Planet ILUG

Oracle laying off GNOME contributors is certainly bad news for the project. It’s particularly bad news because Willie Walker, one of my favourite GNOME contributors, is now out of a job.

I just want to put this in perspective, though. In 2007, IBM made deep cuts in its support of GNOME accessibility, affecting contributors such as Peter Parente, Eitan Isaacson and Aaron Leventhal, who are no longer paid to work on GNOME accessibility work. The IBM cuts were perhaps deeper than those that Oracle are announcing right now (but I suspect that we’re not finished hearing bad news from Oracle). So we’ve been through this (and worse) before.

Next, it’s not all bad news on the accessibility front: other distributions are carrying a small amount of the accessibility mantle (Ubuntu, OpenSuse), with projects like MouseTweaks being funded by Canonical, the Inference lab in Cambridge has been funded for some projects (Dasher, OpenGazer (the newer development of OpenGazer is not yet available for download)) through the AEGIS project, and of course as others have noticed, the Mozilla Foundation has repeated its accessibility grant of the last two years to the GNOME Foundation, and supporting Orca is part of its accessibility roadmap. Mozilla has also funded work to port AT-SPI from Orbit to DBus, and other work on Orca and Accerciser.

So there are people who care about accessibility in GNOME, and there appears to be a potential for funding for accessibility work, for the right people with the right contacts and the right projects.

Perhaps it’s time for the GNOME Foundation to start seeking funds from government bodies, other public institutions and private funding to fund accessibility work for the greater good? I know that we’re currently raising funds for a sysadmin, and have not yet reached the level of support where we can make that position a regular fixture, but accessibility is different.

No one player is willing to put enough funding into accessibility to properly support Orca, gok, Dasher, AT-SPI, Accerciser, MouseTweaks, keyboard accessibility tools like SlowKeys and StickyKeys, and so on – but perhaps there are lots of people who are willing to support a project for a specific feature, or general stability & bug fixing work for a11y on the desktop?

If there is no commercial justification for a company like Oracle to pay two people to work full time on free software accessibility, then it’ll be a hard sell to any other company. But perhaps the GNOME Foundation could bear two full time accessibility employees with targeted grants working on a public roadmap? Raising $250,000 – $300,000 a year for accessibility from grants doesn’t sound that hard.

But then, maybe I’m nuts…

(February 09, 2010 03:01 PM)

Spartacus Blood and Sand isn't going to be showing in Europe for a while I suspect ..

For those of you who have been able to see it the tshirts it has inspired so far are quite amusing.

Who'd have thought that you could get so much inuendo into a simple Latin word like "ludus" ....

More info here

(February 09, 2010 01:34 AM)

I'll try and post these regularly when I make major additions/removals.

drm-radeon-testing is the cutting edge KMS radeon branch, it is going to be rebased and things will be added/removed as they are worked on by developers. So you can base patches on it but you should talk to the developer who owns the area first.

git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6.git drm-radeon-testing

I've just pushed a rebased tree now with the following:

latest i2c algo + hw i2c engine code + all fixes squashed: This adds support for hw i2c engines found on radeons and
exposes them + sw i2c buses to userspace so i2c tools can use them. (agd5f).

pll algorithm reworking + quirks: cleans up the code to allow for the selection of the old pll algorithm on some hardware. (agd5f)

pm support so far: Adds all the current PM patches - just does engine reclocking so far using the power tables from the BIOS. (Zajec/agd5f)

Evergreen (Radeon HD 5xxx) support: basic KMS support for the evergreen range of devices - no irqs or accel yet. (agd5f)

radeon unlocked ioctl support (airlied)

bad CS recording (glisse)

misc cleanups/fixes - Dell/Sun server support ported from userspace hopefully.

The tree did contain Jerome's r600 CS checker but I've dropped it for now at his request as he has newer patches
in testing.

(February 08, 2010 11:58 PM)

As part of my "let's use those domains" plan I finally put a new Home Cinema Discussion site live at the weekend.

I picked up the domain about a year ago, but it had been sitting "gathering dust", so I'm happy to see it's now in use .. hopefully the site will get some traffic and attract a few active members in the coming weeks / months...

Now where did I leave that list of domains?

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(February 08, 2010 10:47 PM)

Well, the new WP Super Cache is available now.

This release adds experimental object cache support. Don’t go looking for it unless you have an external object cache already. It won’t show up. I recommend using the Memcached object cache.

Some of the other major changes include more translations: Chinese (Pseric), Ukranian (Vitaly) and Japanese (Tai). The Italian and Japanese translations have since been updated but not included in 0.9.9. You can grab them from the languages directory if you don’t want to wait until the next release.

If you have WordPress Mobile Edition installed the plugin will grab the list of mobile user agents from that and warn if your .htaccess is outdated.

And, a small but significant change is that the PHP cache loader will use the static “super” cache if necessary. This might happen if your rewrite rules aren’t working properly and not serving cache files. At least your anonymous visitors will see some sort of cached file. Use the debugging system built into the plugin to determine where the cache comes from.

See the changelog for the complete list of changes.

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(February 08, 2010 06:14 PM)

Another year over and FOSDEM has come and gone.  It was an amazing weekend, full of interesting talks and meeting people.  With so many attendees on this subject, there are so many opinions on subjects, technology, languages and operating systems flying about it can get heated. It’s also rather entertaining!

Friday night I met up with the Freenode Staffers for dinner, I’ve only been involved in Freenode since last summer, and work on community areas, so nice to meet the folks who do a lot more work than I do.   Followed by the Friday beer event, leaves you set up for the weekend ahead of you!

Saturday morning consisted of me in the lightning talks room, nice way to ease myself into the day after the night before! I popped down to the Ubuntu booth, passing all the others and listening to what was being said, great chatterings.  I brought along some extra Karmic, Kubuntu , Server CDs and stickers as we’d some left over to give out to folks.  Nice to put the faces to the names and chat to people. Always great, even though I am woeful with names!

Popping in and out of talks, and finding people I chat to on IRC to wave hi, and grab a bite to eat with others was great.  I got to bounce ideas off others and get some feedback, which was handy. Saturday night was the Ubuntu Dinner, if there were folks going we asked them to sign up, most did.  Thanks to JanC who organised it, as to seat a large number of people is rather difficult. 18 of us went for dinner, nice to chat to people sitting down,Muharem Hrnjadovic from the Launchpad team joined us, nice for community and non community to meet up a these events. Went to the GNOME drinks meet up as it was close by, but I really needed an early night so homewards I went.

Sunday was the day I’d been looking forward to, more lightning talks, followed by Make your users happy, “cloudify” your app with desktopcouch which was interesting. Afterwards I ran to the Ubuntu Debian talk, but this was wedged packed, I got to hear the first 2 minutes before I had to leave due to the heat and over crowding.

Lucas is both a Debian and an Ubuntu developer and stated that at the beginning of the talk, followed by he had friends on both teams and the talk was being recorded, trying to lighten the humour I suspect as the room was very packed and a show of hands for Debian was rather over whelming where as when it was show of hands for Ubuntu maintaining, it was one other person.

It’s a developer conference so I must admit I found that rather saddening to be honest.  There was a distinct lack of Ubuntu developers there for what ever reason, it’s the largest OSS developer conference that I’m aware of, I could be wrong. You could see the sea of Red Fedoras and Debian kilts, BSD, Gnome, KDE and many more around the conference.  So it would seem Ubuntu should have a larger presence at it.

Afterwards I went to the short presentation from the Mozilla team on WoMoz -  Woman and Mozilla and  then chatted to some of the women involved and exchanged contact details once I explained my role in what I do.  I pointed out their ideas sounded great, and that other groups had done similar, we should pool our resources together. I was even shortly interviewed for the Mozilla team on women in open source, for those who don’t know me, I hate speaking in public on my own, in discussion groups I’m fine.  On my own, I tend to get rather embarrassed and speak even faster than normal, plus I also hate cameras and usually want to punch the person with the camera pointing it at me.

The afternoon was filled with more lightning talks, this time they were from the  Mozilla room, then finally the end talk for me was the Inside StatusNet: How Identi.ca Works.

It was a very enjoyable weekend, I’m glad I went, following the tweets/dents for #fosdem did help to highlight some of the other talks I didn’t get to, which was rather handy.  Lots of the talks were recorded for later viewing.  One tweet that caught my eye was – Debian’s conclusion about Ubuntu at FOSDEM, add that to google and you get the interesting views of the talk which features photos of slides of the presentation, and also a thread

(February 08, 2010 05:46 PM)

Zombie movies: the intersection of horror films and string theory? “Branes…. branes….” Filed under: General

(February 07, 2010 11:26 PM)

When we launched dropped.ie a couple of months ago it was aimed at helping people find good domain names to register.

We limited it, however, to .ie domain names only.

Of course we know that people don't always want a .ie domain name and, in many cases, the extra paperwork for getting a .ie domain name may not be everyone's cup of tea.

The other "problem" was that sometimes there simply were no domains that matched a given keyword. Sure, if you did a search for some words you got back plenty of domains to choose from, but you hit a virtual "brick wall" with others.

With that in mind we have extended the site's functionality to include semantic suggestions.

What does that mean?

When you do a search for say "espresso" you'd expect to see results including domain names that contain the term "espresso". However with semantic search you also get back names which are related in meaning.

Try it out to see what I mean.



You'll also notice that at the bottom of the page we're showing domains available via Sedo, which is one of the largest domain aftermarket sites in the world.

We're going to be adding in some other features in the coming weeks, but I thought I'd share this one with you all now.

Let us know how you find it.

Is it useful?

(February 07, 2010 05:58 PM)

Bishop Lucey Park in Cork City was the location of a wonderful display of angel statues. They were decorated in all sorts of ways and even had one dedicated to Jedward!

Adam had a great time running around them, and had loads of fun playing with another boy named Nathaniel. They went crazy chasing around and screaming as loud as they could at the pigeons who had an unexpected bout of exercise!

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(February 06, 2010 10:11 PM)

Well we’ve arrived, met up with more Irish guys over here at FOSDEM, had waffles and lots of Kriek beer.  Six of us left Dublin yesterday from the Ubuntu Ireland LoCo, and we ended up finding a Debian guy on the place who lives in Dublin so he’s been with us on our wee journey. An early flight at 6:50am meant by the time we arrived, we’d been up hours and hungry, in search of waffles and coffee and checking into our hotels, we walked into the city dropping our bags off at different locations along the way. Who knew we’d find it so hard to find a place to sit down find coffee and waffles in the same place.  We ended up a little restaurant and folks got their coffee and food and we started to sample the beer, at 12 in the day….

Should note I’m going to create a quotes page based on the groups smart ass comments, we’ve ubuntu, kde, fedora and Debian folks with us this weekend, comments in good fun and jest are flying left right and centre and it’s proving rather entertaining. Last night we went to the beer event, just sitting down and chatting to random folks, it’s great. I got to put the faces to the handles of the freenode staffers and go out for dinner with them. So all in all a great day.

Today the talks have started, great buzz around the place and a few sore heads. Looking forward to the ubuntu dinner tonight.

(February 06, 2010 01:17 PM)

Remember the Irish Blog Awards?

Well nominations have been open for the last couple of weeks BUT they are closing this afternoon.

So if you haven't had a chance to nominate your favourite Irish blogs (and bloggers) now is the time to do it under one of the many categories.

The event will be held later this year in Galway.

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(February 05, 2010 01:36 PM)

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(February 05, 2010 11:52 AM)

Back in early 2008 myself and Eoghan O’Brien ran RagRadio. The setup consisted of a PC for playing music, two CD decks, 3 stage mics and a mixing desk. We took the mixer output and ran it into a laptop which encoded it, shipped it off to Icecast and broadcast our little radio station to the Internet. It was during Rag week and we interviewed a few bands who were floating around; Fred, The Saw Doctor’s and Messiah J.

We peaked at about 24 concurrent listeners and averaged 6 if memory serves.

I fell in love, ian – The Internet Audio Network was founded. That summer I went to the US on a J1. Armed with my iRiver and a borrowed SM-57 I took off on an interview hunt. With the ian domain registered and a stack of business cards I attended HOPE and DEFCON, as a member of the press. Through sheer brass neck I landed a few interviews, including the only press interview at DEFCON that year with the team captain of the winning capture the flag team.

When I came back to Limerick I bought a Zoom H4 for ian. I traveled to 25c3 and FOSDEM ‘09 on a determined content hunt. The game was on.

Last summer the semblance of a website came together and a podcast started: ITFreely. It was recorded over Skype with Gareth, Joe and Patrick. We had no idea what we were doing but had one rule: keep it under half an hour. The first two shows were an amazing shambles, they’re not going public (maybe for a year anniversary or Christmas Special bonus show).

While all this tech oriented content chasing was going on a second itch presented itself to me – the music business. I set out to find musicians to interview.

My interest here was in the future of the music industry, how piracy is really affecting music, and what an upcoming artist should brace themselves for. I got into the VIP area of Oxegen, was at the debut single launch of an Irish pop band, traveled to London to interview an Israeli outfit in the Ministry of Sound, and had a smattering of back-stage chat’s. Neck and business cards.

As I was coming to NUIG in September I contacted the local campus radio station – FlirtFM. I secured two half hour FM shows, off the back of the content I had put online. ITFreely ported from a collection of bedroom’s to a modern studio broadcast over the FM (at 12:30pm on Wednesdays, just so you know). Joe took a work related sabbatical and Gareth started a night course in Law, so myself and Patrick were joined by Shane Tuohy, Niall Campbell and Andy Regan.

Niall joins me on the second show to talk about rights, lawsuits and piracy from a Music point of view, we call the show Talk Like A Pirate. Unfortunately as we include copy-righted music in the show we can’t freely distribute it online, or Podcast it, but you can tune into the web-stream live (Tuesdays at 12:30pm).

In the last few week’s we’ve really started to settle into a groove with ITFreely. We’ve tried to concentrate less on opinion and comment, and more on original research. We’ve had Lecturers on the show, representatives from companies and organisation’s, started to do live streaming of the pre-record sessions, set up IRC channels for live feedback during the show, got onto iTunes, and set up a Facebook group and Twitter feed to keep in contact with you. We even got some intro music.

We’re learning production values the hard way, through trial and error. We’re getting there, but we’re a long way off before ITFreely become’s the show it could be. We want to bring you a though provoking and interesting weekly show about some aspect of Irish or Global Tech.

This is where we need your help. We need you to let us know when the show is dull and what just isn’t working. We’ll post a laptop sticker to anyone who give us some feedback, leaves us a comment or sends us a mail (any good economist will tell you that humans are incentive driven).

So check out our back catalogue, sign up to the mailing list, and most importantly, let us know what you think.

We’re out of our public Alpha. We’re entering our public Beta. Hop on board.

(February 05, 2010 01:11 AM)

The Apache HTTP Server team recently released 1.3.42, the final release of the hugely-popular 1.3 codebase. I wrote a bit about our reasoning, and where we’re going next, in response to some questions from El Reg. A lot of people have been asking about the decision to stop support for 1.3, so I thought I’d republish what I wrote.

Overview

In June 1999, the Apache Software Foundation was incorporated in Delaware.

A year previously, Apache HTTP Server 1.3.0 had been released, and it was rapidly becoming the most popular web server on the planet.

Not known for resting on their laurels, it was barely nine months later that the Apache HTTP Server team released the first alpha of Version 2.0. This was a significant rewrite of much of the original code, focused on improving modularization and portability. It made general release in April 2002, and remained best-of-breed until Version 2.2.0 came out in December 2005.

More than ten years and forty revisions later, Apache HTTP Server 1.3 has reached end-of-life status. Version 2.2 has been available for more than four years, and is widely deployed across the internet. Although critical security fixes may be released as patches for Version 1.3, there will be no further releases or support from the Apache HTTP Server team. We encourage all users of Version 1.3 to upgrade to Version 2.2 as soon as possible.

If you’ve been reading closely, you might be wondering what happened to 2.1, and what the developers were doing between April 2002 and December 2005? Since the advent of Version 2.0, the Apache HTTP Server team have reserved even-numbered minor versions for stable versions of the software. The odd-numbered minor versions are made public as alpha and beta releases, allowing developers to try out the bleeding edge of new features, and giving module authors a chance to prepare their software for the next release.

For anyone working on code that integrates with the Apache HTTP Server, these odd-numbered revisions are your best opportunity to request changes in the API, before it is released as stable!

The current best-of-breed stable version of Apache HTTP Server is Version 2.2.14, released in September 2009. But if you’re already itching to take Version 2.4 for a test drive, you can get a headstart by installing the alpha Version 2.3.5, released just last month. This version includes significant improvements to caching and proxying behaviour, and will eventually be released as Version 2.4.

Why will the 1.3 code no longer be supported or updated?

As I previously mentioned, Apache HTTP Server 1.3.0 was originally released in June 1998. To put that in perspective, it would be another three weeks before Microsoft Windows 98 became available, a product which, despite significant commercial support, reached end-of-life four years ago. The first production 1GHz processors didn’t ship for another two years; today, if you want to buy a 1GHz processor, you’re probably in the market for a new phone!

Version 2 is a significant improvement over 1.3. The API has been rewritten to prevent many of the problems with module ordering and priority. Better support exists for non-Unix platforms, and smart filtering is now available. Version 2.0 includes support for IPv6 and multiple protocols, while Version 2.2 adds LFS, enabling you to serve files over 2GB in size. The core modules for authentication and authorisation have been greatly improved, as well as subsystems from caching to proxying.

In short, technology and the Internet have come a long way in the last twelve years, and Version 1.3 is simply no longer the best-of-breed solution it once was.

What has happened to 2.0? What should 1.3/2.0 users do now?

Version 2.0 continues to enjoy bugfix releases, but does not see active development.

We encourage all users to upgrade to Apache HTTP Server 2.2.14.

What’s the planned features roadmap and release schedule for the next version?

The Apache HTTP Server team release software when it’s ready – we prefer to ensure that our releases represent the best software available, rather than worrying about shipping deadlines. Features currently under development include further updates to auth modules, as well as state-of-the-art cache and proxy modules. If you’re impatient to try these things, you can check out Version 2.3.5 (alpha). Or, if you’d prefer a more academic look at the subject, you might enjoy Roy Fielding’s presentation, “Apache 3.0 (A Tall Tale)”.

Key facts

• Apache HTTP Server Version 1.3 has now reached end-of-life status.
• The current best-of-breed stable version of the Apache HTTP Server is Version 2.2.14 – we encourage all users to upgrade to this version as soon as possible.
• For those who prefer to try out new features as soon as they become available, Version 2.3.5 provides an alpha preview of what will become stable Version 2.4.
• The latest version of the Apache HTTP Server is always available from our download page.

(February 04, 2010 10:18 PM)

I’m a big fan of short-form presentations, and I like to give one whenever I get a chance. I also like to encourage others to do them for other conferences I’ve organised or run, like  GUADEC, the Maemo Summit or Fostel (site seems to be down now – shame).

I’ve been an admirer from afar of Ignite for years, for the variety and quality of the presentations that you find at their events, and seeing Global Ignite Week announced a few months ago, around the same time that PLOSS Rhone-Alpes started coming together gave me an excuse to do what I’ve wanted to for a while, and host an Ignite Lyon event! The inaugural Ignite Lyon will be held on March 4th in Université Lyon 2 on the quais.

For those unfamiliar with the Ignite talk format, you get 5 minutes for your talk – 20 slides, which advance automatically every 15 seconds. There are lots of Ignite videos on the site.

Once again I’m teaming up with Vincent Mabillot from Colibre, with whom I co-organised Richard Stallman’s recent stop in Lyon last month, and François Aubriot from PLOSS R-A and DotRiver, as well as all of the members of ALDIL and PLOSS R-A who have time to give in this busy month (in addition to school holidays, ALDIL and Colibre are once again participating in the conference Primevere and the week-long “Libre en fête” festival of free software).

I’m looking for presenters! I want to hear cool stuff – personal passions, unusual hobbies or projects, complete with pitfalls and tiny successes that led to a fun conclusion, advice on how to handle difficult problems we all meet, tips on reducing your carbon footprint, how your non-profit group made a difference in your neighbourhood, cries of passion for people to stop doing something you care about *wrong*. Ignite is not just IT, and that’s what I love about it. I will be giving a presentation myself called “hacking your body”, talking about running as performance testing for real life. Of course, it’s also IT, so the geekier and cooler your project, the better If you’re into soldering your own chopper bicycles, I want to hear about it.

As you’ve figured out, I want to hear from you if you have something interesting to say. We’re expecing 100 people from a range of backgrounds, including entrepreneurs, hackers, makers, DIY fans and general geeks & freaks (in the nicest sense). If you want to submit a talk, please use the online form I set up.

(February 04, 2010 05:04 PM)

I was in Dublin yesterday to see Matt and Craig become Honorary Patrons of The University Philosophical Society in Trinity College. It was a low key informal event with many students and a few staff in attendance.

Eamon Leonard, of Echo Libre, kindly used my Flip Mino to record the Q&A session that followed. I want to express my gratitude to him for doing a fine job, especially as I saw him switch the camera from arm to arm during the hour long event. It wasn’t easy holding the camera aloft for so long. I’m currently transcoding the video and trying to make it smaller before uploading it.
I’ll add it to this post later, you won’t want to miss it!

Update! Matt was interviewed by Silicon Republic earlier today. Catch up on what’s happening at the Web Summit in Dublin by following #dws2 on Twitter.

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(February 04, 2010 01:18 PM)

(February 04, 2010 12:03 PM)

I upgraded my Blackberry 9500 (Storm 1) to OS5 this week from OS4.7. There are a few new features this brings that I like, and a drawback or two.

Pro’s:

• Major speed improvements. The OS is no longer sluggish, without removing any applications or data.
• gTalk, BBM and AIM status updates are shown when viewing a contact.
• Ability to Flag E-Mail’s for follow up.
• Bedside mode can be restricted to only activate within certain hours.
• Threaded bubble SMS interface, akin to the iPhone.
• Saner Keyboard layout in Landscape mode.
• New Font BBAlpha Sans Condensed allowing more characters on screen while keeping readability, a major UI boost.
• Macro shooting mode for camera.
• Radio is no longer disabled when battery is low. This was a real pain.

Con’s:

• Links between gTalk and the Contacts application break frequently, I haven’t been able to pin-point a cause.
• Still no useful E-Mail folders or filters. I can flag a mail for follow up, but I can’t see a list of just the mail’s i need to follow up, or a list of drafts.
• gTalk requires two lines per user. Before you could view 15odd users at a time, now it’s more like 6.

(February 04, 2010 02:46 AM)

Here's a really badly shot video of GPU switching in action ;-0 - whiteouts are mostly be logging out and in ;-)

(February 04, 2010 02:16 AM)

DEV300_m71, svx, soltools and accessibility all 0 unused methods now. ucb reportdesign and sal nearly unused free. sc and sw creep up again. Over all count -17

(February 03, 2010 08:45 PM)

More and more we’re seeing organisations outside the free software world  try to learn the lessons of our success, and integrate “open source” practices into their organisation.

Whether it’s companies adopting transparency and other cluetrain or pinko marketing strategies, proprietary software development companies integrating standard free software practices, or one of the other areas where “crowdsourcing” has become the cool new thing, it’s obvious hat we have gotten some things right, some of the time, and it is definitely worth learning the right lessons from projects like Linux, Mozilla, GNOME, or Wikipedia, and trying to reproduce the magic elsewhere.

Sometimes this feels like the cargo cults in the Pacific Islands, trying to make airplanes land as their ancestors saw 60 years ago, by building airstrips and imitation airplanes. But at least they’re trying to figure out what makes our communities successful.

But are we learning enough lessons from others? It seems to me like we’re charging head first like sharecroppers into undiscovered country, only to find that we’ve run into a highly advanced civilisation.

As developers, we’ve invented our own brand of everything, from scratch. We figure out how to run conferences, or raise money from people who like what we do, when these are not new problems.

This isn’t new in IT. The entire learned history of typography got thrown out the window more or less, because with the advent of WYSIWYG editors and the web, everyone has complete control of their authoring tools and Comic Sans is shipped by default, and if I need to reduce the margins to get the letter to fit on one page then by golly I will.

Merchandising and recruitment of new star talent are more examples of things that some other organisations are pretty good at.

So – as an open question – are we learning the lessons from the past which we should be learning, or is it too attractive to think that what we’re doing is so new that every problem we encounter needs a new solution?

One example of a place where there is a wealth of experience out there is convincing people to give money to a cause they believe in. There are dozens of organisations that do this well – humanitarian organisations, political lobbyists, political parties, universities – the list goes on.

Can we figure out how GNOME is like them, and learn the lessons from their fundraising campaigns?

A typical fundraising drive for an organisation like this has three main steps:

1. Get a list of potential donors
2. Convince them that you are doing good
3. Find a pressure point or argument which will convince them to donate

If you look at a mailing for Médecins Sans Frontières for example, you see all of these points in action. Find potential donors – through sign-up campaigns, former donor drives, referrals. Send them a mail package, with a newsletter outlining good work, but with just enough bad news (new conflicts, new refugees, unfinished projects) and artwork (a smiling nurse taking care of a village vs a child ill from a curable illness) to show that money given to MSF will do good, and the need has never been greater.

Your response rate may be small – perhaps only 1% – but that’s enough.

Whether we’re talking about lobby groups, political parties or humanitarian agencies, the same strategies come into play – construct big databases of potential donors, and get them riled up about the thing they’re passionate about being endangered – show them the shining light of all the good work your organisation does, and then drive the sale home by making it really easy to give money or sign up.

University fundraising is an interesting case – and in fact, GNOME’s fundraising model ressembles it now. Your primary source of donations is alumni, people who have been through the university, like receiving updates every year, maybe a class-mate just became a professor, maybe a friend’s daughter got a prize in the annual awards ceremony, maybe a club or association you were in had a good year? And then you leverage the affection with the flip side of the coin – the need, the things we’d like to do better, the project we’re fundraising for which will allow us to do great work.

All of these organisations invest heavily in direct mailing, in building and maintaining databases of supporters, and in monetising them. I recently read a book by a direct mailing copywriter called “My First 40 Years in Junk Mail” and it opened my eyes to what works in that world – and also gave some ideas on the kinds of strategies maybe the GNOME Foundation should be adopting.

The first step  is building and maintaining a list of GNOME fans and supporters, by any means possible, and ensuring that they are made aware of what we’re up to and what we’d like to do. And, of course, continuing to build great products.

(February 03, 2010 07:54 PM)

v6 of the patch + another patch which needs some work before I can merge it are available now.

This mainly cleans up the patch architecture a lot and allow for Matthew to put his nvidia code in easier hopefully. Its moves the ATPX specific code to the radeon driver.

The second patch is from an experiment that I videod on a webcam but am now failing to upload, I'll probably get a better video tomorrow, the lighting was fairly bad for it today.

It basically allows for a delayed gpu switch ( it changes the debugfs API ), and allows gpu drivers to block the switch.

The switch file now takes ON/OFF like always, but the PCI IDs input is gone. There are 4 commands

IGD - try and switch now to the integrated device - can fail if drm drivers block it (mainly if X has the device open)
DIS - try and switch now to the discrete device - can fail if drm drivers block it (X again).
DIGD - try a delayed switch to integrated device
DDIS - try a delayed switch to discrete device.

So with X running you can echo DDIS to the file and log off X, it'll then switch as soon as X closes the drm device, and when
gdm restarts X it'll be running on the discrete GPU. If we had a shiny GUI on top of this it'd be as close as MacOSX can do it.
When you select to do a delayed switch we power up the other GPU straight away so the switch is quicker.

It needs more debugging, some open issues include:

after a few switches it can die on its ass
powering up the Intel glitches the display even when running the AMD
there may be race conditions in the patch, probably need a mutex around device open + this stuff
suspend/resume - since we D3 the card, if you do an s/r cycle it'll resume it, we need a flag in the
driver to say its powered off by the mux and to ignore s/r cycles - I've started adding this to radeon.

mjg59 has access to an nvidia laptop and is looking closely at how to make that all work.

(February 03, 2010 07:07 AM)

As folks are are aware Ubuntu channels are on Freenode as are many other organisations and groups. Last year I joined the freenode staff to help with community matters and how we can help people using their services to make them more visible.

One project that I’ve been working on is Fossevents. For people like me who like to go to events and more importantly organise them I need to know when others are on so I don’t organise one at a conflicting time or I can budget to attend.  I’m not the only one who needs to know this information.

It was launched last summer and has had a few tweaks made to it, we still need some help with the feature requests we get in. But one we did work on was making it easier to submit information to us.

We want Lugs, meet ups,Ubuntu hours, conferences, unconferences, LoCo meet ups, all things open source related so we can have them under one site.  We are going to subscribe to peoples mailing lists, if they have an ANNOUNCE List   (we will email and ask you if this is ok)  so when it’s announced it is picked up by Fossevents and it appears in the site as an draft item. For those who don’t announce via mailing lists, they can contact us and we can arrange for them to be given a BCC address so again the event is sent to us.

I am working on other ideas at present to make sure the word is spread on topics more, and people seem unaware of the freenode blog when there are issues, we do try and blog about them also. If anyone wants to help with fossevents join us on #fossevents on funnily enough freenode

(February 02, 2010 09:03 PM)

We know you love our silly domain offers, so we're doing it again.

We've cut the price on one year .ie domain name registrations to €14.99

You don't need any coupon codes - just place the order online via our website and you'll get the special price of €14.99 ex-VAT.

Not sure what to get? Why not check out some of the previously owned names listed on our deleted IE domain site?

NB: Price is ONLY valid for new .ie registrations for one year

Remember our .com promotion? Well we've extended it yet again!

Register or transfer a .com domain name for only €4.99 / year ex-VAT.

No coupon code required - the discount appears in the shopping cart.

UPDATE: We've extended the offer to include transfers of .ie domains

(February 02, 2010 09:32 AM)

Okay v4 of the patch is available at

http://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/vgaswitcheroo/
http://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/vgaswitcheroo/0001-vga_switcheroo-initial-implementation-v4.patch

First thing I added was power up/down methods. This calls the DRM suspend/resume methods + along with the cut power for discrete GPU. I'm not sure dynamic Windows ever does this as it seems to take a bit of work, I suspect they just run the second GPU in really low power modes. This is slow because we have to repost the ATI card after turning it back on.

I then talked to mjg59 and worked over the ATPX detection. I removed all the DMI code and it should detect *any* laptop that uses ATPX (i.e. ATI/ATI and Intel/ATI) from what I can see. I've tested on Lenovo W500 and T500 now and it appears to work on both. Would be nice if someone on a ATI/ATI and/or ASUS ATI/ATI or ATI/Intel machines could give it a whirl. I think the main problem with ATI/ATI is the poweroff methods have a hardcoded Intel PCI ID. I've no idea yet how to tell on an ATI/ATI which device is the IGD and which is discrete. Its probably more than likely the IGD is the one with the ATPX method on it.

It doesn't switch off at boot yet but I've added commands to let you do it.

echo "OFF" > switch - turns off the not in use card, so if Intel and ATI are on at boot, it will turn off ATI
echo "ON" > switch - turns back on not in use card
echo "PCIID" > switch - causes a switch with full off/on cycles.

nvidia combos appear to use a DSM method and in theory nouveau_acpi.c should be detecting that, so it might be possible for someone to hook that up.

I've also started looking at some desktop integration via gdm or logout - but its not my usual place to code so going is a bit slower ;-)

(February 02, 2010 05:49 AM)

The bridge spanning the river outside Abbeystrowry Cemetery near Skibereen in County Cork.

My wife was driving, I was able to enjoy the scenery!

Related Posts

• Golden Arches
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(February 01, 2010 08:12 PM)

I’m happy this week. Last week, I spent some time and organised myself a bit more. In work, things are going smoothly – managed to get over a tricky piece of work and the rest is simply a list of small tasks.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been emailing and messaging Darshana at Packt Publishing, about writing a second book (jQuery 1.3 with PHP is going very well – list of reviews).

I initially wanted to write about file management, to explain how KFM works, and to help force me to improve on it. But there’s just not enough of an interested market in that – it’s too specialised.

So instead, I’ll be writing about CMS design using PHP and jQuery.

We (webworks.ie) have a CMS engine which we’ve written and improved for the last 6 or so years. We’ve open-sourced it a number of times, but never managed to generate much interest in it. We never had the time to spend on publicising it.

The book will not be specifically about that engine, but rather about the concepts that went into creating it – how a CMS works, how to manage plugins, administration, user management, and all the other little bits and pieces that every PHP developer needs to eventually address.

By way of explanation, I will be demonstrating various parts of our CMS, and explaining how and why it was built that way. I will be closely examining the other major CMSes as well, and giving alternative methods where good ones exist.

The proposed chapter list is:

1. Introduction
2. CMS core design
3. User management and access control
4. Page creation and Navigation
5. Template Management
6. Plugins
7. Form creation
8. Image Gallery
9. Panels
10. Search and Polls
11. RSS and News
12. Online Store
13. Products

I’m really excited about this project!

(February 01, 2010 10:55 AM)

So someone thought it would be a good idea to make laptops with two graphics chips in them and switch betweem them to save power.

Now other OSes support this to varying degrees, I think XP + MacOSX require a logout cycle and Vista/Win7 can dynamically switch while running, while Linux basically falls over in a heap.

So I sat down today with a Lenovo W500 which has an Intel GM45 and AMD Radeon 3650 Mobility in it, and I wrote a patch to try and get closer to the XP/MacOSX level.

The result of one days straight hacking is at:
http://people.freedesktop.org/~airlied/vgaswitcheroo/

The patch is totally focused on the Lenovo W500, other switchers will need to add stuff to this codebase.

So what works?
Boot in switchable graphics - which boots with intel and radeon turned on
KMS drivers load for radeon and intel, radeon BIOS stored in start of VRAM (driver hacked to read it)
bind to both drivers + fbs for both.
mount debugfs - cat /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
2
0 :0000:01:00.0
1+:0000:00:02.0
shows the 02.0 (intel) device is in charge of the MUX.
goto runlevel 5, play with X under the Intel driver, goto runlevel 3 kill X
at fbcon echo "0000:01:00.0" > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
barely glitches console and switches
goto runlevel 5, play with X under the ATI driver, goto runlevel 3 kill X
echo "0000:00:02.0" > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
goto runlevel 5, play with X under intel again.
wash and repeat.

What does it do?
So far its just switching the MUX using the ACPI method and remapping all the console to the other framebuffer device,
it also reset the bits that denotes which devices is the boot vga device which X uses to pick the primary GPU. This
means X doesn't need an xorg.conf to switch. (I think all those patches are in upstream X server).

What does it not do?
It doesn't powerdown the radeon when its not in use yet. I know the ACPI call to power it off/on, and since I have
the BIOS I should be able to repost it. So I'll try adding the callbacks into the KMS driver to do this soon.
It doesn't poewrdown the intel when its not in use yet. Not sure what I can do here, since there is no ACPI method to turn
it off. I think I can just D3 the GPU, and use the normal s/r paths to bring it back. Again requires more investigation.
The whole what ACPI + methods map to what device, how the mux ids match etc will probably all need to be stored in the DMI table.
Anything not a Lenovo W500 - probably not that hard to add other Intel/AMD variants to this, add DMI and mux switching method.
nouveau isn't hooked up - this could probably be done by some interested party - the driver hooks so far aren't very hard.
No idea about ATI/ATI or NV/NV ones either.

I'm really hoping interested community people can make this actually useful to them on other hw, I won't have permanent access to the W500 to keep this all tested in the future.

Can we do dynamic switch without restarting X?
No. X needs a lot of work, a lot more than the day it took to hack the kernel.

How do we go forward?
We probably need to add gdm support to move this forward. A logout button that is "Switch GPU", that gdm kills the X server,
then hits the switch port and starts a new X server. I'll try and talk to some gdm hackers over the next few days.
I'll try and push this into a git tree against Linus current, and we can add tested patches for other machines as they go in.
Also the DMI section is only imaginary of what I think others might need, we might have to rip it all out. Also I've no idea
if there are ACPI methods to query the switchable modes etc.

(February 01, 2010 09:03 AM)

I'd have to be the first one to admit it. I have an annoying habit of registering domains then forgetting about them or simply not having the time / energy to do anything meaningful with them.

So I love it when I'm actually able to get something up and running on a domain that is functional and hopefully of some use. Emphasis on hopefully!

A few months ago I picked up carlow.biz. It was available, though it was registered a few times in the past to other people.

So with the aid of Forbairt Media's graphic skills, the new Carlow business directory is now live.

Yes - it's still a work in progress (the design is still being tweaked), but if you're based in Carlow and have a site that should be included please submit it! It won't cost you anything.

For the SEO types ...

All the links are clean, direct links.

And of course it's hosted by Blacknight.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Another Web Project Goes Live (mneylon.com)
• Carlow Past and Present - (keithshirley.ie)

(January 30, 2010 09:11 PM)

The roofed gates of Abbeystrowry Cemetery near Skibereen in County Cork.

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(January 28, 2010 10:06 PM)

I forgot to update folks on how well the Ubuntu Hour is going here in Ireland. We held a poll to see what day best suited folks to meet up as we wanted to meet as many people as we could. The last Wednesday of the month was the winner, our venue . The Trinity Capital Hotel.  It has free wifi, food, beer and cosy couches and great service. They don’t seem to mind a bunch of geeks with their laptops out, dragging chairs over to a table we have occupied as more and more people arrive.

Tonight saw 10 people attend the Ubuntu hour, I was there from just before 6pm as I came straight from work, one by one folks started to arrive, take out their laptops and chat and talk about Christmas the weather and you guessed it, Yahoo and Ubuntu hand in hand.

It was great to catch up with folks and make plans. There are 6 of us going to FOSDEM, all on the same plane on the Friday morning 6:50am flight so that should be fun. We started to plan out Global jam day also this evening, as we’re hoping to add an Irish slant to the event and call it Free Jam, we want to invite other groups here to take part in the day and work on their projects side by side. That way throughout the day we can give talks and hopefully some of the groups will to and break up the day a bit for us.

I also announced the next OSSBarcamp taking place in Dublin, on Saturday 17th April so I got some feedback on what we can differently this time as the room layout is a bit different, perhaps some hands on tutorials, more LPI exams.  I’m still not sure, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.

All in all it was a great evening and nice to catch up with folks and plan things out face to face and bounce ideas off one another. Thanks for coming folks and see you next month.

(January 27, 2010 09:54 PM)

Here’s a quick post to encourage brave testers. I’m adding object cache support to WP Super Cache so you’ll be able to store your cached files in a memcached backend instead of disk.

It’s not complete but it’s running on this blog and well, you’re reading this which means it’s doing something and not breaking! If you want to give it a go grab the development version from the download page.

There are few caveats, but three spring to mind:

• It won’t cache anything for “known” users. That is users who are logged in or leave comments. Usually a tiny minority of the visitors to any site.
• Refreshing of the cache is very incomplete. If you leave a comment, the cache for that page may not update immediately. The cache lifetime is set to 30 seconds, and after you leave a comment you become a “known user” and see the uncached version of the page anyway.
• When posts are updated the whole cache is invalidated.

If you don’t know what memcached is, or how to set it up then you probably don’t want to test this. If you do, use Google and find out about them. Unfortunately I don’t have time to explain how to install it.

Inspiration and some code taken from batcache, the excellent caching plugin we use on WordPress.com.

Update! I updated the Changelog in the readme.txt and I’m looking for testers. Here’s what’s new in the development version:

* Added experimental object cache support.
* Added Chinese(Traditional) translation by Pseric.
* Added FAQ on WP-Cache vs Supercache files.
* Use Supercache file if WP-Cache file not found. Useful if mod_rewrite rules are broken or not working.
* Get mobile browser list from WP Mobile Edition if found. Warn user if .htaccess out of date.
* Make sure writer lock is unlocked after writing cache files.
* Added link to developer docs in readme.
* Added Ukranian translation by Vitaly Mylo.
* Added Upgrade Notice section to readme.
* Warn if zlib compression in PHP is enabled.
* Added compression troubleshooting answer. Props Vladimir (http://blog.sjinks.pro/)
* Added Japanese translation by Tai (http://tekapo.com/)
* Updated Italian translation.

The biggest changes are the addition of the object cache and a small change to the php code that serves cached wp-cache files. If the mod_rewrite rules on your site don’t work for whatever reason the plugin will look for the Supercache file and serve that instead. An extra header is added to the served page when this happens. It’s all in the readme.txt!

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(January 27, 2010 04:02 PM)

Short run-down of what I’m doing lately: nothing.

Less short: I’m trying to get work out the door, get a good run at some personal projects, pass grade 2 piano, get organised, and generally improve my lot.

None of this is working. I think the “get organised” bit is the most important, as it will help the rest of it fall into place.

I usually only post about web-development-related topics here, as that’s the only subject where I feel I can contribute something new and interesting, so I tend to not talk about other stuff. But sometimes, rattling off the current state of the head is good for clearing it.

In work, I can’t really complain – we have a number of largish projects which are slowly creeping towards completion. The hardest thing about them is getting information from the clients, and then a week or two later being told that half the information is not required. I guess my main complaint at work is the inexorably slow completion rate.

On the personal projects side:

There are still a number of small bugs in KFM 1.4, and either I don’t have the time to get to them, or there is no enough information to recreate the bug and the submitter doesn’t give me access to their copy so I can’t see it from their side.

KFM 2 has been halted for a while – the idea is huge, but I simply don’t have the time, and no-one is clambering for it. I’ll get to it when I have time, but I might have to approach it by evolving KFM 1.x into meeting what I wanted, instead of the original goal of building KFM 2 from scratch.

I started a new project, OddJobs4Locals two weeks back, and got a good two-day run at it, then time got ahead of me again. I think this will be a good one, when I can complete it. Useful for students, people with a little spare time, or simply people that just want to make a little extra cash. Not yet working, but it will be soon, I hope… This is doubly interesting to me, as it is done purely through AJAX, so it will be easy to do a smart-phone client or a desktop client when the time comes.

I’m in the back/forth stage of working with Packt publishing to see if they want me to do a second book (the first one has no bad reviews at all). We’ve mostly agreed on a table of contents, and I’m just trying to get the time to combine a few of the smaller chapters together.

On the piano, I’ve been ready for the grade 2 exam since November, and am still waiting to see if there will be an exam near me any time soon – I hate the effort that goes into travelling (I have a family, and no car). I was hoping to do a grade every 6 months. It looks like this might not be possible, despite me being ready for it… The tunes I’m doing for it are Beethoven’s Sonatina in G Major, a waltz by Bela Bartok, and Boys And Girls Come Out To Samba, by Terence Greaves – by the way, I don’t like those videos; there are no dynamics in any of them, and I can hear a number of mistakes as well. No video apparently of the Terence Greaves one.

As for organisation… well I guess I’d better start working with Mantis again.

My lot will have to wait – I’ve a load of work to get done before it can improve.

Meh. Depression taking hold again.

(January 27, 2010 09:35 AM)

Or “Turning Twenty-Five in the San Francisco Bay Area”

As the quarter-century creeps steadily up on me, I’ve been having a blast seeing the sights and meeting friends old and new. I can’t help thinking back to all the things I’ve enjoyed (and suffered through!) along the way. I’ve been incredibly lucky, and I hope that the next 25 years are as fun as the past 25 have been!

The following are just a few of the things that have set me off down memory lane

• Winetasting in Napa made me reminisce about collecting Michelin stars with the Ellerays when all we (the kids!) wanted to do was see who could grow the biggest, coolest, oldest Tamagotchi.
• A going-away party for the coolest kernel hacker around reminded me of the weekend I spent with Natasha, trying to create a working Linux boot floppy for a hand-me-down machine that didn’t have a bootable CD drive.
• Hot-tubbing with engineers, dancers, and a girl who “does circus” was fun – but when we jumped in the (relatively) freezing pool, I was brought straight back to Ennareilly and our “punch, punch, punch-punch-punch” strategy for surviving the cold!
• Paddling in the Pacific, well, I’ve done that before – on the other side! Remember Caloundra, and the pelicans?
• Of course, the hour-long commute (in a very well-kitted-out bus) puts me more in mind of the camper van. Remember the ginger beer all over the camper? The flies all over the rest stop? The sugar-cane we begged for and then never got through?
• Wandering around San Francisco, taking the cable-car to Ghirardelli Square, puts me in mind of our wanderings in Zurich, and all the wonderful times you’ve come to see me. I guess this year it’s my turn to come to you!
• On the other hand, getting settled in the corporate apartment, checking out the farmers’ market for lunch, looking for the laundry room, and settling in to a glass of wine and a home-made dinner is more like Munich. That spag bol was great, although I’m glad to have graduated to a slightly bigger kitchen!
• When Steve destroyed my new top in the laundry, how could I help but remember that beautiful white Susst top? And how could I help but be grateful for the thousands of loads of laundry you’ve done for me? Thanks mum!
• Of course, the trip to Liz Claiborne afterwards? Let’s just say there are still things in your wardrobe I wish I could borrow

I haven’t found anything as good as your bread yet, and I miss our long, evening dinners catching up. I hope your year on the island is as fulfilling as all our childhood expeditions were – from the Giant’s Causeway to the Wicklow lighthouse, from Kilmainham to the Cliffs of Moher.

Thank you, mum and dad, for twenty-five wonderful years. (And Eoin & Rosie, for almost 45 between you )

(January 27, 2010 06:29 AM)

Over the last couple of weeks several people suggested that I watch "The Big Bang Theory", which is an American comedy (if you, like me, weren't aware).

I finally succumbed and "gave it a go" and am now totally hooked.

One of the shows main characters, Sheldon, seems to get some of the best and funniest lines (and scenes).

Sheldon isn't very good with human interpersonal relations (and that's putting it mildly!), so when he had to become friends with a colleague from work he decided to apply logic and a flowchart to the "problem".

The result was hilarious.

So what you say.

Well I'm into my "geeky" and "funny" tshirts, so I came across this one over on ThinkGeek :
I'm not sure how well that would look on a tshirt, though I'm willing to give it a try!

If you're "into" crazy tshirts there's even a site dedicated to the tshirts worn by Sheldon in the series!

(January 27, 2010 01:35 AM)

We've just posted a new job vacancy (or vacancies) here.

This time round we're looking for multilingual customer service / technical support staff.

Let's see how we do with CVs ..

Further details and how to apply here

NO AGENCIES OF ANY KIND

(January 25, 2010 12:04 PM)

Abbeystrowry Cemetery is located near Skibereen in County Cork. It is the site of some of the mass graves used in the area during the famine around 1845.

I didn’t know, or had forgotten there was a famine in 1740/1741 when 400,000 people died. That many people died on this little island of ours in such a short time? The mind boggles.

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(January 24, 2010 08:21 PM)

We'll be attending the upcoming DomainPulse event in Lucerne, Switzerland.

DomainPulse is the most important event for the German speaking domain industry, and is held each year in either Germany, Austria or Switzerland.

This year's agenda includes topics such as IDNs, DNSSEC, legal issues and internet governance.

It's also one of the few domain industry events that doesn't seem to have new TLDs on the agenda, so that's probably as good a reason as any to attend! (Only kidding!)

(January 24, 2010 05:16 PM)

Like a lot of people I've been playing Mafia Wars on Facebook for quite some time. You can usually check your progress once or twice a day, which probably takes a couple of minutes at a time.

Yes - it is addictive

No - Nobody will ever win.

But it's still semi-amusing and keeps me vaguely entertained.

However they may have gone a little bit too far now with their latest addition - SMS notifications.

If you are a player based in the US you will be able to signup to get alerts when you are attacked etc., which means that you will never really have any peace from the game, which I don't think is a particularly good idea for the players. For Zynga, of course, the more time people spend on their platform the more money they will earn.

Here's what the offer looks like:

Maybe I'm reading too much into this, but I still see it as being a bad move.

(January 24, 2010 02:40 PM)

Recently I popped down to the BT Young Scientist Exhibition here in Dublin.  This is for secondary school students/ High school junior students in Ireland.  It’s pretty amazing to see the enthusiasm they show for science and technology at an early age.

The process starts months ago, students submit a one page proposal on a topic, if it’s accepted they research and come up with the results, prototype or something to show from it all. It also gives Industries who are based over here to come and show case their projects and encourage students into those areas. IBM, Google, Analog Devices to name a few all took part and all have offices here in Ireland.

Walking through the exhibition, I stumbled upon Zorin OS, which caught my eye.  So I stopped and asked Kyrill and Artyom Zorin  the developers behind it all a few questions and I thought I’d share them here. Firstly, Zorin OS is an OS they have developed based on Ubuntu, which is why it caught my eye.

Q: So where did you hear about Ubuntu ?

We first came across Ubuntu while watching videos on YouTube of Compiz and Kiba dock.
We were very impressed by Ubuntu and started using it since June 2008.  However, we learnt that many Windows users found the Ubuntu interface unfamiliar and difficult to operate.

We decided to develop Zorin OS to make Ubuntu more friendly for Windows users. We started our project in September 2008. We added a Windows like start menu and theme, many applications to improve user experience and usability including WINE, which lets users run Windows programs on Zorin OS, and Ubuntu Tweak.

A preview of Zorin OS 1.0 was displayed at the BT Young Scientist And Technology Exhibition 2009 and was highly commended. The public beta was released on 5 May 2009. Zorin OS Lite beta, which was a stripped down version of the original beta, was released on 30 May 2009. We had a few bugs including a start menu bug and a bug with 64bit but we fixed these bugs.

The first stable version of Zorin OS was released on 1 July 2009. In summer 2009 Zorin OS was tested in Kenya by Camara, an Irish charity that ships used computers to Africa to educate the community there. We received very positive feedback. Zorin OS 1.0 was downloaded by estimated 3,000 users.

Based on the comments and feedback from the community we decided to improve Zorin OS even more. We decided to make Zorin OS as friendly for Windows users as possible. We made a new Windows 7 style look including a new theme and Windows 7 like task bar.

We improved stability, fixed bugs, included many updates, added many new wallpapers created by ourselves. We also added many new applications including PlayOnLinux to make it easier for Windows users to install Windows programs on Zorin OS.

We created five different Zorin OS flavours:

1. Zorin OS Core which is a free down loadable release
2. Zorin OS Educational which is also available to download for free
3. Zorin OS Gaming which includes over 40 games
4. Zorin OS Multimedia which has a host of multimedia processing programs
5. Zorin OS Ultimate which includes the best programs from the Gaming and Multimedia editions

Zorin OS Gaming, Multimedia and Ultimate can be purchased on a DVD from our website to support our project. Currently we have to sell our products in order to support our project due to a very small level of donations.

Zorin OS 2.0 was released on 1 January 2010 and currently has over 8000 downloads. Zorin OS 2.0 was displayed at the BT Young Scientist 2010. We got 3rd Intermediate group in the Technology section and also got into the BT Business of Science program.

Zorin OS is growing at a fast pace and we are constantly improving it. Currently Zorin OS has about 75,000 relevant web pages on Google. There are also several very positive reviews on the internet.

Zorin OS 3.0 will be released this summer and will have many new features. It will also be tested in Africa again. We also plan to develop Zorin OS Educational Lite for law spec computers which are widely used in third world countries and Zorin OS Educational for high spec computers. We hope that these products would be used by individuals and schools.

We were very impressed by all of the features of Ubuntu. We really enjoyed its openness and functionality, and were amazed by the stability and the incredible desktop effects. We found Ubuntu to be very robust and extremely fast. We’re looking forward to the new 10.04 release.

Kyrill and Artyom Zorin

I think it’s pretty amazing that a 4th year and a 2 year student came up with this idea, and implemented it. I’d still prefer to work on the idea of getting more people using Ubuntu, then having it themed to look more windows like, but I can see the reasoning behind it.

I also think it’s pretty amazing these developments are happening in my back yard, here in Ireland, and makes me rather proud, that if students can do this, what else we can do.

(January 23, 2010 11:11 PM)

Special offers and discounts can be fun! If you subscribe to our newsletter you can get subscriber only discounts that we don't offer anywhere else!

In order to celebrate Friday, which seemed like a stupid enough reason to have a discount,  we've put together a couple of special discounts for you.

Use the coupon code: fridayfeeling
(coupon expires at midnight tonight Irish time (UTC) )

When ordering via our site you will get the following prices:

.net 1 year registration €4.99
.biz 1 year registration €2.99
.info 1 year registration €2.99
.mobi 1 year registration €4.99
.eu 1 year registration €1.99
.me 1 year registration €9.99
.be 1 year registration €0.99
.co.za 1 year registration €9.99

We're also trying to raise some money for a good cause. Check out our blog post here

Keep an eye on our Twitter and Facebook accounts for other silly offers

(January 22, 2010 11:13 AM)

So I originally was going to attend LCA 2010 for the week, but real life interjected and I couldn't abandon family commitments for that long, so I ended up doing a crazy cross-Tasman dash. As well as the change in flights, Isabel came down with a virus and Gia also got it, I think I got a milder version of it, but they both seem alright by the time I left but I had little sleep the previous two nights.

So I flew on Wednesday morning, got in Wed afternoon, met up with ppl, had a couple of beers, wrote slides, slept, finished slides, went to Thur morning, drugged myself up on Nurofen Plus to combat viral effects, gave my talk, went to see ajax talk, went to professional network dinner, went for beers with ajax + benh (listening to an American and a Frenchman speaking about wine while listening to drum n bass in a Wellington pub was a bit wierd). Decided to push on through, so got back to room at 3am or so, checked out/left for airport at 4:20am, flew at 6:20am, into BNE at 7am, home, bed, sleep for a few hours and mind Isabel for afternoon.

So my talk was "So you've put kernel graphics drivers in the kernel... what next? can I haz ponies?". My slide deck is off the 0-content style + lots of pictures of various ponies, which I've found, they'll be on the LCA site soon and I'll upload them when I plug that laptop in again.

(a) stop people reading ahead of your bullet points so they don't doze off while you are catching up
(b) gives them something to look at apart from me while they actually have to listen to me :-P

It seemed well received, the room was pretty packed out (ppl standing/sitting - LCA schedulers you listening?) and I don't think the sickness or lack of decent preparation made a big difference. I'd like to apologise for not even mentioning SGX/poulsbo, I'm not sure how but it totally slipped my mind, but the situation hasn't really changed in terms of how screwed it is.

(January 22, 2010 03:18 AM)

DEV300_m70 callcatcher results show four new unused methods arising out of the (cool) new printing changes.

(January 21, 2010 05:49 PM)

A small boat in Baltimore, County Cork.

The Galleries on Mallow Camera Club are back in operation! The site used to use a modified fGallery to allow members to upload photos but there’s an exploit for the last version of that plugin, it doesn’t work in WP 2.9.x and the author has abandoned the project unfortunately.

WordPress now supports galleries anyway so I converted the fGallery galleries into pages and upload files in the posts table. Works nicely now!

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(January 21, 2010 03:56 PM)

Those of you who know me may have noticed that I don’t often respond to solicitations for charitable donations. Whether it’s a sponsored walk or a collection for malaria, I’m just not into “impulse buying”.

Those of you who know me better might know why this is. It’s not because I’m mean, honest I’ve maxed out corporate Gift Matching programs with the employers who’ve had them (even when I was just an intern), and I hope to continue to do so. But I prefer to give in a “concentrated” fashion – rather than sprinkling my charitable donations across the vast spectrum of worthy causes, I choose a few each year that I really believe in, and do my best not to feel guilty that I can’t do everything!

When I lived in Ireland, particularly while I was still in college, I tried to “give global, act local”. I volunteered with various groups, from a local literacy program to the St John Ambulance. I even indulged in retail therapy for the St Vincent de Paul, both groceries and Christmas presents

Living in Switzerland, however, I’ve found that the attitude towards volunteer work is very different. Add my frequent travels (particularly in 2010) into the mix, and it’s just not a model that’s working for me any more. But my employment situation and the local tax regime mean that I have room to expand my financial giving – yay!

But I’m not sure where to put my money. We’re not talking millions, but I still think it’s worth spending time making sure it goes to something I believe in. That way, when I do have millions, I’ve already done the tough part And this is where you come in.

Where do you think I should put my charity bucks?

To give you some background, I think if my giving had a “theme”, it would be this: Knowledge is Power.

I’m interested in improving access to knowledge, information, education. So one of my favourite charities is Literacy Bridge, which began with the idea “that the most effective approach towards ending global poverty requires empowering people with better access to knowledge”.

I’m also interested in preserving knowledge for future generations. Last year, for example, I sponsored the restoration and preservation of a collection of James Lind manuscripts, in celebration of dad’s birthday.

In general, I’m interested in charities serving those with the greatest need (not necessarily those who are easiest to reach), and I’m not looking for advocacy groups for one particular idea or cause.

What am I looking for?

• Charities that understand the importance of inspiration. If I lived anywhere on the West Coast of the US, I’d already be a Friend of the California Academy of Sciences (and heck, I’m still considering it!). They understand that an interesting, engaging story is key to getting people to care. And whether the knowledge you want to impart is in science, the arts, or just basic literacy and numeracy, if you can’t get people to care about it, you’ll have a hard time achieving anything lasting.
• Charities that engage in a personal connection. I prefer to share my donations among a smaller group of charities, which means each gets a larger share of the pot. In return, I’d like to hear what each charity is doing, and connect with more than just bank slips.
• Charities that promote access to information over one particular message. Learning about family planning may be key to helping women in the developing world steer their fate, but if all you do is hand out contraceptives, they’re not going to learn how to run a small business that could give them a real degree of independence. Building people up, giving them the tools they need, is vital to sustainability.

Do you know a charity that fits the bill? Leave me a comment, or drop me an e-mail. Thanks!

(January 21, 2010 01:33 AM)

I emailed the LoCo teams mailing list today but wanted to let more people know about this new process.

We the LoCo council are going to be interviewing and meeting with approved LoCos to see how they are doing, how they have progressed in the 2 years (some a bit more ) since they were first approved. If they have had any issues, how they have dealt with them. If they have any issues, or ideas and how we the LoCo council can help with them.

So many times, a LoCo is approved and you don’t hear much about them, this can be due to a language barrier in some cases, or perhaps they don’t have people who have a blog on the planet.  Many LoCos do great and wonderful things out there for the community, I for one want to hear about it.

How it’s going to work.  Very simple, we have selected a number of teams at random who have been approved over 2 years. Broken them down into groups, and assigned a  LoCo Council member to them. They will attempt to contact the loco team contact/leader 3 times in a one month period.  Once contact has been made, they will be asked to attend a meeting, where we will do a short interview like they first did to get approved.

This is one of the goals set out for the LoCo Council for the Lucid cycle, and I think it’s one we can achieve and well worth doing,. All of the teams that are going to be re approved are on the re approval process page. In case you’re not sure of the LoCo Council member are, you will be hearing from one of them over the course of this cycle.

• Laura Czajkowski (czajkowski)
• Alan Pope (popey)
• Jan Claeys (janc)
• Efrain Valles (effie-jayx)
• Christophe Sauthier (huats)
• Chris Crisafulli (itnet7)

(January 20, 2010 10:47 PM)

With the wealth of information available on the internet, I find I'm using it more and more to learn about new things, to remind me about things I have failed to retain or indeed to discover those new subject areas that I should gain some understanding of.

Unfortunately (for me), more and more material is being presented in video format, particularly with the increasing ease with which one may create and upload something to YouTube and similar sites. This is good - with both visual and auditory stimulation information tends to be better retained. However, I am currently limited to 3G bandwidth (as in HSDPA from a mobile provider, not 3Gbit/s - which would be lovely ;-) ) and I'm finding that this pretty much precludes me from using video. It's no longer reasonable to have to wait 8 times the length of a video clip to download it.

Interestingly, given the Irish governments recent underwriting of 'broadband expansion' within the country through the medium of HSDPA coverage, their own website defines broadband as (from broadband.gov.ie):

"Broadband is an always-on Internet connection that gives you high-speed access and downloads for a flat rate monthly charge.
Everything works faster, from downloading emails and files (such as pictures & mp3's) or streaming movies and radio."

I'm not sure where they've run tests from, but in real world testing where I'm situated more than a few metres from the transmission mast / basestation, and there is more than just me as a subscriber in the area, video just does not work. Neither does VoIP / Skype or a number of other things that depend on reasonable, consistent latency - particularly on the uplink. I was amused to notice, in fairness, that the Broadband Technologies page on the same site does not list HSDPA/HSUPA as a broadband technology (rightly, in my personal opinion.)

I await the delivery of actual broadband to my house, so I may enjoy the occasional video from the internet once more...

(January 20, 2010 07:22 AM)

(January 19, 2010 06:55 PM)

The tragedy that struck Haiti a few days ago has shocked the world.

So we've decided to try and raise some cash for what we consider to be a worthy charity - Médecins Sans Frontières.

We've setup a donation site which uses the mycharity.ie system, so the funds go to the charity we've chosen - NOT us.

The target we've set is currently €10000 (ten thousand euro) and we've added a little twist. We've thrown €1000 into the pot to start things going.

For every €5000 raised we'll release a €5 discount on IE domain registrations - so if you can help us reach our target we'll be slicing €10 of the cost of registration. And, if you're all really generous, we'll end up giving away IE domains for a purely nominal fee..


So what are you waiting for? Get donating!

About the Charity:


Médecins Sans Frontières is an international organisation that helps provide emergency medical assistance to people in over 70 countries worldwide.

You can find out more about the organisation from either their international site or the Irish one.

(January 19, 2010 05:24 PM)

one dot one dot one dot one dot dot dot…. Yes, last week’s release of WordPress MU wasn’t to be the last one. This is. Really.

WordPress MU 2.9.1.1 fixes #1193 and #1195, two annoying but one liner bugs that crept into the last release.

This is also a security release fixing a bug in the installer that has existed for quite some time. If you can’t update yet, delete the file index-install.php immediately. That file is only used when you install WordPress MU for the first time so it’s not needed afterwards. Don’t ask, “I’m using version x.x.x, do I need to delete this file?” Just do it. Thanks Mad Sprat for reporting the problem.
The index-install.php in 2.9.1.1 is safe, but I’ve added a note at the end of the install recommending the file be removed. The file is not used after installation and it’s always a good idea to clean up unused scripts.

Get WordPress MU 2.9.1.1 on the download page or wait until your Dashboard upgrader finds the new release.
If you’re adventurous, download and replace the following files on your site to upgrade:

1. index-install.php
2. wp-admin/includes/mu.php
3. xmlrpc.php
4. wp-includes/version.php

Sorry Jeffro!

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(January 18, 2010 06:15 PM)

ICANN announced on Friday evening that we, Blacknight, had been chosen to receive the bulk transfer of all domains on the Hosting 365 Inc ICANN accreditation (IANA ID: 956).

This bulk transfer is a result of Hosting365 Inc  losing their ICANN accreditation on January 4th 2010 due to a compliance action taken by ICANN  (PDF)

We have setup a dedicated page on our site which addresses most of the common questions, but to summarise:

- all domains on the Hosting365 Inc accreditation have been transferred to us
- if your domain was one of those affected you should receive login details from us
- we have already attempted to contact all affected registrants to inform them of the change in registrar
- you can check if we are the registrar of record for any domain using WHOIS (our whois server will only show domains that are on our accreditation)
- nameserver records will not have been affected by the change in registrar
- domain renewal dates remain unchanged

If you have any queries related to this announcement please let us know.

While we realise that this sort of change may be traumatic for some registrants we intend to make the transition as painless as possible and look forward to doing business with the affected registrants.

(January 18, 2010 04:55 PM)

I write in English and Irish reasonably frequently, with an occasional sojourn into German and French too. Of course, there is also a requirement that I be able to correctly punctuate and accent the names of colleagues with non-Anglicised names too - so that leaves me with some fairly extensive requirements for keyboard layouts. My operating system of choice is Ubuntu Linux and I consider myself fortunate that the international flavour of the developers appears to have rubbed off on its multi-lingual configuration.

If you want one language and layout, simply choose System | Preferences | Keyboard and choose the Layouts tab. There you can add or remove layouts at will - I prefer the Ireland UnicodeExpert layout as it allows me to type English, Irish, German and French (and probably other languages too) without changing layout at all. Note that if you want to add this layout 'by language' it's under English, rather than Irish or Gaeilge/Gaelic.

Once you have selected this keyboard layout you can, of course, type in English as normal. Note that it's a 'UK' keyboard layout rather than American (i.e. the quotation marks are above the number 2 and the @-sign is above the single quote character. Also, the hash is next to the Enter key and the monetary pound sign is above the 3.) To get letters with fadas on them, as required for Irish, simply use (usually) AltGr + vowel. AltGr + o produces ó for example. This makes typing as Gaeilge go han-shimplí ar fad. Níl a lán rudaí níos éasca ar chor ar bith.

As well as this feature - the ability to get fadas (or French acute accents) with a single key-combo, things like umlauts are not too difficult: a simple AltGr + : (colon) followed by a vowel will give an umlaut over the letter. AltGr + : followed by 'e' gives ë - easy-peasy. Note that AltGr + ; (semi-colon) will do - it 'implies' the Shift key, saving you from having to be a concert pianist or an emacs user to key the keystrokes right. AltGr + ^ (the 6 key) and an appropriate letter puts a hat over the letter. AltGr + ~ (tilde) puts a tilde over letters like 'n' for Spanish (I think...) There are lots more characters and languages supported without changing keyboard layout.

(January 18, 2010 12:25 PM)

The Clarion Hotel and the Boardwalk and offices sit on the banks of the River Lee in Cork City Centre.

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(January 16, 2010 08:43 PM)

I am a big fan of funny tshirts.

It's not a secret.

Some of the tshirt captions and graphics that people come up with are sheer genius.

One of the latest ones from Tshirt Hell is a quite playful, yet risque, Facebook influenced one:




Grab it here

(January 14, 2010 08:12 PM)

WordPress MU version 2.9.1 has just been released.

This is probably the last release before it is merged into WordPress 3.0 as the merge has already started!

Anyway this release brings the new features and bug fixes of WordPress 2.9 and 2.9.1 into WordPress MU. My favourite new feature has to be the Trash can, but there’s also an image editor, plugins can be bulk updated and video embeds are easier to do.
If you have more than a few dozen blogs, be sure to add the commentmeta table first before upgrade.

Thank you to everyone who has helped make WordPress MU better over the years, either by helping on the forums, writing plugins, contributing code, working on Trac tickets or any of the other hundred and one other things that go into an open source project.

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(January 14, 2010 01:20 PM)

The Blackrock end of Pairc Ui Chaoimh in Cork. Michael Jackson, U2 and err, not sure who else have played in this stadium as well as the obvious GAA matches!

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(January 13, 2010 08:42 PM)

I was going to announce WordPress MU 2.9.1 today but I knew that people would run into trouble with the missing commentmeta table if they didn’t upgrade their blogs immediately.

So, download add-commentmeta.txt, rename it to add-commentmeta.php and copy it into your mu-plugins folder. Login to your site as a Site Admin, visit Site Admin->Upgrade and upgrade all the blogs on your site. Make sure you’re using WordPress MU 2.8.6 as the upgrade script in older versions may not execute the plugin.

The script above will add the commentmeta table to each blog. Give it time because it will take quite a while on large sites. WordPress MU 2.9.1 tomorrow.

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(January 13, 2010 05:43 PM)

It's a new year, so we're rejigging some of our service offerings. We're also giving a nice discount, but you'll have to read more about our hosted email service to get it ..

And besides, any excuse to use photos of cute kittens is always welcome, isn't it?

So our Hosted Exchange plans have now got even better!

We've doubled the disk space AND we've reduced the price.

We're offering Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, so you get all sorts of cool features for your outsourced email including:

• global address book
  
• shared calendar
• public folders
• ActiveSync

And all Hosted Exchange Email plans come with:

• IMAP4 / POP3
• Spam Filtering
• Virus Filtering

Not sure which plan is right for you? Check out our Hosted Exchange Email comparison chart.

From now until the end of January 2010 use the coupon code:

email0110

and you'll get 30% off your first month of Hosted Exchange Email. (Coupon is only valid on monthly accounts)

(January 11, 2010 11:50 AM)

Last year in Dublin I ran a Girl Geek Day event to celebrate Ada Lovelace day.  It was an afternoon of discussions where we got some feedback on issues we faced at college, in the workplace and how we thought we could help one another.

This year, the Ubuntu Women project has decided to celebrate International Women’s Day in a unique way.

International Women’s Day (IWD) is marked on March 8 every year. It is a major day of global celebration for the economic, political and social achievements of women.

Started as a political event, the holiday blended in the culture of many countries (primarily Russia and the countries of former Soviet bloc). In some celebrations, the day lost its political flavour, and became simply an occasion for men to express their love to the women around them in a way somewhat similar to Mother’s Day and St Valentine’s Day mixed together. In others, however, the political and human rights theme as designated by the United Nations runs strong, and political and social awareness of the struggles of women worldwide are brought out and examined in a hopeful manner.

What we are doing is going to collect  stories from people who are involved in the project. Everyone gets involved in different ways, and we want to hear your story.  Were you involved in your LoCo before this, a member of a different team, heard about Ubuntu in college, or were you looking for help an answers with a project you were working on.  No story is going to be there same. Your story is important to us, as a community so we can share it with others, and encourage them to join and take part.

To hear how you got involved, shows us there are numerous ways to stumble into our world and take part.  This is what we want to hear about.

Now, how do you do it, how can you take part, here’s the information, read it and do circulate it. Share it amongst your friends.

There will be two (2) prizes up for grabs. One (1) prize pack will be given to the story that the community votes is their favourite. One (1) prize pack will be given to a randomly drawn entrant. Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager will be drawing this entrant in a videocast, and announcing both winners to the world on March 8th.

Please email your stories to ubuntuwomen.competition at gmail.com by UTC  23:59 22nd February 2010.

By submitting a story, you acknowledge that it will be posted on the Ubuntu Women website under the Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivatives [0] licence. If you prefer that your story be posted under a less restrictive licence such as Creative Commons Attribution [1] or Public Domain [2], then feel free to let us know when you submit. All stories are to be non-fiction and of a family-friendly nature. The  organisers also reserve the right to interview prospective winners over
the phone or other voice chat at their discretion.

We will celebrate International Women’s Day by announcing the winners, who will receive gift packs (which are still in negotiation — we will announce when it is confirmed!).

[0] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/
[1] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
[2] http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain

Looking forward to reading all the stories about how you got involved in Ubuntu! Remember it can be any length, it can be about anything you want, don’t feel your story has to be technical to enter! We just want to hear it from you!

(January 10, 2010 09:22 PM)

Oscar our Shih Tzu is as comfortable in snow as he is in any other extreme weather. He’d rather be indoors in the warmth!

It snowed heavily and steadily today in Blarney. We took Adam out in it after wrapping him up warm and he played with the kids down the road, throwing snow around, messing with a bucket, and generally having fun.

Hi Mairead! Glad you follow my blog, you should comment some time!

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(January 10, 2010 08:27 PM)