Planet ILUG

I blogged a while back about Barry doing his Masters Thesis on The motivational drivers and barriers of volunteers in open source communities which looked at the Ubuntu Community, he handed it in yesterday and I know some folks were curious about results so I asked him to write a small piece for the blog:

Barry Smyth:
In early 2010 I sat in on a seminar on Open Source Software and the community in Ireland, organised as part of my masters course in DIT Kevin St. One of the speakers was Laura Czajkowski. It was during her
talk that I saw the commitment she had to the community and it begins a process of thought about what drives individuals to offer their time and effort to Open Source Communities.

The course that I was studying was Computing but specialising in Knowledge Management (KM). Knowledge Management is the realisation that knowledge is an organisations greatest asset. We constantly hear
the term Knowledge and Smart economy being touted by the Irish government at the moment. They like so many large organisations realise that it is what we know and don’t realise we already know can
be our greatest resource.

Within companies it is commonplace for individuals to hoard knowledge, we do this for various reasons.

• We are not confident about what we know, and are afraid others may disregard our knowledge.
• We fear giving our knowledge freely, as it may make us redundant.
• We find it difficult to articulate our knowledge.
• We do not have the tools available to record our knowledge.
• We simple do not realise that we possess some knowledge.

KM is about accessing the knowledge within people, teams, departments, organisations, then storing that knowledge in an understandable or codified fashion, and finally making that knowledge available and
easily accessible to others. Some prime examples of where KM can work effectively is in the Pharmaceutical industry, where the process of getting new drugs to market can be as long as 12 years. Most of the large pharmaceutical companies have implemented large KM projects. One in particular cut the time for filling applications to the European and American drug boards in half. The KM systems they installed held the knowledge of previous employees and former workers of the American Federal drug  Administration (FDA). Due to their expertise as to what information was required in an application, these applications could be filled out much faster. As you can imagine the saving of several years in getting a drug to market is worth a considerable amount of money to drug companies. This is can be the power of KM.

However what many organisations find when they implement KM initiatives, regardless of the money, time and expertise that they throw at it, is people seem unwilling to share their Knowledge. There are drivers that motivate and barriers that prevent people from sharing their knowledge.

Within Open Source communities, we have a group of people who come together to freely share knowledge. This makes it an ideal place to investigate positive motivations. If KM initiatives could replicate
the motivations within Open Source Communities then their initiatives could prove far more successful.

Back to my story, I began to realise that the Ubuntu community could offer me a perfect environment to investigate motivations to knowledge sharing. In May I contacted Laura and told her about my Idea. Within days we
were sitting down together in a lab in DIT and Laura was showing me around the Ubuntu community. Over the course of the next 3 months with Laura and several other members of Ubuntu’s community I had fashioned
a suitable experiment. The experiment would utilise the existing social networking pages (Launchpad) within the community and over a period of Two weeks would email an advertisement of one of those profiles to the mailing list of the Irish team. I would then survey the Irish team to ascertain the usefulness of the experiment. The idea of the experiment was to measure the levels of trust needed for knowledge sharing, and whether tools like Launchpad could assist in people getting curious about others in the community. This is the starting point of building relationships and trust. The experiment received great support from the community and I had a fantastic response to the survey. The experiment idea was even taken on board as a continuous feature by the UK and North Carolina teams. The results of the experiment did indeed indicate that, firstly trust
is important to knowledge sharing and secondly tools like launhpad if used in a proactive manner can initiate contact between members of the group.

Overall my experience dealing with Laura and the rest of the Ubuntu community was extremely pleasant. I could not of asked for any more help or enthusiasm. It was a privilege to get an insight into a remarkable community.

This is an extract of some of the projects findings:

• The project’s findings clearly suggested the varying forms of trust. That initial conversations between members in the Ubuntu community did lead to greater curiosity of others.
• This can then lead to a process where two individuals will get to know more about each other and strengthen the bonds of trust between them.
• The project also identified tools as being very important within online communities in building familiarity and trust.
• Correspondence and direct communication was identified as being the most important tool in which people will get to know one another and build trust.
• The project results suggested that the availability of social networking tools in this case Launchpad was utilised by members as a means to gain more knowledge about other users. However it also suggested that this was after initial correspondence with that individual. Curiosity of others increased after correspondence with them. This would suggest that tools are very useful in the process of building trust and friendships in virtual communities.
• Communities where there is little correspondence however may not benefit from this trust building processes and utilisation of community tools. This is where the project findings are so useful. They clearly suggest that by advertising members profiles can initiate curiosity in them. Traffic to the profiles and results of the survey indicate that this is the case. This can be an important initiative in implementing the trust building processes in communities and subsequently the sharing of knowledge. It can help drive the initial stages of a KM system and could become an important part of the familarisation and trust building process.
• The building of friendships was indicated as being one of the main motivators of membership in open source communities and thus the free sharing of knowledge. Trust is a vital element in any friendship and therefore any tools that can facilitate this are very valuable in creating a healthy dynamic knowledge-sharing environment.
• The findings imply that a proactive approach is needed within a community to initiate the trust building process, that although members desire to build relationships of trust with others they may need a push to do so.

Thanks to Barry for the update, if anyone wants to drop him a line here is his email address.

(September 02, 2010 03:27 PM)

I don't like lazy marketing.

I've never given the Golden Spiders permission to email me or my business, yet again today they did.

Annoying.

However it's also quite amusing ..

One of the emails landed in our helpdesk which stripped out ALL the HTML .. what was left over wasn't exactly um .. intelligible..

(September 02, 2010 03:01 PM)

I overhauled my Tweet Tweet plugin for WordPress yesterday so it would work with the new Twitter OAuth mechanism. This morning I made it possible to download your older tweets, up to the max limit of 3,200 tweets that Twitter allows.

It’s still a work in progress but I want to get a new release out as soon as I can for current users who are using the basic auth that doesn’t work any more. If you’re feeling adventurous give the development version on the download page a go and tell me what you think!

99% of the OAuth code was ripped from Alex King’s Twitter Tools which in turn uses Abraham Williams’ twitteroauth.php library and OAuth.php from oauth.net. Thank you all for doing the heavy lifting required!

Related Posts

• Tweet Tweet
• Tweet Tweet 0.1 for WordPress
• TechLudd Cork 2008

(September 02, 2010 02:25 PM)

Packt launches fifth annual Open Source Awards

The 2010 Open Source Awards was launched last month by Packt, inviting people to visit www.PacktPub.com and submit nominations for their favorite Open Source project. Now in its fifth year, the Award has been adapted from the established Open Source CMS Award with the wider aim of encouraging, supporting, recognizing and rewarding all Open Source projects.
WordPress won the 2009 Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award in what was a very close contest with MODx and SilverStripe. While MODx was the first runner up, SilverStripe, a Most Promising CMS Award winner in 2008, made its way to the second runner up position in its first year in the Open Source CMS Award final.
The 2010 Award will feature a prize fund of $24,000 with several new categories introduced. While the Open Source CMS Award category will continue to recognize the best content management system, Packt is introducing categories for the Most Promising Open Source Project, Open Source E-Commerce Applications, Open Source JavaScript Libraries and Open Source Graphics Software. CMSes that won the Overall CMS Award in previous years will continue to compete against one another in the Hall of Fame CMS category.
These new categories will ensure that the Open Source Awards is the ultimate platform to recognise excellence within the community while supporting projects both new and old. “We believe that the adaption of the Award and the new categories will provide a new level of accessibility, with the Award recognizing a wider range of Open Source projects; both previous winners while at the same time, encouraging new projects” said Julian Copes, organizer of this year’s Awards.
Packt has opened up nominations for people to submit their favorite Open Source projects for each category at http://www.PacktPub.com/open-source-awards-home . The top five in each category will go through to the final, which begins in the last week of September. For more information on the categories, please visit Packt’s website http://www.PacktPub.com/blog/packt’s-2010-open-source-awards-announcement

(September 02, 2010 10:21 AM)

A common software engineering pattern is the need to test elements for set membership.

Practical questions like “is this item in my cache” arise surprisingly often. Bloom Filters are a great mechanism for performing this test, and if you haven’t encountered them before – they’re well worth knowing about. But over the last year, I’ve been experimenting with a different method for these kinds of membership tests on enumerated sets, and thought it was worth sharing.

It’s definitely not the first time the technique has been used, Cian found some papers on its use. But it’s not a common pattern, which is a pity – because it’s incredibly simple, and lends itself very well to modern hardware.

First things first, some huge disclaimers;

• The approach only works on enumerated sets. Each element in the problem space has to be assigned a unique counted number. Hashes won’t do.
• The method is constrained by the size of product of the total number of elements and the maximum size of any set.

So, it’s very simple; Take each element in the problem space, assign it a unique prime number, and then represent sets as the products of those primes. This works because of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic.

Here’s a summary of operations;

Computing a set:
Compute the product of all of the elemental primes in the set.

s = a * b * c

Testing for element membership:
Test the modulus of the set number.

(s % a) == 0

Adding to the set:
Multiply the existing set product by the new element’s prime number.

s *= d

Removing from the set:
Divide the existing set product by the element’s prime number.

s /= a

Now at this point, you’re probably skeptical about the usefulness of the technique, given the constraints. Obviously other operations like unions and intersections between sets are possible, but they require factorisation – and so are not particularly efficient (though you’d be surprised how quickly they do run). But look at the benefits;

• Unlike Bloom filters, there are zero false positives, and zero false negatives. The method is 100% precise.
• Due to their use in cryptography; libraries, CPUs and other hardware have arisen that are highly efficient at computing the products and modulus of very large numbers.

As a case-in-point, let’s use the internet as an example. Suppose you want to model the internet as a system of interconnected autonomous systems and paths. A really common test when using such models is to determine whether or not a particular system is on a particular path.

If we take the internet as 100,000 autonomous systems, and the longest practical path on the internet as containing 20 such systems (longer paths exist, but are oddities – in real terms these numbers are both over-estimates) the largest product we would ever need to compute is smaller than 2⁴¹⁰. That’s much smaller than even modern cryptographic primes themselves, and much much smaller than their products. There is a lot more room.

Actually, that was my first real-world use-case for this technique – modeling the internet in a few hundred lines of python, on a laptop – as a prototype. Surprisingly, a Macbook Air could perform well over one million such membership tests per second without skipping a beat – after reordering to assign the most popular AS numbers the lowest prime-numbers. And incidentally, if that kind of problem interests you – Cloudfront are hiring.

Now a question, for the information theorists; How is it that this method can seemingly perfectly encode N bits of information in fewer than N bits? For example it takes 2 bits to represent the number “2″ and 2-bits to represent the number “3″, yet to represent both through their product – “6″ it takes only 3 bits. But this isn’t like addition or some other operation – there really only is one way of factorising 6 to get back to “3″ and “2″. The information is seemingly encoded perfectly.

(September 02, 2010 06:24 AM)

I had a fun time with my dd-wrt device lately. It seems that it doesn't give IPv6 router advertisement to my clients, let alone get an IPv6 address on its own. My fix was to add these two commands on startup (make sure that the IPv6 address you assign is in the same subnet as your router (my dd-wrt deals only with wireless, it is not my home router):

ip addr add 2001:xxx:xxx:b:/64 dev br0
ip -6 ro add default via 2001:xxx:xxx:b::1
radvd -C /tmp/radvd.conf

Onto the radvd.conf front, this is my setup:

interface br0
{
AdvSendAdvert on;
prefix 2001:xxx:xxxx:b::/64
{
AdvOnLink on;
AdvAutonomous on;
};
};

And voila!

~# ping6 frlinux.net
PING frlinux.net: 56 data bytes
64 bytes : seq=0 ttl=56 time=30.131 ms
64 bytes : seq=1 ttl=56 time=28.834 ms
64 bytes : seq=2 ttl=56 time=29.812 ms
64 bytes : seq=3 ttl=56 time=29.507 ms

(September 01, 2010 11:47 PM)

I recently went it alone, and now I’m trying to start my own business InHouseIT.ie ,providing(linux) IT support. I finished up in Blacknight in July after a year and a bit working there. From my conversations on the phone to different (blacknight) clients I figured out that there is a market of this Linux stuff [...]

(September 01, 2010 04:06 PM)

Following on from my post  last week regarding the up to date conference packs and the new banners for APPROVED teams, we have created a new wiki page we need the team contact to fill in. Again, a big thank you goes to Canonical for making this possible!

(August 31, 2010 04:36 PM)

I am sending this more as a reminder of a few good links I found lately. I managed to render the phone unusable with its SIM card last night. After a lot of testing and trialling, eventually found a firmware which works (JPC) which fixes my baseband radio issue. I can now make and receive calls again. Build seems to be a fairly recent one (few days old). I have also found a page about all the downloads you need which includes rooting stuff, radio files and more. I feel the need to include the thread which began my sleepless night. On the baseband front, this is what you want. I would advise by start reading this thread first.

(August 31, 2010 03:34 PM)

I stumbled upon phpUnderControl today by chance and it looks like a very interesting project which integrates:

• PHPUnit
• PhpDocumentor
• PHP_CodeSniffer

I hope to take a closer look at it in the near future for a new project we’re lining up at work (want to help us?).

Speaking of continuous integration, for another project we installed and look after a Hudson server for a customer who is developing a Java and Cocoa application – if you’re looking for a CI tool for a Java (or other) development project, this is definitely worth a look (easy installation, nice and intuitive interface and well featured).

(August 30, 2010 07:24 PM)

For a customer of Open Solutions, we need to mass encode thousands of video files and also segment and encrypt them for use with Apple’s HTTP Streaming. (using Amazon EC2 instances for the leg work).

The one piece of the jigsaw we were missing was encryption and after some work ourselves and with the help of a stackoverflow question, we have a working sequence of commands to successfully and compatibly encrypt segments for playback on Safari and other supported HTTP streaming clients.

Head on over to Open Solutions’ blog to read how we did it.

(August 30, 2010 01:00 PM)

I have recently purchased a USB dongle to measure temperature and humidity. This dongle is supported under Linux as follows: 1130:660c Tenx Technology, Inc., I am quite happy to see that a few projects exist around this device. I have found one which seems to work properly. You just need to compile it then it will give you the following on first run:

./temper
Found device: 413c:2106
Found device: 046d:c00e
Found device: 1d6b:0001
Found device: 067b:2303
Found device: 1d6b:0001
Found device: 1d6b:0001
Found device: 1d6b:0001
Found device: 1130:660c
Found deviceNum 0
Trying to detach kernel driver
detach successful
detach successful
sending bytes 10, 11, 12, 13, 0, 0, 2, 0
sending bytes 82, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
sending bytes 10, 11, 12, 13, 0, 0, 1, 0
Other Stuff (232 bytes):
57 58 14 00 14 00 53 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
sending bytes 10, 11, 12, 13, 0, 0, 2, 0
sending bytes 84, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
sending bytes 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
sending bytes 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
sending bytes 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
sending bytes 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
sending bytes 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
sending bytes 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
sending bytes 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
sending bytes 10, 11, 12, 13, 0, 0, 1, 0
temperature 75.20F 24.00C

Note the temperature on the last line. Since this is a C file, you just need to tweak it according to your needs. You can also download a perl class if you prefer. And last but not least, it is also possible to add it to cacti

(August 30, 2010 12:47 PM)

If you're going to spend money registering domains in target countries and doing targetted pay per click campaigns you should also take the time to do some basic market research. And no, I don't mean pure figures - I mean cultural stuff.

Jonathan Brazil spotted a really silly mistake this morning:

If you go to the hassle of buying a .ie and sponsored Google links for Irish searches, don't call it EIRE and price your products in GB£

The ad in question:


And here's another one I found:
I can't think of anyone IN Ireland using the term "Eire" or in what context they might even try to use it.

Seriously.

If you're going to try selling to us then learn to speak to us in terms we understand and use.

(August 30, 2010 11:45 AM)

Even though this is not official yet, a test firmware is available. You will need Windows for this :( but this is quite worth it. I got the 2.2 JP3 version. So far so good, some minor glitches but overall experience much faster! The final is due for september, so not long to wait i guess.

(August 30, 2010 12:24 AM)

When you don't have a massive marketing budget you need to be careful how you spend what you have and try to find alternate methods to promote your business.

Promoting your business shouldn't be just about the sale. Of course you need to make sales, but there are better ways to interact with people than just trying to sell people your products and services.

This is where "social media" comes into the picture.

"Social Media" for us as a company has gone from being almost an "afterthought" to being one of our more focussed online channels. It helps us provide customer service to our clients, while also helping to drive sales and get feedback on new product and service ideas.

Unfortunately there are a hell of a lot of "buzzwords" and inane claims being made by people about how social media can help companies. A couple of years ago everyone was told that they needed to have a blog, now they're being told that Twitter and Facebook are the "one true way".

Sure, there is some truth in it, but the reality is that a lot of people don't really understand how it works and a lot of the people advising them are out for very short term benefit. (I'd love to know how many "social media" related businesses have sprung up over the last couple of years!)

For many companies they'd be better off ignoring Twitter and Facebook rather than setting up profiles across multiple social media networking site and services and not actually using them actively. This may seem to be counter-intuitive, but in reality it's not.

You'll have to excuse the analogy, but if you're never going to answer the phone or make a phone call, would you continue paying line rental?

While a company that actively engages and adopts social media as part of its business processes can benefit (and I know we have), unless you are willing to really "dive in" it's probably going to do you more harm than good.

So what has been our experience to date?

Bear in mind that some things we've done probably wouldn't suit everyone, but I'll share them anyway.

We have been actively engaging with the public via discussion forums, blogs and mailing lists since we first started out over 7 years ago. The "explosion" in social media hasn't changed that. All that's really changed is the media that we use.

I've posted some of the statistics of our usage etc., in the past, so let's revisit them again.

Twitter can be a fun medium, though when things go wrong you need to be able to respond as quickly as possible. We have hooked both this blog and our status one into our Twitter account, so that all our blog posts, be they news or service related, get distributed to our Twitter followers. We have experimented with adding in other RSS sources, such as our forum, to our Twitter account, but the results weren't favourable.

Apart from news, customer service stuff and technical service related messages, we've also used Twitter to run a variety of "silly" competitions and other promotions. We view them as "silly" and "fun" and based on the feedback we've had from clients they seem to get a "kick" out of them as well.

In terms of our follower count it has been growing, but I wouldn't consider that to be the most valuable metric. When talking about social media you need to remember that the important thing is the "social" side of it. You need to interact!


We do use the web interface sometimes, but generally speaking we use 3rd party services to read and respond.

As you can see the most popular client for us is Tweetdeck, which we use on both desktop machines and mobile phones (iPhone). The only thing to be wary of if you're using a single client to handle multiple accounts is not mixing up the accounts! (We've all made that mistake in the past and it could be potentially embarassing!)

You'll also notice that we're using Twitterfeed, which pulls in any RSS source you throw at it and Facebook. Anything we post on our Facebook wall gets automatically sent to Twitter as well.

We recently setup a custom branded URL shortener so you'll see tweets from @blacknight and various members of our staff referencing blacknig.ht.

And since I mentioned branding....

If you're tweeting for business then you need to do it separately from any personal account that you may have. You should also spend a bit of time customising the avatar and background to fit in with your company's branding. We got our designer to do custom backgrounds for our main account and those of several staff members, so if you go to our accounts in a browser you'll see our branding is retained.

Facebook is a slightly different beast.

We've been using it in pretty much the same way that we've been using Twitter, so it's also being used to pull in posts from both blogs, as well as a channel to promote special offers and deal with customer service queries.

There is one notable downside to Facebook. There is no way to know if someone has posted on your "wall" unless you actually go there and check, so it's very easy to miss time-sensitive queries. To help counter this we added our primary contact details to the sidebar.

But what about actual metrics?

Here's a breakdown of our Facebook page:

The page has grown in popularity steadily over the last year and you can clearly see that our audience is primarily male and Irish!

Making sense of Facebook stats isn't that easy, as they use a lot of their own jargon, but "interactions" are pretty self-explanatory:

We tend to see spikes in activity if we run promotions or competitions

Over the past year we've run several promotions via Twitter and Facebook. While the uptake on them has been very good we've also been reminded more than once that not everyone is using them, so cross-posting coupon codes and other offers to our main blog or via our email newsletter has paid dividends. To that end we also setup a dedicated site just for our latest offers and coupon codes.

Going where our customers are (or could be) is essential, so we keep an active eye on discussion forums and mailing lists where people might be talking about us or the services that we offer. While there are several monitoring tools available Google Alerts works very well most of the time.  We also use Twitter's search functions pretty heavily!

Another area that we've found helpful has been video. Using tools like Camtasia or iShowU it's quite easy to put together tutorials and screencasts to help our clients make the most of our services. Admittedly we haven't posted a new video in quite some time, but it's on our ever growing todo list! And since we don't like being overly constrained by 3rd party services we've been cross-posting our videos to multiple video sharing sites using a combination of blip.tv and TubeMogul.

So what if any advice can I / we give you?

I guess the sanest advice is as follows.

If you're thinking of using social media to help your business then that is commendable. However if you're going to do it setup a personal account first and see how people use (and abuse) the various media first. A common issue I've seen with businesses attempting to use social media is that they don't understand how people use it, as they haven't watched at all and simply dived in. If you take a bit of time to observe and learn you'll probably gain a lot more.

There are an ever growing number of tools and services available to help people and businesses use social media and a lot of them either don't cost anything or are incredibly cost-effective.

We intend to keep using social media to communicate and interact with our clientele as we feel that is working for us.

There are probably a lot of things we could be doing and things we might be able to do better, but we're always willing to try new things!

In closing, though I started this off thinking about our experiences as a registrar and hosting provider I guess most of what we've done would apply to any company that offers services.. Maybe I should change the title?


Metrics pulled in from Facebook, Tweetstats and Twittercounter

(August 29, 2010 08:46 PM)

My closest and dearest friend left Ireland 2 years ago due to the construction industry recession over here.  She packed up her bags and 3 kids and headed west and landed in Guelph Toronto and hasn’t looked back since.  She has 3 lovely kids Saoirse 10 and twins Alannah and Cillian who are 4.5.

She’s looking for an Au Pair to mind the kids.  The Twins need minding 2 days a week as they’ve just started school. So before and after school otherwise.  Tara works as a health and safety manager for a construction company, and travels a small amount so on those times she’d like the person to be able to stay over.

The eldest is 10 and in Grade 5, and the twins are starting Junior Kindergarden in Sept. If you’re fun reliable and looking for work do contact her and meet 3 great kids!

(August 29, 2010 08:39 PM)

Thanks to the folks over at Tog who kindly offered us space to meet up and work on Ubuntu Global Jam.  It was I think the best one so far for us. 8 people turned up over the day and we worked on different areas and helped one another.  It was great to see two people who’d never log a bug before get excited how they could log all their information in the ubuntu-bug command so that was pretty good to see.

Mike took on the task of giving the Irish wiki page a massive overhaul, we gave him some ideas and showed him how to create the fancy sub header, so it’s now looking very nice. Rory worked on some LoCo Directory bits namely the stuff he logged as bugs Others worked on Answers on Launchpad and triaging bugs so all in all a great day was had.  Thanks to all those who came in it was great to see new faces there. It was great to get people using Ubuntu in ways they never had, learning how to create their own wiki pages and logging into the LoCo Directory and showing them how to look up events.

(August 29, 2010 11:51 AM)

I was using Sweetcron to publish a rather boring "life stream" over on one of my other personal domains.

Unfortunately the script has been pretty much abandoned by developers, so no new features or updates have been made in well over a year.

It also didn't have ANY caching options whatsoever, so it really wasn't a "gentle" script to run.

I'm currently looking for a suitable alternative, though I'm experimenting with a Wordpress plugin and theme, which seem to work reasonably well.

(August 28, 2010 07:03 PM)

Last Sunday, I announced that Conor and myself were starting a new file manager called SaorFM.

We started out slow, because we want to have absolutely everything in this to be checked by PHPUnit (for console-style testing) or Selenium (for GUI testing).

We’ve got enough written that you can do the following:

• Write and save a config file.
• Rename/Move files.
• Delete files/directories.
• List the contents of a directory.

All of the above have automated tests, so we’re fairly sure they’re correct. The main class’s source is readable here, and the test’s source is readable here.

Conor is currently adding support for SaorFM into his own CMS, Furasta. I’ll be working on adding it to my own tomorrow (got relatives coming over today – busy busy!).

We need to add some more functionality to make this basically complete:

• Move directories.
• Upload files.

After that, things get interesting, as we’ll be adding a plugin architecture.

Tomorrow, I’ll be finishing up the basics, and will write some simple jQuery plugins to select files, select directories, upload files, etc.

Soon, we’ll be catching up on KFM in functionality .

(August 28, 2010 01:15 PM)

There is an enormous amount of useful information on wiki.ubuntu.com however there is also a lot of duplicate triplicate and redundant material on there also.  This weekend why not get your loco reviewing a section of the wiki and help to clear up some of the pages.  I’ve noticed sometimes that a page was created in lower  case and then never used as someone else created the wiki in upper case, well then the one not used should be removed.

The LoCo Council are going to be looking over the sections of the pages LoCo Teams and if you want to help that would be great.  A lof of that information is on the LoCo Directory – I’d hope by now folks know about the directory………………

If you go through the wiki and find all the pages that are out of date, unused or the information is over on the LD already  add the Category “CategoryLoCoObsolete” to it.   We the LC will review the pages and decide their fate.  So don’t be worried.

FYI — to add a Category, just append:

----
CategoryLoCoObsolete

to the bottom of a page. If there’s already a Category, do this:

----
CategoryAwesomeTag CategoryLoCoObsolete

I’ll be in #ubuntu-locoteams on Satuday from 9am UTC – 4pm UTC and on Sunday from 10am UTC – 7pm UTC

(August 27, 2010 08:53 PM)

I had a call from a client who asked why, after logging into a CMS admin area and spending an hour or so writing a document, she was unable to submit it because it claimed she was not logged in.

The answer was that the session had expired.

On busy servers, one method of optimisation is to reduce the session-time. This makes it easier for the server to cope with a large number of visitors, but also has the undesired effect of logging people out if they take their time over anything.

One solution to this is to keep the admin session in a database table, tied to a cookie in the browser. Unfortunately, that means that every time the browser sends the cookie, it must be verified, whereas a session is usually trusted.

The workaround is to use some JavaScript to refresh the session every now and then.

I wrote a simple cyclical script which polled the server every minute to refresh the session.

Here it is, using jQuery to handle the AJAX:

function keep_session_alive(){
  setTimeout(keep_session_alive,60000);
  $.get('/ww.admin/keepalive.php');
}
setTimeout(keep_session_alive,60000);

And the server-side code is this:

<?php
session_start();

Very very simple trick. The polling could be enhanced, if you want, to alert the admin of anything interesting that’s happened on the server.

(August 27, 2010 09:14 AM)

I rather dislike “the community” as a term, it’s too easy to mentally substitute it as other people or useful idiots.

(August 27, 2010 08:51 AM)

Not Linux related (although i'm going to use that on my kindle app on Android), i have found 2 places fairly nice to get free digital books, first one would be feedbooks and second one is the amazon kindle store, if you sort by price, then there's plenty free there (thanks Sean for that one :)

(August 27, 2010 12:53 AM)

UPDATE: Official Announcement

We’ve just announced that we are looking for someone new to join our team over at Open Solutions.

We’ll be making a more official announcement later next week but I’m heading away for a few days and wanted to get something out there.

(August 26, 2010 11:18 AM)

Not long left till Maverick Meerkat aka 10.10 is released with that in  mind it’s time for loco teams to start to plan for their release party.  I’ve added the global event to the LoCo Directory Maverick Meerkat is scheduled for  release on the 10th of the 10th 2010. To celebrate 10.10 LoCo teams have  organised parties to celebrate these events.

Release parties are a great way to celebrate, meet new friends and often introduce new people to Ubuntu and to our local communities. Release parties are not only great way to meet people but also they are a lot of  fun.  Please add your event to the LoCo Directory

If you want to organise a release party:

* Learn more. Read the guidelines on how to run a party.  Many of the release parties are organised by Ubuntu LoCo Teams. Check with your local team to see if  you can work together on a party.

* Get advice. Ask other loco teams what they have done in the past and what to do, ask on the loco contacts list, or in #ubuntu-locoteams
* Let everyone know. Announce your party on the loco-contacts mailing list to spread the word!

If you have a release party scheduled, be sure to:

* Add your party to the LoCo directory – http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/team/add

* Spread the word. Blog about it, advertise it, tell your friends, tell local media, tell podcasts and otherwise promote it, tag it with #locoteams

* Stay in touch. Join the IRC channel #ubuntu-release-party on irc.freenode.net

* Add picture tags. If you post photos to Flickr, please tag them with *ubuntu*, *release*, *party*, *2010*, *10.10* and *Maverick*.

Jono Bacon the Ubuntu Community Manager is wanting to put together a collage of release party group photos, so take a group photo of your party people and email jono AT ubuntu DOT com with a link to the photo online and the subject *”Maverick Release Party Photo”* — ensure that you specify which LoCo Team party it is at.

(August 25, 2010 03:31 PM)

Queen cover band Killer Queen played in The Opera House, Cork a few months back and I snapped a few photos!

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(August 24, 2010 08:27 PM)

A small update, I’m slowly working through the WP Super Cache admin page in an effort to make it better. You can in fact download the development version if you want to follow along.

What you see above is my first pass. An effort to make the first options section match the look and feel of the standard Settings pages in WordPress. It’s all likely to be mixed around and moved about before the next release, so please, dig in and lend a hand!

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(August 24, 2010 05:20 PM)

I am very pleased to announce the new Conference packs for LoCo Teams, this came from a session at UDS-M in Brussels of this year but also was something we’ve been looking at for a while.  So it’s great to see an action item marked DONE (which makes bacon happy) but also has a positive effect for a lot of people.  We wanted to encourage teams to become and stay an approved LoCo Team and how we could possibly help. With that in mind we looked what was currently available, we talked to many people on what they thought might be helpful to them. When you attend an event you are representing your team and Ubuntu, so to present yourself in a professional manner we looked at things like a banner for teams.

The LoCo Council would like to thank Jane Silber for this as she was one of the people in the session who encouraged us to bring this action item to light and also we’ve had great help from Cezzaine Haugh and also Canonical for making this happen for all LoCo Teams, thank you very much!

The following has been approved for conference packs, and the wiki has been updated to reflect this

Once off gift to approved loco teams
When a LoCo Team is approved, part of what they need to do is nominate someone to receive and manage their LoCo Welcome Pack, which Canonical will provide.

• x1 PVC banner – (one design only)
• x1 Table cloth – (one design only)

Pack A – Approved loco teams

• x55 Lanyards
• x2 caps
• x25 mixed sticker sheets
• x25 pin-badges – (These have yet to be produced)
• x2 t-shirts (release t-shirt) for give-away/booth staff
• x1 Official Ubuntu Book (prize/give-away) – (Only while stocks last, we will not produce anymore than the amount received after each release)
• CDs (250 Desktop, 25 Server, 25 Kubuntu) – (To be requested via shipit as per usual process)
  
• Name badges (Loco to produce their own)
• Ubuntu leaflets (Loco to create a project to produce their own ideas)
• Ubuntu video (Canonical to provide – will be available for d/l on wiki once completed)
  

Pack B – UnApproved loco teams

• x25 mixed sticker sheets
• x55 Lanyards
• CDs (75 Desktop) – (To be requested via shipit as per usual process)
• Name badges (Loco to produce their own)
• Ubuntu leaflets (Loco to create a project to produce their own ideas)
• Ubuntu video (Canonical to provide – will be available for d/l on wiki once completed)

Also discussed and decided last week on was:

• Ubuntu leaflets – not relevant in most countries due to various languages. Loco council will introduce a community driven project for loco teams to design their own Ubuntu leaflets based on brand guidelines and access to assets. Assets for these can be found at: http://design.canonical.com/the-toolkit/ubuntu-brand-guidelines/
• Name-badge designs - this is mainly when hosting their own events. Again Loco’s to create their own using assets and brand guidelines.
• Ubuntu video to run on machines at events – Canonical is currently working on a generic Ubuntu video in English and a few other languages – this will be added to the wiki page once completed.

(August 24, 2010 02:59 PM)

Yesterday I found out about the Limeick hackerspace meet up and I thought I should pop along.  I signed up to the Google group and read some of the past threads, seemed interesting and with that I popped along.

We met at the absolute hotel in the bar area, and there were a few faces I knew so that was nice, folks began to chatter .  James Corbett kicked off the welcome and got the ball rolling with discussions, folks began to talk about what they wanted but it was a little hard to hear in the pub, very nice bar staff muted the music.  We kicked off a formal introduction as it’s always nice to put the face and name to the people who have been talking on mailing lists.

It was interesting for me to see all the different backgrounds looking to take part, from developers, to hands on knitting and sewing to welding and making robots.   We also kicked off what we would like to see in a place, what are our requirements and the various empty buildings in Limerick that could possibly be a potential place for us to dwell. A name for the place also was discussed, in Dublin it  is called TOG and in Galway 091labs, s to make it unique what do folks want it called, this is rather important to sort out as effects on domain names twitter acs and marketing of the organisation.  Which also lead us onto what kind of organisation do folks want.  So lots of discussion! I also suggested to make it regular, have the event on the 2nd Tuesday of the month at 6pm, any later means people have longer to wait around after work and  if you can come to some place after work  you’re more inclined to come along.

It was lovely to meet people and great to see this kind of initiative taking off here in Limerick!

(August 24, 2010 12:29 PM)

For the next couple of days I'll be in Dublin for the TRAFFIC conference.

It's the first time that there's been a serious domain industry event in Ireland, so it's nice to see so many familiar faces on my "home turf".

The lineup for the event is good, but I'm really looking forward to seeing how the auction tomorrow afternoon goes. There are some really good names on the list...

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(August 24, 2010 10:57 AM)

I'm at TRAFFIC Dublin for the next couple of days.

It's nice to not have to get a plane to attend a domain industry event!

The schedule for the two days is interesting but, in common with most industry events, the real work and interest is in what goes on in the corridors.

Dublin's Shelbourne hotel has been invaded by internet industry professionals from the four corners of the globe!

Tomorrow's live auction should be fun and I'll try to post the results as soon as I have them

(August 24, 2010 10:13 AM)

Just found this out today, there is a meeting tonight to discuss the plans to set up a Limerick Hackerspace.  If you can make it, come along to the Absolute Hotel at 7:30pm or you can join up to the group on Google Groups HERE. Nice to see one taking off here as there are ones in Galway, Cork and Dublin.

Just for those who might not be keeping up to date with developments at other hackespaces – there are now three in the country – TOG.ie in  Dublin, 091Labs.com in Galway and a new one in Cork

There’s an active forum on Boards.ie for 091labs

There is a Twitter list for people involved in the various  spaces - http://twitter.com/eirepreneur/hackerspaces

(August 23, 2010 10:20 AM)

This is not really Linux related but I feel the need to write about it. On the 31st of July, my line dropped dramatically in speed in excess of 10 times slower. After a quick check at the graphs (yes, i graph my home line, but who doesn't :) I noticed 2 disconnections on Saturday between 8 and 9am. An unlikely time for eircom engineers to do any work (I confirmed this by asking the same question to the 3 eircom engineers I saw on-site). As it was a bank holiday week end, I could only call Smart's tech support on Tuesday morning. A friend of mine suggested that I checked if I still had a dial tone. Sure enough, nothing. Smart scheduled an eircom engineer to come take a look at my line the next Friday. On Friday, my line disconnected for 45mn then the man called me saying all was fine and I needed to get in touch with Smart... Called Smart straight away who said this wasn't right and scheduled another eircom engineer to come and take a look.

The second engineer came around the appartement and just couldn't find my line, for him, my appartment had a faulty cable to the DCN so it was the property management's fault... Called back Smart and they scheduled another appointment. This time got a sharp man who not only located my line, but also figured that the line to the exchange was degraded somewhere and decided to rewire my line to another free line in the DCN then back to the exchange.

So here we are, 2 weeks later, got my line fixed. What have we learnt, people will say everything if they have no idea what the problem is and get rid of the issue. Hands down to Smart for having followed the problem so closely and made sure that eircom would come back again until the problem was fixed...

(August 22, 2010 08:08 PM)

Last night, I spent four hours chatting with Conor MacAoidh.

We’re both the authors of CMSes, and both need file managers.

I’m the original creator of KFM, but recently, I’ve been getting annoyed at it. The project has grown too large to be easily managed, and it’s slow to start up because of the amount of database configuration involved.

We discussed this, and came up with a plan, which coincides with what I wanted to do for KFM2, but is probably much better.

We are going to reboot the whole thing – write a complete new file manager from scratch. It will only use code from the original KFM2 if the code is demonstrably better than any alternative we come up with.

The project will be properly documented, will have 100% test coverage, and will be completely free.

It will come in a number of separate parts, but only one, the core, will be absolutely needed.

The core of the engine is the bit which handles the actual file management. It will be designed to load in only two or three files for the most part, and as fast as possible.

Communication with the core will be done by either including the core as part of your own CMS, or by interacting with it via RPC.

The RPC will be very important – you send a command such as /rpc.php?action=move&from=/my-files/test1.jpg&to=/images/me.jpg, and results will be returned as JSON.

We decided on the name SaorFM. While this may be slightly confusing for non-Irish-speakers (“Saor”, pronounced half-way between “sair” and “seer”, means “Free”), we feel this is not very important. After all, Ubuntu is a household name, and that’s Bantu.

The main site will be SaorFM.org, the blog will be here, and downloads, issue tracker and SVN can be found here.

We’re still deciding on how to go about things, so there are no downloads yet. The decision to do this was made literally last night.

Having a co-developer on board from the absolute start will encourage me to get my arse in gear on this – if Conor does something cool, I have to beat that. And vice-versa, hopefully!

I’m starting the project off at the moment by working on a description of what it’s all about, and then will start writing some starter tests. This will use “test-driven development”, so every single line of code in this project will be repeatedly tested throughout the development.

We’re planning a load of features, such as desktop-/system- integration for Linux, Mac and Windows, and having totally external UI systems. We even considered going mad and creating a bump-top-like UI for it.

It’s taken me almost a year since planning KFM2 and getting to this.

Part of the reason for the delay is that this is so far removed from the current KFM, that I really didn’t know how to bring KFM1 up to the specification I wanted to reach.

Starting from absolute scratch with a brand new name is the right thing to do, I think.

(August 22, 2010 02:43 PM)

We now have this fantastic all in one place information on teams, global and local events.  It makes finding information for everyone a lot easier.  It’s come on a long way and looks rather pretty also and is still being worked on there are bugs logged for some issues so with every week there are new improvements coming.

What I have noticed however is the amount of teams there on the LD with not up to date information, no wiki page listed, no mailing list, no website, no IRC channel listed or any information about themselves and in many cases most of the teams are providing this help.  We need you to update your information, that’s either through your team leader, point of contact or you have admins set up on launchpad who can edit the loco directory,  if you see your team has other resources that are not listed there PLEASE ASK OF YOUR TEAM TO ADD IT!

This morning there were 69 teams listed on the LD with no fix abode they had no country listed against them.  I’ve gone in and added them all, bar 5 which I need help on.  In the LD Language is a mandatory field, I’ve added the one language against each team, you can select more, PLEASE SELECT MORE if you have more than one language in your team.

Think of the directory from a new persons point of view a yellow pages of information they can access.  If someone was in your area and wanted to learn more about your team, that information should be visible.  They shouldn’t have to join a mailing list or an IRC channel just to find out where your wiki page is located.

Also a really handy tool for people who are travelling is they can view the LD and see if there are any events going on in the area so they can drop by and say hi.

After spending some time on wikpedia and learning a lot about other countries and their languages I was able to reduce the list to following 5

*edit: All teams are now listed under a country! including the 5 homeless ones above!  See I won’t be beaten!

(August 22, 2010 01:34 PM)

We are now offering Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) on our Linux VPS servers.

Ubuntu 10.04 is an LTS (long term support) release, which means that there will be security updates made available for a longer period of time than you would get with a non-LTS version.

You can read more about how Ubuntu handles release cycles here.

Ubuntu is a very flexible operating system and is perfect for anyone who wants to run a variety of services on a LAMP system.

For example, you could run:

• webservers
• email servers
• database servers
• development servers
• CVS

If you want to play around with a variety of open source technologies a recent release, such as Lucid Lynx is ideal.

UPDATE: Just for a laugh I got an output of the exact version information from a VPS running Ubuntu so you can see it:

Distributor ID:    Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS
Release:    10.04
Codename:    lucid

NB: You CANNOT run Plesk on an Ubuntu VPS.

(August 21, 2010 04:05 PM)

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I won an Apple iPad while I was at the ICANN meeting in Brussels.

So today was "D Day", with the latest "shiny object" arriving in my office.

The packaging is very similar to other Apple products, so it's neat and functional. The guys in Ascio made sure I got the right kind of plug, which was thoughtful of them.

It's the WIFI model, which was going to be a problem, but the technical team in the office got a WIFI network up and running fairly quickly, so that at least, ceased to be an issue.

The user interface is very similar to the iPhone and a lot of the iPhone apps that were on my desktop happily synced across to the iPad. Unfortunately a lot of apps that "work" on the iPad look terrible.

Playing video or using apps that make full use of the screen real estate is a wonderful experience

I'll be playing around with it over the next few days, so I'll be able to get a better idea of how well it suits me

(August 20, 2010 10:50 PM)

I’m sure you’ve all heard about this, well if you haven’t I don’t know where you’ve been! Daniel, Nigel and Jorge blog about it every week and keep us all informed.

So what is it all  about ?

Operation Cleansweep was launched at UDS-M by Jono Bacon. The idea is to get the number of bugs with patches down to 0 by Maverick’s release. It is a huge undertaking considering that there are 2000 bugs with patches right now, and almost 80 new patches come in every month! It comes down to about 2000 bugs with patches to be reviewed by the end of the release.

How Can you help?

It’s easy to get involved in Operation Cleansweep. Just 10 minutes of your time can make a great contribution to the project. It’s coming up to UGJ folks, loads of time there over a weekend to spend some time on this!

We’ve set a daily target of 20 bugs per day. That should get us well on our way to reviewing all the patches in Ubuntu. We follow the Reviewers Guide for patches.

So Where can you start, there are a list of bugs waiting for your help, 1475 to be exact listed over HERE.  If every team got on board with this project over the weekend of UGJ we could knock a large chunk off that list of bugs so lets get on board and help the team out!

(August 19, 2010 09:39 AM)

What started off as a one time event has surely grown.  This is my 4th OSSBarcamp I’ve run in two years. I decided to run this event as quite frankly there was diddly squat in open source events happening over here and I was spending a small fortune between time off work ,travel and and bits and pieces.  I thought if I got 70 attendees I would be very happy and this was my target…………130 people turned up. As you can imagine I was more than a bit surprised.  I was asked to run another and then well another, the rest is history.

This event is running with the help of UCD Netsoc, the college computer society who have very kindly sorted out the venue for me, which is half the battle.  It’s going to take place this time over 2 days, Saturday and Sunday 25/26th September.  We have a lovely new site done up thanks to James Forbairt , the guy is a saint! We have some new sponsors this time also, Enterpise Ireland are coming on board to help us with getting some new speakers over to talk, such as Stefano Zacchiroli and Daviey Walker, Alan Pope and Tony Whitemore of the UUPC fame who will be doing a live show! Linux Fund is also a sponsor this year. There will be lots of things going over the weekend, so do come along and sign up take part, either give a short talk, a demo or a presentation it’s entirely up to you.

OSSBarcamp is what you make it. It’s not just about Ubuntu, it’s about all forms of open source, if it’s about development, programming or other distros we want to hear about it, everyone is welcome to take part. There will also be an after party on the Saturday at the Landsdown hotel.

(August 18, 2010 03:00 PM)

They're at it again

UK Food Exports, which claims it's an independent guide to to sourcing products from the UK, is spamming me and others again.

They're still using that stupid disclaimer and their phone number goes to a fax machine.

So since I can't contact them directly I think I'll just see if the UK data protection lot have anything to say about them ...

(August 18, 2010 01:38 PM)

We are always working on adding new products and services to our portfolio, so I am delighted to announce the addition of 5 new domain name extensions.

We are now offering domain registrations in Antigua (.ag), Honduras (.hn), Saint Lucia (.lc),
Mongolia (.mn) and Saint Vincent and Grenadines.

All of the domain extensions are available for registration periods of up to 10 years.

 

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(August 18, 2010 11:28 AM)

Today thousands of Irish teenagers will be collecting / checking their Leaving Cert results (Ireland's answer to A Levels / Bac / SAT).

Based on the media hype surrounding it you could be easily conned into thinking that the world actually cares.

Reality - they don't.

The Leaving Cert is a bit of paper. You can use the points / score to get a place in a university.

That is all.

In a couple of years time you won't care about it.

The rest of us haven't cared in years. Some of us never cared to begin with.

Putting your LC results on your CV when you're 17 or 18 is fine. Putting them on it when you're in your late 20s with a college degree is pointless. Providing details of ALL your grades is just plain wrong.

(August 18, 2010 10:17 AM)

• Update from action items from last meeting
  • popey to create pdfs of successful team re approvals as examples to help teams
• LoCo Team {re}approvals
  • Ubuntu-CO – Re-approved
  • Ubuntu-HU - Re-approved
  • Ubuntu-TAM – Asked the team to come back in two months with a more detailed application
  • Ubuntu-PE - Asked the team to come back in September with 2009 Events documented
  • Ubuntu-US-NM – Re-approved
  • Ubuntu-US-CHI – Re-approved
  • Ubuntu-AST – Approved

Thanks to all those who came and if you need a council member to look over your application for advice just ask us in #ubuntu-locoteams

(August 17, 2010 10:26 PM)

Sky have been promoting their Sky Player service for quite some time.
At the moment you can access it on the XBox, though for some odd reason the XBox version doesn't have access to the "premium" content ie. Sky Box Office.

So if, like me, you don't have a phone line setup with your Sky box and you don't run Windows, your options are a bit limited.

You can, however, watch Sky Box Office on your desktop.

Word of warning. To use the Sky Player you will need to have the latest version of Microsoft's Silverlight installed.

For some bizarre reason the player will load fine in Firefox, but trying to watch anything using Firefox will not work. You might have better luck than me, but I ended up switching to Safari. In Firefox it seemed to be stuck permanently "buffering".

So what's the experience like?

To be honest I can't really complain. I'm using a 27" iMac, so once I was in a comfortable chair I was able to enjoy a couple of films without any issues. You can easily view the films in full screen view and the quality on a 27" screen was fine. It wasn't as good as watching on my TV with my full surround sound, but that was my choice (albeit one dictated by circumstance).

Renting films is pretty easy. Once you have an online account with Sky you can signup for their "wallet", which you can add funds to in order to watch films and other paid content.

It is unfortunate that the standalone player software is not available for the Mac as I suspect it might give more options in terms of quality and control. The Silverlight powered stream works fine, but has very little in the way of controls.

All in all it's not an unpleasant way to watch Sky Box Office films legally!

(August 17, 2010 07:23 PM)

While I’m writing about video encoding, another task I did recently was encode a load of video files for my HTC Desire (a handset I’d strongly recommend for anyone). The main reason being that I like to watch something while pounding the threadmill in the gym.

A useful script to encode all files passed as parameters(s) (must all end in .avi) is:

#! /bin/bash

src="$*"
dst="_${*%%avi}mp4"

echo -en "Encoding $src\t\t\tPASS1"

ffmpeg -b 600kb -i "$src" -v 0 -pass 1 -passlogfile FF -vb 600Kb \
    -r 25 -an -threads 2 -y "$dst" /dev/null

echo -e "\tPASS2"

ffmpeg -b 600kb -i "$src" -v 0 -pass 2 -passlogfile FF -vb 600Kb \
    -r 25 -threads 2 -y -vol 1536 "$dst" /dev/null

rm FF-0.log

(August 17, 2010 12:23 PM)

I have a very nice Samsung R10 Full HD Camcorder which I bought last year. After a recent family holiday, I wanted to stick some good quality video on my gallery for relatives to view. The gallery is RC2 of the excellent Gallery 3 package which uses another excellent open source tool called Flow Player to play movies.

So, I needed to convert my test 100MB MP4 full HD file to a suitably sized FLV for the Gallery. My initial attempts with ffmpeg worked fine but the quality (sample) was very poor and changing the bit rate in different ways seemed to make no difference:

ffmpeg -i HDV_0056.MP4 -vb 600k -s vga -ar 22050 -y Test.flv
ffmpeg -i HDV_0056.MP4 -b 600k -s vga -ar 22050 -y Test.flv
ffmpeg -i HDV_0056.MP4 -vb 600k -s vga -ar 22050 -y Test.flv

I then turned to x264 and broke the process down to a number of stages:

1. Extract the raw video to YUV4MPEG (this creates a 7GB file from my 100MB MP4):

   ffmpeg -i HDV_0056.MP4 HDV_0056.y4m

2. Encode the video component to H.264/FLV at the specified bit rate with good quality:

   x264 --pass 1 --preset veryslow --threads 0 --bitrate 4000 \
           -o HDV_0056.flv HDV_0056.y4m
   x264 --pass 2 --preset veryslow --threads 0 --bitrate 4000 \
           -o HDV_0056.flv HDV_0056.y4m

   Note that I’m using the veryslow preset which is… very slow! You can use other presets as explained in the x264 man page.

3. Extract and convert the audio component to MP3 (the sample rate is important):

   ffmpeg -i HDV_0056.MP4 -vn -ar 22050 HDV_0056.mp3

4. Merge the converted audio and video back together:

   ffmpeg -i HDV_0056.flv -i HDV_0056.mp3 -acodec copy \
           -vcodec copy -y FullSizeVideo.flv

   This yields a near perfect encoding at 22MB. It’s still full size though (HD at 1920×1080).

5. The last step is to then use ffmpeg to resize the video and it now seems to respect bit rate parameters:

   ffmpeg -i FullSizeVideo.flv -s vga -b 2000k \
           -vb 2000k SmallSizeVideo.flv

The resultant video can be seen here.

Robert Swain has a useful guide for ffmpeg x264 encoding.

(August 17, 2010 12:08 PM)

I get a lot of deliveries to the office. A lot of the time it's simply because my name is on a supplier account, so the package arrives. Is checked and gets handed over to one of our staff.

Of course I also get deliveries from Amazon and other places.

Yesterday's delivery was a bit "different"

A white body bag.

The problem now is, what the hell do I do with it?

While some of my staff are annoying at times, I haven't actually killed any of them *yet*. Besides, if I was going to kill any of my staff I'd want quick lime - not a body bag.

So does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do with it?

It seems like a waste letting it gather dust!

(August 17, 2010 09:26 AM)

Earlier today there was apparently some kind of demonstration outside Batt O' Keeffe's offices in Cork. Of course he wasn't even there ..

Why?

Seemingly USI are upset that the minister didn't drop everything to meet them. Or at least that's what it sounds like based on their rather whingy press release. I love this bit:

Last week Minister O’Keeffe requested the help of the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) to combat graduate unemployment. However, despite our request for an urgent meeting, the Minister has so far failed to meet with us.

Yeah - getting meetings with important people is going to happen overnight.

In the "real world" getting a meeting with a business or political leader can take weeks. That doesn't mean that they don't want to meet you or that they're not interested, but they have busy schedules (and no - I'm not an apologist for Fianna Fail or O'Keeffe)

But what really gets me is the entire tone of the USI release

Have all the graduates made an effort to get a job? Of ANY kind?

Or are they just sitting there expecting someone to spoon feed them?

(August 16, 2010 02:39 PM)

Got a website?

Think it's cool?

Want fame and glory?

Then maybe the Irish Web Awards sponsored by Realex Payments are for you.

They've just opened the nominations this morning and it won't cost you anything but a couple of minutes of your time to nominate a site. Just don't spam them!

There's plenty of different categories you can enter under, including a number of new ones that include:

• Best Mobile App
• Best SME/Small Business Website
• Best Facebook Page
• Best Web Only Publication
• Best Guerilla Social Media Campaign (Zero Budget)

(August 16, 2010 11:45 AM)

Nominations for the 2010 Irish Web Awards are now open

NOTE: New shiny web address

This year sees the introduction of some new categories as well:

• Best Mobile App
• Best SME/Small Business Website
• Best Facebook Page
• Best Web Only Publication
• Best Guerilla Social Media Campaign (Zero Budget)

The event is organised by Mulley and headline sponsor is Realex Payments

(August 16, 2010 11:38 AM)

My poor much abused laptop tends to get introduced to a lot of networks, most of which happily use DHCP, but a few which need special setup such as static ip addresses etc. In general, Network Manager handles this fairly well, however I've yet to find a way within Network Manager to set a default set of search domains for all connections.

The most reliable method I've found to implement this is the resolvconf package. Install this by running "sudo apt-get install resolvconf" and then edit /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/base to add the following line:

search domain1.com domain2.com

Tell Network Manager to restart whatever connection your on, and /etc/resolv.conf should have the above line in it.

An added advantage to this method is that resolvconf is smart enough to look at any search domains set via DHCP or that you might have added to the connection in Network Manager and append them to the search line.

(August 16, 2010 10:42 AM)

As I write this, it’s a little over a fortnight since Stephen and I split up, and almost exactly a week since we told most of our friends. I’ve danced to remember and danced to forget. I’ve been taken care of by family, friends and acquaintances locally and across the world – truly, it’s been a 24hr support network, and to all of you, I am deeply grateful. In particular to all those in Zurich who have provided hugs, and to those at the top of my chat list who have been bombarded day and night, thank you.

Stephen has already published his take on what went wrong, and how it could have gone this badly. Many of you have responded, and I love and thank all of you who’ve supported him, publicly and privately. Some of you have also asked whether I’d write something similar from my own perspective, and a few of you have suggested that I should be taking more responsibility for the breakdown of our marriage.

With those latter few, I respectfully disagree. To me, taking responsibility suggests that blame should be assigned, and implicitly assumes that the breakdown is “bad news”. In fact, when I first shared the news with my family and a very small group of friends, in an e-mail written while I sat at the airport gate, that was the subject of the missive. But someone I trust deeply responded, saying:

I view these things as local minima that need to be overcome so you can reach global maxima.

It’s taken me a while to get my head around that, but I think it’s true. To help make sense of it, let me bring you on a whirlwind tour of the last three years.

Stephen was unwell before we got married. I knew that, and it affected our lives, but I was happy to make those sacrifices. We were a busy couple, and our lives weren’t without stress – my graduation ceremony was the week before the wedding, and our honeymoon brought us to Hong Kong expressly so that I could help out with a conference there. (That didn’t work out in the end, but we had a lovely time all the same!) I also had my moments – our first Christmas dinner was pasta bake with a special delivery of antibiotics for the shocking chest infection that had kept me out of the kitchen

Stephen’s memory had never been great, but when we moved to Zurich, things got harder. The trouble he had remembering things compounded the trouble he had learning German, which massively compounded the trouble he had with integrating (and Switzerland’s not easy to start with!). Combine that with having to start over on all of the medical care he needed, and it all caused a lot of stress, which didn’t help anyone. Where I had previously had to keep an eye on things (like our finances) that we managed together, I now had to single-handedly take care of all the details.

To give Stephen his due, over time, he stepped up on the things that he was able to do – but, like so many other things, the division of labour was always dictated by his health, and it left me feeling isolated and overworked.

Nine months ago, Stephen went into hospital for surgery that, we hoped, would make things drastically better. So much hope was poured into that operation. If it works, his bladder problems will get better. If his bladder problems get better, his sleep problems will get better. If his sleep problems get better, his memory will get better, our ability to do fun stuff/travel/share time will get better, and so on.

Day surgery turned into almost two weeks in hospital. A few days in, I left for the airport, and headed out to ApacheCon, straight from his bedside – having always planned that there would be plenty of time to get him home and help him recover before I had to leave. Our friends, as usual, filled the gap – and again, huge thanks to those who visited him daily while I was away.

We had planned to take our dream holiday, our second honeymoon, a couple of weeks later. Until pretty much the day we left, it wasn’t at all clear that Stephen would be able to do it – and I remain grateful that I never had to decide whether we should cancel it or whether I should go alone. As it was, we had a wonderful time – but many aspects of it still sucked. In fact, before we had even left Venice, we thought we would have to pack our bags and head to the hospital.

In all of that chaos, as we looked at plans we had made together and re-evaluated them in a context where we couldn’t simply wish things better, I started spending more time introspecting, thinking, trying to work out what was really important to me. And as 2009 turned into 2010, I started building more of those things into my life. After a year of a fairly serious “flight ban” (I took nine flights in 2009), I started to travel more – in fact, I spent the first six weeks of the year in San Francisco, three of them with Stephen.

It was during the latter three weeks, after he had gone home, that I had the epic swing-dancing/Superbowl weekend. But both before and after, as I tried new things or just did the things I wanted to do without having to worry about whether he’d be waiting up for me to get home, I was conscious of how much sacrifice our relationship required, from both of us.

“Life is pain, Highness” – this I know. And I truly understand the value of compromise. But I would say that I now understand it better than ever, having seen how far compromise can go before things break.

There were many compromises in our relationship. On his side and on mine, we settled and agreed and worked within our limitations. But ultimately, the things that had brought us and kept us together were no longer strong enough to make the sacrifices seem reasonable, desirable.

It’s easy to get into the game of “if-only”. If only Steve’s sleep hadn’t been so compromised, maybe we could have had more time to do things together, and maybe that would have seen us through the memory issues. If only I had faced less stress at work, maybe I could have given more energy to the relationship and kept things going more smoothly. If only Steve’s memory had not impaired his language learning, maybe he would have had an easier time integrating and been less likely to get depressed. If only I could have been more understanding and patient, maybe we could have found better ways to meet in the middle rather than relentlessly sacrificing. If only our sex life had not fallen by the wayside, or if only it had been possible to revive, maybe we could have relied on basic instinct to keep us together!

But none of that makes any difference, in the end.

I married Stephen because I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him, and to share in the rest of his. We have split up because those things are no longer true – for me, at least. And as I’ve learnt, slowly, but inexorably, my primary responsibility is to myself. I have dreams, and hopes, and ambitions, and I would willingly sacrifice many of them, but I can’t sacrifice all of them, and I can’t sacrifice the essence of who I am.

Some of you have asked about regrets. I don’t regret a minute of it. Not the worst days I can remember, nor the worse days I’ve tried to forget. I don’t bear any ill-will towards Stephen, I still think he’s great, and although things are hard right now, I hope and intend that we might remain friends.

I met a man who had a dream he had since he was twenty. I met that man when he was eighty-one. He said “too many people just stand and wait until the mornin’. Don’t they know tomorrow never comes?”

(August 15, 2010 08:31 PM)

As we all well know, Apple’s iPhone 4 is the current must-have gadget. As a self confessed Apple ‘fan boy’, I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on an iPhone 4 since it was first announced.

As I’m a Telstra Business customer, I have been patiently waiting for Telstra to allow for the iPhone 4 to be distributed amongst it’s business channel. For some reason, they have made the decision to release the phone only to their consumer channel first – and despite my having some pretty good contacts within Telstra itself, I have had to wait to get my hands on it.

I did try to purchase one in the Apple Store last week – but apparently they can only sell to Telstra’s non-business customers so I had no joy there!

So yesterday, as I was wandering around Brisbane CBD with some time to spare, I decided to try calling into the Telstra T-Life store to see if they have any in stock. I know from previous experience that they can in fact sell to business – even if they are likely to screw things up (again, have had that experience).

I was quite pleased and excited to hear that they did in fact have iPhones in stock – only to be cut down seconds later and explained that they are only prepared to sell these to new – and not existing customers!!

I was amazed! Talk about a blatant disregard for existing loyal customers. How many of these existing customers must Telstra be loosing every day who get disgruntled with this response and walk next door to a Vodafone / Optus store and buy from there?

I’m tempted to even look into the legality of this. Telstra are openly discriminating against a particular demographic and refusing to sell them a product that they have in stock. If anyone has an insight into this I would be very interested to hear.

(August 15, 2010 04:13 AM)

The lovely LoCo Directory(LD) developers have done an amazing job on the LD.  What started off as an idea has really come to fruit and now is a useful source of information for everyone.  For your own team, for people travelling to see if they are in the area and if you’ve events running so they can join you.  With this in mind there are some bugs that need YOUR help with.  They need YOUR OPINIONS Now rather than later.

The first bug is one Chris Johnson is working on and is looking for some constructive feedback on the bug – https://bugs.launchpad.net/loco-directory/+bug/616544

The following bugs are CSS related and need some help with as well :

1) Launchpad bug 601944 in loco-directory “In a team detail page, the label column don’t have a fixed width
2) Launchpad bug 610944 in ubuntu-website (and 1 other project) “the header seems to be shapeless

3) Launchpad bug 612047 in loco-directory “Menus are getting crowded

4) Launchpad bug 612089 in loco-directory “Add a style box around confirmation messages

As Always please add your comments to the Bug in question as that keeps all of the information in one place so the developers and others can follow the flow of ideas.

Log into the LD  and do make sure your team information is up to date, right link to your wiki page, website, forums, IRC etc, correct language and location http://loco.ubuntu.com/

If you do find any bugs, or think there is a bug there, please report it on https://bugs.launchpad.net/loco-directory/+filebug Also most of the developers hang out in #ubuntu-locoteams pop in and say hi

Please do leave feedback for the developers now, rather than when it’s all been implemented!

(August 14, 2010 05:25 PM)

I flew, with colleagues, to Portland in Oregon for the Diagrams 2010 conference. We arrived on a Saturday and departed the following Thursday. This makes it the shortest period that I’ve ever taken a long-haul flight for. So today I’m feeling rough: approximately one part dead, four parts like I have some painful communicable disease and six parts hungover. I’m counting on a smoked rasher sandwich to right all the ills in the world.

As I previously posted, Portland is fantastic. We partook in many of the local cultural delights such as visiting Powell’s book store, sampling ale at the Deschutes micro-brewery and visiting the Bite of Oregon festival. I spent $10 at Powells and picked up a copy of Flatland and a copy of Wittgenstein’s Brown and Blue book. To my lifelong shame, I made a beeline for the maths section, but totally forgot to visit the computing section! The conference banquet was in the local art museum, which was excellent. They have a collection of American abstract art which Paolo Bottoni kindly explained to me. They also have some Rodin sculptures and a sculpture by Picasso, a Monet water-lilly, an early Van Gogh and several other impressionist works by artists such as Cezzane. All very beautiful.

The conference itself was an excellent event. I thoroughly enjoyed Randall Davis’ keynote. He demonstrated the breadth and depth of research that you might expect from an MIT lab. His assertion that we should be having a conversation with our computers has already influenced how I think some of our sketch recognition work should proceed.

There were lots of excellent papers. Two in particular will, I think, influence future directions of my own research. The first is by Koji Mineshima, Mitsuhiro Okada and Ryo Takemura titled “Two Types of Diagrammatic Inference System: Natural Deduction Style and Resolution Style”. In this paper they do lots of interesting things, including quantifying free rides by comparison of Euler diagrams and certain sentential forms used in reasoning. The second is by Mathias Frisch, Jens Heydekorn and Raimund Dachselt titled “Diagram Editing on Interactive Displays Using Multi-Touch and Pen Gestures”. They demonstrated some really well done software for drawing certain types of diagrams. I’m particularly interested in taking the approach described in Davis’ keynote, the design and technology described by Frisch et al. and the constraint based layout described by Tim Dwyer in “Hi-tree layout using quadratic programming ” to inform our sketch recognition stuff.

There were some other great papers. David Landy spoke about his “Toward a physics of equations” and demo’ed his very, very cool iPhone/iPad application that helped him capture his findings. The papers that won the best paper prizes were, unsurprisingly, interesting and well presented.

All in all, I had a great time in Portland. I enjoyed the beer and the food was better than food I’ve eaten anywhere I’ve visited in the US. And thankfully, the rasher sandwich seems to be doing its thing. I might even get some work done later

(August 14, 2010 11:27 AM)

Just noticed this morning that adsense is displaying adverts in a very different format:

So it looks like some kind of hybrid between the normal text ads and the link units

This was probably announced somewhere, but I haven't had a chance to go digging and / or keeping up with all the changes in the "wonderful" world  of PPC

Anyone else noticing this?

(August 13, 2010 10:03 AM)

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is a smartphone and portable entertainment device by Nokia. It was introduced on October 2, 2008 and released on November 27, 2008. Code-named “Tube”, it is the first touchscreen-equipped S60 device by Nokia. The version being s60v5. It’s part of the XpressMusic series of phones, which emphasizes music and multimedia playback. The touchscreen features tactile feedback. (Wikipedia)

I’ve had a Nokia 5800 for almost a year now. I was really excited when I bought this phone last year. My first touchscreen smartphone! It took some getting used to, having mostly been a Nokia S40 user. It didn’t take long, and in fact now I try to press the screen when I use older phones!

The phone itself does all the usual things and frankly, there are many in-depth reviews out there. Here are a few:

• Nokia 5800 review
• Nokia 5800 Xpress Music (Unlocked)
• Nokia 5800 XpressMusic hands-on

I love this phone. It’s the best phone I’ve ever owned. It’s not perfect by any means but the pros outweigh the cons!

1. I love the on-screen keyboard for entering texts. It will switch from portait to landscape mode when you turn the phone on it’s side. When I first bought the phone I could use predictive text in both portrait and landscape mode but the latest firmware upgrade changed that. In landscape mode I can’t use predictive text now. That sucks.
2. The GPS works reasonably well though. Using Windows or Mac OS X software you can download maps for your area to the phone. Unfortunately the GPS chip in the phone is Assisted GPS. It makes a network connection almost every time it needs to find it’s location. I actually bought a data add-on simply because the phone seemed to “leak” data for no apparent reason but it was probably because I had loaded Nokia Maps.
3. Nokia recently made their navigation system free of charge and it works, sometimes well, sometimes not. Unfortunately it sends us driving in round about ways on occasion. Our journey may be directly down a road but the map told us to cross the river, drive for a bit and then drive across a bridge further up!
4. The camera is decent enough. It has a flash too. There’s a plastic cover over the lens on the back and unfortunately it cracked. I bought a cheap cover on Amazon but now the light leaks from the flash so I usually disable it when I can.
5. Reception is very good. Phone calls don’t drop very often, and texts go through all the time. Data calls drop occasionally, and will drop back to Edge if required. No “grip of death”! (har har, bet you’re all sick of that now aren’t you?)
6. My favourite apps would have to be Gravity, a Twitter application, and Opera Mini for browsing. Opera Mini loads the mobile version of Gmail and Google Reader quickly and display them with little lag. There’s also the free Youtube app which is excellent but I prefer to use a computer for watching videos. I also have numerous free apps and games installed, almost all from the Ovi store.
7. The Ovi store is Nokia’s application store. It’s basic, but it’s quite good. You can search for apps, and sort and display by different criteria. Only want free apps? There ya go! Installing is a sinch, but it would be nice if they made reviews more accessible. You have to click through to them.
8. Battery life is pretty good too. If you’re browsing the net and making phone calls it’ll last well over a day but add GPS and suddenly battery life drops like a bomb. If it has to hunt for a signal that hurts too unfortunately.

So, there it is. The Nokia 5800 is an excellent phone. It’s not perfect but I can heartily recommend it.

My next phone? I already bought it. It’s the Samsung Galaxy S, an Android powered smartphone. While the 5800 is an excellent phone it’s showing it’s age. Using the new phone is like moving from Windows 3.11 on a 486 to Windows 95 on a Pentium. Hmm, time to update my analogies?

Related Posts

• Nokia – Nokia 7650 Phone Suppo …
• Mac OS X Leopard and Nokia N73 Bluetooth Problems
• Long term review: Sony Ericsson W810i phone

(August 13, 2010 09:33 AM)

After reading on Tom's post I decided to give it a go as I wanted to experiment with coffee shots tonight. So grabbed the latest version. Then setup doing the usual python setup.py install.

Creating an album was then dead easy : google picasa create --title "coffee_bottomless" *. It will authenticate you in your browser, you just need to grant access.

And adding is also easy : google picasa post --title "coffee_bottomless" img_9138.jpg

Now onto the gallery :)

(August 12, 2010 10:19 PM)

I’ve been neglecting this blog for far too long.

I stopped posting to it for a number of reasons, primarily a lack of time along with a lack of interesting topics. The emergence of Twitter also played a part, since I find short updates much more convenient, plus Twitter’s API means I have a multitude of clients to use (I’ve never actually managed to get WordPress’ XMLRPC API working here) making posting much more convenient.

But I’ve got a number of thoughts these days too long for Twitter, so it’s time to review this blog and actually continue to use it.

(August 12, 2010 05:43 PM)

Threads, window managers and complex text layout.

(August 12, 2010 11:14 AM)