Choosing a project management software package is like buying a house: it’s a serious investment and a long-term commitment, so it must fit your needs perfectly. There are plenty of open source project management tools to choose from, but if you need a powerful application that can help you to stay abreast of your projects and collaborate with other users, then Todoyu is your best bet. Project management is only one of Todoyu’s many talents: you can also use it to manage tasks, share files, maintain group calendars, track time spent on specific tasks, and much more. In short, Todoyu offers pretty much everything you need to successfully manage your business. And this tutorial will help you to get started with this powerful and flexible project management and collaboration solution.

Resources:
You’ll need a machine running the Apache/PHP/MySQL stack, or the XAMPP package.
You’ll also need the latest release of Todoyu.

1. Preparatory work
Assuming that you already have a server with the Apache/MySQL/PHP stack, grab the latest release of Todoyu, unpack the downloaded archive, rename the resulting folder as ‘todoyu’ and move it to the document root of your server. Make the following directories and files writable: /files, /config, /cache, /config, index.html.

2. Installation step 1
Point your browser to http://yourserver/todoyu to start the installation. Read the licence agreement and hit the ‘I Accept, Install Todoyu’ button. If the server check has been successful, press the Setup Database Connection button and specify the required database connection info.

3. Installation step 2
Press ‘Update Database Configuration’ and select the existing database or create a new one for use with Todoyu. Hit the Save Database Setup button, then select ‘Import Tables and Data’. Specify the required system settings and press the Save System Configuration button.

4. Installation step 3
Specify an administrator password and press ‘Change admin Password’. The Todoyu installer can populate the application with demo data. So if you don’t want to start with an empty system, tick the ‘Import the Demo Data’ checkbox and press the Next Step button to finish the installation.

5. Finish installation and log in
Once the installation is finished, press the ‘Disable Installer and Go to Login’ button. Log in to Todoyu as ‘admin’ using the administrator password you specified during installation.

6. Configure roles and rights
Todoyu features a flexible user privilege mechanism that allows you to specify granular access to the system. User privileges in Todoyu are defined using Roles and Rights. Roles act as groups which you use to organise Todoyu’s users, while Rights specify access rights for each role.

Keep it simple
“Things should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.” (Einstein)

Do one thing well
The UNIX Philosophy certainly applies here.

Don’t fret!
Don’t fret too much about performance – plan to optimise later when needed.

Go with it
Don’t fight the environment and go with the flow.

No-one’s Perfect
Don’t try for perfection because ‘good enough’ is often just that.

Minor shortcut
(Hence) it’s okay to cut corners sometimes, especially if you plan to optimise later.

Learn from the masters
Borrow ideas from elsewhere whenever it makes sense.

Think Cross-platform
The Python implementation should not be tied to a particular platform. It’s okay if some functionality is not always available, but the core should work everywhere.

Stop bugging me (that’s Window’s job)
Don’t bother users with details that the machine can handle.

Extensibility
A large complex system should have multiple levels of extensibility. This maximizes the opportunities for users, sophisticated or not, to help themselves.

Senseless fatalities
Errors should not be fatal. That is, user code should be able to recover from error conditions as long as the virtual machine is still functional. At the same time, errors should not pass silently.

Bug off
A bug in the user’s Python code should not be allowed to lead to undefined behavior of the Python interpreter; a core dump is never the user’s fault.

You can find Linux User & Developer’s Python Development Masterclass here.

This article originally appeared in issue 88 of Linux User & Developer magazine.

Details:
Price: £286
Tech Specs
OS Tested: Ubuntu 10.04 NBR
CPU:Intel Atom N450 (1.6GHz)
Memory: 1GB DDR2
HDD: 250GB
Display: 10.1” (1024×600)
Dimensions:266 x 192 x 36mm
Weight:1.33kg
Expansion: SD card, 3x USB, Wi-Fi, webcam
Supplied by: Buyitdirect.co.uk

Pros: It’s a pleasing design with some of the best netbook technology  on the market
Cons: The glossy chassis smears easily and the lack of Bluetooth may cause problems for some

The netbook market has moved beyond its infancy and most manufacturers have now found their feet. Like the well-entrenched notebook scene, the market’s biggest netbook makers have hit upon their preferred technology combination and standardised designs have been cropping up over the last couple of generations. Since Intel’s N450 Atom processor boasts such excellent power-saving capabilities over previous chips (courtesy of its integrated graphics processor and improved manufacturing process), it has powered almost all  netbooks released in the same period – Toshiba’s mini NB300 was no exception.

Like many of its kin, its 1.66GHz processor complete with Intel IGP is accompanied by 1GB of DDR2 RAM, a 250GB hard drive and a 10” screen. With such similar specification cropping up everywhere, the buying decision often comes down to build quality, battery life and simple user preference.

As we’ve come to expect from Toshiba over the years, its NB300 offers excellent build quality. The chassis is solid and attractive and the finish is very glossy. Be warned, however: it picks up fingerprints like they’re going out of fashion. We weren’t fans of the power button placement (in the middle of the ‘rod’ connecting the main body to the screen), but that may be a case of personal preference. The keyboard is very well laid out, opting for large 18mm Qwerty keys that dominate the space. This leads to some cramping of function keys, but nothing too detrimental.

Thought it’s unfortunate to see it only features 1GB of RAM, in the NB300’s defense it’s great to see a netbook that actually allows for quick and easy memory upgrades. Usually a netbook needs to be almost completely dismantled before getting to the memory slots (Acer’s otherwise excellent Aspire One is a prime example, needing at least an hour and some heart-stopping manoeuvres to complete), but this is like a standard laptop. On the downside, there’s only a single memory slot, so you’ll need to swap the existing 1GB DIMM with a 2GB replacement if and when you want to upgrade.

Every now and then you will realise that compiled programming is just not cutting it for you and you want to get your work done. In fact, at these times you just want to be freed from all the boundaries that compiled languages put in front of you, like the processor dependency, OS dependency, static typing and altogether the complexity of a compiled language. Python is a good answer for this type of situation.

Mostly seen as a scripting language for system administrators, it is actually capable of doing almost everything and beyond the limitations of regular programming languages. Python started its life as a time-saver programming language. Python’s inventor Guido van Rossum started the project with a set of philosophical rules which drives Python even today.
These philosophical rules led to some of the primary reasons behind the popularity of Python, such as better software quality, component integration, extensibility, cross-platform support and developer productivity.

In this article we will look into the diverse range of applications of Python. We will look into the following categories:
1. System administration
2. Desktop (GUI) application development
3. Web development
4. Application scripting and component integration
5. Game development

System Administration
A system administrator’s job is not an easy one. They often need to do things like managing users, disk quotas, processes, devices and so on. Doing these tasks again and again on a large scale can cause a lot of stress and even result in premature hair loss! No kidding. Read the book Mastering Windows Server 2000 Registry for more details.

Python can be of great help to system administrators by automating a lot of administration tasks. In this section we will look at some sample Python scripts that will give you an idea about how to perform system administration tasks using Python. It is important to note here that for most of the tasks we will be using Python’s built-in modules only.

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Samba is a Linux/UNIX software package that allows you to share files and directories with computers running other operating systems over the network. It also allows your Linux desktop or laptop to sign into a Windows network and be able to share files inside a workgroup. There are several advanced features that Samba comes with, such as domain controller. We will look at how to convert your Ubuntu box into a Samba file server and configure it to share directories with different combinations of permissions.

01 Prerequisites
When setting up a Linux file server, there are certain things that you will to have set up on your server before you start working on the Samba bit. The first thing you want to do is to set up the server with a static IP address, as opposed to one assigned dynamically by a DHCP server. Edit the file ‘/etc/network/interfaces’ with root user privileges and set the IP address manually. An example of the settings would be using something like the following:

auto eth1
 iface eth1 inet static
 address 192.168.1.3
 gateway 192.168.1.1
 netmask 255.255.255.0
 network 192.168.1.0
 broadcast 192.168.1.255

Using a static IP for any type of server makes good sense. Save the changes and restart the network with the command ‘# sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart’.

02 Installing Samba
Distributions such as Ubuntu have made the installation of just about anything so simple and straightforward with smart package management that you can have pretty much any software installed with a one-line command. To install Samba on your Ubuntu computer, execute the following:

# sudo apt-get update
# sudo apt-get install libcupsys2 samba samba-common

Here we are requesting Ubuntu to install three packages. The first one is to share your printer, the other two are Samba and its support packages.

03 Configuration file
The configuration files of Samba are stored in the ‘/etc/samba/’ directory. The first thing you should do before we dive into the configuration of Samba is to make a backup of the main configuration file.

# cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.bak

Now open the file with your favourite text editor and let’s make some configuration changes:

# sudo vim /etc/samba/smb.conf

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The GNOME and LiMo Foundations have today announced their intention to collaborate closely with a key partnership. With immediate effect the LiMO Foundation will become a member of the GNOME Foundation’s Advisory Board and the GNOME Foundation will become an Industry Liaison Partner for the LiMo Foundation. According to the pair, this development represents a natural formalization founded upon the significant use of GNOME Mobile software components within Release 2 and Release 3 of the LiMo Platform.

“This close alignment between LiMo and GNOME provides important support for this commitment and will take in an expanding ecosystem of products and services developed by GNOME developers in conjunction with the members of LiMo Foundation,” says Morgan Gillis, Executive Director of LiMo Foundation.

“LiMo has a proud heritage of well established open source technology and is committed to bringing open source innovation to a broad range of commercial products. This close alignment between LiMo and GNOME provides important support for this commitment and will take in an expanding ecosystem of products and services developed by GNOME developers in conjunction with the members of LiMo Foundation.”

“The objective of GNOME Mobile is to provide a platform for the next stage of client computing. We are committed to bringing the quality and freedom of GNOME to users on mobile platforms,” said Stormy Peters, Executive Director of GNOME Foundation. “We are excited to work with commercial partners like the LiMo Foundation to ensure that GNOME Mobile technologies are available on mobile and connected devices incorporating the LiMo platform.”

More information on LiMo’s work with open source communities can be found here.

Are you interested in mobile operating systems? You can find our review of Android 2.2 here…

The sales of Android phones in the UK have jumped up a staggering 350% during 2010 according to GfK Retail and Technology. The contract market as a whole only grew by 1 percent in the same period.

“The figures suggest an increasing number of consumers are now asking for Android handsets by name,” commented GfK analyst Megan Baldock. “Operating Systems are no longer simply a by-product but a key selling point in their own right.”

Android’s share of the UK mobile phone contract market has grown to 13.2% in Q2 2010, say GfK, despite the release of Apple’s iPhone 4 and the impending arrival of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.

Are you interested in developing for Android? Check out our Android Development Masterclass…

Last month’s Hadoop Summit in Santa Clara, California, saw a number of interesting developments around this increasingly hot open source project. Hadoop is a top-level Apache project that provides a Java software framework for storing, managing, processing and analysing the massive datasets produced by enterprise web and cloud computing applications. Inspired by Google’s internal software framework and file system, Hadoop includes the HBase distributed database, HDFS distributed file system, MapReduce application framework, Hive data warehousing application and a number of other open source tools, languages and common utilities.

Hadoop’s list of users increasingly reads like a who’s who of the web. And, as revealed at the summit, many are now contributing significant, enterprise-tested technologies back into the project.

Yahoo announced it was handing over ‘Hadoop with Security’ and its in-house Oozie workflow engine to the open source community. Hadoop with Security is a custom integration of the open source Kerberos authentication standard to enable secure collaboration and sharing of datasets, as well as hardware sharing between different instances. Oozie, meanwhile, is a workflow and job management tool for complex work processes and global scale ETL (extract, transform, load). Oozie works with most of Hadoop’s core components and, coming straight from Yahoo’s operational systems, has been pretty thoroughly tested.

Twitter also announced that it was open sourcing Crane, a tool for moving data from MySQL into a Hadoop infrastructure. Crane has, again, been pretty thoroughly tested, with Twitter using the tool as part of its arsenal to lift 7TB of data into Hadoop every day. While all of this may seem like immense corporate benevolence, Hadoop is a prime example of free software working as it should.

Hadoop’s large corporate users are effectively forced to contribute their most critical tools and tweaks back into the community. The alternative is to risk the project’s community developing alternative tools or taking the core components off in directions that leave them constantly refactoring their proprietary tools and developments.

Somewhat at odds with this then, Cloudera – the company that now employs some of the creators, committers and key contributors to the projects that make up Hadoop – used the summit to announce a risky new proprietary business model with a set of closed ‘enterprise’ tools for Hadoop.

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Tech specs:
CPU Intel Atom D510 (1.66 GHz, dual-core)
GPU Nvidia NG-ION (512MB DDR3)
Memory 1x 200-pin DDR2 SODIMM slot
Storage 2.5” SATA drive space
Networking 10/100/1000Mbps, 802.11n Wi-Fi
Audio 7.1-channel LPCM digital audio (HDMI),
Optical digital S/PDIF audio output
Video I/O HDMI, Dual-link DVI
Dimensions 188 x 188 x 44mm
Weight 1.6kg
Expansion 6x USB 2.0, 6-in-1
(SD/SDHC/MMC/MS/MS Pro/xD)
Other Tool-less chassis design

Pros: This tiny home theatre box is the perfect partner for streaming HD content to your TV, or as a mini Linux entertainment system
Cons: Fan noise and driver support are currently an issue, but these should improve with updated BIOS and driver releases in no time

The engineers at Zotac know a thing or two about putting together Home Theatre PC (HTPC) motherboards, and the Zotac MAG was an excellent first nettop from the company. While it scored well, it wasn’t perfect, and the Zbox aims to address many of those issues while injecting the latest technology from Intel and Nvidia in the process. The D510 dual-core Atom processor (which supports multithreading, offering a total of four threads) running at 1.6GHz introduces the extra processing power, while Nvidia’s next-gen ION-2 discrete GPU gives the Zbox access to the best GPU acceleration for video and general-purpose processing.

One of the key problems facing the MAG was its closed design – an almost impregnable chassis that was almost impossible to tweak or upgrade. This time Zotac has taken the barebones route, meaning you’ll need to invest in a hard drive and memory to finish off the system. The firm has also made it incredibly easy to get into. There are just two large thumb screws separating you from the business end of the Zbox – the bottom half of the chassis slides right off. The only downside to the design is that there’s only one DDR2 DIMM slot on offer (unlike the Zotac MAG, which had two stacked slots). This being the case, we opted for a 1GB DDR2-800 stick from Crucial. It’s not ideal, but 2GB is ample to cater for the multimedia capabilities the Zbox offers.

For the hard drive we plumped for Samsung’s 2.5” Spinpoint. We’re long-time supporters of the Samsung Spinpoint range since they tend to be among the quietest yet quickest drives in mass production. With its 5400rpm spindle speed it’s no match for the SpinPoint F1, but with a tight space to work with and sound being an issue in the HTPC market, the choice was spot on – it runs almost silently and stays cool even under the heavy duress of the tiny Zbox chassis. The total price of these extra purcahses, including fast delivery, was just over £80. Considering the quality of said components it was a real steal and a highly recommended combination for the Zbox as a result.

Jump to page two for our verdict…

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Let’s admit it, writing applications is a complex thing to do; it requires lot of blood and sweat. After putting so much effort into creating an application it would be shame to see it not being used just because it was only available in English. The bottom line is; most people pay more attention and give more respect to a product which is available in their own language. By its very nature, open source software qualifies as some of the most translated on the planet. If you want to seek a global audience for your software, it is very important that you localise your application for your users. Here’s how…

The Basics
Technical terms involved in internationalisation can be very daunting, so let’s clear these before proceeding. The following are the key components that make up the complete internationalisation framework…

Locale: A locale is the part of a user’s environment that brings together information about how to handle data that is specific to the end user’s particular country, language or territory. The locale is typically installed as part of the operating system. Usually a locale identifier consists of at least a language identifier and a region identifier. It is defined in this format: [language[_territory][.codeset][@modifier]]. For example, British English using the UTF-8 encoding is en_GB.UTF-8. (More on character sets later in this article.) The same code also defines the territorial convention for spelling, currency, date format etc.:

en_US = “color,” mm/dd/yyyy, $1,234.56
en_GB = “colour,” dd/mm/yyyy, £1.234,56

Translation: It simply means the translation of the text into another language. It may not be an accurate word-by-word translation, but it conveys the correct message.
Localisation (aka L10n): Localisation is a combined term used for both translation while conforming to a relevant locale.
Internationalisation (also known as i18n): The term ‘internationalisation’ refers to the process of building a product that is locale-neutral. It means that the application should be adapted to target languages and countries without making changes to the core of the product.
Globalisation: The combination of localisation and internationalisation. It commonly refers to the process of transforming a locale-specific product into one that support all locales.
Character sets/encodings: ‘Character set’ is often used to describe a digital representation of text. A character encoding system consists of a code that pairs each character from a given repertoire with something else, such as a sequence of natural numbers, or octets, in order to facilitate the transmission of data. The following are the popular character encodings…
8-bit character encodings and multibyte encodings: This Includes Latin-1, Latin-2 and ISO-8859-3 encodings. These collectively support English, Danish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Baltic and many others. Multibyte character applies when you do not have one-byte-per-character mapping.
Unicode: This is by far the most complete character set produced ever. It contains 96,447 characters from all of the world’s languages. Unicode comes in many flavours, mostly differentiated based on the bytes used. Popular ones are UTF-8, UCS-2 and UTF-16. UTF-8 is a variable-length encoding using 1-4 bytes. Primary applications are for use with XML, XHTML and various other text file formats. UCS-2 provides native encoding on NT-based systems. UTF-16 introduces 16-bit encodings plus 4-byte surrogates. Used for Asian language characters, mathematical symbols, esoteric scripts etc.

Android is changing the way that Linux is perceived. It has become the single most widely adopted type of Linux on embedded devices. It is not only popular in the smartphone space but also expanding its coverage to tablets, set‑top Boxes, televisions and appliances. For an Android application developer, this means a broader market to reach out to. We have already covered the introduction to Android development back in issue 83, so this time we go beyond the ‘hello world’ basics and give you the tips and recipes you need to become a better Android developer…

Using an alternative integrated development environment
an important part of any development platform. The IDE lets you make the most of your time by helping you focus on the code and logic rather than doing redundant tasks. Unlike other platforms, the Android SDK does not come with an IDE. Google provides an Eclipse plug-in called ADT (Android Development Tools) for Eclipse. This lets you use Eclipse as an IDE for Android. While ADT is good at basic tasks, it still is very limited in terms of functionality. As you grow as an Android developer, you’ll need more features and power from an Android IDE. So here are some alternative IDEs available for Android that make development both fun and easy:

MOTODEV Studio for Android (Free)
MOTODEV Studio is from phone maker Motorola. It includes the standard Google ADT and builds on top of it. Motorola has added several features that make Android development easier. Important features are…

1. Code snippets: You can use frequently used parts of code as snippets and use them in any number of applications you want. An example of a code snippet would be a code that is needed to initialise a database connection.
2. Database management tools: You can work with SQLite databases using a GUI interface without leaving the IDE.
3. Localisation file editor: This helps you manage strings to create localised applications.
4. Application creation wizards: It is possible to create essential Android classes – such as Content Provider, Service, Activity and Broadcast Receiver – quickly and easily using application creation wizards.
5. Automated SDK download: MOTODEV Studio is capable of executing automatic download, installation and configuration for the latest Android SDK. This is useful for newbies starting out in Android development.

Other features include application signing, Android Market integration and a built-in emulator. You can download MOTODEV Studio for Android from here.

IntelliJ IDEA (Commercial)
IntelliJ IDEA dares to be different in a world dominated by Eclipse-based IDEs. IntelliJ IDEA supports Android using an open source plug-in called idea-android (now part of the commercial distribution starting from version 9). Important features are:
1. Code insight support including code completion and navigation for Android projects.
2. Seamless Android SDK integration.
3. Android project deployment support.
IntelliJ IDEA is a popular Java IDE and has offers a host of excellent features that apply to most Java projects in general, as well as Android ones. IntelliJ IDEA can be downloaded here.

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Committing these sins will cause you burn in Android hell and you will have no place in the Android Market.

1 Poor Performance
If your application is not responsive enough, your users will receive an ugly ANR (Application Not Responding) message. An ANR is thrown when your application is not able to respond to user input within five seconds, or the Broadcast Receiver does not complete in ten seconds.
An ANR message allows the user to either close the application or wait for it to respond. You know what most users will do, so optimise your application for performance. Or else.

2 Using Excessive System Resources
Always keep in mind that you are programming for low-powered handhelds and not desktop-class systems. There are far more important applications running on the device and you need to play fair. If you are not using system resources responsibly, you will slow down the whole system and the user will banish your application from their device. And so they should.

3 creating a Weird User Interface
People use applications on their smartphones because they are easy to use. Do not try to hijack their user experience. Always provide a consistent user interface.  For example, the Back button should always cause the application to show the previous screen or you should go back to the drawing board. Simple.

4 Using undocumented APIs
Never use an undocumented API, no matter how interesting it looks. Undocumented APIs tend to break applications between OS releases. They are also not tested for third-party usage. Using undocumented APIs can cause all sort of problems including performance issues and compatibility.

5 Designing for One Device (or only a small sub-set)
Android is not just about one smartphone, but a whole range of devices. If you design for all of them, you will have a larger marketplace. The Android SDK provides many APIs to support writing device-neutral applications. Use them.

Makes sure you check out our advanced Android development guide. Better yet, follow us on Twitter and get updates the minute they hit the net…