Chicago GNU/Linux User Group Planet

Account Hackers Have No Mojo

2011-02-22T22:07:19+00:00

Today while I was writing some code, I got an instant message from a friend of mine I haven’t spoken to in a while. At first I figured it was his dumb self because he can’t spell worth a crap, or is actually pretty dumb in many cases. I shrugged it off and thought nothing of it. After another line or so the next message threw me for a loop. He wanted me to go to some website and trying something. OK, I haven’t talked to you in over a year, and that is the first thing out of your keyboard? I responded with something about porn, and the next response from him is what gave it away. He used ‘plz‘ instead of ‘please‘. Sorry Matt, but you aren’t hip to the Internet chat lingo. After that, I responded letting them know I was on to them, and after a little research I knew it wasn’t Matt at all.

Here is the conversation in its entirety. Thought it was kind of funny, especially since many people would have fallen for this. FYI, the website he wanted me to lookout was revealed by Google of course to be a phishing, virus, and that other crud Windows users have to deal with, website.

Either his password was insanely simple, which I don’t think it was, or he will be calling me within the next couple of days stating something along the lines of, “Can you fix my computer, I think I have a virus?”

UPDATE: After that conversation I filed a report on Yahoo!, just like any good contributor does. I gave them my system information and all of the details letting them know I didn’t have to worry about clicking links. Well it seems they throw that information out and use some USER_AGENT sniffing instead. Boy did they get that all wrong. First off, here is a snippet of what they replied to me with, of course you can tell it is computer generated:

Dear Richard,
 
Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Messenger.
 
I understand that you have received an Instant Message or Messages 
containing a suspicious link or links. The links appear to have been 
sent by one or more of your contacts, but were actually sent by a 
malicious third party. Please do not click these links or download the 
associated EXE files. 
 
Remember, we always recommend that you never click suspicious links or 
download executable files sent from anyone including your contacts. 
Also, keep in mind that we are working to identify the source of the 
issue as well as to take down the sites that are the destination of 
these links.
 
To remove and prevent further infection, please update your anti-virus 
software.

I told them previously in my report that I was using Linux and had nothing to worry about. Typically this helps with the pre-generated email responses, but in this case it didn’t. Then it went on and detailed the conversation I had with my hacked friend. After that though is what got me, and that was their information about my computer I used to contact them. Here that is:

Machine: Unknown
 
OS: unknown
 
Browser: Default Browser 0
 
REMOTE_ADDR: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
 
REMOTE_HOST: xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx.somerouter.insomelocation.onsomenetwork.net
 
Date Originated: Tuesday February 22, 2011 - 13:47:01
 
Cookies: disabled
 
AOL: yes

Umm, for one I am not using AOL, and the last I checked, you couldn’t use it with Linux. If their sniffing were correct, it should have looked something like this:

Machine: ShakaDoobie
 
OS: Linux  (probably either Ubuntu or Kubuntu, as the WordPress sniffers pick this up)
 
Browser: Default Browser 0  (should say Google Chrome, and it isn't my default browser)
 
...
 
Cookies: enabled
 
AOL: hell no!

Ahh the fun an excitement I tell you. OK, you can go back to doing whatever you were doing now that I wasted 5 minutes of your time.

Account Hackers Have No Mojo is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Urinal model

2011-02-19T22:22:24+00:00

In December Rob Myers contacted me about a commision of making a urinal in Blender as CC BY-SA 3.0. He wanted to get it 3d printed via Shapeways, etc. I agreed to it with moderate enthusiasm. Most of the things I do are more gobliny or monsterish. But, I figured, Rob Myers is such an awesome free culture advocate and a good friend, it would be a challenge to do something different, and that it would be pretty awesome to see a model of mine 3d printed. Besides, how long could an object that looked so simple take?

Well it ended up taking about 5 times longer than I expected. But the results, I thought, were pretty good:

As usual, I neglected blogging about cool things once I'd done them, but Rob Myers pushed it all over the place. First a post on his blog called Freeing Art History: Urinal. Then he uploaded it to Thingiverse and... super cool... BotFarm (from the MakerBot people!) printed one. It looks super cool. Click that last link. Click it!

But last, and most awesomely, Rob got his Shapeways urinal print, which looks super awesome. And guess what? BoingBoing picked it up! Holy cow, I'm on BoingBoing!

Anyway, the urinal.blend is available if you want to open it in Blender (also CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported licensed). Hopefully you can have fun using it (digitally or physically)! I also have some renders from alternate angles up if you want to look at those.

Anyway, sometimes when I do things, I think "maybe I should blog about or promote these things". But then I feel like they aren't that impressive, don't matter too much, and sometimes I lose enthusiasm for putting them out there (which is somewhat ironic since a good portion of my life is about encouraging other people to put things out there in a free-as-in-freedom manner). I guess maybe the biggest thing I've learned from this is that maybe I should be more confident and enthused about showing the cool things I've done. Thanks Rob, for giving me an opportunity to learn that. :)

PS: I mentioned that most of my 3d modeling involves monsters, spaceships, robots, etc, and that here was an excuse to do something different. But that didn't stop me from making a spaceshipified version. :)

Gonna speak on Blender at PyCon 2011

2011-02-19T17:48:10+00:00

Are you going to (the US) PyCon this year? I am! And I'm pretty excited about it, since I will also be presenting on Blender's new Python API!

The talk lineup looks really great this year. If you're planning to go, and you read this, maybe consider contacting me; maybe we could say hello, potentially having one or more interesting conversations!

Linux and GMail Part III – Thunderbird

2011-02-18T03:20:43+00:00

OK, as you can probably tell now, I have been wasting a lot of time playing with GUI email clients. Why you ask? Simple, I am nuts, like that wasn’t obvious! Like I did in Part I and Part II, I am going to do the same this go round, but with Mozilla Thunderbird instead.

First off, I am using version 3.1.9~hg20110206r5951 from the Ubuntu Mozilla Team Daily Builds PPA. Forgot I added that PPA to check out Firefox, so because of that, I have the version of Thunderbird that I do.

First things first, I like Thunderbird. I will even go as far as saying it is by far the best GUI-based email client available for Linux, and Windows for that matter. It integrates as better as the others, if not better actually, when it comes to tying it in to GMail. My complaints at this time are small, damn small. They are:

Unsubscribing from an IMAP folder does not hide that folder, you can still see it in the list, annoying
I don’t use local folders, so I had to download Mail Tweak just to hide it. Mail Tweak has about 50 or so other tweaks built into it, but I am only using one of the tweaks
You have to try a few shitty extensions until you find the right one

I have 2 GMail accounts set up, and there are different folder views you can use. I was using the Unified Folders view, which is a really great idea, one I haven’t seen on any other client out there. So I have 2 accounts, and they both have an Inbox, this will show only 1 inbox with both of them combined, and when you expand that inbox, you can then access each inbox individually. This saves space when you have a ton of folders in view. Another thing I like is the support of IMAP IDLE which allows damn near real-time communications between GMail and Thunderbird. You can kind of think of it as the PUSH Technology deployed in mobile devices these days. It is funny. An email will show up both on my Android and Thunderbird before it does in the GMail web client. When I get a new email in my inbox, a message pops up, and at the same time my phone makes a noise, and about 15 to 30 seconds later, the message shows up in my GMail web client. Also, it uses its own message indicator and not the Ubuntu or Kubuntu indicator. I kind of prefer the Thunderbird one because it is more out of the way for me. To be honest, I absolutely hate the indicators in Ubuntu and Kubuntu, but that is my personal preference, I just have a different work flow than those who like them.

It doesn’t look to bad in KDE. Of course it doesn’t fit in look wise, but that is easily overlooked when it comes to functionality, speed, and usability. I have installed the Zindus extension which syncs my calendar and contacts with Google’s calendar and contacts. It does this better than any other extension out there, so don’t waste your time trying this or that, just get Zindus, enter your username and password, and in seconds you are up and running. Thanks to Timothy Richardson for leaving a comment telling me about Zindus. As it stands, I don’t think I am missing anything from any of the other clients that I wish was here. Well maybe a social tab with sex built in like Zimbra Desktop had, out of the box I might add.

So, are you a Thunderbird user? Am I missing anything? Any extension that is a must have? Any tips or tricks I need to know? Speak up in the comments and let me know.

NOTE: Inbox zero!!!

Linux and GMail Part III – Thunderbird is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Linux and Gmail II – Zimbra Desktop

2011-02-17T01:35:22+00:00

Just the other day I posted about Linux and Gmail in reference to clients other than a web browser. I had noted trying out Evolution, KMail, Thunderbird, and of course Mutt which I use daily already. Well, one of the comments, by David Fraser, was about the Zimbra Desktop. I don’t think I have ever used a Zimbra client but I am fairly certain I have used their backend products in the past. Anyways, I went ahead and downloaded Zimbra Desktop, and after a fairly simple installation, have it up and running.

The installation was fairly simple. You extract the tarball, then sudo ./install.pl, answer the questions, and boom it is installed. Fairly quick, less than a minute I would say. After it finished installing I went ahead and run it. I was presented a dialog asking me to create an account, in which I did. I selected GMail, entered a name for that account, my username and password, and my name. I clicked save, said OK, and it was up and running and synchronizing my folders faster than any client out there. Sparrow and Mailplane, which I like for GMail clients, can’t even compare in speed. Thunderbird? Evolution? Not even close. KMail? Don’t even ask! OfflineIMAP can’t even compare to the speed in which I was up and running with all email downloaded.

Usability? I would say it is pretty much the same as every other GUI client in terms of usability. It may seem a little snappier to me compared to the other GUI clients, but time will only tell. The first thing I did was click on a message, I thought, “OK, lets reply.” I am used to the Reply button being over the message I am reading, however Zimbra has it to the left of the message in the top toolbar. I had to actually search for a second to find it. Before I found it, I decided to just do the tried-and-true pressing of the r key, and wouldn’t you know, my reply was ready to be created.

So I haven’t really dug into it deep yet, but first thoughts are not bad, but not great. So, I know my stuff is synchronizing because I can see the little spinner that is up by my account name. What it is synchronizing though I have no clue. Would be nice if it told me. Also, if you look at the image I have included, you will notice a Social tab. This does not belong in an Email client at all. I don’t need Twitter, Facebook, or Digg in my email client. Also, one of the columns that were displayed to me under the Social tab was a Twitter trending topic, #verysexy. Nice, just what I need in my email client, sex. Nothing like reading about a nipple in this shape or size, or a girl or guys ass, in your email client. Classy! As of right now Zimbra folks, get rid of that shit, otherwise I will end up chalking your entire client up as nothing more than a joke.

Oh, and one more thing, it is actually a web client, and uses Prism, which Mozilla is discontinuing and rolling the good stuff into Chromeless. So, keep an eye out, and if I think it is worthy of more discussion, I will add more to the comments, update this post, or create a new post in the future.

Linux and Gmail II – Zimbra Desktop is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Thing-A-Day #14: Knitting group and final coat of paint

2011-02-15T04:43:02+00:00

Mondays are when the PSOne knitting group meets, so I went and put some rows on my scarf. I also put the last bits of paint on my cabinet. One more day left on that project until I reveal what it’s for!

After examining the dry paint from yesterday I firmly believe the foam roller is the way to go. I think I could sand that out in no time and get a nice finish. However, I think I would need to prep the wood better than I did to make this particular piece look as nice as I want, so it’s just not going to happen this time. Oh well, another project!

Linux and GMail

2011-02-15T01:15:34+00:00

I have spent a bit of today playing with the various email clients on Linux today. I use GMail with IMAP for all of my email. Why you ask, especially when there are so many other options? Easy, convenience. I don’t have to set anything up, works with my phone, computers, TV, and then some. I also like how my calendar, contacts, and email are all in one place, and can be viewed, edited, or used from all of the devices I just listed above without having to install a single application. Convenience. I wanted to see how the desktop clients were going these days in regards to email so I played with Evolution, Kontact/KMail, and Thunderbird.

All 3 left a bad taste in my mouth. They all connected with GMail just fine, without having to do more than giving it my GMail address and password. Evolution was probably the fastest on the initial import of email out of the 3. KMail was by far the slowest. Evolution took about an hour, Thunderbird was about the same, and then there was KMail. It is now 19:00 and I started the KMail one at about 16:00, so almost 3 hours. Once KMail got up and running, you would hover over a message and a popup would display with information pertaining to the email. Everything was correct except for the body. The body was for an email in some other folder who knows where. Other than that, they all did what they are supposed to do with GMail.

Well how about with Google Calendar or GMail Contacts? Yeah, not so great. One would work great with contacts, but suck with the calendar, or one would work great with calendar or suck with the contacts, or one wouldn’t work with either. So, I have concluded thus far for me, that Mutt combined with a script or terminal command worked better than the GUI solutions. So I guess the Mutt slogan is 100% true then:

All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less

I just went in and did an apt-cache search gmail and this is what it told me:

Each red dot in that image signifies a GMail notification application. Well, it seems the Linux world has plenty of GMail notification applications and no GMail application. I think it is maybe time you stop being opportunistic with the notifiers. I wish I had some more time, as I would love for something like sparrow or Mailplane for Linux. If you want to be opportunistic, there you go. I think an application like either of those 2 would be great.

That’s all, just wanted to have a little fun today and it has been a while since I blogged, so I figured I would bother you all really quickly

EDIT: I Google’d mac gmail and realized they are as bad as Linux when it comes to the notifiers too. I didn’t Google windows gmail because they don’t matter anyways

Linux and GMail is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Thing-A-Day #13: Lathe Stuff & Painting

2011-02-14T05:03:31+00:00

I had a very productive maker day today to make up for all the knitting throughout the week. First, I installed the new bearing on the metal lathe’s lead screw. It seems to be working much better now, but the change gears have been modified since I tested it before. I’ll have to change it back to absolutely confirm that it was an issue with that bearing, but for now it’s working well.

On the left of the lathe you can see my second project of the day. We have several brushes and tools that go with the lathe and they usually just lay in the chip tray or on the workbench. I made this rack for some of the tools and brushes to get the area more organized. It’s just some 1 inch holes in a scrap of 2×4, but it does the job well enough.

Finally, I put what is hopefully the last coat of paint on the secret cabinet. Like I said in the last post, I think my sanding and use of a brush was a problem. I got a sander that could take my higher grit sandpaper and used some 400 on it to smooth out the painted faces. It worked very well, some other people commented that it feels like plastic rather than wood. I think I probably should have started even lower than 400, but 400 did the job. I also got a foam roller and did most of the painting with that. It left a nice finish and any bubbling that occurred during application had dissipated by the time I got back around to that side to examine it. I still had to use the brush on the inner corners, but it’s greatly reduced. Maybe that’s what those foam brushes are for. Anyway, this isn’t actually the last application of paint because the frame for the door is painted on both sides. I’ll have to get the other side painted tomorrow. However, this is hopefully the last time I paint over existing paint.

Thing-A-Day #12: More paint on the secret cabinet

2011-02-14T03:13:59+00:00

I put another coat of paint on the secret cabinet project. The reason this is taking so long is that I’d like to get it smoothed out to a mirror finish. I’m starting to get frustrated with that though. I keep putting on more paint and sanding but I don’t think I’m making any progress. Here are some of the problems I think I’m having:

I’m using a paint brush. When I bought the paint I asked the Home Depot guy what the best way to get a really smooth finish was. He said either a Purdy brand brush or a foam roller. I went with the brush since the cabinet is small and the tray is more of a hassle. I think that was a mistake. A brush will always leave stroke marks in the surface, and that has to be sanded out. I’m going to switch to a foam roller tomorrow.
I’m not sanding properly. I don’t know what grit of paper to use at which level of roughness, and committing the elbow grease to try something for it to be a failure is eating up too much time. I’m going to get a sander and try some lower grits.

Thing-A-Day #7 – #11: Scarf knitting

2011-02-14T03:05:37+00:00

Due to an explosion of work this week I was unable to do any making besides scarf knitting on the weeknights. I’ve made some nice progress on the black portion of the scarf and I’m going faster than I used to. Maybe I’ll actually be done with it in time to put it away in a box for next winter!

Thing-A-Day #6: More knitting on the scarf

2011-02-07T03:52:01+00:00

I’m crunched at work lately but I made time to knit for a while again. Hopefully I can finish this scarf by the end of February. I also bought some new yarn and needles to make the next project go a bit faster.

Thing-A-Day #5: More progress on the secret cabinet

2011-02-06T04:01:24+00:00

Here’s some more progress on the secret cabinet project. The door is framed and both are painted. Also, the plexiglass is cut to size for the door, but I’m not going to drill and nail it on until the painting is done. Here’s a current picture.

Thing-A-Day #4: More Knitting

2011-02-05T03:51:32+00:00

Work crushed me today and I had a lot of other stuff to do so I just did some knitting again tonight. I feel like I’m making good progress on the scarf but there’s just a ton of rows to go through. No picture today, it looks pretty much the same as last time.

Thing-A-Day #3: Knit Scarf

2011-02-04T05:54:41+00:00

I’ve been working on this scarf for a while with the PSOne knitting group. I didn’t have time today to get back in to working on the secret cabinet project so I knit on this for a while.

Thing-A-Day #2: Progress on a cabinet

2011-02-03T05:03:23+00:00

Today I worked on a larger project. I don’t want to reveal the whole thing until it’s done but it’s basically a cabinet. So far I cut the sides of the cabinet, routed out a groove to hold the back, and screwed it all together. Here’s a picture:

February is Thing-A-Day month! Thing #1: Snowshoes

2011-02-02T04:08:53+00:00

February is thing-a-day month, and I’m participating. Well, I’m not blogging with them, but I’m making something every day and blogging here about it.

In honor, or perhaps in defiance, of the snowpocalypse setting in tonight, I made snowshoes. It’s just a rectangular wooden frame with a small platform to stand on and wrapped in fabric to add surface area. It didn’t work great, but it worked well enough. You can see the effectiveness in the photoset linked below:

Snowshoe victory!

Blizzard of 2011

2011-02-02T03:45:06+00:00

As I sit here writing this right now, we here in Chicago are hunkered down with the expectation of receiving more than 24 inches (60cm), of snow. Hoping I can get this posted before the power totally goes out here due to the wind. The wind is making it even worse. We have sustained winds in the 25 to 35 miles per hour (40 to 56 kph), with gusts around 50mph (80kph). It is nuts, but it is fun at the same time. Luckily for us, we don’t close down like other major cities in the US, well except for schools.

EDIT: Forgot to add a link to pics I will be updating of our storm just in case you were interested. Head over to my Picasa Pictures and enjoy. Getting ready to head out and try to stream via U-Stream, because it is nuts right now.

Well, I was looking at the state of documentation in both KDE and Kubuntu and realized it really needs a lot of help. Now that I am starting to have a bit more time available, I am looking at making my way back into contributing to both projects again. I have missed doing the work and hanging out with everyone online.

I plan on making changes to my blog as well in the coming months. I want to get back to not only giving updates about my personal life and my contributions, but I also want to start documenting work I have been doing in the cycling world, and some development work I have been doing there as well that I think other cycling groups around the world could use. With that, it is high time to once again pay that dreadful hosting bill, and right now I am very limited on the funds I have available to go out on things like this. I hate doing this and thought it wasn’t fare to do things like this, but I would appreciate any donation possible. Whether it is $0.15 or $1, any little bit helps me keep this site alive so I can bring news to everyone who reads it. Over to the right of my page is a donate button that goes to PayPal, and if you could click it and spare some change, I would greatly appreciate it.

So with that said, you peeps in the KDE and Kubuntu worlds, get ready, because I want to come back! I have missed you all and I have so much love for each and everyone of you. You all have held the fort down perfectly and have kept progressing in creating the greatest operating system and workspace I have used to date. Thanks for that!

Blizzard of 2011 is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

I found the perfect project to dive into Haskell

2011-01-30T00:00:44+00:00

I've had a recurring project in my life, a modular software synth. See here to get an idea of what I'm doing. The difference being that with software synths, you're not limited to how many components you have and how they're configured. I somehow thought I came to this revelation on my own years ago, but there's plenty of this sort of thing out there, such as SuperCollider, which sounds like it's fairly popular.

I've been trying to get into Haskell, but have been struggling to get myself out of my Python comfort zone. A friend of mine actually told me about SuperCollider recently, and I realized that my own synth would be the perfect project to get me started on Haskell, and one day last week I got inspired to get started. I found a simple example to start with of a sine wave being played through Pulse Audio and I went from there. Here's my repo

Unfortunately, you need PulseAudio to run this. I'm working on either getting Alsa output or file generation working soon.

When I was making this a few times before, I made it in C++, the latest instance being several years ago. Amazingly enough, despite still being a novice in the language, I found that doing this in Haskell is easier. The infinite lazy lists work perfectly as signals. Before I considered each component to be an object that had a value, and input signals. And I had to have a global "tick" that conveyed info between items. (And I thought that was really neat at the time.) Now I just have components be functions that "output" (return) infinite lists, and take infinite lists as inputs. It all sortof just sorts itself out.

Speed is sacrificed to be sure, at least so far, but real-time synths have been made for Haskell, so I bet I can profile it and optimize it significantly.

Also you will notice that everything is hard coded! I sortof like it that way, it's amusing, particularly when it starts making beat sequences (which is a point I got to in my old version), but I'll probably make an interface at some point. Or maybe not, Haskell is a nice interface.

Here's why I'm writing now of all times though. On top of being functional with the lazy infinite lists and such, Haskell also has a type system from Nazi Germany. This is actually an advantage, though. I have some trouble remembering all the unit conversions involved in the oscillators, when I'm dealing with cycles, seconds, and samples. So today, I made a type framework that provided functions that did the conversions properly. When I was writing out an improved version of my oscillator function, I used these types.

It took me a long time to figure out exactly how I wanted it all to work, and how to make it work. I would start on an expression, and then realize that I was adding different units, and Haskell wouldn't let me do it. Or sometimes the compiler told me so. But eventually I got through it. This is the monstrosity that resulted.

And the kicker: I used this to make a new version of the square wave oscillator, and it sounded exactly the same as the old one, the first time I ran it.

Qt in the land of Gnome-based desktops: The issue of copyright in Free software

2011-01-23T17:43:31+00:00

Recently Mark Shuttleworth wrote about how Qt will become part of the Ubuntu 11.10 desktop, and that Qt-based apps will eventually be considered as possible default Ubuntu apps. Obviously, this would be a big change from using GTK-only applications (that is, aside from Firefox and Open/Libreoffice applications), but Mark encourages GNOME developers to consider using Qt, too. He writes, “Perhaps GNOME itself will embrace Qt, perhaps not, but if it does then our willingness to blaze this trail would be a contribution in leadership.”

I agree on this, and think that enabling usage of Qt in GNOME projects would be a contribution in leadership. It would be great if developers had the option of using tools like Qt Creator and Qt Quick when building applications for GNOME-based desktops (or other devices!).

The question is: How do you make that happen? All technical matters aside, how do you encourage GNOME developers to consider using Qt for their applications?

To me, one major consideration in further developing the Qt-to-GNOME bridge, and encouraging developers to use Qt in GNOME-based desktops, involves copyright. I think the GNOME project, and its large group of developers, would be more likely to embrace Qt if Canonical did not put the dconf binding work (or other such Qt/GNOME integration work) under strict Canonical ownership via their contributor agreement.

The issue is that the contributor agreement gives all copyrights of the work (even contributions made by non-Canonical employees) to Canonical, and permits Canonical to relicense the work (even make it proprietary) at their discretion. To me, this would present a considerable risk for the GNOME developers and for the GNOME project.

The folks at Canonical have not yet indicated whether or not the contributor agreement applies, or will apply, to the early QT/dconf binding work. My thinking is that, if Canonical is disinclined to having the larger GNOME project use Qt, Canonical will request full copyright ownership of any Qt/dconf work. Thus, Canonical would “own the bridge” between the land of Qt and the land of GNOME, and anyone who wants to use that bridge would have to do so knowing that it could eventually be made proprietary.

Moreover, I think it would be a bit ironic if Canonical put the Qt/dconf work under their contributor agreement. As I understand it, Canonical’s main justification for requiring copyright assignment is that they “wrote the code,” for that project, and would like to maintain ownership of it. While folks at Canonical may have done the initial Qt/dconf bindings work, a primary reason that Canonical is even able to safely use Qt in their business is because Nokia opened up Qt, and removed the copyright assignment requirement from Qt contributions. Surely the Qt codebase, along with all of its associated tools, is much larger than any binding work (no matter how significant), so Canonical’s reasoning wouldn’t seem to be as applicable here.

However, if Mark and the rest of the folks at Canonical actually wants GNOME developers to embrace Qt on equal footing with GTK, they will either donate out the Qt/GNOME integration work to the larger GNOME community, or they will push the integration work upstream to Qt.

I’m hopeful that the folks at Canonical will choose either of the latter two options and make their initial Qt/Gnome integration work available under the same copyright-free terms that Qt has been made available to them. I agree with Mark when he writes, “it’s the values which are important, and the toolkit is only a means to that end.” While it may ruffle some feathers initially, having Qt as a viable option for development in GNOME-based desktops can only improve the free software ecosystem by giving developers more choices in the tools that they are able to use.

As a closing note, some of what I’ve written here is speculation and opinion, but if I’ve misunderstood anything, or if anyone can shed further light on this topic, please share a note in the comments.

Testing Multiple Login Sessions Simultaneously

2011-01-02T18:04:36+00:00

One annoyance in developing websites is that you sometimes have to log in and out all the time to test interaction between multiple users.

Have you ever visited or administered a website (say, www.example.com) which lets you visit "www.example.com" or "www2.example.com", etc, and doesn't forward to "example.com"? Did you ever try logging in at one subdomain, and then switch to another? You'll be logged out, it's a different login session. If you needed to test something remotely with multiple users logging in at once, that's a nice trick to use.

Now let's do the same thing locally (*nix systems only afaik, sorry):

In /etc/hosts you should see:

127.0.0.1 localhost

Add the following:

127.0.0.1 localhost2
127.0.0.1 localhost3
127.0.0.1 localhost4

And so on for however many you need. Now each one will access your site with a different session, so you can log in as a different user for each.

RelaxNG, Entities, and Namespaces

2010-12-19T16:32:19+00:00

I ran into a couple of roadblocks in trying to use entities with Mallard recently, and thought I would share how I worked around them in case anyone else needed to do the same thing. Although my examples deal with Mallard, what I note here will also work for entities in DocBook 5 documents, or any other RelaxNG-based XML documents.

Entities?

Before I start, though, if anyone is wondering what I’m talking about when I say, “entities,” they are a handy variable-like feature of XML and a couple of other markup languages. For example, they allow you to type something like &exaile; into your document, and then have it magically parsed as:

<guiseq><gui>Applications</gui><gui>Multimedia</gui><gui>Exaile</gui><guiseq>

The final, rendered result would be a familiar GUI click-path like, "Click Applications > Multimedia > Exaile." While entities have their limitations and are not ideal for all use-cases, they serve a purpose. This web page gives a good overview of entities and how to use them.

Using Entities in Mallard / RelaxNG documents

To set up and use entities in your XML-based document, you basically need three things. You need a file that contains the entities you want to use*, you need to declare where those entities are tracked, and you need to actually use the entities in your document.

The Entities File

Previously, step one was very easy. You would just create a file that contained values like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- MENUS -->
<!ENTITY abiword '<guiseq><gui>Applications</gui><gui>Office</gui>
<gui>AbiWord</gui></guiseq>'>
<!ENTITY about-me '<guiseq><gui>Applications</gui><gui>System</gui>
<gui>Users and Groups</gui></guiseq>'>

However a somewhat recent change in libxml** prevents these entities from being parsed as they used to be, making things slightly more involved. (If you’ve been bitten by this bug, libxml will throw up a, “Namespace default prefix was not found” error message.) To resolve this, you need to include the relevant XML namespace in the entity. For Mallard-based documents, the resulting changes look like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- MENUS -->
<!ENTITY abiword '<guiseq xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"><gui>Applications</gui>
<gui>Office</gui><gui>AbiWord</gui></guiseq>'>
<!ENTITY about-me '<guiseq xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"><gui>Applications</gui>
<gui>System</gui><gui>Users and Groups</gui></guiseq>'>

Out of the Woods

Once you make it past step one, the rest is a walk in the park.

Step two is to declare your entities in the start of your documentation files. I modified a DocBook 5 example to come up with this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE page [
<!ENTITY % entities-xubuntu SYSTEM "libs/xubuntu.ent">
%entities-xubuntu;
]>
<page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"
      type="topic" style="task"
      id="music">

Wrapping Things Up

Step three, using your entities in your documents, is no different than what you would have done with DocBook 4 or any other XML-based syntax. For example, typing &abiword; will be parsed as:

<guiseq><gui>Applications</gui><gui>Office</gui><gui>AbiWord</gui></guiseq>

and will cause “Application > Office > Abiword,” to magically appear in your rendered documentation.

If you have any questions, corrections, or suggestions (as I’m sure you’re all keen to be chatting about XML entities), feel free to leave me a note in the comments.

* I’m using external entities, which requires a separate file, but you can also use named or charater entities.
** Apparently the namespace of the parent node is no longer inherited by the entities, so you need to declare the namespace in the entity itself.

Cryptonomicon: A Lesson for my Hyper-Logical Friends

2010-12-19T11:04:55+00:00

I'm currently reading Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson. I'm not very acquainted with literature at large, so forgive me if I'm being ignorant here, but it seems that this book is unique or among very few that are in wide release and yet somewhat esoteric. That is to say, anybody can appreciate it, but I think it speaks specifically to computer programmers and mathematicians, and may not be 100% understood by those who are unfamiliar with certain mathematical and engineering concepts, and who don't share that mentality. Then again, the purpose could be to provide some insight to outsiders who may want to understand the hyper-logical nerd mentality. Tom Wolfe seems to do a similar thing, for instance, with the investment bankers in Bonfire of the Vanities.

Though I think Neil Stephenson must have a closer personal connection with this mentality. It's a great book for a nerd because it's literature we can really relate to. It's told from the perspective of those of us who try to make logical sense of everything, see patterns all around us, and are confused by strange things like social niceties.

All in all I think it teaches an important lesson to nerds and non-nerds alike. I only just now crossed the 1/3 way mark (it's like 1100 pages), but I just came across some particular dialog which I think is particularly insightful. In this scene, Randy Waterhouse pulls Eberhard Föhr aside during a business meeting, and explains to him why, for their own legal protection, information has been withheld from them by one of their business partners, Avi. Ebehard, being of this nerd mindset, is frustrated that his business partners are not behaving logically. Randy, being of the same mindset but somewhat more enlightened, explains to Ebehard the realities of dealing with illogical people, but he does so in logical terms that Ebehard can relate to. This conversation is amusing like a lot of things in this book, because it demonstrates how us analytical types like to deconstruct everything.

Rather than risk inviting Neil Stephenson's lawyers (I have no idea how likely a scenario this is be but I don't care to do the research right now) I'll just invite you to read this page via Google Books.

I appreciate a couple things about this passage. Firstly, I appreciate that Randy's character is sort of an enlightened techie, who we should aspire to, who respects the qualities of other sorts of people, even if he doesn't understand their mentality. Business people clueless about technology, idealistic designers with a vision, techies who can't design a usable interface to save their life, we should all accept our own limitations of understanding, respect the others, and occasionally yield our own ideals for the sake of other ones. (ex: if "doing it right" means taking twice as long, and failing in the market, what use is your ideally laid out code if nobody's going to use it?)

The other thing I like about this passage is, as I mentioned above, the logical way that it approaches illogical people. Some nerds have a tendency to refuse to approach the world in anything other than a logical manner. Normal People may try to explain to them that the world, particularly other individuals, aren't rational at all, and we should stop seeing things so logically. I include myself in this group of nerds, so honestly, this line of argument is ridiculous to me. The universe is logical. But, I think that sometimes we as nerds are just Doing It Wrong, and we can take a cue from Randy here.

What we need to do is to appreciate that the fact that people act irrationally, out of emotion, is just a condition of the world. Just as we accept that animals are irrational, or that the sun is hot. It's a datum. Further, accept that you yourself, the nerd, are also emotional, particularly when people don't act logically. This frustration with others' illogical behavior is based on an expectation for people to act contrary to their nature. You're ignoring a data point. You're mad at the sun for being hot. You're a non-techie who's mad at your computer for doing something other than exactly what you told it to. Now look who is being irrational? I'm going to agitate a little and propose that we are in fact being hypocritical here.

The main problem I think we sometimes have is the distinction between Logic and Logical Faculties. The expectation of perfection in Logic is not the same as expecting a human to have perfect Logical Faculties. The universe works by rational laws. People are part of the universe, so their workings are rationally explainable. But this is entirely distinct from their Logical Faculties being able to perfectly model the world around them. Furthermore, people's Logical Faculties being able to model the world around them is distinct from their ability to defend it from any of their Emotional Faculties getting in the way. We humans are but animals who happen to possess a limited amount of logical faculties.

Expecting people to act in a rational straightforward manner is like expecting a computer to compute beyond its capacity. A problem may be Logically solvable. There is a perfect Logical progression toward the answer. If we treated computers the same way we sometimes treat other humans, we would demand that we should be able to stick the problem into a computer and get an instant output. But again, Logical Faculties are in limited supply. Somehow we don't seem to have a problem accepting this in computers. In fact, we have entire sub-fields of computer science, taking RAM, HD, and time limitations as data, and creating a whole new set of Logical problems. Why not accept the same limitations and challenges in humans?

Perhaps it's that there is one fundamental difference between computers and humans, which is that our departure from being perfect logic solvers is not just in our processing capabilities, but also, as Randy pointed out in the passage linked above, in our interfaces. Human interfaces are more like neural networks than serial connections. To gain access to the Logical Faculties, one must enter a pattern that is accepted by the neural network. The patterns include such things as social niceties and innuendo. Some of us have simpler interfaces than others. (And as Randy described, some may even require other humans to act as intermediate interfaces. When I worked at Oracle, there was a guy who was fluent in both Engineer and Customer, and intermediated all conversation. I understand this is a common thing to have in a company.)

And you, the nerd, are a neural network, at your core, not a Turing machine. You operate in that domain. That means you have the natural ability, however impaired by years sitting in front of the computer, to interface with other neural networks, if you would just accept your nature. This is in fact the only way you can communicate with other humans, so you might as well accept it for what it is. You may try to approximate a Turing machine, but your neural network nature will still show on occasion. For instance, as I pointed out above, when you are frustrated about others not behaving like Turing machines.

Promise me you won't fail like this

2010-12-15T06:08:15+00:00

UPDATE: after just over 2 days, all of my whining may have paid off. I woke up 12/15 to find my GMail working again. I would like to think a Google employee who contacted me on Twitter got it fixed or at least escalated for me.

If you can’t read what that says, here it is:
Temporary Error(500)
We’re sorry, but your Gmail account is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest trying again in a few minutes.

Well, 2 days later, not a few minutes, it is still dead. So I did what everyone else would do in a situation like this, I head to Tech Support. Yeah, like you, I couldn’t find a clear tech support channel either. I did find a bunch of documentation that didn’t pertain to the situation, and what documentation I did find, didn’t help the situation. Well, luckily I found a contact link, actually I found 2, maybe 3, different contact links, to report the issue. So I did, all 3 times. I waited with another email account, thanks Yahoo! for working! And I am still waiting, over 24 hours later. Next step, the amazing Google Forums, or whatever the hell they call that.

So I post my problem initially with a subject of Temporary Error(500) – Numeric Code: 93. This didn’t even draw in a response. So, I did something I can’t stand, I said screw bumping the thread, let me create one with a subject that shows a little panic. I added the info they asked for, I told them everything I have gone to from Google and GMail to rectify the situation, and none of it works. Wouldn’t you know, my subject draws someone in, and their first response is:

Did you check this link? Have you done this?

At this point I have steam coming out of my ears. How in the hell could you ask me that question if you read my initial post? How? I don’t get it? Supposedly this person is a ‘Level 4′, whatever the hell that means. I think they give you a level by the amount of posts you get. I did a little research on this person, and wouldn’t you know it, they are doing the same shit in every one of the other HELP ME! posts in the forums. Oh, this is part of the reason I can’t stand forums.

I have done everything. I hit Twitter, messaged people who work on GMail, everything, except fly to Mountain View and grab the first ass I saw riding some foldable bicycle coming out of one of their numerous gyms or campus hot spots there, and choking them until my GMail worked again. So now I have resorted to my blog, and I am hoping that just 1 of the 3 people who read my blog, knows someone who knows someone.

I am seriously at a standstill here. Everyone of my email addresses forward to my GMail account. It is kind of like my digital lifeline. I have a few major tasks, one including Christmas presents and lists, that I have to do like yesterday, but I can’t. I have an Android that is damn near useless to me right now, except for Angry Birds and Bubble Blast 2.

OK, so to my other point. What ever we all do with this wonderful world of free and open source software, lets never get this bad when it comes to getting some sort of support for a free product. Yes, we have docs, we have forums, we have IRC, and we have, well we have everything one needs to get something fixed. I don’t think in all of my years of working on Linux, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, KDE, you name it, I have had to wait a day, let alone 2 or more, to get something fixed. Well, get something fixed that is as important as your email. If you want to make sure you don’t fail with your product, just head over to GMail support, look it over, and promise not only yourself, but everyone of your users, that you will never be like that!

OK, my venting, or dribble, is done here. Everyone enjoy your day and the rest of your week!

NOTE: I have another GMail account for cycling stuff that works perfectly. I have tried no less than 6 other browsers, 2 other operating systems, cleared cache, history, cookies, and candy bars.

Promise me you won't fail like this is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

That’s the last time I trust Ubuntu to upgrade correctly

2010-12-09T00:18:37+00:00

I host Barcamp Chicago’s website. It’s a custom Django site on Ubuntu. I recently upgraded the server to the latest LTS and later discovered my Postgresql database was gone. Postgresql had gone from 8.3 to 8.4 in the upgrade, but since it didn’t warn me about needing to migrate the data I assumed it took care of that. That was a mistake. I had three databases on Postgresql 8.3 and none of them were present anymore. I read on a forum that I could reinstall 8.3, but that person was working from Karmic not Lucid like I had. I ultimately had to:

add the Karmic repositories to apt,
shut down 8.4,
install 8.3,
go through the normal data dump procedure for upgrading Postgresql manually,
uninstall 8.3,
start 8.4,
and load all the data again.

After that the CLI showed my databases were present so I relaunched the barcamp site, but it still wasn’t connecting. A little more googling revealed that Postgresql likes to increment the port number it listens on when there are two versions installed on the same machine. That was indeed the problem, so I changed the port number back, restarted it and Apache, and finally I’m back to where I started.

I should have known better than to trust Ubuntu to migrate the data, but even if I did that myself I’d never expect a minor version upgrade to listen on a different port when that upgrade disables the old version anyway.

The blurry line between the web and the desktop

2010-12-07T13:52:50+00:00

I implement an HRIS web-app for my dayjob, and one of my clients was having trouble with our application today. She said that she had uploaded some graphics to the site, and that now they were gone. This sounded strange to me – I’ve never seen any content just disappear from our site. That being said, I checked a few things from my end, took down some notes, and explained that I would look into it a bit further and call her right back.

About 5 minutes later, I got an email from her saying that she had fixed her problem. She had rebooted her computer, and now the pictures were back. Apparently she either thought that rebooting her computer had fixed an issue that had been ocurring at our data center (?!?), or that the issue was caused by something on her own computer (and that rebooting her entire PC had somehow fixed it).

I’ve never seen such confusion between web and desktop-based apps before, and wonder if others have ever seen the same thing.

She is actually one of my favorite clients, so I think I’m going to ask her a few more questions about her computing problems from yesterday. Then I’ll probably need to explain how clearing browser’s cache and cookies can be a means of “rebooting” a web application.

Flourish Open Source Conference – Call for Speakers

2010-11-23T01:54:03+00:00

The University of Illinois at Chicago is once again planning to host their Flourish Open Source conference, and have put out a call for speakers. The event will be held April 1-3, 2011, on the university’s campus on the near Northwest side of Chicago.

Though the conference is run by student volunteers, you wouldn’t know it judging by how well it is run. This will be its fifth year, and each event has been well-organized, informative and fun.

For those who are interested in speaking:

Presentations are typically an hour long (including Q&A) and discuss
open-source-related matters of technical, community, or industry importance.
Past presentations have tackled a diverse array of topics – from kernel hacking and programming languages, to community/project management and women in open-source. If they get several proposals around a particular topic, they may opt to build a panel discussion.

Workshops are usually three hours long, and explore a particular topic in an
intensive, hands-on environment. In the past, Flourish has offered workshops
on Android, Websphere, Erlang, Processing, Plone and Drupal. The organizers
provide all necessary connectivity.

The organizers will be accepting proposals via their speaker proposal page up through the Christmas holiday.

Ubuntu Chicago Maverick Release Party Today!

2010-11-21T17:18:40+00:00

WHO
Ubuntu Chicago LoCo Team

WHAT
Maverick Release Party

WHEN
Today! Sunday, November 21, 2010 from 3PM until 6PM

WHERE
Pumping Station One
3354 N. Elston
Chicago, IL 60618

View Larger Map

Please stop by and say hi. We will have some snacks, some CDs, and a lot of fun! Hope to see you there!

Ubuntu Chicago Maverick Release Party Today! is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Emacs appointment notifications via XMPP

2010-11-21T16:48:37+00:00

Since I've started using Emacs' appointment notifications with orgmode, I've wished that I could get notifications via XMPP. I think it's the most sensible system to use; I have it running on both my desktop, my phone, and my laptop, and the whole issue of "figuring out which device to send this notification to" has already been evaluated and solved by the XMPP community long long ago (back when everyone called XMPP Jabber, even ;)).

I initially thought I'd use a SleekXMPP bot connected to emacs via D-Bus, but then I decided that maybe I would eventually want to add more commands to this that integrated more closely with emacs, so maybe I should use emacs lisp directly. I had heard of Jabber.el but thought that it was mainly aimed at users who want a client, and that writing a bot in it would end up cluttering up my emacs with extra UI stuff I don't want. Then I was pointed at Steersman.el, and that seemed like a cleanly written bot, so I decided to give it a shot.

I was running a newer version of JabberEl than the copy of Steersman's code I looked at, so it took a little bit to figure out how to adjust for the multi-account code, but once I did that the implementation happened fairly quickly. Here's the relevant code:

;; Copyright (C) 2010  Christopher Allan Webber

;; This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
;; it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
;; the Free Software Foundation; either version 3, or (at your option)
;; any later version.
;;
;; This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
;; but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
;; MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
;; GNU General Public License for more details.

(require 'jabber)

(load-file "~/.emacs.d/emacs-jabberbot-login.el")

(defun botler->appt-message-me (min-to-app new-time appt-msg)
  "Message me about an upcoming appointment."
  (let ((message-body
         (format "Appointment %s: %s%s"
           (if (string-equal "0" min-to-app) "now"
             (format "in %s minute%s" min-to-app
                     (if (string-equal "1" min-to-app) "" "s")))
           new-time appt-msg)))
    (jabber-send-sexp
     (jabber-find-connection "thisbot@example.org")
     `(message ((to . "sendto@example.org")
                (type . "normal"))
                (body () ,message-body)))))

; I don't care when people come online to my bot's roster.
(setq jabber-alert-presence-hooks nil)

(setq appt-display-format 'window)
(setq appt-disp-window-function 'botler->appt-message-me)
(setq appt-delete-window-function (lambda ()))

Adjust "thisbot@example.org" with your bot's JID and "sendto@example.org" with who you want to send messages to. You can replace emacs-jabber-bot-login.el with whatevever you want to login with, but you probably want to setq jabber-account-list and then run (jabber-connect-all). Note that if you're connecting with a self-signed cert with Jabber.el you'll need to do:

(setq starttls-extra-arguments '("--insecure"))
(setq starttls-use-gnutls t)

I haven't yet figured how to whitelist my own self-signed cert yet, and passing in --insecure makes me feel like a monster, but it works for now. Maybe it's about time I finally got my ssl cert signed for dustycloud.org.

Anyway! It works, and I've been successfully getting appointment messages from my emacs session over IM for the last week, and it's pretty great. Next up, configuring things so that I can retrieve my agenda over IM when I request it and be able to IM myself new tasks and events.

allCombinations: leaveOut

2010-11-15T01:43:00+00:00

leaveOut

Ok, on my previous post I brought up a small Python module I was inspired to throw together while writing tests. It's still sitting in a gist, though I'll probably move it to a real repo before too long:

https://gist.github.com/674715

So I admit, as I was posting it, it occurred to me that to a large extent this stuff could be replaced with a nested for loop. For instance, this:

for lst in allCombinations([1, 2, oneOf(3,4), oneOf(5,6)]):

can be pulled off with:

for x in (3, 4):
for y in (5, 6):
   lst = [1, 2, x, y]

Not a huge gain necessarily on my part. So as I was using it in my testing I realized I once again had engineered something for a tiny use that, neat as it is, could have been done much faster by brute force. But then, I realized another thing I could add that would make my code much more concise. I've added another keyword called "leaveOut". It lets you opt to not have the element show up at all. Here's an example:

allCombinations([1,2, oneOf(3, leaveOut), oneOf(4, leaveOut)])

This will return:

[ [1, 2, 3, 4], [1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 4], [1, 2] ]

And of course, the "leaveOut" case will omit dictionary entries and object data members as well.

BTW

I should also mention another use case I thought of, "leaveOut" aside, that might be a real pain to do without an aide such as allCombinations, which is dynamically created structures, with an arbitrary amount of variables:

allCombinations( [ oneOf(1, 2) ] * x )

I've just generated all possible lists of either 1 or 2, of an arbitrary length, which can be set at runtime. Or how about something a bit more fun:

allCombinations( [ oneOf( *range(y) + [leaveOut] ) for y in range(x) ] )

Taking all combinations of lists of length x, where each element can equal any integer from zero to its index, and then adding combinations where items are omitted. Not horribly useful, but complicated.

To do these in a standard way you'd need x for loops, which you can't do directly. (I bet you could do it with recursion).

Fixes

I'll also mentione that I fixed a couple general errors. oneOf on Data members had a big bug. And now if you don't have oneOf in your structure, allCombinations just returns a list containing only the original structure, instead of looping to death.

allcombinations - generating combinations of python structures

2010-11-12T15:53:52+00:00

Alright, on a whim I decided to make another tricky thing in Python. This one is less of a hack, and is more likely to be useful.

So let's say you want to do something with all combinations of... something.

[5, 6, oneOf(7,8,9), oneOf(10, 11, "shazaam")]

So you want to turn this structure into all the possibilities represented within:

[
[5, 6, 7, 10],
[5, 6, 7, 11],
[5, 6, 7, "shazaam"],
[5, 6, 8, 10],
[5, 6, 8, 11],
[5, 6, 8, "shazaam"],
[5, 6, 9, 10],
[5, 6, 9, 11],
[5, 6, 9, "shazaam"],
]

Well with allcombinations, you can do just that:

from allcombinations import allCombinations

allCombinations( [5, 6, oneOf(7,8,9), oneOf(10, 11, 12)] )

Here it is. The gist includes more complicated example.

Features
The oneOf should be able to reside almost anywhere in your expression. It can be in a list (as seen here), in a dict, or even in the attribute of an object. It can also reside in a list within a dict within an object's attribute, etc, as long as it's nowhere within an unsupported container type.

Limitations:
This will only work if oneOf resides in a list, dict, or an object's attributes. It shouldn't work anywhere within a set, or any other structure I can't think of. If you try it in something unsupported, the oneOf object should just stick around in all your combinations.

I'm probably actually going to use this, particularly (again) for testing. Anyone else think they'd find it useful? Should I package it?

Testing (Django) views with pyquery

2010-11-12T10:39:11+00:00

PyQuery is basically what it sounds like. Using jQuery syntax, you can query and even manipulate XML files. Obviously we don't (yet!) have Python in the browser, so it's not useful in the same domain, but it can help out in dealing with XML in general, in the same way as, say, lxml, but without having to learn about things like ElementTree for simple cases. It's particularly good for XHTML because jQuery (and thus PyQuery) uses CSS syntax for class= and id=. Which brings me to how I'm using it:


from django.test.client import Client
from pyquery import PyQuery
from django.test.testcases import TestCase

...

class TestSomeViews(TestCase):

   def testAView(self):

       client = Client()

       ...

       response = client.get("/someurl/")

       self.assertTrue("expected text" in PyQuery(response.content)("#someid").html() )

(If you're unfamiliar with testing Django views, see this.)

For some basic tests, you can just search the entire response html, and not have to worry about where it shows up. But suppose you're searching for a username in a particular part of your response. You're pretty likely to find that username elsewhere on the page, so you have to select out the part of the file you expect it. I think this is much easier than using a regex.

So what this bit of PyQuery does is find the tag with the id of "someid" (presumably there's only only one, being an id), and returns the html within that tag. (If you search for a class that returns multiple tags, it seems that a simple call to .html() will only return the contents of the first one. This very well may match jQuery's behavior, I'm admittedly not that familiar, but just a head's up.) For more details look at the PyQuery API.

Linux Software Developer Required

2010-11-10T05:42:12+00:00

My buddy Curtis is at it again with his awesome company, Bluecherry. For those of you who don’t know what Bluecherry is, a quick introduction. Bluecherry is a US based company out of the sticks in Missouri. They specialize in creating high quality Linux supported video capture cards as well as surveillance software. Those of you who work in a tight-security data center might be familiar with the Windows surveillance systems that out there, since more than likely you are hosting those servers as well. Well Bluecherry lightens the load by supplying the same type of equipment, just in a Linux environment.

Well Curtis hit me up on IRC this evening, and it seems my previous post where he was looking for a Qt dev worked out well for him. He asked me again to help out, and of course I am more than happy. Seems I am doing better at getting other people employed than I am with getting myself employed. Oh well.

This time around they are looking for someone who can hack on drivers and the kernel for their equipment, as well as a little bit more. I know the salary is competitive, the atmosphere is great, and if it is warm, you can wear shorts. My type of job, except for the fact I couldn’t hack myself out of a wet paper bag when it comes to creating drivers. Here is a quick breakdown on what they are looking for:

Prior experience in Linux based software design / implementation including design
Extensive knowledge of Ubuntu, including building / maintaining Debian packages
Extensive knowledge of the Video4Linux2 and ALSA sound API
Prior experience with gstreamer and RTSP
Prior experience with SQLite, Postgres and Mysql
Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Linux operating system development (device and kernel level) recommended
Strong knowledge of C, PHP, Javascript required. Knowledge of Perl and Python suggested
Strong knowledge of Apache2 and prior experience in writing PHP modules
Played a leading role in the design and develop of previous client / server based applications
Previous work with and understanding of working with video / audio formatting / codecs including MPEG4 and H.264
Internet and operating system security fundamentals
Sharp analytical abilities and proven design skills
Strong sense of ownership, urgency, and drive
Demonstrated ability to achieve goals in a highly innovative and fast paced environment

Sound like your type of job? If so, head on over to the Monster page for the position, Linux video surveillance software developer. In the past Curtis was looking for someone in the US to fill this position. And just so you know, you don’t have to live in Missouri, but if you happen to live in any of the US time zones, then you would be a groovy candidate. I do happen to know they are using Qt as well as Ubuntu (cough, someone get him on Kubuntu fast!) so I am sure knowing a little of that wouldn’t be to bad either, but I am sure it isn’t necessary.

There are great perks, so hurry up while it lasts!

Linux Software Developer Required is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Xfce 4.8pre1 is released

2010-11-07T19:21:47+00:00

Today the Xfce team released the first official pre-release build of what will later become Xfce version 4.8.

From the release announcement:

This release incorporates major changes to the core of the Xfce desktop
environment and hopefully succeeds in fulfilling a number of long time
requests. Among the most notable updates is that we have ported the
entire Xfce core (Thunar, xfdesktop and thunar-volman in particular)
from ThunarVFS to GIO, bringing remote filesystems to the Xfce desktop.
The panel has been rewritten from scratch and provides better launcher
management and improved multi-head support. The list of new panel
features is too long to mention in its entirety here. Thanks to the new
menu library garcon (formerly known as libxfce4menu, but rewritten once
again) we now support menu editing via a third-party menu editor such as
Alacarte (we do not ship our own yet). Our core libraries have been
streamlined a bit, a good examplle being the newly introduced libxfce4ui
library which is meant to replace libxfcegui4.

Perhaps the most important achievement we will accomplish with Xfce 4.8
is that, despite suffering from the small size of the development team
from time to time, the core of the desktop environment has been aligned
with today’s desktop technologies such as GIO, ConsoleKit, PolicyKit,
udev and many more. A lot of old cruft has been stripped from the
core as well, as has happened with HAL and ThunarVFS (which is still
around for compatibility reasons).

There will be several additional pre-releases prior to the final release in January. Read the full release announcement (best viewed in Firefox) for more information about this particular pre-release build.

Project News & Status Updates

2010-10-27T02:43:03+00:00

Here’s a somewhat quick run-down of some projects with-which I’ll be participating, and some other projects that, while I might not be a direct participant, I am curious to watch develop.

Xfce Updates

I see the LXDE project get a good amount of attention lately, in large part (I think) because it uses somewhat less memory than Xfce. Xfce is still going on strong, though, and plans are in the words for the eventual release of Xfce 4.8.

Jérôme Guelfucci recently provided a brief update on what’s going on with Xfce, and one of the big things is a push for updated documentation. I’ll be contributing to that, and will likely be borrowing some of the user-help topic “stubs” that have been put-together by the GNOME Documentation team. I’ll be sure to share any relevant topic stubs with them, too.

Jannis Pohlman has also started the process of forming an Xfce foundation. Jannis notes that this would make Xfce a legal entity with a board of directors, and that it would help to raise funds through sponsors and other contributors for hackfests and other events.

My Documentation Projects

Lately I have been continuing work on gedit documentation and have also done some initial work on updating the Ubuntu Packaging Guide. I should have the gedit docs well-drafted within another week or so, but I welcome suggestions and contributions with regards to the Packaging Guide.

Thus far, I’ve drafted the Packaging Guide in Mallard, and although Mallard is XML-based, it is much simpler than DocBook. It is not difficult to learn, and you can draft-up a nice-looking, topic-focused documentation set with it rather quickly. I also know that there was a UDS session about the Packaging Guide today, so I welcome any feedback that resulted from that session, too.

Other Documentation Projects of Note

In non-Linux-help news, there are a couple of interesting DITA-related projects that I’ve been wanting to mention. If you haven’t heard of it before, DITA* stands for the Darwin Information Typing Architecture, an XML-based syntax originally developed (and later open-sourced) by IBM. The toolkit that processes the syntax, the DITA Open Toolkit, is Java-based, though, which I think has somewhat slowed its adoption in the Linux community. (Currently, only OpenSUSE packages DITA and the DITA Open Toolkit, but their implementation is a bit broken, perhaps due to an outdated version of Saxon in the OpenSUSE repositories.)

When people ask me what the big deal is about DITA**, I like to point them to this white paper (PDF). It seems to provide a pretty clear picture of what DITA can help you do, even if it does make it look easier to implement than it is in real life.

There are a couple of DITA tools on the horizon that look to make it a bit easier to work with, though. A group of Drupal developers are working with DITA developers to build a Drupal-based DITA authoring platform. From what I can tell, it will be released under an open-source license. They are just in the planning stages now, but I’ve relayed the Ubuntu Documentation / Ubuntu Manual / Ubuntu Learning Team’s requirements from what we talked about this past summer when considering the Ubuntu Learning Center.

Also, Don Day, the chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee, has put together a Free-as-in-Freedom web-based DITA platform. It’s in its early stages, too, but you can get a look at it here. You can log in as a guest, and then select topic tools from the bottom of the page to have a go at editing the document.

A Docs Conference? In Ohio?

Finally, there is word on the street about the possibility of a docs conference in Cincinnati during the first weekend in June. I’ve expressed interest in helping with planning and organizing that conference. For now I will keep my calendar open, and will post more news here as conference plans solidify.

*Whenever you do a Google search for DITA, it’s typically a good idea to exclude the phrase “Von Teese” from your search query. That is, unless you want your documentation searches to also include results for a fabulous burlesque dancer / entertainer. If you do want dancer / entertainer results in your documentation search queries, then make sure to include the phrase “Von Teese” in your queries.

** Generally, people do not ask me about DITA.

Django Model Validation

2010-10-27T02:15:04+00:00

I'm really excited about model validation, in Django circa 1.2. It's going to save me from the disastrous hack of ModelForms I've used so far. One wants something to validate data before saving it, since validating it by saving it is apparently a Bad Idea, since you may have already made changes to the database by the time the error is thrown.

I wanted this done automatically, and Django only had form validation until 1.2, so I hacked forms into some sort of all-purpose wrapper for models. I've since learned to program Django like an adult, and model validation came around just in time anyway. But there's a problem I have with it.

First I should point out that there's a few different things that get validated, but the two I'll point out are A) checking that required fields are set and B) whatever I put into the clean() function. Judging by some errors I've gotten while debugging/testing, Django seems to be checking B before A.

Now, when I use a ModelForm, sometimes I want to use the commit=False option when I save. This returns a model that hasn't been committed to the database. Sometimes there's extra data I want to add to the model that the form didn't supply. Sometimes that data is in fact necessary for the model to be valid. So clearly Django shouldn't check A, and it doesn't. Here's the funny thing though: it does check B. Why would it do that? I can understand checking when I call is_valid(), I can control when that's called, making sure I added everything first.

So far the consequences of checking B early have been trying to access members that haven't yet been set, in my clean() function. So in clean() I just check for those items, and just let it pass if they don't exist. I figure, yeah, it'll pass certain tests when it shouldn't. But if it's really running through validation (not just B as in the save (commit=False) case) that means it'll catch the missing members on the A pass anyway.

Maybe I got something wrong, but I thought it was a weird design decision.

This past Sunday I went to see the ugliest football game I have...

2010-10-25T19:50:46+00:00

This past Sunday I went to see the ugliest football game I have seen in a long time, Bears vs Redskins. At least I was hanging out with a good friend so the game didn’t totally suck.

Getting Ready for the Opening Kick Off (by Kevin Harriss)

UDS Remotely

2010-10-25T18:17:00+00:00

So, as you probably already know, since it is quiet in Orlando, I am not at UDS. Because of that, I am tuning in remotely. Thanks to Harald for the Amarok script that is working amazingly right now. Thus far, here is my little summary of what I have witnessed today:

Mark announced Unity by default, in turn uniting a bunch of pissed off people on Twitter. Psst! gnome-desktop-environment will still be there
The live video feed of Mark looked black and white, except Ubuntu was aubergine
Gobby (gobby-0.5 is the package you want to use by the way, or kobby as it actually works with this UDS) can’t make up its mind on if it wants to be up or down
Kubuntu is thinking about going with the stable Kontact/KMail, stable being version 3.5.10, until KMail2 is alive and well
Scott brought up default browsers, in turn causing every Kubuntu developer to bring out some fangs and claws
Oh and concerning the live video feed, it is true about the camera adding 5 or more pounds, but I also learned it also removes 5 or more hairs on your head at the same time

Working remotely, I also realized something else, and this concerns the plenaries. Remotely, these would be best at the end of the day, as then I would only have to worry about the lunch break as a disruption for remote participation. Instead of 2 hours of disruption, there would only be an hour. Also, I remember the plenaries after lunch while being at UDS physically. At times, they were hard to stay awake for after having a belly full of food. I think having them the last hour of the day as the closer would be good, as it brings everyone to the same location at that time.

Also, playing the UDS live audio streams along with Severed Fifth is quite amusing.

UDS Remotely is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Wherein I Go From One Business To Three

2010-10-25T01:18:29+00:00

A few months ago I decided that I wasn’t going to tolerate excuses any more and it was time to get started with my own business. Since that time nothing has gone as I planned, but my quest to owning a business couldn’t be developing any better. I have my hands in three different businesses right now.

The first is RuggedScents. I mentioned this a little bit in my last post. Sacha De’Angeli and I started this business half as a goof to enter in the BARcompany competition at BARcamp Chicago 2010. Surprisingly we won the competition, so we used the prize money to develop a production process and start selling our line of masculine colognes. We have the process figured out for our first product; Smoque, a campfire scented cologne. Our products will be available for purchase soon.

The next one to come along was Maker Tees, though it has its roots in some things I did much earlier in the year. Pumping Station: One wanted to sell logo t-shirts, but nobody was interested in making that happen. As they were crippled by indecision, a group of members including myself stumbled upon a separate awesome t-shirt idea, the “Sir, I Practise Hacking” shirt. I had no choice but to have those shirts made, and since I was doing it already I made the Pumping Station: One shirts too. I carried around a big box of shirts, selling them in person until I broke even, then I temporarily dropped out of the t-shirt business. The process was so simple and appealing though that I decided to take it larger scale and sell a wide variety of maker themed shirts, and seek to sell shirts on behalf of hackerspaces.

Finally, I’m a big part of another venture that’s just getting some momentum. A few months ago I had the idea that a social network for hackerspace members could be very popular and useful. I mentioned this to a fellow PS:One member Jordan Bunker, and that mention along with some discussions he had with the Space Federation led to us working out a set of features, a few possible business models, and deciding to actually build it. We will be building this software and developing the community around it in the coming months, and with sponsorship from the Space Federation we may actually get paid to make it.

This is definitely a very exciting, and far too busy, time in my life.

The Cast of The League on FX did a live tour to promote the show...

2010-10-20T21:26:57+00:00

The Cast of The League on FX did a live tour to promote the show and stopped in Chicago. The show was great and you must get your ass out to see them if they come to your town.

The Cast of The League (by Kevin Harriss)

OfflineIMAP and Byobu hacks

2010-10-18T15:55:42+00:00

Just a quick post showing a couple of hacks I have done using OfflineIMAP and Byobu on my server. I use OfflineIMAP to download my email from GMail and then use Mutt to read that email. I use Byobu on my server because I run Irssi, Mutt, and a shell, and of course Byobu makes this easy. So here we go.

OfflineIMAP
First, here is my ~/.offlineimaprc configuration:

[general]
metadata = ~/.offlineimap
accounts = GMAIL
maxsyncaccounts = 1
ui = Noninteractive.Quiet
 
[Account GMAIL]
localrepository = LocalGmail
remoterepository = RemoteGmail
 
[Repository LocalGmail]
type = Maildir
localfolders = ~/.maildb/GMAIL
#restoretime = no
 
[Repository RemoteGmail]
type = Gmail
remotehost = imap.gmail.com
remoteuser = your_gmail_login@gmail.com
remotepass = your_gmail_password
ssl = yes
realdelete = no

To fire off OfflineIMAP, I use a cronjob:

*/5 * * * * $HOME/bin/cron-run-offlineimap.sh

And my ~/bin/cron-run-offlineimap.sh looks like this:

#!/bin/sh
ps aux | grep "\/usr\/bin\/offlineimap"
if [ $? -eq "0" ]; then
    logger -i -t offlineimap "Another instance of offlineimap running. Exiting."
    exit 0
else
    logger -i -t offlineimap "Starting offlineimap..."
    chmod +x $HOME/.byobu/bin/1234_OFFLINEIMAP
    offlineimap
    logger -i -t offlineimap "Done offlineimap..."
    chmod -x $HOME/.byobu/bin/1234_OFFLINEIMAP
    exit 0
fi

You can see that this script changes the file mode bits to executable when it runs, and removes the executable bit when it finishes, on the ~/.byobu/bibn/1234_OFFLINEIMAP file which is a Byobu script.

Byobu
Here is what ~/.byobu/bin/1234_OFFLINEIMAP looks like:

#!/bin/sh
printf "\005{= rw}IMAP\005{-}"

So now every time my OfflineIMAP cronjob runs, I will get IMAP in my Byobu bar.

A super simple hack that lets me know when OfflineIMAP is running. Another reason I use this is because sometimes OfflineIMAP hangs, and when it does, I will know this if IMAP stays displayed in Byobu after a minute or so. Then I can check /var/log/syslog to see exactly when OfflineIMAP started. Normally OfflineIMAP runs for about a minute on my server every check. This could all be streamlined into one script as well with Byobu, but I know you don’t want to fire off processes or other things that may cause resource hogging.

View from my first ever USMNT soccer match. Action on the Field...

2010-10-13T20:35:36+00:00

View from my first ever USMNT soccer match.

Action on the Field (by Kevin Harriss)

Significant Whitespace in Python Data Structures

2010-10-05T11:49:12+00:00

I recently wrote a program in Python for parsing files. I'm pretty naive still when it comes to functional programming, but I'm still excited about it, so I wanted it to be more functional in style. It had a complicated data structure representing the file structure, instead of a loop with bunch of if-thens. By Python standards I may have gone a bit overboard. Guido probably would not have approved of my code (not to mention what follows in this blog post).

So as a result, most of the program became whitespace irrelevant. Huge dicts of lists of tuples, etc. It made me think that relevant whitespace might become handy for data too. And while talking on IRC about it this morning I realized I could sortof hack it using decorators and generators. So here's what it looks like:

http://gist.github.com/611646

So I have two examples:

example.py - This shows how you can define a more complicated structure with whitespace instead of a bunch of ){(}[].

inlinefunc.py - This demonstrates a sort of side-effect benefit. You can have multi-line functions inline in a list (or tuple or dict). Usually you're stuck with lambdas, and of course that starts to look confusing too.

I'd like to clean up the syntax. Obviously having to have a decorator before and a yield after isn't great. I'll have to think about how I could do that. Maybe make an even dirtier hack by doing introspection.

Any thoughts?

Astronomers help!

2010-09-30T02:13:15+00:00

Dear Internet, I am at my wit’s end. I have been trying to build some astronomy software for my graduate program for 2.5 weeks and I have hit a dead end. The software is called Heasoft and is used in analyzing spectrum files. I am on Maverick and getting this error -> http://pastebin.com/mDkuRUba when I [...]

Moved to teh Deklabbs (DeKalb)

2010-09-11T16:43:44+00:00

About a month ago Morgan and I left our wonderful apartment in Andersonville, Chicago, IL and moved most of our things to our new apartment in DeKalb, IL (or as my friend Miles calls it, "the Deklabbs", a nonsense name that's just silly enough to stick). Morgan has started a graduate studies and teaching assistanceship program at Northern Illinois University, and since I telecommute, there was no real reason not to make the move. Meanwhile my good friend Lunpa is currently moving into our old apartment in Andersonville. Oh Andersonville, I miss you.

The Dekalbbs aren't too bad of a place to live. It's a small college town, has a nice food co-op, etc etc. Except that I really don't know much of anyone. I've only found one other person in the area who is interested in programming and free software, and it's unclear if I can attend the university GLUG except as a presenter. In Chicago, my group of friends (aside from people I met at college and work) WAS the free software community.

Which all and all means I'll probably be back now and then to attend usergroups. After all, teh Deklabbs is only about two hours away from Chicago, and I have several friends who have offered me couch-space if I need somewhere to crash. Chicago, you haven't gotten rid of me quite yet.

Overall, DeKalb is not bad so far. It's a small, quiet, beautiful town, not too far from Chicago... oh and the rent is cheap. The rent is so cheap.

BARcamp Chicago 2010 and Why I Haven’t Built a Hero’s Fountain

2010-09-03T04:00:37+00:00

BARcamp Chicago 2010 wrapped up a couple weeks ago, and it was a great success. Last year was the first time that Jason Rexilius, the founder of BARcamp Chicago, took a smaller role in planning the event and as a result it was a bit rocky. This year we got a better start on planning, got enough sponsorship to cover all our costs, and were well organized enough that nobody had to run around putting out fires all weekend. There were definitely some areas where we could improve for next year, particularly in marketing and managing content, and we’re already working on ways to do better.

One of the things I was most looking forward to at BARcamp this year was BARcompany. We’ve tried to foster entrepreneurship in the past but there hasn’t been much success. This year we had five teams start to build something, and three made it through to present their idea. The winner was RuggedScents, a campfire scented cologne put made Sacha De’Angeli and myself. Check out his write up of how the idea came about. This is why I’m not building a Hero’s Fountain anymore: I was only focusing on that to make a kit that I could sell, but since RuggedScents fell in my lap there’s no need to work on the fountain. I’ll still get back to the fountain and other kit ideas I have eventually, but for now RuggedScents looks promising!

Open Letter to our newest community blogger: UofI President Mike Hogan

2010-08-31T01:41:23+00:00

Congratulations on your position and your new blog. I find it refreshing that you have taken the time out of your busy schedule to share with students and community members what you believe to be in the interest of our community and our young people. This is, of course, not without some sense of irony… I have a hard time grasping how a man making $620,000 in the days of budget cuts, tuition hikes, and unpaid furloughs could possibly have any clue as to what would be best for either our students or our community. That said, it does seem like you have quite a knack for looking out for what’s best for you and the other wealthy elites and blue-bloods in our community, so maybe its not your ability to act in the best interest of a population or organization that should be in question, but perhaps your ability to do so for people other than the rich, connected, and yourself.

I would like to extend my sincerest congratulations for managing to land such a lucrative position on the backs of working-class Illinois residents. I don’t know how you did it, but I suppose at least I must concede that you’ve displayed an ability to succeed in an endeavor we all had hoped was impossible: fooling the whole of the State of Illinois into making another rich, connected person even more rich and connected at tax-payer expense.

I look forward to seeing how you will spin what is best for yourself and your connections into what is best for students, the Champaign-Urbana community, and the state of Illinois as a whole. I wish you the best, but in all reality I do hope you are ashamed of yourself.

Duck, Duck, Gnu: Mallard and DocBook 5 support in Emacs

2010-08-29T20:31:30+00:00

I’ve been doing some documentation work with Mallard and DocBook 5 recently, and have been looking for software that supports them well. The trick is that both Mallard and DocBook 5 are based on RelaxNG schemas, and while there are many XML tools out there, there are few that are open source, and fewer still that support RelaxNG.

From flickr user tsmall. Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

After perusing my options, I decided to try Emacs with nXML-mode. Emacs’ nXML-mode provides real-time validation for RelaxNG-based documents, something which no other open source authoring tool provides. But while nXML-mode can validate XML documents on-the-fly, the default installation is not set up to validate against the recently-developed Mallard and DocBook 5 schemas.

Thus, to take full advantage of the latest in duck-based documentation technologies, I needed to modify my .emacs file and the nxml-mode files themselves. What follows is an overview of exactly what I did in the hopes that others can make use of the same changes, too.

An nXML-mode foundation

Before we get started, though, you should know that much of what follows is derived from information on this website. I encourage you to visit the site, as it provides an introduction to how nXML-mode is configured, and enough of an introduction to using nXML-mode to make you at least modestly productive right away.

Part One: Setting up your .emacs file

The first step in setting up nXML-mode for Mallard and DocBook 5 is to make a few changes to your .emacs file. If you are new to Emacs, your .emacs file sits in your home directory, and serves as a personalized Emacs configuration file. You may need to create the .emacs file if it doesn’t already exist.

;; /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/tcc-nxml-emacs:  Add these lines
;;      to your .emacs to use nxml-mode.  For documentation of
;;      this mode, see http://www.nmt.edu/tcc/help/pubs/nxml/
;;--
;; Add the nxml files to emacs's search path for loading:
;;--
(setq load-path
      (append load-path
              '("/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/nxml/")))
;;--
;; Make sure nxml-mode can autoload
;;--
(load "/usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/nxml/rng-auto.el")

;;--
;; Load nxml-mode for files ending in .xml, .xsl, .rng, .xhtml .page
;;--
(setq auto-mode-alist
      (cons '("\.\(xml\|xsl\|rng\|xhtml\|page\)\'" . nxml-mode)
            auto-mode-alist))

The above .emacs configuration tells Emacs where to look for detailed XML processing instructions, and also causes Emacs to automatically use nXML-mode for XML-related files. (Did I tell you that Emacs might have a bit of a learning curve? Yeah, that’s true.)

Part Two: Modifying the nXML-mode configuration files

The second step is to modify the nXML-mode configuration files themselves. This will add the appropriate nXML-mode secret sauce to handle Mallard and DocBook 5 documents.

Fortunately for you, I grabbed the latest nXML-mode source files from the nXML-mode website, and made the appropriate modifications myself. You can download my customized nXML-mode files from this archive.

Here’s what I changed from the default setup:

I added the docbookxi.rnc and mallard-1.0.rnc schemas to the schemas directory
I modified the schemas.xml file, thus including the docbookxi.rnc and mallard-1.0.rnc schemas as part of the XML-validation process.

Note that I have used the DocBook 5 “docbookxi.rnc” schema which allows for xinclude functionality. If you want to use the schema that does not allow for use of xinclude features, you’ll need to adjust the files accordingly. The current DocBook 5 schemas are available here.

Part Three: Copy your nXML-mode files to the proper location
The final step is to copy the nXML-mode files to the proper location on your file system. As indicated in our .emacs file, that location is: /usr/share/emacs/site-lisp/nxml/. Thus, you should copy all of the files in the downloaded “nxml” folder into that directory. You will need administrative privileges (using root or sudo) to do this.

Wrapping up

That’s it, though. You should now have a functioning nXML-mode environment that will allow you to fire-up Emacs and start writing Relax-NG-based documents, getting all of the real-time-validation features that Emacs provides. If you can think of any ways in which I could improve my approach, please let me know. Otherwise, I encourage you to head-on over to the nXML-mode website, and view some of the nXML-mode information and resources that are available as you get started.

My ZaReason Laptop

2010-08-28T02:35:41+00:00

First off let me make a quick apology to Earl over at ZaReason for publishing this write up a bit late. Right after I received the new laptop, I had my daughter for the end of the summer, so needless to say, I decided to spend time with her. Once again sorry Earl.

So, a little over a month ago I found myself in one heck of a situation. I was sitting here with piles of ruined equipment with nothing more than my netbook. Well, as many of you know, a netbook will not get you anywhere with development except for some testing here or there. Try and build packages or compile code, jeesh what a pain. Jono got wind of my situation and hooked me up with Earl over at ZaReason who helped me out tremendously in a time of need. I needed something right now that would do what I needed and didn’t need to be top of the line. Well, top of the line is exactly what I received, and today I would like to take a few minutes to show off my new toy which I absolutely love!

Those of you who know me know that I speak my mind. If something sucks, I will say it sucks, even if I can’t make it better or don’t know how to make it better. I have no problem calling something out when I don’t like it. With that said, lets get on to the goodies!

My new laptop is a machine which ZaReason was carrying until recently. It seems they have massively upgraded the version I currently have which provides me with a bit of jealousy and awe. For being an inexpensive machine it is plenty powerful for what I need. It is actually really damn powerful! It boasts an Intel Core 2 Duo T7100, 4 GB of memory, 160GB SATA drive, a NVIDIA GeForce 9200M, a 15.4″ widescreen display, camera, DVD burner, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi, and the lists goes on. Hell, this thing even has HDMI, which I am proud to say, it is the only device in my house with such an option. Anyone have a high definition TV for me so I can test it out?

Unboxing

The nicest box in the industry

Inside the ZaReason Box

The Kubuntu CD

The ZaReason Open Hardware Warranty. This rocks, keep reading to find out more!

The ZaReason Quick Start Paper

Sexy Is The Name

The ZaReason Notebook Lid, it needs stickers doesn't it?

ZaReason!!! Stickers!!!

The ZaReason Notebook Right Side: DVD burner and a lonely USB port.

The ZaReason Notebook Back: Security lock spot, a plugged hole, some rectangle plastic thing I haven't figured out (yet?), power, VGA, HDMI, and USB times two.

The ZaReason Notebook Left Side: Gigabit Ethernet, headphone jack, microphone jack, funky card slots.

The ZaReason Notebook Opened: Anyone order a real keyboard?

Hey, where did the Windows key go?

The Ubuntu Key

This baffles me, no Window’s sticker either

Energy, NVIDIA, and Ubuntu

Open Hardware What?

The ZaReason Open Hardware Warranty

In a recent post by Jono Bacon concerning his new ZaReason laptop, he talks about this and that, and says:

Zareason are a company that I think really gets Open Source.

Jono, you know I love you, but let me fix this for you. ZaReason is a company that really gets the meaning of being OPEN. ZaReason provides you with what they refer to as the Open Hardware Warranty. What exactly does this mean? Just look at the next picture to see what they say.

The ZaReason Open Hardware Warranty

That’s right, you are free to tinker with your hardware. Go ahead, open up the case, there is no Warranty Void if Seal Broken sticker like everyone else uses. Heck, they even provide you with a small ZaReason screw driver to do just this. So I did what anyone else would do in this case, I opened it up!

The ZaReason Notebook Hardware

I am in love! I didn’t void my warranty! If I broke it, I fix it, but if I didn’t break it, then ZaReason will fix it. How kick ass is that?

Up and running

BLOOOOOOOOOOOO!

This machine is a tank, but it is a very light tank. I am impressed with the weight. It is so darn light for its size. There isn’t much I can say except this machine kicks ass, it is fast, it is stable, it is quiet, it runs cool, and it is fast. Did I say fast? I mean it is super fast! Well faster than anything I had before hands down.

Did you notice the Kubuntu CD? That’s right, they shipped me a notebook with Kubuntu. Earl and I joked around and I said, “Now don’t ship me Ubuntu or Fedora now!” I was waiting for him to pull a trick, but I am happy to say I got a brand new notebook running Kubuntu out of the box. No tweaking really needed, everything works out of the box. The only thing I did was enable the proprietary NVIDIA driver. Yeah I know, kill me. I am following the open source drivers closely and playing around with those as well. They are definitely getting much better for KDE compositing but still have a little more to go before I can use them and be 100% happy. Right now I am probably 90% happy.

Conclusion
OK, so where do I stand? I am in love. I have been a huge fan of Compaq and Dell notebooks for ages when it came to running and developing Linux. I can say I am now a huge fan of ZaReason and I will definitely do business with them in the future. Sure, you might pay a little extra when comparing to the others, but you don’t get the level of support, the freedom to do as you wish without voiding a warranty, and you don’t get Kubuntu or the KDE Software Compilation out of the box! I am super happy and super in love with my new machine!

Thanks again to Earl and the wonderful folks over at ZaReason. If you are in the market for a new computer and want to support the Linux community, then I will highly recommend ZaReason. Make sure you let them know ‘Rich Johnson’ sent you. Happy hacking!

If you have any questions please feel free to ask in the comments.

Upcoming FLOSS-related Events in the Midwest

2010-08-21T15:35:02+00:00

Here’s a quick rundown of some upcoming Free and Open-Source software events in the Chicagoland / greater-midwest area.

Saturday and Sunday, August 21 and 22, 2010: Barcamp Chicago

Running all day and night this Saturday and Sunday
215 E. Ohio Street in downtown Chicago
Numerous presentations, and a “BarCompany” startup hackathon

Sunday, August 29: Ubuntu Chicago’s Ubuntu Global Jam

Socialize and work with the team on bug-triaging and fixing, documentation, and more!

Friday through Sunday, September 10th through 12th: Ohio Linux Fest

Keynote presentations by Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, and Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, creator of the open-source audio format Ogg Vorbis
Tracks dedicated to getting started in Free and Open-Source software, Linux security, and so much more.
For Ubuntu users, there will be an “Ubucon” during the morning and mid-afternoon hours on Friday.

Saturday and Sunday, October 2nd and 3rd: Barcamp Milwaukee

A wide range of sessions relating to Free and Open Source software and general geekery.
Like Barcamp Chicago, this event will run throughout the entire weekend, including overnight activities between Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday and Sunday, October 22nd and 23rd: Erlang Camp, Chicago

A weekend devoted to learning how to confidently put Erlang code into production for your company, group, or individual project.

Events at the Chicago hacker space, Pumping Station One

Check their calendar for their ongoing list of events and activities

Kubuntu and Kubuntu Netbook 10.04.1 Released

2010-08-18T03:15:56+00:00

Along with the latest point release of Ubuntu, the Kubuntu developers have been busy whipping up the 10.04 release in to a shape good enough to present you all with the latest point release. This release will bring along with it any security fixes, bug fixes, or updated packages or applications that have been made available since the original 10.04 release.

Both Kubuntu and Kubuntu Netbook Remix are now updated to 10.04.1. These new ISO images are updated to include all the post-release fixes delivered since Kubuntu and Kubuntu Netbook Remix were released. This release includes updated desktop installation CDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures and an updated ISO image for USB installs for netbooks.

Note to those already running 10.04: There is nothing you need to do. As long as you have been doing your regularly scheduled updates then you are running the same as 10.04.1.

Please visit the website under Get Kubuntu to see your options for obtaining this latest release.

Thank you for listening, and we will now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.