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GUPnP migrates to GitCoder's Log

Posted: January 6th, 2009, 11:22pm CET by zeenix

Thanks to Ross and Richard Purdie, GUPnP moved to Git today. I already updated the jhbuild modulesets to reflect the new repos.
Open Source and Open Learningjonobacon@home

Posted: January 6th, 2009, 8:54pm CET by jono

Enclosure: [download]

Years ago when I was at OpenAdvantage, I worked closely with a group called Access To Recycled Technology. Formed by two salt-of-the-earth students called Steve and Vinnie, they secured what they referred to as “access space” in Birmingham. It was basically a decent sized room that they used to fill with old, discarded computers. They would then install Linux on these computers and use them to train people and upskill them in Open Source software and general computing skills. Linux was the perfect choice: it ran well on older hardware, and software such as XFCE managed to squeeze more juice out of those machines.

For many of the people who came to access space, Steve and Vinnie would furnish them with a computer that they could take home to continue to learn and refine their skills. The guys had struck a deal with Birmingham City Council to take a warehouse full of old computers that were destined for the dump. This gave them a stock of computers to give out to the local community, complete with Linux and application software pre-installed. It was perfect for all involved: for the council to dispose of the computers in landfill was expensive, so when Steve and Vinnie came knocking, it was ideal.

I loved the concept of the scheme. It fits the opportunity of Open Source perfectly: old computers re-energised with free software to give away to people who need them. It helps put computers in the hands of people who could not ordinarily afford them, helps encourage learning, and contributes to closing the digital divide. It is also an ideal green-friendly way to deal with the mounds and mounds of computers that are simply not cut-out for Vista.

The opportunity for Open Source in this area is stunning. While at OpenAdvantage I worked with Birmingham City Council to fill a Community Center in Aston (a deprived part of Birmingham) with machines that ran Ubuntu to help train the local community. Courses were given in using the desktop, office productivity, graphics with the GIMP and Blender, web development in HTML and PHP, learning and sharing knowledge with Wikipedia, desktop publishing with Scribus and more. We also worked with the center to run courses designed to excite local young people. Courses were run on podcasting, recording music, editing video and more. The courses helped to get kids off the street and in a computer room, being creative and enjoying the technology. It was great to see their faces when they realised they could take the software home and use it there too, and that they could share it as much as they liked.

Open Source really paves the way to learning. I have met so many people who have had a hugely positive impact on their lives by enabling their creativity with Open Source.

An example of this was a kid known as WeirdHat. Years ago he used Blender to composite him fighting an animated character in lightsaber battle (unfortunately I can’t find the original video to share with you all). He then entered Theforce.net’s fanfilm forum with this video of him having a lightsaber battle with himself. It is stunning. Not only that, but he then went on to animate Colbert with a lightsaber and got featured on the show. He used Blender for it all.

WeirdHat is obviously a talented guy. The free availability of Blender and a stunning community of Blender users helped unlock his creativity. There are thousands of similar stories happening right now: Open Source opening up doors to creativity which are not only rewarding, but career building. Do you folks have any other success stories to share?

But lets get back to the concept of using Linux to recycle computers. While there are many of these schemes around the world, it seems that they are largely uncoordinated. It strikes me that there is oodles of potential in getting these different projects together to share knowledge, best practice and advice. There is also huge potential in working with other user groups such as Ubuntu LoCo Teams and Linux User Groups to help staff the projects, deliver training and install the software on computers.

Speaking personally, I would love to see our worldwide collection of Ubuntu LoCo Teams help to deliver Ubuntu or its derivatives to people on these computers. Are any LoCo teams doing this? If we have a small number of teams doing this, lets get them talking together and see what opportunities flow from it.
Efficient SQL console, follow-upVivien

Posted: January 6th, 2009, 8:43pm CET by vivien
Following my post on the new embedded web server feature of Libgda’s SQL console, I have spent some time on improving the user experience (the web server is optionnaly enabled and serves pages containing information about the current opened connections).

Here are the improvements so far:
- the UI is more polished thanks to the usage of AJAX (through the very nice JQuery javascript library) and to some CSS work
- a simplified authentication mechanism has been implemented where one can specifiy (when starting the embedded web server) a “token string” which is requested when a browser first connects to the server
- a “terminal emulator” page has been added, which behaves almost like a normal terminal emulator and where commands can be entered. Through it, one can execute SQL commands and internal commands (commands specific to Libgda’s console for various tasks such as opening and closing connections).
The following screenshot shows a sample session in the terminal emulator; the “.c SalesTest” command requires that the “SalesTest” connection be used, the “.d” command lists all the tables and views of the connection.

This second screenshot is similar to the one above except that the result of the “.d” command has been folded (by double clicking on it) so it just shows the number of rows:
Cognitive Disonance – Synology Cubestation CS407eStopped Clock

Posted: January 6th, 2009, 8:42pm CET by jimmac

I had a series of hard drive failures in a rather short time frame last year. My backup strategy sucks as much as the next guy’s. I figured the drives are cheap enough to finally buy/build a disk array.

I have a very noisy and probably very power hungry dual pIII/700MHz box that I use as a file server since 1999. It holds my git repositories, my music, my photo library, videos. It has a bunch of internal drives and two firewire and one usb external drive. A mess. It also acts as a print server and DHCP/DNS Cache/PXE server. I use the awesome dnsmasq for this as my router’s DHCP server configuration involves an on/off switch.

I looked around for cheap NAS boxes. There’s quite a few of them, but I’ve ended up fancying Synology Cubestation. Looking at the feature list, I was a bit worried if those aren’t just bullet points. I expected this coming from the marketing department making sure to have more features than the competition, while the actual features wouldn’t really deliver. That fear was luckily unsubstantiated. Everything I tried worked marvelously as expected from an appliance, despite including features like torrent download and your own personal Flickr-like web service.

I’ve done the initial setup from a Mac, using the included client software. The client finds the CubeStation on the LAN and sets up a small ~2GB partition where it puts the kernel and the system software. There’s a Linux client for this included in the upcoming firmware package, which I was quickly pointed to on the company forum, a valuable resource. Once the root partition with the system is up, you can use the web frontend to manage your Cubestation. The UI is decent, I was highly suspicious when I read “AJAX frontend” on the box. It lacks the elegance of a Wordpress dashboard, but gets the job done (crystal icons, yuck).

The initial creation of the RAID-5 Volume took longer than I expected. Somewhere around 10-12 hours. Then I was able to set up my samba sharing, ssh terminal access, iTunes (DAAP), printer and UPS (so it can shut down cleanly on power failure). That’s what the appliance provides out of the box. I had to upgrade the firmware (through the web-ui) to be able to serve media to my PS3 through UPNP (It presents the media in a much more sane way than mediatomb I was using).

This piece of hardware got me really excited because it’s what an appliance should be. It’s designed to solve a specific set of problems. But unlike something that would come from Apple, it allows customizations for those special cases you may need. Usually you don’t get both of these at the same time. Setting up all this on a stock Linux distro would take quite a lot of effort and I doubt I’d be able to pull it off. Having a solid foundation which you can extend is heaven. And extending I needed. Apart from the DNS/PXE/caching server I wanted to have a git server for my local repos I used to have on my Linux server. I was expecting to fight with building all these manually, but luckily things were a lot easier.

There’s tons of apps already compiled and packaged for the box. You need to download a script that installs a package management system, ipkg on your main Volume (so it’s unaffected when you update firmware) and sets up an /opt mount point. Then you can simply ipkg install package. Apart from dnsmasq and git, I also installed iptraf to monitor bandwith usage (And some other handy utils like screen).

I found the performance good, but if you fear the 64MB 266MHz PPC being too shabby for things like a rails server, they make an 800MHz/128MB variant as well, the CS407. But for what it’s been designed for, the hardware is perfectly adequate.
git and bzrwingolog

Posted: January 6th, 2009, 8:29pm CET by Andy Wingo
A DVCS survey went out recently to GNOME SVN committers, and the results came out a couple days ago. There is much nuance to pull out of the data, but I think that it's fair to say that the respondents prefer git.
(Script here, requires latest guile-charting from bzr.)
The survey was not posited as a referendum on whether or not GNOME should switch to a particular DVCS, but it certainly sheds light on the question.
Unfortunately, the resulting thread on desktop-devel has been quite nasty -- there are a lot of very legitimate concerns coming out, but even Behdad (whom I respect) at one point took an entirely reasonable post as a personal attack.
This is looney.
We're not here to win some kind of victory over each other, to turn other people into losers -- we're here to build something that's bigger than we are. We should remember this when we communicate. We should read at a deeper level to find out what's really on people's minds, to acknowledge those concerns, and work from there to build things, not to tear people down.
* * *
Enough of that. One of the options on the table was a really neat hack from John Carr, in which repositories could be accessed via git or bzr.
So, everyone should see this as being a pretty sweet hack, I think. But it has many downsides, and not all of them were mentioned in the ensuing discussion:
- The canonical repository format would be bzr, not git. Preferences for git often are based on its semantic model and repository format, so this would be going against developer preference.
- Thus, bzr web tools would probably be used instead of git web tools. Personally I prefer cgit and gitweb to loggerhead, though loggerhead has improved quite a bit recently.
- Bzr revisions would be the primary way to refer to code. You couldn't say "check revision 034fea225", you'd have to say "check revision 1". So in practice, bzr and git would not be equal, neither from the admin side, nor the developer side.
  I was one of the 14 respondents of the survey that actually *use* bzr and git. I mantain many projects in bzr, but am in the slow process of switching to git. Initially I was attracted by the bzr idea that you can usefully refer to revisions by simple numbers, but time has convinced me otherwise.
  I want my family jewels in a safe place. When I refer to a revision, I mean that revision and not another tree and history that happens to be the 35th in a series of patches.
Joe Shaw has a few more.
There is of course the important caveat regarding renaming, which many git proponents fail to acknowledge. But my instincts are that if git works for the kernel, its renaming heuristic failure rate should be equivalent to the rate of me starting a new file, but saying it was a copy, or my starting a copy and saying it came ex nihilo. But that's just my feeling -- I have no data on that.
apologies from a git supporter
As one who now prefers git, I would like to apologize to users of other version control systems, especially bzr: for the VCS BOF at GUADEC that wasn't, for the tone of git proponents, for the FUD, and for a general lack of respect. And for ongoing git UI crappiness, though it has improved quite a bit.
But I think that git's the best thing going, and so do most of the other survey respondents. We should figure out a pragmatic way forward that takes all perspectives into account, and I think that Behdad's proposal is a good start.