Just a quick note to wish everyone a happy Pi day.

After testing out the plugin pidgin-embeddedvideo, im thinking I will keep it. Its nice and easy to use and to turn off.

As you see in the pic above, it generates a embedded video for you inside pidgin and you don’t need to start any browser.

To try it out, open a terminal and write:

sudo conary update pidgin-embeddedvideo=@fl:2-devel

Lets start with a screenshot:

Right now, the only hacked gnome-shell is in my personal repo. The installation is here. So it will only work if you use my version of Gnome-Shell. Or you will end up with conflicts.

To install the forest theme, open a Terminal and write:

sudo conary update gnome-shell-theme-forest=zinden.rpath.org@fl:2-devel

Then restart desktop or if you already using gnome now, push alt+F2 and write r or restart.

Thats it, be happy with your new gnome-Shell theme.

This will overwrite the old theme thats black, so if you want to get default again. Then you need to uninstall the theme and sync gnome-shell again.

sudo conary erase gnome-shell-theme-forest

sudo conary sync gnome-shell

I’ve been meaning to follow-up on Shaun’s recent bog post about “Explain More” when writing user help. Zonker’s blog post this morning on how to write an interview finally motivated me to get this blog post done.

One of my favorite sayings in a work environment is “Plan the work and work the plan”. This applies to writing as well.

One of the two major takeaways I had last year after attending the first Writing Open Source conference was the importance of planning. At least for me, almost of all the heavy lifting and hard work is done in the planning phase. (Not that writing and editing are easy either, but the planning for me is where my brain works the hardest).

When I was in school, especially high school, all of my English teachers required an outline when writing a term paper. School was fairly easy for me and I’d just write the paper and then do the outline. Oh, how I wish I had listened to them and learned those skills then!

It’s fascinating to me reading novels and then reading about or listening to an author talk about the years they spent researching their book. After last year, it’s finally clicked for me. (Having just finished io9’s recent book club selection, The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi I found his answers in the book club Q&A session fascinating, especially his research on Thailand and the Thai culture).

Planning your writing will help you connect with your readers, stay on message and help you faster. (Faster isn’t always better but you may spend less time getting stuck or if you do get stuck, be able to write the next section that you’ve planned and come back and finish where you were stuck).

Whether it’s user help, a blog post or an interview, spend some time thinking about what you want to write about and who your audience is. Your readers will thank you.

Just wanted to update everyone who showed interest in the new release of GNOME Developer Kit I announced yesterday. Based on some preliminary statistics I collected in the (less than) last 24 hours, it seems that the VMware image type got the most download, followed closely by the installable ISO format. I guess that was due to VirtualBox being able to use *.vmdk files and some people opting for the free virtualization tool.

Here are the preliminary results so far:

1. VMware image: 42 downloads
2. Installable ISO: 26 downloads
3. RAW filesystem image: 17 downloads

About GNOME 2.29.92

Due to the number of downloads and and comments I received, I felt that I should provide with some background on how to install/remove packages and update your system using the conary package management system. So here you go:

The package management system behind the GNOME Developer Kit is called conary and is considered by many as the next generation package management system when compared to some of the popular options out there. One of the reasons behind this claim is the fact that your entire system is actually completely maintained in a versioned state, and conary is always “aware” of what is installed on your system and what files and dependencies make up the entire “set”. This allows for some pretty nifty operations such as rolling back to a specific state of your system.

In order to check for new updates for your system, open a terminal and run the command sudo conary updateall. conary will then check for updates and prompt you to accept the update or not. Please keep in mind that the first time you run conary for the first time, you will experience a delay as your entire system gets analyzed in preparation for the changes that are to take place. All subsequent actions performed will be much faster, I promise. If after a while you don’t feel like waiting for the prompt, add –no-interactive to the update command to have your system updated automatically.

Now, let’s just say that you decided to install something new, such as Banshee. Easy, just run sudo conary update banshee (remember to add –no-interactive for no-hands updates) and voilá!

Want to know what was actually installed on your system? conary q banshee will tell you what version of banshee was installed. How about what files were installed? conary q –ls banshee will give you a list of all the files that were installed and conary q –lsl banshee will give you the long list with file permissions and modes.

Changed your mind and want to remove banshee from your system? sudo conary erase banshee will take care of that. Want to actually roll your system back to the state it was before you installed banshee instead? sudo conary rollback 1 will rollback your system exactly one transaction. Want to go further back? Just increase that number to represent how many transactions to roll back. Want to rollback but don’t remember what point in time you want to go? sudo conary rblist will display a list of all transactions and what was changed. Note that each transaction is preceded by the letter “r“, so if you want to rollback to the point r.15, then use sudo conary rollback r.15 (and don’t forget that “r” or you’ll rollback exactly 15 transactions instead).

How about searching for a package? If it is something that it is already installed on your system, then conary q [package name] will give you the information you want. If the package is not installed on your system yet, then conary rq [package name] is what you need, though since conary does not yet make use of metadata, you’ll need to know the exact name of what you’re looking for. Now, let’s say you want to find out what package provides the command /sbin/service? Use conary q –path /sbin/service to find out that initscripts:runtime=8.81.2-0.11-1 is responsible for providing it (use rq if you want to search the remote repository).

Well, I think this is enough to get you going. You’ll probably want to install Flash and media codecs to enjoy browsing some sites and listening to your media, so let’s apply what we’ve learned so far and run: sudo conary update flashplayer group-codecs

If you’ve stayed with me until now, you may want to read up on what else conary can do or even consider packaging for GNOME Developer Kit. Your help will be greatly appreciated!

Blogpost

Today im read on IRC channel:

foresight linux 2.3.0 will be taped out as soon as we get the PkgKit backend working again and fix polkit to not use root password

OMG!! ok lets take PackageKit an get works again and then release foresight 2.3.0 . The good point is Smerp its helping.

On other way Doniphon request use packagekit 0.5.x series. So i create a branch on packagekit git repo (conary-devel) for trying to get the packagekit works.

Whats the problem on PackageKit ?
Actually PackageKit=fl:2-devel have a blocked issue. When do the equal of "conary rq" the conary backend do a findtroves of a list of packages.
Example : pkcon search name py

the backend search all packages on xml cache what contains py, now packagekit needs know if packages are installed or availables. So all packages pass to a "conary q" if return a trove its installed now have a group of packages what not know if availables then do a "conary rq" here its where packagekit get the issue. For some reason do a client.repo.findtroves(installLabel,PackagesSpec) take a long time for answer or never end ..you can view this on /tmp/conarybackend.log when do a search seen the last action put its doing repos.findTroves.. i think need take a look into a findTrove method of conary and seen why taking time for answer....

UPDATE: Thanks Alberto Ruiz for pointing out that VirtualBox can use .vmdk files, so the VMware image can be used for that purpose.

Thanks to the incredible work of Zhang “Jesse” Sen and Vladimir Melo, a brand new release of the GNOME Developer Kit has been published! “What’s new”, you may ask? Everything, since all packages are built directly from git.gnome.org! But that alone is not what makes this release so cool, but the fact that the final image went through a dramatic “diet”, shedding a lot of its “weight” and going from a 1.4GB monster to less than 700MB of pure GNOME goodness!!!

From Screenshots

Firefox was replaced by Epiphany and codecs and fancy-Nancy stuff was scrapped to make room for a lightweight release for developers and translators!

So go ahead and try the new images today:

• x86  VMware (R) Virtual Appliance 636 MB, SHA1: 4b4266fc1a65189d65efd7f3ac51797396babf78
• x86  Appliance Installable ISO 697 MB, SHA1: c3345cadae9c7338d0b92ba0ad1a187930652357
• x86  Parallels, QEMU (Raw Hard Disk) 644 MB, SHA1: e3dbbff4e65f8e086f422885a24d8ee04bc89f44

As many have seen, Fedora 13 has a slogan now. That would be “Rock it”. I think this is a great slogan. The other nominations can be found here. The release name for Fedora 13 will be “Goddard” named after Robert H.  Goddard a real life rocket scientist. Maybe it is because I have kids but whenever I here Goddard I don’t think of rockets. I think of Jimmy Neutron’s robot dog that shares the name. That is probably caused by the numerous hours that the 3 of us spent watching the show.

Image borrowed from here

Lets start with whats new.

Changes (since version 2.28.0) in Gnome Shell include:

• Redo the application browser to use a grid of icons
• Initial version of the extension system
• Initial support for RTL layout in ST and the shell
• Add undo capability to overview, e.g., when removing favorites
• New workspace switcher popup
• Work on visual appearance to match mockups
• Port most of existing code to CSS
• Show a scaled-up excerpt from the application item in the panel
• Minimize windows to ‘Activities’ button
• Use a fixed ordering for well-known icons in the system tray
• Nicer animation of hidden windows when transitioning to/from the overview
• Draw a ripple when the hot corner is hit
• Completion to the Alt-F2 run dialog
• And many more

A complete list of changes can be found HERE.

The latest version of Gnome Shell also adds the ability to set your presence to the user status menu, yet another feature which will remind you of Ubuntu. I still don’t understand what’s going on here, why are so many Ubuntu features replicated in Gnome Shell?

Important note: due to problems encountered in testing GNOME Shell against Clutter 1.1, gnome-shell-2.29.0 still requires Clutter 1.0

If you missed what Gnome-Shell is, here is some info:

Site: Gnome-Shell
pdf file: here

Brief info
The GNOME Shell redefines user interactions with the GNOME desktop. In particular, it offers new paradigms for launching applications, accessing documents, and organizing open windows in GNOME. Later, it will introduce a new applets eco-system and offer new solutions for other desktop features, such as notifications and contacts management. The GNOME Shell is intended to replace functions handled by the GNOME Panel and by the window manager in previous versions of GNOME. The GNOME Shell has rich visual effects enabled by new graphical technologies.

Pictures:

Video:
From Vimeo

And there is alot of youtube videos…..

How to install it:
Foresight Linux
Foresight Linux – Bleeding edge Gnome-Shell

Source code for Gnome-Shell 2.29.0 : Here

There is also Themes available for Gnome-Shell, will write about it in my next post.

Python Testing: Beginner's Guide

I was looking for some material on proper python testing in order to improve my QA skills and after some “Googling” came across “Python Testing: Beginner’s Guide“. My first impulse was to hit Amazon and see if they had it and if I could buy an ebook version. Sadly, they only had the “dead tree” version, so I decided to check if the publisher, PackT Publishing, had an alternative.

Boy, was I glad I hit their web site! Not only there was an ebook version of that book, but they do not password protect them, giving you complete control over your purchase!!! You can also copy text from it, which makes your life really easy when you’re following along and want to copy some of the code being described!

Needless to say I purchased the ebook version and have already allocated my weekend to read it, so you can expect a review next week. In the meantime, here’s a free chapter (PDF) for you to get a taste for the book: Chapter 5: When Doctest isn’t Enough: Unittest to the Rescue

Following the tradition of releasing simultaneously with the Transifex project, I’m pleased to present you the Transifex “Magneto” Appliance 0.8! There are just too many cool features to mention here… so I won’t! Just go ahead and read the release notes instead.

From Transifex v8.0 featutes

As far as the appliance goes, the most important thing to know is that I dropped MySQL and replaced it with Postgresql, so if you’re thinking of updating an existing deployment, you’ll have to backup your data and handle the restoration process. If you’re installing for the first time, choose from the following image types:

• Installable ISO (x86)
• Installable ISO (x86_64)
• VMware (x86)
• VMware (x86_64)
• Amazon EC2 Small (ami-af8669c6)
• Amazon EC2 Large (ami-b7a54ade)

The appliance is pre-configured with 2 unique users: editor and guest (with passwords editor and guest respectively) and several projects for you to play!  To keep it up to date, log in to the web based administrative interface by connecting to your appliances url using https and adding port 8003 at the end. Then, login as admin (the initial password is password but you’ll be prompted to change it during the initial wizard). I can proudly say that the Transifex Appliance has been downloaded several hundred times in the last 2 months and is currently being used by several companies and projects that are either test driving Transifex or decided to host their own instance like the Xfce project for their translations!

As always the development branch of the appliance will follow the development code line of Transifex and provide a playground for anyone who wants to help out the project, such as the tasks created ahead of the upcoming Google Summer of Code. Download the appliance today and see why projects such as Meego, LXDE, Xfce, Fedora, and many more chose Transifex to manage their translations!

With the GNOME 2.30 release just around the corner, translators are feverishly working hard to get the desktop completely translated into a multitude of different languages! But unless you’re comfortable building the application you’re trying to translate on your own (or perhaps the entire desktop), you’re pretty much doing what I call “blind translations.”

From Screenshots

The good news is that you don’t have to do any compiling to play with the very latest GNOME applications! Just download the GNOME Developer Kit and start translating knowing that you can actually see what you’re translating!

Borrowing from a previous post I wrote, just what is the GNOME Developer Kit? It is a continuous build of GNOME packages all bundled up into a distribution (in this case, Foresight Linux) and distributed in a few different formats that you can either install or run in a virtual environmen.

So if you’re a translator or writing docs, imagine being able to see the application you’re trying to translate running right in front of you! As the GNOME Developer’s Kit already comes with a lot of tools such as gettext, intltool and poEdit, you got your work cut out for you!

So don’t just sit there! Go download your GNOME Developer Kit today!

Ten songs listened to this morning by yours truly, in alphabetical order.

1. “About to Happen”, Siouxsie
2. “Adnan’s”, Orbital
3. “Adventures in Solitude”, The New Pornographers
4. “Again Today / Hiding My Heart”, Brandi Carlile
5. “All That I’m Good For”, Hem
6. “All That Makes Us Human Continues”, BT
7. “All the Old Showstoppers”, The New Pornographers
8. “All of the Things That Go to Make Heaven and Earth”, The New Pornographers
9. “Ambassador”, Noe Veneble
10. “The Antikythera Mechanism”, BT

This idea was gleefully stolen from Slacktivist, which itself is an alternate version of a the “it’s-Friday-Morning-so-post-the-next-ten-random-songs-played-on-your-iPod” meme.

Neil Gaiman continues to be one of my favorite authors (and tweeters). I bought a print of his poem “The Day the Saucers Came” in 2007 when it first came out and finally have gotten around to having it framed. (And I have #69 of 750 made, a nice low number!)

“The Day the Saucers Came” was originally published in Neil Gaiman’s short story collection, “Fragile Things” and was one of my favorite stories included. The fact that it became the first print available illustrated by Jouni Koponen was even better.

My wife found her smartphone screen cracked recently. AT&T told her to suck it up and buy a new phone, and the local independent shop couldn't fix her phone. I had a great deal of trepidation about sending the phone off to some random place I googled, but in the end sent it off to Jet City Devices in Seattle.

They turned the repair in about an hour from the phone's arrival on a Saturday (!) afternoon, and had it back in the mail same day, so that it arrived back in North Carolina on Monday with a new screen.

Good Work!

For using stable Gnome-Shell, you can read and install it here.

To get the latest Gnome-Shell available, you only need to change some packages to use git instead. This packages are built in my personal repo, and they work perfectly with Foresight Linux.

We start with 32bit users.

Open Terminal and write:

sudo conary erase gobject-introspection --no-deps

sudo conary update {gobject-introspection,gjs,gir-repository,gnome-shell,mutter,clutter}=zinden.rpath.org@fl:2-devel

Done, lets try it. Write in terminal:

gnome-shell --replace

If everything is fine, your desktop should now be using gnome-shell.

For 64bit users:

sudo conary erase gobject-introspection --no-deps

sudo conary update gobject-introspection=zinden.rpath.org@fl:2-devel[is:x86_64] gobject-introspection:lib=zinden.rpath.org@fl:2-devel[is:x86]

sudo conary update {gobject-introspection,gjs,gir-repository,gnome-shell,mutter,clutter}=zinden.rpath.org@fl:2-devel

Done, lets try it. Write in terminal:

gnome-shell --replace

If everything is fine, your desktop should now be using gnome-shell.

Make Gnome-Shell permanent

Open terminal and write:

gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager gnome-shell --type string

Tomas Forsman explica una introduccion a foresight y a conary

http://www.foresightlinux.se/blog/2010/02/21/introduction-to-foresight-linux/

Foresight Linux is an OS for your computer/laptop. And here is some info about Foresight Linux:

• Rolling updates
• Rollback feature
• Conary as package manager
• Standalone, not based on any other Linux dist.
• Easy to create own packages [2], maintain packagers and create a own repository address to use/share.
• 32bit and 64bit always available. i686 system.

i686 is a much more modern architecture. It includes practically every processor that’s Pentium II or better. x86_64 is a 64 bit extension to the x86 architecture. x86_64 processors can still run 32 bit operating systems (e.g. i386) if you so choose, but they’re also capable of running 64 bit operating systems.

Watch the presentation that Michael Johnson gave at FOSDEM 2008 (follow along with his slides)

Watch how fast a user in Foresight can update a package to newer version.

That’s little info in generally. Let’s dig little deeper now.

At anytime an update fails Conary will rollback to the previous job leaving your system dep complete and fully functional.

How Conary Organizes Packages

If you use debian or rpm repositories…you know that inside a repository directory “stable” (as an example) are all the stable packages for your distribution. The packages are versioned according to their upstream version (if the repository maintainers are sane) and maybe arch and revision number. This is done by hand. It is managed by hand. If developers/packagers cross names between repositories you are brought into dependency problems. To illustrate this concept, if you and I both packaged firefox3 and named it accordingly…and someone used both your and my repository…our versions would conflict because the packaging system wouldn’t know which one to install.

Conary takes the manual operation from this…if you use a Conary based system, yourrepositories ARE VERSIONED. In other words, the repositories aren’t static directories that contain a bunch of packages…they are versioned branches that contain components of software.

These components (packages) are also versioned according to upstream version…but revision is handled automatically by Conary…no manual process. This eliminates the possibility of having two packages named the same exact thing in different repositories. In other words, if Joe Schmoe is packaging Liferea for his apt.joeschmoe.com repository and names his package the same thing as say Joe Smith’s package for Liferea in his apt.joesmith.com repository we run into problems. With conary this NEVER WILL HAPPEN…EVER. This kills about 90% of dependency problems all together.

But what about arch? Arch is architecture…32bit or 64bit…PPC and more. Once again, you’re bit by the possibility of conflicting names across repositories. You’re also limited in the name because a developer has to put the architecture INSIDE THE NAME. Take a look at liferea as an example: liferea-1.2.2-2.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm. Is this easy for an end user to understand? Is it the same as liferea-1.2.2-2.el5.rf.x86-64.rpm?

Conary takes a different approach. Each package has a ‘flavor’ that it is ‘cooked’ (committed) in. There may be a 64bit flavor, 32bit flavor, Xen flavor, and so on. This flavor is visible to the user only if the user requests to see it…and it is NOT inside the name of the package. The package is still called, simply enough, liferea. Revision number, arch, upstream version, etc…are all handled automatically by Conary.

You can see how creating and maintaining software would rely less on a manual process and more on automatic source controlled one with Conary. You can also see how organized Conary is with its packages. (this chapter comes from devnet)

Conary treats packages as change-sets and not as a bundle of files. This means that when updating a package, Conary communicates with the repositories to determine what needs to change on the system to install the new package and only downloads the bits needed for that change. There are many advantages to this approach, but most visible to the user is the efficiency in bandwidth and speed.

When updating a large package for the first time, you will essentially download the full package, however, when updating in the future the downloads could be significantly smaller. Here is an example: installing Abiword 2.2.6 on a system for the first time would be approximately a 15MB download, however updating to Abiword 2.2.7 is only 2.4MB.

How can I be sure things still work if I remove a component from my system?

First, Conary warns you if you are about to remove a component that is used to resolve a dependency elsewhere on the system. Conary keeps track of these dependencies for you. Second, you can use the –deps option to display dependency-related information. Furthermore, you can also use –file-deps to list component dependencies at the file level. Results display what the trove “requires” to resolve its own dependencies and “provides” to resolve other packages’ dependencies. You don’t have to track this information unless you really want to do so; trusting Conary’s warnings is usually enough to prevent mistakes when installing and removing software.

What’s that colon for? Is “chromium:runtime” different than the “chromium” package?

It is different, but part of the same package. When the package name is followed by a colon and another name,

such as “chromium:runtime” and “chromium: doc,” this references a component.

When the package is first built, Conary separates out the files into components.

Each component represents some logical grouping of files within the package,

such as everything needed to run the software or the documentation for how to use the software.

This gives the flexibility for other packages to resolve dependencies by bringing in components rather than entire packages.

It also gives users the freedom to uninstall components that are just taking up space without removing an entire package.

But, enough about how awesome Conary can be.

So unlike other packaging systems, where you might have 2 packages, firefox and firefox-devel, Conary would have one package with the devel headers split into firefox: devel. This is a great thing, you no longer end up installing -devel packages from random repos in your sources.list just because it looks like a newer version. The devel headers are just part of the same package, you just don’t have to have them installed. These components combined with rich dependancy information really shines.

Info about some packages

There is few applications that makes a user happy with a Linux dist, so here is a few that works perfectly with Foresight:

Chromium: Updates almost every week. Flash, embedded trailers works out of the box.

Nvidia/ATI: Easy to install, but legazy drivers is little harder. But works to get them in too.

Gnome-Shell: Stable gnome-shell available and latest git gnome-shell can be easily installed. (very easy to go back to stable when testing unstable)

Wine: When installed, everything works as it should with wine. 32bit and 64bit works fine from start.

Create own packages

Maybe sounds hard, but think again. It’s very easy.

1: Setup environment

2: Full packaging example

And as you saw in the video earlier in this post, an update of a package can go really fast :)

What do you really get from creating own packages?

First of all, very easy to maintain and update. Usually updating before every linux dist out there. Very easy to uninstall a package. Very easy to switch from stable repo of a package to unstable and back again. Easy to change parameters for a package and repack it for your needs.

And as soon you see a new application, like radiotray, you can easily make a package and test it. As soon you are done testing, unistall it as it never was installed. Or even better, let Foresight users also use it and suggest it to be added in Foresight repo. (can offcourse be installed from your personal repo too)

Download

Test iso files:

If you want to use test iso, then after installation and first time you boot up Foresight, you need to change installation label in it. To make it use “test” repo instead of stable repo.

Open terminal and write:

sudo sed -i -e 's/fl:2/fl:2-qa/g' /etc/conary/config.d/foresight

To get started with Foresight Linux:

Look at foresight userguide at system > Foresight userguide

To get common codecs, open terminal and write: sudo conary update group-codecs

To install Nvidia drivers: sudo conary update nvidia nvidia-kernel

sudo nvidia-xconfig

To install ATI drivers: sudo conary update ati-fglrx ati-fglrx-kernel

sudo aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Search after applications or browse after applications: rBuilder online

Some known problems:

Packagekit, the gui for conary isnt working as it should.

This is also holding up the new release of a new iso for stable repo.

First time when trying to update system can fail, a restart of system will fix it.

Gnome-shell, a video says more than 1000 words, so here you go:

It’s from my personal repo. But if you feel like using it, send a short comment and I can add info how to install it properly with all new packages.

I am working on an open source project called BeerEnthusiasts with Tristan and Jordan and we need a volunteer to help us with the front-end development of the site. You can find out more information about BeerEnthusiasts here but I will give a quick overview of the project. BeerEnthusiasts is a site for homebrewers to upload, share and rate brewing recipes. The whole project is open sourced and built using open source tools. You can follow the project on GitHub. We currently have some mock ups of a few of the main pages done by Tim Toomey. He did an awesome job and I can’t wait to put out a site to show off his kick-ass work. We have a little bit of the mockups translated into web pages done by Cezar. Unfortunately, Cezar doesn’t have the availability to help right now. This is where you come in if you happen to enjoy beer, HTML/CSS and JavaScript. We are looking for a volunteer to help with this project and work on the front-end of the site. If you are interested please contact me and let me know.

Puteţi asculta Canonul cel Mare aici.

(if you cannot read above this line: it’s a link to the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, officiated during the first week of the Great Lent).

Did you know that the same individual mandate that Senate Republicans have been recently attacking in the proposed health care reform legislation was initially proposed by Republican lawmakers as a part of an alternate bill during Clinton’s failed health care reform initiative in 1993? Neither did I.

Digging around on this, I found an article from the American Prospect by Paul Starr that was written just after the collapse of that initiative. He notes that

The collapse of health care reform in the first two years of the Clinton administration will go down as one of the great lost political opportunities in American history. It is a story of compromises that never happened, of deals that were never closed, of Republicans, moderate Democrats, and key interest groups that backpedaled from proposals they themselves had earlier co-sponsored or endorsed.

It is also a story of strategic miscalculation on the part of the president and those of us who advised him. In 1993, 23 Republican senators, including then-Minority Leader Robert Dole, cosponsored a bill introduced by Senator John Chafee that sought to achieve universal coverage through a mandate that is, a mandate on individuals to buy insurance. Nearly every major health care interest group had endorsed substantial reforms—grandiose ones, in fact. The American Medical Association (AMA) and Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA), the two great, historic bastions of opposition to compulsory health insurance, both went on record in support of an employer mandate and universal coverage. Even the U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed an employer mandate, as did many large corporations. Other groups came out variously for reform options that ran along a spectrum from Canadian-style, single-payer programs on the left to managed competition and medical savings accounts and radical changes in tax policy on the right. Under the circumstances, it was easy to believe the country was ready for substantial reform and that a market-oriented, consumer-choice approach to universal coverage, positioned in the center, could become a platform for consensus.

It was easy to believe, but it turned out to be wrong.

Read the whole thing if for no other reason then to be reminded that the seeds of political nihilism were sown far earlier than you may want to imagine.

(This is reposted from an email earlier this evening)

Hi all, I wanted to give you a brief update on the GNOME Sysadmin team.

Last April, Owen sent out an email outlining changes to the Sysadmin team and a goal of hiring a part-time System Administrator to help coordinate the Sysadmin team. (And we’re getting closer to be the goal every day!)

Last year John Carr oversaw the team and the Sysadmin team was able to work on a number of improvements to the GNOME infrastructure, including a Bugzilla upgrade, installing a CRM system and web analytics application for the Marketing team and Plone, a CMS for a new www.gnome.org.

In October I volunteered to help with coordinating the team as John stepped down and with a new year starting a couple other members have indicated they don’t have time to help right now as well.

We have lots of improvements planned for this year such as bringing a brand new server online (thanks to Jeff Schroeder’s donation!) and migrating services from older servers to the new one, Git and Damned Lies integration, integrating all GNOME servers with Puppet and scoping Tomboy Online. That’s just to name a few – we also have a number of tasks open in Bugzilla in the sysadmin component.

We are looking for two volunteers to join the team to help with these projects and more. As Owen mentioned last year, team member responsibilities include:

• Attending the IRC meetings
• Regularly spending time handling routine tasks
• Volunteering for infrastructure development projects as needed

We have a number of projects planned for this year, so that 3rd bullet is important!

If you are interested in joining the team, please join the gnome-infrastructure mailing list and introduce yourself, why you want to join and any relevant skills or experience you have. It is helpful if you have been active in other GNOME teams and can have someone vouch for you. (We are talking about giving you root access to GNOME servers, after all!)

If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email, email the infrastructure list or stop by the #sysadmin IRC channel on GIMPNet IRC.

rBuild 1.2.2 is a maintenance release.

• The "rbuild rebase" command now saves product definition files in the latest version supported by the associated rBuilder, rather than the latest version supported by the installed rpath-product-definition. (RBLD-298)

• The "rbuild rebase" command now fails when the rBuilder does not support the product definition schema version only if the schema version is being changed. (RBLD-297)

Associated with rBuild 1.2.2, rpath-product-definition 4.0.1 is a maintenance release.

• The compatibility interfaces created for RPCL-63 are now compiled. (RPCL-64)
• The api1 module now properly sets __all__ to include all public interfaces.
• The preMigrateVersion property now reflects the version of the product definition as found in the serialized XML representation prior to applying all migrations. (RPCL-66)
• Older versions of product definition XML data can now be saved. (RPCL-67)

A tool I have really come to appreciate has been Fabric. It is a Python library and command line tool for simplifying the use of SSH in system administration. A common use for Fabric is with software deployment. However, I use it for simplifying some of my more menial system administration tasks. Currently I am working on a tool for handling remote updates of our various servers. One problem I ran into was with Fabric and ssh key based logins not passing a password when running an application with sudo(). The problem is that since Fabric didn’t need to ask for a password to connect via ssh it never passed one for sudo(). The solution to the problem is to use python’s getpass module to prompt for a password. Below is a code example to show how this is done in a fabfile.py. This problem has been fixed in the the upcoming 1.0 version that can be checked out from GitHub. Sometime soon I will write a post with an introduction to fabric and some example usage.

1
2
3
4

import getpass
def update():
    set(fab_password=getpass.getpass())
    sudo('apt-get upgrade -s')

I followed through and canceled my DirecTV service today. My MythTV / Boxee setup has been running great the last couple of weeks and I kept DirecTV through yesterday just as a backup as I hosted a Super Bowl party.

This all started due to extremely poor customer service from DirecTV. My high-def DVR was dying in November, specifically the hard drive, as I could hear it grinding from twelve feet away over the sound of my speakers and the buffering and audio / video playback was terrible.

I had to reboot my DVR every 2-3 days, and performance would be better, then degrade. Calling DirecTV, they made me jump through a number of hoops to diagnose it which resulted in it taking almost a month and three phone calls before they agreed to replace it. Now, I don’t own this HD-DVR receiver – I lease it from DirecTV. When I first signed up for DirecTV 11 years ago you had to buy your hardware, now you just lease it from them for $5 / month.

They finally agreed to replace it, but they were going to charge me a $20 shipping & handling fee. My wife runs a small business out of the house, and I know it doesn’t cost $20 to ship one of those, especially in bulk. To say I was livid that I had to pay to get a receiver repaired that they own is an understatement. Each time I called in, they also tried to “upgrade” me on the last receiver that I actually owned – so I’d have to pay them another lease fee. I always told I’d only upgrade if it was a DVR, not just a standard receiver, and they always declined. (I had been able to take advantage of this a couple years ago, so I know they can upgrade old receivers to a DVR).

I emailed and called their customer service to complain – and their response was: “Sorry, that’s our policy”.

So now they’ve lost a customer. I may have had their lowest tier of service, but I also bought the March Madness and NFL Sunday Ticket packages each year, so from a revenue per customer standpoint I was above average.

When I called to cancel, they offered me $20 per month off for the next twelve months and a free DVR upgrade. Too little, too late. When they asked why I was cancelling, I said poor customer service for my HD-DVR experience this past November. So the customer service rep processed my cancellation, and then let me know I’d be receiving a box with pre-paid shipping to send my HD-DVR back to them. Where exactly was this pre-paid box when I needed to get it repaired? (The state of Washington is suing DirecTV over hidden fees).

What gets me is the focus DirecTV, cable companies and cell phone companies have on customer acquisition rather than keeping existing customers happy. Even though I had already contacted them and complained they weren’t willing to do anything about it until I actually cancelled. In my opinion, they need to keep a balance between these two groups of customers. This wasn’t the first customer service incident I’ve had with them over the years, but enough was enough. Thanks to innovations like Boxee I can make up some (but not all) of the content I’ll be missing from going over-the-air only. A loyal customer will pay dividends – do you think I’ll be recommending DirecTV to friends in the future?

The Mutliplayblog today published the results of a survey measuring customer satisfaction levels in satellite, cable and telco TV subscriptions:

Low Perceived “Value for Money” among all Digital Pay TV customers

Virtually across the board—and irrespective of platform—respondents reported low satisfaction in the metric of `Value for Money.’ There was very little measurable difference by platform among respondents, and in all cases, fewer than 22% of respondents felt the service “exceeded” or “greatly exceeded” expectations of value for money.

This is among the most important findings of study, as it underlines the vulnerability of pay television in its current state. Indeed, in a report published in 2008, we found that over 50% of US digital pay television customers would be willing to scale back or completely drop their television service if household budgetary circumstances dictated.

I highly recommend reading the rest of the blog post, as these companies are at a tipping point. We’ve seen it in the music industry, the video industry is feeling it, and now pay TV services will be feeling the pressure as technological innovations will put their business models at risk. Will they embrace their customers and these new technologies or will they become extinct? First they need to look in the mirror and see if they’re keeping their existing customers happy before trying to sign up more. And I’ve already had a few people ask me about my setup and express interest in ditching pay TV…

The local orienteering club, BOK, is organizing an A-meet (i.e. a national event), February 20-21. I’ve signed up to be one of the setter/vetters.

It’s very interesting how we decided to make sure we minimize the risk for mistakes when setting up controls, and in a way it’s an OCD-er’s dream. There are at least three setters that will go out and hang ribbons where the controls are placed. Then, two other persons (the vetters) have to go and vet (approve) the location chosen by the setter. Setters have the liberty to move the control from where the course designer suggested the location to be, for example if a feature is missing or is too dangerous to get to; vetters should try hard not to move controls, unless they were set wrong.

This gives you triple accountability for a control’s location, not to mention that some of the club members will have a practice run of the courses the week prior to the meet (which happens to be next weekend).

Today I spent more than 4 hours vetting. Now I am barely moving. Probably getting into the warm house after all that time in the balmy 34-36°F (1-2°C) did not help much. However, this is exactly what I need, hopefully the small injuries I’ve been accumulating over the past couple of months will eventually go away to let me go back to running on a more regular schedule.

I’ve also worked on a solution to download data from an Sportident box on a Linux computer (it might work on Windows too, since it’s written in python, and I believe pyserial does work on Windows. It has sound to alert users if their download was unsuccessful (more about that in a future post), and generates a PDF for the splits and total time; I think the printing part is going to be the one that will cause most of the problems, I seem to have bad luck with printers in general. (The printing part would definitely not work on Windows). At some point I will publish the code, maybe someone else has a use for it.

Just in time for your weekend reading pleasure, GNOME Journal #18 is out. Issue 18 is a special edition focusing on Multimedia & GNOME, as well as recap of the recent Boston Summit.

• Writing Multimedia Applications in Vala by Jim Nelson
• Pitivi by Jono Bacon
• What’s new with Banshee by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier
• An interview with Jonathan Thomas, creator of the OpenShot video editor by Paul Cutler
• Boston Summit Recap by Jason Clinton

This issue features four (4!) new authors and the GNOME Journal team is thankful for their contribution. We also couldn’t have done it without our editors: Stormy Peters, Sumana Harihareswara, and Jim Hodapp.

Go read it now!

Making Light:

[F]amously-crackpot Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has now made himself sufficiently repellent that I very much doubt I’ll ever feel like spending a dime in one of his stores again. Not content with peddling rich-guy “libertarian” attacks on health-care reform, asserting that climate change is a fraud designed to “raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty,” comparing unionization to herpes, and getting caught playing sockpuppet games on financial message boards, Mackey is now‌charging his employees more for food if they fail to meet his arbitrarily-chosen cholesterol, blood pressure, and body-mass index criteria.

The original article at Jezebel dryly observes:

Because if public health research has taught us anything, it’s that reducing people’s buying power totally makes them healthier. Stay classy, Whole Foods.

That explains why Notepad++ is not available (and won't be available) under Linux :P

source http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/commun/images/linux-evil.png

I mentioned a post or so ago about a new application that I have started to run called logwatch. One of the things that I noticed in the output that I was getting from log watch was a fair number of failed ssh log in attempts. I looked like most of the attempts were automated hits using root/password to get in. This got me looking into a way to stop these types of attempts from happening. A quick google search lead me to denyhosts. It is a really simple but effective app that watches for failed attempts and will put the offending IP address in your /etc/hosts.deny.

The only issue that I had once installing it was that my own IP was being blocked from my laptop while on my wireless connection (weird). To fix this I edited /var/lib/denyhosts/allowed-hosts to add my IP info to keep me from being blocked.

Running grep sshd: /etc/hosts.deny | wc -l I can see that my hosts.deny file has gone from having no entries to having 100. And that is just in the timespan of a month or so.

Fraser Speirs:

What you’re seeing in the industry’s reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the ‘average person’. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.

The iPad bashing reminds me of how hardcore gamers made fun of the Nintendo Wii near its release. Nintendo made a game system for non-gamers, and there are tons more of them than folks who care about polygons, shaders and fps. Nintendo made serious money on that system, and continues to do so because for every serious gaming enthusiast, there’s about four people who just want to play virtual bowling with their friends.

Case in point: my step-mother. She would love the iPad. As far as I know, all she has every used her computer for are the following tasks:

• Play solitaire (or some game like it)
• Read her email
• Browse the web

I don’t doubt there are many other people whose requirements for a personal computing device are about as pithy.

Yesterday I attended my first TriZPUG meeting to check out Kurt Grandis‘ talk on Fabric, “a Python library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks.”

It was pretty cool to see a bunch of guys who share the same interests take some time on a Thursday to hang out, drink beers, and chat about python, django, zope, and other stuff. After the original talk was over and some of the other lightening talks that succeeded it was over, a couple of things became very clear to me:

• There was a real need to make it easier for system administrators and OPS people to handle the difficult task of deploying and maintaining systems, cloud or not;
• Some of the tools and/or tool implementations presented were being used in an attempt to minimize this pain, but you were still pretty much had no control over what made its way to the systems in the end of the process;

Having been using rBuilder Online to manage and maintain my Transifex Appliance, and being somewhat “spoiled” with the ability of having fine grained control over the entire software stack and having the option of deploying my final “product” on several different cloud environments, I couldn’t help but offer to speak a bit about my experience. I sure hope my impromptu presentation didn’t come across as being “just a sell’s pitch” and I definitely tried my best not to sound like I was selling something. I truly feel that the technology developed here at rPath can solve many of the typical issues that people have getting their product through the many different life cycles and eventually out the door and into the hands of their customers!

Today I started going through Fabric’s documentation and am already making plans to include it in some of the test automation tools we’re developing here!

Anyhow, after my presentation there was a quick intro to epdb, the “Extended Python Debugger”, a very cool python debugger developed by an ex-rPathian and something I use on a daily basis! Turns out that the epdb currently packaged for Foresight Linux was outdated, so I spent a few minutes during my lunch today to update it. If you’re running Foresight, just run conary update epdb=:2-devel or wait for it to make its way to the stable label. If you’ve never heard of epdb, I strongly suggest you give it a try!

I’m working on building an HTPC based on Foresight and xbmc/boxee using Conary+rBuild. I could really use your help.

It’s called Tapatio. If you are interested in lending a hand with packaging, etc. please let me know by joining the mailing list.

Thank you.

The newest game I added in Gameway official Game repo for Foresight is:

Chroma

Chroma is an abstract puzzle game. A variety of colourful shapes are arranged in a series of increasingly complex patterns, forming fiendish traps that must be disarmed and mysterious puzzles that must be manipulated in order to give up their subtle secrets. Initially so straightforward that anyone can pick it up and begin to play, yet gradually becoming difficult enough to tax even the brightest of minds.

Can you find the shortest solutions to Chroma’s challenges? Compete with other players in the Hall of Fame.

To install chroma, open Terminal and write:

sudo conary update chroma=gameway.rpath.org@fl:2

rBuild 1.2.1 is a maintenance release.

• The product definition facade no longer uses the internal BaseDefinition class. (RBLD-289)
• The RbuilderClient class is kept around for backwards compatibility, and the _getRbuilderClient internal method has been made backward compatible with the earlier interface. (RBLD-290)
• searchPath entries without a troveName specification in the product definition are considered label search paths, and properly handled, both by the conary and the rmake facade. conaryfacade's internal _findPackageInGroups method was renamed to _findPackageInSearchPaths, to clearly indicate that packages are looked up on labels too. (RBLD-294)
• A dependency on urllib internals that is not consistent between Python versions has been resolved; previously, some successful calls to rBuilder resulted in errors. (RBLD-295)

Radio Tray is an online radio streaming player that runs on a Linux system tray. Its goal is to have the minimum interface possible, making it very straightforward to use.
Radio Tray is not a full featured music player, there are plenty of excellent music players already. However, there was a need for a simple application with minimal interface just to listen to online radios. And that’s the sole purpose of Radio Tray.

Site: http://radiotray.sourceforge.net/

Features

• plays most media formats (based on gstreamer libraries)
• bookmarks support
• easy to use
• supports Shoutcast/Icecast playlist file formats

To install it in Foresight Linux, open terminal and write:

sudo conary update radiotray=@fl:2-devel

Will be in all repo labels as soon it gets pushed to -qa and stable repo.

What I miss in this application is a way to change the order of the radio channels.  And some small things that i might write to the developer about.

A few weeks ago I blogged about buying the hardware to set up a MythTV PC to record off air high def TV and integrate it with Boxee.

The hardware arrived and I’ve been working on on the setup off and on over the last few weeks. Some random thoughts:

• The HD Homerun tuner is pretty cool. Fedora has the HD Homerun configuration tool in their repos. Installing that through PackageKit and yum made it easy to test out that it was working and had a good signal.
• I had to install MyTV 3 times before I could get it to work. On a vanilla Fedora 12 install and then adding MythTV from the repos, only one tuner of the HD Homerun would work. Trying Mythdora, my MythTV front ends on my desktop PC and my laptop wouldn’t connect. Also there was a nasty bug in Mythdora’s kernel that wouldn’t let me mount a NFS share. Using Mythbuntu everything just worked.
• Schedules Direct is a pretty cool service. I remember hearing about the story a couple years ago when it all went down, but when Zap2It started charging users for the scheduling data, a group of MythTV users started Schedules Direct and licensed the data. $20 / year is more than reasonable to pay to get all the scheduling data.
• I love the fact that I can browse to the IP address of the MythTV PC from any computer and see the scheduling data and record a show. It took a few minutes to find the setting to only record new episodes, but it’s there!

  Obligatory screenshot:
  

• The first recordings I made were the second night of the 24 season premiere and an episode of How I Met Your Mother. A one hour recording is about 6 GB.
• I only have a 100GB hard drive in the MythTV backend, so I mounted my NAS via NFS . I would then in Boxee use the File Browser and surf to my tv recording directory. One downside to this method is that MythTV records the file, such as last week’s 24 as 1091_2010011819000mpg. The File Browser also displays a PNG file so it’s easy to tell what show is what, but it’s not intuitive at all.
• There are plugins for XBMC, such as MythSExx and MythicalLibrarian that will rename your TV recordings into a S01E01 format and create a symlink for you to make it easier to browse your recordings. I couldn’t get the former script to run, but I didn’t spend a lot of time troubleshooting either.

And then yesterday while idling in #boxee on Freenode IRC, user SpaceBass mentioned that MythTV support was working for him in the Boxee Beta. There are a number of threads in the Boxee forums that the “mythtv://” protocol doesn’t work – but it appears to be working now.

In the Boxee settings, add a manual souce, and make it: myth://IPADDRESS where IPADDRESS is the IP address of your Myth backend and give the source a name – I used “DVR”.

Now use the File Browser in Boxee and when you first choose it you’ll have a list of your sources:

Select DVR and you’ll be presented with “All Recordings”, “Guide”, “Live Channels”, “Movies” and “TV Shows”:

Note: Guide doesn’t work for me.

If you choose “All Recordings” you’ll see everything that MythTV has recorded:

(TV Shows and Movies will just show the MythTV recordings based on those filters). I haven’t looked into using MythTV’s built-in commercial skip as Boxee has a 30 second skip that just works too. I also like that Boxee remembers to resume where I left off watching if I stop playback.

To watch Live TV streaming from your Myth backend to Boxee, choose Live TV from the menu I mentioned above. You’ll be presented with a list of TV channels by station ID, not number:

And here’s a screenshot of the NHL game on NBC in HD earlier this afternoon:

There are two bugs I’m experiencing that I need to spend some time with:

• When playing back a recording or starting a live TV stream, it will sometimes start as if it’s being fast-forwarded, including the audio. Hitting pause and then unpausing fixes it.
• I think this may be related to signal strength as I’m seeing it on NBC and CBS, but not Fox, but I’m seeing jagged edges around an object, such as a person, when it’s moving quickly. If it’s a fairly static image, there are no jagged edges. But even someone quickly sitting down will have the distortion. But I don’t see this problem when accessing the recording from a Myth frontend on another computer, so it needs more investigating.
• My other theory is it could have something to do with saving the content on the NAS and not on a hard drive in the Myth backend, so I bought a larger hard drive to throw in there too. I’d also rather have it on a hard drive than the NAS just to save wear and tear.

I’m almost done – if I had to guess, I’m about a week away from telling DirecTV to pound sand. I’ll poke at the distortion issue some more and install that hard drive when it arrives but this has been a pretty cool project to work on so far.

A few different things going on:

• Tomboy documentation is almost done in Mallard. I’ve really enjoyed using the Mallard syntax – so much less complex than Docbook. Every time I have to look up an element reference, I shake my head and think, “Duh! That makes so much more sense I should have figured that out!“. Nice work Shaun.
• I triaged some docs bugs in GNOME Bugzilla. Want to get involved with the GNOME Documentation team but don’t know where to start? This wiki page has a list of projects looking for help with their documentation.
• We had a Marketing team meeting earlier this month and we’re having another next month.
• We’ll be having Sysadmin Team meeting soon too. (Surprise Sysadmin team members!)
• We’re having a Snowy meeting tomorrow. I know it’s short notice, but I love the potential of Tomboy Online – if you can’t attend I’ve volunteered to post the log and meeting minutes. We need web designers, web developers, CouchDB folks (whoops!) – you name it there’s probably a role for you. Come get in on a project at the ground level! GNOME needs a web service likes this.
• Rumor is we’ll have the beginnings of Banshee documentation showing up next week, stay tuned. (Though I have no idea where these rumors start, really!)
• We’re in the final throes of pushing out a new GNOME Journal. Soon, I promise you, soon!

Over at TPM, a longtime reader and former Republican Hill staffer takes the pulse of Obama and our current Congress and concludes that

This isn’t an argument about the merits of policy. It’s all politics. Ask yourself, is it easier to pass a difficult, complex legislative agenda when the country is under stress if the opposition party is seen as the Party of Bush, or if the opposition party is able to begin redefining itself as the party of populism, or of un-Washingtonism, or of fiscal restraint? Give the opposition party a fresh start, for free, and you’ve bought yourself all manner of trouble. That’s really the only transformative development Obama has presided over so far. (emphasis mine)

This is exactly why many of my Republican friends call themselves “conservative” instead of Republicans. This is why Michael Steele bumbles around begging the base to “come back” to the party fold. This is why Sarah Palin continues to be popular in spite of all her flaws. This is why Massachussetts voted Brown into office. This is why 2009 was the Summer of the Teabaggers.

Once the taint of eight years of Republican rule presided over by possibly the worst president in history is removed from the political petri dish as well as the American people’s collective memories, the culture of populism grows fast and furious into the strain of “conservative” that exists today. Not a new GOP, but something else entirely. Something that reflexively says “no” to everything proposed by the Democrats, no matter how reasonable or “bipartisan”.

We cannot live like this forever.

Just wanted to tease you guys out there about a new feature that the Transifex guys are working on these days: Translation Reviews! Have you ever wandered if your translations conform to the standard vocabulary that your team uses? Have you ever wanted someone to take a look at what you’ve done before sending in your final work for commit approval?

From Transifex v8.0 featutes

Now, mind you this is still very alpha code but that is probably a good thing since you can play with it and give your feedback on how to improve it. As always, you can get this in an easy to consume format by using the Transifex Appliance Developer edition… or you can join the Xfce translators who are already enjoying Transifex latest code!

It’s that time when we need to start thinking of all the new cool and exciting features that GNOME 2.30 will bring. If you’re a GNOME Developer, please add a brief description of new features or benefits to the Release Notes page on live.gnome.org.

Thanks!

Martin Pitt mentions in his latest blog post that it took only 4 hours to get a GNOME git account after requesting it.

And that’s all do to the work of one person: Andrea Veri.

I’ve done some poking around on the status of the Accounts Team and whether it’s active or not, but after Jeff Schroeder on the Sysadmin team sponsored Andrea last month, Andrea joined to help out specifically with GNOME Accounts and has done an awesome job. He’s cleaned up Request Tracker, stayed on top of new requests, and helped with some outstanding and older requests. (And a big thanks to Olav and Jeff and everyone who has helped mentor Andrea).

I can’t thank Andrea enough for all of his help and chances are if you’ve requested git access, mango password resets or anything else Accounts related in the last month, it was Andrea helping you.

Don’t let Ted Kennedy down.

In case you’ve missed it, the Xfce project has been using their own installation of Transifex to manage their translations online! Translators can now visit http://translations.xfce.org and keep up with the action!

From Transifex v8.0 featutes

I’ve been contributing with translations for the Brazilian Portuguese language for quite some time now, and have been a strong supporter for the Transifex project as well, so I was thrilled to learn they were “working together”! But there is a second reason why I’m mentioning this on my blog:

Turns out that Nick Schermer, maintainer for http://translations.xfce.org, is using my Transifex appliance too!!! Moreover, he chose to use the appliance built from the development branch to get the very latest bits being committed to the development branch of Transifex. It has been a win-win-win (yes, 3 times!) relationship so far for all parties involved, for:

• Xfce gets a ready to run, batteries included, Transifex appliance with all the latest and coolest features without having to build things by hand.
• Transifex gets tons of excellent feedback for this version still in development and work out all the kinks before the next release.
• My appliance has also enjoyed of tons of excellent feedback and is now more robust and ready for consumption.

From Transifex v8.0 featutes

Some of the cool features that you can expect from the next version of Transifex (and that the over 200 registered Xfce translators are already enjoying) are:

• Better support for Lotte, the online translations editor, and the removal of the 100-strings limitation;
• Automatic translation suggestions within Lotte;
• Support for translation teams;
• New timeline history for tracking contributors, teams, and projects activities;
• Top Translators “hit list” for your bragging rights

From Transifex v8.0 featutes

The Transifex Appliance (developer image) has been updated almost on a daily basis, so those out there already using it can keep it updated using the web based appliance management tool or running conary updateall. As always, you can expect a stable release the very same day that Transifex releases the upcoming 0.8 version! I’d love to hear from all of you appliance users out there. Just drop me a line or a comment here and I’ll do my best to improve your experience.

Friday I wrote a blog post kicking off a wiki page on debunking GNOME 3 myths. The dozen or so comments left on that blog post highlight perfectly why we need a wiki page that debunks myths – and it’s a good place to start to add to the wiki page. (And refine it, I think some of the comments are valid).

If you’re a GNOME developer, please give the GNOME 3 Myths page a look over and add any questions that you have been asked.

Thanks!

Conary 2.1.4 is a maintenance release.

• A redundant check that could trigger an assertion error in the lazy cache code has been removed. (CNY-3331)

Conary 2.1.3 is a maintenance release.

• Conary now stores RPM obsolete information as troveinfo data. (CNY-3328)

• Building rpm capsules properly eliminates dependencies in the RPM namespace that are also discovered by Conary. (CNY-3318)

conary-policy 1.0.27 is a maintenance release.

• All destdir policies have been audited, and modified as necessary, to correctly handle capsules, in preparation for enabling destdir policies for capsules. (CNY-3320)
• The new WarnScriptSharedLibrary policy looks at capsule scripts for possible instances of modifying the ld.so.conf, when used with Conary 2.1.2 or later. (CNP-185)

Conary 2.1.2 is a maintenance release.

• Conary now runs all destdir policies for capsule packages. Previously, it disabled destdir policies to avoid unintentional modification; now all destdir policies should take capsules into account and some destdir policies are required. (CNY-3320)
• Scripts from capsules are now written as files that are not packaged but are available for inspection during the packaging process, and policy can investigate script files. (CNY-3321)

• Committing relative changesets with multiple specifications for a single fileId no longer causes a repository traceback when those specifications are part of different troves. (CNY-3316)

Change is hard. People go through six predictable stages as they adjust to change, which I learned at a former company. From Changecycle.com:

People react, respond and adjust to change in a sequence of six predictable stages. The Change Cycle model identifies the thoughts, feelings and behaviors associated with each stage of change.

1. Loss
2. Doubt
3. Discomfort
4. Discovery
5. Understanding
6. Integration

With GNOME 3.0 coming out later this year, there is certain to be fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with the changes in GNOME’s user interface and applications.

Diego had an awesome idea that we should start a PR campaign and / or meme to start debunking this myths. It’s best to get out ahead of these things, and with that I give you: Debunking GNOME 3.0 Myths.

Please consider this page just a stub at the moment, but if you have heard of any misconceptions around GNOME 3.0 or you’re a developer on a project and have an idea or myth to debunk, please add it! It will take all of us through the year to keep this page up to date and help our users and journalists informed of what the changes in the GNOME experience entail.

Thanks in advance!

Our friends Gwenn and Nick Mangine are houseparents for an children’s home in Jacmel, Haiti and were there when the quake struck. They have a blog, and have been reporting on the aftermath. CNN even interviewed the Mangines and used their photographs for a story on Jacmel.

I probably should have blogged this sooner, but the GNOME Marketing Team is having a meeting today at 22:00 GMT / 17:00 US EST.

The meeting will be held in #marketing on GIMPNet IRC. The agenda is here.

See you there!

I have for some time now been wondering how many people actually use Bongo.

The reason for this is that we have had images available for a while and I am still non the wiser as to how many people actually use them.

I faithfully spend hours and hours building packages and getting them out the door but have no markers to see if they are being used.

While reading the docs for the ESVA appliance (http://www.global-domination.org/esva) I noticed that they have a cronjob that downloads a file and immediately deletes it. This allows for roughly seeing who is using their appliance .

They have documentation that tells people how to remove the cronjob which effectively turns off this tool.

I propose that the Bongo project perhaps use something similar to allow us to know how many people use the products we produce. it would be nice to know how many people are using Bong while the Web-UI is not working and then once we release something if that number increases and at what rate.

I am really  interested in ideas as to how we can achieve this with or without having some kind of phone home too.

Please leave a comment on this post if you like, or send an e-mail to the user or devel list or even come and have your say on the IRC channel.

I have also added a simple poll on the left

Thanks in advance

I recently released a plugin for XChat-GNOME (and XChat) which adds support for the messaging menu in Ubuntu. This was a fun little side project of mine, I use xchat-gnome very heavily and have really been craving integration with the messaging menu.

When I started working on this, I wanted to make sure it was a standalone plugin that didn’t need to be built inline with xchat sources and didn’t require changes to xchat. In the process I ran accross a couple pieces of the XChat plugin API that hadn’t been implemented in xchat-gnome yet. This meant of course I needed to patch xchat-gnome, and send those patches upstream.

Both of these were trivial changes to xchat-gnome, and I didnt expect any problem getting them accepted. I had to implement the “GUI FOCUS” command which has been merged already (bug).   And I had implement the win_ptr argument to xchat_get_info, which lets the plugin get a pointer to the GtkWindow (bug).

Overall I am very impressed with the plugin API for XChat, it is really awesome to be able to get access to the GtkWindow.

If you are running Lucid or Karmic, you can install it from from my xchat-gnome PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ken-vandine/xchat-gnome
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install xchat-gnome-indicator


If you use xchat instead of xchat-gnome, just change the package name in that last command:

sudo apt-get install xchat-indicator


To get the source, file bug reports or feature requests, check out the project page on launchpad.