Colin Charles Agenda

Fedora
GTK deprecation warnings are aplenty, with the new PyGTK. Maintainers, go fix your packages, or even, get it upstreamed. Before FC-4, it’d be nice if Core and Extras didn’t have a single one of these weird warnings. Quick fix: perl -i -p -e ’s/gtk.FALSE/False/g’ *.py (that magic needs to happen for gtk.TRUE too).

LCA
Tridge gave an excellent keynote, titled Musings on Software Engineering. Some sparse notes on it:

• Static Analysis: lint, ’sparse’ for kernel, samba has perl scripts, advanced gcc warnings
• Runtime Analysis: valgrind
• Code generation: based on IDL, using pidl or swig (for python bindings)
• Threads are evil: like declaring all your variables global; or not looking at the fact that the MMU is there, use it
• State machines will make you mad (and I agree)
• talloc - sane memory handling in C; destructors allow huge lumps of complex code to be removed, and easy integration with existing resources

Of course he had to give the magical BK mystery solver: echo clone | nc thunk.org 5000 > e2fsprogs.dat & is the magic you need. Want help? Just telnet thunk.org 5000 and type help. What great joys. Replacing thunk.org with any other BK repository is sufficient, it’d seem. SourcePuller is what you’re really looking for, however.

Virtualizing Linux on PPC64 by David Boutcher was fun to watch, but a bit over the head for me. Asterisk talk was somewhat disappointing (would’ve preferred it to be more technical), and the Fighting Spammers with exim and sa-exim by Marc Merlin was cool too. Professional Delegates Network session rocked hard - at CSIRO, and there were plenty of drinks and finger foods.

Andrew Morton’s keynote on Friday was great too. “Who’d write a GUI in C?” was his response to why he’d not use GNOME. But he surely did give heaps on insights as to how he maintains the -mm series of things. Saw Michael Davies talk about Rapid Application Development using C# and Mono - it was far too beginner like for me. Maybe next time they’d do a C#/Mono tutorial…

Conference dinner was fun, as always. No alcohol, but the buffet meant plenty of food. Didn’t sleep afterward, as I had to catch a 0615 flight out of Canberra and go back to Melbourne. Seems that I missed a really good talk by Eben Moglen (and the standing ovation), but c’est la vie.

Life
Arrived in Melbourne, to hop into the car and head to the Basin. Weekend was the Alpha church camp. Needless to say, it was fun, even if S. and I were recovering from how apeshit things have been for a while. Back on Sunday, saw my house after a week of being away from it, do laundry, repack, don’t sleep, as a 0615 flight out to Sydney was abound on Monday morning…

OpenOffice.org
Attended Jonathon Coombes talk about De Bortoli Wines and how they switched to OOo. Learnt about a new OOo+Content Management System plugin, Typo3. Its open source, and apparently works really well with Writer documents (with styles), uses nice structure for a web content base, and you can print and so on.

Ron Skeoch talked about Muli & Ngipi, which is a project based accounting system, and now its built/integrated with OOo. Other talks happened, it was great to see Jim Watson (sparcmoz) talk about Linux/Sparc OOo, then I talked about OOo and how “cool” it was on OS X, and PowerPC. Got to show off natively built OOo (gcj) on Fedora Core 4, which got lots of people happy.

Today, we see the Lack of developers delays OpenOffice.org article, and there’s some stuff that’s seriously wrong with that… Sure its just large, but where are the Red Hat contributors? 4 active community developers? C’mon, maybe just for Linux building, but there are way more than that. Either misquoted, or highly incorrect.

PHP
I attended Rasmus’ talk/tutorial on PHP5. Boy did I learn some new things: simple RSS reading/parsing, lots of the Yahoo! developer API, its uses (web nodes, Buzz Images and News), PHP security, maintaining large PHP development teams, regression testing, debugging, templating, tuning for high performance.

“Any PHP site out there, can be hacked”. Now that’s troubling. Its in regards to input filtering (and the next version of PHP will have this and break things; alas, full Unicode comes then too). So using PHP5 and input_filter would make sense, it’d seem, but its hard to write a good input filter.

Thinkpad R51 becomes useful
I’ve had issues getting video out working for a while, on my Thinkpad R51. I wasn’t one of those lucky enough to get a Radeon card, but instead I got 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device (rev 02). With a little pointer from daniels I got i855crt (rather than i810switch, which I was trying to use). Now just running sudo ./i855crt on 1024×768@70 works wonders. I still can’t get the software cursor going, but I didn’t have too much time to play with it.

And today, I just made sure sleep has started working. The 2.6.11-1.1240_FC4 kernel, with echo -n 3 > /proc/acpi/sleep actually puts the laptop to sleep, and wakes it up. Magic appending of acpi_sleep=s3_bios to grub as a kernel parameter, and voila! things magically work.

Others…
Met dwmw2 for the first time in a funny way… Dinner at a not-so-good Asian restaurant, audio thing was so-so, overall retired early. So yeah, David pointed out the breasts in my firefox…

Breasts? Really, it came out of a newspaper article. Why female breasts? or Women’s breasts: Let it all hang out, I say

Today, I won the Sun Regional Delegates Programme National Winner category. That entailed me $5,000 to go to a cool Linux conference, so I’m headed to OLS this year, I should think. I’ve heard heaps of good things about it, and could just never really afford going (and this year at Boston, pjones kept on telling me how cool it was!). So thank you Sun.

Then I went to the really nice dinner that Sun hosted. It was so far the best meal I had in Canberra - 3 courses, of great food. Of course I said lots of things why JAVA was bad, and why we love gcj for instance, and they were respectful of my decisions. Went back, talked to S., didn’t feel so good, so headed to the Wig N Pen with the rest of the folk. Met Menno Smits (yum fame; bought me a guinness), Andy Fitzimmons, talked to jdub and gman, and just had a good time (with alcohol). Fun night in all.

Yay, LCA has started. Yesterday was dinner at the (in)famous Woodstock in Canberra. Russell agreed that it was the worst pizza ever… Internet at the accomodation was down, so I got lots of reading done instead.

OpenOffice.org
Today was Day #1 of the OpenOffice.org MiniConf. Simon Phipps, Chief Technology Evangelist at Sun sort of wrapped around a talk, and not agreeing with him at many stages happened I guess. Silly talk about licensing and software patents, and beating up of the “Even Red Hat recommends Windows for desktops”.

Marc Englaro, from Si2 mentioned challenges faced within organisation. His quick approach to desktop migration:

1. Preliminary Business Case - Desktop Usage Survey and user requirements analysis, SOE analysis, Review of current cost structure, TCO analysis, Business case
2. Proof of Concept - Design of proposed SOE, development of acceptance tests, workshop-based test of SOE by users, review results
3. Pilot - similar to POC, small group of users running in production for fixed period, review results
4. Staged rollout

Also good to know the common objections business face with OOo (and not with MSO): Pivot Tables, OOo Calc’s 32,000 row limit, macros requiring conversion, Access databases, Outlook, Visio, Project. Now, in Linux land, we have Evolution to replace Outlook, but neither Dia or OOo Draw comes close to Visio. Planner and MS Project are worlds apart as well. For document revision control tracking, it was mentioned that Xena, from the Australian National Archives would be cool to use, otherwise Propylon has something similar, in a commercial fashion.

Ian Laurenson had a good presentation about OOo Macro Development. His website has some of his macro resources. He heartily recommended the X-Ray Tool. And he’s also starting a OpenOffice.org Extensions Wiki, all really useful resources if you’re into OOo Macro stuff. I ended up buying Andrew Pitonyak’s book on OpenOffice.org Macros.

Ditesh had a great talk on document templating, and how he used the file format (go OASIS XML) and PHP to get things going. And afterward, Ken Foskey talked lots about developing on OpenOffice.org… then it was time for the pub, and Sun was footing the bill :)

GNOME
So, with the 2.10 release, libwnck (metacity) sort of behaves funny in the sense that my GAIM windows don’t pop-up anymore. Its true, the current method of not stealing focus is a good one, but I felt it was important for IM. Havoc made an interesting post with options that we could work around, and reading back, the adding “URGENT” flashing to tasklist is a solution (that requires some coding effort). Otherwise, for IM purposes Guifications works really well. nosnilmot packaged them for review at his site, and if you’re lazy to rebuild rpm’s, I’ve got them built against a rawhide snapshot from post-test2 here.

Fedora
Fighting with QEMU. Its broken in Extras with GCC4 (log) and its also broken when I attempt a “export GCC=gcc32″ (log). All on a stock QEMU 0.6.1, which I’d really like to get going before Wednesday, for the LCA kernel hacking tute. Paul Brook pointed me to missing FORCE_RET on store ops, and figures this is what I need to do for i386.

MyOSS Magazine
Remember the days of LinMagAu? Now defunct, but while it was around, every month it got Slashdotted. Ow Mun Heng got enterprising and created Malaysian Open Source Software Magazine, now affectionaly known as MyOSS Magazine. Good first attempt, and hope it continues this way. Pay it a visit, contribute an article or two. Better still, print it for the next install fest or something (there are pretty pictures).

Handhelds
Loaded Familiar 0.8.2 onto the iPaq. Delved into using minicom again, and boy did that bring back old memories. With GPE of course. My Dlink DCF-650W used to work with the slim sleeve, however, no drivers are being loaded now, so I’m sort of wireless impaired at the moment. Even a manual modprobe orinoco_cs seems to not work. However, my full-sized PCMCIA card seems to work nowadays; only catch is using the dual-sleeve, with battery thing, thats huge. Gotta love the new GPE Package Manager (though I think it lacks dependency resolution capabilities). Command line ipkg search seems broken, but listing works. Minimo, vim, and python are on it now. Online screenshot application (scap) works well from the command line and the menu, but via the command line, you get a direct URL to your shots.

Life
Boringness. Its just mad rush before LCA. Plenty to do, not enough time. Went for cell yesterday after a hiatus, and it was surprsingly good. Last day to see S. for a week, till next Saturday. I’m actually going to be missing her.

OpenOffice.org
Some useful OpenOffice.org links (great for marketing, showing off new features, etc… for OOo2 in general; Erwin probably should start indexing his articles, they’re really helpful!):

• Creating PDF Forms with StarOffice 8
• Secure Document Exchange with StarOffice 8 - using the new digital signature features
• Analyzing data with StarOffice 8 - if you’ve never used the Data Pilot feature, this is a relatively good introduction. The other day I went to take a look at Excel from Office XP, and found its Goal Seek to be rather friendlier than OOo 2’s, but that means more improvements for us.
• XForms Editor in OpenOffice.org (XForms Essentials a book; Using XForms in Office Applications a paper)
• Java Macros in StarOffice 8 - this BeanShell stuff is probably in OOo2 as well. Its not in what I have in Fedora Rawhide though, I seem to have StarBasic and Python (yes!). Take a gander at openoffice.org-pyuno if running Fedora.
• Small college saves big with OpenOffice.org and Linux
• Perl OOo modules - Rene talks about OpenOffice::OODoc, which allows one to generate OOo docs for reporting purposes. Even more impressive are the 66 CPAN modules that consist ‘OpenOffice’.
• DUO - an OpenOffice.org UNO/Java wrapper that allows you to control OOo remotely using Java.
• Codesnippets are simply cool. Try them out!

Life
Plenty has been happening. I’ve been to a couple of acupuncture sessions. They’re fun. Especially when performed by a doctor that still practices Western medicine as a day job.

Spent yesterday being out all day, from lunch at Ying Thai, gelati for tea, to dinner at The Rydges (a hotel with really good seafood), and then Mamma Mia!. I can’t say enough good things about the play, it was just great! Its got an amazing story line, and a great selection of tunes from ABBA. And if that wasn’t good enough, she also bought me the show book. Rock! Thanks for a wonderful day out S. - I was smiling all day. Oh, and if you get the chance, go see Mamma Mia! - its great, even if you’re not an ABBA fan.

Today, Ditesh arrived in Melbourne. Attempted the under-eight hours tour of the general city sites, and whatever it was the CBD had to offer. A tour of Parliament house was a first for me. Plenty talking in regards to software industry, patents, markets in both Melbourne and KL.

Enterprise
Dinesh and a few others had a round-table discussion on the State of the Malaysian Software Industry, and the transcript’s now online. There’s a video too. In a sick format, but at least it works (the live stream didn’t for me on both Linux and OS X).

The seven tips to help FOSS companies succeed might be an interesting read.

Fedora
Paranoia is a bad thing. And running into constant roadblocks because “its a legal issue” seems to be getting like a rather boring and old answer. And damnit, where is the trust?

Fedora has come to a stage where we now offer you: x86, x86_64, and ppc. Now a lot of folk don’t have any x86_64 or ppc hardware lying around. When a build fails in Extras, you see build logs (*.rpm.log means built, *.log means failure). These alone are not enough for package maintainers to fix things.

So I did the funny thing and joined #debian-devel today to talk to some of their developers. Romain Francoise and Adam Heath stepped up to give me assistance to see how the Debian Project handled things. Look ma, a Debian.org developer machine list! Sure developers don’t have direct access to the buildd’s, but they sure as heck have access to a machine of every arch, so they can see why their build’s failed.

Developers do not have root on any machines they have access to. BuildRequires (or the Deb equivalent?) get provided for by a helper. I admit to not having looked closely at mach/mach+yum, but mach-helper as thomasvs pointed out might be useful.

Now, to decide if a build breaks on a certain arch, does it break for all Extras or not? I say Yes. But that means developers need access to boxes of other archs, no? This will undoubtedly increase the quality of Extras, and make it not sound like “Everyone’s favourite fourth-class citizen!”. The drugs to some degree need wearing off.

I don’t have all the answers yet, but its about 4.45am and I’m cranky. But if I wake up again and feel like this, boy am I going to take a closer look at this shite.

Life
Points to remember: Space is important. I don’t own anyone. My opinions count, but they don’t have to be followed.

I just found out a couple of days ago that I’m headed to WWDC 2005. That ought to be fun. Busy week ahead; lots of school work, and I think Fedora Traffic will make its first debut soon.

You know something’s also wrong when you meet five independent people at the university, and they all say, “Colin, you’re at uni!” And they express that in amazement.

Fedora
Hmm, so it looks like Core 4 test2 will go out with blank virtual terminals, and only vt7 (X) will work. I see this symptom on my x86 and ppc boxes, and I never realised how much I miss a console login sometimes to just get stuff done. (like rsyncing /home without being logged in). No doubt others are possibly going to be seeing this too, so headsup to bugzilla triagers.

And look, Extras/PPC not made in Melbourne anymore! First bunch of build errors are now for PPC. Seth got himself a nice dual-G4 build box, so its been a lot quicker than bigmac to get things going.

Life
“A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde uttered those words, but more to the point Sidney Harris said “A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.” Let’s hope I’m not getting cynical; someone certainly thinks so.

Fedora Core 4 test2
Okay, this is from a rawhide snapshot of 3.91. There are some things that just don’t work the same, that seem to get somewhat annoying. Otherwise, everything seems to be a whole lot snappier on the laptop, in spite of lots of the kernel debug stuff still being turned on during test releases. I’m really happy about the speed improvements. Some notes…

1. Upgrading from test1 to test2 and enjoy using OpenOffice.org? Don’t forget to sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/openoffice.org*/share/template/*/wizard/bitmap or there’ll be a little complaint during OOo’s installation. The GTK2+ file selector doesn’t seem to be available either, its the stock upstream version.
2. Not having my windows pop-up is really annoying. C’mon, metacity, when I get a message from GAIM, I expect the window to pop-up, not just display in the Window List, minimised. That’s just wrong. It seems useful when I click on a website from Evolution to have Firefox appearing at the Window List minimised, because at least there I’m expecting something; its not the same with IM. Taking a screenshot in The GIMP of an application also exhibits this behaviour. For IM, I’ve resorted to using Buddy Pounces now for “important folk”.
3. The Sticky Notes application used to be a joy to use. Configured it in such a way to click on it, would mean I see my notes (one-click), to right-click on it, would give me the option to add new notes (two-clicks). Now, to do either, I need two-clicks. Well, here’s more reason to clean them out (having ~29 stickies makes you unproductive) and think about getting something along the likes of Tomboy going.
4. Evince is cool. My benchmark is the Firefox NYTimes ad, which gave me issues before (I had to install Acrobat5). I’ve now removed that, because Evince almost just works. Everything else I’ve given it, it seems to handle really well. Jumping thru links in PDFs make it all the more cooler. Why it isn’t the default PDF viewer in Firefox, I’ll never know - xpdf in comparison is rather ugly. (#154091)
   
   Evince being a champ, wins the nytimes Firefox ad
5. The sound mixer in GNOME doesn’t represent doom anymore. Options are a lot simpler, and I think end-users will definitely appreciate them.
   
   Nice, simple sound mixer in GNOME 2.10
6. We need to start shipping gcjwebplugin. It simply makes the web browsing experience a lot more fun. However, with security implications, and lack of auditing, its still not in Core. (#127537)
7. Informative post by Panu showing the tree differences between FC-3 and FC-4 test2. Lots of apps removed, but most generally sitting in Extras.
8. The default GNOME Clearlooks theme is refreshingly nice. I’m glad Bluecurve has mostly gone.
9. Xen is cool. I’ll have to write more about this later; only complaints and this is upstream anyways, is that when in xen0, CPU frequency scaling, and ACPI/APM stuff doesn’t work. And if you’re following the Fedora Xen Quickstart, which is an excellent guide might I add, right before running xm create -c rawhide, don’t forget to balloon down the memory for the host OS; this is because Xen now gives it all the physical memory, not saving anything for the guest OS. So it works out pretty simply such that you run: xm balloon 0 384. That gives 384MB of RAM to dom0, leaving space for the new guest. Also, initscripts doesn’t get installed in base, and that causes problems when making your chroot-based environment; do install it (or as Will Cohen/Ulrich Drepper points out in a post, rpm –noscripts –root /xen/base -vhi
   /xen/base/var/cache/yum/development/packages/initscripts-8.05-1.i386.rpm)

Life
A perfectly hot day to do nothing, was definitely Saturday Well, I did get to see parts of Closer, but the little innuendeos there made her switch it off. So Uptown Girls it was (and that was a good show), and Vanity Fair was just way too confusing for us. We’re now also reading A Purpose Driven Life, so I’m on Day #2/40. What interesting reading I’ll have, to find my purpose in such a timely fashion right before my birthday.

Sunday came and it presented itself with my house warming. Lots of people came over, and I missed my first F1 of the season. Monday, seemed like a good day to unpack the rest of my machines, and after fiddling around, I’ve ended up with a net plus of one 20gb disk. Exercise regime has started - light walking to a bit of jogging.

Fedora
LUV meeting yesterday. Gave a talk on Fedora. Re-jigged from what I did at LWE, added some screenshots, and preached about why it was cool. Got some interest in possible Extras contributors. Todo: fedora-marketing style presentations. Damn, if I wasn’t so busy this would have already happened. Also found out that folk are moving away from RHEL3 because of lack of XFS support to FC3. Troubling in some way, but also interesting enough to want to get XFS fixed I guess…

My laptop (which is what I use daily) is now running Rawhide completely. Xen is cool. Really. Rawhide is also usable. One thing that annoys me is the Metacity “lets not steal your focus” feature. Damnit, at least raise my window, it really helps when I’m having an IM chat in GAIM. Also, doing an rsync of /home seemed to work just fine (since I really wanted to go LVM this time around), I just lost some GNOME settings. system-config-lvm looks like it could use some love…