Planet Pgc

“What does it take to be good at something at which failure is so easy,so effortless ? ” : a quote from Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande which is a highly recommended reading for those who have not read it yet (that’s a link to the flipkart.com entry for those who are local).

Last evening over dinner, among other things, Runa and me got talking about translations and, translation quality. That is one of our favorite shop-talk items and, since the morning blog had bits about my performance with spellings, it was a bit more significant. It is a somewhat known issue that most translation teams measure the length of the sprint, that is, how many strings were completed or, the percentage of the coverage for a particular project. Some projects attach badges like “supported” / “unsupported“, “main” / “beta” to the coverage and thus make the rush to the tape more important. At some point in time, it is important for the teams to sit down, understand and make notes about the quality of translations. Left to itself, the phrase “quality of translations” doesn’t mean anything does it ? For example, if the phrase was “Disconnect from VPN…” and, you were required to translate it – how wrong can you go ?

It seems you can go wrong, and, most often do.

• One of the reasons that I have observed is that translating strings in application and, translating content like documentation/release_notes/guides require different kind of mind patterns.
• The second reason is the lack of fluency in the source language. So, if you are a translator/reviewer for any language, if you are using English source files (as most of us do), you need to be extremely proficient in the language. The way the sentences, phrases and sub-phrases arrange themselves in English may or may not lend themselves to direct translations
• The third reason is that most translators do not take time out to first use the application in English (or, read the documentation completely in English) and, use it again (or, read it again) after translation. That is a recipe for disaster. English is a funny language and, sometimes, due to the structure of the source files, the context of the content is lost. What does look like a simple word might have a funny implication if the comprehension about how it is placed within the UI or, the user-interaction flow is not made a note of.

Now that most projects have some kind of “localization steering committees” it would be a good small project to observe which locales are coming up with the highest quality of translations and, attempting to understand what they are doing. Asking the language teams about the reasons that inhibit them from maintaining a high quality would also enable deeper understanding of how a project can help itself become a better one (in a somewhat strange loop way). Such discussions would enable coming up with Guidelines for Quality which are important to have. I firmly believe that all developers desire that their applications be consumed by the largest number of audience possible and, at heart, they are willing to sit down and listen to constructive suggestions about how best they can help the localization teams make it happen. That is the sweet spot the “LSCo” folks need to converge on and get going. In fact, for projects like OLPC, where a lot of new paradigms are being created, understanding translation processes and, chipping away at improving translation quality is highly requested.

Translation is still an activity that requires a fanatical attention to detail and, that little bit of ingenuity. There is something not right about committing a translation that smacks of a “letting go of the disciplined focus on detail” and, does not contain anything new. The job is made somewhat more hard when it comes to documentation. One cannot (and, perhaps should not) go beyond what the author has written and yet, it has to be made available in the local language after “stepping into the shoes” (or, “getting into the mind”) of the original author while making it aligned with the natural flow of the target language. This is also the place where the “translator memory”, as opposed to the “Translation Memory” becomes important. The mind should be supple enough to recall how similar idioms were translated earlier or, if an error that was already reported has cropped up again. Translators have a significant bit to contribute towards making the translation source files better, cleaner, well-maintained and, well documented. And, they have to do it right every time.

All this would come together to produce high quality translations and, wider usage of applications and documentation. Collaboration for the win !

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.6

July 04, 2009 02:07 AM

movesguy sends us to The Daily Galaxy for comments by Stephen Hawking about how humans are evolving in a different way than any species before us. Quoting: "'At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information. I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said. In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, 'an external transmission phase,' where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. 'But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage,' Hawking says, 'has grown enormously. Some people would use the term evolution only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 04, 2009 02:03 AM

Half a decade ago I landed in Canada. Not sure what happened since, but that's surely 5 years.

July 04, 2009 01:30 AM

This has got to be the weirdest spam ever. Today I received this email with “unsubscribe” as subject and content, from an unknown sender. Could anyone think I would ever reply to this email?

July 04, 2009 12:23 AM

theodp writes "Three Amazon inventors set out to correct what they felt was a real problem: that 'out-of-print or rare books ... typically do not include advertisements ... the content is fixed and, therefore, has not been adapted to modern marketing.' Their solution is spelled out in newly-disclosed Amazon patent applications for On-Demand Generating E-Book Content with Advertising and Incorporating Advertising in On-Demand Generated Content. From the patent apps, here's what the future of reading may look like: 'For instance, if a restaurant is described on page 12, [then the advertising page], either on page 11 or page 13, may include advertisements about restaurants, wine, food, etc., which are related to restaurants and dining.' So, what would a delightfully-tacky-yet-unrefined Hooters ad do for your Hemingway experience?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 04, 2009 12:02 AM

Growing up without any noticeable athletic skills, the nerd-jock duality was a pretty important part of my childhood.  Nerds were the kids who carried calculators, wore glasses, dressed poorly, read books for fun, liked to be right in class, and had few friends.  Jocks were athletic, well dressed, and popular, but probably stupid as well.  Every person in my class could have listed, by name, the “nerds” and the “jocks” among our classmates, and if we’d transferred to a different school, we could have identified them on sight.  It was, for me, and I suspect for many other kids like me, the primary sorting system for my peers (I guess there was also “goth” and “punk,” but we only had one of each at the entire school, so they didn’t count).

Both these terms are pejorative, but “nerd” was my stigma.  At dinner one evening in 3rd grade, I explained to my parents that my friends and I were the nerds, and that we were proud of it.  I still remember my father’s horrified reaction. “You’re not a nerd!” he said.

Of course as you get older you find that the labels that dominated your childhood don’t make any sense - but early childhood perspectives sometimes linger, lensing your experiences in ways you don’t notice.

So when I moved to Germany, and found myself having to explain this whole concept to bewildered friends and colleagues, I started to think about the nerd-jock duality a little deeper.  What I realized is that, in Germany, engineering is not stigmatized in the same way that it is in the US.  It is possible to self-identify as an engineer, even at a very early age, without being a nerd.

Germany is, in fact, a country of engineers.  It has to be.  Think about it: a cold, cloudy country ranked only 62nd in land mass, 14th in population, and yet in 2008 Germany was #1 in the world in exports by dollars!  Yes, ahead of the US and ahead of China.  How is that possible?  Nerds!  Oops, I mean engineers; engineers who design and build high-quality cars, engines, tools, machinery, scientific equipment.  This is what happens when you don’t stigmatize engineers: you get a country full of engineers, self-identifying as engineers, growing up dreaming of being engineers.

But what kind of country do you get  when you do stigmatize nerds?  I’m afraid you get a country of importers.  A country of investment bankers and “famous for being famous” celebrities and television “news” shows that are frighteningly reminiscent of some of my worst memories of grade school.  A country of people who don’t make things.

My 20 year old sister informs me that the “nerd” thing has softened a bit in recent years, but maybe not always for the right reasons.  Lots more people spend time with technological devices now, and to be part of the priesthood that creates them, tweaks them, hacks them is more impactful than it used to be.

But one of the reasons “nerd” isn’t such a dirty word now is because some nerds get rich.  And that’s the wrong reason to appreciate nerds.  Because only very few nerds will get rich, but we need lots of engineers to build our society.

The archetypes that you have as a country matter.  They affect the kind of society you create.  We have a lot of good archetypes in the US.  We have the pioneer, the frontiersman, the individualist, the entrepreneur.  Let’s keep those.  But we can do without the whole nerd/jock thing.  It isn’t helping.

And I think we’d do well to celebrate the engineer archetype again.  I hear it was a big thing in the 50s.  Can we bring it back?

July 03, 2009 11:47 PM

cin62 writes "The number of Internet scammers offering fake versions of the anti-swine flu drug Tamiflu has surpassed those selling counterfeit Viagra, reports CNN. Since the H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, was declared a global pandemic last month, there has been an increase in the number of Web sites and junk emails offering Tamiflu for sale. 'Every Web site that used to sell Viagra is now selling Tamiflu. We are pretty sure that the same people are making the Tamiflu as are making the Viagra,' said Director of Policy for the UK's Royal Pharmaceutical Society." This news fits in nicely with a report Wired ran a couple weeks ago about the hysteria behind H1N1.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 11:11 PM

jadoon88 writes to share a series of old Atari 7800 games that have been unofficially open sourced. "Remember Dig Dug or Centipede or Robotron? They used to be favorites when Atari's 7800 series was still around. Since the era of those consoles is over, and a different world of interactive reality gaming has taken over, Atari has unofficially released source code of over 15 games for the coders and enthusiasts to admire the state-of-the-art (because this is what it was back then). During those times, nobody would have imagined in their wildest dreams the games that Atari's developers floated into the gaming thirsty market and instantly swept across continental boundaries. But things changed soon after that and a company once regarded as one of the most successful gaming console manufacturers and developers faded away in the pages of our technology's hall-of-fame."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 10:22 PM

one-man orchestra writes "I'm the sole programmer of a small, multi-platform, commercial audio program (a spectrogram editor). After over 6 months on the market, I realized that the program would never just sell itself, and that I need some real marketing done for it. Being a one-man orchestra is becoming increasingly difficult; I only can devote so much time to marketing, my skills in that department are lacking, and I'd much rather spend more time coding. Despite my lackluster part-time marketing effort, I still manage to make a modest living out of the sales. My logical assumption is that with someone competent taking care of that part, revenue could greatly scale up. But what's the right way to go about doing this? What type of people/company do I need to contact? What to expect? What to look out for?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 09:30 PM

• I'm putting in a little time today on my windows branch of jhbuild. Running git now works (using a .bat file to call MSYSgit in its own shell, it's all messy but works fine once it's set up).
  
  
• I spent the past hour or so wondering why ACLOCAL_FLAGS was being ignored. I finally realised that it's not actually honoured by aclocal at all and never has been. autogen.sh scripts tend to execute aclocal $ACLOCAL_FLAGS which make it work often enough that I assumed it was meant to.
  
  Now I wonder whether autoreconf would accept a patch to make it honour $ACLOCAL_FLAGS, or if I should patch Pixman's autogen.sh to call autoreconf $ACLOCAL_FLAGS .. and any others that don't ..
  
  
• Highlights of Glastonbury were definitely Blur, and a more obscure band called Edward II who I last saw aged about 12.
  
  Best wishes for everyone in Gran Canaria!

July 03, 2009 09:22 PM

Hugh Pickens writes "Retired University of Tennessee Professor Dr. John Reece Roth has been sentenced to four years in prison after he allowed a Chinese graduate student to see sensitive information on Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones. In 2004, the company Roth helped found, Atmospheric Glow Technologies, won a US Air Force contract to develop a plasma actuator that could help reduce drag on the wings of drones, such as the ones the military uses. Under the contract, for which Roth was reportedly paid $6,000, he was prohibited from sharing sensitive data with foreign nationals. Despite warnings from his university's Export Control Officer, in 2006, Roth took a laptop containing sensitive plans with him on a lecture tour in China and also allowed graduate students Xin Dai of China and Sirous Nourgostar of Iran to work on the project. 'The illegal export of restricted military data represents a serious threat to national security,' says David Kris of the US Department of Justice. 'We know that foreign governments are actively seeking this information for their own military development. Today's sentence should serve as a warning to anyone who knowingly discloses restricted military data in violation of our laws.' During his trial, Roth testified that he was unaware that hiring the graduate students was a violation of his contract. 'This whole thing has not helped me, it has not helped the university,' said Roth. 'And it has probably not helped this country, either.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 08:38 PM

Techdirt has an interesting look at copyright and the idea that an author is the originator of a new work. Instead, the piece suggests that all works are in some way based on the works of others (even our own copyright law), and the system should be much more encouraging of "remixing" work into new, unique experiences. "Friedman also points back to another recent post where he discusses the nature of content creation, based on a blog post by Rene Kita. In it, she points out that remixing and creating through collaboration and building on the works of others has always been the norm. It's what we do naturally. It's only in the last century or so, when we reached a means of recording, manufacturing and selling music — which was limited to just those with the machinery and capital to do it, that copyright was suddenly brought out to 'protect' such things."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 07:47 PM

A recent eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady caught the attention of Matt Asay, who breaks down the difficulty of this David and Goliath problem. "In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those 'horses,' in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging 'Goliath' are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business. Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is 'a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today.' He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 06:55 PM

A recent eulogy for open source's relevance to cloud computing by Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady caught the attention of Matt Asay, who breaks down the difficulty of this David and Goliath problem. "In a world where horsepower matters more than the software feeding those 'horses,' in terms of the entry cost to compete, and where big vendors like Amazon and Google are already divvying up the market, the odds of a small-fry, open-source start-up challenging 'Goliath' are slim. It's not a new argument: Nick Carr has been suggesting for some time that only a few, big companies can afford relevance in this hardware-intensive business. Given this fact, O'Grady thinks the best we can hope for (and he thinks it's pretty important) is 'a loose coalition or confederation of [open-source] projects and vendors that will together comprise an increasingly viable top to bottom alternative to some of the cloud providers today.' He includes projects like Puppet (Reductive Labs) and Hadoop in this mix, but is careful to point out that he doesn't see a full-fledged, open-source alternative seriously challenging the closed platforms of Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and the other mega-clouds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 06:55 PM

July 03, 2009 06:36 PM

Many outlets are reporting on the recently released results of the various experiments and observations of NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander. Most notable is the discovery of nighttime snowfall on the planet, lending credibility to the idea of a hypothesized active water cycle based on earlier data collection. "The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings. The overall conclusion is that the northern pole has an active water cycle. This had been suggested by a variety of evidence from orbital sensors, as well early images returned from Phoenix. It's also not a huge shock, given the seasonal growth and retreat of the polar ice cap. Still, Phoenix provided some significant details on the cycling of water in the area where it landed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 06:02 PM

Many outlets are reporting on the recently released results of the various experiments and observations of NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander. Most notable is the discovery of nighttime snowfall on the planet, lending credibility to the idea of a hypothesized active water cycle based on earlier data collection. "The papers rely on evidence from a variety of the instruments on the lander, and the description of the data provides an impressive catalog of the various ways that Phoenix could prod and query the Martian pole. In the months before Martian winter shut the lander down, it managed to dig a dozen trenches, taking soil samples from each. These samples went into wet and dry chemistry labs, had their conductivity tested, and were even examined using an atomic force microscope. Meanwhile, cameras and a LIDAR system (a laser-based range detector) scanned the surroundings. The overall conclusion is that the northern pole has an active water cycle. This had been suggested by a variety of evidence from orbital sensors, as well early images returned from Phoenix. It's also not a huge shock, given the seasonal growth and retreat of the polar ice cap. Still, Phoenix provided some significant details on the cycling of water in the area where it landed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 06:02 PM

AbiWord had a long lasting usability issue: pressing the insert key caused to toggle the overwrite mode on and off. When doing so we provided two different feedback to the user:

• a display in the status that switch from "INS" to "OVR"
• the caret (insert point) switch to red.

This lead to different kind of complaints:

• "When I type, the text to the right is replaced"
• "Why is the insert point red? What did I do?"

See bug 3641

This reveal two problems. The first one is that the user didn't realise something happened. I hit a random key (ie he didn't realise which one) and something happened. The second the user noticed the caret changed colour, but still didn't know why.

I had a few ideas in mind.

• Change the feedback, and there are a few options for that: change the caret shape (colour is never enough), change the status bar message, any other kind of notification
• Do something for the key binding: popup a dialog, use clippy, play a music just make it disabled by default.

How I did implement it:

• For now I changed the status bar message to be more readable. INS and OVR are just confusing obscure and an anachronism inherited from the AbiWord first step over 11 years ago mostly in trying to clone MS-Word with some of its atrocities. Now it is in plain $LANG (English here, but it is / will be localised, I hope).
• I added a UI to enable the toggle. We had that option already in place, it was just on by default, not bound to any UI. I'm not a big fan of adding options, but that's just the best way to do it for now.

What can be done in the future?

• Change the caret shape when in overwrite mode. I didn't want to do it that late in the release cycle has it seems to have been source of problems. Also it need to be well thought too as we also deal with bi-directional writing.

But that was a real paper cut for AbiWord. Not the only one, just one of them, and it was not that hard to fix. For the sake of it, I did it watching the BSG mini-series for the 3rd time.

July 03, 2009 05:55 PM

A few weeks ago I attended a press event that the San Francisco Giants and Shoretel put on. The audio isn’t that great because we’re in the server room for the San Francisco Giants baseball team. Here SF Giants’ CIO, Bill Schlough, is showing off how the Giants saved a million bucks by upgrading its telecommunications equipment.

Remember that the ballpark that the Giants is in was originally named for PacBell, the local phone company. Interesting look at how phone systems have changed in just the past 10 years.

This is a nice win for Shoretel. How often do you get a customer to sing your praises like this? Especially one that so many people in the community like and appreciate?

The system will save the SF Giants about $1,000 a day. Not bad. Plus they got a ton of new features, which lets the Giants serve their customers better.

July 03, 2009 05:51 PM

I know it’s a bit late, but I hope this helps.

I’m from Gran Canaria, the place where the event is going to be, so I like to give you some advices and recommendations:

• Sun protection. Here the sun can burn you if you don’t take some protections. Some times seems like it’s not so sunny, but it could be dangerous if you are from a northern area.
• Don’t drink top water. The top water here is supposed to be good enough for human consumption, but the true is that nobody here drink it. We always drink mineral water. And also here was a incident a few month ago about top water’s high levels of boron. That now is normal, but you know…
• Here there is not so many place with vegetarian food but we try to find all kind places for eat nearby the event. You’ll find that info (which will be updated) at the wiki.
• The important phone numbers are also at the wiki. Remember the international code for Spain is +34
• In Gran Canaria (Spain), electricity is provided normally at a voltage of 220 V and 50 Hz. But you’ll probably find adapters at the mall (Centro comercial Las Arenas) just in front the event’s place.
• Here in Gran Canaria we talk Spanish, so you can find useful the list of common words and expressions we have at the wiki. If you already know Spanish, you need have in mind that here we have some different words (eg. Autobus = Guagua).
• The most useful lines of guaguas (buses) for going from or at the auditorium are the lines 47 and 17.
• Taxi is also a good option. Probably you’ll pay 4 € for a normal ride (from the Auditorium to the farthest hotels.
• There will be a infodesk where you’ll find people who can bring you some help. The contact person will be Fabio, but there will be more people there.
• I will be also around there during the weekend, I can’t be sure about the rest of the week. Anyways, if you need touristic/local information or just any info of Canarias or Gran Canaria, find me (Juanje Ojeda) and ask me
• If you have a group of people who want place for lunch of dinner, ask for me at the infodesk, I’ve been talking with some places to try to arrange this king of things.

I just like to add that Gran Canaria is much more than beaches and sun. So try to get into the countryside or to different part of the island. They are so different between them hat people usually get surprised.

I’ll highly recommend to visit Teror, Tejeda, Agaete, Artenara (and the Tamadaba pine forest), Mogán, Agüimes, Santa Lucía and, of course Maspalomas. There are more interesting places, but with those you’ll get the idea

Well, we’ll meet you at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

July 03, 2009 05:45 PM

1sockchuck writes "A major power outage at Seattle telecom hub Fisher Plaza has knocked payment processing provider Authorize.net offline for hours, leaving thousands of web sites unable to take credit cards for online sales. The Authorize site is still down, but its Twitter account attributes the outage to a fire, while AdHost calls it a 'significant power event.' Authorize.net is said to be trying to resume processing from a backup data center, but there's no clear ETA on when Fisher Plaza will have power again."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 05:11 PM

GUADEC is starting tomorrow, but the GNOME Foundation was busy today with a all-day board meeting. With the election results now being official, we were able to welcome Germán and Srini.

Still, the meeting wasn't easy for everybody.

Still, you can be sure that the board is working hard for the Foundation to make sure that the GNOME project will succeed!

July 03, 2009 04:58 PM

Arrived at the hotel/summit. Going to head to the venue with a couple of folks soon.

And a small screencast for the day. Testing out the new blur-cache meant for notify-osd:

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~1.5 MBytes)

It’s easy on CPU. So light actually, that I was able to record this very screencast with recordmydesktop on a Dell Mini 9. This is finally also using the subtle text drop-shadow the design folks asked for. Color, font, size and all are just randomly picked by me, as this is a test-program to exercise the small interal APIs I created for implementing the blur-cache.

July 03, 2009 04:51 PM

I just did a quick read of an academic paper about Jorn Barger's contribution to the development of blogging written by Rudolf Ammann, and presented at Hypertext 09 in Torino, Italy.

I really liked the paper, and I plan to go through the it and read all the citations. A trip down memory lane.

One thing I liked about this treatment is that it is dispassionate. He doesn't take sides and lets our words speak for us. For both Barger and myself, linkrot has not claimed our work -- it's all still there, many many years later.

It was also gratifying to see the Frontier community get the credit it deserves in laying the foundation for the blogging world that followed, including (in no special order) Michael Sippey, Peter Prodoehl, Steve Bogart, Brent Simmons, Daniel Berlinger, Andy J. Williams, Chris Gulker, Cameron Barrett and Jorn Barger. There were so many others, I'm sure I'm leaving people out who I both appreciate and have great affection for.

Ammann credits Barger specially, as do many others. For me, all these people made important contributions.

BTW, the software we were using then is an ancient predecessor of the OPML Editor, which is still, in many ways, light years ahead of any other content management environment. Perhaps that will be the next thing people dig up. It's GPL-licensed open source.

Back then I said, and still say now..

Still diggin!

PS: I'll keep saying it until I'm not diggin anymore.

PPS: Docs on the NewsPage suite, the software that defined the community.

PPPS: I found a copy of Frontier 4.2.3 on my hard drive, and uploaded it. This was the April 1997 release. I also found a copy of the NewsPage suite, which is the lizard brain of everything that followed in the blogging world. I may release it so that every copy of the OPML Editor has this bit of history, so it never gets lost, fingers crossed, Murphy-willing, IANAL, my mother loves me, etc.

July 03, 2009 04:38 PM

An anonymous reader writes "Now that some little time has passed, and the hype has died down a bit, I'm wondering if anyone has taken the $500 plunge and gotten a Kindle DX. From the academic-paper-reading-geek perspective, is it worth the money? How well does it work with PDFs, and is it easy to get them on and off? I haven't been able to find any good reviews on the interweb that address its usability as I would like to use it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 04:20 PM

Had an excellent afternoon in Amsterdam with my old buddy Mehrdad. Well, the first officer at the Amsterdam border didn't want to let me although I had a Schengen visa, the second one was happy to do so.

Anyway, got to Gran Canaria last night just before midnight, but my luggage decided to spend a night in Barcelona...

Was in board meeting all day today. Vincent is working on sending out the minutes right away.

Looking forward to meeting everyone at the opening party tonight at 9.

July 03, 2009 03:51 PM

Jake Lazaroff writes "According to the W3 News Archive, the charter for the XHTML2 Working Group — set to expire on December 31st, 2009 — will not be renewed. What does this mean? XHTML2 will never be a W3C recommendation, so get on the HTML 5 bandwagon now. According to the XHTML FAQ, however, the W3C does 'plan for the XML serialization of HTML to remain compatible with XML.' Looks like with HTML 5, we'll get the best of both worlds."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 03:32 PM

Quite some stuff has been going on in Zeitgeist since UDS, including the addition of two new developers to our team: Mikkel Kamstrup and Markus Korn, who both have been doing awesome work!

As planned, we split the project into the engine (Zeitgeist) and the default graphical user interface (GNOME Activity Journal), but during this time we also dropped our old database to start with a completely new structure which is way more flexible and uses less disk space than our previous one.

Not so positively, some team members wanted to try out an ORM (Storm), which from the start one I thought was a bad idea (it’s not that I can’t see the convenience for using one in certain projects, but for Zeitgeist, an engine mainly constituted by a little set of rather complex queries, I don’t really see how it can help us). Doing this -at the same time as the switch the the new database model- ended up as a pretty demotivating experience, and while we got it working at the end the result was an engine which worked slow (even with caching) and used lots of resources, so we’ve decided to go back to plain SQL.

Right now we still have a mix (we’ll probably finish quicking out the remaining Storm parts within the next weeks), but I already changed the main information request methods to SQL, thus reducing common operations from requiring up to thousands of queries to doing only a single one, doubling the speed while reducing memory usage. I hope to get further performance improvements while converting the remaining parts (for example, inserting data currently takes way more time than I’d like).

We also cleaned up the D-Bus API (it was pretty much of a mess before, just enough for the GUI to work) and added more functionality to it. However, it may still undergo substantial changes in future versions once we start making more use of the added flexibility the new database gives us (for example, for the 0.2 release we’ll probably split up tags into “user defined tags” and “automatically assigned tags”). Unrelated to this, Markus has started working at making it possible to configure and enable/disable loggers, so there’s also some cool stuff coming from this front (but nothing visible yet).

Just some random notes… You can read more about Zeitgeist at Seif’s blog, in his recent blog post “Some Zeitgeist news“, and if you have any comment you can come find us in #gnome-zeitgeist on GIMPnet . I’m now going back to work: after all, today we’re going to release Zeitgeist 0.1 (development preview)!

Related posts:

1. I’m in Google Summer of Code!
2. UDS 2009

---

© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2009. | Permalink | License | No comments | Add to del.icio.us | Post tags: gnome, gsoc2009, Programari lliure, Ubuntu, zeitgeist

July 03, 2009 02:45 PM

blackbearnh writes with this excerpt from O'Reilly Radar "Think about Wikipedia, what some consider the most complete general survey of human knowledge we have at the moment. Now imagine squeezing it down to fit comfortably on an 8GB iPhone. Sound daunting? Well, that's just what Patrick Collison's Encyclopedia iPhone application does. App Store purchasers of Collison's open source application can browse and search the full text of Wikipedia when stuck in a plane, or trapped in the middle of nowhere (or, as defined by AT&T coverage...)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 02:41 PM

I’ve arrived yesterday to Gran Canaria for the Desktop Summit, awesome weather, specially for someone like me who is coming from a pretty cold winter at Santiago de Chile. I’m pretty happy to see a few of my good Gnome friends here and I’m really looking forward for the conference to start.

Also remember to put your info at http://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2009/Rooms

July 03, 2009 02:29 PM

Yesterday while my poor addled brain struggled to cope with jetlag, Twitter released a small feature with potentially wide implication, and FriendFeed released something new related to search that I thought they had already released. I don't think my confusion in the latter case had anything to do with jetlag.

New Twitter feature: It now hots-up hashtags.

So when you refer to #iranelection in a tweet it links to a search page with the results of a search for that string in the twitstream. I've hotted it up the way Twitter would have. Nice to have for sure, seems it should have always worked that way. They probably didn't do it earlier to lessen the load on the search servers.

And FriendFeed now has real-time search. Maybe the feature is totally new. It seems I've seen it before. But I still don't get it. Let me try to explain.

FF has a lot of stuff flowing through it, including part of the Twitter firehose. I think they just get the tweets of Twitter users who are followed on FF. So if I have it search for "davewiner" it returns a subset of all the occurences of my Twitter handle. Steve Gillmor says that they've now got his much-fabled feature -- Track -- implemented. How so? Unless they're getting the whole firehose from Twitter.

http://friendfeed.com/search?q=kitten+or+cat

It's nice that they track sources other than Twitter, like this blog's RSS feed. But apparently they don't poll very often, and they don't support weblogs.com-compatible pings (I know they invented a more complicated protocol, why am I not excited about that) so you can hardly call that "real-time." (BTW, this item first appeared in the feed at 7:52AM. It showed in FF at 8:28AM.)

All this hype about real-time is welcome (but hardly new). The ideal of having search be up-to-the-minute accurate is an important one. It's just that no one is there yet. And 140-char tweets all repeating the same thing over and over and then retweeting those same things, well that hardly counts as information. After a while it's more interesting to watch Wolf Blitzer. And that's really saying something.

So, while I'm glad that FF is reaching out beyond Twitter, their interface is impossible to use. Sit someone down off the street and have them try to watch the flow of tweets and comments rush by. No doubt FF's interface would make an impressive display for a mad genius in a scifi movie about the end of the world, but for more ordinary folk? Back to the drawing board.

BTW, talking about new features that should be sent back to the labs -- Microsoft announced that they are including results from selected Twitter users. The relevance criteria is follower count. Might have worked last year, before the SUL, but now follower count is more a reflection of how much you are pwned by Ev and Biz, not how the net values your opinion. I'm sure Larry and Sergey are having a good laugh. Try again Microsoft. Use some other algorithm, follower count is meaningless.

July 03, 2009 02:25 PM

As of a week ago or so, HAL is no longer required by either NetworkManager or ModemManager.  This helps streamline the hardware detection process and cleans up that code a lot.  It was a fun ride and a lot of other great stuff came along with the udev port, because rewriting everything to use udev pretty much required cleaning up a bunch of other stuff.  The udev parts were a lot easier than I thought they would be; what was complex was rewriting a ton of ModemManager to be more flexible and work better with multi-port modems on the one hand, and really stupid quirky hardware on the other.

For everyone in the US, have wonderful 4th of July.  To everyone who’s not, have fun at the Desktop Summit.  Had prior plans meaning I couldn’t attend, but I’m sure the Red Hat team will honor my absence by spreading the love and drinking all the liquor.  Rock on, GNOME.

July 03, 2009 02:12 PM

Ianopolous writes "Classic DOOM and DSL Linux Desktop inside your Java-enabled browser! The latest JPC, the fast 100% Java x86 PC emulator, is now available with online demos and downloads. JPC is open source and is the most secure way of running x86 software ever — 2 layers (applet sandbox, JPC sandbox) of independently validated security make it the world's most secure means of isolating x86 software. Visit the website to try out some classic games and play around with Linux all within your web browser. Refresh = reboot!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 01:50 PM

BBCWatcher writes "Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that the London Stock Exchange is abandoning its Microsoft Windows-based trading platform: 'Anyone who was ever fool enough to believe that Microsoft software was good enough to be used for a mission-critical operation had their face slapped this September when the LSE's Windows-based TradElect system brought the market to a standstill for almost an entire day .... Sources at the LSE tell me to this day that the problem was with TradElect ...'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 01:24 PM

This morning I committed a rather largish (23 files changed, 28 insertions, 1551 deletions) patch:

commit f884a1ae954d14928a6a7055d4d4b182fbb2a3bc
Author: Richard Hughes <richard_at_hughsie.com>
Date:   Fri Jul 3 13:49:05 2009 +0100
    HAL is no longer a dependency of gnome-power-manager

This means that gnome power manager in git master no longer needs HAL to compile or run. This is a quite a significant moment, as now it relies just on the thriving DeviceKit* stack, rather than the old lumbering HAL.

Just a word of warning: You’ll need DeviceKit-power 009 (released in a few days time) if you want to use g-p-m in git master without loosing your ability to change your backlight, or to set the lid action preferences. It’ll still compile with 008, but 009 is very much recommended.

July 03, 2009 01:19 PM

snydeq writes "Pwn2Own winner Charlie Miller has revealed an SMS vulnerability that could provide hackers with root access to the iPhone. Malicious code sent by SMS to run on the phone could include commands to monitor location using GPS, turn on the phone's microphone to eavesdrop on conversations, or make the phone join a DDoS attack or botnet, Miller said. Miller did not provide detailed description of the SMS vulnerability, citing an agreement with Apple, which is working to fix the vulnerability in advance of Black Hat, where Miller plans to discuss the attack in greater detail. 'SMS is a great vector to attack the iPhone,' Miller said, as SMS can send binary code that the iPhone processes without user interaction. Sequences can be sent to the phone as multiple messages that are automatically reassembled, thereby surpassing individual SMS message limits of 140 bytes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 01:01 PM

angry tapir writes "The husband and wife owners of a California company that distributed pornographic materials over the Internet have been each sentenced to one year and one day in prison. Extreme Associates and owners Robert Zicari, also known as Rob Black, 35, and his wife, Janet Romano, aka Lizzie Borden, 32, pleaded guilty in March to a felony charge of conspiracy to distribute obscene material through the mail and over the Internet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 12:15 PM

• Arrived last night at Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. This city looks a lot like Salvador, my home city!
• Dinner with Stormy, Jonathan, Zana, and Vincent at a nice Spanish (duh!) restaurant. I ate so much that I’m still feeling stuffed today!
• Foundation Board meeting during the whole day today.

July 03, 2009 12:01 PM

Fill it in: l.g.o/GUADEC/2009/Rooms.

July 03, 2009 09:44 AM

• As all the other cool kids in town, I'm flying to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, to attend the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. In practical terms, this means GUADEC, GUADEC Hispana, Akademy, and, eventually, other conferences/activities that might be arranged during the big event.

  Partly because of laziness, partly because of having really busy weeks lately (both work and life-wise), I won't be presenting anything during GUADEC Hispana, although I would have liked to. However, Berto and I will be giving a talk on the new Hildon toolkit for Maemo 5, during the Mobile Day. Besides introducing the new widgets and UI style for Fremantle, we will also talk about the difficulties we have been facing during this major revamp of the toolkit, which will hopefully serve to clarify some of the doubts spread around lately.

July 03, 2009 09:07 AM

Francesco Fondi writes "An Italian Company is using RC scale model submarines to lay fiber through Milan's sewage system. The RC submarine used is the Neptune SB-1, produced by Taiwanese company Thunder Tiger. It costs ca $600 in US hobby shops." In Italian, but the pictures speak for themselves.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 08:57 AM

sheepweevil writes "IBM just released Milepost GCC, 'the world's first open source machine learning compiler.' The compiler analyses the software and determines which code optimizations will be most effective during compilation using machine learning techniques. Experiments carried out with the compiler achieved an average 18% performance improvement. The compiler is expected to significantly reduce time-to-market of new software, because lengthy manual optimization can now be carried out by the compiler. A new code tuning website has been launched to coincide with the compiler release. The website features collaborative performance tuning and sharing of interesting optimization cases."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 05:42 AM

I had submitted a talk for the GUADEC which was accepted. However, in light of this blog entry, my decidedly infrequent contributions to GNOME and, an inability to travel using my own finances, I decided that there was no glory in asking for travel+lodging assistance. So, once again, I am not going to be at GUADEC ! Some day I will make it though.

One of the reasons that GCDS was interesting for me was the chance to talk about localization in terms of improving the context of the localization-ready content. During translations, one often encounters sentence construction which does not have context and, providing a means to overcome the issue in a gradual manner would make for much nicer localized UIs. Additionally, learning about improvements to the GNOME L10n infrastructure was a secondary goal. The ulterior motive was also to know about the project’s plans to outreach to groups of students beyond the obvious GSoC and, how to use the project’s knowledge to teach open source.

Meanwhile, let me go back to doing some more translations. They seem to be improving my vocabulary by leaps and bounds. Although, my reviewer says that my spelling is atrocious

The post is brought to you by lekhonee v0.5

July 03, 2009 04:52 AM

Ara Pulido will be presenting Mago in Gran Canaria Desktop summit. Eitan Isaacson will also be attending the conference.

Eitan has done all the base ground work for LDTPv2. Eitan also did the ground work with Javier and Ara on Mago too :) alrounder !!!

Any one interested in GNOME / KDE automated testing, I recommend you to attend the session by Ara.

Happy hacking Ara, Eitan.

July 03, 2009 04:21 AM

Heading to the airport shortly to fly to GUADEC/GCDS.

Doing a bit of an airport tour: Perth, Singapore, Paris, Madrid, Las Palmas; then Las Palmas, Madrid, Gatwick; then Heathrow, Paris, Singapore, Perth. It's like the days of yore, when you had to stop all the time to refuel.

When I get home, there's a week left in Perth before our stuff is uplifted for the move to Melbourne. Have spent the morning packing books into boxes. Steph is going to finish most of the packing while I'm away.

July 03, 2009 04:06 AM

It’s that time of the year again I’m about to start my trip to the summit. Uff… 5:00 in the morning and a trip of roughly 14 hours before me. But can’t wait to see all you GNOME-heads again face to face!

July 03, 2009 03:06 AM

Gary Vaynerchuk’s dad came to the United States with nothing in his pocket. He worked for less than minimum wage and built up a business, Wine Library, that today sells $50 million a year in wine in a sizeable store in New Jersey.

Today Gary is building on top of his dad’s work and is taking the store global with a video show, Wine Library TV, that gets about 100,000 views a show. I remember when I first saw the impact he was having when I walked into a meeting at Revision 3 and the team was sitting around watching his show and drinking the wine he was talking about.

Here we visited Gary’s store and got more of how he’s using the 2010 web to bash in the skulls of his competitors. He calls it “bringing the thunder.” I call it the most innovative marketing I’ve seen on the web to date. We talked about a range of things from his dad to how he would compete with his show, if someone else had done Wine Library TV and he wanted in on the action.

This is part of our Building43 series of videos. Come over and join the community there, we’re looking for people who are fanatical about the 2010 web and who are looking to help other people and businesses get into this new world.

By the way, I’m a huge fan because Gary has never mislead me and he’s very willing to tell a CEO his/her wine is crap to his/her face (I’ve seen him do it, even after the CEO threw us a party).

Hope  you enjoy, tomorrow Rocky (behind the camera producer at Building43) and me are headed to London to find out what’s happening on the other side of the pond with regards to the 2010 web. Join us on Sunday night at a Tweetup in London.

July 03, 2009 02:59 AM

meketrefi writes "It's been quite a while since I got interested in the idea of using html (instead of .doc. or .odf) as a standard for saving documents — including the more official ones like academic papers. The problem is using HTML to create pages with a stable size that would deal with bibliographical references, page breaks, different printers, etc. Does anyone think it is possible to develop a decent tag like 'div,' but called 'page,' specially for this? Something that would make no use of CSS? Maybe something with attributes as follows: {page size="A4" borders="2.5cm,2.5cm,2cm,2cm" page_numbering="bottomleft,startfrom0"} — You get the idea... { /page} I guess you would not be able to tell when the page would be full, so the browser would have to be in charge of breaking the content into multiple pages when needed. Bibliographical references would probably need a special tag as well, positioned inside the tag ..." Is this such a crazy idea? What would you advise?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 03, 2009 02:39 AM

I've started to write blog posts three times today and gave up each of the three times because...

It's impossible to write coherently when your mind is scrambled by jetlag!

It's hard for me to finish a sentence coherently or even remember if I've used the word coherenent, or even spell it right, or finish the sentence without getting hung up if coherent is actually the right word to use, and where did it come from and why is that the word I thought to use anyway.

This post was going somewhere.

I thought I had discovered the algorithm for fighting jetlag in both directions.

Flying west to east, time your arrival so that it's bedtime locally when you arrive so you can go to bed and when you wake it will be the proper time to wake for the place you're in. Fine, as far as it goes, but... It doesn't mean your body thinks it should be asleep at what it perceives to be two in the afternoon.

Coming home, arrive at 1AM and schedule something for 9AM so you have to get by with 8 hours sleep at roughly the time everyone else sleeps. No problem waking up at 4AM! (First sign of a problem.) Then when I return at noon I figure I'll just catch up on a couple hours but I can't fall asleep. (Maybe it's working!) Now as the time for the podcast arrives I realize my mind is complete Jell-o. I've tried to write three blog posts today, easy ones, and given up each time. And now I'm at the beginning of the piece again. Looping.

All this led me to post this tweet earlier today.

Good advice.

July 03, 2009 01:30 AM

Everyone’s written a JavaScript loop that just loops over all the {LIs, links, divs} on a page*, and it’s pretty standard. Something like

var lis = document.getElementsByTagName("li");
for (var i=0; i<lis.length; i++) { // yes this could be more efficient, don't care
  // do something here to lis[i]
};

or, if you’re using jQuery:

$("li").each(function() {
  // do something here to this
});

This is problematic if there are, say, 2000 LI elements on the page, and what you’re doing in the loop is semi-intensive (imagine you’re creating a couple of extra elements to append to each of those LIs, or something like that). The reason this is a problem is that JavaScript is single-threaded. A tight loop like this hangs the browser until it’s finished, you get the “this script has been running for a long time” dialog, and the user interface doesn’t update while you’re in this kind of loop. You might think: aha, this will take a long time, so I’ll have some sort of a progress monitor thing:

var lis = document.getElementsByTagName("li");
for (var i=0; i<lis.length; i++) { // yes this could be more efficient, don't care
  // do something here to lis[i]
  progressMonitor.innerHTML = "processing list item " + i; // fail
};

but that doesn’t work. What happens is that the browser freezes until the loop finishes. Annoying, but there it is.

One approach to getting around this is with timeouts rather than a for loop.

var lis = document.getElementsByTagName("li");
var counter = 0;
function doWork() {
  // do something here to lis[i]
  counter += 1;
  progressMonitor.innerHTML = "processing list item " + counter;
  if (counter < lis.length) {
    setTimeout(doWork, 1);
  }
};
setTimeout(doWork, 1);

so you move the bit of work you need to do into a function, and that function re-schedules itself repeatedly, using setTimeout. This time, your user interface will indeed update, and your progress monitor will show where you’re up to. There are a couple of caveats with this: it’ll take a bit longer, and you’re no longer guaranteed to have things processed in the order you expect, but they’re minor issues.

For doing this in jQuery, a tiny plugin:

jQuery.eachCallback = function(arr, process, callback) {
    var cnt = 0;
    function work() {
        var item = arr[cnt];
        process.apply(item);
        callback.apply(item, [cnt]);
        cnt += 1;
        if (cnt < arr.length) {
            setTimeout(work, 1);
        }
    }
    setTimeout(work, 1);
};
jQuery.fn.eachCallback = function(process, callback) {
    var cnt = 0;
    var jq = this;
    function work() {
        var item = jq.get(cnt);
        process.apply(item);
        callback.apply(item, [cnt]);
        cnt += 1;
        if (cnt < jq.length) {
            setTimeout(work, 1);
        }
    }
    setTimeout(work, 1);
};

and now you can do

$.eachCallback(someArray, function() {
  // "this" is the array item, just like $.each
}, function(loopcount) {
  // here you get to do some UI updating
  // loopcount is how far into the loop you are
});

$("li").eachCallback(function() {
  // do something to this
}, function(loopcount) {
  // update the UI
});

Not always a useful technique, but when you need it, you need it.

July 03, 2009 12:52 AM

Officially a computer scientist
As of today, I have graduated and I am now officially a master of computer science, with a specialization in software engineering. Awesome! I graduated magna cum laude (with an average of 81.52%) and scored 18.5/20 on my masters thesis. Needless to say, I'm very pleased with this.

What's next? After much indecision as to whether I'd like to find a job in the open-source (GNOME) world or do something else, I've accepted a PhD offer at the Distrinet Research Group of K.U.Leuven. GNOME hacking will stay a spare-time activity for now, though I might change that decision in a few years. Exciting times ahead!

Gran Canaria Desktop Summit
Tomorrow I'll be flying out to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit. I'll be spending 11 days in Gran Canaria. I will be arriving in the late afternoon, so that shouldn't stop me from dropping by at the Canonical hosted opening party. Really looking forward to another GUADEC, Istanbul 2008 was really great. Many thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring part of this trip, without them, this would not have been possible.



I won't be giving a talk, but if anyone wants to have a chat about F-Spot (or any other subject), come and find me!

July 02, 2009 11:45 PM

BabyDuckHat writes "Cnet's Dennis O'Reilly caught 'Windows Search Helper' trying to change his default Firefox search from Google to Bing. This isn't the first time the software company has been caught quietly changing user's preferences to benefit its own products."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 02, 2009 11:34 PM

An anonymous reader points to Digital Daily, writing "Looks like the fireworks have begun early in Mountain View. On Thursday afternoon, the Department of Justice officially notified Google that it is investigating its book deal for violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 02, 2009 10:42 PM

ericatcw writes "The inaugural NoSQL meet-up in San Francisco during last month's Yahoo! Apache Hadoop Summit had a whiff of revolution about it, like a latter-day techie version of the American Patriots planning the Boston Tea Party. Like the Patriots, who rebelled against Britain's heavy taxes, NoSQLers came to share how they had overthrown the tyranny of burdensome, expensive relational databases in favor of more efficient and cheaper ways of managing data, reports Computerworld."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 02, 2009 09:56 PM

So far I neglected writing about this year's Google Summer of Code. This ends with this post. As last year, I'm working on GNOME DVB Daemon.

In the last couple of weeks I concentrated on the user experience, thus making setting up devices as easy as possible. I made a short screencast that shows the new assistant started by the Totem plugin.

If there's only one unconfigured device it's selected automatically. If you have multiple devices it's checked if there's already a device group of the same type and adds the device to the group, if possible. In addition, you don't have to care about channels.conf at all anymore. In expert mode, though, you still can create only a channels.conf file without actually setting up the devices.

The Totem plugin was improved, too. As you can see in the next screencast:

Everything that's available in gnome-dvb-control can be accessed from within Totem. You can browse EPG, manage recordings, schedule recordings and configure devices. The next step is to remove the existing DVB code from Totem and make the dvb-daemon plugin built-in.

Furthermore, I finally took care that live TV doesn't interfere with recordings. If a recording is coming up and you're watching a channel on a different transport stream, streaming is stopped so the recordings can start properly. That means you can still watch a different channel on the same transport stream (TS) or record multiple channels on the same TS simultaneously.

This are all unreleased features I'm talking about, but hopefully I can make a proper tarball release soon.

Now there are basically two items left on my GSoC todo list. Writing a ring buffer to provide a way to do time shifting, pause/rewind/fast-forward live TV and a plugin system for EPG aggregators.

July 02, 2009 09:51 PM

I've been heads down for the last few weeks getting a project out the door for a new customer. As I mentioned, this involves creating a virtual appliance. I decided, due to the circumstances of this deployment that the best option was the build an appliance factory that is capable of churning out new virtual machines at will. I'm going to describe how I did that in this post.

There are bascially three steps to creating a new image that runs the Kynetx Network Service (KNS):

1. Create a new virtual machine
2. Install packages and Perl libraries, create users, and otherwise configure the machine to run KNS
3. Deploy the KNS code and test it

I was exporing Kickstart files for automatically installing Fedora and CentOS when someone pointed me at Cobbler. Cobbler is a Linux installation server that is simply amazing. It includes templated kickstart files, DHCP and DNS servers, the ability to manage multiple distros and repositories, and a database for keeping it all straight.

You start by importing distros and images, then define profiles that combine those with kickstart files, and finally create system definitions for each machine refering to profiles. I pnly needed one distro, one repo, and one kickstart, so I ended up with multiple systems hanging off of one profile. Once that's done, a command called koan (kickstart over a network) is used on the Dom0 machine to create virtual machines as defined by the system definitions cobbler.

I carefully edited the kickstart file to create just the machine I wanted with the right packages installed. At this point, I was building new VMs and taking them down 20-30 times a day as I tested this. That's the beauty of automation--tacking up a machine is just dirt simple.

I was lucky that I'd already invested considerable effort in Puppet recipes for building the environment that KNS need to run, so the second step was almost done. In fact, with just a few edits, I had Puppet building the new VMs up.

The third step was also one that I'd spent some time on. I have a custom deploy script (in Perl) that deploys KNS code based on server role and takes care of all the little details like setting up the configuration files for the various servers.

Every system is slightly different, but I think there's a definite distinction between machine setup, system configuration, and code deployment. The first creates a fairly standard environment, the second configures it to a specific purpose, and the third manages the code.

Some thoughts on all of this:

• Some have asked "Why not put the code in Puppet (i.e. why use a deployment system)?" My answer is that code deployment is a dynamic process that I want more control of than puppet's automatic configuration provides. You could probably press Puppet into this, but it didn't seem to fit for me.
• I had to create a simple YAML-based configuration file for KNS to pull everything together. YAML was the right answer for this. I chose to put that configuration file in Puppet, but I think I'll pull it into the deployment process in the future.
• One missing piece is a database that everything can read system configurations from. Cobbler provides a light-weight one that may serve our purposes for a while, but something like iClassify is more flexible. Right now there's system information in Cobbler, Puppet, and the deploy script. There's a way to put additional attributes in Cobbler that we could use in other places.
• All of this--Cobbler, Puppet, and the deploy script--were installed and running on a virtual machine that we call the factory. That one image, once installed in Xen is capable of creating as many copies of each type of machine we run as needed.
• This can all be done on physical boxes too, of course, but I prefer the flexibility of virtual machines--even when only one will be running on the physical hardware. They can be moved, replicated, and managed with a lot more ease that physical hardware. Plus I have the ability to fire up new ones for QA or whatever without buying and installing new physical hardware. When a 8 core, 32 Gb box costs $4K, you can amortize that investment a lot with virtual machines.

Startups need to be lean. Achieving that goal in a compute-intensive business requires automation. Fortunately with tools like Cobbler and Puppet, automating the build-side of your infrastructure is not only possible, but fairly easy. We manage several dozen machines with only a few hours a week of effort. What's more, adding a new box for load or experimenting is as easy as typing a few commands and waiting 20-30 minutes.

Tags: kynetx system+administration cobbler puppet

July 02, 2009 09:30 PM

Al writes "The AcceleGlove from AnthroTronix, is the first fully programmable glove that records hand and finger movements. Other gloves — like 5DT's Data Glove, which is used primarily in virtual reality — normally cost $1,000 to $5,000, but the AcceleGlove costs just $499. The AcceleGlove comes with software that lets developers use Java to program it for any application they wish. AnthroTronix initially developed the glove with the US Department of Defense for robotic control but it could also be used in video games, sports training, or physical rehabilitation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 02, 2009 09:07 PM

‘Rock Star’ is perhaps the most abused phrase in the history of job listings. Nobody should be looking for a “rock star” accountant, HR recruiter or janitor. Whomever is posting these jobs is grossly misinformed as to the nature of rock stardom. Or accounting. Or both.

—AvoidThisJob.com on the differences between a Rock Star and a Planet Funk Store Manager

July 02, 2009 09:02 PM

An anonymous reader writes "According to Wired, 'A federal judge on Thursday overturned guilty verdicts against Lori Drew, and issued a directed acquittal on the three misdemeanor charges.'" A similar story in the L.A. Times notes that "The decision by US District Judge George H. Wu will not become final until his written ruling is filed, probably next week." Update: 07/02 21:15 GMT by T : For those not following, Lori Drew's three convictions sprang from charges of online harassment of Megan Meier, a Missouri teenager whose suicide was linked to Drew's actions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 02, 2009 08:23 PM

Attila Dimedici writes "A code expert just cracked a code used by a friend of Thomas Jefferson in a letter written to Jefferson some 200 years ago. This code is fairly easy to crack using a computer, but extremely difficult without one. I think it would have been much harder if the author had not included an indication as to what code algorithm he used in the letter accompanying the coded message."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

July 02, 2009 07:46 PM