Stormy asks if oss can transition to a web services world, and uses the Etherpad open sourcing as an example. First off, I think it’s going to have to regardless if it wants it or not.

A few weeks ago my python-mako broke on my Lucid system, and I just didn’t care to fix it right then, so my gwibber was effectively broken. But I wanted to still use twitter. So I used Chrome’s app mode to embed a website called hahlo and then use that as my desktop application. In that screenshot you’ll also see my google tasks as an app, looks alot like Tasque! And I’ve already talked about alice. I already use gmail and gtalk for mail and IM, what’s another few apps?

So as I was explaining this over IM with Ryan Paul and the usual “yeah but you don’t get native widgets”, “you have to give your credentials to other sites”, “so now instead of 15 desktop apps taking all your memory you have 15 browser instances taking up all your memory”, and the usual bits. So I made the decision to try to use as many “web apps” on my desktop for as long as I could to see “how long I would last”. That was 2 weeks ago. Today I’ve determined that I’m not really going back. When Chrome does a “Create Application Shortcuts” thing it creates a .desktop file. I put these in my Ubuntu One folder. Voila, I am now “syncing” my applications across all my machines.

One by one my desktop apps are being replaced by web versions that let me get access to my data wherever I am, and I’m totally ok with that, so I think OSS apps will have to compete in this space. I know having your life in the cloud is controversial for some people, but not for me.

I generally agree with what Stormy says, it would be nice to have a one stop shop of open web services for me to have all my stuff on. I think etherpad is a bad example however, because etherpad has the potential to be very very awesome for OSS conferences and events. Currently right now for events like UDS we use a tool called Gobby, which is great but has many limitations. First off, it’s a seperate application that people need to have installed and it can be flaky. It’s not really integrated into anything we use right now so when we start a session someone asks “which gobby document?”, and then you have 16 million colors to choose from, etc. Etherpad is much easier to use, it doesn’t need anything but a browser. My ideal goal would be pad.ubuntu.com, and each one has a corresponding document that is the same as the irc and spec name so that we have pad.ubuntu.com/community/lucid/developerweek-roadmap or whatever. The service just becomes another item in the URL namespace for that project.

I would imagine that for Summit and GUADEC it would be great for people to use etherpad.gnome.org to work on their ideas, and then be able to push a button to have their notes pushed right to live.gnome.org. Heck, someone can very well just make the etherpad UI be the editing interface for Moin and we could just work in realtime editors all the time! The possibilities are definitely there; I can see organizations like GNOME, KDE, etc. having etherpad instances as a service to developers like they have IRC, wikis, and mailing lists. I think this is valuable for them because organizations want to control their data, that’s why they have their own bugtrackers and infrastructure. The opening of the code let’s them at least experiment with this. I don’t think projects will want to run a service like Sugar or something, but for a tool like this I think it would be great.

Sure, no one likes when code is just thrown over the wall, that’s not going to stop people from messing with it and forming their own communities around it. And if it doesn’t work out and the project dies then that’s a shame, but like everything else, evolution doesn’t really take sides it just drives forward and the things that adapt to that environment move on. I personally hope this one lives and thrives!

Someone in IRC asks: “Wait, so you say the desktop is obsolete, why don’t you just say that.” I leave that up to you to discuss! For me personally there are some things that need to be local, there’s no web thing that can replace Banshee for me, I wish that web apps could use my notify-osd, and a wiki just doesn’t cut it compared to Tomboy. However there was a time when I couldn’t imagine using webmail and now the thought of using a local mail client frightens me. We’ll see!

So I’ve been really pumped up about getting a snuggie as a gift. Mine was even the deluxe, it has like pockets and stuff. Anyway, I have been using this thing all week and I love it. Except it’s more designed for you to lay in the couch, not sitting in a computer chair – it’s basically a big hospital gown, not a poncho or anything like that. So it was kind of falling down on occasion, so I wanted to mod it to add a belt (I am using a big paperclip to wrap the open end around myself.) I figure, HEY, if I wrap it around my waist it will be more manageable.

So I was having this conversation with a friend thinking I was being clever and that this is the greatest thing ever. But it turns out I’m a total moron:

Trevor: so basically it’s a robe?
me: no, more like a hospital gown, the back is open
it’s more for like, laying on the couch

Trevor: turn it around…
Trevor: and then tell me if it’s not a robe

me: OMG.

This snuggie guy is laughing all the way to the bank I tell you.

Thanks to the bot-like Fabien Tassin there are now Chromium builds of the “Beta Channel” the recent Chrome is based off of.

https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/beta/

fta’s original PPA was tracking the Chromium builds every day. So every day it would build new debs. Depending on what landed in upstream Chromium this could be good or bad. This specific PPA is of the beta channel, so it is the upstream that Google Chrome Beta is built off of, as such it’s not updated every day, just what lands in the more tested Beta Channel.

If you want to use Chromium but not experience the churn of the dailies this is the build you want. If you don’t like the auto-updating-I-put-something-in-your-sources.list.d .deb Google puts out and prefer a non-branded experience then this is what you want.

I just ran into alice, which is an irc client you run on a box, and then you connect to it via you’re browser. So I installed it (forgot the last time I used CPAN), then went to localhost:8080/view. It has a little settings box so you can set your prefs and channels.

Then I went to my laptop and put in http://192.168.1.101:8080/view and it just worked. And by just work I mean connected to the same session where I left off. This is basically screen+irssi, except I can do it over the web on any browser. OMFG. Add some auth and ssl and I will be set!

Why would I do this? So I can do this:

Now on the desktop combine that with Chrome’s App Mode (or Mozilla’s Prism):

I see something about libnotify but it doesn’t seem to work for me, also there are some layout quirks, for example the horizontal channels just scroll off the right side of the window and there’s no way to scroll there. Searching on the internet only shows me the CPAN resources and the author – I wish I would have known about this years ago! Who knows Perl? This is like, so close. Has anyone used this before? I’m going to keep messing with it and see about filing some bug reports but just had to get the word out.

One more local app down!

EDIT: http://www.donneker.de/projects/web-irssi/ (!)

As usual, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre has helped me fix my idea problems. When I was in Ireland I realized that I wanted a “extras” package for Ubuntu. Things that I would normally kickstart or add to a friend’s machine when I’m hooking them up. Apps like Pitivi, Miro, GTG, etc.

Such a side project would need to be classy; adding great apps, as if we had a larger CD, but not swapping out apps or anything like that. I had the idea of having something like a b-side to a record. Now before you think “crap apps that don’t make side a”, think of things like “Garage Days”. Awesome songs that are better than most hits, but apps people use, so it’s not a big wildcard.

Thus my idea for b-sides was born. I got a lame metapackage started and Mathieu actually made it work. Here’s the PPA and here’s the list of apps. Add the metapackage and it’s like Matt and I coming to your house and adding to your Ubuntu experience!

Thanks to Matt for making my idea work! Thanks to David Siegel for the name, and mpt and Ryan Paul for the initial app suggestions. We’ll likely keep these apps static, so if you want to modify it, please feel free to take it and make your own remix! Remixes I would like to see:

K-sides (hah, guess what this would be!)
Sysadmin Remix (with your htop, terminator, etc.)
Mega-art remix! (With tons o’ artwork)

This saves me time because I can just tell people to install b-sides instead of remembering what apps I install over and over. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Someone was keen enough to point out that this is basically the “Fifth Toe” from the old GNOME days, but for Ubuntu. That sounds about right.

We’ve had to make an adjustment to the Open Week schedule for tomorrow. The “Ask Mark” and “AppArmor” sessions have been swapped. Ask Mark is now on Friday at 1700UTC and AppArmor is tomorrow at 1500UTC. Please see the schedule for the change.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

So about half way through this cycle I moved to squid for my apt-caching needs since all the others ones would fail or be rewrites of other ones or something. Ends up squid is real easy to use and I get the bonus of caching everything instead of just .debs. It’s been real solid for me. Here’s how mine is set up if you’re looking to do a bunch of upgrades and want to save time and load on your local mirror.

1. Find a machine you want to be your server.
2. Install squid: sudo apt-get install squid
3. Configure squid by editing /etc/squid/squid.conf (Warning, this file is probably the most commented file in the history of UNIX so it’s big)

By default squid won’t accept connections from remote hosts so I modified one line to be like this (My server is not internet-facing):

http_access allow all #forgive me kees


And … add this to the bottom (I nicked this from another blog and cranked the numbers up but can’t find it now for some reason, shucks for attribution):

refresh_pattern deb$ 1577846 100% 1577846
refresh_pattern udeb$ 1577846 100% 1577846
refresh_pattern Packages.gz$ 1440 100% 1440
cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 15000 2 8
maximum_object_size 409600 KB


4. Restart squid: sudo /etc/init.d/squid restart
5. Configure your machines to use your server, either by setting it in the GNOME Proxy gui thing (squid defaults to port 3128 so make sure you specify that), or in http_proxy in your environment, or for apt in /etc/apt/apt.conf:
Acquire::http::Proxy "http://192.168.1.117:3128"
Setting it in the GUI GNOME thing is easiest for me.

6. Confirm it’s working. On the server do sudo tail -F /var/log/squid/access.log to watch the log. Now go to one machine and do an apt-get update and upgrade and the log should show a bunch of TCP_MISS lines for each deb you download. Now go to the second machine and do the same thing. This time each deb should show something like TCP_REFRESH_HIT, which means squid is intercepting the request and sending the deb directly to that machine. Rinse and repeat. This will also work for PPAs and whatnot.

Random tips:

• Use the same mirrors on every machine. If you have a mirror on one machine and the other machines don’t the debs won’t get cached. (Anyone know a fancy rewrite or something to get around this?)
• Do one machine and then do the others when that one is done, otherwise if the one machine is partially done the other ones will catch up and you’ll end up with all the machines trying to pull the last few debs at the same time.
• I haven’t figured out an easy way to have my laptop use a proxy when it’s connected to my home network, but have no proxy set when travelling, I have to do it by hand.
• I set one machine to autodownload updates in the update-manager prefs, that way when I wake up in the morning the debs are already cached, making for quick upgrades as soon as you wake up. That’s what everyone does first thing in the morning right?

Any other bandwidth saving tips? Leave a comment!

I’ll be speaking in Toronto this weekend at the Ontario Linuxfest, specifically I’ll be talking about the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, as well as showing some of the Moblin Remix hotness. Make sure you stop by the Ubuntu booth and hang out with Ralph Janke…

Can you believe it’s been five years since Warty?

Does it feel like five years? I don’t think so. I feel old! Anyway, here’s an old pic from UDS Sydney back when I was fatter and dholbach looked like he was 14:

From Ubuntu and GNOME

Rick Spencer’s Quickly video tutorials are now available in a more digestible form in the Ubuntu Developer’s Blip channel, which is syndicated to the youtube channel of the same name.

blip.tv allows us to post natively in ogg video, so check out episodes one, two, and three. To download directly just click the download link at the bottom.

Alan Pope and I have now set it up that native ogg videos will be uploaded to the blip channels for both the developer channel and the screencasts channel in native ogg. Blip will syndicate it out to youtube and the Internet Archive, so that’s useful. If you’re looking at making video content that is relevant to Ubuntu people please let me know and I’ll help you get it out there.

It’s that time of the year folks. Ubuntu Open Week, the IRC workshop that’s taking the world by storm. We’ve got a great schedule of talks for you from some really great people from the Ubuntu Community. The wiki page has all the information you need to participate. Hope to see you there!

Update: Speak Spanish? If so, there’s an entire week of Spanish Open Week goodness available as well, thanks to the people who put that together!

I remember once hearing a radio interview with Kirk Hammett where he mentions that he’s still waiting for the band’s greatest record and song to be written. That’s because he’s never satisfied and in his mind perfection is always one step away. It’s the pursuit that matters right? I am surrounded by these kind of people every day.

It’s been a stressful few weeks for a bunch of us. October and April always suck because the release is coming up, we’ve got Jams, release parties, planning for UDS, and all sorts of crazy shit going on. I was kind of sucking a few weeks ago. It was one of those bad days where I felt like I didn’t get anything done, I was having empathy problems so I was having crashers and missing IMs, and just when I would get it working Ken Vandine would ping me and have me break it more for the sake of testing. I just couldn’t get a break because everyone was GO GO GO. So I was feeling a bit down, but let’s not dwell on that. Today when I logged in and saw what we have accomplished this cycle I want to take a moment before crunchtime to thank some people who have done a really awesome job.

I am going to thank some really hardworking people who make Ubuntu awesome. And since I can’t possibly name them all it’s up to you, Planet Ubuntu, to add to this list, consider this your meme for the weekend. I am going to touch up on my favorites:

• The Ubuntu Community Team – and I don’t mean just the four horsemen. Alan Pope, Nick Ali, Mike Basinger, Amber Graner, Lyz Krumbach, Nathan Handler, Rich Johnson, Christophe Sauthier, Jacob Petticord, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre, Laura Czajkowski, Dave Walker, Greg Grossmeier, Jono Bacon, James Westby, David Planella, Daniel Holbach, Dan and Chris down in Florida … wow, the list is endless.
• Upstreams – This list is waaaaaaaay too long for one post.
• Xavier Claessens and Guillaume Desmottes for being rocking upstreams with empathy, in fact, the entire crew at Collabora rocks.
• I’d like to thank Ryan Paul for working on Gwibber for Karmic despite not having enough time.
• Sandy Armstrong (Tomboy), who was really a great sport working along side our Ubuntu One folks on note syncing. (yeah yeah Brad, you rock too). Also thanks for being so patient with regard to our SRU policies.
• Seif Lofty – the Zeitgeist crazyman is unstoppable. I don’t know whether I should be feeding you more caffeine or shooting you with a tranquilizer, it’s all good.
• Paul Cutler – I’d like to thank you for recharging my GNOME battery. I still owe you an article. :-/
• GCDS People (omg crossdesktop) – The folks at KDAB, couch.io, codethink (Rob and crew), Yorba, imendio, lamendo…etc. Also I don’t think Guy Lunardi at Novell ever got props for paying for dinner for like 30+ some people on the last night.
• Puppet – Shout out to Luke Kanies and Andrew Pollock.
• Dan Nurmi and the crew at Eucalyptus.
• Debian – Thanks to all the Debian folks who continue to rock and roll. Thanks to Uncle Steve, all of debian-uk, Lucas Nussbaum, Martin Krafft, Bdale and Edale Garbee, and John Wright.
• The entire Boot Experience Team – I remember a few months ago Mat Tomaszewski showed off a demo of what the boot experience would look like. I kind of shrugged it off as “just a demo, it’ll never really look like that.” But it does. Kudos to Mat for the design, and Cody Russell for making alot of that happen. Underneath it all is Scott James Remnant’s plumbing.
• The “Is it a Store or a Center People” – In 20 years there will be a TV show about Matthew Paul Thomas and Michael Vogt and how they were roomates and how they get into wacky adventures. It will be epic. I’ve got a whole angle for it and everything; it’ll be like a kid’s cartoon, and one guy will be the funny ‘out of control’ one and one guy will be the straight man. I have no idea who the straight man will be. Stay tuned.
• I’d like to thank the entire server team for just brutally chomping through EC2, Eucalyptus, and the 39,847,592,348 things they need to do.
• Anyone who had anything to do with 100 papercuts gets a hug.
• The ubuntu-news team is just awesome.
• Bazaar – Great job reaching 2.0, and Emma Jane’s website redux is \m/
• Launchpad – off the hook, way too many people to thank, I’ll let someone more awesome do it.
• I’d like to thank Eric Hammond for shining a light on an entire area of computing that I knew nothing about.
• Thanks to Ken Vandine who constantly forces me to help test shit. I hate the work you make me do, I want to punch you so bad sometimes.

My final hug is reserved for Kyle Rankin, my partner in Linux Crime, for his heartfelt acknowledgement in the Ubuntu Server Book; There aren’t metal horns brutal enough for you bro. Well, that’s my SHORT LIST. Add your own, blog it. Go forth and hug. Who are your heroes?

PS – Ken Wimer, you are fucking awesome.

Thanks to SRT Solutions for hosting us!

I will see you all tomorrow and Saturday at THE Ohio Linuxfest. I’ll be floating around tomorrow, probably spending time in the Hackathon area with other ubu-maniacs. If you’re around consider dropping by, I am keen on having an impromptu bug jam or if you need some Ubuntu tips or something.

Thanks to Alan Pope’s great work there are now two Personal Package Archives available for Tomboy. One day in IRC Sandy Armstrong asked if I could help them get the ball rolling on their own PPA and that Alan was all ready to go. Here is the announcement of the PPA. There’s some things I like to recommend to upstreams when they create a PPA that I thought I would share with you.

• PPAs get popular and posted over the web so it’s important that you think about namespace like all URLs, this is why I usually create a team and make a team PPA rather than individual PPAs. Plus it looks more professional to have a PPA named after your project rather than an individual. This leads to point two:
• Using a team PPA helps with the bus factor. Even if the team has one person when they move on (because people invariably move around) someone else can just be added to the team as opposed to making users follow which PPA tomboy is supposed to be in depending on who is around at the time.
• Make as many PPAs as you want. If you want testing on a new version make a development one but keep a stable one around. Throw some dailies up if you want to, the infrastructure is all there. PPAs have a copy feature so you can “predeploy” .debs to a PPA to test with, and then just copy them over to the “production” PPA, this helps reduce brown paper bag errors.

Reminder! Tomorrow will be the last “How to Run a Jam” tutorial session in IRC. Join me at 1500UTC in #ubuntu-classroom for tips and tricks, and don’t forget to join us for the Ubuntu Global Jam the weekend of 2-4 October!

Chris Jones, creator of Terminator has been working on a small little tool that you might like. It’s called Lifesaver. It’s a small screensaver that searches for “ubuntu” on twitter and identi.ca and then presents it on your screen all slick-like. Here’s what it looks like on my dual monitors:

Cute huh? Chris has a PPA for Karmic here. Unfortunately the version of goocanvas in Jaunty is too old to do what he needed to do to get a PPA working for Jaunty. So if you’re feeling like contributing, you might want to check out the code and see if you can make it work on Jaunty to give Chris a hand, patches in this area are very welcome.

Ubuntu Local teams, if you’re participating in the Ubuntu Global Jam please don’t forget to add your team to the participation list!

Greg Grossmeier has announced the time and place for the Michigan Team’s Global Jam session. Hey, if a State fan can go to Ann Arbor in October then anyone can participate! Looking for a place to Jam? Check out the list, and if your LoCo isn’t on there, then plan one! More information here.

Go Green, Go White! errr, I mean … go Ubuntu.

Dinosaurs and Open Source! You know, for those days you want to read a review on a EEE PC and ankylosaur tail club function on one blog. Speaking of dinos, Dinosauria is coming to a close, and I will miss the hat …

Photo by Craig Maloney

Andre Klapper would like to pass along his highly detailed infographic for bug triagers on where the URL field is in GNOME Bugzilla. Ubuntu GNOME bug triagers, take note!

So I love covers, in fact, I love the covers station on last.fm. I love pseudo-covers too, songs that are clearly based on something else, but you just can’t quite catch what. So like, Weezer’s sweater song is basically Metallica’s Sanitarium. Duh.

One of my favorites is Sum 41’s The Bitter End. So instead of doing a Metallica cover, they just basically rewrite the song and throw out something new as an homage. I dig it, especially since “Battery” is one of my favorite songs. I love trying to figure these out.

I am digging Disturbed’s “Land of Confusion” lately, and I’m sure those of you that have been to UDS have heard Jono play Children of Bodom’s “Oops I did it again”. Yes, it exists.

What are your favorite covers? Have a good weekend!

Behold, my first screencast, it’s about linking bugs to upstream trackers. I am having a hard time figuring out how to do the <video> tag in wordpress (it keeps removing(!) it when I do a publish), so if you know how please post a comment so can add it to the docs.

(Yes, I know I speak way too fast, it’s kind of how I roll. :-/ )

At the end of every work day I check the wiki’s RecentChanges for cool new stuff. I mean, who doesn’t do that. I ran into some of James Westby’s work on daily builds, specifically this page on BzrBuilder and I was able to make a daily build of an upstream in about 5 minutes, that includes reading the docs! Here’s what I did. First off, pick a project. I picked Quickly, since it’s the new black.

Then install the bzr plugin like in the instructions. Then I created a recipe file like so:

jorge@bojack:~/dailies$ cat quickly.recipe
# bzr-builder format 0.2 deb-version 1.0+{revno}+{time}
lp:quickly


Then it’s ONE command:


bzr dailydeb quickly.recipe --key-id FFC27DD0 --dput ppa:jorge/ppa


Booyah, that’s it. Now, we got lucky here since Quickly is all in launchpad already and has a debian directory already in there. For other projects I suspect that grabbing them from vcs-imports and then merging in the packaging branch will also work, however I have not done this yet, but if you want to try it, the instructions are available. So if your project is already in launchpad you can start making dailies right now. Make sure you read up on more docs.

More than one way…

James isn’t the only person looking into dailies. The now-famous Fabien Tassin has been working on this as well, but taking a different approach. His scripts are available here:

https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~fta/+junk/ppa-scripts
https://code.edge.launchpad.net/~fta/+junk/ppa-confs

Fabien’s daily builds have been insanely popular, the chromium PPA alone has over 10k users (and that’s just the fractional popcon numbers). Also, odd that people keep the wine build around, but whatever.

He also has them for the various mozilla projects, gwibber, and has just set up one for network-manager. Other people are using it as well. Since they were announced in February the Mozilla daily builds have about 10,000 users of Firefox and over 1000 of Thunderbird. (Sorry no graphs for that, but look at numbers.

Great Power, Great Responsibility

Alexander mentions in his blog post on the ideal type of person to use daily builds.

• All advanced users that run the current ubuntu development release (e.g. karmic for now) that also want to focus their testing efforts on network-manager
• Users that have filed a bug against NM which then got fixed upstream can verify the fix by trying our daily build.
• Since we are targeting 0.8 for karmic the dailies reflect what will go into karmic soon. So if you like to run the bleeding edge and like to report issues right when they happen, this PPA is meant for you too.
• We also have jaunty builds, but those are not yet fully tested. If you want and run jaunty please try them and report your findings back (of course, be sure that you know how to recover from not having network-manager network)

And James points out: “Obviously, as there is automation involved in the process the resulting packages can be risky as they haven’t had human verification. This means that there has to be some care taken with them, and the project and packager should do there best to ensure that the risks are minimized. They are also not something that an average user should be using. With due diligence the benefits can certainly outweigh the risks though.”

My view is that people will always want crack, and the availability of things like PPAs certainly lowers the barrier for users to use your software. But those people aren’t necessarily capable of giving you the kind of bug reports you need to fix problems, or things might be in a state where you know things are broken and don’t need bug reports spamming you every day. Chromium even tells you “Don’t file bugs without doing the work!”

I am interested in how upstreams perceive the idea of daily builds, I’m sure there are plenty of plusses and minuses to having them. However, I am convinced that Chromium’s spike in popularity in Ubuntu is because of the ease in which it is to use them. So the real question becomes, do the benefits of getting more testers outweigh people arguing in circles?