UK Linux User Groups

Why would someone write Python and mix tabs and spaces. Do you really want to have random arbitrary bugs … grr….

:%s/^I/    //g

Grr. grr. grr. stupid programmer. Grr.. That’s my final moan. honest.

One thing that really annoys me is when I come to look at the log file and I see something like :

blah blah did blah blah blah foo blah random comment fish blah some data which spans many lines or does it?

This is bad, as I’ve got absolutely no idea where the messages are from (so have to grep around a code base), and I’ve no idea WHEN they were made. At best I can look at timestamps on this file and figure out a timeframe (assuming logrotate is in use so there is a definite (must be after X timestamp)).

What’s far better from a maintenance point of view :

2010/07/29 09:33 filewhatever.py:355 blah blah blah did blah blah

2010/07/29 09:34 filewhatever.py:355 blah blah blah did blah blah

2010/07/29 09:35 filewhatever.py:355 data received from x is {{{hello world…. }}}

Changes are :

1. Date and time stamps (in python: datetime.datetime.now())
2. Recording where the message came from (see the ‘inspect’ python module – inspect.stack()[1][1] for calling file, and inspect.stack()[1][2] for the line number, or debug_backtrace() in PHP)
3. Wrapping any interesting output (e.g. from a remote service) in obvious delimiters (e.g. {{{ and }}} )  - without e.g. timestamps or some other common line prefix, I’ve no way of knowing what’s from where, especially if the output spreads over many lines.

Other good ideas :

1. Different severities of log message (classic: debug, info, error type annotation with appropriate filtering).
2. Make sure logrotate is in use, or a simple shell script via cron, to stop the log file growing too large and causing problems.
3. Stop writing your own logging mechanisms and use ones provided by the system (e.g. Python has a logger built in which does all of the above and more)

EOR - EndOfRant

Are you good folks aware of what is happening on 27th – 29th August 2010. But of course, it is the Ubuntu Global Jam!

In the last few cycles we have organized and run an event called the Ubuntu Global Jam. The idea was simple: encourage our awesome global Ubuntu community to get together in the same room to work on bugs, translations, documentation, testing and more. And they did, all over the world, as can be seen here.

To make the event as simple and accessible as possible, we have picked five topic areas and we are encouraging you lovely people to organize an event with one or more of them:

• Bugs – finding, triaging and fixing bugs.
• Testing – testing the new release and reporting your feedback.
• Upgrade – upgrading to Maverick from Lucid and reporting your upgrade experience.
• Documentation – writing documentation about how to use Ubuntu and how to join the community.
• Translations – translating Ubuntu and helping to make it available in everyone’s local language.
• Packaging – packaging software for Ubuntu users to install with a clock.
• Other – other types of contribution such as marketing and advocacy etc.

With six primary methods of getting involved, there is something for everyone in this rocking global event.

One thing that I am keen that everyone remembers: you don’t have to be an official developer, packager or programmer to take part in the Ubuntu Global Jam. Also, lets not forget that Ubuntu Global Jam events are a fantastic place to learn and improve your skills: you can sit next to someone who can show you how to do something or explain something in more detail.

If this is all sounding right up your street and you fancy organizing an event, go and read this page and then add your event to the LoCo Directory by following these instructions.

Rock and roll: let’s make this one to remember. Start your engines, folks…

I have always been a fan of helping in any way I can to encourage people to support small organizations and businesses who are doing their best to be successful by working hard and providing a friendly, honest service.

For the earlier part of this week I am in The Hague at GUADEC, and I stumbled across a small espresso shop that is the embodiment of these kinds of small business. It is impeccably clean, the food is awesome, the coffee is fantastic, it is good value, and the guy who runs the shop is the definition of kind and welcoming. Oh, and it has great wi-fi too.

So, I wanted to share with all my friends who are visiting GUADEC too to come and support this guy’s small business, drink some coffee and leach his Internet.

The address is: 7 o’clock Espressobar, Wagenstraat 187 2512 AW Den Haag and if you are walking back to the hotel before you walk over the small bridge you will see it on the left with a big Coca-Cola sign above it.

More details on the website.

As I prepare for the third Ignite Liverpool event, I found my first talk online, on urban food - from foraging to guerilla gardening. As a pecha kucha style talk it’s a bit of a gallop, but manages to cover a few points. (It also doesn’t jump after a minute like the Manchester recording did.)

• VIVID - Inbindable Volume
  '...The multiple screens journey through the Brutalist space of an empty library interior which unfolds in an assemblage of tracking shots...'

Some time ago we created the Team Reporting facility in Ubuntu, and I am pleased to see that LoCo Teams are using Team Reports to kep us all up to date on the awesome progress going on across the community.

I just wanted to remind you good folks of where to find the reports and how to get involved.

Last week I was in Prague with my team; the first with Ahmed since he joined. It was an awesome week and it was useful to checkpoint our progress.

We also took the first ever full team photos of us, first in our room and second at the end of the week having a drink:

Thanks to Gord for the photos.

This photo makes me feel incredibly to be part of such an awesome team. Rock and roll!

The volume of Chakra comments has been steadily increasing over the last month or so, for those who don’t know Chakra is a KDE module Linux distribution based on Arch Linux, I have installed it a couple of times and run it ‘Live’ from a USB drive but that was when it first came out. The previous method for getting the image on the drive was to use Unetbootin on Linux or Win32-image-writer on Windows however the project appears to had dropped that method and gone for a isohybrid based method.

For reasons that are not important I decided to go the ‘Windows’ method this required me to obviously download the iso then download isohybrid and dd for Windows I stuck them both in a folder C:\dd then opened a console and did cd c:\dd and ran the first command as per the Chakra wiki. OK so I got the ubiquitous Mr Anvin welcome screen and? Well  that’s just it, and? There was no activity or progress bar and no blinking light showing activity on my HDD? “This is not working I’m sure of it?”, with a shrug and a sigh I issued the dd command back came the message “Get lost something else is using the file!” what? Maybe I shouldn’t have issued the isohybrid and dd commands separately maybe they was all in one go so to speak?

After 3 reboots, ergo three tries, I gave up and copied the iso over to my Dell Mini 10 that’s running Ubuntu Lucid and is the machine I wanted to have a look at Chakra on. The idea was that I would now try from Linux, having checked that I have isohybrid installed I discovered it is in fact part of syslinux, thanks for telling me, which was installed as was dd so it looked like we was good to go. I issued the isohybrid command “Never heard of it mate?” what? Yes apparently there is a bug #553581 which supposedly is fixed but I reinstalled and still had the problem.

I did try and get the patch but for the life of me couldn’t figure out how, oh and then couldn’t find my Launchpad login details and slowly the day went from bad to worse. Having wasted three to four hours I gave up true its possibly down to my machines but I would have thought the Windows method would have worked? Thing is I cant be bothered now so will probably have a play with openSUSE 11.3 instead which is sad for the project.

• Morrisons. You are the worst supermarket ever. Let me buy single bananas. #
• Even with an iPhone and google maps etc I got lost around Bentley / webheath. #amireallyawoman #mapreadingfail #
• Cycled to arrow valley park (redditch) and back, via lickey hill (out) and cycle route 5 on the way back….. #
• Cycling with a dead weight toddler in a rear seat is hard. This might have to become a regular routine. #
• Toddler cycling day (well I'm cycling, he's along for the ride) #
• Hmm. Apple case app crashed my phone. Great. Shame there aren't more pictures or info provided to help me choose #iPhone4 #case #
• Wish subversion would let me revert line ranges within a file so I can easily avoid committing whitespace changes etc. #svn #
• FOOL WOMEN into thinking their opinions are valued by nodding occasionally and saying 'mmm' /via @VizTopTips #
• Say the word and I'll be gone. Say the word and I'll be gone forever, and ever. #
• Yey. Query time reduced from 2.5 seconds to 0 seconds. And a happy customer soon. #
• http://www.myconfinedspace.com/2010/07/20/proper-use-of-your-and-there/ #

• Morrisons. You are the worst supermarket ever. Let me buy single bananas. #
• Even with an iPhone and google maps etc I got lost around Bentley / webheath. #amireallyawoman #mapreadingfail #
• Cycled to arrow valley park (redditch) and back, via lickey hill (out) and cycle route 5 on the way back….. #
• Cycling with a dead weight toddler in a rear seat is hard. This might have to become a regular routine. #
• Toddler cycling day (well I'm cycling, he's along for the ride) #
• Hmm. Apple case app crashed my phone. Great. Shame there aren't more pictures or info provided to help me choose #iPhone4 #case #
• Wish subversion would let me revert line ranges within a file so I can easily avoid committing whitespace changes etc. #svn #
• FOOL WOMEN into thinking their opinions are valued by nodding occasionally and saying 'mmm' /via @VizTopTips #
• Say the word and I'll be gone. Say the word and I'll be gone forever, and ever. #
• Yey. Query time reduced from 2.5 seconds to 0 seconds. And a happy customer soon. #
• http://www.myconfinedspace.com/2010/07/20/proper-use-of-your-and-there/ #

Lately, I’ve been interviewing Launchpad users to learn more about how they work with Launchpad and what they think of new features we’re proposing.

Until now, this has been mostly face to face, either at the Ubuntu Developer Summits or Canonical’s London office. Talking in person seems to be the best way of doing this: as the interviewer, I can see exactly which part of a proposed page the person is looking at when they pull a certain face, for example.

However, doing it this way greatly limits who I get to speak to. Not everybody who uses Launchpad attends UDS or is within easy travelling distance of central London during the work day.

So, I’ve been looking at ways of doing this remotely. There are some important constraints:

• pretty much anyone should be able to take part
• no special equipment should be needed
• it should cost nothing, or very little, to conduct.

Recording Skype video calls in Ubuntu

As it seems to meet my requirements, I’m going to give Skype video calling a go. And I say “Skype”, rather than anything else, for reasons that I’ll now explain.

I’ve spent quite some time trying to find a straightforward way to record video calls in Ubuntu. I’ve come up with nothing, so here’s one way that seems to work:

• capture the audio using Skype Call Recorder
• capture video using GTK-RecordMyDesktop (apt-getable)
• splice the two together in a video editor.

Test calls have worked. I’ll post again with a report on how it worked in practice.

I've recently been delving more deeply into Debian Lenny, and have had to learn all the package management and administration tricks all over again. I compiled a little table of command equivalents to help me remember how to do most of the things I need to do on a daily basis:

Package Management

Task

Red-Hat based

Debian based

Install updates

yum update

apt-get update; apt-get upgrade

Find package

yum search packagename

apt-cache search packagename

Install package

yum install packagename

apt-get install packagename

Uninstall package

yum remove packagename

apt-get remove packagename

List installed packages

rpm -qa|grep keyword

dpkg --get-selections|grep keyword

 

Service Management

Task

Red-Hat based

Debian based

List installed services

chkconfig --list

sysv-rc-conf --list

Enable service

chkconfig servicename on

sysv-rc-conf servicename on

Disable service

chkconfig servicename off

sysv-rc-conf servicename off

Start service

service servicename start

/etc/init.d/servicename start

Stop service

service servicename stop

/etc/init.d/servicename stop

Restart service

service servicename restart

/etc/init.d/servicename restart

Service status

service servicename status

/etc/init.d/servicename status

 

Configuration Files

Task

Red-Hat based

Debian based

Network interfaces

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* one file per interface

/etc/network/interfaces one file contains all interfaces

 

Comments

The wife was involved in a car accident on Tuesday night, 20.7.10, my wife works 30 mile away from home she has done this trip for 15 odd years now and has already had one other car accident on that journey in all that time.

The normal routine is I take her part way and a work colleague takes her the rest of the way on this occasion I had to take her a little further as a new co worker was providing the transport. Everything seemed fine my wife said goodbye and got into her co workers car and they set off for work and I headed back home, I arrived back at about 9.30pm and settled down to watch some TV around 10pm my mobile rang “Pete your wife has been in a car crash and is on her way to Stafford hospital” Stafford is around 20 miles from our house.

Upon arrival
Me “Hi I’ve had a phone call my wife has been in a car crash”
Reception: “There is no one here with that name”
Me: “What?”
Reception: “Maybe they took them to Burton-on-Trent?”
Me: “What?”

The next thing an ambulance driver appeared clutching some documents;

Ambulance man: “Hi Mr Cannon? We have your wife she’s OK we’ll get you through in a minute”
Me: “Where have you been? I’ve come 20 miles and you done about 8 mile! How come I’m here before you?” (So much for the ‘Golden Hour’ my friends)

So as you would expect in these situations things look far worse than they actually are, my wife was on a stretcher on a back board with one of those orange Darth Vader head restraints she has heavy bruising, one of those seat belt marks and her neck was hurting but luckily no broken bones or cuts. As far as I could [can] tell the front tyre burst and they hit a concrete bollard which I suspect is one of the posts on the bridge over the reservoir, this sent the vehicle into a spin whereby the car rebounded off the opposite bridge wall thus spinning them a bit more before what remained of the car finally came to a halt. Given that the road was wet this actually worked in their favour as if the road had of been dry there was a greater chance of the car flipping and even possibly entering the reservoir! As there was four people in the car they had two ambulances, fire engines and of course the police. I suspect the road was closed for a fair few hours which would have been a nightmare.

The following day was when things started to hit home a bit, as you can imagine lumps and bumps have started to appear and aches and pains we went to see our GP who prescribed pain killers and rest arriving back home the phone calls started from my wife’s friends even her employer rang to see if she was OK which I thought was nice then the bombshell!

Now at the hospital I heard someone say “They (or we) had two cars and cancelled the insurance on one, I hope its cancelled on the right one?” I passed this off as some sort of stress relieving joke remember I was more worried about the wife at the time, the driver rang my wife to see if she was OK then said “The police have called there’s no insurance on the car!” now I’m sorry there is no excuse in my book, you check your certificate thoroughly when it comes through to make sure all the details are correct which makes me wonder if she knew she had no insurance.

We have contacted a solicitor but I suspect its going to get messy, fortunately nobody is dead or seriously injured, I doubt there is anything more to say other than say a court case for no insurance if there is I’ll update this post.

• Transverge! Marcos Novak responds to "Architects in Cyberspace, or not" | ARCH Virtual
  “@ARCHVirtual: Transverge! Marcos Novak responds to “Architects in Cyberspace, or not” http://bit.ly/9Wni4A #secondlife” #bm

• Good morning world. #
• . @ChairmumMiaow is on @BBcWm tomorrow
  Morning (fri) to talk about upcoming breastfeeding picnic (Monday – http://bit.ly/brumbfpicnic) #
• Breastfeeding picnic in Birmingham – monday 19th July 12-3pm http://bit.ly/brumbfpicnic see fb group. #Birmingham #bfpicnic #
• Sblug html5 talk from @brucel might start soon. #
• So much for an early night. Potential office viewing tomorrow…. *crosses fingers* #
• Evolution is better than thunderbird for mail on Linux …. Except for address learning / completion. #
• Interesting day – customer turns up unannounced for what turns into a near 5 hour meeting. Still he bought lunch #
• Finding a wordpress virus thing (eval(gzinflate(base64_decode(….)))) on a site just before bed is annoying. Timestamp implies before us #
• 2 old ladies sitting in church 1 leans over and whispers to the other "my butt is going to sleep", other replies "i heard it snore 3 times" #
• I love orange. O2 you sucked so much. #
• Sweet. FETIDUS is back on podcast. Zombies. Yey. #
• I'm not sorry to see the Food Standards Agency go #fsa #
• Thanks mr postman for parking your bike right in front of me in the middle of the fricking pavement. #
• This is excellent and should be seen by everyone: http://is.gd/doq8o /via @FellowAtheists – zombies religion venn diagram #
• My 10km time – 42.38 (43rd, last year: 42.50 & 29th). #timberhonger #running #bromsgrove (results at http://timberhonger10k.co.uk) #
• Back home from the launch party of Intimate Perfection. Go Jenny! Congrats on doing the England team! And the world cup winners get it free? #

I’m at WordCampUK - a conference for WordPress developers and users. There have been great presentations, from Accessibility & HTML5 to WordPress Themes. However the real value of any conference is the corridor time, face-to-face chat with peers, and people doing all sorts of unexpected and fun things with Free Software. WordCampUK has been a bit [...]

Hope all of you lovely people are doing well and are primed and ready for an awesome Community Leadership Summit 2010 this weekend on Sat 17th and Sun 18th July 2010! We have an absolutely incredible list of registered attendees and the event is shaping up to be an fantastic opportunity to discuss community management, strategy, building and development skills without the pressure of a vendor driven environment. We had a wonderful event last year, and I am confident that this year we are going to have an awesome event too.

I just wanted to share some information about the event that you will probably want to know. As ever, if you have any questions, feel free to let me know.

Getting there

Getting there is simple. The Community Leadership Summit 2010 takes place at:

Oregon Convention Center 777 NE Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. Portland, Oregon 97232

The event takes place in F150 – 152.

More details here.

Schedule

The Community Leadership Summit 2010 kicks off at 9am with the opening keynote starting at 10am. Do join us at 9am though, get to know some folks, have some coffee and get ready for the day.

As with last year, CLS is an unconference, so you good folks drive the content of the schedule. This first hour while people arrive and get to know each other is a great time to share ideas for sessions, plan how they will be run, share thoughts and experience and more. Last year we were blessed with some truly unique and innovative sessions, and I am excited to see what everyone wants to discuss this year!

The full schedule is here.

Pre-Event Gathering

On Friday night (16th July 2010) we have anointed the DoubleTree Hotel as the place in which we will get together and have some pre-event drinks. Everyone is welcome, so join us in the DoubleTree bar and get to know some folks! The address is:

DoubleTree Hotel 1000 NE Multnomah Street, Portland, Oregon, United States 97232

We hope to see you there!

OK, those are the key details and I look forward to seeing you all on Saturday morning! Oh, and as with every CLS, everyone is welcome, so feel free to bring along friends and colleagues who you think may be interested in joining us!

See you soon, and thanks for joining us again this year,

I am pleased to announce that Ahmed Kamal has joined my team at Canonical to build the Ubuntu Cloud Community.

Although Ahmed’s formal background is Electronics and Communications engineering, he was always a Linux geek at heart. He touched his first Linux CD in 1998 with Red Hat 5.x and has been hooked ever since. He says:

“I think the main reasons why I fell in love with Linux was because it’s predictable! It doesn’t try to hide anything, you can always understand why things happen the way they do. Also the Linux community was mind blowing to me, to imagine those millions of people networking and helping each other move Linux forward was/is just amazing. This was especially true back in the days when Linux was not yet an enterprise rock-star. Over the years I had been involved with Linux one way or the other. I had worked at a great redhat partner in Egypt, where I had the chance to do consultation and Linux professional services work for some of the largest enterprises. I had also enjoyed evangelizing Linux and open-source to hundreds of people through various trainings. I started the Egyptian Open-Solaris group as well as engaged in various university talks to introduce open-source concepts in general. It is such a great feeling to introduce and excite minds about FOSS. For the past couple of years, I had been working with a bunch of extremely talented engineers building next generation cloud and virtualization management solutions. The technology base we were working on later got acquired by Sun Microsystems and later of-course by Oracle. Cloud computing is extremely exciting to me, while the term has been abused to fit almost anything, I am confident of the potential cloud computing has to offer. The cloud is not a single technology, it’s rather a paradigm shift of our expectations and how we use technology”.

Ahmed is hugely excited about being part of the team and helping to grow the community:

“What excites me the most about joining the Ubuntu community team is the far reaching impact of what that team’s work on the foss community at large. My role is to connect the Ubuntu cloud community with Canonical’s engineering teams making sure community contributers can find their way, as well as to ignite worldwide excitement about the great work Canonical is doing to innovate in the open-source cloud computing domain. What I find very exciting is that the result of our work with the community, is far more reaching than anything I could have ever done on my own”.

Ahmed is exciting about making the cloud accessible to all:

“Cloud computing is re-shaping computing as we know it. Ubuntu is easily the master of the Linux desktop, and is re-shaping the open-source desktop and server experience. Put the two together, and you can understand why I am tremendously excited about a cloud computing solution based on Ubuntu and open-source software. While Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is an awesome product, that’s not where it ends. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Canonical’s server and cloud engineering teams are hard at work innovating on top of the cloud. And from what I’ve seen, it is going to be awesome. If you’re into open-source and you’re into cloud computing, you’re in for a treat, so stay tuned!”

All, please welcome Ahmed to the team!

I just wanted to provide another quick update on the latest goings on in my Free Culture music band, Severed Fifth. As ever, you can always get the latest updates on Severed Fifth on our website, in the forums, and on Twitter.

The New Album

The up-coming as yet untitled new album, which follows up from 2008’s Denied By Reign is scheduled to be recorded from 11th August 2010 – 15th August 2010. As with the previous album, I wrote all the songs and will be performing and recording all the drums, guitars, bass, and vocals.

The new album comprises of eleven songs and runs in at around 50mins of audio. It is a far richer musical experience than Denied By Reign, and much more accessible. It retains the heavyness of Severed Fifth but brings in more clean vocals and a mix of fast, slow, thrashy, chugging, and acoustic guitars. I have a great feeling about this new record and I think you folks will like it too.

What is exciting about this new record is that I will be streaming the recording of it live from the Severed Fifth studio on the Severed Fifth In The Studio UStream from 10am – 6pm Pacific from 11th August 2010 – 15th August 2010. This is going to provide an awesome opportunity to take a peek into the recording process, watch a Free Culture album evolve and interact with me while the recording happens.

The Band

More photos available here.

Over the last three weeks Severed Fifth has gone from being just me to becoming a full-fledged band. This all kicked off with the help of Chris Kontos from Attitude Adjustment and started with Ben Gibbs joining us on Drums, then moved on to Jim Adams from Defiance joining us, and on Saturday we recruited Ron Crockett on bass. I will be taking care of vocal and guitar playing duties.

In that three week period in which Ben, Jim and I have been together we have started working on our live set, focusing on six songs from the up-coming album. Four of the six songs are almost complete, we are going to now finalize the next two and then focus on refining them. Our goal is to be gig-ready by August 15th so we can get out there and break some necks.

Our primary live focus is going to be the California Bay Area and then we plan on moving further afield as the Severed Fifth presence grows.

The Community

The Severed Fifth community is rocking (pun intended). We have been seeing some great growth in the community and some awesome work going on in a variety of different areas. These include:

• Oodles of wallpapers – torontomario and justnice have been rocking and rolling on the wallpaper front, and we now have an awesome gallery of wallpapers.
• Severed Fifth Android app – Rob Kielty is working on an Android app for Severed Fifth. Be sure to keep up to date with the latest developments.
• Street Team Content – the Severed Fifth Street Team continues to grow with a series of new flyers and website banners, and our street team forum rocking.
• Frets On Fire: Severed Fifth Edition – work is continuing in charting all the songs, and I am excited about this release when we release the new album.

Funding The Project

You have read the website, listened to the music, watched the videos, and possibly even chatted on the forum. You may have even taken some Severed Fifth content and used it in your own music or videos, played it in your car, shared it with your friends or otherwise enjoyed the content. All of this requires money to invest and produce these things, and I am passionate about Severed Fifth fans having the opportunity to contribute to the project, but only paying (a) what they can afford and (b) what they feel is fair.

Importantly: Severed Fifth will never expect any kind of payment for this content or service; we will always provide an awesome free service with lots of awesome content to rock out to.

To achieve this there are two ways of supporting the project:

• Severed Fifth Fair Pay – it is simple: you pay what you feel is fair and comfortable. If you download the music and enjoy using the website and services and would like to pay $1, that is awesome. If you decide to pay $50 that is awesome too. It is also awesome if you decide to pay nothing at all.
• Severed Fifth Store – we are adding more and more products to the store and right now we have some t-shirts for sale. Stickers and more shirts are coming soon!

Contributions help power the Severed Fifth project and buy t-shirts and merchandise to reward awesome Severed Fifth Street Team members, to replace broken equipment in the studio, to invest in cool new products, to rent rehearsal space, put on live shows and tours and other elements that spread Severed Fifth further afield, putting Free Culture music in the hands of fans and setting a great example for the music industry.