May 28, 2008
Planet GNOME
Michael Meeks: 2008-05-28: Wednesday
- Poked mail quickly, some debugging fun with Rodrigo. Curious about the AMD 780 radeonhd work; I updated my git repo and was unfeasibly pleased to see the 3D / DRI work by Matthias Hopf starting to appear there.
- Found gbookmarkfile doing a thousand or so time() syscalls for no reason while digging through strace code. Poked at gvim - which appears to provoke compiz into doing it's window-selection effect: XWarpPointer is even more harmful than I thought, as you see in this gvim KWin 3.1 workaround.
Davyd Madeley: inherit the earth
We received formal financing approval from the bank to buy our townhouse. The mortgage insurance is much less than I would have thought, which I see as a positive thing. Not too many more giant piles of paperwork, I expect.
I went to visit my Granddad, who is currently in hospital. Renal dialysis is amazingly low-tech. Much more low-tech than I would have thought. Clearly the result of some inspired medical engineering team looking under the hood of their car. The original filters that you ship with fitted are much more advanced.
I walked into town at lunch yesterday to try and buy green and orange colour correction gels for my flash gun. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to find them in town, but I figured that maybe someone might have them. I went to Plaza Imaging, who have a pro store in Northbridge, and thus figured were my best bet. The first person gave me a look of confusion and asked "Why would you want to do that?", she called her boss. He gave me the "I've worked in photography for 25 years and never sold anything like that" line. Ok, good. I know they exist, why don't you call your pro store? He did do this, asked for a man, determined he wasn't available, and then hung up. This makes him even more of a condescending ass, but I'll get to that. Not to be disheartened, I walked over to the camera store in Carillion Arcade, where I bought my DSLR, because at least those guys seem to know stuff. The guy there told me I'd need to try a pro store, like Plaza.
I figured Plaza's pro-store in Northbridge wasn't that far from The Court, which you can walk to from Carillion Arcade using the overpasses, so it wouldn't be that far. There were two people working in the pro store, a man (clearly the boss) and a young woman (looked 19/20ish, the person who must have answered the phone). The boss was clearly busy selling some guy about $30,000 of new Canon; so I asked the girl. Straight away she told me no, people here mostly used big studio lights, so they could order in gels for those, but they don't have a supplier for smaller gels. She suggested a few places that might have something that could be modded. We chatted about Strobist for a bit and off camera lighting (she brought it up — so much for Mr Condescending assuming she would be useless). She then checked her boss wasn't looking, lent across the desk and told me I was much better getting the stuff from the US via the net. She was actually incredibly helpful.
In the end, I took her advice to look on the Strobist forums, and found photogels.com. I've ordered some (cost me $16, including postage, yay US dollar), I'll write more when they show up.
I walked back to Hay St and caught the Red CAT back to West Perth. When I got back to work I checked with Google Maps and realised that I was only 1km away from my new house. This is quite exciting, not only does this mean I'm only going to be a km from some seriously geeky window shopping, but that our new house will be easy walking distance from the Red CAT and even all the way from work if I'm feeling dedicated (3.8km). Perhaps I should rediscover cycling.
Planet Fedora
Peter Lemenkov: Copiepresse vs. Google
Опять!
Я ажно заржал, когда прочел.
EN
RU
Когда же все копирасты передохнут-то?
Кстати, на Антикопирайт-вики есть страничка про это дело:
http://anticopyright.ru/wiki/Copiepresse_v._Google
Peter Lemenkov: Ohloh ratings
С этим охлохом (название-то какое, да?) какая-то странная тема.
Во-1 они зачем-то прикручивают с упорством, достойным лучшего применения, туда примивтиную блог-площадку. Внимание вопрос - нахрена? Этих блог-площадок уже жопой жуй, так зачем еще одна? Тут есть один тонкий момент, который почему-то многими в упор не замечается. Каково преимущество у одноклассников.ру (например) перед мойкруг.ру? А то, что в отличие от одноклассников, мойкруг косит под универсала - там и то, и это, и другое... Мне (и прочим людям) это не очень нужно - языком болтать есть где, а что-то более специализированное (может даже и в довесок к *уже* *имеющемуся* сервису) можно опробовать. А как этого добиться? Не пытаться конкурировать с уже имеющимся сервисом (у нас можно и блог вести, и то, и се), а добавить что-то новое, вклиниться в существующую инфраструктуру.
А как подключиться? Да вот как - забить на всякие уже давно реализованные фичи и добавить логин с уже имеющегося аккаунта, т.е. OpenID, (и не надо бояться проблем с безопасностью - ведь "волков бояться - в лес не ходить"). Кстати, вот как можно легко нагнать себе аудиторию маленькому стартапу - разрешить к себе логин по OpenID, а большая аудитория, это +5 к здоровью и +5 харизмы. Все же будут довольны! Человеку не надо заводить еще один Useless Account (а это уже раздражает) а маленький стартап получает хорошую прибавку к аудитории, причем нахаляву, присосавшись к крупным.
С этой точки зрения в Ohloh не хватает возможности привязать тамошний аккаунт к уже имеющемуся (приходится заводить еще один, а самый популярный вопрос на мое предложение завести там аккаунт, это "what for?"), зато эти ребята делают всякую лабуду.
Во-2 какое-то нездоровое палево с рейтингом. Я там еще не полностью разобрался, то там такая тема - рейтинг создается из строчек кода + Kudos, которые могут тебе навешать другие лемминги. Приколитесь, да? На самом деле должно быть так - рейтинг должен склоадываться *только* из строчек кода, причем т.к. некоторые приложения действительно популярны, то некоторые строчки должны быть дороже остальных. Никакие Kudos, данные тебе другими юзерами не должны влиять на рейтинг.
Еще момент - надо учесть, что пользователей Ohloh, указавших, что они юзают Fedora полно, однако не все из них (далеко не все) указывают, что они используют, например Linux Kernel 2.6. Я про то, что в описании софтины надо добавить возможность указывать от чего она зависит, и это тоже учитывать в рейтинге, ведь иначе библиотеки вообще никто указывать не будет, хотя их все используют.
А Kudos раздавать и получать надо вообще запретить. Максимум можно включить функцию "добавлять в друзья". Хотя и это вполне можно запретить, если мы запретим там унылое блоггерство, а группы пользователей и разработчиков и так появляются.
Как-то так.
Ну и по мелочи - виданое-ли дело, что среди VCS там поддерживаются только CVS, SVN и Git? Это тоже косяк.
А в целом мне идея нравится. Я-бы даже поучаствовал в улучшении ихнего проекта, но в опеосорц у них только (ГЫГЫГГЫ) счетчик строк кода.
James Morris: Tumbleblog
I've set up a tumbleblog here:
http://jamesmorris.tumblr.com/
essentially as a kind of public bookmarking of things which I find interesting, without much in the way of commentary (if any).
If you want to follow it, grab the rss feed. The topics will likely vary beyond the typically work-related stuff I post here, although still somewhat geeky & security-ish. I'd suggest not adding the feed to public blog aggregation sites.
Peter Lemenkov: Links
* Facebook opens up (after Google, Yahoo, MySpace).
* So-called "Trusted" Computing Platform will end piracy.
* A Singapore patent troll, VueStar has threatened to sue websites that use pictures or graphics to link to another page
От последних двух ссылок совсем уж весело.
Скорей-бы ученые прогрели Last Hadron Collider, и все-бы это закончилось.
Yaakov M. Nemoy: Berlin is Fedora for a day
Berlin is Fedora Steampunk.
Berlin is Fedora DNA.
Berlin serves us up lots of food and beer. This was enough for two people.
I wonder if she misses me....
Mark McLoughlin: Checksums, Scatter-Gather I/O and Segmentation Offload
When dealing with virtualization and networking in the kernel, a number of fairly difficult concepts come up regularly. Last week, while tracking down some bugs with KVM and virtio in this area, decided to write up some notes on this stuff.
Thanks to Herbert Xu for checking over these.
Also, a good resource I came across while looking into this stuff is Dave Miller’s How SKBs Work. If you don’t know your headroom from your tailroom, that’s not a bad place to start.
Checksumming
TCP (and other protocols) have a checksum in its header which is a sum of the TCP header, payload and the “pseudo header” consisting of the source and destination addresses, the protocol number and the length of the TCP header and payload.
A TCP checksum is the inverted ones-complement sum of the pseudo header and TCP header and payload, with the checksum field set to zero during the computation.
Some hardware can do this checksum, so the networking stack will pass the packet to the driver without the checksum computed, and the hardware will insert the checksum before transmitting.
Now, with (para-)virtualization, we have a reliable transmission medium between a guest and its host and any other guests, so a PV network driver can claim to do hardware checksumming, but just pass the packet to the host without the checksum. If it ever gets forwarded through a physical device to a physical network, the checksum will be computed at that point.
What we actually do with virtualization is compute a partial checksum of everything except the TCP header and payload, invert that (getting the ones-complement sum again) and store that in the checksum field. We then instruct the other side that in order to compute the complete checksum, it merely needs to sum the contents of the TCP header and payload (without zeroing the checksum field) and invert the result.
This is accomplished in a generic way using the csum_start and csum_offset fields - csum_start denotes the point at which to start summing and csum_offset gives the location at which the result should be stored.
Scatter-Gather I/O
If you’ve ever used readv()/writev(), you know the basic idea here. Rather than passing around one large buffer with a bunch of data, you pass a number of smaller buffers which make up a larger logical buffer. For example, you might have an array of buffer descriptors like:
struct iovec {
size_t iov_len; /* Number of bytes to transfer */
void *iov_base; /* Starting address */
};
In the case of network drivers, (non-linear) data can be scattered across page size fragments:
struct skb_frag_struct {
struct page *page;
__u32 page_offset;
__u32 size;
};
sk_buff (well, skb_shared_info) is designed to be able to hold a 64k frame in page size[1] fragments (skb_shinfo::nr_frags and skb_shinfo::frags). The NETIF_F_SG feature flag lets the core networking stack know that the driver supports scatter-gather across this paged data.
Note, the skb_shared_info frag_list member is not used for maintaining paged data, but rather it is used for fragmentation purposes. The NETIF_F_FRAGLIST feature flag relates to this.
Another aspect of SG a flag, NETIF_F_HIGHDMA, which specifies whether the driver can handle fragment buffers that were allocated out of high memory.
You can see all these flags in action in dev_queue_xmit() where if any of these conditions are not met, skb_linearize() is called which coalesces any fragments into the skb buffer.
[1] - These are also known as non-linear skbs, or paged skbs. This what “pskb” stands for in some APIs.
Segmentation Offload
TCP Segmentation Offload (TSO). UDP Fragmentation Offload (UFO). Generic Segmentation Offload (GSO). Yeah, that stuff.
TSO is the ability of some network devices to take a frame and break it down to smaller (i.e. MTU) sized frames before transmitting. This is done by breaking the TCP payload into segments and using the same IP header with each of the segments.
GSO is a generalisation of this in the kernel. The idea is that you delay segmenting a packet until the latest possible moment. In the case where a device doesn’t support TSO, this would be just before passing the skb to the driver. If the device does support TSO, the unsegmented skb would be passed to the driver.
See dev_hard_start_xmit() for where dev_gso_segment() is used to segment a frame before passing to the driver in the case where the device does not support GSO.
With paravirtualization, the guest driver has the ability to transfer much larger frames to the host, so the need for segmentation can be avoided completely. The reason this is so important is that GSO enables a much larger *effective* MTU between guests themselves and to their host. The ability to transmit such large frames significantly increases throughput.
An skb’s skb_shinfo contains information on how the frame should be segmented.
gso_size is the size of the segments which the payload should be broken down into. With TCP, this would usually be the Maximum Segment Size (MSS), which is the MTU minus the size of the TCP/IP header.
gso_segs is the number of segments that should result from segmentation. gso_type indicates e.g. whether the payload is UDP or TCP.
drivers/net/loopback.c:emulate_large_send_offload() provides a nice simple example of the actions a TSO device is expected to perform - i.e. breaking the TCP payload into segments and transmitting each of them as individual frames after updating the IP and TCP headers with the length of the packet, sequence number, flags etc.
Planet GNOME
Sergey Udaltsov: xkeyboard-config 1.3
New release was uploaded and announced last night. Despite the hassle with the ssh keys, I made it in time (ok, 30 mins after midnight).
The highlights of the release:
- A lot of information about countries and languages, in a form of ISO codes. Users of unstable GNOME 2.23.x are highly encouraged to try new xk-c and keyboard-configuration applet. I would love to see bugreports about errors in that information (missing/wrong codes). In theory, every layout/variant should be accessible at least 2 ways - per-country and per-language (well, some variants are multilingual and multinational).
- Dropped sun/sgi rulesets. I do not foresee many complains - but if someone is still using them, please come to me and we’ll discuss the upgrade path.
- For Russians: all your
base are belong to ushowtows regarding specifying “winkeys” variant are now practically obsolete. The default variant is winkeys now - because most of the people are using it (I suspected that for quite a while, voting on linux.org.ru confirmed it). - For Romanians: the default variant was changed (see this bug if you’re interested in rather hot discussion around that). Now it is “commabelow” (earlier it was “cedillabelow”). It might cause some side effects for users of early versions of Windows - but it is the right thing to do.
Enjoy! And please remember - some open issues with xkeyboard-config still require resolution on xkbcomp/xserver level.
PS It is great to see Nokia hiring people for maemo. I wish I lived in Helsinki - a couple of hundred kilometers from the best city of the world (if you happen not to know yet, it is St. Petersburg, Russia). But for a “family man” mobility is the word in the past tense 
BTW, I am always available for remote open source work offers…
Planet Fedora
Yaakov M. Nemoy: Testing Planet
Loup to Fedora Planet, come in Fedora Planet.
posts on LinuxTag coming soon....
Fabian Affolter: Der Fedora-Stand
Zuerst:
Zwischenzeitlich:
Bei Beginn:
Max Spevack: tidbits from linuxtag 2008, day 1
Holger Levsen is giving a talk in German about the OLPC, but the word "Fedora" was easily understood, when he was talking about the software that runs the machine.
I am not the only Dumb-American-Who Either-Is-Or-Has-Been-the-Fedora-Project-Leader to fry an electronic device with the voltage differences.
We had a very interesting conversation over breakfast about the differences in wine and beer making in Europe and America.
A booth near us is occupied by FlightGear, an open source flight simulator. They are based on Fedora 8. Paul and I were chatting with their developers, and they offered to let us jump to the front of the line, once they are up and running with their four-monitor cockpit setup.
I am in search of a printer and fax machine to finish up the Community Architecture expenses for Q1.
Fabian Affolter: Fedora Logistics Group
I'm proud to announce the first member of the Fedora Logistics Group (FLG). It's JoergSimon. With his car, a VW Passat, he is able to transport a lot of stuff (1731 litres). This car is equipped is very good navigation system, so he can find any place on earth. Just turn around
Take a look another workday of him. Driving around in the city of Berlin: Fairground - RH Berlin
The slogan is: "There are a lot of cartoons (=carton box) in my trunk"
Clint Savage: Tweets for 2008-05-27
- Blog Post: Tweets for 2008-05-26:
Just realized it was monday. Didn’t call my son because .. http://tinyurl.com/6ylmcq # - iProvo hearings tonight at provo city bldgs. Apparently, broadweave has this all sealed up anyway… #
- @libel_vox need help for b4b? I’m available to help w/whatever you need… #
- @libel_vox sounds good. When and where would you like me? #
- Wishing that twitter Im was working again. #
Powered by Twitter Tools.
Jon Masters (Fedora Category Posts): Fedora Category
I’ve created a “fedora” category and added an RSS2 feed to the fedora planet. This way, Fedora folks only have to wade through relevant postings. I should use categories and tagging more often.
Oh, and, “this is a test” 
Jon.
Planet Jabber
Jack Moffitt: Get Inspired By Watching Startup School
I’ve been going through the startup school 08 videos today and have found them both interesting and inspiring. For example, David Heinemeier Hansson talks about a simple solution for profits (having a price), and Paul Graham talks about how benevolence helps you succeed.
I still have a bunch more to watch.
by metajack at May 28, 2008 04:53 AM
Planet Fedora
Debarshi Ray: FireGPG
Although I use Mutt to read my office email, for various reasons I have stuck to GMail's Web interface to access my personal email account. However, I often missed an easy way to send encrypted/signed mails like the other non-Web clients.
Then I came across FireGPG yesterday. Now, is there is something similar for Epiphany too?
Eric Christensen: The Fedora Security Guide
When I started working with the Docs Project team one of my goals was to pull together information on securing a Fedora installation. There was already a lot of information in the wiki but it was spread out and wasn't centrally linked together in any straight forward method. Input the Fedora Security Guide (FSG).
The FSG is a compilation of many different publications and has been written by several people. The FSG isn't finished and will require regular updating but it contains quite a bit of information that could be helpful for the Fedora user or administrator. I hope this becomes an asset to the Fedora community.
Juank Prada: I'm still here
This is just a test to see if my .planet file is really working...
And also a chance for me to say how disappointed I am right now. I was suppose to travel yesterday to Bogota (Colombia's capital city) due to Campus Party, which is scheduled for June 23th (I know its still early but I wanted to have a chance to spend some time at Bogota visiting some old friends, and presenting my CV to some companies there to have a chance to do an internship the next semester). But then something here about my thesis appeared to ruin my travel plans and so I had to stay and fix all those issues in the document.
One good thing though is that my university is writing an small article about Fedora 9's release and my involvement with the project so I'm gonna take this chance to encourage everybody at the university to join the project, now that's easier than ever :)
/home/fedora/mdehaan/.planet: Fedora Planet testing
testing 1 2 testing 1 2
can I get a little more snare drum in the monitors please
testing 1 2 testing 1 2
Planet GNOME
Adam Schreiber: Fitness
I'm with Eric on this one. I know plenty of scientists and engineers that run, bike, climb and participate in other sports. Although for athletic people I don't put much stock in BMI. For instance, mine is 24.8 and 25 is considered over weight. For athletes, percent body fat is a much more accurate albeit more difficult to measure indicator of fitness level.
by noreply@blogger.com (Adam) at May 28, 2008 01:21 AM
Christopher Blizzard: an important word from our sponsor
Babies are still cute.
That is all. Carry on.
Planet Fedora
Ryan Lerch: testing my fedora .planet file
testing
Planet GNOME
Chris Lord: Guadec approaching
As Guadec approaches, I find myself preparing space in my drawers for whatever awesome new T-Shirts my inner student and I can pick up. I'm sure everyone appreciates these - I know I do, I wear them to work and the gym all the time, sometimes even going out (no one knows what 'GNOME' is, people occasionally mistake it for some trendy new clothing brand).
This all leaves me wondering though, shirts are definitely fully exploited... But what about... Trousers? I'm terrible at buying clothes, every time I go out to buy something, I always end up coming back with T-shirts, and possibly some weird gadgety thing or a new pair of shoes or something along those lines... But for some reason, rarely trousers. Just think how awesome GNOME/guadec trousers would be! This seems to be a missed opportunity, is it just me?
May 27, 2008
Planet Fedora
Peter Gordon: Epic Failure (the Bad Kind)
My secondary hard drive - which I was using for backups (queue the irony) and general storage - died on me over the past couple of days. Unfortunately, that was also the drive on which I kept my Virt Manager images. So until I get a replacement, I'm afraid I'll be unable to triage any F-9/rawhide bugs (since my machine is running F-8).
I'm also going to be gone for the next week (on the other side of the country) so I won't be able to replace that until about the weekend after I get back.
I apologize for any inconvience this may cause but hardware has a way of disagreeing with me at the most inopportune times. =(
Oh well, C'est la vie...See you all in a week!
Ian Weller: At long last, it's done
The new Fedora Wiki, powered by MediaWiki, is now finally complete! Well… on the infrastructure side, that is.
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Main_Page
Wiki editors: see the Wiki migration to-do page on what you can do to help make this migratoin even better.
Karsten Wade: Release the flying wiki-monkeys!
A few hours ago the wiki quietly switched under the URL cover, and with the final-import done, we are ready to have it, my fiends!
There is a page you want to start at, and in particular the FedoraProject:Wiki_migration_to-do#Individual_folks_to-do_list.
There are many people who helped make this effort get even this far, especially all of you who took time to clean-up before the migration. The last few days I’ve been working closely with Ian Weller, Ricky Zhou, and Mike McGrath, but the fact is the existing and prowess of the Websites and Infrastructure teams are the key to all of our success.
Now comes the hard part — training the community on how to think in MediaWiki.
Allisson Azevedo: Palestra sobre desenvolvimento do Fedora
Esses são os slides da apresentação, vou mostrar algumas ferramentas utilizadas no desenvolvimento do Fedora, no final eu faço um panorama geral do que acontece antes de ser liberado um release novo
Planet GNOME
Vincent Untz: Ich bin ein Berliner
After Prague (will post about it really soon, I promise :-)), I came back home a few days and didn't even have time to feel home: I'm now in Berlin for LinuxTag. Interestingly, I was surprisingly happy to walk in Berlin after landing earlier in the evening. I'm not quite sure why, but I guess it means I have a positive feeling for the city. Also good to see that I'm having fun speaking (or maybe I should say trying to speak
) German, while back in school, this was really something I disliked. I guess that's because I now choose to speak German instead of being forced to do so...
I'm getting quite excited about LinuxTag since it will be my first time attending this event, and I wonder how it will be in comparison of the other big events I know. But from what I've heard, that's a pretty decent event :-) It will also be a good occasion to meet a lot of openSUSE people -- always good to put faces on names. Oh, and I've heard there are some cool openSUSE stickers on the booth, so everybody should come and say hi! Hopefully, there'll also be a good bunch of GNOME friends there (can't wait to see them again), and I'll obviously be glad to talk about GNOME with everybody patient enough to listen to me.
On Saturday morning, I'll give a talk around freedesktop.org and cross-desktop collaboration during the GNOME track. Of course, as usual for me, my slides are... err... not finished yet ;-) But it's nearly there, really: I just need to sit down and put on paper^Wthe slides what is already completely ready in my brain -- it shouldn't take too long...
Planet Fedora
Stephen Smoogen: Autism, children, and Survivor...
As a person with autism like symptoms and a father of a child with autism.. stories about children being 'mistreated' because of their autism... hits me in the gut. Having spent most of my youth being the painful butt of jokes for being different and not understanding why they occurred, I can say I understand the fear and sadness this child is going through. I can also feel blessed with the professionals and teachers that have helped us the last 5 years. I just wish there were more of them so that so many parents did not have to go through that Hell. [And I realize there are 2 sides to every story.. with usually the teacher being the one getting the short end of the story. I just hope that the teacher and the school learn something from this to come up with better ways to handle students with autism.]
- http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2008/may/23/st-lucie-teacher-has-class-vote-whether-5-year-old/
- http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/6319
Planet GNOME
Erich Schubert: Fitness
When people think of computer scientists, they think of someone with bad health, a bad skin color and no fitness at all. While there probably are some like that, I actually don't know many. Instead I know people who do things like fighting with sword and rapier.
Myselfi, I can claim to be the very opposite: I just came back from 5 hours of sports, and I'm not even exhausted, just very hungry. The 5 hours include riding about 13 km in half an hour through the city (and we're suffering from a heat wave these days, with winds from the sahara desert reaching germany), then two full training sessions (that really used to stress me when I started), then the ride back of 13 km again.
My body mass index is 18.something, so I'm slightly underweight, but I actually eat a lot - but I also eat healthy and diverse. Most of my food I cook myself, so I know it's fresh and where I got it from. I'm not vegetarian, I do eat meat about two times a week. I also try to have some variety there, pork, beef, lamb, deer, chicken, ... I don't drink much alkohol and I do not smoke.
So don't stick to that prejudice that computer science people or geeks are physically in a bad shape. You can be both a geek and athletic. The people I know how are in really bad shape actually watch too much TV and such, they neither engage their body nor their mind.
Florian Boor: LinuxTag is (almost) there
In a few hours LinuxTag 2008 will open its gates. There is a large booth for mobile and embedded Open Source projects in hall 7b - I’ll be there for OpenEmbedded. GPE is there and right next to us there is the booth of the OpenMoko folks.
Planet Fedora
Stephen Smoogen: Grumpy Old Man Post: F-9
So this weekend, I moved my laptop from CentOS 5.1 to Fedora-9 so I could use the 'encrypt' partition rules on LVM since I will be doing a lot of travel in the next month. And so far its been a long day of "huh why doesn't that work". Most of it is the stuff that comes from jumping from Fedora-5.9 to Fedora-9 should entail.
- Pulseaudio does not start up when I log in. This causes some apps to leave nasty-grams in .xsession-errors and such. Changing gconf did not seem to help things... so I went old school and rm'd .gconf, .gnome, .mcop, .i-have-no-idea and anything else that I figured migth set up a session. And went through and reset up my 'account'.
- Wrestling with the fluendo site to get the updated drivers I paid for a while back. The Fedora codeina doesn't talk to the new website, and the codeina in SVN at fluendo doesn't 'deal' with Firefox-3.0x very well. Lots of bug-buddy dumps on my screen as I tried and failed to get that working.
- I use CNTRL a lot.. between emacs, screen, and other things it is probably the most used key on my keyboard. Having it in the lower left really caused my RSI to flair up.. so I have usually gone with the 'Sun' layout with swapping my Caps lock and Control. Well for some reason F-9 lights up the caps lock LED everytime I tap the remapped Control key. It never did this before.. so I am trying to figure out what I screwed up.
- I completely failed the google apps treasure hunt this weekend. I forgot binomial theorum, my scripts came up with the wrong numbers to 'add/multiply' together.. and I felt like a complete idjut by the end.
- I need more bran I think.
- my fonts look nicer in F-9
- my laptop is now encrypted so I won't be a bad news story if it gets ripped off from me while I am on travel this year.
- my laptop can now do 3d effects!
- I am going to FudCon!
Groklaw
Viacom's 1st Amended Complaint and YouTube/Google's Answer - updated, both as text
I thought you might like to see the actual filings in the Viacom v. YouTube/Google litigation. In April, Viacom filed a First Amended Complaint [PDF] and YouTube/Google has now filed its Answer [PDF].
If you'd like to see the original complaint and answer from 2007, for comparison purposes, we have it as text here on Groklaw. I think what it means is that Google has decided not to settle. In fact, they just promised to take this case to the US Supreme Court, if necessary. I don't expect that to be necessary, since Viacom is essentially asking the court to rewrite the DMCA safe harbor provision, and rewriting the law is exactly what courts are not supposed to do.
So what's new? Viacom tried to get the court to let it amend its complaint to assert a claim for punitive damages, if they elect after trial to claim actual damages and profits instead of statutory damages, which the court refused to let them do:
Common-law punitive damages cannot be recovered under the Copyright Act.
Hollywood is forever trying to extend copyright law, it seems. One of the YouTube/Google defenses is copyright misuse, and that's pretty much what it is, trying to claim more protection than copyright law gives you. You can read the Order [PDF] for yourself. You can see in the footnote on the first page that what Viacom plaintiffs were allowed to add, without opposition from YouTube/Google, were a claim of distribution and a request for a jury trial, something the defendants also asked for. The Order also explains well about choosing statutory or actual damages under Copyright Law, if you are curious, since you can see in the First Amended Complaint that Viacom asks for one or the other, depending on how it all plays out at trial.
Planet Fedora
Allisson Azevedo: Projeto Fedora migra para MediaWiki
Eu estava acessando o wiki do Fedora e comecei a receber mensagens de erro, depois de pouco tempo eu vi que a promessa de migrar do MoinMoin para o MediaWiki finalmente tinha sido cumprida.
Agora é aproveitar a melhor performance do MediaWiki 
Jonathan Roberts: Help me internet! London Accomodation for 2 weeks!?
Anyone have any suggestions about where I could stay extremely cheaply in London for two weeks? I’m thinking a youth hostel, and that’s certainly my fall back plan, but recommendations or other ideas are welcome!
Roland Wolters: Arora, a WebKit browser in Qt
The release of Qt 4.4 came along with the WebKit browser engine which could be tested with an included demo browser. This demo browser is now developed independent under the name Arora and aims to become a cross platform Qt browser in the future.
WebKit is a browser engine which was originally forked from KHTML and is now developed further by Apple, Nokia, Adobe, Trolltech and others. Up to a certain point there is also cooperation going on between KHTML and WebKit.
With Qt 4.4 WebKit is officially part of Qt, and therefore every Qt app can take advantage of WebKit (this is also true for every KDE app, but they can use KHTML for quite some time now anyway). The demo browser of Qt 4.4 was shipped with the release to show what the engine is actually capable off. Since it was already a (basically) working browser its own code repository under the name Arora. The WebKit code used is the one of Qt which is directly developd in the WebKit trunk.
The browser is currently under heavy development and is still in an early phase, so it can hardly be compared against the “old” ones like Firefox or Konqueror/KHTML. However, the browser already has a nicely working Rich Text Editor support which for example works with WordPress blogs:
Also, there special private browsing mode which makes it possible to deactivate the history and cookies just for a short time:
Besides, recently the support for flash plugins was included, and Arora can restore closed tabs. Currently planned features include the support for password store mechanisms in the form of plugins which will make it possible to connect Arora to kwalletmanager and therefore integrate it seamless with KDE - or to connect it with the Gnome keyring and integrate it with Gnome.
But it can also be seen that Arora is still in development: in the version tested on this machine there were some issues with the scroll bar and also with the line-edit field and the buttons on the Google home page:
Additionally, there are some things missing: especially web shortcuts which I really got used to should be added at some point in the future. Also, the preferences dialog does not list options which are normal for other browsers (always display tabs, always open in a new tab, etc.).
However, given that the development continues at the current speed these features should be available soon. In the long term Arora could become a real competitor to Firefox: while it is also cross platform like Firefox it could actually adapt the native design of each platform thanks to Qt. Additionally, with intelligent chosen plugins it should be easy to integrate it into the platform (password storage, favourites, desktop search, etc.). Last but not least thanks to its origins it features a much smaller memory foot print and is simply faster than Firefox.
For KDE users it could be an interesting alternative to Konqueror to have a look at WebKit and simply as a stand alone browser inside KDE.
In case you want to give Arora a first test the easiest is to run Ubuntu (probably in a virtual machine) and install the precompiled binary. Since Arora does require quite recent Qt packages it can’t be compiled in Fedora 8, and even Fedora 9 might not be sufficient at the moment.
Fedora Tunisia: Chandler Project
Chandler Project offer tools to organize your work and your life. you can download desktop application for any platform ( Linux, Mac or Windows), install it and begin to exploit this tools connecting to the a server.
But, the beauty of this application is when you install the server on your home or enterprise and use it with your coworkers. The server is a bundle using Tomcat as container, Spring as Framework and DOJO for ajax animation to give more pleasure for users.
For my part, I install it on a Red Hat 4 machine and it work very well,
An RPM in addition will be an extra for the applicationand why not see it on livna or fedora project repository.
Planet GNOME
Michael Meeks: 2008-05-27: Tuesday
-
Up early, breakfast - disappeared up-stairs with Rodrigo for
some mail processing. Poked at super-irritating pulseaudio glitch-fest
on my oldest, slowest machine - stracing the daemon we see that it's
waking up 5x per second (or so) and some rather unfortunately long
poll response times: eg.
1211970599.543457 poll({snip fd details}], 14, 186) = 1 1211970599.543928 gettimeofday({1211970599, 544334}, NULL) = 0ie. we ask to sleep for 186us, and we get control back to call gettimeofday 471us later. Of course, quite why we are waking up -so- frequently, and reading ~20 bytes of samples, and going back to sleep for such a short time is unclear to me; 260 poll / recvmsg's per second - just to play a mp3; odd. Could it be that this is the solution ? Unfortunately esd works (apparently) perfectly on the same machine at a much more sedate 14 2k reads per second instead. - Hit upon a nice e-d-s crasher. Wrestled with memos, and got some sent in the end, and the web tool setup for vacation Thur/Fri. Lunch. Call with Jeff, interview.
- Hacked with Rodrigo on misc. bugs. Out for Dinner with Rodrigo & his sister Eva's family - pleasant; bed late.
Christopher Blizzard: mozilla on directfb
Over the last few months some of our contributors have been hacking away on trying to get Mozilla running on directfb systems on top of gtk. You can see Niranjan’s latest post on the topic here as well as the DirectFB Porting Page in our wiki. Sounds like they have things mostly up and running at this point.
There are some patches required to some of the GNOME stack to get things up and running. The patches are up on the page.
Good work, guys!
Planet Fedora
Eric Christensen: So I'm building a laptop...
on Dell's website and I get to where I can choose the operating system...
I won't even show you what the RAM selection said.
Mike McGrath: Account System Woes
The account system has a problem and I'm not quite sure how to fix it. Take a look at this (all too common) work flow.
1) A big push towards http://join.fedoraproject.org/ has brought people to sign up for accounts
2) Jonny signs up for an account at https://admin.fedoraproject.org/accounts/
3) Jonny signs the CLA
4) Jonny signs up to be an admin of the account system
Huh?
Sometimes 4) is "Jonny signs up to be on the infrastructure team" or "Jonny signs up to be on the websites team". Then nothing happens. We don't hear from the user, they don't introduce themselves. They just sit at the application request.
The problem is people sign up for an account, then start signing up for groups thinking that's where they should start when, in almost every team I can think of, it's the last place they should go. The first is to IRC, mailing lists or just someone in the group.
How do we get that point across to people? Even if they do apply first, too many of them just stop there and it has to be a bad experience for them. Finding sponsors is hard enough now, trying to get sponsors to contact each of these people and follow up and stuff just won't work in a volunteer environment.
Planet GNOME
Jason Clinton: Putting money in place of mouth
In the past week, I have been called some amazingly childish names for pointing to the release manager's decision. Since that blog post, some progress has been made including reducing the frequency of fsync calls and looking at the use of alternatives to fsync. On Sunday, someone in Mozilla joined in the name-calling and--in a fit of rage--I took time out of my own responsibilities and wrote a patch that actually implements the backup-and-run-without-fsync behavior that was suggested by others. The work and discussion are on Bug #435712. (Please do not add anything to the BugZilla page unless it is of a technical nature. Let's keep the BS to a minimum.) The libeatmydata author, Stewart Smith, has linked to it, as well.
by me@jasonclinton.com (Jason Clinton) at May 27, 2008 07:05 PM
Bruce Schneier
Tracking People with their Mobile Phones
Not that we didn't think it was possible:
The surveillance mechanism works by monitoring the signals produced by mobile handsets and then locating the phone by triangulation measuring the phone’s distance from three receivers.[....]
The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) expressed cautious approval of the technology, which does not identify the owner of the phone but rather the handset's IMEI code -- a unique number given to every device so that the network can recognise it.
But an ICO spokesman said, "we would be very worried if this technology was used in connection with other systems that contain personal information, if the intention was to provide more detailed profiles about identifiable individuals and their shopping habits.”
Only the phone network can match a handset's IMEI number to the personal details of a customer.
Path Intelligence, the Portsmouth-based company which developed the technology, said its equipment was just a tool for market research. "There's absolutely no way we can link the information we gather back to the individual,” a spokeswoman said. “There's nothing personal in the data."
Liberty, the campaign group, said that although the data do not meet the legal definition of ‘personal information’, it "had the potential" to identify particular individuals' shopping habits by referencing information held by the phone networks.
Seems to me that the point of sale is a pretty obvious place to match the location of an anonymous person with an identity.
by schneier at May 27, 2008 06:57 PM
Planet Fedora
Henrique Junior: Lançada a segunda edição da Revista Fedora Brasil
Publicação é voltada para a comunidade Fedora, que vem crescendo exponencialmente no Brasil.O Projeto Fedora Brasil lança hoje (27/03) a segunda edição de sua revista online voltada para a comunidade Fedora. No Brasil o Fedora é uma das mais populares distribuições Linux, contando com uma comunidade crescente e ativa. Disponível no endereço http://www.projetofedora.org/Revista, a publicação é voltada a principal vertente do Fedora, a Inovação. Os artigos dessa nova versão são focados sobre o novo lançamento do Projeto, o Fedora 9 e suas novidades. A equipe editorial da Revista Fedora Brasil é composta por Embaixadores do Fedora no Brasil e membros da comunidade Linux que cuidam do conteúdo, diagramação, arte e revisão. Link para a revista: http://projetofedora.org/Revista Equipe Revista Fedora Brasil.
Planet GNOME
Robert Love: I can't believe this is Massachusetts
Crane Beach, Ipswich, MA
by noreply@blogger.com (Robert Love) at May 27, 2008 06:36 PM
Planet Fedora
Paul W. Frields: Der Flug war ausgezeichnet.
These posts may be a little behind realtime… this covers my Sunday/Monday journey.
Leg the First.
I manage not to forget anything vitally important, like my passport, or my wallet, or how to negotiate Sunday afternoon on the I-495 Beltway. (I don’t travel around up in “true” Northern Virginia as much as I used to.) I arrive in plenty of time at the airport, and board an enormous Boeing 777, a plane so big that an actual flight seems unlikely. Maybe we’ll just taxi onto a pontoon boat and have that count as a delay.
But no, the jet does in fact take to the sky, and during the next eight hours, I manage to catch about two or three hours of sleep divided up into numerous catnaps. These are unfortunately punctuated by short but ferocious bouts of severe turbulence that cause me to wonder whether the plane’s incredible size does anything to offset the turbulence, in which case I’m glad we’re on this one, or whether it exacerbates the problem, in which case I’m glad I’ve dutifully memorized the location of the nearest exit. During one of these episodes several of the passengers shout involuntarily, and everyone around them tries to look stoic. I usually cope by pretending I’m back on one of my parent’s powerboats, at nine or ten years old, holed up in the front cabin as we make our way back across choppy seas on the Potomac. It’s a lot less unpleasant than thinking about the seven miles of empty air beneath the bucking jumbo jet.
All histrionics aside, we finally arrive at Frankfurt safe and sound. The plane can’t be accommodated at an attached gate, so all the passengers disembark onto the tarmac and a bus takes us to the arrivals area. A very kind information desk attendant tells me that I can go through passport control upstairs, since my bags are (presumably) on their way to Berlin without my needing to clear customs. This makes me wish I had booked the earlier connecting flight, despite repeated warnings from friends that if I left less than a two-hour layover I was asking for trouble. Nevertheless, better safe than sorry I suppose — maybe it’s a slow time at Frankfurt on Monday at lunchtime.
I have plenty of time before my flight, so after about a half-hour of negotiating repeated passport control areas and the Escherian route to the A gates, I find a DeutscheBank ATM and finally get my hands on some real currency. I also find a stand selling warm focaccia sandwiches, which seems like a good way to reset my internal clock. Recent studies are indicating that resetting your eating cycle during intercontinental travel is as important as resynchronizing your sleep cycle.
I stop at a convenience market and pick up the cheapest thing I can find — a Kit-Kat bar — so I’ll have some change in my pocket for the Express X9 bus when I get to TXL this afternoon. All in all, I’m feeling pretty competent for someone who’s never been to the European continent before. I’ve been to the UK a few times, but the difficulty factor is considerably lower there, what with no language barrier. To be fair though, every single person I’ve come in contact with here has spoken passable (to excellent) English, and most of the important signage is bilingual. I therefore settle on a constant low-level undercurrent of guilt in every personal exchange, feeling I should be doing a better job in the native language. For now my attempts are limited to pronouncing proper names correctly (I hope), and concluding with a bashful “danke.”
Writing this narrative keeps me awake while I wait for the plane to Berlin, but my body is still fighting with the idea that I’ve been up all night and it’s 8:30 in the morning. I’m going to close up now and wait for boarding, and maybe a small nap.
Leg the Second.
This part of the journey was relatively simple, and after landing in Berlin, the only mistake I make is in exiting the airport early. I think I’m following the sings to “Zoll” (customs) but instead, I’m exiting to the ticket counters. Then it’s a short walk to the actual customs desk where I have to basically wait a half hour for my bag to go unclaimed and be ported over to this desk for storage. Thankfully, everyone is extremely polite and understanding, which tells me I’m not the first person to whom this has happened.
I finally reach the hotel and, although I really want to collapse at the end of what’s basically been a 24-hour day with practically no sleep, I need food more. So I requisition some help from a nice young desk clerk — who I swear, honey, is not a lovely young blonde named Heidi. Well, at least the “Heidi” part; at least, I didn’t ask her name. She directs me to the Savignyplatz just up the Knesebeckkstrasse from the hotel, and there I find an enormous grab bag of eateries of every conceivable national origin.
Leg the Third, unfortunately not a hollow one.
I settle on the Zwoelf Apostel (12 Apostles), where I have not only some wonderful thick bread with a superb cream of spinach soup with pine nuts, followed by their petto di pollo, chicken breast with a side of spicy ratatouille. Once a couple Berliner pilsners are figured in to round it out, I’m lucky to be able to roll back to the hotel, but this is all part of my plan for a sound sleep!
Tuesday I have a master plan to accomplish some sightseeing before I have to meet Max and Jeroen to head over to the fairgrounds.
Coming tomorrow-ish… Tuesday, In Which Our Intrepid Hero Gets His Dogs a-Barkin’ Along With a Metric Boatload of Digital Photography.
[read this post in: ar de es fr it ja ko pt ru zh-CN ]Jeroen van Meeuwen: Arrived at LinuxTag
We're 10 minutes away from entering the Ambassadors meeting so I'll keep it short. The flight was short (Amsterdam to Berlin Tegel). You take off and almost immediately start descending ;-) It was nice and smooth though. Going off to have a smoke, and enter the Ambassadors Meeting which will definitely involve a lot of talking about Fedora EMEA.
Fabian Affolter: Standaufbau beginnt...
Dieses Mal sind wir ziemlich früh an der Messe Berlin angekommen. Sogar noch vor Jörg, der in seiner "rollenden Event-Box" ziemlich viel mitgeschleppt hat. Bilder gibt es später und auch einen längeren Eintrag, denn das WLAN ist nicht gerade stabil. Dies sind wir uns aber gewohnt.
Peter Lemenkov: Nokia: No Linux for mobile phones.
http://www.symbian-freak.com/news/008/05/linux_powered_nokia_phones_no_way_for_now.htm
Взято из ![[info]](http://lj.rossia.org/img/userinfo-lj.gif)
voip4u@lj.
Ну и пусть подыхают со своим симбианом.
Max Spevack: linuxtag 2008, day 0
I'm sitting in the midst of the Fedora booth here at LinuxTag 2008. Gerold, our lead organizer, has secured us the *best* booth in the entire exhibition hall. The Fedora logo (approximately 3 feet in diameter) will be the first thing that every person who walks through LinuxTag's front doors will see.
Looking around the booth right now, I see about 15 folks, with several new faces of European ambassadors who have joined the project since I was here last year. We have our Fedora Live USB kiosk set up, and we're also in the process of setting up a local mirror of Fedora 9.
I've also had one embarassing moment, in which I told Harald Hoyer that it was good to finally meet him, and he mentioned that we actually had already met each other briefly last year, but with so many new faces in the span of just a few days, he understood that I couldn't map every name and face back together instantly.
Time to finish up the booth preparations, then I think we'll all go find some food and participate in the Fedora Ambassador Day, a meeting of all our contributors, volunteers, and ambassadors in which we will discuss all the LinuxTag details and begin discussing the plans for Fedora in Europe overall.
More updates tomorrow.
JoergSimon: Linuxtag Logistic
The work on Linuxtag Booth is started! Right now Fedora Fellows showed up here on the Fedora Booth and preparing for FAD and the evening.
Like last year i was the driving "Event Box" and i started from Stuttgart this morning with a not so heavy loaded car. After a Stop at the RedHat Office Berlin this changed. With the help of Fabian my car is filled up with a lot of goods. So we will have a cool party the next days!
Planet Classpath
Joe Darcy: Indiana Jones: Ants aren't like scorpions!
There have been many years and many miles since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and after seeing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull this weekend, I think the franchise is a little worse for wear. In the opening action sequence, I was was surprised to learn Soviet gunpowder in the 1950's apparently included iron filings in addition to sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate since the powder was magnetic! Somewhere in editing, I'm convinced the line "Ants aren't like scorpions!" must have been deleted, a line I hope will be added back for the DVD edition.
Planet Jabber
Process One: New ejabberd 2.0.1 installer released for Windows
A version 4 of the Windows installer for ejabberd has been released to fix a problem related to SMP support on Windows with Erlang R12.
If you have downloaded a previous version of the installer, and if it does not work for you, you can give another try with the latest release, from the ejabberd download page.
Erlang R12 is unsupported yet on Windows and will only be supported with the 2.0.2 release.
by Mickaël Rémond at May 27, 2008 04:59 PM
Planet Fedora
Karsten Wade: Yet more mid-migration update
In case you were wondering what the status of the wiki migration is …
The weekend went fairly well. Right now Mike is working on technical stuff, such as failover testing and redirects, which explains why the wikinew URL may not be working at any particular moment.
Look for announcements on fedora-announce list.
Mark J Cox: test only
my last blog was missing from aggregators, trying to figure out why, sorry :)
See 26 May 2008: Enterprise Linux 5.1 to 5.2 risk report
Benjamin (tc1415) Lewis: A-Levels and some time away from keyboard
Right, until about Friday/Saturday time I'm taking a brief hiatus from the world for two reasons (of differing importance and fun level):
- I'm going to see the grandparents whilst the mother is on a short break of her own [Importance Level: -1, Fun Level: +1]
- I need to do A-Level revision [Importance Level: +10, Fun Level: -1×10100]
See you all whenever!
Planet Jabber
Coccinella: Tcl/Tk 8.5
I have just removed the compatibility code for Tcl/Tk 8.4 in cvs, and Coccinella therefore now requires Tcl/Tk 8.5. Since 8.5 was released already in December last year I thought that five months should be enough to allow for people running Coccinella from sources to get a Tcl/Tk 8.5 installation.
Well, there is not much to install if you run a single executable tclkit which can be found for most platforms. If you don't find your platform there it is not difficult to build Tcl/Tk yourself. Since the tile package is contained in the core Tk of 8.5, only the treectrl and tkpng packages require additional builds.
Speaking of 8.5, the direct reason the switch is made now is that I used the dict command for the new themeing engine. As typical with Tcl, commands (and manual pages) look deceptively simple. The hardcore programmer who is used to pointers and reference counts can't understand that Tcl has it all built in. Dictionaries can be seen as a hash table that maps from arbitrary strings to arbitrary strings. But here it can also contain other dicts in a recursive manner. This makes it very useful for representing a kind of arrays with multiple keys. Before 8.5, the standard way was to form a string like arrayName($key1,$key2) where "$key1,$key2" was used to lookup the value. This was clearly very ugly. With dicts you set values as:
dict set myDict $key1 $key2 ... $value
which implicitly creates a hierarchy of dictionaries.
by matben at May 27, 2008 02:40 PM
Planet Fedora
Tom 'spot' Callaway: for years and years i roamed
Memorial Day weekend was pretty good. I spent a lot of time building Fedora SPARC packages and sending patches upstream.
Haven't really done any serious "work" since last Thursday, because I had to take Pam to her doctor's appointments on Friday. We saw Indiana Jones 4 on Friday evening, and while ludicrous in parts (including the ending), it was enjoyable. No credit cookie, so if you've not yet seen it, there is no need to wait through the credits.
On Saturday, we went bike riding on the Minuteman Trail with ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
mihmo and Ray, had a little picnic lunch on the trailside, then came home. Afterwards, Pam and I went to the first Boston graticule geohash meetup, where our Apples to Apples was a minor hit until people became obsessed with frisbees.
Sunday, we cleaned the house in preparation for some of Pam's new gardening friends to come over. Pam made delicious vegetarian chili and good times were had by all.
Spent most of yesterday digging a hole for our new patio (many thanks to jkeating), then putting rocks in it. Several hours of that was enough to put me flat on my back, so I took a nice long nap, then just rested for the remainder of the day. Sometimes it is nice to just do nothing, especially when you hurt all over. Thankfully, I feel a lot better today.
David Nielsen: The VIA open platform
Slahdot reports on VIA’s new open platform which reportedly supports a number of distributions out of the box - while I am sure Fedora does work on this it would be nice if we were able to get them to test F9 on this and list it along with the existing supported distributions.If we don’t work on this hardware, hopefully some enterprising hacker will make it work like the work that is going on to make the eee machines run really sexy with Fedora.
I wonder exactly how open this is though, I am sure all the hardware is supportable by open drivers but could we make this into the ultimate open laptop, everything from a free BIOS to a free OS with all the hardware working at full capacity on Free Software. There are machines out there like this such as the OLPC but none I can think of that are publicly available, even the OLPC I can’t buy here in Denmark. I’d definitely buy one if that was the case, I have a VIA chip in my Zonbu and it is a very nice and silent machine, I am hoping the C7 chip in this will offer a similar pleasant computing experience.
Excellent work VIA, and while we are at it, thank you for the +16.000 lines of fb code. I am not qualified to say if it’s good code but I value active contribution to Free Software and I hope to see more.
