UK Linux User Groups

I noticed that the videos from the most recent Ubuntu Developer Summit are now online, and thought I’d have a play with the new embedded HTML5 video stuff in Firefox 3.5.

Rather than view all the videos by downloading them individually I thought I’d make a page where I can view them all sequentially.

Here is the html I threw together. Guess it will look rubbish in anything but Firefox 3.5. Of course that’s no guarantee it will look any good in Firefox 3.5. Just, y’know, you’ll see the videos

I noticed that the videos from the most recent Ubuntu Developer Summit are now online, and thought I’d have a play with the new embedded HTML5 video stuff in Firefox 3.5.

Rather than view all the videos by downloading them individually I thought I’d make a page where I can view them all sequentially.

Here is the html I threw together. Guess it will look rubbish in anything but Firefox 3.5. Of course that’s no guarantee it will look any good in Firefox 3.5. Just, y’know, you’ll see the videos

Dear oh dear. The well-loved and well-respected actress Mollie Sugden has died, aged 86. In tribute to Ms. Sugden’s most famous character, Mrs. Slocombe, and to the constant running jokes about her pet pussy cat Tiddles, Jonathan Ross sent out a tweet encouraging one and all to use the Twitter hashtag #MrsSlocombesPussy in their tweets. Unbelievably rude, but also staggeringly apt! However, Twitter has decided (perhaps algorithimically) not to display search results for that hashtag: that, in and of itself, is somewhat disappointing. The hashtag became so immediately popular it appeared in Twitter’s list of trending topics, dominated in recent days by topics like Michael Jackson, and Glastonbury.

What’s more disappointing, however, is how US technology gossip blogs TechCrunch and Mashable dealt with this information. They considered it an attempt to poison the trending topics list with spam, neither bothering for an instant before publication to check and see if perhaps it was legitimate in some way.

Both sites have since been put right by blog commenters, and they’ve updated their posts to reflect that, but their knee jerk reaction was to condemn the tag as spam. $deity forbid that a territory outwith the US with a better sense of humour, and with less instinct to consider mild double entendres as nasty in some way, would gather up the power to invade the hallowed Temple of Twitter’s Trending Topics.

The blogs’ concerns were that the system could be gamed, but are we saying that those clicking through the trending topics list are stupid, and can’t tell the difference between targeted spam, and legitimate trends?

This was my second Python conference. The first was PyCon 2008, which was so well organised (by many of the same team as this years EuroPython) that I was inspired to come back. And I wasn't disappointed. There were a lot of very good talks, some that have planted seeds that I'll have to come back and try to find the time to look at and some that showed me things I plan on using in the very near future (such as py.test).

The atmosphere was topnotch. Everyone seemed friendly, the speakers were approachable and after spending the evening with so many people working on so many things it was a pleasure to get back to the room and make sure I actually did something technical before bed.

It's a wonderful feeling to come away from a conference feeling motivated to try new technologies and all I need to do now is actually schedule some time actually write some Python code...

The organisers did a great job and I'll be back next year.

• http://twitpic.com/8yrx6 I say mummy, Hannah says <grin> #
• Quick #lazytweet – should I watch Superman returns or Mock the week? #
• did 20 press ups and 20 sit ups yesterday. Today, I need a wheelchair and a stairlift. #
• Hugs #python for making things easier #
• Has attained a whole new level of awesome #

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• http://twitpic.com/8yrx6 I say mummy, Hannah says <grin> #
• Quick #lazytweet – should I watch Superman returns or Mock the week? #
• did 20 press ups and 20 sit ups yesterday. Today, I need a wheelchair and a stairlift. #
• Hugs #python for making things easier #
• Has attained a whole new level of awesome #

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Yesterday I made a batch of jam using Mr Miot's method. It's based on his standard method which is different from the method I've used myself previously.

• 1 Kg Rhubarb (frozen then defrosted)
• 0.8 Kg Sugar
• ½ a lemon (frozen then defrosted)
• 200 ml rhubarb juice (from the defrosted 1 Kg)
• 250 g crystallised ginger (my addition, not in the French original)

First you freeze the lemon and the chopped and cleaned rhubarb. Freezing and defrosting the lemon should ease the extraction of pectin for setting the jam. Freezing and defrosting the rhubarb should extract water juices from it, keep just 200 ml.

Heat the sugar, juice from the lemon and the lemon along with the rhubarb juice up to boiling point (121°C). Once it's rolling along add the chopped rhubarb and return to the boiling point. Boil hard for a further 15 minutes (give or take) and then add the ginger. After removing any scum and a a few more minutes it should be ready to pot.

I jammed 2.2 Kg of rhubarb with 1.76 Kg sugar, two small lemons and 0.5 Kg of chopped crystalised ginger. Tasted okay on the night, but rhubarb and ginger takes a few days to reach full flavour.

• Mr Miot's jam method
• my previous rhubarb jams

While it's useful enough in its default state there is even more functionality lurking just below the surface. To see which other modules are available (but are not enabled by default) run dstat -M list. To add an extra module to the output use a command like this one: dstat -a -M topmem -M topcpu

As part of my growing use of the tool I've started to write my own little dstat plugins. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy they were to write and deploy even with my basic python skills. While the memcached plugin was a proof of concept I've not needed much I've found the process count plugin to be very handy.

dstat is becoming one of the overview tools I use when investigating performance issues and it's worthy of a place in your toolbox too.

So, I'm publishing them. They're in the home:Riggwelter:GNOME_Contrib repository for 11.1 and Factory. Feel free to test them but the usual warnings about non-stable and non-official packages.

• got horrible trapped wind. without the trapped. #
• debating whether to get breakfast, knowing full well as soon as I do, Hannah will wake up. #
• http://twitpic.com/8xiup no daddy, no breakfast for you! #
• Needs something to do while mother & baby do their daytime tv routine. #
• Re-watching last week's top gear, Lisa spotted The Stig photocopying his head! #

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• got horrible trapped wind. without the trapped. #
• debating whether to get breakfast, knowing full well as soon as I do, Hannah will wake up. #
• http://twitpic.com/8xiup no daddy, no breakfast for you! #
• Needs something to do while mother & baby do their daytime tv routine. #
• Re-watching last week's top gear, Lisa spotted The Stig photocopying his head! #

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Plenty of people seem to have an issue with snmpd logging connection information for each poll on CentOS 5, like this:

This isnt necessarily a bad thing, however if you want to turn that off, on a fully updated CentOS-5 machine you can change /etc/sysconfig/snmpd.options to something like this :

# snmpd command line options
OPTIONS="-LS4d -Lf /dev/null -p /var/run/snmpd.pid"

Thats about all there is to it. Also, the reason why one finds so many different ways or achieving the same thing on the internet, isn't because everyone is wrong. Its mostly since the -L options syntax and use has been changing over the last few years. And while I am sure there is a good reason for this change but the developers really should consider keeping some backward compatibility in place.

- KB

Original post.

The Digital Britain Report was published on 16 June 2009. I only got time to look at it quickly recently because this is one of the co-op AGM seasons.

At first glance, it misses the mark. It doesn’t do anything to unlock Digital Britain and make us a more sharing and social place. From failing to open the 3G mobile networks to the Phone Co-op and other operators completely (they describe it as already being “highly competitive” - haven’t they visited a South West “notspot”?), through the unnecessary increase in protection for Star Wars’s foreign owners, right down to the continued support for Adobe on the report download site instead of third-sector-produced pdfreaders.org, it looks like the report won’t stop us being “Digital Divide Britain”.

I also have my suspicions about the effect of the “DAB-only from the end of 2015″ decision on our community radio companies, but I’ve not been active in that sector for years and there’s a further consultation about that.

Ultimately, “the Government believes piracy of intellectual propert for profit is theft and will be pursued as such through the criminal law” is the killer phrase in this report. The concept of being allowed to file-share without payment doesn’t even appear in the same section. I’ve been warning about these “New Enclosure” attempts for years: I didn’t expect the Digital Britain report to be such a leap towards them.

I think many of these problems could have been avoided if digital production cooperatives had been included in the preparation of this report in any significant way. I feel it has been captured by the private sector and a few trading funds, to the detriment of the nation. Shouldn’t we expect better from a Labour and Co-operative government?

What did you think of the report? What else am I missing? Seen any good reviews of it for free software fans or cooperators?

• now needs a new network card too. Looks like frankenstein's monster is dying #
• thinking about going to sit in the fridge #

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While I've been doing that, Cowon have released an updated firmware that adds M3U playlist support. This is a real result for Linux users. The S9 doesn't actually seem to be able to read the M3U files correctly as yet but I've opened this as an issue with Cowon and hopefully they'll fix it in the next release. Remember, this latest firmware is only a beta and may eat your children or your data - install with care although I've had no problems other that then non-reading M3Us.

Just have to get the HAL information integrated upstream so that people don't have to download my .fdi file for it.

Track my thoughts on this via Twitter.

So to speak, regarding the overall look of stevey.eu, using the Hemingway theme as a basis, I am giving the site a face lift! Watch this space, it is very much a work in progress at present, due to lack of available development time.

Today’s notable achievements were that I managed to stay on power and network for most of the day. Mostly due to the fact that I lucked out to get a seat next to a power bar in the lecture theatre holding Luke Leighton’s Pyjamas tutorial. I was interested in Pyjamas for a web project I may have to get up and running quite quickly over the summer. Although there were some rocky patches due to SVN mismatches I mostly managed to get a handle on how Pyjamas works. As a note to future tutors: if you need your tutees to download the trunk from SVN it’s probably best to specify the revision that works. This avoids everyone turning up with a version of your code that won’t run the examples. Also, I still don’t understand decorators.

Today’s buffet lunch was nice. Props to the conference organisers.

The day was nicely rounded off by dinner at a fine indian restaurant and a pint of very nice beer in the Wellington. Looking forward to the start of the conference proper.

Recently Microsoft replaced their also-ran web search engine MSN Live Search with an all new Google beating search engine called "Bing". Their old search engine wasn't actually that bad, it's just that no body used it, so along with a redesign they came up with a new name that they thought would be more catchy.

Just like Google they want Bing to enter normal language and for people to use it by default - gradually pushing Google into the same obscurity as Netscape, Stac, AOL, Yahoo!, Real and countless other companies that MS decided to destroy.

So here we go with some examples of how to use "Bing".

• To Bing for - to look in vain
• I Binged it - I looked and couldn't find it
• I've been Binged - I've been swamped with irrelevant commercial data

and so on... The old MSN Live engine wasn't too bad, sometimes it was even better than Google but no one used it. Considering this is Microsoft's nth go at search it's sad that it's actual worse than it's predecessor...