UK Linux User Groups

This review is a supplement to the one on the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK Local Community.

The COOL-ER ebook reader is available in a range of colours. When the good people at COOL-ER told me that they only had pink review units left, I had a mental image of something the colour of Barbie’s car. It was a pleasant surprise when a unit in the palest of pinks with a brushed metal look arrived. Something I could definitely hold on a train without my innate masculinity being threatened.

The device is supplied with a standard USB cable and a quick start guide. No software is bundled, meaning Windows and Mac users have to download their copy of Adobe Digital Editions from the web. The lack of bundled software is reassuring to Linux geeks, because it means the device must operate as a mass storage device, which work flawlessly with Linux. On plugging it in, the COOL-ER automatically started charging and was detected and mounted on my Ubuntu system. The directory structure follows that of the on-screen menus: one for “Digital Editions”, one for music, another for other documents. Adding Free content to the COOL-ER is a simple click and drag operation, but adding DRM-protected books requires Adobe Digital Editions. Adobe initially promised a Linux verison of this Flash application, but have since reneged on it. So users of Ubuntu and other Linux distros are pretty much stuck to free books like those available from Project Gutenberg, a very worthy project and full of some great classical works, but a little light on pulp fiction.

The COOL-ER has 1GB storage, which equates to just under 900MB usable space. At about 1MB for a novel in ePub format, that’s a lot of books! It can also be supplemented by a 4GB SD card. I loaded the PDF version of Jono’s Art of Community and a variety of books in HTML and plain text book from Project Gutenberg. Bizarrely, whilst the COOL-ER was rock solid whilst displaying the ePub book, it crashed repeatedly showing the HTML and plain text books. Some crashes resulted in the unit rebooting (a rather slow process which takes about theirty seconds) and on a couple of occasions required a reset using the dimpled button on the rear.

Because it is so light, the COOL-ER build quality doesn’t feel great. It doesn’t flex or bend in the way that you would expect a poorly constructed product to, but it does creak a little. A screw fell out of the unit whilst I was using it, although being a review unit, I can’t tell whether this is due to poor build quality or whether a previous reviewer hasn’t dismantled it and not tightened everything back up properly. The device is very light, weighing in at under 170 grams. It is lighter on the wrist than anything but the thinnest paperback. It has a beautifully simple appearance, with the only button on the front being an ipod-like 4-way dial with centre button, although the print on this did wear off whilst reading a single ebook. It looks as if it’s been designed as the ebook reader for the Apple fan. The high resolution epaper display is clear and easy to read. It is not backlit, like all ebook readers, and is ever so slightly too small to display a useful amount of text in a legible size at a comfortable reading distance. This means changing pages much more frequently than a paper novel and, as page changes seem to be as slow as with other ebook readers, the reading process feels disrupted.

It charges over the USB cable, meaning there’s likely to be a way to charge it pretty much anywhere. Charging seemed pretty slow, taking about 9 hours to charge from nearly empty to full. Geeks with the Ubuntu travel adapter will be able to charge it on holiday even without a laptop to hand. Next to the USB connector, on the bottom edge of the device, is a 2.5mm headphone jack. This is smaller than the standard 3.5mm size but apparently there is usually an adapter supplied (it was missing from this review unit). The chassis of the device is big enough to to incorporate a 3.5mm jack socket, so presumably it is the internal design which prevented one from being included. Hopefully a full-size socket can be included in future versions, as the need for an adapter detracts from the convenience of having the unit play MP3s in the first place. The right hand side has a rocker switch for increasing or decreasing the size of the text, whilst the left has four buttons for navigating the menu and other functions. The landscape-view button switches the orientation of the screen and works very well as a landscape display too.

What appeals about this device is its simplicity. Unlike the kindle or the Sony ebook readers, the front of it isn’t cluttered with buttons. It doesn’t try to be anything more than it is – a replacement for books. Yes, it incorporates MP3 playback, but reading a book and listening to some suitable music go hand-in-hand. What could be better than having your COOL-ER provide the music when you’re lying on the beach reading the latest Dan Brown? The COOL-ER is a great device for the price. If they could address the software issues in a future firmware release, it would be an excellent purchase.

Last year in MPGe of an electric car I attempted to compare the carbon emissions of the BMW Mini-E, and my own Ford Sport Ka. The result was 212 g/km (30 MPGe) for the Mini-E charged from coal, and 172 g/km for my Sport Ka (37 MPGe). In retrospect, the comparison was far too rough to draw conclusions from. This post is an attempt to correct that.

This morning the Today Programme on Radio 4 covered the news that the Nissan Leaf electric car is to be built in Sunderland. In a piece Evan Davis asked the BBC Business Reporter whether the electric car would really reduce carbon emissions. Here is a partial transcript:

Evan Davis:

Coming briefly back to the electric car in Sunderland. You talked about the rollout of a way of getting it recharged. Nissan will make much of the idea that it is a low carbon car, but of course it relies on electricity, which comes from the National Grid, and the National grid is powered by… whatever, coal fired power stations. Is it really a low carbon car, or is it masquerading?

John Moylan:

Well I suppose it depends where you see our wider energy system in the decade to come. The government has decided that it wants nuclear to be a big part of that, it has also announced major plans for off shore wind. So in the future the shape of electricity generation could look very different in the UK, it could have a more low carbon base, and that would link into making people who buy electric vehicles more comforatable about where the energy is coming from.

This provoked a quick AudioBoo response from Robert Llewellyn. Clearly annoyed at Radio 4 he said

The Toyota Prius which I drive regularly and record CarPool in produces between 80 and 90 grams of CO₂ per kilometer. The next cleanest cars are all in the 120-150 mark, that’s most small saloon cars. Anything with a slightly bigger engine it’s up in the 200 – 300 grams per km.

An electric car like the Nissan Leaf plugged directly into a coal burning electricity plant, somewhere like Didcot or Drax B up in Yorkshire. Those huge coal burning plants that burn millions of tonnes of coal every day. They burn that coal incredibly efficiently. It is on a massive scale, it’s not like 10 million tailpipes from lots and lots of clanking internal combustion engines. It’s very simple and that electricity goes into the car where it is used incredibly efficiently.

So even if you charge an electric car from a coal burning, unfiltered power station you release between 40 and 45 grams per km, in comparison to the 90 of the Prius, and the 120-150 of the very small econobox diesel/petrol car, to 350 grams/km for the Porsche Cayenne (oh how I love that car).

Today listeners might have have left thinking that electric car and conventional car emissions are on par, but Robert’s numbers put electric car emissions (even on coal) at half that of a Prius. There is a clear discrepancy.

In Februrary Mike Boxwell (author of Owning an Electric Car) performed a direct test. He drove 2 conventional and 2 electric cars along the same route and measuring their respective energy use:

In his test the electric cars charged from the National Grid both emitted 50 g/km, whilst the conventional cars emitted 137 and 155 g/km tank-to-wheel. The same electric cars emitted 131 and 140 g/km charged from coal. I compared Mike’s numbers to my own to arrive at the following tables:

REVA
G-Wiz Mitsubishi
i-Miev BMW
Mini-E Distance travelled (km) 22.6 22.6 100.0 Electricity used (kWh) 2.99 3.19 20.63 Electrical eff. (kWh/km) 0.13 0.14 0.21 Elec. Emissions, grid (g/kWh CO₂) 375.2 351.2 Elec. Emissions, coal (g/kWh CO₂) 1056.2 927.9 1028.8 Car emissions, grid (g/km CO₂) 49.7 49.7 Car emissions, coal (g/km CO₂) 140.0 131.2 212.2 Toyota
Aygo Fiat
Panda Ford
Sport Ka Distance travelled (km) 22.6 22.6 492.4 Fuel used (l) 1.33 1.51 37.60 Fuel eff. (l/km) 0.059 0.067 0.076 Fuel emissions, ttw (g/l CO₂) 2315.0 2314.9 2246.0 Fuel emissions, wtw (g/l CO₂) 2789.6 2789.4 Emissions, ttw (g/km CO₂) 136.5 154.9 171.5 Emissions, wtw (g/km CO₂) 164.5 186.7

The difference came down to how many units of electricity (kilowatt hours/km) were used by the electric car. Not having one to test myself I had used the EPA combined cycle figure for the Mini-E, which represents a very harsh driving style with many stop-starts. Mike’s direct measurements, however used his own driving style in all cases. The EPA figure for the Mini-E (0.21 kWh/km) is 1.5 times Mike’s highest (0.14 kWh/km). Mike’s test produces the fairest comparison, and it’s his numbers that should be used over my flawed comparison. It does show though, how critical driving style is to carbon emissions. Driving an electric car very aggressively, will make it perform worse than a conventional car driven conservatively.

Coming back to the Nissan Leaf, why did the BBC interviewer suggest it wouldn’t reduce carbon emissions? Most likely because that’s the public’s impression, that the power to charge electric cars comes mostly from coal. This impression is wrong, as I write this only 29.5 % of electricity in the UK is coming from coal, you can see the current carbon footprint of the National Grid for yourself.

Robert’s number of 45 g/km is correct for an electric car charged from the UK national grid, but not for a fictional car plugging straight into Drax or Didcot coal power station. It was 7:30 though, so such slips are forgivable.

Dear Lazyweb,

Anyone got a Nagios plugin that will take a domain as argument, work out its list of nameservers and alert if the zone serial is different on any of them versus the serial on the host that the check is running against?

There has been a lot of discussion about the experimental move of the window buttons (maximise, minimise, close) from the right hand side of the window to the left in the new theme for the next release of Ubuntu, Lucid Lynx. People have approved of the innovation, submitted it as a bug and helped people to change the buttons back to the right hand side. Some people said that they felt the decision to change the button location was made without consulting the community.

We were extremely pleased to be able to interview Ivanka Majic on the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK Local Community. Ivanka is the Design Team Lead for Canonical, the team responsible for the new look and feel of Ubuntu, from the ethos of the rebranding, through to the website to the font and of course the pesky window button placement. She talks about the button placement, the work of her team, why it is so important to have good data to back design decisions up and communicating with the community. It was a fascinating discussion which could have gone on for three times as long. I hope to have the opportunity to meet Ivanka in real life to continue it one day! The lengthy interview makes this bumper edition of the show “Behind The Screen” especially worth listening to.

You can download the episode here:

– MP3 (81MB download)

– OGG (40MB download)

When you’ve listened, please give us your feedback. Details are on the website.

This month was the first of the London DevOps tech talks. Organised by R I Pienaar and masterfully shepherded on the evening by Chris Read about thirty sysadmins (and some developers, project managers and scrum masters) met for a series of impromptu discussions, beer and pizza

While there was no formal schedule for the evening Chris led the group in a fishbowl, seeding some ideas and then watched the conversations bloom. We went through some tool chain issues, trending, log analysis, how Splunk is the best thing since sliced bread with bacon in it and how Centos does some very interesting things with the data they collect. It was the first fishbowl I'd ever attended and it was actually a lot of fun, especially when people suggested RDF and SPARQL for a common data store.

A short break was taken when the pizza arrived and a number of interesting conversations broke out, how little admin time Apache Solr seems to need (and how odd it is to use rsync and shell scripts to sync out changes), how Redis and CouchDB are making certain problem domains easier to deal with and how the BBC has so many cool people hidden away were among those I ambled in to.

ThoughtWorks kindly donated beer, pizza and most importantly the venue - and for that we should say thank you. Getting a decent venue is always difficult for a new group. Although it's early days the group feels like it's got potential, the conversations were interesting, we don't all agree on where we should be heading and what we need next but the atmosphere was friendly and open. Hopefully these meets will last longer than SAGE-WISE did, with all the developer focused events in London it's nice to get to one that's a little closer to what I do.

On Monday some of the Ubuntu UK Podcast team got together once more to record an episode. Sadly Laura and Ciemon couldn’t be there, but were represented by a fluffy Tux and Firefox. We asked Ivanka Majic (Canonical Design Team Lead) to come on the show and discuss all matters ‘Design’ with us and she very kindly took time out of her evening to talk to us at length about what she does at Canonical and the changes we are seeing.

We had a set of questions we wanted to ask her, about the new buttons, the proposed design changes in Ubuntu 10.04 more generally what she did for Canonical. We also put out the call to our listeners via Identica and Twitter to get more questions, and we had plenty. With a full set of questions and a very open guest we ended up with a rather longer interview than we usually feature. We are concious that many of our listeners don’t like very lengthy podcasts, so we try to keep the duration at least under an hour. With this one we made an exception and went over 80 minutes, but I think it was wise to do that.

Ivanka talked at length about her background, the team she has at Canonical and the work they are doing. I don’t think any of us on the show realised how significant a workload the Canonical design team have, and how limited the resources are. Whilst many disagree with the approach, the colours, position or other design details, there are of course reasons for these decisions, and Ivanka did her best to detail the process by which those decisions came about. Ivanka was very open and honest in the interview with us, speaking frankly about where there could be improvements in the way the team operates.

For anyone interested in Ubuntu and more especially the thought processes behind some of the work you’re seeing emerging from the design team, I’d recommend having a listen to what Ivanka has to say. You can hear the full interview in “Behind The Screen” – Season 3 Episode 3 of the Ubuntu Podcast made by members of the UK LoCo team.

– MP3 (81MB download)

– OGG (40MB download)

Thanks again to Ivanka for taking the time to talk to us.

                          

Just a short announcement that my Debian BTS IRC bot which hangs out on #debian-devel-changes can now spam your favourite subproject's channel with specific bug activity and uploads.

Filtering is done with a regular expression tested against the package name. /msg me with your (channel, regex) tuples (in Python re format, please).

Virt-resize is a tool which can resize a virtual machine disk, making it larger or smaller overall, and resizing or deleting any partitions and filesystems contained within.

Read the rest of the proposal here …

Xen has a feature where it can export virtual partitions directly to virtual machines. You can configure a Xen VM like this example:

disk = ['phy:raidvg/devroot,hda1,w','phy:raidvg/devswap,hda2,w']

Notice that host device /dev/raidvg/devroot is mapped to a partition inside the guest (/dev/hda1), and on the host this device directly contains a filesystem:

host# file - < /dev/raidvg/devroot /dev/stdin: Linux rev 1.0 ext3 filesystem data, UUID=... (needs journal recovery)

Inside the guest, it sees /dev/hda1, /dev/hda2, but no /dev/hda device or partition table.

This is actually a nice feature of Xen because resizing filesystems directly is much easier than resizing a partitioned block device. You can just make the host device bigger (lvresize -L sizeG /dev/raidvg/devroot), reboot the guest so it sees the increased device size, then resize the filesystem (resize2fs — this can even be done live if you want to make the filesystem bigger).

Imagine if we’d been dealing with a KVM partitioned block device instead:

+-+---------------------+------------+ |M| hda1 | hda2 | |B| (root filesystem) | (swap) | |R| | | +-+---------------------+------------+

Resizing this is much more painful. You first have to extend the host block device:

+-+---------------------+------------+-------+ |M| hda1 | hda2 | space | |B| (root filesystem) | (swap) | | |R| | | | +-+---------------------+------------+-------+

Now what do you do? Easiest is probably to create a third (hda3) partition in that extra space. If you didn’t have the foresight to use LVM, then this means your root filesystem cannot be extended — you can only create another extra filesystem (say for /var) and copy files over. This is very inflexible.

Instead you could recalculate the MBR and move (ie. copy block by block) hda2 up. (Imagine it wasn’t swap space since you can just throw that away and recreate it, but some valuable files). Recalculating the MBR is generally error-prone because partitions have strange limitations and alignment requirements.

One day I intend to write a program to do these kinds of complex resizing operations …

Anyhow, this wasn’t even what this rambling blog entry was about. It is a companion to last week’s tip about extracting filesystems from disk images. Can we do the opposite, ie. create a partitioned device from a collection of Xen filesystems?

Answer, yes we can, with guestfish.

I’m starting in fact with the filesystem and swap devices copied from my Xen server, and I need to know their exact sizes in 1024-byte-blocks first:

$ ls --block-size=1024 -l devroot devswap -rw-rw-r--. 1 rjones rjones 3145728 2010-03-17 14:18 devroot -rw-rw-r--. 1 rjones rjones 1048576 2010-03-17 14:19 devswap

I’m going to put this into a 5G disk image, giving me space to expand the root filesystem to fit. Inexplicably I’ve decided to keep the swap partition content even though in reality I would just throw it away and recreate the swap partition (imagine there’s some important filesystem content in there instead). I want devswap to precisely fit at the end of the new disk image.

Let’s create the disk image and find out how big it is in sectors:

$ rm -f disk.img $ truncate -s 5G disk.img $ guestfish -a disk.img -a devroot -a devswap ><fs> run ><fs> blockdev-getsz /dev/vda 10485760 # size in 512 byte sectors

Now I need to do some back of the envelope calculations to work out how I will size and place each partition. (This is a huge pain in the neck — I had to do several runs to get the numbers to come out right …)

><fs> part-init /dev/vda mbr # numbers below are in units of 512 byte sectors: ><fs> part-add /dev/vda primary 64 8388607 ><fs> part-add /dev/vda primary 8388608 -1 ><fs> sfdisk-l /dev/vda Disk /dev/vda: 10402 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors/track Units = cylinders of 516096 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0 Device Boot Start End #cyls #blocks Id System /dev/vda1 0+ 8322- 8322- 4194272 83 Linux /dev/vda2 8322+ 10402- 2081- 1048576 83 Linux /dev/vda3 0 - 0 0 0 Empty /dev/vda4 0 - 0 0 0 Empty

Notice the number of (1024-byte) blocks for devswap is exactly the correct size: 1048576.

The sfdisk-l command is also telling me that my partitions aren’t aligned on “cylinders” which I don’t care about. But the swap partition should be aligned for the underlying device because sector 8388608 == 8192 * 1024.

Once the hard bit is out of the way, I can now copy across my filesystems. Notice I added devroot and devswap as devices (the -a option to guestfish). They appear in the guest as /dev/vdb and /dev/vdc respectively and I can just dd them to the right places:

><fs> dd /dev/vdb /dev/vda1 ><fs> dd /dev/vdc /dev/vda2

and resize the root filesystem to fit the space available:

><fs> e2fsck-f /dev/vda1 ><fs> resize2fs /dev/vda1

Now I have a single partitioned device, suitable for use with KVM (mind you, not bootable because it still contains a Xen paravirt kernel):

$ virt-list-filesystems -al disk.img /dev/sda1 ext3 /dev/sda2 swap

As you can see there is much scope for automation …

Recently I received a small flurry of patches to my blog compiler, from Chris Frey. These patches significantly speedup rebuilding a static blog when using Danga's memcached.

The speedup is sufficiently fast that my prior SQLite based approach is no longer required - and (re)building my blog now takes on the order of 5 seconds.

On the topic of other people's blogs I've been enjoying David Watson's recent photo challenge. I was almost tempted to join in, but I'm not sure I could manage one every day - Although I can pretend I recently carried out my my first real photoshoot.

I'm still taking pictures of "things/places" but I'm starting to enjoy "people" more. With a bit of luck I'll get some more people to pose in the near future, even if I have to rely upon posting to gumtree for local bodies!

ObFilm: Love Actually

Been waiting for this for aaaages.

Posted via email from Fragments

I have just sent the following email to my MP, David Lepper MP, outlining my concerns about the Digital Economy Bill. I urge you to write to your MP with a similar letter.

Open Rights Group's guide to writing to your MP From: David Pashley <david@davidpashley.com> To: David Lepper Cc: Bcc: Subject: Digital Economy Bill Reply-To: Dear Mr Lepper, I'm writing to you so express my concern at the Digital Economy Bill which is currently working its way through the House of Commons. I believe that the bill as it stands will have a negative effect on the digital economy that the UK and in particular Brighton have worked so hard to foster. Section 4-17 deals with disconnecting people reported as infringing copyright. As it stands, this section will result in the possibility that my internet connection could be disconnected as a result of the actions of my flatmate. My freelance web development business is inherently linked to my access of the Internet. I currently allow my landlady to share my internet access with her holiday flat above me. I will have to stop this arrangement for fear of a tourist's actions jeopardising my business. This section will also result in the many pubs and cafes, much favoured by Brighton's freelancers, from removing their free wifi. I have often used my local pub's wifi when I needed a change of scenery. I know a great many freelancers use Cafe Delice in the North Laine as a place to meet other freelancers and discuss projects while drinking coffee and working. Section 18 deals with ISPs being required to prevent access to sites hosting copyrighted material. The ISPs can insist on a court injunction forcing them to prevent access. Unfortunately, a great many ISPs will not want to deal with the costs of any court proceedings and will just block the site in question. A similar law in the Unitied States, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) has been abused time and time again by spurious copyright claims to silence critics or embarrassments. A recent case is Microsoft shutting down the entire Cryptome.org website because they were embarrassed by a document they had hosted. There are many more examples of abuse at http://www.chillingeffects.org/ A concern is that there's no requirement for the accuser to prove infringement has occured, nor is there a valid defense that a user has done everything possible to prevent infringement. There are several ways to reduce copyright infringement of music and movies without introducing new legislation. The promotion of legal services like iTunes and spotify, easier access to legal media, like Digital Rights Management free music. Many of the record labels and movie studios are failing to promote competing legal services which many people would use if they were aware of them. A fairer alternative to disconnection is a fine through the courts. You can find further information on the effects of the Digital Economy Bill at http://www.openrightsgroup.org/ and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8544935.stm The bill has currently passed the House of Lords and its first reading in the Commons. There is a danger that without MPs demanding to scrutinise this bill, this damaging piece of legislation will be rushed through Parliament before the general election. I ask you to demand your right to debate this bill and to amend the bill to remove sections 4-18. I would also appreciate a response to this email. If you would like to discuss the issues I've raised further, I can be contacted on 01273 xxxxxx or 07966 xxx xxx or via email at this address. Thank you for your time. -- David Pashley david@davidpashley.com Read Comments (0)

As many of you wonderful people of the Internet should be intimately aware of, the Ubuntu Global Jam takes place from the 26th – 28th March 2010. That is only a few weeks away, and while we have some great events already set up, we need more!

I just wanted to highlight how simple it is to put together an event. I explained much of this in my recent live videocast today:

Can’t see it? Watch it here!

I was keen to summarize much of the key points here though so this post can be linked to so we can spread some best practice around how easy it is to put together an event.

Ubuntu Global Jam events are simple events designed to get Ubuntu users and contributors in the same room to work together and contribute to Ubuntu. This can happen through any means: testing, documentation writing, working on a LoCo team, development or whatever else. The key focus here is on getting people together and having fun with Ubuntu.

Let’s look at how to put together an event.

Step 1: Pick a date

The Ubuntu Global Jam takes place on three days:

• Fri 26th March 2010
• Sat 27th March 2010
• Sun 28th March 2010

The first step is to pick a date for the event to happen. There is no fixed time of how long a jam should be it: it could be a few hours or a few days: it does not need to take place on all days. Just pick the times that work well for you.

Step 2: Pick a venue

The next step is to pick a place to hold your event. One of the misconceptions about global jam events is that they need to be big, professional, full-on events. Not at all! Many are simple, low-key events that are pretty much like most LUG meetings: a group of Open Source fans getting together to have fun and work on Ubuntu together.

When choosing a place I recommend you ensure the following are available as a bare minimum:

• Enough seating for ten or so people.
• An freely available Internet connection.
• Optional but preferable is access to refreshments (e.g. in a coffee shop).

A few great options for venues are:

• Coffee shops
• Bars
• University/school buildings
• Restaurants
• Homes
• If it is a nice day, what about a picnic at a park?

Importantly, you often don’t need to inform the venue that you are going. Just choose a venue (e.g. a coffee shop) and just show up like any other day.

Step 3: Add your event

The next step is to add your event to the list of events that are going as part of the Ubuntu Global Jam.

We are in the process of moving over to our dedicated LoCo teams LoCo directory but as we are in a transitional period, we are also asking LoCo teams to list their events on the old wiki page too. As such, to add your events just follow these instructions:

The LoCo Directory

To add an event to the LoCo directory you will need to be a member of your LoCo team in Launchpad.

1. Go to http://loco.ubuntu.com and in the top right on the page, log in.
2. Click the Venues link.
3. Check to see if the venue you are holding your event at is in the list. If not, click the Add new venue link and add the venue to the system.
4. Click here to straight to the page to add a new event. On that page, click on the team that the event will be happening as part of and then fill in the form. Be sure to select Global Jam in the Related Global Event drop-down box.

The Wiki Page

Simply go to this page and add your event to it.

Step 4: Build some buzz!

Now is the time to spread the word about your event and encourage people to come along! Here are some ideas:

• Be sure to tweet/dent, and post on Facebook about the event. When you add the event to the LoCo directory you will have a link to point people at (e.g. my event’s link is this) – send multiple messages to remind people of the event and keep it upfront in their minds.
• Blog it – particularly if your blog appears on one of the planets.
• Post to your LoCo’s mailing list – let them know about the event, when it is and where it is.
• Post to local LUG mailing lists – let your local LUGs know: many people may want to come along and join the event!
• Put up fliers – fliers in libraries, computer shops, universities and at the venue itself are great ways to get people to join you.
• Website buttons – why not create some website buttons so attendees can put them on their website and link to your event page in the LoCo directory.

And that’s it! If you have any questions, here are a few useful resources:

• Mailing List – this is where the LoCo community discuss general LoCo related topics. In most cases cases teams have mailing lists too.
• #ubuntu-locoteams on Freenode – this is an online discussion channel where you can ask questions and socialize with other LoCo community members.

I look forward to seeing you good folks organizing your events and having a great time!

Simple invading aliens game in coded in C using a text editor in 2001 with SDL and the mixer library. You only get one life (or is that 5)  – you must stop those aliens from landing on you! <space> Fire (unlimited shots available) <right arrow> Move right <left arrow> Move left <escape> Quit the game.

The Linux and Windows XP 32bit binary still works, a re-cross compile may be needed for Vista and Windows 7 and a rebuild to optimise for Linux.

NB: I have been sent an Ubuntu 64bit fix which I will apply as soon as possible, the weekend 18/03/2010

The game over 5K lines of C is based on Sam Latinga’s Aliens 1.0.2, about 600 lines of C, part of the SDL library projects released under GPLv2. http://www.libsdl.org/projects/aliens/

Contact me and ABOUT

Download the Windows or Linux (inc source) binary of DSI from SourceForge

“A Space Invaders Clone For Linux And Windows 95 And 98 – excerpt 2001″

There must be a million space invader clones out there probably no room for another… but hey, it is my first game programming project and I thought I’d share it with you.

Downloading DSI-0.1-alpha

You can choose between the Win95-98 binary, the Linux binary or the source file if you want to compile your own Linux binary. Instructions for running DSI-0.1 are included in the readme in each package.

Windows binary: dsi-0.1-win-bin.zip

Use winzip to unzip the file to the C:\ dir or a directory of your choice then change to the dsi-win directory and double click the DSI.exe executable. I have not verified that DSI-0.1 works in 32 thousand colors but it does work with 16 thousand colors and below.

Linux binary: dsi-0.1-lin-bin.tar

cd to the directory that you saved the download to, possibly your home directory. Use the commands: tar -xvf dsi-0.1-lin-bin.tar

cd dsi-0.1-lin-bin

./DSI

PLEASE NOTE that this binary was compiled using Mandrake 7.2 the binary may not work with other distros, you are probably better off downloading the source files and compiling your own. You will also need to have the SDL, SDL mixer and SDL image runtime Libraries installed on on you system.

Source file: dsi-0.1-src.tar

You will need at least:

> SDL-1.1.4
> SDL mixer 1.0.6
> SDL image-1.0.9
> SDL devel 1.1.4, SDL mixer devel 1.0.6 , SDL image devel 1.0.9

If you have the latest SDL version installed (1.2.0) DSI should still compile.
X windows ( I use Xfree86 4.01), as well gcc and relevant c libraries.

If you are using the source to compile:

tar -xvf dsi-0.1-src.tar

cd dsi-0.1-src

./configure

./make

./DSI

Playing DSI-0.1-alpha

It is very easy to play… left and right arrow keys and the space bar to shoot, that’s it. Just follow the on screen instructions to view hi-scores and start the game. The game gets more difficult the higher your score becomes and you start with 4 lives.

© Damian Brasher 2000-2001

One of the most wonderful sub-communities in the Ubuntu world are our LoCo Teams; the global span of Ubuntu advocacy groups that are out there every day helping to spread the word about Ubuntu. These wonderful people are on the front-lines helping people to get started with Ubuntu and providing a fantastic place to meet, greet and have fun with other Ubuntu users and contributors.

In terms of resources for this community, we have the following key components:

• Wiki Pages – these wiki pages include best practise and details about how to join the community.
• Teams List – this is the big list of teams, complete with contact details and online resources.
• Mailing List – this is where the LoCo community discuss general LoCo related topics. In most cases cases teams have mailing lists too.
• #ubuntu-locoteams on Freenode – this is an online discussion channel where you can ask questions and socialize with other LoCo community members.

One component we have been keen to fix is the listing of LoCo teams and associated resources and events. We have discussed this over a few UDSs and I am pleased to show off some work that has been going into making our LoCo portal really effective. Thanks to the wonderful LoCo Directory hackers who have been feverishly working away on this project. You can go and play with it at http://loco.ubuntu.com.

The LoCo directory looks like this:

Right now it has the following key features:

• Teams – a list of all the LoCo teams in the community.
• Venues – a list of venues used by LoCo teams (useful so you don’t need to repeatedly enter new venue information each time you organize and event and also good for sharing good venues with other LoCo team members).
• Events – events can be saved to the system and associated with LoCo teams as well as global events such as the Ubuntu Global Jam.

If you click on the Teams link you can see the list of LoCo teams:

This is the full list of teams. Teams that have a humanity colored Ubuntu circle of friends next to them are Approved teams, otherwise it is colored gray and indicates the team is not yet approved. Already this makes finding teams much nicer for new Ubuntu members: just point them at http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/

When you click on a team you see more information about the team and their resources/events. As an example, here is my local team Ubuntu California:

The team information page shows some key details such as the owner, admins, when the team is next up for re-approval and also links to a series of resources such as websites, IRC channels, forums etc. The page also rather nicely shows their logo.

Not only this, but the page also shows a list of events that have been organized by the team. In the screenshot above there are two events (they are a little squashed, that is a bug). Clicking on an event shows the details for that specific event. As an example, here are the details for the Ubuntu Global Jam event that I have organized in a few weeks time:

When you view an event you can see when it is, what it happens, the location, a map reference and a description. There is also an area where you can RSVP for an event to confirm your attendance or non-attendance: this is a great way of determining how many people are likely to show up to your event.

The way the LoCo directory works is to suck as much information out of Launchpad where possible about teams and then it builds in some of the other features (such as events) into the LoCo directory. This avoids duplication of data and uses Launchpad for key features such as access control and owner/admin information.

Great work, LoCo directory hackers!

I’ve just bought a new toy - a Canon Pixma 250 MFP (Multi Function Peripheral). Basically a colour inkjet printer/scanner/photocopier. £35 from Argos which seemed pretty good, I had to wait a whole minute or two for it to arrive after I ordered it - very impressive.

I did some research and found that new versions of SANE (Linux’s scanner library) support it. Unfortunately the last release of SANE was back in May 2009 and whilst that’s not so long ago, companies just _love_ making each scanner just that bit different. There has been some questions asked about when the next version of SANE will be released, but that was over a month ago so it doesn’t look as if things have moved forward a great deal.

Using some details from here, I cloned the latest SANE git repository, then applied the latest Debian patches over the top. After a bit of digging around, I came up with a set of changes required to build:

• remove tex* stuff from debian/control (I didn’t want to download 500MB of apps)
• comment out sane.ps line from debian/rules due to the lack of tex
• debian/patches/21_sane-config.in_no_rpath.dpatch needs a small adjustment. increase the number of lines from “12″ to “13″, then before LIBS, add:
  • LDFLAGS=”@LDFLAGS@ @GPHOTO2@”
• now edit debian/patches/00list
  • many patches appear to be included uipstream now
  • two patches (09_po_update_es_add_gl and 33_epson2_update) I ignored rather than fixup since they aren’t useful to me

01_missing_pthreads 02_frontends_libs 03_libsane_deps #04_udev_rules_fix #05_saned_avahi_fds_fix 06_cap_always_settable #07_tools_missing_libcam #08_cardscan_usbids ##09_po_update_es_add_gl #10_sanei_usb_update #11_udev_147 #12_saned_polling_fix #13_saned_aliasing_fix #20_disable_rpath 21_sane-config.in_no_rpath 22_dll_backend_conf 23_unneeded_doc 24_sane-desc.c_debian_mods #30_xerox_samsung_ids #31_genesys_raw_log_fix 32_epson_perfection636 ##33_epson2_update #34_genesys_gl841_cal_fix

• finally I build a package, then installed the resulting libsane and sane-utils packages
  • libsane_1.0.21-amd64
  • sane-utils_1.0.21-amd64

At last Spring is etcetera, tra-la. In the bright sunlight the land looks strangely drab without its usual March display of leaf and blossom, but no doubt it will rush to catch up.

It's warm outside, bees are getting into the house, and it's almost time to look for mosquito-nets. Birds are warbling their nesting-songs; the redstarts are back on the terrace shouting "Get Orf Moy Lahnd!" every time I go into the kitchen.

A snake has sloughed by the steps outside my bedroom.

I studied art in Penzance for 3 months in 1996, this picture is one of my pop art inspired pieces “Good day bad day” acrylic on canvas.

"Good day bad day"

I gave this to one of my oldest friends in 1998, he and his wife have it sited it in their home office.

I read way too much, sadly I came across a post this morning about data storage technologies that will die. Most of those I think are fairly obvious, however some are just wrong and some lack an explanation. I’ll start with the biggest error:

Scripts

Firstly, scripts aren’t anything to do with data storage other than being just general useful things. The gobsmacking phrase “scripts don’t automate well” had me stunned. Of _course_ scripts automate well - it’s been the basis of Unix sysadmin for decades. The implication that the alternative (GUIs in their article) automate well is of course laughable. Perhaps they mean that instead of data retention policy being set by scripts (er, how?) it would be set automatically by backup software. This is the way any decent backup currently works - after all you want to say “please keep three copies of this, at least one a week old and one off site at all times”.

RAID-1

“All the rage in the nineties”. Well, and the noughties too. Yes, RAID-1 is inefficient compared to RAID-5 or RAID-6. If you have an 10 disk array, with RAID-1 you would have 5 disks of storage, with RAID-5 (assuming a hot swap spare) you’d have 8 disks, with RAID-6, 7 disks. As disks have become larger at a faster rate than their performance has increased, their rebuild times have increased - leading many to say that RAID-5 is obsolete. However where does this leave RAID-1 - is that as the article claims, obsolete too? Well at large array sizes, if you need high write performance (I’ll assume you have a decent write-caching controller), whilst RAID-5/6 should be fine, RAID-1 will be faster - and with modern large disk sizes, surely the wasteful space is _less_ important than it was since performance, not size is the limiting facter. However the real reason why RAID-1 won’t disappear is on small arrays. If you only have two disks, RAID-1 is the only sane choice. Personally I’d suggest using net/iSCSI/SAN-boot such small systems anyhow if it’s practical.

Tapes

At last, one I do agree with, but I’ll state some reasons. Tapes are horrifically expensive - often more than disk drives. That’s also before you take into account the cost of a tape driver (I’ve certainly seen Fibre Channel drives sold for £6-12K although that was a few years ago). However the two nails in tape’s coffin for me are reliability and (lack of) random access. The former is a personal bugbear - I’ve seen more failures with tape libraries than any other computing hardware. It’s just not possible to get something as complex as a tape mechanism as reliable as the far simpler disk mechanics. I don’t know about long-term archive storage reliability which can be important to certain sectors.

Omission

In my opinion they’ve missed the one technology which will change data storage more than any other - SSDs. In terms of pure IOPS it is now possible to replaces huge storage arrays with a single, cheap SSD. Granted, that SSD won’t last very long - however they are many orders of magnitude faster than HDDs. Such a change in performance hasn’t occurred in computing for a long time - it opens up new ways to solve problems. SSDs themselves won’t be an obsolete technology, however I wonder what they will render obsolete.

Now over to you to poke holes in _my_ article

As many of you will know, I manage the Ubuntu Community team at Canonical where Daniel Holbach, Jorge Castro and David Planella work. Together we strive to make the Ubuntu community a fun, productive and engaging environment. This work involves a tremendous range of diverse disciplines and projects.

One thing that we have been really keen to facilitate in Ubuntu is an ethos of just do it. I really believe our community should feel engaged to be creative in their ideas and be able to get out there and do it, with plenty of support resources so others can help them achieve their goals. I am keen that we don’t have a bottleneck where creativity is limited. Of course, this happens from time to time, but we are always keen to resolve it where possible.

While Ubuntu has a great many projects going on at any one time, some of these projects I explicitly put on my radar so I can help contribute to make them successful, and some of these are projects that I have been happy for me and my team to commit their time to. Each of these projects is scoped for a six month cycle, and when we get a little closer to the 10.10 cycle we will start thinking of where we will focus our time in that cycle too.

In the Lucid cycle I was keen to track work on this set of projects in a more effective way. To do this the process worked a little like this:

1. We first had a series of discussions at both UDS and online in which we discuss each project, what is involved and what targets and goals are in scope for the Lucid cycle. Targets beyond the Lucid cycle were explicitly deferred until the 10.10 cycle.
2. The conclusions generated from these discussions were first documented as a Roadmap on the Ubuntu wiki. This provides a high-level set of goals that the project is striving for.
3. We then produced a Blueprint for each project and a set of actions that are assigned to people. The blueprint is what we use to track progress on the project. The actions are stored in the whiteboard on the blueprint (which anyone can edit) and anyone can subscribe to the blueprint, which makes it great for keeping on track projects even if you are not involved in them.

The actions in the blueprint are stored in a set format, like this:

[jonobacon] An example action: TODO

In the above example, it clearly states who the action is assigned to (jonobacon on Launchpad), what it is (an example action) and it’s status (TODO). When an action is completed it is set to DONE and if we decide we want to bump it to next cycle, it is marked as POSTPONED.

This process in itself offers some key benefits:

• Commitments to a given project are clearly scoped to a cycle.
• Work is assigned to people: this is a great way of getting things done. Project Management theory has long taught that publicly assigning work to people improves it’s chances of getting done.
• Transparent: anyone can subscribe to a blueprint. As an example, even though I am not managing the Desktop Experience team or contributing to their projects, I am interested in their work, so I subscribe to a number of their blueprints. Each time the state of an action changes, I then get an automated email with the update. This is great for keeping up to date with their work.

With a bunch of blueprints that follow this format, I then approve a number of them as projects that my team will help have oversight on and help them to succeed. Some of these projects are driven by my team and I, but many of them are entirely community driven projects that I assign my team to have oversight over.

The legendary Martin Pitt then wrote a script to take this range of blueprints and actions and generate a burndown chart. Here is my team’s as of today:

It works like this: the Y axis is the number of actions in the blueprints I have approved for my team, and the X axis is the time until the end of the cycle (it is a little shorter as the graph was regenerated). The thick line through the middle of the chart is the trend line. My responsibility as a manager is to help keep the number of completed actions (shown as green) under the trend line: this ensures that we are on track for completing the committed actions throughout the cycle.

This was a pretty new concept for our community and of course the community is not expected to follow this way of working, but I have been stunned at how everyone has worked hard to stick to the actions they committed to and see the work through. As such this has felt like a really great cycle with some stunning work going on. Thanks everyone for your contributions!