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

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.

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.

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?

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...

I think I’ve just made up another new word (to go alongside my pet hate lawyerbomb):

attendocracy

a whole society run mainly by meeting attendees. Usually, the meetings are basically non-discriminatory (all members may attend) and attendance is itself enough to give one power, but those not at the meeting are positively ignored (no postal ballots or elections). Choice of location, price and time of meetings is key to power in an attendocratic society.

Did this word exist? Is there another existing word for this idea? Is it the same as meetingocracy? Is there a better word for it?

I’m broadly in favour of do-ocracy (even when it doesn’t work out as I want), so I think I’ve been handling attendocracies badly. Are they worth the time?

Well, what passes for a heat wave in England: “an average threshold temperature is 30 °C by day and 15 °C overnight” according to the Met Office: Heat-Health Watch.

So, I’ll be following HOWTO not melt - keeping cool at midsummer again. Anyone got any new tips or tricks for 2009?

Finally, one of TTLLP’s full-timers is away this week, so enquiries may get saved and answered in batches. If it’s urgent, please put “urgent” in the subject line of an email.

I came 29th - with a time of 42 minutes 50 seconds - it was pretty hot, and I was therefore quite pleased with my time - which was better than last year.

thanks to the organisers; more info here

Yesterday we went to a local PYO farm to collect fruit for jamming. As much as we love redcurrant jelly we decided to skip it for this year and try something new - so I spent £15 on mostly strawberries.

Strawberries are terrible to jam, they are low in pectin, high in water and (in the shops in the UK) low in flavour. If it were not for the national obsession with them, no one in their right mind would bother with them...

I decided to use the recipe of Francis Miot, who is some top French jam maker:

• 700 g strawberries (fraises)
• 350 g redcurrants (groseilles) - you are supposed to remove the pips with a goose quill but we skipped this...
• 200 g water (d'eau) - it seemed an awful lot but it did turn out okay
• 1/2 lemon (citron décongelé) - ideally frozen and defrosted
• 800 g sugar (sucre blanc) - does not need added pectin
• 30 ml red wine (vin rouge) - we skipped this as we don't drink wine

The method is his standard method. First heat the sugar, water and lemon (squeezed juice and whole fruit) up to a full boil (121°C), then you add your topped and halved strawberries and (deseeded) redcurrants and bring back to a full boil. You then boil on full heat for 20 minutes before potting into hot cleaned jars as normal.

For best flavour do not add butter, remove the scum with a slotted jam spoon instead. Don't soak your fruit overnight in sugar as it draws out too much water - or so Mr Miot says.

We started with 2.1 Kg strawberries and 1.05 Kg redcurrants and yielded 13 (full) 370 g Bonne Maman jars. This morning we opened a jar to test - VERY GOOD!

Yesterday I went to see the second of two performances of “Teechers” by John Godber at the Oasthouse Theatre in Rainham. The play was being performed to raise money for Jenny’s trip to Ecuador. She assures me that this isn’t just a holiday, but that she’s going to help teach young children. More importantly, it was an opportunity to see three very good friends of mine acting. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Chris performing, I’ve never seen Jenny in as big a big part and I’ve never seen Heidi perform in a play at all! It was all very enjoyable and hopefully raised some cash to help swell the charitable coffers. Particularly impressive was that the cast of three brought to life about twenty different characters, which was an excuse for some particularly tongue-in-cheek performances which I’m sure would be recognisable by anyone who has worked in education. Not, I should add, just characterisations of students, either. It was certainly fun to see some classic silly voices be wheeled out for some of the smaller characters.

The Teechers cast

The programme for the play was also special, as I had taken the cast photos for it. It was, pretty much, my first commission, albeit not a paid one! The session, which was a couple of months ago now, was fast and fun, but I learnt the same lessons as Graham “codedragon” Binns did recently shooting outside in strong direct sunlight. Although I did have a reflector, there wasn’t time to use it as effectively as it could have been. This was because I was rushing. (To be fair, there wasn’t much time, we all had other appointments to make.) I shot lots and hoped they would be OK, rather than taking a bit longer to ensure the shots were set up properly. So I learnt some important lessons and am looking forward to the next time a similar opportunity arises.

I gave a CD with the JPEG versions of all the image to the cast with a list of of images I recommended, although I was doing so without knowing the context of the play. It was therefore quite interesting to see the ones that they selected for use; on the programme covers, a centre-page scrapbook montage and for each character (not cast) biography. (The image above is the one they picked for the poster.) It was surprisingly gratifiying to see photos I had taken all over the programme.

I also won a bottle of wine in the raffle. Having previously scoffed at the auction of cakes and comestibles at other AmDram productions, I am now convinced by this activity and will petition the National Theatre to follow suit. I want to see Trevor Nunn giving away Blue Nun forthwith!

I have to admit to a certain amount of trepidation when I signed up for EuroPython 2009. As primarily a sysadmin rather than a developer I was worried that I might not have the requisite knowledge to get the benefit of a week-long developer conference. After today’s experience I’m beginning to relax about that.

Today and tomorrow are the tutorial sessions before the conference proper starts. Having never been to a Python conference before I wasn’t sure what form the tutorials would take. From the outcome of the day I would have to say “much less programming than you might expect”.

The day started off with Michael Spark’s giving an introduction to Kamaelia the simple concurrency system designed by BBC Research. We started off by building a brain-dead simple version of Kamaelia to outline the principles by which it operates. This took us on to writing a bulletin-board system by chaining together simple Kamaelia components. This was, needless to say, pretty intense for a Sunday morning.

Having expected to be doing a lot of coding I dutifully spent Friday evening makeing sure that I had the suggested software installed and working on my netbook. As it turned out I only wrote about 20 lines of code during the whole tutorial. I was ever so slighlty miffed by this. This is the first time this tutorial has been given and in my opinion would benefit from being all-day with time for coding exercises between explanations.

Despite these minor problems I felt that the tutorial left me with enough of a grasp of Kamaelia’s basics that I could go away and write something simple in it without too much trouble. One other good point of the this session was the handout printed from lulu.com which was really nice. So nice in fact that I think we should spring for these next time we run a training course at work.

After lunch I was in Jonathan Fine’s JavaScript for Python Programmers tutorial. Which was in a room that was too small for the audience and much, much too hot. It also appeared to have a grand total of two power outlets. Fine started off with a horrifying list of the ways basic constructs in JS behave in ways that Pythonistas will find completely illogical. After the break he delved into the nitty-gritty of OO and Inheritance. As the tutorial progressed and Fine got further from his slides the session transformed into something more like a seminar rather that a tutorial. Overall I found this session enjoyable and informative, although my brain was beginning to melt by the end of the day.

I suspect that Wifi and power are what most people will grumble about, but knowing how hard it is to sort these out for events at my home institution I won’t carp too much.

Now for some time with the Django tutorial in preparations for tomorrow’s Pyjamas session.

PDF of the accompanying presentation.