UK Linux User Groups

As previously mentioned I was looking to package pwsafe for Wheezy, as this is one of the few tools that I rely upon which isn't present.

There are now packages available, with the source on github.

I've also been doing some minor scripting because I've run into a few common problems recently:

run-parts

run-parts is a simple utility which will run every executable in a directory, more or less.

In Debian-land run-parts is the mechanism for /etc/cron.daily and /etc/cron.hourly - and that is where I've had problems recently.

Imagine you run a backup via cron.daily. Further imagine that you run a post-backup rsync and that this might take many many hours. If your backup takes >=24 hours you're screwed.

To that end I've patched my run-parts tool to alert and exit if a prior invocation is still running.

silent-run

I think everybody has this script - hide all output when running a command, unless the command fails. Looking today I see chronic from Joey's excellent moreutils does this. D'oh.

I think I've done more, but I cannot remember. In conclusion software is both easy and hard - easy because these two trivial changes were within my reach, but hard because years after encountering GNU/Linux we still have to add in the missing pieces.

Still could be worse, I spent four/five hours yesterday evening fighting with MS-SQL server, and that is time I'm never going to get back.

Start: 2013-04-13 11:00 End: 2013-04-13 17:00

We have regular sessions on the second Saturday of each month. Our meeting this month is at Sirius Corporation in Addlestone, Surrey. Thanks to Andrew Wilkins for hosting us this month.

New members are very welcome. We're not a cliquey bunch, so you won't feel out of place! Usually between 15 and 30 people come along.

I have finally reach the limit with unsolicited marketing calls (in spite of being registered with the TPS). So today I have implemented a couple of changes to the Asterisk phone system here.

1. All inbound calls with the number withheld will be presented with the number disconnected tones, then told that the call may be recorded (it will be!) before any phones ring.

2. If the call is from a telemarketer, I will transfer the call to sip:lenny@itslenny.com:5060

3. If they are already on my blacklist, they will automatically get transferred to sip:lenny@itslenny.com:5060

read more

Hi,

In the last 45 days, Vault.centos.org's 2 public facing machines delivered just under 66 TiB of data. So while we try and spread this load a bit ( its growing at 25 - 35% month on month ), we've had to make a few changes.

Firstly, isos are no longer directly downloadable from vault.centos.org, you will need to go the torrent route if you want older, deprecated release isos

Secondly, we've turned off multi range requests ( httpd will still accept upto 5 range's, and then block after that )

Over the next few days, we are going to recycle some of the larger disk mirror.centos.org nodes into vault.centos.org; If someone wants to contribute to this effort, please come find us on irc.freenode.net in channel #centos-devel or #centos-mirror or tweet us @centos or email us the address mentioned at http://wiki.centos.org/Donate - but keep in mind that need machines with more than 1 TiB of usable space, and more than 300mbps of network capacity, and since we will consume that bandwidth high density hosting facilities with high contention on the links wont work.

- KB

A couple of days ago, someone asked me whether the Gmail website was any good on mobile. I said: it seems so, the couple of times I’ve used it, but I’m not really sure. I’ll find out, I said.

You’d think I’d know better by now.

once more into the breach, dear enemies

The way to actually find out whether it’s any good, with the gmail web app as with all things, is to use it for real for a bit. So I decided that what I’d do is exclusively use the web app to read my mail on my phone for a week.

There are two base criteria here which must be met. First: I have to be able to get at gmail from an icon on my iPhone’s home screen, and second I have to get notifications when I get a new mail. Those two things are axioms, here: if they’re not possible, then my answer is “the gmail web app is crap” because I can’t use it. The easy bit first.

the easy bit

Go to gmail.com in the browser: press the share button, press “add to home screen”. Done.

notifications for a new email

Web apps have a notification API, but it’s not useful on mobiles, because the whole point of a new mail notification is that you get it even if you’re not looking at your mail app. You wouldn’t want to keep the gmail web page open all the time, even if you were allowed to do so on a phone, which you are not. (The Nokia N9 allowed this. No-one else does; mobile platforms routinely decide to quietly kill your app and then raise it from the dead again when you want it back, and while it’s dead it’s not notifying anybody of anything, because it’s dead). So, we need a way for me to get a notification that I have a new email. This requires some sort of native app on the phone, fine, OK, but I didn’t want to have to write a native app to do it; someone must have written an app which can handle notifications and then open up gmail in the web browser. And indeed it is so: on the iPhone there’s Boxcar and Prowl. (I assume there are similar for Android.) Prowl costs money, so I looked at Boxcar first. Boxcar does, indeed, allow you to have it get notifications when you get a new email and then do some sort of user-specified activity when a notification comes in, hooray! (It does this by giving you a magic email address: you tell gmail to forward all your mail to that email address, and when it gets an email, it sends your phone a notification and then deletes the email. This requires trusting the Boxcar people, I agree, but the purpose of this exercise was to see if this could be done at all. If you want security, run your own webmail server, or your own server which monitors gmail and then send the notifications yourself, that’s fine; Boxcar can help with that too via their API.)

the easy bit… is never that easy

So, at this point, when I get an email, Boxcar shows a notification: I press the notification, and it opens my configured URL, which is gmail.com. This is great and I should be done by now, except…Boxcar opens my chosen address in a little in-built web view rather than my browser. Lots of iPhone apps do this — build in a webview rather than using the browser — and it really, really irritates me. There is no option to say “open this in the browser, damn you!” Grr.

But, after some poking around, I notice that the Boxcar changelog says “NEW: Add ability to open custom safari:// URLs in MobileSafari.” Aha! That sounds like what I want. So… I configure my custom URL to be safari://mail.google.com, right?

That doesn’t work. Nor does safari://http://mail.google.com, or any other combination I could think of. There is no documentation other than the above changelog line. Frustrated.

Then I thought: well, it doesn’t have to be Safari, per se. I have Google Chrome on the phone too. Maybe I can use that. The iPhone is set up so that apps routinely register custom URL schemes: it’s how they communicate. Is there, wondered I, some sort of custom URL scheme that I can use to force an https link to open in Chrome rather than Safari?

Indeed there is. Well done Chrome people. If I open googlechromes://mail.google.com it opens https://mail.google.com in Chrome. Yay! So I configure that as my link in Boxcar. Now when I get an email, I touch the notification, and gmail opens in Chrome! Hooray! We’re done!

We’re not done. Now, you see, my home screen link opens in Safari, and my Boxcar link opens in Chrome. That’s annoying and wrong. So, how do I edit the home screen link to be to googlechromes://mail.google.com?

You can’t. You can’t edit a home screen bookmark once it’s created. Bah. So, how do I make Chrome bookmark something to the home screen?

You can’t. Only Safari can do that, because it’s allowed the magic secret APIs and no-one else is.

So how do I put a Chrome bookmark on my home screen? Well, one way would be to have an HTML file which meta refreshes to the googlechromes: URL, and bookmark the HTML file in Safari. That way, I’ll press the home screen icon, that’ll start Safari, Safari will instantly start Chrome, and I’ll have a bookmark. Slightly inelegant, but not too bad.

I stuck the HTML page on my site, and tried it. Minor problem: the page refreshes before I can bookmark it! So, remove the meta refresh, open the page in Safari, bookmark it, put the meta refresh back in again. Ha! That works. (And add a nice home screen icon with <link rel="apple-touch-icon">.

New problem. Every time I hit the home screen bookmark, or the link from Boxcar, we open a new tab in Chrome with gmail in it. After ten minutes of testing this, I’ve got fifteen gmail tabs in Chrome. That’s no good. The Chrome links doc dictates how to explicitly say “I want a new tab”, but not how to say “I don’t want a new tab: reuse the previous one”. After a bit more poking around, though, you can use an x-callback-url-style URL with Chrome, and that lets you specify a source. So, instead of making my bookmark and my Boxcar URL be googlechromes://mail.google.com, I’ll make it be googlechrome-x-callback://x-callback-url/open/?x-source=boxcar&&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com. That way, when you open that link a second time, it stays in the same tab as the first time! Hooray!

It’s not perfect. I can’t get Boxcar links and the home screen link to share a tab between them, so I end up with two Gmail tabs in Chrome. That’s annoying but not a total crisis. And this is now clean enough that I can stand to use it for a week. Now I get to actually try using the Gmail web app for a week and see what it’s like!

how annoying is the iPhone?

This all seems like a great big faff to me. Is that all the iPhone’s fault? Well… certainly some of it is. All that crap with Safari being the only thing that can bookmark to the home screen? You can’t add home screen bookmarks that aren’t to real URLs? Sure, these things are fairly technical, but they don’t seem like they’d get in anyone’s way if they did exist. Apparently in older versions of iOS you could bookmark (via a roundabout data URL procedure) weird URLs such as pref:something to open a Settings page directly, and Apple took that away. So that’s annoying.

But in general, I think that the approach of having a server monitor my email and then use the platform’s push notification service to tell me about it and open the webmail client…seems like a good approach. Android does seem to have a couple of IMAP notify apps in the Play Store, but they aren’t reviewed very well, and I don’t really want my phone to hang on an IMAP IDLE socket 24 hours a day. Avoiding that is precisely what push notifications (Google’s “Cloud to Device Messaging”) were invented for. (Note: there are lots of mail notification apps, but they poll. I don’t want polling. When I get an email, I want a notification. Not five minutes later.)

So, then… is this doable on Android? Is there an app like Boxcar where there’s a server component which can (somehow) monitor my gmail account and notify my Android phone, and then pressing the notification on my Android phone will open up https://mail.google.com in the phone’s browser? I’d be interested in hearing the answer to this, Android-using readers.

What about other platforms? How will Firefox OS handle this? (Maybe because they’re all web, they’ll just keep the web page open without ever suspending it, and let it use the web notification API?) I’d like to hear about other approaches. (I don’t want to hear “just use the native app”. Of course that’s the logical thing to do. The point here is to see whether I can set up my life so using a web app for email on my phone is a doable thing. If your answer is “you need to use the native app”, then I’ll take that as you saying “you can’t use web apps for this; you have to go native”. That’s a perfectly reasonable argument, but this post is not directed at you if that’s how you feel.)

Fun little project of gluing together technical bits, I must say. Constraints are the mother of inventiveness!

Customer: "Hi Pete, can I order two of your XP refurbished boxes please?"
Me: "Tell you what, if you order three I'll make you a nice filter coffee when you come to collect."
Customer: "But I don't need three?"
Me: "It's very nice filter coffee."
Customer: "Well I suppose I can put one in the warehouse, go on I'll take three then."

I do like a man who can be bribed with filter coffee.

The Google Summer of Code is a program that allows post-secondary students aged 18 and older to earn a stipend writing code for Free and Open Source Software projects during the summer.

For the eighth time, Debian has just been accepted as a mentoring organization for this year's program. If you're an eligible student, now is the time to take a look at our project ideas list, engage with the mentors for the projects you find interesting, and start working on your application!
Please read the FAQ and the Program Timeline on Google's website.

If you are interested, we encourage you to come and chat with us on irc (#debian-soc on irc.oftc.net), or to send an email to the SoC coordination mailing-list. Most of the GSoC related information in Debian can be found on our wiki pages, but feel free to ask us directly on irc or via email.

We're looking forward to work with amazing students again this summer!

So there I was last week at my parents’ house, and my dad said: I am thinking of getting Netflix.

“Oh?”, says I. “What brought this on?”

Questions like that end up turning into long discussions, and this was no exception. Those of you with the attention span of a four-year-old will find a summary at the bottom of the post.

He explained (in response to my question) that he likes the idea of watching films and it’s probably easier and probably cheaper and probably less hassle to do that in your own living room rather than the cinema, especially since the nearest cinema to him is probably 15 miles away. I pointed out that the available films will lag behind the cinema releases (so if you see an ad for, say, Star Trek Into Darkness 1 on the side of a bus, you can’t watch it in your living room now) but that they lag behind a consistent amount (so all the films that hit the cinema 12 months ago 2 arrive online at now, roughly, so all the films which were contemporarily released with one another are still contemporary with one another), and that there are multiple different providers of this sort of thing (Netflix, Lovefilm, Now TV). And I pointed out 3 that this would be a bit of a problem technically, because the computer plugged into the big TV in the living room runs Ubuntu, and you can’t watch commercial streaming video on Ubuntu 4 because it all requires MS PlayReady DRM 5 and there’s no Ubuntu implementation of that, and so this meant that we’d need to install Windows on that TV computer instead. 6

so, like, wassitallabout?

“How does it work?”, says my dad. “Well,” said I, settling into the chair and adopting a wise look, “you pay a monthly subscription, and then pick any film you want and watch it whenever you want for free, beyond the subscription. I think if you watch the very latest films then they might charge an extra cost because it’s a really recent film, but you’re already waiting 12 months before it hits Netflix at all; you might as well just set your clock to 18 months behind and watch a film once it hits non-pay-per-view.” A nod from Dad. “Oh, and I think occasionally there might be a film that Netflix doesn’t have: sometimes there are little wars between them and, say, Amazon or Lovefilm 7 or Hulu or whatever, and a film is a ‘Netflix exclusive’ or something.” 8

“We should check that,” says my dad, a man for whom “films I want to watch” has hitherto been Zulu and The Great Escape, but he’s right 9. Now we pause here for twenty minutes while, with increasing disbelief and shrillness, I discover that Netflix don’t provide a browseable list of their films. They don’t. That’s insane. Also: you know how shops that don’t display their prices are doing so because it’s all stupidly expensive? Anyone who doesn’t display a list of their products is doing so because that list is a lot shorter and less comprehensive than you think it will be. So we poke around some more (I was honestly, properly shocked by the absence of a list) and find a website that searches Netflix and gives you a link. Commence another twenty minute block of disbelief during which my dad names film after film after film he wants to watch, or wouldn’t mind watching, or has always meant to watch… and we find, I think, three. These weren’t all new films, weren’t all obscure films, weren’t all old films: there was a good mix. And hardly any of them were there.

and the rat was nowhere at all

Further research establishes that the rivals — Lovefilm, Now TV, Blinkbox — are the same. I was under the impression that every one of these online movie places had basically every film you’ve ever heard of, and they compete on pricing, or access to the very latest films. It is not like that. 10 Instead, Netflix and Lovefilm and Now TV have basically no films for streaming and then every now and again they might have one. That is: I thought that the model was “think on the bus of a film you fancy watching, then go home and find it on Netflix and watch it”, and the model is totally not that. Instead, the model is “decide you want to watch a film, and set aside two hours for film-watchy time, and then go to Netflix and choose a film from their list of films”. Or, in practice, from the subset of their list of films that you actually want to watch. That’s not necessarily a bad model — I’m sure new films come into Netflix’s list faster than you can watch them, and you could probably get quite a long way by just looking at their list and finding all the stuff on it that you like the look of — but I totally misunderstood (and so did Dad). I thought that Netflix were like Spotify but for films, and they really ain’t. 11

father, I shall bring you only the finest blank tv screens

At this point he said, well, that’s crap then. I suppose I ought to go to the cinema.

I said: well, if you have to do the just-choose-off-the-list thing anyway, then why not just use a service who don’t charge a monthly subscription? What I mean is: do it all pay-per-view. So then you’re not paying when you’re not using it, and on any given day you can just do a search and see if there’s anything you fancy watching (and paying for), and if there isn’t, get in the car and go to the cinema instead. Best of both worlds. I’m sure that if you watched ten films a week that Netflix would be cheaper, but I don’t think that you’re gonna do that, daddy dearest.

OK, says daddy dearest. So, we do that, and put Windows on the computer, right?

Yep, I said. None of this stuff works on Ubuntu. Amazon Instant Video works fine, and does exactly what you want, but (check briefly on internet to confirm; briefly bitch on reddit about this; go back to dad) it’s US only. Soz.

the sacred art of stealing

We then have a little discussion about BitTorrent and theft of movies, during which I basically say: it is not the solution for you. First, it is really awkward and annoying. Popup ads, hundreds of different websites, being able to tell the difference between a “download the torrent” link which is real and one which is put there by an advert. Torrent sites are blocked by ISPs in the UK. Yes, gentle reader, stop sniggering at how this blocking approach is useless. Tt’s not meant to stop you, you filthy techie pirate: it’s meant to be a speed bump which makes it difficult for the unwashed masses to do this, to keep people like my dad out of the torrent gutter and in paid-for shiny Netflix territory… and it works.

I specifically recommended to dad that he not think about dealing with this stuff through theft, because theft is hard. Try it, next time you steal a movie: look at what you’re doing with the eyes of an inexperienced person. A person who doesn’t have Adblock Plus, who isn’t able to read through a list of search results and identify which ones “look legit” and which look like spam, who isn’t able to tell which links on a site are real and which download an exe. Theft is hard, and frankly it’s fairly close to not being worth the pain. It’s fairly close to it being easier to just pay the money. And that’s all the movie people want. They don’t want to make it impossible, they don’t want to studiously ignore that DRM doesn’t work, that blocking doesn’t work, that they can’t shut down every Pirate Bay proxy… all they have to do is make most people think “blimey, it’d be easier to pay the money than do this”. To me it feels like that’s now fairly close to being the case unless you’re a super techie (like most of the people reading this).

Also, y’know, stealing.

Also also: mkv. avi. srt. Do you really want to care about this stuff? Learn what a “BRRIP” is? Learn whether the thing you’ve got has Italian audio rather than English? Is "Incepcja - Inception DVDRip.XviD AC3 - ENG / Lektor PL" OK to download? 12 Srsly, hassle. Avoid.

say that my glory was I had such friends

While explaining BitTorrent and why it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, a couple of very helpful people saw and commented on my Reddit post complaining about this stuff. Google Play, they said… that’s in the UK. Single-purchase pay-per-view videos, no subscription required. Dad’s got an Android phone so he’s already got a Play account… and Play Video works in Ubuntu?

Really?

It does, it turns out.

I was quite surprised by this.

he saved every one of us

You have to install hal to make Google Play work in Ubuntu 13: to do this, search for hal in Ubuntu Software Centre and then install it (“Hardware Abstraction Layer”) 14. This is the same thing that Amazon Instant Video in the US needs. It’s using Adobe’s Flash DRM stuff. This is good for us, we happy few, we Ubuntu users, because we have Flash. We do not have the PlayReady DRM which is in Silverlight 15, and which the movie studios are pressuring online video people to switch to — that’s why Netflix doesn’t work in Ubuntu, that’s why Lovefilm no longer works, why Now TV doesn’t work. Google Play, on the other hand, works fine. Dad likes the pay-just-when-you-watch-a-film model, and it works on his existing computer with his existing accounts; he didn’t even have to sign up for anything. Just click and he’s bought a film and can watch it. Right there in the web browser. No app required at all.

It was literally that simple.

People on other platforms, who are not only used to the idea that it’s that simple, but have hardly any concept that it might not be simple, are laughing themselves sick right now at me being so childishly, pathetically pleased by this. I personally am thinking: good work, Google Play. You made that easy.

The film that Dad chose to watch… was Twilight. Twilight. You’re not my real dad, dad.

dispatch war rocket Ajax to bring back his body

This is worrying. (Not the Twilight thing.) Flash still exists on Ubuntu, but Adobe have stopped making it. The DRM parts of it are already dependent on hal, which is basically deprecated: Adobe built the Flash DRM stuff into Flash and on Linux when hal was the thing, and since then hal has stopped being the thing, but Adobe didn’t update Flash to work with the replacement… and right at the moment it doesn’t look like they will at all, because they’ve stopped doing Flash for Linux. This means that at some point it will stop working. At the moment it is possible to legitimately, legally, happily, easily watch a Hollywood film on a stock, standard Ubuntu machine. Google Play can do it in at least the US and the UK; Amazon Instant Video can do it in the US. If Flash stops working, that goes away.

And HTML5 will not save us. It will not. They’re talking about putting DRM into HTML5 video right now, but either they won’t do it (and then there won’t be any commercial videos in HTML5, just like there aren’t now) or they will do it and they’ll likely pick a DRM scheme which is not implemented on Ubuntu and won’t be (highly likely to be something like PlayReady, because the whole industry is already familiar with it). A move away from Flash and towards anything else makes life measurably worse for Ubuntu users, because we have Flash, and don’t have anything else.

fight the work per unit time

But you’re missing the point, man! We must fight DRM! It doesn’t work and it’s evil and useless!

I agree with all that. But that’s a long-term fight. And no-one has yet convinced me that there is a way to do it without selling the whole world on the idea that they should just Stop Watching Movies until the DRM goes away. And we, the DRM-haters, have had little to no success convincing people to make that sacrifice.

The music industry is not a good guide here. What happened in music was that all the players fought one another with different DRM schemes, no cooperation, to try and beat out their rivals. And while they were doing that, Apple came along and built something which was slick and easy to use and had Apple-specific DRM in it and dominated the market. Then the music industry said: it is our music, you have to play by our rules… and Apple said: no we don’t. We really don’t. What are you going to do, music people? Go and sell WMAs? Not likely. Everyone’s got an iPod now. And Apple were right… and because everyone wanted to sell music to iPod owners and didn’t want to do it through Apple’s sales channel, they had to go DRM-free. Because that’s all that iPods would play. You could see this as a great victory for consumer power, if you squint a bit.

The movie people, though (and this is an important point) are not stupid. They have seen what happened to the music industry, have seen that it ended up with all viable saleable music being DRM-free, and have said: that’s not gonna happen to us. They are not going to fight and bicker amongst themselves while Apple builds a royal road to all the money. They are not going to knife one another. They’re going to get together, swallow their pride a bit, and cooperate because they recognise that one DRM system that everyone compromises a bit on is better than a million and the eventual arrival of DRM-free videos. And so they did cooperate: that’s what Ultraviolet is. And it does not matter that Ultraviolet hasn’t taken off yet: it does not matter that it is not a viable competitor to Netflix. The point is that it exists. The movie people will not be forced into offering DRM-free movies because they didn’t cooperate until it was too late. They have seen the mistakes the music industry made, and won’t get caught the same way.

Let’s talk about how, in the long term, the studios can be convinced to not use DRM: that’s a good conversation to have. But it’s hard to see how to do that now without telling my dad that he can’t watch Twilight on Ubuntu even if he wants to.

whataboutery

One of the things about this whole topic of movies and DRM and Ubuntu and stuff is that every sentence comes larded with a million caveats, oh-but-what-abouts, roads-not-taken, sidebars, and other ancilliary things. If you manage to find something where I said “and therefore X” and didn’t mention that Y and Z also exist as possibilities, do not assume that it is because I do not know about Y and Z. But tell me about them!

tl; dr

Summary: Google Play video works on stock Ubuntu, in your browser, and exists here in England. It is, as far as I am aware, the only legitimate, unhacky 16 way to watch a streamed Hollywood film on a standard Ubuntu laptop in England. I like it. So does my dad.

Notes:

1. not Star Trek: Into Darkness ↩
2. or 18 months ago, or whatever the time lag actually is ↩
3. a touch shamefacedly ↩
4. he wants instant gratification: being able to go from “I want to watch a film” to “I am watching a film” in seconds. This means that a DVD rental service is no good for his use case ↩
5. yes, Silverlight, but Silverlight itself is not the problem ↩
6. yes, I know about the Netflix-under-Wine stuff in Ubuntu. Read on ↩
7. yes I know Amazon own Lovefilm ↩
8. pause for brief explanation of how Netflix are remaking House of Cards in America ↩
9. and this is a massively unfair characterisation ↩
10. Maybe it is like that in America. It isn’t, here. ↩
11. this is not necessarily a complaint. I understand that Netflix are not Spotify for films, and it is not Netflix’s fault that they are not Spotify for films. You think the music industry is full of back-alley cheating and under-the-table secret deals? Ha! You should see the movie people. ↩
12. I’ll be honest: I’m not sure myself. Looks like it’s got English audio and Polish subtitles? Don’t know. ↩
13. if you don’t install hal, Flash obviously still works, but the movie just won’t play ↩
14. or sudo apt-get install hal from a terminal ↩
15. we could have. Microsoft have not “refused” to put PlayReady on Ubuntu. They just haven’t done it, and why should they? what’s their motivation? I wouldn’t do it if I were them, right now ↩
16. installing a custom Wine and a PPA is hacky; using a US-based proxy is hacky. If you think it isn’t, that’s fine; continue to think so, and we’ll agree to differ. ↩

I’ve been reading with great interest the blog posts from Michael Hall highlighting all the activity in the Ubuntu Touch developer community. It’s exciting to see people have started poking at our fledgling SDK and have already created some cool applications. Likewise, internally at Canonical developers are working hard on the infrastructure, platform and SDK to make it easy, fun and robust to create applications for Ubuntu Touch.

We’re keen to keep lines of communication between the developer community and platform developers wide open, while allowing everyone to get on with their work. From the Canonical side we’ll shortly be publishing more details of our plans for the platform so developers have a better understanding of our roadmap and can set their own expectations accordingly.

On the flip-side we’re also keen to get feedback from developers. We’ve scheduled regular check-up meetings with developers of the Core Apps which are listed on the wiki. Everyone is welcome to attend and join in, but the primary goal of each is to allow us to help Core Apps developers.

It’s great to see that new contributors, hackers and people just having a play with Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview are coming to #ubuntu-touch at all hours of the day and night to get and give help and discuss what they’re doing.

We have noticed though that sometimes people aren’t getting answers to their questions, usually because they ask when many core contributors are asleep or just busy doing other things. This is the nature of IRC, and we’re not looking to force people to only come to the channel at certain times.

We do though want to improve our communication by having a specific time when developers and other experts will actually be around, and if we can’t get an answer immediately, make a note of it so we can get back to people later.

So every Wednesday we’re also holding a regular open “Ubuntu Touch Weekly Clinic” in #ubuntu-touch on freenode IRC at 13:00 UTC. Feel free to ping myself (popey) or Michael Hall (mhall119) on IRC to get our attention

We picked a time when it seems most core contributors are available, covering European afternoon and American morning. Everyone is of course welcome at any time in the channel, this gives us a focal point for our users. This isn’t a formal “Q&A” like the Ubuntu On Air sessions, but simply an accessible-for-most slot when we can guarantee people will be around.

So come along on Wednesday to the “Ubuntu Touch Weekly Clinic” in #ubuntu-touch on freenode IRC at 13:00 UTC

                          Tweet

I’ve been reading with great interest the blog posts from Michael Hall highlighting all the activity in the Ubuntu Touch developer community. It’s exciting to see people have started poking at our fledgling SDK and have already created some cool applications. Likewise, internally at Canonical developers are working hard on the infrastructure, platform and SDK to make it easy, fun and robust to create applications for Ubuntu Touch.

We’re keen to keep lines of communication between the developer community and platform developers wide open, while allowing everyone to get on with their work. From the Canonical side we’ll shortly be publishing more details of our plans for the platform so developers have a better understanding of our roadmap and can set their own expectations accordingly.

On the flip-side we’re also keen to get feedback from developers. We’ve scheduled regular check-up meetings with developers of the Core Apps which are listed on the wiki. Everyone is welcome to attend and join in, but the primary goal of each is to allow us to help Core Apps developers.

It’s great to see that new contributors, hackers and people just having a play with Ubuntu Touch Developer Preview are coming to #ubuntu-touch at all hours of the day and night to get and give help and discuss what they’re doing.

We have noticed though that sometimes people aren’t getting answers to their questions, usually because they ask when many core contributors are asleep or just busy doing other things. This is the nature of IRC, and we’re not looking to force people to only come to the channel at certain times.

We do though want to improve our communication by having a specific time when developers and other experts will actually be around, and if we can’t get an answer immediately, make a note of it so we can get back to people later.

So every Wednesday we’re also holding a regular open “Ubuntu Touch Weekly Clinic” in #ubuntu-touch on freenode IRC at 13:00 UTC. Feel free to ping myself (popey) or Michael Hall (mhall119) on IRC to get our attention

We picked a time when it seems most core contributors are available, covering European afternoon and American morning. Everyone is of course welcome at any time in the channel, this gives us a focal point for our users. This isn’t a formal “Q&A” like the Ubuntu On Air sessions, but simply an accessible-for-most slot when we can guarantee people will be around.

So come along on Wednesday to the “Ubuntu Touch Weekly Clinic” in #ubuntu-touch on freenode IRC at 13:00 UTC

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Whilst going over my MOT certificates last night, I noticed they include odometer readings. Time for some chart pr0n!

I acquired this car at the start of 2007. It seems my average mileage per year has been pretty constant, even without consciously trying to hit a certain point. The only dip was in 2008-2009, when coincidentally I also achieved Carte Blanche status on the Eurostar.

I suspect this year will be significantly lower, given:

• the high price of petrol makes the choice between car and train travel a little easier
• there’s better connections to airports from where I’m now living
• I’m within walking distance of three decent supermarkets and have a smaller kitchen with less space to store large (car load) quantities of food

I suppose I should do the sums and work out the cost per mile for maintaining a car, and see whether it makes economic sense to keep it. Maybe it will give me an excuse to get a Brompton?

"Well I hope you live long now, I pray the lord your soul to keep
I think I'll be going before we fold our arms and start to weep
I never thought for a moment that human life could be so cheap" Elvis Costello, "Tramp the Dirt Down"
Today there is only one subject: Margaret Thatcher's legacy. To listen to the voice of her contemporaries such as Ken Clarke, you hear talk of a Britain in the 1970s in terminal decline, of a reform and rebirth that is still with us.

To talk to the young people with whom I work you can certainly find supporters of Cameron but very few Thatcherites. Of course for those aged considerably under 30 that is hardly surprising, she is not even a memory to those for whom Blair is the first Prime Minster, those who came to political maturity in 2010. 
At a funeral, I find it is often the children who have the final say on the deceased. We who grew up in the 1980s have always been 'Thatchers children'. More so those of us who grew up in the deepest south, who's parents voted for her in their overwhelming majority in 1979, 1983 and 1987.

My father bought his council house in Sussex in 1984 and told his children that is Kinnock won the next election we would end up living in the Soviet Union and the country would be ruined. Kinnock did not win and we prospered as a family. 
However I am struck that her traditional conservative side was so out of step with the cultural world I inhabited. Her frumpy dresses so far from the music my brother listened to - Culture Club, UB40, Spandal Ballet and Madness. Her mother-knows-best world view so far from the comedy I spent my youth enjoying - Ben Elton, Blackadder, Loadsamoney and the Comic Strip Presents.

As much as she was on the right side of history she was also on the wrong side of it. She helped to dispatch the cold war but she also unfailingly supported dictators like Saddam Hussein and Pinochet in the mistaken belief that the alternative was worse. The Arab Spring gave the lie to that.

That Mandella was a terrorist -she refused sanctions on Apartheid South Africa.

She bought in section 28 which was predicated on the mistaken homophobic view that a if a left wing gay teacher was in a school he was there to proslytise. I have no doubt that she would have hated gay marriage, I don't know what her view was on civil partnerships, but it was probably not affirming.

She also would not give and inch to the Sinn Féin or the IRA yet by talking to them we may have achieved a lasting peace in Northern Ireland.

Though many of my parents' generation admired her and many of today's young people vote for her party. I do not know many of her children who would vote for her if she were leading the conservatives today.

Of course as I always note when preparing a funeral, the only problem of building the service around the memories of the children is that they only really knew one side of the person who has died. 

A couple of years ago my good friends Chris and Heidi set up their own theatre company, Boffo Theatre. As well as their own productions, they also run acting and musical classes for young people.

A few months ago I spent a hectic Saturday photographing the three members of Boffo, Chris, Heidi and Carly, as they taught their classes. They certainly work hard but all their students seemed to have a great time.

Afterwards we spent some time making new headshots for the Boffo crew and then we got to have some fun, coming up with new images for them to use in their marketing materials. It was great to have the time to experiment and be creative. Having access to an entire theatre including a well-stocked wardrobe helped too! A handful of the photos accompany this blog post.

So if you are looking for acting and musical classes for young people in the Kent area, check out the Boffo website or Facebook group.

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The next meeting will be on Monday 8th of April from 7:30 at Veritas for a social
meet-up.

Feel free to bring your Linux problems and issues down for the experts to take
a look at (laptops only, of course).

If you’re new to Linux and want a little hand-holding, do come along, or if
you just fancy a bit of geeky chat there’s always lively debate on a range of
geek and non-geek subjects.