02 September 2010
If you pop on over to OMG! Ubuntu! no doubt you’ll notice something different. That’s right, after two months of design and development, we have unleashed the new face of OMG! Ubuntu!
It might take a few minutes hours for the DNS to resolve around the world.
So what’s new?
The site is now on wordpress instead of blogger and on a dedicated new server, which means it’s much faster, and we have a lot more flexibility when it comes to formatting of posts and customizing the layout and style to truly give it that OMG! feel.
There’s an entirely new design that brings in elements of the new Ubuntu branding, and also sets the standard for the new websites that Ohso will be opening up over the next few months.
The new design features a much nicer category, tag and search system to make it easy to find older posts, a custom set of icons, new sidebar widgets, a new colour pallete, lovely static pages and a beautiful footer that all combine to make this site something unique.
The design was done by me and later on I’ll be going into detail examining some of the new aspects of the design, decisions we had to make and unique features that makes this website something we’re really pleased with.
In case you didn’t notice, the new website is over 3x faster than the old one! Niall Molloy, our ace web developer and optimization ninja has worked long and hard making sure that this website is the fastest around. Niall has managed to balance beauty and speed, producing something that is faster than most other tech sites on the web!
Niall also uses the new CSS3 standard to give lovely fading rollovers and other assorted details, so if you’re using Firefox 4 or Google Chrome you can enjoy these.
Niall will be talking about the code behind the site in a later post, including the challenge of transferring nearly 2000 posts with links and comments intact from one provider to another.
Overall we’re really happy with the new site and the fact that with a small team of two people working on it, we’ve managed to hit the deadline for launch which we set over 3 months ago!
       
01 September 2010
Enjoy: Burning Man is the test zone for the OpenBTS cellular test site, offering up free GSM access to 50,000 people from a shoebox:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/083010-open-source-voip-cell-phones-at-burning-man.html?hpg1=bn How the adoption of Open Source and Open Standards in UK local government stands to save UKP51m in Windsor & Maidenhead:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/aug/26/local-government-spending-open-standards-saving 3D Printers start to drop in price and drop onto desktops, but what are they good for?:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/diy/3d-printers-proliferate NZICT vote in a new chair from Simpl, a company claiming "direct relationships with Microsoft in Redmond, MS UK, Canada, AsiaPac & NZ":
http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/new-nzict-chair-elected Google adds VoIP capabilities to gmail, allowing subscribers to call mobile and landlines in the US and UK. More to come:
http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/8/25/google-brings-voice-gmail/ LG Electronics have 19" flexible e-Paper screens, and will make them available in 2011 together with colour e-Paper:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/08/lg-will-mass-produce-19-inch-flexible-e.html And finally. Some say he'll be named in a new autobiography, others say the case will be heard in private. All we know is, he's The Stig:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-11139252 Vik :v) Diamond Age Solutions Ltd. http://diamondage.co.nz
a cat named linux, originally uploaded by Br3nda.
In memory of our old family cat, my sister's old kitty: Linux.
1996 - 31st August 2010.
30 August 2010
It is easy to think that the software patents issue is this year's news. But it is worth reflecting on the fact that, in New Zealand as elsewhere, practically the entire IT industry has been campaigning against software patents for years. What was highly unusual *this* year was an New Zealand IT vendor organisation, NZICT, coming out in favour of software patents.
read more
29 August 2010
instead of fencing the baby in, it's much easier to put the heater and the cat in the playpen (and the cat loves it)
As many of you know, I tend to be the first to criticize anything in this community of people who are often afraid to voice their opinion about something. This time, however, I’m not going to do the talking, I’m just going to share some comments.
A couple of days ago we revealed the new default wallpaper for Ubuntu 10.10 over on OMG! Ubuntu! The new wallpaper is so bad, that Joey thought it was a joke. There’s even a bug reported on Launchpad.
This is what it looks like:
Here is a selection of comments from the OMG! Ubuntu! article:
“This is like “Chuck Norris fart on my screen, and i can’t clean it.”
“Never commented before despite reading religiously, this was just TOO ugly to dignify with mental distaste, it had to be made public.”
“Looks like I was eating a burrito over the 10.04 one and some hot sauce dripped.”
“I’ve seen many bad things in my life and it hurts me to say this, but this is in that list.”
“Worst wallpaper in the existence of the universe. This has to be a joke!”
“All this talk about “paper-cuts,” and the face of OS for newbies, first of all, looks like a piece of crap.”
“When I find out who designed this wall paper I’m going to give them a brain slushie.”
“I’ve been looking at this for a while now trying to think of what it reminds me of, and I finally realised, and dare i say it, it looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hemorrhoids.jpg“
With over 200 comments on that post, almost all of them unanimously expressing disgust at the new wallpaper (not to mention quite a few on Twitter) I have to wonder why this crap is still the first thing millions of new users will see come October 10th.
If this isn’t the final wallpaper, then why land it on the day of the UI freeze and set it as the GDM, then not explain anything? Why land it at all if it’s not final?
I have an entire team of people in the Ubuntu Manual Project who need to start taking screenshots for the next release of the book in multiple languages, but we can’t start until we have the final interface to screenshot!
Isn’t that the entire idea behind freezes?
       
buying way too many perishable foods, because they look pretty at the market, and then not using them up cos i was too tired to cook.
28 August 2010
there's a geek fallacy that your friends are friends with you therefore they'd naturally be friends with each other -- yeah, it's a fallacy.
"Friend" is a changing word - facebook has destroyed it's true meaning. I define friend is someone you'd expect would let you sleep on their couch (and vice versa).
In absence of any photograph of me with a giant group of friends, here are photos of friends. If i've missed you out, it's mostly likely becasue there's no photo!
27 August 2010
i like coffee -- alot. I like fairtrade (or similar) and i like rich choclatey beans. No sugar.
New Zealand has a .geek 2nd level domain names. I think is this awesome.
hence i have coffee.geek.nz
26 August 2010
25 August 2010
Yes, it's a meme.
15 things.. FIFTEEN.... this will be difficult.
1. I'm from Whakamaru, which is a small village in the South Waikato - the locals who cannot pronounce maori call it "wockamarro". (near Mangakino and Tokoroa)
2. I contribute to many open source projects, as and when i have time - usually when i find a bug i'll fix it.
3. I went back to work 5 weeks after having a baby. My husband has taken a year off to look after her.
4. I don't drive.
5. I play flute, cello, piano, and a bunch of wind instruments (in that order)
6. I read many social justice and human rights blogs regularly.
7. I like Fairs and Markets.
8. I take LOTS of photos - see my flickr http://flickr.com/photos/taniwha
9. I spend my Saturday at One Laptop per Child test fest.
10. I also write most of the tweets on the @OLPC twitter account.
11. I was once a finalist for a NZ Open Source Award.
12. I am missing a big chunk out of one of my fingers.
13. I garden - mostly veges. Plants should serve a purpose.
14. I have been married for 12 years.
15. I like malty beers and scotch.
Recent pictures - these are what Apture finds of me:
attempting to make yoghurt in the rice cooker's keep warm mode.
I was asked to write this article for an IT publication a month ago but missed the publishing deadline. Due to the wonders of modern technology the world is still able to share and acclaim my wise words:
 Photo Google Schwag (CC) Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Some rights reserved The Cloud application of the moment is Facebook. Facebook represents the web within the web. It is a privately owned world that is more populated than most countries. It allows individuals and businesses to create their own identities, manage their contacts, find new contacts, conduct business and develop applications specific to Facebook’s technologies.
It seems everyone is “on” Facebook, whether you are a government department, Telecommunications business or simply someone with funny cat photos to share.
But there is a cloud on the horizon. The Bloomburg Business Week is reporting that Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, may have signed a contract which if upheld, would see the company transfer ownership (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-07-20/facebook-lawyer-unsure-zuckerberg-signed-contract.html). In addition to its ownership uncertainty, Facebook has a nasty habit of making unilateral changes to the usage policies, effectively the contract it has with each Facebook user. This is a risky proposition for businesses relying on Facebook for their future, and for individuals putting significant parts of their life on one platform.
While I was in the UK recently I heard about a musical instrument supplier. They have sold their goods through Amazon for many years, with Amazon taking about a 7 percent commission. That week Amazon announced that it was getting into the musical instrument vending business itself. Co-incidentally Amazon was also unilaterally doubling the commission they were charging to third party music instrument vendors.
So what do these anecdotes mean for people who have invested everything in “the cloud”. The people who rely on Facebook, or Google apps, or Amazon, to be the “internet of everything”, for their livelihood?
How do you shift from one vendor to another? If their infrastructure is cutting out, or the terms of service becoming more and more unfavourable, or your ISP is favouring a competitor’s traffic, or your clients are moving from one application to another (Bebo anyone?) how do you move? How do you get your data and applications transferred? Is the data you created even yours in the first place?
The success of “the cloud” is also its massive failing – scale. The scale of the cloud has pushed down costs and increased convenience significantly. But, as Google’s Vint Cerf points out, there are no accepted standards or protocols for cloud services and systems to store and exchange information and systems.
With the huge scale that the internet has enabled comes an equally huge imbalance in the nature of the relationship between cloud service vendors and users. The magnitude of the lock-in that users of cloud applications find themselves committed to far outweighs anything that has preceded the current phenomenon.
So, what do we do? If the convenience of cloud services is impossible to ignore then the pitfalls and potential for “all of business” disasters are should be evaluated and mitigated.
To start with, your data should be available to you on a device of your choosing at any time and in an open format that can be easily recognised by different software systems. This means that you should be able to backup and download your data easily and at regular intervals.
Secondly, you should easily be able to transfer from one platform to another. The best way of achieving this is to ensure that whatever cloud service you are using is based on software that is free and open source. This is easier than you might imagine. For every Google app, Twitter, Amazon Web Service, there is an open source alternative. Most, if not all, of these also run as cloud services. Examples include Wordpress, Status.net, Teambox, RedMine, FengOffice and WikiMedia. Using open source cloud services ensures that transferring from one provider to another is not just possible, but straightforward. It also guarantees that your data can be processed if you decide you have to make the shift.
To conclude, the advantages of cloud services have been well sold, I would say oversold. They represent a privatisation of what we used to call “The Internet”. The pitfalls are less well expressed but they exist.
The trick for businesses and government in particular is to ensure that they avoid becoming enslaved on a scale that has never previously been possible. Fortunately free and open source software proves, yet again, to be an effective way of getting the best of all worlds – access to high quality technology and services without the proprietary capture and other business risks that are a feature of many cloud services.
24 August 2010
git rebase provides a simple way of combining multiple commits into a single one. However using rebase to squash an entire branch down to a single commit is not completely straightforward. Squashing normal commitsUsing the following repository: $ git log --oneline
c172641 Fix second file
24f5ad2 Another file
97c9d7d Add first file
we can combine the last two commits ( c172641 and 24f5ad2) by rebasing up to the first commit: $ git rebase -i 97c9d7d
and specify the following commands in the interactive rebase screen: pick 24f5ad2 Another file
squash c172641 Fix second file
which will rewrite the history into this: $ git log --oneline
1a9d5e4 Another file
97c9d7d Add first file
Rebasing the initial commitTrying to include the initial commit in the interactive rebase screen will return this error: $ git rebase -i 97c9d7d^
fatal: Needed a single revision
Invalid base
and squashing the top commit in the interactive rebase screen: $ git rebase -i 97c9d7d
squash 24f5ad2 Another file
squash c172641 Fix second file
will return this error: Cannot 'squash' without a previous commit
So we need to use a different approach to deal with the initial commit. Amending the initial commitHere is an alternative to rebase which will work on commits that don't have a parent. Taking the previously rebased branch: $ git log --oneline
1a9d5e4 Another file
97c9d7d Add first file
we can rewind the branch to the initial commit: $ git reset 97c9d7d
$ git log --oneline
97c9d7d Add first file
without losing any of the changes introduced in 1a9d5e4 (shown here as uncommitted changes): $ git status
# On branch master
# Changed but not updated:
# (use "git add ..." to update what will be committed)
# (use "git checkout -- ..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
# modified: file1
#
# Untracked files:
# (use "git add ..." to include in what will be committed)
#
# file2
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
Then we can reopen commit 97c9d7d and add the changes present in the working directory: $ git add .
$ gitc -a --amend -m "Initial version"
which will finally give us a fully squashed branch: $ git log --oneline
fcb85fb Initial version
$ git status
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)
22 August 2010
Something different - NZ's Labour party doing their policy forming in the open, this coming saturday, at an event where all comers are welcome. (instead of back room dealing, that happens all over the show.. at least i hope it's "instead of", not "as well as")...
if you're in Wellington consider coming and checking them out, whatever your political opinions are.
http://blog.labour.org.nz/index.php/2010/08/23/doing-things-differently-...
 I've known about Openshotvideo for a while, but for some reason, I hadn't really put it through its paces. I don't know why, but I didn't think it was very full featured. How wrong I was!!! I spent a couple of hours in the weekend playing with Openshot and found it very intuitive and full-featured: titles, effects, transitions, even chroma keying is easy to use straight out of the box. I've put the video below together from footage of my little son William. Note the 'four square' layout that allows picture in picture. I'd love to say that was really difficult and beginners shouldn't really try it, but actually, all you have to do is right click on a clip and choose 'top left' or 'bottom right'. Easy as pie. Something I didn't put into this video was animations; if you want a clip to slide across the screen and out the other side, there's a preset for that too. Clips zooming in and out? One click. In fact, the only thing lacking from Openshotvideo is support for free video codecs (ogv in particular). It was a bit of a shame that using open software, my own footage and Creative Commons licenced music, I had to export to a proprietary video format. But hey, I'm not complaining: Openshot video is my new best friend. William aged 1-6 mths from Mark Osborne on Vimeo.
21 August 2010
turns out it's not in the mall
At my place of work, we use a Java-based trouble-ticketing system from Atlassian called Jira. It is hosted on a LAMP server virtual machine in our production VMware environment. The system has been in daily use (well, week day use) since near the end of 2008 - requiring minimal maintenance in that time (the occasional reboot after security updates have been installed). Up until yesterday, we had been using Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server. I decided it was time to move to the latest LTS release - 10.04 - which was released earlier this year and had just received it's first .1 refresh. Some googling around revealed the potential for various issues with the process so I took a snapshot before beginning - just to be safe. I then found this link which detailed how to upgrade the server to the next LTS release. I was shocked at how simple the process appeared to be - surely not?! This is that crazy technical, awful command line operating system with a really high cost of ownership isn't it? So, SSH'ing into the server, I took a copy of /etc (just being extra safe again), fired up a screen session and ran the command as instructed on the page above. sudo do-release-upgrade Various lists were obtained from the internet and upgrades calculated, I then had to press Y to show my acceptance of the results. Everything slowed down at this point due to our internet connection speed (changing soon, yay!). I disconnected and went to sleep. This morning, I connected back to the server and screen session to find a reboot necessary. So, Y again and a reboot later the 10.04.1 based system was up and running. I fired up a browser and pointed to the Jira system - fail. Oh noes, I thought, now it gets difficult. Well, no, not really. Over the course of various Ubuntu releases since 8.04, the sun-java6-* packages were moved into the partner repository. So, I uncommented the partner repository in /etc/apt/sources.list, ran an apt-get update and reinstalled the sun-java6-jre package. A reboot (only to test that everything would start by itself as it should) and Jira is running again, no data lost and inbound email requests to the system are working. Awesome. Just so you get the significance of that, imagine doing an inplace upgrade (eg not a fresh install) of a Windows 2000 Server running IIS5 and SQL 2000 and have it coming out running Windows Server 2008, IIS7 and SQL 2008. Two reboots, no data loss, no restores necessary and all done remotely. And Jira was actually still running and available for most of the time except when the box was rebooting and having java re-installed. Yep, *really* difficult. Watch out.
including our session on OLPC in New Zealand
 check the top right -- my session on security updates for websites.
Things we talked about:
Most of the non-profits in Wellington, if they're using web management software, then it's Joomla.
Our joomla expert said joomla doesn't have easy upgrade methods like Drupal's drush or wordpress has. Upgrades instead involve manually downloading new versions of joomla and installing on each website you support.
Joomla has a security announcement mailing list - so do drupal, wordpress, and probably every other web cms (at least i hope so!) If you are responsible for any website, you really oughta be on the mailing list for the software you are using.
The plugins that are available for joomla are many, and are listed on joomla.org, but the download are from individual websites, and joomla does not facilitate security announcements for these plugins. You need to find the security announcement methods for every extension you add to your joomla.
Other open source web software we knew off all did announcements for contributed plugins/modules/themes...
We talked about what happens when you don't patch.
Websites are defaced. Data stolen. The site may be used to send spam. It may be used to host links to increase the google page rank of other websites such as viagra sellers. It may be used to host and trade illegal items including pornography.
We talked about use of static html files, where appropriate, as it has much less attack surface.
20 August 2010
Haegwan is interviewing famous and interesting people to talk about what they do and advice they might have to people wanting to be successful. He interviewed me earlier this month. I enjoyed it a lot, and I’m flattered by the company I keep: racing car drivers, famous technologists, novelists, and astrophysicists.
I’ve always kept my iPhone pretty much up to date with Apple software. After all, upgrades are free, and they often deliver exciting new stuff. Over the two years I’ve had my iPhone 3G, it has got more and more capable due to improving software.
Then Apple pushed iPhone OS 4 – or iOS4, as it’s now called – and the trouble began. Programs on my phone kept crashing, the sound kept getting interrupted and it became glacially slow. My phone went from being a thing of beauty and a joy to use to being a clunky machine to be endured and cursed. Using Wellington’s helpful text-to-park feature became nearly impossible because the parking machine would time out in the time it took me to send it a text message. And, in what was the last straw, it started ignoring incoming calls and going straight to voicemail.
This is the story of how I fixed all that by going back to iPhone OS 3.
Many others with the same phone model are complaining. I called Apple about it and they told me to reset the phone. I had tried that already, of course. I also updated it to 4.0.2, the very latest iOS, but to no avail. I tried all the tricks to improve the speed on a 3G that I could find on the Net including turning off Spotlight but it didn’t return my phone to a usable state. So I went back to the old iPhone OS.
Apple say that it is not possible to return an iPhone 3G that has been “upgraded” to iOS4 to the previous release of the iPhone software. There are many pages on the Web telling you how to do it, so I didn’t believe them. It is possible, as I have proved for myself, but it took a fair bit of time and some nail biting moments when the phone was all black.
Before I tell you what I did, please bear in mind that Apple claims this can’t be done and I’m certainly not offering you any guarantees. It worked for me, but if it fails for you, you are on your own with Google to figure out what to do next. Also, it should go without saying that you won’t have access to the iOS4-only features if you go back. For the iPhone 3G that includes threads in the email client and the ability to put programs into folders.
I started from this How to Guide by Taimur Asad. It covers downgrading your iPhone or iPod touch to iPhone OS 3. The guide provides instructions to get back to 3.1.2 or 3.1.3. I went back to 3.1.3 because I knew it worked well on my phone. If you are keen to do this, read the guide thoroughly a couple of times and be sure that you have one of the specific models it covers.
I use a Mac for the computer that my phone syncs with, and my phone is on Telecom’s XT network. Those things affect the instructions and you need to understand what to do differently if you use Windows or a different telco. That said, the guide looks as though it would work for a Windows computer, and carrier bundles are available for most mobile carriers.
I had several false starts when trying to follow the guide. Each was slightly scary because you have to put your phone into DFU mode (I think I know what that stands for!) which makes the phone black and unresponsive. Getting back from DFU mode involves a bit of (free) software such as RecBoot which you need to install on your computer before you start. Eventually the phone comes back to life. It’s all in the guide – thanks, Taimur.
Eventually I figured out that my false starts were because I was using a USB hub. I normally sync through a hub and it works just fine, but my computer wouldn’t recognise a phone in DFU mode unless it was connected directly to it with a single USB cable. Once I had sorted that out, the restore process followed the one set out in the guide.
The actual process was relatively quick once I’d figured it out. It took about half an hour. Then I had to do a restore and a sync of what was now an empty phone. That ran overnight.
There was a problem early in the restore process. iTunes refused to let me reload a recent backup saying that the backup had been made by more recent software than now existed on the phone, which it had. I wound up restoring from a very old backup. I’ve spent a chunk of today reloading configuration detail like my wireless passwords. It would be a good idea to identify the last backup you have (iTunes makes them when you sync) from iPhone OS 3 and restoring from that when the time comes. Do bear in mind, though, that you might lose information that is embedded in programs on your iPhone if you do this.
The final step for me was to reapply the carrier bundle for XT so my phone would do 3G data, texting and tethering again.
The result – one iPhone 3G functioning as well as it ever did, which is very well indeed. I only wish Apple hadn’t put me through so much grief to get it back that way.
|
