Sean's Mental Walkabout

As it turns out I’ll be giving 2 talks at the Ohio Linux Fest, coming up on Sept 26th in Columbus Ohio.

OpenSim: Open Source 3D Worlds

For OpenSim folks seeing this in the planet (or elsewheres), I’ll be giving an overview of OpenSim at Ohio Linux Fest.  A little bit of history, a little bit of architecture, and hopefully some live demo (if the wireless holds out).  I’ve done this before, and it’s quite a bit of fun, especially when folks in the audience figure out the build tools for the first time, and the in world presentation gets a bunch of random things building in and around you.  If you are within driving distance of Ohio Linux Fest, you should come out for it.  And if you do, please come up and introduce yourself afterwards.

A Decade of Linux at IBM

I was asked today to fill another slot, with a talk that’s become called a Decade of Linux at IBM.  I’ve been part of the LTC for 8.5 years now, since near the inception, and part of some of the underground Linux movement at IBM before that.  Starting in early 1999 I began running Linux as my primary desktop inside the firewall, and never looked back.  I managed to sneak Linux into the Sydney 2000 Olympics, and was lucky enough to move into the LTC as it was starting to spin up in early 2001.  This talk will be a mix of history and tech, with hopefully a couple of fun annecdotes from the early days of Linux at IBM, through to modern day, highlighting a lot of what we’ve accomplished as a group along the way.

Now I just need to work on my slides… as it’s only 15 days away!

A curious thing happened yesterday, a thing that had been feared for years, Microsoft code started down the road to be included in the Linux kernel.  But, unlike the fears of old, it wasn’t slipped in in the middle of the night as a secret time bomb.  It was presented at the front door, going to LKML directly.

Well, maybe it was the side door.  As it wasn’t actually a microsoft.com post to LKML, it was actually Greg K-H doing the heavy lifting, as Microsoft is working it’s patches in via Novell.  Greg is one of the harshest reviewers out there, so in working through him, these should actually be well up to community standards now.  It also shows some street smarts in not running the gauntlet directly.

I’m still not sure what to make of all of this, as earlier this year Microsoft sued TomTom, and forced crippling of the Linux vfat driver to dodge MS patents.  That being said, I’m also of no illusion that MS speaks with one voice.  Big organizations don’t do that, and breaking in lawyers to understand open source principals takes a good few years (I know, I’ve done it before).

It will be curious to see if these drivers make it in to upstream.  There are plenty of good reasons, and many bad, why they wouldn’t.  Far more useful features have managed to not make it mainstream in the past, and nothing draws the lightning like Microsoft.  I look forward to seeing how this will play out.

I’m quite impressed by how agressively the Cannonical team is getting when it comes to cloud computing.  They’re integrating eucalyptus into Ubuntu 9.10, which is open source software that lets you build your own “Amazon-like” cloud.  Eucalyptus even implements the same APIs so that all those hundreds of EC2 applications work with it.

But the Cannonical folks haven’t stopped there.  They recently launched Ubuntuone, which is a storage cloud.  Anyone running Ubuntu 9.04 can sign up for an invite (I did last month, and just got mine yesterday).  This provides you with 2 GB of cloud storage for free, or 10 GB for a nominal fee.  The mechanics behind Ubuntuone is an applet that’s running which synchronizes $HOME/Ubuntu One directory on changes.  It’s not rocket science, but it is seemlessly integrated.

At 2 GB of free space, this isn’t for keeping media in sync.  It will do a fair job with text documents, and I’ve started to put my ebooks and pdfs into it for easy reading wherever I am.  I’m also considering redoing my dot files sharing in this manner, though that will mean symlinking into the Ubuntuone directory, as it doesn’t seem like you can share beyond it.

Another interesting feature is a “share with others” on those documents.  That opens this up to be a ghetto version of google docs, at least amongst Ubuntu users.  Again, while this is not rocket science, usability is a huge feature here, and the fact that it is so seemless starts to bring a lot of value to having a whole office on Ubuntu. 

This is where I think Cannonical is making a really brilliant play.  Previously Linux on the Desktop was always about being interoperable with other people’s stuff, as it was the edge case, and the value in running all Linux on the desktop was low.  With really useful, Linux only, services like Ubuntu One, there is now an incentive to get everyone there.  The Mac folks have been playing this game for years with all their zeroconf tools that work on a local network, and it definitely helped shore up offices of Mac users.

Kudos to Mark and the Ubuntu folks for thinking past just desktop clones and really starting to push cloud as a concept into Ubuntu across the board.  It makes me excited to be both a Linux and Ubuntu user, and I can’t wait to see what they add to my platform of choice next.

I was just following up on an android article, and got this instead:

I laughed.

I can’t even remember the last time I had a coworker that was co-located with me in the same town.  Within IBM the other software developers that I typically work with are in: Minnesota, Texas, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Germany, Brazil, and Australia.  These are the folks that I would have 1 or more technical discussions with a week.  If I openned that umbrella up to a month, we’d add another few countries, and a whole lot more states.

A truly unsolved challenge in collaboration is replacing white board discussions with some sort of online equivalent.  I’ve got a drawing tablet, but honestly, my brain doesn’t think quite as well with it as when I get on a proper whiteboard.  After a phone conversation earlier this week that I realized was circling for lack of common artifacts, I took some time to try and figure out how I could get people to see the whiteboard in my office.

Ingredients of Real Time Whiteboarding

• Logitech 9000 web cam.  This has 1600×1200 resolution, runs about $90, and does low light scenarios really well.
• mjpg_streamer
• a Linux machine that’s at least a P4 processor

Install all this software onto you Linux machine.  Then run the following to start streaming your webcam as video in real time:

mjpg_streamer -i "input_uvc.so -d /dev/video0 -y -r 1600x1200" -o "output_http.so -w /webcam_www -p 8080"

Viewing the results

The results can be viewed a number of ways.  There is a built in client in the source tree (screen shot below is from that).  You can also view it from vlc or firefox with the url http://your.server.name:8080/?action=stream. (In firefox I found you need 1 reload to get it to update frames, not sure why).  If you want to just get the current frame you can use http://your.server.name:8080/?action=snapshot.

The results a quite impressive (you may need to right click to get to full res):

This is definitely readable to as small as you are going to be able to write.  It’s about a 5 second delay from capture point to writing, which isn’t too bad considering.  I’m definitely going to use this in the days ahead, as it works a heck of a lot better for me than trying to diagram in a computer program interactively.  You’ll get motion blur on people, but given that this is mostly about the text on the whiteboard, that’s not really a big deal.

Update: I figured out how to do this with firefox and vlc, so the text now reflects that.

I’ve now migrated my work laptop to Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty), which went pretty smoothly.  I played some games to use internal mirrors, but still use the graphical update process (instead of just dist-upgrade), which all worked out well.

New in Jaunty

One of the bigger items that got press for Jaunty was their new notification system.  I really does rock.  It looks slick, and is very consistent, and I’m a fan.  I’m also a fan of the new splash screen.  All these bits are cosmetic, but something that looks beautiful is important in using a computing environment.

Bugs Fixed

I’ve had a number of bugs that I used to have to work around, now they work correctly:

• there used to be a race in bringing up superswitcher when gnome started that meant it didn’t get to lock out the caps lock key.  So I had to stop and restart it after a fresh login.  That appears fixed.
• Jaunty now understands the right suspend settings for my nvidia card, no need to adjust that in the acpi hal configs any more.
• emacs-snapshot is now current enough that it loads my configs perfectly.  For the first time in 10 years I’m now running a prebuilt version of emacs/xemacs for daily development.  /usr/local just got a bit smaller for me.

Dear Amarok… why do you suck now?

The Amarok team took their application off a cliff with version 2.0 (which is now what’s in Jaunty).  All support for syncing devices is gone.  While some aspects of their UI is neat, including podcast search, I’m really not interested in going back to rsync for device management.  It’s also really unclear that is ever coming back.  Fortunately, banshee seems to have gotten pretty good, so that’s where I’m at now.

Update notifier, where did you go?

Update manager doesn’t display the orange star for daily updates any more.  There is a workaround listed in the bug, and a lot of this is wrapped up in the philosophy of the new notification system.  However, I really liked my daily updates.  I get that the team was trying to get stuff out of the notification tray but this seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Final Thoughts

It’s really nice to see Canonical push Linux into something that is beautiful, consistant, and flexible.  I find myself tweaking my volume settings just to get the nice notifications.

Using libconcordance and congruity, you can access the logitech website directly, then hit the update file and let congruity process the 2 hex files (it will hand them to you in the right order) to update your remote.  Here is the congruity interface processing the second one:

And with that, I think I crossed off the last app that I still had to keep a windows virtual machine around for.

I was working on the MHVLUG wiki, and needed to find a good color of orange.  Typically I just launch gimp, and use the color wheel in there.  But I stopped this time, and did this instead:

apt-cache search color picker

which returned 3 results, including gcolor2.

First off, this is exactly the application I needed.  It launches fast, and just gives me a color wheel to pick colors.  But, it turns out it has something else that’s great.

You see that little eye dropper?  You can click it and then click any pixel on your computer, and it will give you the RGB color of that pixel.  It doesn’t need to be anything special, as it’s pulling directly from the xbuffer.  So handy.  I can’t believe I didn’t know this existed until now.

I found that Liferea (my rss reader) was starting to get really slow. Hitting space bar to go to the next article was getting somewhat painful levels of delay.

The Fix

Liferea uses sqlite to store it’s information. Over time, when you delete from sqlite, the db gets pretty unoptimized (lots of tombstones). This can be fixed with the following command (make sure Liferea is NOT running before doing this):

sqlite3 ~/.liferea_1.4/liferea.db vacuum

(adjust the directory if running a different version of liferea.) It both made my liferea.db 1/2 as big, and now everything is snappy again.