Planet OpenSource DK

Søren Bredlund Caspersen: Open Source Days 2010

Søren Bredlund Caspersen () — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:59:24 +0000

The Danish Ubuntu LoCo team had a community booth at the 2010 Open Source Days in Copenhagen last weekend.

The picture shows us (and the Exherbo guys next to us) setting up early Friday morning. Later in the day a Zebrapig banner joined the Ubuntu banner. All the community booths were located on the first floor, upstairs from the firms and organisations who had a paid booth. I didn’t take that many pictures, and the ones I did take didn’t turn out that great, but Flickr seems to have a nice collection if you are curious.

The new theme for Ubuntu Lucid had just been released the day before, so Friday, when we weren’t talking to people about Ubuntu, we spend a bit of time arguing for and against the new colour scheme.
We managed to hand out all our remaining Ubuntu 9.10 CD’s and Jesper gave a talk about ubuntu-dk.

As always, it was nice to meet up with the other people from the LoCo team. Although we do a lot of work together, it is often via e-mail or irc chat. Putting names to faces is always a pleasure. The beers both Friday and Saturday night were also a pleasure – beer and good company seldom lets you down.

We even managed to do some planning for the coming Ubuntu Global Jam.

Anders is set on doing an entire day of translating Sunday 28 at his place. And the plan is to do some more general bugwork on Friday and Saturday. Location is still to be decided, but properly Jesper or I will open our homes to the masses of Ubuntu volunteers. Stay tuned for more info about the Global Jam in Copenhagen / Denmark.

Martin Pihl: Ubuntu Community dag i Århus i aften

Martin Pihl () — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:21:31 +0000

Husk det nu. I aften, tirsdag den 9. marts, kl 19-21 mødes vi atter på hovedbiblioteket i Århus til endnu en omgang Ubuntu-nørderi.

Der er et par spændende ting på programmet, og vi skal bl.a. finde ud af, hvad vi gør til Ubuntu Global Jam i weekenden 26-28. marts, hvor Ubuntu-bidragsydere over hele verden mødes og arbejder med de mange bugs.

Udover det spændende med at arbejde med Ubuntu, er det også generelt bare en weekend, hvor folk med fælles interesse hygger og lærer hinanden at kende. Det bliver en super-weekend – og så SKAL vi jo helst være flere som mødes i Århus til Global Jam, end som mødes i København samme weekend, ikke?

Så kom med i aften til UCD Århus på hovedbiblioteket kl. 19. Det er på 1.sal og første dør på højre hånd (lige om hjørnet).

Læs mere her: http://ubuntudanmark.dk/ucd

Martin Pihl: Se gamle danske maskiner få nyt liv med Ubuntu i Afrika

Martin Pihl () — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:26:12 +0000

Jeg har tidligere skrevet om FAIR Danmark, en organisation som indsamler brugt dansk IT-udstyr, som virksomheder ikke længere kan/vil benytte. FAIR Danmark sørger for at slette alt data på maskinerne, udstyrer dem (som oftest) med Ubuntu, og sender dem efterfølgende til uddannelsescentre i Afrika.

Version 2 har besøgt FAIR Danmark på Dortheavej i København, og har lavet en lille video om FAIR Danmark og genbrug af IT-udstyr.

Se artiklen og videoen her.

Poul-Henning Kamp: Potientiale for elongerede kønskirtler

Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:17:00 +0000

Blandt meget andet manglende tankegods i socket-API'et, er en måde at finde ud af om data faktisk er sendt ud på nettet og hvis relevant for protokollen, ACK'et af den anden ende. Der findes…

Martin Pihl: Pihlen Peger På Podcast #3 – Open Source Days og O-Biz

Martin Pihl () — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:20:17 +0000

Jah, jeg ved det. Det er alt for længe siden, jeg sidst har lavet noget rigtigt aktivt her på bloggen. Det vil ændre sig nu

Mit podcast afsnit #3 handler mest af alt om, at jeg ikke har lavet noget på bloggen i 3-4 uger. Jeg fortæller lidt om, at der er sket meget, og at der kommer til at ske rigtigt meget de kommende måneder.

De links jeg nævner er:

Mit Ubuntu firma, O-Biz

O-Biz’s nyhedsbrev

Open Source Days hjemmeside

Husk at smid en kommentar med feedback, og kom gerne med ønsker til indhold for næste podcast!

Jah, jeg ved det. Det er alt for laelig;nge siden, jeg sidst har lavet noget rigtigt aktivt her paring; bloggen. Det vil aelig;ndre sig nu :-) Mit podcast afsnit #3 handler mest af alt om, at jeg ikke har lavet noget paring; bloggen i 3-4 uger. Jeg fortaelig;ller lidt om, at der er sket meget, og at der kommer til at ske rigtigt meget de kommende maring;neder. De links jeg naelig;vner er: Mit Ubuntu firma, O-Biz O-Biz's nyhedsbrev Open Source Days hjemmeside Husk at smid en kommentar med feedback, og kom gerne med oslash;nsker til indhold for naelig;ste podcast! :-)

Jesper Louis Andersen: On Computer games and Tufte

Jesper Louis Andersen (jlouis) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 04:02:53 +0000

Tufte applied to games

I played a small bit of the old Infocom game “Wishbringer” the other day. And somehting struck me. This game is small. It has something like 50 locations, with miniscule text at each location. Of course this is because of the limitations of the hardware from the day the game was released, but it also made me think. There is so much game crammed into those 50 locations. Clever location reuse makes the game seem larger than it is. In fact, the majority of locations change considerably over the course of the game.

Now contrast this with newer sandbox games of enormous size: Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, all by Bethesda. These games are absolutely huge, but in contrast, the world is a mostly static one with very few changes over the course of the game. Tufte, who just got appointed by the US government to visualize government spending, had this notion of “ink carrying meaning” and “ink”. The ratio between these gives you a number of how much ink is wasted and how tightly information is packed on a piece of paper.

Applying Tuftes observation to game worlds is interesting and fun. Games like Morrowind and Oblivion has a very low ratio of value, whereas an old game like Wishbringer has a very high value. Surprisingly, the game Arx Fatalis from 2002 will have a rather high ratio. In Arx Fatalis, the game world is pretty small. But the game uses several tricks to circumvent this. The game world is reusing locations for more than one thing. Also, the game world is opened up to you gradually along with the game unfolding. The same idea is applied in the game “The Witcher” where the majority of the game is going on inside a city. New major areas of the city opens up in later acts, but the old areas are kept and changes.

Today, building huge worlds is not hard. You procedurally generate most of the content in the game through different technologies like SpeedTree for instance. Oblivion has hand-crafted dungeons it would seem, but usually they are just there for being there and not for moving the story ahead. Contrast that with random dungeon in Diablo 2. Usually, there is a chest at the end of those with good levelled loot. Being a loot-game, Diablo 2 encourages you to walk the dungeon.

I sincerely hope that in the future, more games will be like “Wishbringer”. Mass Effect 1 (Have not played the 2nd game) shows some of the way, but it also adds a lot of randomly generated open spaces driven by a car. These are boring. Kill.

Luck has it, that small flash-games and similar platforms will make the game logic be central again. I expect there to be some really interesting games with good “Tufte ratios” in the coming years. But the platform will be Web, mobile phone, Javascript or Flash.

Peter Toft: Open Source Days: Tak fra coord

Peter Toft (pto) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 23:54:00 +0000

Efter to fantastiske dage med fremgang for antal udstillere og antal solgte billetter til Open Source Days konferencen kan coord-holdet været meget tilfredse - og trætte Det er et halvt års fritids-…

Flemming Jacobsen: Open Source Days - vel overstået

Flemming Jacobsen (F3) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:28:03 +0000

Det er altid en underlig tom fornemmelse at vågne søndag morgen efter Open Source Days. Flere måneders målrettet indsats er kulmineret. Og festen er nu vel overstået. Pludselig er der ikke en mulliard opgaver der skal huskes, og en zillion ting der skal koordineres med ‘de andre’[1]. Morgenen (dvs. formiddagen/middagen) er foregået halvt i zombie tilstand. Det lokale brunch sted havde lukket, så jeg har holdt den gående på bagerbrød og Red Bull. Jeg er...

Poul-Henning Kamp: Ovenpå en Sej Dag

Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 11:42:00 +0000

Det tager unægteligt noget længere at komme ud af fjerene, dagen efter Open Source Days, men som alle de andre år var det turen værd. Derfor skal der allerførst lyde en stor tak til det legendariske C…

Erwin Lansing: Partial ports thaw

Erwin Lansing () — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:05:49 +0000

The ports tree is now tagged and partially thawed. Until 7.3 is released, sweeping commits still need explicit approval from portmgr to assure that tags can be slipped for potential security issues. For more information what constitutes a sweeping change, see the portmgr web pages.

Partial ports thaw The ports tree is now tagged and partially thawed. Until...
Partial ports thaw The ports tree is now tagged and partially thawed. Until...
Ports feature freeze now enforced As an experiment, there will not be a complete ports...

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Josef Assad: A new kind of Microsoft license

Josef Assad () — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:10:01 +0000

This picture explains why Microsoft doesn't have to be Apple cool to everyone, it just has to be cool to the rank and file developer. Seriously, kudos; a company that can get its advertising on its clients' license plates is a force to be reckoned with.

Poul-Henning Kamp: Erlang roterer

Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 10:06:00 +0000

Dengang jeg startede i skolen var "Erlang" der hvor man fandt sin(x) værdier, senere lærte jeg, at Agner Krarup Erlang var verdensberømt for sit arbejde indenfor statistisk modelering af kø-…

Peter Toft: Open Source Days: Open Source og .... MASSER af sjov Hardware

Peter Toft (pto) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:21:00 +0000

På Open Source Days i morgen og overmorgen kommer der en masse sjov hardware med. Linuxshoppen kommer bla. med sheevaplug, som jeg kommer til at skrive om i næste uge. Det er en ultra-grøn computer -…

Peter Toft: Open Source Days: Ready to rock

Peter Toft (pto) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:28:00 +0000

... det er bare så fedt at komme til Open Source Days - dvs. på ITU - her dagen før. Gamle venner myldrer rundt som er i gang med at bygge udstillerområde op - stemningen er god. FEDT! Sidste minuts …

Martin Pihl: Open Source Days – here we come

Martin Pihl () — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:00:43 +0000

Arbejder du med Open Source, eller er bare interesseret heri, kan det ikke have gået forbi din næse, at der fredag-lørdag afholdes nordens største Open Source konference: Open Source Days.

Jeg skal selvfølgelig også med, og selvom jeg beklageligvis ikke præsenterer min Ubuntu virksomhed O-Biz med en stand eller foredrag (det må blive næste år), så vil jeg dog være personligt til stedet og lytte til en masse gode og spændende foredrag, samt tale med de mange interessante mennesker fra branchen, som vil være der.

Fredag på Open Source Days

Fredag er forretnings-dagen, og her er der et særligt fokus på OpenOffice, hvilket jeg ser meget frem til. Jeg har hørt en del af OpenOffice foredragsholderne før, men det interessante for dette område er blandt andet, at der næsten altid kan findes nye vinkler, nye perspektiver og nye erfaringer, når man hører folk tale om det.

OpenOffice er selvfølgelig ikke det eneste interessante fredag, og jeg glæder mig bl.a. også til at høre Devoteams foredrag om “Why Open Source”.

Lørdag på Open Source Days

Lørdag er generelt mere teknisk og meget mere community-rettet. Her er også de særlige lightning talks, hvor taleren får 15 minutter til at præsentere et projekt, en teknologi eller en anden ting, som han synes tilhørerene skal høre om.

Det bliver et større problem at vælge foredrag til/fra denne dag, da der er rigtig meget spændende på programmet. Jeg ser blandt andet frem til foredrag om communities, noget jeg har været optaget af i mange år, der er noget open source jura og selvfølgelig skal jeg høre Dan Klein som den sidste taler.

Ikke mindst bliver det bare et par rigtig rigtig hyggelige dage, hvor der skal snakkes med en masse mennesker, hvoraf nogle kender man kun fra nettet og omsider får mødt, lytte til spændende foredrag om emner der interesser en, og selvfølgelig hygge med et par øl, når dagen er omme

Vi ses til Open Source Days!

Poul-Henning Kamp: Hed din mor virkelig Vjrtgsyvdh ?

Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 08:04:00 +0000

Da jeg var i USA, opdagede jeg ret hurtigt, at uanset hvem eller hvad man talte med på telefon, banken, udlejeren, Hertz, osv, brugte de "Mothers Maiden Name" som authentifikation. Det forek…

Bryan Østergaard: Exherbo at Open Source Days

Bryan Østergaard (kloeri) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:29:58 +0000

The danish open source conference, Open Source Days, will run this friday and saturday. Exherbo will be present both days with quite a few developers in attendance.

I'm sure there will be a (little) hacking on Exherbo and related projects like Genesis but it's also a very good, if somewhat rare, opportunity to meet some of the leading Exherbo developers and talk to them about the current status of Exherbo and what's in the future.

Personally I'm hoping to have some good discussions about the kind of problems people currently face when they use Linux in various business settings and ways that those problems might be solved. I'm also hoping that you can learn something from the way the Exherbo project is managed and get an idea how the project manages to move at such a fast pace.

And finally I'm looking forward to meeting lots of people and having a good time :)

Flemming Jacobsen: Open Source Days og forår

Flemming Jacobsen (F3) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 15:42:23 +0000

Billedet herunder viser IT-universitetet i forårssolen. Det er her Open Source Days 2010 løber af stabelen fredag og lørdag. Open Source Days[1] er for mig en af de vigtige events, der bebuder forårets komme. Og arbejdet med at få konferencen op at stå, har altid hjulpet med at få de kedelige og triste vintermåneder til at gå hurtigere. Nu er der kun de sidste hektiske 1½ dage tilbage til festen begynder. Kommer du? [1] inklusive...

Sune Vuorela: for my irc fans

Sune Vuorela (pusling) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:42:38 +0000

-!- You’re now known as svuorela

Thor Dekov Buur: DR2 Udland om det frie internet

Thor Dekov Buur (tdekov) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:11:11 +0000

DR2 Udland havde forleden et interview med Henrik Molkte fra Socialsquare om det åbne internet. Helt klar værd at høre (ca 6 min).

Peter Toft: Open Source Days: T minus 3 days and counting

Peter Toft (pto) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 06:08:00 +0000

Program-ændringer: små justeringer i det udmeldte - checkPerl-program: Perl-track annonceret om lørdagen og i program - checkT-shirts: Sponsor på plads og bestilt - checkPresse: Facebook-post/Twit/blo…

Poul-Henning Kamp: Duer dataloger til noget ?

Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 09:25:00 +0000

Jeg har tidligere været ude med riven efter datalogers evner til at programmere og et af de argumenter der kom tilbage var, at det var analyse dataloger var gode til. Fint: Bevis det. Over på ing.dk k…

Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen: B2evolution antispam list

Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen (jaervosz) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 07:39:33 +0000

Before I implemented comment captchas on this blog I was flodded with comment spam. Captchas helped a lot! Like removing 95+% of all comment spam, however some still gets through. Deleting a spam comment now and then have irritated me greatly, but until earlier this week I haven't really done much about it.

After just a bit of research I decided that my first move was to automatically pull the B2evolution antispam list. I also considered Akismet but one step at a time.

Here is the simple script called from cron I use to pull the updates:

 #!/bin/sh

site=http://example.com/admin.php
name=username
pass=password
cookies=`mktemp`

wget -O /dev/null --post-data="login=$name&pwd=$pass" \
        "${site}?ctrl=antispam&action=poll"

It's not perfect since at least one comment spam went through already.

I'd like to hear what other people to prevent comment spam (other than disabling comments :-) )?

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Bryan Østergaard: On Genesis commits

Bryan Østergaard (kloeri) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:42:11 +0000

I've been asked a few times by different people whether they should push simple patches to genesis. The answer is a resounding 'Yes, please go ahead' but it seems like stating my policy towards other peoples contributions might not go entirely amiss.

My current policy (which will stay until genesis starts stabilising a lot more) is:

Any contribution is welcome so you just need to find somebody with push access (the usual Exherbo devs will do)
Large patches / feature contributions are also extremely welcome but you might want to contact me first and make sure I won't undo you hard work.

I'm not in any case going to complain about contributions (large or small) so don't hold back. And remember that I have a pressing need for people to play around with genesis scripts and tell me what you need from genesis. git://git.exherbo.org/genesis-scripts.git was created yesterday for this purpose.

And for those of you who don't have direct push access you can just cue your patches using the hacchi patch bot in #exherbo on irc://chat.freenode.net and I'm sure one of the friendly exherbo developers will help you :)

Peter Toft: Open Source Days: Linux i lommen og Nokia Open 2010

Peter Toft (pto) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:47:00 +0000

Jeg har over de sidste par måneder hygget mig med at bruge Nokia N900 som mobil computer. Jeg er som det nok er bekendt ansat hos Nokia, hvor jeg dog laver algoritme-design. dvs. er langt fra Maemo-ud…

Poul-Henning Kamp: SerieNr. 000001

Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:42:00 +0000

Jeg roder med noget USB host kode for en kunde og når jeg så alligevel var igang, var det faktisk nemmest at programmere en microcontroller så jeg havde noget at debugge med i den fjerne ende. Og når …

Klavs Klavsen: EU VAT and Drupal+Ubercart 2

Klavs Klavsen (FiXion a.k.a. Linuxpusher) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:49:39 +0000

I finally got some time to start working on a new homepage for linuxpusher.com and choose to use Drupal and Ubercart (among two shop-modules for drupal) for this job.

I need to be able to sell items without VAT to none-EU citizens, and the builtin taxes support didn't handle this, and the uc_vat module that improves upon the built-in support, didn't do the job either.

I have just fixed the code, with some tips from the author of uc_vat (longwave) so we were sure as how it should be done, so I hope he'll accept my code as an improvement for uc_vat.

Bryan Østergaard: Genesis just got internal events

Bryan Østergaard (kloeri) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 14:41:11 +0000

One of the big problems with Genesis was that you'd get its coldplugging events in that the events wasn't necessarily delivered in a sane order. I briefly considered different ways of controlling the order of the events but quickly came to the conclusion that was madness.

The solution I decided upon instead is generating an internal event after coldplugging is finished and send that event to all event modules. This way we can simply trigger on the 'genesis-started' event and start mounting filesystems and whatever else is needed for bootup.

So how can you help? What I need right now from you is just playing around with some homegrown scripts, trying to catch some events and telling me about all the things that are absolutely impossible to do without. Testing Genesis is quite simple and can easily be done without interfering with the rest of your system.

How to test Genesis:
1. Clone the git://git.exherbo.org/genesis.git repository
2. Run ./autogen.sh in the genesis repository
3. Run ./configure
4. Run make

5. Run sudo make install (by default it installs to /usr/local and won't conflict with anything)

6. Write a /usr/local/etc/genesis/config file

My current config file looks like:


[genesis]
# Currently supported log destinations are file and console
logging = console
logfile = /var/log/genesis.log

[modules]
command = yes
netlink-uevent = yes
netlink-route = yes

[netlink-uevent]
coldplug = yes
coldplug_mounts_sysfs = no
log_matched_events = yes
log_unmatched_events = yes

Ignore all the options except the coldplug_* options. The other options might be necessary due to the rather haphazard way configuration is implemented currently but don't expect them to work right now. The coldplug option enables/disables coldplug events and the coldplyg_mounts_sysfs option controls whether the coldplugging part tries to mount and umount /sys. You want to keep this option disabled unless you're doing actual boot testing.

Stick one or more bash scripts in /usr/local/etc/genesis/netlink-uevent/ or /usr/local/etc/genesis/netlink-route/ and try running: sudo /usr/local/sbin/genesis

The test scripts I'm using currently looks like (from /usr/local/etc/genesis/netlink-uevent/foo.sh):

SUBSCRIPTIONS_add=vcs10

add()
{
echo "netlink-uevent::add" >> /var/tmp/genesis.log
}

You can add any number of event subscriptions you like in a single script or spread subscriptions over several scripts. Each subscription is defined as SUBSCRIPTION_function=trigger

Trigger is simply a regex that matches the metadata from events in an internally serialized string format. Function denotes the function in the script called when matching that event. So all the above script does is triggering the add() function on all events matching the string 'vcs10'. Since I have coldplugging enabled I'm guaranteed to see that event.

And that's all there is to it.. One of the things high on my TODO list is to replace the regex matching with a udev like language where I can match on subsystem, MAC address or whatever other metadata events generate. I'd very much appreciate comments on what you think is needed in a simple language like that.

Jesper Louis Andersen: HaskellTorrent v0.0 and further developments

Jesper Louis Andersen (jlouis) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:58:42 +0000

HaskellTorrent v0.0 released!

Last weekend I released version 0.0 of the HaskellTorrent project. However, as modern development will have it, the interesting things happen on the main integration branch, master, on github: haskell-torrent. From the point where the 0.0 release was done and till today, three main things happened in the client.

CPU optimizations

A little bit of work with the profiler has shaved the use of the CPU down by a fairly large amount. I optimized the assertions on the piece database by using Data.IntSet rather than plain old lists. Right now the cost centres are the piece database assertions (still) and deciding which blocks to download. The former of these is simple to get rid of. We don’t need to assert the database at each message, but can do so with a rarer frequency. As for the latter, I have a couple of ideas to shave off CPU cycles on that one as well.

Listen sockets

HaskellTorrent now accepts incoming connections! It does this on port 1579 that has no special connotation apart from being one of the fairly low prime numbers. The etorrent project uses 1729 which has a more interesting history associated with it. Of course, one has to open the eventual NAT/PAT or Firewall to get connections flowing in, should you want to test it.

test-framework

Finally, we now use the excellent test-framework by Max Bolingbroke. The test inclusion was inspired a lot by Eric Koweys blog post on the subject, and it also used bits and pieces from Real World Haskell.

The bottom line is that now you can execute tests directly:

jlouis@illithid:~/Projects/haskell-torrent$ make test
runghc Setup.lhs build
Preprocessing executables for HaskellTorrent-0.0...
Building HaskellTorrent-0.0...
runghc Setup.lhs test
Test test-framework:
reverse-reverse/id: [OK, passed 100 tests]
Protocol/BCode:
QC encode-decode/id: [OK, passed 100 tests]
HUnit encode-decode/id: [OK]
Protocol/Wire:
Piece (-1) 1 ""
QC encode-decode/id: [Failed]
Falsifiable with seed 2776559770653812966, after 1 tests. Reason: Falsifiable

       Properties  Test Cases  Total
Passed  2           1           3
Failed  1           0           1
Total   3           1           4

though it does seem we need to do some work in order to correct the software :)

Bryan Østergaard: Remember Genesis? The oft mentioned new init system for Exherbo?

Bryan Østergaard (kloeri) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:46:53 +0000

If not you might want to read this old exherbo-dev post to refresh your mind.

Genesis started out as me being rather frustrated with current init systems and their huge failures. My basic idea was that all the different init systems fail badly at solving any real problems for system administrators and that it was about time fixing that situation.

So as I started really thinking about the problems that init systems should solve I decided that writing a new init system from scratch was the approach..

A short while later I discussed most of my ideas in a talk at FOSS Aalborg and had a fair bit of positive feedback. It's worth noting that I haven't started writing any code at this point and consequently my problems hadn't started yet.

When I did start writing code I quickly got even more ideas for Genesis and it became an even more ambitious project. And then it changed radically.. again and again.

Due to all the changes and lack of direction I didn't want to publish the code and it was often compared to Duke Nukem Forever (for good reasons I might add). But now that I finally seem to be reasonably sure about the direction I've finally released the code for everybody to peruse and contribute to.

The current status of the code is quite messy and it's not yet usable as an init system at all. You can glean the basic ideas of it however and there's a TODO list that you're most welcome to take a swing at. A few people have already contributed some minor patches for the build system for which I am grateful. I'd get around to fixing those things myself but for now I'd rather focus more on Genesis design/architecture and make sure that development progresses quickly.

As for progress I'm trying to make sure I do at least one Genesis commit every day and tracking that on http://calendaraboutnothing.com/~kloeri. Some days might only see very small commits but I'm shooting for larger, daily updates.

My primary goals right now is getting Genesis to a state where it can boot a system as well as making the code more hacker friendly so more people can contribute.

As for booting I expect to set up a separate git repository for genesis scripts as soon as Genesis is ready for that. It's my hope that most scripts will be contributed by other Exherbo contributors and that I can keep my focus on Genesis itself.

Martin von Haller Grønbæk: Denmark’s new IT-minister’s got potential!

Martin von Haller Grønbæk () — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 03:17:39 +0000

Charlotte Sahl-Madsen and Lars Løkke Rasmussen at an event at Danfoss Universe a couple of months before the appointment

In a year or so the Danish center-right government is facing an election. But I am pretty much apolitical and I find the choice between on the one side a new center-left government lead by spineless, opportunistic leftist career politicians backed by revamped old communists and on the other hand a tired, lethargic, sitting government with an apparent lack of intellectual substance who relies on a social-national party for its parliamentary majority as a choice between the plague and the cholera.

With such a pessimistic and cynical outlook it was a real pleasant surprise to hear this morning that as part of cabinet reshuffling a friend of mine, Charlotte Sahl-Madsen, was elected as the new Danish Minister of Science, which post has as its unofficial title: Minister of IT. This is good news for science, information technology and more generally speaking, innovative thinking in the Danish society.

The Danish media has been speculating since the announcement about who is the new minister. To her great credit, Charlotte Sahl-Madsen has not spent much of her time trying to make a name of herself within Danish mainstream media. She has held leading positions in the strategic departments of both Lego and Danfoss, two pillars of Danish exporting industry. Lately, she has worked as leader of Danfoss Universe, a wonderful science park in the south Denmark that I have visited several times with my kids.

What can Charlotte Sahl-Madsen achieve as new minister of science (and IT). Probably not wonders. But that is due to the unfortunate low status of that particular ministry within the hierarchy of Danish ministries. But I think that she more than any other minister of science before her can set the agenda for innovation within the ministry and its resort. I expect her to be much more genuinely interested in open innovation, open government, open data and all other good things than any of her predecessors that were all more or less clueless in this field.

Charlotte Sahl-Madsen has IMHO the potential to be the best minister of Science that Denmark have had so far.

Full disclosure: Charlotte and I are both members of VL67 – a network for Danish leaders with business and culture.

Peter Toft: Open Source Days: Kom gratis ind - som hjælper

Peter Toft (pto) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:33:00 +0000

En af de ting, som altid glæder mig når vi laver konference er vores hjælpere. Der er folk, jeg er meget glade for at kende. De møder glade op, vi spiser morgenmad sammen og så har de en fire-timers v…

Flemming Jacobsen: Marketing fail

Flemming Jacobsen (F3) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:58:59 +0000

While driving with my friend Anders, we passed this truck. Luckily the highway was busy, and i could make him slow down a little, and get in behind it for pictures. My apoligies for the shaky picture. It is the best of the 30 odd pictures I took. I blame Anders car and his driving skills :-) The text is “www.@it-rental.dk”. According to whois, the it-rental.dk domain does not exist anymore. I wonder why …...

Henrik Brix Andersen: Terminal.app vs. iTerm, Round II

Henrik Brix Andersen (brix) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:12:13 +0000

A lot of water has passed beneath the bridge since I wrote my last entry about Apples Terminal.app vs. iTerm. Apple has released Snow Leopard with, among other things, a much improved version of Terminal.app, which has gotten me to ditch iTerm again.

So, I bring to you a version of the script for opening a new terminal window on the currently active desktop space – the Terminal.app way:

tell application "System Events"
	set TerminalCount to (count (every process whose name is "Terminal"))
end tell

if (TerminalCount is not 0) then
	tell application "Terminal"
		do script
		activate
	end tell
else
	tell application "Terminal"
		activate
	end tell
end if

As usual: Save the script to a .scpt file, open it with Script Editor, save as an Application and place a shortcut in your Dock.

Poul-Henning Kamp: Open Source har værdi!

Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:12:00 +0000

Så er sagen om modeljernbanesoftwaren lukket og slukket og Open Source vandt stort: Selvom vi giver vores software væk gratis, lider vi et tab når folk overtræder licensen og tabet kan forfølges ved d…

Mads Toftum: XKCD gets close to the truth

Mads Toftum (quasi) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:10:40 +0000

Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen: Transcoding LATM packed HE-AAC audio with MythTV

Sune Kloppenborg Jeppesen (jaervosz) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 08:01:37 +0000

Since some of the new Danish digital TV channels (on MUX2) are using the HE-AAC audio codec which is not widely supported (ie. on my Pop Corn Hour) I had to transcode the recordings before being able to watch it on my frontend.

I'm using VLC for the transcoding, since ffmpeg couldn't quite grok it yet.

For this I use the following simple script:

#!/bin/bash
vcodec="mp4v"
acodec="a52"
bitrate="VIDEO_BITRATE"
arate="128"
ext="aac"
mux="mp4"
vlc="/usr/bin/vlc"
input=$1
output=$2

#http://www.geekzone.co.nz/forums.asp?forumid=83&topicid=55394
$vlc -v -I dummy "$input" --sout "#transcode{acodec=$acodec,ab=$arate,channels=2,samplerate=48000}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=ts,dst=\"$output\"}" vlc://quit
exit $?

Note: You have to enable VLC stream support for the --sout to work (USE="stream").

With MythTV I wrap it in the following script for it to work as a normal MythTV UserJob:

#!/bin/bash                                         
VIDEODIR=$1                                         
FILENAME=$2                                         
JOBID=$3                                            
NEWFILENAME=`echo $FILENAME | sed -e "s/\....$//"`.mp4

# Sanity checking, to make sure everything is in order.
if [ -z "$VIDEODIR" -o -z "$FILENAME" ]; then          
        echo "Usage: $0 <VideoDirectory> <FileName>"   
        exit 5                                         
fi                                                     
if [ ! -f "$VIDEODIR/$FILENAME" ]; then                
        echo "File does not exist: $VIDEODIR/$FILENAME"
        exit 6                                         
fi                                                     

cat << EOF | mysql -h mysqlserver -u mythtv -ppassword mythconverg
UPDATE jobqueue SET comment = "Starting transcoding using vlc." WHERE id = $JOBID;
EOF

# Remove previous mp4 if any
if [ -f $VIDEODIR/$NEWFILENAME  ]; then
        rm $VIDEODIR/$NEWFILENAME
fi

/home/mythtv/bin/transcodelatm.sh $VIDEODIR/$FILENAME $VIDEODIR/$NEWFILENAME

ERROR=$?
if [ $ERROR -ne 0 ]; then
        echo "vlc failed for ${FILENAME}.tmp with error $ERROR"
        exit $ERROR
fi

#Update MySQL

cat << EOF | mysql -h mysqlserver -u mythtv -ppassword mythconverg
UPDATE recorded SET basename = "$NEWFILENAME", filesize = $(ls -l $VIDEODIR/$NEWFILENAME | awk '{print $5}') WHERE basename = "$FILENAME";
EOF

#Remove previous version
rm $VIDEODIR/$FILENAME

exit 0

I don't update the jobqueue table once the job is finished, since MythTV immediately overwrites my update. The wiki shows how to use a bit of trickery to update the jobqueue table after the job completes, but the above solution is fine for me.

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Peter Larsen: Nyt gTLD?

Peter Larsen (czar) — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:55:06 +0000

Der bliver snakket rigtig meget om nye gTLD’er, hvertfald, internationalt set.

Vi mangler endnu at se et dansk gTLD, men i mellemtiden er vi tilsyneladende blevet slået af vores Norske broderfolk, som har åbnet øjene og set hvad der sker ude i verden:

http://www.domainnews.com/en/norway-considers-new-gtlds-such-as-.oslo.html

Med en nedsættelse af en arbejdsgruppe der feks skal vurdere om et .OSLO eller et .TRONDELAG kunne være til nytte for Norge, eller som branding af den Norske hovedstad og andre områder, så tager Norge hermed klart føringen på den internationalle hest indenfor domæner i norden.. Man kan jo så sige, det er så heller ikke så svært..

Søren Bredlund Caspersen: Tivoli Fredagsrock 2010

Søren Bredlund Caspersen () — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:15:04 +0000

Programmet for Tivoli Fredagsrock 2010 er nu tilgængeligt. Det er jo altid rart i den kolde vintertid, at blive mindet om, at det nok skal blive sæson for sommer, sol og udendørs koncerter på et tidspunkt igen – selvom man mildest talt ikke kan mærke det i øjeblikket.

Jeg forstår ikke hvorfor, men Tivoli har ikke publiceeret programmet i et format, som er let at importere i elektroniske kalendere – det der kommer tættest på er deres events på Facebook.
Men hvis du syntes det er rart at have Fredagsrock programmet importeret i kalenderen på din computer, mobil eller hvor du nu har en elektronisk kalender, så er muligheden her:

Direkte link til: html, iCal, xml.

Disclaimer:
Hvis der kommer ændringer i programmet er det selvfølgelig Tivolis Fredagsrock side der gælder og ikke denne kalender.

Peter Toft: Open Source Days: Sunde og usunde open source projekter

Peter Toft (pto) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:17:00 +0000

Der er mange ting jeg ser frem til på Open Source Days 2010 i næste weekend. Et at de foredrag jeg glæder mig meget til er Jonas Gamalielsson "Assessing the Health of Open Source Communities. Jon…

Peter Toft: Open Source Days: 12 dage til festen starter

Peter Toft (pto) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 15:43:00 +0000

Jeg glæder mig. Nu er der kun 12 dage til Open Source Days 2010 konferencen i København 5+6. marts. Som altid har der været tilføjelser i programmet, men nu er det færdigt. Over de næste halvanden uge…

Leif Lodahl: 2D barcodes in OpenOffice.org

Leif Lodahl () — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:00:22 +0000

This extension provides you with 2D barcodes directly inserted into your OpenOffice.org text document or spreadsheet.Select the text and click the button or click the button and type the text.You can get the extension here: http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/project/2DBarcodeDo you have ideas about how to take advantage of 2D barcodes? Please comment!

Poul-Henning Kamp: John Strand har ret, men tager fejl

Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 11:07:00 +0000

Jeg morede mig gevaldigt over John Strands udfald imod Google, for manden har naturligvis ret, men tager i den grad fejl at det er til at tude af grin over. Til de af mine læsere der er gamle nok til …

Martin von Haller Grønbæk: Danish Open Source Vendors declares victory in open standards war

Martin von Haller Grønbæk () — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 17:23:23 +0000

Danish Open Source Vendors' Association (OSL)

Many years ago (10 December 2003), I helped to cofound an organisation with the aim of uniting all the good forces to promote the commercial use of open source in Denmark. The result was The Danish Open Source Vendors’ Association (aka OSL – an acronym from the Danish name Foreningen af Open Source Leverandører). Yesterday, OSL held another general meeting where among other more important things I was reelected to its board of directors for another 2 year period.

The mood at this year’s general meeting was joyous. In late January 2010, OSL could declare victory in maybe the most important and hard fought battle that OSL has been part of since its formation.

On 29 January 2010 the Danish Parliament (Folketinget) decided unanimously to place the ODF standard as the only compliant open standard for editable documents on the list of open standards to be used by the Danish public sector.

Open Document Format (ODF)

This decision reverses the prior opinion by the Danish National IT and Telecom Agency (NITA) and the panel of experts appointed by NITA that the list should be comprised by two competing standards – ODF and OOXML. Microsoft lobbyied hard for OOXML to kept on the list, but in the end common sense prevailed.

That Denmark has opted for ODF brings us on par with other countries such as the Netherlands.

True, the actual wording of the decision by the Danish Parliament leaves room for interpretation. And surely, the proponents of OOXML will try to tweak this to their advantage in the future. So OSL and other believers and open standards will have to stay alert.

But the status quo today is undeniably that

that there is clear political majority in the Danish Parliament in favour of ODF,
ODF is currently the only compliant standard on the list,
ODF is thus the current reference for open standards for editable documents, and
all other “competing” documentsformat will have to comply with the requirement that they should be fully compatible with other open standards.

: Image of Morten Kjærsgaard

Its been a lot work for OSL the last couple of years trying to turn a defeat (when it seemed that Microsoft had persuaded a majority of the Danish Parliament into opting for “a two standards solution”) into a victory. Truly a good reason for celebration. And credits and kudos go to the indefatigable Morten Kjærsgaard, long time chairman of OSL!

Andreas Bach Aaen: 1.2GHz arm server i drift

Andreas Bach Aaen () — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 19:57:35 +0000

Hvor er det en fornøjelse. Endelig fik jeg min Buffalo Linkstation LS-XHL i drift. Jeg demoede den i efteråret til Open Source Community Day, hvor man kunne se, at den godt kunne trække både Mythtv og en squeezebox server. Jeg havde dog snydt lidt blot lagt min gamle debian NAS installation ind i et underkatalog og så lavet en chroot til dette underkatalog, mounted /proc og så ellers starte de ekstra services. Dette virker fint men har en række fordele og ulemper. Man kan fortsætte med at benytte NAS’en som den er tænkt af fabrikanten og så blot lege med sine egne programmer i et hjørne. Den største ulemper er nok, at man er bundet til en bestemt Linuxkerne. Jeg ville kunne benytte en nyere og bygge de kernemoduler, der gør det muligt, at benytte sjove USB-dimser så som en DVB-T tuner. Fordelen ved at beholde den medleverede kerne er, at det er nemmere at få aflæst powerkanppen og få blæserstyringen til at fungere.

Det var stort set lige ud af landevejen at bygge en 2.6.32 Linuxkerne til NAS-boksen.Ingridienserne er en vanilla 2.6.32 kerne og en mindre LS-XHL platformspatch fundet her. Dertil skal man selvfølgelig have en arm krydscompiler installeret. Her benyttede jeg den så lå i Marvells udviklingskit til SheevaPlugen, der jo benytter samme chipsæt.

Det absolut mest bøvlede var, at der ikke er seriel kontakt med uboot bootloaderen. Hermed, skal alt klappe og virke, man kan først få kontakt med sin NAS når systemer er bootet så langt op at netværket er oppe at køre. Meget kan gå galt inden da. Så skift kun een komponent ud af gangen og start med en kørende opstilling. Så den nye kerne kunne fint køre med det originale rodfilsystem leveret af Buffalo.

Jeg valgte at lave en noget anderledes partitionering end den oprindelige. Et par ting er vigtige at huske her. Da jeg ikke piller ved uboot, som ligger i flash, så er bootparametrene faste: “ console=ttyS0,115200 root=/dev/sda2 rw initrd=0×00800040,32M panic=5 BOOTVER=0.08″. Lad dig ikke snyde af at der tilsyneladende er seriel support. Alt er på plads på softwaresiden, det er blot på hardwaresiden, at der lige er klippet et par komponenter ud i forbrugerversionen frem for udviklerversionen af NAS-hardwaren. Så initrd og kerne skal ligge på partition 1, som skal være ext3 formateret. Navnene er: uImage.buffalo og initrd.buffalo. Partition 2 skal være rodpartitionen - med mindre man laver sjove julelege i initrd’en. Det er vigtigt at man ved formatering af ext3 filsystemet på partition 1 husker at bruge option “-I 128″ til mkfs.ext3. Ellers kan uboot i flashromen ikke læse kernen og initrd’en.

Oprettelse af rodfilsystem laves med debootstrap. Jeg gjorde det nemt for mig selv og lavede det natively på en af mine gamle ARM baserede NASer. Krydsinstallation kan godt være noget vanskelig, så det sprang jeg over. Så skal der tilrettes nogle få filer og netværket sættes op. Kogebogsopskriften fandt jeg her. Men ak, der var noget der drillede. Og hvert mislykket forsøg kræver, at disken afmonteres og sættes over i et sata til usb interface på en anden PC. Det viste sig, at min bootsekevens kom til at hænge i /etc/rcS.d/S06checkroot.sh. Hvis jeg rettede i scriptet og tvang rootcheck=no, så kørte alt på skinner. For at kunne komme frem til dette, så lavede jeg mig en “console”, der skrev til disk under opstart. Jeg rettede i /lib/lsb/init-functions og pipede alle echo kommandoer over i /tmp/snydekonsol.Hermed fik jeg et spor på disken, som kunne bruges til næste boot forsøg.

Nå men det lykkedes at få installeret en debian unstable med en 2.6.32.4 kerne på Buffalo Linkstaion LS-XHL maskinen. Så kom de mange glædelige overraskelser. Jeg have forkælet mig med en DVB-T USB tuner. Jeg valgte en Asus Mycinema-U3100/mini DVBT. Skuffelsen var stor da jeg fik den tilsendt og fik modellen, som hed plus til efternavn. Modellen uden plus skulle virke på Linux Asus EEE uden kvaler, den anden nævnte det overhovedet ikke på produkthjemmesiden. Heldigvis var hardwaren identisk. Der var blot en ekstra USB-dims med et IR-øje og en elendig fjernbetjening med. Det virkede med Linux lige ud af boksen. Den næste gode overraskelse var, at den også virkede under ARM linux. På min gamle buffalo NAS kørte jeg en 2.6.25 kerne, og der krævede det et hack i usb-delen af kernen at lokke data ud af DVB-T enheder. Så den fejl er fikset i mellemtiden. Asus DVB-T enheden har heller ikke den samme irriterende firmware bug som min gamle TakeMS DVB-T enhed havede. Den holdt i praksis op med at virke efter et par dage. Kun en kold reboot fik den på bedre tanker. Så den er fin til at tage med laptopen på farten med ikke i en fast serveropstilling.

Som kom tiden til softwareopdaterinerne. Squeezebox serverne havde tidligere været ret bøvlet at installere fordi, de kløjs rundt i hvilke versioner den krævede af en række Perl CPAN moduler. Men her havde Logitech oppet sig. En deb fil hentet direkte fra Logitechs Squeezeboxhjemmeside og så var den hjemme. Install med dpkg -i og så en efterfølgende apt-get install -f for at sikre afhængighederne. Nemt.

Mythtv installerede jeg i version 0.22, hvor jeg tidligere havde kørt 0.21. Det gav lidt knas, men ikke noget som 1000 andre ikke var faldet i før mig. Jeg installerede også mythweb, da jeg nu har en NAS-server med hele 256MB ram og ikke sølle 128 MB som jeg tidligere har måttet nøjes med. Ingen problemer med at trække dette også. Lækkert.

Og så endnu en god overraskelse. Jeg havde indtil nu kørt ATA over Ethernet (AoE) på min en gamle sløve NAS og alle de andre sjove services på NAS nummer 2. Min LS-XHL havde ingen problemer med at trække begge dele. Og faktisk så kan man virkeligt mærke at AoE er hurtigere pga. den hurtigere CPU NAS-serveren har.

Alt i alt så har jeg skiftet to servere ud med en ny, hurtigere og billigere. Det er ganske meget server man kan få for 1500 kr.

De to gamle servere er nu kommet på pension. de har kostet omkring 4000 kr i indkøb. Men så var det jo også med en 500GB disk i hver og 400 MHz ARM processorer.

Kenneth Geisshirt: Web-applikationer - offline

Kenneth Geisshirt (kneth) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:04:00 +0000

Det er ikke altid muligt at være online - og det skal dine web-applikationer tage hensyn til i fremtiden.

Poul-Henning Kamp: UNIX idioterne

Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:09:00 +0000

Jeg bliver regelmæssigt beskyldt for at være efter alt hvad Microsoft gør, mens de same folk ikke lægger mærke til når jeg revser UNIX verdenen. Nu har jeg sat en overskrift der burde fange deres opmæ…

Christian Jørgensen: Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so

Christian Jørgensen (razor) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 07:57:17 +0000

Do you have some spare CPU cycles and a little bandwidth on your server?

Then you should consider taking part in the NTP Pool project and become a part of the global effort to provide accurate time for millions of users.

There continues to be a large growth of users of the pool, and the number of servers doesn't seem to grow quite as fast.

It will only take you about 15 minutes to setup. Read more here: How do I join pool.ntp.org?

Oh yeah, and the quote in the headline of course is by Douglas Adams from h2g2.

Erwin Lansing: ports feature freeze now in effect

Erwin Lansing () — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:21:15 +0000

In preparation for 7.3-RELEASE, the ports tree is now in feature freeze.

Normal upgrade, new ports, and changes that only affect other branches are allowed without prior approval but with the extra Feature safe: yes tag in the commit message. Any commit that is sweeping, i.e. touches a large number of ports, infrastructural changes, commits to ports with unusually high number of dependent ports, and any other commit that requires the rebuilding of many packages is not allowed without prior explicit approval from portmgr after that date.

When in doubt, please do not hesitate to contact portmgr.

ports feature freeze starts in February 8 In preparation for 7.3-RELEASE, the ports tree will be in...
Ports feature freeze now enforced As an experiment, there will not be a complete ports...
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Kristian Nielsen: Conference time!

Kristian Nielsen () — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:44:58 +0000

It is conference time for me. I just came home from FOSDEM 2010 where we had a booth and I gave a talk. At the end of the month there will be a company meeting in Iceland for Monty Program, followed by Open Source Days 2010 where I will also be speaking. And then in April there is the MySQL User Conference. With two additional talks given at local user groups end of last year, I think I've about filled my quota for now, I feel quite fortunate that it turned out that I will not also be presenting at the UC! (I do not have a natural talent for speaking, and tend to need to spend quite a lot of time in preparations.)

Having a booth at FOSDEM turned out really well I think, as I got to talk to a lot of different people that passed by the booth. I also had a very nice dinner with the PostgreSQL people where I learned a lot about the internals of that database. As well as dinners with people from the MySQL world, also with lots of interesting discussions.

Thanks to all of the people that I met at FOSDEM. It was fun and inspiring to meet you, looking forward to the next time!

One thing strikes me as I am piecing together the mandatory "MariaDB feature list" for my next talk. It seems people tend to focus a lot on the extra features MariaDB has over MySQL. But there is another aspect that I think is just as important: MariaDB is creating an open framework where community developers can work together on new development. This is something that has been missing in the past.

It is easy to focus on a concrete list of features, whereas the idea of an abstract framework is much harder to present as more than buzzword talk. But I will try to get it into my next talk, as I think ultimately both are of equal importance.