Planet LDTP

Kartik Mistry: Kavin@School

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:57:28 +0000

* This really deserve more than ‘twit’, so I am putting it here as NEWS.

We selected nearby no-nonsense, no-hype, no-big-fees kind of school running in somewhat 4 BHK kind of bungalow in residential area. He is in ‘Playgroup’ where primary motive is to interact with others, to learn by monkey business and to learn some good (hopefully) stuffs. I was glad that he did not cried while going to school, but we had to drag him to home and he cried a lot

Current school timings are 9.30 AM to 11.30 AM, so I must help K and need to wake up early in the morning and probably stop (or reduce) useless hacking till late night.

However, I’m kind of down due to RCT, Stomach issues and now some pain in shoulder – but still alive to write this.

Guofu Xu: bwshare module refuse your requests -- cloning web

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:12:00 +0000

当你看到某个网站觉得有收藏的下来的冲动时, 用工具自动下载吧 -- teleport.

界面朴素, 功能当然一个不少. 今天在用到它下载techonthenet.com的内容发现该网站限制了ip连接频率和个数. 用了"不间断运行"的选项似乎不正常(停止之后就没有看到它在自动开启...), 换来代理很麻烦哪...

看到状态栏的线程启动得非常快, 让人看到一点希望软件无壳 --vc. 中断在createthread, 梦游在堆栈中, 找到一个loop的结束点, 加一个1s的sleep.

现在跑的速度和原来差不多(我就没有见过哪个网站的一个网页1s内能好的), 只是界面卡, 下载的页面还是很欢快的.

记:

该网站的Excel函数公式例子很全, 没有编程经历的老婆一定会喜欢的(昨晚看那个sumif还在想range和sum_range有什么区别, 看例子很清楚了, sum_range是实际上是要选择的数据域).

Eitan Isaacson: What I Did Today Before 9 AM

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:21:59 +0000

I needed a non-interactive way of generating PDFs from websites. I really liked Midori’s output, so I figured doing the same with the Python WebKitGtk bindings would be easy.

So I created a tool called interwibble, you could get it from my github repo.

There are probably other tools out there already that do the same thing, but I couldn’t find any.

This has been something that I have wanted more than a decade ago, when I thought it would be really cool to have a daily newspaper waiting on your printer every morning when you wake up.

Eitan Isaacson: Git

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:19:37 +0000

Can’t get enough of it. I lurv Git.

If anything is worth doing, it could be done with Git.

Over the past few weeks I have written pre/post hooks and new Git commands for the most esoteric tasks.

I think Git overshadows any other achievement that Linus guy ever had. He should stop working on that hobby kernel, and put more time into Git, I think it has potential.

I need to migrate this blog to being Git based…

Kartik Mistry: foss.in/2009

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:45:54 +0000

* Long awaited CFP is out! Lets see how we represent Debian this time. Last year’s I missed it completely and I am also not sure about this year, but as always – I am excited

Go for it!

Dobey: Web of Old

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:49:53 +0000

I miss the web, when it was the web, and not a platform for building giant applications that require a more expensive computer to use, than to play a very complex 3D massively multiplayer adventure role playing shooter. Then, all I needed to find some information was a keyboard, a screen, and average cheap hardware. Now I need a multi-core CPU with 8GB of RAM, just to load and render some pages. REST feels sort of in the same boat as RISC was 10 years ago, right now.

Ara Pulido: Lets test Karmic RC!

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:02:42 +0000

This Thursday Karmic reaches the last milestone before the final release. As for every milestone, we need to test all the ISO images we produce, with every possible installation.

All of these test cases will appear, with instructions to follow, in the ISO tracker. If you don’t know how to use the tracker, this blog post will serve as starting guide.

One of the complains of the new comers is that they don’t know which test case needs testing. The coordination is done at #ubuntu-testing at Freenode and not everybody can access IRC. This time, Dave Morley and I, will try something new. As the RC images start appearing and testing begins, we are going to update in Twitter, using #ubuntutesting as tag.

If you want to help us testing RC images, please, follow us in Twitter and make sure to search for #ubuntutesting for updates. And if you’re helping testing, please, tweet about it!

Of course, this is an extra way to get informed. Coordination will happen, as usual, at #ubuntu-testing IRC channel.

Eitan Isaacson: CSUN Hackfest and Exhibition: Call for Participation

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:49:36 +0000

On March 22-27 2010, GNOME will have a booth presence at the CSUN conference in San Diego. CSUN is one of the largest and most important gatherings on the topic of technology and persons with disabilities. This is going to be a great opportunity to bring the gospel of Free Software to a space and industry that is largely proprietary, and to a user base with special needs that sometimes could only be addressed with Open Source software. This is going to be über exciting!

Along with the booth and a presentation or two, we will also be hosting a GNOME assistive technology hackfest. The reasoning for this being the fact that this is an assistive technologies conference, so there really isn’t a better place to draw inspiration, both by seeing the “state of the art” proprietary products first hand, and by talking with users who have needs that we could answer.

Are you a maintainer of one of GNOME’s assistive technology modules? Are you developing an on screen keyboard? An alternative means for text input? A magnifier? Some trippy head-tracking app? Voice control? Switch access? Something new and exciting for cognitive disabilities? Are you hacking on new features for Orca? Are you working to provide users with disabilities unfettered access to GNOME?

If the answer to any of the above is ‘yes’, we hope you will consider joining fellow GNOME a11y folks at CSUN this year to help promote GNOME and to hack with fellow AT developers.

We hope to have funding for this hackfest, but we don’t yet really know what that means. We know that we will have to be creative about it to pull it off, so hopefully once you made up your mind to attend, you could help figure out how to afford it, if your employer could pay, if you have student discounts, etc. We will do our best to make it affordable to people who should be there, but no promises. Hope to have specifics about that in the future.

Please contact me if you have questions or interest in participating in this: eitani at gnome dot org

Guofu Xu: 那些, 如今迷上魔兽的日子

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:18:36 +0000

老婆责怪我老是玩游戏, 一天到晚都是那样, 形容是"那罪恶的双手又伸向电脑了..."

魔兽和以前玩的红警有些类似, 不过这里强调英雄的不可替代的作用, 使用英雄携带的物品来对群体的抽调, 比如加速, 群补, 回城等等, 我喜欢用兽族, 原因是兵力召唤简单, 科技升级也简单. 通常使用就2种方法, 一波步兵强拆建筑, 二波猎夺者/风骑士+科多兽+灵魂行者. 相当简单. 呵呵.

在HF上别人戏谑我的厉害, 毕竟只能和电脑(中等)怎么去和人家砍, 根本就没有合作的意识, 而且有时候激动之下还伤自己人. 算是喜欢 Grubby 中的一个吧, 跑动意识很强, 都不知道他是怎么调兵遣将的, 那么顺畅..:)

有个WarHelper (warkey?)可以显血和改键, 满方便的(启动的时候会弹ie, 只好拖了他的衣服, 把网址给cut :).

有本"冰封王座白皮书V1.22.chm"参考书... 相当的详细解释. 但没有发现类似的战略参考, 遗憾...

Eitan Isaacson: Laptop Battery Lifetime

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:36:20 +0000

Hey,

What’s up with my battery? I got this laptop, a Lenovo T400, about a year ago, and my 4 cell battery is reporting 37.4% capacity. This sucks. I’m going to need to get a new one.

eitan@sparky:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info present: yes design capacity: 37440 mWh last full capacity: 14010 mWh battery technology: rechargeable design voltage: 14400 mV design capacity warning: 700 mWh design capacity low: 200 mWh capacity granularity 1: 1 mWh capacity granularity 2: 1 mWh model number: 42T4573 serial number: 2242 battery type: LION OEM info: SONY
What did I do to deserve this? Any fellow Internet users know? I have been running alpha versions of Ubuntu often, has there been some major power management bug that may have killed my battery? Have my usage habits been destructive? I can’t think of any awful abuse that I put my battery through.

Ara Pulido: Thanks! (Beta ISO Testing)

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 11:34:12 +0000

Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Beta was released last Thursday. I am so glad to announced that we 98.9% coverage of the test cases in the ISO tracker. I would like to thank the community members that helped testing the ISOs, specially those who joined recently. Thanks! I am discussing with the Community team about the possibility of including this participation in the Ubuntu Hall Of Fame, just as the bug triagers or sponsors are.

I will blog about Release Candidate ISO testing as we approach the milestone week

Also, and because we are getting new contributions, I would like to comment some of the reports we got, so we can improve every milestone.

Not really a failure

We got this comment, in a test case marked as failure:

I have a tablet fujitsu p1630 and the stylus works in the life cd! great, congratulations!
(missing is the calibration tool which should be loaded. The stylus is not properly calibrated and cannot reach the top line (where the application menus sit!).[...]

In the ISO test tracker we mark as failures those experiences that prevented us to do what we want to achieve in that test case. I.e. If we want to install, and the partition manager fails, that’s a failure. If we do install (or can access to the Live environement, as in this case), the test didn’t fail as such. We would mark that as success, but will link the non-critical bugs that we find.

Usability bugs are bugs

The lack of colour in the default options during installation could cause problems for new users.
The default setting of Mute, for sound could cause problems for new users.

These are great examples of usability bugs. Thanks for noticing them! Usability bugs are bugs, so do not only put them as comments in your report, also go and file bugs in Launchpad for them. They will help a lot to new users to understand how Ubuntu works.

Eitan Isaacson: Banshee Accessibility: It Talks!

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 17:30:09 +0000

Instead of showing cryptic Accerciser screenshots, I went ahead and created a screencast of Banshee working with Orca.

I forgot to demo a few things, but you get the idea, Banshee works with Orca. I started a Banshee Orca script that enables such prettiness as synchronized seek bar reports. You could get it from the bug report, or an updated version from my Orca git branch. You could also keep track of all the Banshee a11y work through my Banshee git branch.

You will notice a few moments of awkward silence, there still is plenty of work to do, particularly with the SourceView on the left hand side: Both visible focus indication and some ATK instrumenting are missing.

Anyway, real life is going to call me soon, so I hope y’all enjoyed this as much as I did. I also hope these things find their way into trunk in one way or another. If I see that this is under popular demand I will try to keep my ppa current.

LDTP SoC: Call for LDTPv2 (Linux Desktop Testing Project) testing

noreply@blogger.com (Nagappan) — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 08:26:38 +0000

We are in the process of migrating all our existing LDTP API based on CSPI (LDTPv1) to pyatspi (LDTPv2).

LDTPv2 framework was written by "Eitan Isaacson". Thanks to eeejay :)

In VMware, we have tested the LDTPv2 API's. Thanks to Ranjith Murugan, Gaurav Sharma, Anupa Kamath for verifying them.

I'm sure still there are some pending API's which has to implemented or some API's which are not compatible with LDTPv1 in LDTPv2. I request to all the users, to verify LDTPv2 in their test environment and report any issues you found. We have tested on Ubuntu 9.04 with Python 2.6. It will be nice, if you could test it on Python 2.4 / 2.5 / 3.0 as well.

New LDTPv2 dependency - twisted-python-web package.

Access LDTPv2 source through git: git://anongit.freedesktop.org/ldtp/ldtp2 or ssh://git.freedesktop.org/git/ldtp/ldtp2 or http://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/ldtp/ldtp2.git

Browse the LDTPv2 source online - http://cgit.freedesktop.org/ldtp/ldtp2/tree/

Eitan Isaacson: Banshee Accessibility: Where Am I?

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:37:14 +0000

When I started working on Banshee accessibility, I pointed out various keyboard navigation issues in the ListView. For one, the column headers were not keyboard Navigable, so you couldn’t sort by column. Also, there was no indication the ListView had keyboard focus, this made keyboard navigation confusing.

With my limited theming skills, I solved the latter, if anyone has a better idea for keyboard focus indication – please submit patches! My solution was slightly changing the ListView selection’s color, and making the frame’s border bolder.

As for header navigation, the behavior I implemented mimics GtkTreeView: When tabbing into a ListView, focus first lands on the column headers, a second tab puts focus in the actual list. When focus is on the column headers, left and right change the active header, and return toggles sorting. There is a hidden advantage of horizontal control in the ListView that we will see in a later post regarding screen reader support.

Enjoy this short screencast of keyboard navigation in Banshee’s ListViews.

Nagappan Alagappan: Call for LDTPv2 (Linux Desktop Testing Project) testing

noreply@blogger.com (Nagappan) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:57:08 +0000

Eitan Isaacson: Banshee Accessibility: The Low Fruit

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:18:15 +0000

In my quest to make Banshee more accessible, I listed several issues that came up in a few minutes of testing. In this post I will review the solutions to some of the more straight-forward issues.

Fix top toolbar keyboard navigation

The top toolbar, where the play controls live had inconsistent keyboard behavior. Typically, you arrow left and right to reach different items on the bar, but the toolbar had two widgets which grabbed the arrow keys, and did not allow further navigation.

The volume button is a highly customized Gtk.Button, the OnKeyPressEvent method is overridden, and all sorts of key pairs are assigned to do essentially the same thing, you guess what: +/-, Add/Subtract, Up/Down, Left/Right. Since there are plenty of alternatives for adjusting the volume, I simply removed the Left/Right keys so the widget does not consume them, and the parent toolbar will receive them.

The seek slider essentially a Gtk.HScale, I haven’t figured out why but pressing left/right when the slider is in focus does not change it’s value. It’s probably some widget property I missed. In any case, since left/right doesn’t do anything in the widget, I figure nobody will miss it. I overrode OnKeyPressEvent, and made sure to return false when left or right is pressed.

You could see the actual patches in the bug report.

Text alternatives to icon buttons

This took me longer to figure out then I want to admit, the problem seems to be that the playback toolbar button accessible objects do not have a textual representation. It also seems that the current Banshee code does everything right: Gtk.UIManager is used, and text labels are provided. The short answer to my long inquiry is simply that GAIL is not exposing toolbar button names. I wish I filed a GAIL bug once I discovered that, because now – two weeks later – I don’t completely remember what the issue is. In any case a quick workaround in Banshee was to use the Gtk.Stock enumerators and not the stock string ids. I know, silly. I promise to file a GAIL bug on this soon. For now, you could look at the bug report for the workaround.

Ara Pulido: Karmic Beta Testing

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:18:32 +0000

Love Ubuntu? Want to help?
Karmic Beta candidate images have started to appear in the ISO tracker.

You don’t know how to use it? It is pretty easy!

Kartik Mistry: 3 years!

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 05:18:26 +0000

* It has been just 3 years since I uploaded my first package, Xosview!

xosview (1.8.2-10) unstable; urgency=low

* New Maintainer (Closes: #390066)
* standards-version to 3.7.2

– Kartik Mistry Fri, 29 Sep 2006 10:16:09 +0530

Dobey: Sexism, Generally

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:57:33 +0000

Really. People. Get over yourselves.

Sexism is a two way street. And every time someone says "girls" it's not sexist. And no, I'm not defending one way or another. This latest stink about someone saying "I've a hard time explaining to girls what we do" was almost certainly not sexist. It was a generalization. Everyone makes generalizations, even girls. As software developers, it's a pretty simple fact. Out of all the people we meet in our line of work, the majority of females are less inclined to understand what we do exactly, than the majority of males. Is that sexism? No. Would it be called sexism by girls, were it to be stated by a female? No. Is it being called such because it was stated by a male? Yes. But in the end, it was a simple generalization based on the same experience we all have to deal with. And you know what... we need quit crying wolf, and deal with it.

But we don't all need to walk on eggshells every day of our lives, in every interaction we post on a blog, or every line we speak when giving a talk. That will never solve the problem. It will only cause more and different problems. Because the world isn't androgynous. It's not how the world works. So get used to it already. If someone does say something that you personally have taken offense to, then you need to deal with it in an appropriate manner. We're all adults here (well, mostly anyway). You should contact that person privately, and discuss the matter in a rational manner. Blogging and making a fuss about every little instance of the word 'girl' on the internet isn't appropriate, nor is it going to help. If either party cannot discuss the matter rationally, then perhaps the issue needs to be escalated in an appropriate manner. Twitter, blogs, or whatever other widely published means, are probably not appropriate, because they are inherently irrational. If you truly want to help put an end to sexism, then being sexist isn't the way to go about it.

Out of all the sexist people I've met in my life, the majority were female.

Ara Pulido: Mago Tutorial

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:24:09 +0000

As part as the Ubuntu Developer Week, I gave a Mago tutorial on how to add new test cases to available applications in the Mago library.

I have reformatted a bit the logs to make the reading easier and it is now part of the Mago documentation. Enjoy!

Mago tutorial

Ara Pulido: Old friend ISO Testing Tracker

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:12:08 +0000

This post is going to be all about the ISO Testing Tracker. You might know it already, it’s been with us for a while. But, like old friends, sometimes you need a reminder that they are there and give them a hug. But before we continue with the tracker, let’s start with the basics:

What’s ISO Testing?

If you are reading this, you would probably know that Ubuntu has a 6-month release cycle, which means that every 6 months we have a new Ubuntu release, ready to install.

The good thing about software fixed cycles is that you can schedule anything you want. In fact, for Ubuntu, we schedule just at the beginning of the cycle up to 8 development releases. You can check at the Karmic schedule that there was an Alpha 1, Alpha 2, Alpha 3, Alpha 4, Alpha 5 and Alpha 6. And that there’s going to be a Beta and a Release Candidate before the “real” Ubuntu 9.10.

Those milestones need to be tested properly, because we release CDs for people to test on their hardware, and we have to make sure that everything is more or less OK. (with “more or less” I mean that these milestones are still software in development, so you have to be careful, anyway).

How do we track milestone testing?

So, here it is how the tracker appears in the show. Milestone releases happen normally on Thursdays. On Monday, in scheduled milestone weeks, testers start looking at the tracker looking for the candidate images: the ISOs that might be announced as the “Karmic Alpha something”. But these images need to be tested before they get announced.

How is the test tracker structured?

At Ubuntu, we produce builds for many different *buntu flavours. In the ISO Tracker we have a category for each of them. You can filter by category using the “Filter” menu in the bottom left of the page. That would allow you to concentrate in the flavour you want to test.

Filter by category

Once you select a category, you will be able to select an image to download for that category. A category like “Kubuntu” may have different images: i386 Live CD, amd64 alternate, etc., and all of them need to be tested before releasing a milestone.

Kubuntu Karmic Alpha 6 images

If you click now in any of those images, you will have access to a direct link of the ISO to download and a selection of tests that you may run for that image. For every test, there is a link to the test case description in the test case wiki. The test cases are easy to follow when running any of them.

So, to sum up, every category contains a set of ISO images and every image contains at least one test case.

Iso Tracker structure

How do I help?

As I wrote before, the week of the release of a milestone we need a lot of help testing the candidate images. If we want full coverage we need to run more than 150 test cases. If you have a spare machine or a virtual machine installed, you can help making Ubuntu better by running the untested test cases during the week of the release of a milestone.

First thing, you will need an account in the ISO tracker. Unfortunately, your Launchpad Open ID won’t work for this site (indeed something that needs to be improved). Click on “Log in” and fill the requested data. As the page explains, if you already have an account in Ubuntu Brainstorm, you can use it for the ISO Testing Tracker.

Create a QA account

Once you have an account just select the image you want to test, choose a test case for that image, start running the installation in a virtual machine or a spare machine and report any bugs you may find in Launchpad.

Once finished, you have to report back in the ISO Testing Tracker. Click on the test case you have run and report Pass/Fail depending on your success. You can also add the bug numbers of the bugs you found. They will be linked to the Launchpad bug and it will help the release team to track them.

Please, report back!

The time is NOW!

Next week, on Thursday 1st of October, we are releasing Ubuntu Karmic Beta, which eventually will become Ubuntu 9.10. This is a very important milestone, because many people upgrade during the beta, so it is very important to release something very stable at this point. From Monday, 27th of September, we will be testing the candidate images at #ubuntu-testing. I will send reminders to the different mailing lists later this week and at the beginning of next week, but you can start right now creating your account and making yourself familiar with the ISO Testing Tracker.

Help us releasing Ubuntu better and better every 6 months! And remember that we are always at #ubuntu-testing if you need to ask any question!

Guofu Xu: 袋子里的吸氧管 -- 生与死的味道

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 13:48:14 +0000

命运是贼, 冷不丁又偷走了你很多东西, 而且专挑最宝贵的.

今天出门的时候停了会雨. 骑车送了老婆一段路, 老婆坚持不让我送到医院(说过隧道害怕). 空气不太冷, 20°左右的温度我依然只穿了一件长袖的白衬衫...

到公司的时候不到九点, 打开电脑, 浏览网页. 偶尔想起该不该打个电话过去, 忍了2次. 40左右电话过来了, 说再到大医院确认一下. 挂电话的时候语气似乎...

我连忙赶到24路底站去接她, 尽管还嘀咕着别忘了东西, 出来还是忘了带伞...

上楼, 做B超, 挂号, 下住院单... 来回穿梭在人群中... 是的, 即便中午医生下班了我们还在奔波, 一个部门一个部门的转, 面对各种不同的仪器, 都还要排队...

大多数时间我是坐在椅子上等待的--妇产科都是限制男士的. 整个过程我都在想, 该说些什么话, 怎么让她不伤心, 怎么安慰, 很乱...

身边都是大肚子的, 来回的走动, 基本都有亲人配同. 这里, 见到最多的就是那些从检查室出来开心笑脸, 然后拿着结果单和家人像模像样的说着, 不时掂掂肚子, 摸摸, 再笑着... 那种时间, 对, 那个时候我们也应该是那个样子. 比划着宝宝的大小, 圆圆的小脑袋, 还有小小的肩膀, 呵呵, 特别是宝宝的肚子, 圆鼓鼓的, 检查的是一定是刚吃饱了的, 睡的呼呼的样子并躺在妈妈的肚子里超可爱...

不经意我的手指碰到了一件东西, 是的, 很熟悉了. 每个周六都会陪老婆去医院吸氧, 对了, 是唯一的一次, 上个周六. 那个周六轮到她义务值班. 只是没有想到那是给宝宝最后一次的机会了...

从外面看吸氧管是淡蓝色的, 和输液时用的那个管子样子差不多, 小一号而已, 一次性的. 而这次它依然在袋子里静静地... 突然一阵酸涌, 眼睛模模糊糊了起来. 宝贝, 为什么你不再给妈妈一个机会, 再给你补补氧气呢. 知道吗, 那可是最快乐的时光了...
妈妈甜甜地躺在那里, 和别的妈妈比着你的大小, 计算着什么时间, 对了, 你妈妈上周末才刚买的二条大号裤子, 怕勒着你呢. 这不, 另外一条都还没有碰呢...

宝贝, 你能感觉到吗? 妈妈, 还有我, 你未来的爸爸, 都还在你身边呢... 你看, 爸爸还有要摸摸你的冲动, 昨天我还为你唱了好几首歌, 看你妈妈当时乐的, 都记得吧, 宝贝?

不. 你说话了, 很伤心的样子. 你对我们说, 你已经是死胎了, 而且有几天了, 你们不是一直担心来着吗...

小孩说的话不算数的, 我还记得你爸爸很小的时候就是这中感觉, 你知道什么啊, 永远是...

你妈妈真的很辛苦, 很为你担心, 每天都做各种奇怪的梦... 呵呵, 有的真的很奇怪, 尽管都是梦, 相信你肯定是知道了的...
今早还梦到给你唱"轻轻我的宝贝"呢, 不是吗?
有一次提前去给你做检查, 医生说未见胎心, 吓得你妈妈又往别的大医院跑.
还有, 整天我和你妈妈都在抢着说你应该是男宝贝还是女宝贝. 到处找支持的想法: 今天你在肚子的右边, 是女宝宝. 今天发现你是前壁落"地", 是男娃... 呵呵, 还嚷着要做B超去鉴定你呢...

......
......

"宝贝", 今天还是个好日子的, 9/18(就要发). 却没想成了你和爸爸妈妈永别的日子, 将近五个多月风风雨雨的日子, 却被定格在了今天. 爸爸也哭了, 特别是一想起你的样子就哭, 办公司有人, 爸爸没有出声. 妈妈回家去张罗钱了, 我在公司等着看看要请假不要, 爸爸现在没有心情工作, 爸爸就是不能想你的样子. 宝宝啊, 宝宝, 你在听吗, 还有你的妈妈, 你感觉得到吗. 她还带着你, 或许还在雨里面行走呢...

宝宝, 你都没有机会让我们当着你的面叫你, 没有机会见见这外面美好的世界, 有多少和你一样迫不及待要出来的. 宝宝, 还知道吗, 有多少人都还在关心着你呢, 你的爷爷奶奶, 你的外公, 对了, 上次打电话, 你爸爸的外公都还有问到你哦. 还有你的舅舅, 姨娘... 可现在, 你让我们怎么和他们说啊, 怎么解释啊. 宝宝. 你不要连一句话都不说好不好, 为什么都不告诉你爸爸妈妈为什么呢. 至少, 你要让爸爸妈妈知道一点为什么吧. 你要爸爸妈妈怎么做, 尽管说, 哪怕最简单的暗示, 对, 踢踢小腿, 翻个跟头. 爸爸妈妈会尽最大的能力去理解你, 去满足你啊. 宝宝.. 我的宝宝啊...

一朝梦里度回人
应是春声年左右
而今化作隔世缘
抒别离合两茫茫

孤秋叶雨风冷亲
单骑三人却实双
最是伤心骨肉离
开花结果却无样

千寻万里路何方
招得人心思断量
托福邮命又来生
你们今生不再枉

---- 安息吧, 我们的宝宝......

Kartik Mistry: We need you!

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:28:55 +0000

* When you are free and have any nice tip(s) that may be useful to our users/developers, just go to http://wiki.debian.org/FortunesDebianHints and add it there!

Eitan Isaacson: Banshee Accessibility

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:31:35 +0000

Over the next week or two I plan to document some work I am doing on Banshee to increase it’s accessibility. It has been a while since I was able to concentrate on a pet project without feeling guilty about my other responsibilities, recently I was able to put some time into Banshee accessibility, and have fun at the same time!

Disclaimer: I currently only working on bare-bones Banshee with UI no extensions like Last.fm. Extensions need to be worked on too, in due time.

Finding access blockers in software is an easy process, you could achieve a good measure of coverage just by using common sense. There will always be issues that you have overlooked, luckily in the Open Source world, there will always be vocal users who will be happy to point out why your application sucks just a bit. Of course you could always opt for an official audit, or refer to such documents as Section 508 for further access requirement guidelines.

In my non-methodological review, I found several issues that need addressing, I am sure there are more, in such a rich application like Banshee, it is hard to reach all the corners, if you see any glaring omissions, or even something more nuanced, please let me know, and I will add it to this master list.

Input Access

Keyboard access, or more specifically non-pointer access, is important for accessibility. Pointer access requires a minimal amount of dexterity and vision. Keyboard access, while not always as efficient or as discoverable, allows keyboard users, or users of alternative input methods to use all features of an application in an unassisted manner. Of course, by adding mnemonics and keyboard shortcuts in a smart fashion that complements the workflow in the application, you provide power users and keyboard users alike with a snappy and efficient experience when using your software.

Of course, there is the other extreme too. Your application should not require elaborate keyboard gestures as the only means of access. This too, requires an amount of dexterity that could be strenuous on keyboard users, especially on-screen keyboard users. Just like general usability, functionality should be easily learnable, users should not have to memorize keyboard commands. This limits usability for users with cognitive disabilities.

Bottom line, provide more than one way of achieving the same thing: Pointer access that will be discoverable to users, and keyboard access that is easily learnable (ctrl+n opens a new document), not too elaborate (not more than two modifiers, no timed strokes, like “double click”), conforms with expected behavior (tab moves focus, ctrl+z does undo).

Before considering shortcuts and mnemonics, a GUI should cycle focus from one component to another when pressing tab. Tab focuses on the next item in logical order, and shift+tab focuses on the previous item. If the focus widget consumes the tab key, for example a text entry widget, ctrl+tab should be used to cycle through it.

A typically sensitive area is drag and drop. Drag and drop requires simultanious pointer motion: click on an item or selection, move pointer while holding down left mouse button, let go of mouse button when pointer is over destination. Besides being a bit complex, often drag and drop operations perform non-trivial tasks that are hard to undo, like file operations. Ever drop a bunch of files over a folder icon in Nautilus, only to discover that they ended up in the parent folder because you weren’t precise enough?

Banshee Input

The first thing I tested was focus cycling. Pressing tab six or seven times returns you to the toolbar, this is good news, it means nothing is grabbing tab in a fashion that won’t let us cycle. When a toolbar item is focused, the left/right arrow keys are used for changing focus between the different toolbar items in the toolbar, this is where problems occurred. When Banshee first starts the seek bar is set to zero, and is disabled, after arrowing right a few times, focus lands on the volume item, pressing any arrow key when the volume item is in focus will invoke the volume control, the only way of returning to other toolbar items is to focus out and back into the toolbar. When a song is paused or playing, and the seek bar holds a value, it will grab focus, and won’t let you right arrow to the volume item. Unlike the volume control, when focus is stuck on the seek bar, the arrow keys don’t do anything useful like seeking, neither does page up/down help.

Knowing that the list views used in Banshee are custom widgets, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there is proper cursor control when arrowing down or up with the control key pressed. This allows selecting multiple items using the keyboard, and exploring the list without changing the selection.

When clicking on the column headers in the track list view, I was able to change the sorting order of the tracks. This doesn’t seem to be possible with the keyboard. The vanilla GtkListView focuses on the column headers before focusing on the list cells. This allows keyboard interaction with the column headers. The Banshee ListView does not implement this.

There seems to be no way to search in a track with the keyboard, I found an open bug that says it used to be possible with ctrl+left/right, this should be reintroduced.

There seems to be alternative methods for drag and drop tasks. I was able to queue and add songs to playlists with the keyboard alone. I may have missed some drag and drop features, if I did let me know.

Theming

While application developers and designers often have a good idea of the look and feel an application should have, it is still necessary to allow users to tweak the user interface’s appearance to achieve higher contrast and comfortable colors. As the computer-literate population ages, the sleek, fine print, interfaces that used to be sexy and awesome will become more of a liability, and something more easy on the eyes will be required.

Specific colors should not be relied on to convey status or information, if they do, there should be a textual alternative.

The text size limit that a GUI could handle should ultimately be the physical display used. For example, I should be able to set the application font to 36 points, and still have the application usable and mildly aesthetic on a 40 inch display.

Banshee Theming

Before trying any special themes with Banshee, I noticed when testing the focus cycle that the Banshee ListView widgets don’t have a clear focus indicator. Anyone who could tell me where keyboard focus is in the screenshot below will receive a free gmail account.

Next I tried all the different contrast themes.

You will notice that it is not possible to read the selection on the left treeview, this is a transient issue that rears it’s head only in certain focus states. The icons in the high-contrast theme are not all high contrast, and their size is not consistent. This is a long-standing, system-wide, issue with accessibility theming, it isn’t Banshee specific, but it needs to be fixed too. The other noticeable issue in the inversed contrast theme is the invisibility of the column header borders in the mail track ListView. Overall, I am pretty pleased with Banshee’s behavior in contrast themes.

As ugly as Banshee looks with large fonts, it renders fairly well, without any serious issues.

One cute UI elements I was not able to personally explore is the capacity bar displayed when a portable music player is plugged in.

The text alternative here seems to do the job, if we were left to colors alone, it would have been an issue. I couldn’t directly test this for ATK support, as I stole this screenshot from the Banshee website.

AT-SPI Support

A recent requirement for applications with GUIs is that they provide out-of-process programmatic access to their interface. This allows assistive technologies to provide alternative output and input for the application. In GNOME we are very fortunate to have AT-SPI, which is a relatively clean accessibility API.

AT-SPI Support in Banshee

A quick way to test AT-SPI support is to use Orca when keyboarding through the application. When tabbing through Banshee, I hardly heard anything. When navigating the top toolbar, I mostly just heard “button”. Browsing artists, albums or tracks brought up no speech at all. We can now use Accerciser to get a better idea why Orca was not providing useful speech for Banshee. Browsing Banshee with Accerciser quickly shows us the reasons for Orca’s muteness.

The play button does not have a text alternative in the accessible object to complement the play icon.

The biggest omission in Banshee’s AT-SPI tree is the custom ListView widget. As seen in the Accerciser screenshot below, a childless accessible object with the role on ‘unknown’ is in place of where we would expect a ‘table’ accessible. This is probably the biggest single access blocker in Banshee, since the ListView widget is the principal component in Banshee, and is part of what makes it such a great media manager.

Summary

Here is a final task list I hope to check off. Might not get to all of this, but I hope to follow up with posts soon when I do.

Banshee’s ListView AT-SPI support (bug #533030).
Text alternatives to icon buttons (bug #595294).
Visible focus indicator for Banshee’s ListView (bug #595296).
ListView column headers’ borders visible in high-contrast inverse (bug #595297).
Keyboard control of ListView column headers (bug #595299).
Add keyboard support for in-track seeking (bug #535924).
Fix top toolbar keyboard navigation (bug #595300).

Kartik Mistry: 30

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:22:57 +0000

* Crossed 30. Hope that I will be more mature, sane and reponsible than before. Hope that I will kick my laziness sometime in this year. Hope that I will be myself.

Thanks to all who wished by call, sms, orkut, facebook, im (all possible ways, accounts) and in person.

Koki surprized me in the morning by putting nice birthday card and gift near laptop. I love you, baby.

Ara Pulido: Testing automation meetings

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:44:42 +0000

If you search for software testing automation in your favourite search engine you will find a lot of matches about testing automation of web applications, lots of proprietary software to test proprietary desktop software, lots of FOSS to test web applications and some blogs about testing proprietary desktop software.

What about testing desktop FOSS? How do I find people interested in these topics? Is there anybody out there? Hello?

Fortunately, there is a growing community in the FOSS world interested in testing desktop applications automatically. To try to keep things going, we are having weekly meetings at #ubuntu-testing (irc.freenode.org) every Wednesday at 16:30UTC, running for half an hour.

If you are interested in these topics, please, join us and feel free to add any items you may want to discuss to the agenda.

Ara Pulido: Mago Roadmap

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:12:03 +0000

It is great to see more and more people interested in Mago.

When I started the project about a year ago (by that time it was called Ubuntu Desktop Testing), it was an in-house project I created to solve the problems I was having on the desktop testing I had to do as part of my daily job.

Up to three sessions at the Ubuntu Developer Week, a talk at Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, some UDS and two changes of name later, Mago seems to have found its path and we are seeing a lot of new contributors adding fantastic ideas to it.

To avoid losing any of these ideas, I have created a Roadmap in the Mago site to track the status of the new Mago features. Please, check it out to see what’s happening on the Free Desktop testing automation world.

Guofu Xu: Avoiding using gdk stuff in atspi -- try porting

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:53:07 +0000

Yesterday, I was trying to compile ldtp stuff to running on our device. First i see it reports libraray lack -- /usr/lib/libgdk-x11-2.0..., even copied from rootstrap, still got a error says "Gdk-WARNNING **: can not open display:" after ran "/usr/libexec/at-spi-registryd"?

After checking code, it breaks out at gdk_init (), I dono't know, but finally i's told by our engineers, gdk stuff now is not supported...

Checking more codes, it seems that DISPLAY is used for transferring ior string (which depends on X11), so i code a mid-layer of that IOR, says _registry_set_ior/_get_registry_ior. After that, at-spi-registryd is runing okay, at-bridge is working too. I test for sample, 2 different app at the same time, ldtp still finds them very nice .

To now, generatekeyevent still not works (This is more a importance feature since scrool/back is not support on client side), this is indeed needing mork works on it...

Guofu Xu: 可以真切的感觉到宝宝的言语了--日子越来越近了...

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 07:46:54 +0000

现在, 每天晚上, 我都会趴在老婆的肚子上面倾听宝宝的一举一动. 有时候, 感觉像是在翻身, 有时候似乎是和我打招呼(Hi, 你能感觉到我吗?..., 有时候, 有时候我把宝宝从右边推到左边, 然后再赶回来.

宝宝, 我该以何种方式,何种状态,何种心情..来迎接你呢? ...

Ara Pulido: Mago tutorial

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:16:39 +0000

In about a couple of hours (16UTC) I will be giving a Mago tutorial as part of the Ubuntu Developer Week.

Please, join us on #ubuntu-classroom for a quick hands-on Mago training session!

Kartik Mistry: Unsubscribe FAILed

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:15:06 +0000

Kartik Mistry: DC 19 in India?

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 04:58:13 +0000

* My wife and kid (ie Kavin) went to Mumbai for enjoying Ganesh Utsav today. I came back home from station to home via AMTS (ah, that bought my 47 route memories of hostel days). During travel of that 15 minutes, I thought why Debconf can’t be in India? It can – May be DC 19 or 21? God knows – that is very long planning and I still have to be there at one Debconf But, but, as always – I am very optimistic.

I am looking for where in India it can happen.

Ahmedabad: Plenty of good venues, well connected, but in dry state – no alcohol ie no Cheese & Wine party! July/August is terrible weather for outsiders.
Bangalore: Very good connectivity (Internet/Reach), Venue is problem, Weather is good/ok.
Chennai: IITM. Probably, other venues? Debian is popular (I am only Indian DD, not connected to IITs). Weather?
Mumbai: Bad for organization of any event, costly – but IITB is plus point.
Pune: Weather seems good, good connectivity but no idea about venue(s).

Any other places?

Don’t shoot me, please

Shreyank Gupta: Fallback

shreyankg@gmail.com ($hRiNk) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 02:47:45 +0000

Rahul (mether) Sundaram proposed this idea of a web-application to make Fedora remixes/spins.

I had decided to implement it using Ruby on Rails (surprising?).

I had already parsed the comps into a MySQL database schema. I then filed a ticket to the Fedora Design Team for a mock-up UI. I am still waiting for a response on this.

The name of the application is yet to be decided.

The next hurdle is to parse/build kickstart files. There are two ways of doing that:

Writing my own kickstart parser in Ruby.
Using the already existing and extensively used pykickstart - a Python library for manipulating kickstart files.

While the fate of the project was already decided at this point, I decided to give it another shot by asking around in the kickstart-list.

Well now its final. The web application would be developed using Django.

Hence I would not only be able to use pykickstart and thus avoid writing a parser from scratch, but I would also be able to integrate the application with FAS.

P.S. - This is the second time a missing or poorly written Ruby parser has let me down. While I am all for the far-more-superior framework of Ruby on Rails when building web-apps, I can't help but admire the advantage Django has when it comes to integration with existing and awesome Python libraries that do cool stuff.

Shreyank Gupta: Tab Auto-Completion in Python Shell

shreyankg@gmail.com ($hRiNk) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:02:43 +0000

Strangely enough, I discovered that I do not get bash-like auto-completion in my python interactive shell.

Looking up helped.

Just need to have a file called .pythonrc in your home directory containing the following:


#!/usr/bin/python
import os
import sys

try:
 import readline
except ImportError:
 print "Module readline not available."
else:
 import rlcompleter
 readline.parse_and_bind("tab: complete")

Apparently, that was not enough. I also needed to add the following line to my .bashrc file (in my home directory again).

export PYTHONSTARTUP=~/.pythonrc

That's all. Open a new shell and start the python shell.

And enjoy auto-completion!

Guofu Xu: 制作光盘版的瑞星杀毒软件 -- linux

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 08:29:41 +0000

应一请求, 机器中毒, 需要光盘启动杀毒. 他给了一个2009的iso 文件, 但是病毒库更新无法正常工作.

到瑞星主页下载了他提供的iso文件, 发现病毒库确实是08年, 相当老. 按他说的依照2007版的方法行不通...

之后把这个iso打开了看看, 使用的是cloop驱动加载的Knoppix文件系统. 发现有def文件夹...

嘿嘿, 利用该地址得到最新的病毒库, 覆盖即可. 给了他之后他用了似乎不满意...

说更新太麻烦, 可是我没有觉得啊...

不过只好再提供另外的一种方法. 创建一个文件夹在iso中, 然后把原来的def ln 到这里即可...

测试一下, 工作, 收工...

Kartik Mistry: Some more updates

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 07:05:41 +0000

* gwibber, yokadi are in. So, you can get it as usual. pem is rejected due to stupidness of myself for not looking things in more detail, lazy /me.

And, yes, python-xml is removed (#540475) so I either need to RM request for pyslide or need to sit again to hack it but I think its difficult for me alone at moment and no reply on #468610. I am just wondering how Ubuntu will fix it now (LP #199014)

Any help is most welcome!

Shreyank Gupta: Dear Juniors,

shreyankg@gmail.com ($hRiNk) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:22:24 +0000

Its the start of a new academic year and I know you feel very fresh after a long stretch of summer vacations. Hope you enjoyed them to the fullest.

But now that you are back to college, the usual worry crops up:

"Will I get a decent job?"

You tell me "Placements are poor!". I say it was inevitable. With the software companies having more on their plates than they can eat and the recent economic chew-up, this scenario was more than expected. Lets say its sad luck, so now what?

For those in final year, my advise is don't let the last few fun days of your lives go to waste looking for a job. Its not time yet. This can be your most productive year in college. There is another whole year of you life you can learn.

Yes, learn. And don't just learn something because you can learn. Learn because you need to. So how does that work?

Think of something you like. Something new you want to develop. A brilliant idea. Its natural you may not have the requisite knowledge to get it done. List down the ways it can be done. Google up. Ask for help on IRC, drop mails to mailing lists. Communicate. Get people to appreciate your idea and contribute to its enrichment. Use other's experience. Chalk up a plan.

Once you have a plan in place draw up a time-line. Make it flexible. A time-line is very important as it keeps the idea afloat. List down the minimum things you need to learn in order to make something which minimally resembles your idea. Learn.

This way of learning is fun as you have a motivation for learning stuff. Its as if you are building a stair in order to reach up. Always keep the goal in mind when learning. Relate how each and every detail fits in with your goal.

Once you think you can start with building your stuff, start on it. Put the rest of your learning as and when you require it. There'll be obstacles, many of them. Don't be afraid to ask questions. Before asking questions, look up and try gathering information yourself. And ask valid, strong and complete questions. The stronger and more complete a question is, the more easier it will be for the other person to help you out. Never look of spoon-fed solutions. Read up, understand the context. You will feel as if you solved the problem without help. Its a different level of excitement altogether.

As a developer one can never stop learning. There is just too many stuff to learn. Its a whole world out there to explore.

Well then coming back to the problem at hand. Once you have something minimal ready, release it. Do not wait for the correct moment. "Release early, Release broken" as they say. Its natural to have snags and edges. You will get enough feedback to help you sustain your motivation.

Where you go from here onward is entirely upto you.

Join a community you want to be a part of. Communicate with people. Build reputation. Discuss matters. Ideas are just waiting to be born and implemented.

Enjoy the journey, do not worry about where the path leads to. Wherever you reach by the time you finish college, I'm sure you'll have found your place.

Ara Pulido: Perfect timing

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:41:14 +0000

Today everything went smoothly:

Starting the day, Nagappan released LDTP 1.7, which comes with one my wanted features, uptime measures. Perfect to test Notify-OSD timings, i.e.
Then I received an email from Debian LDTP maintainer, reminding me that we should be changing python-gnome2-desktop dependency, which is now deprecated.
I packaged the new upstream version for Ubuntu and also changed the deprecated dependency.
Then, the packaging training gang did an on-call review session, where you could talk directly to the sponsors and ask them to review your package. I attended and Colin Watson kindly reviewed my changes.
I attached a new diff.gz to the bug report with the changes Colin had suggested.
I went for lunch. By the time I came back the new LDTP package had been sponsored and uploaded to universe. Again, just in time before holidays and Karmic feature freeze.

Teamwork rocks!

Ara Pulido: Mago is in Karmic!!

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:11:49 +0000

Yes, if you updated your Karmic repositories lately, you can install Mago just typing “sudo apt-get install mago”. What does that mean? Not much, for the moment.

We have packaged the library and harness, but not the tests. Once you have installed Mago in your machine, you can start writing tests using the library, you will be able to run the tests with the Mago harness and get nice reports in XML and HTML. You won’t have the already written tests, though. Tests change a lot, so it does not make sense to keep them in the repositories, which are quite static. PPAs are a much better place for tests, which I am planning to maintain.

I still have a lot of work to be done regarding this: I have to set up the PPA for the tests and update the documentation at the Mago site, to start. Why did I push Mago into Karmic, then? There are two main reason: Feature Freeze and Holidays. Ubuntu development schedule has an important date called Feature Freeze, after which no new packages are generally accepted and only bug fixes are supposed to get uploaded. Karmic FF is happening August 27th, but I will be on holidays since August 14th, so it was now or never (or Karmic+1).

The main advantage of having Mago in the repositories is that, if a project wants to use it as part of the testing of their daily builds, they can set Mago as a Build-Depends of the project and forget about whether Mago is installed or not in the build machine. And, don’t worry, I will be updating the documentation and setting up the tests PPAs after my holidays, but, in the mean time, Mago is there, ready before Feature Freeze. Happy testing!

Dobey: Hacking Launchpad

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 01:39:10 +0000

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a quick hack for myself and the Online Services team at Canonical, to help make doing reviews on all the projects we manage, much easier. It pulls the list of branch merge proposals for each project from Launchpad, and sticks them all in a nice list in a GtkTreeView, along with the number of votes, and what type of vote. As there was a lot of immediate interest in the tool from other people, I ended up creating a new project on Launchpad, and pushing the code to a public branch there, under the GPLv3. You'll find it at http://launchpad.net/lptools. I will probably be adding other tools soon as well, as every time I have to use a web browser, it slows my progress, and interrupts my ideal workflow. If anyone else has tools they'd like to have included here, or ideas for tools, feel free to propose branches which add them, or send me mail.

I'm not a fan of Python. But I chose to write this tool in it anyway, as I wasn't intending to make a real project out of it. It was just a quick hack to make part of my life much easier, until I can get around to writing something much better and more deeply integrated with the desktop. But the GTK+ bindings, and python-launchpadlib, made it very easy to hack this script up very quickly. I do wish there was a better way to do the authentication though. Opening a browser, and requiring the user to press "Enter" in the console, is an awful experience. But it works, and I only have to do it once...

Frankly, launchpadlib makes it very easy to not have to use the web... and in some cases, makes it better, since the Launchpad web UI doesn't expose all the features that are in the API.

Eitan Isaacson: GNOME@CSUN

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:15:37 +0000

As Stormy mentioned, we will be exhibiting at CSUN this coming March. Besides the opportunity to offer users a free and accessible alternative to proprietary platforms and assistive technologies, we hope to take advantage of the gathering for a GNOME accessibility hackfest.

CSUN is a great place to meet vendors, users, and other AT developers. I think such an experience would be beneficial for our own AT folks. We often draw inspiration only from the limited resources surrounding us, and don’t look at the “state of the art” products out there that many users depend on daily.

So, budget permitting, I hope to see as many assisitive technology hackers as possible this March. Still too many unknowns right now, but I hope we will have more details regarding this hackfest soon.

Dobey: Central Services

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 02:17:10 +0000

We do the work, You do the pleasure

Hi there. I want to talk to you about ducts. Do your ducts seem old-fashioned? Out of date? Central Services' new duct designs are now available in hundreds of different colors, to suit your individual taste. Hurry now while stocks last, to your nearest Central Services showroom. Designer colors to suit your demanding taste.

A lot of people have talking about the social desktop, networked services, and similar stories lately. I guess the integration between computers and network services, which I had been talking about over 11 years ago, is finally catching on. Thanks to all the new smartphones, netbooks, and similar devices, designed to be on-line all the time, and the services people are providing for those devices, we're now trying to wedge the same integration into our outdated desktops. And it seems like nobody really wants to do what's best for everyone here. Having all the apps just use the same libraries to access the same data, and parse it separately, and have the user add their account to all the apps N times, just isn't going to make a good or useful experience.

This is where Central Services would come in. I've talked a little bit about it before, to a few people at UDS, and on IRC. I haven't had a lot of time to work on getting the ball rolling though. But I really want to get things going now, so that we can build a really awesome experience in the desktop, around all the services available, and that everyone uses daily. The goal is to provide a central system where all the plug-ins and configuration live. The user would then only have to add their account for any particular service once. The system would also provide transcoding features for data, taking the XML or JSON for example, and converting it to a common format that all the apps which are designed to display the data only have to actually deal with a single, defined, common format. Central Services however, would not be a data store. Rather, it is a central place for accessing your data from wherever it is stored. There would be a small, optimized local cache, perhaps, and we could integrate with indexing solutions, which may store the data, to provide more feature-rich search capabilities in the desktop as well. But the overall goal is to provide a simple, consistent means for accessing and managing your data. I've been thinking a lot about the problem over the years, and I think a modular, centralized system is the best way forward on the desktop with it. I've been trying to think of a nice way to design the API, with a good balance between being generic, yet powerful. The main API access will be via DBus, but there will be some C and Python convenience libraries as well. I'm not entirely sure what the best way to document the API, and get stuff rolling there is, but I'd love some help and feedback with it. If you're interested in making the desktop awesome, and helping define the API, and getting some working code up and out in the wild, please e-mail me and let me know, or poke me on IRC. You can e-mail me at the usual dobey on gnome.org or dobey on wayofthemonkey.com to get my attention.

A common API, accounts interface for users, and cross-service integration all over the desktop would be a huge win for everyone. Let's get together and make it happen.

Dobey: The System Is Down

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 16:26:16 +0000

Last night, Stuart and I were having a little argument about the merits of OAuth and whether it is actually suitable for what we are using it for (authenticating destop applications to access a service), as I am not particularly fond of it, and I was working on support for OAuth 1.0a. Stuart's argument is that user's trust the browser, and we need some piece of trust in the system, and OAuth provides that as it pretty much requires a browser to use it. But I don't really think users trust their browser (as so many don't even know what a browser is), but instead, what they trust is the site they're looking at. The browser doesn't even exist. It's just this inherent part of the system that you have to use. To most people it's The Internet, or the giant blue e, or a compass. The browser has no real meaning to them. It's the place they have to go to search for things, and access information. And Humans have two very important attributes. They are both very prone to error, and very resilient. People will keep going to the web, despite all its problems with poorly designed sites, and crashing browsers, and broken plug-ins, because they need to get at the information they're looking for. And they will very often type their password in the wrong place, or mistake a phishing site for a real site. No amount of code will fix this. And nothing that requires a Human to do something will guarantee security and authenticity. It will only create annoyances that Humans will optimize around.

As a specific example. I received a PayPal phishing mail in my Inbox this morning. It's a pretty nifty attempt at getting credit info, too. It includes an HTML form attachment, which POSTs to PHP script that was implanted on http://ag-exchange.com/, presumably by compromising either Apache, PHP, or some other module their server is using. It appears to be a simple script which just reads the POST data, and redirects the user to the PayPal About Us page. The HTML form requires javascript and has a little card number validation method it seems, to avoid getting bad data. The mail was sent to my alias on gnome.org, and apparently got sent by taking advantage of an SMTP relay with a broken configuration. Of course, the SMTP server may have also been compromised and just had the configuration changed to allow open relay as well, but I suspect it was probably just open already. And that mail server belongs to Vidalia Brands. It appears to not do any validation on the IP and domain specified in the HELO/EHLO.

The sending IP appears to have been 85-18-236-97.ip.fastwebnet.it and not paypal.com, as the EHLO apparently claimed.

And so, this is a message to site admins everywhere...

MAKE SURE YOUR SYSTEMS ARE PROPERLY SECURED!

And for all you users that might be taken advantage of by such e-mails and broken web sites... PLEASE have some common sense to make sure the messae is REALLY from who it says it is from. HTML form attachments asking for your Credit/Debit card, PIN number, mother's maiden name, and social security number ARE NOT REAL. If you fill out such forms, be prepared to wake up to an empty bank account one day, or a credit score of about 5, because YOUR MONEY WILL GET STOLEN.

Thank you. This ends the PSA for today.

Kartik Mistry: Desktop or Netbook?

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 12:26:13 +0000

* I am looking for either assembled desktop or netbook suitable for my wife` K`. She refused to use my Macbook even it will be unused during daytime after I will be joining new place/job from Monday!

She asked: What will be OS in it?

Me: Linux.

She: Oh!

Me: What will you do with that machine?

She: Surfing, Email etc

Me: Then, why you should worry, dear

Eitan Isaacson: Mono And Virgins

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 20:37:06 +0000

I really can’t get myself worked up on anything RMS says anymore.

By reading the blogosphere in the week after GCDS, you would think that the only thing that went down there was RMS’s silly comments. While I am a long-time free software user and advocate, I have a hard time staying in tune with the FSF that spends most of it’s time telling us what not to do, what not to use, and generally informs us of the world’s evils. Sitting at the registration desk at GCDS we got a sticker dump from Stallman, besides a “Linux/GNU” sticker, all the stickers informed us about what is crap. This is not how you build a movement.

In the past decade I have seen some fantastic and creative FOSS. While RMS has played a historic role in this movement, it is time to thank him for the tool chain, invite him to keynote, if you must be polite, and move on. Write code, write documentation, compose music, in any platform you choose. But most important, don’t get caught up in this guy’s rhetoric, it’s just not worth it.

Sexism

While it would be convenient to self righteously point fingers at an infrequent keynoter’s sexist joke, the real work needs to be done in the IRC channels, the planets, and mailing lists. With ourselves. We have issues with sexism, big ones.

Kartik Mistry: Get it..

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 04:28:05 +0000

.. while they are hot!

I have uploaded long awaited Gwibber (Many thanks to Filip Chabik for hard work) and Yokadi in unstable. Until they stays in NEW, you can grab source+binary from this place.

LDTP SoC: Mago – Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

noreply@blogger.com (Nagappan) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:07:04 +0000

Ara Pulido will be presenting Mago in Gran Canaria Desktop summit. Eitan Isaacson will also be attending the conference.

Eitan has done all the base ground work for LDTPv2. Eitan also did the ground work with Javier and Ara on Mago too :) alrounder !!!

Any one interested in GNOME / KDE automated testing, I recommend you to attend the session by Ara.

Happy hacking Ara, Eitan.

Nagappan Alagappan: Mago – Gran Canaria Desktop Summit

noreply@blogger.com (Nagappan) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:36:30 +0000

Nagappan Alagappan: Clonezilla - Linux and Windows imaging

noreply@blogger.com (Nagappan) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 16:04:36 +0000

In VMware, Palo Alto, we evaluated Clonezilla for Imaging different Linux distributions like openSUSE, SLED, Ubuntu, RHEL, Fedora, Madriva. Some success stories:

Took Ubuntu image on DELL 390 Intel single processor, first hard disk and restored it in HP AMD Athlon Dual processor, second hard disk using Clonezilla Live CD and worked awesome ! The restore times took approx 2 minutes 12 seconds. The system is usable now ! wow !! I didn't expect this to work, to be frank :) This is with regular partition.

Also, tried with Fedora LVM image, with different hard disk size, this failed, I assume this is due to LVM, though I'm not sure.

Next tried creating Windows XP SP2 32bit image from DELL 390 and deployed it on DELL 3400 based on the info available here and here and it worked amazingly !

Great work Clonezilla team

Nagappan Alagappan: Clonezilla imaging solution - Better than Altiris imaging solution

noreply@blogger.com (Nagappan) — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:07:20 +0000

Today at work I tried creating an Ubuntu image from DELL 390 and restored the image on DELL 3400 using Clonezilla Live CD and everything worked seamlessly !

In our Desktop (Workstation) team setup, we have our NFS server hosted, just pointed this server to the Clonezilla Live CD for saving and restoring the image. NFS Server located in first floor of the building and the test machine is on the same building, second floor.

Some interesting points:

Tried Ubuntu image with 2.1 GB of data with two partitions (/dev/sda1 - ext3, actual partition size 153 GB and /dev/sda5 is swap of 6 GB)

* Saving this image took 2 minutes 15 seconds to store on the NFS Server (DELL 390)

* Restoring this image took 2 minutes 10 seconds from the NFS Server (DELL 3400)

Well, if you want to setup Clonezilla you need to have:

* NFS Server or SSH Server or another local hard disk (Read more on Clonezilla web site)

* Clonezilla live CD

I’m amazed by the performance ! and you ?

Nagappan Alagappan: Mago – A Desktop Testing Initiative

noreply@blogger.com (Nagappan) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 20:25:15 +0000

A project announcement from Ara Pulido today. Automated testing for GNOME and KDE (as soon as AT-SPI gets migrated to D-BUS) using LDTP !!!

More info here. Congratulations to the team, good work.

Guofu Xu: 局域网中要回我的ip 地址 (利用ip 冲突--arp欺骗)

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:19:39 +0000

部门有台服务器, 为了方便, 固定了其ip 地址. 今天发现拒绝服务??? 看了下, mac是别人的了, 懊恼中 (为什么他没有收到ip 冲突的消息?).

算了, 主动争取吧. 谁寄予希望那个混蛋会自动获取ip 地址呢 (公司dhcp工作的非常好不是)?

不就是发个arp告诉它我在使用嘛, 应当很简单的.

从windump里面抓一个arp的reply包, 用bittwiste.exe 修改一下. 然后用bittwist.exe 发下.

# ping & get arp reply msg

windump -i3 -w fake -c1 "arp[7] = 2" and host 192.168.168.110

# 修改成我想要的包

bittwiste.exe -I arp_t -O arp_r -T eth -s 00:0C:29:B2:DC:C8 -d ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
bittwiste.exe -I arp_t -O arp_r -T arp -o 2 -s 00:0C:29:B2:DC:C8 -p 192.168.168.222 -t 00:00:00:00:00:00 -q 0.0.0.0

# 发包

bittwist.exe -i3 -l2 -r1 -m1 -p 2 arp_r

(红色是我的mac, 192.168.168.222 是我要的ip地址)

等了一会, ping了下我的服务器, 呵呵, 上线了

Guofu Xu: 6 X (乘) 9 = 42 吗?

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 19:16:57 +0000

这个是 Douglas Adams 写的 Hitchhiker's 系列笑话中的一个神秘数字.

可以这样理解, 如果它们是用13进制(base 13)表示的, 42(13) = 54 (10). 为什么要这样表达呢?

因为计算机中的42是01000010, 注意到没有? (0100-0010) 01和10倒换, 等同于6和9的颠倒(阿拉伯数字的伎俩了, 不要想到人的行为哦).在某种意义上的重合并相等.

这个42又用在spanning tree算法的Configuration Messages 里面的SAP值. 看来大家就是喜欢同乐:)

Nagappan Alagappan: Harshini Nagappan

noreply@blogger.com (Nagappan) — Sun, 31 May 2009 23:17:25 +0000

On Wednesday May 27, 2009 me and my wife are blessed with baby girl Harshini Nagappan !!! Both baby and Mom are doing good :)

Shreyank Gupta: This is why we love python!

shreyankg@gmail.com ($hRiNk) — Thu, 28 May 2009 14:40:00 +0000

Well, this is what Kushal said, and I agree completely.

I wanted to sort a dictionary by value. I asked Kushal.
He said, "I don't know. You can sort it by key. Maybe you have to do manually!"

I went ahead and googled...

And this is how we do it:

alist = sorted(alist.iteritems(), key=lambda (k,v): (v,k))

LDTP SoC: Racetrack Repository

noreply@blogger.com (Nagappan) — Tue, 26 May 2009 10:45:48 +0000

BODY { SCROLLBAR-HIGHLIGHT-COLOR: #cecfce; SCROLLBAR-ARROW-COLOR: #3f52b8; SCROLLBAR-TRACK-COLOR: #fffbff; SCROLLBAR-DARKSHADOW-COLOR: #fafafa; SCROLLBAR-BASE-COLOR: #f7f7f7 }

Racetrack is a designed to store and display the results of automated tests. At VMware, over 2,000,000 test results have been stored in Racetrack Repository. Over 25 different teams use the repository to report results. It has a very simple data model, just three basic tables. ResultSet (stores information about a set of tests (Product, Build, etc.) Result, which stores information about the testcase itself, and ResultDetail, which stores the details of each verification performed within the test. ResultDetails also include screenshots and log files, make it easy for the triage engineer to determine the cause of the failure.

We are very excited to offer Racetrack to the public as an Open Source project. It offers complete visibility on test results to the organization, much more than Pass/Fail. QA Engineers, Developers, QA Managers, Project Managers all find it useful to quickly see the results of Basic Acceptance Tests, available within an hour of the build completing. Racetrack Triage Report makes it easy to see the number of defects found by a set of tests, and the number of failures caused by Product Changes, and Script failures. By adding a reference to your Bugzilla and Build systems, you can easily provide links directly from Racetrack to a defect or a build information page. The Web Services API is already part of the package, and SilkTest and Java APIs will be added shortly.

Nagappan Alagappan: Racetrack Repository

noreply@blogger.com (Nagappan) — Mon, 25 May 2009 22:15:30 +0000

BODY { SCROLLBAR-HIGHLIGHT-COLOR: #cecfce; SCROLLBAR-ARROW-COLOR: #3f52b8; SCROLLBAR-TRACK-COLOR: #fffbff; SCROLLBAR-DARKSHADOW-COLOR: #fafafa; SCROLLBAR-BASE-COLOR: #f7f7f7 }

Guofu Xu: 书记 -- 泰兴 -- 聚餐 -- 世事

Mon, 25 May 2009 08:27:21 +0000

>>_ 厕所里见一过期的报纸, 说九夜茴的文字如风如画(很美, uh?) -- 花开半夏. G了一下没有提供一两章的免费导读, 放弃.

然终究是放不下, 被一个人说成"80后作者最有实力的其中一个;洞悉世情,敏感,敏锐;文笔技巧(这也可断句),细心,细腻..." -- <180 c> 怎么打字的时候就没有了兴致.

另一则是<空谷幽兰>--安妮宝贝著, 说是访问华山的隐士--得到: "他们拥有灵魂深处纯粹而坚定的一簇火焰(一簇的感觉就是飘摇不定, 死灰复燃, 似灭不灭的), 那就是坚持和相信自己的修行."

谁不坚定? 我无信仰?

>>_ 周末陪lp去了趟泰兴, 同室同学聚会. 受到相当热情和周到的招待, 其中的一位有着四层的楼房, 一大间超市(阳光), 可随意打滚的空间让人羡慕不已. 另一位请我们去饭店吃(忘了名了, 怕她们说我给她们照相--俗, 就没敢提合影). 晚饭后, 还把我们(9位仁士)拉去K歌了一把. 为了表达我的感激之前, 我第二次用我那不会绕弯的吼劲给她们献上<三万英尺>. "好评"如潮. 十二点后街上溜电动车感觉不错--让我懂得夏天也有磕牙的抖劲.二日午时我们各并照了全家福--好大的太阳. 饭后我就卖弄我的电脑伎俩, 在800M/256M摸腾了半天. 可用的软件很少, 不过看来, QQ游戏大厅是深得人心啊. 听说年底汽车站就迁至此, 前景一片大好!

>>_ 有一位就不是那么幸福了, 听说感情有了些分叉. 旧情新景, 景过心变, 变幻莫测啊. 漫漫长路其修远兮. 但愿, 有情人终成眷属, 无情人好聚好散吧...

Shreyank Gupta: Nightro

shreyankg@gmail.com ($hRiNk) — Sat, 23 May 2009 20:00:25 +0000

This is perhaps the most interesting way I have blogged!

I am sitting outside my flat door because I forgot to take the keys to office yesterday. Actually I couldn't find it. So I went without it. Why did I do it?

I returned back to my GusetHouse/Flat at 1 a.m. and knocked incessently. No one answered. I called the caretaker again and again (over the phone, which is switched-off now because its out of charge; and before it got out of charge it got out of balance [I won't say how]). He didn't receive my call. So I went down and asked the guard. He said "Kharak singh does not live here, woh lamba rehta hai (he lives tall??)". Anyway he called another guy from the security cabin, and he tried calling some another guy with my phone. No one was picking up.

So I told him I would go up and try knocking again. And if no one answers, I would go back to my office. I came up and knocked, no answer.

Ten minutes later the guard and the other guy(Kamal I guess, or not maybe) came up and saw me squatting on the floor outside my flat door, with my laptop on my lap trying to connect to the Wireless Broadband Modem inside. They laughed and asked me to come along. They would try and get me a room for the night.

So together we went around the buildings of the Sophronia Society Complex, waking this guy up and that (mostly caretakers of different GuestHouseFlats in the Society, looking for a place where I could spend the night.

Finally when the group has increased to a Five, they got me a room at some S1-302, air-conditioned.

And I slept.

I woke up at 7:30 today hoping someone would be up in my guesthouse by now....

KNOCK!! KNOCK!!!!!
OPEN UP FOR GOD'S SAKE!

Ah, I hear footsteps! :)

Shreyank Gupta: Into the Wild

shreyankg@gmail.com ($hRiNk) — Sun, 17 May 2009 16:18:25 +0000

Yesterday while walking my way back from Koregaon Park to Kalyani Nagar, I lost my way. I walked some three kilometres extra. Total of five kilometres. Alone. At the dead of night. After midnight.

Things I saw on the road were strange. My thoughts, however, were different.

The last four years have been so happy. Stuck in a small place called Durgapur, with nothing more important to do than organising some fests, with your friends all around you. Bunking classes. Studying a day before the examination. Visting home once_in_a_while. That was so unrealistic. So not RealWorld.

This was so inevitable that you did not want to realise it before. But now when reality comes and hits you hard on the face, you can all but ignore it.

High time when you realised the importance of hard work. How there is no second chance in this real life. How values you had assumed to be something have totally different values than what you can possibly imagine. Plans you had made for the future were actually fantacies and differ a lot from what is actually in store for you.

Friends you had taken for granted, made for free, that you have left behind. Now now that you start afresh with a clean board you realise the effort that goes into earning the trust of someone.

Now that you have enjoyed your dream, wake up. Brush your teeth, wash your face, wear your specks. And when you look out of your balcony, you'll notice that the world below is much more stranger than you had always wanted it to be.