Planet Ubuntu-AU

James Purser: Inspiring and Depressing at the same time

2010-03-16T21:54:05+00:00

Last night I finished watching a series called "From the earth to the moon". I think it was the first of Tom Hanks' forays into docu-drama (coming after the movie Apollo 13).

As you might guess from the title the series follows the events leading up to the first landing on the moon and afterwards to the final Apollo mission in 1972. As a series it is an excellent examination of the people involved in the American Space effort, from Astronauts to their wives, to the contractors and everyone else involved.

What it did for me was to bring home how far short we have fallen from the promise offered by the Apollo missions themselves. If the momentum had been maintained, Apollo could have been the stepping stone to the next wave of human exploration. By now we wouldn't be marvelling at the staying power of a couple of Rovers on Mars, but instead we'd be marvelling at the fact that the human species had set foot on another planet, not just our celestial partner, but a whole other world.

Today we are told that it's better to send probes and rovers to other worlds. Less of a risk, cheaper and so on. Feh I say. The USSR sent a probe to the moon, then the US sent two men to the moon, which is more inspiring? Which is more likely to stir the blood?

So yes, "From the earth to the moon" is an inspiring series, it details what can be done when there is the will to move forward and achieve something great. However it's also depressing to see where the evaporation of that will has left us.

Dave Hall: Making it Easier to Spawn php-cgi on Debian and Ubuntu

2010-03-16T03:57:23+00:00

Apache is a great web server, but sometimes I need something a bit more lightweight. I already have a bunch of sites using lighttpd, but I'm planning on switching them to nginx. Both nginx and lighttpd use FastCGI for running php. Getting FastCGI up and running on Ubuntu (or Debian) involves a bit of manual work which can slow down deployment.

The normal process to get nginx and php-cgi up and running is to install the spawn-fcgi package, create a shell script such as /usr/local/bin/php-fastcgi to launch it, then a custom init script, after making both of these executable you need to run update-rc.d then finally should be right to go. Each of these manual steps increases the likelihood of mistakes being made.

Instead, I created a deb contains a configurable init script. It is pretty simple, the init script calls spawn-fcgi with the appropriate arguments. All of the configuration is handled in /etc/default/php-fastcgi. The main config options are:

ENABLED - Enable (or disable) the init script. default: 0 (disabled)
ADDRESS - The IP address to bind to. default: 127.0.0.1
PORT - The TCP Port to bind to. default: 9000
USER - The user the php scripts will be excuted as. default: www-data
GROUP - The group the php scripts will be executed as. default: www-data
PHP_CGI - The full path to the php-cgi binary. default: /usr/bin/php5-cgi

The last 3 variables are not in the defaults file as I didn't think many users would want/need to change them, feel free to add them in if you need them.

Once you have set ENABLED to 1, launch the init scipt by executing sudo /etc/init.d/php-fastcgi start. To check that it is running run sudo netstat -nplt | grep 9000 and you should see /usr/bin/php5-cgi listed. Now you can continue to configure your webserver.

The package depends on php5-cgi and spawn-fcgi, which is available in Debian testing/squeeze, unstable/sid, along with Ubuntu karmic and lucid. For earlier versions of ubuntu you can change the dependency in debian/control from spawn-fcgi to lighttpd and disable lighttpd once it is installed so you can get spawn-fcgi . I haven't tested this approach and wouldn't recommend it.

You can grab the
">
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">binary package and install it using dpkg or build it yourself from the source tarball.

For more information on setting up nginx using php-cgi I recommend the linode howto - just skip the "Configure spawn-fcgi" step :)

Scott Evans: Canonical and transparency with Ubuntu community

2010-03-13T03:39:14+00:00

There has been much debate on planet ubuntu about the new default themes and the more controversial decision to the placement of the window buttons on the top left hand side (Mac style) as opposed to what some class as the default on the top right hand side (Windows style) What I find more of a concern to to larger community is that major changes never get discussed publicly but just “happen” then those that aren’t adjusted to change then feel that they haven’t had a fair chance to contribute to the overall project. I earlier posted about “ubuntu is happy to call itself open source or is it” there is a growing divide between the commercial interest of Canonical and what they (Canonical) call the ubuntu community, the very people that both support and contribute there time and expertise to better the overall project.

As users of ubuntu, should we be better informed about the major changes, weather they be trivial or actual so that as a community we have a say as currently we are simply sheep following the Canonical shepherd… are we better than this?

Dave Hall: Solr Replication, Load Balancing, haproxy and Drupal

2010-03-12T21:55:46+00:00

I use Apache Solr for search on several projects, including a few using Drupal. Solr has built in support for replication and load balancing, unfortunately the load balancing is done on the client side and works best when using a persistent connection, which doesn't make a lot of sense for php based webapps. In the case of Drupal, there has been a long discussion on a patch in the issue queue to enable Solr's native load balancing, but things seem to have stalled.

In one instance I have Solr replicating from the master to a slave, with the plan to add additional slaves if the load justifies it. In order to get Drupal to write to the master and read from either node I needed a proxy or load balancer. In my case the best lightweight http load balancer that would easily run on the web heads was haproxy. I could have run varnish in front of solr and had it do the load balancing but that seemed like overkill at this stage.

Now when an update request hits haproxy it directs it to the master, but for reads it balances the requests between the 2 nodes. To get this setup running on ubuntu 9.10 with haproxy 1.3.18, I used the following /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg on each of the web heads:

global
    log 127.0.0.1   local0
    log 127.0.0.1   local1 notice
    maxconn 4096
    nbproc 4
    user haproxy
    group haproxy
    daemon

defaults
    log     global
    mode    http
    option  httplog
    option  dontlognull
    retries 3
    maxconn 2000
    balance roundrobin
    stats enable
    stats uri /haproxy?stats

frontend solr_lb
    bind localhost:8080
    acl master_methods method POST DELETE PUT
    use_backend master_backend if master_methods
    default_backend read_backends

backend master_backend
    server solr-a 192.168.201.161:8080 weight 1 maxconn 512 check

backend slave_backend
    server solr-b 192.168.201.162:8080 weight 1 maxconn 512 check

backend read_backends
    server solr-a 192.168.201.161:8080 weight 1 maxconn 512 check
    server solr-b 192.168.201.162:8080 weight 1 maxconn 512 check

To ensure the configuration is working properly run "wget http://localhost:8080/solr -O -" on each of the web heads. If you get a connection refused message haproxy may not be running. If you get a 503 error make sure solr/jetty/tomcat is running on the solr nodes. If you get some html output which mentions Solr, then it should be working properly.

For Drupal's apachesolr module to use this configuration, simply set the hostname to localhost and the port to 8080 in the module configuration page. Rebuild your search index and you should be right to go.

If you had a lot of index updates then you could consider making the master write only and having 2 read only slaves, just change the IP addresses to point to the right hosts.

For more information on Solr replication refer to the Solr wiki, for more information on configuring haproxy refer to the manual. Thanks to Joe William and his blog post on load balancing couchdb using haproxy which helped me get the configuration I needed after I decided what I wanted.

Paul Schulz: Part 3a: xlog - Preparing to hack, the aftermath.

2010-03-12T00:38:17+00:00

The previously published parts of this series can be found here:

Some build issues...

After completing a build, it would be nice if we could return the code the state we started from. This is actually more than a 'nice to have' as it is a useful indicator of completeness. For example, if a particular compiled file isn't removed in a 'make clean', then maybe the associated source code hasn't been added to the source repository. There is not necessarily any logic in this, except that something is wrong, needs to be looked at and fixed.

I think of this as being a zero'th order test for any software that I compile from source, and git makes this issue very easy to describe and characterise.

With regards to 'xlog', after a build and a 'make clean', the 'git status' command reveils the following (where I've reformatted the output just a little.)

Changed but not updated:
  deleted:    po/xlog.pot
and
  modified:   CVS/Entries
  modified:   data/doc/CVS/Entries
  modified:   po/CVS/Entries
  modified:   src/CVS/Entries
and
Untracked files:
  AUTHORS
  CVSROOT/
  ChangeLog
  Makefile.in
  autom4te.cache/
  configure
  data/Makefile.in
  data/desktop/Makefile.in
  data/doc/Makefile.in
  data/dxcc/Makefile.in
  data/glabels/Makefile.in
  data/man/Makefile.in
  data/maps/3D2/Makefile.in
  data/maps/3Y/Makefile.in
  data/maps/E5/Makefile.in
  data/maps/FK/Makefile.in
  data/maps/FO/Makefile.in
  data/maps/FR/Makefile.in
  data/maps/HK0/Makefile.in
  data/maps/JD/Makefile.in
  data/maps/KH8/Makefile.in
  data/maps/Makefile.in
  data/maps/SV/Makefile.in
  data/maps/VP6/Makefile.in
  data/maps/VP8/Makefile.in
  data/mime/Makefile.in
  data/pixmaps/Makefile.in
  data/remote/Makefile.in
  data/utils/Makefile.in
  src/Makefile.in
  src/logfile/Makefile.in

The first issue is with po/xlog.pot, which has mysteriously disappeared. It can be restored with the following.

$ git checkout -- po/xlog.pot

I have seen glib errors when trying to run the application and haven't got to the bottom of this yet. I don't see the error occur if I make sure that the above file is present, but I haven't been able to reliably replicate to problem.

The '''CVS/Entries''' files can be committed to the git repository, but looking at the actual differences shows that this is only due to timestamp changes from upstream. It would probably be safe enough to ignore these files, and git has a file that allows these this to be set. (An exercise for the reader. Have a look at the man page for git.)

$ git diff CVS/Entries
diff --git a/CVS/Entries b/CVS/Entries
index 30be513..42e4863 100644
--- a/CVS/Entries
+++ b/CVS/Entries
@@ -36,4 +36,4 @@ D/xlog////
 /missing/1.3/Wed Jan 14 11:45:11 2009//
 /mkinstalldirs/1.3/Wed Jan 14 11:45:11 2009//
 /xlog-2.0.lsm/1.1/Tue Feb 10 09:33:11 2009//
-/aclocal.m4/1.8/Thu Mar 11 11:55:55 2010//
+/aclocal.m4/1.8/Thu Mar 11 12:54:52 2010//

Finally, other than '''AUTHORS''' and '''ChangeLog''' (which are symbolic links as specified in README.cvs) all of the other files have come into existence in the build process and should be able to be safely removed, as they didn't exist in the original source.

$ rm -rf autom4te.cache
$ rm configure
$ find . -name Makefile.in | xargs -n 1 rm

This leaves use with the following, which is where we want to be:

$ git status
# On branch master
# Untracked files:
#   (use "git add ..." to include in what will be committed)
#
# AUTHORS
# ChangeLog
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

A git repository with the code that I will be working on in the next blog posts has been setup here: http://git.mawsonlakes.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=paul/xlog.

Paul Schulz: Appendix: References (links etc.) for xlog hacking.

2010-03-12T00:16:44+00:00

Useful Webpages

xlog

Software Website - http://freshmeat.net/projects/xlog
CVS Download Page - http://savannah.nongnu.org/cvs/?group=xlog
Browse CVS Source- http://cvs.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/xlog/xlog

git

git - The Fast Version Control System

Software website - http://git-scm.com
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)

epkg

epkg is an encap package manager.

Software Website - http://www.encap.org/epkg

Software Repository

I'll be updating my code changes to xlog here.

Repository Browser - http://git.mawsonlakes.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?p=paul/xlog
GIT Clone URL - http://git.mawsonlakes.org/paul/xlog

Melissa Draper: Random winner!

2010-03-11T12:29:11+00:00

Monday saw the announcement of the International Women’s Day competition winners.

Well, most of them. Jono had unfortunately misunderstood what we had asked of him and hence promoted, and not drawn the second winner randomly. Oops! (We’ll blame it on his runaway glasses). Thankfully, being a man of his word, he has managed to right this. During his q&a ustream broadcast yesterday, he drew a truly random winner… Caterina Brigandi!

Congrats again to Elvira, Karen, Jen and now Caterina! Thank you all so much for participating.

Allan Armstrong: Open Source Science Software Review: Stellarium

2010-03-10T09:33:24+00:00

I'm going to start writing reviews for open source science software. I haven't written anything like this before so you'll have to excuse the length/lack of information or lack of writing ability.

In case people were wondering I'm a physics/maths/astronomy student at Monash University and being a student I don't have a lot of money to spend on software for the PC. Luckily in my astronomy lab classes we're using a free application called Stellarium.

It's a reasonably good app giving you the ability to track stars all from the desk of your computer. This is an entirely free and open source application available to anyone with an interest in the night sky.

The interface is pretty simple with the ability to add/remove the atmosphere for a good view of the stars and the ability to turn different objects on and off. After selecting an object you can view details about that object. It will tell you all the information about the star an amateur astronomer would ever need. If you want to watch the object travel through the sky you can do so by using the simple date/time window that you can select and change the year, month, day, hours, minutes and seconds to view the object at any particular time you need.

It has the ability for you to change your location to anywhere in the world if you know the latitude and longitude. You can add the ecliptic line and the "Celestial Sphere" lines.

Stellarium is extendable to an extent. There are some plugins for it but not as many as other astronomy software.

The problem with Stellarium like most graphic intense software is that speed that the app runs at. As you can see I was only getting 2.27 fps and thats using my laptop and on Windows 7. I have run it on Fedora at uni and it is significantly slower on that. I have heard rumours that it does run faster on Macs and Ubuntu.

I'd recommend this program to all amateur astronomers and people who don't have access to a telescope. It's a very good program to view the stars without having to leave the comfort of your own home.

Melissa Draper: And the winners are…

2010-03-09T15:11:49+00:00

Whilst I was quite happily sleeping yesterday morning, the International Women’s Day competition winners were announced. The popular vote prize went to Elvira Martinez “tatica1″. The second prize went to Karen Y. Perez, and Jen Phillips got an honourable mention for her awesome analogy-style story.

You can read all the stories and see the record of votes on the Ubuntu Women wiki.

Thanks so much to everyone who entered and voted (and Jono for announcing). The competition was heaps of fun to organise and now we have lots of stories to show that we forge our own paths to Ubuntu just like the guys do!

Paul Schulz: Part 3: xlog - Preparing to hack

2010-03-08T23:57:34+00:00

The previously published parts of this series can be found here:

So, we've downloaded the source code for xlog from the CVS repoistory:

  cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.savannah.nongnu.org:/sources/xlog co xlog

Even before configuring, the first thing I do is put the whole thing into a Git repository. The main reason for doing this upfront is that it then becomes possible to see what files are created or altered during the software building process. When we get around to making changes we can then make use of branches and commits.

  cd xlog
  git init-db
  git add .
  git commit -m 'Initial commit'

Use 'git status' to see which files are different.

Lets now build the software, as per README.cvs.

  ln -s ...
  autoconf
  automake
  ./configure
  make
  make install

Now, 'make install' will fail unless you give yourself system (root) privileges as it will try to install the code into the system directories (eg. /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc.). For the developer, there are several methods to get around this requirement. I use a tool called 'epkg', which allows software to be installed

To update the repository from upstream:

  (commit any outstanding changes to another branch)
  git checkout master
  cvs update

These changes can then be pulled into a local working branch by using:

  git checkout (your-branch)
  git rebase master

Paul Schulz: Part 2: Hacking on xlog

2010-03-08T22:19:03+00:00

In the first part on "Hacking on xlog" I eluded to the fact that xlog was good, but that I wanted to made some changes to it. The following article discusses these changes. What changes do I want to make to xlog?

Be able to add additional rules for more contests - Currently xlog has some useful rules and checks (eg. duplicates) but they are either overly general (check for all the duplicates in a log file) or specific to a particular competition. It would be good able to support different contests rules by either an extension language or a plug-in or dynamic library architecture.
Make the User Interface (UI) layout configurable - It would be good to be able to modify the UI to suit the way that I setup and use my set radio. Gnome and Gtk+ applications can be written using libglade, where the UI is defined in an XML file along with the functions that they call. It is then possible to rearrange the interface via the XML code, without touching any of the underlying code. Currently, xlog has 'hardcoded' all of the widgets and their positions into the code of the application itself.
Add support for other forms of radio operation - Logging is necessary in on-air contests but there are other types of radio operation where a suitable logging application would also be very useful. Examples include: Running nets, Message Relaying and Emergency Operations.
Multiple Operator Support - Support for multi-user access and multiple user logs. This would be useful for multiple user stations and for collating logs for competition managers.

In order to make these changes and make any form of useful contribution, I'm going to have to download the code and spend some time poking around in it, just to understand how it works. More about this in my next post.

Paul Schulz: Logging Software for Amateur Radio contacts - xlog

2010-03-08T22:18:04+00:00

Introduction

Something that I have recently been looking into is Amateur Radio logging software available on Linux, in particular Ubuntu and Gnome. One of the things that Ham (Amateur) Radio operators like to do is make contacts with other Hams, exchange details and sometimes, even exchange physical 'QSL Cards', which are postcards giving details of the contact made (Frequency, Equipment used etc.). In general, the more and varied these contacts are the greater the enjoyment found in the hobby. In addition to the adhoc 'CQ' contacts, there are regular contests, where operators try to make contacts in a particular period of time, on particular radio bands. Logs of the contacts make are submitted to the contest manager and points are awarded based on the contest rules. Rules include such things as a point for every contact made, multipliers for contacts made in particular bands and bonus points given for particular types of contacts. The software that I have found and I am most happy with is called 'xlog', which does most of what I want. I would like to be able to get it to do more (see below) and there are a couple of things which if they were done just a little bit differently would make if even more useful and easy to customise. The software is licensed under the GPL v2, so in the words of Jeremy Clarkson - 'How hard can it be?' The plan is to put together a series of posts about my experience with working on this software. Future posts will follow something like the following outline..

What do I want to change?
Getting the source - and using git.
Setting up the development environment - using epkg
Making changes.
Getting these changes back into xlog.

Watch this space.

Melissa Draper: IWD2010 story competition — did you vote yet?

2010-03-07T08:03:00+00:00

Remember how I said that the voting for the International Women’s Day competition was open?

Well that statement only stays valid for about the next 16hrs or so.

There’s also a substantial number of people who’ve gone through, read all the stories and submitted their votes, but have not followed the instructions that were emailed to them. They really ought to do that. The token that is emailed out is how you validate your email address — votes are held in quarantine until this happens.

Scott Evans: Ubuntu UNE (Alpha3)

2010-03-07T04:01:23+00:00

I have recently downloaded the current Alpha3 ISO of UNE (formally UNR) and have installed it on a 4Gb SD card to test it out on my Eee PC 701SD. After spending a little while bringing it up to date (as of the time of writing) I chose to update it before attempting to to check out most of the functionality.

As you can see the desktop it set out the same as Karmic Koala. With the new theme schema I must say has given this release a more professional appearance! I was skeptical of the Plymouth adoption, but I must say that now seeing it, the transitions are a lot smoother with no noticeable flicker (at least on the netbook anyway!)

So far I haven’t noticed any regressions, but I really only use my netbook for web browsing (funny that’s what they are for right?) I have installed the ubuntu-restricted-extras & Skype 2.1.0.81 beta. Skype works fine! there are no noticeable sound issues as like were present in both Jaunty UNR & Karmic UNR. The flash plugin provided in the ubuntu-restricted-extras package has no noticeable issues either as has pass versions. So so far so good!

Scott Evans: Ubuntu Lucid Lynx has a new theme…

2010-03-05T04:41:48+00:00

Well the official announcement was made that ubuntu 10.04 (lucid lynx) is to have a new theme, and with this comes much discussion over the colour schema. The default for many years has been an Orange & Brown blend that for some they have got fairly accustomed too, so as with most changes you have to either accept it and move on or voice opposition to the change! (the latter not being of any use IMHO)

Here is a screen shot of my desktop… (click on image for a full size view)

As most have been talking on the ubuntu forums about the window buttons being placed on the top left (Mac style) mine has remained as the normal on the top right (Windows style) now my guess is that this is due to the setting in my profile (Gconf) was set like this when the theme was installed and as such did not alter the appearance. My current install was done from the alpha2 install media, this to may have some bearing on that as well but I’m not to sure! there is a poll on ubuntu-forums (may require to login to see the poll)

As I still insist on using Pidgin, the task bar icon doesn’t match the new theme! but then I’m not too fussed about that!

UPDATE: After adjusting the metacity settings in Gconf-editor, I’ve now reproduced the setting displayed in the demo images (ubuntu 10.04)

Melissa Draper: Erk.

2010-03-05T01:56:21+00:00

I’ve just gotten around to reading my email.

There’s a faux journalist in my inbox wanting comment about my relationship with Ubuntu of late. He’s been told to publish no such thing. Forecast is for a high chance of misquotes and misappropriations.

You have been warned.

James Purser: Dear TV Networks - Sigh

2010-03-05T00:01:20+00:00

Okay, Freeview (the group that represents all of the major Free to Air Networks, including commercial and government owned) has announced that it's going to be launching a new Electronic Programme Guide service in June, complete with new hardware and something they are calling an Online Catchup Service.

Apart from the Online Catchup Service (which I will be talking about shortly) the biggest selling point that Freeview seems to be pushing for this new service is the ability to record based not only on time blocks, but by genre and programme as well.

This is what 250 million dollars buys you these days?

From the article and the reading around that I've done, it appears that the Free To Air Television industry (somewhat bizzarley aided by the ABC, an organisation that has proven time and again that it knows where the future lies) has decided that the best way to tackle the threat of extinction is to re-arrange the deck chairs on the titanic. People have had the ability to record programmes based on genre and programme titles, episode titles and so on for a few years now. If they haven't been building their own PVR's via projects like MythTV (my personal favourite), they've been using off the shelf solutions such as TiVO. It's not new people, it's old and people have been doing it for a long time now.

Hell I was there when digital came to a certain regional television network, I helped setup their first EPG generator and I can tell you that the Standard of the day, derived from the European DVB-T EPG stuff required genre information to be sent out.

Oh yes, there is something new about this particular EPG service. It's not going to be standard. In order for you to take advantage of it and the attached "Online Catchup Service", you are going to need to buy new hardware. Your set top box isn't going to be able to use any of the new features, and certainly your plasma/led/lcd tv with built in HD tuner isn't going to be able to utilise the new features being offered. Nope, you're going to have to go out and spend another couple of hundred bucks so that you can make sure you don't miss that 6 month old episode of Big Bang Theory or which ever is your Television poison.

Re the "Online Catchup Service" that appears to be a service that allows you to catchup with programmes that you've missed, online. Though I'm not quite sure if you're going to need to "catchup" given that you're going to have teh cool new "recording by genre and programme" features of the new EPG Service.

Sigh.