I’ve been meaning to follow-up on Shaun’s recent bog post about “Explain More” when writing user help. Zonker’s blog post this morning on how to write an interview finally motivated me to get this blog post done. One of my favorite sayings in a work environment is “Plan the work and work the plan”. This applies to writing as well. One of the two major takeaways I had last year after attending the first Writing Open Source conference was the importance of planning. At least for me, almost of all the heavy lifting and hard work is done in the planning phase. (Not that writing and editing are easy either, but the planning for me is where my brain works the hardest). When I was in school, especially high school, all of my English teachers required an outline when writing a term p...

Wasn't expecting such a lopsided result, but EU Parliament voted 663 to 13 against ACTA , saying that "it flouts agreed EU laws on counterfeiting and piracy online." Beyond that, apparently the Parliament is ready to go to court to stop EU negotiators from continuing down the path its on:

MEPs will go to the Court of Justice if the EU does not reject ACTA rules, including cutting off users from the Internet "gradually" if caught stealing content.

Derek Schauland recently ran into a support situation involving the filtering of outbound email messages. How much emphasis does your organization put on outbound filtering?

Apple's control over iPhone developers is the last straw. Taxpayer money should not be used to help one company tighten its grip on the smartphone market.

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It's 2 a.m. when this IT pilot fish gets the automated call from the data center: A job has failed, and he'll have to drive for an hour and a half to the site to see what the problem is.

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The best reference book.

Fedora 11 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Bible

xD !

(Public service announcement: I’ve always hated themes and still wish they’d mostly just go away so we could all just concentrate on building and using the same sexy pixel-perfect GNOME look-and-feel. GNOME branding wins, performance wins, some people complain but don’t they always, yadda yadda. Now, with that out of the way…) I was having a look at this OpenSolaris bug report yesterday. Basic problem: icons from the OpenSolaris Nimbus theme are showing up in some places larger than they ought to. Apparent cause is that the icon theme doesn’t provide those particular icons in a small enough size, and the larger versions aren’t being scaled down as required. The vinagre toolbar is the example given in the bug report, but I’ve seen it other places too (e.g. in the Glade toolbar...

The companies you've worked for should not take precedence over your skill set. Here's how to restructure your resume to reflect that.

Scrum is a structured agile methodology that is gaining a lot of traction. Rick Freedman discusses Scrum's fundamental concepts and key roles.

Jack Wallen was blown away by the Verizon Devour's speed and network agility, but he says the smartphone has one major drawback.

[sub focus - rock it]

did’nt believe it fits so good… hear it, feeil it, rock it.

We finally have an units policy in Ubuntu. I started to work on this issue over a year ago. The first step was to talk to other people (Ubuntu developers and upstream), but the opinions diverged. Neither a consensus was found, nor any result came out of it (except heated discussions). Upstream was not willing to change anything. It was time to contact the Technical Board to get a decision for Ubuntu.

Now we have the policy and we can start filing bug reports and fixing them without discussions about the reasonability of the patches. Let’s get Ubuntu 10.04 (lucid) in shape!

Forrester analyst Mark Mulligan believes that the problem for the recording industry is one of demographics . Mulligan uses the fact that the billionth application purchaser on iTunes, 13 year-old Connor Mulcahey, was much younger than the 10 billionth iTunes music purchaser, 71 year-old Louie Sulcer, to highlight the issue: older users may still pay for music tracks, but younger users are more likely to "part with their cash" for apps than for music. To Mulligan, the problem is with the current digital-music product itself. Thus, he prescribes a featu...

Bill Pollock is the president and founder of No Starch Press, which publishes books on computing. Known to offer the “finest in geek entertainment,” the publishing house has released such titles as “Steal This Computer Book,” “How Linux Works,” “Hacking: The Art of Exploitation,” “The Cult of Mac,” and “The Unofficial LEGO Builder's Guide.” Its books are largely about hacking, open source, security, programming, and non-Windows-based operating systems, such as Linux. Mr. Pollock shared his thoughts with Intellectual Property Watch about hacking, piracy, and future of the book publishing business....

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted some family/home updates, so here they are, sorta random-like…

Jacob is 3.5 now, and Oliver is about 8 months old at this point.

Jacob has a few trends going on lately: pretending to be a cat, and inventing new games to play. He has one game he likes to play with me called “tunnels and slippers.” He will have me sit on the couch, put my feet up on the footstool, and crawl on top of my legs. He’ll want me to bounce him, then he can crawl underneath the “tunnel.”

The slippers part came because he started to steal my slippers one time during winter. He’d struggle furiously to get it off, then shriek with delight as he ran away, listing to my indignation at having a cold foot now. Then I was suppos...

Pois é, hoje, quem diria, o homem mais poderoso do mundo está completando 70 anos! (lembre-se de que um ano de Chuck Norris equivale a 7 anos em idade de gente) Como diz o artigo do Yahoo "ele acaba...

Um blog sobre tecnologia, informática, ironia e desventuras na vida de um geek

Fedora 13 “Goddard de la” Alpha está disponible! ¿Qué sigue para el sistema operativo libre que muestra la mejor tecnología del mañana? Podés ver el futuro en:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-prerelease

¿Qué es una versión Alpha? La versión alfa contiene todas las características de Fedora 13 en una forma que cualquier persona puede ayudar a probar. Esta prueba, guiados por el equipo de control de calidad de Fedora, nos ayuda a identificar los errores. Al arreglar estos errores, hacemos una versión beta disponible. Una versión beta es de código comple...

From what I have seen in this blog post looks like Ubuntu has gained option to have transparent GNOME windows.

I hope this feature goes upstream as fast as possible so that Fedora gets this great feature as soon as possible, maybe for Fedora 14? Anybody has some insight regardi...

Technical thoughts:

I installed goddard on my eeepc 900 and have some issues. Right after the first boot gnote crashed and activated the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT). So I lol’d and started getting my WPA key put in so that I could report it. Only one problem. The ABRT window is bigger than my screen size, it cuts off just above where you can attach files. So I have no way of easily reporting the gnote bug.

If that wasn’t enough I can’t update it because of a discrepancy in Open Offic...

There is a lot of discussion ongoing about how to change Fedora updates and several proposals for an update policy float around. But after I read parts of the FESCo log for the meeting last night, where an updates policy was discussed, I came to another conclusion. Fedora needs more systematic testing. There is a proposal to require at least three positive testing comments in Bodhi (aka 3 karma points) to allow testing updates to become stable. But afaics nobody prepared some statistics about what this would have meant for the previous updates, i.e. how many updates would have been pushed in the past from testint to stable with this policy enabled.

And t...

Many places I go I meet people telling how much they liked graphic tutorials and how much they learned about using GIMP and Inkscape following the, and this make me feel bad, as I am quite busy lately with a lot of things (video and photography ate a lot of my time) and rarely manage to write something new. But here is a perfect opportunity, Fedora 13 entered Alpha and had a code name (Goddard) and so far a visual theme based on rocketry, so it seems a tutorial titled "Drawing a rocket with Inkscape is not rocket science" would...

Will ergonomic difficulties cripple the iPad? That's one of several questions emerging as iPad availability looms closer.

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Jonathan Schwartz, the ponytailed, ex-CEO of Sun Microsystems, is now blogging all the things he wished he could have said earlier. Yikes; in his first missive, he lays into Steve Jobs, comparing him to a patent troll, and offers lessons for HTC in their defense against Apple's iPhone IP lawyers. In IT Blogwatch...

I've now added basic X11 memory information to System Activity's Detailed Memory Information. It's a bit crude at the moment and simply states the total pixmap memory usage.

As I've blogged about before, System Activity now has an option to show the detailed memory usage of a process. However the numbers shown there don't match up at all with the numbers shown in the process list. This can be very confusing.

The reason is because the process list shows an approximation, so tends to underestimate the Private memory usage, and overestimate the Shared memory usage. It also doesn't help that it had a different name in the tooltip (URSS etc).

So I've added WhatsThis and tooltips to everything to try to explain the situation, and tried to use consistent naming. Hopefully this help. I've also updated the userbase FAQ .

Please let me know if you have any questions that are not answe...

Nothing magic today. Just a simple small perl script. From the header:

Download at http://users.linpro.no/ingvar/check_clustat.txt .

A ton of users are dissatisfied with the decision to change the buttons on the title bar, however, it’s incredibly easy to change back and forth between the old (Karmic) look, and the new (Lucid Alpha) look. You do not have to be on Lucid to test out the new look. These commands work fine on Karmic and (probably) older. (...)Read the rest of Quick and Easy Ti...

Whilst this blog allows OSS Watch members and guest posters to express personal opinion we don’t usually use this blog for personal items. However, I’m making an exception today to remind myself, and hopefully some others, that whilst life can sometimes be horrible it is more often than not wonderful .   On Sunday at 17:17 (GMT) March 7th my wife gave birth to a be...

Many of you have been asking for some correspondence regarding the button position in the window manager. Here it is. At Ubuntu we have a golden opportunity not only to make our OS as good as the competition but to make it better. The button position discussion and analysis started with: - Why do Mac OS and Windows have the buttons where they do? - What was the functional reason behind the Mac OS choice (or the Windows position for that matter)? - Why, when most application menus are top left should the window controls go top right? - Why, when we read left to right is the most destructive action first? - Are we smoking crack to think that the learning curve for getting used to a new position is ever going to be worth any real or perceived benefit of new positions? As p...

Do you know this one?

Phoronix tested md5sums of ISO images of distributions. The winner was openSUSE, scoring e29311f6f1bf1af907f9ef9f44b8328b, which gave it a noticeable lead before second Slackware (b026324c6904b2a9cb4b88d6d61c81d1), which is quite closely followed by Fedora (9ffbf43126e33be52cd2bf7e01d627f9) and Debian (9ae0ea9e3c9c6e1b9b6252c8395efdc1). The difference between these two distributions, as you can see, is only very small. Ubuntu completely flopped in this test, achieving only 1dcca23355272056f04fe8bf20edfce0, which is surprising, especially considering that its previous release scored a very nice c30f7472766d25af1dc80b3ffc9a58c7. ( source ).

Ok, that's ju...

Last year, we wrote about how a property management firm in Illinois, Horizon Group Management, had sued a tenant for defamation over a short Twitter message she sent, claiming:

"Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon realty thinks it's okay."

"We're a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization."

Giggle is a graphical frontend for the git content tracker (think of gitk on GTK+). (...)Read the rest of Giggle - A graphical frontend for the git content tracker (26 words) © admin for Ubuntu Geek, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: desktop, Giggle, Giggle ubuntu, git frontend ubuntu, install Giggle ubuntu Related Articles Howto Install KDE 4.3.2 on ubuntu J...

So the devil called me this afternoon and said they where having a snowstorm in hell.

In other news Valve announced that their revolutionary "content delivery service" known as "Steam" is being ported to OSX and will be available as early as April 2010. No really its true, straight from the horse's mouth. In addition the actual client and "Steam-works" being brought to Apple's operating system Valve also plans to port all of the Source Engine games, these include:
...

DEV300_m74 +5 overall unused, though sal becomes unused method free.

In preparation for a Fedora Netbook Respin every package that isn’t essential has to be removed. This Respin should work on Asus eee (4GB version) with 7″ screen, maybe even on 2GB version if possible (this is especially hard to do).
 
Initial inspection found some packages that take a lot of space and aren’t suited for Netbook Respin:
Mos...

There's been lots of talk about the band Ok Go lately, with its latest album coming out and two viral videos (of the same song) in the last few weeks. Of course, the whole thing has been a bit of a mess between the band and its label. When the first viral video came out, Capitol Records/EMI decided to ban embeds of the video, which seems like the best way to totally kill off a viral video. The band responded with a mild, but still somewhat exasperated note about how the label didn't fully grasp the situation, but while also partly blaming YouTube for the way it (supposedly) handles payments on music in embedded videos. Later, Ok Go's lead...

Have you ever faced the need to rename a file and do a search and replace to adjust all places where it is referenced? For example if you are a C++ developer you may want to rename foo.h and foo.cpp to bar.h and bar.cpp, but you must also replace all lines which says msrp foo. ba...

On Monday our partner Groundwork Open Source, whom are selling a monitoring solutions that they recently certified for Ubuntu, published their statistics of the OS on which they see GWOS running on .

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The meeting agenda is already posted for tonight’s (Wednesday’s) SPI board IRC meeting which will be at 2000 UTC.

It’s another pretty lean meeting, with only some minutes to approve, so why not come along and let the board know what you think they should be doing to promote free and open source software?

A top mobile service harnesses its strengths to compete in the mobile ad space.

Click to read the rest of this post...

I am currently visiting the Centre for Next Generation Localisation to work on a localisation guide for Amharic. It is part of the subproject for training in the African Network for Localisation. Hopefully we'll have our results on the ANLoc website soon.

March 8, 2010 - 1st Annual Ubuntu Women Project "How I discovered Ubuntu." International Women’s Day Competition

The Competition which was announced back in January, asked women and girls who use Ubuntu to submit their "How I discovered Ubuntu&qu...

Ross Pruden points us to the news that Zen Films, a decade old production house, is launching a new storytelling project , which they admit is partly inspired by the CwF+RtB model that we talk about here. One of the cool things here is that rather than just making a "movie" or a "book," they've this is a "transmedia" project. That is, it's a single story, but told from the viewpoints of (at least) three different participants in the story. One participant's story will be told via a novella, another via a blog a...

Sarah's doing her phlebotomy externship at San Francisco General Hospital on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and needs to leave home fairly early to get there by 9am. As a result, I've been walking to work those mornings.

I remembered to record a track this morning:

GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

<iframe frameborder="0" height="490" scrolling="no" src="http://www.instamapper.com/trk?key=18001994905475607884&amp;width=500&amp;height=350&amp;type=roadmap" style="border:1px solid;" width="527"> </iframe>...

So the devil called me this afternoon and said they where having a snowstorm in hell.

In other news Valve announced that their revolutionary "content delivery service" known as "Steam" is being ported to OSX and will be available as early as April 2010. No really its true, straight from the horse's mouth. In addition the actual client and "Steam-works" being brought to Apple's operating system Valve also plans to port all of the Source Engine games, these include:
...

Installation was strange as Anaconda backtraced right at the option of checking media. Fortunately, quickly switch to "skip" button seems to not have impact on installation. A welcome change is the home partition inside Logical Volume Management. 4.8 GB is not enough because of my intensive use as designer so I increased it to the maximum after setting root partition to 16 GB. To be continued...

----------
L'installation a été étrange puisque Anaconda a laisse des traces de bogues sur l'option de vérification du média. Changer et presser rapidement le bouton "skip" semble ne pas avoir d'impact sur l'installation. Un changement agréa...

It’s Test Day time again! This Thursday, 2010-03-11, is webcam Test Day . It’s really pretty simple: if you have a webcam we want you to boot up a recent Fedora and check if it works. There’s detailed instructions on the Wiki page but that’s really what it boils down to – fire up your webcam, run Cheese or something like it, and make sure it all works well. If not, let us know about it! As always, the Test Day runs all Thursday in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC – see this page if you’re not sure how to use...

So going through various posts today, I came to the conclusion that the most wearing of body and soul are the ones where the writer has nothing but critiques of an idea, a position, the implied criticism that the person who wrote the letter has no worth as a human being, and the fact that no part of the idea should ever be implemented, reviewed, added onto or listened to.

It is really depressing... because it implies
Pe...

Quad-Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, ATI Radeon HD 4850, SSD Drive all in a Mini body. Price: $1000.

Here's how...

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Version 0.7.8 of the Rcpp R / C++ interface classes is now on CRAN and in Debian . As of right now. Debian has already built packages for eight more architectures; and CRAN has built the Windows binary. Oh, and cran2deb had Debian packages for 'testing' before I was done with the blog entry.

This is a minor feature release based on a over three weeks of changes that are summarised below in the extract from the NEWS file. Some noteworthy highlights are

The Publican User Guide is the best source of information on all things Publican.

Keywords what is getting for me more and more familliar to me/us. One of my (our) contributors has doing nice plans and work, and he is getting ready to make something big. Several months ago, I have showed to him our Fedora Electronic Lab, and he has begun to feel big love with it. Me either.
We have collected colleges, mates from work - and shared the experience with FEL. In return, a bunch of question has appeared and I have sent them to Chitlesh, who has answered to us between his relocation. (Kindly thank you!)

Later, my friend, after we have discussed the mail - has came over to me and talked about one "little" thing what he has thought o...

Just wanted to update everyone who showed interest in the new release of GNOME Developer Kit I announced yesterday. Based on some preliminary statistics I collected in the (less than) last 24 hours, it seems that the VMware image type got the most download, followed closely by the installable ISO format. I guess that was due to VirtualBox being able to use *.vmdk files and some people opting for the free virtualization tool. Here are the preliminary results so far: VMware image: 42 downloads Installable ISO: 26 downloads RAW filesystem image: 17 downloads About GNOME 2.29.92 Due to the numbe...

We've covered some of Rescuecom's bizarre lawsuit against Google for selling Adwords based on Rescuecom's trademarks. The lawsuit has been going on for a while, without Rescuecom getting very far. At almost every turn it was pointed out that what was happening was not trademark infringement. Finally, after many years, Rescuecom has given up and dropped the case... but in the process it's declaring "victory" in the lawsuit . Seriously. The explanation for the "victory"? That Google now lets trademark holders remove trademarks from the "keyword suggestion" tool. Only problem? Google enabled this in 2005.

Basica...

So, here I am, a bit peeved but more humored than anything else. Today I spent some time with a client of mine, actually a friend. His company asked me to come in and sit in while 5 other companies bid on a project they are working on. I listened to sales people all day long, and it isn’t like I have anything against all sales people, just a vast majority of them. My head was spinning when it was all over with. So, I got to listen to 4 companies give their spiel about using Linux here, possibly Windows there, and one even promoted the idea of using Macs as the workstations. Interesting stuff by these 4 companies, yet still boring as hell. Then come sales dude number five,...

Last week, there were reports that the EU trade policy folks had decided to stand up for ACTA transparency , and now it looks like they're really doing it. As various reports are noting, a joint resolution was put forth by nearly all party groups in the EU Parliament demanding that ACTA negotiations be opened up . It also goes further, demanding that there be a ban on imposing "three strikes" laws included as well and a promise that ACTA will not impose personal searches at the border. This is tremendous news, and if this gets approved, it could reshape ACTA in a positive way. But, of course, let's see how the US reacts. While repeatedly ins...

In the GNOME beer event, I had a nice chat with ebassi about the problems around our build configuration system and how things like CMake, SCons and Waf do not get the full picture and do not cover some of the really strange corncercases that autotools supports and therefore, coming up with a solution would be a 1 year work with a team of really experienced engineers. As stubborn as I am, I decided to prove him wrong so I give you BuilDj: The Problem My main problem with our current Autotools situation are these: It is not portable as it encourages strong use of Bash and command line tools which ends up making it really hard to use on a non POSIX system, you know, like that used by 92% of the...

Estuve viendo la página donde se está llevando a cabo la creación de toda la parte estética de la próxima versión y encontré unos cuantos wallpapers que se la traen...

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/F13_Artwork#Concepts.2C_WIP_Designs

Acaba de salir el primer alfa de Fedora 13 llamada Goddard.
Entre lo que se viene vamos a encontrar:

...

Recently I got one of these new...