Planet HantsLUG

In addition to the existing German and Spanish language versions of Planet SUSE, I've added a new Polish version.

If a Polish speaker wants to give me a translation of the sidebar contents, I'd be very grateful.

Wordle. A strange name for a cracking site.

Thanks to Cornelius for the Wordle of Planet SUSE:

Here's one of my site:

I’ve blogged about last.fm before, but it’s so good it’s worth mentioning again. It’s changed a fair bit since I last used it, the client has got better (it’s also as simple as “apt-get install lastfm” in Ubuntu and Debian for us Linux users).

A recap - you run last.fm, type in an artist you like and it streams music by artists it thinks you might like to you. For free. I really like it and have found several artists from it - in particular there are many I’ve never heard of. One thing I’d like is the ability to listen to a particular artist. You can love/skip/ban tracks.

The client now has information about the artists. I just wish lyrics were there too as I have a (bad) habit of singing along but my memory fails me way too often.

What with the summer weather finally here and some good light, it’s a good time to be taking photos.

While I do encourage people to take nice, artistic photographs, and include them on a website perhaps in a frame, this is ultimately limiting. If you would like to end up with photos you can use within the design of a website, you need to take a different approach to setting up your shots. The composition will be done using graphics software at a later date, so you need to avoid doing the composition when you’re in the field.

The following guidelines are based on the main reasons I have to rule out a particular photograph as suitable for a piece of graphic design.

Don’t crop the subject

It may look artistic if the subject extends out of the frame, because it places the subject better in frame and leads the eye in the opposite direction. But it’s the number one reason for ruling out photographs from a layout. With no cropping of the subject, the designer can place a photo anywhere and composite the subject into the layout. With one edge running through the subject, the designer is constrained to place that edge along a natural edge in the layout, or failing that, hide it behind something else. With each additional edge that runs through the subject, the designer is more and more constrained with what can go where.

Don’t take black and white shots

It’s easy to convert colour photos to black and white on a computer; the opposite is not possible. Take colour photos just in case you need them.

Use a mixture of different shots

Most photographers will take multiple shots of a subject, but often this will just be a process of refinement - to try and capture one excellent photograph. You should aim for a much more varied mixture, of portrait and landscape, wide-angle and close-up, different angles and so on.

Try and take the same shot of different subjects

Designers will often be creating a suite of graphics to work together, so take similar shots of different but related subjects.

Include acres of background in your shots

In artistic photography you’re told to put the subject off-centre in the picture, roughly a third into the frame.

In web design we often have very long or tall regions to fill, quite different dimensions that you might encounter in print design. The aspect ratio of the photos that we might be putting on a website is rarely 16:9 let alone the traditional 4:3. We’re more likely to deal with aspect ratios of 10:1.

To successfully frame photos that can be cropped to a very wide or tall aspect ratio, your subject should be much smaller and nearer the edge.

Don’t use depth of field effects

A short depth of field can really 3D effect to a photograph. But it is difficult to cut out something that’s blurry, and sometimes that’s what designers want to do. A blurry background isn’t a problem, as part or all of the background may be removed, but when parts of the subject extend out of focus it’s impossible to separate the subject from the background.

A designer can fake a depth of field effect if the subject is in focus.

Don’t strive for contrast

As a rule of thumb, artistic photos look best with dark darks and bright highlights. Nearly all B2B and the majority of B2C websites are dark text on a pale background, and the dark darks contrast too much with the light and airy environment of the average website. That’s something that you can’t actually fix with colour curves as you can only produce murky greys. A subject that is mostly well lit but fades to black is as hard to work with on a pale website as one that is blurry or cropped: there’s no good way to blend the dark bit into the site.

If your website is on black or dark grey, you’re in luck. These are ideal for publishing artistic photography and really good contrast will look stunning.

Sadly there seems to be no sign of our regular foxes this year. For a good few years now we’ve had cubs playing in our back garden by now, but we’ve not seen or heard any yet, so we fear the worst.

Earlier this year when I was chatting to a friend who lost their dog to having eaten something poisoned, which was thought to have been put down for foxes. That’s pretty unpleasant on both counts - somebodies pet was killed, and there seems little justification for killing foxes to me, but there’s no accounting for some people.

The first fox in our garden goes back a good few years now, and sadly we dubbed him Basil. There was a bit more to the name than simply being a fox though. When he first appeared I was doing some painting in the garden and he crept up and nicked my paintbrush!

There’s some shots that should convince most that foxes are loveable creatures in our family photo gallery.

I was going to write a post about this, but I discovered that the brilliant Bruno had said it all already. All I can add is that I’ll miss the show, it’s been a big part of my spare time for the last four years, it’s taken me to Wolverhampton and San Francisco, given me some of the most random experiences of my life and above all it’s introduced me to a lot of people I now regard as friends. And that now the news is out I haven’t got to stop myself from saying something stupid and accidentally letting it slip early!

Discussions in #lugradio suggest that I’m a member of a pretty exclusive club of people who have been to all the LUG Radio Live events (including the US event earlier this year and the one coming up in the next couple of weeks). The list seems to be: Jono, Aq, Adam, Chris, Matthew Walster and me. Or have we missed someone?

Hi guys, had an idea that I don’t have a lot of time to do, but thought I would throw it out to the community since I thought it was a cool idea. I was thinking of an extension fo Banshee that worked like a real radio station. So here’s how it would work. It would pick a selection of your highest rated tracks, and put them into a hits list. These would be played more often during the day, kinda like when a new single comes out. So for example, at the moment I’m really into Weezer, The Red Album. So I’d like to hear those tracks more often. It would fill in the rest with other tracks. You could also have an 80’s hour, or a 90’s hour, where it picks music just from that year. Or a genre hour.

You could issue requests, and right click on a track and say “I wanna hear this” and it would work it into the playlist. I was also thinking it could plan the playlist for the next few minutes in advance and you could even ask it to announce what was coming up soon, just like on a real radio station.

So here’s the deal. I’ve found it hard to get information about the API for Banshee. If anyone has some time to help out on this, or would like to give it a go…..please get in touch.

I saw this on Hugo’s blog, and thought I should have a look. The list is not repeated here, as I am one of those people causing the average to be down at six. Only one book on that list was read out of choice, and that was Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy. The other few were required reading at school.

There exists in me no inclination to read the others. If I am going to sit down and read, which does happen, then it will have to be something that educates me, not just entertaining, to make the effort worthwhile.

People reading Planet SUSE (or indeed my site) over the last few days will have noticed it was responding really slowly. I don't know how long this had been the case with being on retreat but after about 24 hours of debugging and investigation, I've identified and resolved the issue.

I've just seen this on nmg's blog.

Copy the list, bold the ones you're read. Underline the ones you loved. Put the ones you're going to read in italics. Marvel at how far you still have to go. Act all concerned over the fact that the average person has only read 6 of these.

read more

There exist many bayasian/statistical spam filters, ranging from products such as spambayes, and spamassassin, to crm114. Each of them works in their own way. Having used and tested almost all of them I've noticed a common flaw.

The vast majority of spam-filters struggle to correctly classify "419 scam" mails, lottery fraud, and similar mails.

Why is that? In general, having read hundreds of these mails, I can see several things that are common in these kind of the mails:

• Mention of currency in both numeric and word forms. ($1,000,000 + 1 million US dollars)
• Mention of a country / nationality (Sierra Lione, Nigerian)
• Mention of a reference/claim number and often "official address".
• Christian references.
• Greetings such as "dear friend", and mentions of discretion/secrecy.
• Size. (A scam mail is typically greater in length than an average spam mail).

Whilst none of these individually are indicative of a scam mail it is interesting to count their combined occurance.

I've written a toy program to count these things, and so far the success rate is >60% which is a reasonable start - providing this kind of detection occurs after normal filtering.

I may experiment further, but I figured a public query on scam detection might be appropriate.

Whilst the detecting a scam mail is a subset of detecting a spam email there are probably simplifications that may be made, and exploring those wouldn't be a bad thing.

ObQuote: Buffy.

Alan Pope, Dave Walker, Tony Whitmore and Ciemon Dunville present the eighth episode of the Ubuntu UK Podcast.

In this episode:-

• The last of our interviews from the Ubuntu Developer Summit:
  • Matt Oquist talks about Software Freedom Day
  • KDE contributor Celeste Lyn Paul talks in depth about human-computer interaction (HCI) and enlightens us on the (KDE) human interface guidelines.
  • Utahs best export, Mike Basinger talks about his passion for the Ubuntu Forums, and his calming influence on the Ubuntu Community Council.
  • A very informative interview with Kurt von Finck about the Canonical Support operation, where to get the best deal on Ubuntu support and some stories from the trenches.
  • An interview with the "King of Bling", Mirco "MacSlow" Müller talks about lowfat, GDM, face browser, cheese, memaker, clutter, avant window navigator, mpx in xorg.
• Competition
  • We set a new competition, which will end on the 12th July. (we have extended the competition due to this episode being late).

Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc

I maintain a few modules. Most of them are simple but one relies on quite a complex stack of other modules, being essentially a wrapper module.

My home systems are running Perl 5.10.0 as that's what comes with Debian Lenny. Yesterday I thought it best to try and create environments with Perl 5.8.8 and 5.6.2 on them so I could test the code on older Perls. I can not get the same level of coverage that CPANTester provide but I can weed out the worst bugs in advance.

Using VirtualBox I installed some older system inside a VM container and tried stuff out. Perl 5.6.1 era systems are a nightmare, not only is Perl old, but all the supporting libraries are old and the Perl modules my module is dependent on will not install because the overall antiquity of the system.

If you had an older system (RedHat 7 era) box that has been patched over the years it's possible to get partially there as some elements of the dependency stack are present, though at older levels. On a new system it's almost impossible to install anything as the more recent versions demand newer libraries that just aren't there...

Is it worth trying to support Perl 5.6.x...?

This has been in my draft file,so i have finally got round to finishing this post.

Clicking on picture gives you a bigger picture with more detail.

This is the desktop I see when I first switch the computer on

On top left is a facebook feeds

words next to Jack Nicholson is quote of the day which changes daily.

I don’t need to tell you what a calendar and a clock does do I ?

As you see here I am reading my gmail using Mutt which is the best mail client in

my opinion. N stand for new mail and D is to delete which I always delete anything from

RNID

Top left is my facebook feeds which Mathew is taking the piss. I upgraded Ubuntu to Hardy Heron and for some reason colours got set to 256  instead of 16.million which of course I had fixed.

In this picture I am viewing my RSS feeds using Newsbeuter

After i highlighted and pressed enter to read post using newsbeuter in this case

I am reading the GOD blog.

Reading See Hear forum this way  as I find  the forum in ghastly colour

I will post more later on , as Newsbeuter and Mutt deserve a post of its own

I'm going on retreat today ahead of my ordination to the priesthood on Saturday which means I'll be offline until then (and may well have a number of emails to catch-up on when I get back).

Well it looks like it’s time to plan a replacement server. My trusty Ideq Biostar which I’ve had since 2004/2005 is still fine, however there are some bugs for which I need to upgrade the kernel and it’s stuck at 2.6.18 since Xen hasn’t been ported to a newer kernel. I’ve backported a few fixes, but really it’s getting a drag. Furthermore the fan in the PSU has been dodgy for ages and I’m sure it chews a fair amount of power.

New server will be small and support KVM virtualisation. Current contenders are:

• Atom CPU based machine - 1.6GHz but not that fast
• [Intel Core 2 duo http://www.mini-itx.com/2008/03/06/intels-eaglelake-mini-itx-boards] DQ45EK or DG45FC with E8200 (£90)
  

The Atom is much lower power (4W), but also lower performance - the E8200 is about 40-50% faster than my current E6300 desktop. On PC Mark 2005 we have:

• current desktop: 4794
• E8200: 6833
• Atom230@1.5GHz: 1406
  

I think the Atom may well be too slow unfortunately. It’d be nice to have the laptop T9300/T9500 processor - 2.5/2.6GHz rather than the 2.67GHz of the E8200, but the TDP is 35W rather than 65W (although mostly it’ll be idle). In fact the T8100/T8300 would do nicely - not as quick, but cheaper. As usual wikipedia is the best source of information.

There also seems to be confusion as to which Atom CPUs have VT (virtualisation extensions).

I’ll also need a new case for the current two IDE disks (and no doubt a slimline DVD drive).

Update: Jetway Mini-ITX look tempting too. Case suggstions welcome.

I've spent a few hours recently looking at building RPM packages of GNU/Linux kernels, which has been a frustrating process.

There are many many online guides which give the impression that this is actually a pretty complex process. For example How To Compile A Kernel - The CentOS Way guide. (Did I mention how bad most of the howtoforge guides are recently?)

So, after fiddling around for an afternoon and getting lost I decided to abandon the process.

Here is a tested process for building a binary RPM kernel package:

cd linux-2.6.24.7/
make rpm

Yes this works just fine upon a Centos 5.x machine - I'm used to using make-kpkg to make a Debian kernel package, but it seems that if you just visit kernel.org and download the latest version you can build a RPM without any extra effort thanks to native support. Cool.

Now I need to work out how to create, host, and update a YUM repository. That looks fiddly and annoying too. XML. Eww. Any guides are most welcome - ultimately I need to package and host a "recent" kernel for Centos 4.x, Centos 5.x and Fedora Core 6-9 - each for i386 + amd64.

ObQuote: Spiderman

Well not me, but something that I worked on has appeared on Star Trek Enterprise. Last night, watching season 2 episode 9, “singularity”, there is a scene in the galley. In the background is the unmistakable shape of a Kenwood Major.

I few years ago, Kenwood was my employer. One of the last things I was working on before leaving them was a new control knob for the Kenwood Chef and Major range of food mixers. It was only a brief shot in the TV show, and even pausing and looking carefully, it is not all that clear, but I am certain that the control knob on the mixer used on the show is the same one I was working on.

Admittedly, it would have been much cooler to have some association with a warp core or photon torpedo. But how many of you can watch an episode of Star Trek and say, “I worked on that!”

Now where is my Klingon phrase book, I am off to a convention…

So I've had a hectic few days, and I'm getting close to having caught up with the things that I've been sitting on whilst I've been away.

ObRandom: Several people, independantly, have told me within the past few days that "whilst" is not a real word. it is. End of ..

Some interesting things I've been working upon recently include a fun little firewall tool. Once upon a time I wrote a firewall script which worked like this:

firewall/
`-- incoming.d
    |-- smtp
    |-- ssh
    `-- www
`-- outgoing.d
    |-- ssh
    |-- smtp
    |-- dns
    `-- icmp

When you executed the magic firewall script it would scan the incoming.d directory, and for each file it found lookup the relevant port in /etc/services. These port numbers would then be opened. And at the end you'd just have a "-j DROP".

After a long phone conversation to a colleague on Thursday/Friday of last week I've now reworked this idea anew. There is still the notion of filenames referring to what is allowed for a pair of directories (incoming.d/ + outgoing.d/) but even more flexability and no hardwired use of /etc/servvices.

I guess some ideas are just too simple to give up ..?

Anyway there are a plethora of different firewall applications of varying sophistication and complexity in the world. I don't really want to go out of my way to promote this one - but at the same time it might be a useful idea for somebody?

The next (work) job I have is determining how to make a "kernel" + "kernel-dev" RPM package based on Debian sources. Joy. Actually the more I look around the more fiddly, annoying, and troublesome I suspect this is going to be. Sigh.

ObQuote: The Grudgy

I’ve been off work for a week having had two teeth removed under general anesthetic and popping pills which have left me somewhat dazed and confused. Yes, more than normal. I’m back to work tomorrow though, and one thing is clear - LUG Radio Live UK 2008 is going to be a blast! Laura has been talking to Emma who it will be great to hook up with again, having met her at LRL USA. Plus lots of British and European people giving fine talks! I’m running the AV crew again, and this year hope to have enough AV crew to enable me to have some time off!

Go to http://lugradio.org/live to find out about hotels, speakers etc.

This has been a belated attempt to do my bit for publicity! I have a sick note though…

Today someone asked me to fix a proxy server for another site at work that wasn't working. The member of staff that should look after the boxes at that site having left the company a few weeks ago and so far they have not been able to replace him.

My colleague left me in front of his notebook logged on as root via PuTTY to some remove Unix/Linux system. A quick ps aux | grep squid showed that Squid wasn't running (I did know that Squid was used already), /etc/init.d/squid start started it up - and ps confirmed it still wasn't running.

I then had a look in the /var/log/ directory tree for a Squid log, and then tail showed that there wasn't able to write to it's log filesystem that Squid wanted to write too, df confirmed the filesystem was full. It's not my box and there just wasn't space to dump 11 GiB of Squid logs any where so rm got rid of the oldest ones (several months old) and then Squid started okay.

The whole process was done in less than 2 minutes, I didn't know which OS it was (though it turned out to be Debian Sarge) and I know sod all about Squid other than it's a proxy server. Interestingly the network guy who asked me to fix it said it took me less time to fix the server than it would have taken him to start the Windows GUI on the Windows ISA servers at our site...

I promised screenshots of the install in progress and here they are, fifty of them - some photos and some normal screenshots of the installation on Amanda's Samsung R60plus (64bit).

See the openSUSE 11.0 installation in progress.

When Amanda acquired the laptop, installing 10.3 on it was not without problems but 11.0 installed beautifully. The only two small issues remaining were the continuing issue of the 64-bit Java plugin not working properly in Firefox. The only solution was to switch Firefox and all plugins to the i586 version. I couldn't work out a way to do this in YaST though so I had to do it in smart. The other issue was the rubbishy onboard Atheros wifi adapter and as-yet equally rubbish ath5k module for it. This is solved by popping blacklist ath5k into /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.

LugRadio Live US 2008 (in San Francisco) was fantastic. And that was with a bunch of people who hadn’t all even heard of LugRadio Live before.

Here are the details (listen out for the trailer on your favourite Linux/OpenSource podcast, such as Linux Outlaws)…

LugRadio Live UK 2008
The Lighthouse Media Center, Fryer St., Wolverhampton, WV1 1HT

LugRadio Live UK 2008, the most popular community Open Source event in the UK takes place in Wolverhampton on the 19th and 20th and features three stages full of 25+ speakers including:

• Chris DiBona (Google)
• Max Spevack (Red Hat)
• Steve Lamb (Microsoft)
• Robert Collins (Canonical)
• Benjamin Otte (GNOME)
• Rob McQueen (Collabora)
• Edward Hervey (Collabora Multimedia)
• James Hooker
• Kevin Sandom
• Barbie (MessageLabs)
• Daniel James
• Emma Jane Hogbin
• Bruno Bord
• Ben Thorp
• Rufus Pollock (FFFI)
• Sam Birchall
• John Carr
• William J Giddings
• and many more…

In addition to this the show will feature over 20 exhibitors, special debate sessions, the legendary Gong-a-thong Lightbulb Talk Extravaganza (read: a series of small talks chaired by a man in a very small pair of pants and a very large gong - not to be missed!), parties on the Friday and Saturday evenings and much, much more.

All of this is just £5, and there are even a raft of hotel deals available to make your trip simple and cost effective. Head over to www.lugradio.org/live to find out more.