CrunchBang - Code, Design & GNU/Linux

A Chat With The Ubuntu UK Podcasters

Last Saturday I received a telephone call from the Ubuntu UK podcast team. We had a chat, it was fun. Parts of our conversation can be heard in their latest podcast, S01E05 - Everybody Come Aboard. I have just listened to the podcast myself and apart from the feature with me, it's another great show :)

I would like to say thank you to the guys for allowing me on the podcast. I can now place a tick next to the item, "Appear on a podcast" on my list of things to do before I die :) Oh, and thanks also for using a picture of Daisy, an unexpected, but pleasant bonus — Daisy will no doubt grin from ear to ear when I show it to her :)

URL: http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2008/05/07/s01e05-everybody-come-aboard/

Launchpad Got It Wrong?!

Some interesting thoughts about Launchpad by Martin F. Krafft. Martin is basically saying that Canonical got it wrong with Launchpad, not because of its closed source nature, but because they missed an opportunity to create a decentralised system:

What we need is something as slick as Launchpad, and thousands of instances thereof, which all peer with each other, automatically. The information would automatically be mirrored wherever it’s referenced, so the entire cloud would be highly-available and failure-proof.

I agree that this would be great, in theory, and I look forward to testing the system soon, not :) Seriously though, being a member of the Launchpad Beta Testers team and having used many of Launchpad's features, I am not sure that Martin's proposal is even remotely possible — is it possible to maintain a complex project such as Ubuntu without a centralised project management system?

Puppy Linux 4.00 Released

Other than Ubuntu, Puppy Linux is probably the only Linux distribution I follow. I have been a Puppy fanboy [yeah, I do not mind admitting it!] for a long time, so I was thrilled to read about the latest release, version 4.00. From the release notes:

Finally it has happened! The last 'official' release of Puppy was version 3.01, released October 15, 2007. Version 4.00 is happening 6 months later, which is an incredibly long time considering the previous frenetic schedule of releases. Anyway, here it is: the live-CD file is 'puppy-4.00-k2.6.21.7-seamonkey.iso' and is just 87.1MB. Download from http://puppylinux.com/download/.

Also from the release notes, and something that I am particularly pleased with:

GTK1 and Tcl/Tk abandoned. The decision was made to go for a totally GTK2-based system. This meant that there could be a consistent user-interface throughout and further reduced the size.

I am downloading the live-CD as I type. I will give the system a run tomorrow night, and if I get time, I will post with my initial thoughts/feedback.

Site Redesign & Fonts by Manfred Klein

I have been working on a small redesign of my website, again. Visually speaking, not much has changed; I have dropped the off-white background colour in favour of pure white, updated my Ubuntu advertisement, and changed the font used in my logo.

Regarding the new logo font, it is BastardusSans, one of Manfred Klein's many freely downloadable fonts. I really like Manfred Klein's fonts, not only because they are high quality and freely available, but because they are so diverse. Manfred Klein's portfolio features hundreds of decorative, historical, picture and text based fonts. If you are looking for a unique font for a new a project, do yourself a favour and go check out Manfred Klein's portfolio at TypOasis.

Back to the website redesign; as well as the visual changes mentioned above, I have also made changes to how the XHTML is formatted — just recently I seem to have been spending a lot of time browsing the web using Links; it was during one of these sessions when I noticed just how poorly my site was rendering in a text-based environment. I have now fixed this and my site should not only look better, but make more sense too :)

Other design alterations include:

• An updated print specific CSS file. Pages from my site should now print nicely [when printed from a modern browser.]

• A complete redesign of my personal wiki, the wiki design now matches that of my blog. I am still loving my Wikka Wakka Wiki installation, its hackability, speed and ease of use continue to impress. I did have a problem with spam comments last month, but it was easily fixed.

• A change to the font-family referenced in my site's CSS. Previously I had been specifying a range of sans-serif fonts, including but not limited to Arial and Verdana. I have changed this and the font used now is simply sans-serif. I am not sure how this change affects other systems, but IMHO, it makes for more readable copy on my Ubuntu Linux based systems.

• As mentioned at the top of this post, I have updated the one and only advert on my site. I have had one advertisement on my site since it started, it is a non-commercial advertisement for Ubuntu Linux. I have toyed with the idea of displaying Google Adsense, but I just cannot bring myself to do it, so instead I have updated my Ubuntu advert :) The image has been shamelessly ripped from the new Hardy Heron CD cover art. I have no idea who the three models are, or who photographed them, but I really like the image — there is something strangely appealing about this type of top-down photography. I am not sure of the legalities of ripping the image, but I am sure modifying it to be used as a webby advert will do no harm. See below for some resized versions:

Ubuntu Circle of Friends - 300 x 396 pixels

Ubuntu Circle of Friends - 200 x 246 pixels

Ubuntu Circle of Friends - 100 x 123 pixels

That pretty much covers my recent redesign efforts [although I have been tinkering for days and I am sure to have missed some minor details.] Finally, I have got some plans to include some new features on my site, namely a new bookmarking system and links to interesting posts and articles from my shared Google Reader feed. I will post more details about this as and when I get around to scripting the features in.

Ubuntu Open Week

Seen yesterday in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net:

[16:05] <jono> the aim of Ubuntu Open Week is to produce a week of interesting and informative IRC sessions explaining how to get involved in the Ubuntu community

The line-up of sessions looks great. I am hoping to attend the following:

• Wed 30th Apr @ 16.00 UTC - Community Q+A - Jono Bacon
• Wed 30th Apr @ 19.00 UTC - Ubuntu Artwork - Ken Wimer
• Wed 30th Apr @ 21.00 UTC - Producing Podcasts in Ubuntu - Alan Pope
• Thu 1st May @ 16.00 UTC - Ubuntu on the Eee PC - Christer Edwards
• Thu 1st May @ 19.00 UTC - The Future of the Ubuntu Desktop - Ted Gould
• Fri 2nd May @ 16.00 UTC - Ask Mark - Mark Shuttleworth
• Fri 2nd May @ 17.00 UTC - Ask Mark - Mark Shuttleworth
• Sat 3rd May @ 17.00 UTC - Reporting Bugs - Brian Murray
• Sat 3rd May @ 19.00 UTC - LoCo Teams - Nick Ali
• Sat 3rd May @ 21.00 UTC - Improving OpenWeek/Feedback - Jorge Castro

U ROCK! Thank you for Hardy 8.04

I came across this rather cool image whilst reading a post on Planet Ubuntu by Nicolas Valcarcel. I thought I would take a closer look to see how many names I could spot. I nearly fell off my chair when I spotted my own name. Not sure how that got on there! Nicolas mentioned something about making some t-shirts, I will have to buy one now :)

Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" Released Today

I am sure that everyone and anyone, who is interested, already knows that today sees the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron". Still, you never know, someone may read this and not be aware. Also, I wanted to mark the release date in my blog.

I have been running with the Hardy Beta releases for a couple of months, so the excitement at seeing all the new features has been slightly diluted; I may have to reinstall Gutsy for a day, and then perform an upgrade to get that "WOW!" factor. Either way, I just wanted to say congratulations to everyone involved in putting the Hardy release together, it rocks!

Also, there are many release parties happening tonight. I will not be attending any as I am working, boo! To those that will be partying, have a fantastic time! And sink a couple for me :)

Ubuntu 8.04 Release Notes: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/804
Download Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
Upgrade Information: http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/upgrading

rpl - A Find & Replace Terminal Tool

Tonight I have mainly been working on Whird. I have been rewriting large chunks of code in an effort to optimise a bunch of functions. As a result of this, I had to change a series of strings in a number of files. As per normal when it comes to fiddly grep, sed and awk commands, I fired up Google and searched for some pointers. Whilst refreshing my memory, I came across a comment by an anonymous reader who suggested using the rpl command.

I had not previously come across rpl before, so I investigated. Turns out that rpl is a really handy text replacement tool — it makes recursive text replacement commands really simple; as simple as:

rpl [options] old_string new_string target_file(s)

Available options are:

--version          show program's version number and exit
-h, --help         show this help message and exit
-L, --license      show the software license
-x SUFFIX          specify file suffix to match
-i, --ignore-case  do a case insensitive match
-w, --whole-words  whole words (old_string matches on word boundaries only)
-b, --backup       make a backup before overwriting files
-q, --quiet        quiet mode
-v, --verbose      verbose mode
-s, --dry-run      simulation mode
-R, --recursive    recurse into subdirectories
-e, --escape       expand escapes in old_string and new_string
-p, --prompt       prompt before modifying each file
-f, --force        ignore errors when trying to preserve permissions
-d, --keep-times   keep the modification times on modified files
-t, --use-tmpdir   use $TMPDIR for storing temporary files
-a, --all          do not ignore files and directories starting with .

rpl is available to install from the Ubuntu repositories, install with the following command:

sudo apt-get install rpl

For more information about rpl, see: http://www.laffeycomputer.com/rpl.html

Create MySQL User Accounts from the Command Line

I have my LAMP install process down to fine art, which is a good thing considering the amount of Linux installs I have been performing lately. Anyhow, just recently I have been experiencing some issues with creating MySQL user accounts. Normally, for ease of use, I would simply login to phpMyAdmin and create a new user account, but, for some unknown reason, this method has not been working; maybe there is a compatibility issue between the latest versions of MySQL Server and phpMyAdmin available from the Ubuntu repositories?

Anyway, to get around this little problem, I have been creating new MySQL user accounts via the command line. It is a fairly straightforward procedure, but like a lot of administration tasks, it is not something I do on a daily basis. With this in mind, I thought it would be a good idea to record the process for future reference.

Follow the steps below to create a new user MySQL account. Note, these instructions assume that you have already set-up Apache, MySQL and PHP.

1. Open a terminal and login to MySQL as root:

mysql --user="root" --password="your_root_password"

2. Create a new user and password with the following command:

CREATE USER 'new_username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password_for_new_username';

3. Assign privileges to the new user, enter the command:

GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'new_username'@'localhost';

4. Exit MySQL interface, enter:

exit

Notes: The above instructions will create a new user account on "localhost" and grant the user all privileges. While this is safe for my development environment, you would obviously want to grant only the necessary permissions in a production environment.

For more developer information, including the MySQL Reference Manual, visit: http://dev.mysql.com/

A New Agenda for Ubuntu CC Meetings

Yesterday, for the first time, I attended an Ubuntu Community Council meeting. The meeting was held in the #ubuntu-meeting channel on irc.freenode.net. The meeting itself was a bit of a non-event for myself; I was on the agenda to have my membership application heard, however, Mark Shuttleworth stated that membership applications would not be on the agenda. Membership applications will now be processed by one of three regional teams. More information about the new "streamline" process can be found at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StreamlineMembershipApproval

Personally, while feeling a little disappointed at not having had my moment, I also felt somewhat relieved. I think I had adequately prepared for the meeting, however, it will be good have a reprieve to work on strengthening my application. Becoming an Ubuntu member is a personal goal of mine, but it is not the be all and end all — making new friends, acquaintances and just being involved in this fantastic community is much more important :)

Regarding the new "Streamline Membership Approval", it can only be a good thing; as part of my preparation for yesterday's meeting I read numerous logs from previous Community Council meetings. Something that I noticed, while reading these logs, was the amount of time taken up by processing membership applications. I am sure that the Community Council members have more important things to discuss in the limited time they have available. Therefore, I, for one, am glad that the membership applications have been delegated; hopefully this will provide the Community Council more time to discuss the wider issues affecting the Ubuntu Community.