fidzu : Planet Grep

Last month we announce the new Sun Fire X4800 which can have 64 cores/128 threads in the current maximum configuration.

We also announced, of course, that Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle Solaris and Oracle VM are fully supported/certified on this product.

On the Oracle VM side we were able to fully utilize all 64 cores, but without hyperthreading enabled. We just now released a hypervisor update on ULN to also enable all the threads. So with Oracle VM 2.2.1 + the latest xen version in the channel (xen-3.4.0-0.1.21) you can run 1TB RAM, 128 threads.

30 Jul 2010 6:34pm GMT

If you are an avid fan of midnight commander (like me) and you happen to inspect RPM files from time to time (like me too), you may have been irritated by a change in the RPM format.

In the past the payload of the RPM package was a simple cpio file. You could use the rpm2cpio tool to extract the cpio payload from the RPM or simply open it using midnight commander.

Nowadays the payload is not a mere cpio archive, but an LZMA compressed cpio archive. And as a result you cannot open Fedora 13 or RHEL6 RPM packages on older RPM versions with the commands you are used to. Same problem with midnight commander (which bails out in an ugly way).

A few weeks ago I looked into the problem and fixed it on my RHEL5 system, the solution is quite simple, look at the RPMVERSION tag in the package, if it's newer than 4.7 process the rpm2cpio output with xz. What's more, I also implemented two types of payloads so it's visible from the directory listing whether it is a .cpio or a .cpio.xz. The patch looks like this:

And for some extra karma points I also added .xz and .lzma support in mc:

Now I have to look into who I have to send this to...

I doubt we will see this appear soon in RHEL5 :-/ But at least I can hapilly peek into RPM packages !

30 Jul 2010 3:32pm GMT

Busy handling

I made an article about reporting busy status in Tracker before.

But then it wasn't yet possible to queue a query while Tracker's RDF store is busy. We're making this possible following next unstable release. Yeah I know you guys hate that Tracker's RDF store can be busy. But you tell us what else to do while restoring a backup, or while replaying a journal?

While we are replaying the journal, or restoring a backup, we'll accept your result-hungry queries into our queue. Meanwhile you get progress and status indication over a DBus signal. Some documentation about this is available here.

SPARQL 1.1 Draft features: IN and NOT IN

We had a feature requests for supporting SPARQL IN and NOT IN. As usual, we're ahead of the SPARQL Draft specification. But I don't think IN and NOT IN will look much different in the end. Anyway, it was straightforward so I just implemented both.

It goes like this:

SELECT ?abc { ?abc a nie:InformationElement ;
                   nie:title ?title .
               FILTER (?title IN ('abc', 'def')) }

SELECT ?abc { ?abc a nie:InformationElement ;
                   nie:title ?title .
               FILTER (?title NOT IN ('xyz', 'def')) }

It's particularly useful to get metadata about a defined set of resources (give me the author of this, this and that file)

Direct access

This work is progressing nicely. Most of the guys on the team are working on this, and it's going to be awesome thanks to SQLite's WAL journal mode. SQLite's WAL mode is still under development and probably unstable here and there, but we're trusting the SQLite guys with this anyway.

What is left to do for direct-access is cleaning up a bit, getting the small nasty things right. You know. The basics are all in place now.

We're doing most of the library code in Vala, but clever people can easily imagine the C API valac makes from the .vala files here. That's the abstract API that client developers will use. Unless you use a higher level API like libqttracker, QSparql, Hormiga or sparql-glib.

All of which still need to be adapted to the direct-access work that we're doing. But we're in close contact with all of the developers involved in those libraries. And they're all thrilled to implement backends for the new stuff.

Plans

We plan to change the signals-on-changes or class-signals feature a bit so that the three signals are merged into one. The problem with three is that you can't reliably identify a change-transaction this way (a rename of a file, for example).

Another thing on our list is merging Zeitgeist's ontology. To the other team members at Tracker: guys, Zeitgeist has been waiting for three months now. Let's just get this done!

Oh there are a lot of plans, to be honest.

I wonder when, if ever, we go in feature freeze. Hehe. I guess we'll just have very short feature-freeze periods. Whatever, it's fun.

MeeGo in cars

Hey BMW & co, if you guys want to learn how to write music players and playlists for car entertainment on MeeGo, get in touch! This Tracker that I'm talking about is on that MeeGo OS; being the Music's metadata database is among its purposes.

I can't wait to have a better music player playlist my car.

Or maybe some integration with the in-car GPS and the car owner's appointments and meetings? With geo-tagged photos on the car owner's phone? Automatic and instant synchronization with Nokia's future phones? Sounds all very doable, even easy, to me. I'd want all that stuff. Use-cases!

Let's talk!

30 Jul 2010 1:45pm GMT

A new month, a new release … the Activiti team keeps its pace! Things are shaping up, and this will be the last release before we're into beta. Download the 5.0.alpha4 release here! This release packs a bunch of goodies, which I'm sure will make you happy: Improvements MySQL support Support for method expressions on [...]

30 Jul 2010 9:35am GMT

29 Jul 2010 10:54pm GMT

I-dosing mag dan misschien de nieuwste hype, dreiging of hoax zijn, maar een intense muzikale roes heb ik als tiener toch ook dikwijls opgezocht. Het moet in maart of april 1986 begonnen zijn, toen ik op de radio voor het eerst "Taking the veil" hoorde. Ik kende David Sylvian nog niet, maar de donkere, poëtische sfeer van het nummer bleef wel hangen in mijn jonge licht-melancholische geest. Dat lag niet zozeer aan de tekst, maar wel aan de muziek; de fretless bass van Ian Maidman als hook, de open maar toch zeer strakke en droge percussie van Steve Jansen, de tweestemmige vocals en de gelaagde gitaren van Sylvian, Phil Palmer en de repetitief-knarsende Robert Fripp. Op de onnodig uitgesponnen 12inch klonk dat zo:

Een paar dagen later, 's avonds laat, hoorde ik hetzelfde nummer opnieuw op Radio21 en ik drukte snel tegelijkertijd op de "Record" en "Play"-knoppen van mijn Sharp radio-cassetterecorder. De presentatrice kondigde met warme stem af en ik had bijna op "Stop" gedrukt, toen ik hoorde dat er een ander nummer van Sylvian volgde. Het was een instrumentaal stuk, "Upon this Earth" geloof ik. En dus nam ik verder op en "Gone to Earth" passeerde volledig de revue, instrumentaal na vocaal, afgewisseld met de prachtige stem van de presentatrice, die duidelijk fan was.

Op het einde van de uitzending had ik de Radio21-editie van "Gone to Earth" quasi volledig op een cassette van 90 minuten staan. Ik kocht dat 2de solo-album van David Sylvian korte tijd daarna op vinyl en later ook op CD, maar op zoek naar hoger sferen en naar de verwondering van die eerste beluistering, heb ik die tape -dikwijls voor het slapengaan- grijs gedraaid. i-dosing avant-la-lettre dus, m'n vader maakte zich blijkbaar niet voor niets zorgen. De grote liefde voor al wat Sylvian maakt, is ondertussen een beetje weggeêbt, maar "Gone to Earth" blijft een indrukwekkende verzameling indringende songs en atmosferische instrumentale miniatuurtjes.

Soit, ik denk dat ik straks toch nog maar eens een dosis neem, for old time's sake én omdat het nu echt cool is, natuurlijk.

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• Gratis te krijg: Google Wave invites
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29 Jul 2010 9:00pm GMT

This year in my keynote at DrupalCon San Francisco, I mentioned that the elephants are coming. Well, earlier this week Capgemini, one of the world's foremost consulting providers with 95,000 employees, announced a new service, Capgemini Immediate. I'm pleased to say that they're using Drupal as a foundational technology for their new Immediate platform.

Capgemini Immediate is an offering which helps organizations to build and run on-line services. It consists of a number of preferred technologies (i.e., Drupal, MySQL, Salesforce, Lithium, etc.), best practices, and an ecosystem of preferred partners of which Acquia is part.

Capgemini Immediate is already being well received and making news. The Royal Mail, the national postal service of the United Kingdom, has signed a large six-year IT contract with Capgemini to transform their on-line services using Capgemini Immediate. With almost 200,000 employees, Royal Mail is the second biggest employer in the UK. Signing of Royal Mail received significant press coverage, including the Wall Street Journal.

The Capgemini stamp of approval, and the fact that Royal Mail will be using Drupal, is tremendous news for all of us. If successful, it could be an important milestone in the history of Drupal -- similar to when Dell and IBM decided to ship machines with Linux pre-installed in 2007.

Incidentally, Capgemini is using Drupal to power their own 95,000 person intranet.

29 Jul 2010 3:24pm GMT

Een zelfstandige in België hoort zijn sociale bijdrage (bv. per kwartaal) vooraf te betalen. Je bent een debiel als je dat niet doet, want dan vragen ze na vier jaar lekker veel interest op het hele bedrag.

Iedereen die je tegen het lijf loopt wanneer je je firma opstart zal het je ook opnieuw zeggen. De mensen bij Unizo, op de cursus boekhouden, mijn boekhouder, de mensen van de bank en zelfs mijn notaris was het aan het uitleggen bij de oprichting. En allemaal met een dringende toon: doe dit, vergeet dat niet. Vergeet dat écht niet. Écht niet!

Je bent dus onwenselijk dom als je het toch niet doet. Maarja, dat er domme mensen bestaan is geen nieuws.

Wat weinig mensen weten is dat je het zelfs kan omdraaien: in tegenstelling tot voorafbetalingen van vennootschapsbelastingen, krijg je voor voorafbetalingen van je sociale bijdrage wél interest op het teveel betaalde bedrag.

En dat is een interest die momenteel hoger ligt dan wat je op een ferme spaarrekening krijgt.

Uiteraard moet je gokken wat je zoal gemiddeld zal verdienen op vier jaar. Dus uiteraard mag je dat vrij hoog inschatten. Weet jij misschien precies hoeveel meer winst je over enkele jaren zal maken? Nou ik niet. En ik geef mezelf uiteraard meer salaris wanneer er meer winst is, meneer de controleur. Maar ik kon het niet weten dat er na vier jaar toch niet zoveel winst was! Tja!

Dus, schat je dat vrij hoog in. En betaal je vier jaar lang te veel sociale bijdrage. Na vier jaar storten ze het teveel terug, mét een hoge interest.

Netjes toch?

Ik denk dat ik dit ga moeten vieren!

Nu niet teveel van jullie freelancers dit gaan doen he! Ik wil nog een paar jaartjes genieten van hun "probleem" ;-)

29 Jul 2010 12:49pm GMT

I put together a few RPMs that can help make life easier on SRS5 on OEL (or RHEL or CentOS).

Download here.

- libflashsupport will help OSS audio support for flash10
- SunRay-addons is an rpm that contains 2 utaction scripts
1) autoresize -> will try to reset resolution based on your new DTU screen resolution when you hotdesk
2) usbdrived (Daniel Cifuentes's usbdrived script) -> pops up a nautilus window when you plug in a usb flash drive into your DTU
-) these scripts can be enabled/disabled from /etc/sysconfig/SunRay-addons

again, this is all just for fun - unsupported - but they help me and I thought I'd share

29 Jul 2010 5:54am GMT

I finally got round to creating a very simple but effective on/off button for the dragon that I created for last CCC Conference, which was themed "Here be Dragons".

Thanks to Lucy Collin for the pattern, which I more or less followed. I added some LEDs so that the dragon can actually spit fire. And for that, I needed a button. The solution is a simple press button.

First, of course, make your dragon and put LEDs in the nose openings. The plus sides of the LEDs are connected (the longest legs), the minus sides of the LEDs are also connected. I used a soldering iron and some soldering wire to do this. Two wires (one from the plus side and one from the minus side) are running through the neck and stick out of the belly, just under one of the wings where they are more or less hidden from sight. You will need a so-called coin-cell battery for the LEDs. At the end of this page is an electric scheme.

To make the switch, apply the press button as follows:

Cut out a piece of felt fabric in matching colour, slightly larger than the coin-cell battery. Using special pliers or just fine scissors, make a hole in the middel of the fabric.

Sew the male part of the button onto the fabric, using conductive wire. (If you do not use conductive thread, you will isolate the button from the circuit.)

This is how it looks on the outside:

I leave the wires a bit too long, in case I make an error. So they are coiled up a bit so that they can be hidden under the fabric rectangle. The end that will go ono the female part of the press button has a loop that fits around the top bulge of that part.

Now take the battery, and sew it onto the the dragon using the fabric as a means to hold it in place. Leave one end open, so that the battery can be replaced when it is empty. It takes about three days of none stop blinking to empty the battery.

Now sew the looped wire onto the female part of the press button. You can do this with normal thread, as long as you make sure that the loop and the wire coming from the LEDs are well connected to each other. You could also just wrap the wire around the button, provided this does not prevent it from connecting to the male part.

In this picture, you can see the battery bulging under the fabric. Just squeezing it a bit makes it slip out of the felt "bag".

By connecting the female part of the press button to the male part, you close the circuit and the battery delivers power to the LEDs.

And we have blinken lights!

These are the LEDs used:

Notice how the positive (+) leg is slightly longer than the negative (-) one.

This is the scheme:

If your lights do not blink, try putting in the battery upside down. The LEDs are sensitive to polarity (i.e. their direction in the circuit matters).

28 Jul 2010 7:01pm GMT

Six years ago, we did the first large scale Ogg Theora stream from the 2004 GUADEC conference.

It was a dime on its side to get things ready for this year. I purposely removed myself from the organization, because for various reasons I'm not going to GUADEC this year, but I was hoping the rest of the company would do their part to get this working, and I just provided the necessary prodding along the way. I've been told one of the organisers in charge of this got ill at some point and communication went a bit south during that period, so I had some complaints from our support guys that they had to do last-minute rushing.

But the streams are live today, and a few developers here are giddily running around looking at the stream, the image, working on some typical bugs you get when you're doing stuff like this for the first time (the artifacts on keyframes the encoder seems to have remind me a lot of the Theora bugs we had to squash back in the day, and obviously they are worse on still images, like, say, an empty conference room…)

Go check out the stream and make sure you have a WebM-enabled browser, like the Firefox 4.0 beta or latest Opera.

Congratulations to our intrepid hackers like Zaheer and Andoni for their hard work a few weeks ago on WebM, and I've been told Marc-André actually went to Holland just to deliver the encoders :)

28 Jul 2010 2:46pm GMT

Once again I'm attending GUADEC thanks to my employer Collabora. There are certainly a lot of interesting things going on during these 3 days but I'd like to highlight 2 events that you certainly don't want to miss.

The traditional Collabora GUADEC party will take place on Thursday night at 7pm and will be a barbecue over the beach! Check the parties map for the exact location.

Friday at 9:30 am I'll give a talk called GNOME 3: the Telepathic Desktop. The first part of the talk will be some kind of overview of the cool new stuff we have recently added to the Telepathy framework or which should land soon. I'll also talk about the work we have done to make Telepathy easier to use by third party applications. The second part of the talk will present new features we have added to Empathy during this cycle. I'll also focus on integration of Telepathy in the GNOME desktop in general. I'll have some demos to show hoping they won't fail horribly. :)

Hope to see you there. I know that's pretty early in the morning, especially after the Collabora party but I'll be there in time so you don't have any excuse. :p

edit: Seems there is a live stream of sessions so you should be able to watch the talk even if you are not at the conference.

28 Jul 2010 2:40pm GMT

Tomorrow at GUADEC there will be a session on Google Summer of Code. It will be structured as a lightning talk session where the students will do the talking and present their projects. Attend the session if you want to see the cool stuff that is coming up. It starts at 11:15 in the Paris room. Be there!

Each student maintains a wiki page with information about their projects. You can find these on the GNOME wiki.

28 Jul 2010 2:10pm GMT

In 2 months, September 17 tot 19 to be exact, FUDcon EMEA will take place again.

I'm pretty excited about it because there are some great things on the program! To start with there will be the normal barcamp sessions and hackfest like you are used to from normal fudcons, but as an extra there will be some lightning talks before the hackfests. This way people can attract new people to their hackfest, and introduce small and new project to a broad audience. As always with FUDcons everyone is free to host an own session.. so if you have something cool and/or important to share with the world, just add your session to this list.

If that didn't convince you yet, maybe the following activities that are planned will:

• Friday: Wired Dream Party
• Saturday: FUDPub
• Monday (if you want to stay): visiting CERN (99% sure)

And if that isn't good enough, we combine our conference with FrOSCamp, so you can be sure you won't only see Fedora people, but people from all sorts of projects and cultures..

I'm sure it will rock!

Did I convince you now? go and sign up here.

Hope to see you there

28 Jul 2010 12:56pm GMT

Tested under Debian Lenny and Mac OS 10.6.3

I've been using this one for a year or so but failed to share it until now..

python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000

This will start a simple HTTP server listening on port 8000.
Python needed, of course.

Run that command from the folder you want to share.

By the way if William from Paris is reading this, thanks for the book

27 Jul 2010 9:34pm GMT

I by chance discovered a severe security vulnerability in iGoogle's Facebook-gadget (more than 1 million users!), which allows an attacker to log into an other user's Facebook account, bypassing authentication.

I contacted the author and the Google security team and they confirmed there appears to be a problem which they'll look into. While they do so, I would strongly advise everyone not to use the iGoogle Facebook gadget. Once the hole is closed, I'll provide more info on how this could be exploited.

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• Why I dislike Facebook's Like widgets
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27 Jul 2010 9:11pm GMT