fidzu : SUSE

Last weekend our family relaxed with my parents at the Jahreszeitenhof near Ansbach. Saturday we drove to the Altmühlsee and walked to the bird island. The most interesting thing for us were not the many birds but the damage done by beavers. We've seen in Fürth's Stadtpark now some beaver damage but the damage done at the Altmühlsee was impressive - and in some ways real art, so I had to document it.




The rest of the left tree looks like a fish - quite impressive beaver art.


There are supposed to be at least three beaver families in the area and we think we found the lodge of one of them.

The beavers even used the bridge close to their lodge for practicing.

17 Mar 2009 9:02pm GMT

This appliance has been implemented for teaching programming languages. It includes multiple editors for multiple languages.

This one has been implemented by Daniel Massaguer, who is a teacher assistant at the University of California, Irvine campus. It has been done with susestudio. Give it a try! You'll like it!


http://lin.cat/Programming_Languages_101-1.0.0.vmx.tar.gz

17 Mar 2009 3:32pm GMT

This is an Instant Messaging based on jabber. First time it boots it configures itself. Give it a try!

http://lin.cat/Instant_Messaging_jabber_Server-0.0.1.vmx.tar.gz

17 Mar 2009 3:32pm GMT

<Damm hell… life philosophize stupid time>

Well… thinking about 'managment lectures' and big stones, there´s something wrong happening. I really don't like life hacks, but I need more useful time to me. Study more efficiently and don't lose my time bringing future goals to the present.

But what you do do Gabriel about that?

I don´t know. But I want to try to do more filtering to bring to the front the biggest stones in my life.

Just patience to wait the right time happen. An I have to admit: Its so hard forget a lot of waves in a greatest sea of your mind.

</Calm down>

17 Mar 2009 3:06pm GMT

Issue #63 of openSUSE Weekly News is now out!

In this week's issue:

• Geeko wants you!
• Update on openSUSE Infrastructure Services (download.opensuse.org)
• KDE 4.2.1 released
• OpenSUSE vs. openSUSE
• Easgs: How to setup a software RAID-5 distribution in openSUSE (video)

The openSUSE Weekly News is available in:

Chinese (delay),
French,
German,
Hungarian,
Indonesian,
Italian (delay),
Japanese,
Polish,
Portuguese (delay),
Russian (delay),
Spanish
Swedish

17 Mar 2009 2:03pm GMT

I'm happy to announce that OpenOffice.org 3.1 beta1 packages are available in the Build Service OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE project.

The packages are build the openSUSE-11.1 way so that the extra packages with extensions are available for openSUSE-11.1 and 11.0. I still have some troubles to build the extensions on openSUSE-10.3 and SLED10. I hope that I'll fix it soon.

The packages are beta versions and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

We kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs. We are especially interested into the testing of SMB access and file locking.

Other information and plans:

I would like to provide another beta build within one week. It should finally include an initial implementation of the OOXML export filters and thus improve the interoperability with MS Office 2007.

There are still some troubles to update the OOo-3.0.1 packages from the OpenOffice:org:STABLE project on openSUSE-11.1. I have committed one more fix yesterday. The fixed packages should be ready tomorrow. I hope that it will be the final fix. See the bug #471280 for more details.

Where to Get It

The packages are provided by the OpenOffice:org:UNSTABLE installation repository.

Installation Problems

There are some problems with the version update on older distributions. You might need to select the right version by hand.

Bug Reports

Please report the bugs into the Novell bugzilla for the product OpenOffice.org. Do not forget to mention enough information about the problem.

Changes in This Version

The detailed summary of the GO-OO project changes are in the NEWS document.

General Information About the Build

The build is based on the GO-OO project. It includes lots bug fixes, features

and optimizations in compare with the regular OpenOffice.org build:

• better startup performance
• improved VBA interoperability
• additional import filters (SVG, WordPerfect Graphics, Microsoft Works, …)
• native KDE Open/Save dialog
• new 3D slide transitions
• rich field support
• multimedia in Impress via GStreamer
• …

, see also the discover page.

17 Mar 2009 1:53pm GMT

It was actually Gabriel who dropped me a kind "very nice to know about a girl programming openSUSE" comment to one of my older blog posts. It made me browse Geek Feminism wiki once again and find something out, but first things first.

I've never dared to publish anything about gender and open-source, about the issues women have to face in these communities. If I did (even now, I know my blog has mostly male audience), I'm pretty certain what response I would get: "Issues? What issues? Women stay out of open-source communities because they want it that way. They do not contribute because they do not want to." One way or another, let me tell you this:

Being on Novell's payroll, I have being active member of openSUSE community in my job description. It means - "read the mailing lists, respond to the threads concerning your area of expertise, write wiki articles, even write the blog, speak at tech events etc." Standing up to these expectations is, to be absolutely honest, stressfull. Exhausting. Hadn't this point been in my list of objectives, I would have never mustered courage to do so on my own. Why?

Each time I'm writing something to openSUSE mailing list, I can't help feeling uneasy, because my point of view might be put down, I might be laughed at, and/or not taken seriously not because what I propose is nonsense, but because I'm a woman (that is, "go back to the kitchen" response).* Each time I have to speak in public on tech conference (that means, to 90% male audience), I fear that these guys will look at my legs and view me more as a potential DNA-exchange mate than an expert.** Each time I'm opening the page with new comments to my blog posts, there is this clenching feeling around my stomach whether some verbally abusive and/or sexually explicit comment from frustrated nerd won't appear.***

Call me a flake, overly sensitive, looking at the things through the prism of my own trauma, call all of the above fears irrational, but as you can see, they are very real. I tried to get the message that being an active member of the community is much more difficult for me as a woman (due to the reasons mentioned above), to my (male) manager. And to my (male) co-workers. I used the favourite "sport bar" analogy ( "Imagine you walk into the sport bar. Canada plays Sweden in the final world ice-hockey championship duel and the bar is full of ice-hockey fans. You wear a bright T-shirt with prominent 'I am not a fan of ice-hockey' banner. How would you feel?" ... as for me, an idea of walking into that bar would not even cross my mind ;-)) and I failed miserably. It was as if I spoke in ancient Egyptian to them ...

openSUSE is one of the open-source communities that doesn't have specific women interest group. Debian Women, KDE Women, GnomeWomen, DrupalChix are examples of such groups existing in other communities. Have you ever wondered why is this the case? Is it because there are no women in openSUSE community? That is an obvious nonsense (Sonja, Antje, Gabi, Klara, Susanne, Edith, Rosanna, Tanja, Anna, ... ). Or is it because openSUSE community is so women-friendly that there is no need of any support group? Women in openSUSE don't have to stay invisible or assume gender-neutral identities in order to avoid verbal abuse and/or in order to be taken seriously, don't they? Well, I wouldn't be so sure.

Now I don't want to lobby for establishing openSUSE-women group, as I somehow expect what kind of response I would get:

• either "We should also form a Jews-only, gays-only and death-metal-fans-only group, as these are also underrepresented groups within our community"
• or "The women are underrepresented in the community - so what? There is nothing I can do about it."
• maybe even "Yeah, go ahead with women group, it'll bring whole lot of chicks I can date to the community"

Rather than that, I would prefer seeing the girls/women in the community stand up, speak up and made themselves visible. Women need to see other women as role models, they need to see their achievement and they need to feel welcome in the community. And although I'm often exhausted, frustrated, feel like giving up as I have an impression that openSUSE is an old-boys club and guys would very much prefer to keep it that way, I dream about the day when lack of feedback from almost half of the humankind will be largely reduced. Or at least, when new female contributors, girl bloggers, mailing-list regulars, testers and commenters start to pop-up. Fwiw, now I have finally publicly admitted that I'm a woman :-) :-D

* I once wrote an article for certain Linux tech e-zine. One of the first comments was "go home cooking, fucking and bearing children, never ever publish anything again." So - I never did. Not on that e-zine.

** Few years ago, I presented a paper on certain Novell technology on a trade fair. After the talk, one of Novell partner's employee approached me and asked whether I was really a software engineer. Given positive answer, he went on to say I was simply too beautiful to be a hacker. He meant it as a compliment.

*** At the university, I posted a notice to a local newsgroup that I was looking for a team-mate for ACM Collegiate Programming Contest. I got a reply. One of the first questions was not "Which programming language do you prefer?" but "Do you like sex?". A vivid description of the most pervert sexual practices this wannabe-contestant would like to try with me followed.

17 Mar 2009 12:28pm GMT

The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit Call for Participation is now open. The Desktop Summit is the first to pair the KDE and GNOME conferences, and will be held from July 3rd to July 11th in Gran Canaria, Spain. Those poor desktop developers. Suffering through a week in the Canary Islands. Is there nothing they wouldn't do for free software?

Ah, anyway - there are actually a couple of CFPs - one for Akademy, one for GUADEC, and they'll also be posting CFPs for the local programme.

The CFP closes on April 10th - so not a lot of time if you want to get your proposal in. I'd like to see several openSUSE representatives at the Desktop Summit, so please be sure to submit those proposals! (I wouldn't mind a few postcards from the Canary Islands, either…)

17 Mar 2009 11:11am GMT

If you are a python developer and will need some querys in MySQL, please read this post. To begin, we will need an API to work with MySQL databases, I will use MySQLdb.

We will need MySQLdb API installed on machine, I won´t talk about it now, please wait another post(very soon).

First: We need to import the MySQL API

import MySQLdb

Second: We will connect, using the method connect()

db=MySQLdc.connect(passwd="my_password","db=gabriel")

And now, go to the queries!

- We need a cursor,

gabriel=db.cursor()

- and after we will execute queries on it:

max_price=3000
gabriel.execute("""SELECT bike, computer, car FROM shop
WHERE price < %s""", (max_price,))

We use %s in the string to MySQLdb convert it to a literal value. The query will actually say, "…WHERE price < 5″

And now, the results:

>>> gabriel.fetchone()
(Spark23S, Macbook1XXs,PorscheCarrera )

Quite unlike the _mysql example, this returns a single tuple, which is the row, and the values are properly converted by default… except… What's with the L's?

As mentioned earlier, while MySQL's INTEGER column translates perfectly into a Python integer, UNSIGNED INTEGER could overflow, so these values are converted to Python long integers instead.

If you wanted more rows, you could use c.fetchmany(n) or c.fetchall(). These do exactly what you think they do. On c.fetchmany(n), the n is optional and defaults to c.arraysize, which is normally 1. Both of these methods return a sequence of rows, or an empty sequence if there are no more rows. If you use a weird cursor class, the rows themselves might not be tuples.

Note that in contrast to the above, c.fetchone() returns None when there are no more rows to fetch.

Post changed and copied from MySQLdb

17 Mar 2009 10:14am GMT

On one Czech Linux website there was an article about IPv6 and in comments one guy left a YouTube link and I liked that song so I Googled for it a little bit and I found both lyrics and mp3 with a little bit better sound.

So how do you like this sad song? :-) Do you know any other so funny computers related songs? And please do not link Free software song… I think you know why :)

17 Mar 2009 7:24am GMT

My friend Victoria Fontan who works at the UN's University for Peace in Costa Rica just published the book from her research work on Iraq.

The book is Voices from Post-Saddam Iraq: Living with Terrorism, Insurgency, and New Forms of Tyranny. From the editorial reviews:

Even today, most Americans can not understand just why the fighting continues in Iraq, whether our nation should be involved there now, and how we could change our tactics to help establish a lasting peace in the face of what many fear will become a full-fledged civil war. In the book at hand, Victoria Fontan - a professor of peace and conflict studies who lived, worked and researched in Iraq - shares pointed insights into the emotions of Iraq's people, and specifically how democratization has in that country come to be associated with humiliation. Including interviews with common people in Iraq this work makes clear how laudable intentions do not always bring the desired result when it comes to international conflict and cross-cultural psychology. For example, Fontan explains, one might consider the comment of a young Shiite: "The greatest humiliation of all was to see foreigners topple Saddam, not because we loved him, but because we could not do it ourselves." This gripping text is focused on a new and growing area of human psychology - humiliation studies.

Please vote to have the book available on Kindle. I got a hardcopy, but I would love to travel with it instead.

17 Mar 2009 12:31am GMT

The KDE folks have created some brilliant bindings for Mono and .NET called Qyoto.

But there is nothing like a polished application to really test the bindings. This week Eric Butler announced Synapse: an advanced Instant Messaging platform.

This is the first large application built with Qt/Qyoto/Mono and it is a beautiful application:

I had a chance to see Synapse live a couple of weeks ago in Seattle when we met Eric for dinner. Eric has written a very polished application. This is what love does to software.

Congratulations to Eric for the release of his app, to the Qymono crowd for creating these polished applications and Nokia/Trolltech for releasing Qt under the LGPL license.

Developers interested in doing Qyoto development with MonoDevelop can take advantage of the QyotoDevelop add-in that Eric created as well. This add-in generates code from the Qt Designers UI files (click for a screenshot).

17 Mar 2009 12:31am GMT

Every distribution has its own conventions to package scripting languages addons (perl modules, ruby gems, etc) as native packages. This allows packages to depend on those addons honoring the package dependencies, and at the same time, look like the addon was installed the scripting language tool (cpan, gem).

openSUSE keeps a repository of gems, thanks to Marcus Rueckert.

For ruby, David Lutterkort (augeas lead developer) created a nice tool to help converting gems into spec files.

I created a template for openSUSE-like rubygem-* packages, and David committed it upstream.

So, to create a package for a gem:

Fetch it:

gem fetch foo

Convert it:

gem2rpm -t opensuse.spec.template ./foo-1.1.gem > rubygem-foo.spec

Build and tweak it. Make sure everything is alright. Some gems work out of the box, some not, but still gem2rpm saves 90% of the effort. Consider submitting it to the project if you are willing to keep it up to date

16 Mar 2009 10:49pm GMT

This month's meeting will be presented on Parrot by Stephen Weeks:

Parrot is a virtual machine for dynamic languages and a very nice set of compiler tools. I'll be walking through the steps of implementing a compiler for Parrot from the ground up, using scheme as an example.

From the Parrot web site:

"Parrot is a virtual machine designed to efficiently compile and execute bytecode for dynamic languages. Parrot currently hosts a variety of language implementations in various stages of completion, including Tcl, Javascript, Ruby, Lua, Scheme, PHP, Python, Perl 6, APL, and a .NET bytecode translator. Parrot is not about parrots, though we are rather fond of them for obvious reasons."

http://www.parrot.org/

It seems that a class may have room 101 scheduled this semester so we may meet in 103 which is just across the hall from 101.

   Time/Date:
   ----------
   Wednesday, March 18, 2009
   7:10pm p.m.

   Place:
   ----------
   Room 101 or 103 in Lower Warnock Engineering Building

Directions/Parking:
Directions - [http://www.map.utah.edu/index.jsp?find=62]
Parking can be found just East of the WEB building and there is a big
lot just North of the Merrill Engineering building (MEB).
Parking is free after 6:00 (Based on the signs posted. Always check in
case this changes.)

Special thanks go to:
- U of U for providing the meeting room.
- Various Volunteers

16 Mar 2009 10:07pm GMT

Moodle is the most known Course Management Software. Universities around the world are using it as an elearning platform. You can manage students, teachers, courses, activities, ... One very easy way to install Moodle is to just copy a virtual appliance like the one I've made with Suse studio . Give it a try!

First time it boots, it configures the network. If you configure it as dhcp, login as root (linux as password) and use ifconfig to know the IP address. Once you know the network configuration, connect to it with your browser, and follow the instructions.

There is a mysql database configured on localhost you can use. Use user root and no password (leave it blank).

Download URL: Course_Management_System_moodle_applianc-0.0.1.vmx.tar.gz

16 Mar 2009 8:19pm GMT

• Some more progress with n#480868; using a specific hardcoded range hack I finally get range data into the Chart1 object. With the manual addition of sheet data for that range into unzip:xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml, from what I found in other sheets I constructed and added

  <cols>
    <col min="1" max="19"/>
    <col min="1" max="19"/>
  </cols>
  <sheetData>
    <row r="1">
      <c r="A1" t="n">
        <v>1</v>
      </c>
      <c r="B1" t="n">
        <v>19</v>
      </c>
    </row>
    ...
  </sheetData>
  

  
  
  
  which finally makes Chart1 show a graph (this is not the graph we should be seeing, this is showing made-up data). Nice to see how this all works, though.
• Get VPN up on openSUSE 11.1, thanks Kendy!
• Also today--of course--receive SLED 10 SP2 cd's [sure way to get vpn up].
• Install MSO 2007, thanks Fridrich!

16 Mar 2009 6:31pm GMT