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An anonymous reader writes "The MariaDB blog is reporting a small change to the license covering the man pages to MySQL. Until recently, the governing license was GPLv2. Now the license reads, 'This software and related documentation are provided under a license agreement containing restrictions on use and disclosure and are protected by intellectual property laws. Except as expressly permitted in your license agreement or allowed by law, you may not use, copy, reproduce, translate, broadcast, modify, license, transmit, distribute, exhibit, perform, publish, or display any part, in any form, or by any means. Reverse engineering, disassembly, or decompilation of this software, unless required by law for interoperability, is prohibited.'"

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Ubuntu Ohio held a business meeting on Tuesday, June 18, 2013. A few items were considered but due to a low turnout final actions were not necessarily taken. One item, finding a deputy to sign the Ohio Linux Fest table contract on behalf of the Leader, has been bound over to the mailing list for further consideration by the community at large.

The log of the meeting with slides interleaved can be found on the Ubuntu Wiki Infrastructure at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OhioTeam/IRC20130618 and the team can be found online at http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/ubuntu-us-ohio/. Voicemail can be left for the LoCo Leader via SIP call at sip:1580@sip.sdf.org.

colinneagle writes "A recent GigaOm report discusses Verizon's 'peering' practices, which involves the exchange of traffic between two bandwidth providers. When peering with bandwidth provider Cogent starts to reach capacity, Verizon reportedly isn't adding any ports to meet the demand, Cogent CEO Dave Schaffer told GigaOm. 'They are allowing the peer connections to degrade,' Schaffer said. 'Today some of the ports are at 100 percent capacity.' Why would Verizon intentionally disrupt Netflix video streaming for its customers? One possible reason is that Verizon owns a 50% stake in Redbox, the video rental service that contributed to the demise of Blockbuster (and more recently, a direct competitor to Netflix in online streaming). If anything threatens the future of Redbox, whose business model requires customers to visit its vending machines to rent and return DVDs, its Netflix's instant streaming service, which delivers the same content directly to their screens."

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I don’t consider myself a programmer but a sort of power user, I’m in love with the cli linux interface and everytime I can automatizate repetive tasks I do it. That’s how I ended writting 60~ scripts (most of them for fun, others for sysadmin work), while doing it I noticed a pattern, I used to cheat and copy some part of other scripts to finish faster so I started to write functions and put them in a lib file. After a while it has been increasing and I thought it would be a good idea to share it and see if it can be useful to someone else, so here it is.

• sh/lib

If you can improve current functions or add new ones your contribution is welcome (just branch and push back), beware that current code may hurt your eyes, you’ve been warned. Have fun n_n/

Previously, my (this) domain used Google Analytics to keep track of visitor (all of your) statistics and data, but I recently transitioned to a free & open source solution: Piwik –in which I control all the data.

Piwik: The Leading Self-Hosted, Decentralized, Open Source Web Analytics Platform

While not as pretty as the Google solution, it certainly makes up for it with an abundance of features –a lot of which I am still familiarizing myself with– a list of which you can find on their site.

Hailing itself as the “leading self-hosted, decentralized, open source web analytics platform”, Piwik was conceived as an open web analytics platform (and an alternative to Google Analytics), priding itself on being open source and privacy centric.

Installation

Once I downloaded, extracted and scp-ied to my server the set-up was relatively simple.

wget http://builds.piwik.org/latest.zip unzip latest.zip && cd latest/piwik scp -r <directory/of/piwik> <username> @re.mote.ip.address:"</remote/directory/for/piwik/"

Deployment was essentially the same as spinning up a WordPress instance (configuring an SQL database, and following the provided setup wizard) which they must be aware of as they have a “5 minute installation” also.

Juju Charm?

I’m not that great a web wizard, but if any of you Juju folks read this, Piwik might be a viable charm, no? Given WordPress is one I assume it is possible to do.

Anyway, you can find more info on their site: piwik.org

The post Switching to Open Source Analytics appeared first on Sam Hewitt | Blog.

Craefter writes "It seems that the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset caught the attention of investors after its showing at E3 this year. Spark Capital and Matrix Partners were able to push $16 million at Oculus VR in the hopes that the product will live up to the hype. The HD unit looks a bit more slick than the ski-goggles-with-a-tablet-glued-to-it prototype, but the device would look even more appealing if the next-gen consoles would commit to supporting it. (We all know how well the PS3's 'wave-stick' did as an afterthought.) That said, major titles like the 9-year-old Half-Life 2 and the 6-year-old Team Fortress 2 are getting full support for the device. Hopefully some developers are looking into support for the Oculus Rift as a launch feature, rather than an addition years after the fact. IA bit like the EAX standard from Soundblaster. That worked out well too."

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An anonymous reader writes "Martin Gräßlin, maintainer of the KWin window manager, writes an informative blog post about his experiences with the less favorable pockets of the Free Software community. Quoting: 'Years ago I had a clear political opinion. I was a civil-rights activist. I appreciated freedom and anything limiting freedom was a problem to me. Freedom of speech was one of the most important rights for me. I thought that democracy has to be able to survive radical or insulting opinions. In a democracy any opinion should have a right even if it's against democracy. I had been a member of the lawsuit against data preservation in Germany. I supported the German Pirate Party during the last election campaign because of a new censorship law. That I became a KDE developer is clearly linked to the fact that it is a free software community. But over the last years my opinion changed. Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor certain comments and encourage others to censor, too. What was able to change my opinion in such a radical way? After all I still consider civil rights as extremely important. The answer is simple: Fanboys and trolls.'"

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The Washington Post reports that Google has filed a motion challenging the gag orders preventing it from disclosing information about the data requests it receives from government agencies. The motion cites the free speech protections of the First Amendment. "FISA court data requests typically are known only to small numbers of a company’s employees. Discussing the requests openly, either within or beyond the walls of an involved company, can violate federal law." From the filing (PDF): "On June 6, 2013, The Guardian newspaper published a story mischaracterizing the scope and nature of Google's receipt of and compliance with foreign intelligence surveillance requests. ... In light of the intense public interest generated by The Guardian's and Post's erroneous articles, and others that have followed them, Google seeks to increase its transparency with users and the public regarding its receipt of national security requests, if any. ... Google's reputation and business has been harmed by the false or misleading reports in the media, and Google's users are concerned by the allegation. Google must respond to such claims with more than generalities. ... In particular, Google seeks a declaratory judgment that Google as a right under the First Amendment to publish ... two aggregate unclassified numbers: (1) the total number of FISA requests it receives, if any; and (2) the total number of users or accounts encompassed within such requests."

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onyxruby writes "In a move that will remind many of Apple in the '80s, Microsoft is going to start dumping Surface RT computers to educational institutions. In an effort to try to gain mindshare for their struggling Surface RT platform, Microsoft is giving away 10,000 Surface RTs to teachers through the International Society for Technology in Education. They're also preparing to offer $199 Surface RTs to K12 and higher education institutions. The strategy of flooding the educational market was quite successful for Apple. Unfortunately for Microsoft, today's computers require management and the Surface RT presents significant management challenges in terms of the inability to join the computer to a domain or available management tools."

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Nerval's Lobster writes "When hurricane Sandy pummeled New York City last fall, it left a sizable percentage of the metropolis without electricity. Residents had trouble keeping their phones and tablets charged, and often walked across whole neighborhoods to reach zones with power. Come the next disaster, at least a few citizens could communicate a little easier thanks to 25 solar-powered charging stations going up around the city. The stations—known as 'Street Charge' — are the result of a partnership between AT&T, Brooklyn design studio Pensa, and portable solar-power maker Goal Zero (with approval by the city's Parks Department). The first unit will deploy in Brooklyn's Fort Green Park on June 18, followed in short order by others in Union Square, Central Park, the Rockaways, and other locations. Each station incorporates lithium-ion batteries in addition to solar panels; charging a phone to full capacity could take as long as two hours, but the time necessary for a partial charge is much shorter. But a couple of charging stations also won't help very much if half the city is without power: In order to help mitigate the effects of the next hurricane, New York City major Michael Bloomberg has put forward a $20 billion plan for seawalls, levees, and dozens of other improvements. 'Sandy exposed weaknesses in the city's telecommunications infrastructure — including the location of critical facilities in areas that are susceptible to flooding,' reads one section of the plan's accompanying report. The city will harden the system 'by increasing the accountability of telecommunications providers to invest in resiliency and by using new regulatory authority to enable rapid recovery after extreme weather events.'"

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adeelarshad82 writes "For the fourth year running, PCMag sent drivers out on U.S. roads to test the nation's Fastest Mobile Networks. Using eight identical Samsung phones, the drivers tested out eight separate networks for four major carriers across 30 cities evenly spread across six regions. Using Sensorly's 2013 software, a broad suite of tests were conducted every three minutes: a 'ping' to test network latency, multi-threaded HTTP upload and download tests including separate 'time to first byte' measures, a 4MB single-threaded file download, a 2MB single-threaded file upload, the download of a 1MB Web page with 70 elements, and 100kbps and 500kbps UDP streams designed to simulate streaming media. Nearly 90,000 data cycles later, the data not only revealed the fastest networks (AT&T) and the most consistent (Verizon), but also other interesting points. The tests recorded the fastest download speed (66.11 Mbits/sec) in New Orleans and the best average in Austin (27.25 Mbits/sec), both for AT&T's LTE network. The tests also found T-Mobile's HSPA network to have the worst Average-Time-To-First-Byte, even when compared with AT&T HSPA network. Also according to the tests, Sprint's LTE network didn't even come close to competing with other LTE networks, to the point that in some cities its LTE network speed averaged less than T-Mobile's HSPA network speed."

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We talked with Peter Wayner about autonomous cars on June 5. He had a lot to say on this topic, to the point where we seem to be doing a whole series of interviews with him because autonomous cars might have a lot of unanticipated effects on our lives and our economy. Heck, Peter has enough to say about driverless cars to fill a book, Future Ride, which we hope he finishes editing soon because we (Tim and Robin) want to read it. While that book is brewing, watch for some thoughts on how autonomous cars (and delivery vans) might affect us in the near future.

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We are working on a powerful vision with Ubuntu; to build a convergent Operating System that runs on phones, tablets, desktops, and TVs. A core part of this vision is that this is a platform and ecosystem that you can influence, improve, and be a part of, significantly more-so than our competitors.

One consistent piece of feedback we have seen from carriers and handset manufacturers is a a greater desire for platform competition and participation on helping to shape and define the ecosystem. A key goal for Ubuntu is to satisfy these needs.

Today we launched the the Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group (CAG) which includes Deutsche Telekom, Everything Everywhere, Telecom Italia, Korea Telecom, LG UPlus, Portugal Telecom, and SK Telecom as founding members. Wide industry participation in the group will help us to prioritize the delivery of new Ubuntu features, and grow an ecosystem of software, services and devices that meets that need.

The CAG provides regular meetings that take place regularly and typically include a briefing by Canonical or a partner company, followed by feedback from carriers. Members can bring domain specialists to calls for each relevant topic covered. Topics planned for discussion in the CAG forum include:

• Differentiation for OEMs and operators.
• Developer ecosystems and application portability.
• HTML5 standards, performance and compatibility.
• Marketplaces for apps, content and services.
• Revenue share models for publishers, operators, and OEMs.
• Payment mechanisms and standards.
• Platform fragmentation.
• Consumer and enterprise market segments and positioning.

CAG members can also launch Ubuntu devices before non-members in local markets. The first two launch partners will be selected from within the group, with the next wave following six months later; non-members will face a substantial wait to gain access to the platform. Members will have early knowledge of silicon, as well as OEM and ODM partners involved in the Ubuntu mobile initiative.

The Carrier Advisory Group is chaired independently of Canonical by David Wood, who has 25 years’ experience in the mobile industry, including leadership roles at Psion, Symbian and Accenture. He has wide experience with collaborative advisory groups, and twice served on the board of directors of the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA).

David has this to say about the CAG:

“The mobile industry still needs an independent platform that enables innovation and differentiation. That platform is Ubuntu. The Carrier Advisory Group will have the opportunity to influence the Ubuntu roadmap, and take full advantage of the potential this emerging platform.”

If you are a carrier interested in helping shape Ubuntu’s mobile strategy and being part of the CAG, click here.

ananyo writes "Physicists have resurrected a particle that may have existed in the first hot moments after the Big Bang. Arcanely called Zc(3900), it is the first confirmed particle made of four quarks, the building blocks of much of the Universe's matter (abstract one, abstract two). Until now, observed particles made of quarks have contained only three quarks (such as protons and neutrons) or two quarks (such as the pions and kaons found in cosmic rays)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week we held the first meeting of the new Ubuntu Carrier Advisory Group, which helps us figure out how best to shape Ubuntu to meet the needs of the mobile industry.

It was very exciting!

We mapped out our approach to the key question I’ve been asked by every carrier we’ve met so far: how can we accommodate differentiation, without fragmenting the platform for developers? We described the range of diversity we think we can support initially, received some initial feedback from carriers participating immediately, and I’m looking forward to the distilled feedback we’ll get on the topic in the next call.

CAG members get a period of exclusivity in their markets. We’ll close the CAG to new members shortly.  We don’t need a very large group; just a few clear-thinking and thoughtful partners who have experience introducing new platforms. And with this initial group of members, we are all set to get really good insight for a really great launch next year.

Next week I’ll be in Shanghai for the GSMA’s Mobile Asia Expo, and looking forward to a round of in-person meetings with our advisory group. Mostly we’ll be meeting by telephone and video conference, given the very global nature of the CAG, but there are a few events which attract critical mass of attendees in the industry where we’ll arrange a CAG face-to-face as well.

Thanks to everyone who is participating in the project – Ubuntu’s touch experience is really coming along in leaps and bounds. I love hearing about the new devices to which it’s been ported, or new apps getting started. This is the frontier for personal computing, and we want free software leading the way. You all make that possible.

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Meeting minutes.

Agenda

20130618 Meeting Agenda

ARM Status

Q/master: lp1176977 (“XFS instability on armhf under load”) – passed all xfs
tests (tested both on arm and x86), but there’s still one patch missing (and
waiting to enter linux-next for 3.11).
*/highbank: lp1182637(“cpu_offlining fails to run on ARM”) – indeed, it was a
firmware issue: updating the node to the last available firmware, made cpu
hotplugging work – lp1185669 (“CPU cores offline and can’t be brought back up on
ARM Server card”) is probably a dup.
R/master: lp1171582(“hvc0 getty causes random hangs”), seems like i can detect
the presence of a jtag console (DBGAUTHSTATUS NSNE bit) and thus attach or not
the xen console to it, i’ll give it a try.

Release Metrics and Incoming Bugs

Release metrics and incoming bug data can be reviewed at the following link:

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/kt-meeting.txt

Milestone Targeted Work Items    apw    client-1303-power-consumption-testing    1 work item          foundations-1305-arm64-bringup    1 work item       ogasawara    foundations-1305-kernel    1 work item          mobile-power-management    1 work item       sforshee    foundations-1303-phablet-kernel-maintenance    1 work item       smb    servercloud-s-virtstack    1 work item   

Status: Saucy Development Kernel

Our Saucy unstable branch has been rebased to the latest v3.10-rc6
upstream kernel. We unfortunately have still not uploaded yet. We are
still awaiting fixups for a few DKMS packages. We hope to upload by EOW
or early next week. In the mean time we have gone ahead and rebased our
Saucy master branch to the recent v3.9.6 upstream stable kernel and
uploaded.
For our phablet kernels we have been investigating some kernel size
constraints and the modules which we have enabled and built in.
Important upcoming dates:
Thurs June 27 – Alpha 1 (opt in)

Status: CVE’s

== 2013-06-18 (7 days) ==
Currently we have 62 CVEs on our radar, with 3 CVEs added and 2 CVEs retired in the last week.
See the CVE matrix for the current list:

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/cve/pkg/ALL-linux.html

  Overall the backlog has increased slightly this week:

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/status/cve-metrics.txt

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/cve/pkg/CVE-linux.txt

Status: Stable, Security, and Bugfix Kernel Updates – Raring/Quantal/Precise/Lucid/Hardy

Status for the main kernels, until today (Jun. 18):

• Lucid – Beginning prep;
• Precise – Beginning prep;
• Quantal – Beginning prep;
• Raring – Beginning prep;
  Current opened tracking bugs details:

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/kernel-sru-workflow.html

  For SRUs, SRU report is a good source of information:

• http://people.canonical.com/~kernel/reports/sru-report.html

  Future stable cadence cycles:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/RaringRingtail/ReleaseInterlock

Open Discussion or Questions? Raise your hand to be recognized

No open discussions.

Qedward writes with an excerpt at TechWorld about a new project from Jon "Maddog" Hall, which is about to launch in Brazil: "The vision of Project Cauã is to promote more efficient computing following the thin client/server model, while creating up to two million privately-funded high-tech jobs in Brazil, and another three to four million in the rest of Latin America. Hall explained that Sao Paolo in Brazil is the second largest city in the Western Hemisphere and has about twelve times the population density of New York City. As a result, there are a lot of people living and working in very tall buildings. Project Cauã will aim to put a server system in the basement of all of these tall buildings and thin clients throughout the building, so that residents and businesses can run all of their data and applications remotely."

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angry tapir writes "Although software-driven high-frequency trading has got a pretty bad rap (being blamed for the so-called 'Flash Crash' in 2012 for example) Australia's chief financial regulator ASIC says that, in Australia at least, it's not cause for concern. After an in-depth study of HFT in Australian markets, ASIC decided to hold off on previously considered regulatory changes (such as implementing a 'pause' for some small trades)."

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First time accepted submitter ramorim writes "In honor of the Chemist Day, celebrated in Brazil on this day June 18, 2013, I publish a proposal for a new Periodic Table of Elements (Original, in Portugese) in a modular spiral-hexagonal model, with continuity and connectivity for all constituent units of the matter. This proposal indeed permits to extrapolate the hypothetical elements of the G-block and H-block in the same model."

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illiteratehack writes "NASA has selected a 39-year-old chief technology officer to become a trainee astronaut. Josh Cassada is the current chief technology officer and co-founder of Quantum Opus, a firm that specialises in photonics. Cassada is one of eight individuals selected by NASA from 6,100 applicants for astronaut training, though what their future mission may be has yet to be revealed." Of the astronaut trainees selected, four of them are women — a new record.

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