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js_sebastian writes "According to an article on the New York Times, a historical cross-over has occurred because of the declining costs of solar vs the increasing costs of nuclear energy: solar, hardly the cheapest of renewable technologies, is now cheaper than nuclear, at around 16 cents per kilowatt hour. Furthermore, the NY Times reports that financial markets will not finance the construction of nuclear power plants unless the risk of default (which is historically as high as 50 percent for the nuclear industry) is externalized to someone else through federal loan guarantees or ratepayer funding. The bottom line seems to be that nuclear is simply not competitive, and the push from the US government to subsidize it seems to be forcing the wrong choice on the market."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

storagedude writes "The FTC wants a do-not-track mechanism that would allow Web users to opt out of online behavioral tracking, similar to the national do-not-call registry. The agency's preferred method for accomplishing this would be a browser-based tool that would give users the option of blocking data collection across the Web. The only problem is that the agency may not have the authority to require this, thanks to concerted lobbying efforts by the advertising industry. The first step may just be voluntary measures, to be released this fall."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This spring I read a course on Python in Vilnius University, Department of Mathematics and informatics. The course was not mandatory, which I suspect is one of the reasons why my students were quite a bright and motivated bunch. I began the course with a brief introduction to the Python language and the standard library, then dedicated a few lectures to Django and in the remainder I covered various libraries (GUI toolkits, Pygame) and techniques (testing, debugging, optimization).

One of the major tasks of the course (and the deciding factor in the final valuation) was to develop a project using Python. The students were given complete freedom over the topic of the project and the tools used, as long as Python was involved. The quality of the result varied, of course; had I given concrete tasks, the low bar would definitely have been higher. However, I am happy with how things turned out.

Probably the best-executed project was 1000 Online, an online multiplayer card game (see rules). It was developed by Vytautas Karpavičius. Vytautas apparently had prior experience with Python and Django, nevertheless, the quality of the app (and the code behind it) is impressive. Among the other projects, Gegute.lt, a Lithuanian clone of Reddit is still up and running. It's nothing too fancy, but looks quite clean for a university project. Other projects perhaps were not perfectly executed, but were very interesting conceptually. Jonas Keturka developed a bot (BitBucket) for the online strategy game Travian. Marius Damarackas developed a web-based guess-the-song game. He used YouTube for the song material and Last.fm (IIRC) to make you guess among similar songs, so that it would not be too easy. Andrius Chamentauskas developed a Puyo Pop clone (GitHub) with PyGame, complete with multiplayer and an AI. Paulius Budzinskas worked towards his course paper by developing a bacteria movement modelling and visualisation app (GitHub; Lithuanian only). David Abdurachmanov developed a spell-checker bot for WikiAnswers.com, with a really baroque and sophisticated architecture. I believe he has applied to Google Summer of Code with that project; I wonder how that is working out.

For reference, you can find links to all student repositories on GitHub/BitBucket in this list. Beware: some of them may be documented/commented in Lithuanian.

Another interesting effect of the course was that people started using Python in other related courses, for example in Mathematical Modelling and Numeric Methods. I even heard that the lecturer was impressed and expressed interest in learning Python. Another lecturer, this time a statistician, was interested in teaching and using SAGE at lab practice. Feeling such 'ripples' going through the department sure felt nice.

By the way, the university also offers lectures on Ruby, read by Saulius Grigaitis. I took some inspiration from him for the course form and content.

Like every year, the entire Lanedo Crowd is currently attending Guadec. If you’re around as well, we can strongly recommend attending one of the talks we’re giving on:

• Multitouching your apps
• Best Practices in Maintaining Vendor Specific GTK+ Branches
• Tracker’s place in the GNOME platform

Feel free to approach us for a chat or for handing over your CV. ;-)

Ok, this post was supposed to happen on Monday but due to real life, got postponed. Here it goes
Total bugs with patches: 2283 (+20)
Reviewed patches: 378 (+31)
—
Bugs with ‘patch-needswork’: 90 (+2)
Bugs with ‘patch-forwarded-upstream’: 164 (+19)
Bugs with ‘patch-forwarded-debian’: 51 (+8)
Bugs with ‘indicator-application’: 42 (-2)
Bugs with ‘patch-accepted-upstream’: 50 (+2)
Bugs with ‘patch-accepted-debian’: 12 (-1)
Bugs with ‘patch-rejected-upstream’: 16 (0)
Bugs with ‘patch-rejected-debian’: 2 (+1)
—
Last updated: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 08:05:25 +0200

Ubuntu Global Jam is coming along and we’d appreciate it if you reviewed patches during the UGJ. I’ll post more details in the coming days. Probably even have a more detailed set of instructions.

If you don’t want to install kbarcode try this:

apt-get install qrencode qrencode "http://www.debian.org/" -o - | display

Long days at GUADEC... Discussing with many teams about how they feel for September, with regads to their work, and the overall picture, and then release team meeting on Monday evening, where we reached a general agreement in favour of a delay. Then back to discussing this proposal, in the Hogeschool lobby, in the advisory board, getting more feedback, refining things.

More drafting of emails & slides on Wednesday morning and finally we took the opportunity of Vincent "Building a strong post-3.0 GNOME story" talk to get the word out.

So if you haven't seen it already: GNOME 3.0 in March 2011.

People are loving the release team, get your sticker at the infodesk (thanks Ryan)

This was not easy, and it was especially difficult for me as I have been running GNOME Shell for months, experiencing all the progress, also because I have been so insistent with so many people to have their modules ported to GTK+ 3.

Of course it's not wasted work (I'd feel so bad if it was), and we actually need to have more modules getting a --with-gtk={2.0,3.0} configure flag (look at this commit in gcalctool for an example), and ported to GSettings (the target date is sill September), etc.

There are still two days to discuss things here, if you have any comment just grab Vincent, Andre, Olav, Karsten, Fred or myself.

OLPC News has an article with the original headline (in fact I took the lazy way out and re-used it). It seems to be posted by ‘Guest Writer’ but the footer of the article says that “Satish Jha is the President and CEO, OLPC India” so I guess OLPC India is in some form involved with the content that is has.

It is an interesting piece. There’s another interesting thread on a mailing list here.

I would have expected it to talk more about the possibilities of doing OLPC stuff in India rather than becoming a somewhat neither-here-nor-there kind of non-committal response to the $35 device that the Ministry of HRD so loudly released. To understand what can bring about the adoption of OLPC India, one would have to probably go back to a post I wrote some time back.

The problem that was highlighted still remains. There is no community of any form,shape or sort around the OLPC in India when compared to OLPC efforts/initiatives and deployments in other countries (the nations that are so eloquently held up as shining examples of OLPC success). There is a significant lack of a downstream community of volunteers and participants and, more importantly, a lack of any sort of publicly discussed plans as to whether any educational institute would volunteer students for a while to keep the deployments going forward. Then of course there is the added discourse around availability of the actual XO hardware.

When I met Dr. Nagarjuna at GNUnify (that’s February this year), he indicated that he was actively looking at using the Sugar Desktop Environment on standard COTS desktops available much easily from vendors because there wasn’t much clarity about the how and when of the hardware availability. In fact, this has been a murmur that has been around for a while – what specifically is the value add of the hardware if the desktop environment is available via a standard Linux desktop/distribution. Which is where an active group of developers working on activities that would be useful in the context of the deployment is a good thing to have. And for that to happen, there needs to be work on building a downstream community – contributors who use the artifacts provided by OLPC and Sugar to develop their own thing.

A distinct advantage that OLPC/XO/Sugar has is brand recognition. Anyone who is peripherally involved in doing things around Free and Open Source Software in India know these names. They may not fully understand the depth of work or, the roadmap of the individual projects, but the name recognition is a jump-off point that should be utilized much more. For example, in a space like the College of Engineering Pune, which has a fairly active mailing list for FOSS related stuff, holding a 2 day event with the aim getting work started on new or, un-maintained activities, teaching the basics of testing/QA stuff would probably be more useful than just wishing about growing a community. I am fairly certain that there would be other institutions like CoEP where a day-long or, similar camps can be organized. Why aren’t they happening ? On that I have no clue.

Earlier this week, there were reports that large numbers of Modern Warfare 2 players on Steam were getting erroneously banned by Valve's Anti-Cheat software. While such claims are usually best taken with a grain of salt, the quantity and suddenness caused speculation that Valve's software wasn't operating correctly. A few days later, Valve president Gabe Newell sent out an email acknowledging that roughly 12,000 players had been inappropriately banned over the preceding two weeks. "The problem was that Steam would fail a signature check between the disk version of a DLL and a latent memory version. This was caused by a combination of conditions occurring while Steam was updating the disk image of a game." Valve reversed the bans and gave free copies of Left 4 Dead 2 to everyone who was affected.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

netbuzz writes "Some 230,000 New Zealanders have been informed that their personal information has apparently fallen into the hands of hackers who compromised the network of a locally famous food chain, Hell Pizza. The company says it suspects 'a rogue employee,' but one security expert says Hell's ordering portal is 'about 50 steps of fail.' Several New Zealand celebrities are among the victims and at least one is taking the matter in stride, musing: 'My Twitter has been hacked, my Facebook has been hacked and I'm pretty sure half of New Zealand has my phone number already. I have nothing bad to say about Hell.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I’m starting to get ready to go to DebConf in New York next week and I’m certainly excited to be given the opportunity to meet more of the Debian community. Because I don’t do much packaging I’ve not managed to get to know enough Debian people and I feel like projects such as http://art.debian.org/ are interesting and I would love to find others who are involved in similar things in that section of our extended community.

Anyone have any suggestions of what I should keep my eyes open for next week?

Do you want to be part of the Ubuntu News Team?  Do you want to be part of a long standing and growing part of the Ubuntu Community?  Looking for a place to contribute. Then the Ubuntu News Team is for you!

The Ubuntu News Team via the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter boasts of bringing more than 200 Issues full of what’s happening in and with Ubuntu and the community that surrounds it. This happens as we gather and summarize those happenings a week at a time to record as well as report how Ubuntu matures through all it’s growing pains and we want you to be part of the team!

First let me say we have some wonderful people who continue to donate many weekend hours to producing the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter but we could always use more help.

In a perfect world we would have all the summaries written by Friday afternoon and all that would need to happen on Sunday would be adding the Stats, Updates and Security portions along with the editing.  As it is right now myself and a few others spend upwards of 10-15 hours each Sunday to get UWN out the door. In the case of weekends when I’m traveling on Sundays then there are times when the newsletter often goes out a day or two later than our announced published dates. (Sorry about that by the way)

Take a look at Issue 200, 201, 202, and 203 to get an idea of what we are writing about and in the meantime let me tell you a little about each section and how you can help.

We often get asked about people writing original content for the newsletter.  The newsletter right now reports and summarizes posts that have been added other places.  However in the near future you will be able to submit original content to the Fridge.  - More about the Fridge in another post though.

LoCo News – Do you like to find out what is happening with all the LoCo Teams.  Would you like to report and summarize what the various teams are writing about?  This section is just as it sounds – we report on what the LoCo Teams are doing.

Launchpad News – This comes from the Launchpad (LP) Team blog.  Most of the time these posts are short enough to include in there entirety sometimes we have to summarize them, but Matthew Revell and the other LP team members usually write very clear and concise items to share with the world about what’s going on with LP.  So if you want to check for Launchpad news and be responsible for adding it to the news letter lets talk.

The Planet - This section is a little tricky but we’re all smart so it’s easy to figure out.  Depending on what people are writing about this could be added to The Planet, General Community News, Blogosphere, or even In Other News sections of the newsletter.  However If you feel like you want to search Planet Ubuntu each week and add the summaries to the planet section we can work it all out.

In The Press – This section is where we post those articles that have been written about Ubuntu in the Press.  This usually means those print publications that also have a web presence.  However there are some exceptions and again  - if it’s a good story then we can figure out where it needs to go

In the Blogosphere – these are blogs that are main stream but may not have a print publication, or commercial backing behind it.  However, blogs from the planet often get included here as well.

In Other News – this is about those items that are related to Ubuntu  - such as great Linux Stories, Canonical press releases, Canonical Partners who write about Ubuntu or other Corporations that discuss Ubuntu.  However, those really quirky and fun stories that are related to Ubuntu in some for or fashion that doesn’t really fit in any other area can go here as well.

Featured Podcasts – this is summaries of podcasts/videocasts such as the Ubuntu UK Podcast, Full Circle Magazine Podcasts, Ubuntu Podcasts, At Home with Jono Bacon Community Q&A UStream TV casts.  If there are other Ubuntu related casts that should be on the list we need to know that as well.  So if you are interested making sure these casts get included in the newsletter that would be great!

Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings – We try to offer the meeting minutes for the Development teams that are list on the Fridge Calendar.  While some teams don’t really have formal meeting minutes some teams do.  If you would like to verify the links each week and make sure we aren’t missing any teams then this the section for you!

Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu - If you are on one of these teams we could always use your help to make sure we include the current news about these derivatives as well.

Currently we have people working on summarizing links or posting to some of the areas but it is the same people giving up part of their precious weekends and while all of us enjoy and like being part of bringing this to the community – the quote – “many hands make light work” really rings true here and if we could get a couple dedicated people per section then people could trade off what weeks they can cover and make the whole process an even more enjoyable one for everyone.

We are also looking at adding an HTML version of the newsletter to be sent to folks via a mail service like mail chimp.  Right now we don’t have true matrix for what people are reading or clicking on 1st for the newsletter.  It would be nice to have those figures.  So if you are interested in being part of this test HTML newsletter please email me and let me know   – akgraner * ubuntu * com.  This will also allow us to include photo’s, videos and some formating that the current plain text version does not.  The plain text, and the wiki versions will still be available.  If you want to help with this process please let me know that as well.

I have to thank all those folks who currently give of their time to make the newsletter what it is – Lizar Siri, J. Scott Gwin, Penelope Stowe, Mike Holstein, Nigel Babu, Daniel Caleb, Jonathan Carter, Nathan Handler, and all the folks who continue to write about Ubuntu so we can bring you UWN each week!

Here are some links to help you learn even more about the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.  Thanks in advance for your continued support and help in making this an even better source of information for the busy Ubuntu user/contributor/developer.

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Wiki – https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/

Checklist and Editing Policy Wiki – https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/EditingPolicies

HowTo Guide for the Newsletter – https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/EditingPolicies/HowToEdit

Newsletter Publication Schedule – https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/Schedule

Section Guidelines and Suggestions – https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter/SectionGuidelines

We also have a googledoc, wiki page and ietherpad areas for you to work on the newsletter at as I am aware that some people prefer to work on UWN in places other than the wiki.  This also keeps editing conflicts down to a minimum on Sundays when everyone is working together on UWN.

So stop by #ubuntu-news on freenode or email me and lets get you started on your way to contributing to UWN.  Looking forward to hearing from you!  Many Thanks!

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