Planet UBUNTU

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.

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!

The Kubuntu team have remodeled their abode, with astounding results.

many thanks to Ofir Klinger of the Kubuntu website team for his hard work making this happen!

Now I have to try and do some updated branding for kubuntuforums as it now looks even more dated than it did before

=-=-=-=-=
Powered by Blogilo

Filed under: planetubuntu

Just noticed the Kubuntu website, www.kubuntu.org, has been revised and updated to its new look.

So fire up your favorite browser and check it out

not sure if you ever met this situation, but it happens to me all the time! I don't like helping on Windows stuff, mainly because it's harder to check what the problem/fix it.

Thanks for lightpriest for sending me this nice comics

Dor.

שיתוף עם אחרים:

BLUA stands for Bangladesh Linux Users Alliance, a LUG formed in 2002 primarily to promote the use of GNU/Linux in the country. We’ve come a long way, and today we officially represent Ubuntu and Fedora in Bangladesh as well as working as the local affiliate of Creative Commons.

We’ve started working on to give a complete face-lift to our website, and as a part of it we’ve come up with a new logo for our organisation. Since this blog post will get aggregated on Planet Ubuntu and Planet Fedora, I’d like to take this opportunity to get feedbacks about the logo from all of you. There are some brilliant graphic designers in our community and I’ll sure with all of your inputs we can improve the logo! Please let me know what you honestly think about it, we’ll take all your comments and suggestions in account.

The logo was created by Adnan Quaium using Inkscape, and the font used comes with a “free for commercial use” license.

This week’s update brings:

TestDrive GTK Front-end

• Minor bugfixes and UI Improvements.
• Support to work with ISOs on the Ubuntu Releases repo (http://releases.ubuntu.com)
• Other ISOs: Add list to UI, to display all the available Other ISO’s. Thanks to this, there’s also support to delete ISO’s in the list.
• Preferences: Improve selection of Ubuntu Release, as well as be able to select Repository from which to Obtain the ISOs.

Unfortunately, these new changes are not yet available in the PPA given that I’m merging the TestDrive Front-end source with TestDrive’s source and new packages will become available in the next couple days to start the Testing, in preparation to the upload to Maverick. So, stay tuned.

Several buildings, including the Maison de Bonneterie as seen from the tram stop 'Gravenstraat', near the 'Le Paris' cafe of the Canonical party.

Today was the first day of the main GUADEC conference and this meant that it was extra busy at the registration desk with many people checking in today. The day was marked by great talks, the first occurrence of WebM streaming for any event and the arrival of some more t-shirts.

I almost overslept this morning because I had worked until 3.40 in the night to make the streaming on the website ready for the first day of streaming. Fortunately Mart was there to wake me up and we made it to the venue just before eight o’ clock, in time.

Almost straight away the first attendees started to arrive and some of them still had to register. There are still some people not registered. We would ask them all to register still, so we can provide them with the necessary information and swag, but also for the municipality of The Hague, which sponsors us for every foreign attendee we have registered. (That is also why bringing the ticket is so important.)

I spent the morning trying to awaken a bit more, doing the regular tidying up, moving stuff, searching for and talking to people, answering questions and looking after the website. The afternoon I spent manning the camera of the Video Live Stream 1, in ‘Paris’, which gave me the opportunity to listen to some talks. I really liked the provocative humour of the ‘State of GNOME’ talk. No patronising, religion doesn’t need any more protection than other fantasies.
That was actually my day. Time does go quickly, but it seems a lot quicker when you’re writing about days you do loads of small things.

T-shirts
Yes, again t-shirts problems. We had hoped to have solved the t-shirt problems today, but unfortunately we haven’t been able to do so. Summary of today’s progress:

• There are no separate speakers’ shirt, they get a regular conference shirt;
• We have run out of men’s M, L and XL definitely;
• Tomorrow we will, at long last, have the women’s sizes and the volunteer shirts;
• Leftovers of the volunteer shirts, if any, will be handed out to the other people still waiting for their shirt;
• Unfortunately the logo of one of our sponsors, Igalia, is still missing from the t-shirts, after the company we ordered the shirts managed to get the logo dropped from the complete template we provided.

Looking at Riviervismarkt from tram stop 'Gravenstraat', near the 'Le Paris' cafe of the Canonical party.

Network
The network isn’t using VPN or any other kind of tunnelling after all, as far as I’m aware. Instead we’re using Google’s public DNS servers. Privacy pundits might not be happy with this, but then privacy pundits would be very stupid privacy pundits if they wouldn’t be using their own tunnel at conferences anyway.

The scenario is,

i have created a pdf file for my personal document, and then to make it safe i put a password so anyone else cant read the file except myself.

After a month later, I've forgot the password but i want to read the file as soon as possible.

here it comes, pdfcrack! ( also available on win32 )


Mission: recover the password
target: piju.pdf's password
weapon: pdfcrack http://pdfcrack.sourceforge.net/
estimation time: depends on the length of the password
situation reports: no text, just photos





status: password recovered, mission accomplished, all units please stand down :-)

I moved back home to Limerick from Dublin and I thought I’d start up an Ubuntu hour here.  On Thursday 29th July, we’re going to have the first one down here.

The idea of an Ubuntu hour is to just chat, meet new people, put a face to a name and talk about Ubuntu, Open Source, other distros what ever you really fancy.  Just makes a change from doing it via mailing list/IRC.  Everyone is welcome, you don’t have to be a user of Ubuntu. We encourage discussion and interaction, but if you just want to come along and listen you’re more than welcome. You can sign up using the LoCo Directory

WHEN: Thursday 29th July

WHERE: Absolute Hotel Limerick  in the Bar area

TIME: Pop in from 6pm onwards

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bracjun/1968911296/in/set-72157603094085314/

Although you should almost never have a decent rationale for doing this, at some point I needed to do it, and documentation was scarce. The basic idea is we have a website – https://www.securewebsite.com and our clients cannot use https (ssl), so we need to decrypt it to http for them.

In order to accomplish this, Apache 2.x is needed, along with mod_ssl and mod_proxy. Here is the magic:

<VirtualHost virtualhostipaddress:443> SSLProxyEngine on #SSLProxyCACertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl/google.crt SSLEngine on RequestHeader set Front-End-Https "On" ServerName testing #SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL SSLCipherSuite ALL:!ADH:!EXPORT56:RC4+RSA:+HIGH:+MEDIUM:+LOW:+SSLv2:+EXP:+eNULL SSLCertificateFile /etc/apache2/ssl.crt SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/apache2/ssl.key #LogLevel debug ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/ssl_proxy_error.log CustomLog /var/log/apache2/ssl_proxy_access.log combined <Proxy *> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> ProxyVia On ProxyRequests Off ProxyPreserveHost Off ProxyPass / https://www.securewebsite.com:443/ ProxyPassReverse / https://www.securewebsite.com:443/ #SetEnvIf User-Agent ".*MSIE.*" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "MSIE [1-4]" nokeepalive ssl-unclean-shutdown downgrade-1.0 force-response-1.0 BrowserMatch "MSIE [5-9]" ssl-unclean-shutdown </VirtualHost>

Obviously replace virtualhostipaddress with the ip you want to bind to and securewebsite.com with the actual website.

No related posts.

As promised, an explanation.

This is the “Command Not Found” runner. For those of you who may not be familiar, command-not-found is a magical little command line tool that gets activated when the shell cannot find the binary you wish to launch. It has a database of binaries and package names, and can check to see which package contains the binary you tried to type. If it finds one, it tells you which package to install to get this binary.

But I find that I use KRunner for launching my stuff more often these days. On new installs, I instinctually go to KRunner and try to type in the name of my favorite app.  But then I get nothing; realizing that this is a new install and I have yet to install this piece of software. I mumble, backspace, and type in the name of my favorite package manager. I then type in the name of the application I wanted (again) and mark it for installation.

…but wouldn’t it be nice if I didn’t have to? I don’t anymore, thanks to the Command Not Found runner. I was browsing the KDE brainstorm section of the KDE forums and saw this idea. I thought it was neat and actually feasible, so yesterday I sat down and hacked. By the end of the day, the installer/command not found runner was born!

Here’s how it works: Whenever KRunner cannot find an application via KService, the Command Not Found runner takes what you typed and tells the command-not-found utility to find which package has that program. If command-not-found finds anything, the runner returns a result. Click that result, and it starts qapt-batch, telling it to install that package. You just have to enter your password, and qapt-batch will do all the rest. Neat!

As an added bonus, if the runner detects that the program you are trying to run has a different name than the package it is in, it gives a nice, helpful little subtext that explains that the amarok package contains “amarokpkg”, even though the package isn’t named “amarokpkg”.

A few notes based on the comments my mysterious post last night introduced:

• This is not meant to replace traditional package management. It is just a little convenience feature that can only ever install things that aren’t installed. It will never do anything more than that package management-wise.
• Going back to the first point, it is (in general) a good thing that you have to know the exact name of the program to get this to show up. It limits the usecase of this service to those who forgot that they hadn’t installed $app yet, and will have a very small likelihood of showing up for somebody who is not trying to run $app. There would really be no reason to not enable this by default, especially since KRunner is somewhat of a hidden feature in the first place…
• The KRunner plugin can be turned off.
• It does not do any package management itself. It leaves the installation to a real batch installer program.
• If the user does not have the privileges to install packages, it will not show up.

At the moment, it only works on Debian-based systems, since it requires the Debian command-not-found program. Sorry ’bout that. I just don’t see a way that this could be done in a cross-distro manner right now… It was simple to code, however, so it shouldn’t be too much trouble to make one for another distro, if you know how their command-not-found works (if they have one, of course)

Going back to the KDE Brainstorm post, it is definitely feasible to add this to Kickoff. It does require a one-line patch, however, so that pretty much limits it to people who want to patch kickoff themselves to get the runner to show results there… It would be neat if we could make certain “categories” of runners, and then have kickoff configured to only show the results of certain categories. At the moment there’s a whitelist that you have to add to before they’ll show.

I’ll try to get packages up in the next few days, but due to my impending vacation I don’t know how successful I’ll be in actually getting around to it. You can grab the source here if you want to. It should just need kdelibs5-dev to build.

While I have made good progress on many of my Debian goals for this year, it’s not the case for the goal number #1: translating my Debian book into English. The picture on the left is the cover of the current French version based on Debian Lenny (450 pages). But the translation would be based on the next edition that we’re currently preparing and it’s based on Debian Squeeze of course! We have already translated the table of contents so that you can get an idea of what’s in the book. Note that many parts of the book apply to Ubuntu as well.

It’s quite difficult for Roland and me to allocate several months of our life to such a huge task without any income in that period and without knowing if our book will sell enough to cover for the time invested. For those reasons, we’re considering using a service like kickstarter.com or ulule.com or yooook.net to get this project funded.

If you don’t know those services, they allow you to present your project and to collect pledges so that you can safely complete your project. The money pledged is distributed only if the total amount pledged exceeds the minimal funding level (set by the project creator). Furthermore you can select nice rewards depending on the amount of money pledged.

To make things even more exciting we are ready to publish the book under a DFSG-compatible license at the sole condition that we reach 25 000€ of donations. That might look like a lot but in fact it’s only 5€ donated by 5000 persons and then everybody benefits! And for the authors, you have to remove ~10% of fees taken by the funding service (including card processing fees), 16.4% VAT, 9% social taxes and if you consider that the project represents a minimum of 6 months of work, that ends up to at most 2850 €/month. We believe this to be reasonable.

The next step for us is to pick the service to use and setup the fundraising. We need your input. Please answer a few questions by filling this form.

In all cases, we will have those rewards and probably more:

• the book in digital format (PDF, HTML, ePub) (between 5€ and 10€, price not fixed yet)
• the book as paperback (between 35€ and 50€, price not fixed yet)
• the paperback book with a dedication by (one of) the authors

A few considerations about the various services: Kickstarter.com is a great service but it’s restricted to US-residents so it’s complicated for us to use that service since we’re French (and live in France) and the supporters need to have an Amazon (payments) account. Ulule.com is open to anyone for project creation but uses a paypal API to deal with the pledge mechanism and thus imposes that all supporters have a paypal account. Is that requirement likely to scare you away? Yooook.net is specialized in liberation fundraising but the interface is not very polished, they don’t offer (many) social features nor do they give a public listing of the projects hosted.

The choice is difficult and thus we’re seeking your feedback to make the right one, take a few minutes and answer our questions: click here to go to the form.

Thank you for your help and please spread the word so that we get enough answers to have meaningful results.

Update: it has been brought to my attention that kickstarter requires an Amazon (payments) account. I fixed my article and the form to document this.

I have also been asked what license we’re going to use. It’s likely to be dual-licensed GPL2+ / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

3 comments | Support my work

German text below. / Deutscher Text weiter unten.

The next part of my mini series about Taskwarrior is about dates, dateformat, due dates and wait dates.

Previous part

The standard date format is m/d/Y. That means the following:

m minimal-digit month, for example 1 or 12
d minimal-digit day, for example 1 or 30
y two-digit year, for example 09
D two-digit day, for example 01 or 30
M two-digit month, for example 01 or 12
Y four-digit year, for example 2009
a short name of weekday, for example Mon or Wed
A long name of weekday, for example Monday or Wednesday
b short name of month, for example Jan or Aug
B long name of month, for example January or August
V weeknumber, for example 03 or 37
H two-digit hour, for example 03 or 11
N two-digit minutes, for example 05 or 42
S two-digit seconds, for example 07 or 47

And, you guess it, it is configurable. Since I am not familiar with the American way of printing dates, I modified the dateformat for everything to YMD. This can be done in ~/.taskrc

$ grep ^dateformat ~/.taskrc
dateformat=YMD # Preferred input and display date format
dateformat.holiday=YMD # Preferred input date format for holidays
dateformat.report=YMD # Preferred display date format for reports
dateformat.annotation=YMD-HN # Preferred display date format for annotations

With this in mind, you can set dates to your tasks. "due" manages the due date of your task, "wait" edits a task to not show up in lists before that specific day.

task shell # makes it a lot easier since you do not need to type the word "task" before any command
task> add Pay rent
Created task 1
task> list

ID Project Pri Due Active Age Description
1 8 secs Pay rent

1 task
task> 1 due:20100731
Modified 1 task
task> list

ID Project Pri Due Active Age Description
1 20100731 1 min Pay rent

1 task
task> quit

Did you notice that the color changed?

I want to do that task tomorrow and I do not want to be bothered with seeing it before tomorrow.

task> 1 wait:20100729
Modified 1 task
task> list
No matches.

Apart from using abolut dates, you can use relative ones as well.

task ... due:today
task ... due:yesterday
task ... due:tomorrow
task ... due:23rd # next occuring 23rd
task ... due:eow # end of week
task ... due:eom # end of month
task ... due:eoy # end of year
task ... due:fri # next occuring Friday
task ... due:wed # next occuring Wednesday (not today!)

The next version of taskwarrior will have the "start of" commands as well.

With this very basic knowledge you can already do a lot of work, I will talk/write about recurring tasks later on.

task add due:20100731 wait:20100724 Pay rent
task add due:20100831 wait:20100824 Pay rent
task add due:20101225 wait:eom Buy christmas presents

To be continued ...

Deutscher Text. / German text.

In diesem zweiten Teil über Taskwarrior geht es um Daten (Termine), Datumsformate, Zieltermine und Wartetermin.

Letzte Episode

Das Standard-Datumsformat ist m/d/Y, was das folgende bedeutet:

m minimale Ziffern für den Monat, beispielsweise 1 oder 12
d minimale Ziffern für den Tag, beispielsweise 1 or 30
y zwei Ziffern für das Jahr, beispielsweise 09
D zwei Ziffern für den Tag, beispielsweise 01 oder 30
M zwei Ziffern für den Monat, beispielsweise 01 oder 12
Y four-digit year, beispielsweise 2009
a Kurzname des Wochentags in englischer Sprache, beispielsweise Mon oder Wed
A Langname des Wochentags in englischer Sprache, beispielsweise Monday oder Wednesday
b Kurzname des Monats (Englisch), beispielsweise Jan oder Aug
B Langname des Monats (Englisch), beispielsweise January oder August
V Wochennummer, beispielsweise 03 oder 37
H die Stunde mit zwei Ziffern, beispielsweise 03 oder 11
N die Minute mit zwei Ziffern, beispielsweise 05 oder 42
S die Sekunde mit zwei Ziffern, beispielsweise 07 oder 47

Und, wie Ihr wahrscheinlich vermutet, ist das konfigurierbar. Da ich mit dem amerikanischen Datumsformat nichts anfangen kann, habe ich es auf YMD gesetzt (D.M.Y) wäre auch möglich. Das kann in der Datei ~/.taskrc eingestellt werden.

$ grep ^dateformat ~/.taskrc
dateformat=YMD # präferiertes Ein- und Ausgabedatumsformat
dateformat.holiday=YMD # Bevorzugtes Eingabedatumsformat für Urlaub und Feiertage
dateformat.report=YMD # Bevorzugtes Ausgabedatumsformat für Reports
dateformat.annotation=YMD-HN # Bevorzugtes Ausgabedatumsformat für Anmerkungen

Mit dem im Hinterkopf könnt Ihr Daten an Eure Aufgaben hängen. "due" für Zieltermine, "wait" für Wartezeiten bis zu dem die Aufgabe in den Übersichten ausgeblendet wird.

task shell # das macht es ein bisschen einfacher, da braucht man nicht mehr "task" vor jedem Kommando zu tippen
task> add Miete zahlen
Created task 1
task> list

ID Project Pri Due Active Age Description
1 8 secs Miete zahlen

1 task
task> 1 due:20100731
Modified 1 task
task> list

ID Project Pri Due Active Age Description
1 20100731 1 min Miete zahlen

1 task
task> quit

Habt Ihr gesehen, dass sich die Farbe geändert hat?

Ich möchte die Aufgabe morgen erledigen und heute nicht mehr in meiner Liste haben.

task> 1 wait:20100729
Modified 1 task
task> list
No matches.

Losgelöst von absoluten Datumsangaben können auch relative verwendet werden (immer in englischer Sprache)

task ... due:today # Heute
task ... due:yesterday # Gestern
task ... due:tomorrow # Morgen
task ... due:23rd # der nächste 23te
task ... due:eow # Ende der Woche
task ... due:eom # Ende des Monats
task ... due:eoy # Ende des Jahres
task ... due:fri # der nächste Freitag
task ... due:wed # der nächste Mittwoch (nicht heute!)

In der nächsten Version von Taskwarrior wird es auch die "start of" Daten geben (sow, som, soy).

Mit dem bis jetzt erreichten Basiswissen, kann bereits eine grosse Menge an Arbeit erledigt werden. Über wiederkehrende Aufgaben schreibe ich später.

task add due:20100731 wait:20100724 Miete zahlen
task add due:20100831 wait:20100824 Miete zahlen
task add due:20101225 wait:eom Weihnachtsgeschenke kaufen

Fortsetzung folgt ...

UPDATE: Mark Bug #315932 as affecting you, if you'd like to see something like this in Ubuntu Maverick.
How often do you run a command line tool on your desktop that takes a really long time? Maybe something like make, debuild, rsync, or wget?

You probably kick off the long running job, and then alt-tab over to something more captivating than watching gcc fill your scroll back buffer -- maybe your web browser or news reader.

You occasionally pop back over to your shell to check on your job. Maybe it's still running. But maybe it finished a while ago. Dang.

No need to beat yourself up over wasted cycles. You can tell your shell to ping you when it's done. Just add this alias to your ~/.bashrc.


alias alert='notify-send -i gnome-terminal \
"[$?] $(history|tail -n1|sed -e '\''s/^\s*[0-9]\+\s*//;s/;\s*alert$//'\'')"'
Install the notify-send utility, and source your new ~/.bashrc:

sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin
. ~/.bashrc

Now, run a long running job, and append "; alert" to the end of the command, like this:

sleep 20; alert

After running the target command, the alert alias will render a notify-osd pop-up on your desktop, telling you the command you just ran, and its exit code.


Nifty, huh?

:-Dustin

Two weeks after alpha 2, the betas of both QApt and Muon are released. Both are now feature and string frozen for 1.0, and the focus for this release and all releases on towards 1.0 (scheduled for 2 weeks from now) will focus on fixing bugs as they are found. Here’s what has changed:

QApt 0.4.0:

• A minor optimization in PackagePrivate::searchPkgFileIter(). Should speed up the generation of the changelog url for Package::changelogUrl()
• Minor optimizations in Package::name(), Package::section(), and Package::component() by constructing less unnecessary temporary QStrings. Shouldn’t be too noticeable, but hey.
• Fixed a crash that occurred when a standards-non-compliant package that lacked a package section was present in the system. (Bug 245177)
• Reduce RAM usage (heap) by 1.3 MiB by not caching the default candidate version in the Package object. It is cheap to calculate it on-the-fly and does not justify the amount of memory caching it was taking up.
• Add the Backend::packageForFile() function that enables looking up a Package by a file it installs
• Fix another encoding bug in the QApt Worker caused by not explicitly converting from UTF-8. It should be the last of those, though.
• For qapt-batch, use a KMessageBox::detailedError for presenting our queued errors, since the text isn’t selectable in KMessageBox::errorList.
• Fix a bug in the QApt Worker where it would not report valid progress. (Applications would have blank progress bars) This happened because when I added support for handling fractional percentages (e.g. 60.5% -> 61%), I accidentally made it so that normal percentages would not be handled, making operations reporting fractional percentages be the only ones that would work.

Muon 0.4.0

• Fix a bug that allowed the items in the Filters sidebar to be editable, due to questionable defaults for QStandardModelItem.
• Do not report an error if the user cancels the opening of a markings file.
• Improve the vertical centering of the “Status” and “Requested” columns of the PackageView. Now it’ll be centered for all font sizes, rather than just my own.
• Use a KMessageBox::detailedError for presenting our queued errors, since the text isn’t selectable in KMessageBox::errorList.
• Let software-properties-kde handle reloading the package lists after it edits them, since you already have to give your password to open it, and having to give it again to reload inside muon is annoying.

Packages are building in the usual place and should be available within the day. Sources for QApt and Muon can be found here and here, respectively. A new snapshot of libdebconf-kde should also be available, as Daniel has made a few nice improvements since the first snapshot.

Things are shaping up for release. I’m quite happy. I am leaving this Friday for vacation, and will return August the 11th. I will, however, try to find the time to do a release candidate for QApt/Muon a week from today. A week after that, 1.0 final will be released, so please, test it and file those bug reports!

I’ll blog about my cryptic blog last night in a bit, so stay tuned.

Like every server, every EC2 instance should have a unique ssh fingerprint. On "real servers" this fingerprint is generated at first installation of the openssh-server package. On EC2, instead, it is done on first boot of an instance. This is because each instance is a byte for byte copy of a registered image.

What this means to you, is that when you launch an instance and then connect with ssh, you'll see something like:

$ ssh -F /tmp/smoser/foo ec2-67-202-47-56.compute-1.amazonaws.com
The authenticity of host 'ec2-67-202-47-56.compute-1.amazonaws.com (67.202.47.56)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is f1:40:a7:4e:0f:28:8d:12:21:59:f1:ff:03:5f:63:54.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?


The ssh client is informing you that you are connecting to a host that you do not have ssh keys stored for. In short, it cannot confirm the identity of 'ec2-67-202-47-56'. There could be a "Man in the Middle" who is attempting to trick you. Just as with "real servers", you should identify that remote system via an out of band method. To do this outside of EC2, you might call a hosting provider up and ask them to verify the fingerprint that you see. On EC2, the only out of band transport is the ec2 console.

In order to provide you with the fingerprint that you need, the ssh fingerprint is written to the console when it is booted. You can see this with ec2-get-console-output.

As seen with the results of Eric's poll on alestic.com, this is a very little known or used piece of information. Over 50% of alestic.com voters have "never verified the fingerprint".


$ euca-get-console-output i-72bf1518 | grep ^ec2:
ec2:
ec2: #############################################################
ec2: -----BEGIN SSH HOST KEY FINGERPRINTS-----
ec2: 2048 f1:40:a7:4e:0f:28:8d:12:21:59:f1:ff:03:5f:63:54 /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub (RSA)
ec2: 1024 28:f3:ef:a6:86:05:50:33:76:16:24:32:56:14:06:13 /etc/ssh/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub (DSA)
ec2: -----END SSH HOST KEY FINGERPRINTS-----
ec2: #############################################################


Note that the ssh fingerprint reported on the console matches the one that ssh client asked me to confirm above. So, I now know that the host I've connected to is the one that I just started.

Putting this all together, lets say you have booted a new EC2 instance, with instance-id i-72bf1518 and hostname ec2-67-202-47-56.compute-1.amazonaws.com.

First we will use ssh-keyscan to get the fingerprint that is being reported by the remote host, and store that in a shell variable 'fp'


$ iid=i-72bf1518
$ ihost=ec2-67-202-47-56.compute-1.amazonaws.com

$ ssh-keyscan ${ihost} 2>/dev/null > ${ihost}.keys
$ ssh-keygen -lf ${iid}.keys > ${iid}.fprint
$ read length fp hostname id < ${iid}.fprint
$ echo $fp
f1:40:a7:4e:0f:28:8d:12:21:59:f1:ff:03:5f:63:54



This fingerprint should also appear on the console output of the instance. If it doesn't, then something is wrong. So, we'll get the console output, and grep through it looking for the fingerprint:


$ euca-get-console-output ${iid} > ${iid}.console
$ grep "ec2: ${length} ${fp}" ${iid}.console
ec2: 2048 f1:40:a7:4e:0f:28:8d:12:21:59:f1:ff:03:5f:63:54 /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub (RSA)


We've now verified that the host we're connecting to is the host we just launched, so we can connect safely. Now you can clean out any old occurences of that host in known_hosts and tell the ssh client that this is a "known_host"


# remove existing entries in ~/.ssh/known_hosts for this host
$ ssh-keygen -R "${ihost}"

# hash the output of the known hosts file. This prevents someone
# from reading known_hosts as simple list of remote hosts you have
# access to in the event that one of your keys was compromised.

$ ssh-keygen -H -f ${iid}.keys

# Add the key to your known_hosts
$ cat ${iid}.keys >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts

# remove the temporary files we created
$ shred -u "${iid}.*"


There, we've now verified that the remote host is the instance we started and told the ssh client about it.

Unfortunately, console output on ec2 is only updated approximately every 4 minutes. So, you can't run through this process until you have console output to check.

Not long ago I had the privilege of interviewing the authors of what I consider to be the best book for learning systems administration with Unix or Linux from a large, enterprise perspective.  This book is unusual in another way: it was published by Prentice-Hall and the forward was written by one of their competitors, Tim O’Reilly, the founder and head of O’Reilly Media. That says something.

My interview with the authors appeared today on InformIT’s website. Take a look.

Share and Enjoy:

Recently I ran into Brian Behlendorf (from Apache) at a conference on medical record systems.  Brian was there demoing a new open source protocol for medical record systems to securely send eachother patient records (NHIN Direct).  Combined, we were the only two who weren’t doctors, vendors, bureaucrats, or hotel staff at the conference.

I introduced myself, and Brian quickly recognized that I could probably help him with a Wine problem.  He needed to run Internet Explorer 6 for the most benevolent reason of all: to prove to a client it didn’t work and that they shouldn’t bother trying to support it.

Internet Explorer in Wine

The good news is these days it’s very simple on the terminal.  On Ubuntu:

• Add the Wine Team PPA:
  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-wine/ppa
• Install the wine1.2 and winetricks packages:
  sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wine1.2 winetricks
• Run winetricks:
  winetricks ie6 or winetricks ie7
• Run IE:
  wine iexplore

Using the WINEPREFIX environment variable:

Note that, just like in Windows, you cannot have both ie6 and ie7 at the same time, at least not in the same virtual C: drive.  Fortunately, it is easy to set up multiple wine folders (”prefixes”) for your version of IE to run.  We do this with the WINEPREFIX environment variable.

WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-ie6 winetricks ie6 to install ie6 into its own virtual C: drive
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-ie7 winetricks ie7 to install ie7 into its own virtual C: drive
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-ie6 wine iexplore to run ie6
WINEPREFIX=~/.wine-ie7 wine iexplore to run ie7

As an aside, Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t currently work in Wine, however once it does there will also be a winetricks ie8 for you to test with.