Agreguesi i feed

So, regarding my cry for help...

I did get several replies and did more research on my own. The TL;DR up to now is "I have a fully functioning device with no input method and my data may well die on it":

• The device is passphrase-protected and encrypted so I can't simply connect an USB cable and use MTP.
• I can't connect a mouse or keyboard as LG, in their endless wisdom, didn't design the USB port with enough power in mind so it can't support USB OTG on its own.
• Google then removed USB OTG support from the Nexus 4's kernel. It's not as if powered USB hubs existed so this is obviously the correct path of action.
• While I can install new programs via Google Play, Android 4.0 and above prevents newly installed programs to start without user interaction.
• LG points towards a third-party service for out-of-warranty repairs and as part of their Terms of Service, you have to forfeit all data as they "always update the software", i.e. they will prolly ship random other devices to you on a regular basis instead of what you sent in.
• The Nexus 4 is running stock Android, locked bootloader and all

The last two options I see are

• Try to find a way to get a custom ROM onto the device with the help of USB cable and physical buttons only without destroying the encrypted data (yeah, right...)
• Try and source a display so I can repair the device myself. But as not even ifixit.com offers a howto or parts... I suspect this may fail.

And I can not even be reached under my normal number as I don't dare turning the device off and/or removing the SIM as that may prevent me from recovering with the running device, somehow.

crackspackle writes "The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the State of Texas earlier today in a murder trial where the defendant , prior to be taken into custody, had been questioned by the police and chose to remain silent on key questions. This fact was bought up at trial and used to convict him. Most of us have seen at least enough cop shows to know police must read a suspect their Miranda rights when placing them in custody. The issue was a bit murkier here in that the defendant had not yet been detained and while we all probably thought the freedom from self-incrimination was an implicit right as stated in the Constitution, apparently SCOTUS now thinks you have to claim that right or at least be properly mirandized first." It appears that if you are "free to leave at any time" you lose a few rights. Fancy trick, up there with getting kids to write apology letters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter. This is issue #321 for the week June 10 – 16, 2013, and the full version is available here.

In this issue we cover:

• Ubuntu Stats
• UbuConLA 2013
• Ubuntu Forums – We’re going social
• What Is Going on With Juju? June 12 Edition
• Matt Fischer: Being a MOTU
• Martin Pitt: Ubuntu Saucy translations are now open
• Dmitrijs Ledkovs: Now, less cryptic – Cryptsetup changes in Saucy
• Jonathan Riddell: nice e-mail
• Stephen M. Webb: Unity Maintenance for Ubuntu “Saucy Salamander”
• Stephen M. Webb: Ubuntu Desktop Convergence
• Jono Bacon: The Ubuntu App Developer Cookbook Announced
• Howard Chan: Multiple DEs for Ubuntu Studio (part 1)
• The Fridge: Certificates For Ubuntu Members
• Charles Profitt: Testing: On To Saucy Salamader!
• Top 10 Ubuntu App Downloads for May
• Taking the ‘fun’ out of OpenStack
• System76 Jumps on the Haswell Bandwagon with Two New Ubuntu Laptops
• Ubuntu up and running on Android min PCs with RK3188 chips
• In The Blogosphere
• Other Articles of Interest
• Featured Audio and Video
• Weekly Ubuntu Development Team Meetings
• Upcoming Meetings and Events
• Updates and Security for 10.04, 12.04, 12.10 and 13.04
• And much more!

The issue of The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

• Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph
• Paul White
• Tiago Carrondo
• Jim Connett
• Matt Rudge
• And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly Newsletter, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content in this issue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License

Last week I had a neat idea. Well, at least I think it is a neat idea. Let me share it with you folks to get your take.

We have been spending a lot of time refining every aspect of the application development process for writing Ubuntu phone/tablet/desktop applications. This has included:

• Building a simple, and powerful Ubuntu SDK.
• Building a comprehensive knowledge base on developer.ubuntu.com for getting started writing your first app, and performing common programming tasks.
• Integrating source control, bug tracking, and more from Launchpad into the SDK.
• Providing a safe and secure, sand-boxed environment to run apps in, and an automated process for reviewing how these apps come into Ubuntu and are exposed to Ubuntu users.

This is all part of an end-to-end process to make writing apps for Ubuntu fun, simple, and intuitive from the minute you load the SDK to the minute your app appears on a users phone, tablet, or desktop.

Project Websites

One piece we haven’t looked into is how app developers can set up a website for their app.

App websites vary tremendously in size and complexity. Some people just want a single static web page with details of the app and how to get it. Some want a more complex site with integrated forums, bug tracking, and more.

As part of what we can offer with Ubuntu, we should be able to bundle all aspects of your infrastructure too. Need a website? Check. Need a forum? Check. Need a bug tracker? Check.

Fortunately we have a powerful cloud orchestration tool in Juju that can not only simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of the service, but could potentially take virtually all of the pain out of getting the site set up in the first place, and then scale up where needed.

The Idea

Let’s assume I have just published my first version of my app in Ubuntu. I now need a simple website to get my app on the web and known to users. While I want to start simple, there is a possibility though that my project may become hugely popular making me a king among men and require a larger, more expansive web presence.

Let’s start simple though. Ideally, I want to be able to specify some configuration detail like this in a file:

app: app-name: Read All About It download-archive-name: readallaboutit launchpad-project: readallaboutit website: website-strapline: All the headlines in your hand. screenshots: ['http://www.myscreenshotonline.com/screen1.jpg', 'http://www.myscreenshotonline.com/screen1.jpg'] page-about: True page-developers: True page-screenshots: True page-contact: False

…and then do this:

juju deploy --config myconfig.yaml ubuntu-app-website

The charm would read in the configuration file and generate a set of static web pages based on that configuration.

As an example, it would pre-populate chunks of the page, and generate developer information on the Developer page with details of the main branch, bug tracking, a form to submit a bug, and more (we can pull this from the Launchpad project).

It could look simple like this:

This would mean an app developer could spin-up a super light-weight app website with just a configuration file and Juju on whichever cloud service they prefer. This would be light-weight both in terms of getting up and running and resource usage; you could set this up on a tiny cloud instance. As ever, if my project was to get slashdotted I could scale up the service, as with any other Juju charm.

Now let’s assume I want to add more functionality to my website. This is where the real power of Juju could come in. Let’s assume I want a forum. I should be able to run:

juju deploy ubuntu-app-website-forum juju relate ubuntu-app-website ubuntu-app-website-forum

This would then spin up a forum (or Discourse site) but the charm would integrate it into the existing website with a navigation link and shared theming. It could then look like this:

We could then conceivably have any number of supported additions (e.g. mailing lists, video streams, event organization, tutorial content, API docs etc) for the website that app maintainers can use to easily expand their service as they see fit.

Next Steps

I shared this idea with Jorge who thought it was a neat idea. He then talked with Marco who has been putting together a first cut that we can experiment with. If anyone is interested in helping to build this, please let me know in the comments.

Bob the Super Hamste writes "The St. Paul Pioneer press is reporting that Comcast is planning on expanding its network of public WiFi hot spots in the Twin Cities area by using home internet connections and user's WiFi routers. Customers will be upgraded to new wireless routers that will have 2 wireless networks, one for the home users and one for the general public. Subscribers to Comcast's Xfinity service and customers that participate in the public WiFi program will be allowed free access to the public WiFi offered by this service. Non Comcast customers get 2 free sessions a month each lasting 1 hour with additional sessions costing money. The article mentions that a similar service already exists and is provided by the Spain-based company Fon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bread, most people eat copious amounts of it but few bake it themselves. It may seem to be a daunting task –all that preparation and kneading– but this recipe requires very little effort (I’d wager the least of any bread recipe that I’ve come across) and should yield delicious bread every time.

No-Knead Bread Recipe Prep Time: 5 minutes – wait time: 12-20 hours – Cooking Time: 45 minutes

Ingredients

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/4 teaspoon yeast
• 1 1/4 teaspoon salt (kosher, if you have it)
• 1 1/2 cup cool water
• cornmeal, semolina or wheat bran –for coating
• olive oil or melted butter

Equipment:

• 1 deep enamelled cast-iron or glass pot, with lid

Directions for dough:

1. Combine the flour, salt and yeast in a large bowl.
2. Add the water.
3. Using your hands mix it together into a dough (about a minute or two).
4. Cover with a sheet of plastic wrap and let it ferment somewhere (at room temperature) for 12-20 hours.

After 12+ hours your dough should resemble this –full of bubbles and have those stringy protein-y strands– and be only slightly tacky.

That particular dough was fermenting for ~14 hours

The long ferment time develops –in place of kneading– the gluten in the flour which is crucial to a bread’s structure.

Carefully remove the dough from the bowl onto a clean work surface, with as minimal manipulation of the dough as possible.

Preheat an oven to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, with your pot inside.

Pinch and fold the dough into it’s centre a couple times to make a nice ball-shape* and coat liberally with the semolina, bran or cornmeal (I used the foremost in this instance).

Where these folds meet is where we’ll get that nice split in the top crust of the bread.

When the oven-pot system is preheated, carefully place the dough inside with the side opposite the folds face-up.

Bake for 30 minutes with the lid on.

After the 30 minutes, remove the lid and drizzle the loaf with oil or butter (if you’re using either) and then continue to bake for 15 minutes without the lid.

When finished baking your loaf should have a nice crust, dark from all the caramelization.

Cutting it open reveals plenty of air pockets (where those bubbles used to be) and beautiful crumb structure.

This recipe was adapted from Mark Bittman, New York Times (who in turn adapted from Jim Lahey, Sullivan Street Bakery) and is one I really enjoy because of how simple (and delicious) it is.

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The post No Knead Bread Recipe appeared first on Sam Hewitt | Blog.

sciencehabit writes "In a few years, an iPhone app may give you a 3D layout of a room as soon as you step into it. Researchers have developed an algorithm that spits out the shape and contours of complex structures (including Switzerland's Lausanne Cathedral) using data compiled from four randomly placed microphones. The technology, which relies on the same sort of echolocation bats and dolphins use to navigate, could be used to develop more realistic echoes in video games and virtual reality simulations and to eliminate the echo from phone calls."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At this year’s GPN13 I gave a talk about Debian Code Search. It was in German, so I spent a few hours creating english subtitles.

Get the video at http://ftp.ccc.de/events/gpn/gpn13/gpn13-debian-code-search.mp4 (84 MiB) and the corresponding subtitle file at http://t.zekjur.net/gpn13-debian-code-search.srt. Drop both files in the same directory, run mplayer gpn13-debian-code-search.mp4 and press v to enable subtitles. I intend to eventually put the (subtitled) video on YouTube and refer to it from codesearch.debian.net, but I wanted to post the video in its current form already.

The presentation itself explains the motivation behind Debian Code Search and how it works. You don’t need any knowledge of the system in order to understand the talk. Enjoy!

Lasrick writes "Evie Sobczak won a trip to Jet Propulsion Lab for her biofuel invention: 'For a fifth-grade science fair, Evie Sobczak found that the acid in fruit could power clocks; she connected a cut-up orange to a clock with wire and watched it tick. In seventh grade, she generated power by engineering paddles that could harness wind. And in eighth grade, she started a project that eventually would become her passion: She wanted to grow algae and turn it into biofuel.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sorry Bryan,
I can show you plenty of hardware that is perfectly 64 bit capable but probably never will run Ubuntu and/or Unity.

First, what is 64 bit for you? Looking at ubuntu.com/download and getting images from there, one gets the impression, that 64 bit is amd64 (also called x86_64). If one digs deeper to cdimage.ubuntu.com, one will find non-Intel images too: PowerPC and amrhf. As the PowerPC images are said to boot on G3 and G4 PowerPCs, these are 32 bit. Armhf is 32 bit too (arm64/aarch64 support in Linux is just evolving). So yes, if 64 bit means amd64, I do have hardware that can run Unity.

But you asked if I have hardware that is 64 bit capable and can run Ubuntu/Unity, so may I apply my definiton of 64 bit here? I have an old Sun Netra T1-200 (500MHz UltraSPARC IIe) running Debian’s sparc port, which has a 64 bit kernel and 32 bit userland. Unity? No wai.

I do not own any ia64 or s390/s390x machines, but I am sure people do. And guess what, no Unity there either :)

Sorry for ranting like this, but 64 bit really just means that the CPU can handle 64 bit big addresses etc. End even then, it not always will do so ;)

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kkleiner writes "A self-described think tank of engineers and inventors called Two Bit Circus have completed a successful crowdfunding campaign to launch a high tech reinvention of carnivals form yesteryear. The campaign raised over $100k to launch the STEAM Carnival (as in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) to take place in Los Angeles and San Francisco next year. Showcasing robots, fire, and lasers, the goal of the carnival is to inspire young people into science and technology through these entertaining and educational events."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MTorrice writes "A surprising suite of microbial species colonizes plastic waste floating in the ocean, according to a new study. The bacteria appeared to burrow pits into the plastic. One possible explanation is that bacteria eat into the polymers, weakening the pieces enough to cause them to break down more quickly and eventually sink to the sea floor. While the microbes could speed the plastic's decay, they might also cause their own ecological problems, the researchers say."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Before I start blogging about the progress of GNOME Music, I would like to announce my happiness (as well as the whole gnome music team) that we now have 3 students sponsored to hack on GNOME Music. Eslam Mostafa (SoC), Shivani Podar (OWP) and Sai Suman Prayaga (SoC) all three of them deserved they internships, showing dedication and patching like crazy before SoC, keeping Vadim, Guillaume and me very busy.

Also I would like to welcome Arnel Borja and Fabiano Fidêncio to the team with their immense contributions, and ofcourse the allmighty Giovanni Campagna (who hacks everything in GNOME by now)

The last couple of weeks have been very hectic here, nevertheless we triumphed over phase of one of developing GNOME Music:

• Set basic infrastructure
• Implement Grilo Querying
• Implement Albums View
• Implement Songs View
• Implement Artist View
• Implement Playback support
• Clean up and port to Glade

Now phase 2 is shaping up nicely:

• Implement Playlist View
• Implement Selection functionality on all views
• Implement Repeat/Shuffle
• Implement Actions
• Clean up

So if you are interested in joining us with the development please feel free to hang out with us on #gnome-music on irc.gnome.org

Currently its only usable via JHbuild. Anyhow for more info like code and bugzilla check out https://live.gnome.org/Music

Here are some screenshots for tempting

 

Before I start blogging about the progress of GNOME Music, I would like to announce my happiness (as well as the whole gnome music team) that we now have 3 students sponsored to hack on GNOME Music. Eslam Mostafa (SoC), Shivani Podar (OWP) and Sai Suman Prayaga (SoC) all three of them deserved they internships, showing dedication and patching like crazy before SoC, keeping Vadim, Guillaume and me very busy.

Also I would like to welcome Arnel Borja and Fabiano Fidêncio to the team with their immense contributions, and ofcourse the allmighty Giovanni Campagna (who hacks everything in GNOME by now)

The last couple of weeks have been very hectic here, nevertheless we triumphed over phase of one of developing GNOME Music:

• Set basic infrastructure
• Implement Grilo Querying
• Implement Albums View
• Implement Songs View
• Implement Artist View
• Implement Playback support
• Clean up and port to Glade

Now phase 2 is shaping up nicely:

• Implement Playlist View
• Implement Selection functionality on all views
• Implement Repeat/Shuffle
• Implement Actions
• Clean up

So if you are interested in joining us with the development please feel free to hang out with us on #gnome-music on irc.gnome.org

Currently its only usable via JHbuild. Anyhow for more info like code and bugzilla check out https://live.gnome.org/Music

Here are some screenshots for tempting

 

Rick Zeman writes "Showing once again that once a privacy door is opened every law enforcement agency will run through it, The Washington Post details how state drivers license photo databases are being mined by various LEOs in their states--and out. From the article: '[L]aw enforcement use of such facial searches is blurring the traditional boundaries between criminal and non-criminal databases, putting images of people never arrested in what amount to perpetual digital lineups. The most advanced systems allow police to run searches from laptop computers in their patrol cars and offer access to the FBI and other federal authorities. Such open access has caused a backlash in some of the few states where there has been a public debate. As the databases grow larger and increasingly connected across jurisdictional boundaries, critics warn that authorities are developing what amounts to a national identification system — based on the distinct geography of each human face.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ever since we first announced Ubuntu for phones on January 2nd this year, a fantastic relationship with our friends in the XDA community has formed. For quite some time now we have been releasing daily images of Ubuntu for phones/tablets and our friends in the XDA community have been working to enable these images for a wide range of devices.

Much of this work has been happening on the Ubuntu Touch XDA forums which have seen 4600+ posts from this enthusiastic community.

I wanted to follow up on a few different XDA-related things that are going on.

Participating in and Sponsoring xda:devcon

From 8-11 August in Miami, Florida will be xda:devcon, the very first XDA developer conference. We are sponsoring the event and will be exhibiting there. We are delighted to be supporting such an awesome event.

I will also be speaking at the event and delivering a new presentation called Building a Convergent Future With Ubuntu that will cover the vision and goals of Ubuntu on devices, how our community is right at the core of what we are doing (and accessible to everyone), and how far along we are in this vision.

Michael Hall will be running an app development workshop and showing attendees how to build an application from scratch that runs across Ubuntu phones, tablets, and desktops. More details on Michael’s workshop will be announced soon. Given that we are releasing the beta of our Ubuntu SDK in July, this workshop will be a great opportunity to come and learn how to get started!

We will also be joining the main conference and happy to answer questions, demo Ubuntu on these different devices, and anything else. If you want to set up a meeting, please drop me an email.

Weekly XDA Q&A

We want to ensure our friends in the XDA community have as much information at their fingertips about Ubuntu Touch. As such, Daniel Holbach is collating questions from the community (you can ask your question here) and then posting a weekly summary of questions on this XDA forum thread.

As ever, if anyone has any other questions, be sure to join my weekly live Ubuntu Q&A videocast. This week it will be happening at 6pm UTC on Wednesday 19th June on Ubuntu On Air. Be sure to join me then!

Making Porting Easier

One of the reasons I am so delighted to see the close relationship between Ubuntu and XDA continuing to form is that I feel making Ubuntu available on a range of different devices is a key part of what will help us to be successful.

Although we at Canonical a are currently targetting a very specific set of handsets for our first release of Ubuntu Touch (Galaxy Nexus and Nexus 4), the wider XDA community has been working to enable the image on other devices that Canonical is not directly focused on. This is an awesome contribution.

One of the technical challenges here is how we handle firmware and binary blobs to make various hardware components work. Unfortunately, some of this firmware cannot be legally re-distributed by us (although the user can typically download it directly).

I have asked Daniel Holbach to work with the phonedations team to ease this process as much as possible and some work is going into phablet-flash to make it easier to handle these firmware pieces. We should have more on this in the coming weeks.

Onwards and Upwards!

There is lots of fantastic work going on and I am looking forward to continuing to work with the always excellent and approachable XDA community. We look forward to seeing you in Miami in August!

An anonymous reader writes "China's Tianhe-2 is the world's fastest supercomputer, according to the latest semiannual Top 500 list of the 500 most powerful computer systems in the world. Developed by China's National University of Defense Technology, the system appeared two years ahead of schedule and will be deployed at the National Supercomputer Center in Guangzho, China, before the end of the year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The purpose of a backup is to allow you to recover from a disaster with reasonable cost and effort. If you delete a file you shouldn't have, or make changes that you shouldn't have, backups are meant to save you from having to re-create the file, or undo a large amount of steps.

Speaking very broadly, any copy of your live data is a backup, but this is a uselessly broad definition. For example, if you use an automatic synchronisation system such as Dropbox or git-annex, to keep your live data in sync between two computers, you could pretend they're backups of each other. However, unless the synchronisation also allows you to keep a history of file versions, it's not a very good backup. If you delete your precious file on one computer, and it gets then deleted on the other computer as well, automatically, perhaps in seconds, then the backup is not of much use.

Another common assumption is that a RAID array works as a backup. RAID is an excellent technology that allows you to combine several hard disks so that they protect you against loss of data in case of disk failure. If one disk fails, the others have enough data to re-create the data on the failed disk, using either full copies (RAID-1) or error correction codes (RAID-5, RAID-6). This is not a backup. It doesn't protect you against accidental file deletions. There is also no backup history.

A version control system is very much like a backup. It stores copies of many of the versions of your project. However, in most version control systems it's fairly easy to make changes that lose history. Ask anyone who has used git reset to change the tip of the master branch to undo a wrong commit or merge, and then accidentally force-pushed that to the server. This is arguably a normal, if uncommon use of the version control system. A good backup system will protect you from you own mistakes, when you do the kinds of things you're expected to do. Version control systems also rarely capture all your data.

When you were five, and made some stuff on the family computer, and saved it on a floppy, and then drew a cute little picture of yourself on the floppy to make it clear to everyone it was your floppy, and not anyone else's, certainly not your bully of your brother's, and your mother kept the floppy for decades because of the cute picture, then that is also not a backup. You didn't even know your Mom had kept it.

A reasonable backup is one from which you can restore a working copy of your data, when you need to, without too much effort or expense, compared to the disaster you're experiencing. If the disaster is that you deleted a one-page draft outline of the book you want to write someday, the disaster is not very severe. The cost of restoring should be low.

If the disaster is that your plans to become the supreme emperor of the world, and make all people your slaves, are in a spreadsheet on your laptop, and your minions accidentally drove a car over your laptop, and you had accidentally not used a Thinkpad as your laptop, the disaster is quite severe. Unless you recover the spreadsheet, you'll never be able to tell apart the buttons to launch the Moon rocket, to self-destruct your HQ, and to switch channels on your TV, and all your work will be in vain, and you'll never, ever, ever convince the pretty girl with red hair living in the house opposite that she should be interested in you. Also, you'll never be able to move away from your parent's house. So, quite severe. It will be acceptable to go to quite some effort and expense to recover that spreadsheet. It's better if you don't need to, but you will, if you have to.

Your backup should also be reasonably up to date. Backing up every Christmas is a fine family tradition, but if you don't make a backup also on Easter, Midsummer, and Aunt Agatha's birthday sometime in September was it, or maybe October, you'll risk losing a whole year's worth of work. A year is a long time, and you might never be able to re-do all the work.

Personally, I backup my personal laptop every day to a file server at home, and less often to an online backup server. My work laptop gets backed up once an hour to the company file server, which gets backed up to two backup servers about once a day.

You need to balance the risk of losing data and work, and the expense and effort to back up your data. How much is a day's work worth to you, or your employer? How much does a backup system cost?

In the next episode, I'll ponder on how many backups are enough.

benrothke writes "It's said that truth is stranger than fiction, as fiction has to make sense. Had The Chinese Information War: Espionage, Cyberwar, Communications Control and Related Threats to United States Interests been written as a spy thriller, it would have been a fascinating novel of international intrigue. But the book is far from a novel. It's a dense, well-researched overview of China's cold-war like cyberwar tactics against the US to regain its past historical glory and world dominance." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Join the ubuntu quality community team's effort this week! As a community we test different things about every ~2 weeks in ubuntu, and share the results to flesh out bugs and problem areas.

So what's up for testing this week? The daily images, the default applications in ubuntu and a new version of the sound stack for testing.

Ready to help? Full details are here.

Need some help on how to contribute? Have a look at this page and the walkthroughs listed. Of particular interest is the ISO testing and Cadence Week testing walkthroughs.

Do note that you don't need anything special to participate in cadence week testing! Both an installed version of the development branch of ubuntu (aka saucy) in a VM or on a real box, or even a live session of the latest daily image will work. For more information on how to use a live session to test, check out the Cadence Week testing walkthrough or watch the youtube video of the same.Happy Testing!