For a lot of programmers, writing an application is fun, but writing its manual is not. Adding new features, refining the product, and responding to users' input are all more rewarding than writing instructions on how to use the software. However, good documentation is necessary to have happy, informed users who can contribute meaningfully to future development. A few months ago, Gilbert Ashley, the author of src2pkg (Slackware's "magic package maker") invited me and two other people to help him manage the user documentation for his program. The process we used to create the src2pkg wiki may be a useful example for other free and open source software (FOSS) application developers.

Just in case Skype is thinking deep second thoughts tonight.

Well, today was the hearing, and Welte reports that one of the judges told Skype's lawyer that if a copyright owner wants a publisher to publish his book in a green envelope, it might seem odd to the publisher, but he can't publish without the green envelope. In short, don't touch the GPL code if you don't follow the requirements of the license.

Like it or lump it. I think that's how one would translate into English the judge's mindset.

At that, after a break, Skype decided to accept the lower court decision and skip the appeal. And so the GPL wins again.

To all those who don't like the license: you don't have to use it. Just write your own code. But if you want to use GPL code, the license comes with it. It's a package deal. Thanks.

Clay Shirky's book on what information technology is doing to our world, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, has important things to say to anyone interested in open source software (OSS). His thoughts on the evolving effects of the technological revolution we are all living in make for a fun way to spend a few hours.

Which path should you follow? Should you take advantage of Ubuntu's package manager and use it to upgrade your system to the latest 8.04 Hardy Heron release, or should you download a CD or DVD ISO image and do a clean install? Common wisdom says that doing a clean install is the better, safer course of action. There may be a little extra work involved configuring everything once the latest and greatest is installed, but that's nothing compared to the pain of an update gone wrong, according to traditional thinking. But that cautious approach may no longer be necessary.

SqlSync lets you compare two databases to see which tuples have been added, removed, and changed. You can also use SqlSync to make one database a clone of another and maintain its contents to be that way. One benefit of using SqlSync to perform synchronization is that you can perform heterogeneous syncs -- for example, from MySQL to PostgreSQL.

I use Tomboy, an open source notetaking app, to cull and organize the hundreds of bits of information I track, and to prioritize it on to-do lists on the fly. When we first reviewed Tomboy 0.3.5, it had some obvious flaws. The project has had a number of updates since then, and the newest version, 0.10.0, really makes the grade.

https://twitter.com/pleia2

They seem to be running out of things to do, which may explain why Tanner has applied to the court for permission to audit SCO's 401K next.

Since i start in development i have had a question in mind, why the f*ck program errors are called Bugs? It seems that it’s for a whimsical reason as it’s said on How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python:

For whimsical reasons, programming errors are called bugs…

But the question finally has been answered!!! The firsts computer errors, given the size of the firsts computers, where caused by real Bugs interfering on the circuits and make the computers do unexpected operations.

Javier Derderian is working on ">">">"integrating Bazaar into gedit, the GNOME standard text editor, so that you can very easily record changes, push them to a server, and so on. Bazaar's model that a branch is just a directory with extra metadata fits pretty well here. He just made another exciting release (or should that be "excited"? :-)

Morten asked today on irc about an error I have hit before myself: you go to upload your new package to a PPA, and get an odd message of Not permitted to upload to the RELEASE pocket in a series in the 'CURRENT' state.

What this means is that your upload was trying to go into the Ubuntu distribution, rather than into a PPA, and you're not authorized to put it there. The underlying reason is that the command line for dput, the tool for uploading source packages, is

dput [options] [host] package.changes ...

It's easy to forget the optional host parameter and if it's omitted it uploads into the Ubuntu archive.

There is a pretty easy (if crude) way to disable this behaviour, by adding these lines to your ~/.dput.cf:

[DEFAULT]
default_host_main = notspecified

[notspecified]
fqdn = SPECIFY.A.PPA.NAME

Ok, I got it built. I had to make two small hacks.

1) I hacked up the script, line 287 becomes

else it complains that it can’t find the avcodec.h

2) Hack up a file in mlt source dir mlt/src/modules/avformat/Makefile
Change line 18, to read

However, even after doing this, it builds, but as soon as it starts, it segfaults, with this.

Any ideas??

Once again proving his editing prowess, Tony has managed to squeeze around 4 hours of wibble into a 40 minute podcast. Nice one.

In this episode:-

• Discussion:
  • An interview with Pete Savage.
    • progbox.vid
  • A chat with Phil Newborough.
    • Random Ubuntu Advocacy
    • Crunchbang Linux
  • We rate our Hardy upgrade experiences.
  • Following up with our CLI vs GUI discussion with Laura Cowen.
• In the news:
  • gNewSense release version 2.
  • Adobe opening up the FLV specs.
  • The UK's Unix User Group has convinced the High Court to carry out a judicial review of the British Standard Institute's decision to vote in favour of Microsoft's controversial Office Open XML (OOXML) specification.
  • 30th birthday of spam
  • Sun in process of certifying Ubuntu.
• Competition results!
  • The winner of the trivia competition is announced. We'll send them a coupon for the Canonical Store to spend on whatever they want! We'll have another competition in Episode 6.

Comments and suggestions are welcomed to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Up to 30 seconds of voicemail can be left at +44 (0) 845 508 1986
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc

From Phoronix (http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=source_linux&num=1):

“There have been rumors since last year that Valve may be serious about porting Source games to Linux after Valve Software began seeking a senior software engineer with the responsibility of porting Windows-based games to the Linux platform. Valve Software has yet to officially announce Linux clients for any of its software, but at Phoronix we have received information confirming that Valve is indeed porting its very popular Source engine to the Linux platform.”

Slackware Linux has stood strong for more than a decade by refusing to compromise. There was a time when people used to say, "If you want to learn Linux and learn it well, give Slackware a try." Attila Craciun, a Romanian software developer and Linux enthusiast, has ported the Slackware tree to the AMD64 architecture to create the Bluewhite64 distro. We spoke with him to find out about Bluewhite64, where it came from, and where it's going.

Updates on current KDE User Research Profiles:

Plasma User Research Profile: A lot of good stuff came out of the Plasma Interviews and the work from Tokamak. I’d like to see more of this written up and discussed in public.

Both the Okular User Research Profile and Gwenview User Research Profile have some good stuff in their profiles. Remember that these profiles grow with the project, and as you expand your scope or add/change functionality, the profiles must be updated to remain useful.

This week, I would like to call on Kopete to begin working on their User Research Profile.

Instant messaging is an activity that nearly every type of user participates in and Kopete is one of the best instant messenger applications out there. But because Kopete has such a broad audience, it makes it that much more important to get all of the user types and use cases/scenarios documented. As always, ping me if you need help getting started.

If Creative Commons (CC) has any say in the matter, the Web will soon have a standard machine-readable notation for licenses. Named the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL), the notation has been under development for the last few years, partly with the cooperation of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3). It is described in a paper by four Creative Commons employees and published by Communia, a European site that explores the relationship between technology and the public domain. Creative Commons plans future presentations of ccREL, and is also actively explaining the need for it -- which is what CC's Chief Technology Officer, Nathan Yergler, was doing when Linux.com caught up with him at the recent Open Web Conference in Vancouver.

As you may know, the Ubuntu team is working on a mobile version of the OS for mobile internet devices. But because there isn’t much of this hardware around, the UME builds don’t get the natural community testing that the desktop and server editions do. But if you are interested there is a way you can help!

The mobile environment can run in a Xephyr window. Setting up this environment is fairly easy and is described in detail here.

If you want to help with structured testing please follow the UME test cases starting with the desktop test. And if you find any bugs please file them under the ubuntu-mobile project in Launchpad.

If you have questions you can usually find cgregan, davmor2 or myself (heno) in the #ubuntu-testing channel. Have fun

Project website: https://fedorahosted.org/s3fs

There are a few different projects calling themselves “s3fs”, but I have used this one with a lot of success. It is written in python and uses fuse, making it very easy to use on the desktop.

Prerequisites

1. Amazon Web Services Account - http://aws.amazon.com
2. sudo aptitude install python-fuse python-boto git-core
3. git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/s3fs s3fs

Handy things
One thing that isn’t required, but is very handy, is s3cmd:
sudo aptitude install s3cmd

If you opted to install s3cmd, run s3cmd --configure and enter your amazon account details. From there you can run commands like s3cmd ls and s3cmd la to see items stored on your account and verify s3fs is working as expected.

Using s3fs
The first thing we need to do is put our access key and our secret key into the environment variables. This could be dangerous if your box is compromised as people could take your keys, but there isn’t much that isn’t dangerous if it’s compromised anyway. Ideally you can make a small bash script with your keys in it for when you launch s3fs and just chmod that 600 for your user, or make it prompt you using the bash ‘read’ command.

For playing around, just throw it in your environment (it will show up in your history, but if you enter a space before these commands it wont):

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="YOUR_KEY_ID_HERE"
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="YOUR_SECRET_KEY_HERE"

Run s3fs
To run s3fs just change to the directory, and chmod +x if it isn’t already executable:

cd s3fs/src
chmod +x s3fs
./s3fs --help

Create a bucket for your files
We need to create a “bucket” which is like a folder to store our files in:
s3fs -C -c ubuntushareddrive

I made up ubuntushareddrive, your bucket name needs to be a globally unique name for all of amazon web services, so you might want to add some numbers at the end of it etc.

After that, we need to “format” our s3fs bucket:
s3fs -C -f ubuntushareddrive

From there, we can mount it and are good to go:
mkdir ~/amazon_drive
s3fs -o bucket=ubuntushareddrive ~/amazon_drive/

For questions on this process, please leave comments on the blog first. If you find a bug, there is a trac page at https://fedorahosted.org/s3fs