Mmmm, crunch! Project Euler Problem 92 solution live-coded for your delight.

(I will be doing other stuff on my channel soonish, so consider these filler and practice :-)

R. Eric Collins made this fascinating and alarming movie to visually demonstrate the dramatic decrease in Arctic sea ice happening right now.

"When I was born, in 1979, the minimum summer sea ice extent in the Arctic was about 17,000 cubic kilometers. In 2012, it was less than 5,000 cubic kilometers.

The red points show weekly estimates of sea ice volume in the Arctic through time, from 1979 to today. The scale is from 0 to 35,000 cubic kilometers. There is a seasonal expansion of the ice during winter and a shrinking during the summer. There is no evidence for a sea-ice free summer in the past 700,000 years of Earth history. The next one is predicted to take place in the next 5-30 years.

Sea ice volume estimates by PIOMAS show a long-term decline in sea ice volume in the Arctic. The summer sea ice minimum now contains only 20–30% of the ice volume observed in the last 1970′s.

This phenomenon has been termed the “Arctic Sea Ice Death Spiral” and is directly related to anthropogenic greenhouse warming of the atmosphere.

It is possible that the Arctic has reached an irreversible “tipping point” from which it cannot recover the lost ice."


Read more and comment at the original source.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote that we were planning the sixth season of the Ubuntu Podcast. Well, after much curry and tea, we decided to sally forth and put on a show!

The first live recording session of the season will be on Wednesday 27th February – that’s this Wednesday! The first episode of the season will be available to download from the website the following day.

The eagle-eyed will have noticed that we’ve moved the live recording session from a Tuesday evening to a Wednesday evening. Wednesdays fit better with our personal schedules. We know that some people who used to be able to listen live won’t be able to, and we’re sad about that. But there are also people who couldn’t listen on Tuesdays who will now be able to. And we’re pleased about that.

The other big change is that the Ubuntu Podcast will be coming to you weekly. Every week there will be a new episode available from the website, or iTunes or wherever else you find the show. We like to shake things up, it helps keep things interesting for us as well as you, the lovely listeners. Some shows will be more topical, with more analysis of the news and events in the Ubuntu community. Others will include interviews and some returning favourite features from previous seasons.

So join us at 2030 UTC on Wednesday 27th February for the first live recording! http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/live

Pin It

This week's episode relays bits from USDA Radio about supercomputers as well as the sixth season announcement from the Ubuntu UK Podcast team where they announce they're shifting to weekly releases. News more local to the Ohio Local Community Team is also presented as members are implored to update the February 2013 Team Report and to log Ubuntu Global Jam events on the LoCo portal.

Unlike normal episodes, producer Gloria Kellat presented this week while head writer Stephen Michael Kellat stood temporary duty as recording engineer.

Download here (MP3) (ogg) (FLAC), or subscribe to the podcast (MP3) to have episodes delivered to your media player. We suggest subscribing by way of a service like gpodder.net. Please note that due to upload size limitations some audio formats for episodes are now being hosted at Internet Archive instead of directly on the team's server.

Burning Circle Episode 102 by The Air Staff of Erie Looking Productions is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/2013/02/20/s06e00-season-6-is-coming/.

We are all aware of the current mobile duopoly which is iOS and Android, but at the Mobile World Congress or MWC13, as its commonly being called, there will be a line up of two platforms that attendees will be eager to have a look at: Firefox OS and Ubuntu. Indeed there will be other contenders like Tizen and Sailfish OS, but let’s be honest, if any two open source platforms have a chance of breaking up the mobile duopoly, the best bet is in Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch.

So between Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch which platform will have the most buzz? I’m betting on Firefox OS considering their platform is mature. has a great line up of apps, and perhaps the better development tools when compared to Ubuntu Touch, which seems to be building its platform on using a mashup of Cyanogenmod and demo applications that are mostly just a UI shell and for all purposes are demoware.

Performance

I have tried out the Ubuntu Touch image on a Galaxy Nexus device. I have also had multiple opportunities to test the Firefox OS platform on development devices, Comparing the two, I found the Firefox OS UI not only to be much faster and more fluid to the Touch, but months ago, when I was playing around with Firefox OS, it was much more mature than the Ubuntu Touch platform is today.

Apps

Firefox OS already has a impressive line up of apps available in the Firefox Marketplace, many of which are officially supported by the service providers. Ubuntu Touch mostly has non-functional demo applications and has no official support from the likes of Twitter, Evernote and other major services. In fact, just a few days ago I asked someone at Canonical whether they even had permission to use the  trademarked branding of Twitter, Facebook and Skype and they had no clue and thought that the trademark policies of these brands would openly allow them to use the brands and make a show like there was official support from these brands for the Ubuntu Touch platform.

Development Advocacy

Firefox OS set out from the start to not only provide excellent developer tools to contributors but also to host events worldwide to support and accelerate app development by supporting its local communities worldwide through the Mozilla Reps program. Ubuntu has yet to use and empower its LoCo’s (Local Communities) to host events and bring potential developers into the fold.

Firefox OS boasts a emulator for the Ubuntu Desktop yet Ubuntu Phone has no comparable emulator so developers can test their apps and see how they function.

Openness

Firefox OS has been an open platform from the start and has had a very open dialogue with its community while Ubuntu Touch has seen a lot of behind the scenes privacy and limited involvement with the Ubuntu Community. It would seem this walled garden approach that Canonical has taken in launching the Ubuntu Touch platform may have actually hindered progress.

Firefox OS being a project of Mozilla, which is a non-profit, is also better geared to be a more open and transparent platform considering that Mozilla does not have the same commercial aspirations that Canonical has.

Privacy

Mozilla has been touted as one of the most trusted internet companies when it comes to user privacy while Canonical has faced criticism both from its community and from the greater open source community for privacy fails in its Unity dash. It is unclear what impact the privacy concerns that were raised by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Software Foundation will have when it comes to consumers making decisions on whether to trust this mobile data with a platform that Canonical controls and seems unwilling to bend to community feedback.

“I’m astonished by Canonical’s blatant disregard for providing a way to opt-in to this gaping privacy hole. This is a dramatic case of “calling home”, and provides a large amount of information about the user, in real-time.” pointed out Kees Cook, Google Developer and Former Ubuntu Security Engineer in his blog post.

Conclusion

I think Canonical has a long way to go not only from the app development aspect and refining their platform, but also in ensuring that end-users and the community feel like Canonical is being receptive to their concerns, because at the end of the day, Canonical is not buying the product. It’s the users and community members that have the buying power and the power to advocate for the platform being more greatly adopted.

As for Firefox OS, I believe all the right moves are being made and that’s clearly being shown with how remarkable the product is becoming already and how much interest has already been built surrounding the platform and the fact that Firefox OS has a thriving developer community while Ubuntu’s is still in an infancy stage.

Notably, I have been very critical as of late towards the decisions Canonical has been making with Ubuntu. These criticisms are not a result of my distaste for Canonical, but instead because Canonical has made poor decisions of which they have admitted to me in private. I think Canonical has an excellent opportunity to make excellent choices going forward. These choices will allow Ubuntu to be the platform that Mark Shuttleworth fondly talks about with buzzwords and the same platform that Ubuntu community members like myself and others also envision.

Note: A Canonical Employee had the opportunity to review the entirety of this post in advance of its publishing and provided feedback and corrections.

The post Firefox OS and Ubuntu Touch: Who Will Prevail at MWC13? appeared first on Benjamin Kerensa dot Com.

I want to let everyone know that the Ubuntu Maryland Loco Team has a new contact. Ron Swift has stepped in to take over the reigns. Those who have been involved with the team know that he has been an invaluable part of the team since its earliest days. Whenever help was needed he has stepped up to find a way to contribute. He is a long time supporter and user both personally and in his business of F/OSS software. I know that the team is in good hands going forward.

I’ve been hitting the limits of gigabit ethernet at home for quite a while now, and as I spend more time working with cloud technologies this started to frustrate me.

I’d heard of other folk getting good results with second hand Infiniband cards and decided to give it a go myself.

I bought two Voltaire dual-port Infiniband adapters – a 4X SDR PCI-E x4 card. And in a 2 metre 8470 cable, and we’re in business.

There are other, more comprehensive guides around to setting this up – e.g. http://davidhunt.ie/wp/?p=2291 or http://pkg-ofed.alioth.debian.org/howto/infiniband-howto-4.html

On ubuntu the hardware was autodetected; all I needed to do was:

modprobe ib_ipoib sudo apt-get install opensm # on one machine

And configure /etc/network/interfaces – e.g.:

iface ib1 inet static address 192.168.2.3 netmask 255.255.255.0 network 192.168.2.0 up echo connected >`find /sys -name mode | grep ib1` up echo 65520 >`find /sys -name mtu | grep ib1`

With no further tuning I was able to get 2Gbps doing linear file copies via Samba, which I suspect is rather pushing the limits of my circa 2007 home server – I’ll investigate futher to identify where the bottlenecks are, but the networking itself I suspect is ok – netperf got me 6.7Gbps in a trivial test.

This time, I did Project Euler problem 80 which was fun. Cocked it up a few times too.

I hope you enjoy :-)

There seems to be quite a bit of buzz around Yahoo! effectively laying off remote workers (making them choose to start going to an office or resign), and I've read different perspectives on the subject, for and against remote working.
Having worked at Canonical for over 4 years, and in open source projects for quite a bit longer than that, my knee-jerk reaction is that the folks crying out that remote working just isn't as productive as working in an office is pretty short-sighted.
Canonical has hundreds of employees working remotely, far more than working in an office, and it seems like we're generally a very productive company. We take on huge competitors who have ten times the amount of people working on any given project, and we put up a pretty good fight. So I can tell you remote working is full of awesome for both the company (productivity, get to choose from a huge pool of talent) and the employee (no commute, less distractions).
I also think that the fact that open source projects are taking over the world at an incredible pace is a pretty huge testament to just how great remote working can be. This is even an extreme case where people aren't even available on a regular schedule with much tighter and clearer shared goals.

 

All that said, there are several ways things can go wrong with remote working.

Thoughtlessly mixing remote and co-located teams. All-remote and all co-located tends to work out easier. Mixing these things without having a clear plan on how communication is going to work is most likely going to end up badly. The co-located team will tend to talk to each other in the hallways and not bring the people who are remote into the loop, mostly because of the extra cost of communication there. If making decisions in person is accepted, and there are no guidelines in place to document and open up the discussion to the full audience, then it's going to fail. Regardless of remote-or-not, documenting these things is good practice, it provides traceability and there's less room for people to go away with different interpretations.

Hiring remote workers that are not generally self-directed. I can't stress this point enough. Remote working isn't for everybody, you have to make sure the people who are working remotely are generally happy making decisions on their own on a daily basis, can push through problems without a lot of hand-holding and are good at flagging problems when they see one. These types of people are great to have on site as well, but in a remote situation this is a non-negotiable skill.

Unclear goals as a team or company. If what people are suppose to be doing isn't crystal clear to everybody involved remote working is going to be very messy. Strongly self-directed people are going to push forward with what they think is the right thing to do (based off of incomplete information), and people less strongly independent are going to be reading a lot of RSS feeds.

 

I also think there are some common sense arguments against remote working that are actually an argument in favor of it.

Slackers will slack harder when at home. So, if you're at home, who's going to know if you spent your morning watching TV or thinking about a really hard problem? When you're at the office, it's much easier to check up on what you're doing with your time. I think that if you have an employee that you need to check up on what he's doing with his time, you have a problem. The answer is not going to be to put him in an office and get him to learn how to alt-tab very quickly to an IDE when you walk by. You should be working with them to make sure their performance is adequate. If it's not, and you can't seem to find a way around it, fire him. Keep him around and force-feeding work is a huge waste of time and money. Slackers are going to slack harder at home, use that to your advantage to get rid of people who aren't up to task or don't care anymore quicker.

Communication is more expensive. It is. It also forces people to learn how to communicate better, more concisely, and in a way that's generally documented. While you can easily have calls, in the end you need to email a list or some form of communication that reaches everybody. So there's a short-term cost for a long-term benefit. You may need that short-term benefit right now, in which case you bring people together for a week or two, spend some of that money you've saved on infrastructure, and push things forward.

 

So, in general I think having remote workers forces a company to have clearer, well-communicated goals, better documentation on decisions, hiring driven and self-directed people. makes you think long and hard about your processes and opens up to hiring from a much larger pool of people (all over the world!). I think those are great things to have pressuring you consistently, and will make you a better company for it.
Like everything else, if you have remote workers and pretend they are the same as co-located it's going to fail.

I'll soon be disposing of the Nissan Leaf that we leased a few months ago, so I thought it a useful exercise to write about my experiences with it.

I am not a car man. I am a gadget man. For me, driving is a means to an end, and I'm much more interested in what I call the "cabin" experience, than the "driving" experience, so this is going to slanted much more that way.

That said, I found the Nissan Leaf a fun car to drive, from my limited experiences of having fun driving cars. I liked how responsive it was when you put your foot down. It has two modes of operation, "D" and "Eco". I've actually taken to driving it in "Eco" mode most of the time, as it squeezes more range out of the batteries, but occasionally I'll pop it back into "D" to have a bit of fun.

The main difference between the two modes, from a driving perspective, is it seems to limit the responsiveness of the accelerator. In "Eco" mode it feels more like you're driving in molasses, whereas in "D" mode, when you put your foot down, it responses instantly. "D" is great for dragging people off at the lights. It's a very zippy little car in "D" mode. It feels lighter.

I've noticed that it has a bit of a penchant for over steering. Or maybe that's just my driving. If I have floored it a bit to take a right turn into oncoming traffic, I've noticed slight over steering.

That's about all the driving type "real car stuff" I'll talk about.

Now to the driver's "cabin experience".

It's absolutely fabulous. I love sitting in the driver's seat of this car.

Firstly, the seat itself is heated (in fact all of them are). As is the steering wheel. Nissan has gone to great lengths to allow you to avoid needing to run the car's heating system to heat the car, as doing so immediately drops at least 10 miles off the range. Unfortunately I found the windscreen had a tendency to fog up in the winter rainy periods, so I'd have to intermittently fire up the air conditioning to defog the windscreen. Of course, in the summer months, you're going to want to run the AC to cool down, so the range hit in that situation is unavoidable. I've only had this car from late Autumn until late Winter so far, so that hasn't been an issue I've had to contend with.

The dashboard is all digital, and looks relatively high tech, which appeals to my inner geek. It's a dashboard. It tells you stuff. The stuff you'd expect it to tell you. Enough said.

The audio system is nice. It supports Bluetooth audio, so one can be streaming Pandora from one's phone, through the sound system, for example. Or listening to audio from the phone. There's also a USB port, and it will play various audio files from USB storage. I found the way it chose to sort the files on a USB stick to be slightly surprising though. I haven't invested the time to figure out how I should be naming files so that they play in the order I expect them to play. The ability to play from USB storage compensates nicely for the fact that it only has a single CD player. (We have a 6 disc stacker in our 2006 Prius).

The car also came with a 3 month free trial of Sirius XM satellite radio. This was fun. The only dance music FM station in the Bay Area has a weak signal in Mountain View, and I hate dance music with static, whereas there was an excellent electronic music station that I could listen to in glorious high definition. As long as I wasn't driving under a bridge. There's no way I'd pay money for satellite radio, but it was a fun gimmick to try out.

The navigation system is really, really good. I haven't bothered using Google Maps on my phone at all. It gives such good spoken directions, that you don't even need to have the map on the screen. It names all the streets. I couldn't figure out a way to get distances in metric.

The telematics service, Carwings, is probably my favourite feature. This is what really makes it feel like a car of the future. Through the companion Android application, I can view the charging status (if it's plugged in) or just check the available range (if it's not plugged in). From a web browser, I can plan a route, and push the route to the vehicle's navigation system. If the car is plugged in, I can also remotely turn on the vehicle's climate control system, pre-warming or cooling the car.

It's a little thing, but the door unlocking annoyed me a little bit. I'm used to the Prius, where if you unlock the boot (that's trunk, Americans), or the front passenger door, all the doors unlocked. This was a convenient way of unlocking the car for multiple people as you approached it. With the Leaf, unlocking the boot only unlocks the boot. Unlocking the front passenger door only unlocks that door. It requires a second unlock action to unlock all the doors. I've found this to be slightly cumbersome when trying to unlock the car for everyone all at once, quickly (like when it's raining).

Another minor annoyance is the headlights. I've gotten into the habit of driving with the headlights on all the time, because I believe it's safer. In the Prius, one could just leave the headlights switched to the "on" position, and they'd turn off whenever the driver's door was opened after the car was switched off. If you try that in the Leaf, the car beeps at you to warn you you've left the headlights on. It has an "auto" mode, where the car will choose when to turn the headlights on, based on ambient light conditions. In that case, when you turn the car off, it'll leave the headlights on for a configurable period of time and then turn them off. This is actually slightly unsettling, because it makes you think you've left your headlights on. The default timeout was quite long as well, something like 60 seconds.

The way multiple Bluetooth phones are handled is just as annoying in the Leaf as it is in the Prius, which disappoints me, given 6 years have passed. The way I'd like to see multiple phones handled is the car chooses to pair with whichever phone is in range, or if multiple phones are in range, it asks or uses the last one it paired with. In reality, it tries to pair with whatever it paired with last time, and one has to press far too many buttons to switch it to one of the other phones it knows about.

Range anxiety is definitely something of a concern. It can be managed by using the GPS navigation for long or otherwise anxiety-inducing trips, and then one can compare the "miles remaining" on the GPS with the "miles remaining" on the battery range, and reassure oneself that they will indeed make it to where they're trying to go. The worst case I had was getting to within 5 miles of empty. The car started complaining at me.

The charging infrastructure in the Bay Area is pretty good. There are plenty of charging stations in San Francisco and San Jose. I'm spoiled in that I have free charging available at work (including a building at the end of my street, so I never bothered with getting a home charger installed). I've almost never had to pay for charging, so it's been great while gas prices have been on the rise.

The car's navigation system knows about some charging stations, so you can plan a route with the charging stations it knows about in mind. The only problem is it doesn't know if the charging stations are in use. If you use the ChargePoint Android app, you can see if the charging stations are in use, but then you have to do this cumbersome dance to find an available charging station and plug the address into the vehicle's navigation system. Of course, what can then happen is in the time you're driving to the charging station, someone else starts using it. I actually got bitten by this yesterday.

Would I buy a Leaf again? Not as my sole car. It makes a perfect second/commuter car, but as a primary vehicle, it's too limited by its range. They're also ridiculously expensive in Australia, and Brisbane has absolutely no charging infrastructure.

I've decided to write this post as a note to myself. I'm still learning Node.js and digging into Express/Jade, but I've read many people using the nice Twitter Bootstrap and I was wondering if there was a way to integrate all these technologies. The short answer is: yes, we can!

Note: once again, I'm not a Node.js expert and surely there are other ways to achieve this task (for example there is a Node.js module called twitter-bootstrap, but I haven't tried it). This tutorial is based on another tutorial I found, but it was not very updated and it had a more complicated way to install Bootstrap, so I decided to write a new one basing it on the original http://www.rs.au.com/31/how-to-install-bootstrap-v2-0-2-in-expressjs-v3-0-0

Preparing the environment

I will assume that you're running any Linux distribution (in my case I'm using Ubuntu 12.10, but feel free to use your own distribution). Be sure to have installed a recent version of nodejs and npm packages (I'm using Node.js 0.8.20 and npm 1.2.11).

Create a project folder and install the required dependencies

mkdir node-bootstrap
cd node-bootstrap
npm install express
npm install jade

Create the basic project structure with Express

andrea@andrea-Inspiron-660:~/Documents/sviluppo/nodejs/node-bootstrap$ node_modules/express/bin/express nodebootstrap

create : nodebootstrap
create : nodebootstrap/package.json
create : nodebootstrap/app.js
create : nodebootstrap/public
create : nodebootstrap/public/javascripts
create : nodebootstrap/public/images
create : nodebootstrap/public/stylesheets
create : nodebootstrap/public/stylesheets/style.css
create : nodebootstrap/routes
create : nodebootstrap/routes/index.js
create : nodebootstrap/routes/user.js
create : nodebootstrap/views
create : nodebootstrap/views/layout.jade
create : nodebootstrap/views/index.jade

install dependencies:
$ cd nodebootstrap && npm install

run the app:
$ node app

You should already have installed all the needed dependencies, even without executing npm install, anyway executing it won't hurt.

Download and install Bootstrap

Download Twitter Boostrap from the official website http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/assets/bootstrap.zip and unzip it under the nodebootstrap/public folder.

Bootstrap integration with Jade template system

At this point you need to edit the views/layout.jade file and include the references to Bootsrap

!!! html head title= title link(rel='stylesheet', href='/bootstrap/css/bootstrap.min.css') link(rel='stylesheet', href='/bootstrap/css/bootstrap-responsive.min.css') link(rel='stylesheet', href='/stylesheets/style.css') script(src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js') script(src='/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.min.js') body block content

Test the Bootstrap integration

At this point we will modify views/index.jade that is the default template used to render the index

extends layout block content div.top form.form-horizontal(method="post", id="loginForm") label Username input.span3(id="username", type="text", name="User", placeholder="Enter your username") label Password input.span3(id="password", type="password", name="Password") input.btn(type="submit", value="Log In") div.container div.content table.table.table-striped thead tr th Table th Heading tbody tr td Blah td Test tr td Hello td World div.footer

Now go back to the terminal and execute the app:

andrea@andrea-Inspiron-660:~/Documents/sviluppo/nodejs/node-bootstrap/nodebootstrap$ node app.js
Express server listening on port 3000

Open your favourite browse and visit http://localhost:3000 to see your first Bootstrap + Node.js application app and running.

On Thursday February 21 Google pulled the curtain back on the much rumored Chromebook Pixel. Here are the specifications.

Screen
• 12.85″ display with a 3:2 aspect ratio
• 2560 x 1700 at 239 PPI
• 400 nit screen brightness
• 178° extra-wide viewing angle

Inputs

• Gorilla® Glass multi-touch screen
• Backlit Chrome keyboard
• Clickable, etched-glass touchpad
• Integrated 720p HD camera

Size / weight

• 297.7 x 224.6 x 16.2 mm
• 3.35 lbs / 1.52 kg

Industrial design

• Machined from anodized aluminum
• Active cooling with no visible vents
• ENERGY STAR® certified

CPU

• Intel® Core™ i5 processor (Dual Core 1.8GHz)
• Intel® HD Graphics 4000 (Integrated)

Ports

• 2 x USB 2.0
• mini display port
• SD / MMC card reader

Memory

• 4GB DDR3 RAM

Storage

• One terabyte Google Drive cloud storage for three years
• 32GB solid state drive (64GB on LTE model)

Audio

• Combo headphone/mic jack
• Built-in microphone array
• Integrated DSP for noise cancellation
• Powerful stereo speakers tuned for clarity

Connectivity

• Dual-band WiFi 802.11a/b/g/n 2×2
• Bluetooth® 3.0
• Built-in LTE modem (LTE model)

Battery

• Up to 5 hours of active use (59 Wh battery)

Suggested Retail Price

• $1,299

The quality of the product is outstanding and I should be reaching for my plastic; but I’m not. A ZNet blog post by James Kendrick states it best.

So Google’s wonderful display on the Chromebook Pixel had the desired effect on me. It made me want a great display, so I bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display. I don’t think it ended quite the way Google hoped it would, though.

Why did Jim abandon the Pixel and spend $200 more for an Apple?

Perceived value.

• Apple Brand
• OS X
• 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5
• 128GB flash storage
• 7 hours of battery operation

In reality the price of the Pixel may very well be a great value for a laptop of this build quality, but the market expected something different. In my opinion priced at $699 or $799 sales would be viral and the Google Play store would be showing “Sold Out”.

Some things I would change to reach these price points.

1. Replace Intel i5 with a low power ARM SoC (nVidia / Samsung / Qualcomm / LG / Others)
2. As the product does not morph into a tablet, lose the touch screen
3. Replace the anodized aluminum case with a stylish polycarbonate material
4. Up battery operation to 7 hours

If the goal of Pixel was to make a statement the result has to be something different, something better, and something more affordable than a high end Ultra book or Mac book.

Hopefully the next round of Chromebooks will get there.

The post Chromebook Pixel – The Saga Continues appeared first on j-Baer.

I have been playing around with Project Euler on and off for the past mumble years. I have been playing around with Haskell for around six months, and when I get to combine the two and do a little screencasting magic, I can make a live coding video about it all. Yay me.

If you like what I did, and want to see more of that kind of thing, send me suggestions by email, or find me on IRC and poke me there. Ta.

Today in my C programing class I thought I would try a new application I had installed C4Droid. After completing about half the installation the process stopped. I was then greeted with warnings that I had a virus. I did not get C4droid from some backstreet appstore, I installed it from the Google app store. I am in no way suggesting C4Droid is a virus. According to the Google Play store it has many happy users. I was prompted to install Armor for Android. Wanting to resolve the situation immediately I installed the app. I normally do not install applications without doing a little research on them. The situation seemed desperate though, I know I overreact. I installed Armor for Android and ran the scan. It said I had three threats. So I chose to remove the offending threats. Then i was greeted with a screen wanting my payment information. I was in class, did not have a a credit card on me, and besides I thought their must be a free open source alternative.

First I wanted to remove the Armor for Android. Turns out this app did not get installed through the Google Play store. This made its removal not as straight forward as i thought. Here is how I removed Armor for Android.

1.Click Settings on your phone

2.Then navigate to and click Applications

3.Scrolling through the list of apps I found Armor for Android

4.Clicking on the application brought me to a screen that offered the option to Uninstall the application.

5.Clicking uninstall warned me ‘This application will be removed’, I then procedded to click OK.

6.Fortunately this resulted in the desired outcome and the application was removed.

My experience did not end their, the Virus warnings continued to pop up at what seemed like an increasing rate.

The next thing I did was remove C4droid and a few other apps it had installed while it was trying to install C4Droid on my phone.

Once I got home and in front of my laptop I was able to spend some time looking for a free, although unfortunately not open source, solution to my problem.

Avast Mobile Security
Full-featured, best/top-rated Android antivirus & security app with malware protection (with USSD blocker). Their are also many other features some include a firewall, scheduled virus scans, SMS and call filter, and an anti-theft option which provides you remote options (via web portal or SMS commands) for locating and recovering your phone.

I installed the application from the Google Play store. After a quick registration I was able to scan my phones apps and SD card. Fortunately no viruses were detected.

Hope this helps anyone else who comes across this issue. Have you had a virus on your Android phone? How did you resolve it? Are their apps other then Avast you recommend?

One thing I love about Linux is the ability to try new applications. After all the open source community is very active and new applications are being created all the time. The command-line makes it easy to add and remove Personal Package Archives. However their is a tool which will let you add, remove, search, manage Personal Package Archives(PPA) and more from a GUI. I will talk about it below.
First the basics. You can easily add a PPA from the command-line with the following commands.

add-apt-repository ppa:

For exaple in three easy commands I can install the application CLI Companion:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:byobu/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install byobu

Because of my endless tinkering and checking out the latest software our FOSS developers have created I ended up with quite a large collection of Personal Package Archives(PPA). Some of which I no longer used.

At first I was unsure how to get rid of these. Today I did a little research and wanted to share with you what I found. This includes a cool new application called Y PPA Manager. Whether it is the command-line or a fancy GUI app we will have you cleaning up your collection of Personal Package Archives in no time.

From the terminal you can use a very similar command that you used to add the PPA.

sudo apt-add-repository –remove ppa:

Then run the following to download the package lists from the repositories and “update” them to get information on the newest versions of packages and their dependencies. It will do this for all repositories and PPAs

sudo apt-get update

Saved The Best For Last

I came across a project which had a lot of positive reviews and made many top 10 application lists. The features definetly peeked my interest. The application is Y PPA Manager. Y PPA Manager is a tool which simplifies this process of managing Personal Package Archives (PPA). It allows adding, deleting and purging PPAs easily. You can also search and install PPAs from Launchpad repositories by entering the name of an application. I gave it a spin today and I have to say so far I like it. You can install Y PPA Manager with the following commands,

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/y-ppa-manager

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install y-ppa-manager

The main interface is quite self explanatory. You can Add a new PPA from the Add button and delete added sources from the Remove button. To get a list of your packages, use the “List Packages”. The Advanced options allows backing up, restoring and purging PPAs.

What makes this application really useful is its PPA search ability. This allows you to easily find a Launchpad PPA, click on Search all Launchpad PPAs and enter an application name. You can also enable the Deep Search option for a more advanced search.

Whichever option you choose your PPPA list will now be much more manageable.

Microsoft Surface Pro vs Samsung Nexus 10

Microsoft’s Surface Pro is the company’s most recent attempt to revolutionize the way we see the personal computer, merging the traditional desktop with tablets in a single interface. Google’s Nexus 10 comes with Android, which is purpose built for smart phones and tablets.

While comparing these two devices, I didn’t expect to enjoy the Nexus 10 as much as I did. On paper having a full core i5 processor in a tablet form was exactly what I was looking for. I don’t have many qualms with the Windows 8 interface, and think it is a decent step forward. However, when using the Surface Pro’s 10.6” screen, I found myself really enjoying the Windows 8 applications, while staying away from the desktop applications and using my laptop for those instead. The problem is that if I don’t actually run desktop applications on it, there isn’t much purpose over the whole line of Atom based Z2760 tablets that still breeze through the Windows 8 applications with ease and double the battery life.

Category Winner DisplayNexus ProcessorSurface EcosystemNexus Legacy EcosystemSurface WeightNexus Battery LifeNexus Open SourceNexus StorageTie - Surface requires more space, but comes with more

The Nexus 10 lasts 3-4 hours longer than the Surface, while having a crisper display, and having more marquee applications available (obviously tablet applications, not legacy). ConnectBot for SSH is fantastic (I used it to generate this blog), and I found the Chrome browser very responsive. To Microsoft’s credit, IE 10 is great too, but from an interface perspective it is definitely first release material (for instance: how do you find your current downloads?). In addition, the Android notification framework works very well, while Microsoft’s live tiles look slicker, but functionally are less useful.

I found that when using Windows 8 and Android applications, the speed of both systems was generally equal. From a gaming perspective, the i5 and HD4000 of the Surface Pro provides a huge advantage over the Nexus 10, but if I am going to play PC games, I will just do it on my regular desktop and not a 10.6” screen (and now on Ubuntu with Steam).

I think Microsoft did a fantastic job designing Windows 8 and the Surface, but even if they were closer in price (Nexus 10 was $499 while the Surface Pro was $999), I would purchase the Nexus 10 over the Surface. It is lighter, open source, higher resolution, longer battery life, and with the Logitech Keyboard even a better typing experience.

KDE Project:

• DCOP

I get nice comments on IRC occationally, here's an especially nice one recently:

Can I thank all the Kubuntu Ninjas for their superlative efforts with Raring (amazingly stable for Alpha 2), KDE SC 4.10 and KDE Telepathy.. it is amazingly smooth and stable, and uses a lot less memory than previous releases.. very impressed..

I was watching a film about the Pirate Bay last night on BBC's Storyville, turns out the people who run The Pirate Bay run KDE.

But most impressive enough was an e-mail from PJ the world's most elite legal geek from Groklaw who e-mailed me saying:

"let me say thank you for KDE. I am a KDE girl, and I have been for years. So thank you."

KDE: the desktop of choice for elite pirates and legal geeks.

Hi guys!

As you know Ubuntu Global jam is coming! And Lubuntu needs help from all us

What is Lubuntu?
Lubuntu is a variant of Ubuntu that is lighter, less resource hungry and more energy-efficient by using lightweight applications and LXDE, The Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, as its default GUI.  more information the official page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Lubuntu

I am a tester! What do I have to do?
Firstly, you need to get Lubuntu isos and you can find them here: http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/milestones/243/builds we need test all our isos but especially our Alternates, so take an hour and help us to make Lubuntu better

I am not a Tester, but I want to to help
If this is your first iso-testing day, don’t worry! all information about the process is in this wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/ISO/Walkthrough

Remember, if you have any question or you want to have a nice time, you can find us in #ubuntu-quality  on Freenode

Hello world!

Ubuntu Global Jam is coming to town (seriously) from 1st to 3rd March, 2013, with different Ubuntu contribution projects that you can play with friends in your city or on the Internet.

Our QA Cadence Week 7 is at the same time as it, so Nicholas Skaggs has posted a new wiki page for all people to check out what YOU can do for QA. Find it at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Cadence/Raring/Week7UbuntuGlobalJam.

We will be focusing on three aspects:

Application testing: This time we have multiple applications for you to test, including Deja-dup, Empathy, Evince, Eye of Gnome, Fileroller, Firefox, Gedit, Gnome Screenshot, Gnome Terminal, LibreOffice, Nautilus, Network Manager, Orca, Pulseaudio, Rythmnbox, Shotwell, Thunderbird, Totem and Ubuntu One. Just follow the detailed testcases and report bugs along the way. Make sure you report them through terminal using `ubuntu-bug (packagename)`.

Images testing: We have Raring daily images freshly prepared for you to come and test. Bring along your spare machine or VM (or even a Nexus 7!) to play with testing. Make sure it installs and works and no bugs.

Hardware testing: If you have a laptop, try to install the Raring daily images and make sure not only the software but the hardware works too, like Trackpad, DVD drive, USB, sound, etc.

If you want to write manual testcases and followed the format but don’t know if it is right or wrong, check out Javier P.L. (chilicuil)’s script in https://raw.github.com/chilicuil/learn/master/sh/test_case_format Download the script and run `./test_case_format (testcase)` to get it converted. Then submit a merge request against lp:ubuntu-manual-tests !

WELCOME TO QUALITY ASSURANCE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here was a talk I gave at Boston Python a few weeks ago. Check it out, and feel free to follow along with the slides, and take a look at the source.