First: The “Why”. Well, it’s because when I write code, I usually don’t have the time (or the patience) to write everything perfectly, so I usually just write in a small TODO or FIXME for later. The issue is, when I do want to fix them (e.g. in the final polishing stage of development), it’s hard to find them (especially if you have many source files, and it takes some time to open any of them). Also, it’s because I wanted to learn perl, and I wanted to take a small break from my other project (which is taking up most of my free time).

The repository is here: https://github.com/MiJyn/extract-xxx. Download it however you want, then run extract-xxx.pl.

What it basically does is that it searches through a file for the “comment types” (which is just a name I assigned for things like “XXX” or “TODO”, since I don’t know that they’re really called), and then prints them with (by default), 2 lines of context, both before and after. It’s kind of like grep, but it’s a bit more specialized towards this task (though you could theoretically do everything this does by fancy utilization of grep, find, and nl).

Example usage:

$ ./extract-xxx.pl ./README.md 48 | An incomplete list of limitations would be: 49 | >50>>| * It doesn't do any lexical parsing, so if you wrote `XXX:` in a string or something else (not a comment), it would still report it. Though it's also somewhat of a feature, as then it supports any language >51>>| * It requires a colon (`:`) after a comment type (i.e. you have to write `XXX:` instead of `XXX`) 52 | * The `-x` option just places whatever you put in a `m/.../` without any kind of processing. Therefore, don't expect things to go too well if you added some kind of weird scripting stuff (or a `/`). 53 |

When run with no arguments, it will recursively go through the current directory (including sub-directories, and sub-sub-directories, etc…), and will then go through each file, as mentioned previously. As you can notice, lines 50 and 51 are highlighted (by >50>>), as they contain a “comment type” (in both cases, XXX), proceeded by a colon.

Instead of rewriting everything here, check out the repository, as the README explains pretty much everything you need to know about it.

Anyways, let me know what you think, any constructive criticism is appreciated

Full Circle

Issue #72

This month:

* Ubuntu News.
* How-To : Programming in Python, LibreOffice, and Network Settings.
* Graphics : Blender, and Inkscape.
* Book Review: The Book of GIMP.
* Review: SolydXK

plus: Q&A, Command & Conquer, Linux Labs, Ask The New Guy, My Story,
and soooo much more! Get it while it’s HOT! http://fullcirclemagazine.org/issue-72/

I have a theory (I know, I am full of them). Like most of you, as I have gotten older I have also tried to improve as a person. I am not just talking about being better at what I do with my career and hobbies, but I want to be a genuinely good person across the board; a good husband, father, son, friend, colleague, and dude who you bump your shopping cart into when buying milk. My theory is that people fundamentally improve by (a) making mistakes and (b) understanding and learning from those mistakes to not only prevent making the mistake again, but to also uncover the cause and effect of why the mistake was made, thus improving your life.

Now, the (probably illogical) logical continuation of my theory is that to make improvements (a) you need to make more mistakes (which opens up the opportunity for learning), and (b) you need to develop CSI-like capabilities in assessing those mistakes and their root causes. Continuing the theme, if we can figure out ways to identify ways of triggering making more mistakes in a way that doesn’t get you arrested and we can identify ways to help us understand why we screw up the way we do, we should have a golden ticket for rocking our lives. Incidentally, this theory was boiled in my head while driving out to pick up Thai food on Saturday night, so this is no Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity in terms of completeness.

While I am rather thin on the ground in terms of what is the next logical part of my theory, I suspect that the way in which we invite more none-life-threatening mistakes is to break out of our molds and take more risks; if we never take chances, we lower the opportunity for risk and mistakes, but also lower the opportunity for learning. Likewise, for the latter understanding our mistakes part I suspect the key is not figuring out ways to prevent the mistake (“I got angry and shouted at my dog today so I will try to keep my cool”) but more about understanding the cause of the mistake (“I am stressed from work and bringing that stress home and taking it out on people and animals”). Much as I love dogs, the goal here is not to stop shouting at the dog but to repair the root cause. So I ask you, dear friends, does my theory wash with you, and if so, how can we increase the number of mistakes and the quality of our self-assessment of those mistakes?

Hello everyone!

The LoCo Council would like to take this opportunity to share with you an announcement of our newest members!  A few weeks ago ChristopheSauthier and EfrainValles took the decision  to step down, this was definitely sad news for us, but we understand and wish them the best. We would like to give many thanks to them both for their great work!

We needed to try and restore the team to six members, and asked the community for nominations. We received many good nominations, but only had two positions available at this time. After we received the nominations we forwarded them on to the Community Council. They have now had a chance to evaluate the nominees, and have came to a decision.

Without further ado, We would now like to introduce you to the new members of the LoCo Council:

- PabloRubianes: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PabloRubianes

- MarcosCostales: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/costales

Welcome Pablo and Marcos, we hope that you’ll have a good time working with us! We would also like give thanks to all of the nominees, as we always have great applicants. The decisions are never easy, when trying to narrow down who’s selected. We hope that those of you who were nominated will consider applying again in the future.

The Firmware Test Suite (fwts) is a tool containing a large set of tests to exercise and diagnose firmware related bugs in x86 PC firmware.  So what new shiny features have appeared in the new Ubuntu Raring 13.04 release?

UEFI specific tests to exercise and stress test various UEFI run time services:
 
  * Stress test for miscellaneous run time service interfaces.
  * Test get/set time interfaces.
  * Test get/set wakeup time interfaces.
  * Test get variable interface.
  * Test get next variable name interface.
  * Test set variable interface.
  * Test query variable info interface. 
  * Set variable interface stress test.
  * Query variable info interface stress test.
  * Test Miscellaneous runtime service interfaces.

These use a new kernel driver to allow fwts to access the kernel UEFI run time interfaces.  The driver is built and installed using DKMS.

ACPI specific improvements:

  * Improved ACPI 5.0 support
  * Annotated ACPI _CRS (Current Resource Settings) dumping.

Kernel log scanning (finds and diagnoses errors as reported by the kernel):

  * Improved kernel log scanning with an additional 450 tests.

This release also includes many small bug fixes as well as minor improvements to the layout of the output of some of the tests.

Many thanks to Alex Hung, Ivan Hu, Keng-Yu Lin and Matt Fleming for all the improvements to fwts for this release.

We have just published a new chapter on our App Design Guides : how to handle orientation.

To cater for the different orientations of a range of touch devices, we need to design apps for Ubuntu in a responsive way.

Phone orientations

1. The primary orientation for an app on the phone is portrait.
2. Consider using landscape orientation when we want to have a full screen experience for a single piece of content, such as watching a video, looking at a photo or gaming.
3. A phone app automatically fits in the tablet’s side stage, with a flexible height.

Tablet orientations

1. The primary orientation for an app on the tablet is landscape.
2. Consider portrait orientation when it will help the user engage with your app; for example reading a magazine or writing a long email.
3. By supporting portrait, your app automatically supports split screen.

Responsive strategies

Use these strategies to make your app work on screens of both different sizes and orientations.

Position graphic elements relatively

For ease of use we space graphical elements relatively; to both one another and the screen edges.

Decide how your app might show more or less content

• An app on the tablet’s main stage might show more content than on the phone.

• An app on the phone with a list of content, such as a feed, would show much more content in the side stage as it is taller.

• If your app’s content is larger than what fits in view, for example a map, you might consider showing more or less content depending on shape and orientation.

• If your app’s content is fixed in shape then it can simply scale up or down. For example the same amount of content on the phone would be scaled up on the tablet.

A few last things

1. Use extra space constructively
Consider what content your app could show in extra space, be it the history of a calculator, a list of missed calls or even high scores!
2. If your phone app does not scale, it will remain a fixed height in the side stage.

Hope this helps – and as ever please let us know what you think, these guidelines are a work in progress and will grow over time. Feel free to get in touch with us on the Ubuntu Phone mailing list and the IRC channel.

Today I can celebrate 3 years of working for Canonical.

First days

I was supposed to start from 1st May but as I had vacations already planned for that week (in Poland 1st and 3rd May are national holidays) they asked me to start work one week earlier — on 26th April 2010.

First week was usual learning about company rules, structure, reading wiki etc. Then I went for vacations and right after I was going for UDS-M (somewhere around Brussels, Belgium) where I met a team of people of unnamed project. Some days after event that team got a name: Linaro.

Linaro Developer Platform

I am a member of Developer Platform from beginning. Our team was changing, we got more people than we lost some as they moved to newly created teams and we had few renames. First it was Foundations (like Ubuntu Foundations at Canonical), then Developer Platform, then just Platform. Now we are Bold & BeautifulBase and Baselines.

We work on delivering components done by other teams (like ARM and AArch64 cross toolchains, Linux kernel), provide test images created from Ubuntu packages or built with OpenEmbedded (soon also Fedora).

Since September 2012 I am working on AArch64 (64-bit ARM) bring-up with use of OpenEmbedded (as at that time none of distributions had anything working to base on). Updated toolchain, fixed many issues with different software packages, patched some applications/libraries. Cooperated with few teams at Linaro and with several upstream projects.

Canonical or Linaro?

As some people remember there was a moment last year when I was supposed to leave Linaro and go to Canonical. But someone decided to keep me for longer…

But such things does not last forever. At the end of May I will probably end my journey at Linaro cause contract for Canonical’s engineers will end. Unless someone wants to keep me for longer…

Related content:

1. 35 months at Linaro
2. So long, and thanks for all the fish
3. ARM 64-bit porting for OpenEmbedded
4. 2012 timeline
5. Events in 2012 which I will attend

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
3 years at Canonical was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

The latest instalment of Ubuntu releases came out today. This is called 13.04 and was code named Raring Ringtail.

There were many exciting developments in the Desktop, but I'd like to offer my thoughts on the Cloud area. I have outlined some of the areas of most interest

Juju

Juju (the cloud service orchestration tool) is in a really exciting area of development at the moment. This release is sporting both the original python based version, and "juju-core" - which is a re-implementation following the same principles, building on lessons from the original. The interesting attribute to "juju-core" is that it is written in the Go language. I believe this is the first Ubuntu release that has included a Go application.

OpenStack Grizzly

Ubuntu 13.04 includes the Grizzly release of Openstack. The projects included in this release are Nova, Glance, Swift, Keystone, Horizon, Cinder and Quantum. Ceilometer is also included in 13.04 in Ubuntu Universe. Grizzly is also available for the 12.04 LTS release, via the Ubuntu Cloud Archive.

Significant enrichment around the Juju Charms for Openstack this release; for the Grizzly release this also includes deploying in a highly available configuration as demonstrated at the OpenStack Summit in Portland. This was achieved thanks to the awesome work in Landscape.

MAAS

MAAS, or Metal-as-a-Service, had a polish cycle of building on the developments of previous releases. This included the 1.3 release which is most notable for the "Fast Path Installer" work, this significantly reduces the install time for new nodes by reusing the ubuntu cloud images as install media - rather than per-package-selection. It is driven from cloud-init, meaning it also offers extended flexibility.

Simple Streams

There is now machine formatted JSON data describing all downloadable content for Ubuntu cloud images. The data format is called "simple streams", and can be found at http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/released/streams/. There is a sample client included in Ubuntu in the 'simplestreams' package. The client can be used to keep cloud or local downloads in sync with what is available from Ubuntu. It will be exciting to see how people make use of this data.

Ceph 0.56.4

The popular distributed storage platform which provides object, block, and file storage latest Ceph Bobtail LTS release (0.56.4) is in 13.04. This version sports OpenStack Keystone integration which is implemented into the RADOS Gateway, providing a drop-in replacement for Swift and can be deployed using Juju Charms.

MongoDB 2.2.4

MongoDB, the popular nosql database has been updated to version 2.2.4; for this release has SSL support enabled for secure usage (primarily to support Juju 2.0). MongoDB's ARM architecture support has also been improved this cycle. This is also being provided as an official backport for 12.04 and 12.10 Ubuntu releases.

OpenvSwitch 1.9.0

Latest stable release of OpenvSwitch 1.9.0, featuring full support for Linux kernel 3.8. This is a particular area of focus due to the popularity in Openstack Quantum, "Network as a Service" component. I'm expecting this release to get more exposure of SDN (Software Defined Networking), than any previous.

VMWare

VMware announced last week that they were partnering with Canonical to make VMWare vSphere a viably supported Openstack Nova compute with Ubuntu Cloud Infrastructure. This is super exciting, as we know that many enterprise users have asked for this.

Support Cycle

Normally Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) releases are supported for 5 years, with the interim releases being supported for 18 months. It was decided this cycle to reduce the term of support to 9 months, to allow greater attention to LTS Stable Updates, and to improve quality velocity in the development version.

Well it’s another cycle and another Ubuntu release and it’s another cycle’s worth of Charm Store improvements. Since the Charm Store doesn’t freeze we can continually improve the capabilites of the charms over time while users can stick to the stable userspace that 12.04 LTS provides.

If you’re new here and have no idea what Juju is then check out the video. And what are charms? Well charms are the services you deploy. If juju is apt-get for the cloud, then charms are the packages for those clouds.

Juju has one mission in life, and that’s getting your services not only deployed, but manage them over the course of their lifecycle. Our job is to take your code and get you up and running on AWS, HP Cloud, Azure, and OpenStack as easily as possible.

First the raw numbers

• 133 peer-reviewed charms in the store
• 288 charms in personal branches
• 151 total contributors (82 Canonical, 57 non-Canonical, 12 Canonical Juju coredevs)

As far as raw Charm download numbers, these are currently unavailable to browse, however next week or so when the new GUI/website land users will not only be able to see the number of downloads per charm, but if the charm works on a given provider. More about that in a future blog post …

So what’s in the app store?

Rails, node.js, and Django

One term you might be hearing tossed around is “PaaS on my own terms”. The idea here is that people really like the workflow that you can get with Heroku and other PaaSes, but don’t want the added complexity. Just your app and your provider.

Here’s how it works… assuming your Rails app is “myapp”, let’s deploy your application with postgresql to show you the kind of workflow we provide. We provide generic “platform charms” that let you snag things right out of version control and deploy them. Assuming you have a myapp.yaml file describing your application:

myapp: app_name: myapp repo_type: git repo_url: "https://github.com/mmm/testrails.git"

Now you’re to deploy on your cloud provider, this can be AWS, HP Cloud, your own OpenStack, or your local Ubuntu laptop:

juju bootstrap juju deploy --config ~/myapp.yaml rails myapp juju deploy postgresql

relate them

juju add-relation postgresql myapp

open it up to the outside world

juju expose myapp

Find the myapp instance’s public URL from

juju status

Like all services that can connect to a reverse proxy, we’ve made it so that you can easily scale out your application horizontally via haproxy:

juju deploy haproxy juju add-relation haproxy myapp juju add-unit -n5 myapp juju expose haproxy # Change your DNS to point to this IP instead juju unexpose myapp # We’re behind haproxy now, no need to leave this open to the world.

And this is just the rails example, we can do this for node.js and django, and I’m always keeping an eye out for Java-smart developers, so if you want to make this kind of workflow for your platform, let me know!

Databases and other infrastructure

Need master/slave with that Postgres? We’ve got it, you just need to fire it up with a few commands.

Any Ubuntu user can set up a master/slave Postgres setup this way. It’s nice, it’s like having Stuart Bishop and his roving band of IS Postgresql gurus setting up your Postgres config for you. And since we dogfood OpenStack and our charms everyday, it’ll work.

Need to set up replicasets in MongoDB? We’ve got that built into the MongoDB charm too.

Or sometimes you just need a blank LAMP stack or you can toss in some elasticsearch if you want it.

Come see us and tell us what you need

Come check us out at any one of these events in 2013 if you’re interested in learning more or join us at our next virtual Charm School.

Developing Python applications sometimes it's useful to be able to test the code with different environments, for example a particular version of Python or a specific Django version etc... Setting up many different virtual machines would be really too much work and even using a chroot environment is not what you need in some cases. Thanks to virtualenv is it possible to create a self contained Python environment with all the specific libraries you may need. Using virtualenv is very easy:

• Creating the virtual environment: virtualenv myenv --no-site-packages
• Entering the virtual environment: source myenv/bin/activate
• Deactivating the virtual environment: deactivate

That's it! Once you're inside the virtual environment you will be using the Python libraries inside it. I suggest you to install all the Python libraries you need using pip.

Since i can remember i was delighted by computer security and always wanted to make a career on that field and be like one of those hackers in dark room with a black screen with green letters in front of me while i hacked into government computers in a matter of seconds like we can see in any hollywood movie, but after i started building my career in the field i found out the reality: cracking is not as glorious as hollywood claims. Working on security is harder, more boring and even waaay easier and no-brainer than media, hollywood and basically every non-computer person thinks.

Don't get me wrong, computer security is indeed a hard work and requieres a deep knowledge of the computing stack, starting from the physics that make the energy flow around the computer to make it work to the highest level known as OSI's eight layer (a.k.a. the user) because a bug can be at any part of that: buffer overflows, scam, MITM, phishing, etc...

There are a lot of saying on the matter, the one i like and say the most if always:

"A system is as secure as its weakest link"

This is the most true anyone can get to a saying in security, and guess which is always the weakest link? No clue? Einstein knew:

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

And here i leave you with a j!nx t-shirt:

So back to the topic of security holes and why i say the media is always wrong. I recently confirmed that a bug that i reported a couple of years ago it's fixed, so let me illustrate what i'm saying with the example. A hotspot company offered internet connection on different establishments for an hourly fee, when you got to the network the only place you can go was the company's establishment site and pay the fee or you won't be able to get into the internet, i think everyone has come across one so i won't get into the details. Also the same company on other establishments offered the connection in exchange of you watching some videos or fill a form and that could only be done in some establishments. Until now this is a pretty good and secure system, you get to establishment A, pay the fee, get internet, go to B, watch a video, get internet, you can't watch a video in A because there is no option for that, all good. Well, not quite, once i went from B where i failed to connect and needed to go right before i clicked "watch the video" and then went to A, to my surprise i got access to B's site and the option to watch the video, so i clicked there and got an internet connection. I never "cracked" anything, used a whole of my technical knowledge or anything, just happend to bypass the security of a system by accident. I tested this a couple of times to be sure what was exactly going on, documented it and informed the hotspot company, no awesome hollywood glorious nonsense or hours in front of a computer hacking, just an iPod with the wrong URL open on it to be able to "crack" a system.
Ok, that's just one time, i was lucky, that doesn't prove your point. Well, i have another example, recently i was playing one of those heavily addictive facebook flash-based games where they give you lifes so you don't play all day long, so i run out of lifes after a while and noticed i had a second tab with the game open, when i went to it to closed guess what happened? My lifes where full! Game gifting lifes? Not really, another bug. The AWESOME flash architecture was playing on my side (yes, i hate flash), so once again i tested it to confirm the bug and what's going on. So once you open the game it downloads this game, checks how many lifes you have and let's you play in case you do and doesn't contact the backend until it needs more data or store some more, so what happens here is i can open a few tabs with the game while i have lifes, backend will report i do have lifes and the game will wait for me to do something, so i can play in one tab, run out of lifes, go to the next tab and i have lifes again! Not all of them are playable, because once the game reports that i lose it will answer with the lifes i do have which is 0, but i can play as many times as tabs i have open. Again no-brainer hack, just terrible architecture.
Ok, i believe you, but what does this has to do with the human being the weakest link always and human stupidity, this is just a technical error. Well yes, but then there is this other times when people find that i'm a security guy and ALWAYS asks me about wikileaks and annonymous and how do they hack this awesomely secure government machines, and i always answer with those quotes, i don't have a single doubt about those hackers skills, but it's quite easy to start the hack for one simple reason: it doesn't matter how secure company computers are, there is every time someone that sends the company confidential files to his personal e-mail account to open it later in the family computer that the wife or kids have already infected with malware surfing the web, and bingo, confidential documents in an easy to steal computer, attach the virus to the file, wait for the user to open it in the company network again and you are done, access to the extra secure network for free! (This is the point where you say "yes i do send company files to my personal e-mail account all the time")
It doesn't matter how skilled or not you are, there are always tricks to fool you, if you don't believe me and think you will never get fooled i dare to attend defcon and open your e-mail in the event's wifi (PROTIP: Do it in front of the wall of sheep and wait :D)

So, in conclusion, don't believe everything the media says, they don't understand computer security so most of the lies are just the result of ignorance, it's not a source to trust. Oh! and no, you didn't won a million dollars in a contest you didn't even signed in, no one is that lucky. And again no, the bank is not asking your personal details over e-mail, they already have them, including your password, why would they ask for information they already have? (This is the point where you go "OMG and what about privacy?" that's for another post, this one is already to long)

Alan Pope, Mark Johnson, Tony Whitmore and Laura Cowen return for the ninth episode of Season Six of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo Team!

 Download OGG Play in Popup  Download MP3 Play in Popup

In this week’s show:-

• We take a look at what’s been happening in the news:
  • Citrix has donated the Zen project to the Linux Foundation
  • Samsung has admitted paying people to post fake positive reviews
  • Royal Mail will keep the postcode database when sold later this year
• We catch up with what’s happening in the Ubuntu community:
  • Fixing a logo that swirls the wrong way
  • A blog post about the reality of sales figures on Ubuntu Software Centre
  • Rhythmbox integration to be retired for the Ubuntu One Music Store
  • Canonical and VMware to collaborate
  • Ivanka Majic of the Canonical Design Team blogs about designing in the open – we’ll talk to Ivanka about this in the next episode!
  • Community website redesign
  • Bytemark encouraging hosting companies to contribute to Geary email client
• And we mention some events:
  • Ubuntu UK Raring Ringtail release party - The Old Thameside Inn, London, UK – 25th April
  • Ubuntu IE Ubuntu Raring Ringtail release party - The Porterhouse Temple Bar on Parliament Street, Dublin – 28th April
  • GNOME Outreach Program for Women - internships from 17th June to 23rd September - application deadline 1st May
  • Hack ‘n’ Talk – London – 29th June
  • Young Rewired State – Wales – 6th – 7th July

Please send your comments and suggestions to: podcast@ubuntu-uk.org
Join us on IRC in #ubuntu-uk-podcast on Freenode
Leave a voicemail via phone: +44 (0) 203 298 1600, sip: podcast@sip.ubuntu-uk.org and skype: ubuntuukpodcast
Follow our twitter feed http://twitter.com/uupc
Find our Facebook Fan Page
Follow us on Google Plus
Leave us some segment ideas on the Etherpad

                          

Ubuntu 13.04, the Raring Ringtail, was released today. Go and download it for Desktop, Server, Cloud, and for our Chinese friends, download Ubuntu Kylin. You can find all the details of what is new in Ubuntu 13.04 on www.ubuntu.com.

Ubuntu 13.04 is a fantastic release, and I just want to offer thanks to the many people around the world in our community who helped make it happen. Folks such as developers, app/charm authors, designers, testers, triagers, translators, sys-admins, support providers, governors, docs writers, advocates, and more, all contributed their brick in the wall to delivering Ubuntu 13.04 across Desktop, Server, and Cloud, and continuing to bring freedom and elegance in technology to more people. But this is only part of the story, as behind the scenes, but in full public view, we are continuing to evolve Ubuntu towards our convergence goals. This will be a common theme as we march forward to Ubuntu 13.10, the Saucy Salamander.

I know many of us are tired after a hectic release schedule, so take some time to enjoy the release, get together with other Ubuntu friends, and celebrate Ubuntu 13.04! I will certainly be blowing the froth off a few cold ones tonight.

I've started to prototype and lay the foundations for the indicators to use the Upstart User Sessions. It's an exciting change to our desktop foundations, and while it's still very fresh, I think it's important to start understanding what it can do for us. For right now you're going to need a patch to Unity and a patch to indicator-network to even get anything working, not recommended for trying at home.

Previously for indicators the way that they've worked is that a small loadable module was loaded by the panel service that had indicator specific UI in it. That plugin also took care of the responsibility to restart the indicator backend, respawning it if it crashed. While this works and it has created a robust desktop (most people don't notice when their indicator backends crash) it has had some downsides. For one, it makes it difficult to build and test new backends as you pretty much have to restart Unity to stop the previous service from getting respawned. Also all the debugging messages end up coming under the DBus process in ~/.xsession-errors because we were using DBus activation to start them.

With upstart user sessions we're now getting a lot more power and flexibility in managing the jobs in the user session, it makes sense that indicators would start to use it to control the backend services. This comes with a set of advantages.

The first one is that there is better developer control of the state of the process. It's really easy to start and stop the service:

$ stop indicator-network
$ start indicator-network and the ever exciting: $ restart indicator-network All of these ensure that the same commands are run each time in a recreatable way. Plus give the user and/or developer full control.

Upstart also takes the output of each process and puts it into its own log file. So for our example here there is a ~/.cache/upstart/indicator-network.log that contains all of the junk that the backend spits out. While this is nice to just make xsession-errors cleaner, it also means that we can have a really nice apport-hook to pick up that file. Hopefully this will lead to easier debugging of every indicator backend bug because they'll have more focused information on what the issue is. You can also file general bugs with ubuntu-bug indicator-network and get that same information attached.

In the future we'll also be able to do fine tuned job control using external events. So we could have the indicator network backend not start if you don't have any networking devices, but startup as soon as you plug in that USB cellular modem. We're not there yet, but I'm excited that we'll be able to reduce the memory and CPU footprint on devices that don't have all the features of higher end devices, scaling as the features are required.

Those that know me know that I love diagrams and visualizations, and so I'll have to real quickly say that I'm excited about being able to map our desktop startup using intlctl2dot. This gives a Graphviz visualization of startup and how things will interact. I expect this to be a critical debugging tool in the future.

What's next? Getting all the indicators over to the branch new Saucy world. We also want to get application indicators using a similar scheme and get a fast responsive desktop. Hope to have a blog post or two on that in the near future.

This was a very interesting cycle and the first time when my name appears in the official credits for testing and BugReporters, where I have the chance to learn a lot! (literally) and work with an amazing team: The Quality-Team. In this cycle I also worked especially with Test-cases and iso-testing (Ubuntu/Lubuntu in amd64 architectures)

But I did another interesting things in this cycle!

1- I have participated as instructor in the Testing-Sessions with a small session about Testing on your laptop https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/Activities/Classroom

2- I have made several interesting material for this cycle in Spanish: A guide about fixing bugs and work with bazaar http://sergioandresmeneses.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/solucionando-bugs-en-ubuntu-fixing-bugs-in-ubuntu-only-in-spanish/

3- A video about HowTo Start with Autopilot http://sergioandresmeneses.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/getting-started-with-autopilot-in-spanish-video/

Buy not everything was about Ubuntu, I also helped to Kubuntu project doing testing, especially in the Ubuntu Global Jam: http://sergioandresmeneses.wordpress.com/2013/02/23/lubuntu-are-you-an-alternate-tester-help-us/

Congratulations and thanks to the entire extended Ubuntu community for today’s release of Ubuntu 13.04, the Raring Ringtail. Feedback over the past few months on raring has been fantastic – pretty much universal recognition of the performance and quality initiatives Rick’s team have lead and which have been embraced across the platform and the community.

In the work to underpin a rolling release, we made huge strides in automated quality assessment and performance testing. From here on our, I’m going to treat the cutting edge of Ubuntu as a rolling release, because the team have done such an amazing job of making daily quality a reality. That’s a value that we have all adopted, and the project is much better off for it.

Slipping the phrase ‘ring ring’ into the codename of 13.04 was, frankly, a triumph of linguistic engineering. And I thought I might quit on a high… For a while, there was the distinct possibility that Rick’s Rolling Release Rodeo would absolve me of the twice-annual rite of composition that goes into the naming of a new release. That, together with the extent of my travels these past few months, have left me a little short in the research department. I usually spend a few weekend afternoons doodling with a dictionary (it’s actually quite a blast, and I recently had the pleasure of actually knowing what some ponce was talking about when they described something as ‘rugose’).

So today I find myself somewhat short in the naming department, which is to say, I have a name, but not the soliloquy that usually goes with it!

Which is why, upon not very deep reflection, I would like to introduce you to our mascot for the next six months, the saucy salamander.

The salamander is one of nature’s most magical creatures; they are a strong indicator of a pristine environment, which is a fitting way to describe the new world emerging around Ubuntu Touch – new applications, a new SDK, a gorgeous clean interface. You’ll find salamanders swimming in clear, clean upstreams – which is exactly what’s forming around Ubuntu’s mobile ecosystem. It’s a way of saying ‘thank you’ to the tremendous community that has joined the effort to create a single unified experience from phone to PC, with tons of crisp and stylish core apps made by people from all over the world who want to build something fast, fresh and free. And we’re saucy too – life’s to short to be stodgy or stilted. Our work is our play – we make amazing things for a huge audience, we find space for pretty much every flavour of interface and do it with style.

Happy release day everyone! Here’s to a super saucy cycle.

Originally posted here by Mark Shuttleworth on Thursday, April 25th, 2013

Congratulations and thanks to the entire extended Ubuntu community for today’s release of Ubuntu 13.04, the Raring Ringtail. Feedback over the past few months on raring has been fantastic – pretty much universal recognition of the performance and quality initiatives Rick’s team have lead and which have been embraced across the platform and the community.

In the work to underpin a rolling release, we made huge strides in automated quality assessment and performance testing. From here on our, I’m going to treat the cutting edge of Ubuntu as a rolling release, because the team have done such an amazing job of making daily quality a reality. That’s a value that we have all adopted, and the project is much better off for it.

Slipping the phrase ‘ring ring’ into the codename of 13.04 was, frankly, a triumph of linguistic engineering. And I thought I might quit on a high… For a while, there was the distinct possibility that Rick’s Rolling Release Rodeo would absolve me of the  twice-annual rite of composition that goes into the naming of a new release. That, together with the extent of my travels these past few months, have left me a little short in the research department. I usually spend a few weekend afternoons doodling with a dictionary (it’s actually quite a blast, and I recently had the pleasure of actually knowing what some ponce was talking about when they described something as ‘rugose’).

So today I find myself somewhat short in the naming department, which is to say, I have a name, but not the soliloquy that usually goes with it!

Which is why, upon not very deep reflection, I would like to introduce you to our mascot for the next six months, the saucy salamander.

The salamander is one of nature’s most magical creatures; they are a strong indicator of a pristine environment, which is a fitting way to describe the new world emerging around Ubuntu Touch – new applications, a new SDK, a gorgeous clean interface. You’ll find salamanders swimming in clear, clean upstreams – which is exactly what’s forming around Ubuntu’s mobile ecosystem. It’s a way of saying ‘thank you’ to the tremendous community that has joined the effort to create a single unified experience from phone to PC, with tons of crisp and stylish core apps made by people from all over the world who want to build something fast, fresh and free. And we’re saucy too – life’s too short to be stodgy or stilted. Our work is our play – we make amazing things for a huge audience, we find space for pretty much every flavour of interface and do it with style.

Happy release day everyone! Here’s to a super saucy cycle.

Ubuntu 13.04 is now available for download.
For more information on the release, and individual products that make up the release, please see the release notes.

Yes folks, the official announcement for Ubuntu 13.04 release just went out an hour ago. And henceforth, Ubuntu Studio 13.04 is also released!

So what’s new (or notable)?

* New software in seeds — We added popular applications like Krita and LMMS into our images.
* New wallpaper (Rock theme, by Kaj Ailomaa)
* A rewritten icon theme
* A new shortened support period of 9 months to accomodate Ubuntu changes
* Bugfixes in JACK and Pulseaudio
* Much more!

Here I would like to thank the following people:
Kaj Ailomaa (zequence, Project Lead) for his excellent work and dedication towards the distribution;
Len Ovenwerks (len-dt, main developer) for his hard work on the menus and seeds;
Thomas Toine (ttoine, founder of Ubuntu Studio) for his return and making Ubuntu Studio merchandises progress;
Mike Holstein (holstein, support guru) for his user supporting efforts in #ubuntustudio IRC channel;
Zak Frappan (madeinkobaia, Art Lead) for joining Ubuntu Studio and making awesome artwork for social artworks;
Maik Adamietz (DarkEra) for his testing efforts for the final release;
Scott Lavender (ScottL, ex-Project Lead) for his guidance and work through the previous years.

Well, the below sentence sums all up:
ALL PEOPLE WHO HAVE CONTRIBUTED,TESTED, FILED BUGS, AND USED UBUNTU STUDIO,THANK YOU!

Now 13.04 is released, we need a load of contributors for S cycle! (Reminder: S codename unknown). We need people to help, but you don’t need to be a coder or know what Python is (LOL). We have opportunities like artwork, testing, documentation, user support and more. Go to http://ubuntustudio.org/contribute to start contributing!

smartboyhw

It has landed! We have new release, the Raring Ringtail. There're lots of changes: New version of pcmanfm / libfm (1.1.0) including a built-in search utility. Artwork improvements, including new wallpapers, community wallpapers, new icons... Removing catfish, since pcmanfm has its own search utility Fix a very old bug causing gnome-mplayer to crash with some CPU (P4) Several fixes for the