RT @vloquet: Appel à communication Salon Solutions Linux soumettre avant le 1er mars : http://t.co/k9KrMfe9 #freesoftware #opensource

100% Give Away: Software Packages To Generate Massive Waves Of Traffic To Your Website http://t.co/q3ZMnUzT via @worldprofit

Appel à communication Salon Solutions Linux soumettre avant le 1er mars : http://t.co/k9KrMfe9 #freesoftware #opensource

¡Juas! :-D #freesoftware #git RT @slashdot: Microsoft Embraces Git For Development Tools http://t.co/KoLeoNE2

#FreeSoftware and #FreeTextbooks | Canadian Education Association (CEA) http://t.co/LgrBCO0S

Where do you go to learn more about the #freesoftware community? Taking a few beers at Delirium Café #fosdem13

Part of my disenchantment with startups has come from the ways that startup employees are discouraged from making responsible investment choices, while the VCs that fund them are allowed and encouraged to use sound investment principals in their own companies. There are two interrelated principals that I found at odds in the startup world, which ultimately caused me to leave it.

Investing in more than one startup

In the investment world, investing your money in only one stock is a huge no-no. Diversify, diversify, diversify. If the company fails for reasons you weren’t able to foresee, you’re out of luck if that was your only investment. VCs understand responsible investing and invest in many startups at once to diversify and both increase their chances of picking a winner and decrease their exposure to a particular failure.

Yet, as an employee, investing your time in a handful of startups at once is frowned upon; you are expected to work full-time at a single company at irresponsible investment risk. Oh, and don’t pull out early just because the forecast isn’t good like a smart investor would, or you might be labelled a job hopper.

Working part-time

When I asked if I could do work on the side for another company, it was rejected. I then asked if I could work part-time so that I could diversify my time between work and personal growth in other ways. The response was that that would be tantamount to quitting, so I had to choose.

And yet VCs only spend a fraction of their time each week or month on one particular startup, so that they each get attention, because that’s healthy. Why is it considered unhealthy for an employee to do the same? Isn’t in unhealthy to spend the majority of one’s waking hours during the week on one particular thing? How often have you seen a bug tracker response / project status analogous to “Sorry, I don’t have time to work on this anymore, I have a real job now.”?

Some might argue that VCs are paying, while employees are getting paid, so VCs are both at more risk and deserve more control. What I’m trying to point out though, is that we’re both investing; VCs invest with money, employees invest with time. However, lost money can be re-gained, while lost time cannot. Which is the riskier and more meaningful investment?

Free up disk space by uninstalling unwanted software with Should I Remove It? http://t.co/LXTGKy1e #Article #FreeSoftware #KnowYourPC

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Dear friends going to #FOSDEM, have nice trips and learn, share, code, make community, make networking, and ENJOY! Long live #freesoftware

Part of my duties as a Hardware Certification Engineer is to develop and maintain our test and bug reports. Previously these have been Python scripts containing lots of inline HTML (yuck :/), which I’m ashamed to admit it because I didn’t know any better when I initially wrote them. I’m currently in the middle of refactoring (hopefully not ref**ktoring) the scripts to take advantage of a new API that’s available for querying data from the Certification website and have decided to use Jinja (precisely Jinja2) as the template engine.

So I have a list of systems which may be in different locations and I want to sort them by location. Initially I did this in the Python code which gathered the data, using a simple .sort(key = lambda obj: obj.datacentre). Then the template code used the sorted list and all was well. Later on when reading the Jinja template documentation I discovered a way to sort a list in the template itself. I considered this to be a cleaner, more transparent way to modify the list (somebody looking at the template asking ‘why does it come out in this order’ has the answer right in front of them). So I gave it a try by changing

for hw in {%reported_hardware %}

to

{% for hw in reported_hardware|sort(attribute='datacentre') %}

and was unfortunately confronted with a traceback from the template engine:

Traceback (most recent call last):
...
AttributeError: Hardware instance has no attribute '__getitem__'

This looks like it’s saying that the ‘Hardware’ object (which I’ll introduce in a second) isn’t the type that the template engine was expecting.

Initially I defined the Hardware object like this:

class Hardware:

def __init__(self..., datacentre):
...
self.datacentre = datacentre

My first attempt to fix this involved making datacentre a property:

@property

def datacentre(self):

return self._datacentre

But this didn’t seem to do the trick. Eventually I read in the Python documentation about the property built in working only on new-style classes and this set off the lightbulb

class Hardware(object):

This seemed to be the magic ingredient, and the sort in the template engine started working. I also realised that making datacentre a property wasn’t really necessary, so reverted that change.

Update: I found out that this whole problem is avoided by using Python3.x because all classes there are new-style classes. So the advice above only applies if you’re stuck with Python2.x

Last week I wrote about my first impressions on working with QML vs Android as I tried to translate a SimpleTodo application.

This week, I managed to find a few more spare hours to finish it. Not only that, but I have been able to go beyond what I had for Android. Specially on the UI part, QML makes it really simple to build in transitions and animations. I also found that defining States for the application had simplified the complexity of the program.

I don’t think that today there are official menus published for Ubuntu qml components, so I have implemented my own menu “a la” Ubuntu for phones. Here is a small video of the app:

or you can access the link here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-gDv-vDMhg

Overall, I highly recommend everyone to play with QML. Here are two very useful links if you are new to it:

• QML Elements
• Qt Quick intro

And of course, lets not forget the awesome developer.ubuntu.com pages!

Unfortunately 13.04′s Ubuntu Developer Week is over. All the logs and videos are linked from the timetable, so you can still enjoy the sessions again and again. We hope you had a great time and we will see you soon again in one of our Ubuntu development channels.

Here’s what happened on day 3:

1. Automated Testing in Ubuntu & Automated Testing Technologies — Martin Pitt did a great job of summarising the current work in the Quality Assurance team. It’s getting more and more important to automatically assure us that software we rely on still provides the functionality we expect and nothing breaks. Check out the log and get an idea of how diverse the activities are and where you can get involved.
2. Syncing your app’s data with u1db — Stuart Langridge has been involved in Ubuntu One since ages and knows how to make app authors happy. If you want simple data storage and syncing without headaches, have a look at u1db and Stuart’s introduction to u1db!
3. Interacting with Debian’s Bug Tracking System — You explain things best if you talk about things you make use of every day. As Stefano Rivera is both a Debian and Ubuntu developer, this talk was quite easy to deliver for him. Debian’s Bug Tracking System is a central place of exchange between the two projects and Stefano’s session will surely make it clearer to you.
4. Building Ubuntu images & The Ubuntu Nexus 7 images — Oliver Grawert has been building Ubuntu images for various platforms for quite a few cycles already, so he knows the problems you probably run into most. His sessions give some good insight into what’s involved in bringing Ubuntu up on all kinds of devices.
5. Fixing packages to cross-build — As a member of the Foundations team Dmitrijs Ledkovs has gathered quite some experience cleaning up problems, including build problems in the archive for a while now. Check out the session to find out how to make packages build for other architectures most easily. Get involved in fixing these issues once and for all.
6. Developers Roundtable — Benjamin Drung and Michael Bienia were kind enough to take on the last session of UDW and answer all the remaining questions regarding Ubuntu development. Be sure to check out the log as your favourite question might well be among the ones answered.

Oh, and before we forget it: join us in the Automated Testing Hackfest today!

LibreOffice on salonkikelpoinen Tietokone-lehdelle : http://t.co/T7MsCwl5 #OpenSource #freesoftware

RT @ben__schaefer: Muahaha nice! The @Xabber_XMPP icon has changed. Now sporting a little GNU badge :-) #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #ftw

Cuidado: no instaléis #Linux en portátiles #Samsung con #UEFI http://t.co/nBtwJayS vía @muylinux #opensource #freesoftware #softwarelibre

In a couple of hours, I'll be taking the train and heading to Brussels for FOSDEM. I've lost counts of how many FOSDEM I've attended, which is probably a good indication of how great the event is!

As usual, this will be a good place to catch up with friends, but also to talk with tons of different people about so many topics. If you want to chat about OpenStack, SUSE Cloud, openSUSE or GNOME, I'll be glad to join you.

The schedule is quite packed, but from what I can tell so far, I'll be sitting in the cloud devroom on Sunday (don't hesitate to join in order to learn about what's happening in the OpenStack world!). Oh, I'll also give a talk in Janson about challenges that the GNOME project is facing, just before the closing keynote.

And no, I won't have my blue hat, so you'll need to find another way to catch me (hint: I have a SUSE backpack nowadays) ;-)

Apple just lost another round. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has denied Apple's petition for en banc review of Judge Lucy Koh's decision not to order a permanent injunction against Samsung. The court also denied Apple's motion asking for permission to file a reply brief.

Say, how's that thermonuclear war against Android working out?