Ruby 1.8.7

I must say I'm a bit worried by the 1.8.7 release. The only reason I even care out about it is because I recently was bitten by a bug in 1.8.6p230 that, as of the time of this blog entry, is the latest version in Fedora. Quite frankly I am surprised whenever Fedora decides not to ship the latest "stable" upstream package which is why I took the time to understand the state of 1.8.6.

I think the main problem is that the goal for 1.8.7 is unclear, at least from the community's perspective. Contrast this situation with 1.9--a release I'm actually excited about. There are plenty of people telling you what to expect from 1.9. Matz talked about it at RubyConf last year. There's even a beta book out about it now.

In short, 1.9 represents the correct way to work with the community to move a platform forward. Namely, coupling core changes that likely break the killer apps with features that entice developers to go through the effort of porting their code. 1.8.7 needs as many eyes looking over it as possible and it's just not attracting them in my opinion simply because the community doesn't see a reason to upgrade.

while(burn :me)
desire_to_upgrade = ignore(:version => :latest_stable)
raise if desire_to_upgrade.nil?
end

Shell History Meme

/me is thrilled svn isn't anywhere on this list.

[bleanhar@tumbolia ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
418 git
166 ls
95 cd
72 exit
58 vim
19 screen
19 rm
16 pwd
14 tig
13 sudo

Success with gstreamer

A few weeks ago I nearly threw my laptop down the hallway at work out of frustration with Kino and Pitivi. All I wished to do was create a simple screencast using open source software. I later tried some tips I found on the Fedora Screencasting wiki only to find the recommended splice script out of date.

Though the script was broken on F8 it did give me insight into the power of the gstreamer framework. I knew that whenever I had the time I should dig in a little deeper. With the help of this Linux Conf Austrailia talk I was able to figure out what needed to be changed in order to get the splice script working again on F8.

Here's how I spliced my theora video (made with istanbul) with a wav file recorded in audacity:

gst-launch oggmux name=mux ! filesink location=ldap-gst.ogg { filesrc location=ldap.ogg ! decodebin name=v } { filesrc location=ldap-audio.wav ! decodebin name=a } { v. ! queue ! ffmpegcolorspace ! theoraenc ! queue ! mux. } { a. ! queue ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! queue ! mux. }

As a big fan of golfing on the command line I can appreciate convoluted oneliners. The big trick to getting the fedora-av-splice.sh script running was:

1. Remove the version number from the 'gst-launch' executable (why hard-code that anyway?)
   
2. Corrected syntax (honestly, I mostly cargo-culted this from examples I found on the interweb)
3. Changed 'rawvorbisenc' to plain old 'vorbisenc'. The talk mentioned 'gst-inspect' which for me was the key to finding out what my system could do.

Now what I would like to do is update the Fedora wiki. Sadly, I can't figure out how to edit http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ScreenCasting. It appears to be an 'Immutable Page'. How should this get updated? Do I email the mailling list? There's probably a doc explaining this on the wiki somewhere so I'll just have to dig for it sometime (unless some knowledgeable reader can enlighten me).

Getting your parents to run Fedora: Challenge 1

Problem 1: Remote system administration
As other people in the session shared their similar philanthropic tech support stories we soon discovered our first problem. A problem which has led to much headache for all involved and marred the name of open source. The issue we speak of in this entry is that of remote system administration.

You can't be serious
It definitely seems odd that a group of people consisting of either developers or system administrators would face challenges with remote administration. I mean, just about every machine I work on is "remote". It's typically a Xen guest whose physical host location is both unknown and unimportant to me. But the fact of the matter is that, when dealing with our family, we're often thrown into a world (almost) completely unfamiliar to us; the world of people who do not attend FUDcons.

"Oh, but I am serious" or Phone support for the inlaws
To make things a little more concrete I'll share a little about a strange tradition in our household. Each year my wife and I fly out to visit her relatives. With impeccable regularity, during our vacation one of their Windows machines goes up in flames due to some mixture of bugs and malware and, with similar predictability, I install Fedora on their machine. The sad part to the story is that every year they end up having to remove Fedora and switch back to Windows simply because we fly back home and they don't have anyone else nearby that can help them. The truth is they have equally as many problems with Windows. It just happens to be the case that they have had years of experience with 'workarounds'. I can't tell you how many times we've had conversations on the phone like this:

mother-in-law: The internet is broken on my laptop
me: Opps, that was probably my fault. Remember that thing I mentioned to about Ogg Vorbis? Well when I ssh'd into your machine this morning to make it so that you could view our family videos I accidentally upgraded your kern...

*mother-in-law* interupts,

mother-in-law: Uhh... what can I type to fix this? I need to check my email.
me: Press alteff too. Then type 'nome terminal'. Then type 'pseudo sue dash enter'. Then type 'yum update eye dubya...'

(I'm trying my best to faithfully represent the role poor mobile phone connectivity plays in to these scenarios.)

Current recommendation for my inlaws:
I was quite surprised when several people from the Fedora project actually suggested not installing Fedora in this particular case. After talking a bit more what they really meant was, "don't install Fedora, yet". In certain cases it can be almost traumatic to have their entire digital world flipped on them. Find _good_ open source solutions to the areas where they are locked in. Once successful the switch to Fedora will be a lot smoother. After all, it's typically the case that a person only uses a handful of rather basic apps and they only have one or two apps where they are truely 'locked in'. In my mother-in-law's case it's Sibelious. Sadly, GNU Denemo didn't work well for her.

For remote support we really need something better than

1. explain how to activate desktop sharing
   
2. reverse an ssh connection
3. port forward to their vino server
4. launch vnc viewer over lousy internet connection and try to couch family member on what button to click on to fix their problem
   

The above steps usually take 20-30 minutes for me to setup and, nine times out of ten, the fix involves something as simple as, "oh, you forgot to type hotmail.com in the browser. That's why your email isn't working".

Wish list for remote tech support

• An effective way to securely establish connections with nontechnical users and their trusted, penguin-loving friends. When connecting two people that are both on networks with some form of NAT you are frequently forced to use a third, internet addressable, machine in order to establish a connection. Obviously you can get around the use of a third party if you control the router on your end, but that's not always the case. Say my mom calls from home and I'm at coffee shop or at work.
  

• A disaster recovery strategy that protects our family members from being forced to return closed source alternatives. With my inlaws some unrecoverable (at least over the phone) situation always comes up and they are forced to do the only thing they know how to--pay someone to install Windows.
  

Possible solutions

• Use a service to spin up secured Fedora virtual machines over the internet. From there have an applet on their dock to request a connection from their trusted friend. Some form of remote desktop connection is then made over a tunnel ssh connection that is brokered by the VM. Of course using such a service would always require money. In the case of the EC2 it's pretty cheap in comparison to the cost of paying some Geek Squader to fix things. With Amazon's DevPay (A service that allows people to pay for usage of VMs) it would be possible to even have a system for Fedora community members to raise support for the Fedora project by volunteering to fix people's machines.

• Koan/Cobbler to allow remote provisioning. Profiles could be created for sundry machine configurations that would lay down a working machine.

• Customized LiveCDs or recovery DVDs. This shouldn't be too hard with the Fedora tooling and fits quite well with Koan/Cobbler.
  

• Another interesting use case for a live CD would be to have an automated method to back up their data before wiping everything and starting over. In the post installation their data could be restored.

Up Next
The second challenge: Usability

Getting your parents to run Fedora: Intro

A few weeks ago at FUDcon I spawned a session entitled "Getting your parents to run Fedora". We had 20 people or so show show up that day and it's high time I posted some of the topics that were discussed. My first attempt in writing this proved far too verbose so I'm going to break it into parts and try and make things a little more concise. To put it best:

"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
--Hemingway, Cicero, Voltaire, Mark Twain, or maybe T.S. Elliot

Intro
Open source computing appears to be at a veritable tipping point for mass adoption. Dell actively promotes machines with Ubuntu preinstalled, Wal-mart has a hot selling Linux-based desktop, the OLPC project is getting commodity laptops in the hands of the third-world and Asus is getting them to the rest. Though this mass adoption might very well be nothing more than a footnote in the minds of many open source aficionados I view it of utmost importance regarding the topic of file formats and true digital freedom. Unless formats like odf, ogg vorbis/theora and the like are actually used in the wild they will be ignored by the online services that we use daily.

How can we assist this mass adoption? Well, like many of my friends at FUDcon, I install Fedora on every machine whose owner will allow it and, at least in my case, there is a clear dual motive. On one hand, as stated previously, I desire open source to be adopted by the masses, on the other I want my family to have machines that meet their needs. Since they are family I would be their tech support regardless of what OS they choose to run. I merely urge them to let me install Fedora since that's what I use and it's the only way I can test things out for them.

Up Next
The first challenge: Remote administration

home Sweet Home 3D

Last night my wife was feeling particularly creative. While I usually approve of her creative inclinations I was simply not in the mood to move our large objects (some call it furniture) around our apartment. Thinking aloud I said to my wife, "there must be some great open source software for interior design".

When someone says such as phrase there a few common outcomes:

1. It is the case that such a project exists therefore the problem is solved
2. It is not the case that such a project exists therefore it is the case that either
   
1. You create the great project yourself therefore your weekend is shot OR
   
2. You do not create the great project yourself therefore you are forced to move heavy objects (your weekend is probably still shot)
   

In my case I was fortunate enough that a great project already exists. Oddly enough, googling around didn't yield much fruit. I had foreknowledge of several good open source CAD programs though I knew that they were probably not well suited for the simple task we were trying to accomplish. I quickly turned to SourceForge and stumbled across Sweet Home 3D. It's your typical java project that comes with binary tarball complete with a bundled version of Sun's java (though Fedora's Iced Tea works just fine). Once unpacked my wife was free to let her loftiest of ideas loose on our virtual apartment. It really was quite simple to use. She cranked out 3 layouts in no time--one of which we might actually implement.

Kino 1.2.0: great on F8

Today I spent some time figuring out why I couldn't get Kino's transitions working on Fedora 8. Previously I was using version 1.1.1 from the livna repository and I noticed today that a tarball for 1.2.0 existed. Building and installing it to my home dir worked like a charm. All audio and video FX are working. During FUDcon I might seen if I could update the livna package for kino so that others could benefit. I'll test it out a bit more in the meantime.

On a side note I also gave pitivi a shot. It's far from it's first 1.0 release but I must I like the interface a bit more than kino. Plus, being written in Python makes it a little more hackable.

FC6

I installed FC6 on my friend's PC. He had been wanted to try out linux for a long time so when I came to visit him in Bilbao we sat down and I gave him a crash course in unix.

The things he was most impressed about:

1. OpenOffice (he really just need a nice way to make PDFs and presentations)
2. He could use skype (he calls home to Brazil a lot)
3. He could use all his other messengers
4. Lots of software he was already familiar with is open source (he just didn't know it)
   
5. It ran on his old computer extremely well and his hardware Just Worked(TM)
6. He could learn the basics in an afternoon.
   

He doesn't really have time to play around with all of the other open source software I installed and I obviously didn't teach him anything about the commandline or anything of that nature. He really just wanted a machine in his living room for his family and visitors to use and not have to be worried about viruses and endless maintenance. For those switching to linux from lesser operating environments the hard part is just picking a distro and getting it setup initially. Many users use so few programs that once everything is setup they are set for a few years.