Elsewhere

I’ve been hacking on some static analyses stuff for debuild.me, and i’ve been involved in a multi-year long yak shaving exercise. As today’s fun part, I wrote python-schroot to help run commands in a schroot chroot (say that 10 times fast!)

After a while, I got some neat stuff working. Here’s an honest example:

from schroot import schroot with schroot('unstable-amd64') as chroot: chroot.copy('/etc/issue', '/etc/issue', user='root')

This will copy a file (/etc/issue) from the “host” system into the schroot chroot. Neat!

Now, to run something:

with schroot('unstable-amd64') as chroot: out, err, ret = chroot.run("whoami") print(out)

Then, in an effort to make a DSL, I set out to create the following syntax:

with schroot('unstable-amd64') as chroot: "apt-get update" in chroot

 but, hit some issues with implementing it, and got the following to work:

with schroot('unstable-amd64') as chroot: "apt-get update" > chroot // "root" # apt-get update as root

More later!

DrupalCon Austin

• Where is the DrupalCon going to be
• Why Austin?
• When is it? (June 2-6)
  • With extended sprints before and after
• What does the tech community look like there?
• What does the Drupal community look like?
  • DrupalCamp Austin (June 21st 2013)
• What’s the Drupal adoption look like in Austin?
  • It’s strongly linked with adoption of other front and back end technologies. (node.js etc)
• Who’s going to be the “boots on the ground” in Austin playing “host”?
  • Probably the same people that did it for Portland. Sponsors etc.
  • Four Kitchens, Astonish, Whole Foods, City of Austin, Volacci, etc.

I want a CLI WebDAV client that's better than cadaver or hdav.

I want a program that can sync an .ics file with a CalDAV server, by dividing it up into events and individually synchronizing each of those. I don't have a clue how deletions would be handled, but that would be nice too. Then I want a program that can synchronize the .ics file with org-mode files.

I want a SIP client that works as well as Twinkle but has the architecture of SFLphone or is a library upon which an arbitrary UI can be constructed.

I want an HTML-rendering library that has callbacks or hooks for security- and privacy-relevant things like cookies and SSL certificates. I want at least one browser built on this library. I want it to support vi-like keybindings.

I want an HTTP(S) proxy that can be dynamically-configured per-client or per-connection through a standardized protocol that web browsers or their plugins can speak. I want it to be able to handle all the relevant things covered by AdBlock Plus, RequestPolicy, and NoScript.

I want HTTPS authentication through Monkeysphere and mod_gnutls.

I want a git-annex backend for Ogg Vorbis files that treat the audio streams independently of the metadata yet stores them together in the same file so that everything behaves as usual but the annex doesn't bloat by 400Go after I run beets.

I want a file transfer queuing system that can work over any sort of transport mechanism, direct or asynchronous, that handles partial transfers and throttling, and is generally magical.

I want all kinds of accounting software improvements.

I want sane PBX software.

I want an OpenStack that doesn't use libvirt for KVM.

I want backup software that behaves some weird hybrid of BoxBackup and Dirvish.

I want a peer-to-peer card- and board-game platform that uses cryptographic assurance.

I want everyone to use YAML instead of XML.

I want a phone that's not running a doomed operating system.

I want lots of other stuff.

Day three was kicked off by Michael Lopp, ex Apple and Dictator at Palantir. His keynote "THE ENGINEER, THE DESIGNER, AND THE DICTATOR" was centered around the productive battle between art, science and execution. A refreshing contrast program to the horizontal hierarchy frenzy.

What else? Sessions, BOFs and another day in wonderful Portland, so different to most US cities I know: Small cars, cyclists, coffee snobs, microbreweries, and raaaaain! Lots.

It's Day 3 of DrupalCon, and so much has happened in the last 72 hours! From keynotes and two full days of recorded sessions, gallons of Stumptown, and let's be honest, sore feet from all the walking... well take a deep breath, because it's not over yet!

So, here's what happened yesterday...

We built a website to help the tornado victims in Oklahoma

On Tuesday night, a team of volunteer Drupal developers gathered in the DrupalCon Portland coder lounge to build a website to help FEMA help the victims of the Oklahoma tornado.

Drupal is a lot like enterprise software. Before you think this is a bad judgement on Drupal or a slur please hear me out. It's more a description of Drupal based on my experience with it for nearly 8 years and my last couple years dealing with enterprise software. I want to dive into some specific points that may be good, bad, and even make us unhappy with some of the things that make us happy.

Continue Reading »

If you are a site builder or themer in Drupal, you might have a similar situation happen to you. You obtain a set of requirements for a content type, create all the necessary fields with semantic labels, and start building the displays and views. Great! Life is good. Now your project manager waltzes over to your desk to deliver an updated set of wireframes, and before you even get halfway down the page, you feel a breeze as you notice a person-shaped cloud of dust where your project manager just stood.... Read more

Although I've still not got the ability to reply to messages, and composing new ones is ugly, my toy mail client is working nicely.

I've received a couple of patches, and given commit access to the repository to one other user.

Currently I'm still juggling primitives around and working out what is missing. The big exceptions are the obvious:

• Cannot reply to a message.
• Cannot move a message to a new folder.
• When composing a mail to be sent no copy is saved in "sent-mail", or similar.
• Thread-view is absent. Indefinitely.

But on the plus side the lua scripting is lovely:

precious ~/git/lumail $ rm /tmp/unread.log precious ~/git/lumail $ ./lumail --rcfile ./lumail.lua --eval "dump_unread();" precious ~/git/lumail $ head /tmp/unread.log Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.Automated.backups Folder has 10 unread messages Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.Automated.bounces Folder has 3 unread messages Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.CRM.Spam Folder has 7 unread messages Selected folder /home/skx/Maildir/.facebook.com Folder has 4 unread messages ..

The website needs some love, most notably a logo. And there are several reported bugs/todo-items I need to work through.

Still for a toy program I'm using it daily. (Though still using mutt to reply to messages & view/save attachments.)

About 10 years ago I started using an electric shaver. An electric shaver is more convenient to use as it doesn’t require any soap, foam, or water. It is also almost impossible to cut yourself properly with an electric shaver which is a major benefit for anyone who’s not particularly alert in the morning. Generally my experience of electric shavers has been good, although the noise is quite annoying.

Recently a friend told me that an electric shaver is as noisy as a chain-saw. Given the inverse-square law and the fact that the shaver operates within 1cm of my ears that sounds plausible. So the risk of hearing loss is a great concern. Disposable ear plugs are very cheap and they can be used multiple times (they don’t get particularly dirty while shaving or get squashed in the short time needed to shave). So for a few weeks I’ve been using ear plugs while shaving which reduces the noise and presumable saves me from some hearing damage – although after 10 years of using electric shavers I may have already sustained some damage.

According to Cooper Safety their ear plugs reduce noise by 29dB, [1] I presume that the cheap ones I bought from Bunnings would be good for at least 15dB.

According to Better Hearing Sydney the noise from an electric shaver is typically around 90dB, less than the 100dB that is typical of a chain-saw [2]. So if my ear-plugs are good for 15dB then they would reduce the noise from a typical electric shaver to 75dB which is well below the 85dB that will cause hearing damage. Given that the noise from a typical shaver is only slightly above the damage threshold it seems that I might not need particularly good ear-plugs when shaving.

A quick scan of shaver reviews indicates that the amount of noise differs by brand and technology. The Hubpages review suggests that rotary shavers tend to make less noise than foil shavers [3], but I’m sure that it varies enough between brands that some rotary shavers are louder than the quietest foil shavers. It seems that the best thing to do when buying a new shaver would be to go to a specialised shaver shop (which has many models on offer) and get the staff to demonstrate them to determine which is the quietest. If a typical shaver produces 90dB then it seems likely that one of the more quiet models would produce less than 85dB.

Another item on my todo list is to buy a noise meter to measure the amount of noise produced in the places where I spend time. There are some Android apps to measure noise, I’m currently playing with the Smart Tools Co Sound Meter [4] which gives some interesting information. The documentation notes that phone microphones are limited to the typical volume and frequencies of human voice, so my Galaxy S3 can’t measure anything about 81dB. My wife’s Nexus 4 doesn’t seem to register anything above 74dB. Additionally there is some uncertainty about the accuracy of the microphone, there is a calibration feature but that requires another meter. Anyway the Sound Meter app suggests that my shaver (a Philips HQ7380/B) produces only 71dB at the closest possible range – and drops down to 67dB at the range I would use if I grew sideburns.

Conclusion

Getting a proper noise meter to protect one’s hearing seems like a good idea. An Android app for measuring noise is a good thing to have, even though it’s not going to be accurate it’s convenient and will give an indication.

When buying a shaver one should listen to all the options and choose a quiet one (I might have got a quiet one by luck).

Sideburns seem like a good idea if you value your hearing.

• [1] http://www.coopersafety.com/NoiseReduction.aspx
• [2] http://www.betterhearingsydney.org.au/content/view/46/53/
• [3] http://tinyurl.com/ojxfx9t
• [4] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kr.sira.sound

Related posts:

1. Testing Noise Canceling Headphones This evening I tested some Noise Canceling Headphones (as...
2. Noise Canceling Headphones and People Talking The Problem I was asked for advice on buying headphones...
3. Noise in Computer Rooms Some people think that you can recognise a good restaurant...

This organization theme was inspired by my talk with Kim McCluskey, the founder of SunInMyHeart.com, a charity fund. During his trip to Halong Bay, I have heard about what he did for SunInMyHeart to help orphanage children. So after the trip, I created this theme for organization and non profit purposes. 

If you are interested in using this theme for your charity funds, please feel free to ask me and I will send you the package free-of-charge.

We have received many requests to download this theme. As we believe the use of this theme for your websites will bring alot of benefits to other people, especially for charity purposes, we have converted this theme to Drupal 7 and provide it free of charge. No more asking, just go to the theme page and click on the Download tab, you will be able to get it.

Demo

See the demo here: Drupal theme ST Fiddle demo

read more

First off, yes, I realize it's "sound bite", but given the context, "byte" sounds more applicable.

The Toads have been at Drupalcon Portland this week in force! With a sponsor booth to manage and two different parties to organize, we've been busy, but I've managed to squeeze a few sessions in as well. Here are some top quotes and takeaways along the way:

• Read more

I belive every sitebuilder already had the need to wrap multiple fields with some markup, for example to group them in a fieldset or simply to wrap them with a div to solve theming issues. The easiest way to acoplish that is to use the field group module, wich gives you a nice and handy ui integrated in the core field_ui. It comes with a common set of often used wrappers, like expandable fieldsets or even horizontal and vertical tabs.

The module itself is a great tool for sitebuilders and themers because it is easy to use and exportable with the features module.

Sadly the module is pretty old and it is very complicated to get new features in it, because so many sites already use the module. So everyone lived with the overload of classes field_group appends to its containers and the poor set of available markup. Yannickoo from Loom created a patch, wich allows the user to decide how the wrapper should look like, by simply adding the tag in the ui.

This looks somewhat like in the image above!

If you want to take advantage of this new feature, you need to download the latest development snapshot 7.x-1.x, instead of the stable release.

Credits are going to yannickoo for this great work!

Weitere Bilder: 

Lets start with sending a big thank you to the Drupal Association for making the session videos at DrupalCon Portland available for watching within hours. It has created a whole new experience for me who couldn't make it there in person. Already I have had several good discussions on Twitter and elsewhere with people at the event.

Read the full "Drupal 8 WYSIWYG and File Cleanup" post on www.tsvenson.com

Often times it is needed to create module specific custom tables to store persistent data. Drupal offers a set of hooks in connection to this. Most commonly used among these are hook_schema() and hook_update_N(). First hook, hook_schema() holds the structure of table in the form of PHP array.

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For a while now, I've been plagued with this ridiculous problem of the keyboard becoming "stuck" in my Fedora 17 VM running under VirtualBox. Keys would stop working until you held them down for several seconds, making typing close to impossible.

Of course, my first thought was to blame VirtualBox, since it has a lot to do with the keyboard. I found out some interesting things, like you can send scan-codes directly to virtual-machines with something like

$ VBoxManage controlvm UUID keyboardputscancode aa

(get the UUID via VBoxManage list vms; figuring out scan-codes is left to the reader!).

I noticed the problem primarily happening while emacs was in the foreground, meaning I was working on code or an email ... my theory was when I typed too fast some race got hit and put the keyboard into a weird state that a reboot fixed.

Well it turns out the problem is almost the exact opposite. Luckily, today I noticed "slow keys enabled" warning that sprung-up and went away quickly just before the keyboard stopped. Once I saw that the game was up; turns out this is a well-known bug that is easily fixed with xkbset -sl. It happens because I was typing too slowly; holding down the shift-key while I thought about something probably.

Hopefully this saves someone else a few hours!

Here's a quick video recap from Drupalcon Portland - Wednesday May 22nd. If you missed yesterday's recap, you can watch it here. 

Episode Number:  141 Post Topics:  Django Contrib Drupal Commerce Drupal 7 Site Building Drupal Planet

In this episode we continue learning about Drupal Commerce and dive into some of the layout aspects of building out Drupal Commerce product displays.

In this episode you will learn:

• How to modify the layout of a Drupal Commerce product display
• How fields are used to control the Drupal Commerce product display layout

DDoD Video: 

This Drupalcon has in many respects been about winning the hearts of the user: There's a constant UX track installed for the first time at a Drupalcon; Dries has used his keynote to talk about the importance of improving the web experience management (with some UXy slides!), UX expert Karen McGrane was invited to give today's keynote on the subject of multi-device content.

Her point: Lots of the tools that we build give the user the illusion that the web is print. Instead of using WYSIWYG and other (misleading) instruments, users should be able to add metadata with longer legs, making content multi channel capable. And if there's just one thing you want to watch today: Chris Blow's magically athwart presentation on Design Ops:

It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2013. This is a snapshot of Debian "sid" at the time of the Debian "wheezy" release (May 2013), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release.

The installation ISO images can be downloaded from Debian Ports in the usual three Debian flavors: NETINST, CD, DVD. Besides the friendly Debian installer, a pre-installed disk image is also available, making it even easier to try Debian GNU/Hurd.

Debian GNU/Hurd is currently available for the i386 architecture with more than 10.000 software packages available (more than 75% of the Debian archive, and more to come!).

Please make sure to read the configuration information, the FAQ, and the translator primer to get a grasp of the great features of GNU/Hurd.

Due to the very small number of developers, our progress of the project has not been as fast as other successful operating systems, but we believe to have reached a very decent state, even with our limited resources.

We would like to thank all the people who have worked on GNU/Hurd over the past decades. There were not many people at any given time (and still not many people today, please join!), but in the end a lot of people have contributed one way or another. Thanks everybody!

This article appeared originally at GNU Hurd news and it's under the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version.

Here is one more conversation I had at Drupal Camp Alpe-Adria in April, 2013. Ranko Marinic is from Croatia and has some great perspectives. He works as an IT consultant with a wide range of technologies and with Drupal "by night". He is studying economics and has become interested in the economic effects on local communities of implementing open source software. Ranko also talks about the moment he really started believing in open source as a social movement.

ranko_final.mp3