Elsewhere

If you updated recently your system to Debian wheezy and you are using vsftpd with enabled chrooted local users ...

[~] # grep -i ^chroot_local_user=yes /etc/vsftpd.conf | tail -1 chroot_local_user=YES

... you maybe faced with the following problem:

500 OOPS: vsftpd: refusing to run with writable root inside chroot() Login failed.

This problem raised already in Bug #656900 and it was fixed by adjusting the documentation. Beside that there maybe configurations you want to relax such a strict check. Unfortunately this feature was implemented in version 3.0.0 which is not part of Debian wheezy:

- Add new config setting "allow_writeable_chroot" to help people in a bit of a spot with the v2.3.5 defensive change. Only applies to non-anonymous.

The Frontier Group created a patched package of vsftpd for Ubuntu. After reviewing the patch we decided to also create a Debian package for wheezy.

You can easily install the package by the following sniplet:

echo "deb http://ftp.cyconet.org/debian wheezy-updates main non-free contrib" >> \ /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy-updates.cyconet.list; \ aptitude update; aptitude install -t wheezy-updates debian-cyconet-archive-keyring vsftpd && \ echo "allow_writeable_chroot=YES" >> /etc/vsftpd.conf && /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

Updates, in case of bugfixes in Debian wheezy, should be also available through this distribution channel.

This was fascinating. They've basically done some very simple things in (what they perceive to be) the idiomatic way in a bunch of different web frameworks and platforms, and compared performance. Unfortunately, the one I consider the most realistic (the “fortunes” test, since it actually spits out HTML in the end) is not run for that many frameworks yet, but it's a very good measure.

The very coarse summary is that Java and Go do well, Node.js and (raw) PHP do quite okay, and Django and Rails do crap. This is pretty much in line with what I'd expect, but most Django and Rails developers I do mostly go “LA LA LA” with regards to performance… (And this is with simple things; you know, those that come before you need a complex query your ORM really can't handle.)

Also note: The difference between raw PHP and the fastest PHP framework in the test is about 3x.

In this tutorial I am going to show you a way you can leverage the power of the Drupal Form API to display form fields in the layout you want. To illustrate this, I will alter a form (the comment form) and arrange the Name and Subject fields in two columns.

I recently started a new development position with Blink Reaction so I needed to get somewhat serious about setting up a local Drupal development environment.

Ariadne

I was leaning towards making use of Vagrant for managing local development environments so I can easily switch between different projects or branches. I also believe Vagrant makes it easier to have as close a mirror to production locally as possible.

I discovered a very interesting project from MyPlanet Digital named vagrant-ariadne. Ariadne is a customized implementation of Vagrant and allows for easy deployment of Drupal installation profiles to a local VM. Another nice feature is that it attempts to emulate Acquia’s infrastructure. This is useful as a lot of Blink’s clients are deployed on the Acquia Cloud.

Assuming you have Vagrant, rvm and a ruby environment installed on your workstation, installing Ariadne is pretty straightforward:

j vagrant gem install vagrant-vbguest vagrant-hostmaster vagrant-librarian [sudo] gem install librarian rake knife-solo git clone https://github.com/myplanetdigital/vagrant-ariadne.git cd vagrant-ariadne bundle install bundle exec rake setup

Everything is now configured to boot a virtual box. Ariadne comes with a simple example that can be deployed:

j project=example vagrant up

Once that command finishes running, the site can be viewed at http://example.dev/ (Ariadne uses vagrant-hostmaster for managing /etc/hosts entries).

A more involved cookbook is a cookbook for deploying the Web Experience Toolkit available on github also. If we wanted to deploy the master branch of this site, we could do:

bundle exec rake "init_project[https://github.com/wet-boew/ariadne-wet-boew-drupal]" project=wet-boew-drupal branch=master vagrant up

And that’s it!

Another nice feature of these deployed environments is that they are configured to allow remote debugging (relevant when setting up an IDE as mentioned later) and the actual site code is shared as an NFS mount. For example, the contents of my /etc/exports file after booting a box with Ariadne looks like:

# VAGRANT-BEGIN: 7ac1cf50-4498-4e49-bd66-edac4a9b2d7e "/Users/posullivan/vagrant-ariadne/tmp/apt/cache" 33.33.33.10 -mapall=501:20 "/Users/posullivan/vagrant-ariadne/tmp/drush/cache" 33.33.33.10 -mapall=501:20 "/Users/posullivan/vagrant-ariadne/data/html" 33.33.33.10 -mapall=501:20 # VAGRANT-END: 7ac1cf50-4498-4e49-bd66-edac4a9b2d7e

Thus, if I navigate to the ~/vagrant-ariadne/data/html directory or import that in my IDE, I can edit the code deployed on the vagrant box.

Drupal Core from git

Another use I’ve found for ariadne is building a local environment for the latest drupal core. To accomplish this, I created a role file named roles/core.rb with the following contents:

name "core" description "Install requirements to run Drupal core." run_list([ "recipe[mysql::server]", "recipe[mysql::client]", "recipe[php::module_mysql]", "recipe[php::module_curl]", "recipe[php::module_gd]", "recipe[php::module_apc]", "recipe[drush::utils]", "recipe[drush::make]", "recipe[php::write_inis]", ]) default_attributes({ :drush => { :version => "5.8.0", }, :mysql => { :server_debian_password => "root", :server_root_password => "root", :server_repl_password => "root", :bind_address => "127.0.0.1", :tunable => { :key_buffer => "384M", :table_cache => "4096", }, }, })

j

Next, I created a new cookbook project named core and created a simple default.rb recipe for this cookbook. This recipe looks like:

branch = node['ariadne']['branch'] git "/mnt/www/html/drupal" do user "vagrant" repository "http://git.drupal.org/project/drupal.git" reference branch enable_submodules true action :sync notifies :run, "bash[Installing Drupal...]", :immediately end bash "Installing Drupal..." do user "vagrant" group "vagrant" code <<-EOH drush -y si \ --root=/mnt/www/html/drupal \ --db-url=mysqli://root:root@localhost/drupal \ --site-name="Drupal Core Installed from Git" \ --site-mail=vagrant+site@localhost \ --account-mail=vagrant+admin@locahost \ --account-name=admin \ --account-pass=admin EOH end site = node['ariadne']['host_name'].nil? ? "#{node['ariadne']['project']}.dev" : node['ariadne']['host_name'] web_app site do cookbook "ariadne" template "drupal-site.conf.erb" port node['apache']['listen_ports'].to_a[0] server_name site server_aliases [ "www.#{site}" ] docroot "/mnt/www/html/drupal" notifies :reload, "service[apache2]" end

With all of the above in place, its quite simple to create a local VM based on the latest in the 7.x branch of drupal core:

project=core branch=7.x vagrant up

The above command simply needs to have the branch name modified to deploy a different branch. Once the above command completes, a site will be available at core.dev and I can log in as the admin user using the credentials specified in my cookbook.

Private Repositories

Most repositories for client projects are stored in private repositories. Thankfully, thats not an issue with ariadne. Ariadne uses agent forwarding to forward the host machine’s ssh session into the VM, including keys and passphrases stored by ssh-agent. What this means is that your VM will have the same Git/SSH access that you enjoy on your local machine. I’ve not had a problem checking out code stored in private repositories on bitbucket for example.

IDE

For an IDE, I’ve been an Eclipse user in the past for Java projects I’ve worked on so Aptana seemed like a good fit for my needs at the moment. A few existing articles already exist on configuring Aptana for Drupal development so I’m not going to go into too much details here.

Installation is very straightforward with the binary downloaded from the site. A ruble exists for Drupal so its pretty natural to install that:

git clone git://github.com/arcaneadam/Drupal-Bundle-for-Aptana.git ~/Documents/Aptana Rubles/Drupal-Bundle-for-Aptana

Next item is to configure Aptana to adhere to the Drupal coding standards. I used an existing profile for Aptana that could be imported for this.

The final thing I needed to configure was a debug configuration. To do this, I created a new PHP web page configuration. First, a new PHP server needs to be added. In this example, lets assume I am using the example box I mentioned in the Ariadne section whose hostname is example.dev. The web server configuration dialog when configured with this hostname and appropriate directory for the site root looks like:

Once a PHP server has been added, the rest of the information to fill in for the debug configuration is pretty straightforward as shown below:

I like to select the break at first line option to make sure the debug configuration works correctly.

With this in place, any visit to example.dev will result in the breakpoint being hit.

Conclusion

I’ve still not settled on this combination for my development environment but I was definitely pretty excited upon discovering the Ariadne project. The drawbacks that I see to using Ariadne are: 1) the need to create a cookbook for each project you want to work with, 2) the project is still in beta stage so documentation is fairly lacking (fair enough for a beta project though), and 3) if you are not familiar with chef, using Ariadne may prove challenging (although it provides the perfect excuse to become familiar with chef).

PHPStorm is the IDE that seems to be pretty popular when I ask what other people are using for an editor but given there is a license fee associated with it, I didn’t want to splurge on that just yet. Aptana looks to work just fine for me and satisfies my needs nicely.

I recently ported my old module Password Require, which allows password protecting any form in Drupal, to Drupal 7.  This module was originally created for my presentation at the Florida Drupal Camp in 2010, as an introduction to module development.

 

A couple of days ago, I had an opportunity to give a guest lecture on our Rcpp package for R and C++ integration. This was in CMSC 12300 Computer Science with Applications-3 in the Department of Computer Science at University of Chicago. The course is the final part of a three term sequence introducing students to data-centric work in R, Python, Java and C++. I tried to keep it brief and engaging in order to motivate the why or R/C++ integration while providing plenry of useful examples.

And yesterday I got to spend a day giving an invited day-long workshop at the Medical College of Wisconsin as part of a two-day R workshop sponsored by the Milwaukee Chapter of the American Statistical Assocation as well as the CTSI and PCOR centers at the Medical College of Wisconsin. In the workshop, I followed the previously-used setup of four parts on introduction, Rcpp details, advanced topics and last-but-not-least applications, but also updated and extended to more recent topics.

Pdf slides from both events are now on my presentations page.

after the release is before the release. this week I started to pick up my RC bug squshing activities again. first results:

• #675231 – psad: "psad: prompting due to modified conffiles which were not modified by the user"
  add a comment to the bug report
• #700527 – libjs-jquery: ""libjs-jquery broken by movabletype-opensource << 5.1.4+dfsg-3~""
  upload to DELAYED/2 with patch (adding Conflicts) prepared by a fellow DD, then uploaded by maintainer
• #706764 – assaultcube-data: "assaultcube-data: fails to upgrade from squeeze - trying to overwrite /usr/share/man/man6/assaultcube-server.6.gz"
  add Breaks/Replaces as suggested in the bug report, upload to DELAYED/2
• #707686 – dhelp: "dhelp: FTBFS and uninstallable in sid: needs ruby-gettext"
  file new bug with patch

besides that I've also started to look at the "FTBFS with perl 5.18 in experimental" bugs which are not RC yet. – yes, perl 5.18 is already in experimental!

Our second event adopted an alternative format not by design but its usefulness has us thinking it may well be the way to go!
Speaker at the seond DPSX event:
Mark Smitham  – Cabinet Office (G-Cloud) A huge thank you… Mark, we appreciate‏ the knowledge shared; old hats, newbies and the curious, we all took away a lot from the discussions.
And the key points shared and discussed:
+ G-Cloud is about engaging the SME sector – it is access to the eco-system #GCloudJoinin
+ has delivered the equivalent of £180m+ in savings; introducing innovative SME enterprises into the eco-system
+ G-Cloud is about greater transparency: there are 29,000 Govt. customers on G-Cloud – the access to opportunities for the SME sector is unparalleled  
+ The new G-Cloud Store interface by the way is a sight of relief! job well done. Note: G-cloud is a non transactional store but a marketplace for Govt. customers to have access to selected SME suppliers that they can engage with
+ on the CloudStore good old SEO is handy for searchability and visibility
+ There are challenges to getting the critical mass from the Govt. customers… SMEs could assist and inform their clients and prospects of the G-Cloud route to product/service acquisition.
+ a short guide to understanding Impact levels and Pan-Govt accreditation

some useful links:
G-Cloud
CloudStore
if you are a buyer
if you are a supplier

if you are not on the G-Cloud as a supplier  and as a Customer/buyer
LocalGov Digital ‏

The next meet-up for Drupal Public Sector Exchange will be held next month and stay tuned on our Twitter account DPSX ‏@DPSXchange

DPSX: @Alanpeart @Calert @Greenman @Kubair @MarcDe_ath @shaunwilde
#Drupal #PublicSector #Innovation #G_Cloud_UK #LocalGovDigital

A week ago, I made the big step and presented my resignation letter at Google. It was not an easy decision, to leave a good job to pursue a blurry plan that sounds a bit infeasible, but I feel this what I want to do: it's a dream becoming reality.

After the 31st of May, I will become self-employed, working as a freelancer, while travelling around the world. I plan to live with a small budget, working with my laptop from wherever I am, instead of stressing about getting many clients to keep an expensive lifestyle.

I've had the travelling bug for some time, always thinking about my next trip, leaving for the airport just after finishing work, coming back on Monday and going directly to the office. You end up wishing for more vacation days all the time (and I had a fair amount of them). Now, for different reasons I want to spend some time in my old house in Nice, and in Argentina. There was no way I could do that with my current job, and that was the trigger for my decision.

After that, I will come back to Ireland, just to think where my next destination will be. I know this is going to be a great experience, we'll see how well it works!

If you think you -or your employer- might need my services, I'd be more than happy to talk! I'll be concentrating on the kind of work I've been doing at Google and before: finding creative solutions for difficult problems, be it systems administration, or (systems) programming. Think of hiring an SRE for just a few hours or days.

I've just released qcontrol 0.5.1. Changes since the last release:

• Add build targets to enable static linking (Original patch by Frans Pop).
• Wake-on-Lan and EUP control (by Michael Stapelberg, Debian bug #703888).
• Updated example configurations (based on Debian package).
• Support loading configuration snippets from a directory (Ian Campbell, Debian bug #697574).
• Various other bug fixes.

I also put together a very basic homepage.

Get it from gitorious or http://www.hellion.org.uk/qcontrol/releases/0.5.0/.

The Debian package will be upload shortly.

I was asked by some people to write a status report about the whole PK/AS/LI stuff – sorry guys that it took so much time to write it .

PackageKit

(PackageKit is an abstraction layer for package-management systems, allowing applications to access the package-manager using simple DBus calls)

PackageKit is an incredibly successful project. With the 0.8.x series, it received many performance improvements, and has now the same speed on my computer than the distribution’s native tools. PackageKit is used in almost all major Linux distributions, except for Ubuntu. But even Ubuntu has written some compatibility layer, so most calls to PackageKit will work.

(I am not sure what Arch and it’s derivatives do, but I assume PK might be used there too)

Debian Wheezy includes PackageKit by default, and in Jessy we are going to replace some distribution-specific tools with PackageKit frontends (mostly the old and unmaintained update-notifier and Software-Updater – no worries, we are not going for a Synaptic replacement (currently this won’t be possible with PK anyway))

Unfortunately, some PackageKit backends are still not adjusted for the 0.8.x API and are only running on 0.7.x. This is bad, since 0.8.x is a huge step forward for PackageKit. But the situation is slowly improving, with the latest OpenSUSE release, the Zypper backend is now available on 0.8.x too.

Being able to run a PackageKit from the 0.8.x series is a requirement for both AppStream and Listaller.

AppStream

(AppStream is a cross-distro effort for building Software-Center-like applications. It contains stuff like a screenshot-service, ratings&reviews etc. The most important component is a Xapian database, storing information about all available applications in the distribution’s repositories. The Xapian DB is distro-agnostik, but distributors need to provide data to fill it. AppStream offers an application-centric way to look at a package database)

The AppStream side doesn’t look incredibly great, but the situation is improving. As far as I know, OpenSUSE is shipping AppStream XML to generate the database. Ubuntu ships the desktop-files, and I am working on AppStream support in Debian’s Archive Kit. On the Fedora side, negotiations with the infrastructure-team are still going on. I haven’t heard anything from Mageia and other AppStream participants yet.

On the software side, Apper (KDE PackageKit frontend) has full support for AppStream. Apper just needs to be compiled with some extra flags to make it use the AppStream database.

On the GNOME-side, GNOME-Software is being developed. The tool will make use of the AppStream database, on distributions where it is available.

Using the Ubuntu Software Center on not-Ubuntu-based distributions ist still not much fun, but with the AppStream database available and a working PackageKit 0.8.x with a backend which supports parallel transactions, it is possible to use it.

On the infrastructure side: I recently landed some patches in AppStream-Core, which will improve the search function a lot. AppStream-Core contains all tools necessary to generate the AppStream database. It also contains libappstream, a GObject-based library which can be used to access the AppStream database.

Also, we discuss dropping PackageKit’s internal desktop-file-cache in favour of using the AppStream database. If we do that, we will also add software descriptions to the AppStream db, to improve search results and to speed up search for applications. Because we have to deprecate API for that, I expect this change to happen with PackageKit 0.9.x.

As soon as the Freedesktop-Wiki is alive again and my account is re-enabled, I will create compatibility-list, showing which distribution implements what of the PK/AS/LI stuff, especially focusing on components needed for AppStream.

Only a few distributions package AppStream-Core so far. Although it is beta-software, creating packages for it and shipping the required data to generate the AppStream database would be a very huge step forward.

Listaller

(Listaller is a cross-distro 3rd-party software installer, which integrates into PackageKit and AppStream. It allows installing 3rd-party applications, which are not part of the distributor’s repositories, using standard tools used also for native-package handling. Everything which uses PackageKit can make use of Listaller packages too. Listaller also allows sandboxing of new applications, and uses an AppDir-like approach for installing software.)

Listaller is currently undergoing it’s last transition before a release with stable API and specifications can be made. Dependency solving will be improved a lot during the current release-cycle, making it less powerful, but working on all distributions instead. (Fedora always had an advantage in dependency-solving, due to RPM providing more package metadata for Listaller to use) This change was delayed due to discussing a possible use of ZeroInstall-feeds to provide missing dependencies with the ZeroInstall team. We did not come to a conclusion about extending the XML, so Listaller will contain an own format to define a dependency, which can reference a ZeroInstall feed. That should be a good solution for everyone.

All these changes will result in IPK1.2, a new version of the IPK spec with small changes in the pkoptions file syntax and huge changes in dependency-handling. The new code is slowly stabilizing in a separate branch, and will soon be merged into master.

The next Listaller release will be the last one of the 0.5.x series, we will start 0.6.x then. KDE currently has support for Listaller through Apper, which is enabled on a few distributions. In GNOME, optional Listaller support is being developed and will be available in one of the upcoming releases.

Currently, to my knowledge, only a few distributions package Listaller. This should improve, so it is easier for application developers to deploy IPK packages.

The upcoming changes in KDE and GNOME to build stable developer platforms will help Listaller a lot in finding matching dependencies, and for stuff which only depends on one software frameworks, installations should be a matter of seconds.

As you can see, lots of things are happening, and there is improvement in all components related to installing and presenting software on Linux machines. However, all these projects have a severe lack of manpower, especially AppStream and Listaller have the lowest number of developers working on the tools (at time, only two active developers). This is the main reason for the slow development. But I am confident that we will have something shipped in the next distribution releases. At least AppStream should be ready then.

Quick tip: Use bash aliases to easily run multiple versions of drush at onceSunday, 12th May 2013

There are times where it can be desirable to run two or more different versions of drush on one computer, or even multiple versions for one user.

For example, if you're using a server running the 1.x (stable) branch of Aegir and you attempt to upgrade from drush 4 to 5 globally all of your provision tasks will start failing, rendering Aegir completely useless.

The "real" solution is to upgrade Aegir to the 2.x branch but if you're looking for a quick fix it's easier to just install drush 5 in parallel with drush 4 for your user.

Steps to install drush 5 in parallel with drush 4:

This assumes you already have drush 4 installed, so that running $ drush status will report version 4.x

1. Download the latest version of drush 5 from the project page.
2. Extract the contents of the drush tarball into your home directory in a folder called drush5, so that the drush files can be found at ~/drush5.
3. Edit or create either ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile and add the following line: alias drush5='~/drush5/drush'.
4. Reload your terminal/console or run $ source ~/.bashrc or $ source ~/.bash_profile as appropriate (whichever file you edited).

That's it! if you run $ drush5 status you should see a drush report a version number 5.x

You can now swap between drush 4 and 5 easily whenever you need to.

These steps can be adapted to do the same thing in reverse and have drush 5 run with the drush command and drush 4 with drush4, or you could even have each version explicitly mapped to drush4 and drush5 - it's up to you :)

Syndicate: planet drupal

Knowledge Language English My Mentor/D8MI Drupalcon Portland ScheduleCathy Theys05/12/2013 - 08:28

This is a wishful schedule. Some things I'm committed to be at. Some I'm wishing I will to have time to go to.

Note, the google core mentoring calendar will make it easy to add some of these to your calendar. Core mentoring calendar: 7ss54o2foktlc8b75d1gest4do@group.calendar.google.com

It's a mix of what I'm into: my sessions, mentoring and multilingual.

Tuesday

• 9:00am Programming Diversity by Ashe Dryden
• 10:15am Making core development sustainable by Greg Dunlap
• 11:30am The Current State of Drupal 8 Keynote by Dries (is what I would go to if I were not staffing the Community booth at that time.)
• 2:30pm I'm going to be trying to be calm right before my session. But if not, I'd pick: Dependency Injection in Drupal 8 by Katherine Bailey
• 3:15pm I'll be at my session! Running coaches wanted! Contribution sprints and trainings by Jess, Andrea, Addi and me
• 4:30pm I'll be in a BoF with mentors doing task selection for the Friday sprint, but if I were not, I'd be in UX Case: Love and Hate in The Issue Queue Garden by Michael Keara, Thomas Svenson
• 5:30pm Exhibit Hall for Drupalcon Kick Off Reception
• 6:00pm or so Women in Drupal Meet and Greet

Then on Weds...

In January, I announced a new IRC channel #debian-lego, for those of us in the Debian and Linux community interested in LEGO, the marvellous construction system from Denmark. We also created a wiki page to have a place to take notes and write down our plans and hopes. And several people showed up to help. I was very happy to see the effect of my call. Since the small start, we have a debtags tag hardware::hobby:lego tag for LEGO related packages, and now count 10 packages related to LEGO and Mindstorms:

brickosalternative OS for LEGO Mindstorms RCX. Supports development in C/C++ leocadvirtual brick CAD software libnxtutility library for talking to the LEGO Mindstorms NX lnpddaemon for LNP communication with BrickOS nbccompiler for LEGO Mindstorms NXT bricks nqcNot Quite C compiler for LEGO Mindstorms RCX python-nxtpython driver/interface/wrapper for the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot python-nxt-filersimple GUI to manage files on a LEGO Mindstorms NXT scratcheasy to use programming environment for ages 8 and up t2nsimple command-line tool for Lego NXT

Some of these are available in Wheezy, and all but one are currently available in Jessie/testing. leocad is so far only available in experimental.

If you care about LEGO in Debian, please join us on IRC and help adding the rest of the great free software tools available on Linux for LEGO designers.

We're not talking about Darwin, but about the fact that a website project - even after delivery - will often stay in a state of evolution before becoming ‘stable’. The evolution itself isn’t the problem. Responding to that evolution is often what causes operational headaches. This article will not deal with the technical complexities of the Drupal development lifecycle, the CMI in Drupal 8 should solve that. Here we delve into the operational issues of website evolution.

Some definitionsAbout a decade ago, websites were constructed by ordinary people promoted from among their peers to the role of webmaster. Because websites weren’t used as the powerful marketing tools they are today, many websites remained under construction for a long time. Sometimes forever. Nowadays, websites can be under construction for a long time as well, but the construction phase is more accurately name; used by website engineers as they actually construct the website. Once the website is completed and delivered, it enters the maintenance phase. The actual go-live might happen overnight, but there’s often a fairly long time before development stops. The time between construction and maintenance is what’s called the evolution phase.  for ITIL lovers Within Application Maintenance Services our focus in this article is on Application (Drupal) Support.   Within Application Maintenance we can identify 4 types of Support. Corrective Support (eg. download link does not work), Adaptive Support (eg. make whole website work for new version of Internet Explorer),  Preventive Support (eg. perform security updates) and Perfective Support (eg. Add a carrousel to the new campaign page).     We rather use the term “Evolution” to denote the combination of Perfective and Preventive Support since it better fits the notion that we are talking about, more than ‘support’. ConstructionThe construction phase for websites is that period between having a neat idea, and bringing the resulting idea into production. The most important part of that phase is the concepting phase, while the largest part of that phase is the actual development project. The business model for development projects is fairly straightforward: sell as many development projects as there is capacity while keeping planning and efficiency (i.e. working billable hours at least 80% of the time). To fill the gaps between projects, you can take on smaller projects. The less downtime you have in your work schedule, the better. The resulting website will consist of everything that the client wants to start from. MaintenanceConstruction processes can be standardized to some extent, but it’s impossible to predict fallouts and failures, once software is running stably. The main problem of these fallouts is not the failure itself, it’s making sure you have resources available to fix the problem. So suppliers of modern-day equipment and services need to make sure they have enough permanent resources to address issues as they arise, in order to comply with their Service Level Agreements (SLA). Typically there are peaks moments and there are moments when everything is running smoothly. Only proactive maintenance tasks (e.g. upgrades, increasing memory) become plannable. But for this to be worthwhile, you need enough clients and enough resources to come up with usable heuristics. Once you have proper statistics, the maintenance business model becomes scalable, because it’s not people but statistics that are sold. In fact, resources can be sold multiple times when you’re dealing with small, unpredictable chunks of work. The resulting website will become  stronger and more stable by performing these maintenance tasks. EvolutionThe business model of maintenance is clear (enough resources + enough clients = scalable workflow), but starts to degrade as soon as these chunks of work become too big. This is what happens when the website is in evolution. During that evolution phase, the client will make feature requests that the development team needs to handle. But due to the nature of the request, the client will be unsatisfied if that request is handled as a project (ie. planned to happen in 5 weeks).  The resulting website will consist of improvements to adapt to changing business requirements, staying up to date with the newest technologies (e.g responsive design) or being ready for new marketing campaigns. What is the problem?If the evolution were handled as construction, clients would have to wait too long for small changes.If, on the other hand, it were handled as maintenance, the support team would lack experience  to complete all the engineering going on. Even if they did have the skills to handle those medium-sized chunks of work, accepting these requests would break the statistics of the business model. This could jeopardize the correct reaction time on more critical requests. What we are hearing from prospects and clients working with Drupal websites at the moment does indeed comply with our findings. We hear remarks like, “Yes, we have a support contract, our supplier reacts quickly and communicates well, but the quality of the fix is low or feature A gets implemented, while another existing feature B breaks down.” Or we hear, “Yes, we have a support contract, and the supplier delivers correct solution. They even bundled multiple requests into one release, but it takes weeks, sometimes months to get a small thing changed.”  Possible solutionsThere’s a list of possible ways to be able to deal with these situations, and the Wunderkraut support model currently handles all of them.  Fixed SupportReserve a few people from the development team for a number of days a week/month for a certain period of time, e.g. every Friday for six months, two developers will be available to react to client requests in the issue queue. The following problems arise with this solution:

• It’s very hard to predict how many resources will be needed and for how long, which will result in either too many or too few blocked resources.
• If these developers are unable to get a feature totally released on that Friday, they need to continue working on it, the next week - i.e. it is still slow.
• If the client does NOT have any requests, they will still be paying (maybe partially) for that unused time, and some clients don’t like that.

 Lower the billabiltyAnother option would be to decrease the billabilty of one or more dev-teams, e.g. only the dev-team is directly billable on projects for 60% of the time, so has extra room to handle these small chunks of works. But the problem here is pretty clear: the risk  is completely moved to the supplier. If in one month, none of the clients requests smaller work, the supplier has no income. This is in general not a good business model. On the other hand, this solution does not scale. If the supplier freed up some resources for each of his clients, the dev-team would just be ‘waiting’ for new features to come in, instead of working on new projects. Wunderkraut Evolution model (beta)We’ve finally managed to devise a model that combines the agility of the two weekly sprints of Scrum, with some warranties on reaction time for certain requests. We won't go into the details of the model, but the general idea is that we use a mix of fixed support and lower billability to spread the risk evenly between client and supplier, and at the same time allow small chunks of (evolutiove) development work to be added to the sprint backlog of a selected development team.  We are currently test-driving this solution for some clients, and will report back at a later time to talk about the results. Let’s discuss and learnIt may not come as a surprise that both clients and service agencies are dealing with complex issues as a result of this dilemma. In fact both parties are actually losing time and money in their search for the best solution. Therefore we would like to invite CTOs, CMOs and other company decision-makers and influencers to our round table discussion group in Belgium to exchange views on how to best solve this.  In an informal setting, a panel composed of a  Marketing Director (Kinepolis), a Technical Director (Cultuurnet) and a Supplier (Wunderkraut) will touch upon the different  aspects  of  the website evolutionary support.  The discussion will be moderated by Bart Gysens (project medewerker V-ICT-OR). If you are interested in joining this event please send an email to be.info@wunderkraut.com to register. 

Lumail <http://lumail.org> received two patches today, one to build on Debian Unstable, and one to build on OpenBSD.

The documentation of the lua primitives is almost 100% complete, and the repository has now got a public list of issues which I'm slowly working on.

Even though I can't reply to messages I'm cheerfully running it on my mail box as a mail-viewer. Faster than mutt. Oddly enough. Or maybe I'm just biased.

I’ve recently been spending a bit of my spare time playing Ingress (see the Wikipedia page if you haven’t heard of it). A quick summary is that Ingress is an Android phone game that involves geo-location of “portals” that you aim to control and most operations on a portal can only be performed when you are within 40 meters – so you do a lot of travelling to get to portals at various locations. One reasonably common operation that can be performed remotely is recharging a portal by using it’s key, after playing for a while you end up with a collection of keys which can be difficult to manage.

Until recently the set of portal keys was ordered alphabetically. This isn’t particularly useful given the fact that portal names are made up by random people who photograph things that they consider to be landmarks. If people tried to use a consistent geographic naming system (which was short enough to fit in large print on a phone display) then it would be really difficult to make it usable. But as joke names are accepted there’s just no benefit in having a sort by name.

A recent update to the Ingress client (the program which runs on the Android phone and is used for all game operations) changed the sort order to be by distance. This makes it really easy to see the portals which are near you (which is really useful) but also means that the order changes whenever you move – which isn’t such a good idea for use on a mobile phone. It’s quite common for Ingress players to recharge portals while on public transport. But with the new Ingress client the list order will change as you move so anyone who does recharging on a train will find the order of the list changing during the process and it’s really difficult to find items in a list which is in a different order each time you look at it.

This problem of ordering by location has a much greater scope than Ingress. One example is collections of GPS tagged photographs, it wouldn’t make any sense to mix the pictures of two different sets of holiday pictures because they were both taken in countries that are the same distance from my current location (as the current Ingress algorithm would do).

It seems to me that the best way of sorting geo-tagged items (Ingress portals, photos, etc) is to base it on the distance from a fixed point which the user can select. It could default to the user’s current location but in that case the order of the list should remain unchanged at least until the user returns to the main menu and I think it would be ideal for the order to remain unchanged until the user requests it.

I think that most Ingress players would agree with me that fixing annoying mis-features of the Ingress client such as this one would be better for the game than adding new features. While most computer games have some degree of make-work (in almost every case a computer could do things better than a person) I don’t think that finding things in a changing list should be part of the make-work.

Also it would be nice if Google released some code for doing this properly to reduce the incidence of other developers implementing the same mistakes as the Ingress developers in this regard.

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Automated installation of apachesolr multicore localy will save you valueable time.

How to automatically install apache solr multicore localy for drupalapachesolrsearchautomationSaturday, May 11, 2013 - 14:49

There was an interesting question by ‘Fool’ recently on the StackExchange site for Boardgames: How do you play a game like Rock-Paper-Scissors with friends online? Or any other game where players have to simultaneously submit their moves (e.g. Diplomacy, or Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizzard-Spock), which, as I just learned, are simultaneous action selection games. While there are websites dedicated to playing specific games, such as webdiplomacy.net, we could not find a generic one that you can use if you, for example, invent your own variants of a game.

So I created one: At you-say-first.nomeata.de you can enter rooms and share the URL with your friends. On the one hand, you have a regular chat room there. But there is also the possibility to enter moves (whatever a move may be to you) and only when all players have done that and marked the move as final, it is shown to everyone. If you want to try it out: There is an integrated, not very fancy Rock-Paper-Scissors-playing bot. Just enter a room, join and say „I want to play!“

Note that this site can be used for more than just for games. Have you ever observed that persons would often want other to express their preference (e.g. where to dine) first to not reveal their own preference, so that they can (or pretend to) change their mind if they would contradict? In such situations simultaneous action selection can be a fairer method.

A technical note: I created this web app using meteor (a JavaScript framework building on node.js and MongoDB that allows for reactive programming), and it is also hosted on meteor.com. I chose Meteor after someone mentioned Firebase to me, which looked very slick, but was not Free Software, so I looked for alternatives. I did not do any cross-browser-testing, and the UI design could be improved, so if you want to help out (or just complain), please use the GitHub code repository and issue tracker.

Last week we released Wheezy, roughly two years after our last release Squeeze.

I’d like to thank all the contributors in- and outside of Debian for your fine work! Every single contribution — no matter how big or small — summed up to the wonderful release we finished last week. Without you this release would not have been possible. Keep up the good work guys and make Jessie rock even harder!

PS: It is very nice to see once again fresh packages rolling into unstable and spending some time fixing broken dependencies