nixternal

Recently I have really gotten into cycling, not just for recreational use, but also for competitive reasons. I am definitely new to their community unlike I have been in the free software community now for more than 15 years. The one thing I noticed is that their community is exactly like ours. Everyone is very welcoming and friendly and it is easy to find a spot just for you. I have done my first 3 group rides within the past week. A group ride is where a bunch of road cyclists get together and do a nice long, fast paced, ride in a group, or what is commonly referred to as a pace line in cycling.

The first ride I went on was with what are called leg shavers. People who are about as close to Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, Alberto Contador, and others. They ride super fast and they know what they are doing. Well, I definitely didn’t fit in with this crowd but they didn’t discourage me from trying to ride with them at all. Actually some of these semi-pro to professional cyclists took some time with me to teach me the basics, something they probably learned many years ago.

The second ride I went on was with leg shavers as well with a local racing team, which I will probably join in the upcoming months. On Monday they went out for what is called a recovery ride. This type of ride is a slower paced ride with very high RPMs, or cadence in the cycling world. After racing on Saturday and Sunday, these athletes need to keep their legs, lungs, and hearts fresh, so they do a somewhat easy ride. This ride was considered a “no-drop” ride. This means that they will not let you drop off and will always help you through. Now those of you who know me, know that I am a fairly large guy. I am not obese, but I used to play football, did wrestling and martial arts, lifted weights forever. I was always into getting bigger. Well because of this, my cardio is absolute garbage. I can ride for 100 plus miles, but I can’t do it all that fast. This ride was my fastest paced ride at the distance we did to date. There was a woman who made sure I didn’t drop the entire time, her name was Sandy and I am forever in her debt as she was not only patient, but she was a ton of help teaching me the ropes.

The third ride was last night. A nice 31 mile ride that is by far the hilliest ride I have done to date. I didn’t even know we had hills like this in the Chicagoland area. I was great with rolling hills, flats, and downhills. Because I have a solid 220 plus pound body, I can easily toast a lot of people down hill that we were riding with. Now, what goes down, must come up, and my lord did it ever come up. There were 3 hills, and all of them had those scary movie names too. Devils Back, Heart Attack Hill, and I can’t remember the other. Well, those hills kicked my ass. I dropped into the lowest gears I had, and I run triples thankfully. I had dropped from doing 18 mile per hour to about 7 miles per hour, I pushed and I pushed, I saw dots, I felt sick, and my legs were on fire. To my rescue to help me up the hill and make sure I didn’t fall back, another woman cyclist. Sandy was also riding with us that night, but I told her to not fall back because of me, I know the route and I will catch up. Thankfully she listened and got a good workout. The lady who did help me was just as friendly, very motivational, and a lot of fun to ride with.

Since these 3 rides, the last 2 I have made some cool friends and already they are emailing me asking me to come out for a bike ride this weekend and a barbecue. Really cool, and this is the type of stuff I really need, the motivation and camaraderie that will help me from burning out in the open source community. There you go Jono, add cycling to your list of burnout preventors As you can see, they welcome me with open arms the same exact way the open source community has as well. Cycling and Ubuntu are so darn close in community representation that I am falling in love with both more and more every day now.

Another moral to this story, which has become somewhat of a hot topic over the past couple of years deals with women. I am here to tell you that women can be as strong and even stronger then men, in so many ways. When I say stronger, I don’t necessarily mean strength. The past 2 rides I have done has given me even more appreciation for the women in our communities. I am proud to say that I was at the brink of quitting and had women come to my rescue. For those of you out there that want to bash women and say they don’t belong, I know some on bikes that are waiting for you to mount up, and I know plenty who have their IDEs fired up ready to code you a paperbag to crawl into. So I had 2 women stick with me during my rides and help me through it, help me succeed. I had women in the open source community do the same. One of them is my good pointy stick buddy Sarah who probably helped me more than Jonathan Riddell, Brandon Holtsclaw, and Daniel T. Chen put together.

COMMUNITY! COMMUNITY! COMMUNITY!

How many cyclists do we have in the house? Did you know there was an Ubuntu Cyclists Team? We are made up from a few hipsters, you know those silly kids who roll up their pant legs, wear funny colored shoes, and those silly cycling caps, similar to the one I am wearing in my Planet Ubuntu hackergotchi, and ride a bike called a fixie. There are some that are leisure riders or commuters, and then there is me, the road cyclist who loves when his legs bleed in pain. I know there is another one, as you had your bike at UDS in Mt. View. Can’t remember the make, it was white though. You had that leg shaver look about you as well. I think Tony Yarusso is also a road cyclist as well, which I have been meaning to make my way up to him and do some riding this summer.

I am looking for more cyclists in our community, and if you fall into this category, hang out with us on #ubuntu-cyclists on IRC (Freenode). I am looking for some road cyclists in or around the Chicagoland area. Tonight I am going out on a training group ride in almost 100°F temperatures. Tonight is attack of the hills out in the western suburbs of Chicago. I am currently planning on entering some Cat 5 races this summer.

So, if you are a cyclist, use Ubuntu, come and join us. I would love to see Mark Shuttleworth, Mr. Athlete himself, get into it and lets create a real licensed and sponsored Team Ubuntu! It would be about the only non-blank cycling jersey I would wear

Come on Mark, I saw you running at Mt. View. You passed us twice, and then the third time you came up with a whole tray of Starbucks, impressive

Cycling also prevents burnout, right Jono?

Just come across this link on IRC (thanks patriconway). I could do nothing but chuckle. My buddy who is an avid web developer and avid anti-Linux and Microsoft guy, wet his pants from laughing so hard. Here is the breakdown of how IE is better than Firefox and Chrome, per Microsoft of course:

Security

If this were true, then I guess all of those manufacturers out there creating Anti this and that software are going under. Thanks Microsoft for contributing to the destabilization of the economy. Maybe this is true, but only so because IE really has to worry about these sort of things far more than either Firefox and Chrome does.

Privacy

Prove it! Put up or shut up, let us see your code! Until then, this is nothing more than a marketing gimmick which the FCC should attack with their whole Truth-in-Marketing bull hockey.

Ease of Use

Oh my, just asked my mom how she likes the Accelerators, Web Slices, and Visual Search Suggestions in Internet Explorer 8. Her response? “I use Firefox now because I couldn’t play Yahoo Games with IE 8 and it kept crashing.” I guess if all you have to do is click that funky ‘e’ on the desktop over and over, then that is pretty easy.

Web Standards
No need to quote it, they pretty much say, “Hey, who cares about CSS 3, we are making IE8 world-class with CSS 2.1″ Though they admit that Firefox and Chrome have more support for emerging standards such as HTML5 and CSS3. You know, the future of the web, that’s what Firefox and Chrome care about now. So when HTML5 and CSS3 become mainstream, you IE8 users will be stuck utilizing, yet again, a useless browser.

Developer Tools
No quoting, but IE8 has the advantage with tools like HTML, CSS and Javascript debugging right in the box. Ya, they got Firefox beat out of the box, but Firebug is far superior to their tools, my opinion of course, and it seems like the opinions of others as well. Oh, and I am sure Chrome will have these features in the future, you know, like when it is READY TO BE USED BY THE MASSES!

Reliability

I guess this is kind of true, as Firefox only has the recovery portion, and Chrome has the tab isolation (does Chrome have crash recovery?). But! Of course there is a but. Using these 2 features as your reliability foundation isn’t saying much. “What mom? You had to click on the ‘e’ again because it just closed?” I really wish she would use Ubuntu!

Customizability

Weather alerts? User Scripts? OK, it isn’t customizable enough for me, but I guess it is for dear ol’ mum.

Compatibility

Well, IE 8 is of course 2 browsers in 1. When it doesn’t work in IE8, which is most of the time, you go to “Compatibility Mode” which is IE7 and hope that it works there. When it doesn’t, fire up Firefox, it will work then. This really is a lie of course, and if it were true, it isn’t saying much. What you just said is, “Hey, we have a bunch of uneducated code monkeys writing IE only websites.” I would really love to see the proof in this one.

Manageability

Umm, OK. Have no idea what they are really referring to, but the suits up at AIG just said, “OH WOW! We gotta get IE8, they said enterprise.” Oh wait, sorry about that, the suits in AIG are all gone, my bad.

Performance

Yay, you just proved that the other 2 browsers are bloated, slow as all hell, garbage. Oh ya, consumers who are out to buy a fast car don’t worry about top speed, they worry about how fast they can get through rush hour. Come to Chicago, your browser will be just like the parking lots we call highways. And here in Chicago, fast automobiles are useless if they don’t get 30+ miles per gallon. We like a bit of efficiency with our speed, and we want to make sure that it will last us a few years too. To bad you can’t say speed, efficiency, and last a few years when it comes to IE 8, or Firefox or Chrome really.

<end satire>

Yes, I just wanted to have a little writing fun right now and maybe put some humor out there as my day in Chicago thus far has been nothing but severe weather I am scared, somebody hold me! What I find interesting is the fact they compared themselves to just Firefox and Chrome. Of course Firefox is #2 in browser land, but what about #3? Isn’t that Safari?

I say we all do our own comparison, really dig into the code and find out who is really the better browser. Uh oh, I just disqualified IE from this comparison, can’t dig into the code and see if they are really telling the truth, or just spewing buzz word here or there. I really wish that consumers were a bit educated and realized that 99.9% of the time, they are being lied to. So, if you just happen to run across this post trying to figure out Accelerators, Web Slices, and Visual Search Suggestions, then let me teach you about alternative choices. There is:

I am really just adding this so I have it documented in case I forget it in the future or need to reference it. One thing I like to do when messing around with web development is when I use a table to hold something, instead of a silly div (really on wiki pages and such to create cheap button-like objects), is use a round border. So here are the example on how to use round borders for tables, utilizing border-radius and CSS.

Firefox

/* 5px radius on all 4 corners of the table */
-moz-border-radius: 5px;
/* 5px radius on top left and bottom right corners only */
-moz-border-radius: 5px 0 5px 0;
/* 5px radius on bottom left and top right corners only */
-moz-border-radius: 0 5px 0 5px;
/* 5px radius on the top left corner only */
-moz-border-radius-topleft: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the bottom left corner only */
-moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the top right corner only */
-moz-border-radius-topright: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the bottom right corner only */
-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 5px;

CSS 3

/* 5px radius on all 4 corners of the table */
border-radius: 5px;
/* 5px radius on top left and bottom right corners only */
border-radius: 5px 0 5px 0;
/* 5px radius on bottom left and top right corners only */
border-radius: 0 5px 0 5px;
/* 5px radius on the top left corner only */
border-top-left-radius: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the bottom left corner only */
border-bottom-left-radius: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the top right corner only */
border-top-right-radius: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the bottom right corner only */
border-bottom-right-radius: 5px;

Webkit

/* Just add -webkit- in front of the CSS 3 styles */
-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 5px;

KHTML (Konqueror)

/* Just add -khtml- in front of the CSS 3 styles */
-khtml-border-radius: 5px;

And with that said, Why is there 4, count them 4, different ways to skin the same exact cat? Come on browser devs, lets come together and accept 1 solution and implement it. I have been noticing Ajax-like functions out there to do rounded corners, and now I see why. With like 10 lines of JavaScript, you get this same functionality. Now do this in your style sheet, and 1 table could have as less as 4 lines if it is a simple table, or as many as 16 lines for a bit more complex layout. Anyways, just wanted to keep this documented instead of Googling for it all of the time when I need it, and pass it on to all of you fine folks who are unfortunate enough to read my blog. Plus, I also wanted to pass on how web developers, when utilizing border-radius, can now make a KHTML friendly site

Yesterday I did a quick, well not so quick, post on some new tasks concerning Kubuntu QA and Feedback. I created a very crude plasmoid that would connect to a web survey so people could provide feedback during the development cycle. The first revision of this plasmoid had a hardcoded URL to the survey in question. So that meant that for every Alpha or RC release during the cycle, we would have to update the plasmoid with the new survey URL. This would become a pain. So I went forward trying to figure out a way to automagically handle this stuff.

My first initiative was to keep the plasmoid super simple and not have it do a lot of processing and stuff to figure out what to do. So enter PHP. I added a script on the server that the plasmoid will connect to. The only processing the plasmoid has to do is with lsb_release. When used with the flag -d, lsb_release will return only the “Description” of the current release of your system. This can be used to determine if the release is a stable release, or if it is a development release. Here are 2 example outputs to show this:

Stable:

Development:

QUIZ: Can you figure out the names of my computers from the 2 screenshots and how or why I named them? Jono, Jorge, and a few others over there in Michigan and here in Chicago, don’t answer! See if you can do this without Googling

So with the stable version, you can see the last bit in the line is the version number, in this case 9.04. In the development version instead of having the 9.04 it instead has karmic. So which ever value that the plasmoid gets when doing this it sends to the script like this:
http://foo.bar.com/foo.php?ver=9.04
If it is a development release, then it connects with ver=karmic.

Once the script gets that, it then does its magic. It first checks if the $ver is a string or a float. If it is a string, then it takes the string and looks over http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/$ver. It parses the HTML and looks for the latest release under $ver. That then returns whatever the latest release is on the development side only. If $ver is a float, then it parses the HTML of the public survey list and matches up version numbers. Once either of these are complete, the $SID is returned, which is the last part of the URL to the respected survey. Then the PHP script magically redirects the plasmoid to the correct survey.

So with that, I think the Kubuntu Team is in good shape to have this as part of the Alpha 3 release, and possibly even sooner. I would still like to take this beyond a plasmoid and look at creating some sort of application for the desktop that can do everything for everybody, this way here we can pass it around to the rest of the distros so they can use it during their development cycles as well. If you have any ideas, please pass them on, or start hacking on it. I would be willing to lend a hand when the time warrants.

Yesterday I decided that I would start tackling the QA side of things on the Todo List for Kubuntu Karmic. So with that I will be creating a QA policy for Kubuntu, which I am sure I build off of the current policies and guidelines for Ubuntu and other distros, since the work is already done pretty much, for the GNOME side of things. That’s what hackers do right? We hack together stuff until we get what we want

Well, one of the projects I have been tasked with is to create some sort of feedback system for Kubuntu. In the past we had utilized the wiki but this ended up being more of an inconvenience than anything. What would happen is on release day, everyone goes and gets their fresh Kubuntu download, and heads over to do some feedback. You know what happens when multiple people start editing a wiki page at the same time without realizing that it is locked by another user. CONFLICTS! So with that said, I headed on out to start working on some sort of feedback system that we could access with a plasmoid. After researching my options, which unbelievably there aren’t many, I landed my first alpha release utilizing Lime Survey (an awesome open source survey application) and created a quick plasmoid utilzing Plasma.WebView in Python. Literally, the plasmoid took me about 5 minutes from start to finish, it is that crude and simple right now.

Here are a couple screenshots of what it currently looks like in action:

It works, so that qualified it for a quick alpha to let people see it in action and hopefully come up with some ideas.

I have come up with a couple of ideas for the plasmoid because of a simple design flaw. Utilizing the plasmoid will only work during a Live CD session or after Kubuntu is installed and running. Now we all know that during a development cycle not everyone can have the luxury of a Live CD or an install going as planned. Because of this, the plasmoid would be useless, therefor causing us to go back to an archaic method of filling in the feedback. The Internet! At least we have the Internet. Some things I would also like to incorporate, which is probably just another 5 minutes with the plasmoid, is the ability to work on the survey offline, and then syncing as soon as you come online.

So with that said now, I decided that the Linux desktop platforms could really use a good feedback application. One that ties into the desktop and submits results back to a central location. So I got to thinking. How about doing it like 5-a-day is done using bzr? Nah, then I thought some more. How about something like the Ubuntu and Debian Popularity Contest? OK, so the backend/server/database part would be fairly simple and straight forward. Now the frontend part. How would the application work? So I thought about XML files that contained the feedback questions and configuration. So far, this makes the most sense, but isn’t XML such a pain, the ball-and-chain for Python? I have so many ideas on how to go forth with this, now I just need to make some time and start playing around with ideas. What do you all think?

Download Here

Once it is downloaded, you can install it by using the “Add Widgets” dialog or via the command line by doing:

plasmapkg -i kubuntu-qa-feedback.plasmoid

Then you can add it to your desktop using the “Add Widgets” dialog or test it out via the command line by doing:

plasmoidviewer kubuntu-qa-feedback

That’s it from me tonight, goodnight world and happy hacking!