Guys,

After a great 13 months with Alan Pope at the helm, it’s time to choose a new Ubuntu UK PoC.

I’ve enjoyed Alan’s time as PoC, and have been able to work with him in his role on one project.  No doubt his contributions will continue even after he steps down as PoC.

There was discussion a while back, about what being a PoC is about.  In my opinion, a PoC defines his or her own role on the Community - but at the end of the day is seen as a figurehead for his or her Localised Community.

The Ubuntu UK community is a happy and well balanced one.  Under Alan’s tenure, we have held together end enjoyed some grand release parties.  With Canonical residing in our Locality too, we even got a visit of Mr Shuttleworth.  Alas, I have not yet been there (time for me to setup events to areas outside of London).

I seriously considered running for the post myself, however, I don’t feel like I have yet been active enough to consider a promise to be ‘more active’ to be anything more than use IRC _three_ times a day

However, I have a good relationship with one of the three runners, and am therefore going to endorse him running as Ubuntu UK PoC.

Dave Walker

I’m sure the other guys have a lot to offer too, but Daviey is someone who I’ve worked with in the past, and who I can see being a great walking advertisement for ubuntu (and that’s not just down to the extra real-estate available on his t-shirts)…

Please take time to vote, for whoever you wish here:

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-uk/+poll/teamlead09/+vote-simple

Subtitle - Ubuntu ROCKS!!!

This morning I got my T-mobile HDSPA card back.  It’s a PCMCIA card which I use to connect to the internet.  I’ve had it for about two years now, and having finally found myself a stable base, have been using it less and less.

Since I last used it, I’ve got myself a new laptop - and it’s running Ubuntu Intrepid.  I was a bit concerned about setting up the datacard, as last time I set it up (circa 9 months ago) it was a bit of a struggle, and I could only use KPPP to connect to network, after entering some arbitary settings.

Today - I plugged in the card.  It was immediately recognised, and libnotify was used to let me know I could configure the card now.  I simply selected my network provider from a drop-down list, and clicked apply.  Thanks to the wonderfulness of Network-Manager applet - I can now simply click on the icon to switch between networks - including my new 3G connection.

It’s streamlining like this that is much harder to do with a proprietary system.  This is all about using the people at the end of the long tail to add their 2 pence worth.

Ubuntu ROCKS!

In the not too distant past, I read this on Popey’s blog:

Friends wife: “Is that Firefox? Where have I heard of that?”
Me: (not wanting a conversation about geek stuff in the pub) “It’s a product which competes with one of Microsofts products.”
Friends wife: “Nah, we don’t have any competitors.”
Me: “…”
Friends wife: “Except maybe Google.

I thought it was quite amusing, and it’s one of those things that really gets people’s backs up in the Community.  However, less than a week later, I came across the same thing myself.  In my parent’s Kitchen of all places.  One of my Mum’s friends was round, and I was working in Birmingham for the day, so popped home to say hi.  I new her son worked ‘In computers’, and she’s been quite knowledgeable in the past.

Mum’s Friend: “So you work up in Manchester then Andy?”
Me: “Yeah, for a technology company”
Mum’s Friend: “So what do you actually do?”
Me: “I develop Open Source Office Servers & Solutions for SMEs - creating a more affordable system than Microsoft Exchange.”
Mum’s Friend: “Ooh, so is it a big company you work for?”
Me: “No, we have about 20 employees”
Mum’s Friend: “So you’re not really a competitor to Microsoft then… My Son works for Microsoft.”

What defines competitor.. someone who competes in the same market.  I’ve replaced MS Exchange Servers with Open Source Solutions.  If that’s not competing, I don’t know what is!

It’s taken me a while, but just over 12 months learning the basics of programming, I’m finally contributing and commiting code to my company’s SVN repo.

One of the things I like about programming, is that it seems to suit me.  Having not done any programming at all before 12 months ago, jumping in at the deep end and going into a career that requires it wasn’t an easy step to take.  However, I’ve had some good guidance from my colleagues - in that I’ve not settled upon a single language.  I wouldn’t say I know any language well, but I’m reading and understanding code better than I’ve done before.

The hardest part for me, is looking at a problem and seeing my own solution - rather than the solution that’s coded infront of me.  Once I’ve understood the train of though of the original programmer, it’s alot easier.. however, at the start I was failing to do that.

At the moment I’m happy making modifications and bugfixes to programs.  It’s simply enough stuff, where auditing and testing the problem takes by far the majority of the time.  However, I’m understanding things better - and feel like I’m finally making some decent progress.

I know it’s possible to contribute to open source in other ways than just coding (I’ve been doing that for the last few years) - but now I’m coding I hope to submit code to the projects I like.  It’s been my aim for a while.  I’ve set up my bzr repo, but most of my code at the moment I’d hope to submit as patches to other projects.  Who knows what the future will hold.

Sometimes we have these moments when something just clicks, and you understand why you believe in something.  One of the biggest criticisms levels at Linux Distros, is that were they to combine, they could share their resources and develop faster.

Whilst I’d hazard a guess at this being true with tribes, and ‘ye olde style’ warfare - in the software world it is exactly this diversity which adds value.  Many groups of people can be coming at the same problem from multiple angles - many of which the other groups have yet to consider as viable/worthwhile.  Therefore you get a variety of methods.

Working on the commercial side of FLOSS, there are a number of Open Source ‘products’ that we re-sell and support.  We add value as a local supplier, and help with end-user support and other IT problems.  The real value we add though, is that we look to support anything (and yes, that includes Vista).  When developing websites, we use a number of FLOSS CMS systems, with each system being a better fit than another for a particular use.  Sure, standardisation may be good on paper… but constantly learning new systems and seeing different approaches adds value to your staff.  Keeping them actively learning stops stagnation, and can only be good for the company in the long run.

Today Boris Johnson has told the BBC he plans to make sure that the 2012 Olympics is under-budget.  With £9.6 billion currently set-aside, there’s plenty of room to make the Olympics a success.

Whilst only being a small part of the overall budget, Boris should push to ‘Open Source’ the IT development required for the games.  Just think of all the useful things that the Olympic management need to do using their IT system.  Well, Open Source it and you’ve got a legacy there already.  Each of the different ‘modules’ for managing different things can be re-used.  Great!

The other approach is to open source all aspects of the games management.  Blog what works, what doesn’t.  Access a massive pool of ‘free’ talent by sharing solutions and problems.  Make sure it’s not just London who are going to benefit from the olympics.  Create in effect a ’shared’ knowldgebase, that future countries can use as the basis to their Olympic preparation.  As we’ve learnt from China, we’re probably not going to beat them on the wow-scale.. but we can beat them in what we give as freedoms to other countries.  Something that I’m sure will resonate with the political minded.

And of course, we can do ‘better IT.’

Legal Copy?

In order to use LUKS to encrypt a filesystem that is contained in a file, you actually have to follow the same steps as when encrypting a physical partition, plus two. These include:

• The creation of a file that will contain the encrypted partition
• Set up an association between this file and a free loop device, so that it can be used by cryptsetup as a block device. At the moment, cryptsetup cannot use a file as a block device directly. That’s why this step is needed.

So, let’s create the file. The following command creates an 100MB file, named “container1“, which is full of random data:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=container1 bs=1024 count=100000

To create a mapping between this file and a free loop device, we’ll use losetup (part of util-linux). Check which loop device is free in your system with the command:

losetup -f

For me it was /dev/loop0. So, I map the “container1″ file to /dev/loop0. As root:

# losetup /dev/loop0 /path/to/container1

From now on, the steps are exactly the same as before. We just use /dev/loop0 instead of the ZIP disk:

# cryptsetup --verbose --cipher "aes-cbc-essiv:sha256" --key-size 256 --verify-passphrase luksFormat /dev/loop0
# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/loop0 encr-container1
# mkfs.ext3 /dev/mapper/encr-container1
# mount -t ext3 -o rw,defaults /dev/mapper/encr-container1 /mnt/tmp/

We can now copy some files to our encrypted partition, like on a regular disk partition. We unmount it and delete the device mappings with the following commands:

# umount /mnt/tmp/
# cryptsetup luksClose encr-container1
# losetup -d /dev/loop0

So, to mount a LUKS encrypted filesystem within a file you need to create two device mappings before you mount it for use. Of course some automation can be achieved using scripts, but you will still have to supply the passphrase in order to use the encrypted partitions.

Originally published: Here

I’ve been playing about with the RadioHead’s House of Cards video on-and-off for the last few weeks.  They released the data to the video as a number of csv files, each one containing the 3D position, and ’strength’ of each of the pixels.  It was a neat idea, and the code and data are freely available at:

http://code.google.com/creative/radiohead/

I’ve not really been programming long, and have yet to ’settle’ on a language.  For this project, I began in python before realising that I’d have to do something much lower level.  I ended up generating images using ‘R’ - an open source version of S-Plus programming language, and ‘Octave’ - MATLAB’s open source equivalent.

It’s great that such powerful software can be found for free, and greater still that I could install it in Ubuntu by typing ‘apt-get install octave.’

It’s things like this that are really going to ‘revolutionise’ learning, and things like this that show how the utopian vision of the world wide web can come into fruition.  I was just disappointed that I didn’t have the mathematical background to utilise the tools.

However, I was always quite good at Maths, getting an A at GCSE (which was the last time I studied it).  So now, after a 6 year break, I’m attempting to do some more maths.  I feel like I need to do it now I’m working in computing; it’s a skill that’s required and one I intend to hone.  I’ve been recommended “Engineering Mathematics” by K.A. Stroud - which looks quite daunting - but should provide me with both a nice refresher course in its early chapters, followed by some chapters in which I’ll no doubt be calling on the open source community to help me get through.

The ony disapointment was that the book comes with a interactive learning CD - which only works on Windows.  I’ve emailed the publishers to see if they’d be interested in converting it into an online-tutor.  The benefits of setting up a community around such a popular book (practically every person I’ve seeked guidance for on choice of textbook has recommended it) are limitless.

It was an open letter, and was published on my blog in the last post.  If you too have a view on whether or not they should create an online version of the tutor (and thus an online community for collaboration, question exchanges .etc) please put your comments in that post, so that on the off-chance they read it, they’ll see the community support.  Please blog about it too if you’re a user of the book!

Dear Sir/Madam,

Having recently purchase ‘Engineering Mathematics’ - 5th Edition, I was disappointed to find that the companion CD contained software that would only work with Windows, and not on my Ubuntu Laptop, or Mac Desktop.

Despite Microsoft having held a seemingly unassailable market share over the past 20 years on the Desktop, current trends show that more and more people are using Mac OSX and Linux on the desktop - with Linux being particularly strong in certain academic fields.

I’d like to suggest that palgrave do not release a ‘Mac OSX version’, nor an ‘Ubuntu version’ of the personal tutor; but anticipate the current market trends and put the personal tutor ‘in the cloud.’  This would enable you to centrally-manage updates and revisions to the tutor, rather than having to ‘push’ updates to your customers.  It would also enable you to leverage the intelligence of the ‘community’ of ‘Engineering Mathematics’ readers since its first publication in 1970.

I won’t preach toward you about the benefits of choosing “open source software” as your platform (although do take a look at moodle for your Virtual Learning Environment).  However, I’d like to place emphasis on the potential of the ‘community’ that such a website would create.   Instead of having students as independent satellites, you’d bring them together online to encourage collaboration and solutions.

These are the skills that the academic community are trying to encourage.  It was Tim Berners-Lee, of the academic community, who started the World Wide Web at CERN.  Please consider contributing yourselves.

Regards,

andylockran

digg story

It’s an essay which most people in the Open Source Software World have read. Yet it’s one that I’ve never got round to reading - that is, until tonight.

It’s alot easier than I expected it to be. Non-technical people should have no worries in attempting to read it (though the motivation for doing so may be reduced by at least an order of magnitude). I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone with 30 minutes free.

The best thing about it, for me, is that it’s simple. It is in effect an empirical review of Linux’s development through the eyes of the ‘fetchmail’ project.

For those of you new to ubuntu (reading this on planet.ubuntu-uk.org) - I’d thoroughly recommend reading it if you’re a non-technical user.  It’s a nice explanation as to why the effort you’re making in switching to Ubuntu is a step in the right direction.