Utah Open Source Planet

A while a go a friend asked me if I would help him set up his office with an Open Directory system, and integrate everything through his Xserve.  It sounded like a simple enough task, as I have done this numerous times in the classroom and for our lab at work.  Boy was I wrong. 

The setup took several hours longer than I would have expected.  He already had the infrastructure, so it should have been simple to set up the server and bind all the clients to the new Directory and establish Kerberos authentication.  The problem ended up being the need to run virtual machines, each of which tried to run remotely on the server instead of locally on the machine (because they were saved in the network home folder).  So, I moved all the virtual machines to the local machines, which fixed that issue.  

Next, preferences within the home folders would get lost all the time.  That it turned out was because the network home folders were taking up too much space, so I moved everyone’s iTunes libraries to the local machine to free up space.  I also had trouble with some internal networking running really slow on occasion (I suspect it’s a problem with the switch, but he can’t replace it), so in order to deal with the flaky network and network home folders, I created mobile accounts on every machine.  If the network goes down, they can authenticate locally and still get what work can be done in an unplugged world.  

Finally, the mail issue.  His office was using Zimbra mail, which was a neat setup, but his version couldn’t be Kerberized.  That, and he wanted to migrate to Apple’s Mail and Calendar server.  So, I set up the mail server, and set up a script utilizing imapsync to transfer the mail from one server to another.  Why?  Because I couldn’t find any documentation on how to move one Postfix database to another while making sure the content was safe and secure.  Anyway, after many attempts (I don’t mind pointing out at this point that imapsync is perhaps one of the most poorly documented open source project I’ve seen), success was made.  Now all I needed to do was redirect the DNS from the router to the new server, and everything should be hunky-dory, right?

The router was using an OpenBSD OS that was extremely limiting.  It took for ever to get the blasted thing to migrate to the right IP’s, and then it didn’t support alias addressing in the DNS.  There’s probably a way to hack the DNS file manually, but I ran into another problem that was really bugging me:  Starting the Mail service in Server Admin didn’t actually start Postfix.  That’s right, it was running all the features of mail without the actual SMTP client to manage it.  

This blew my mind.  A quick search and help from a friend that was Linux savvy indicated that this is a rare bug that happens, and all you have to do is run Postfix manually.  Seems simple enough, but then you need to set it up to start when the system starts.  Again, not too difficult, and easy to set up by adding it to the rc.local file (you can also write a launchd .plist file to handle it, but that’s more complicated than the rc.local step, and I wanted to get this done as soon as possible).

So now Postfix was working, but no one could send or receive mail.  Huge problem, since that’s the point of the mail service.  So, again with the help of my friend, we managed to edit both the main.cf and the master.cf to the right specifications, all of which managed to get Mail working.  

Now, I would like to point out that never in my time as an Instructor have I seen these services fail this badly and completely.  Part of the problem was the strain on his internal network and some bad ports in his router.  Part of the problem was random issues that should never have existed, and yet do because life is never perfect.  And finally, because I have been touting Apple as such as simple solution for a UNIX-based network, it just had to be a problem. 

Has anyone else out there had a similar problem where they have gone into a job with the knowledge that your solution would work, regardless of the platform, and seen it go horribly wrong?  I’m just grateful my friend who asked this of me was so understanding and patient.

My brother Luke sent me a link to a cool online favicon maker he used to make a favicon for my new company, Izeni. It’s pretty easy to use, so I made one for my blog as well. (Yes, it’s that same ugly pic, just smaller). Anyway, it’s kind of fun. If I’d known it would be that easy to do, I would have made a favicon forever ago. :)

Many of my readers will already know that Gabe and I have been busy launching a business for the last few months.

Well, we’ve finally got Izeni officially incorporated, and since we hope to launch our first product soon, we decided we’d better get something of a corporate website thrown together.

It’s really not much content-wise, but it is live; and it’s just in time for us to start pumping the engines of hype and hearsay. Check it out.

Our other (product) website, which is where the majority of our development has been, will be launched shortly.

So, how do you know you’re a developer in a bootstrapping high-tech startup? You have neither business cards nor a corporate website until your product is nearly ready to hit the market. This is pretty much opposite the spend-all-your-money-making-yourself-look-cool approach that many companies take. I hope our product-first approach is vindicated, but we’ll see. :)

Anyway, sign up for Izeni news updates, and we’ll let you know how it goes.

Until then, anyone know where we can get some great business cards?

I’m pleased with how much opportunity for personal development and professional networking there is in Utah. Yes, I do want to see it grow even more, but it’s nice have more good options than I could possibly attend.

Tonight for example, the Utah Tech Events and Utah Business Events calendars show four events in which I have genuine interested, all occurring at the same time.  At 7:30 tonight I would be perfectly content to be at any of these four events:

1. Twelve Horses: Brand Evolution
2. Ignite Salt Lake
3. BYU Web Startup Group
4. Utah Python Users Group

Incidentally, I’d also enjoy being at home with my family, but this abundance of events centered around professional networking and personal development shows that Utah really does have a great (albeit budding) tech and business ecosystem. These mostly non-profit knowledge-sharing groups constitute, I believe, some crucial intangibles that are important underpinnings to a vibrant economy. I’m glad to see them, and I’d love to see them grow.

Anyway, there’s no excuse to not be developing your personal and professional skills at some of these events. Just don’t try to substitute them for hard and diligent work. :)

If you’d like to be a contributor to out local tech and business calendars, please ping me or any of the other calendar admins. Especially if you’ve got a utah-based business or tech group and would like a channel to attract more people, we’d love to hear from you.

I’ve been MIA for a while in these past couple weeks, but for good reason.  So let me cover the events of the past couple of weeks in order, based on what I felt was noteworthy.  

First and foremost, my wife gave birth to our son Alistair Scott on November 1st at 10:27 PM.  He was 7 pounds, 11.8 ounces, and was 20 and 3/4 inches long.  Since then he has already gained 3 ounces and grown 3/4 of an inch.  He’s doing well, and so is my wife. 

With the birth of our second son, I was worried about how this would effect my first son, who is on the autism spectrum.  He was not really happy with either of us at first when he came to visit, but ended the day giving us both kisses.  For the past week or so, he has barely acknowledged his little brother.  Then last night he stood by the bassinet and watched his brother sleep.  I think he’s getting an idea of the change that has come to our family, and is accepting it.  I’m going to be watching him closely, to be sure that the baby doesn’t become a problem for him.  

With the birth of another son, and taking into the account that 6% of all boys born are likely to be autistic, and as autism runs in my family, it’s very likely that our son will have autism.  So that’s something that we hope to catch early if possible.  

The Election on Tuesday was exciting for a lot of people, disappointing for many others, and I didn’t follow it at all.  I had voted a week before (because the baby’s due date was so close), and as such didn’t care much for the results.  Instead I spent my time feeding my new son.  That being said, there is what I think of the results:  

1.  President-elect Obama will do a fine job, particularly if he manages to make a bipartisan cabinet.  I think he is a very intelligent and capable man, though I have yet to see him tested in the nightmare of an administrative job that is the Presidency.  Quite frankly, I think that anyone that want’s to be President of the United States has serious issues.  That is why I would vote for General Colin Powell in a heartbeat:  he doesn’t want the job.  

But that being said, I’ve been long burned out politically, and would rather see results on important issues instead of radical wings of both parties trying to push their agendas.  I think the election was good for the Democrats, in that they got what they have long wanted:  another Hoover to run against.  But the election will be just as effective for the Republicans, in that they will do some soul searching to determine why they have been losing so badly.  It isn’t because of Sarah Palin, it isn’t because of Senator Stevens, it’s because they don’t have a real direction in their party and have become too reactionary and desperate.

The last thing I hope to see is the issue of Autism taken up by both the new Administration and Congress.  Autism is growing in diagnoses, with more parents needing help in discovering what it is and how to help those on the spectrum lead a self-sufficient life.  I’m not looking for a cure, I’m looking for support from somewhere to help parents like myself and my wife who want desperately to teach our son and help him show the intelligence we have observed in him to others.  

And finally, Apple and the Tablet!  Yes, there seems to be a lot of evidence floating out in the rumorsphere that Apple is building a Tablet pc, and that it is due any time now.  The most logical time to announce it would be in January, which would be ideal.  I hope Apple keeps in mind all the features I had put down, particularly that the device will let one tether a bluetooth keyboard and mouse to it, have a full OS with the ability to install software on it, and a micro-DisplayPort for presentations.  

So, anyway, that’s the past week and a few days in review.  Now, it’s back to helping my wife with the new baby!

I just added the BYU Web Startup Group to my comprehensive list of Utah Tech Groups.

From their website:

The Web Startup group was founded to bring together people interested in creating new sites and services online. Group members include web developers (programmers and designers), marketing and business-minded individuals, creative idea people, and others with technology related skills. The group meets regularly to discuss and make Web Startups come to life. If you are interested in making a difference online then join us!

Their next meeting will be this Thursday and will cover Android and “Jump Starting your Website”.

I also added one of the founders, Adam Chavez, to Utah’s Business Blog Aggregator and invited him to contribute his events to the Utah Tech Events Calendar. If you or anyone you know should be added to these Utah business community sites, please contact me.

BTW, there’s also a Utah Business Events Calendar which hasn’t caught on nearly as much. Let me know if you’d like to contribute. Maybe I’ll merge the two calendars in the future; we’ll see.

Anyway, checkout the Web Startup Group. I think they could end up being a really valuable resource to the Utah business and technology communities.

I posted the other day about how universal wishlists are one of the ways the walls of traditional marketing are coming down. In a broader sense, this trend is going on all over the place: the walls of the walled gardens are coming down as big companies realize that customers don’t like to be corralled. Even the quintessentially walled AOL is allowing users to access their Yahoo mail through AOL. They’re still a long way from not sucking, but they’re making steps.

Still remarkably walled: Apple. I understand that uniformity is a big part of their branding, but I predict some of the those walls will come down. Competition from open platforms (like Rockbox for the iPod and Android as an answer to the iPhone SDK) practically ensures it.

And the greatest enemy to walled gardens (at least in the software world): open source. It’s big enough now that even regular folks should start figuring out what it’s all about. Open source is the reason Firefox kicks IE’s butt in terms of useabilty.

Read Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar for an excellent treatise on the way open source is changing the software world.

Photo credit: historyanorak

Universal Wishlist Review

I’m not a big shopper, especially when it comes to traditional brick-and-morter stores, but the internet marketer in me loves new features that make online shopping more pleasant. Such is Amazon’s new Universal Wishlist feature. (OK, it’s not that new, but it’s still awesome.)

I love Amazon’s Universal Wishlist because it allows me to save items from other online stores right to my Amazon wishlist. Being able to store all of the products I want in one place has made Amazon my de facto shopping site for filing away stuff that I want now, but can only afford to buy someday. It’s my new virtual den of covetousness.

Other similar services exist as well. TheThingsIWant also looks kind of cool, and it has basically the same core functionality.  I haven’t tried it, but they supposedly have a feature that allows you to syndicate your wishlist to your blog. Very cool, and surely they’re getting some affiliate commission from that. I’m not sure that I would ever use wishlist syndication, but I can definitely see it being an interesting component of a personal or family blog.

It occurred to me that Google Product Search must have some similar feature, and sure enough, they do. Google shopping list lets you save products you want and compare prices across tons of online stores. It also lets you save notes and publish products in either a public or private list. Very cool. The biggest feature that it’s missing (for me, anyway) is the ability to make your own wishlist submissions for items from smaller stores (like the Mises.org store) that don’t show up on Google’s radar. Too bad. Still, it’s great if you only buy from big retailers.

Anyway, if you’re online shopping experience has been bound to one retailer, I now pronounce it unbound.

Lessons in Open Marketing

But, you might be asking yourself: “Why would Amazon extend it’s functionality to to other sites? Isn’t that giving away some of its secret sauce, let alone revenue?”

Answers:

1. Amazon uses the Universal Wishlists to make the “long tail” even longer, meaning it allows for even more product to be saved on it’s site. This is not necessarily to their direct benefit (since they don’t get the direct sale) but it does help build a shopping community around their site, and that’s as good as gold.
2. I’m sure Amazon also gets a bit of a traffic boost from this. When else would I ever go from Mises.org directly to Amazon? Having a “Click to add” to my Amazon wishlist right in my browser makes Amazon one click away from any retailer on the net. Now that’s smart. (This is somewhat analogous to building a brick-and-morter store in the mall. Why build right next to your competition? Because you can both benefit from the increased traffic that being in the the place for shopping will bring. If it’s sybmiotic, it works for everyone.)
3. Another win for Amazon: data mining. Suddenly Amazon knows what products I’m “eyeing” from other sites, often their direct competition. That’s great data to have when for making pricing, merchandising, and marketing decisions. That kind of competitive data is priceless, especially to an online store that process and act on that data quickly. Interested in a lawnchair from so-and-so? well here are our lawnchairs. X customer added Y watch from Z store? Why don’t we sell Y watch? You get the picture.

Overall I think implementing the Universal Wishlist a great, although somewhat unintuitive, strategic move for Amazon. It’s gutsy to encourage and facilitate increasing sales for other retailers; but it also builds community, increases site traffic, and provides meaningful (and actionable) data for competive analysis. Plus it builds goodwill –or at least it did for me. I appreciate being able to use Amazon’s wishlist feature wherever I find good products. That’s just good marketing.

OS reinstallation would be much easier with a plugin that could dump your entire list of Firefox plugins and reload them later.

Does anybody know of a plugin like that?  I’ve used screenshots to remember which plugins I’d installed, then reinstalled them one at a time, but that’s a remarkably sucky way to go.

What do you use to avoid having to find and reinstall your favorite plugins one at a time? Anything?

The email announcement arrived yesterday afternoon: OpenBSD 4.4 is officially released as of today, November 1.

The new Ubuntu is out. Download it here if you haven’t already.

For my non-technical readers:

Ubuntu is a flavor of Linux, an operating system that can replace Windows. Linux is open sourced, meaning you can look at the code and see how it works. It’s also free to download and includes a ton of world-class open-source software: Firefox for web browsing, OpenOffice for office software, Gimp for photo editing, and much more.

Ubuntu is easy to use, and it’s a great way to familiarize yourself with Linux. Plus it can save you a lot of money if you’re buying a PC that doesn’t come with Windows. (Or, if you’re currently pirating Windows –you know who you are– switching to Linux can help you get legal.)

There is a ton of help online. There are also lots of local user groups like Ubuntu Utah that can help you get it installed and answer any questions you have along the way.

Anyway, give Linux a try; you’ll probably like it. I for one, am never going back to Windows.

I’ve been throwing hints on Twitter over the last week or two that I’ve been working on this, and with a little extra time I finally got it together. Today I’d like to announce that, as of this moment, we have some really cool new features for Twitter users on SocialToo.com, all in one place!

SocialToo, which is trying to be “Your Companion to the Social Web”, is seeking to build the tools and utilities that compliment your experience on the social networks you belong to. Up until now, anyone could sign up and automatically get the ability to have it follow all those on Twitter that follow you. The script ran once a day, and would do all the work for you, while also enabling you to blacklist users you don’t want it to follow. This enables you to automate, while making exceptions, making management of your friends on Twitter much easier. In addition, by providing Facebook credentials it would redirect “yourusername.socialtoo.com” to your Facebook profile.

Today, I’d like to announce some new features:

• First of all, for those with less than 2,000 followers (this is due to a Twitter limit), we’re now updating your followers up to the hour - as Twitter improves their API I’ll update this to work even more realtime. We’re working with Twitter on getting their API improved to handle this. If you have 2,000 followers or more instead of just once a day, we’re now updating every 6 hours, so even your followers will update faster than before.
• Today, we’re adding the ability to add a message that we’ll send to all your new followers via direct message. This can be a great opportunity to thank your followers, or, as a business account, tell them about a unique promotion you are running. However, if you’re just signing up and aren’t already following those who follow you, we recommend waiting until your account syncs up before turning this on, or all those we follow will get dm’d, even if they’re not new followers. This should only be applicable to new accounts - if you have an existing account, check your preferences and be sure to turn this feature on!
• In addition, if you have a bunch of people who followed you, you followed back, and then they stopped following you (this is the case for many Twitter spammers), we’ve added the ability to turn on a feature that unfollows those that are not following you back. I think it’s who you follow that matters, so my recommendation is to use this feature sparingly, and turn it off when your account is back in sync. You can use it however you want though.
• We’ve got a fresh new design! - okay, I admit, we’re not perfect yet, and were this the golden days I’d say we’re still technically in “beta” (I hate that excuse though), but we got a superstar designer to offer some help on the design for this - thanks so much to our designer!! You know who you are. The new design will come into play much more in the next round of features.
• My favorite feature: follower statistics. Not only are we now tracking those that follow you, but we’re also tracking those that stopped following you. You’ll now get an e-mail every night telling you the followers that stopped following you, and who your new followers are (and consequently who you followed). This is turned off for all existing users - go into your preferences to turn this on and find out details about those you’re following and those who may have unfollowed you (and we’ll soon provide other statistics to help you find out why).

As planned, I think we’re changing the game in making your social experience better all in one place with these tools. You may be familiar with other sites that do similar things out there, but you will quickly find that SocialToo.com is easier to set up, more automated, more accurate, and much less hassle than some of the other services out there.

Oh, and there’s one more really big thing. You’ll have to wait a few weeks to hear our next announcement though. Much more on the way!

You can sign up at http://socialtoo.com (that’s T-O-O, like “tool”, or “also”). Follow us on Twitter at @socialtoo for more updates!

Don’t forget about the inaugural meeting of Utah Mobile Developers Group tonight.  They’ll be discussing both iPhone and Android development and handing out some O’Reilly iPhone books.

I have a feeling that this group is going to be awesome. At least it will be for me; it’s right up the alley of what my new business will be doing. Here’s UMDG’s mission statement:

The mission of the UMDG is provide development-level education and networking around mobile applications. This includes device-specific apps, client-server apps and web-only apps formatted for use on mobile devices. We will cover all mobile devices for which there is interest, including iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, J2ME and more.

By the way, they’re looking for sponsors. I pledge to be one once we’re actually profitable.

Okay, it’s not quite that bad but that’s how I feel. It’s been a long and dusty road fixing the major bugs in the Mono 2.0 VMware Appliance and LiveCD.

Fixed in 2.0-1: mono-debugger was missing. This is a big deal because this is the first release where the debugger is released at the same time as, and with guaranteed* compatibility with, the mono release.

* no guarantees, implied or otherwise, unless you have some other agreement with Novell

Fixed in 2.0-2: No sound support. This took a while to fix. Why is hal-resmgr not required by any package or pattern?

Fixed in 2.0-3: Absolutely no scalable (truetype) fonts installed. You wouldn’t have noticed probably but it breaks Moonlight which, though not included (until the 1.0 release probably), we definitely want to work properly.

Those of you who had problems with ftp.novell.com should find that it’s working much better now. Please use the torrents.

Since I’m not at all confident that nothing else will go wrong I’m not going to link directly to anything this time. Find the LiveCD or VMware Appliance at the Mono download page. Bonus points to whoever finds the next bug serious enough that I have to fix it and re-release… again.

Coming soon for Mono 2.2…

Dear Lazyweb,

Some time ago I read on planet gnome that someone wrote some code that would take an existing color scheme and adjust it automatically such that where a pink is too close to white it would get darkened so that there was enough contrast, and if you changed the background to blue or whatever it would change the scheme to cope with the new background. I think it was proposed that this code go into xchat at least but would be useful in vte and other terminal and IM applications. Can someone please find me that article? My google-powers have utterly failed me here so far.

Thanks in Advance,
Andrew Jorgensen

I thought it interesting that the Google 2001 index had only 671 search results for “Barack Obama“.

“Sarah Palin” had 0 results.

These old indexes are interesting, especially if you’re searching for old data. I hope we see more of them.

The Mono 2.0 LiveCD was delayed a bit from the Mono 2.0 release but it is available now. The delay was cause by me culling unneeded packages too aggressively. On the upside we’re down to only 562MB!

Help your neighbor and join the torrent or grab it from ftp.novell.com.

The content is very nearly the same as the VMware appliance released this morning, including:

• Mono 2.0
• MonoDevelop 1.0
• Banshee 1.2.1
• F-Spot 0.5.0.1
• GNOME Do 0.6.0
• Tomboy 0.12.0
• Tasque 0.1.6
• Various ASP.NET Applications
• … and more

Update: New images have been uploaded, now with sound! It turns out you couldn’t do sound of any kind. The missing package (aside from alsa)? hal-resmgr, which sets ACLs on sound devices amongst other things.

Over the weekend I installed Rockbox on my iPod, and let me just say that I love my iPod again.

I love that I can rate podcasts. I love that I can delete a song right from my iPod. I love that I can play Ogg Vorbis files. I love that I can make dynamic playlists on the fly based on song metadata.

Rockbox is not only functional, it's themeable! :)

There are numberous other features as well. Because it’s an open-source platform, the possibilities really are limitless. You can even play Doom on it, although I don’t know who would really want that.  :)  Also, it dual boots into the Apple Firmware, so I could easily switch back if I ran into problems.

Lastly, Rockbox was surprisingly super easy to install: there’s a simple wizard that walks you through it. You don’t even need to backup your music. (I still did though, only because I didn’t know it wasn’t necessary.)

Next step: Giving my songs sane filenames instead of Apple’s hidden nosensical hex-based names.

Finally my iPod is being beaten into submission. :)

I’m way excited about the Utah Mobile Developers user group that is forming. Their first activity is on the schedule for Wednesday, October 29 and will discuss both iPhone and Android development. Here’s the agenda and RVSP:

6:00pm Doors open, pizza, networking
6:30 Opening, recognize sponsors, review agenda, review door prizes
6:40 Presentation 1 - iPhone Development
7:40 Presentation 2 - Android (Google Phone) Development
8:40 Door prizes
9:00 Meeting over
Afterward - trip to someplace local for pie, drinks, fries, whatever

Please rsvp by sending an email to glen@glenlewis.com.

I’ve already added it to the Utah Tech Events Calendar. If you’re a nerdy Utahn who loves mobile phones you should come. This is going to be an area of explosive growth and opportunity.

For those who didn’t know, I’m working on a tech business that’s very mobile-phone related, so I’m very excited to see this group forming in Utah.

One of my favorite ways to abuse the openSUSE Build Service is to link the packages I want to use into my home project. This is remarkably convenient but it wastes CPU cycles and disk space. It’s generally considered A Bad Thing™. But there are some good reasons why I do it and some ways openSUSE could change so that I won’t need to.

Executive Summary: Let upstream projects have their own top-level projects.

Currently it’s very difficult to get a top-level build service project created. You file a bug saying that you want one and they close the bug WONT-FIX. It’s a win-win. There’s a desire inside SUSE to keep the top-level as clean as possible. The solution, from their point of view, is to limit top-level to categories. People who think categories are a good thing need to read Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, or at least watch the Google Tech Talk. The result is massive projects like GNOME:Community.

GNOME:Community is not all bad but it has some fundamental problems, most prominently that there are often at least a few packages there which are older than the packages on your system. The underlying cause of this is that there are too many packages and not enough people interested in maintaining them. In some cases someone volunteers to maintain a package and does a fine job for a while but then loses interest and the package stagnates.

On the other end of the spectrum we find projects like Banshee. The Banshee developers maintain their own build service project. When they have a release they will update their packages because they want to be able to publish a 1-click link. If I add the Banshee repository I will always have the latest version and I won’t get any fluff I don’t need. This is the right way to do it. I would like to see top-level projects for every major project that wants to participate in openSUSE. There should be top-level projects for Pidgin (well, purple anyway), F-Spot, GIMP, Ekiga, etc. That way I can choose to get the latest GIMP without getting the latest F-Spot if I want to and I know that it’s maintained by people who care about it and are committed to quality.

Not every piece of software should have it’s own top-level project, of course. Some are closely related to each other such that it doesn’t make sense to keep them separate: Pidgin and Finch, for instance, or Firefox and Thunderbird. Others share a release schedule and have interdependencies that would prevent them from splitting up effectively, like GNOME. These should be brought under a single project, but this is not strange because they are already under a single upstream project (GNOME, Mozilla, etc.).

Many upstream projects do not distribute binaries. When they do it’s often just the Windows and Mac binaries because it can be difficult or expensive to build your own. openSUSE could be the place to get binaries of your favorite software, but not if we try to pigeonhole them into someone else’s project. It’s a risk for GIMP to advertise that high quality binaries of 2.6 are available from openSUSE if adding the repository is also going to upgrade your Tomboy.

It’s also difficult to properly categorize a project. Suppose there were a slick new open source file-sharing application and we put it under file-sharing but a year down the road it gets an instant-messaging feature and this feature becomes the feature people really like about it. Should we move it to an IM category? What about a nice DAAP server. Does it go under multimedia or file-sharing? Let’s toss out categories right now and make decent use of tags instead. The technology is already there, tags have been an underused feature of OBS since the beginning.

Making OBS more appealing to upstream projects is good for everyone. Upstream gets a release build system and a network of willing mirrors for free. openSUSE gets free publicity and better coordination with upstream. Users get repositories they know are well maintained by people who care about the project without any extra fluff they don’t want or need.

When packaging a new program for the first time one of the big headaches is figuring out where all your dependencies are.  This difficulty is greatly mitigated on openSUSE by a little tool called webpin.  It’s available in the openSUSE:Tools repository.

When you first build out your basic spec file you have little or no idea what goes in BuildRequires.  For a few projects you don’t need anything there at all so I like to just go ahead and run osc build and see what happens. If you’re not using OBS to build your software then I’m very sorry for you. Usually the configure script will stop somewhere saying that it couldn’t find something it needs, usually a header file or a pkg-config (.pc) file. This is where webpin comes in.

Suppose you get a line that says:

No package 'avahi-sharp' found

This means that configure is looking for a pkg-config file called avahi-sharp.pc. So with webpin installed we type webpin avahi-sharp.pc and we get a result that looks something like this:

1 results (1 packages) found for "avahi-sharp.pc" in openSUSE_110
* avahi-mono: Mono Bindings for avahi, the D-BUS Service for Zeroconf and Bonjour
   - 0.6.22 [suse-oss]
     >> /usr/lib/pkgconfig/avahi-sharp.pc

Now we know to add avahi-mono to our BuildRequires.

Later we might get an error that looks like this:

session-glue.c:5:26: error: X11/SM/SMlib.h: No such file or directory

Unfortunately for us this kind of error comes from gcc and is harder to see in all the gcc error: gobbledygook. If the upstream maintainer had been more careful we would have seen a configure error instead. But no matter! we just type webpin X11/SM/SMlib.h to find that this header file is found in xorg-x11-libSM-devel.

My new package packaging time is as much as cut in half thanks to this excellent tool. Many thanks to those responsible. There is also a web interface for webpin (I’m pretty sure it started out that way, hence the name).

Side note: RPM really needs to have automatic provides for pkg-config files so that we can use BuildRequires: pc(avahi-sharp) >= 0.6 instead of explicit package names. pkg-config is one of the best things to happen to software in a long time IMHO and RPM should be taking full advantage of it.

The package used for this example was Tangerine, a very nice little DAAP server written by James Willcox.

Sometimes gloves are the best thing when you need to keep your hands warm. How often do we find ourselves over-engineering the obvious.

Check out this gem from The Daily WTF…

-Peter

Pre-orders for OpenBSD 4.4 (to be released November 1) are now available. The official announcement:

To: misc@cvs.openbsd.org
Subject: OpenBSD 4.4 pre-orders
Date: Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:59:04 -0600
From: "Theo de Raadt" <deraadt @cvs.openbsd.org>

Pre-orders for OpenBSD 4.4 (CD, tshirt, poster) are up at

   http://www.openbsd.org/orders.html

As well, the new song for the release is also being made available at
the same time. This can be found at

   http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html

Enjoy the song, and think about ordering some of our things, since
purchases help fund the project. Thanks.

I mentioned earlier I was going to announce a big change this week. I’m “on the move“, as Jeremiah Owyang would put it. Today was my first day working full time at a new Silicon Valley startup with offices here in Utah, where I will be leading their Social Product strategy moving forward. I am phasing off my regular consulting, and moving to this new Entrepreneurial effort in helping them grow.

At the moment, I can’t reveal much more, other than the fact that we’re building the next era in Interactive Entertainment on the iPhone. The company I’m working with right now started out as a client of mine, and I liked their product so much I decided it would be worth helping them out full time. I believe fully that we are going to change much of the way you watch TV today. We will be launching most likely next week, and you can follow the Twitter account @MediaMyWay to catch our launch announcement and follow our updates (I’ll also point you there from my Twitter account when we launch - we’ll announce it there first!). Other Twitter accounts you can follow for updates and “clues” are @JustintheWhitt, @Romay, and our CEO, @BradPelo.

How will this affect the other stuff I do? In reality, not much is changing, other than what I do full time. I have received permission to keep SocialToo.com going part-time, as it has, unless it takes off. Expect some very cool things to come from SocialToo in the near future - we’re working on a completely new design and a really cool new feature that will be released in the next couple weeks.

As far as my blogging and book-writing is concerned, I see nothing changing, and I intend fully to continue blogging regular, unbiased articles that I feel inspire and educate. I will disclose where necessary if I feel my current employment has any influence in what I am writing. I still hope to continue writing in other capacities as well, as long as speak as I’m asked to do (I’m speaking in Dallas next week to the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, in fact - come see me speak!).

So, keep watching the @MediaMyWay Twitter account, and you can also follow this blog and I’ll be sure you’re aware of the latest of our happenings (we’ll have a company blog here shortly, which I’ll let you know about). In the meantime I’ll keep posting regular, educational, and original content as I always have and always will. “Stay” Tuned!

The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference was amazing.  It was quite literally too legitimate to quitimate.  Last year was great but everything this year was double that.  Twice as professional, twice as engaging, twice as many high profile keynote speakers, and more than twice the attendance (an undisclosed number >= 500).

Paul Frields, Fedora Project Leader and Joe Brockmeier, openSUSE Community Manager both flew out to keynote at the conference.  Novell brought up some of the Hack Week participants and UTOS arranged a room for us to hack in.  In fact Novell was, appropriately (this is Utah), the best represented company at the conference with 10 presenters and many more attendees.

We wanted to get Jono Bacon, Ubuntu Community Manager to keynote as well but he declined.  In fact Canonical didn’t deign to represent themselves at all.  Ubuntu Utah pulled something together for a booth but Canonical didn’t even send pressed CDs.

Favorite Sessions

Panel: Open Source And Government.  Phil Windley, former CIO of the State of Utah and Pete Ashdown, Founder and CEO of Xmission (Utah’s First and Best ISP) discussed everything from transparency in legislation to voting machines.  Pete talked about how he solicited outside contribution to his policies during his United States Senate campaign using a Wiki.

Fedora: The Future First.  Paul Frields discussed the history and goals of the Fedora Project as well as their completely open source infrastructure and community policies.  Did you know that Fedora has their own VoIP system?  I didn’t.  They can schedule conference calls, have them recorded, and post them publicly so that everything they do is in the open.  Cool stuff.

Banshee Media Player.  Aaron Bockover was too tired to be coherent but we love him anyway and the software, new features, and T-shirts spoke for themselves.  I wish I’d got a photo of him drinking that nasty Sugar Free ROCKSTAR at the podium.

The Free Content Business Model.  Howard Tayler is a web cartoonist and small business owner.  He’s also a brilliant speaker.  If you missed this I feel sorry for you.  Excellent points about how to monetize something you are comitted to keep free.

Dialplans for Dummies: An introduction to the Asterisk Dialplan.  Jared Smith is hilarious.  To decide who would get a copy of his book he had those who wanted it do a rock, paper, scissors tournament.  After a vigorous and tense last round the loser sadly handed the book over to the winner, and Jared pulled out another copy for the loser.  Perhaps that didn’t sound as funny as it was.  You should have been there.  Jared is also a great presenter, and Asterisk is awesome.

openSUSE Build Service

I gave a hands-on presentation on the openSUSE Build Service.  This was my first time presenting at a conference but I thought it went very well.  All the demos were successful and I was able to cover everything I had planned in the allotted time.  I even got to demo SuSE Studio.  An audio-only recording should be posted at the conference website soon.  If I had known there wouldn’t be video I would have setup a screen recorder.

Update: Audio now available on Utah Open Source Podcast.  I’m pretty sure my voice is not actually that low.

RPM Guides

One of the attendees asked me where he can learn more about RPM.  It is lamentable that there are no published guides written in the last 5 years.  Here are some links that should help.

• The Fedora RPM Guide - Probably the most up to date
• RPM API Documentation (Related Pages) - Not very accessible, but useful
• SUSE Package Conventions - SuSE specific and outdated in parts
  
• Maximum RPM - Notoriously outdated, but still relevant
• Cross Distribution Package HOWTO - OBS specific

There’s also the SuSE Packager’s Manual but this appears to be an internal document and is admittedly very specific to SuSE.

It’s been another exciting and worth while Hack Week.  Sadly I had a number of high priority Mono updates to push to SuSE so I probably spent only about half of Monday through Wednesday hacking.  Thursday through Saturday were spent at the Utah Open Source Conference (more on that soon).  The real highlight for me was spending the week with Aaron Bockover, Hubert Figuiere, Sandy Armstrong, Gabriel Burt, Brad Taylor, Mario Carrion, Brian Merrell, and Jared Allen.  Technically I’m not on their team(s) but they kindly let me bum rides off them and eat their snacks.  Good times.

I’m really looking forward to new features for Banshee like the Muine-like interface and the new track editor.  Good stuff happens at Novell.  Seriously.

DigitalMe

My hack week project was to package DigitalMe and get it ready for distribution.  DigitalMe is Novell’s Open Source, Open Standards, InfoCard (CardSpace) Selector, part of the Bandit Project.  I am not the best person to ask but I think I can summarize it as like OpenID but you can also generate your own credentials.  The project needed some help or it would not get into openSUSE 11.1 or SLE 11 so I volunteered my time.  We’re almost there, but not quite.  I will post a link to the package repository when it’s done and with some luck we’ll get it submitted to SuSE before feature freeze.

While listening to NPR this morning, I was thinking of the basic principle of development.  Whether it’s new technologies, new processes, or new products, it all seems to be developed through the same principle:  The shotgun effect.  

What is the shotgun effect?  Well, let’s say you go hunting for water fowl (duck or goose), and want to be sure you get one.  Say you and your buddy each take a gun, you have a rifle, your buddy has a shotgun.  You split up and start shooting.  Who gets more fowl?  The shotgun.  Why?  Because the shotgun, instead of firing one projectile in a (relatively) straight line, fires a collection of projectiles (shot) in a close group.  As such, it increases the likelihood a hit will come from a shot.  

So what does this have to do with development?  Let’s say your company is new to the market.  You have one killer product that is great, and you pour all your investment into this one project.  Then the Economy changes, and your product is no longer a necessary product.  Your company will most likely fail, and the product will go the way of the Turnip-flavored ice cream.  

But let’s say your company has that one killer product, but your development team has a number of other ideas to which they would like to devote time.  You give in, allowing your development team to have a small portion of their time to work on their own projects (sound familiar, like Google?).  Because they are developing on Company time their projects provide value to the company depending on whether or not it pans out.  

Now the economy changes again, and your killer product is no longer relevant, and as such goes the way of the beet-flavored popcicle.  All of a sudden you have a collection of products that you can fall back on, because you allowed your development team freedom to work on their own ideas and projects.  Given now the full investment capital from your company, one or several of these little projects become all killer products.  

This same principle is followed by Biology.  Genes have set codes that allow some variation without significant changes.  Yet they also mutate while being copied, and eventually significant variations start to show.  As one set of codes become too limiting in a given environment, another set may thrive, and those genes become dominant.  Whether you believe in Evolution or not, this concept of adaptation and genetic variation has been proven, within species.  Genetic codes follow the shotgun effect in their development, and only those viable characteristics that are the result dictate which codes work.  

So why was I thinking about this?  Because Energy policy and the Economy has been very prevalent in the political spectrum for this shining moment (who knows how the political landscape will change in a few weeks).  We can either put all our eggs in one basket, or allow the shotgun effect to work and invest in all technologies out there that can grow our energy production.  Only those that are the most viable in the given environment will succeed, while others may be waiting in the wings should the environment change.  

Perhaps it’s my bias showing through, but I see this happening again in Air travel.  Soon airlines will realize that airships will become less expensive to maintain for passengers than current airplanes, though it will take longer for someone to travel from one place to another.  It will probably start in the small communities that are currently losing airlines because of the low rate of return.  But soon I do see it becoming a more common method of travel and shipping.  After all, it’s just one more bit of shot from the gun.

The trouble with pizza girls (and everyone else these days) is that they blog.

I love the internet and its bountious opportunities for citizen journalism.  Ten years ago you would never have heard this story.

My brother Gabe wrote an interesting post highlighting how Google Trends searches show that Utah is a hotbed of Open Source. It reminded me that I haven’t plugged the Utah Open Source Conference that’s happening this week. This conference is something you don’t want to miss.  I think you can still get tickets.

If your business is still not leveraging open source, you need to stop by to meet some of the people that can help you make it happen.

Now, on a separate nerdy note, I wanted to echo Gabe’s post by pointing out some business terms in which Utahans have peculiar interest according to search data in Google Trends.  When it comes to industry related searches, we rank #1 for Multi Level Marketing, #2 in Outdoor Recreation, and #3 in Telemarketing.

Utah also does a disproportionate amount of searches for online business terms: we rank #1 for SEO, #2 for Internet Marketing, #1 for Web Analytics, and #2 for Internet Business.

Can you think of any other obvious top Utah searches?  I’m looking specifically for business terms; although searches for jello, meth, and vouchers are interesting in their own right.

We just finished upgrading our home server. The migration, while it took time, was rather easy. I combined our separate blogs all under a Wordpress MU install to simplfy maintenance. One thing that I am happy about with the upgrade, besides improved performance, is that the iPhone wordpress app now works. I had errors connecting before. One thing that helped in configuring the app is improved error handling in the latest version. The initial release would always just die when trying to connect with no errors. I tried sniffing the connection, but unsuccesfully.

As I contiunue to use the app, I’ll update you on to what I like and don’t like. For now I’m happy!

Yesterday I guest-posted on LouisGray.com about how the technology behind Identi.ca, Laconi.ca, could pose as the launching platform to brand many smaller microblogging services. Today I’d like to share one more power of the service - its working API. Identi.ca/Laconi.ca seem to have introduced a new ideology to Web 2.0 with this code, viral software.

Now, when I mention “viral software”, I’m not necessarily mentioning software that can make things viral. I’m instead meaning software in which the underlying code itself is viral. This could change the face of the way developers write code in the future, and open source is only part of it.

Today I noticed (through Steve Gillmor on identi.ca) another new interesting thing that I knew was coming - Brad Williams (@williamsba) wrote a bridge that essentially allows you to post on identi.ca and have it automatically post to Twitter, prepended by “identi.ca:”. Interestingly enough, “Hippy Steve” (@exador23) pointed out now one of the top trends on Twitter as of today, according to http://search.twitter.com is “identi”. Now, many of the posts you see on Twitter are going to become posts prepended by “identi.ca:”, and many more are going to feel pressured to join identi.ca where they are seeing all their other friends post from. I guess you could consider it competitive micro-advertising, created and distributed on purpose by the users themselves (as Charlene and Josh would put it, we’re seeing a “Groundswell“).

It should be noted that you can remove the “Identi.ca:” from being prepended, but as long as you’re on identi.ca and want those on Twitter to know you’re posting from there and not Twitter, why remove it? You are posting from the competing team, after all. Would anyone want to pretend they’re not posting from Twitter? I’d like to know where my friends are posting from.

Now, onto the viral part. Why did Brad Williams implement this bridge? I’m sure there are preferential issues of trying to get his network onto identi.ca, but the fact of the matter is, from a development standpoint these applications like Brad William’s bridge are simply easier to write for Identi.ca. The lack of limits and plan to keep off those limits on Identi.ca are just one more thing that make the software behind Identi.ca viral. Developers want to develop for Identi.ca. With an API that also supports Twitter (I mean literally, it is simply a change in the hostname for your Twitter code), developing for Identi.ca is just too easy! Again, developers jumping ship could very well mean the demise for Twitter.

I can only hope that developers of the future learn from this experience - in a social era such as today, even your software has to remain viral and easily shareable and distributable. Laconi.ca is the prime example of this - completely open source, based on open protocols, and your software should be able to talk to other instances of itself in some way, preferably using standard protocols. In addition to that, a completely open API is a must - the minute you start closing your API you begin to lose your code’s virality. Brad William’s bridge is only the start of apps that make the transition to Identi.ca much easier. I imagine you’ll see many more of these things in the coming days and weeks.

Looking to learn more on how to make the jump to identi.ca? Check out my friend, Marina Martin’s site, ohidentica.com for some great howtos and tips all in one place. You can find me at http://identi.ca/jessestay.

Of necessity I have decided to release gnome-keyring-sharp-1.0.0.  The release is nothing more than r87622 from SVN.

Debian has been using r87622 as 1.0.0 for some time now and there have been no commits since October of 2007.  openSUSE has been using a much older version (how old, I don’t know) but GNOME Do 0.6 will depend on gnome-keyring-sharp 1.0.

I don’t have any kind of change log to post since as far as I can tell there has never been a formal release.

gnome-keyring-sharp is a fully managed implementation of libgnome-keyring.

When the gnome-keyring-daemon is running, you can use this to retrieve/store confidential information such as passwords, notes or network services user information.

Sources are at http://ftp.novell.com/pub/mono/sources/gnome-keyring-sharp/gnome-keyring-sharp-1.0.0.tar.bz2

My apologies to authors Alp Toker and Gonzalo Paniagua if I’m stepping on their toes. I did try to contact Alp last week to get him to sign off on this.

A while ago I published a post on my problems trying to work in an enterprise environment without an Exchange compatible calendar.  It’s been tough, it’s been heart-breaking, it’s been a lot of work, but I have managed to hobble along with various forms of updates, patches, syncing tools that failed, etc.  

Then today, while still looking for a solution to Outlook 2007 and iCal Server compatibility, I read it:  Google finally enabled CalDAV for their calendars.  It’s still very much in the beta stage, but it works.  

For those who are not familiar with the CalDAV protocol, it’s an open source subset of the WebDAV protocol, which is a subset of the HTTP protocol.  The standard was developed as an open source, non-proprietary competitor to the Exchange format, and works with cross-platform clients.  The protocol allows for publishing and updating iCalendar files from multiple sources.  Apple developers spent a lot of time and effort with this protocol in order to get it out there for their Collaboration server setup (iCal Server, Wiki Server, Blogs, iChat, etc.).  As such, iCal 3.x (the version that came with 10.5 Leopard) supports it, as does a number of other clients (Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc.).  

The set up went very smoothly.  Google has a support link here that shows you how to set up your iCal client to connect to your Google Calendar, and any secondary calendars to which you have access.  It’s very painless, and from what I can see so far works just fine for regular calendar entries.  That being said, beyond just scheduling my classes, lab deployments, and the odd meeting, I don’t use calendaring software much.  

Of course there enters a new wrench:  Outlook.  I still need to share my calendar with other people in the department using Outlook.  Outlook 2003 doesn’t support viewing iCal calendars through a WebDAV connection (which allows sharing, but not multi-user publishing), without a 3rd party plugin.  It can read files that are in the iCal and vCal format, but from what I have read it doesn’t support them very well (if anyone has heard or knows otherwise, please let me know!). 

Enter Outlook 2007.  Outlook 2007 will let you read a Google Calendar without a problem.  It’s actually fairly easy to set up.  You can also publish a calendar the same way using WebDAV.  The problem is, you can’t use a CalDAV calendar, no matter how hard you try.  There are, in theory, some applications that act as a bridge, but I’m not too keen on bridges like that (though if you must, Calgoo has added CalDAV to it’s calendaring utility!).  I’d much rather use the application that comes with the OS (or in Windows case, the application that comes with the Office software you purchase separately).  If anyone is aware of an alternative solution, please let me know!  

So while my personal calendaring needs are met with the Google Calendar solution, there is still one missing:  setting up Outlook to add to a CalDAV calendar.  Perhaps, with a patch to Outlook, this will be possible.

Next week we are running a Final Cut Pro 5-day class to prepare students for the Final Cut Pro exam and get more familiar with the software.  It’s great, except the software is huge and doesn’t load into a monolithic system image very well.  As such, I had to find a way to deploy the software in a timely manner without a lot of work or overhead.  

I started first with a modular NetInstall image.  The idea was that I would include the software packages in the install image, it would create the image, and I could install it without worrying about configuration.  Boy was I being hopeful!  At first it would not recognize the software, and then it finally accepted the mounted disk images as I dragged them into the Automator Action.  I thought all was well, until I tested the image.  

It installed the OS just fine, but didn’t include the Final Cut Pro packages.  Well, I thought, I would just need to create a base install, and then deploy the software through a package.  Seemed easy enough, at least..

Mac OS X 10.5 has a great feature with PackageMaker (available with the XCode Tools Development package) that is called a Snapshot Package.  Basically, you can install software on your Macintosh Computer while this is running, and PackageMaker can tell the difference between the original state of the machine and the new improved state.  You can then create a package that would install all the changes across the board, and you would be all set.  

I started by using PackageMaker on the MacBook Pro that I would be using for the class.  I then started the process on the MacBook Pro, installed Final Cut Pro and the Motion Content, and waited.  Once done, I stopped the snapshot, reviewed the changes, and tried to make the package.  PackageMaker crashed on me every time.  I tried three different MacBook Pros, each with the same result.  

At that point, I started to get frustrated.  I tried the same process on my office Mac Pro, and it worked!  I was able to make the snapshot image, and create the package.  I then transferred it to a MacBook Pro computer and started the package.  It ran, told me it was successful, and I was sitting on cloud nine!  Until I tried to run Final Cut Pro, that is.  It would crash every time I tried to run it.  It could have been a permissions issue, but by this time I was running out of time.  I have a busy week with a surprise class and some instructor interviews to conduct, and I needed to come up with a solution quickly.  

So, I tried installing the software on a MacBook Pro from disk images using the installer command from the Command Line.  It worked, installed a bit more than we usually do, but otherwise was successful.  Well, if this would work, surely I could create a script that would mount the images, install the packages, unmount the images, and delete the images to free up space.  It was worth a try. 

The script was easy to write, and is below: 

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# This script should install Final Cut Pro and Motion from disk images.
# The script will need to be run as root, which the package should do
# automatically.
# First it will mount the images, and then it will run the Installer
# scripts for Final Cut Pro, and then Motion.

# The Images are assumed to be in /Users/Shared

hdiutil mount /Users/Shared/Final\ Cut\ Studio.cdr
hdiutil mount /Users/Shared/Motion\ Content.cdr

# Now the Installation will be run.

installer -pkg /Volumes/Final\ Cut\ Studio/Installer/FinalCutStudio.mpkg -target /
installer -pkg /Volumes/Motion\ Content/Installer/MotionContent.mpkg -target /

# Once finished, the script needs to unmount the images.

umount Volumes/Final\ Cut\ Studio
umount Volumes/Motion\ Content

# Now no longer needed, the disk images can be deleted.

rm -rf /Users/Shared/*.cdr

The Script worked on my inital testing, as long as