Category Archives: News Update

Privacy and Activity Manager (Zeitgeist) Release

We all love privacy and we take it seriously. Most of the people whom I have met are pretty much vigilant about their data and which makes complete sense to have a tool which can you can use to fine tune your privacy settings. Till now most of our experience with Privacy Settings are related to Facebook which makes me feel like

Layman control center?

If you are a Zeitgeist user, it is pretty expected to expect a Privacy application. Yes, we have it. Today we are releasing it. The first release was a hastily assembled up together application using pygtk (gtk2) which served it’s purpose well for the time being.

Older version of Activity Log Manager

Older version of Activity Log Manager

Soon it was decided in Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando that Activity Log Manager will be included in Ubuntu Precise to provide greater privacy controls to user. We improved the looks based on the design provided by the Canonical Design Team.

The interface was kept as simple as possible. This first release lacks a few things as of now and some more UI polish is pending including localization support. Both of them will land sooner.

It has been integrated in Gnome Control Panel (which works only on Ubuntu). In distributions where it cannot integrate in Control Panel, it runs as a standalone application.

Here is how it looks

Entry in GNOME Control Center

Entry in GNOME Control Center

Blacklisting Applications

Blacklisting Applications

Files and Folder blacklisting

Files and Folder blacklisting

Activity Log Manager History tab with Icon

Activity Log Manager History tab with the Icon

The Zeitgeist Team worked on it and ported the application to gtk3 and vala in a few weeks which was a pleasure (and I finally learnt vala. Finally!)

Geeky Juice:

The release is named “Friendly Dolphin” 0.9.0 and can be downloaded from here.

This application would be made available in Ubuntu Precise soon.

If you are building it yourself and want Control Center integration, then pass –with-ccpanel to the configure script.

./configure --with-ccpanel

This would work on all the Linux distributions which derive from Ubuntu and don’t change the gnome-control-center packaging since this integration relies on a Ubuntu specific patch for control center.

Please log any bugs which you come across. To make sure that we are able to help you, please provide detailed explanation of what led to the issue. You can file your bugs here

Android Camp Bangalore

I got up in the morning only to find there was no electricity. Not sure if this is somewhat related to April Fool prank, but was enough to piss me off.  Checked my watch – 9:30AM and the unconference is supposed to start in half an hour! I needed to get ready and travel more than 18 kms. The next one and an half hour involved running all around the house to get ready, gulping down breakfast, hunting for buses and then finally messing up with an autorickshaw driver when he started using his random number generator for determining the fare.

Finally I managed to reach the place by 11AM. The event AndroidCamp was of an un-conference style. Upon entering the first bad news I got was that I missed a session on Arduino which went excellent.

The rest of the first half session were pretty boring except one from Kashif Razzaqui. His talk was on his experience when developing apps using cross-platforms development tools like Titamium and PhoneGap. He nearly blasted off on the technologies which I think all the geeks love to do. I can see from everyone’s face that they were really enjoying his session. He pointed out how developing anything with Titanium is a total PITA. He did use some funny and amusing quotes like

Those Apple fanboys have to use objective C which cannot be even called a programming language

If Java and XML gives you a hardon, then something is really wrong.

Not sure if both of the quotes is exact as he said, but the audience did chuckle and smile at these jokes. No one at the event did a “Well Actually”

Then Kiran told us that the food van had got lost and the driver is circling the neighborhood searching for the venue. How not, even we all had so much of problems locating the venue. During that time Kashif put up a video of Android during Google IO.

After the lunch when all of us are supposed to sleep, two sessions caught everyone’s excitement. Since I was in the “Geek” room I missed the Firmware and Rooting talk in “Suits” room. Later two sessions happened in Suits room – “Android-scripting” and “Android Rants”.

The session android-scripting was taken by Sajjad ‘geohacker’ Anwar. He is the person who works on OpenStreetMap, writes python code and contributes to Ubuntu Accessibility. He explained how and when scripting can be useful using python than writing Java code. People put up points about speed, performance of this idea, all of which was answered by him. Good job.

Sajjad Anwar presenting android-scripting

The next session was about “Android Rants, The reluctant skeptics” by Supreeth which was basically a session to tell what all issues you have with Android. Some of the topics discussed were

  • Battery
  • Upgrades
  • Fragmentation
  • iOS and Apple as a competitor
  • WP7 as a competitor

I think this was the topic where people took part with utmost interest. Comments came from all the sides of the room. Supreeth had to stop them many times to make sure that the discussion did not turn unruly or offt-topic. I don’t think any aspect of mobile ecosystem was left out during this talk which includes Android, Google, Motorola, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Nook, Windows Phone 7, Nokia, Palm, HP and every other entity even remotely associated with mobile phones.

The last session was the Feedback session. This was the session where everyone ended up speaking even though I thought that only a few people might express their opinion. The thing most requested was keeping such events on weekends as getting day-off is really tough for most of the people especially when it is Friday.

All the day I kept a track of the April Fool pranks starting from cyanogen quitting Android to GNOME3 getting delayed to Google Motion. On returning home, I stumbled across one excellent-brilliant-kickass article I am Jef Spaleta by Jono Bacon. This was the day! Lastly if you didn’t notice even WordPress has a small prank (for wordpress.com hosted blogs)

 

Zeitgeist in my blood

For the last three months, I have been working with the Zeitgeist team for achieving the goal of a semantic Linux desktop. Right now I am not much involved in the daemon, but not for long.

Basics

Daemon is just one part of the solution. A server is of no use if there isn’t any client to use it. Similarly now what zeitgeist needs is a deep integration with most of the applications and the shell. Unity is already on it’s way rocking ahead with Unity Places. There are many applications for which plugins have been developed to push events to the daemon. Apart from these Banshee plugin is there in banshee-community-extensions and Rhythmbox plugin is already upstream in the source tree.

The awesome team

I think this is my first experience working in an open source project with a team. Believe me, the team is awesome. To put it straight – MIND BLOWING. Mikkel is the architect who is the role model for being always right. Seif is always encouraging. Markus Korn’s keen eyes on details and the knack for extreme review sessions make sure that the mistake I commit is always the first and last time. Same goes for Micheal Hruby.  Siegfried does a lot of heavy-lifting and is the person I catch first when some information is needed about the daemon/API/backend.

The development process is pretty much democratic. Before any new feature is added or before something is finalized a lot of discussion takes places. There is a voting in spirit with democratic values. This is a sign of QA. No one is allowed to push a change to the trunk without any other person reviewing it. The patches are then fine tuned and ultimately the merge happens.

Seif’s role is that of a manager. No! I am not talking about the managers in your office. Manager role here is about keeping an eye on the overall thing so that every other person can concentrate on their work. He is also our community manager. That’s why you can see his face everytime zeitgeist is involved. Even though he started the project, we don’t have a benovalent dictator.

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Role

When I started contributing, everyone in the team mostly worked on python and C/Vala applications. This left a gap for integrating zeitgeist in CLI based applications. Randel Barlow had tried sometime back, but he hit the rock(ndesk-dbus) and stumbled over. (Die ndesk-dbus). I took over the work of creating a CLI wrapper over DBus API. Finally after some lengthy hack sessions and constant hair-pulling, I managed to finish the work with help of Mirco Bauer who created the build script(autofooling in our language). All the time during the development, ndesk-dbus was at the receiving end of my rage.

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Packaging

Jo Shields came into picture when he did the necessary work for packaging the library. Well, after the decision to make Banshee the default media player for Natty. most of the focus has shifted to slim down Banshee. This needs a lot of work and the Debian CLI team became very busy. The only work left was packaging the library.

Yesterday I caught Jason Gerard DeRose on #novacut and asked for help to package it. Even though he had never packaged CLI based applications, he offered his help to the best of his capabilities. I worked till 5 in the morning to get the build working. His step-by-step guidance and explanation made me his instant fan. Jason – we need people like you. Seriously! Be convinced that novacut will receive all the help possible from me.

Here is the PPA. This is my first package(for Maverick and Lucid), so please be calm. It should not screw up your system. Be relaxed! The name of the package is libzeitgeist0.1-cil and if you want to build the dataproviders yourself, then you need to get libzeitgeist-cil-dev

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Banshee and Tomboy Dataprovider for the impatient

If you love Banshee and Tomboy and feel that they need Zeitgeist love, then here is a dirty solution. I am providing the binary files for it. Manually dropping the files in the respective locations is a bad practice. Actually getting these dataproviders packaged can take some time, so for those people who can’t wait can try downloading both of these files. Remember to delete them when these are packaged. I will warn you again next time when the package will land.

Banshee dataprovider [code]: Put the file in /usr/lib/banshee-1/Extensions

Tomboy dataprovider [code]: Put the files in ~/.config/tomboy/addins

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Disclaimer

If you want to submit your objections to mono, please go and talk to mono developers. For a non-techie end user, mono hardly matters. For them having an application with better desktop integration matters. I work for them. I serve them. Again if you think my work is going to be the reason for the upcoming apocalypse on this planet, do feel to contact me via Launchpad page. Please keep your mails polite.

You can ignore the title of this post if you were about to take it literally.

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Maverick Development Updates #2

1. btrfs support
With current daily builds of maverick, installation with btrfs filesystem is supported, though ext4 is the default filesystem. btrfs was pulled in mainline kernel on 9th January 2010.

2. Suspend/Resume bug

Lee Jones working in the kernel team, has written a long exhaustive mail on his experience reguarding to suspend/resume in Thinkpad X61 when SD card is in the card reader. If this bug is solved, it can help a lot of us. Just read the whole paragraph and you would come to know how nasty the situation actually is.

3. Maverick Alpha 2 approaching

Maverick Alpha 2 would be released on July 1st (Thursday).  Archives would be frozen on June 29th,. The next Alpha would be Alpha 3 on August 5th.

4. Freezes in effect and in future

DebianImportFreeze on June 24th and Colin Watson has sent a mail to ubuntu-devel asking people responsible for packages to get the packages imported ASAP

Freezes which are still far off are FetaureFreeze on August 12th, UserInterfaceFreeze and BetaFreeze on August 26th. Beta freeze is for Beta Release planned on September 2nd.

5. Bug Days

6. Ubuntu Developer Week has been announced

Ubuntu Developer Week starts on 12th July(Monday) and ends on 17th July(Friday) between 1600UTC and 2100UTC

7.  Kubuntu Tutorial days

Kubuntu doesn’t get as much love at Ubuntu gets, still it’s the second choice for many people after Ubuntu(GNOME) who want to stick to the environment.

Kubuntu Tutorial day is just one way on 7th July and  only some 6-7 hours.

8. Update from Operation Cleensweep

Daniel Holbach informs that progress is at 14%

9. Software Center Update

From the logs of Desktop Team Meeting dated 15th June, it looks like, we can buy applications from the Software Center in near future. Remember, long back it was rumored to be called Ubuntu Software Store? Later the actual name came out to be Software Center

Under “Buy Something”:

# Payments API is in good shape; we had an API overview from Ricardo Kirkner including a walkthrough of the process
# We identified a problem in that there is the potential for unverified payment amounts submitted to the billing service by the client

* Will require some LP to payment service integration for verification of price paid before authorizing access
* This integration has been targeted for Alpha 3 (after the June 30th LP upload window, tho we can use edge while developing)

# Currently prototyping a payments widget to learn/test/use the payments API
# Launchpad login functionality and basic integration features have been release with Software Center 2.1.2

* As these features are still in-development the next release of software center (later this week?) will hide this feature unless s-c is launched using a command line switch

# LP team on track to deliver needed core functionality at June 30th upload window

Ubuntu Maverick development updates

For last 2 hours, I dug through all the mails from ubuntu mailing lists, esp the announcements related to development, recalled many changes which I heard in last week or two and penned them down.

  • Ubuntu Maverick Meerkat Alpha 1 released with Linux Kernel 2.6.34-5  #
  • Ubuntu sparc and IA64 ports are candidates for decommissioning unless someone comes up to take the responsibility of maintaining it. #
  • Maverick won’t run on processors below i686 #
  • DebianImportFreeze on June 24th, Alpha 2 will come on July 1st #
  • On Alpha 1 alternate, creation of encrypted /home is broken #
  • Shotwell replaces F-Spot as Image organizer #
  • Daniel Holbach invites everyone for Operation Cleansweep. It aims to bring down bugs with patches down to 0(zero) by the time of Maverick release. #
  • Ubuntu User Days has been postponed till July 10th, 2010 #
  • Jono Bacon has invited interested people to come forward and take over Acire and PyJunior development #
  • Maverick rebased to Kernel 2.6.35-rc1 # # # (Status: Maverick (ogasawara) section)
  • Maverick will be getting 1.8 X Server due to which all drivers need to be rebuilt. It might break X when upgrading. Later in the cycle X will be upgraded to 1.9 #
  • Chromium is default for Ubuntu Netbook Remix #
  • Martin Pitt has a page for burn-down chart and work progress for Maverick Alpha 2 #
  • Lots of Software Center UI enhancements on the way #

Edit on June 9,  12:02

Two more entries:

  • Next Ubuntu Hug Day targets Gnome Games to be held on June 10th. 68 New bugs, 28 Incomplete and 14 Confirmed. #
  • Aptitude has been removed. Though it is still available in repos. #

Upcoming exciting news from Tech World

  1. Steve Ballmer throws a car at Eric Schmidt.
  2. Ubuntu L***** L**** just works without any goof-ups.
  3. Apple makes iPhone un-pwnable.
  4. Windows 8 removes administrative privileges from default user. In short, now onwards viruses will run with non-administrative privileges.
  5. Opera re-invents the web again. Bundles an Operating System in it’s upcoming “Opera Fright”.
  6. Flash 11 needs 4 CPU cores to render basic animations.
  7. Internet Explorer becomes the safest browser. Reminds “Connecting to the Internet might expose you to viruses, do you want to go offline?” and shows an OK button.
  8. Sun re-writes Solaris in Java. Amen!
  9. Windows 8 requires just 8GB of RAM to run properly.
  10. Script kiddies write malware for Linux and Mac and affect them badly.
  11. FreeBSD gets fool-proof secure. Asks for password when opening Firefox.
  12. Ballmer boasts “Windows has maximum number of applications” (considering viruses as apps too)

Shifted to FeedBurner

This is a pretty off-topic post, but still relevant.

The feeds of this blog would now be burned via FeedBurner. I should have done this pretty earlier.

I would request all of my feed readers to please change the feed settings, the new Feed URI is
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ManishTechBlog

Thanks for all the encouragement, I get a lot of hits and comments for each post. I salute you, the FOSS and related communities are awesome.