Category Archives: Operating Systems

Pulling options from the sql db is done.

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Thought I’d give an update to my Christmas plans. I ended up taking longer than just the Christmas break. I used the extra time to do some refactoring and cut the size of DB.pm by a thousand lines or so.

Filters will slowly be pulled from DB.pm and moved into a logical hierarchy within the new ‘filter’ directory. As it is now DB.pm is simply too large to wrap your head around. When I started this summer DB.pm was almost 10k lines. Since then it has slowly shrunk to 8k. Due to the size some dead code has built up.

An excellent example of this is get_javascript2() which the old openprinting website used. The funny part is that there is not get_javascript1() or get_javascript().

Oh and then there is comment_filter() which filters user input on a web page with regex. It actually works! Which is quite a feat considering the many got-ya’s with user input

My strategy right now is to remove the proper functionality into modules. My hope is that the dead code will then become more obvious.

Christmas plans, get_option()

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The openprinting bzr repositories are back up. The commit process has gotten a lot nicer. Prior I had to create a bzr bundle (a large diff) and upload that through logger head which would then commit the changes. Between our changelog, my local bzr, and the remote bzr, three commit messages were required per commit. With the new commit process I can commit from the command line (as it should be) and the commit messages are pushed automagically.

Fun fact: the changelog is the second largest file in the foomatic-db-engine repository. 5.5k lines and 10 years of commit documentation. I also made a bit of a mess of it before I noticed the  standardized commenting format. I blame gedit for not providing highlighting.

Over the Christmas break I intend to implement support in get_option() for sql backends. This is one of the two bugs I assigned to myself after the summer. Till would probably prefer I implement printer groups but sql support is a left over from the summer and it wouldn’t feel right to implement new features before I finished polishing my first feature.

Android and a pizza

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During discrete mathematics today the guy next to me mentioned that Google was doing a presentation. I glanced at one of the posters on my way to computer science tutorial and it only mentioned recruitment. I went anyway in the off chance an engineer would be there.

There wasn’t, but they did have a very charismatic recruiter. She opened with some questions about Google Doodles. The guy from discrete math got the first question but he picked a tout bag! I got the third question so I picked an android continuously posable action figure (aka a doll).

Once the proper presentation ended most people left but a few of us held back. I’m glad I did because we then started a very fun Q&A session. I must respect recruiters; they need to know a bit about everything their company does. There were bits and pieces of facts which got miss quoted or were not known but they were the minority.Once the Q&A was over we got to take the extra pizza home.

In the end I will not be applying for an internship. Japan Google has a program near identical to the north american one and does not require japanese (私には佰年早いです) both exactly what I’d want. I simply do not want to abandon the openprinting work or my freelancing projects.

Now in regards to openpriting I did ask her if an engineer would be doing a presentation any time soon. She said that she wanted to bring one up in February. She also asked if I had a preference, of course I asked for cloud printing.   I’m looking forward to that presentation.

Kobo Vox first-impressions

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I just picked up a Kobo Vox from Future Shop. The Vox is the first reasonably priced android tablet you can get in Canada. Americans have been able to get a Nook Colour for a while.

The build is solid and the matte padding on the back feels quite nice. The volume rocker is located lower than I expected it to be which is nice for holding the Vox horizontally as the rocker is away from your hand.

The backlight has some noticeable leakage on black screens.

The setup process rquires you to download a firmware update and create a kobo account.

In the marketing material I had read that Google’s android market would be available, this is not the case rather a getjar app is installed.  Honestly I should have expected this since Google will not allow devices without GPS and other phone specific features to ship with the market.

Oddly enough there does not appear to be a way to associate the Vox with a Google account, something I have had to do even with cheap Chinese tablets. The Gmail app is really a link to the mobile version of gmail.

Update: I’ve played with the Vox for a few hours now. The lack of Google Market is very noticeable and annoying. I used this guide to install the Amazon Appstore which has more quality apps than the default getjar market. Open source apps are easier to get, often apks are available for download from the project’s website. By default the backlight is not set to auto, which it should be for the battery’s sake. I should mention again the build quality, the Vox is very nice to hold. The touch panel is very responsive.

Oh and angry birds works fine. Overall the Vox is a nice tablet.

Openprinting down due to hack at the linux foundation

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I did not expect the Linux foundation service outage to last this long.

All our openprinting infrastructure is hosted by LF, thus for over a month we’ve been without mailing lists, IRC, bugzilla, and even the main code repository is down.

If my understanding of the outage is correct, nothing was lost per-say but instead they took the servers down as a precaution and are rebuilding everything clean.

This month’s teleconference was organized by simply CC’ing everyone. Till doesn’t have any place to upload the recording so that will be lost to time. The meeting notes are here: ftp://ftp.pwg.org/pub/pwg/fsg/minutes/OP-Minutes-20111012.htm

The relevant section of Till’s email:

(2) OP Logistics – Recovery of OP web site (Till Kamppeter)

- Status of LF OP Infrastructure (Till)
  - No OP mailing lists

  - No OP web site

  - OP Wiki is working (but no images)

  - OP web site *server* should be back up by end of week (per LF staff)
    - Software and data backups then have to be re-installed

    - Web app (GSoC project) and download area are NOT backed up
      outside of LF infrastructure

    - Database itself and Foomatic backed up locally - part of Ubuntu

- Alternate OP mailing list (Ira)
  - Free-standing OP mailing list(s) outside LF infrastructure?

  - ACTION - Ira/Glen - create new Gmail OP mailing list
    (if OP mailing list still down in 2 weeks)

- Alternate OP FTP site (Ira)
  - Use FSG/OP subtree on PWG FTP site?

  - ACTION - All - suggest alternate FTP sites for current tarballs

- Alternate OP web site (Till)
  - Possible second site at Canonical for backup / availability?

  - Backup of databases, all applications, all reference code/specs

  - ACTION - Till/Lars - quickly pursue alternate OP host server

The wiki is back up, minus images, and it has my most recent edits to the frontpage. When bugzilla comes back I might finally have to fix those bugs I gave myself this summer.

2011-10-26 update: Mailing lists are back up.

2011-11-28 update: Bugzilla back up.