A while back I bought some UniFi access points. I hadn’t gotten round to setting up the Network Controller software to properly manage them though, so thought I’d dig into setting that up.

To help keep myself honest, I wanted to set up automated test runs on a few personal projects I host on Github. At first I gave Travis a try, since a number of projects I contribute to use it, but it felt a bit clunky. When I found Github had a new CI system in beta, I signed up for the beta and was accepted a few weeks later. While it is still in development, the configuration language feels lean and powerful.

Last week I gave a talk at Perth Linux Users Group about building IoT projects using Ubuntu Core and Snapcraft. The video is now available online. Unfortunately there were some problems with the audio setup leading to some background noise in the video, but it is still intelligible: The slides used in the talk can be found here. The talk was focused on how Ubuntu Core could be used to help with the ongoing security and maintenance of IoT projects.

When the Ubuntu Phone project was cancelled, I moved to the desktop team. The initial goal for team was to bring up a GNOME 3 based desktop for the Ubuntu 17.10 release that would be familiar to both Ubuntu users coming from the earlier Unity desktop, and users of “vanilla” GNOME 3.

While working on a feature for snapd, we had a need to perform a "secure bind mount". In this context, "secure" meant: The source and/or target of the mount is owned by a less privileged user. User processes will continue to run while we're performing the mount (so solutions that involve suspending all user processes are out). While we can't prevent the user from moving the mount point, they should not be able to trick us into mounting to locations they don't control (e.

One of the options available when configuring the my ThinkPad was an Infrared camera. The main selling point being "Windows Hello" facial recognition based login. While I wasn't planning on keeping Windows on the system, I was curious to see what I could do with it under Linux. Hopefully this is of use to anyone else trying to get it to work. The camera is manufactured by Chicony Electronics (probably a CKFGE03 or similar), and shows up as two USB devices:

At the end of 2012, I moved from Ubuntu One to the Unity API Team at Canonical. This team was responsible for various services that supported the Unity desktop shell: most noticeably the search functionality. This work initially focused on the Unity 7 desktop shipping with Ubuntu, but then changed focus to the Unity 8 rewrite used by the Ubuntu Phone project.

Ubuntu One was a set of online services provided by Canonical for Ubuntu users. It provided cloud hosted storage for files and structured data, synchronised to the user’s local machine. The Ubuntu One service was discontinued in 2014.

One of the projects I've been working on has been to improve aspects of the Ubuntu One Developer Documentation web site. While there are still some layout problems we are working on, it is now in a state where it is a lot easier for us to update. I have been working on updating our authentication/authorisation documentation and revising some of the file storage documentation (the API used by the mobile Ubuntu One clients).

Today Ohloh finished importing the Launchpad source code and produced the first source code analysis report. There seems to be something fishy about the reported line counts (e.g. -3,291 lines of SQL), but the commit counts and contributor list look about right. If you're interested in what sort of effort goes into producing an application like Launchpad, then it is worth a look. Comments: e - 27 Oct, 2009 Have you seen the perl language?

In my last post, I said I had trouble getting Rygel's tracker backend to function and assumed that it was expecting an older version of the API. It turns out I was incorrect and the problem was due in part to Ubuntu specific changes to the Tracker package and the unusual way Rygel was trying to talk to Tracker. The Tracker packages in Ubuntu remove the D-Bus service activation file for the "org.

I promised Zeeshan that I'd have a look at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few months back, and finally got around to doing so. For anyone else who wants to give it a shot, I've put together some Ubuntu packages for Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA here: https://launchpad.net/~jamesh/+archive/upnp Most of the packages there are just rebuilds or version updates of existing packages, but the Rygel ones were done from scratch.

Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth. This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications. It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you've already used the code. Rather than trying to cover all possible use cases of OpenID, it focuses on providing OpenID Relying Party support to applications using Django's django.

One of the nice features of the PlayStation 3 is the UPNP/DLNA media renderer. Unfortunately, the set of codecs is pretty limited, which is a problem since most of my music is encoded as Vorbis. MediaTomb was suggested to me as a server that could transcode the files to a format the PS3 could understand. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much luck with the version included with Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid), and after a bit of investigation it seems that there isn’t a released version of MediaTomb that can send PCM audio to the PS3.

From 2004 to 2008, I worked on the Launchpad code hosting site for Canonical. As well as providing hosting for third party Open Source projects, the site is central to the Ubuntu project: doing everything from bug tracking to managing the package repository.

I arrived in Prague yesterday for the Ubuntu Developer Summit. Including time spent in transit in Singapore and London, the flights took about 30 hours. As I was flying on BA, I got to experience Heathrow Terminal 5. It wasn't quite as bad as some of the horror stories I'd heard. There were definitely aspects that weren't forgiving of mistakes. For example, when taking the train to the "B" section there was a sign saying that if you accidentally got on the train when you shouldn't have it would take 40 minutes to get back to the "A" section.

Since upgrading to Ubuntu Gutsy I've occasionally been seeing the following notification from GNOME Power Manager: I'd usually trigger this error by unplugging the AC adapter and then picking suspend from GPM's left click menu. My first thought on seeing this was "What's a policy timeout, and why is it not valid?" followed by "I don't remember setting a policy timeout". Looking at bug 492132 I found a pointer to the policy_suppression_timeout gconf value, whose description gives a bit more information.

I am at Narita Airport at the moment, on the way to Boston for some of the meetings being held during UDS. It'll be good to catch up with everyone again. Hopefully this trip won't be as eventful as the previous one to Florida :)

When Storm was released, one of the comments made was that it did not include the ability to generate a database schema from the Python classes used to represent the tables while this feature is available in a number of competing ORMs. The simple reason for this is that we haven't used schema generation in any of our ORM-using projects. Furthermore I'd argue that schema generation is not really appropriate for long lived projects where the data stored in the database is important.

I got round to upgrading my desktop system to Gutsy today. I'd upgraded my laptop the previous week, so was not expecting much in the way of problems. I'd done the original install on my desktop back in the Warty days, and the root partition was a bit too small to perform the upgrade. As there was a fair bit of accumulated crud, I decided to do a clean install. Things mostly worked, but there were a few problems, which I detail below:

The new Canonical Shop was opened recently which allows you to buy anything from Ubuntu tshirts and DVDs up to a 24/7 support contract for your server. One thing to note is that this is the first site using our new Launchpad single sign-on infrastructure. We will be rolling this out to other sites in time, which should give a better user experience to the existing shared authentication system currently in place for the wikis.

It hasn't been long since the last gnome-vfs-obexftp release, but I thought it'd be good to get these fixes out before undertaking more invasive development. The new version is available from: http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-vfs-obexftp/0.4/ The highlights of this release are: If the phone does not provide free space values in the OBEX capability object, do not report this as zero free space. This fixes Nautilus file copy behaviour on a number of Sony Ericsson phones.

I've had a number of requests for USB support in gnome-vfs-obexftp. At first I didn't have much luck talking to my phone via USB. Running the obex_test utility from OpenOBEX gave the following results: $ obex_test -u Using USB transport, querying available interfaces Interface 0: (null) Interface 1: (null) Interface 2: (null) Use 'obex_test -u interface_number' to run interactive OBEX test client Trying to talk via any of these interface numbers failed.

I've just released a new version of gnome-vfs-obexftp, which includes the features discussed previously. It can be downloaded from: http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-vfs-obexftp/0.3/ The highlights of the release include: Sync osso-gwobex and osso-gnome-vfs-extras changes from Maemo Subversion. Instead of asking hcid to set up the RFCOMM device for communication, use an RFCOMM socket directly. This is both faster and doesn't require enabling experimental hcid interfaces. Based on work from Bastien Nocera. Improve free space calculation for Nokia phones with multiple memory types (e.

Previously, I posted about the FM radio plugin I was working on. I just posted the code to bug 168735. A few notes about the implementation: The code only supports Video4Linux 2 radio tuners (since that’s the interface my device supports, and the V4L1 compatibility layer doesn’t work for it). It should be possible to port it support both protocols if someone is interested. It does not pass the audio through the GStreamer pipeline.

I've been working on some FM radio support in Rhythmbox in my spare time. Below is screenshot At the moment, the basic tuning and mute/unmute works fine with my DSB-R100. I don't have any UI for adding/removing stations at the moment though, so it is necessary to edit ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/rhythmdb.xml to add them. Comments: Joel - 4 May, 2007 This feature would truly be a welcome addition! I'm especially pleased it's being developed by a fellow Australian!

I upgraded to Feisty about a month or so ago, and it has been a nice improvement so far. One regression I noticed though was that my USB FM radio tuner had stopped working (or at least, Gnomeradio could no longer tune it). It turns out that some time between the kernel release found in Edgy and the one found in Feisty, the dsbr100 driver had been upgraded from the Video4Linux 1 API to Video4Linux 2.

Today we unveiled the Launchpad 1.0 User Interface, which has been in private beta for the last few months. As well as the improved visual appearance, there are a number of new features such as the ability to add your own branding to Launchpad pages associated with your project (for example, Ubuntu's pages). As mentioned in the press release, we've got two new high profile projects using us for bug tracking: The Zope 3 Project and The Silva Content Management System.

Daylight saving started yesterday: the first time since 1991/1992 summer for Western Australia. The legislation finally passed the upper house on 21st November (12 days before the transition date). The updated tzdata packages were released on 27th November (6 days before the transition). So far, there hasn't been an updated package released for Ubuntu (see bug 72125). One thing brought up in the Launchpad bug was that not all applications used the system /usr/share/zoneinfo time zone database.

I arrived in San Francisco today for the Canonical company conference. Seems like a nice place, and not too cold :). So far I've just gone for a walk along Fisherman's Wharf for a few hours. There look On the plane trip, I had a chance to see Last Train to Freo, which I didn't get round to seeing in the cinemas. Definitely worth watching.

Like a few other states, Western Australia does not do daylight saving. Recently the state parliament has been discussing a Daylight saving bill. The bill is now before the Legislative Council (the upper house). If the bill gets passed, there will be a 3 year trial followed by a referendum to see if we want to continue. I hadn't been paying too much attention to it, and had assumed they would be talking about starting the trial next year.

I published a Bazaar branch of the Nautilus obex method here: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jamesh/+junk/gnome-vfs-obexftp This version works with the hcid daemon included with Ubuntu Edgy, rather than requiring the btcond daemon from Maemo. Some simple instructions on building it: Download and build the osso-gwobex library: svn checkout https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/connectivity/osso-gwobex/trunk osso-gwobex The debian/ directory should work fine to build a package using debuild. Download and build the obex module: bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jamesh/+junk/gnome-vfs-obexftp There is no debian packaging for this — just an autogen.

In my previous entry about using the Maemo obex-module on the desktop, Johan Hedberg mentioned that bluez-utils 3.7 included equivalent interfaces to the osso-gwconnect daemon used by the method. Since then, the copy of bluez-utils in Edgy has been updated to 3.7, and the necessary interfaces are enabled in hcid by default. Before trying to modify the VFS code, I thought I'd experiment a bit with the D-BUS interfaces via the D-BUS python bindings.

When I got my new laptop, one of the features it had that my previous one didn't was Bluetooth support. There are a few Bluetooth related utilities for Gnome that let you send and receive SMS messages and a few other things, but a big missing feature is the ability to transfer files to and from the phone easily. Ideally, I'd be able to browse the phone's file system using Nautilus.

Earlier in the year, we migrated the bugs from bugzilla.ubuntu.com over to Launchpad. This process involved changes to the bug numbers, since the Launchpad is used for more than just Ubuntu and already had a number of bugs reported in the system. People often refer to other bugs in comments, which both Bugzilla and Launchpad conveniently turn into links. The changed bug numbers meant that the bug references in the comments ended up pointing to the wrong bugs.

I've been testing out Ekiga recently, and so far the experience has been a bit hit and miss. Firewall traversal has been unreliable. Some numbers (like the SIPPhone echo test) work great. In some cases, no traffic has gotten through (where both parties were behind Linux firewalls). In other cases, voice gets through in one direction but not the other. Robert Collins has some instructions on setting up siproxd which might solve all this though, so I'll have to try that.

Thought I'd post a followup on my previous post since it generated a bit of interest. First a quick summary: It is not an Ubuntu Dapper specific bug. With the appropriate combination of fonts and pango versions, it will exhibit itself on other Pango-enabled Firefox builds (it was verified on the Fedora build too). It is not a DejaVu bug, although it is one of the few fonts to exhibit the problem.

Ran into an annoying Firefox bug after upgrading to Ubuntu Dapper. It seems to affect rendering of ligatures. At this point, I am not sure if it is an Ubuntu specific bug. The current conditions I know of to trigger the bug are: Firefox 1.5 (I am using the 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.1-1ubuntu10 package). Pango rendering enabled (the default for Ubuntu). The web page must use a font that contains ligatures and use those ligatures.

I've been in London for a bit over a week now at the Launchpad sprint. We've been staying in a hotel near the Excel exhibition centre in Docklands, which has a nice view of the docs and you can see the planes landing at the airport out the windows of the conference rooms. I met up with James Bromberger (one of the two main organisers of linux.conf.au 2003) on Thursday, which is the first time I've seen him since he left for the UK after the conference.

Launchpad got a mention in the latest Everybody Loves Eric Raymond comic. It is full of inaccuracies though — we use XML-RPC rather than SOAP. Comments: opi - 24 Feb, 2006 Oh, c'mon. It was quite fun. :-)

The Bugzilla migration on Friday went quite well, so we've now got all the old Ubuntu bug reports in Launchpad. Before the migration, we were up to bug #6760. Now that the migration is complete, there are more than 28000 bugs in the system. Here are some quick points to help with the transition: All bugzilla.ubuntu.com accounts were migrated to Launchpad accounts with a few caveats: If you already had a Launchpad account with your bugzilla email address associated with it, then the existing Launchpad account was used.

The migration is finally going to happen, after much testing of migration code and improvements to Malone. If all goes well, Ubuntu will be using a single bug tracker again on Friday (as opposed to the current system where bugs in main go in Bugzilla and bugs in universe go in Malone). Comments: Keshav - 17 Jan, 2006 Hiiii, I am Keshav and i am 22. I am working as software dev.

Joao: you can configure XScreenSaver to show a "Switch User" button in it's password dialog (which calls gdmflexiserver when run). This lets you start a new X session after the screen has locked. This feature is turned on in Ubuntu if you want to try it out. Of course, this is not a full solution, since it doesn't help you switch to an existing session (you'd need to guess the correct Ctrl+Alt+Fn combo).

One of the things that was discussed at UBZ was moving Ubuntu's bug tracking over to Launchpad. The current situation sees bugs in main being filed in bugzilla while bugs in universe go in Launchpad. Putting all the bugs in Launchpad is an improvement, since users only need to go to one system to file bugs. I wrote the majority of the conversion script before the conference, but made a few important improvements at the conference after discussions with some of the developers.

So after I posted some instructions for setting up Avahi on Breezy, a fair number of people at UBZ did so. For most people this worked fine, but it seems that a few people's systems started spewing a lot of network traffic. It turns out that the problem was actually caused by the zeroconf package (which I did not suggest installing) rather than Avahi. The zeroconf package is not needed for service discovery or .

During conferences, it is often useful to be able to connect to connect to other people's machines (e.g. for collaborative editing sessions with Gobby). This is a place where mDNS hostname resolution can come in handy, so you don't need to remember IP addresses. This is quite easy to set up on Breezy: Install the avahi-daemon, avahi-utils and libnss-mdns packages from universe. Restart dbus in order for the new system bus security policies to take effect with "sudo invoke-rc.

I've been in Montreal since Wednesday for Ubuntu Below Zero. As well as being my first time in Canada, it was my first time in transit through the USA. Unlike in most countries, I needed to pass through customs and get a visa waiver even though I was in transit. The visa waiver form had some pretty weird questions, such as whether I was involved in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies.

Picked up a DSB-R100 USB Radio tuner off EBay recently. I did this partly because I have better speakers on my computer than on the radio in that room, and partly because I wanted to play around with timed recordings. Setting it up was trivial -- the dsbr100 driver got loaded automatically, and a program to tune the radio (gnomeradio) was available in the Ubuntu universe repository. I did need to change the radio device from /dev/radio to /dev/radio0 though.