tensixtyone

It might of happened a while ago, but i’ve only noticed today! Folly have posted the video and audio for the various gigs that happened as part of Open Source City. As I missed the gigs it’s nice for me to listen to these artists for the first time, and also your helping (a little) to support Open Source!

Tuesday night was a slightly reorganised Manchester Free Software, due to a small admin and booking error. It was decided to keep the talk on the 22nd as Ian Forrester had already agreed to the date. Really, the date change didn’t matter to the crowd that turned out, some interesting people from various areas, I also spotted one of the Folly guys in the crowd as well.

Ian Forrester was, up until recently, BBC Backstage, that was until a new member of staff started recently. Backstage is the “freen and open” side of the BBC, spearheading the production of open APIs, free content, and sharing within the BBC. For a media company this may be strange, but due to the “unique way the BBC is funded” we almost have a right to the production content of the BBC to be free and open to all UK license fee payers. As described by Ian, Backstage are at the forefront of new media in the BBC, keeping a eye on new “Web 2.0″ trends and trying to adapt existing data and services to acheive new levels of interaction with the mass public.

Ian described a time where anyone syndicating BBC News stories were instantly sent a C&D order. After stern warnings internally from Ashley Highfield via the Ariel magazine the BBC decided to change its ways an allow access to the services of the BBC by the general public via APIs, and Backstage was born.

Overall, Ian’s insight into the inner workings of the BBC explained alot. He mentioned the Backstage Wild West servers where anyone within the BBC is allowed to use space for any purpose, subverting the already existing Siemens infrastructure. While I was discussing this with Simon this morning he noted that it shows there are key problems within the BBC if a group has to circumvent the normal operating proceedures to carry out their work.

For all those who missed Ian on Tuesday, he’ll be speaking at Geekup Liverpool on 29th July, signup on Upcoming and check it out.

*Edit*

Ian’s video is now available on the BBC Backstage blog.

Well, the “final” LUGRadio has been and gone, what a weekend!

After the initial fighting with trains, hotels, and various other things, I managed to get down to Wolverhampton with plenty of time to spare before the Friday night unofficial piss-up. After much Hoegaarden and other ales I managed to stumble back to my hotel to continue drinking. As you imagine this didn’t really help me for the next day…

So, mildly hung over, I stumbled down for breakfast at the local greasy spoon, the directions were a little vague and made reference to “The man on the horse” in Wolverhampton city centre. Lucky, some of the more organised members of the group worked out the directions before hand. The choice was good, from a small breakfast up to a 17 piece “death by breakfast” deal for £4.20. Due to the wicked hangover, I was hardly the most social person and proceeded to plow through my food without even a whisper to anyone else.

The event started later on with much fanfare as the previous show, and the jury-rigged improvement to the Atrium stage was a simple canopy over the projector screen, Ingenious. The layout remained the same as 2007 and while we had a little more walking room than last year in the exhibition space it still ended up as a maul to try and walk around.

First talk of the day, for me anyway, was Kevin Sandom on the Lightning Talks stage showing his Bash based clustering solution called GroupHug, as you can imagine the crowd chuckled at the initial idea of it, but as the presentation went on you could actual see use for it, possibly not by sysadmins, but for home projects. The project is amazing, and it seems to work extremely well for such a crazy idea. Maybe it would be useful as a replacement to the MythTV job queue system, but that’s for another post.

Andy Robinson from the OpenStreetMap Foundation was next on the stage, discussing the project as a whole and a brisk introduction to acquiring data for the project. The bright, Hi-Viz jacket amused a few people, I guess they’ll be great for getting the name out there in the public. His talk was straight to the point and gave a excellent overview to a very interested crowd. After the talk I ended walking back to the stall and had a very interesting discussion with Andy regarding the future of OpenStreetMap. In a ideal world, Andy would like to see an expansion in the database to allow dated entries, allowing for the generation of maps for a specific date period. So for example, you could generate a map of what the town looked like in the 19th century, He acknowledged that it would be a massive change in OSM to support this but the interest from the Genealogy crowd would be worth it.

After a quick lunch, I went to see Jeremy Allison from the Samba project on the main stage. Jeremy’s talk gave a quick insight into the milestones and issues Samba had getting to the point it’s at today. Various quips about the state of Microsoft went down well, and the talk was very insightful into the early days of open source software.

Glyn Wintle from the Open Rights Group gave a whirlwind talk on various topics that the group have looked at in the last year. The most interesting is the poor woman who was sued by the BBC for producing knitting patterns for Dr. Who characters, with the help of the ORG and some heavy beating by the likes of the Times and even CBeebies, the BBC backed down and licensed the lady’s works.
Glyn is also responsible of enlisting me as a support of the ORG, while I was slightly intoxicated may I add. I don’t have any regrets as the work they are doing is interesting to me. I hope i’ll be able to support the ORG for quite a long time and hopefully get involved when I can.

After another short break, It was time for LUGRadio Live, the final one. A lot of reminiscing and slander, as per usual. The shock announcement was that after some discussions the night before they have decided to continue the Live shows. The recording will appear in the next few days and you can have a listen yourself, if you missed it that is.

The nighttime entertainment at the venue was something not to be missed. Add Karaoke, quite a lot of drunk people, and you have a situation. Needless to say many people made a complete arse of themselves but it was all in good spirits, and the results can be seen on astopy’s Vimeo. Again, I had too much Guinness and ended up (some how) back in bed.

Day 2, a return visit to the greasy spoon and a groggy entrance into the event. The morning introduction was short and to the point, much to the delight of the hung over crowd. First talk of the morning was dotwaffle / Matthew Walster showing off the demoscene. As my brother was in a demo group called Crusaders while I was growing up, I had to go along to this one. Matthew showed a few demos from the “modern era”, initially I was disappointed that it was all heavily 3D based then later on with the showing of Kewlers/MFX - 1995 I started to liven up a little, a return to the “good old days” from my view. Matthew finished with a little invitation demo to Sundown 08, the Sundown event is accordingly the rebirth of the demoscene parties in the UK. I wish Matthew all the best in getting the UK back on the map for parties.

The Mass Debate was very interested. mrben, Jeremey Allison, Matthew Garrett, and Max Spevack all took the stage to discuss hot topics suggested by the audience, It was a slow start but after a few threats from Matthew regarding the GPL it started to move quickly. Most of the discussion has slipped my mind but I’m sure someone else will be able to go into more details about the topics.

Later on in the day Chris Jones gave a overview of his Terminator application, which might I add, i’m now using as a replacement to Gnome Terminal. The more interesting part is a overview of how he fostered a community around this new application. I’m going through a similar time now with my MythView application, while some basic code is there I need feedback on what feature people would like to see. Chris gave a great talk, which was sadly cut short due to overrunning.

So, it’s all over. The show closed with prizes being handed out and a few last minute slapstick jokes. All in all it’s been a excellent weekend of drinking padded out with talks and I’d highly recommend anyone to keep a space open in July for next year’s event.

photo credit: sheilaellen

Peter pointed out on the ManLUG mailing list that Liverpool will play host to a “micro-festival” on open source software in media production. The Open Source City festival is running from the 17th – 22nd of June at Mello Mello and various other sites across the city centre. This event has twigged interest from me due to the presentation on open source software from a speaker on IP from the Green Party, i’ve always known that the greens are very pro-open source but i’ve never heard it “from the horses mouth”.

So, my name is down and it’s booked into my calendar. Drop me a message if your also visiting.

I’ve been quite busy over the last two weeks, catching up on home projects and other things. After a few quick fixes and features sent over to the LottaNZB guys I was added to the development team, which is quite a change for me considering the last project I was on was over 4-5 years ago. Anyway, it’s been good to get my Launchpad user ID” back in use as the LottaNZB project is hosted on their services.

As well as LottaNZB, I’m also adding to the Python bindings for MythTV. At the moment the existing bindings only support simple operations and I’m expanding it out to abstract out most of the major concepts within the DB, for example channels and programs. Hopefully, they’ll provide useful in the future when I need to do a channel rescan.

The eee-acpi module, hacked by Asus from the asus-laptop module, currently manages the kill switches for the various extra hardware (wifi, cardreader, webcam) and also handles the extra Fn keys via ACPI events.

While hotkeys via ACPI are well supported by acpid and its ilk it is no longer the best way to handle these types of keys. Generally, the drivers for the mainstream laptops (ibm/lenovo, hp) have moved over to the input framework to communicate these key presses, usually displaying as an extra input device under /dev/input. These input devices can be handled by HAL and notifications of key presses send over the dbus allowing for desktop environments such as GNOME to handle these events without any strange hackery and fakekeys calls.

Thanks to the previous work of the asus-laptop developers there’s a patch that exists to disable the existing ACPI events and provide a input device for the extra keys, I’ve managed to hack together a version of the eeepc-acpi module using the Debian 1.01 source to export the “Asus Extra Buttons” input device.

After you have the inputs available, it’s a simple matter of producing a FDI for HAL to identify the device and map the scan codes to the actual keys. After the initial FDI was created I could use the volume keys without any extra software and also map the two application buttons (marked as VGA switch, and AP button) in GNOME to call scripts. The wifi key (Fn+F2) presented more of a problem, while it was mapped to “wifi” HAL didn’t know how to actually switch off the Atheros card. The killswitch for the card would need to be implemented as a program that listens to dbus, something a little outside my skill set.

The other buttons on the keyboard (sleep, brightness) are pure ACPI calls. This presents a problem that the keys produce events via the input layer and the ACPI layer at the same time, so for example you hit the brightness down button and HAL will pickup the notification and display the brightness OSD, but it quickly goes out of sync as what HAL sees and what the ACPI are doing are completely separate. Again, this is outside my skill set but I’d probably approach it by filtering out the keys in the kernel and let the ACPI events do their work.

The guys over at Fedora have a similar idea of moving over to an input based module, but for the moment no source has been produced. Due to the numerous little issues I’ve had I’ve decided to put this little project on the back-burner until I see what the Fedora people have produced, after all they’ll have people that are more experienced in this type of thing, whereas I am not.

I’ll get round to posting the source deb for the modified eee-acpi tonight or tomorrow.

After initally setting up my EeePC to run Debian Lenny I quickly encountered a issue were the madwifi drivers wouldn’t resume correctly. The card would be unable to operate as it has lost sync with the kernel drivers, removing and reloading the related modules solved the issue.

Some people on the EeeUser forums ripped out the existing script from the default Xandros install, a simple acpi script that jumped through some hoops to disable the modules and clear everything down. The script worked as part of the existing acpi-support package and worked when using the acpi suspend options, now i’ve got GNOME and HAL installed it turns out these are no longer used, therefore still causing the issue.

After a little research it seems that the suspend support within Debian is currently in a state of flux, and a few bug tickets have been raised about the various issues. This provided my first hint of how to resolve it, a quick script in pm-utils, much like the acpi one, will fix this for good.

Simply, place this script into your /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/ folder, I’ve got it as 45eee-wifi that way if the script fails for some reason at least your video will be resumed.

#!/bin/bash

PWR=$(cat /proc/acpi/asus/wlan)

load_modules() {
   modprobe ath_pci
   modprobe wlan_wep
   modprobe wlan_tkip
   modprobe wlan_ccmp
}

unload_modules() {
   rmmod ath_pci
   rmmod wlan_scan_sta
   rmmod wlan_tkip
   rmmod wlan_wep
   rmmod wlan_ccmp
   rmmod ath_rate_sample
   rmmod wlan_acl
   rmmod wlan
   rmmod ath_hal
}

wifi_on() {

   if [ "$PWR" = "0" ]; then
      modprobe pciehp pciehp_force=1
      sleep 3
      echo 1 > /proc/acpi/asus/wlan
      sleep 2
      load_modules
      sleep 1
   fi
}

wifi_off() {
   if [ "$PWR" = "1" ]; then
      unload_modules

      echo 0 > /proc/acpi/asus/wlan
      sleep 1
      rmmod pciehp
      rmmod pci_hotplug
   fi
}

case "$1" in
        hibernate|suspend)
                wifi_off
                ;;
        thaw|resume)
                wifi_on
                ;;
        *)
                ;;
esac

The scripts in the “Arch acpi-eee” package provided the basis for this script, and it also works alot better than the existing scripts provided on eeeuser.com.

Hackers have managed to circumvent the BBC’s anti-piracy systems to gain unrestricted access to the programmes on the corporation’s iPlayer internet TV service. – The Guardian

I never knew how true my previous statement would be, while i’m a little late posting a follow-up I have to comment on the media’s perspective of the “technically-able” internet users. It seems if something is hidden in plain sight and discovered by the masses it will be classed as hacking no matter how idiotic it is. The media should change it’s perspective and chastise the BBC for their inepitude.

Of course, it’s easier to blame a bunch of people with no legal department…

From time to time, to save on resources and make things easier you have to bodge certain items. Today’s example is generating a different report on the first working day of the month than the rest of the month. Crystal Reports doesn’t offer the functionality to identify the first working day of the month, so i’ve created the following fuction:

Function FirstWorkingDayOfMonth(d as Date)
   dim td as date

   ' Grab the first day of the month and check what day of the week it is
   td = datevalue(Year(d),Month(d),1)

   select case dayofweek(td,crMonday)
      case 6
         ' Saturday
         FirstWorkingDayOfMonth = datevalue(year(d),month(d),3)
      case 7
         ' Sunday
         FirstWorkingDayOfMonth = datevalue(year(d),month(d),2)
      case else
         FirstWorkingDayOfMonth = td
   end select
End Function

Just incase this is handy for anyone else.

With the launch of BBC iPlayer for iPhones it seems they’ve let slip a little extra “feature”. You can now download programs from BBC iPlayer without DRM in a well encoded MP4 format. How? Easy.

First of all, install User Agent Switch for Firefox and setup the iPhone user-agent:

• Description: iPhone
• User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
• App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
• App Version: Version/3.0
• Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3

Now browse to any BBC iPlayer program page and you’ll notice that it tries to serve up a Quicktime video, the MP4. As the URL isn’t displayed raw in the code, you can use a little Javascript wizardry to redirect you to the raw stream:

javascript:(function(){url = document.getElementById('mip-flash-player').getElementsByTagName("object")[0].childNodes[0].value; window.location = url;})()

Or if you want a simple drag and drop bookmarklet: iPlayer Download

The BBC will either pull the iPhone beta or re-engineer it with the iPhone SDK to develop a full client, either way this will not last long. Initally when I heard the iPhone was supported by iPlayer I was outraged, Why does a device with only around 100,000 users in the UK get priority over a operating system? It almost seems like Karma is against them, but no doubt this will get into the news as “hackers exploiting the system” rubbish. Only time will tell, enjoy it while you can.