stick's corner

I was playing with the idea to write an application inspired by xkcd comics 715 since it was released, but today I finally found time to whip it up! The whole source code is a single webpage (HTML+Javascript/jQuery) around 100 lines long. It basically forms the query by replacing hash sign “#” with the particular number from loop and then asks Google via its Search API. Resulting data are shown via Google Visualization API. It doesn’t have much eye-candy yet, but it works and that’s what counts. I put the presets Randall came up with and also added some of my own. I will now describe the first three in detail:

The first one was "xkcd #", which easily showed that the most popular issues were: 10, 12, 244, 385, 427, 449, 452, 505, 701, 705 and 714.

I continued with "# czechoslovakia", which of course spotted the most important years of the 20th century for this country (1918, 1938, 1945, 1948, 1968, 1989 and 1993).

The last one, "favorite number is #", shows the distribution of favorite numbers. Three, seven, eight and thirteen were expected, but I was surprised to see peak also at 42. I guess you know why.

Bear in mind that there are still some outstanding issues and also if you have any ideas for interesting presets to add, I’d be more than happy to include them!

Ah, I almost forgot the link, so here it is: http://gk2.sk/xkcd715.html. Enjoy!

Yesterday, we needed with darix to obtain a dependency graph of the package you are about to install. I knew that something similar was planned in zypper, so I went to Jano Kupec to check the status of it. Unfortunately, I learned that this feature is not implemented yet. I think it should not be very hard to enhance the zypper package list with some eye-candy, but I haven’t looked into it yet. I would love to have these outputs similar to Gentoo ones (colors and simple ASCII art dependency trees). Btw, zypper already has color support, so if you want to start hacking, there is source code in gitorious.

Jano also showed me a neat trick how to obtain the results we wanted anyway. If you are in similar situation, just follow these steps (they are of course not suitable for everyday use, but still better than nothing):

1. install package libzypp-testsuite-tools
2. run zypper install --debug-solver pkg
3. cd into /var/log/zypper.solverTestCase
4. open solver-test.xml in your favorite editor
5. add <graphic/> tag just above the </trial> closing tag
6. run /usr/lib/zypp/testsuite/bin/deptestomatic.multi solver-test.xml (as normal user, you won’t get any graph when running as root)
7. you can pan the graph, rotate it with the right click or even save it to disk!

The resulting image can be seen here:

Yesterday Andrea aka anubisg1 announced the Live CDs for LXDE, which he built in Build Service with the help of Dmitry Serpokryl. It was a very easy task for me to replace LXDE packages with Xfce ones in kiwi definition, so I can present you the Xfce Live CDs!

I’ve created an entry in our Derivates page and you can download the images from this location. The default user is linux with no password, user root uses the same empty password.

I’ve tested the 32-bit image in VirtualBox and hit some issues (see below), the 64-bit image is untested at the moment. There’s where I would like you to ask for testing both images. Some points first:

• currently the Qt YaST is used (I had some issues with GTK one)
• after the login a warning message is shown (about putting “linux” into /etc/hosts)
• you can install the system to hard drive using the Live Installer icon on the desktop
  • unfortunately this blocks us from enabling autologin (installed system expects “linux” user which is present only on Live CD and login ends in loop, the bug in YaST is being worked on)
  • also some message dialogs about locked storage subsystem are shown during the installation steps

If you hit a new issue, please report it to me. Also if you know how to fix any existing ones, please don’t hesitate as well! Thank you!

Almost exactly 3 months ago I blogged about a Geeko Bus. What a surprise I had today when I saw a tram decorated in a very similar fashion. The weird thing is, that both bus 183 and tram 8 have their stops near our Prague offices. There is definitely something fishy going on!

I was even able to find a video on Youtube, so you know it is not shopped^Wgimped.

A few days ago Michal blogged about a public virtual machine by our dear friend Jaromir Cervenka. Time flew by, Jaromir installed the latest Milestone 3 to the machine and the project is now available from the new and easy to remember domain (thanks darix for driving this). The new frontpage also contains the instructions in English how to access it via VNC and SSH client or directly inside the browser.

http://live.opensuse.org/

Enjoy this gift from our community member and don’t forget to report any problems you find with this new milestone in our bugzilla.

PS: I had a talk with our SUSE Studio guys and they are up to something similar using their infrastructure. They have to solve some issues first, though. Feature for this is already filed in openFATE.

During the last openSUSE Conference we (Benji, Brent, Bryen, Francis, Michal, Petr, Stephen and me) had a brainstorming meeting about social aspects of our community. We were able to come up with lots of ideas and I want to thank all of you for your participation!

We felt that openSUSE is missing something similar than Ubuntu Launchpad or Fedora Community. The discussion happened two months after Canonical released their Launchpad sources to the public, so I had time to investigate both these solutions before the Conference (Fedora stuff was of course open-sourced from the start). Unfortunately, it turned out that none of these existing solutions were good for us.

My next step was to investigate social networking frameworks built on Ruby on Rails platform, because most of our web infrastructure uses this framework and Ruby development stack is in a perfect shape in openSUSE. I played a lot with Community Engine, Insoshi and Lovd By Less, but finally I decided to go for Tog. This was the only solution that was modular (not monolithic) and seemed pretty well hackable.

I created a Tog application, ported all anonymously visible pages to our Bento theme and finally deployed it on connect.opensuse.org address, so you can look at it. In the end we would like to replace the old users.opensuse.org application with Connect and make it a new central place for users. We also plan to add extra features like for example:

• user groups
• user karma or XP points
• user management (GPG+SSH keys, location, mailing lists subscriptions, IRC cloak, etc.)
• ribbons/buttons to put on your site, wordpress/facebook plugins
• business cards printing
• public API for retrieving all user information
• …

There are plenty of ideas and I’m sure you can come up with even more! I’m announcing this in a VERY early stage of the development so you can jump in and take part in a discussion and development from the beginning. The full sources are available on gitorious and if you are interested in helping us (that does not necessarily mean coding!) don’t hesitate and contact me using my work email.

For the comparison I added screenshots how my profile looks in applications I mentioned in this post:

Fedora Account System

Launchpad

openSUSE Connect