Well it’s been almost seven months since our inaugural conference, and there were a load of videos taken. The problem was that our usual VT gurus have been unavailable to do any of the editing etc. So the raw video has languished on the servers waiting for some kind soul to help edit them.

After multiple calls for help and nudges from the marketing team, I decided to see if I could slot it in anywhere (yay me, I’m such a hero :-P) Thankfully I had some brilliant help from SankarP who refreshed my memory on how to edit video, thanks chief!

Currently only Day 1 of the conference is available, you can view online (flash) or download (ogg) the talks from the openSUSE TV channel on BlipTV. I am working on getting a channel on YouTube to enable a wider reach, as some people have bandwidth issues with Blip. You can also subscribe to the feeds in multiple formats – rss, miro, itunes.

If anyone has any openSUSE related video that they would like put on the channel, then please let me know

Oh yes, I’m still going at it folks! Let’s discuss :-) This time round I’d like us to discuss Collaboration, Learning, Listening and Leading. Let me clarify what I mean by Collaboration; I’m NOT talking about Groupwise/Exchange/Zimbra/Alfresco/SharePoint/Kablink style collabortaion, but I AM talking about working with other parties and teams. Within openSUSE as with other distributions there are multiple teams/projects that in some cases could be classed as competitors – GNOME & KDE are a prime example.

The folks of the openSUSE Community in Nicaragua, are preparing a great event in the city of Granada, Nicaragua, in Central America.

Now we have a schedule for that special day:

Sede	Hora	Tema	Ponente
Granada	09:00 am – 09:40 am	Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with gnome, basic Aplicacions	Denis Torres
Granada	09:50 am – 10:30 am	Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with KDE, basic Aplicacionss	Adolfo Fitoria
Granada	10:40 am – 11:20 am	Openoffice.org	Carlos Leal
Granada	11:30 am – 12:10 pm	Multimedia Aplication	Jose Angel Bonilla
Granada	01:00 pm – 01:40 am	Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with gnome, basic Aplicacions	Denis Torres
Granada	01:50 am – 02:30 am	Introduction to the world of GNU / linux with KDE, basic Aplicacions	Adolfo Fitoria
Granada	02:40 pm – 03:20 pm	Openoffice.org	Carlos Leal
Granada	03:30 pm – 04:00 pm	Multimedia Aplication	Jose Angel Bonilla

And we just recieve the package from novell

Once again another interesting and informative day at the ELN Workshop in Amsterdam.

The topics of discussion in the final day were compliance, risk, patents and industry development. Different organizations made presentations in the morning regarding licensing compliance and how it pertains to the internal part of the organization, as well as, through to distribution. Intra-organization compliance systems were discussed in short and the various mediums that could be used in order to insure that the vendor(s) is complaint. Most all were in agreement that it was vital for an organization to integrate a compliance policy into the supply chain. Different measures on how this compliance policy could be constructed were discussed also.

The second topic discussed was Risk and how to evaluate and contain it. A balanced discussion on risk from both the legal and business sides of things gave a realistic case view on what open source companies are facing in the current and expanding market. Members of the ELN have also created and are developing a Risk Grid to address procurement of F/OSS and it's function within the supply chain. This grid aims to assist professionals in the field to regulate their actions with their suppliers and buyers by allocating  risk to the appropriate actor within the supply chain.

A patent panel also discussed briefly about the pro's and con's of patents within the organization and argued how these patents can hinder, as well as, support innovation within an organization. The affects of patents on licensing and the various complications that arise were also discussed, but agreed that another workshop will be set aside to discuss patents in more detail.

Finally, Future developments were discussed and their impacts on the F/OSS industry. Technological innovations and shifts were discussed and weighed against the developments of the F/OSS movement in the past. We are seeing quite a shift from software as a product to more of a service driven industry with such developments as the cloud and embedded MID's. Awareness must be made now that assists professionals in evaluating legal risk in accordance to licensing and procurement, through educating professionals on the importance of compliance and how to properly implement a compliance policy within their respective organizations. Moreover, it is generally agreed that there must be more interaction with developers/engineers and management/legal counsel to work together and build a "best case" practice that incorporates the developer/engineers issues and needs together with the organizations compliance. The most sound method of accomplishing this is through working together to reach our common goal with special emphasis on proper education and documentation.

I would like to thank the Free Software Foundation Europe and everyone who attended the ELN workshop and especially thank them for allowing me to participate in this closed discussion. It definitely opened  my eyes to topics in which I have only scratched the surface on. The complexities of the topics discussed were just another confirmation that we need to work even harder together to meet the ever growing issues faced by all levels of the F/OSS movement. I look forward to working together with you at the ELN and sharing the knowledge and contributions from the unique position I hold between industry and community.

Did you know every app built with KDE 4 can save files as easily to a FTP server or a remote computer using SSH as easily as it accesses your local hard disk? You should! This is a feature that I take for granted since it was introduced in the days of KDE 2.0, but it's easy to forget that the majority of KDE users only started using it since then.

A few of our community people got together and wrote this thorough overview of network transparent file management in KDE at the weekend. Cookies to them for writing it and even if you think you are an old KDE hand, give it a read - I didn't know about the handy protocol selector in Dolphin, and that let me discover the settings:/ protocol - now I can access my Settings directly in Dolphin.

Nice weekend without any further need-to-do's so I worked on the due release 2.4.9 of libgphoto2.
(And a dinner invitation to friends, and some biking through the south part of Nuernberg.)

News of 2.4.9 can be found here if you are curious.

First time I used a (more or less ad-hoc) testplan for the ptp2 driver.
I went through the currently 3 major types of remote controllable cameras and tested
generic common scenarios of remote control.

And I actually found I had to fix some EOS stuff before release during testing.

Testplan ptp2 driver

Canon Powershot series (currently: Powershot SX100IS)

        --capture-image-and-download
        --capture-image-and-download -F 3 -I 5
                - via SDRAM (capturetarget=0):                          PASS
                - via Card (capturetarget=1):                           PASS
                - Card configured, but not inserted (capturetarget=1)   PASS

        --capture-preview
                commandline tool                                        PASS
                gtkam                                                   PASS
                mixed with --capture-image-and-download                 PASS

        --list-config                                                   PASS


Canon EOS series (currently: Canon EOS 1000D)
        --capture-image-and-download
                - via SDRAM (capturetarget=0)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - via Card (SD) (capturetarget=1)
                        - JPEG                                          xxxx
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    xxxx
                - no SD card inserted
                        - JPEG                                          FAIL/IGNORE (hangs without error)
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    FAIL/IGNORE (hangs without error)

        --capture-image-and-download -F 3 -I 5
                - via SDRAM (capturetarget=0)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - via Card (capturetarget=1)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - no SD card insert
                        - JPEG                                          FAIL/IGNORE (hangs without error)
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    FAIL/IGNORE (hangs without error)

        --capture-preview
                commandline tool                                        PASS
                gtkam                                                   PASS
                mixed with --capture-image-and-download                 PASS

        --wait-event-and-download
                - JPEG                                                  PASS
                - JPEG + RAW                                            PASS

        --list-config                                                   PASS
        --get-config somevalue                                          PASS
        --set-config somevalue=value                                    PASS


Nikon DSLR series (currently: Nikon D90)
        --capture-image-and-download
                - via SDRAM (capturetarget=0)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - via Card (SD) (capturetarget=1)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - no SD card inserted
                        - JPEG                                          PASS reports error
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS reports error

        --capture-image-and-download -F 3 -I 5
                - via SDRAM (capturetarget=0)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - via Card (capturetarget=1)
                        - JPEG                                          PASS
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS
                - no SD card insert
                        - JPEG                                          PASS reports error
                        - JPEG + RAW                                    PASS reports error

        --capture-preview
                commandline tool                                        PASS
                gtkam                                                   PASS
                mixed with --capture-image-and-download 
                        - SDRAM mode                                    PASS
                        - Card mode                                     FAIL/IGNORE (returns PTP Device Busy)

        --wait-event-and-download
                - JPEG                                                  PASS
                - JPEG + RAW                                            FAIL (deleting NEF also deletes JPG I think)


        --list-config                                                   PASS
        --get-config somevalue                                          PASS
        --set-config somevalue=value                                    PASS

For posterity:

I have a Canon HF200 HD video camera, which records to AVCHD format. AVCHD is H.264 encoded video and AC-3 encoded audio in a MPEG-2 Transport Stream (m2ts, mts) container. This format is not supported by Aperture 3, which I use to store my video.

With Blizzard’s help, I figured out an ffmpeg command-line to convert to H.264 encoded video and AAC encoded audio in an MPEG-4 (mp4) container. This is supported by Aperture 3 and other Quicktime apps.

$ ffmpeg -sameq -ab 256k -i input-file.m2ts -s hd1080 output-file.mp4 -acodec aac

Command-line order is important, which is infuriating. If you move the -s or -ab arguments, they may not work. Add -deinterlace if the source videos are interlaced, which mine were originally until I turned it off. The only downside to this is that it generates huge output files, on the order of 4-5x greater than the input file.

Update, 28 April 2010: Alexander Wauck emailed me to say that re-encoding the video isn’t necessary, and that the existing H.264 video could be moved from the m2ts container to the mp4 container with a command-line like this:

$ ffmpeg -i input-file.m2ts -ab 256k -vcodec copy -acodec aac output-file.mp4

And he’s right… as long as you don’t need to deinterlace the video. With the whatever-random-ffmpeg-trunk checkout I have, adding -deinterlace to the command-line segfaults. I actually had tried -vcodec copy early in my experiments but abandoned it after I found that it didn’t deinterlace. I had forgotten to try it again after I moved past my older interlaced videos. Thanks Alex!

This article is about saving the world. At least, give our small green planet a chance to last until it is eaten by this red dwarf called sun.

Motivated by an article and my recent purchase of a new laptop, I went looking for some reasons for the mismatch in power usage of KDE vs the other DEs. Although is was not worried about the differences in memory usage (others have commented on measuring memory usage correctly in depth), the increase of power usage between the beginning of the benchmark and the end struck me. As the system is idle in both cases, power usage should be the same, if not, there is something going on.

The fact something went wrong came very prominent after I left the laptop idling for some hours, only with kopete running in the background. After I came back, the CPU was working at full load. top revealed the process responsible for the high load, plasma-destop. Using strace it became obvious it was spending its whole time in the main event loop, caused by an insane number of timeouts (about every 10 milliseconds …).

The first part was easy, the second was a little bit more difficult. First, I tried to find the responsible timer using gdb, but after some time it became evident not a single timer was causing this, but a large number of different timers (the object address changed every time it hit the breakpoint in the event loop).

Fortunately, I stumbled over a small patch which is part of Qt4 as delivered by openSUSE (and probably others, haven’t checked). This patch prints the name of the object, or at least its class name, responsible for a timeout which has occurred, and the hierarchy of parents.

After restarting plasma-desktop with QT_DEBUG_TIMER=1 set (which enables the logging of timeouts), at first there was nothing suspicious. After some this changed, there was an ever increasing number of events like the following:
activating 5000 ms timer for Application Notifications

Every time a new notification popup opened, a new timer was started, but it was newer killed.

If you are using openSUSE, call yourself lucky, because the patch has been included in the KDE 4.4 packages for some time now, else point your distributor to KDE bug #230740 (patch provided).

Although this is IMHO the most critical bug, there are a few more timer related ones. Stay tuned …

This is a plea to the Free Software Community. This is an appeal to you. This is a incitement to kick ass!

So you think that you are not entitled to decide something?

YOU ARE > GO KICK ASS!

Despite the fact that our community is around for some time we are a very young movement. We don't have much organization. No hierarchy, very little processes, no roles or functions, no directions and only very general rules. If you’re hesitant now and try not to stick your neck out, this community will fail.

You participate in a time where it’s only you that makes a difference.

Don’t be shy. You're a peach! Don’t be modest, KICK ASS!

Waiting for something “official”?

THERE IS NO ONE OFFICIAL > GO KICK ASS!

There is only you and the people next to you. There is no one steering the Free Software community, there is only you pushing your topic. There is no mastermind behind all this, there is only you thinking about your thing. There is no management, there is only you running your things. If you do something it’s what Free Software does. If you decide something it’s what Free Software decides.

Don't hesitate, just do it. Don’t wait, KICK ASS!

You’re worried about your idea being liked?

THEY LOVE IT > GO KICK ASS!

Push for your goal. In this community we value others’ opinions. We value openness. We value critique. We do NOT value consensus. It’s nice if it happens, it makes you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside but consensus is not the prerequisite for action.

Try to incorporate the feedback you get as good as you can. Be open minded and willing to try new things. But also keep your goal in mind. You started with an idea on how to do something, don’t let the feedback kill your idea. Remember, there are always many people who just like your idea and don’t say anything.

Don’t let the nay-sayers stop you, KICK ASS!

You're afraid of contradiction?

WE ARE NOT A LOGICAL CONSISTENT COMMUNITY > GO KICK ASS!

We can have a team but no leader. We can have vim and emacs. We can be self-contradictory! Free Software consists of so many projects, ideas, values and people that they can’t possibly all be on the same page. You don’t need to prove to yourself or anyone else that you conform. There can be two or more things of the same kind even if they do exactly the same thing.

Don't buy into conformity. KICK ASS!

You are unsure about something?

TRY IT > GO KICK ASS!

Here we don’t think everything through to the end. We are playful! You need to release early, release often. Everything! Not only code but your frustrations, ideas and plans also. That means that people will see your mistakes. People will spot your inconsistencies. People will get on your nerves with their own ideas about your stuff. But it also means you don’t have be 100% correct, don’t have to be 100% ready and you don’t have to do 100% yourself.

Put everything out there, KICK ASS!

You Fear Falling Down?

More often then we like it, the things we dream of, the ideas we come up with, the lines of code we produce STINK. And that’s okay, shit happens. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes, nobody will think less of you. In this community people will scrape you off the ground and put you on your feet again. Failure is punished by a pat on the back and a smile. Don’t doubt that for a second.

Fail and KICK ASS!

Stop contemplating!
Stop holding back!
Stop worrying!

KICK ASS!

I was invited by the FSF Europe to take part in the ELN Workshop in Amsterdam for a discussion between industry professionals, lawyers and engineers with how licensing impacts their respective organizations. The workshop presentations consisted of highly recognized F/OSS industry professionals from Europe and the US. The first day of the event was well organized and quite refreshing since there were many open minded discussions that are leading up to implementation and management of governance in F/OSS projects, as well as, working towards a collaborative grid/matrix for developers/engineers to use when choosing a license to release their code under with a view to compliance.

Moreover, it was nice to hear presentations of up to date casework of GPL violations, casework from professionals about industry adoption of F/OSS and how the OSS industry is gathering momentum and legitimacy at lightning speeds ;-) Also, it was nice to hear the current information about the recent legal developments on a country by country level in Europe and also the recent development at the EU parliament level. Thank you especially to the small, but hard working group of lobbyists that attended!!

The organizers and presenters did a great job of keeping theoretical concepts to a minimal and successfully explained their issues and topics in layman terms. I thank you all for your openness and collaboration and must say I have never experienced an event quite like this with legal council and industry professionals that was so open, free flowing and transparent without having the feeling or worry of those luring second agendas.

I look very much forward to continuing our discussion and developments on Day 2.