Having a few days holiday, we decided to visit something here in UK, so we went to Liverpool and Knowsley Safari Park.

"Knowsley Safari Park has become one of Merseyside's premier leisure attractions, winning several awards for tourism and it's animal husbandry."

"These days Knowsley's 500 mammals include rhinos, camels, buffalo, bison, wildebeest, lions, tigers, zebra, baboons, monkeys, deer, antelopes and wallabies."

It was a great weekend a lot of photos are available on my Flickr gallery: Liverpool and Knowsley Safari Park set.

Last week i became a gnome-do fan. That make me also use it for a Twitter client.
Now you can follow me on Twitter.

Today i've just released Brasero 2.26.1.

I'm trying to write an Android game, but I've been rather addicted to playing KNetWalk, which is slowing me down somewhat. I'm getting fast at KNetWalk though - I just did the Very Hard level in 59 seconds without any penalties. I think I might give up now, although I reckon I could probably do it in 50 seconds if I was very lucky.

At least, not on my Android phone. I've just released Check Redirect on the Android Market (for free, of course), which intercepts view intentions on links, and if the link is a tiny url of some sort (the list of intercepted hosts is configurable) it pops up a dialog letting you know where the link redirects to, and asks if you wish to follow the link.

And when I'm using Linux instead of my phone, I found an extension for firefox which does a similar thing. I can't remember what it was called though.

UPDATE: New Dates. You now have more time to plan!

As you can see the week of the 11th to the 17th of May is openSUSE Week.  What’s so special about this week?  Well in a nutshell, the aim is to get all corners of the community together to focus on specific topics.  These topics range from wiki cleanup to packaging; testing certain features/functions to translation work; discussion with the openSUSE Board and almost anything inbetween.

I’d like to suggest a couple of other items to the list (yes I know I need to add them to the wiki).  Both items are marketing related:

1. Create good screencasts, ideally of each major component but I’m open to ideas.
2. As requested by certain a11y users & proponents, close caption the video that we have (and the interviews I still need to upload).
3. I know I said a couple but maths was never my strong point Try and do some video interviews that we can group under the “People Of openSUSE” banner.  I’ve already started this but mainly with Novell employees.  If community members are willing to help out, please let me know (it could even be you filming yourself without any need for video conferencing).

So please make sure you come and join the fun, remember the openSUSE community wont succeed unless you join in.  We may even have the opportunity to have a soap box where you can voice your complaints and issues.  The important thing is the openSUSE Week is about you the community for you the community, to get something out of it you need to put something into it.  Lastly it’s all about having good old fashioned geeko fun!  So come along and join the fun

Recently I found UML modeling tool - Umbrello. Well, it's not very stable, but there is autosave function ;-)
So I created Class diagram for my small widget_library:



Some objects are missing (work in progress), anyway it's important to visualise objects from begining. It's could be too late when library becomes too complex and relations complicated ...

During the last weekend I hacked a bit on rockmarble and I added a new feature: retrieve all the events happening in a certain city.

As usual data is provided by last.fm, which should return also the events _“near” _the specified city (don’t ask me to define a value for near :) ).

I have created new openSUSE packages, this time everything should work fine. Just make sure to remove all qjson packages before installing this release (in fact all the previous problems were due to packaging errors of qjson, now I have created new packages called libqjson0).

Packages are available for openSUSE 11.0, 11.1 and Factory (both for i586 and x86_64 architectures).

One last news: rockmarble has also a new site, something slightly better than github wiki ;)

I’ve written (incomplete) simple plugin for Evolution which provides a combo box + menu for switching folders. Now you can hide the sidebar. This really helps in freeing up some space in your screen and can have good vertical view layout. This would help computers with smaller screen size.

Screenshots :

Sidebar hidden. Small combo box in top left corner

Switching folders

To try out this plugin / For more information :   http://www.johnnyjacob.org/makespace.html .

One other feature that I would like to have is simple folder bookmarks. Bookmarked folders would appear in the top of the menu (You don’t have to navigate all the way down in the menus)

Let me know what you think and if you would like to have any features put it down in the comments.

For quite some time, we had user requests (fate #100386) to provide the logging that would be readable to users (= not only YaST developers). Such logs should provide the information what certain YaST action is really doing to the system and exclude all the internal debug info our y2logs are full of.

Martin and Stano created some concept and added new logging functions y2usernote and y2useritem. These log to the new log file, /var/log/YaST2/y2changes (or $HOME/.y2changes).

The question which is still not resolved is how should we use these functions? Which events our modules produce should provide description as “note” and which should provide “items”? What level of complexity should be presented to user? Should we log the real actions, just like commands passed to system agent or rather the explanations of the actions taken? Or both?

Let’s go to the example. The changes are already in FACTORY version of yast2-users packages (yast2-perl-bindings needed as well), so you may even try yourself.

At first, I started logging actions done in Write function. I deleted one user and renamed another. See:

2009-02-05 15:15:55 <item> rivendell User and Group Management module started
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell File written: ‘/etc/group’
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell User pre-deletion script called: ‘/usr/sbin/userdel-pre.local cc 1003 100 /local/home/cc’
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell File written: ‘/etc/passwd’
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell User ‘aa’ renamed to ‘bb’
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell Home directory moved: ‘/bin/mv /local/home/aa /local/home/bb’
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell File written: ‘/etc/shadow’
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell nscd cache invalidated: ‘/usr/sbin/nscd -i passwd’
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell nscd cache invalidated: ‘/usr/sbin/nscd -i group’
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell Group ‘dialout’ modified
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell Group ‘video’ modified
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell Home directory removed: ‘/bin/rm -rf /local/home/cc’
2009-02-05 15:16:12 <note> rivendell User post-deletion script called: ‘/usr/sbin/userdel-post.local cc 1003 100 /local/home/cc’
2009-02-05 15:16:13 <item> rivendell User and Group Management module finished

Now, it is not bad, but the item “File written: ‘/etc/group'” doesn’t give much detailed info about what was done to that file. Stano proposed printing the diffs of the original and modified one, it could look this way:

2009-02-09 10:05:50 <item> rivendell User and Group Management module started
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell Backup created: ‘/bin/cp /etc/group /etc/group.YaST2save’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell File written: ‘/etc/group’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell Comparing original and new version:
— /etc/group.YaST2save    2009-02-09 11:05:49.000000000 +0100
+++ /etc/group    2009-02-09 11:05:49.000000000 +0100
@@ -8,3 +8,3 @@
daemon:x:2:
-dialout:x:16:bb,hh,linux,zz
+dialout:x:16:aa,hh,linux
disk:x:6:
@@ -45,3 +45,3 @@
vboxusers:!:113:jsuchome
-video:x:33:bb,hh,linux,zz
+video:x:33:aa,hh,linux
wheel:x:10:
`
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell User pre-deletion script called: ‘/usr/sbin/userdel-pre.local zz 1003 100 /local/home/zz’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell Backup created: ‘/bin/cp /etc/passwd /etc/passwd.YaST2save’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell File written: ‘/etc/passwd’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell Comparing original and new version:
— /etc/passwd.YaST2save    2009-02-09 11:05:49.000000000 +0100
+++ /etc/passwd    2009-02-09 11:05:49.000000000 +0100
@@ -28,6 +28,5 @@
wwwrun:x:30:8:WWW daemon apache:/var/lib/wwwrun:/bin/false
-bb:x:1002:100:AAA:/local/home/bb:/bin/bash
+aa:x:1002:100:AAA:/local/home/aa:/bin/bash
hh:x:1000:100:hhh:/local/home/hh:/bin/bash
linux:x:1001:100:linux:/local/home/linux:/bin/bash
-zz:x:1003:100:zz:/local/home/zz:/bin/bash
+::::::
`
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell User ‘bb’ renamed to ‘aa’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell Home directory moved: ‘/bin/mv /local/home/bb /local/home/aa’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell Backup created: ‘/bin/cp /etc/shadow /etc/shadow.YaST2save’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell File written: ‘/etc/shadow’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell nscd cache invalidated: ‘/usr/sbin/nscd -i passwd’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell nscd cache invalidated: ‘/usr/sbin/nscd -i group’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell Group ‘dialout’ modified
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell Group ‘video’ modified
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell Home directory removed: ‘/bin/rm -rf /local/home/zz’
2009-02-09 11:05:49 <note> rivendell User post-deletion script called: ‘/usr/sbin/userdel-post.local zz 1003 100 /local/home/zz’
2009-02-09 11:05:50 <item> rivendell User and Group Management module finished

Here, the user knows more about the real changes, but the log file is getting a bit less readable again… still I think I’d prefer it.

You could see on examples that I don’t really use the advantage of having 2 logging functions. AFAIK Martin’s original proposal was to use items to tell what actions are we going to perform and notes to log the details of such action. This is hardly achievable in yast2-users module (may be better with
others), since at the time of writing we don’t know the “user actions” taken, this is the info which is known when user is clicking in the UI (*). So another idea is to log directly when users is using UI and not at the time of write. See the last example (this is not a full log this time, just part of it):

2009-02-06 15:54:02 <item> rivendell User and Group Management module started
2009-02-06 15:54:11 <note> rivendell (UI info) User ‘bb’ removed from group ‘dialout’
2009-02-06 15:54:11 <note> rivendell (UI info) User ‘aa’ added to group ‘dialout’
2009-02-06 15:54:11 <note> rivendell (UI info) User ‘bb’ removed from group ‘video’
2009-02-06 15:54:11 <note> rivendell (UI info) User ‘aa’ added to group ‘video’
2009-02-06 15:54:11 <note> rivendell (UI info) User ‘bb’ renamed to ‘aa’
2009-02-06 15:54:11 <item> rivendell (UI info) User modified: ‘aa’
2009-02-06 16:03:10 <item> rivendell User and Group Management module finished

I think the last method is getting more talkative and actually is not more helpful.

So – comments? Proposals?

(*) Actually it would need to be cached during the UI-clicking and logged at the time of writing only if user doesn’t cancel the actions.

I was just notified by the ftp admin of gwdg.de (Eberhard), the long time reliable mirror of openSUSE, that he is going to stop the cronjobs at ftp4 which generate the /pub/linux/suse/apt/ contents at ftp4.gwdg.de, and shortly there after the rsync runs which sync it to ftp3 and ftp5 will be disabled.

I would like to thank Eberhard for the reliable service and all the hard work that was performed to generate the apt repositories during all those years!