Archive for the ‘geeky escapades’ Category

PackageKit presentation

Friday, March 20th, 2009

On Wednesday we had the pleasure of Richard Hughes joining us at Hursley to talk about PackageKit. I’ve heard of it but never quite bothered finding out any more than the name but having gone to the presentation I’m pretty glad. PackageKit is (yet another) attempt at making software updating/installation easier on Linux. There are many existing tools for this already but PackageKit seems to be particularly interesting because it’s not actually trying to replace anything; it works with and makes use of the existing tools whilst providing some real value on top. Below is a very quick summary of Richard’s presentation.

Existing stuff

  • Good packaging formats
  • Depency solvers, downloaders and UIs bolted on
  • Can’t have automatic updates (needs password authentication)
  • Can’t use fast-user switching (lock out install applications/databases)
  • Errors/warnings in English only and really confusing to average user
  • Installation is done by package names not application names (many to many relationships)
  • Can power down during update – bit dangerous!

PackageKit implementation

  • The ‘glue’
  • Integrates with existing tools (including dependency mangement etc)
  • Improves authentication (uses PolicyKit – fine grained control)
  • System activited daemon (only running when you need it)
  • Only need to write simple integration between tools and PackageKit (doesn’t even need to be complete and done for most tools already) plus thin UI
  • Uses DBUS (two layers – one for full control, one “just do it”)
  • Applications can integrate directly (e.g. install clipart from openoffice)
  • Installation/update by application not package (users know what it is they’re installing!)
  • Doesn’t allow shutdown during installs

PackageKit project

  • Easy to contribute (git with anonymous access – merged to release daily)
  • Rapid development (roughly one minor release per month)
  • Shipped with Fedora 9 (and others)
  • Strong interest from OpenMOKO, Ubuntu (and others)

I’ve installed an old-ish release on my Ubuntu machine (straight from the repositories) and it looks pretty good. Definitely gonna pay attention to this project, it looks like a big step in the right direction.

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Am I online?

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

I’ve recently changed my broadband provider and wondered how reliable they’d be. I figured I needed a way for my house to let me know whenever the connection had dropped and for how long for etc. Remembering my post a little while ago about
publishing to Twitter about local Bluetooth devices, I thought I could do something similar. So now I’ve written a little script (twitter-netcheck) that notices whenever my internet connection is dropped and then publishes to Twitter whenever it comes back. It also sends me a direct message so I get alerted by SMS or IM immediately. Quite handy I think – try it out for yourself

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Tweetjects and Bluetooth

Friday, March 7th, 2008

Andy Stanford-Clark recently got a few people together to talk about blogjects and tweetjects after getting his house to tweet about the various goings-on there. That inspired me to think about what I could do with Twitter and remembered a while ago I’d created a little script that polled for nearby Bluetooth devices and published them via MQTT. So as a good distraction from work I thought I might integrate this with Twitter and so we now have a little python script that lets my laptop publish details of any bluetooth devices it sees appear and disappear. So what’s the use of this then? Probably very little but it might be interesting to hook it up in my flat and see who goes in and out of there…

[Update]
I failed to find the time to set this up as a proper project somewhere but here’s the scripts in case anyone wanted to make use of the application:

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Passwords passwords passwords… again

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

Since the big password changeover of 2008 I’ve noticed a couple of minor problems:

  1. My passwords are completely unmemorable and stored in a specific location. This makes it difficult to use one of my accounts on another machine (e.g. phone, Wii, internet cafe) without planning in advance. It also means I have to backup the store somewhere (and preferably a couple of places).
  2. To access my passwords on my machine I have to have a password to login to the operating system and then another to unlock the password store. These will have to be memorable so I don’t get locked out and hence will most likely be the same as my brain can’t cope with much. Either that or I write them down somewhere.

One option to solve this would be to use an online password store (a quick search seems to reveal quite a few). Firstly, I can’t use these for work and secondly how can I trust them myself? Thoughts? Suggestions? How does everyone else solve this problem? Or is it just me worrying too much…

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Leave me alone!

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Ok, I’ve realised that I am being bothered so much that I can no longer be productive. By friends or colleagues? No, all my own doing unfortunately. Throughout the day I am constantly interrupted with important information such as a new work email, a new personal email, a new blog post, etc etc. The amount of things I had automatically checking and notifiying me was a bit large. Suddenly inspiration hits with a little help from Merlin Mann over at 43 Folders.

So last week I took the plunge. I turned off automatic mail checking in Lotus Notes for my work email, uninstalled my mail notifier for my personal mail and kept my feed readers closed (Liferea for internal feeds behind the firewall and Google Reader for everything else). I made sure all my RSS feeds were split up into categories so I could process them more efficiently (blogs in priorities 1 to 4 plus some extra feeds separately such as comments on this blog or on my Flickr photos, twitter updates of interest etc. I also customized some of my feeds such as Twitter using Feed Rinse. This allowed me to filter the feed so that I only show updates from particular people, and only those that are @replies to me etc – I really don’t need to make sure I miss every single tweet from everyone I follow!

So now with this new setup in place I’m trying to only check my mail and feeds once in the morning, once in the afternoon and maybe once before I leave the office. If I happen to be at the computer in the evening or weekend then I can check my personal stuff if I feel the need. I certainly feel more in control and I haven’t seen a problem with it yet – if anyone expects an immediate reply to an email, they should contact me by phone or instant message! We’ll see how this goes…

For anyone that’s interested, I highly recommend watching Merlin’s recent MacWorld presentation on ‘Attention Sinks & Time Burglars‘. I’d also recommend any of his other presentations, particularly Inbox Zero.

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Passwords passwords passwords

Saturday, February 16th, 2008

In the past I’ve taken the very secure approach to passwords by having the same one for everything. As I have to change most of my passwords for work every 90 days I even had trouble remembering that one password so I made sure it was a recognisable word (usually something childish and inappropriate that would make me laugh such as ‘pooping’) and threw a number in the middle somewhere so the checkers wouldn’t block it. I’ve since (i.e. today) seen the error of my ways and decided this really isn’t good enough, particularly for someone who works in the IT industry and really should just know better.

I figured that with my special memory even improving this technique very slightly would leave me in the dark so I decided I’d need a tool to help me. Given that I’ll be using a tool, I decided I may as well go the whole hog and have a different, auto-generated and complex password for everything. Then I found Revelation, a password manager for the GNOME desktop. It seems to be a really neat little app that can store, generate and quality check passwords. It even has a handy little tray applet for quickly copying a particular password into your clipboard and other useful bits and pieces.

Of course the major drawback to this approach is that if I lose the file containing my passwords I’m screwed. So now I have something else to backup. This might seem like a bad thing but actually it meant that I improved my current backup process too. That’s even less interesting that this post so I won’t go into any details :)

Having said and done all this, I’m sure that even if all my passwords are the same, no-one would ever find out one and then try it in a million different systems. But man would I look like a prize idiot if they did – so just in case I’ll stick with it.

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Back again

Monday, January 21st, 2008

Ok, I’m sure no-one actually noticed but this blog is back in action after well over a week. Apparently my host had some major issues and struggled to get everything up and running again – that’s the price you pay for having a free host! Ah well, this is hardly life-critical…

I would have moved it to another server but apart expecting it to be solved quicker than that, typically it occurred while I’m investigating the best backup mechanisms for Wordpress. Apparently any backup process would have been better than the one I used :)

One good thing did come out of it though – when working out the best way of redirecting domains etc I discovered a great service from EditDNS. They allow free nameserver management of your domain(s), including all sorts of things such as SRV records. Very handy so that’s a recommendation from me.

P.S. Apologies if you already received this entry – I had to enter it again as my database was overwritten. Reliable service huh?

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Christmas fun

Monday, December 31st, 2007

Ok, so I got a bit bored at some point over Christmas and decided to play with one of my presents – a USB Rocket Launcher.

The first difficulty was getting it to run on my Linux laptop as the drivers were only for Windows. A quick search and Scott Weston sorted me out. Then I thought it should really be controlled by more than just the keyboard so I hooked it into the Thinkpad accelerometer – now movements of the laptop could direct it. Finally, as I knew Andy Stanford-Clark would be a bit disappointed in me if I hadn’t, I MQTT‘d it so that the accelerometer details are published to a broker, a bridge app subscribes to that info and (where appropriate) publishes commands which are received by a final subscriber that actually sends the commands to the rocket launcher. This way you can easily swap out the accelerometer or indeed rocket launcher for something completely different.

I feel quite pleased with myself and slightly ashamed at the same time.

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Web 2.gareth

Monday, December 31st, 2007

Ok, so given that I enjoy working with Web technologies and I’m interested in many of the Web 2.0 (or whatever you want to call it) ideas, I’ve been trying to get more involved. After trying to use Flickr a bit more socially, playing around with Twitter and even starting a blog, I realised I’ve never even bought a domain name. So now I have. This blog is now to be found at blog.garethj.com so please update your links (including the new feed by feedburner) as I’ll be removing the wordpress.com one at some point soon. I might have splashed out on a new domain but I’m still cheap so it’s being hosted for free. That may change if it all falls apart! Or I could host it myself at home…

I also thought while I’m at it I’d play around a bit more so I’ve setup a couple of subdomains, one for my little slug machine at home and playpen.garethj.com as a place for playing around with a few things (nothing useful to see here yet though).

My mail is now handled by Google Apps so I can have email addresses such as somecompany@garethj.com for any website/company I sign up to to see where spam might originate from. I might end up with problems as Roo did so I’ll probably end up manually add these company names to my filters and let the rest fall into the spam folder. Or see how Google manages it first – they might do alright!

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