Richard A. Johnson

Oh lord that was corny. Any ways, it isn’t about taking off and landing safely, but it is about saving some of that important Lithium Ion juice while you are in flight. That’s right, I have hacked together a little system tray applet that will allow you to enable or disable the power of your wireless devices such as WiFi and Bluetooth. In the future 3G support will (hopefully) be included as well as function key support, but since we are approaching a Feature Freeze with Karmic, we had to get something in right away, and then work out the kinks before release. At first it was designed to be used with the Kubuntu Netbook Edition which we are planning on providing a preview release for Karmic. Then after working on it, it seemed to work fine for laptops just as well. D’uh, it uses Wireless Tools and BlueZ, so of course it would work.

Right now it has only been tested with Dell hardware. I know for a fact it will not work with the Asus eeePC due to their silly wireless drivers. Because of that, I will probably end up either borrowing code from eee-controls or eee-applet or just using those and porting them for use in this applet.

As this project goes on, and updates are added, I will keep you informed. It will be put in the repos just as soon as it passes its packaging review.

And now for some pics:

KDE Airplane Mode with no devices (Tooltip)

KDE Aiplane Mode with devices (Tooltip)

KDE Airplane Mode with devices (Menu)

KDE Airplane Mode popup to enable/disable airplane mode

Note that this application is buggy and has been known to eat 2 children and the neighbors cat. What you see might not be what you get. There will definitely be some more changes and updates coming to the application as well as the GUI.

Yesterday I did a quick, well not so quick, post on some new tasks concerning Kubuntu QA and Feedback. I created a very crude plasmoid that would connect to a web survey so people could provide feedback during the development cycle. The first revision of this plasmoid had a hardcoded URL to the survey in question. So that meant that for every Alpha or RC release during the cycle, we would have to update the plasmoid with the new survey URL. This would become a pain. So I went forward trying to figure out a way to automagically handle this stuff.

My first initiative was to keep the plasmoid super simple and not have it do a lot of processing and stuff to figure out what to do. So enter PHP. I added a script on the server that the plasmoid will connect to. The only processing the plasmoid has to do is with lsb_release. When used with the flag -d, lsb_release will return only the “Description” of the current release of your system. This can be used to determine if the release is a stable release, or if it is a development release. Here are 2 example outputs to show this:

Stable:

Development:

QUIZ: Can you figure out the names of my computers from the 2 screenshots and how or why I named them? Jono, Jorge, and a few others over there in Michigan and here in Chicago, don’t answer! See if you can do this without Googling

So with the stable version, you can see the last bit in the line is the version number, in this case 9.04. In the development version instead of having the 9.04 it instead has karmic. So which ever value that the plasmoid gets when doing this it sends to the script like this:
http://foo.bar.com/foo.php?ver=9.04
If it is a development release, then it connects with ver=karmic.

Once the script gets that, it then does its magic. It first checks if the $ver is a string or a float. If it is a string, then it takes the string and looks over http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/$ver. It parses the HTML and looks for the latest release under $ver. That then returns whatever the latest release is on the development side only. If $ver is a float, then it parses the HTML of the public survey list and matches up version numbers. Once either of these are complete, the $SID is returned, which is the last part of the URL to the respected survey. Then the PHP script magically redirects the plasmoid to the correct survey.

So with that, I think the Kubuntu Team is in good shape to have this as part of the Alpha 3 release, and possibly even sooner. I would still like to take this beyond a plasmoid and look at creating some sort of application for the desktop that can do everything for everybody, this way here we can pass it around to the rest of the distros so they can use it during their development cycles as well. If you have any ideas, please pass them on, or start hacking on it. I would be willing to lend a hand when the time warrants.

I guess I should start off with some sort of disclaimer. What you are about to read is probably useless, my opinion, not the opinions of Ubuntu and Canonical, and probably not even worth 2 cents.

Who cares? Really? All of this complaining is destructive, interruptive, and really annoying. So now that I have said my 2 cents, let me be destructive, interruptive,a nd really annoying as well as elaborate a bit.

Everyone keeps quoting the Ubuntu Philosophy. That’s great, however there is a flaw to that.

1. Every computer user should have the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees.

You have the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve the software that is provided to you by Ubuntu One. Last I heard the client was open source, has that recently changed? You aren’t getting the backend to the entire thing are you? No. Have you been asked to pay a licensing fee? Besides the insanely amount of $10/month for 10GB of storage, you haven’t been asked to pay a licensing fee. Heck you haven’t even been asked to agree to a EULA!

Our philosophy is reflected in the software we produce and included in our distribution. As a result, the licensing terms of the software we distribute are measured against our philosophy, using the Ubuntu License Policy

Dean this is not a pot shot at you the least bit, as you didn’t start this or weren’t the first to quote this, however you were right up top in the Planet when I started writing this post. This doesn’t pertain to Ubuntu One either, because a) it isn’t being distributed with Ubuntu, and if they do distribute it with Ubuntu in the future, the client that is, this is perfectly valid.

I really like what Dave Morley said about voting with your feet. If you don’t like it, don’t use it, plain and simple. Also, most of the people seem to complain as well that it is a DropBox knock off, and in its current state, you are absolutely correct. But also in its current state it isn’t complete. There will be more offerings from my understanding in the future.

Now here is where I do have a problem, actually it isn’t a problem at all to me, just something I do not understand. The entry price point, it makes absolutely no sense to me. If you release something that is a direct competitor to another product out there already, why do you offer less for more? I always thought the motto should be more for less. In this day in age storage is very important, and remote storage is just as important. The price per petabyte is very important, or in this case the price per gigabyte. If I used Ubuntu One month on a paid plan, I am looking at $1 per gigabyte, if I use it for a year, I am looking at $12 per gigabyte. This is a bit much in my opinion, but I do have a bit of experience when it comes to storage and pricing. Spending the last year of my life working on a distributed storage solution, I had the opportunity to learn the market and the business quite well.

Ok, that’s it, now can we all quit complaining about it and get to work? We are wasting to many cycles, me included, talking about this until we are blue in the face. If you want to be constructive, check out the following:

• Merge-O-Matic
• REVU
• Ubuntu Bugs
• Ubuntu Wire for any dev stuff I may have missed