I went to linux.conf.au this week, and learnt about some pretty awesome tech (as well as hearing some entertaining, inspiring, touching and terrifying talks from the likes of Paul Fenwick, Bruce Perens, Karen Sandler and Jacob Appelbaum).

So here’s a quick dump of cool projects I learnt about, with links where I could find them.

browser id:

Openid is not so great, due to:

• usability / confusion (requiring a url as an id)
• reliability (if your provider goes down, you can’t log in)
• lock in, (hard for the user to migrate providers)
• privacy (your provider knows every url you log into, every time)

Browserid serves one simple purpose: to prove you own an email. It’s distributed. The browser, (not a third-party server) is the login intermediary.

As an example: The login process to gmail generates a shortlived (in the order of hours or maybe days, I guess) cryptographically signed statement that you own that email, which your browser stores. Other sites just need to grab gmail’s public key and then they can themselves verify that the assertion you sent them proves you own (or can log in to) you@example.com.

Demo site: myfavoritebeer.org

Not awesome yet: There’s no browser or email provider support. But it’s developed by mozilla, has scaffolding in js to work already in all browsers. Certs are stored on browserid.org for now, until browsers implement native support (so they are just as bad as a server intermediary, but only as a stopgap).

mediastreams processing api:

Very cool demos, which are online (although they require a dev build of firefox).

css calc()

Computation in css. Very cool. There are implementations in IE and Firefox so far, and work on webkit is in progress. This is not just a convenience like SASS and friends - it allows for previously impossible mixing of units like 100% - 10px.

News on arbitrary metadata in git:

Apparently many people feel this is important for VCS interop (git-svn, fastimport, etc), and there are proposals for adding support (but it’s difficult to figure out how to do right in a way that won’t prohibit other useful things in the future).

openstack

Uses orchestra by ubuntu for deployments.

gerrit for code review. Use Jenkins plugins, pushes state notifications to launchpad. openstack wrote a patch submission tool: git-review. Rebases & pushes patchset to gerrit.

testing ctdb

Autocluster is a tool for testing clustered samba (and other things, presumably). Virtual kvm based clusters. Uses guestfish to manage volumes inside the kvm guests.

dbench for automated performance tests. Can describe any kind of IO workload.

Assessing the potential impact of package updates

Tools for spelunking package relationships (on debian at least):

• Recursive depends, reverse depends, apt-cache, germinate.

misc projects / pointers

sozi is an inkscape plugin for chopping up vectors into slide presentations.

fossil scm is a VCS that tracks docs, wikis, bugs, etc in with the source code. Cool idea, apparently some bad implementation decisions though.

safe-rm: replaces rm and has a blacklist of folders you probably don’t really want to remove, such as /usr/. No more bumblebeeing (can’t find the link, but there was once a bug in the bumblebee uninstall script that removed all of /usr as root).

handbag makes android accessory dev easy(er)

libvirt-sandbox: new library and command-line tools for app-level sandboxing with LCX and/or KVM. Should be coming in Fedora 17.

Vsualisation: gapminder.org

freedombox: 100% free tiny personal server project. Uses all open-source & federated social software like diaspora, buddycloud

instamorph: malleable plastic that’s solid at room temperature, for making ad-hoc hooks, connectors, docks, etc. The aussie equivalent is apparently called “Polymorph”.

Today I released the first version of shellshape, a tiling window manager plugin for gnome-shell. It’s definitely pre-alpha software, and currently requires a custom fork of the mutter window manager. I’ve had some trouble getting it running due to awful packaging things (I now know far too much about dynamic linking path resolution on linux), but it should work, at least on Fedora 15. Please give it a go if you use gnome-shell - and if not, there’s more information and a demo video at the above link.

It’s got a long way to go - there are certainly bugs, and some features aren’t done right yet. But it works, and that’s pretty exciting to me after working towards it on and off for about four months.

I recently moved from Ubuntu to Fedora. It seemed like the right time for it. I just got a new computer, so I’d have to do a fresh install of something anyway. And on the day that my computer arrived, the Fedora 15 beta was released. Perhaps it was meant to be?

In gnome-shell (and in contrast to Ubuntu), notifications are persistent by default - they don’t go away until you dismiss them.

I have been using notify-send for some time to pop up quick messages that do not need to stick around, so I’m happy to have found how you can make individual notifications transient. If you want to make a transient notify-send message, you can do the following:

notify-send --hint=int:transient:1 [standard-arguments ...]

I’ve created a notify-send script in my ~/bin directory that sets this by default, although that depends on you having added ~/bin before /usr/bin in your $PATH

The official gvim icon (left) is showing its age. The palette seems to be from the days of 256color, there is no anti-aliasing to speak of in many variants, and it’s just generally bland. I have found a few more modern variants, most notably the tango version, but none of them looked terribly great to me.

So I set out to create a more modern rendering of the classic logo. I exchanged the round serifs for a round diamond, added some psuedo-3d shading, gradients and shadows. All in all I’m quite pleased with how it’s turned out: 128px / svg

If you’d like to use this for gvim, you should do something like this¹:

mkdir -p ~/.icons
cd ~/.icons
wget http://gfxmonk.net/misc/gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz
tar zxf gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz
rm gvim-icon-gfxmonk.tgz

Then go to your system’s theme selector and pick the “gfxmonk” icon theme.

If all the other (non-gvim) icons have now reverted to the system default and you didn’t want that, you will need to edit ~/.icons/gfxmonk/index.theme and set the inherits value to the name of your preferred icon set².

Note: the svg icon may need the norasi font installed to display properly.

While my main computer is out of action, I’ve been trying beta 2 of ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal). The biggest change in this version is the introduction of unity, but there are also a number of other UI changes. Here are some of the bad bits:

• The new scrollbars break a few interactions that I am rather fond of:
  • Sometimes the grabber is inside the window, sometimes it’s outside.
  • If you scroll up or down by pressing the buttons a few times, and then pause to read, and then try to click the arrow again, it may have disappeared - leading to awfully surprising results.
  • You can’t use the neat trick of middle-clicking anywhere in the scrollbar pane to immediately bring the scrubber there (instead you have to find its current location, then drag it to where you want it to be).
  • If the orange scrubber is taller than the pair of arrows and you want to hit one of the arrows, it remains a moving target until you actually leave the window’s boundary.
  • After scrolling with the mouse wheel, the orange scrubber turns practically invisible, making it impossible to tell how much scrolling remains.
• The new terminal theme makes it really hard to tell which tab is active.
• Whenever I press alt (for example, when starting alt-tab or another keyboard shortcut) I get really distracted by the global menu flashing in and out of my peripheral vision.
• Alt-tab raises windows but does not focus them (bug).
• Focus-follows-mouse (my preferred setting) is incompatible with the new global menu. You can remove the global menu, but that didn’t work for me. For now, I’m having to get used to pressing F10. There’s a proposal to fix the global menu behaviour when using focus-follows-mouse, but nobody seems interested in implementing it.
• There’s no way to make “fullscreen” mean “everything but the dock”, as it does by default for other non-auto-hide docks. I do like the combination of titlebar & top-bar though.

Given my progress on a tiling window manager for gnome-shell (more on that when it’s working, I hope), I may well end up switching to gnome-shell soon. I’ll probably try out fedora 15 in the process, I wonder how much of ubuntu I’ll miss.