Planet

Ok my computer is making this really bad sound that means the fan is broken. The sound came and went a few times but its not stopping now. I cant get any work done because I get a headache listening to it. Its a broken fan obviously from the sound but its old anyway and really crap.

Im trying to get things done like changing the interface for updates of the software sources program to the specifications of the design team (which is almost done by the way and is in a branch) and make a quickly vala template (started but not anywhere near done) for this ubuntu release cycle.

Just so people dont think im trying to cod them out of some money heres a video.

Id like to get this computer from zareason. So thats my goal $ 799.00 or € 617 if I cant get that much ill figure something out or just get a different computer for cheaper.

So if you can spare a small bit of money id be really appreciative.

Donate

EDIT: WordPress strikes again it ruined the donate link so I had to do it like any normal link so its fixed now ^
EDIT 2: I fixed some bad writing on my part sorry about that.

To see if mod rewrite is enabled just create a simple php page with the following content

<?php
echo phpinfo();
?>

When you browse to this page you should see mod_rewrite listed as a loaded module.

If not, then you gotta enable mod_rewrite for Apache

sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now you can create a .htaccess file into the root of your site and start adding rewrite rules. Here’s a simple example to make sure rewrites are working

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.google.com/

When you browse to your site, you should now be redirected to Google – if not, don’t fret! There’s one other gotcha you should know about! Look in the configuration file for your site under Apache (eg. /etc/apache2/sites-available/default) and you will see a <directory> element for your site (careful, there could be a few different <directory> elements floating around, be sure to pick the right one). This will have an AllowOverride attribute which is likely set to None. This is the problem – if you want rewrite rules to take effect then AllowOverride should not be set to None. Try changing it to All. And hey presto, you should be good to go!

This thread on Ubuntu’s forums proved invaluable in explaining this.

Why oh why do we always have to be at war about the small things? Technology is such a hard place to be at the moment with many mine fields and cold wars going on for so long. Copyrights, patents, closed source vs open source software and just politics harming development.

Its just business its not personal so its really a war between business and ideals.

So for the first battle is open source vs closed source when you want to make money.
So you open source the code now you have some serious problems with piracy people using the software without paying. So I have to ask how exactly do you make money and keep the code open?

The only code I can think of thats open and makes money is the id software engines that are used in many of the worlds biggest games. The way they do it is they ship older versions as free software and only charge for commercial use of the engines and don’t ship anything that can be used without extra code being written. So then other games a few of them probably are in the repo at the moment use this great engine for free and its awesome that id software do that. The problem is they only ship the older versions of the engines and keep the two newest proprietary and open source them when it gets old. So its only semi open source but still the best example of selling open source software at the moment.

The other side of the coin is the idea of shipping a free product and offer support services around it. This is the Ubuntu model of doing things and is nice but in the sort term doesn’t make money because it requires building a community and a need for those services.

So back to the war how can a multi-billion dollar product succeed if all the code is open for people to exploit?

Patents are a known issue with software development at the moment for companies and community development efforts alike. My opinion on this is that patents for technologies other than software is ok but when people file dumb generalized patents and sit on them is what is wrong at the moment. People are so afraid to write creative code and do cool things with computers because they are so afraid of a patent troll coming in and suing them out of existence.

The last thing id like to rant about is politics. Politics is something that is very funny to me and is something that we have a lot of problems with in the open source movement. In particular Mono has been a big topic over the past few years. Ive had long chats about mono and im guilty of doing some miss informed posts and had great conversations that cleared up some things about the issue for me. The result is that im not against mono because its creation by Microsoft or anything but because it takes up a lot of space on the cd for not many applications. If you want to use mono I don’t mind I think the only thing holding it back is the politics. On a personal level I prefer python or vala for apps that I make.

So what do you all think? Love is a battle field and so is technology. Oh and I haven’t written for a while so hopefully im not too rusty

EDIT: I removed the word piracy because its not really pirating if the code is out there. Its in the spirit of open source to share and use the code. What I meant really here was if you are charging for software in the per copy ideal and you open source the code who will pay for it.
Oh and doctormo made a great blog post at the same time that answers a lot of the issues I bring up about business so have a read here.

I thought I should give a rundown of my 3 favorite mailing lists.

Ubuntu devel discuss there always seems to be some weird stuff discussed here its just one of those lists that gets a good mix of people talking.
Ayatana this is the ubuntu design mailing list and its crazy busy but always interesting.
WHATWG making the web better.

Hehe I finally got updated to wordpress 3 and I made a new look have a look if your interested I did it really quickly. Its just the new default wordpress theme with a few changes.

So this will be the first time theirishpenguin makes it onto Planet KDE! And no better time – blogging straight from the KDE community feast that is Akademy! It’s been a superb week, in the stunning city of Tampere in Finland. It’s Day 6 of the event, a day which has been quite a Ruby-tinted one. First up, I had the pleasure of hacking on Grantlee, a Django-inspired string templating engine in Qt, with Stephen Kelly; adding Ruby support to the code generator example it ships with. Also, after talking to Cornelius Schumacher from OpenSUSE I learned that Ruby’s splashed all over the place – even helping power the OpenSUSE Build Service which allows packages to be easily built for any distro. Cool, eh?

Grantlee’s an interesting project already in use in Akonadi integration and KJots, providing an elegant templating solution. It’s available on gitorious.org in the Grantlee repo. It was good fun hacking on it, particularly useful picking up on some of Stephen’s Ninja skills with git! At least it gives a couple of Irish lads something to do while all the Germans and Spaniards are talking about the World Cup!

The organisation of Akademy 2010 has been top notch, from the welcome packs with all the details you need to get oriented – to the big screen for the footie in the hacker room. This was matched by the friendliness of everyone who turned up to the event and the local Finnish. Even these two fellows had a great time coding…

I feel a duck typing joke coming on. Me too!

There’s been some interesting BoF (Birds of a Feather) sessions, in particular the KDE Bioinformatics session with Luca Beltrame and KDE for Scientists session, again with Luca and also Stuart Jarvis. Some of the ideas raised pushed me to start working on getting ActiveResource support into Qt on Rails, to make hitting remote APIs possible from a Qt client app.

Well it’s 15 minutes to kick off in tonight’s semi-final. If anyone out there wants to talk about anything Ruby, or get a quick demo of Qt on Rails, then feel free to ping me. You can comment to this post or find me on twitter (theirishpenguin).

Last night we went Dutch… Tonight who knows…