Essa versão do Amarok já é mais manipulável, tanto que deixei o meu Amarok com a aparência do Amarok1.5 do KDE3, caso queira fazer o mesmo siga os passos:

Primeiro execute esses dois comandos como usuário em um terminal:

• cd ~/.kde4/share/apps/amarok/playlist_layouts/
• wget http://warever.info/sr/Uploads/bedi.xml

Agora abra o Amarok, e no Menu Principal dele selecione:

• Configurações >> ‘Configurar Amarok’, na tela que abrir marque a opção “Esconder a área de Contexto” e clique em Ok para sair.

Agora, na interface principal do Amarok, procure pela ícone de chave Inglesa que fica embaixo a direita, clique nela e selecione a opção ‘bedi’ Assim que fizer isso o Amarok vai ficar com a aparência da screenshot acima.

Dr. Eugeni

Well, the title says it all . Yep, it is true – after 5 years, 3 journal publications, 7 conference publications and 1 book chapter, I am finally a PhD .

Update: a short description about the nature of the thesis is here

It was a very interesting experience: working out procedures to migrate the mailboxes (from Dovecot on the Linux server and Cyrus on the Mac server to Cyrus on the new server), finding out how to set up one NIC in two different subnets (especially the routing is a little bit tricky), getting all services hooked up to LDAP and managed by GOSA, getting dhcpd to do exactly what we want in a shared-network set up, and much more.

The new server is a HP DL185 G5 with an AMD Opteron quad core CPU and 8 GB of RAM and hosts two KVM virtual machines, one for public services and another one running internal services. You can visit the two websites, which are also hosted on this machine of course, of the concerned research labs:

• Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
• Computational Modeling Lab

Maybe in the not too far away future, I should try to move the services hosted on the underpowered desktop machine running this website, also to a virtual machine…

QT originally developed a GStreamer based backend for use on Linux. This is, for me, the right approach as the GStreamer library seems ideally suited for this. Unfortantely the KDE community didn't really pick up on this and rather than develop and improve the GStreamer backend (which was pretty early stage and could definitely done with improvement), a Xine based backend was created instead. While this works fine for audio decoding, I don't think that this is the right approach longer term, but such is life.

The sad thing is that Pulse support in Xine is not that great right now and causes a lot of problems for people. Improving this support will go a long, long way to gaining better acceptance of PulseAudio by the KDE community.

Speaking of which, this is where the rest of my interest lies - improving KDE integration.

Phonon has a settings GUI that lists various output devices, including those not currently connected, and allows the user to rank the devices in order of preference. These "devices" also include output special output drivers such as  the PulseAudio plugin. Now as pulse is a complete management system, it makes very little sense to include it like any other physical device and order them - when a user uses pulse on their system, they want to use it for everything (of course they may choose not to use pulse at all and that's fine too - even if I wouldn't recommend it!). In Mandriva we've long since patched the settings GUI to detect if the user wants to use pulse and simply hide all the other devices - the user is directed to use pavucontrol to move their streams around. This works OK, but it's clearly not the ultimate solution! Any self respecting KDE zealot would never run pavucontrol (it's a GTK app!) and while my own desktop is a horrible mix of just about every DE under the sun, I appreciate many people want to be "pure"!

So what do I want to see? Well, when it's in use, I'd like to off load pretty much all the handling of audio devices to pulse. It should take care of handling the device preferences and the automatic switching to higher priority devices when they become available and/or are reordered. The routing system in pulse is alreay setup to do a lot of funky things routing wise (like automatically moving music streams to RAOP devices, or VOIP streams to Bluetooth headsets), although a manual priority list is not currently supported. I am aiming to create such support for a priority list in pulse and expose it via a protocol extension. In the Gnome case, it's likely that this priority list either completely masked from the user and the existing routing stuff is used in it's stead, or that said existing routing stuff is evolved to just become a manager for managing the priority list internally. The final design decisions here are not finalised, but there will be some sort of working solution that will present itself!

In the mean time, I've started development on "module-device-manager" which acheives the rather simple goal of remembering all the past and present devices pulse has seen and allow querying of that list. As a neat little side effect, it can be used to edit the descriptions given to devices so for shits and giggles I implemented this renaming support in pavucontrol.

 Here is a quick screenie:

Changing a port on a sink is pretty much the same as changing a card profile - the UI is sucpiciously similar!

Please note, that if your device does not have any ports then you wont see any change in the UI.

[AutoPrereq]

I'm currently in UK for the week-end and this morning my French mobile phone operator (SFR) sent me a wonderful SMS: WAP sessions within European Union are charged 1.20 euros for the first 50kB and then 5 euros per MB. I was so happy to learn that the prices are still crazy...

Then a friend pointed me to this Europe press release. It tells that starting on July 1st, the maximum price in Europe will be €1/MB, then it will decrease to €0.80 in 2010 and to €0.50 in 2011. SFR had not the nice idea to inform me about this price drop (5 times cheaper) which will happen in 34 hours...

This decision also tells that sending SMS in Europe will not be charged more than 0.11€ (before VAT). That explains why SFR was so proud to annouce me one month ago that starting on July 1st they will decrease the price of SMS in Europe from 0.30€ to 0.13 (VAT included).

I hope the 4th mobile license will be given soon and real competition will enter French mobile market, so that we don't need European laws to have reasonable prices (mobile prices in UK are so low compared to France...).

This time we have several improvements, such as:

• support for audit plugins
• more msec auditing checks
• improved auditing logging
• and, of course, bugfixes.

So let me introduce some details about each one of them.

Support for audit plugins

You may remember that msec shipped with Mandriva 2009.1 introduced support for plugins infrastructure (take a look at your /usr/share/msec/plugins/ directory to see some examples). This new msec, which will be shipped with Mandriva 2010, also introduces auditing plugins.

Well, you might be asking what the ..? what is the difference between those plugins?, so let me clarify it a bit.

Msec has two main functionalities:

• Security configuration
• Security auditing

The security configuration is what you configure using msecgui or using security levels – basically, you say what settings should be used on your machine for ssh, user logins, and all kind of system configuration. The security auditing are those background checks that run daily on your machine, to determine what has changed since the last run and let you know about that.

In old msec, this security auditing was performed by security.sh, security_check.sh and diff_check.sh, so we had just three large and complex files with a lot of duplicated code. With new msec version, everything was split to reduce code duplication, improve readability and simplify plugins creation.

Let me show you a sample plugin which checks for changes in system users:

    #!/bin/bash
    # msec: check for changes in local users

    # check if we are run from main script
    if [ -z "$MSEC_TMP" -o -z "$INFOS" -o -z "$SECURITY" -o -z "$DIFF" ]; then
            # variables are set in security.sh and propagated to the subscripts
            echo "Error: this check should be run by the main msec security check!"
            echo "       do not run it directly unless you know what you are doing."
            return 1
    fi

    # files to log the list of today's and yesterday's, and difference between them
    USERS_LIST_TODAY="/var/log/security/users_list.today"
    USERS_LIST_YESTERDAY="/var/log/security/users_list.yesterday"
    USERS_LIST_DIFF="/var/log/security/users_list.diff"

    # update yesterday's list
    if [[ -f ${USERS_LIST_TODAY} ]]; then
        mv ${USERS_LIST_TODAY} ${USERS_LIST_YESTERDAY};
    fi

    # check for changes in users
    if [[ ${CHECK_USERS} == yes ]]; then
        getent passwd | cut -f 1 -d : | sort > ${USERS_LIST_TODAY}
        Diffcheck ${USERS_LIST_TODAY} ${USERS_LIST_YESTERDAY} ${USERS_LIST_DIFF} "local users"
    fi

that’s it. You just drop this file into /usr/share/msec/scripts/01_check_for_users.sh and this check will be executed every time msec security checks are run. The security log will be updated, the diff check mail will be created and mailed (along with all other checks), and it will be working automatically from now on.

More msec auditing checks

A few additional msec auditing checks were added:

• CHECK_FIREWALL — checks for changes in iptables configuration
• CHECK_USERS — checks for changes in local users (most of its code was shown above actually)
• CHECK_GROUPS — checks for changes in local groups
• FIX_OWNER — if unowned files are found on the system, this check gives the opportunity to change their ownership to nobody/nogroup, instead of blindly doing it automatically
• CHECK_RPM_PACKAGES — checks for changes in installed RPM packages
• CHECK_RPM_INTEGRITY — checks all the installed packages for changed files. Both those checks were run before under the CHECK_RPM check, but, as they are quite expensive, these two new checks were introduced instead

If you are using cooker or 2010 alpha, these options will not be added automatically to your /etc/security/msec/security.conf configuration file. The best way to experiment with them is by using msecgui, or running msec -f standard or msec -f secure to install default configuration for standard and secure levels.

Besides those items, I was thinking on an option to check for changes in PAM authentication, check for failed login attempts and support for rkhunter. And, as always, if you have any idea on some other functionality that should be interesting to have in msec, feel free to comment!

Improved auditing logging

The logging format of /var/log/security.log was changed to be compatible with syslog-based logging. This should make it easier for system applications to parse it, and for administrator to examine its contents. Now it is way easier to find information by date, kind of message and check type.

Other ideas

Among other ideas for msec I thought on the following:

• msec supports an arbitrary number of custom security levels, but msecgui only supports two basic ones (standard and secure). It could be nice to have a combobox to select a custom profile..
• gui for TOMOYO security framework, since the AppArmor project looks quite stone-cold dead. This is already a work in progress, so probably I’ll post some update on this later.
• Support for administrator-supplied rules for security and diff checks. For example, to exclude everything matching ‘/var/tmp’ from any kind of checks and reports, or excluding network ports from 3000 to 5000 from open port checks.

Besides that, there is a number of bugfixes (which are going to be backported to 2009.1 shortly).

So msec is definitely is alive and getting better and better. Stay tuned for more news!

has foo => ( is=>'ro', ... );

event frobnize => sub { say $_[0]->foo };

An update on the situation, BTW: I haven’t worked on cleaning up the packages for the driver for F11, as I said I would, because of some later experience with it. For both me and a couple of others who’ve successfully built and got it working, it causes the system to hang solid, quite reliably, about half an hour after you turn it on. Which is a bit of a big problem. With benchmarking, it also seems to be slow even for basic 2D operations, almost as slow as the vesa driver; so it’s not providing much of a benefit besides the RandR 1.2 support for external monitors.

An email I got from within Intel hints that some of the proprietary special sauce is required even for basic 2D acceleration to work right. I can’t find any indication of this in the logs, but it may be that - even though I sucked as much of the proprietary stuff as I could into the packages - I missed some, or it somehow doesn’t quite play right, and hence the 2D acceleration isn’t working. I’m not sure.

So for now I’m just using the vesa driver and sucking it up. Sigh. BTW, through this whole three week UK trip I’ll be doing all my work from the P. So far this is going pretty well, despite the slow graphics!

I got onto this by looking at the Ubuntu debugging procedures page, which is great. We’re looking at improving the Fedora wiki pages on what information to include when reporting bugs on particular components, and it would make sense to just re-use the Ubuntu community’s work here rather than spend time re-do it all ourselves which could more usefully be spent elsewhere. But if I’m right, we can’t.

If anyone knows that I’m wrong here (or can explain why there isn’t a less restrictive license, if I’m right), please do comment. Thanks!

If I learned anything at the Nepomuk workshop it is that too much information is just in my head and nowhere else. I tried to share it by writing API documentation and tutorials and blogs. But it never is enough. So today comes another dump from my brain: Nepomuk tips and tricks, a new chapter in the Nepomuk tutorial series. I hope it helps you to make more of the technologies Nepomuk provides.

• The file was big (a DVD ISO)
• The only way to access it was over a SSH connection
• The only authentication method it supported was public key authentication
• The directory from where the file was downloaded was read-only
• The link was sloooow
• I already had downloaded about 70% of the file

So I started looking for solutions. Most of ideas I found on google suggested using ‘rsync –partial –rsh=ssh‘, and indeed it could work. However, rsync tried to create a temporary file on the server, and, as the directory was read-only, it failed. There probably is some option to make it work, but I don’t have plenty of rsync experience. And this approach just looked to be over complicated.

After a bit of more googling, I found out that curl supported sftp backend. And, after a few minutes trying to figure out how to make it work with public key authentication, I finally figured it out:

curl -C - --pubkey ~/.ssh/key.pub --key ~/.ssh/key \
  sftp://eugeni@somewhere/mnt/.../i586/my_precious_iso.iso \
  -o my_precious_iso.iso

To shorten it up, it is possible to write a simple wrapper function (or a script) for bash:

#!/bin/bash
function scp_resume() {
        URL="$1"
        FILE="$2"
        if [ "a$FILE" == "a" ]; then
                echo "Usage: scp_resume <sftp url> <local target>"
                return 1
        fi
        # the magic
        curl -C - $URL -o $FILE
}

function scp_resume_key() {
        URL="$1"
        FILE="$2"
        KEY="$3"
        if [ "a$FILE" == "a" ]; then
                echo "Usage: scp_resume <sftp url> <local target> <key file name>"
                return 1
        fi
        # the magic
        curl -C - --key $HOME/.ssh/$KEY --pubkey $HOME/.ssh/${KEY}.pub $URL -o $FILE
}

so it did the trick.

The first Nepomuk workshop and the first KDE workshop held in Freiburg ever is over. It was great but short. I could have worked on with these guys for much longer. It was a lot of fun to explain the Nepomuk ideas directly and having people not only listening but also understanding and realizing them.

On Friday we started out slowly. Due to different travel times and also some stupidity from travel agencies and German bus drivers we were only complete at around sixish. To get in the mood I had everyone explain what they wanted to achieve over the weekend or what they thought could be interesting to work on with Nepomuk. The beginning was not easy, at least I feared that we would have trouble to actually getting to work. After all, you do not start to work with Nepomuk just like that. It is too confusing and different for that. But the ideas were very good and the people very interested and eager.

So on Saturday my fears of me not being able to handle it were vanished. I explained about PIMO (just to confuse everyone for real) and showed what I had done with respect to NLP in the Scribo project (Tom already mentioned it in his blog although he confused it with PIMO. No big deal, there are way too many project and technology names to get mixed up). Sebastian Faubel showed his very interesting work on a replacement for the Gnome open and save file dialog. He also uses RDF to store meta data and then based on that decides on a location for the documents in a fixed (not really fixed but based on a template) folder tree. After that coding began.

What did we do?

Well, I did not really code anything. There was no time for that. I was too busy discussing with and helping the others. And they did do cool stuff. Let me start by mentioning my hero of the weekend: Tobias König aka tokoe. He wanted to improve the performance of the Akonadi Nepomuk feeder agents which export contact and email meta data from Akonadi to Nepomuk. He did that by introducing a new fast mode into the nepomuk resource generator. Now he would not be tokoe if he would not have been shocked by the hack that is rcgen. So over the weekend he cleaned it up. He cursed, he sweated, he nearly went mad, but he did it! And since we defined it as a bug fix it is even in 4.3. Great work, Tobias.

Then there was Tom Albers. Now he already blogged about what he did himself. But I will summarize it anyway: he actually dared and integrated the Scribo-based annotation suggestions into Mailody. I will blog about details on that later. But the idea is that the email body is analysed and a plugin system generates possible annotations such as dates, cities, persons, and also possible events that are mentioned in the email. Not only did he integrate it into Mailody, he also found two bugs that would have been showstoppers for the Mandriva Scribo demo yesterday. So thanks a lot, Tom.

Raptor. Now Raptor is a cool project. Raptor sets out to replace or provide an alternative to Kickoff. And their idea for Nepomuk integration is to remember the launches of applications. For starters “only” when an application was launched. This then allows to show more frequently used applications with bigger icons. But it will not stop there. Application launches can be linked to the current context (or the current Plasma activity). I might use KPresenter at work all the time but never at home. Also it would be possible to link files to the application launch that was used to open them. And so on. Alessandro, Francesco, and Lukas quickly understood how to create and ontology and use it in KDE. They now have their dedicated application launch ontology and use it via the Nepomuk libs in Raptor. I hope that the ontology can at some point be made into somewhat of a standard in the desktop ontology project.

Daniel, while normally being an Amarok developer (he did the Nepomuk integration in the GSoC last year), was very eager on making Nepomuk really useful on the basic level. So we discussed handling of removable storage and nicer resource URI design a lot. In the end we decided:

1. All files will have a random URI that never changes.
2. All file systems will be represented in Nepomuk with their mount point and their mount status (Daniel already started working on the service that handles that. Also the tracker guys are working on something similar. Matching the ontologies should be fairly easy as the concepts are the same.)
3. All file URLs will be relative.
4. All files will have a link to their storing file system.

This helps in solving a bunch of problems. Files on removable storages like USB sticks which can be mounted in different places are handled the exact same way as files on local file systems. Moving a file in most cases only means to update one property: the relative URL. Only if the file is moved to another file system that link has to be changed, too. Through the mount state flag on the file system in Nepomuk it is very simple to see if a file is currently available or not. A search client can simply tell the user that they have to mount the file system in question to access the file. I think this is a fine solution and since I tried to design everything without relying on the file resource’s URI being the file’s URL the transition should be fairly simply. A goal for 4.4.

George already blogged about his Nepomuk integration work with Telepathy. What is so great about his work is that he actually uses PIMO in a productive way: one PIMO Person represents one person that can be contacted via Telepathy. And this one pimo:Person has a set of occurrences being the actual contacts like jabber accounts and so on. Thus, if you want to chat with a person you simply click their icon and Telepathy will open one of the available systems, depending on their online status. One could even think of email as a fallback. I find this especially interesting since it so clearly uses the two different layers of information defined via the PIMO ontology: on the lower level we have all the desktop resources like files and emails and jabber accounts and so on. And on a higher level we have all the real world entities like the actual person or a project or a city represented by PIMO concepts. I hope that we will see more integration like this is the future. (I know, I know, I need to write better documentation on this.)

Marcel worked on the Nepomuk integration in Digikam. Since the Digikam team does not want to entirely rely on Nepomuk yet (with it being optional and all) he created a Nepomuk service that keeps the Digikam database and Nepomuk in sync. So rating and tagging your images in Digikam would directly be reflected in Nepomuk and the other way around. Very nice. I hope to see this hitting a stable release soon.

I had hoped to have more time to work with Peter on the meta data display in Dolphin. But sadly that dropped under the table a bit. But I was at least able to show him my crappy formatting rule system I drafted a while back and we cleaned up the display a bit: nicer labels and less useless properties shown.

What did we look like?

What about the future?

I hope that we can do this again soon. I think it was really worth it and am very happy to have done it. Thanks again to all of you. You made this a successful event.

PS: I wanted to blog earlier but first I had to sleep for two days straight. I am too old for this shit! ;)