Author Archives: Arjen Lentz

Pot Luck at Lentz on most Fridays – starting a new tradition?

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I moved to my current house months ago but hadn’t yet done a house warming… instead of just holding a belated party, I started something different: (almost) every Friday is Pot Luck at Lentz. All the info is at that wiki page.

It’ll build over time as people get used to it happening. With the iCal feed it’s easy to track and see whether it’s on (some Fridays I might have something else to do), and one of the great things is that even I won’t know who might show up. I like that kind of surprise and it creates a nice mix of different people.

For now I’ve mainly invited some locals, but I have friends around Australia and elsewhere in the world – many will sometimes find themselves in Brisbane and of course it’d be fine for them to just drop in!

The one problem I haven’t yet solved is making sure that friends have my address details up-to-date. My electronic, phone and postal details are location-independent but of course my street address is not… how can I convey that to a relatively large number of people safely; yes a mailing list of sorts could work, but it needs to be kept up to date as new people need to be added and some do change their email. Ideas welcome – in the meantime if you do need my address to have on record, just in case you might find yourself in Bris on a Fri in the coming months, just drop me a line. Then, no need to RSVP for the night, just check the iCal beforehand.

Running Ubuntu Linux on MacBook

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Why would I? Well, I have two 13″ MacBooks (one spare, I think I blogged that story earlier) that are essentially my office. I used to travel lots for work, and at the time (around 2004) neither wireless nor suspend worked reliably (or at all) on laptops running Linux. I really didn’t want to be stuck with Windows, so when Apple came out with the 13″ MacBook I convinced my then employer MySQL AB to allow me to get one. They were the perfect size. It solved the problems, and at the command line it’s still a Unix derivative so all familiar tools like ssh just work as expected.

Mac laptops are slick (noticed how many macbooks you see at conferences!), they just works, so essentially I became a “happy captive” of the OSX environment… for a while. Yes it does work better than Windows, but with Steve Jobs and Apple’s attitude towards open development, making software and even hardware obsolete with upgrades, DRM and other nonsense, in the end it’s just another form of annoyance (or evil, as you will).

But how do you get rid of a complete environment, when there’s lots of convenient apps you use, that have your data semi-captive? Think mail, addresses, calendar, photos, music…

Some time ago I already set up a Linux desktop machine (with Ubuntu), and later we shifted my company Open Query to a new mail server (Zimbra) that has a decent web interface – so Mac Mail was no longer necessary either.

I have an iPod nano (gift from years ago) but I can actually just copy MP3s onto the microSD card of my Android phone and play them through my Bluetooth headset… in some ways more convenient than the iPod, so that’s the music taken care of, really.

For photos I’m looking at Google’s Picasa, as it has apps for OSX and Linux as well and can export photos and metadata from iPhoto; it can also publish albums online which I sometimes do (I’ve used Flickr which is not so convenient as it’s only online, and Facebook is just a nuisance I’ll cover in a separate blog some time soon). Also Picasa merely indexes photos, rather than importing them into its own system under magic names. So it’s useful but doesn’t lock in like iPhoto does.

So with all those things just progressing over time, I still had another problem to solve: I don’t just want to toss out lots of perfectly functional hardware and purchase a new laptop to run Linux on. Running Linux in a virtual machine is not an option, too much speed and RAM gets lost that way. The “obvious” solution would be to run Linux straight on the MacBook hardware, but that path has had many hurdles. I do have it working now on my spare laptop (alongside OSX) and while there are still some minor glitches, I have to say it works pretty darn well. Again, thanks to a lot of dedicated developers!

Making my TV work better with MythBuntu builds

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My TV is actually a PC behind the scenes, running the MythTV on Ubuntu Linux. It records the programs I have selected to record, figuring out when they are on from an automatically updated electronic guide.
I hardly ever watch live TV and have no idea when programs are actually broadcast… don’t see ads either as MythTV detects and skips them. I can even add a recording rule remotely while I’m travelling – if I find out about a certain program I’d like to see later. I don’t watch that much these days, but at least with this at TV can be useful again.

The box can also play DVDs, and one problem there is the stupid copy protection that get put on them – mind you, these are DVDs I bought and thus have the right to play in my home. Inevitably the copy protection breaks the DVD standard in some way, requiring playing software to figure out what the blazes is going on this week.
Disney is particularly good at it, although frankly they should be ashamed of themselves for causing so much hassle, and frankly grief to children.

Some months ago I bought some collectors’ DVDs of the Muppet Show (Kermit turned 50yo! ;-) and I watched some with Phoebe. Naturally, she loved it! The DVD menus weren’t working perfectly at the time but enough so that we could watch. Then a software upgrade (which was necessary for other reasons) made it no longer work at all. Suck. Phoebe sad, but not nearly as much as my crankyness against Disney.

Of course, Disney is no match for the open source community, there are so many capable developers out there that will just solve such problems quickly. I’ve added a special respository (software update source) to my Ubuntu setup, so that it now grabs the very latest fixes of MythTV in a particular version. The info is at http://www.mythbuntu.org/auto-builds and setup is a breeze.

The additional advantage is that I can have the same packages on other machines even if they are running a different version of Ubuntu Linux. This is handy because MythTV is a client-server system. You don’t have to watch programs on the machine where they were recorded or received, it can stream them over the local network.

Good stuff. Thank you, Mythbuntu & MythTV developers!

OtherSkills lightning session at OSDC 2010

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The Open Source Developers’ Conference 2010 will take place November 24-26 in Melbourne. Registration is cheap-as, just $250 for the whole conf and that includes lunches and the conference dinner!

I was lucky to get several items accepted in the program, covering a few of my diverse interests. One I’d like to specifically draw your attention is called OtherSkills lightning session:

Many OSDC attendees have other skills and hobbies, some vastly different from how we mainly know them. There are gardeners, cooks, bee keepers, brewers, photographers, divers, mushroom growers, chemists – so far only the electronics tinkerers have made it in to talks… but given this fabulously eclectic group of people is gathered in one spot anyway, let’s have the great speakers talk about “something else” too.
It’ll be inspiring, as creativity always flows beyond strict topic boundaries… we can learn from anything, as long as the talk is good (just think about TED talks to see a fab example of that).

This session will be run in lightning format, with many speakers each max 4-5 minutes.

Are you coming to OSDC and could speak on OtherSkills, please let me know!

Introducing People’s Forum – Australia

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There’s a lot of great debate on Australian political topics, with many gems of insight. But much of it is getting lost, or just available to a very limited audience. Why? Because

  • Twitter is highly transient; you can search, but it becomes harder as you go back further in time. It’s not suitable as an archive, nor as a place for engaged discussion;
  • Facebook comment threads are limited to the page or group-of-friends;
  • Online newspaper articles allow comments, but require a separate signup/login which is tedious. Also it makes for a very scattered discussion, when a topic gets discussed on various sites.

With great help from Peter Lieverdink and James Purser, I have set up People’s Forum – Australia. Using Open Source tools this took mere days. It accepts quick Twitter, Facebook and OpenID logins as well as having the ability to interact further with the big social networks. But it’s not dependent on or restricted to them, and I think that’s very important.

Ages ago I wrote that social networking is a great tool, but cannot optimally be restricted to one site or infrastructure. Hoarding the social graph is silly. The social network can be open and used everywhere, with broad benefits. Interestingly, the technology to do this is now available – and that’s what we’ve used. So the site is also a little experiment to see how this works in practice. Some examples:

  • To reply to a forum topic, you can simply click one of the buttons on the right to login with your Twitter or Facebook account; easy as! Or OpenID, for the more tech-savvy.
  • When posting (starting a new forum topic), the system allows you to also post a link to your own Twitter stream.
  • You can easily invite friends to join the forum.
  • Posts have “Share” (on FB) and “Tweet this” buttons, but that’s very common on other sites already.

We’ll see how this develops further. I reckon there’s no better way to figure out and develop ideas further than to put them live and let them meet the real world. It just requires a suitable opportunity – with the tools readily available, actually putting something out there –quickly– is actually the easy part!

Today is Software Freedom Day 2010, celebrating free/open software through many events around the world. I offer the People’s Forum site as my contribution, a practical showcase.