Entries Tagged 'Free/Libre and Open Source Software' ↓

Mark Shuttleworth names Ubuntu 11.04 (the April, 2011) scheduled release  of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution as “Natty Narwhal” in a pretty poetic piece, where he also passingly alludes to Russia having the only spaceship in service post the shuttle retirement.

And so, we come swiftly to a conclusion: allow me to introduce the Natty Narwhal, our mascot for development work that we expect to deliver as Ubuntu 11.04.

The Narwhal, as an Arctic (and somewhat endangered) animal, is a fitting reminder of the fact that we have only one spaceship that can host all of humanity (trust me, a Soyuz won’t do for the long haul to Alpha Centauri). And Ubuntu is all about bringing the generosity of all contributors in this functional commons of code to the widest possible audience, it’s about treating one another with respect, and it’s about being aware of the complexity and diversity of the ecosystems which feed us, clothe us and keep us healthy. Being a natty narwhal, of course, means we have some obligation to put our best foot forward. First impressions count, lasting impressions count more, so let’s make both and make them favourable.

via Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » N-imal?.

Interestingly, Narhwal pictures seem to be pretty rare on the Internet. Here is a one hosted at National Geographic:

I was searching for some nice free (could be free as in beer or free as in freedom) fonts for my Ubuntu system.

Found a nice set of articles at: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/tag/typography/ and they pointed me to the awesome “The League of Moveable Type”

NavankurIT, a new age IT consulting organisation focused on Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for the Indian Micro, Small and Mediyum Enterprises is looking for young and dynamic students or fresh college graduates as interns for an in-house project. More details are available at http://www.navankurit.in/index.html#internship OR http://bit.ly/aUDIZh

Interesting ad that I saw while browsing Slashdot. I just couldn’t resist juxtaposing the about window of my browser here (needless to say, I am running Firefox 3) :

A challenge to create a low cost “distributed cluster storage system” described as:

• Data server: 2 units (appliances/servers) that each have a 4+ drives in a RAID5 disk set (3 active, 1 hot spare). These 2 units can be active/passive or active/active I don’t care. These two units should mirror each other in in real-time. If 1 unit fails for any reason the other picks up the load and carries on without any delay or hang time on the clients. If a unit fails, when it comes back up, I want the data to be re-synced automatically. Then the unit should “come back on-line” (assuming its normal state is active) after it is synced. It would be even more ideal if the data servers could be 1-N instead of just 1-2.
• Data clients: Each cluster node machine (the clients) in the server farm (CentOS 5.4 OS) will mount 1 or more data partitions (in read/write mode) provided by the data server(s). Multiple clients will mount the same partition at the same time in r/w, so network file locking is needed. If the a server goes down (multiple HD failure, network issue, power supply, etc) the other server takes over 100% of the traffic and the client machines never know.
• Linux CentOS will be used on the cluster nodes.

To re-cap:

• 2 data servers mirroring each other in real time.
• Auto fail over to the working server if one fails (without the clients needing to be restarted, or even being interrupted).
• Auto re-sync of the data if a failed unit comes back on-line, when the sync is done the unit goes active again (assuming its normal state is active).

Article continues to explain what has been tried and the results not achieved …

via Storage Cluster: A Challenge to LJ Staff and Readers | Linux Journal.

It has been a long time since I last posted – more than 3 months. In the interregnum, much water has flowed under the bridge – I have a new old job, having re-joined Yahoo! as a Service Engineering Architect at the Bangalore center, where I am involved with Yahoo!’s Search Advertising business. It is a real pleasure to be back amongst old friends with a lot of freedom to be who you are and do what you want. Being an architect allows one to play with systems and generally freak out.

Soon, after joining I got my MacBook pro replaced with a plain-jane HP laptop, promptly installing the 64-bit build of Karmic Koala and its a breeze. I recently sorted out a problem with  the default DHCP client – dhcp3, that is extremely well-integrated into the networking susbsystem and Network-Manager. I have realised that Network-Manager has come a long way with being able to connect to wireless on boot (without X) and it would be a shame to replace it with the old mechanisms to solve the simple issue of automatically setting the hostname to what DHCP gives out. A search for this turned up many forums which  suggested replacing dhcp3 with dhcpcd, but that might have meant forgoing Network-Manager, something I wasn’t really keen on. Some of these solutions are available at:  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=71587 , the last post of which pointed me to: http://lugwash.org/linux-users/200312/0127.html that I have used as a starting point. There is a bug open about this on Launchpad (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dhcp3/+bug/90388)  which says the following:

This cannot be enabled by default in dhcp client. X becomes very angry if you change the hostname underneath it, so this should only be done at boot time, not when changing the lease at runtime.

Could someone point me to why X gets angry?

So, here is what I did to get the laptop to set the hostname to what the DHCP server provides. The solution is based on the fact that dhcp3 runs certain scripts in the /etc/dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/ directory and consists of writing a small script that resides in that directory. The script follows below. Note the “\]\]” on line 29 (highlighted) – it is to prevent one of the WP plugins from converting that to a Wiki link

#!/bin/bash

# Filename:     /etc/dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/dhcp_set_hostname
# Purpose:      Used by dhclient-script to set the hostname of the system
#               to match the DNS information for the host as provided by
#               DHCP.
# Depends:      dhcp3-client (should be in the base install)
#               hostname (for hostname, again, should be in the base)
#               bind9-host (for host)
#               coreutils (for cut and echo)
#

# To enable this script set the following variable to "yes"
RUN="yes"

if [ "$reason" != BOUND ] && [ "$reason" != RENEW ] \
&& [ "$reason" != REBIND ] && [ "$reason" != REBOOT ]
then
 return
fi

# $new_host_name contains the FQDN. We are only interested in the hostname part. FQDN stuff will be taken care of in the resolv.conf section

if [ "$RUN" = "yes" ]
then
 new_hostname=$(echo $new_host_name | cut -d '.' -f 1 | sed -e 's/\.$//')
 if [ -s /etc/hostname ]
 then
   if \[\[ ${new_hostname} != ${old_hostname} ]]
   then
     hostname $new_hostname
     echo $new_hostname > /etc/hostname
   fi
   else
     hostname $new_hostname
     echo $new_hostname > /etc/hostname
   fi
fi

# And that _should_ just about do it...

Any comments to improve this are most welcome.

for the “Karmic Koala” to show its face.

Interesting article by James Boyle, the William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke Law School and founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain. More about him can be found here.

This article is adapted from his book “The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind” which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.

Here is what he has to say about In Re Bilski,

The case that announced the rule on business methods involved a patent over the process of keeping accounts in a “hub-and-spoke” mutual fund, including multiplying all of the stock holdings of each fund in a family of funds by the respective current share price to get total fund value, then dividing by the number of mutual-fund shares that each customer actually holds to find the balance in their accounts.l As my son observed, “I couldn’t do that until nearly the end of third grade!”

He points out some valuable lessons that could be learnt from the history of Intellectual Property Rights Law as it has been applied to software:

First, we should realize that the mere decision to include a technology within a property regime is only the first in a sequence. As the copyright system showed with software, it is possible to trim protection so as to minimize overreaching. As the business-method patent decisions show us, we don’t always do it.
Second, we should understand that we have some new methods of combining property rights and an open “commons” of raw material. The experience of free and open source software should be studied to see whether it has implications for new technologies. We need all the innovation tools we can get.
Third, we should be mindful of the fact that much depends on the moment in the development of a technology when property rights begin to be rigorously applied. For better or for worse, property rights came fully to software at a point when no one would have thought of claiming the most fundamental building blocks—patenting the idea of a Turing machine or the precepts of Boolean algebra. The basics of the field were there for all to build upon. Will that be true with future technologies?

In particular, he cautions about the evolving field of synthetic biology where

it is quite possible to imagine a perfect storm in which the expansive patent law decisions of the past 20 years do to synthetic biology what they could not do to software—lock up the basic building blocks before the field can develop.

An interesting and balanced article which does more than pay lip service to the idea of Intellectual Property (an idea that Richard Stallman calls a “Seductive Mirage”. Though, IMHO, he is right in cautioning people not to bundle different laws, used for different purposes into one big bucket.

via What Intellectual Property Law Should Learn from Software | September 2009 | Communications of the ACM.

IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are hsoting a 1 day cloud computing workshop for developers. Looks to be good opportunity for people to get their hands dirty with AWS and IBM technologies.

From the event website:

The IBM Development Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) are ready to run in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) with Novell® SuSE Linux and these products:

• DB2
• Informix Dynamic Server
• Lotus Mashup Center
• Lotus Forms Turbo
• WebSphere Portal Server and Lotus Web Content Management Standard Edition
• WebSphere Application Server
• WebSphere eXtreme Scale
• WebSphere sMash

and a pre-requisite is to have a valid credit card

To participate in any of the hands on labs, you must set up an AWS account in advance of the session and sign up for Amazon EC2 at http://aws.amazon.com/ec2. You will be asked for a valid credit card number as part of the registration process.

The AWS services that you consume during the labs will be no cost to you if you use the special coupon code that we provide during the workshop, shut down the virtual servers, and remove any data that you stored in the cloud as part of the lab. We recommend that you shut down the lab resources because any remaining resources will be billed at normal rates after the event.

More details at the event website: http://tinyurl.com/nltoj3

Read about the Apache Mahout project which aims to bring machine learning out of the ether to mere mortals who can use thse techniques to bring more innovation. The origin of the name is also interesting. From the IBM DeveloperWorks article:

A mahout is a person who keeps and drives an elephant. The name Mahout comes from the project’s (sometime) use of Apache Hadoop — which has a yellow elephant as its logo — for scalability and fault tolerance.

The article’s summary says it all:

Once the exclusive domain of academics and corporations with large research budgets, intelligent applications that learn from data and user input are becoming more common. The need for machine-learning techniques like clustering, collaborative filtering, and categorization has never been greater, be it for finding commonalities among large groups of people or automatically tagging large volumes of Web content. The Apache Mahout project aims to make building intelligent applications easier and faster. Mahout co-founder Grant Ingersoll introduces the basic concepts of machine learning and then demonstrates how to use Mahout to cluster documents, make recommendations, and organize content.

More at the IBM dW article: http://tinyurl.com/mv87zy

via Introducing Apache Mahout.