GNOME and The Cloud

Recently I've read some thoughts on GNOME and its (no) integration with the Internet. Let me throw my 2 cents here:

Please allow user to fill its accounts in 'About Me' dialog. Distros (like Ubuntu) can make a nice wizard. possibly the first time GNOME starts (is installed). It can even simplify the install process a lot. User would fill Name, Password (also default from gnome-keyring) and was allowed to add its on-line accounts (possibly with templates for well known, reccomended and new online services out there).

First time user can benefit in following ways:

• It is logical to edit this kind of information in one place. It will not have to be entered multiple times in various applications. User will be happy.
  

• Gnome can automatically start Piding, Empathy or other IM if user has pre-configured at least one IM account.

• Other applications can pull for this information (Ekiga, DropBox, Firefox Plugins?, Banshee-Last.Fm) and use it whenever appropriate.

• The first time application wants to know about specific account, confirmation dialog for access gnome-keyring data is raised.

I am not a GNOME hacker but is this feasible? I guess store it in the gnome-keyring and write a DBUS service Accounts?

Internet HD TV

I recently bought an HD LCD TV just to find out the only super picture I can get is from the PS3 console. I can't understand why are people buying those TVs, the picture compared to old analog CRT TVs really sucks unless you get and HD signal. In Czech Republic we have a DVB-T (digital broadcasting) already but as it uses MPEG2 compression so the resolution is still the same (or almost the same) as it was for analog broadcasting. Such a resolution has to be so called upscaled (converted, recomputed) and thats where the crappines comes from. Even if your TV does a good job in this, you are still getting low resolution picture. MPEG4 wich might bring HD signal to your TV is only supported on very few channels provided either via Cable TV or Satelite (DVB-S). Most of the people uses DVB-T.

Luckily we have the Internet. I put aside this 'illegal' content, which can be nice, but is too much of effort for me to do it. I rather reccomend Miro. Miro is an Internet TV. Via nice guide it allows you to subcribe to 'channels' (there are over 5000 already!) you are intereted in. Then whenever there is a new content/episode availabe it is automatically downloaded for you to see later. It includes some nice features like automatic expiring of episodes (until you click to keep them) so you do not have to worry about your disk space, rating, sharing and much more.

Miro was here for some time already, but last year it received one million of dollars for development from Mozilla (yep, the same non-profit company that makes sure the Internet is free, open and safe and gives you Firefox) and there is new 2.0 version out there. It supports Mac, Linux and Windows. So head to getmiro.com and test it for you today.

Dealing with bugs in Linux and Windows

This afternoon Eva told me her Firefox crashes about 10 times a day on just bought Lenovo IdeaPad S10. We've checked that updates are enabled and that she is using latest version 3.0.6 and no extra add-ons are installed but nothing helped. In the end we installed a Chrome for a while. Now what to blame? Old Windows Xp running on netbook, mozilla, antivirus? No clue where to start or what to do next.

Contrary, on my Linux machine one super application stopped working. It is called gnome-do and it is unbeliable productivity booster. I worked for about two days without it and my work flow was seriously disrupted. Today I created bug in ubuntu and joined #gnome-do IRC channel on freenode server and got an answer which has solved my problem within few minutes.

You decide which system works better.

1234567890 is here, heureka

Time on UNIX like machines (including Linux) is counted in seconds since midnight January 1st 1970, the moment when time began on the Unix operating system (aka the Unix Epoch).

Today at 00:31:30 CET (23:31:30 UTC) counter showed magnificent number 1234567890 (that happens once in an epoch !) and many hearts of the right geeks have been pleased ;) Congratulations.

Celebrations have taken on many places around the world. Sometimes its the little things I enjoy.

Sunday Linux adventures

Sometimes it does not help how much you prepare ... the system is mighty.

To keep practicing and learning Linux with my friend we are running small business including hosting couple of websites and running about a dozen of virtualized machines. We are actually proud of our solution as we have managed to build kinda interesting infrastructure that runs for years.

If we have any problem with it, the it is usually with hard drives. We now have achieved 222 days without a downtime (I guess our SLA is now much better then London Stock Exchange powered by Microsoft). With this gained confidentiality we decided to upgrade whole SW stack on our infrastructure including major changes (XEN core, Linux Kernels and up-to-date to all services / packages). We decided to clean up everything for the next big thing.

We spent whole Friday and Saturday preparing all the packages and the process for smooth upgrade. On Sunday before lunch, we were ready just for the reboot. I asked my friend to get to site just in case anything goes wrong. In short we ended up at 1:00am on Monday morning. But we learned a lot, all the services have been restored and machines are ready to rock again.

Now follows Linux rant about the problem:

13:00 - Hypervizor complains about being compiled against wrong kernel headers. Solution was to recompile against latest xen headers. That means boot into usable environment using rescue CD. Our system has not CDROM, create usb stick and boot from that.

14:30 - Root partition is not detected. We use otherwise excellent Enterpise Volume Management System ( EVMS ) stack to manage our disks/partitions. But for some reason the root (main) partition was not detected. Too bad, after some help from IRC we reenabled EVMS flag on the partition and it was back online. Ok we can access everything to recompile the XEN.

15:30 - Hypervizor recompiled and is booting but now complains about mismatch with kernel. It turns out, kernel for some reason was compiled without PAE extension. XEN has dropped support for non-pae kernel in 3.1+ series. Took a while to figure out, but we recompiled the kernel with High Memory Support.

16:30 - Hypervisor boots, kernel boots but now init complains it can't switch root partition from RAM to EVMS partition. After some investigation it turns out something is worng with BusyBox (missing switch_root function). Edited initrd manually and used busybox from working initrd.

18:30 - System boots. We now have our main domain ready.

19:00 - 01:00am we spent in an effort to bring the rest of our services back on line. We allso had to recompile kernel for domU machines, modules for our FireWall to include support for iptables and TUN/TAP interface for VPN services, modify udev rules to create persistent rules for network interfaces.

What a learning experience. Anytime I hear a PM saying upgrade process has to be smooth, there has to be 0 downtime I have to laugh. World is not static, so is not development of the packages. The longer you do not touch your system, the more interesting things appears when you try to get it up-2-date. Linux is great.

UPDATE: One day later we probably could avoid the hypervisor booting and save about 5 hours! Everybody is a general after a battle :)

Back to Athens, Greece

Well after my return from Kuwait, I managed to spent some time back in Prague and visit most of the friends I've been neglecting for a long time. With Eva, we bought some furniture and I've spent like a week to put it all together. But at the moment, the kitchen, the bedroom and the bathroom are almost finished. Hurray!



And then the good news came and I packed all my stuff (two kites and few t-shirts) and headed back to Athens to spend nice and warm autumn here. I kinda got used to sun this year (spring in Greece, summer was exceptionally hot in Denmark, then Middle East and now Greece again). Staying in the same flat with Petr Novak. Gotta visit Acropolis this time!

My friend Petr Drobny aka 'drobek' (which means tiny, but Peter is almost 190cm tall) arrived and we went to Paros to catch some wind at Punda. We stayed at SunSet studios (place I can reccommend to everyone). No wind on Friday was not at problem as we rented 150cc quads and it was a lot of fun to ride it around the island.



Rest of the stay was great, wind was up to 20knots and we managed to do some small jumps as well. Only problem was my kite, a local guy who knows how to ride told me: 'This is EVIL kite'. True, if I do not watch it for a second, the beast is already going another direction and I shortly fly-follow. Well as they said Nobile High Performance, turns fast, high power, superior hang time. If only I could say I match those prerequisites. Neverethe less I also tested 2009 Cabrinha Switchblade, this is excellent kite for beginners.



Now back to Athens, working for the customer and occasionally trying to catch some wind at Loutsa. Which is always too strong for me, so the whole point of riding is to get to the open water and then spend like 2 hours trying to get back to starting point. But I will manage!


I'm off to have my first lesson of scuba diving.

Kuwait, Al Kuwait

Ok, few days ago I moved to do some tasks in Kuwait. I flew with Fly Emirates and yey, what an Airline. On 1,35h flight I got served like a king. It was this huge Airbus (no, not the 380), and the food was delicious. Three courses, compare that to sandwich I get on 1.1h flight to Denmark with CSA (I still like CSA a lot though;) ).

First thing I really enjoyed was the TAXI ride from Airport to the hotel. Perhaps it was because I tried to look like I do not care (or better like 'I own the world' - which was btw another advise from my Danish colleagues ! They said, every Arab behaves like that :)) this guy has impressed me. Driving old Ford (but with at least 5.0L engine) we were in 140+Kmh (or was it Mph?) going on the motorway from one lane to another and honking everyone around. What a ride, say WOW!

Al Kuwait city centre from the Marina Mall.

During a day I was mainly working and because the sunset is about 6:30pm most of the pictures were shot at night when I wondered around the city. Hotel was great and I spent a lot of time in this place ;)

Hotel's pool on top floor (23rd).

Most of the week I was starving. Ramadan in Kuwait is a litlle bit more seriously taken (at least when it comes to people just visiting the place) then in UAE. If they catch you drinking or eating during a day (Iftar starts about at 6 pm) you pay fine of 1000 KWD (about 4000$) and you go to jail until end of Ramadan (about three weeks from now). I really tried my best to not to miss my vacation. So the first day I was very happy to see the hotel service to forgot to clean my room. There were some leftovers from the breakfast .)

In the evening I tried to explore the surrounding areas but at the first sight there is just nothing in Al Kuwait. Only a few people wondering around, lot of dust and heat. This is what the Mall looks like at 7PM. At 10PM it got quite crowded.


Yesterday I got little bit of tired of thinking of Al Kuwait as a bad place to live. I asked the people where the locals go, there has to be some markets right? So I went to Souk Mubarakia. And that changed my mind completely. Temperature got down to about 37 degrees at night so it was 'comfy' to walk around in my full cotton trousers.
The whole markets is consisted of hundreds of small streets connected together. Those streets are full of small shops of various kinds. Interestingly same types of shops are close to each other. From spice shops, dates shops, fish market, meat streets to all kind of groceries shops.

Gold district :0 I am not into gold, but this place is magnificent.

Dinning place, I've really enjoyed local fish with rice, Arabic bread, salads, mango juice and Čaj a lot. Eva would be proud of me for the way I cut this fish and got rid of the fishbones (she is the real master in this!). And all this just for 2KWD, I could barely walk after eating here, delicious!

On the streets one can see the REAL cars! In some way the time is ticking slower than other places. What I also found interesting were the people. Very friendly. And you go somewhere, you think there has to be something special because you see crowds of people there and when you get close, you realize they are just standing there. Talking and nothing more.

I even managed to get to the Liberation Tower and everybody told me it is possible to go up and see the city from the top. Well that turned out not to be so true. Anyway it is magnificent construction, tallest in Kuwait. I've enjoyed the markets a lot, bought a lot of junk (like night vision binoculars which of course do not work and zooming 1:1, but don't buy it if it was 3KWD).

Well, time to say good bye to Kuwait. My flight to back to Dubai is in about 4 hours, then transit to Amsterdam and then back to Prague, home sweet home. Full album is here.