SquareCows

If you got spotify installed under wine in Linux it may annoy you that you can’t open spotify url’s from just any application. The howto spotify provides works for firefox but not for chrome or pidgin etc etc.

So here is how to make all your apps (at least in gnome) open spotify url’s.

First of all create the browser2spotify script that’s going to be called when you click on a spotify link, don’t forget to make it executable!

echo ‘#!/bin/sh’ > ~/.browser2spotify
echo ‘exec wine “C:\Program Files\Spotify\spotify.exe” /uri “$@”‘ >> ~/.browser2spotify
chmod 755 ~/.browser2spotify

Now let’s associate spotify URL with the open script by editing gconf. Change USERNAME for your account login name

gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/spotify/command “/home/USERNAME/.browser2spotify”
gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/spotify/needs_terminal false -t bool
gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/spotify/enabled true -t bool

You should now be set and ready to roll.

SVN is now up and running again. ApacheMap and MonoBackup are on google code:

ApacheMap: https://code.google.com/p/apachegeomap/source/checkout

Mono-backup: https://code.google.com/p/m0n0-backup/source/checkout

wp-rdfa and wp-dephorm are hosted by wordpress:

wp-rdfa: http://svn.wp-plugins.org/wp-rdfa/

wp-dephorm: http://svn.wp-plugins.org/wp-dephorm/

Feel free to download alter and suggest changes again.

I’m doing some work on the dev server here at SquareCows to improve performance. This however means the local SVN is not currently working. I’m planning to migrate all the SVN repositories over to google code and will be pushing lots of new software patches at the same time. Hopefully I’ll get some time over the holidays to do this. For those of you interested in what I’m doing with the server I’m trialling lighttpd to see what kind of performance boost can be achieved.

I’ve just confirmed wp-RDFa and wp-dephorm are both compatible with WordPress 2.9-RC1. So your free to test the new release without breaking your semantic web presence or leaving your readers vulnerable to the prying eyes of phorm.

If you spot any problems just drop me a mail via the contact form and I’ll look into it.

Here’s a little file to drop into your cowsay to get your very own Square Cow!

If you dont have cowsay installed:

apt-get install cowsay (on any debian/ubuntu system)

Then copy this file you can download to

sudo cp sqcow.cow /usr/share/cowsay/cows/

then simply run:

cowsay -f /usr/share/cowsay/cows/sqcow.cow YOUR-MESSAGE

Your very own SquareCow!

Enjoy!

Canonical has just announced Landscape 1.4. This allows you to manage and monitor groups of servers in your business. They also now offer a dedicated landscape server for inside your organisation. <original here>

Cloud management dominates the theme for Landscape 1.4 with new features that allow you to manage your private Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) as easily as you manage your instances on Amazon EC2. Also released are new features that help system administrators be more efficient including time based package updates and role based access. These new features will be available this week on both the Hosted and Dedicated Server Editions of Landscape.

Cloud Computing: UEC Support

Building upon our support for Amazon’s EC2 Cloud, users can now start, stop and manage their private Ubuntu instances on their UEC from within Landscape. Users simply enter their credentials directly through Landscape to start, stop and manage an instance. We’ve designed Landscape to work directly with both Amazon and Eucalyptus console pages so you can manage your instances without having to use any other tools. Landscape securely stores your security credentials making is easy to spin up new instances on UEC or EC2 at anytime. Once the instances are initiated, they all display on the same page allowing you manage all your physical, virtuali and Cloud instances in one place.

New Timed Package Updates

Users can now schedule package updates, system reboots and shutdowns in the future with minute increments. This gives System Administrators the flexibility to schedule activities for systems to occur during planned maintenance windows or low use periods to minimise the impact on the network. Now that we have developed the time / scheduling function, look for us to add this to other areas of Landscape where it it makes sense, like scheduling scripts in the future.

Administrator Roles

As Landscape is deployed in larger enterprises the need to delegate and limit access to systems has become a key need. Now, in addition to having a master admin who can manage all systems within a Landscape account, you can delegate access to systems to other administrators. This builds on our tags function (which allows you to tag computers performing the same function and update them with a single command) to allocate full access to systems by admin. Typically this means sys admins in different areas can be given full access to their local systems, but not to those in another area or country. Like tags, assigning systems to other administrators is completely flexible so you can use what ever criteria you need.

The Landscape 1.4 client is available today and is included with Ubuntu 9.10 server edition. Details are at www.canonical.com/landscape

Ken Drachnik, Landscape Manager

Well worth a look!

Why open data?

Why should you use open data on your site? Data is what drives commerce on the internet, its also what helps us all search and find what we are looking for. Finding relevant data presented to in a useful way to your needs is however becoming harder due to the shear volume of data on the internet. This is why open data and open standards are gathering support from such organisations as w3c. Open data has the potential to solve many problems of finding and sharing information on the web for both humans and machines.

Linked and Open Data!

Open Data is a philosophy and practice requiring that certain data is freely available to everyone, without restrictions from copyrights, patents or other mechanisms of control. It has a similar ethos to a number of other “Open” movements and communities such as open source. However open data on its own needs a framework to make that data useful. This is know as the semantic web, or as Tim Berners-Lee puts it “next web”. Linked data and the semantic is a way of using data in which the semantics of information and services on the web is defined, making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of humans and machines to use the web content. In layman’s terms its a way using the web as a universal medium for data, information and knowledge exchange.

The Purpose of Semantic Data.

Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Finnish word for “monkey”, reserving a library book, and searching for a low price for a DVD. However, a computer cannot accomplish the same tasks without human direction because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so that they can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, sharing, and combining information on the web.

Gains from Linked and Open Data.

Opening your data and using standards can bring significant gains to usefulness of the data you are already publishing on your web site. The data is already there but in human form, using mark-up designed to be interpreted by computers frees that data for use in other applications or mash-ups. The main concern of most organisations will be “Why should I give this data away? Isn’t it worth money?”. The main answer is your already giving this data away but only for humans! Allowing computers and programs to analyse this data can open up your data to new concepts and ideas and ultimately new revenue streams. For example you product data may get included in a new application for a mobile phone platform, or the data on your website could be used to plot events happening in the local area on Google maps. There are of course thousands more examples and potentially millions of people who could use your data in new and exciting ways. The possibilities are endless, and open data allows development of the way your business works without huge investments in R&D teams. Your data could be used in ways you’ve never imagined. Because this data is linked it will also allow people to find out further information about the data set, because it can all be analysed by machines, this could lead to new markets finding your products via other data sets and that can mean new customers!

How to share your data?

There are multiple ways to share your data and depending upon your data set this can influence your choice. The wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web provides more in depth technical information should you wish to learn more. Using RDF and N-Triples is an incredibly powerful way of parsing your data however if your looking for details on humans the FOAF vocabulary may be the correct method for you. The data can either be embedded in the HTML of your site or accessed via RESTful API using SPARQL or XML. Of course you can use a multitude of methods and link the data sets together making the data you already own far more useful on the “next web”. At the very least I recommend that people start to look at this technology and keep an eye on developments.

Further Reading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

http://4store.org

I’ve started work on creating some debian/ubuntu packages of Garlik’s 4store RDF database, currently there is source and soon there will be some RPM’s, so I thought I’d help bring  .deb’s to the party. The guys from Garlik are very helpful and can be contacted in #4store on freenode. According to their site:

4store was designed by Steve Harris and developed at Garlik to underpin their Semantic Web applications. It has been providing the base platform for around 3 years. At times holding and running queries over databases of 15GT, supporting a Web application used by thousands of people.

I’m looking at this product to build the core of system that will help create a scalable, repeatable, easy to use data store system. The idea behind this is to help organisations achieve the goal of opening their data. @johnlsheridan stated that open source is the perfect system for promoting and achieving the goal of open data and open standards, all three go hand in hand. My aim is to remove the “black magic” currently involved in setting up some of these systems and help people free their data easily, which should benefit us all in the long run.

4store has some very interesting features such as the ability of nodes to clustering database nodes for scalability. It also has a SPARQL http server which provides a RESTful API. The fact that all the data can be accessed by a URI means this data is cacheable, which in turn means you can scale this system very easily with proxies and load balancers. The beauty of the system though is that none of these extra features are a requirement, so if your a small organisation with a moderate amount of data you don’t need to break the bank to do it.

Why free your data?

Well data is key for communication and the traditional business model is to guard your data and protect it. However the internet generation is here, and they’re changing the world! As soon as you put your data in a open standard anyone can use it. Using linked data means that someone looking for information about a certain item can find your data easier and more importantly can be interpreted by machines easily which improves search algorithms. If this item searched for is a product it may get you a sale. If the item is data about health it might even save a life. Data is diverse and so is its uses, when you open your data people may find a new way of using it and progress is made. Opening your data allows people create mashups and pull in data from a multitude of sources, giving a accurate and informative view on the requested subject matter. Open source, open data and open standards if embraced by enough people will help everyone move forward. I’ve only skimmed the surface of what these systems can be used for and trying to describe the importance of open data is incredibly difficult because data can be anything! If you want to know more I’d suggest looking at these TED speaches:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

and an excellent example of open data in use:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_you_ve_ever_seen.html

Recently I’ve been asked to convert a few Windows Machines to Ubuntu after some spectacular failures in the MS operating system. The main problem with converting people to Ubuntu or any flavour of Linux is iTunes! Apple and Linux are both trying to take on Windows in the market and as Windows is the biggest user base for desktop users iTunes is often used as a way to give Windows users their first *Mac Experience*, hoping that more and more people will convert to their platform. This approach seems to be working as Apple grows in the desktop usage charts. Linux on the other hand is a very small market and its users, so far, have shown no interest in switching their distro to OSX. So this is why Apple haven’t spent lots of money and released a Linux version of iTunes. However we still love our music, and one of the best players (IMHO) on the market is still the iPod. Because open source users are a resourceful bunch it wasn’t long before they started work on a integrated media player and portable music device manager. Enter the Banshee!

Installation

On Ubuntu install is very easy, by either using synaptic or the command line:

sudo apt-get install banshee

It really is that simple to get started.

Importing Music

Banshee will either let you import CD’s, current mp3′/ogg’s etc on your hard drive or there is a VERY VERY handy feature. On plugging in your iPod your presented with a screen that may or may not report that banshee can not read your library. This is to do with the fact apple keep changing their library format which tells your about all the details of the song your playing. However all is not lost, by clicking convert my library you’ll instantly be granted access to all your songs and can just drag and drop them into your local library!

Album Art

The version of Banshee I installed on Ubuntu shipped with the album art plugin. Automatically on importing tunes to your library banshee will go and find artwork for your tunes.

Purchasing Music

Banshee doesn’t offer a built in music store like iTunes does so purchasing music has to be done via separate programs. There are several alternatives on offer now and many download the music straight into your Music directory. All you have to do then is tell Banshee to import the music and your ready to go. I would however recommend using a DRM Free music service such as amazon MP3.

Video and Podcasts

Yes you can even subscribe to podcasts via banshee however you’ll need to find the url of the podcast via firefox and paste the details into banshee which doesn’t have a iTunes style store for such things. Banshee will also play a hole plethora of video formats so you could even use it to manage your video library.

Overall view

I’m a big banshee fan however I’d love to see work for more devices being ploughed into the project. Whilst iPods and creative xen’s etc etc etc we are still missing some support for newer iPod’s like the touchs. Hopefully the power of open source will come up with a solution soon. Using banshee beats the pants off running iTunes in wine performance wise and to me this far out ways any losses you may loose in functionality. It you really want to go the whole hog with open source and your music collection check out the rockbox project which is an open source firmware for your portable music player.

What can I say apart from I’m very impressed with Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Netbook Remix. I found the whole experience far better than 8.10 which left me with sound card driver bugs and strange display errors. All of these were all fixable and easy enough to do but I want my Ubuntu to work out the box, and Jaunty seems to have delivered this!

Installation.

Installation was incredibly easy. I downloaded the netbook remix usb image from:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook

I had a 1gb USB pen drive handy and copied the image onto that using the dd command.

dd bs=1M if=<IMAGE-NAME>.img of=/dev/<USB DEVICE>

There are easier ways to install the image to usb disk and instructions can be found here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromImgFiles

Its then a simple case of booting your netbook from USB and following the instructions. Basically its a set of multiple choice questions asking about time zone’s, keyboard lay out and the such. If your not familiar with installing Linux, make the sensible choices for language and keyboard and leave the rest as default.

Now I’m lucky enough to have one of the supported models, in this case a Dell Mini 9. Everything worked out of the box, graphics, sound, webcam, wifi, card reader and bluetooth. I was very impressed that there was zero tinkering to be done.

The only tinkering I did was to choose EXT4 for the file system as I wanted to give this a go and see if there were any speed improvements, over the standard install of EXT3. You can choose this by selecting advanced on the disk partitioner.

Running.

Now there has been a lot of hype about how quickly Ubuntu 9.04 boots and especially when you use EXT4 as your file system. I must admit I was slightly sceptical. However I was pleasantly surprised! I’m seeing boot times of around 19-20 seconds which is pretty amazing and lets you boot up at a whim quickly, which is great for using your netbook quickly whilst on the move.

The user interface is pretty different from a normal Linux desktop and your presented with a nice control panel that allows you quick access to everything installed either by using the small track pad or keyboard strokes. Apart from the nice GUI with easily accessible icons you get the usual run of tools, openoffice.org, firefox, evolution mail etc etc, which gives you basically everything you need for a mobile office. You also get cheese the new gnome application which uses the inbuilt webcam to take and apply effects to pictures of yourself. I did install a couple of extra media components in the form of vlc in order to watch some xvid encoded videos on the train.

sudo apt-get install vlc

Everything had a real slick finish to it and Jaunty is looking very polished. I was VERY impressed when I plugged in a USB 3G card this was instantly recognised. All I had to do was tell it my mobile/cell network provider and I was connected within 2 or 3 clicks. Having used this same dongle on Windows and Mac, Ubuntu beats the easy of use by 10 fold.

I then chose to install dropbox which is a third party piece of software not available via apt-get. Dropbox allows you to have a online web drive which adds some extra space to your netbook. I just have the free 2GB account, which for me is more than enough. You can download it here:

http://www.getdropbox.com

I’d also suggest opening up firefox and visiting your normal sites to make sure you have all the installed plugging you need whilst your on a connection at home rather than trying to pulled down flash over a 3G network.

Improvements?

One thing that I felt was missing is an easy way to switch between netbook desktop and traditional desktop. This feature would be great, and I fully admit may already be there but I couldn’t see how to do it easily. I’d find this feature really useful especially when plugging the netbook into an external monitor and keyboard, in order to use as a traditional desktop.

Round up.

Just try it for yourself! Hopefully you’ll be as pleased as me. If you do have problems hop onto the ubuntu forums and I’m sure people will be more than happy to help.