This is the list of talks/presentations I attended on the Sunday of FOSDEM 2012.
Each talk contains a link to its FOSDEM page, where you can find extra links on the topic or the presenter.
Asterisk 10: New Features, New Testing - Matt Jordan
Asterisk 10 added many new features, and includes substantial automated testing.
Asterisk 10 was recently released, and incorporates many new features, including nearly unlimited support for codec formats and sample rates, wideband audio conferencing, and much more. In addition, the Asterisk project team has built a large suite of unit and functional tests that are now run against each Asterisk release.
This talk will cover the major new features of Asterisk 10, and also cover how the Asterisk testsuite is developed and used to improve the code quality of each release.
debtags.debian.net reloaded! - Enrico Zini
I have just finished redesigning the Debtags website, consolidating a 9 years long history of bringing categories to a large and complex distribution like Debian.
There is more to Debtags than meets the eye: interesting library science concepts, anonymous submissions, an efficient review workflow, a fully automated tagging engine, dynamically generated tagging hints, fancy tag search algorithms.
On top of that, there is not much that is Debian-specific in the new codebase, so if you are interested in implementing categories on your distribution of choice, this could give you quite a head start.
From zero to VoIP provider in 15 minutes - Andreas Granig
By using the sip:provider Community Edition, an open source VoIP soft-switch leveraging powerful and widely used open source components, we will in 15 minutes create a VoIP deployment from scratch in order to provide future-proof voice and video communication services, preceded by an introduction into the system architecture.
There are various open source components (e.g. Kamailio, Asterisk, Freeswitch and Sems) available to build a reasonably sized VoIP service from scratch. There are also some administrative web interfaces (e.g. Webmin, Siremis), allowing you to control the most basic things in such a system. And in order to escape the lab stage, you can even put an open source billing engine (e.g. a2billing) into the mix. Since your customers would like to manage their accounts and features, you will then develop a customer self-care interface as well. Time to market: at least two months. Feature set: basic. Service quality: uncertain at best. Future-proof: not.
There is a solution to that though. During this talk, I will present how to deploy a solid VoIP Provider platform from scratch in just a few minutes, using the Sipwise sip:provider CE (SPCE) v2.4. The SPCE is a free and open source soft-switch based on Kamailio, Sems and Asterisk, providing fully featured and seamlessly integrated administrative and customer-self-care web interfaces, SOAP/XMLRPC provisioning APIs, a flexible rating engine and a huge load of subscriber features like conferencing, voicemail, call forwards, block lists etc. On reasonable hardware, the SPCE can serve 50k subscribers and more.
As an introduction, I will outline the basic elements involved in a VoIP deployment. Then I will dive into the architecture of the SPCE, showing the building blocks and their interaction. Finally, I am going to do a live presentation on how to configure an SPCE instance for a typical deployment.
29,000 packages in 24 hours - Releasing Debian - Neil McGovern
This talk is to give an overview of what is involved in releasing Debian. It will cover policy, tools and an insight into what it takes to release the largest linux distribution.
Enhancing FreePBX with Adhearsion - Luca Pradovera
Demonstration of building applications with the Adhearsion voice application development framework.
Many open source hackers see the allure of building applications that integrate with the telephone network. However layers of industry jargon, proprietary technology and arcane knowledge lead many to believe that telephony is “hard.” Adhearsion will change their minds. The Adhearsion project is an open source voice application development framework, the first of its kind in the open source world. In this talk we will build several working voice applications and demonstrate how to integrate them with existing PBX installations. Along the way, we will discuss voice application design and show how to avoid common pitfalls.
A real Skype alternative using standards compliant FLOSS - Emil Ivov
The University of Strasbourg has built a ‘Skype replacement’ for ~60,000 users using open source standards and software.
A few years ago the French Ministry of Education and Research, issued a memo that strongly advised against use of Skype in universities and research centers. Security and excessive bandwidth consumption were among the main concerns.
In practice however, the directive has been rarely applied for one major reason: (perceived) lack of alternatives.
Therefore, in the beginning of 2011, the University of Strasbourg has started an effort that aims to propose an actual Skype alternative to both its faculty and students (~60 000 users). The project started with a number of extensions added to the Jitsi project in order to add support for features such as GTalk interoperability for example.
It then continued with a deployment of the actual network using exclusively FLOSS projects such as Openfire, Jinglenodes, FreeSWITCH/Asterisk, TurnServer and others.
The talk will also cover aspects such as NAT traversal with ICE and JingleNodes, redundancy, security and confidentiality.
PMH: Home Automation made right™ - Vasilis Georgitzikis
PMH is a home automation system built from the ground up to be easy to use, modular and as open as possible. Our software and hardware are completely open source, with source code, schematics and CAD files available online. PMH consists of 3 layers. The hardware layer, the überdust layer and the apps.
In the hardware layer, we use a wireless sensor network with sensor nodes and actuators that communicate with each other using the low-power IEEE 802.15.4 protocol and with a computer that acts as the main controller. The wireless sensor network consists mostly of Arduino nodes which control lighting, heating/air conditioning and electrical devices while at the same time using sensors to measure things like power consumption, temperature, light, movement, air quality etc.
Überdust is responsible to bridge the other two layers by capturing and saving the data from the WSN to a central database, and provide easy to use interfaces (i.e. REST, Web Sockets) to the application layer. This way, applications can get sensor values from the wireless sensor nodes, and control the nodes accordingly.
In the application layer, we have developed a web and smartphone application that gives users the ability to remotely control the system, view the current status of the various sensors and set automated behaviors such as turning on the lights when there are people in the room, sending a notification to the user’s smartphone when someone enters your room, turning on the water boiler on predefined times, etc.
Last but not least, due to the modular and open source nature of our system, its easy to add additional data providers in the hardware layer, such as an arduino with additional sensors, or even your computer and smartphone (i.e. your smartphone’s accelerometer, the status of your server). It’s just as easy to develop your own apps using our APIs, and extend the capabilities of the system to meet your own needs (remote controlled BBQ anyone?)
Debian Secrets - what I wish I knew before joining Debian - Lucas Nussbaum
Debian is usually advertised as a volunteer project with a subtle mix of democracy and do-ocracy. While this is correct, implementation details are mostly undocumented, and it is often difficult for prospective or relatively new contributors to really understand the inner workings of the project.
This talk will detail some useful lessons, and also some secrets about Debian learned over the years. It is hoped that it will be helpful to people willing to get things done in Debian.
Freedom, Out of the Box! - Bdale Garbee
Update on activites at the FreedomBox Foundation
FreedomBox is a personal server running a free software operating system and free applications, designed to create and preserve personal privacy by providing a secure platform upon which federated social networks can be constructed. Eben Moglen articulated the need for FreedomBox in his 2011 FOSDEM keynote, this presentation is a status update on the work done to turn Eben’s vision into reality over the past year. Software for FreedomBox is being assembled by volunteer programmers around the world who believe in Free Software and Free Society, with Bdale coordinating development of a reference implementation on behalf of the non-profit FreedomBox Foundation.
The descriptions of the talks come from the FOSDEM site.
Classé dans fosdem
This is the list of talks/presentations I attended on the Saturday of FOSDEM 2012.
Each talk contains a link to its FOSDEM page, where you can find extra links on the topic or the presenter.
Welcome to FOSDEM 2012
FOSDEM welcome and opening talk.
Free Software: A viable model for Commercial Success - Robert Dewar
This talk will discuss our experience at AdaCore, one of only a handful of 100% Free Software companies. All of our commercial products are licensed under the GPL and other Free Software Licenses. People often assume that there is a conflict between the use of such licenses and the needs of a commercial software company. Our experience at AdaCore shows that on the contrary, the Free Software model can be very successful both for us as a company and for our customers. We think this model can be used in many other circumstances, and want to encourage free software enthusiasts to consider this model in other circumstances.
An introduction to Ada 2005 and Ada 2012 - Jean-Pierre Rosen
Overview of the main features of the Ada language, with special emphasis on those features that make it especially attractive for free software development.
Ada is a feature-rich language, but what really makes Ada stand-out is that the features are nicely integrated towards serving the goals of software engineering. If you prefer to spend your time on designing elegant solutions rather than on low-level debugging, if you think that software should not fail, if you like to build programs from readily available components that you can trust, you should really consider Ada!
Multiarch - why it’s important - Wookey
Multiarch is a properly generic solution to the installation and use of library packages from one than one architecture at a time, which changes the way running non-native binaries and crossbuilding are dealt with in a fundamental way. It is both powerful and intrusive and has taken a long time to make happen.
This talk explains what it is, how it works, and what you can do with it. We will also discuss future adoption by other distros.
Hacking in the real world: photography from above - Guillaume Emont
This talk is about taking pictures from above with a big latex balloon, helium, strings, duct tape and CHDK, and making a nice video with the pictures using python, GStreamer and OpenCV.
Some friends of mine and I got pretty busy last year on a crazy balloon photography project. I want to share that experience, say what worked (helium, CHDK, GStreamer) and what didn’t (crazy kite-balloon ideas, arduino connectivity, and some other things, all due to a lack of time). Hopefully, that would motivate hackers to get out of their basement and go do cool things under the Sun.
FLOSSing for Good Legal Hygiene: Stories from the Trenches - Allison Randal
The legal structures of free software projects go through phases of popularity reminiscent of fashion trends. The early days of free software were decentralized and individualistic, partially inspired by the “free culture” movements of the ’60s. Over time, centralization and incorporated non-profit organizations grew popular, parallel with a period of time where FLOSS was struggling for recognition as a viable alternative to proprietary solutions. As FLOSS crested that wave, and won the recognition of the business world, people began to recognize an over-proliferation of special-purpose foundations, and the conservancies (foundations that host multiple independent projects) came to the fore. In the past year we’ve seen a movement back toward decentralized individualism, questioning the need of any formal legal structures. The fact of the matter is that free software and international law work just fine for a whole gamut of legal structures, from the lone individual hacker to the largest of incorporated entities. It’s a free choice for each project. The important thing is for every project to think through their legal strategy. Not just the “What?” (-license? -contribution policy? -legal documentation?) but “Why?” (-pick option X over option Y? -are we doing this? -do we care?) and “How?” (-can we make this work for us? -will this affect our users and developers?).
Debian packaging for beginners - Lior Kaplan
An introduction for creating Debian packages. The lecture is meant for people who want to package for Debian (or any Debian based distribution) with no prior experience or people during their first steps in packaging.
Programming LEGO MINDSTORMS robots in Ada - José F. Ruiz
This presentation explains and demonstrates how Ada is effectively used to control a Segway-like self-balancing robot.
LEGO MINDSTORMS are affordable and attractive robotics kits that can be used as teaching material, or as funny and interesting hobby. We have used this kit to design a Segway-like robot, where the control system is written in Ada and built with the GNAT compiler. The concurrency and real-time capabilities of the Ada Ravenscar profile are used to implement the dynamic interaction with the physical environment, respecting very stringent timing constraints.
I wrote Distromatch, shall we use it? - Enrico Zini
At the AppInstaller2011 meeting I started writing Distromatch which is able to map binary package names across different distribution using a wide set of euristics.
Distromatch has the potential of being a radical change in cross-distro cooperation, enabling exchange of package screenshots, categories, ratings, reviews and many other interesting kinds of metadata.
Since distromatch has existed for almost a year and (afaik) so far none of this has happened, I am taking advantage of the cross-distro room to show how it works and discuss how to move on from here.
The descriptions of the talks come from the FOSDEM site.
Classé dans fosdem
Classé dans Ubuntu Linux
These are the steps I used to install the Citrix ICA Client (also called “Citrix Receiver for Linux”) on my freshly installed Ubuntu 11.04 box:
First of all, install the following package:
sudo aptitude install libmotif4
Download the latest .tar.gz from Citrix’s website.
Unpack the archive and run the installer:
sudo ./setupwfc
Just use the defaults when responding to the prompts.
Try to run the executable from the command line:
/usr/lib/ICAClient
There should be no error (because we installed libmotif in the first step)
When I tried to open a secured .ica files (behind https) I got this error:
“SSL Error 61: You have not chosen to trust “YYYY”, the issuer of the server’s security certificate.”
In order to fix that, execute the following command:
cp /usr/share/ca-certificates/mozilla/* /usr/lib/ICAClient/keystore/cacerts/
Resources:
Classé dans Citrix, Ubuntu Linux
This blog post pretty much says out loud what I was thinking. Interesting read if you ask me.
Classé dans open-source open opensource
Summary: The character ”+” is valid in email addresses!
This is the content of an email message I sent to United (the airline) about 2 years ago, since i couldn’t create an account using a perfectly valid email address containing a + in it. This has been happening with other sites, so I’m posting it here so that I don’t need to copy/paste it all the time. And if others want to link to it, feel free!
Edit 11/10/2011: Look at this good link resuming the issue around email regexes, with links to the RFC and some nice examples of “weird” email addresses.
================================================================
PLEASE FORWARD TO YOUR TECHNICAL SERVICES
Hi,
I wanted to point you to an error in your forms all over your site. It
is not possible to use email addresses that contain the symbol “+”,
such as toto+united@gmail.com
Please forward this message to your web development team, as what
follows is a technical subject.
A plus is a totally valid symbol in an email address, and is used by
Gmail to provide email address alias:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=12096
Please update your regular expressions so that it accepts email
addresses that contain the symbol “+”.
This should be done (at least) in your regex on
http://www.united.com/ual/asset/err_myprof.js line 937:
var emailRe = /^[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+@([a-zA-Z0-9.-]+.)+[a-zA-Z0-9.-]{2,4}$/.test(chkVal.value);
include a plus in “[a-zA-Z0-9._-]”
It might not seem very important to you, but once you get the habit of
using aliases to filter your mails to different labels (I have just
created a special “United” label to store your emails), having sites
that say “your address is not valid” when it is is really frustrating.
Let me say it once again: “a plus sign in an email address is valid,
so don’t say it’s not!”
Classé dans email email alias alias
This video represents one year of OpenStreetMap edits in 2008. It’s far from being recent news, but I like the visual aspect and this video’s music ;)
Classé dans osm openstreetmap
I am currently preparing what I called a Linux workshop for my techy colleagues at work. I intend it to be an introduction to the world of Linux, but by no means am I pretending to be a Linux guru, I’m just a Linux user at home (unfortunately not at work…)
I am thinking about some quick slides (max 5-10 min) to get the basic information about Linux out. I won’t go too deep into the FLOSS side of things in this session, but I want them to get hands on on the system. I plan to prepare a VM that they will run on their Windows computers to get their first contact with Linux. I originally planned on installing Ubuntu 10.10 in the VMs because that’s what I use at home and am most familiar with, but I recently installed Linux Mint 10, and it’s pretty impressive! I might go with that for their first contact with Linux.
I will update this post with links to resources I can find on the Internet to get this presentation going. Once my presentation is finished, I’ll post a link to it so that others can re-use and improve it. Stay tuned!
Classé dans Linux Ubuntu Work Mint Linux Mint
Yesterday I submitted my first Debian package. The packaged software is Nautilus Image Manipulator, a program I started writing as a Christmas present for my father 3 months ago. It seemed as a good fit for learning how to do Debian packaging.
The package has been submitted to http://mentors.debian.net/ and can be found there. I hope I haven’t messed it up too much ;)
EDIT: Here are some links that were pretty useful to me to understand the packaging process:
Since it’s a Python program, I first created the Distutils package following the Distributing Python Modules.
I then read the Debian New Maintainers’ Guide from A to Z. This document is really full of information, it explains each step very thoroughly. It can seem as if it is a long and complicated process, but that’s because the guide goes really into each detail you need to know.
Also pretty useful to learn about the Debian packaging process from another angle is the Ubuntu PackagingGuide.
I have started compiling the different steps into a document that’s in my project’s version control repository, so that I can build packages in the future without having to read all this information again. It is a work in progress (for example the part about rebuilding a package for a new version using the older package’s ./debian files is not yet written), but it will definitely help me in the future. Here is a link to the latest version of that file!
Hope this can be useful to others that want to get involved with Debian packaging!
Classé dans Debian Nautilus Image Manipulator Linux
