Jacob Peddicord

OLF Day 1: Ubucon

Someone ought to have pictures up shortly as there were plenty of cameras about.

Things I have learned/realized/noticed today:

• Not many people interested in Ubuntu know what a LoCo is
• I should have brought the business cards in today, as everyone was scrambling to write down the LoCo URL
• Jorge's favorite arbitrary number is 56 (I'm probably the only one to have noticed this during his talk...)
• Convention center parking rates change dramatically depending on location. I should have checked the rates before entering the $11 garage and went to the $5 one next to it.
• Our banner, which I picked up this morning, looks awesome. Props to signscolumbus.com for a beautiful printing of a vinyl banner that should last us years, and only cost $25.
• The Chipotle near the convention center is closed on Saturdays, so I didn't go. Fatal flaw: today was Friday.
• Improvised talks seemed more engaging than planned ones -- they flowed based on the thoughts of the audience.
• I can't navigate I-270, even though I've lived pretty close all my life.
• The convention center kills cellphone reception pretty effectively.

I skipped the preparty to go home and get stuff ready for Saturday, but I got distracted by other things anyway. :P

If you're in your comfy Drury/Hyatt/whatever room right now reading this, be sure to stop by the booth tomorrow and say hi! I'll be in the brown "do it with ubuntu" shirt. Pick up a business card to remember to visit the LoCo when you return home. Seriously. We have 2000 of them. :)

I'm fairly tired, but I'm sure tomorrow will be even more exhausting (and awesome). I should probably go to sleep, considering I need to get up in 5 hours.

OLF Registration - Last call!

In under 2 days registration for Ohio LinuxFest will close. I can't stress enough how awesome this event is and how you (yes, you) should register and attend. You can't beat free.

We (Ubuntu Ohio) have printed a bunch of business cards to hand out at the event (any beyond). This will be a little experiment in letting people know about the LoCo. Take a look at them here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpeddicord/4942412165/

(Aside: I'm about had it with Movable Type. Anyone have any ideas for alternative (Python/Django/PHP) blog software? I don't care for WordPress either but I'm willing to give it a shot again.)

SLS introduction

So what is SLS, and how can it be used to change settings? I've talked about it a lot, but what are the practical applications? This 5-minute screencast should give you a general idea: I go through the process of writing a quick SLS XML definition to show it all in action, from a developer point of view.

• Theora, low quality
• YouTube (H.264/WebM), high quality

The complete documentation and reference to SLS is available here and under /usr/share/doc/jobservice. If you're interested at all in using SLS for a service, I highly recommend you check that page out, even if just to skim.

If you maintain or help maintain any system service, be it a media streamer or a web server, do get in touch and we'll see how jobservice and SLS can apply to your service.

Call for testing: jobs-admin

Google Summer of Code ends this week, which indirectly means that jobs-admin is now ready for testing! Interested testers need only to add a PPA and install a package to begin. Within a few days the packages will be available in maverick universe.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jpeddicord/jobs
sudo apt-get install jobs-admin

Essentially, jobs-admin is a replacement for services-admin. Upstart support has been added, along with the ability to change settings on individual services. For example, you can tweak simple firewall settings or enable and disable Apport.

jobs-admin may be launched from the terminal, or can be found under System > Administration > System Jobs. We've hidden most jobs/services that are essential to your system, so ideally you shouldn't be able to break anything even if you wanted to. With that in mind, feel free to give it all a stress test. Shut off jobs you don't want, and change the settings of others. By testing this you'll also be testing jobservice, the daemon which powers it all. Think of jobservice as a "PackageKit" for system services: it's a generic backend to manage jobs no matter whether a system is running Upstart or a basic System V setup.

Bugs can be reported on Launchpad:

http://bugs.launchpad.net/jobsadmin

We're also open for translating:

• - for most UI elements
• - for job settings

Any and all feedback is welcome. We'll have a bugfix release in the next few weeks. I won't be responding to reports or feedback until August 16 (Monday), however.

For Maverick, you'll be able to install jobs-admin and have easy access to your system's services. The PPA will be maintained so Lucid users aren't left out. We're hoping to make this the de-facto utility (and framework) for managing services and jobs, and hopefully you'll see this in-place as the replacement for the missed services-admin in 11.04. I'll be working on getting these packages into Debian as well.

Sneaky Songs

I'm going on vacation (OBX!) in a week, and figured I should probably update my music player (a Sansa Fuze) for the 12-hour ride there. I've had most of it sync'd for a while, but then I noticed that a few songs were missing ReplayGain tags. Oh no! (ReplayGain ensures everything plays at the same volume so your ears don't bleed when switching songs.)

So, there were a few options:

1. Erase the player and re-sync 3.5 GB of songs.
2. rsync the changed songs after adding ReplayGain tags
3. Find which songs on the player were missing ReplayGain tags

The first option isn't very nice on the flash memory, and I figured there was a smarter way to go about things.

The second would have been viable if Banshee hadn't been updating playcount tags in the files, so almost everything had changed anyway.

So I dove into the third. Installed tagtool and started dumping some files. Those with ReplayGain had "REPLAYGAIN" in the output. Easy enough. It took some time, but I came up with the following command:

find . -name "*.ogg" -print -exec sh -c "tagtool --dump \"{}\" | grep -L REPLAYGAIN" \;

It looks through all ogg files (might work for MP3 too), sends them to tagtool, and then checks the output for a lack of "REPLAYGAIN" in which case it prints "(standard input)" after the filename.

So I ran this, sent it to a file, and scanned it for "standard input." Found about 20 songs. Deleted them off of the player, had Banshee re-sync, and things were back to being awesome.

Now I know what you're saying: "Why not just use Banshee's search bar?" Yes, Banshee's search is quite powerful, but unfortunately you cannot yet search by raw tag or replaygain.

/me scurries off to bugzilla

*Edit: Bug 624000. Nice number!*