Time for an Upgrade

The Ubuntu UK Local Team allocation of CDs arrived yesterday and as usual these are available for free to anyone who wants one in the UK. Just send me an SAE following the procedure here and please please try to put enough postage on it, I get bored of walking to the post office to pay the fine.

If you want several of them to hand out at an event then please get in touch and we can sort that out.

As usual there is one special CD that gets upgraded each release, the one my chickens peck at! They were using Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS before, but today I upgraded them to Ubuntu Server 12.10 the Quantal Qetzal. I think they were pleased at the bird themed code name and they have been getting quite familiar with the command line over the last few months. I tested the retired 12.04 CD and it still works great in a computer after washing the muck off it.

Would you put that in your chicken run?

It might have Long Term Support, but would you put it in your laptop?

OpenERP and Ubuntu Unity Desktop Integration

Ubuntu has been in the news quite a lot recently with the release of version 12.10 including the Amazon shopping lens and next week some game shop thing called Steam is going to be announced. It isn’t all toys and shopping though, some of the new features make a heap of sense for serious business applications too. One really interesting area for me is the webapp integration, this is an extension for Firefox and Chromium that allows stuff running in the web browser to integrate with the Unity desktop in a variety of ways, making the distinction between a web application and a desktop application a bit more blurry – which is a good thing. There is built in integration for an assortment of popular consumer websites like youtube, twitter, facebook etc. but it isn’t limited to these single domain software as a service sites. Any web site or web application can test for the presence of the extension then export it’s menu items, do notifications and other actions.

OpenERP is probably my favourite web application to work on, and this is a typical application you might install to help manage a business, it is a modular framework that covers accountancy, logistics, sales process, project management, manufacturing, HR etc. The web server is largely python based, but as it happens this integration just uses javascript. After you install the module and visit your OpenERP server you should be prompted to allow integration, if you accept this you will get a notification (bubble in the top right of the screen) to say it is activated and from then you can use the alt key to bring up the HUD and type anything you might find in an OpenERP menu somewhere, such as “Invoice”. You don’t have to type all of the word, it will search as you type.

OpenERP Unity Integration

You can grab the code from here and the module as a standard module zip file from here. I am thinking of adding some more features, possibly messaging menu integration and notifications. I might do a separate theme module that is mostly CSS and cosmetically adjusts the user interface to match the unity desktop. Right now most of our customers running OpenERP use it on an Ubuntu server, but use a mixture of Windows and Mac on the desktop, what I want to show with this kind of integration (this is just the start) is that Ubuntu can simply be a better platform for business than other operating systems, especially as things move away from dedicated client applications to web based interfaces.

Camera Control

This is based on a £35 wireless pan and tilt camera, but with a bit of python running on a separate web server to control it. The camera comes with a rather messy user interface, that isn’t tablet/phone friendly but is fairly easy to pick apart and see how it operates by poking a few cgi files on the camera to give it instructions. The camera itself is running Linux (with a bit of a GPL violation as there is no source published as far as I can tell). The mjpeg video stream is direct from the camera and it has a clickable imagemap overlay which chops up the image into 40px squares. Clicking a square requests a simple web service running on a computer close to the camera which starts the camera moving and stops it again after a fraction of a second multiplied by the number of pixels it needs to move. The camera itself has no absolute or relative positioning (not quite true, you can set 8 preset absolute positions), it is just done by careful timing of the start and stop signals.

The camera can move in diagonal directions, it would be nice to get it to smoothly move to a new location smoothly first by panning and tilting, then the rest of the way on one axis. Might be nice to have something round the outside of the image to allow you to move double the distance, at the moment you can move a half frame in one click would be nice to be able to go a whole frame away.

The camera stream has a maximum of 4 concurrent viewers, a few more if I drop the resolution to 320×200. For lots of viewers I would use ffmpeg to reencode from mjpeg to something else on the fly and possibly pass it to a streaming server of some kind, the overlay control should work just as it is over a multicast video stream. In reality, if you are expecting more than a couple of concurrent viewers they are going to argue over control too much.

Source code is on launchpad and I will tidy it up somewhat as time goes by and make it more of a collaborative project (starting with some installation instructions, it uses apache and mod_python at the moment). Please share ideas for features in the comments here.

This is an image from the camera when you loaded this page, click through for the live steerable video

If you can’t see the video, try coming back later, it probably hit the limit of viewers.

The Quantal Quetzal takes flight

Quetzal A week today on the 18th October is the release date of Ubuntu 12.10 the Quantal Quetzal. This release was pitched to be all about quality and from my testing I think the quality has improved quite a lot. If you were thinking of trying Ubuntu with the Unity interface then 12.10 is the release to go for, a lot of niggles have been unniggled and sharp edges smoothed over.

As is traditional with Ubuntu releases there will be a party in London where users, enthusiasts and the Canonical release team get together to consume some adult beverages and generally have a fun evening. This release is no exception to the tradition and you are most welcome to join us at the George Inn from about 7ish (or whenever you can). There is an optional sign up sheet with more details, anyone on the list will probably have a name badge waiting for them (this is based on feedback from previous events).

If you want to get your hands on an official Ubuntu 12.10 DVD we are now taking pre-orders for the UK local team allocation just send in an SAE they will probably arrive around the end of the month or early November.

Rate My Spice Rack

On a bit of a whim I set up http://ratemyspicerack.com as a site for people to share a picture of their spice collection and a list of the contents. It runs WordPress with GD Star Rating, Really Simple Sharing buttons, Simple Lightbox, tweetblender and User Submitted Posts all Free Software and all excellent. There is no way I would have been able to do something as frivolous and silly as this using proprietary software or by writing it myself. Free software lowers the bar to doing interesting, but rather pointless things, and I think the world is a spicier place as a result.

If you have a spice collection that is small or large, minimalist or chaotic, conventional or exotic then please Share your Rack and vote on the racks that other people have shared. Here is mine by the way:

Open Source Software and Security

Back in December the UK Government published their Open Source procurement toolkit (in PDF and ODF formats) which is mostly aimed at the public sector procurement officials, but is of general interest too. One document in particular I would like to pick out and quote verbatim (which I can do under the creative-commons inspired open government license) relates to the myth that the government can’t use Free Software because of security concerns. This is completely and utterly false. Free Software can be put through the certification processes just like closed software, but for most normal applications formal certification makes little difference one way or another as this is not the way solutions are accredited. So here it is, in their own words:

Open Source Software and Security

December 2011
This note, developed in consultation with CESG, highlights some of the key security considerations for the use of open source software in Government, and their implications for procurement practice. It focuses on dispelling common security myths about open source software which prevent a level playing field for its evaluation and use in Government. It is published in recognition that a wider audience wish to understand the UK Government’s position on open source software and security. Public sector customers can obtain further information from CESG in GPG38.

1. Open source, as a category, is no more or less secure than closed proprietary software.

All software, including open source and closed proprietary, will have vulnerabilities. Individual software products, regardless of category, will have strengths and weaknesses in security characteristics such as provenance, quality, support, and vulnerability management. Given the range of vulnerabilities and diversity of exploits, on balance, neither category is considered more or less secure than the other.

2. Therefore, open source software cannot be excluded from an options analysis for Government IT.

Given that no one type of software is inherently more secure than another, neither open source nor closed proprietary software should be excluded from an options analysis for security reasons. It is Government policy for open source software to be evaluated in an options analysis, and for suppliers to provide appropriately detailed evidence of the reasoning behind their selection. It is entirely possible that an open source option is not selected for valid reasons, such as insufficient functional fit, inability to meet performance requirements, or higher cost of ownership due to more expensive security controls. It is important that the same selection criteria are applied to all options. It is also important that requirements are not exaggerated, unnecessarily inflating costs.

3. CESG does not accredit software products. Departments accredit their own ICT solutions.

It is a myth that some software products are “accredited” for use in Government. This is a misunderstanding of the security framework and accreditation process. Departmental accreditation of their own IT solutions is a sophisticated and rigorous process encompassing business benefit, threat and risk assessment, hardware, software, communications, and human factors. CESG does operate assurance schemes through which security enforcing products, both open source and closed proprietary, can be evaluated and certified. Such certification assures the public sector that security enforcing products, such as firewalls and cryptography tools, can mitigate various risks to its information. The large majority of software used to build Government IT solutions does not fall into this category. Furthermore, the risk managed decision whether or not to use such software remains with the Department’s information risk owner.

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