INdT recently published a link to the Canola Theme Maker on the Canola website

This service allows *anyone* to create (and publish if they would like to) a theme for Canola. All you need to do is read the guide (PDF), create your images,zip them up and upload them to the site. The service then handles the creation of the Debian package and offers a choice of Creative Commons licenses should you want your new theme to be submitted for inclusion on the gallery. The resulting .deb can be downloaded and installed on any Maemo powered device

The site was conceived by handful, the UI was designed by giselle, the CSS written by hugo and I did the Django and the Python work (based on a prototype made by Eduardo Fleury). It was really great working as a team and web work really lends itself to working in a distributed manner (in this case between Manaus and Recife)

The Ubuntu Golden Theme written by Marcello Mendes (rapadura) from Debian Amazonas is already in the gallery for you to download!.It is licensed under CC ATTRIBUTION NON-COMMERCIAL (by-nc)

Enjoy!

I have just spent a couple of weeks on holiday back
in the UK seeing my family which was great after so
long away.

One thing I did not miss however was the weather.
I spent the first four days with a headache due to the
cold and I seemed to suffer more this time or at least
take more time to adjust.

As the January weather continues to bring misery to
everyone there it is always nice to come back in
Brazil and start to think about the year ahead.

A personal goal is to try to remember as much as
possible from my youth playing rugby so that I can
try to translate some of the wiley old pack leader tricks
I used to use to my new role as a scrum master @ INdT
My recollections mostly involve pinching, poking eyes
and biting so I am not sure they will be too appropriate
as a tactic but never discount anything :)

The start of a new year also is great because it means
there will be another Bossa Conference coming around
soon.

This year it will happen again on March 8 -11 in the

beautiful North East of Brazil

with the focus definitely on QT, Gnome and the 'plumbing'  of a distro.

The guys organizing this years event have some
great stuff planned so it will be an awesome show for sure.
Highly recommended!

Great to see too that Scott James Remnant from Ubuntu
will be there and I hope he will give us some more insights
into Upstart and the whole 'boot the distro damn fast' memes
which are gaining traction in the Linux world at the moment.

 Interesting times ahead then..so see you there!.

Education used to be an end in itself, not a means. It wasn't about
having a high-paying career. It was about knowing the world, about
having knowledge and wisdom for its own sake. It was, quite bluntly,
the accumulation of useless knowledge by the elite -- those that could
afford to spend time on such things, knowing that useless knowledge has
a way of becoming useful in the most unexpected of ways. How fortunate
we are to live in an age where the accumulation of useless knowledge is
available to so many, and how sad it is that so few take advantage of
it.

So this came from Planet  Debian and it sort of fits with some things that I have been worrying about recently. We need to solve some big problems in the world and urgently  (global warming, population control, cancer etc) but the innovation which I see around is about putting some beeer on a beer wall or BuddyPoking someone with a ninja kick .

Thousands of tons of e-waste – such as discarded PCs, mobile phones and TVs - are dumped in Africa and Asia every year. Some of this waste is exported to Pakistan..

In the Karachi district of Lyari, hundreds of workers, including teenage children, earn their livelihoods by dismantling the electronic scrap and extracting valuable components such as copper to sell.

The photo story below by Robert Knoth reveals what happens to that e-waste and the people who try to scrape a living from it. This is an insight into the personal cost of e-waste.

It is good to know that Nokia is innovating in this area. It does quite well on e-waste issues with a comprehensive take-back programme that spans 85 countries providing almost 5000 collection points for end-of-life mobile phones (it has one of the best take-back programmes in India for example) However, its overall recycling rate of 3-5% is relatively poor and needs to be focused on.

Other pluses for Nokia are that it does very well on toxic chemical issues, launching new models free of PVC since the end of 2005 and aiming to have all new models free of brominated flame retardants and antimony trioxide by the end of 2009. Nokia’s overall energy score is boosted by sourcing 25% of its total energy needs from renewable sources in 2007 and a target to increase use of renewables to 50% by 2010. Nokia also scores top marks (doubled) for all its mobile phone chargers meeting Energy Star and exceeding the Energy Star requirements by 30-90%.

When

Saturday 25th - Sunday 26th October 2008 17:00 - 17:00

Where

'casa do fedoraeiro'

Why

Some of the FUCAPI Linux Lab students joined our local Debian Users Group and one of them, Henry Bilby, posted this a while back

Estou achando um pouco parado o grupo, em questão de contribuição para a comunidade. Minha sugestão é que, seja marcado pelo menos um encontro por mês, em um final de semana (local a ser definido), para desenvolvermos algum projeto parado, retirar bugs do gnome, desenvolvermos nossas próprias idéias

What

Using Python GASP, PyGame and a git repo develop a game. Put a simple QT User Interface onto it and package it for Debian

How

Get a good start by checking out the existing GASP games which give an idea of what is possible

bzr branch lp:gasp-games

Python QT documentation is here and a quick Hello World PyQT app is below

import sys
from qt import *

class HelloButton(QPushButton):

   def __init__(self, *args):
       apply(QPushButton.__init__, (self,) + args)
       self.setText("Hello World")

class HelloWindow(QMainWindow):

   def __init__(self, *args):
       apply(QMainWindow.__init__, (self,) + args)
       self.button=HelloButton(self)
       self.setCentralWidget(self.button)

def main(args):
   app=QApplication(args)
   win=HelloWindow()
   win.show()
   app.connect(app, SIGNAL("lastWindowClosed()"),
               app, SLOT("quit()"))
   app.exec_loop()

if __name__=="__main__":
   main(sys.argv)

Extra Info

If any graphic artists are reading this and are available to help design a UI for the game you are encouraged to come along

Final Note

This is a technical event. This means it is a chance for developers who normally collaborate online to meet up in person to gain creative synergy through peer interaction and source code. It is *not* an install fest or a chance to clear any doubts about whether you want to install Linux on your computer or not. If the internet connection stays up and there are no power failures we should have have a productive event. Thanks

I asked Marcello a.k.a Rapadura to create an Ubuntu Theme for Canola.

He was up for it and set to work with Inkscape, GIMP and Debian.

Check it out The deb is available here

Modern apps are web based but we have no real standardized way to package them. Partly this is because Javascript is still in the 'vote with your feet' stage of standardization but also because of the complexity involved in the client/server exchange (i.e sorry dude, the code runs where again?)
So what best practices do we currently have in Debian?

db-config-common

This package presents a policy and implementation for managing various databases used by applications included in Debian packages. I have just proposed an integration of django evolution into this package. This will allow us to track changes in our Django models over time, and to update the database to reflect those changes.

Javascript Packaging

This is provided in Debian by the package javascript-common and it allows javascript libraries to be installed in

/usr/share/javascript

and makes them automatically available in Apache at

/javascript/${package}/*.js

The Debian Webapps Policy Document

This was first drafted in 2005 and is undergoing revision here @ Debconf.
Web applications should not make any assumption about how the administrator has arranged the file hierarchy on the target machine.

The suggested guidelines for the layout of an application are:

Static and dynamically interpreted content

/usr/share/PACKAGE/www

Dynamically executed content

    A unique subdirectory of either

/usr/lib/cgi-bin/PACKAGE

or

/usr/lib/PACKAGE (architecture-dependant)

or A unique subdirectory of

/usr/share/PACKAGE (architecture-independant)

Application-specific include files

A unique subdirectory of

/usr/share/PACKAGE

Other static data, and helper scripts that don't belong in users' paths

A unique subdirectory of

/usr/share/PACKAGE

Site configuration (settings/passwords)

/etc/PACKAGE

Modifiable and overridable content

A subdirectory of

/etc/PACKAGE

Specific Requirements for Programming Languages

The web application policy divides includable files into two distinct categories:
application-specific and site-wide.

The former includes files not intended for use outside of the particular application in question, and the latter addresses files intended for more general use. As previously mentioned, application-specific include files should exist in a unique subdirectory of /usr/share/PACKAGE. This subdirectory should exist outside of any web-accessible directory, as many security-related problems in poorly written web applications are the direct result of not doing so.

Whilst the Policy Manual has specific requirements for PHP and Perl there is nothing yet for Python. I am currently working on this and it will likely be based closely on the Perl Policy document. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Creating a web application involves HTML, CSS, images and usually some type of dynamic scripting language. Occasionally, one person will fulfill all these roles, however once an application reaches a certain scale, the question arises of how best to divide these skills between the people involved in the project.
It is a fairly common workflow for the programmer to be given some mock ups from the designer or even some HTML/CSS and he/she is then tasked with implementing the site functionality. Another question then arises of how the designer can best structure this HTML/CSS for the workflow of the programmer.
Django has a philosophy of loose coupling between objects and this is applied equally to the HTML output. To achieve this Django uses the concept of template inheritance. Template inheritance allows you to build a base 'skeleton' template that contains all the common elements of the site and defines blocks that child templates can override. This means you can literally design an entire site by creating only one HTML file. For example look at the maemo site:

I spent some time today talking with Junichi Uekawa about how he runs Japanese TV on Debian (the same technology is used in Brazil for digital TV) and the solution seems to be some buggy driver on the MonsterTV HDTV card which we maybe can hack to make work.
 
I also talked some with Joachim Breitner about his work with Debian on the OpenMoko Neo phone. There is a repository which contains the packages until they are included in Debian proper, both for armel and desktop architectures. Add these apt lines:

deb http://pkg-fso.alioth.debian.org/debian unstable main
deb-src http://pkg-fso.alioth.debian.org/debian unstable main

A merge of this repository, Debian experimental and Debian unstable can be used for debootstrap as follows.

Please note that this is a hack and might not work properly

 cdebootstrap --allow-unauthenticated -d sid /mnt/target http://people.debian.org/~nomeata/pkg-fso

You may need to activate experimental in your sources.list

The packages in this repo include:

• zhone: The demo UI
• zhone-session: Init scripts to start zhone on system start.
• frameworkd: System daemon providing most phone features via dbus. 
  
• gsm0710muxd: GSM multiplexer daemon

I arrived at Manaus airport feeling pretty groggy after I fell asleep listening to some old Bossa Nova music on the radio. I was also *still* feeling the effects of some virus I picked up last week which was unfortunately just like Malaria (thankfully this time however without the hallucinations).

After waiting (and waiting) in the queue to check in, when I arrived at the counter I saw that they were writing the tickets out by hand. Apparently the system was 'in maintenance' although this could just have meant that it had crashed given the amount of head shaking and so on which was going on and it left me feeling a bit nervous about the flight to be honest.

The chaos with the airlines in South America shows no signs of improvement and so all the Brazilian flights into Buenos Aires were delayed. This was OK though. Me and Bdale stood around holding a Debian sign and waited for the rest of the developers to show up. We got talking about his hobby of rocket flying and apparently he has launched one up to 14,000 feet which is pretty impressive I reckon. His latest project will use a different fuel mixture based in part on sugar and he hopes he can get to 18000 feet. Good luck with that.

After Uncle Steve's excellent keynote speech (I found out that all of Debian Lenny will be available on a single Blue Ray disk!!) I bumped into Jacob at lunch. The conversation inevitably moved onto Tor and anonymity online and told me about a book that he is reading. Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier by Julian Assange is about the WANK worm crisis in NASA.

Next to the RTM worm, WANK is the most famous worm in the history of computer networks. And it is the first major worm bearing a political message, in this case against nuclear power (WORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR KILLERS).It was a worm that attacked DEC VMS computers over the DECnet in 1989 and written into the source code were instructions not to propagate in DEC area 48 which is New Zealand (at that time New Zealand was a nuclear free zone). It also greeted NASA's Galileo flight engineers with the words "You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war." as they logged in. (Galileo controversially used 24 kg of plutonium as an energy source)
With WANK, life imitated art, since the term computer 'worm' came from John Brunner's sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider, which is about a politically motivated worm.

Can't wait for tomorrow!