Unix Howto

Leading me down the garden path today, how to quickly display an XML document … graphically, from the command line?
This doesn’t work:
$ virt-inspector –xml RHEL54.img | firefox -

Creating a temporary file is possible, but ugly.
Then I was tipped off that you can create and pass a data: URI to Firefox.
There is no existing command line tool to generate data URIs, but we can write one in 3 lines of shell script:
#!/bin/sh -
echo -n data:$1\;
uuencode -m notused | tail -n +2 | tr -d ‘\n’

Example:
$ cat > /tmp/test.html
<b>Hello,</b>
<i>world!</i>
$ datauri text/html < /tmp/test.html
data:text/html;PGI+SGVsbG8sPC9iPgo8aT53b3JsZCE8L2k+Cg======

This also doesn’t work. There are two problems: the XML generated by virt-inspector is too long for a data URI, and in any case Firefox seems to ignore the data URI although I’m sure I’m constructing it correctly. Maybe it’s a security or configuration issue?
Well, good idea, but let’s go back to the temporary file idea. Bash process substitution might have worked:
$ firefox <(virt-inspector –xml RHEL54.img)

but Firefox’s frankly stupid session management crap gets in the way because this command expands to something like:
$ firefox /proc/self/fd/123

and the new firefox process passes the non-portable /proc/self path to the currently running instance of Firefox which doesn’t have the same view of /proc/self.
So we are finally left with:
$ firefox $(f=`mktemp -u`;
virt-inspector –xml RHEL54.img > $f.xml;
echo $f.xml)

which is fugly and unsafe.
If only there was a less insane tool to display XML, but being XML I guess insane goes with the territory.


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Okay, lets see. In the last week, I’ve sold my house, added a healthy baby boy to our family, had our first choice house fall through, had our second choice house fall through, and finally, bought a house. Oh yeah, and the Bruins broke their losing streak. :)Pam did an excellent writeup about the baby’s birth, so if you’re interested, please go read it here: Pam&aposs Baby Birth StoryIf you just want to look at baby pics, go here: http://spot.fedorapeople.org/baby/While we were in labor on Monday, our Arlington condo was being shown, and the person decided they wanted to buy it and put an offer in. After a little back and forth, we got to a final offer, which we accepted. The only catch was that now we needed to find suitable housing to move to. We’ve been looking for 2 months now, so we had our short list narrowed down. We put in an offer on our first choice, which was an estate sale. It was a smallish house on 2 acres of beautiful land, we had already started planning out how we would expand and improve the house over time and where Pam would plant her garden. The house was priced very high, but the realtor assured us that it would never re-appraise for that value, so we put in a lower price offer. We assumed that they would provide a counter offer, but they refused! They were unwilling to move from the price at all. Our realtor strongly recommended that we not even consider paying their asking price. In fact, the seller’s broker got so fed up with this decision that he dropped the listing entirely. Apparently, the sellers saw what the town had tax appraised the property for a few years back and intended to get exactly that much out of it and not a penny less. This was very sad, because the MLS listing had “MAKE AN OFFER!” as its first line.Pam and I moved on to our second choice, but we wanted to go out and walk through it one more time to make sure, so we scheduled to go out with our realtor this past weekend. Our realtor was out of town, but her backup agreed to make the arrangements… but then she called us back to tell us that our second choice had gone under agreement the day before! Again, we’d gotten our hopes up, and now we really didn’t know what to do. We did have a few more houses on our short-list, but they were honestly, not ideal for what we wanted. The backup realtor pointed out a new house that had just come on the market in Ayer, and encouraged us to go and check it out. It looked good on the MLS listing, but we’d been fooled before.On Super Bowl Sunday, Pam, Baby Jimmy (we haven’t decided exactly what we’re calling the baby yet, James/Jim/Jimmy, so I’m trying nicknames out), Pam’s parents (who flew down to help us out with the baby), and me all got into the car and went to see the house in Ayer, and wouldn’t you know, it was just great! It had the space we wanted, nice high ceilings and wide hallways and a very open layout. There are a few places where it needs some work, the kitchen really needs to be redone and expanded, the finished office in the basement is a bit of a DYI job and it shows, but there is space to expand/fix it. Also, because it is in Ayer, there is no FIOS yet (the town website says it will be coming to Ayer in 6 months). But, we can have chickens (with permit)! It has an awesome yard with lots of gardening space and wooded areas. The lot backs up to protected land that the town owns that isn’t buildable. The house is in a lovely little neighborhood, so Jimmy will have lots of other kids to play with when he gets older. I wanted to check out one other house that we hadn’t yet seen, so we went to go look at it, but it had severe water damage, so I didn’t get much past the front room before I knew it wasn’t right. We headed back to the realty to meet our regular realtor (who was back in town) and we put in an offer on the Ayer house. During the Super Bowl, we went back and forth with counter offers, but they gave a verbal agreement to our second offer! Finally, we have a house!My back is killing me! Babies involve so much bending and lifting. I haven’t hurt this much in a really long time, but the baby is worth it. Today, we have more doctors appointments for Pam and Baby Jimmy. I’m going to try to get some small pieces of work done. I’m hopeful I can get back to work, at least part time, tomorrow. If you’re waiting on me to do something, please be patient!

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from the traveling side this trip was horrible - broken car, hotel charged the wrong credit card, navigation system gave us wrong routes on the way back.FOSDEM itself was better than ever for me, because i could meet so many motivated Fedora Contributors. We started on the Beer-Event, where i had a Cherry-Beer which made me drunk with only one glas.The Beer-Event is crowded and geeky - you love it or you hate it ;)First Day, we build up the booth and around 11:00 am visitors started to showing up and we could see right from the beginning that they love our T-Shirts which we gave away for a donation. After a short while it was possible to completely reimburse the trip and accomodation for our hungarian contributor from this donations - so cool! I attended Max’s talk about Fedora-Governance, which gave me an impulse to think over how we can reduce governance as much as possible inside the Fedora Project without loosing the scope.Second Day, much visitors, much booth duties - i could not even write my blog.I hope we could convince some of them to join the fedoraproject.I presented my foss.in talk and the Fedora Security Spin to several Fedora People on the booth they gave me very good feedback and i am happy and proud what we achieved together!I brought 880 F12 DVD/CD with me to FOSDEM - i took not a single one back home with me!!! This means we gave out around 600 DVD/CD’s!!! in 1,5 days to the visitors and distributed the rest between the Fedora People.I brought also around 100 Splatter T-Shirts with me and they are all gone for a donation to Fedora EMEA for Future Events and for handling shipping and producing new stuff.If you have the chance to attend FOSDEM one day you should do it, there are many strange places to discover

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After many days of planning, discussions, hanging over the IRC’s , holding meetings for LUGB and decide only one thing . How to reach Bangalore and attend FOSS.IN that too from Bikaner which is not connected directly  and most importantly how to manage all the 25 plus people who were so much motivated that they didn’t gave a second thought for going to India’s Biggest Open Source Conference ,most importantly the developers and contributors from   different open source projects. I moved to Delhi as I had to get all my clothes and stuffs washed , join my friends at Nizamudin Railway Station and board the train at 6.45 am in the morning. I was praying that all the people arrive on time as we were around 30 and the tickets were all with pkuhad, luckily it happened and we were on the train.
What was expected from the Journey to Yashwantpur (a nearby railway station to Bangalore ) , passing those 40 hours , I would say one line that is — ” Total Fun” , we started by hogging on the food that every one was carrying and it used to get vanished by blink of the eye. But that I know we would be doing for rest of the two days. Every one engaged themselves by playing cards, antakshri, gossiping, clicking pictures, play stations, music . I was wondering how much distance we were covering just to keep ourself motivated and work for FOSS. The no of states we crossed was judged by the welcome message I got from my Cellular Network.
After dwelling at my friend’s place and moving to NIMHANS Convention Center where the buzz and breeze was for Open Source and Open Source (I loved it) , meeting some of the great guys who have been working for FOSS , past few years and motivating lots of us , there were GNOME people , KDE guys , Fedora and many open source projects with their introductions and priorities ,  the five days was with the finest  geeks , listening them , attending their views , it was totally fun . Hmm and how could you forget the food , totally yummy !!
Although it was my first experience at Bangalore, I could not see most of the places , but I still managed to be at M.G Road, and the how could you forget Mysore trip , that was like icing on the cake.
Any ways I hang up now , will write something as it comes to my mind


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Mukti is the annual FOSS festival organised by the GNU/Linux Users Group of NIT Durgapur. Mukti 2010 was held on 5-7th Feb. Students from various institutions in and around Durgapur and many FOSS enthusiasts were present through the three days and AFAIK, for the first time, the registrations crossed the 1000 mark!
The first day began with the lighting of the lamp after which Prof. S. Bhattacharya, Director, NIT Durgapur, Mr. Indranil Das Gupta and Mrs. Stephanie Das Gupta addressed the audience.  There were many events and workshops and after hanging around a bit at the IOTA stall, I went to attend the workshop on “Developing applications using Android“; although, I missed the workshop on Qt.

The second day,  Indradg, Stepdg, Rtnpro and myself went to Bijra High School and thus, missed most of the events. The final day, I attended Debayan Banerjee’s session entitled “FOSS + Me” in which he talked about his own experiences with FOSS. It was inspiring to know the kind of the commitment he put into his work. This was the last talk of Mukti’10.
Although this time I did not attend many sessions ( just two in fact), it was nice to meet FOSSy people especially Indradg, Stephdg and Debayan. Debayan is one of the guys whom I know from the days when I had just begun using Linux and meeting him was a very nice experience.
Congratulations to all those who put their labour to make the event a huge success and hoping that the next year would be even bigger.

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After reading a lot about interesting stuff happening at this years FOSDEM, I decided very short term to go there. The FOSDEM in Brussels is probably one of the biggest (if not the biggest at all) meetings of free software developers. Unlike similar events (like several Linuxtag-events in Germany), it’s focus is mainly on developers, so the talks are more high level.

My impressions from FOSDEM so far: There are much more people compared when I was here a few years ago, so it seems the number of free software developers is inceasing (which is great). The interest focus seems to be to extend free software to other areas. Embedded devices, the BIOS, open hardware (lot’s of interest in 3D-printers).

Yesterday morning, there was a quite interesting talk by Richard Clayton about Phishing, Scam etc. with lots of statistics and info about the supposed business models behind it. Afterwards I had a nice chat with some developers from OpenInkpot. There was a big interest in the Coreboot-talk, so I (and many others) just didn’t get in because it was full.

Later Gentoo-developer Petteri Räty gave a talk about “How to be a good upstream” and I’d suggest every free software developer to have a look on that (I’ll put the link here later).

I’ve just attended a rather interesting talk about 3D-printers like RepRap and MakerBot.

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In this podcast comprookie talks about learning Python as a group, and his Gentoo unslacking.

Slacker
The term slacker is commonly used to refer to a person who avoids work (especially British English), or (primarily in North American English) an educated person who is viewed as an underachiever. Slackers, understood mostly as males in their twenties and thirties, or older may be regarded as belonging to an antimaterialistic counterculture, though in many cases their behavior may merely be due to apathy or laziness.

LINKS:
Slacker
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker
Fedora Bugzilla
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugzilla
PythonGroup Wiki
http://asterisklinks.com/wiki/doku.php?id=core:start
PythonGroup Forum
http://asterisklinks.com/python/index.php?board=4.0
Gentoo (dabbott)
http://dev.gentoo.org/~dabbott/

irc network freenode channel #linuxcrazy

Download

Hey, stop slacking!

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