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itwbennett writes "Last week, Dell said that it would be 'refining' its OpenStack plans. Now we know that 'refining' means 'backing away from'. Although the company wouldn't answer direct questions on the subject, a press release spells it out like this: 'Sales of Dell's current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the U.S. in favor of best-in-class partner offerings.' Interestingly, none of Dell's initial partners, including Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag, have platforms built on OpenStack."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sciencehabit writes "Archaeologists have long debated when early humans began hurling stone-tipped spears and darts at large prey. By throwing a spear, instead of thrusting it, humans could hunt buffalo and other dangerous game from a safe distance, with less risk of a goring or mauling. But direct evidence of this hunting technique in early sites has been lacking. A new study of impact marks on the bones of ancient prey shows that such sophisticated killing techniques go back at least 90,000 years ago in Africa and offers a new method of determining how prehistoric hunters made their kills."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jyosim writes "Hundreds of people are spending 20 or 30 hours a week just taking free Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. They're not looking for credit, just the challenge of learning. This Chronicle of Higher Ed story looks at whether these MOOC addicts think they're learning as much as they would in a traditional college course. From the article: 'Consider Anna Nachesa, a 42-year-old single mother in a village near Amsterdam who logs on to MOOCs for several hours each night after dinner with her teenage kids. She has always found TV boring, she says, and for her, MOOCs replace reading books. She is a physicist by training, with a degree from Moscow State University, and she works as a software developer. "This stuff is actually addictive," she says. In some ways the lure is like Everest: Some want to climb it to see if they can. "The Dutch have the proverb 'If you never shoot, you already missed,'" she says.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In just nine years, Ubuntu has become one of the most popular Linux distributions in the world with millions of users and a thriving community. Ever wondered what all the fuss is about? How have we achieved such a great feat in such a short space of time? Here’s where you can find out. Ubuntu Open Week is a week of IRC tuition and Q+A sessions all about getting involved in the rock-and-roll world that is the Ubuntu community. We organise this week for the beginning of a new release cycle to help new contributors get involved.

Ubuntu Open Week takes place in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net (#ubuntu-classroom-chat for questions), on May 20th-21st, from 13 to 18 UTC each day. We will be having people from different teams in, such as the Quality team, the Development team, the News team, and more! We are also going to have an “Ask Mark!” session with Mark Shuttleworth, the Ubuntu Community founder!

During the “Ask Mark!” session, community members are invited to ask Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl) questions about the Ubuntu project. You will ask your questions in #ubuntu-classroom-chat with the prefix QUESTION: and philipballew will be selecting specific questions to pass along to Mark in the main #ubuntu-classroom channel.

To check out the full schedule and learn more about the event, visit the Ubuntu Open Week page on the Ubuntu wiki (we’re finishing to nail the schedule!)

We hope to see you there! But if not, as always, logs will be available after each session, and linked to the schedule at the end of each day.

kkleiner writes "The FDA is finalizing its review of the antibacterial agent triclosan common to many soaps and other health/household products after four decades of use. Recent studies suggest the chemical may be harmful to animals and could interfere with the human immune system along with increasing the proliferation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The agency has been slow to cast a verdict, to much criticism considering its widespread use."

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judgecorp writes "Government institutions are among the targets of an attack on Pakistani bodies, which originates in India, according to reports. The campaign is using vulnerabilities in Microsoft software to install the HangOver malware, according to Norwegian security firm Norman Shark (PDF). From the article: 'In the attacks on Pakistani organizations, spear phishing emails were sent out purporting to contain information on "ongoing conflicts in the region, regional culture and religious matters," according to Norman. Norman could not provide direct attribution to the attacks, but its report did note the following: "The continued targeting of Pakistani interests and origins suggested that the attacker was of Indian origin." Snorre Fagerland, principal security researcher in the Malware Detection Team at Norman, told TechWeekEurope it appeared Pakistani government bodies had been attacked.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the past, we have had multiple heated discussions involving systemd. We (the pkg-systemd-maintainers team) would like to better understand why some people dislike systemd.

Therefore, we have created a survey, which you can find at http://survey.zekjur.net/index.php/391182

Please only submit your feedback to the survey and not this thread, we are not particularly interested in yet another systemd discussion at this point.

The deadline for participating in that survey is 7 days from now, that is 2013-05-26 23:59:00 UTC.

Please participate only if you consider yourself an active member of the Debian community (for example participating in the debian-devel mailing list, maintaining packages, etc.).

Of course, we will publish the results after the survey ends.

Thanks!

Best regards,
the Debian systemd maintainers

x_IamSpartacus_x writes "Jolla, the Finnish company that continued Nokia's work on the MeeGo mobile platform, announced details of its first smartphone on Monday. Availability for the Jolla device is expected by year end and can be pre-ordered now; the phone will be priced at no more than €399 (US $512.26). The Jolla hardware looks similar to that of Nokia's Lumia, with a clean, button-less front face that houses the 4.5-inch touchcscreen. The phone will use a dual-core processor and support 4G LTE in some regions. Internal storage tops out at 16 GB, but can be expanded via microSD card. The phone also includes an 8 megapixel rear camera with auto focus. The phone is also 'Android app compliant' which, in a move similar to that of BlackBerry, can help with available apps at launch."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jones_supa writes "Google's YouTube is celebrating its 8-year birthday, and at the same time they reveal some interesting numbers. 'Today, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. That's more than four days of video uploaded each minute! Every month, more than 1 billion people come to YouTube to access news, answer questions and have a little fun. That's almost one out of every two people on the Internet. Millions of partners are creating content for YouTube and more than 1,000 companies worldwide have mandated a one-hour mid-day break to watch nothing but funny YouTube videos. Well, we made that last stat up, but that would be cool (the other stats are true).'"

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According to reports a bush fire burned down John McAfee's home in Belize on Thursday. The local fire department was unable to to contain the blaze and the the two main buildings were completely destroyed. Property Manager Noel Codd (who was not there at the time) estimated the value of the buildings at $250,000 each. Despite the reported cause of the fire, McAfee says that the destruction of his compound was no accident. We caught up with him to talk about why he thinks the fire was set and what he plans to do now. Read below to see what he had to say.

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Apparently (hi Zhenech, found on Plänet Debian), a Man does not only need to fork a child, plant a tree, etc. in their life but also write a DynDNS service. Perfect for opening a new tag in the wlog called archæology (pagetable.com – Some Assembly Required is also a nice example for these).

Once upon a time, I used SixXS’ heartbeat protocol client for updating the Legacy IP (known as “IPv4” earlier) endpoint address of my tunnel at home (My ISP offers static v4 for some payment now, luckily). Their client sucked, so I wrote on in ksh, naturally.

And because mksh(1) is such nice a language to program in (although, I only really begun becoming proficient in Korn Shell in 2005-2006 or so, thus please take those scripts with a grain of salt, I’d do them much differently nowadays) I also wrote a heartbeat server implementation. In Shell.

The heartbeat server supports different backends (per client), and to date I’ve run backends providing DynDNS (automatically disabling the RR if the client goes offline), an IP (IPv6) tunnel of my own (basically the same setup SixXS has, without knowing theirs), rdate(8) based time offset monitoring for ntpd(8), and an eMail forwarding service (as one must not run an MTA on dynamic IP) with it; some of these even in parallel.

Not all of it is documented, but I’ve written up most things in CVS. There also were some issues (mostly to do with killing sleep(1)ing subprocesses not working right), so it occasionally hung, but very rarely. Running it under the supervise of DJB dæmontools was nice, as I was already using djbdns, since I do not understand the BIND zone file format and do not consider MySQL a database (and did not even like databases at all, back then). For DynDNS, the heartbeat server’s backend simply updated the zone file (by either adding or updating or deleting the line for the client) then running tinydns-data, then rsync’ing it to the djbdns server primary and secondaries, then running zonenotify so the BIND secondaries get a NOTIFY to update their zones (so I never had to bother much with the SOA values, only allow AXFR). That’s a really KISS setup ☺

Anyway. This is archæology. The scripts are there, feel free to use them, hack on them, take them as examples… even submit back patches if you want. I’ll even answer questions, to some degree, in IRC. But that’s it. I urge people to go use a decent ISP, even if the bandwidth is smaller. To paraphrase a coworker after he cancelled his cable based internet access (I think at Un*tym*dia) before the 2-week trial period was even over: rather have slow but reliable internet at Netc*logne than “that”. People, vote with your purse!

Nerval's Lobster writes "Yahoo has agreed to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion. As you know, Yahoo is a major corporation with a need to monetize its assets in a way that makes its shareholders happy, leaving open the question of whether it'll alter Tumblr's DNA in order to make the latter more of a significant cash generator. But at least for the moment, Yahoo seems content to leave its new property alone. 'Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business,' read the company's press release. 'The product, service and brand will continue to be defined and developed separately with the same Tumblr irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.' Tumblr CEO David Karp, who has been known to make some very anti-advertising comments in the past, will remain in place. Even so, anyone who likes Tumblr may have some cause for concern, because Yahoo has a history of making high-profile acquisitions that subsequently implode. Back in 1999, for example, it paid over $3 billion for GeoCities, another blogging network that it eventually shut down after years of failing the update the property. In 2005, it acquired popular photo-sharing Website Flickr, which it likewise allowed to languish and die. That same year it bought Delicious, a popular Webpage-bookmarking site, and did exactly nothing with it. So when Yahoo starts off its Tumblr press release with a promise not to screw things up, it's a self-deprecating nod toward all that history. New Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been on a bit of a buying spree of late, snatching up startups such as Summly in an attempt to make her company 'cool' and relevant."

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I usually try to avoid administering printers whenever possible. As a result I end of flailing around the CUPS web interface before I figure out how to re-enable a printer. And, when I get a call to help debug a printer, I can't easily tell people what to do.

When I try to do what I need via the command line, I end up spending at least 10 or 15 minutes re-reading man pages before I piece together the steps.

Here's my attempt to document the steps so I don't have to re-read man pages.

Setup

In these examples, the printer name in question is: stability and it is a network printer, with local DNS that properly resolves the hostname stability to an IP address.

The cups commands in these examples can be run as a non-root user if that user is in the lpadmin group.

Type:

groups

To see if lpadmin is listed. If not:

sudo adduser <your-user-name> lpadmin

Then, to gain access to the new group without logging out and logging in again:

newgrp lpadmin Network access

First, try to ping the printer:

ping stability

If this fails, restart the printer and/or check network cables. No point in doing anything else until it responds to pings.

Can't submit new jobs to the printer

Next, if the problem is that the printer is greyed out when you try to print a document or your application tells you that the printer is rejecting jobs, confirm this status with:

lpstat -a stability

It will either output:

stability accepting requests since Mon 20 May 2013 10:28:57 AM EDT

Or

stability not accepting requests since Mon 20 May 2013 10:28:57 AM EDT - Rejecting Jobs

If it is rejecting jobs, try:

/usr/sbin/cupsaccept stability Accepts new jobs, but just doesn't print

On the other hand, if the printer is accepting jobs, but the jobs are not printing, find out if the printer is enabled with:

lpstat -p stability

You should get either:

printer stability is idle. enabled since Mon 20 May 2013 10:28:57 AM EDT

Or:

printer stability disabled since Mon 20 May 2013 10:35:10 AM EDT - Paused

If it is disabled, you should first see what queued jobs there are:

lpq

If you have a list of duplicate pending jobs, be sure to delete the duplicates to avoid having your print job come out multiple times.

To delete a queued job, type the following (n should be the number in the Job column of the lpq output):

cancel <n>

After you have deleted duplicate jobs, try "enabling" it:

/usr/sbin/cupsenable stability

Then, re-rerun the lpq command and see if it's now "ready." At this point, the jobs should start printing.

Review of concepts

For review... a few important concepts:

• cupsaccept/cupsreject: controls whether a printer will accept or reject new jobs. It doesn't matter whether the printer is enabled or disabled.
• cupsenable/cupsdisable: controls whether a printer will print existing jobs. It doesn't matter whether the print is accepting or rejecting new jobs.

sciencehabit writes "Whooping cough, or pertussis, has exploded in the United States in recent years. A new study (abstract) confirms what scientists have suspected for some time: The return of the disease is caused by the introduction of new, safer vaccines 2 decades ago. Although they have far fewer side effects, the new shots don't offer long-lived protection the way older vaccines do."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since it was founded 12 years ago this week, Wikipedia has become an indispensable part of the world’s information infrastructure. It’s a kind of public utility: You turn on the faucet and water comes out; you do an Internet search and Wikipedia answers your question. People don’t think much about who creates it, but you should. We do it for you, with love.

Wikimedia Foundation Executive Director Sue Gardner, from http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/01/14/wikipedia-the-peoples-encyclopedia/

As Sue says, the people who create Wikipedia are terrific. I’m lucky enough to say that I’ve just wrapped up my first three months as their lawyer – as Deputy General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation. Consider this the personal announcement I should have made three months ago :)

Wikimania 2012 Group Photograph, by Helpameout, under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Greenberg Traurig was terrific for me: Heather has a wealth of knowledge and experience about how to do deals (both open source and otherwise), and through her, I did a lot of interesting work for interesting clients. Giving up that diversity and experience was the hardest part of leaving private practice.

Based on the evidence of the first three months, though, I made a great choice – I’ve replaced diversity of clients with a vast diversity of work; replaced one experienced, thoughtful boss with one of equal skill but different background (so I’m learning new things); and replaced the resources (and distance) of a vast firm with a small but tight and energized team. All of these have been wins. And of course working on behalf of this movement is a great privilege, and (so far) a pleasure. (With no offense to GT, pleasure is rarely part of the package at a large firm.)

The new scope of the work is perhaps the biggest change. Where I previously focused primarily on technology licensing, I’m now an “internet lawyer” in the broadest sense of the word: I, my (great) team, and our various strong outside counsel work on topics from employment contracts, to privacy policies, to headline-grabbing speech issues, to patent/trademark/copyright questions – it is all over the place. This is both challenging, and great fun – I couldn’t ask for a better place to be at this point in my life. (And of course, being always on the side of the community is great too – though I did more of that at Greenberg than many people would assume.)

I don’t expect that this move will have a negative impact on my other work in the broader open source community. If anything, not focusing on licensing all day at work has given me more energy to work on OSI-related things when I get home, and I have more flexibility to travel and speak with and for various communities too. (I’m having great fun being on the mailing lists of literally every known open source license revision community, for example. :)

If you’d like to join us (as we work to get the next 1/2 billion users a month), there are a lot of opportunities open right  now, including one working for me on my team, and some doing interesting work at the overlap between community, tech, and product management. Come on over – you won’t regret it :)

I've got a project going to utilize Salesforce.com api over json and oauth rather than soap. Today I uploaded the package to the cheeseshop in hopes to pull in some interest from the community.

Right now the library contains authorization over OAuth 1.0a and client methods for retrieving basic Account, Case, and Asset information. My goal is to be api complete by the end of the year.

I would love to have contributors join the project in order to shape this young project into a well documented, tested, and easy to use library. As far as I can tell there isn't another python library like this that doesn't utilize SOAP for its endpoints.

Using the library is pretty straight forward, currently, I have 2 scripts that provide a simple way to authorize yourself and communicate with the endpoints.

sf-exchange-auth provides a local ssl enabled web server for going through the OAuth process and storing your token/secret.

sf-cli provides some arguments for pulling in rudimentary account and case information. Usage documentation is provided for this script.

The current focus is to stick to the YAGNI principles and utilize OO when it makes sense. This may or may not be the way to go so I am open to ideas and patches :D.

You can currently install python-salesforce through pip

$ pip install python-salesforce

The project page is located at

http://python.salesforce.astokes.org

Looking forward to hearing from you.

A quick post to say that two weeks ago I went to Red Hat‘s New Hire Orientation in Munich. This is an event for (guess what) new hires in order to show how the company operates, etc. with great focus on how Open things are.

Being a remote worker, it was also very nice to meet other employees, not only engineers but also sales and other roles. Jan Wildeboar gave a great presentation summarizing the Free Software history and explaining how committed to it the company is. With a bit of shame from my side, I was the only one lifting up my hand when he asked who knew the words of the Free Software song… of course later, during the awesome Bavarian dinner (with awesome Bavarian beer) we had, the sale folks forced me to sing it (luckily I could only remember the first part).

The next day we all got our fedoras and I thought “so this is how they get their hats…”

Some people have been asking me what I am actually doing so, currently I am working in Wacom support in GNOME. You will see some of my patches on the GNOME Control Center and the Settings Daemon as well as in libwacom.

I will try to keep you posted on the big changes.

cylonlover writes "Recently the media has been saturated with overly-hyped reports that NASA's Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer may have detected dark matter. These claims may have some justification if the word 'may' is shouted, but they rest on a number of really major assumptions and guesses, some of which are on weak and shifting soil. So just what was seen in the experiment, and what are the possible explanations?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

itwbennett writes "Whoever said 'everyone has to start somewhere' has clearly never tried contributing to an open source project — the Linux Kernel development team in particular is known for its savagery. But if you're determined to donate your time and talents, there are some things you can do to get off on the right foot. Of course you should pick something you're interested in and that you use. Check, and double check. You should also research the project, learn about the process for contributing, and do your utmost to avoid asking questions that you can find the answers to. But beyond that there are some hallmarks of beginner-friendly open source projects like Drupal, Python, and LibreOffice — namely, a friendly and active community, training and mentorship programs, and a low barrier to entry."

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riverat1 writes "After being embarrassed when the Europeans did a better job forecasting Sandy than the National Weather Service Congress allocated $25 million ($23.7 after sequestration) in the Sandy relief bill for upgrades to forecasting and supercomputer resources. The NWS announced that their main forecasting computer will be upgraded from the current 213 TeraFlops to 2,600 TFlops by fiscal year 2015, over a twelve-fold increase. The upgrade is expected to increase the horizontal grid scale by a factor of 3 allowing more precise forecasting of local features of weather. The some of the allocated funds will also be used to hire some contract scientists to improve the forecast model physics and enhance the collection and assimilation of data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.