This article responds to some of the points in Andrew's post about Pushing a bzr branch with rsync.

bzr rspush and shared repositories

First of all, to understand why bzr rspush refuses to operate on a non-standalone branch, it is worth looking at what it does:

1. Download the revision history of the remote branch, and check to see that the remote head revision is an ancestor of the local head revision. If it is not, error out.
2. If it is an ancestor, use rsync to copy the local branch and repository information to the remote location.

Now if you bring shared repositories into the mix, and there is a different set of branches in the local and remote repositories, then step (2) is liable to delete revision information needed by those branches that don't exist locally. This is not a theoretical concern if you do development from multiple machines (e.g. a desktop and a laptop) and publish to the same repository.

Got around to tasting the latest batch of home-brew beer recently: a chilli beer. It came out very nicely: very refreshing but with a chilli aftertaste in the back of your throat. You can definitely taste the chilli after drinking a pint :).

I used a beer kit as a base, since I haven't yet had the patience to do a brew from scratch. The ingredients were:

1. A Black Rock Mexican Lager beer kit.
2. 1kg of Coopers brewing sugar.
3. About 20 red chillis.
4. Caster sugar for carbonation.

I took half the chillis and cut off the stems and cut them up roughly (in hind sight, it probably would have been enough to cut them lengthwise). I then covered them with a small amount of water in a pot and pasteurised them in the oven at 80°C for about half an hour. The wort was then prepared as normal, but with the pasteurised chillis added before the yeast.

Daylight saving started yesterday: the first time since 1991/1992 summer for Western Australia. The legislation finally passed the upper house on 21st November (12 days before the transition date). The updated tzdata packages were released on 27th November (6 days before the transition). So far, there hasn't been an updated package released for Ubuntu (see bug 72125).

One thing brought up in the Launchpad bug was that not all applications used the system /usr/share/zoneinfo time zone database. So other places that might need updating include:

On Monday, I was exposed to US-style motivational speaking and team building. There was an element of forced enthusiasm in the team building company employees. Overall it was okay, but frustrating at times.

At the end they taught us to punch through flaming boards of wood. I was only on fire for a little while.

Comments:

John - 16 Nov, 2006

Excellent, I am sure you will now be able to write better code, achieve higher availability figures all with your new flaming hands. I really do wonder why companies fall for this team building, when typically all employees want to know is that what they do is appreciated, fairly treated and paid accordingly.

I arrived in San Francisco today for the Canonical company conference. Seems like a nice place, and not too cold :). So far I've just gone for a walk along Fisherman's Wharf for a few hours. There look

On the plane trip, I had a chance to see Last Train to Freo, which I didn't get round to seeing in the cinemas. Definitely worth watching.

Like a few other states, Western Australia does not do daylight saving. Recently the state parliament has been discussing a Daylight saving bill. The bill is now before the Legislative Council (the upper house). If the bill gets passed, there will be a 3 year trial followed by a referendum to see if we want to continue.

I hadn't been paying too much attention to it, and had assumed they would be talking about starting the trial next year. But it seems they're actually talking about starting it on 3rd December. So assuming the bill gets passed, there will be less than a month til it starts.

I published a Bazaar branch of the Nautilus obex method here:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jamesh/+junk/gnome-vfs-obexftp

This version works with the hcid daemon included with Ubuntu Edgy, rather than requiring the btcond daemon from Maemo.

Some simple instructions on building it:

1. Download and build the osso-gwobex library:

   svn checkout https://stage.maemo.org/svn/maemo/projects/connectivity/osso-gwobex/trunk osso-gwobex

   The debian/ directory should work fine to build a package using debuild.

2. Download and build the obex module:

   bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~jamesh/+junk/gnome-vfs-obexftp

   There is no debian packaging for this — just an autogen.sh script.

In my previous entry about using the Maemo obex-module on the desktop, Johan Hedberg mentioned that bluez-utils 3.7 included equivalent interfaces to the osso-gwconnect daemon used by the method. Since then, the copy of bluez-utils in Edgy has been updated to 3.7, and the necessary interfaces are enabled in hcid by default.

Before trying to modify the VFS code, I thought I'd experiment a bit with the D-BUS interfaces via the D-BUS python bindings. Most of the interesting method calls exist on the org.bluez.Adapter interface. We can easily get the default adapter with the following code:

One of the things we've been working on for Launchpad is good integration with Bazaar. Launchpad provides a way to register or host Bazaar branches, and nominate a Bazaar branch as representing a particular product series.

For each registered branch, there is a branch information page. This leads to a bit of confusion since Bazaar uses URLs to identify branches, so people try running bzr branch on a branch information page. We also get people trying to branch the product or product series pages.

When I got my new laptop, one of the features it had that my previous one didn't was Bluetooth support. There are a few Bluetooth related utilities for Gnome that let you send and receive SMS messages and a few other things, but a big missing feature is the ability to transfer files to and from the phone easily.

Ideally, I'd be able to browse the phone's file system using Nautilus. Luckily, the Maemo guys have already done the hard work of writing a gnome-vfs module that speaks the OBEX FTP protocol. I had a go at compiling it on my laptop (running Ubuntu Edgy), and you can see the result below:

So it seems that Lenovo has decided to join in on this battery recall fad. It turns out that the main battery in my X60s is one of the explosive Sony variety (the extended life battery isn't though). I rang them up to organise the replacement, which will be arriving in 5 weeks.

Even though he hasn't asked for it yet, I sent the details to Richard Hughes. It looks like the battery model numbers are exposed through HAL, so gnome-power-manager should be able to detect the bad batteries.

Saw this interesting sculpture while cycling through East Perth:

Of course, it can only be appreciated when standing in a particular location (Here is what it looks like from another angle). I wonder how many people pass it and don't realise what it is or how you are meant to look at it?

Update: the sculpture can be seen on Google Maps in the centre of the round about. You can clearly see the arms of the triangle going off in different directions.

[JohnHoward](http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200609/s1741675.htm): You know what really aggravazes me? It\'s them immigants. They wants all the benefits of living in ~~Springfield~~ Australia, but they ain\'t even bother to learn themselves the language.
[KimBeazley](http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200609/s1739588.htm): Hey, those are exactly my sentimonies.

::: {align=“right”} From episode 3F20 :::

I wonder if this is just setting the stage for the next federal election?

Comments:

dra - 15 Sep, 2006

Hey, I'm actually thinking about going to Australia for my PhD. Well, I do know the language though... ;)

One of the new features in Firefox 2 is Microsummaries, which essentially allows dynamic bookmark titles. This is useful when bookmarking volatile pages, since the title can reflect the current state of the document rather than the state when the bookmark was created.

The system works by registering XSLT transformations that generate a simple text string from the page content. The registrations are either done via a <link> element, or matched via regular expressions. The system is designed to target users (who can register their own microsummary generators), website owners (who can suggest a generator through a <link> tag) and 3rd parties (who can provide generators for other sites to users).

When outlining the use of team branches on Launchpad previously, I used the --create-prefix option when pushing the branch to sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net. This was to make sure the initial push would succeed, even if the /\~username/product directory the branch would be created in didn't exist.

To simplify things for users, we made a change to the SFTP server in the latest release, so that --create-prefix is no longer necessary. This does not affect the allowed branch directories though: the structure is used to associate the branches with products, and decide who can write to the branches.

Earlier in the year, we migrated the bugs from bugzilla.ubuntu.com over to Launchpad. This process involved changes to the bug numbers, since the Launchpad is used for more than just Ubuntu and already had a number of bugs reported in the system.

People often refer to other bugs in comments, which both Bugzilla and Launchpad conveniently turn into links. The changed bug numbers meant that the bug references in the comments ended up pointing to the wrong bugs. The bug import was done one bug at a time, so if bug A referred to bug B but bug B hadn't been imported by the time we were importing bug A, then we wouldn't know what bug number it should be referring to.

Over the weekend, I released gnome-gpg 0.5.0. The main features in this release is support for running without gnome-keyring-daemon (of course, you can't save the passphrase in this mode), and to use the same keyring item name for the passphrase as Seahorse. The release can be downloaded here:

http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-gpg/0.5/

I also switched over from Arch to Bazaar. The conversion was fairly painless using bzr baz-import-branch, and means that I have both my revisions and Colins revisions in a single tree. The branch can be pulled from:

Went to see Kenny at the cinema yesterday. A very funny movie and worth watching if you get a chance. Given that it is a small budget Australian film though, it will probably be hard to find overseas (similar to The Castle).

I also got round to watching my Double the Fist volume 2 DVD which arrived while I was in Europe. The "Nobodies to Nobodies" documentary included as an extra gives a behind the scenes view of how the team was treated during and after making the series. It is good to see that they have finally got a chance to make series 2.

Earlier, David Allouche described how to host Bazaar branches on Launchpad. At the end, he alluded to the ability to create branches that can be committed to by anyone on a team. I'll describe how this works here.

Launchpad Teams

Launchpad allows people to organise themseleves into teams. Most of the things people can do in Launchpad can also be done by teams, including owning branches.

You can create a new team at the following page:

I got back from London on Sunday from the Launchpad infrastructure sprint. Because of the terrorism scare, Heathrow was chaos (more so than usual). The bus service from the tube station to Terminal 4 ended up in a traffic jam. There were a lot of people milling around outside the terminal who were not being allowed in because they'd arrived too early (it was around 9am, and some of them had afternoon flights).

One of the other guys here joked that the baggage handlers at the airports are more likely to be careful with your luggage now.

Since there is a higher threat level, the chance of a bag exploding if a handler mistreats it should be higher. Therefore it is in their best interests to be careful.

Comments:

- 12 Aug, 2006

"Careful, there! Don't do anything too violent to that laptop bag until after we've had a chance to steal the laptop!"

So the airports in the UK went crazy today after a terror plot was uncovered. The upshot is severe restrictions on what you can take on as hand luggage, and a fair number of flight cancellations.

The restrictions mean you can't carry laptop computers on board. Instead they want you to check them through and trust them to the baggage handlers ...

I'm meant to be flying back to Australia on Saturday, so we'll see what happens. I'm not particularly looking forward to getting home with a broken laptop.

The Python developers have been looking for a new bug tracker, and essentially put out a tender for people interested in providing a bug tracker. Recently I have been working on getting Launchpad's entry ready, which mainly involved working on SourceForge import.

The entry is now up, and our demonstration server is up and running with a snapshot of the Python bug tracker data.

As a side effect of this, we've got fairly good SourceForge tracker import support now, which we should be able to use if other projects want to switch away from SF.

I'm in London at the moment with Carlos, Danilo, David and Steve for a Launchpad sprint focused on Bazaar and Rosetta. The weather is a nice change from Perth winter.

Next week I'll be in Vilnius, Lithuania, and then it is back to London for another week before going home.

It is a nice change from winter weather in Perth.

Comments:

Pupeno - 27 Jul, 2006

Hello, Since you seem to be a developer of Rosetta; to where should I send an 'official' feature request for having an easy or even automatic way of feeding-back the translations to mainstream projects ?

Have you wanted to play around with bzr but had nowhere to share your branches? You can now publish them through Launchpad. David Allouche provides the details.

In short, you can upload branches to sftp://bazaar.launchpad.net/, and they will be published on http://bazaar.launchpad.net/.