Planet ubuntu-uk

Symfony 1.4 Doctrine 1.2 MS SQL Server

2012-02-02T00:03:57+00:00

Web server: Linux (Ubuntu on my dev setup), Apache, PHP 5.3, Symfony 1.4, Doctrine 1.2.
Database server: Microsoft Windows 2008 Server, MS SQL Server

Trying to get Symfony to talk to the database server has been a painful experience for the last few days. But perseverance has paid off.

Lots of Googling with trial & error has resulted in actually achieving a development setup that will mirror the eventual production setup.

Short version:

Follow the FreeTDS and ODBC setup instructions of http://jamesrossiter.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/connecting-to-microsoft-sql-server-using-odbc-from-ubuntu-server/
Use the following in config/databases.yml

all:
  doctrine:
    class: sfDoctrineDatabase
      param:
        dsn: dblib:dbname=datasourcename;host=sqlserver;
        username: ###
        password: ###

In the above snippit, replace ‘datasourcename’ with whatever you used in /etc/odbc.ini and replace ‘sqlserver’ with the name used in /etc/freetds/freetds.conf & /etc/odbc.ini

It’s late and I’ve been struggling to get this working for some time. I may expand this entry in the future if required.

References and insperation:
1) http://blog.acjacinto.com/2011/11/compiling-php-with-mssql-servers-native.html
2) http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28160
3) http://jamesrossiter.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/connecting-to-microsoft-sql-server-using-odbc-from-ubuntu-server/
4) http://trac.symfony-project.org/wiki/HowToConnectToMSSQLServer

Ubuntu Q+A Videocast Today

2012-02-01T18:47:45+00:00

Today (1st Feb 2012) I will be doing my live Ubuntu Q+A session at 12pm Pacific / 3pm Eastern / 8pm UK / 9pm Europe. You can join the videocast here (anyone can view, but if you want to ask a question you should register an account with ustream.tv first).

All questions are welcome!

Will 2012 be the year of Linux?

2012-02-01T12:53:00+00:00

I read several posts recently on the popularity of Linux and how it seems to be enjoying unusually large gains in user numbers at the moment. It appears that some time between August and October something has changed which has attracted a large number of new users to the platform. Nobody seems to be able to agree on the cause and of course there is always the chance it is just a ‘blip’ and that the market share will return to the usual range of 0.95%-1.19% but again this month another comparatively large jump has been achieved. As you can see below http://netmarketshare.com reports this month as 1.56%. Since I began using Linux in 2006 these figures have remained pretty static within the range I have given so to see jumps of up to 0.15 occurring apparently sustainably is something that not surprisingly is turning heads.

So the big question is what does 2012 hold for our favourite distros? Who can tell, however I did spot one statistic which ‘may’ give us a clue. This is simply my own opinion and of course based entirely on gut instinct but I would expect the popularity of a new version of Windows to have an upward trend as more and more people try it out. It seems that Windows 8 is not following that trend as the graph below shows. Does this mean people are ditching the new Metro interface before it has even been released? Just something for you all to think about….

Unity 5.2: Testers Needed!

2012-01-31T23:38:38+00:00

A new Unity has been pushed into the Unity team’s PPA and we need testers to help give it a run for it’s money before it is accepted into Precise. Nick has all the details of how to participate in the testing right here. You will need to be running Precise to participate in the testing.

You can also find help if you get stuck in #ubuntu-unity on Freenode. Happy testing!

I am running it now and the multi-monitor improvements in Precise are so much better than they used to be.

Severed Fifth Release Party this Friday in San Francisco

2012-01-31T02:33:33+00:00

Can’t see the video? Watch it here.

Just a quick note to let you know that this Friday, 3rd February in San Francisco we will be having the Severed Fifth CD Release Party. The new album ‘Liberate’ was funded by donations from the Severed Fifth community and will be released soon under a Creative Commons license.

As such, on Friday we will be releasing the album at Cafe Cocomo, 650 Indiana St, San Francisco, CA where we will perform a full, live set of the new record. We will also be supported by Ulysses Siren and My Victim. Not only this but everyone who comes to the show will get a free copy of the new album on CD and there will plenty of give-aways and prizes.

Tickets are $10 advance ($12 on the door). You can buy tickets for the show here as well as buying tickets on the door. Doors open at 8pm.

I would love to encourage you to come out to support Creative Commons and local music and have a great time.

A year goes past

2012-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Blimey, I've been doing these birthday posts for ten years.

Today I am a year older. This particular day will be a subdued day; last weekend I spent with Niamh and Birmingham geeks (not at the same time), the previous one with my parents, so there's not actually a lot left to do on this actual birthday day. So I'm working, heh.

When I first met Sam, I related the old joke about being able to say "eighteen happy years... and then I met her". Which was totally invalid since we only were eighteen. Today I could tell that joke legitimately. Well, except that we're not married any more, probably because of inappropriate jokes. Might give her a ring later.

It's an interesting age, this. I'm now over halfway to the days of my years (three-score and ten), and I am supremely unworried by this. At previous points in my life I've felt like I knew everything now, and it turned out there was always more to learn. Now, of course, I finally have learned everything. It's a good feeling.

(No, of course I haven't.)

Anyway, many happy returns to me. I have to get back to work now. I'm wearing the rosette that Niamh bought me, though.

Amy and Andrew: Behind the scenes

2012-01-29T16:01:25+00:00

I met Emma from Emma Lappin Flowers last summer, when I was asked to photograph a wedding to help with the launch of their new blog, Postcards from the Potting Shed. The good news is that the site is now well and truly up and running. Emma included lots of my photographs in her recent twelve days of Christmas series of posts, which was amazing to see. I’ve carried on working with Emma, producing behind the scenes photographs and video of two more weddings. Emma has been incredibly supportive, giving me these opportunities to photograph her and her team at work, and I’m very grateful. This weekend Emma e-mailed me with some very exciting news that I can’t wait to share.

Anyway, back to last summer. I met up with Emma and Amy at Lainston House Hotel near Winchester, a superbly impressive venue and a beautiful English country hotel. I could have shot there all day, there were so many little gardens, lawns, walls and even a crumbling old chapel just perfect for beautiful wedding photos. The wedding itself was stunningly decorated and we even got to see the bridal party before they left for the church. You can read more about this wedding on my wedding photography site.

More Ubuntu Accomplishments Hacking

2012-01-29T01:05:44+00:00

I spent some more time this weekend hacking on the Ubuntu Accomplishments spec I blogged about recently. I just wanted to provide a little more eye-candy of some of the progress.

When you load the app it shows you a list of the available opportunities you can achieve:

(obviously a bunch of these are dummy ones).

You can use the combo boxes at the top to choose which types of opportunities (e.g. Ubuntu Community, Ubuntu UK LoCo Team) you want to view, as well as their category (e.g. Ubuntu Community could have categories such as QA, Development, Advocacy).

Some of the opportunities have padlocks on them. This means that you need to complete another opportunity before that one is unlocked. This helps provide more of a logical journey of things that you can do.

Part of the goal of the accomplishments project is to provide better, more contextual information for how to get started doing something. As an example, if you are curious about the Filed First Bug opportunity, you can double-click it to read information about how to complete it and where to find help:

Obviously this information can be improved (and particularly the links, they are just dummy links). We would also want to add nice things like clicking on an IRC channel and it loading in an IRC client.

The Filed First Bug is a real working accomplishment. When you run the scriptrunner (part of the prototype, but not tied into the GUI yet) it will run the accomplishment’s script and check Launchpad to see if you have filed a bug. If you have, a small notify-osd bubble appears and you can see your trophy in the My Trophies view:

In the real implementation the scriptrunner would run as a service without you having to run the app to start it.

I am pleased with the progress I am making. Next I want to get some more example accomplishments tied in and then I am going to start looking at building the verification service. Should be fun!

Tottenham Court Road – 28th January 2012

2012-01-28T20:18:44+00:00

Well, what can I say? It’s been an absolutely fantastic day! I really must say thanks to Matt for having me at the fair, it’s been a record breaking day for me in several respects. We were provided with a steady trickle of public who critically were spending and very readily engaging with the stallholders. The result was the sale of the only complete system I had in my stock today (running Xubuntu), several Ubuntu CDs and so many in depth discussions about Linux I simply couldn’t give a detailed report, it’s all a bit of a blur!

Once again the Super Nintendo took centre stage and did an admirable job of drawing attention. In addition I have compiled a selection of some of the fabulous promo videos available on the net which do a far more comprehensive and eloquent job of showcasing Ubuntu’s best features than I ever could.

The highlight of the day has to be the moment I was showing the promo for the Ubuntu TV to a customer and was discussing how this may serve as a bridge to introduce new users to the interface when someone stepped in to ask ‘Did I hear you talking about TV on computers?’ Cue Mythbuntu sales pitch….

Most surprising/confusing moment of the day was the hoard (flock? gaggle? herd?) of teenagers who descended upon my stall to ask me a variety of questions about the SOPA and PIPA internet censorship bills. Presumably for some college or university project.

So all in all I’d say that today has been the closest to being on target so far. The hope is that at some point soon I will start to receive phone calls from new users who need a helping and or perhaps just general support. That will be the first chance to really get some feedback on how people are taking to it and whether they are planning on using Ubuntu as a long term install.

Next week:

Sat: Tottenham Court Road

Sun: Bristol

Python GTK Documentation

2012-01-28T19:12:30+00:00

After my recent blog post about the lack of Python GTK documentation since the new era of GIR bindings, I was delighted to find this awesome online documentation.

I am certainly not presuming that this documentation was as a result of someone reading my blog post; I assume I didn’t see it online before, but thankyou to everyone who has contributed to it.

Quick Team Update

2012-01-27T21:15:21+00:00

I just wanted to provide a quick update on how the team is doing on our set of commitments in the 12.04 cycle. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.

In terms of general team progress, this is how our burndown chart looks today:

I asked each of the guys on the team to follow up with their respective community members to start moving the needle on those work items. As such, if you committed to something in 12.04 for our team’s burndown, expect Jorge, Daniel, or David to come knocking on your door soon.

With Nick and Michael joining the team recently, their work is not reflected in this burndown – their work will appear in the 12.10 burndown.

Developer Growth

Daniel’s core focus in this cycle is developer growth. The first step here is ensuring that our developer processes are working effectively. Over the holiday period the sponsorship queue got a little out of shape, so I asked Daniel to work with the patch pilots to get this back on track. Good progress is being made:

You can see how the queue is falling back down at the end of the graph since Daniel started hammering on this over the last few weeks. Thanks to all the patch pilots for their hard work.

Daniel has also been fixing up some metrics so we can track this work more effectively, and putting together a developer outreach team to provide a more personal level of support to get developers through the process. He will be speaking more about this in the coming weeks.

Cloud and Juju

Jorge is focused on growing the Juju charming community and is making great progress. A tour of events is planned and Jorge has a hit-list of upstream projects which he is focusing on to get charms put together for. We are seeing good progress on this list and I am confident Jorge will hit his goals in this cycle.

Juju really is awesome. You should check it out.

App Developers

David has been focusing on app developers in this cycle. A first chunk of work here is helping the App Review Board to get in shape. The ARB has a large queue of content to get through, so in Budapest we sat down and dissected the ARB process and made a bunch of optimizations. David has been coordinating with the team to help coordinate this work, and we are seeing progress happening.

We have recently seen three lenses get through the ARB, and David is going to be starting a regular cadence of queue reviews to keep the ball rolling. Thanks to the ARB for all your contributions.

David originally planned a Phase II set of additions to developer.ubuntu.com, but with some re-structuring from the Canonical web team, those plans have been put on hold a little. Instead d.u.c is now being put into maintenance mode and we identified a set of things that need fixing (particularly on the publishing side), and David is coordinating those changes.

The next chunk of work will be outreach to grow our app developer community. Stay tuned for more…and an up-coming competition…

Upstream Relations

Michael is the new upstream community coordinator, and will be focusing on Unity in particular as he gets started. I have asked him to first work with the Desktop Experience team to help get their community merge proposals in shape. There are a number of branches that have been sitting around for a while, and Michael is coordinating a patch pilot scheme to ensure these get reviewed regularly. We expect to see this in place over the next week.

Michael has also been performing an assessment of Mozilla’s SUMO for a potential solution for help in Ubuntu. He has put together an extensive report and a test instance to play with and he will be working with the docs team to continue assessing this as a solution. I am excited to see what work happens here.

Finally, next week we will be putting together an upstream target list for Michael to reach out to to start engaging app authors more effectively around our technology. I am excited to see this work progressing.

…oh, and one other thing: Michael is working with Didier to merge Singlet into Quickly. This should make creating Unity lenses a piece of cake. Bring it!

QA

Finally, the latest addition to the team has been Nick Skaggs. Nick has been working with the QA around a few core pieces of work:

Getting our manual test infrastructure in place. We are going to be piloting Case Conductor as a solution that will fit alongside Jenkins.
Consolidating our QA community teams. Nick is evaluating our current QA on-ramp and then we will put together a proposal for bringing more efficiencies and consistency to the QA community.
Building a take-and-bake testing process so Ubuntu Engineering can reach out to Nick to facilitate community testing more effectively.

The former two items will take time to put in place, but the latter item should be in place in the next week. As such, you should see a regular stream of testing campaigns driven by Nick in 12.04. Be sure to keep an eye on his blog.

. . .

Of course, there are lots of other things going on, but these summarize some of the key themes.

Ubuntu Developer Summit Sponsorship Now Open

2012-01-27T20:17:21+00:00

The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is the most important event in the Ubuntu calendar. It is where we get together to discuss, design, and plan the next version of Ubuntu; in this case the Ubuntu 12.10 release.

The next UDS takes place at The Oakland Marriott City Center, Oakland, California, USA from the 7th – 11th May 2012. You can find out more about why UDS is interesting from the perspective of a member of the community, an upstream contributor, and a vendor. We also welcome everyone to participate remotely if you can’t attend the event in person. More more details on how to get there, see this page.

At the heart of a great UDS is a diverse group of attendees who can bring their experience and expertise to the discussions. You don’t have to be technical, or be a programmer or packager to attend – UDS is open to everyone (including non-Ubuntu folks) and free to attend. We encourage everyone with an interest in Ubuntu to attend.

Sponsorship

For every UDS Canonical sponsors the hotel and accommodation of a set of community members to ensure they are free to contribute and bring value to the discussions. We have a limited budget so we can’t sponsor everyone, but we are always keen to have a capable and diverse group to sponsor:

We strive to support community members who are actively involved in Ubuntu and who are providing significant and sustained contributions to the Ubuntu project.
We always welcome Upstream contributors who are bring value to Ubuntu indirectly via active participation in their upstream project, but who are keen to see quality support for that upstream in Ubuntu.
Contributors are willing to actively participate not only throughout the full Ubuntu Developer Summit week, but also following with active contributions throughout the release cycle.
We are always keen to welcome members of the community who have never been to UDS before and are keen to participate and experience the event.
You don’t have to provide technical contributions to apply – if you have participated in the areas of advocacy, documentation, testing, art, design etc, you are encouraged to apply.
UDS is an event that encourages diversity – we welcome everyone to apply for sponsorship, irrespective of gender, race, impairment, technical expertise, or other factors.

If you are participating in the Ubuntu community, we would love you to apply for sponsorship. This is how it works:

You can apply for sponsorship by following these instructions. Apologies for the different forms you need to fill in – we are going to consolidate these forms at the next UDS. The deadline for submissions is Wed 22nd February 2012 so be sure to get yours in!
When the deadline is reached we will assess the applications and finalize who we will be able to sponsor.
You will then receive an email outlining whether we can sponsor you or not.

Simple! I look forward to seeing your applications, and seeing many of you in Oakland!

Plasma and KDE Applications 4.8 on Kubuntu

2012-01-27T00:16:24+00:00

Kubuntu has packages for 4.8 bringing updates to Plasma workspaces and a load of KDE Applications.

To quote a nice user posting on kde-devel

"I upgraded to Ubuntu's Precise Alpha 1 a few days ago. After the upgrade completed, I tried out KDE 4.8 RC 2. It worked great until the final release of KDE 4.8 Final. KDE 4.8 Final is even better than the RC!"

or later in the same thread

"KDE 4.8 is rocking for me too.Using the Kubuntu PPA's on Sandy Bridge system and it's just lightning fast to do anything. "

Automated ssh reconnects and handling slow connections

2012-01-25T22:43:24+00:00

When using a slow connection such as via a mobile phone, even a command line prompt via ssh can be slow to type on at times.

The ‘rlwrap’ command works around the fact that each character sometimes take a long time to be echoed back to your client, by allowing you to prepare the line locally before hitting return whilst still allowing you to pass control characters.

In addition, the ‘autossh’ command will keep trying to automatically reconnect a remote login session whilst a connection is down, and ‘GNU Screen’ for multiplexing windows and being able to leave commands running on a system even whilst disconnected or not viewing the output, and you have a pretty powerful toolset.

Here is an example of how I connect to a remote system with these commands:

rlwrap autossh -M 22007 -t user@example.com 'screen -dr'

Prompt with colour-changing smiley dependant upon exit code of command

2012-01-24T23:35:54+00:00

The file ~/.bashrc can contain a definition of the variable PS1 which is used to determine the prompt used on a command line. Normally this would display the username, hostname, working directory and is often modified to include additional information such as the time of day the command completes, history number or exit code.

The exit code of a process is zero if the command has completed successfully, otherwise the number is determined by the application – these are normally documented in its manpage.

A function can be defined within the .bashrc file which prints different strings dependant upon the exit code of the previously executed application, and the prompt constructed to include this, but upon further testing an issue arises with the length of the line when the text being entered wraps, as the number of characters in the prompt is calculated incorrectly. The reason for this is that the escape codes used to change the colour within the prompt are assumed by bash to take up space, but in fact they do not. This can be worked-around by enclosing the variables expressing the colours in escaped square brackets, but the same is not true within the print command used within the exit-code dependant function – instead, the strings 01 and 02 are used to denote the non-printing colour changes:

Red="\33[0;31m" Green="\33[0;32m" Yellow="\33[0;33m" Blue="\33[0;34m" Magenta="\33[0;35m" Cyan="\33[0;36m" Normal="\33[m"

smiley() {
ret_val=$?
if [ "$ret_val" = "0" ]
then
printf "\001$Green02:)\001$Normal\002"
else
printf "\001$Red\002:(\001$Normal\002 ($ret_val)"
fi
}
PS1="\[$Magenta\]\u@\h\[$Normal\]:\[$Cyan\]\w \$(smiley) \[$Normal\]"

References:

1. http://superuser.com/questions/301353/escape-non-printing-characters-in-a-function-for-a-bash-prompt
2. http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/bashref.html#index-prompting-257