Ubuntu Wiki

   1 [20:01] <nigelb> Hello and welcome to lightning talks!
   2 [20:02] <nigelb> Since the last few "weeks", we've been having a session on the last day that's just lightning talks
   3 [20:02] <nigelb> Basically, we'll have people talk about a project they're working on
   4 [20:02] <nigelb> and you guys can check out and proably help with the project
   5 [20:03] <nigelb> First up today is tumbleweed. He's going to talk about Ubuntu dev tools.
   6 [20:03] <nigelb> tumbleweed: Stage's all yours :)
   7 [20:03] <tumbleweed> Thanks nigelb
   8 [20:03] <tumbleweed> evening everyone
   9 [20:04] <tumbleweed> for me it's pretty late on a friday evening, but hopefully there are a few people listening :)
  10 [20:04] <tumbleweed> so
  11 [20:04] <tumbleweed> ubuntu developers (like all developers) like scripting things where possible
  12 [20:04] <tumbleweed> there's a whole bunch of really useful scripts in devscripts and ubuntu-dev-tools
  13 [20:05] <tumbleweed> I recommend that everyone go and have a look through the list, even if you already have
  14 [20:05] <tumbleweed> I keep discovering new things in devscripts, every time I look
  15 [20:05] <tumbleweed> /usr/share/doc/devscripts/README.gz has a reasonable list
  16 [20:05] <tumbleweed> and apt-cache show ubuntu-dev-tools will show you what's there
  17 [20:06] <tumbleweed> I'll just present a couple of highlights
  18 [20:06] <tumbleweed> last UDW, bdrung spoke about wrap-and-sort, which is a neat littel tool that sorts lists of dependencies in debian/control
  19 [20:06] <tumbleweed> I find it makes packages far more maintainable (and recommend that my debian sponsorees use it in packages they mantain)
  20 [20:07] <tumbleweed> If you haven't seen it, look at it
  21 [20:07] <tumbleweed> ubuntu-dev-tools also has a couple of other useful bits:
  22 [20:07] <tumbleweed> backportpackage makes it really easy to test a backport into your PPA
  23 [20:08] <tumbleweed> pull-lp-source and pull-debian source make it really easy to download source packages without having to have deb-src lines for all releases in your /etc/apt/sources.list
  24 [20:08] <tumbleweed> "pull-lp-source bash lucid" will get you the bash sourcepackage for lucid
  25 [20:09] <tumbleweed> it can also pull old, superseded versions from lp's archives, or debian's snapshot service
  26 [20:09] <tumbleweed> ok, that's my 5 minutes, back to nigelb
  27 [20:09] <nigelb> Thanks tumbleweed!
  28 [20:09] <nigelb> Next up, we have crazedpsyc. He's going to talk about Melia, which from the screenshots I saw was quite interesting
  29 [20:10] <crazedpsyc> Thanks
  30 [20:10] <crazedpsyc> Hey folks, My name is Michael Smith, and I am a python lover :)
  31 [20:10] <crazedpsyc> I've just recently started a project called Melia, written in PyGTK
  32 [20:10] <crazedpsyc> Melia is a desktop shell, meaning that it just sits on top of an existing desktop environment like GNOME or XFCE
  33 [20:10] <crazedpsyc> If you'd like to take a look at some screenshots, go to http://strenua.github.com/Melia and click 'Take a Peek'
  34 [20:11] <crazedpsyc> I'll start out by walking you through some of the features and goals of Melia
  35 [20:11] <crazedpsyc> The biggest goal for Melia is to be completely mobile-ready, while remaining versatile enough to use on netbooks, laptops, and even desktops.
  36 [20:11] <crazedpsyc> Another big goal is speed. You don't want your tablet or phone to take more than a few seconds to boot and log in, so we really have to work on 'de-bloating' everything.
  37 [20:12] <crazedpsyc> The big, long-term goal is to create an entire touch-friendly distribution, where we will use parts of MeeGo
  38 [20:12] <crazedpsyc> At the moment, Melia is not very polished. However it does have plenty of features, and there are many more on the way.
  39 [20:13] <crazedpsyc> The most important features are mostly interpreted from other desktops including Unity, Gnome Shell, Gnome2 classic, and even a few ideas from KDE.
  40 [20:13] <crazedpsyc> A quick summary of the top feaures:
  41 [20:13] <crazedpsyc>  - Customizability: Melia is completely themable, the launcher can be moved, resized, and much more... and soon Melia will support loading extensions, which can modify the shell in any way.
  42 [20:14] <crazedpsyc>  - Quicklists: Melia supports dynamic quicklists via its own simple API, and it will soon support Unity's quicklists as well. (soon being tomorrow in this case)
  43 [20:14] <crazedpsyc>  - Integrated notifications: Small, quiet notifications appear in the center of the panel, where you will soon be able to reply to IMs just like gnome shell.
  44 [20:14] <crazedpsyc>  - Indicators and systray: Melia currently has its own poweful indicator API, which is almost entirely compatible with Ubuntu's. Melia will also have a system tray similar to gnome shell's
  45 [20:14] <crazedpsyc>  - Native: Melia is written entirely in Gtk, so everything blends seamlessly
  46 [20:15] <crazedpsyc> At this point I am the only developer for Melia, so my time is a bit stretched. I need help! One of the biggest tasks is porting Melia to PyGI (thanks pitti!).
  47 [20:15] <crazedpsyc> Time's up already :) back to nigelb
  48 [20:15] <nigelb> Thanks crazedpsyc
  49 [20:16] <nigelb> crazedpsyc: Do you want to finish answering the questions before I go on to the next talk?
  50 [20:16] <crazedpsyc> Only one question right now, but if there are more, I'm free in #melia :)
  51 [20:17] <nigelb> cool
  52 [20:17] <nigelb> Next up is mhall119!
  53 [20:17] <nigelb> He got OMG!Ubuntu'd recently for his work on tomboy-pastebinit
  54 [20:17] <nigelb> That's what he'll be talking about :)
  55 [20:17] <mhall119> thanks nigelb
  56 [20:18] <mhall119> so, I like tomboy, kind of a lot, I use it anytime I need to quickly write something down
  57 [20:18] <mhall119> however, it's not really useful for sharing, and a lot of time I'm writing stuff down in tomboy that I'm only writing down so I can share it later
  58 [20:19] <mhall119> what I ended up doing was just select-all, copy, open up paste.ubuntu.com, paste
  59 [20:19] <mhall119> over and over and over again
  60 [20:19] <mhall119> I also use pastebinit, a greate little command line tool written by stgraber
  61 [20:20] <mhall119> you can pipe anything to it, and it'll send it to a pastebin service, and print out the pastebin URL
  62 [20:20] <mhall119> for some reason, it took me a while to put 2 and 2 together
  63 [20:20] <mhall119> but when I did, I took an hour to learn C# and the Tomboy addin API
  64 [20:21] <mhall119> and I wrote an addin that will take the content of a note, pass it through the pastebinit command line tool, take the URL it spits out and open it in your browser
  65 [20:21] <mhall119> the result was tomboy-pastebint: http://mhall119.com/2011/06/pastebinit-for-tomboy-notes/
  66 [20:22] <mhall119> it's nothing big, it's nothing fancy, but it cuts down a frequent task from 5 steps to 1
  67 [20:22] <mhall119> there are things that would be nice to add to it, and I'd love to have someone better at C# helping me with it
  68 [20:23] <mhall119> project is here: https://launchpad.net/tomboy-pastebinit
  69 [20:23] <mhall119> instructions are in the source tree
  70 [20:23] <mhall119> any questions?
  71 [20:25] <mhall119> if not, that's my time
  72 [20:26] <tumbleweed> hello again
  73 [20:26] <tumbleweed> this time I'm talking about something not directly related to Ubuntu devolpment. Something I work on in my spare time is IRC bots
  74 [20:27] <tumbleweed> every online community needs bots to help manage their channels
  75 [20:27] <tumbleweed> but they can also be fun to play with and useful
  76 [20:27] <tumbleweed> we went a bit all out, and tried ot create a bot (in python, of course) that would be really easy to write plugins for
  77 [20:27] <tumbleweed> (and also great fun to have in your channel)
  78 [20:27]  * tumbleweed has one here tonight
  79 [20:27] <tumbleweed> Ibid_: hi
  80 [20:27] <Ibid_> wussup
  81 [20:28] <tumbleweed> I wrote a quite plugin for him while the last talk was happening
  82 [20:28] <tumbleweed> http://pastebin.com/YP3JsALS
  83 [20:28] <tumbleweed> it seems to work
  84 [20:28] <tumbleweed> Ibid_: udw talk
  85 [20:28] <Ibid_> tumbleweed: I suggest: Growing the Ubuntu Server
  86 [20:28] <tumbleweed> Ibid_: udw talk
  87 [20:28] <Ibid_> tumbleweed: I suggest: Growing the Ubuntu Community
  88 [20:28] <tumbleweed> heh, that's a useful one
  89 [20:29] <tumbleweed> anyway, the point of the project is to make a bot that's fun to have around and dead-simple to write plugins for
  90 [20:29] <tumbleweed> in this one you can see it registers the plugin based on the regex in line 8, and puts together a response by making some random choices
  91 [20:29] <tumbleweed> it can do a *whole* lot more
  92 [20:29] <tumbleweed> Ibid_: what can you do?
  93 [20:29] <Ibid_> tumbleweed: I can help you with: administrative functions, bot accounts and permissions, debugging me, looking things up, remembering things, delivering messages, decisions, games, monitoring things, browsing the internet, conversions, silly fun stuff, calculations, system administration, software development and south african stuff.
  94 [20:29] <Ibid_> Ask me "help me with ..." for more details.
  95 [20:30] <tumbleweed> Ibid_: help me with silly fun stuff
  96 [20:30] <Ibid_> tumbleweed: I use the following features for silly fun stuff: bash, bucket, choose, coffee, dinner, draw-aa, duel, dvorak, figlet, fml, fortune, insult, mlia, morse, nickometer, random, redirect, remind, rot13, saydo, tfln and werewolf
  97 [20:30] <Ibid_> Ask me "how do I use ..." for more details.
  98 [20:30] <tumbleweed> Ibid_: how do I use choose
  99 [20:30] <Ibid_> tumbleweed: Choose one of the given options. You can use it like this:
 100 [20:30] <Ibid_>   choose <choice> or <choice>...
 101 [20:30] <tumbleweed> Ibid_: choose should I fix a bug tonight or go to bed early?
 102 [20:30] <Ibid_> tumbleweed: I choose go to bed early
 103 [20:30] <tumbleweed> Ibid_: botsnack
 104 [20:30] <Ibid_> :)
 105 [20:31] <tumbleweed> ibid.omnia.za.net / launchpad.net/ibid if you want to see more, or ping me on IRC
 106 [20:31] <tumbleweed> that's my 5 mins
 107 [20:34] <nigelb> Ok, so lightning talks are done!
 108 [20:35] <nigelb> Sorry it was too short.
 109 [20:35] <nigelb> Now, I'm handing over to mhall119 for some impromtu fun :)
 110 [20:35] <mhall119> ok, so I floated this idea to nigelb only a little bit ago, but I wanted to try having a reverse-lightning talk
 111 [20:35] <mhall119> what's that you say?
 112 [20:35] <mhall119> well, I'm glad you asked
 113 [20:36] <mhall119> in a reverse lighting talk, you get 5 minutes to tell people what you'd like to see made
 114 [20:36] <mhall119> so, if you've ever though "someone should write a program to do x", here's your chance to tell us
 115 [20:36] <mhall119> if it's interesting, maybe someone will do it
 116 [20:37] <mhall119> but you only have 5 minutes to describe it in enough details for a developer to implement it, so you're not getting a new OS or anything big
 117 [20:37] <mhall119> would anybody like to give it a shot?
 118 [20:38] <mhall119> nobody?
 119 [20:41] <mhall119> ok, well maybe we'll give this a try when we have time to advertise it prior to it actually happening
 120 [20:41] <nigelb> Ok, then. We tried.
 121 [20:41] <nigelb> Thank you all for showing up at the Ubuntu Developer Week!
 122 [20:42] <nigelb> Until next time, this is a goodbye from the classroom team :)
 123 [20:42] <nigelb> Don't forget we have an upcoming Ubuntu Cloud days!
 124 [20:45] <nhaines> And don't forget next week is Ubuntu Community Week.  :)
 125 [20:46] <nigelb> Yes! that too :-)
 126 [20:46] <pleia2> oh, randall said he'd have the schedule put in calendar tonight so we can review over the weekend
 127 [20:47] <pleia2> \o/ community week!