== Dev Week -- Project Lightning talks -- Fri, Jul 15th, 2011 == {{{#!irc [20:01] Hello and welcome to lightning talks! [20:02] Since the last few "weeks", we've been having a session on the last day that's just lightning talks [20:02] Basically, we'll have people talk about a project they're working on [20:02] and you guys can check out and proably help with the project [20:03] First up today is tumbleweed. He's going to talk about Ubuntu dev tools. [20:03] tumbleweed: Stage's all yours :) [20:03] Thanks nigelb [20:03] evening everyone [20:04] for me it's pretty late on a friday evening, but hopefully there are a few people listening :) [20:04] so [20:04] ubuntu developers (like all developers) like scripting things where possible [20:04] there's a whole bunch of really useful scripts in devscripts and ubuntu-dev-tools [20:05] I recommend that everyone go and have a look through the list, even if you already have [20:05] I keep discovering new things in devscripts, every time I look [20:05] /usr/share/doc/devscripts/README.gz has a reasonable list [20:05] and apt-cache show ubuntu-dev-tools will show you what's there [20:06] I'll just present a couple of highlights [20:06] last UDW, bdrung spoke about wrap-and-sort, which is a neat littel tool that sorts lists of dependencies in debian/control [20:06] I find it makes packages far more maintainable (and recommend that my debian sponsorees use it in packages they mantain) [20:07] If you haven't seen it, look at it [20:07] ubuntu-dev-tools also has a couple of other useful bits: [20:07] backportpackage makes it really easy to test a backport into your PPA [20:08] 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 [20:08] "pull-lp-source bash lucid" will get you the bash sourcepackage for lucid [20:09] it can also pull old, superseded versions from lp's archives, or debian's snapshot service [20:09] ok, that's my 5 minutes, back to nigelb [20:09] Thanks tumbleweed! [20:09] Next up, we have crazedpsyc. He's going to talk about Melia, which from the screenshots I saw was quite interesting [20:10] Thanks [20:10] Hey folks, My name is Michael Smith, and I am a python lover :) [20:10] I've just recently started a project called Melia, written in PyGTK [20:10] Melia is a desktop shell, meaning that it just sits on top of an existing desktop environment like GNOME or XFCE [20:10] If you'd like to take a look at some screenshots, go to http://strenua.github.com/Melia and click 'Take a Peek' [20:11] I'll start out by walking you through some of the features and goals of Melia [20:11] The biggest goal for Melia is to be completely mobile-ready, while remaining versatile enough to use on netbooks, laptops, and even desktops. [20:11] 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. [20:12] The big, long-term goal is to create an entire touch-friendly distribution, where we will use parts of MeeGo [20:12] At the moment, Melia is not very polished. However it does have plenty of features, and there are many more on the way. [20:13] The most important features are mostly interpreted from other desktops including Unity, Gnome Shell, Gnome2 classic, and even a few ideas from KDE. [20:13] A quick summary of the top feaures: [20:13] - 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. [20:14] - 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) [20:14] - 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. [20:14] - 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 [20:14] - Native: Melia is written entirely in Gtk, so everything blends seamlessly [20:15] 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!). [20:15] Time's up already :) back to nigelb [20:15] Thanks crazedpsyc [20:16] crazedpsyc: Do you want to finish answering the questions before I go on to the next talk? [20:16] Only one question right now, but if there are more, I'm free in #melia :) [20:17] cool [20:17] Next up is mhall119! [20:17] He got OMG!Ubuntu'd recently for his work on tomboy-pastebinit [20:17] That's what he'll be talking about :) [20:17] thanks nigelb [20:18] so, I like tomboy, kind of a lot, I use it anytime I need to quickly write something down [20:18] 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 [20:19] what I ended up doing was just select-all, copy, open up paste.ubuntu.com, paste [20:19] over and over and over again [20:19] I also use pastebinit, a greate little command line tool written by stgraber [20:20] you can pipe anything to it, and it'll send it to a pastebin service, and print out the pastebin URL [20:20] for some reason, it took me a while to put 2 and 2 together [20:20] but when I did, I took an hour to learn C# and the Tomboy addin API [20:21] 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 [20:21] the result was tomboy-pastebint: http://mhall119.com/2011/06/pastebinit-for-tomboy-notes/ [20:22] it's nothing big, it's nothing fancy, but it cuts down a frequent task from 5 steps to 1 [20:22] 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 [20:23] project is here: https://launchpad.net/tomboy-pastebinit [20:23] instructions are in the source tree [20:23] any questions? [20:25] if not, that's my time [20:26] hello again [20:26] this time I'm talking about something not directly related to Ubuntu devolpment. Something I work on in my spare time is IRC bots [20:27] every online community needs bots to help manage their channels [20:27] but they can also be fun to play with and useful [20:27] 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 [20:27] (and also great fun to have in your channel) [20:27] * tumbleweed has one here tonight [20:27] Ibid_: hi [20:27] wussup [20:28] I wrote a quite plugin for him while the last talk was happening [20:28] http://pastebin.com/YP3JsALS [20:28] it seems to work [20:28] Ibid_: udw talk [20:28] tumbleweed: I suggest: Growing the Ubuntu Server [20:28] Ibid_: udw talk [20:28] tumbleweed: I suggest: Growing the Ubuntu Community [20:28] heh, that's a useful one [20:29] anyway, the point of the project is to make a bot that's fun to have around and dead-simple to write plugins for [20:29] 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 [20:29] it can do a *whole* lot more [20:29] Ibid_: what can you do? [20:29] 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. [20:29] Ask me "help me with ..." for more details. [20:30] Ibid_: help me with silly fun stuff [20:30] 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 [20:30] Ask me "how do I use ..." for more details. [20:30] Ibid_: how do I use choose [20:30] tumbleweed: Choose one of the given options. You can use it like this: [20:30] choose or ... [20:30] Ibid_: choose should I fix a bug tonight or go to bed early? [20:30] tumbleweed: I choose go to bed early [20:30] Ibid_: botsnack [20:30] :) [20:31] ibid.omnia.za.net / launchpad.net/ibid if you want to see more, or ping me on IRC [20:31] that's my 5 mins [20:34] Ok, so lightning talks are done! [20:35] Sorry it was too short. [20:35] Now, I'm handing over to mhall119 for some impromtu fun :) [20:35] ok, so I floated this idea to nigelb only a little bit ago, but I wanted to try having a reverse-lightning talk [20:35] what's that you say? [20:35] well, I'm glad you asked [20:36] in a reverse lighting talk, you get 5 minutes to tell people what you'd like to see made [20:36] so, if you've ever though "someone should write a program to do x", here's your chance to tell us [20:36] if it's interesting, maybe someone will do it [20:37] 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 [20:37] would anybody like to give it a shot? [20:38] nobody? [20:41] ok, well maybe we'll give this a try when we have time to advertise it prior to it actually happening [20:41] Ok, then. We tried. [20:41] Thank you all for showing up at the Ubuntu Developer Week! [20:42] Until next time, this is a goodbye from the classroom team :) [20:42] Don't forget we have an upcoming Ubuntu Cloud days! [20:45] And don't forget next week is Ubuntu Community Week. :) [20:46] Yes! that too :-) [20:46] oh, randall said he'd have the schedule put in calendar tonight so we can review over the weekend [20:47] \o/ community week! }}}