Search Results: "ed"

4 April 2013

Andrew Pollock: [life/repatexpat] Day #4 of repatriation -- delivery central

Today was spent at my apartment with Zoe. Harvey Norman were scheduled to deliver the fridge, washing machine and TV. Someone from Telstra was scheduled to come out and monkey with the MDF to get the naked ADSL happening, and my desk was scheduled to be delivered. My parents drove us over in the morning, with some of our suitcases. Zoe was very happy with her new room and bed. I was going to get a 1 hour advance warning of Harvey Norman coming, so we all went for a little walk around the neighbourhood to explore. It turns out there's a convenience store right next door, which is, well extremely convenient. I won't need to even hop in the car to get last minute bread or milk or anything like that. Very happy about that. There's also a really gorgeous little boutique deli/gourmet grocery that is easily within walking distance. The neighbourhood is indeed very nice. Mid-morning, Brent dropped around with his daughter to say hi. Zoe had a good time playing with her as well, and we went out for lunch at the Hawthorne Garage. At the end of lunch, Harvey Norman called to say they'd be an hour away, which was well timed. Zoe declined to nap again, so we just hung out waiting for the delivery. In the middle of them delivering, the desk delivery happened as well, and then as Brent was leaving, the Telstra guy turned up, so it all happened at once. I set up the TV and DVD player and Zoe happily christened it all by watching some Play School DVDs, and then my Dad came back and picked us up. So the apartment is now almost habitable. I just need my bed. That's scheduled for Saturday. I'm planning on sleeping there on Saturday night. In the furniture department, I'm still lacking a sofa, a dining table and something to put the TV on. Leah has volunteered to help me shop tomorrow, but I'm starting to think I should focus on resolving the lack of a car, then I can do any further shopping myself. Nick had set me up with a car wholesaler who was going to search for a used Subaru Forester for me, but so far he hasn't turned anything up, so I'm thinking I need to widen my net a little and use some other avenues as well. I'd really wanted for the car finding to be outsourced as much as possible so I could focus on other things, but it's not looking like that's going to be the case, and I really need mobility. I got a notification from Internode after I'd left today that the Internet should now be working, so I need to configure the ADSL router when I next get a chance and confirm that's the case, then I'm all sorted for being technologically able to work from home.

3 April 2013

Sylvain Le Gall: Sekred a password helper for puppet.

Puppet is a nice tool but it has a significant problem with passwords: This lead to complex situation and various workaround that more or less work: Most of these workarounds are complex, don't allow you to share the password you have set easily and most of the time are stored in another place than the target node. So I have decided to create my own solution: sekred (LGPL-2.1). The idea of sekred is to generate the password on the target node and made it available to the user that needs it. Then the user just have to ssh into the host and get the password. Pro: Cons: Let see some concrete examples. Setting mysql root password This is a very simple problem. When you first install mysql on Debian Squeeze, the root password is not set. That's bad. Let set it using sekred and puppet.
node "mysqlserver"  
  package  
    ["mysql-server",
     "mysql-client",
     "sekred"]:
      ensure => installed;
   
  service  
    "mysqld":
      name => "mysql",
      ensure => running,
      hasrestart => true,
      hasstatus => true;
   
  exec  
    "mysql-set-root-password":
      command => "mysqladmin -u root password $(sekred get root@mysql)",
      onlyif => "mysql -u root",  # Trigger only if password-less root account.
      require => [Service["mysqld"], Package["mysql-client", "sekred"]];
   
 
And to get the root password for mysql, just login into the node "mysqlserver":
$> sekred get root@mysql
Cie8ieza
Setting password for SSH-only user This example is quite typical of the broken fully automated scenario with passwords: - you setup a remote host only accessible through SSH - you create a user and set its SSH public key to authorize access - your user cannot access its account because SSH prevent password-less account login! In other word, you need to login into the node, set a password for the user and mail him back.... That defeats a little bit the "automation" provided by puppet. Here is what I do with sekred:
define user::template ()  
  user  
    $name:
      ensure => present,
      membership => minimum,
      shell => "/bin/bash",
      ....
   
  include "ssh_keys::$name"
  # Check password less account and set one, if required.
  $user_passwd="$(sekred get --uid $name $name@login)"
  exec  
    "user-set-default-password-$name":
      command => "echo $name:$user_passwd   chpasswd",
      onlyif => "test \"$(getent shadow $name   cut -f2 -d:)\" = \"!\"",
      require => [User[$name], Package["sekred"]];
   
 
So the command "test \"$(getent shadow $name cut -f2 -d:)\" = \"!\"" test for a password-less account. If this is the case, it creates a password using sekred get --uid $name $name@login and set it through chpasswd. Note that $user_passwd use a shell expansion that will be evaluated when running the command only, on the host. The --uid flag of sekred assign the ownership of the password to the given user id. So now the user (foo) can login into the node and retrieve its password using sekred get foo@login. Try it! Sekred was a very short project but I am pretty happy with it. It solves a long standing problem and helps to cover an extra mile of automation when setting up new nodes. The homepage is here and you can download it here. Feel free to send patches, bugs and feature requests (here, login required).

Jonas Smedegaard: Debian Pure Blends - Creating sustainable hacks

Today Thursday April 4th I give a talk at Distro-recipes in Paris about Debian Pure Blends. Slides and sources for them.

Luke Faraone: Teaching free/open source to high school students

A few weeks ago I taught a class on Open Source: Contributing to free culture (catalog entry) for Spark, a one-day program put on by the student-run MIT Educational Studies Program. I was fortunate to have two helpful co-teachers, Tyler Hallada and Jacob Hurwitz, who assisted with the lesson plan and the in class lecture.

We ended up teaching 3 sessions of the 1hr 50min class that Saturday, with about 10 students in each session.

I was pretty impressed by the quality of the students; a number of them had used GNU/Linux before, but even those who hadn't were able to gain something from the experience. The class was broken up into three segments:

  1. Lecture on a brief history of open source and the free software movement
  2. Small research project on an open source project
  3. Lab where students could work through OpenHatch's training missions
The point was to mix up what could otherwise be a very boring lecture.

I think we might have missed the mark on the last bit, as I get the feeling that we didn't end up giving the students good actionables. While the quality of OpenHatch is high and the organization's campus outreach programs are amazing, skills practice only goes so far without clear direction to apply said skills. I'll be following up with the class participants to see how they're progressing on their own open source contributor journey, and will post updates if I have any.

While not an OpenHatch event, if this sort of thing interests you, OpenHatch runs a series of events like this one and has a mailing list for discussing planning and sharing best practices. Subscribe and say hi!

The presentation is enclosed below, and of course is licensed under CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. [PDF]

<iframe allowfullscreen="true" frameborder="0" height="389" mozallowfullscreen="true" src="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14R1o_5rOfjCw19mFtxZj29HQOhlJWK0F53MNj5tL8iU/embed?start=false&amp;loop=false&amp;delayms=3000" webkitallowfullscreen="true" width="480"></iframe>

Julien Danjou: Hy, Lisp in Python

I've meant to look at Hy since Paul Tagliamonte started to talk to me about it, but never took a chance until now. Yesterday, Paul indicated it was a good time for me to start looking at it, so I spent a few hours playing. But what's Hy? Python is very nice: it has a great community and a wide range of useful libraries. But let's face it, it misses a great language. Hy is an implementation of a Lisp on top of Python. Technically, Hy is built directly with a custom made parser (for now) which then translates expressions using the Python AST module to generate code, which is then run by Python. Therefore, it shares the same properties as Python, and is a Lisp-1 (i.e. with a single namespace for symbols and functions). If you're interested to listen Paul talking about Hy during last PyCon US, I recommend watching his lightning talk. As the name implies, it's only a few minutes long. <iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" class="shadow" frameborder="0" height="374" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/1vui-LupKJI?wmode=transparent&amp;autohide=1&amp;egm=0&amp;hd=1&amp;iv_load_policy=3&amp;modestbranding=1&amp;rel=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;showsearch=0#t=16m14s" width="500"></iframe> Does it work? I've been cloning the code and played around a bit with Hy. And to my greatest surprise and pleasure, it works quite well. You can imagine writing Python from there easily. Part of the syntax smells like Clojure's, which looks like a good thing since they're playing in the same area. You can try a Hy REPL in your Web browser if you want. Here's what some code look like:
(import requests)

(setv req (requests.get "http://hy.pault.ag"))
(if (= req.status_code 200)
(for (kv (.iteritems req.headers))
(print kv))
(throw (Exception "Wrong status code")))

This code would ouput:
('date', 'Wed, 03 Apr 2013 12:09:23 GMT')
('connection', 'keep-alive')
('content-encoding', 'gzip')
('transfer-encoding', 'chunked')
('content-type', 'text/html; charset=utf-8')
('server', 'nginx/1.2.6')
As you can see, it's really simple to write Lispy code that really uses Python idioms. There's obviously still a lots of missing features in Hy. The language if far from complete and many parts are moving, but it's really promising, and Paul's doing a great job implementing every idea. I actually started to hack a bit on Hy, and will try to continue to do so, since I'm really eager to learn a bit more about both Lisp and Python internals in the process. I've already send a few patches on small bugs I've encountered, and proposed a few ideas. It's really exciting to be able to influence early a language design that I'll love to use! Being a recent fan of Common Lisp, I tend to grab the good stuff from it to add them into Hy.

Petter Reinholdtsen: Isenkram 0.2 finally in the Debian archive

Today the Isenkram package finally made it into the archive, after lingering in NEW for many months. I uploaded it to the Debian experimental suite 2013-01-27, and today it was accepted into the archive. Isenkram is a system for suggesting to users what packages to install to work with a pluggable hardware device. The suggestion pop up when the device is plugged in. For example if a Lego Mindstorm NXT is inserted, it will suggest to install the program needed to program the NXT controller. Give it a go, and report bugs and suggestions to BTS. :)

Sylvestre Ledru: LLVM Debian/Ubuntu nightly packages

Lately, I have been working on providing nightly packages of the whole LLVM toolchain.
With the help of folks from Intel, Google and Apple, I am happy to announce the publication of these packages:
http://llvm.org/apt/ Built through a Jenkins instance (http://llvm-jenkins.debian.net/), packages for Debian wheezy and Unstable and Ubuntu quantal, precise and raring are created twice a day. 3.2 and 3.3 llvm-toolchain packages are currently waiting in the Debian NEW queue. More information on the LLVM blog.

Joey Hess: upstream git repositories

Daniel Pocock posted The multiple repository conundrum in Linux packaging. While a generally good and useful post, which upstream developers will find helpful to understand how Debian packages their software, it contains this statement:
If it is the first download, the maintainer creates a new git repository. If it has been packaged before, he clones the repository. The important point here is that this is not the upstream repository, it is an independent repository for Debian packaging.
The only thing important about that point is that it highlights an unnecessary disconnect between the Debian developer and upstream development. One which upstream will surely find annoying and should certainly not be bothered with. There is absolutely no technical reason to not use the upstream git repository as the basis for the git repository used in Debian packaging. I would never package software maintained in a git repository upstream and not do so. The details are as follows: So using the upstream git repository is valuable. And there is absolutely no technical value, and plenty of potential friction in maintaining a history-disconnected git repository for Debian packaging.

Michal &#268;iha&#345;: Weblate and Hackweek 9

You might have already noticed that there is Hackweek 9 coming next week. At SUSE we will get pizzas, icecream and other nice stuff, but most importantly we can spend the week on hacking anything we want. Same as last year, I want to spend most of my Hackweek on Weblate, nice crowdsourcing tool for translations. The major goal is to finish 1.5 release, what should not be that hard. The most challenging bits for new machine translation interface are already implemented, and the rest is pretty much only tweaking of existing code. Another thing we want to explore is possibility of using Weblate for openSUSE translations. Currently they are mostly kept in SVN, what is blocker for using Weblate, but we will see what can be done there.

Filed under: English Phpmyadmin Suse Weblate 0 comments Flattr this!

Jon Dowland: UKUUG and FLOSS UK

Last year, I failed to write and mention that I'd joined the Council of the Free/Libre Open-Source Software UK group FLOSS UK, formerly known as the UK UNIX User's Group (UKUUG). As a council-member, I helped to organise the recent Large Installation Systems Administration conference that took place in my native Newcastle, UK. Five years ago I gave a talk at the (then) UKUUG Linux conference in Manchester, 2008, about documentation for sysadmins, using ikiwiki. I recently noticed that I hadn't put the abstract or slides up here, so now I have.

Daniel Pocock: The multiple repository conundrum in Linux packaging

I'm involved with a number of free software projects as both a developer and as the maintainer of packages for various distributions such as Debian (which also feeds packages to Ubuntu) and OpenCSW. I regularly come across the following situations:
  • Developers of great software who would like to see it packaged, distributed and promoted conveniently through platforms like Debian
  • Users of Linux distributions who are keen to use free software if it is presented in a convenient and accessible manner they are familiar with.
Sadly, despite everybody having the best intentions, there is sometimes a chasm separating these two groups of people. Upstream developers are often busy developing new features and don't have time to work on the intricacies of packaging. I hope that by sharing a few of my own experiences I can help more developers get their software packaged more easily. Fortunately, a number of great tools like git-buildpackage have emerged for streamlining the packaging process, but this has also created more confusion for developers who have their own git repositories and don't quite understand how the Debian git repository and patching process relates to their own repository. The autotools world Here, I focus on autotools based software, because this type of software has it's own peculiar issues when packaging. In particular, these issues appear when using a version control system to track upstream releases. Some of the concepts can be applied to the study of regular Makefile or cmake projects as well. Here is a diagram giving an overview: Let's work through each of the steps in the diagram: The upstream release
  1. The developer/release manager updates the version number in
    configure.ac
    (sometimes called configure.in) and tags the code. (Usually this tag is on a dedicated release branch.)
  2. The developer checks out a copy of the code from the tag into a fresh working directory
  3. The developer runs the autoreconf/automake tools, usually from a bootstrap script. These tools create a number of new files that don't exist in the project repository. Finally, the developer runs
    make dist
    , which puts all the files,
    including the generated files, into a distribution tarball. It is worth emphasizing this point: the tarball is not just an archive of the files from the repository/tag, it also contains a number of
    files generated by autotools.
  4. The developer uploads the tarball to a web site such as the Sourceforge download page. Usually a release announcement is made now containing checksums for the tarball.
At this point, the upstream developer's work is done and packaging teams from various projects such as Debian will take over. Sometimes, the upstream developer is also building the packages and continues
onto the next steps himself: Packaging
  1. The package is downloaded by the package maintainer
  2. If it is the first download, the maintainer creates a new git repository. If it has been packaged before, he clones the repository. The important point here is that this is not the upstream repository, it is an independent repository for Debian packaging. The maintainer uses the git-import-orig tool to import the upstream tarball into the packaging repository. The git-import-orig tool captures an exact snapshot of the upstream release tarball contents in a branch called upstream. One point where the Debian repository differs fundamentally from the upstream repository is that all files from the tarball will be tracked in the Debian git repository, even those automatically generated files that were created by autotools and don't exist in the upstream repository.
  3. The maintainer creates or updates the various artifacts for packaging. These files are kept on the master branch, and the tarball contents from the upstream branch are merged into master to create packages.
  4. When the maintainer feels the code is ready, he will check out a clean copy of the repository to build the package from.
  5. The maintainer executes a tool such as git-buildpackage or regular dpkg-buildpackage, which creates the *.deb files.
  6. The files are checked with a tool like lintian and some manual testing/installation. If all is OK, a tag is made in the packaging repository, with a suffix appended to the upstream version number to indicate which iteration of the package it applies to.
AttachmentSize
release-packaging-workflow.dia3.97 KB

Peter Eisentraut: Installing multiple PostgreSQL versions on Homebrew

I was going to post this yesterday, but some might have thought that it was a joke. April 1st is always an annoying day to communicate real information. If you have been fond of the way Debian and Ubuntu manage multiple PostgreSQL versions in parallel, you can now have the same on OS X with Homebrew:
brew tap petere/postgresql
brew install postgresql-9.2
# etc.
brew install --HEAD postgresql-common
postgresql-common is the same code as in Debian, only mangled a little. Now you have all the client programs symlinked through pg_wrapper, and you can use the server management tools such as:
pg_createcluster 9.2 main
pg_ctlcluster 9.2 main start
pg_lsclusters
Let me know if you find this useful. Links:

Paul Tagliamonte: Here s my talk from PyCon 2013 (I tried to queue it up to...

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Here s my talk from PyCon 2013 (I tried to queue it up to where I start (@ 16:14)

A bit more giggley then I intended, but apparently it s endearing.

If anyone s actually interested in Hy, check out #hy on irc.freenode.net, star the code @ git.io/hy - it s actually pretty feature complete. If you want to play with it, check out the magic repl I ve been pondering taking it a bit more serious, so there is even a bit of documentation thanks to Chris Webber (hey, thanks!). Rock on!

2 April 2013

Jon Dowland: GSettings

With GNOME 3, if you want to override a setting with a new site default, assuming your app has been updated to use the new gsettings API and doesn't still use the old gconf one, the best guide on what to do is still Ross Burton's blog post from two years ago, although you can find most of what you need to know buried deep in the GSettings C API specification, which is not the first place I would have looked (lesson learned!) Note: In this context I'm in the role of systems administrator, rather than distributor/vendor or software author. Whereas you are generally advised to use gsettings itself and not poke at the backend (dconf for Linux), the documentation seems to point sysadmins towards dconf hackery rather than gsettings. However gsettings worked for me, and I got nowhere with dconf direct. Some caveats worth knowing about: Today I had to create 40 guest accounts on our 70-seat Linux cluster, including randomly generate passwords, set up persistent storage on our NFS server, etc.; quickly. As a nice-to-have I also wanted to add some application icons to the GNOME 3 "Favourite Apps" menu for the guests. Would you like to guess which of those jobs was the easier of the two?

Hideki Yamane: re-compress debian.tar. gz.bz2

You can use bzip2 to compress debian.tar source file in debian/source/options. But usually xz is more efficient than bzip2 (in my experience, and I love xz :) So, how about re-compressing those files with xz?

This is the result.

2.1G tar
503M current
414M xz_6e
410M xz_9e

non-compressed file is 2.1GB and we've compressed to 0.5GB. If we would use xz, it becomes 0.4GB.

debian.tar.bz2 files are 6.3M, if we would use gz, it becomes 40M, it means that package maintainers' choice is right.

6.3M bz2
40M gz
5.8M xz

Wouter Verhelst: Switching away from mutt

After having used mutt for about a decade, I decided it's time I move away from it, for various reasons that I won't go into here. I've been evaluating thunderbird^Wicedove now for a few weeks, but I can already see I won't keep using it forever, because I find too many issues with it:
  1. I can't tell the thing that I never ever ever want to write HTML-formatted emails. While there is an option "Compose messages in HTML format" in the "Account settings" dialog, that only seems to impact the behaviour of the client upon "new mail", not its reply behaviour, forcing me to go to Options->Format and switch it off.
  2. To make matters worse, the HTML editor and the plain-text editor are not the same dialog. That means it is not possible to switch on HTML formatting if it wasn't on originally (not a problem for me, but I can imagine it being a problem for others), but also that the fugly quoting style (vertical line next to the text) of the HTML editor is not removed when you switch from HTML to plain-text. Further on, it has issues when you want to remove white space, where it will remove entire quoting levels rather than just an empty line. This is horrible, horrible behaviour.
  3. While there is support for multiple email addresses connected to the same IMAP account, it does appear that there is no support for automatically choosing the right email address based on user-defined rules, such as "which mail folder are we currently in". Having to remember that I need to select the right mail address is tiresome and error-prone; e.g., when I'm in a Debian-related mail folder, I want my mail client to use my Debian mail address automatically. It appears the only way in which icedove can automatically select sender addresses is by checking the recipient list in the To: and Cc: headers for any of its configured mail addresses, and using that to decide what to put in the from: header.
Any one of the above would eventually be enough for me to grow tired of icedove and switch to something else; but the three combined mean that I'll be looking for something else fairly soon. Suggestions are, of course, welcome.

Jonathan McDowell: Building a new house server

I've moved (only a couple of blocks from where I was before), and as the new place has Webpass I've reluctantly given up my Sonic.net connection, along with its static IPv4 address and ISP IPv6 tunnel. Hard to resist a 200Mb/s ethernet connection for the same price I was paying for 18Mb/s ADSL2 though. However that leaves my DGN3500 router somewhat inappropriate for providing my net connection. Freed from the need for an ADSL/cable router I decided it was time to build an all in one house server (I'm a believer in as few always on boxes as possible). I already had a nettop acting as a media box, but wanted to build something that would handle: Probably in that order if it turns out I'm asking too much. The intention is the box is the only one that always needs to be on, so I wanted it to be low power consumption. I also wanted the option of hooking it up to the TV if it turned out to have enough grunt, so the case needed to be something suitable for the living room. I like Intel's approach to graphics drivers, in particular the existence of Free video acceleration support, so I went with an Intel Core i3-3220T as the processor. It's a 35W Ivybridge processor with HD 2500 graphics, plus I got it for a decent price. For the case I chose a CFI A2059. There's a local supplier I was able to pick it up from, it has a couple of large fans which helps keeps the noise down while keeping things cool and as I was aiming for backup / file sharing being more important than a media box the 2 hot swap bays tipped the balance away from an AV style case. The small case limits the motherboard options. I wanted twin GigE ports so the external was entirely separate from the internal (my switch does VLANs so I could have made do with a single port, but with a 200Mb/s connection I didn't really want to share the port). The Gigabyte GA-H77N-WIFI seemed to fit the bill, with the added advantage of a built in WiFi card (an Intel 2230 in a mini PCI-E slot) which leaves the PCI-E slot free for either a TV tuner or a second WiFi card to cover 5GHz. I maxed out the board with 2 8G G.SKILL DDR3-1600 DIMMs. I normally go Crucial because I've found them reliable, but these were slightly cheaper and available from the same place as the motherboard. Finally I added a Seagate ST4000DM000 for storage. It actually came from a Backup Plus that Costco were selling for about $20 less than the bare drive sells for. The plan is to add at least another 1T drive to RAID1 the most important bits (or possibly a 2T - it depends which of my existing drives I can tidy stuff off most easily). Of course it's running Debian and I took the opportunity to try out the RC1 Wheezy image. For extra giggles I did an EFI install; this all worked fine except I didn't end up with grub-efi installed at the end, instead I had grub-pc. I booted with legacy BIOS enabled and followed Tanguy's switch to UEFI boot instructions. Further notes on software setup to follow...

Russ Allbery: Review: An Election

Review: An Election, by John Scalzi
Publisher: Subterranean
Copyright: 2010
Printing: 2012
ISBN: 1-59606-496-X
Format: Kindle
Pages: 24
This is another story from the Subterranean Scalzi Super Bundle that probably doesn't justify a full review, particularly since this time it's a short story and not even a novelette, but as with the others it's been independently published on the Kindle (and is still available that way for 99 cents). So by my obsessive internal consistency that matters only to me, it gets a full review anyway. I was mildly surprised to find that this was actually my second reading, and now vaguely remember that Subterranean had actually sponsored the story's appearance on Scalzi's blog as an advertising experiment. So I originally read the story from Scalzi's blog, and if you don't really want to pay money for it, you still can as well. Along with a couple of ads that appear to have bit-rotted. The chief feature of An Election is the background: a world in which aliens and humans are intermingled in a political district, going about their lives against a background of rather extreme multispecies diversity. The protagonist, David, decides to run for the upcoming city council special election, despite living in a district that's minority-human and that hasn't seen a human councilor in forty-four years. (David also happens to be a gay man, which goes entirely unremarked in the story and is, in fact, entirely unremarkable given the excitingly diverse characteristics of his alien neighbors. I thought that was a nice touch.) He of course appears to stand no chance, particularly when one of the city bosses decides to run as well, but ends up with a campaign advisor almost by accident and determinedly attempts to connect with his neighbors and earn their votes. This felt quite typical to me of Scalzi's humor writing. The protagonist is a good-hearted person who gets in rather over his head but is still determined to do the right thing, while not taking anything too seriously. The background humor is never particularly threatening and tends towards slapstick and banter. I found it similar in tone to most of Agent to the Stars, although of course much shorter. As usual, Scalzi's grasp of conversational banter is probably the strongest part of the story; the dynamic between David, his husband James, and his campaign advisor brought several chuckles for me. This is slight but enjoyable. I wouldn't go out of my way to read it, but it's a good story to toss into a bundle of other work, and I remember it holding my interest when reading it on-line. (Which is rare; usually I fail to finish any fiction I try to read in a browser unless it's extremely short.) Rating: 6 out of 10

1 April 2013

Andrew Pollock: [life/repatexpat] On Queensland electricity retailers

So one of the first things I need to do when I get my apartment today is get the electricity on. I've actually already ordered ADSL, which shows you what I think is more important, but without electricity, there is no Internet... It would appear that in 2007, Queensland opened up its electricity and gas markets to "full retail competition". According to Energex, they do the generation, distribution, and the retailer handles connections, disconnections, billing and green energy. I still need to deal directly with Energex for power outages, reporting faulty street lights, requesting a tree that's near power lines be trimmed, and so on. So if the retailers have no say in what price they're paying for the electricity that's being generated by Energex, I'm struggling to see what their point is. I guess they get to differentiate on customer service, but really, that's it? It was also really hard to find a canonical list of retailers to choose from. I would have thought that'd be linked off Energex's "Choosing your electricity retailer" page, but no, it's buried in the FAQ. Now it comes down to a case of doing a comparison between 11 retailers and trying to choose one. Or just going with the first one on the list. It's just electricity, people. It's a utility. I do not want to expend as much time on choosing an electricity retailer as I would my ISP (interestingly, it looks like Dodo has gotten in on the electricity retailing act). But one could say that an upside of having jet lag and being awake since 3am, is that one has time to comparison shop the 11 electricity retailers, except I won't. I'll just write this blog post instead. I have heard of one horror story, where a homeowner returned to living in his house, and had a nightmare time with one retailer because the previous occupants had an outstanding debt with that retailer, and he was trying to get a connection going with a different retailer, and lots of hilarity ensued. Except it wasn't hilarious. So I'll have to keep an eye on that. My current thought is to go with AGL, because What's pretty crazy is that at no point from quickly skimming AGL's landing page for Queensland pricing is there any indication of kWh or an actual price for anything. There's lots of noise about discounts, and flexibility, and other nonsense, but it seems like the actual cost of energy is so buried, it's incredible. It seems to be all about locking in on a contract, which is somewhat amazing. This is just electricity, but they seem to have turned this into a mobile phone plan type of situation. Amazing. After more digging, it looks like I can pay 5.5 cents per kWh for 100% green energy. Maybe.

Lisandro Dami&aacute;n Nicanor P&eacute;rez Meyer: On the road to Qt 5: Qt 4.8.4 and qtchooser uploaded to experimental

I have just uploaded Qt 4.8.4 to experimental. Apart from being the newest upstream release of the 4 series, it adds the basic support for coexisting with Qt 5. Because of this support it will need to go trough the NEW queue though, so we will need to be patient.

Developers will be interested in qtchooser, the tool that allows to switch between Qt 4 and 5 development apps. It has also been uploaded to experimental.

Of course, all this has been possible thanks to the efforts of the wonderful Qt/KDE team =)

Update: our efficacious FTP masters have already made Qt pass the NEW queue. Thanks a lot!

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