Older blog entries for ctrlsoft (starting at number 89)

Mumble and bluetooth

Mumble is an open source, low-latency, high quality voice chat application that we're using at Canonical, and which Samba has recently also adopted.

After I busted the cable of my cabled headset and inspired by Matt's post about Mumble and Bluetooth I bought a cheap Nokia Bluetooth headset that works with my laptop as well as my phone. By using BlueMan I even found that the headset worked out of the box on Maverick.

A nice feature in Mumble is that it is controllable using D-Bus. Blueman supports running an arbitrary command when the answer button is pressed. Combining these two features, it is possible to automatically toggle mute when the answer button is pressed:


#!/usr/bin/python
import dbus
bus = dbus.SessionBus()
mumble = bus.get_object("net.sourceforge.mumble.mumble", "/")
is_muted = mumble.isSelfMuted()
mumble.setSelfMuted(not is_muted)

To use this script, set its path in the configuration tab for the "Headset" plugin in blueman.

The only remaining problem with this setup is that I can't keep the headset on during my work day, as I don't have a way to put it in standby mode automatically. This means that my battery runs out pretty quickly, even when nothing is happening on Mumble.

cp: Red Sparowes - Finally As That Blazing Sun Shone

Syndicated 2010-11-07 21:38:35 from Stationary Traveller

OpenChange server and SOGo

There's more good news on the OpenChange front. Julien has been working together with Wolfgang and Ludovic from Inverse recently to leverage the server-side support in OpenChange to provide native Exchange server support in SOGo.

A couple of days ago we announced that there now is an initial version that allows the use of Outlook against a SOGo server through OpenChange.

As far as I know, this is the first time it's possible to actually use Outlook clients with a non-Microsoft Exchange-compatible server without the need for plugins on the Outlook side. And it's all Free Software. Of course, this is just a preview, and not something we'd recommend everybody to run in production yet. But it's exciting to finally see this come together.

We already have OpenChange packages in Debian and Ubuntu but I hope I can help get SOGo packaged for both distributions as well.

Syndicated 2010-10-26 17:47:16 from Stationary Traveller

Samba 4 and OpenChange daily Ubuntu packages

Daily builds

As of a month ago there are Ubuntu archives with fresh packages of Samba 4 and Openchange, built on a daily basis day from the latest upstream revision.

This means that it is now possible to run a version of Samba 4 that is less than 24 hours old, without having to know how to extract source code from the version control system that upstream is using, without having to know how to build and install an application from source, but perhaps most importantly: without having to go through the tedious process of manually updating the source code and rebuilding.

OpenChange is tightly coupled to Samba 4, so installing a new version of OpenChange usually involves installing a new version of Samba 4 as well. To make matters more confusing, the two projects use different version control systems (Samba 4 is in Git, while OpenChange is in Subversion) and different build systems (Samba 4 uses waf, OpenChange uses autoconf and make).

I have been involved in Samba 4 and OpenChange as an upstream developer and more recently also as a packager for both Debian and Ubuntu.

As an upstream developer for both these projects it is important for me that users can easily run the development versions. It makes it possible for interested users to confirm the fixes for issues they have reported and to test new features. The more users run the development version, the more confident I can be as a developer that doing a release will not cause any unexpected surprises.

As a packager it is useful to know when there are upstream changes that are going to break my package with the next release.

Recipes

The daily builds work using so-called recipes which describe how to build a Debian source package from a set of Bazaar branches. For example, the Samba 4 recipe looks like this:

  # bzr-builder format 0.2 deb-version 4.0.0~alpha14~bzr{revno}~ppa{revno:packaging}+{revno:debian}
lp:samba
merge debian lp:~samba-team/samba/unstable
merge packaging lp:~samba-team/samba/4.0-ppa-maverick

This dictates that a source package should be built by taking the upstream Samba branch and merging the Debian packaging and some recipe-specific tweaking. The last bit on the first line indicates the version string to be used when generating a changelog entry for the daily build.

Every night Launchpad (through bzr-builder) merges these branches and attempts to build the resulting source package, e-mailing me in case of build problems. Generally I fix issues that come up by committing directly to upstream VCS or to the Debian packaging branch. There is no overhead in maintaining the daily build after I've set it up.

For more information on creating source package recipes, see getting started.

Toolchain

The entire toolchain that does the daily package builds for Ubuntu is Free Software, and I have contributed to various bits of that toolchain over the years. It's exciting to see everything come together.

Soyuz

Launchpad consists of multiple pillars - one of those pillars is Soyuz, which I hack on as part of my day job at Canonical. Soyuz is responsible for the archive management and package building. Debian source packages (a combination of upstream source code and packaging metadata) get uploaded by users and then built for various architectures on our buildfarm and published to the Ubuntu archive or to users personal package archives.

Launchpad-code

Another pillar of Launchpad is Launchpad-code, which is responsible for the hosting and management of version control branches. Launchpad users can either host their branches on Launchpad directly or mirror branches (either native Bazaar branches or branches in a foreign format such as Subversion, Git or Mercurial). The mirrorring of native and foreign branches happens using standard Bazaar API's. In the case of Samba and OpenChange we import the branches of the upstream projects (Samba is in Git, OpenChange is in Subversion) and the packaging for both projects is in Bazaar.

Launchad-code calls out to Bazaar to do the actual mirrorring. Over the last few years I have done a lot of work to improve Bazaars support for foreign branches, in particular on supporting Subversion, Git and Mercurial. As the code mirrorring in Launchpad is one of the biggest users of bzr-svn and bzr-git it has helped find some of the more obscure bugs in those plugins over the last few years, to the point where there are only a handful of issues with Git and Subversion imports left.

bzr-git and dulwich

bzr-git provides transparent access to Git repositories from within Bazaar and is built on top of Dulwich. Dulwich is a Python library that provides access to the Git file formats and protocols that is completely independent of Bazaar. James Westby originally started it and I adopted it for bzr-git and further extended it. There are now several other projects that use it as well, including hg-git, and rabbitvcs. Apart from James and me almost two dozen other people have contributed it so far.

bzr-svn and subvertpy

bzr-svn provides transparant access to Subversion repositories in Bazaar. When I grew frustrated with the existing Subversion Python bindings for various reasons, I decided to create independent Python bindings for Subversion from scratch. These bindings have since been split out into a separate project - subvertpy - and other projects have since also started using them, e.g. hgsubversion and basie.

Using the daily builds

To use the Samba 4 and OpenChange daily builds (Ubuntu Maverick only for now), run:

  $ apt-add-repository ppa:samba-team/ppa
$ apt-add-repository ppa:openchange/daily-builds

cp: Karnivool - Themata

Syndicated 2010-09-28 10:39:50 from Stationary Traveller

subunit usage in Samba

Both Samba 3 and Samba 4 are now using the "subunit" protocol inside their testsuite (aka "make test"). subunit is a streaming protocol used to report test results that is aimed at being simple to generate and parse as well as being human readable.

A very simple subunit stream might look like this:

  test: samba4.tests.util.strlist.check_list_make
creating list...
list created!
success: samba4.tests.util.strlist.check_list_make
test: samba4.tests.util.strlist.check_list_make_shell
creating list...
xfail: samba4.tests.util.strlist.check_list_make_shell [
returned NT_STATUS_NOT_IMPLEMENTED
]

For those that are familiar with the TAP protocol used by Perl, it is similar to that, although it has a couple of features that TAP does not have. For example, it can report timestamps (useful for determining test duration) and has more flexible progress reporting.

Subunit is particularly useful for projects that use multiple programming languages as it allows a single tool to be used for test visualization or analysis rather than one per language. All that's required per-language is a test runner that can spit out subunit streams.

selftest.pl, the main engine behind Samba's test suite, has been using subunit internally since its creation couple of years ago. Most other test tools we use can also report subunit, in particular our Python tests, blackbox tests, Perl tests (using tap2subunit) and smbtorture.

"make test" never displays raw subunit results, it always formats them using our format-subunit script. Samba 4's "make test" stores the raw subunit output in st/subunit.

I'm attending SNIA SDC at the moment and a couple of people here have asked me about the tools I use to display and analyse test results. They are:

The subunit project contains a bunch of convenience tools for working with subunit. Other than libraries for parsing/generating subunit for several languages it contains tools for manipulating and analysing subunit streams, including:

  • subunit-ls: List all tests in a subunit stream, optionally including their run times (I used this for the test duration summary I sent to the Samba mailing list earlier)
  • tap2subunit: convert a TAP stream to a Subunit stream
  • subunit-stats: Print statistics for a subunit stream (how many successful tests, failed tests, skipped tests, etc)
  • subunit-filter: E.g. remove test result or output from a stream
  • subunit-diff: Compare two subunit streams and see what tests have started failing or are no longer failing
  • subunit2pyunit: Format a subunit stream using Python's standard unit test test result formatter

We're including the subunit tree in the Samba git tree at lib/subunit.

Tribunal is a GTK+ viewer for subunit streams. It allows for easy browsing of test results. Tribunal is still a bit rough around the edges, although it should already be useful.

Example usage:

  $ make test
$ tribunal-subunit st/subunit

Test Repository provides a database of test results which fits into developers work flow and keeps track of useful information like what tests are failing, or which failures have the same backtrace.

In particular Test Repository can re-run only the tests that failed in the previous test run:

  $ testr init
# Run the full testsuite (1 hour goes by)
$ testr run
# Run those tests from the testsuite that failed in the previous run 
# (this would be a lot shorter usually, depending on how many tests were
# failing)
$ testr run --failing

testrepository is also still in its early days, but can potentially be very useful, e.g. when comparing old test runs on the buildfarm.

Syndicated 2010-09-24 00:46:11 from Stationary Traveller

It's that time of year again

Ik ga op vakantie en neem mee:

  • Agalloch - Ashes Against the Grain
  • Aimee Mann - Lost In Space
  • Anathema - Alternative 4
  • Arch Enemy - Burning Japan
  • Blackfield_-_Blackfield
  • Camel - Coming of Age
  • Dream Theater - Black Clouds And Silver Linings
  • Evanescence - Fallen
  • Gazpacho - Tick Tock
  • Green Day - American Idiot
  • Heather Nova - Redbird
  • Isis - Wavering Radiant
  • Karnivool - Sound Awake
  • Karnivool - Themata
  • Kashmir - The Good Life
  • Mostly Autumn- Glass Shadows
  • Muse - Black Holes And Revelations
  • Orgy - Vapor Transmission
  • Redemption - Snowfall on Judgement Day
  • Red Sparowes - The Fear Is Excruciating, But Therein Lies the Answer
  • Riverside - Anno Domini
  • Sophie Ellis Bextor - Trip The Light Fantastic
  • Sylvan - Posthumous Silence
  • The Mars Volta - The Bedlam in Goliath
  • Third Eye Blind - Out Of The Vein
  • This Town Needs Guns - This Town Needs Guns
  • Threshold - Critical Mass
  • Trivium - Ascendancy
  • We Are Scientists - Barbara
  • Zero 7 - The Garden

In other words, I'm for two weeks of camping. The final destination of our annual cycling tour is either Slovenia or Croatia, in 10 stages of about 130 km each.

Syndicated 2010-07-02 13:40:00 from Stationary Traveller

Working from home

For about 6 months now I've been working for Canonical on the Soyuz component of Launchpad. Like most other engineers at Canonical I don't work at the office but from a desk at home, as our nearest office is in London, not really a distance that is feasible for a commute. I do work at regular hours during work days and stay in touch with my colleagues using IRC and voice over IP.

I did have some experience working on contracts and study assignments from home previously, but working a fulltime regular job has turned out to be a bigger challenge. It seems easy enough. No travel time, every day is casual Friday, being able to listen to obscure death metal all day without driving coworkers crazy. Awesome, right?

Well, not entirely. I can't say I wasn't warned beforehand (I was) but I still ran head-first into some of the common mistakes.

Solitude

I can work well by myself and I appreciate the occasional solitude, but it does get kinda lonely when you're physically sitting by yourself for 8 hours a day, five days a week.

Fortunately we regularly have sprints at different locations around the world and, apart from appealing to the travel junkie in me, that brings some essential face time with coworkers. Electronic communication mechanisms such as mailing lists, IRC, Skype and, more recently, mumble also help make the rest of the company feel closer, but it's still very different from being able to talk to people at the water cooler (the point of which, btw, still escapes me. What's wrong with proper cold tap water?).

What also seems to help is going into the city and meeting up with others for lunch, or even just to get groceries.

Concentration, work times

One of the nice things about working at home is that you're quite flexible in planning your days; it's possible to interrupt work to run an errand if necessary. The downside of it is that it is also really easy to get distracted, and there's something I do very well: procrastinating. I initially ended up getting distracted quite often and then would end up working into the evening to make up for that lost time. The result being that, while only spending 8 hours doing actual work, it felt like having been at work for 12 hours in the end and having lost all spare time. Or as a friend summarized it accurately: working at home is all about boundaries.

This is at least partially related to the fact that I am a compulsive multi-tasker; I always do several things at once and context-switch every minute or so (prompted by e.g. having to wait for code to compile), including checking email and responding to conversations on IRC and Google Talk. This, among other things, has the affect that I respond quite slowly in IRC/IM conversations; if you've ever chatted with me you've probably noticed it. Multi-tasking has always worked well for me, despite research suggesting otherwise, probably because software development always involves a lot of waiting (for vcses, compilers, testsuites, ...).

Recently I've tried to eliminate some more of the distractions by signing out off Skype, Empathy (Google Talk, MSN, etc) and Google reader completely and only checking email a couple of times per day.

Feeling productive

What has perhaps surprised me most of all was how essential the satisfaction of getting something done is. After spending about a day staring at Python code it's important for your mood to have accomplished *something*. This appears to be a virtuous circle, as lack of progress kills the fun of work, which kills motivation, which causes a lack of progress.

I am hard core, so during my first few months I used my lunch breaks and evenings to hack on other free software projects, triaging bug reports that had come in or reviewing patches. Despite the fact that this is indeed technically a break from Launchpad, it didn't (surprise!) seem to work as well as stepping away from hacking completely. Also, it turns out that spending 14 hours a day programming doesn't make you all that much more productive than working a couple of hours less.

What I've discovered recently is that getting at least one branch done by the end of each day, even if it's just by fixing a trivial bug, helps tremendously in giving me some sense of accomplishment. Julian also wrote a blog post with some useful hints on feeling productive a while ago.

What is your experience working from home? Any good tips?

cp: Sieges Even - Unbreakable

Syndicated 2010-06-25 12:38:00 from Stationary Traveller

Proof of concept OpenChange server working

Seeing this makes me very happy. It's taken us a couple of years to get to this point but we've finally made it, mostly thanks to the dedication and persistence of Julien and Brad.

Syndicated 2010-06-08 19:09:08 from Stationary Traveller

Input overload

During the last few months, despite filtering and thread-scoring, I'm having trouble keeping up with the continuous flood of emails that come my way. I'm now spending way too much of my time dealing with both email and other background noise (hello, web 2.0 services). To cope with this, I've now dropped off a couple dozen mailing lists, unsubscribed from a similar number of RSS feeds and left a few IRC channels. I'm slowly working working my way through the backlog of emails and merge requests that I still have to deal with. If you need me to participate in a mailing list discussion, please CC me.

cp: Agalloch - Our Fortress Is Burning, pt. 1

Syndicated 2010-03-13 23:05:19 from Stationary Traveller

Nostalgia: 10 Years of Samba Hacking

While searching for something else I happened to come across one of my first posts to the ntdom list in November 2000.

My post is a simple question about a Samba crash that I myself no doubt had introduced. I'm sure I could have found a solution to it by using Google - excuse me, AltaVista - but I still received a friendly reply from Jerry explaining me to use GDB. I'm not too embarrassed, at least I used proper punctuation and wrote somewhat comprehensible English.

It's also strange to realize it's already been almost ten years since I started hacking on the Samba project.

Syndicated 2010-02-11 04:32:00 from Stationary Traveller

Nostalgia: 10 Years of Samba Hacking

While searching for something else I happened to come across one of my first posts to the ntdom list in November 2000.

My post is a simple question about a Samba crash that I myself no doubt had introduced. I'm sure I could have found a solution to it by using Google - excuse me, AltaVista - but I still received a friendly reply from Jerry explaining me to use GDB. I'm not too embarrassed, at least I used proper punctuation and wrote somewhat comprehensible English.

It's also strange to realize it's already been almost ten years since I started hacking on the Samba project.

Syndicated 2010-02-11 01:34:00 from Stationary Traveller

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