It’s that time again. Alpha 2 was released yesterday, here is one members experience:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1919854

There have also been several threads on kernel panics with the 3.2 version:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1913073

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1896087

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1910857

My own problem was solved by removing an SD card from the card reader, but that really is only a work around.  The  problem looks to be solved with the next kernel release.

The classroom session effenberg0x0 and I put on at UDW went well, but we found we had to much information for the length of the session. We are in discussion about doing some sessions using the Community Learning Project.

It’s been a long standing policy that bugs are off-topic for Ask Ubuntu and for good reason, we have Launchpad which is the best  place for bugs in Ubuntu to end up. Before I dive too deeply into the history of this issue and what we’re doing to fix this, if you have a bug please see here on how to report it!  Despite having formed the “No bugs on Ask Ubuntu” policy over a year and a half ago we’ve ended up being too lax in how we identified and handled bugs. As a result the site is swimming with “Questions” that have no answer and likely never will because they are bugs.

We can improve Ask Ubuntu by just pointing the user to bug filing advice and promptly closing the question. -  Martin Pool

To combat this we’ve mobilized the community to weed out, flag, and close these buggy questions which means a lot of questions will end up closed as off-topic. This isn’t a bad thing – in fact it’s quite a good thing. With each question getting a sign post saying “This is a bug, report your bug to Launchpad” any future users who stumble on to these questions from search engines will now know where to look, instead of finding disappointment in an  answer-less  ”question”.

We need more help! If you happen to come across a question on Ask Ubuntu that’s a duplicate of an existing bug report, or clearly should be submitted as a bug report, click the “flag” button at the bottom of the post and let us know! The sooner we prune and notify users these are actually bugs the quicker we can get them logged against the appropriate Launchpad project/package. The result will be a more fluid experience for new users and future users (since all these bugs will be fixed!). If you have questions about whether a question is a bug you can join the Ask Ubuntu chat or ask on the Ask Ubuntu Meta site.

• What to do about questions that describe bugs?
• What are some of Ask Ubuntu’s problems, if any?

We’re going out for the Planning Curry for season five of the Ubuntu Podcast  this week.  Over the years, it has become a tradition for all the presenters to go out for a curry before the start of the season. It’s a time to catch up in person, as we haven’t seen much of each other since the end of the last season. But it’s also a chance to discuss any changes we want to make to the show and throw ideas for new segments around. So, if there’s anything you’d like to see in the new season, whether it’s an idea for a segment or a change to something we already do, please let us know. You can leave a comment on this blog post or get in touch using any of the methods on the show website. Thanks!

You're gonna catch a cold
From the ice inside your soul
Christina Perri — Jar of Hearts

I bet at four o'clock this morning you weren't in a police station.

Or, at least, if you were I bet you were drunk and I bet it wasn't voluntary.

After the usual Friday night poor showing from my local pub (people who follow me on twitter will be aware that the torture of watching a hundred people think they're affirming their lives by singing Mr Brightside at the top of their voices is a regular part of my balanced weekly diet), I walked home, on a cold and cloudless night. I live about ten minutes walk from town, so the walk's no hardship, except that I was dressed in shirt and no coat and it was, as mentioned, cold.

I need to be clear about this. Ten degrees below zero, Celsius, is seriously chilly when you're standing in it in shirt-sleeves. I'm sure people in actually cold places like Canada or Minneapolis or Refrigeration, North Dakota will be laughing mockingly at this point, but firstly, bugger off, secondly I bet you lot bother to put a coat on when you go out, thirdly it's not two in the morning for you, and fourthly bugger off.

Anyway, I get home and... no door key in my pocket.

You know that feeling when the Fist of Fear grabs your balls when you realise something disastrous has happened? (I don't know what the Fist grabs for women. Feel free to fill me in, or actually maybe not.) Anyway: yeah, that. I went through the usual search-all-pockets-and-then-search-them-all-again routine, just in case a mischievous cold-tolerant leprechaun hid my key from the first search and then put it back, and... no door key. Oh dear.

I'll tell you this; the walk back to the pub again seems a much longer trek. Nowhere near as long as the second return to the house without my key, though, after it turned out no-one had handed it in. And now, what the hell to do, eh? I'm not prescient enough to hide a key in the garden, especially since that's a damned good way to come home one night and find no television where a television used to be, so... locksmith? Do they have 24-hour locksmiths? I can't be the first moron to have done this.

If you're bored today, I have a suggestion for you. Go and find a dude who claims to be a 24-hour locksmith and punch him in his stupid lying face.

Incidentally, how in Jah's name did anyone manage in this situation five years ago without a smartphone, huh?

Not that the internet helps when no-one frigging answers their supposedly-24-hour phone. Also, it turns out that about four of the local 24-hour locksmith companies are actually the same company, who did answer their phone, agreed to send someone, and then after an hour of me standing in the freezing bloody freezing cold confessed that they didn't actually have anyone to send.

It's now half three in the morning, and the shivering is starting to get on my nerves, and I can't get into my house without destroying something like a double-glazed plate glass window which will cost me hundreds of pounds to fix and my hands are shaking enough that I can barely light a cigarette, let alone throw a brick through a door that probably wouldn't break anyway, and I'd like to avoid the police showing up since I have no way of proving that I actually live here except for being able to describe where all the broken bits of skirting-board are, and everywhere is closed and the doors are all locked and it's really spectacularly bone-shudderingly mightily arse-clenchingly ridiculously psychopathically cold, and what to do? I tried sleeping in the shed. Now, cold is not like wind. Being inside a thin empty wooden building does not protect you from it. I was shivering like a jackhammer on a bouncy castle and it was becoming clear, even in my not-very-operational brain state, that lying on the floor at minus ten with only a shirt on could quite possibly lead to me actually freezing to death for real.

Well, if the police came, either I'd get into the house or they'd arrest me, and being arrested would at least make me warm, and right now I'd cut my right hand off if Pol Pot showed up as long as he brought a pair of gloves and some soup.

And then, through the frozen and frosty neurons came the sparkling thought that the police station would be open, wouldn't it?

I actually felt warmer just at the thought. Not much warmer, though.

Anyway, that's how I came to be sitting in the cop shop voluntarily at four am. One lovely copper even made me a cup of tea after I poured out my tale of woe in one long sentence, breaking only for my teeth to chatter together like I was trying to bite through the world.

Police stations: while I appreciate that you're generally there to deal with miscreants and so on, it wouldn't kill you to get rid of two screwed-to-the-ground plastic chairs and put in, say, a chaise longue. After switching my phone to airplane mode I managed to eke out enough battery life that I could sit and read while huddled up against the radiator for five hours until nine o'clock this morning, whereupon I went and fetched the spare key from my estate agent after the longest and coldest and most sleepless night I have ever experienced.

So, tips, for surviving a similar situation.

1. Have a spare key. Note: I do not have a spare key hidden in my garden, burglars, so don't go looking for it. I do not know how to have a spare key somewhere where you can get at it but thieves cannot; suggestions welcomed.
2. Have a girlfriend so that there's someone to let you back in.
3. Next time you see a policeman, be nice to him.

I think I might have a nap now.

12.04 (Precise Pangolin) Alpha 2 is now available for those developers and testers interested in helping find and fix bugs before we beta.

More details can be found at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PrecisePangolin/TechnicalOverview/Alpha2

(This is part 2 of the PyQt+WebKit experiments series)

In Part 1 I described how to embed WebKit in a PyQt application and how to expose PyQt objects in WebKit and manipulate them with JavaScript.

Even if you are a great JavaScript master, you can’t avoid the occasional typo while writing JavaScript code in your application. This can be quite frustrating with QtWebKit because it likes to stay quiet: it won’t tell you about any error.

Let’s have a look at an example.

First here is loader.py, a simple Python script which loads a block of HTML:

import sys

from PyQt4.QtCore import *
from PyQt4.QtGui import *
from PyQt4.QtWebKit import *

class Window(QWidget):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Window, self).__init__()
        self.view = QWebView(self)

        layout = QVBoxLayout(self)
        layout.setMargin(0)
        layout.addWidget(self.view)

def main():
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)
    window = Window()
    html = open(sys.argv[1]).read()
    window.show()
    window.view.setHtml(html)
    app.exec_()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

And here is “broken.html”, our broken HTML code:

<html>
<head>
<script>
function brokenFunction(arg1, arg2) {
    var result;
    result = arg1 * 2;
    result += arg2;
    resul /= 4;
    return result;
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
Complex computation:
<script>
document.write(brokenFunction(2, 3));
</script>
</body>
</html>

Notice the missing ‘t’ in “resul /= 4″?

The last-resort, grandpa-debugged-js-this-way, debugging tool is still there: the mighty alert() function. Just stuff your code with calls to alert() and be happy… Anyone ever wrote code like that?

<html>
<head>
<script>
function brokenFunction(arg1, arg2) {
    var result;
    result = arg1 * 2;
    alert("1");
    result += arg2;
    alert("2");
    resul /= 4;
    alert("3");
    return result;
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
Complex computation:
<script>
document.write(brokenFunction(2, 3));
</script>
</body>
</html>

Easy enough, no? With the great alert() function we can quickly pinpoint the bug in our brokenFunction() is between alert(“2″) and alert(“3″).

Can we do better?

alert()-style debugging gets old very fast. Clicking that “OK” button is a pain. Fortunately, there is a way to get more useful feedback from our PyQt application.

The job of the QWebView class is to show the content of a QWebPage instance. By default QWebView creates its own instance of QWebPage, but it is possible to replace this instance with our own QWebPage. The QWebPage class has a few virtual methods. Among them, the javaScriptConsoleMessage() method is the one we are looking for: it is called every time console.log() is called from JavaScript.

Here is an implementation of WebPage which uses Python logging module to get JavaScript console messages out:

import logging

from PyQt4.QtWebKit import *

class WebPage(QWebPage):
    """
    Makes it possible to use a Python logger to print javascript console messages
    """
    def __init__(self, logger=None, parent=None):
        super(WebPage, self).__init__(parent)
        if not logger:
            logger = logging
        self.logger = logger

    def javaScriptConsoleMessage(self, msg, lineNumber, sourceID):
        self.logger.warning("JsConsole(%s:%d): %s" % (sourceID, lineNumber, msg))

And here is “loader-log.py”, a loader which uses this class:

import os
import sys

from PyQt4.QtCore import *
from PyQt4.QtGui import *
from PyQt4.QtWebKit import *

from webpage import WebPage

class Window(QWidget):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Window, self).__init__()
        self.view = QWebView(self)
        self.view.setPage(WebPage())

        layout = QVBoxLayout(self)
        layout.setMargin(0)
        layout.addWidget(self.view)

def main():
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)
    window = Window()
    html = open(sys.argv[1]).read()
    window.show()
    window.view.setHtml(html)
    app.exec_()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

If we load “broken.html” with “loader-log.py” we get the following on stderr:

$ python loader-log.py broken.html
WARNING:root:JsConsole(undefined:0): ReferenceError: Can't find variable: resul

That should make it easier to find and fix our bug, even if we don’t get very useful file names or line numbers.

javaScriptConsoleMessage() receives all console messages. This means our logger will also print out calls to console.log(). Here is “console-log.html”:

<html>
<head>
<script>
function chattyFunction(arg1, arg2) {
    var result;
    result = arg1 * 2;
    console.log("result" + result);
    result += arg2;
    console.log("result" + result);
    result /= 4;
    console.log("result" + result);
    return result;
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
Complex computation:
<script>
document.write(chattyFunction(2, 3));
</script>
</body>
</html>

When loaded with “loader-log.py”, we get this output:

$ python loader-log.py console-log.html
WARNING:root:JsConsole(about:blank:5): result: 4
WARNING:root:JsConsole(about:blank:5): result: 7
WARNING:root:JsConsole(about:blank:5): result: 1.75

Not good enough?

Getting the output of console.log() is nice, but modern browsers have much more efficient tools: if you open “broken.html” with Rekonq and look at the output in the Web Inspector Console, you can not only see console output, but you can also easily inspect your HTML tree and many other things.

Like us, Rekonq uses QtWebKit, so is there a way to get a similar tool?

It is actually possible. Rekonq uses a class named QWebInspector. All that is necessary to get a nice inspector tool for our application is to:

1. Get the QWebView page
2. set the QWebSettings.DeveloperExtrasEnabled attribute on this page
3. Instantiate a QWebInspector
4. Pass the view page to the inspector

Here is “loader-webinspector.py”, a new HTML loader which can show a web inspector when one presses F12:

import os
import sys

from PyQt4.QtCore import *
from PyQt4.QtGui import *
from PyQt4.QtWebKit import *

from webpage import WebPage

class Window(QWidget):
    def __init__(self):
        super(Window, self).__init__()
        self.view = QWebView(self)

        self.setupInspector()

        self.splitter = QSplitter(self)
        self.splitter.setOrientation(Qt.Vertical)

        layout = QVBoxLayout(self)
        layout.setMargin(0)
        layout.addWidget(self.splitter)

        self.splitter.addWidget(self.view)
        self.splitter.addWidget(self.webInspector)

    def setupInspector(self):
        page = self.view.page()
        page.settings().setAttribute(QWebSettings.DeveloperExtrasEnabled, True)
        self.webInspector = QWebInspector(self)
        self.webInspector.setPage(page)

        shortcut = QShortcut(self)
        shortcut.setKey(Qt.Key_F12)
        shortcut.activated.connect(self.toggleInspector)
        self.webInspector.setVisible(False)

    def toggleInspector(self):
        self.webInspector.setVisible(not self.webInspector.isVisible())

def main():
    app = QApplication(sys.argv)
    window = Window()
    html = open(sys.argv[1]).read()
    window.show()
    window.view.setHtml(html)
    app.exec_()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

The four steps I described are done in the “setupInspector()” method.

And here is “console-webinspector.html”:

<html>
<head>
<script>
function chattyFunction(arg1, arg2) {
    var result;
    result = arg1 * 2;
    console.log("result: %d", result);
    result += arg2;
    console.warn("result: %d", result);
    result /= 4;
    console.error("result: %d", result);
    return result;
}
</script>
</head>
<body>
Complex computation:
<script>
document.write(chattyFunction(2, 3));
</script>
</body>
</html>

It is similar to “console-log.html” but takes advantage of two new features which do not work with the previous approach:

• printf-style formatting: that is, printing the value of result with "result: %d", result, not "result: " + result
• log categorization: you can use console.warn() and console.error() to get different type of output. These methods worked with the previous approach, but the categorization was lost.

Loading “console-webinspector.html” with “loader-webinspector.py” and pressing F12 we get this:

Closing words

These two approaches should help you track down the nastiest bugs in your embedded JavaScript code. The Web Inspector approach is probably the most powerful one, but the Python logging approach can also be useful when tracking down bugs where it is more practical to have one single log output for both the PyQt and the JavaScript sides.

One of the "good problems" I think we have is there's always things to do. As Charlie Kravetz points out, this can be a bad thing too.

I wanted to post this on Planet to get a better feel for what other people think.

I see my own participation in Xubuntu and Ubuntu development slowing down. Too many events, scheduled on top or close to each other, making it impossible to participate easily.

We are either scheduling too many things, or not checking calendars any more. In past years, it was quite easy to attend all the events held and still participate in development testing.

So for certain things I think we're doing too much, which is why we've streamlined some of the IRC workshops to be shorter. However as I thought of a more detailed answer to Charlie's concern I came up with the answer (I think).

I don't think we have too many events, in fact, as we grow the number of events will grow, and our community will need to scale to match that. I am starting to realize that it's not a bad thing that people can't find the time to participate in everything.

The real problem isn't that Charlie doesn't scale, it's that someone needs to have his back. So perhaps when events do clash we should look at which teams have what coverage in what events. For example, Charlie clearly needs to do ISO testing, but at the same time Xubuntu should have coverage in developer week because it's really one of the best places to find new contributors that can .... help Charlie do ISO testing. Catch 22.

So maybe from a team level instead of an individual level we should be focusing on finding people who can jump in when a team is overtaxed for a week. For example, in hindsight maybe we could have done a better job helping Charlie find someone to cover developer week for Xubuntu. A forum thread, a planet post, a tweet, a mention on our Facebook page?

These are all things we could do to help the creaking an overburdened person might face. It's a bummer that one person can't scale, but at the same time having different people focusing on different individual things will probably be healthier in the long run.

Discuss!

FCM reader Brian has pulled together my Scribus tutorials from the early issues of FCM and even added updated screenshots to it. So, if you’re thinking of creating a publication of any kind, you might want to check out this special edition.

http://fullcirclemagazine.org/scribus-special-edition/

The alpha release for our development version, codenamed Precise, is available for download. Early testers can try it to provide feedback and bug reports. This is the first alpha for Kubuntu in the Precise series but the second from the Ubuntu family.

1. Bootmail now sends a message on both boot, and shutdown, using an upstart job.  Big thanks to Clint Byrum for a bit of help on that one!
2. Bootmail has always sent GPG-signed email.  But now, it will actually send GPG-encrypted email too!  All you need to do is set the RECIPIENT_KEYID variable in /etc/bootmail/gpg.conf to your GPG key id, and bootmail will send you GPG encrypted AND signed boot and shutdown messages!