European Wafaa

After a little request from suseROCKs (yes the very same openSUSE Board Candidate going by the pseudonym of Bryen Yunashko), I started to package a neat looking a11y application. This was my first foray into an accessibility application, and to be honest I sucked. I sucked so bad that after 3 days of trying to package it and it's relevant dependency that I called on a professional a11y packager, decriptor (yes the very same openSUSE Board Candidate going by the pseudonym of Stephen Shaw) who managed to fix the blessed thing in less than half a day.

NOTE: This post is in now way an endorsement or vote for either candidate

So pray tell what fancy a11y dohickey am I rambling about? Why MouseTrap of course. WTF is MouseTrap and how does it have any a11y uses? Well quite simply, it allows users to utilise their webcam instead of the mouse. If you go to the project's website you can see a video of it in action. As always I give you:


As you can see the project is pretty young and as such has no funky/pretty icon - I won't attempt to draw one as my artistic skills are worse than my packaging skills. So calling all artists, please could you help out and design an icon that can be used in the application and elsewhere?

Ladies and Gentlemen I present to you the last of the HackWeek III videos - OMGWTFBBQ

This was a spur of the moment thing at the HackWeek BBQ held on the second day. Many thanks to AJ, maybe with a bit of Dutch courage, for taking the time to do the introductions and generally all the speaking. I apologise for the background noise, but as I didn't have a separate microphone I was reliant on the built in one which picked up the world and its dog; I also apologise for the lack of transitions between scenes, Kino refused to cooperate. I managed to get most people that were in Nurenberg for HackWeek, and would like to thank everyone for a wonderful time and for allowing me to disturb their fine food and drink.

You can view the video below or go to openSUSE TV to view it online. Don't forget people you can download it in all it's glory from there too



I am still very much looking for more ideas, and contributions to add to the channel. This could be anything in any language (although English is preferred but not absolute), as long as it relates to openSUSE - screencasts, interviews, presentations, animations, etc. If you have any, please either get hold of me on irc (I'm in most channels as FunkyPenguin), mail the Marketing Team (you'll need to subscribe first), mail me direct, or speak to your nearest Board member.

Happy viewing

Stephen,

Would this do?

Phase1 of the Board Election process comes to a close at 1200 UTC on 09 October 2008.  That means after that time there will be no additional people eligible to vote for candidates.  Franchise votes are possibly the least understood aspect of the election process, this is even after the best efforts of the Election Committee and Candidates.  No one is to blame, it’s just fact.

So let me try once more to explain what the Franchise voting is all about.  In a nutshell an openSUSE Member has the ability to grant a registered user, but not member, the priveledge to vote in the upcoming Board Election.  Why? Simplisticly it’s to get more voters/users/contributors involved in influencing how the openSUSE project progresses.  There are 2831 registered users now, but only 212 Members – so according to my bad maths that makes about 7.5% eligable to vote. That to me isn’t entirely representative of the community, so in comes the Franchise vote, we members have the ability to increase that voting percentage to 15%.  The catch is that the users have to have registered prior to 01 September 2008.

So how do users get the franchise? Simplist way is ask a member   Members will not be able to grant users a franchise if they have not registered prior to 01Sept08 so dont try and bluff, the system knows   How do you find out who is a member? Simple, go to users.opensuse.org and “Browse Members“.  From there you can get contact details for IRC nicks, etc and try and convince them that you are worthy.

So please if you haven’t done so, go and get your franchise and help influence openSUSE.  For members that haven’t given out their franchise you can “Browse Users” and find someone you recognise and ask them if they would like a franchise vote.  People this is YOUR Board that is being voted in, if you don’t speak up now then you’ll loose your voice until the next election!

I would like to take this opportunity to say - I am very sorry for the spam that I seem to have generated over the last couple of days. Those that have borne the brunt of it are those on the opensuse-gnome mailing list and my son's PTFA.

I have opened up a ticket with Nokia as their email.nokia.com service seems to insist on re-sending the same e-mail over and over at random times Hopefully I have rectified it by deleting the originals and upgrading to the latest version of the software. This has been the only real issue I have experienced in almost 3 months of use, and granted it is still classed as Beta quality.

Once again, I AM VERY SORRY!!

UPDATE: Looks like my fix attempt failed badly Apparently I have managed to get some messages stuck in an endless loop on Nokia's SMTP queue which get triggered when I sync!

Now that Bongo has passed the M4 release, it is time that the house was brought into order. By 'house' I mean documentation, yes ewww indeed. That laborious and unpleasant task of all projects is needed! This serves multiple purposes: 1) The developers and testers can get to the information easily, and the information is correct; 2) Visitors can get the info they need without having to ask around, not that we mind the questions; 3) It gives the look of professionalism, and completes the overall image of Bongo - a finely honed Adonis of a Mail and Calendaring solution.

Interested? Good. Basically head on over to the wiki and help tidy things up. We have missing pages, incorrect info for installation from source and packages (yes I am guilty of taking my eye off the ball here, sorry), and the list goes on. Nothing is too big, but lots of small things add up If one is feeling adventurous, one could dissect some of the tools/commands and document them a la Man Page. If you have any questions, don't forget you can get hold of people on IRC, post to the forums, or fire a mail off to the Mailing Lists (the devel list is probably best for questions regarding documentation), and if you're feeling highly critical you could file a bug

Please help out, this is one of those miserable tasks that is needed, and ultimately helps the project - an ideal way for someone with no coding skills to contribute.

This is a call for help to all Python knowledgeable hackers.

I am having issues, and have been for several weeks now in fixing Gwibber. It all broke when I upgraded python-simplejson to version >=2.0.0. So what is the problem? well whenever I fire it up it kinda brain farts and doesn't display any content from any of the services that I use All it spews is:


Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gwibber/microblog/_init_.py", line 32, in get_message_data
for message in client.get_messages():
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gwibber/microblog/twitter.py", line 64, in get_messages
for data in self.get_data():
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gwibber/microblog/twitter.py", line 60, in get_data
return support.simplejson.loads(self.connect(
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'simplejson'
Failed to retrieve messages
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gwibber/microblog/_init_.py", line 32, in get_message_data
for message in client.get_messages():
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gwibber/microblog/identica.py", line 64, in get_messages
for data in self.get_data():
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gwibber/microblog/identica.py", line 60, in get_data
return support.simplejson.loads(self.connect(
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'simplejson'
Failed to retrieve messages
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gwibber/microblog/_init_.py", line 32, in get_message_data
for message in client.get_messages():
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gwibber/microblog/jaiku.py", line 76, in get_messages
for data in self.get_data()["stream"]:
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/gwibber/microblog/jaiku.py", line 59, in get_data
return support.simplejson.loads(urllib2.urlopen(urllib2.Request(
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'simplejson'
Failed to retrieve messages
console message: undefined @1: ReferenceError: Can't find variable: clearMessages


Please, oh please, could someone help? I am utterly lost, and have tried to build against python-simplejson 1.9.3 but to no avail

With uber thanks to Ryan Paul for answering my plea for help, I have now packaged a working gwibber for openSUSE:



Word of caution: This is not from the main branch of gwibber, but from one of the slightly experimental ones. This doesn't ruin any of your social fun, but you may encounter some oddities; if you do please file a bug or ask around. You will notice also that there is a "Reply Tab" now, and it does what it says on the tin - shows replies to your posts

Happy Social times are back

As many know I package the wonderful microblogging/social network client that is Gwibber. For a short while there it was refusing to run for many of us on openSUSE, but many thanks to Ryan Paul (the author) these bugs were fixed. Not only that but a slew of new features have been added, some slightly less stable than others but they do work . I have just submitted a new version (r118) to the darling Build Service which will fix the issue of not being able to edit account details etc.

I have also created a simple but fairly comprehensive Gwibber User Guide with some screenshots etc. This should hopefully help people get the most out of this great little app, this is a kind of unofficial doc pending the real deal so be gentle with your comments, which I would like to hear

Talking of social networks and things, it was brought to my attention the other day via Twitter about a couple of fairly useful sites that interact with the likes of Twitter:

Tweet What You Spend - Cash tracking made simple through Twitter
An accounts ledger where you can use Twitter for the entry of details and other items

Fuel Frog - Track your fuel usage and mileage
Use Twitter to enter you fuel and mileage to get a good overview of what and how your is doing with all that fine fossil fuel.

Personally I think they are actually good uses of services like Twitter, where you can send the message from almost any where so you never really have to worry about putting the receipt in a safe place and sitting down later to do all those boring accounts related chores.

I'm sure there are many more out there, do people know of others? If you do, please leave a comment with the details, I'm curious as to how far the use of Twitter, identi.ca and others can be taken.