linuxchix.org.nz

Last night I spent at least two whole whole discussing with my sis about the manga I am currently doing concept pictures for. After These two rabid hours of frantic think, OMG, awesome, does that work, etc. I came home at 2AM and started drawing to get at least *one* of my ideas down onto paper. I then felt sick, lay down and couldnt sleep. then i had another flash of inspiration and started drawing at 6 AM. Then I fell asleep. When i woke up, I looked at it and tried doing MORE drawing in efforts to at least undo and use productively the madness of the previous night! The results, (Critique me people!):

One of the previous Pages also, to get more of a feel for what I'm working on:

Good afternoon my female geek friends (I'm praying that no-one here is going to be offended by the word 'geek' here, or i think that i might be in the wrong place).

I'm maxiie, and I found this lj community through the linuxchix site and I must say I'm extremely exited to be here! So I thought I'd post an introduction to say hello to the community!

Ok, where to begin? My name's maxiie, I'm a self-professed girl geek of many things. I've been using linux for the past 2 years now and I've been feeling like I'm drifting ashore a desert island. I live in a small town in england where, despite the heavy amounts of art students pottering around, they all seem to be mac users with no clue of open source, let alone about linux. The few people I do know and see often who use linux have only started using it since I introduced it to them.

I dont run any other OSes than Linux/GNU ones- I tried windows about a year ago on my new pc and I didnt want to invalidate the warrantee by re-partitioning the HD, but I got so utterly frustrated, I formatted the computer and set up my partitions to run linux / XP dual boot. I then Never used windows ever again, and decided to just use linux solely and the rest, as they say is history!

I'm not utterly n00by but i am prone to ask RTFM questions, so please don't flame me (another reason I joined the community!!).

IRL, I'm a photographer / artist / musician, I speak english and Osaka Dialect Japanese (Albeit badly). I'm Bi, a Feminist and glad to be here!!

Eveything else is in my interests lists; heracio diem!

I met the devchix at the RailsConf 2008 Birds of a Feather (great time BTW) and somehow the conversation got onto the topic of PVRs. I was telling the ladies about the MythTV system I setup in my home a couple of months ago and how much fun I was having with it. They all wanted to know more about it and suggested maybe I could blog on devchix about it. Wow, a group of females that actually gets excited about this stuff! I’d love to share what I’ve learned with the group. So here goes!

First off, MythTV is very cool. It is a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) like TiVo or Windows Media Center but with some important differences;

1. It’s cheap. Well, at least the software is. MythTV itself is free but you still have to have buy, borrow, or steal a computer to run it on and you have to sign-up with Schedules Direct for channel listings at about $20/year.
2. It’s open source - yay!
3. It’s not Microsoft - something about that just makes me feel good
4. It includes some features the commercial PVRs don’t have like automatic commercial skip and burning to DVD
5. You build your own hardware so you can add as many video capture cards or hard drives as your heart desires
6. Techno geek ability is a prerequisite

And like other PVRs, MythTV includes;

• Pause and Rewind live TV
• Automatic recording of a show every time it’s on
• Disk storage of as many recordings as you can fit on your disk
• Playback of music and video from other sources
• Support for HDTV

The only major feature that MythTV does not include, if you live in Canada, is the ability to purchase online movies. If you live in the U.S., however, you can download movies via Netflix.
MythTV Step 1 - hardware

Choosing hardware was the most difficult part of this project for me. I was nervous about forking out $500 to $1,000 for a computer and then not being able to get MythTV to work. I spent a lot of time googling hardware options to make sure that the components I selected would be compatible with Linux. Rule #1 when choosing hardware is make sure it works with Linux. Linux just isn’t plug and play and you will save yourself a lot of grief if you get hardware that MythDora includes drivers for. See MythTV HOWTO for details on compatible hardware. I chose an ASUS M2NPV mother board with embedded nVidia video card (detailed specs below). I recommend checking compatability of all the components you plan to buy especially the video card and video capture card. I chose an nVidia video card because they seem to be well supported in MythDora with binary nVideo drivers - just remember to select the nVideo drivers option when installing MythDora (it is not enabled by default). I installed 2 video captures cards, both Hauppauge PVR-150s. Having multiple video capture cards means you can record 2 shows at the same time or record and watch TV at the same time. I found tons of documentation online on MythTV with Hauppage cards so they seemed like a safe bet. Once I had selected all my components I went to our neighbourhood computer store with my specs and had them assemble it.

Here is the hardware I used…

• ASUS M2NPV-VM with integrated nVidia Geforce 6150 video card
• Antek New Solution Series NSK2480 Case
• AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200++ Processor
• Kingston ValueRAM 2GB
• Western Digital 750GB Caviar SE16 7200rpm SATA II w/ 16MB
• Lg Super Multi Security DVD Writer 20×20x10
• Hauppauge WinTV PVR150 MCE w/ MCE Remote

Once you have your box get it all hooked up and ready for installation. You’ll need a few special cables.

• S/Video cable to connect the video out on the video card to your TV (assuming your TV supports S/Video, if not, there are other video output options)
• audio cable to connect left and right audio outputs on the audio card to your TV

Hook-up steps

1. Connect cable TV via coax cable to TV in on Video Capture Card
2. Connect S/Video Out on Video Card to S/Video in on TV Input-1 using S/Video cable
3. Connect Audio Out on motherboard to Right and Left Audio In on TV Input-1 using Audio/Video Cable, black connector to Audio Out on motherboard, right and white connectors to red and white connectors on TV

MythTV Step 2 - Channel Listings

Before you install MythTV, sign up for Schedules Direct so that you can setup MythTV to download channel listings.

MythTV Step 3 - MythDora Installation

MythDora is an installation of MythTV bundled with Fedora. If you are installing a dedicated MythTV server I recommend MythDora for ease of installation.

Download MythDora DVD ISO from www.mythdora.com and burn to DVD (alternately you could download the CD ISO and burn to CD). I recommend connecting a monitor, keyboard, and mouse for installation, you can disconnect it later. MythDora installation is pretty straightforward. The only place I was a bit confused was in network setup. Remember that if you ever want to run another MythClient some day (if you want to access and play your MythTV content from another TV in your house), you should choose a static IP address when installing MythDora. I recommend watching the install video before you start. I had to do some additional steps to get Schedules Direct working with MythDora 4, as follows. Please note these instructions may not be applicable to the recently released MythDora 5.

Upgrading MythDora for Schedules Direct

1. During the installation of MythTV under Video Sources select North America (Data Direct) for XMLTV Listings Grabber but do *not* select Retrieve Lineups. Under Input do *not* select Fetch channels from listings source.
2. After completing the installation, follow the instructions at Upgrading MythDora4 for Schedules Direct
3. Go back into MythTV setup and delete and recreate a video source. Then go back and select Retrieve Lineups and re-configure the Input and select Fetch channels from listings source.
4. When done, exit out of Myth TV and run xterm via MythTV Tools and execute mythfilldatabase.

I also had an issue with TV out not working for this video card - nVidia GeForce 6150. Here’s what I did to fix it;
If TV out doesn’t work, disconnect the monitor and reboot. If it still doesn’t work, change the BIOS as follows;

1. On Boot, select Del on the setup screen (be quick!) to enter the BIOS
2. Select Advanced
3. Select Chipset
4. Change RGV/TV Display to TV
5. Change TV Mode Support to NTSC-M
6. Disconnect monitor and reboot

MythTV Step 4 - Using and Configuring

Here are a few tips on areas of MythTV usage and configuration that you may encounter.

Create a samba share /videos to /storage/videos and grant access to user mythtv

edit /etc/samba/smb.conf and add

videos
comment = Videos
path = /storage/videos
valid user = mythtv
public = no
writeable = yes
browseable = no

In a linux shell execute
smbpasswd -a mythtv and setting samba password
/etc/init.d/smb restart

Connect network share to \\myth\mythtv (where myth is hostname of MythTV server)

Skip Commercials

To skip commercials, configure the Recording Profile to flag Commercials and configure the Playback Profile to skip commercials. MythTV doesn’t delete commercials it just marks them and you can watch the recording with Auto-Skip enabled. If you burn a recording to DVD you can tell it to delete commercials before burning but you have to first load the commercials into a cut list. To load commercials into a cut list you need to click Menu to edit the recording (while watching it) and click Z to load the cut list. Unfortunately, the keys to press for Menu and Z will vary depending on the remote control you are using. It took me awhile to figure out what all the key mappings were for my remote control. If you are trying to figure out the buttons on your remote control the MythTV wiki is a good place to start . Also the MythTV Daily Use Manual is a great resource for figuring out the day to day operation of MythTV

MythTV has completed changed television viewing for my family. I haven’t watched *any* live TV since we set it up. Instead, I regularly surf the channel listings and record everything I want to watch. Now if I could just get enough time to watch all those hundreds of shows before my hard drive fills up - since of course I can’t possibly delete anything I haven’t seen, I mean, some day I’ll desperately want to watch it, right!? Or maybe I’ll just stroll back into the computer store and get a 2nd hard drive…

Where I work, we have about 45 external Oracle Database Servers running RHEL 3. It’s a little tough keeping up with all of them day to day, so I made a quick BASH script that will check for any ORA- alerts in your Oracle alert_*.ora file. Here goes:
********************************
#!/bin/sh

tail -500 /usr/oracle/admin/ora_sid/bdump/alert_sid.log | grep ORA- > mailoraalerts.log
wc -l mailoraalerts.log > greporacount.txt
COUNT=`awk ‘{print $1}’ greporacount.txt`
if [ $COUNT -gt 0 ]; then
mail -s “Check ” your.address@mail.net < mailoraalerts.log
fi
********************************

So what this does is greps the last 500 lines of your alert log looking for ORA- string, and pipes that out to a log file. It then does a word count on that log file. If the word count is greater than 0 (there exists ORA- errors) then email me what the error is.

Then just schedule a cron job to run at whatever interval you desire. This probably isn’t the prettiest way to do this, I’d love to see other suggestions if anyone has any! My next step is to find out how to get Oracle to email me directly when there’s an error, instead of having cron determine when I am alerted.

Enjoy!

I had an ah ha moment that maybe shouldn’t have been such an ah ha moment but it was so I figured I would share it. Yeah so I am sure most of us have had a situation where we needed to have multiple model forms. Most of the time now days I use attribute_fu to solve this issue but attribute_fu doesn’t work with has_one associations. Today I had a situation where I had two fields that were required for a has_one association object. Long story short it came to me that if we just used the delegate method provided by rails that we could essentially act like the attributes we were setting were on the parent model. This meant we only needed to create one form with multiple fields even though some of those fields were actually on a different model. I then remembered that back when I was working with the guys over at ThoughtWorks that we used a Ruby Extension called Forwardable to be able to delegate multiple attributes on one object.

So instead of this:

delegate :first_name, :to => :profile
delegate :last_name, :to => :profile
delegate :some_other_attribute, :to => :profile

side note: I’m not sure but I don’t believe delegate can take multiple attributes (I tried to look this up but for some reason couldn’t find the documentation for this method and didn’t have time to dig in the code)

You could do the following:

include the Ruby Extension Forwardable in the parent model class

include Forwardable

and then add this line:

def_delegators :profile, :first_name, :last_name, :some_other_attribute

So yeah that was my little ah ha moment. I am sure there are even better ways than this but this was better than what we were looking at doing to begin with.

Hello Ladies,
I am reporting from RailsConf 2008. The main focus of this post is logistics for the conference. I’ll be posting about the talks as soon as I get to attend one. I have been running around trying to take care of DevChix related stuff.

We were unable to get an official room for a BoF but I have decided we will just take over some area of the convention center. Lets meet outside Exhibit Hall E at 7:30 on Saturday night. We can discuss whatever we want to. We are also planning appetizers and cocktails after the BoF. Hashrocket Inc, the company I work for is sponsoring the evening. Thanks Hashrocket!

Please either come to the BoF for more information or find one of the ladies with a DevChix logo on their badges for more information. I will also have stickers to give out (until they run out).

We would love to meet ALL the women developers at the conference so please come out and get to know us.

Cheers
Desi

It’s difficult to find words for this tech gathering, without sounding like an excited child on their birthday. It’s fun, awesome, amazing, unreal, just simply great.

From social issues to soldering, this gathering has the most diverse lineup of things to do and see for techhie type women. Every year it’s held in a different European city, making it even better. I don’t know how to describe it other than saying it’s just the best damn gathering I go to on a regular basis.

Woo! Back to soldering.

Gloria

Kamaelia is a general purpose Python framework developed by BBC Research.
http://kamaelia.sourceforge.net/Home

It is what I would consider a second generation framework. It has a mature level of feature and plug-in support, and a naturally extensible model, two things which are either rare in most frameworks, or too difficult to be practical. Audio and video plug-in support is amazingly clean in the Kamaelia examples. The Kamaelia kernel, named Axon, is the core component for module execution. Module intercommunication happens via pipes, so the issue of the context switch slowness for threaded apps is not an issue here.

Kamaelia also supports OS level threading, but this support seems to be nested down into the TCP protocol module. Nevertheless, the snap-together pipe model is tempting for any app, since it’s quite easy to grok. The code examples are exactly what Python enthusiasts have come to expect: clean, short, and almost intuitive.

Like many great tools, it comfortably straddles the line between tool and toy, with clean integration of pygame, as well as the support of many common protcols (HTTP, Torrent, etc.) and audio and video codecs (Vorbis, Wav, etc.) supplemented by a solid engine.

The component list for Kamaelia is called the Component Toybox, setting the tone for this project. We are encouraged to play, and novice contributors are encouraged to join and contribute. This is what I love the most about this project. It is unpretentious, approachable by anyone who wants to learn and contribute, and it is well organized and well designed. The documentation flows smoothly, although I’d love to see more detail on helping newbies find, install and configure all of the dependencies for the dependencies for each architecture. Pygame, for example, needs SDL development libs to run the provided examples. But newbies are stuck calling friends like me to explain this to them and help them past the installation hump. This is a difficult problem to resolve in any toolset dependent on many external toolsets, having their own development paths and practices. Maybe the Python buildout tool, plus some additional scripting could resolve this issue?

This framework is exciting. It opens the possibilities of faster web and app based integration of tools and tricks. It makes you ponder the infinite possibilities of nested protocol support, not just encapsulation of protocols within HTTP. Python development just keeps getting better and more fun, and this is most certainly a project to watch for ideas and possibilities of things to come.

Gloria

If you are reading this that means we are on our new slice provided by the generous folks at Engine Yard. Thank you for supporting us in our mission to encourage more women to choose careers in development.

Though they are traditionally a rails shop they setup Wordpress for us and configured it with PHP. We plan to do more with the site than just have a Wordpress blog and now we have the space and resources to do it :)

So far, its been great. They have a handy ticket system that lets us keep track of issues and I was able to hop onto IRC and get some quick questions answered.

If you notice any weirdness please send an email to devchix *at* gmail and let us know!

Thanks

This module scrapes the BBC language web site (http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/languages/)
for sample text from all 35 languages offered. It encodes the text snippets and writes to independent files, then test-reads one sample file.

The encoding requirements took some digging through obscure docs, but the rest wasn’t so bad. If you want to know how to do unicode language support to file in Python, this is for you.

import urllib2 import codecs import BeautifulSoup import re import pdb import os class GetBBC: def __init__(self): print "In constructor" self.language_links = [] self.dir = ‘BBC_Language_pages’ try: os.makedirs(self.dir) except OSError: pass def getLanguageChoices(self): lang_page = urllib2.urlopen(”http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/languages/”).read() self.soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(lang_page) # match langtexttop too links = self.soup.findAll(attrs={’class’:re.compile(’^langtext*’)}) for x in links: self.language_links.append(x) print “Appending %s with link %s ” % (x.a.string,x.a['href']) print “There are %d language choices for the BBC news page!” % len(self.language_links) def archiveLanguagePages(self): os.chdir(self.dir) for x in self.language_links: lang_page = urllib2.urlopen(’http://www.bbc.co.uk’ + x.a['href']).read() clean_page = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(lang_page).prettify() rawfile = codecs.open(x.a.string,’wb+’,'ISO8859-1′) rawfile.write(unicode(clean_page,’ISO8859-1′)) rawfile.close() print “Saved the %s page.” % x.a.string os.chdir(’..’) def readLanguagePage(self,language): os.chdir(self.dir) rawfile = codecs.open(language,’rb’,'ISO8859-1′) file = rawfile.read() rawfile.close() os.chdir(’..’) return rawfile if __name__ == “__main__”: x=GetBBC() x.getLanguageChoices() x.archiveLanguagePages() y = x.readLanguagePage(’Portuguese’)

There are languages for which ISO8859-1 encoding may not work, so you may need to experiment with encoding codecs for languages not supported by the BBC.

I wrote this in May 2007, as a language support test for GrrlCamp, which is an online Open Source development group for women. We will be recruiting again in late June. If you are female, interested in volunteering development effort in exchange for learning, and have at least 6 hours free each week to do cutting edge fun Python design and development in a supportive and great online community, please post your email address and we will get back to you.

Gloria

The unmodified code

Here’s a module I wrote (in an hour. Damn, Python is wonderful) which scrapes the US Postal service web site for three-digit zip code extensions (http://pe.usps.gov/text/dmm300/L002.htm). It creates a db table and injects zip code prefix, region and state info for each record found. It uses BeautifulSoup to parse the HTML, and SqlAlchemy to do the DB operations.

If you only need to check what region and state a particular zip code belongs, this is for you. If anyone can point me to a free longitude/latitude/full zip code site, please post that info to a reply, and I’ll rewrite this module.

import urllib2 import codecs import re import pdb import os import BeautifulSoup import sqlalchemy class GetZips: def __init__(self): self.zip_info = [] def getZipPrefixes(self): zip_page = urllib2.urlopen(”http://pe.usps.gov/text/dmm300/L002.htm”).read() self.soup = BeautifulSoup.BeautifulSoup(zip_page) # match zip columns zips = self.soup.findAll(attrs={’class’:re.compile(’^trBodyRow*’)}) for i in zips: y = i.find(attrs={’class’:re.compile(’^pTblBodyLL pAlignLeft*’)}) ”’ X is the symbol for an unused 3 digit zip prefix. ”’ if y.span and y.span.string == ‘X’: continue # last 3 digits zip_prefix_3 = y.a.next.next zip_prefix_3 = re.sub(’[\n\r]+’,”,zip_prefix_3) # finding the first column will suffice. y = i.find(attrs={’class’:re.compile(’^pTblBodyLL pAlignRight*’)}) region_state = y.a.next.next.split() region = region_state[-3] state_abbrev = region_state[-2] if region_state[-1] != zip_prefix_3: print “There is a problem here: %s” % i self.zip_info.append((region,state_abbrev,zip_prefix_3)) print “Found %s %s %s” % (region,state_abbrev,zip_prefix_3) def injectIntoDB(self): engine = sqlalchemy.create_engine(’postgres://%s:%s@%s/%s’ % (’postgresql’,’something’,'127.0.0.1:5432′,’zip_db’),strategy=’threadlocal’) ”’ The sqlalchemy explicit scope is done for clarity. Of course you can “from sqlalchemy import *” instead, and change the scope of these calls. ”’ metadata = sqlalchemy.MetaData() metadata.bind = engine zip_table = sqlalchemy.Table(’zip_abbrevs’, metadata, sqlalchemy.Column(’zip_abbrevs_id’, sqlalchemy.Integer, primary_key=True), sqlalchemy.Column(’three_digit_abbrev’, sqlalchemy.String(4)), sqlalchemy.Column(’region’, sqlalchemy.VARCHAR(50)), sqlalchemy.Column(’state_abbrev’, sqlalchemy.String(3))) metadata.create_all(engine) for (region, state, zip) in self.zip_info: print “Injecting %s %s %s\n” % (region, state,zip) zip_table.insert(values={’region’:region,’state_abbrev’:state,’three_digit_abbrev’:zip}).execute() if __name__ == “__main__”: x=GetZips() x.getZipPrefixes() x.injectIntoDB() # vim:ts=4: noet:

I am writing this code for the nonprofit called The Freelancer’s Union in NYC, which currently has a nationwide member drive: http://www.freelancersunion.org/advocacy/index.html.
I will shamelessly plug them in exchange for sharing this code with the world.

The more members they get in each US state, the better nationwide insurance plans they can offer. They offer E&O insurance for IT freelancers as well, so even if you freelance part-time, this could be for you. This organization rocks. I’ve been a member for three years, and now I proudly write code for them.

Gloria

The unmodified code

On Saturday, the 4th of February there will be an IRC python tutorial in #debian-women on irc.oftc.net.

From the announcement email:"The topic is Python for people who can program (at least a little), but don't know Python at all. We will cover the very basics: syntax, basic data types, lists, dictionaries, control structures, functions, classes and objects, and modules. Or possibly less, depending on how time allows. Certainly not all the details of everything. Most of the examples will be about string manipulation, since that is common in most kinds of programs."

Feel free to join in!

Since the #debian-women-new channel that was opened on the occasion of this year's Software Freedom Day was so well received there will now be a special "Newcomers Welcome" timeslot at #debian-women every Saturday from 14:00 to 16:00 GMT.
While newcomers are of course always welcome to join , this timeslot will be dedicated to keeping the discussions on a not too technical basis and paying special attention to new visitors and their questions.

So if you have never before visited #debian-women, this might be an opportunity for you. If you have further questions about the #debian-women channel please refer to our irc FAQ, our irc guidelines or ask in the channel.

On the occasion of this year's Software Freedom Day the Debian-Women Project was running several events. In order to appeal to all levels of experience there were multiple activities: A new irc channel, #debian-women-new, was opened for until then inactive people who would like to get involved with the Debian-Women Project. For more experienced members there was a "help day" on the usual #debian-women channel. Erinn Clark installed a local BTS, dak and buildd for people to try out and practice with. Last but not least a Bug Squashing Party was organised by Hanna Wallach at #debian-bugs. All three events were well received and many women used the opportunity to catch up on the Debian-Women Project and general Debian development.

Thanks to some great work by Clytie and Thierry, the wiki now also offers pages in Vietnamese!
The wiki currently offers eight different languages. Add your translations!

From June 22nd to June 25th the LinuxTag will again take place in Karlsruhe. As usual this will be a large venue for all kinds of Open Source projects with a big fair, talks, workshops, forums and tutorials.

There will also be two talks featuring women in FS: "The Debian Women Project" (link) by Meike which will be given as a part of the Debian Day and "Free Software with a female touch" (link) by Fernanda. There will also be talks by other Debian Women members. Check the wiki for more information. If you plan to come, please drop a line in the wiki.

Following up on last week's story about the Debian Project Leader Elections: Helen Faulkner and Martin Krafft will be chairing the IRC debate, during which this year's six candidates will be answering questions asked by the Debian community. Everybody is encouraged to send in suggestions.

Miriam Ruiz moderated a discussion about Women in Free Software on IRC in the #linuxpreview channel. She has made slides available in Spanish.

Hanna M. Wallach gave a talk about Debian Women at FOSDEM. The talk attracted over 80 people, among which were about 15 women. The slides of the talk are available from Hanna's blog. A short summary can be found in Jill Walker's blog.