root@worker2:~# pip install setproctitle
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/pip", line 8, in <module>
from pip.baseparser import parser
ImportError: cannot import name parser

Luckly there is a very easy workaround:

easy_install pip
rm /usr/bin/pip
ln -sv /usr/local/bin/pip-2.6 /usr/bin/pip
pip install pip --upgrade

Reference: http://blog.102web.ru/tag/virtualenvs/

• Creating the virtual environment: virtualenv myenv --no-site-packages
• Entering the virtual environment: source myenv/bin/activate
• Deactivating the virtual environment: deactivate

That's it! Once you're inside the virtual environment you will be using the Python libraries inside it. I suggest you to install all the Python libraries you need using pip.

Pros

Having 4 UDS every year, instead of 2, is surely a better thing. I'm a big fan of Scrum methodology, so I think that iterating more often is better than iterating less. If there are any mistakes you can correct them and iterating again before releasing the final product.

Potentially more people can partecipate to the event (even the opposite is true and I will explain why). People won't need to move from home, travel, pay any expense etc... they just need a computer and a good Internet connection.

It's cheaper for everyone: I can just imagine how expensive could be for Canonical to organize a similar event. Booking a big hotel, paying travel and expenses to near one houndred of community people. People who didn't get any sponsorization had to pay all the travel expenses to attend the event.

Cons

Potentially less people can partecipate to the event. Yes, like I said before even this sentence is true and I will explain why. First of all, using Google+ there are at least three countries that will be cut out: China, Thailand and Vietnam. Google+ is not available in those countries.

Are you sure that special people will be able to follow the event? For example blind people won't be able to chat or to ask question in the chat.

Only 10 people will be able to talk. In normal UDS sessions more people could raise the hand and ask a question or interact with the track leaders. Who will choose the 10 people with audio+video streaming rights?

We will completly miss the social aspect of the UDS. If you think this was only a secondary part, please go on. I felt more committed to work and collaborate with people I met in person than with someone I've never met before.

Announcing an event, even if online, just one week before it happens. Really? Some people had already taken vacation from work, booked flights etc... not counting many people that can't take 2 days off from work just with 1 week notice period. It's also almost impossible that community members have the time to schedule a blueprint and be able to discuss about a subject.

Final thoughts

From a cutting costs point of view I really can't say anything. Organizing UDS was surely very expensive for Canonical and nobody can blame them if they decided to spend those money in a different way.

What really concerns me: is UDS still useful? My opinion is that at least since latest 2 or 3 UDS the presence of the Community was not so relevant, because I had the clear sensation that the most important decisions were made by Canonical before the UDS and then there was just some details tuning. Another proof of my thoughts is the today announcement: despite the fact that I 100% agree with Unity switching to Qt/QML (I already proposed this 2 years ago during Budapest UDS, but nobody listened to me) I completly disagree with the way the decision was made: not a single involvement or discussion with the community.

I would apreaciate more openness and honesty from Canonical. Do you want to take all the decisions? That's fine, but at least state it clearly.

Note: once again, I'm not a Node.js expert and surely there are other ways to achieve this task (for example there is a Node.js module called twitter-bootstrap, but I haven't tried it). This tutorial is based on another tutorial I found, but it was not very updated and it had a more complicated way to install Bootstrap, so I decided to write a new one basing it on the original http://www.rs.au.com/31/how-to-install-bootstrap-v2-0-2-in-expressjs-v3-0-0

Preparing the environment

I will assume that you're running any Linux distribution (in my case I'm using Ubuntu 12.10, but feel free to use your own distribution). Be sure to have installed a recent version of nodejs and npm packages (I'm using Node.js 0.8.20 and npm 1.2.11).

Create a project folder and install the required dependencies

mkdir node-bootstrap
cd node-bootstrap
npm install express
npm install jade

Create the basic project structure with Express

andrea@andrea-Inspiron-660:~/Documents/sviluppo/nodejs/node-bootstrap$ node_modules/express/bin/express nodebootstrap

run the app:
$ node app

You should already have installed all the needed dependencies, even without executing npm install, anyway executing it won't hurt.

Download and install Bootstrap

Download Twitter Boostrap from the official website http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/assets/bootstrap.zip and unzip it under the nodebootstrap/public folder.

Bootstrap integration with Jade template system

At this point you need to edit the views/layout.jade file and include the references to Bootsrap

!!!
html
  head
    title= title
    link(rel='stylesheet', href='/bootstrap/css/bootstrap.min.css')
    link(rel='stylesheet', href='/bootstrap/css/bootstrap-responsive.min.css')
    link(rel='stylesheet', href='/stylesheets/style.css')
    script(src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js')
    script(src='/bootstrap/js/bootstrap.min.js')
  body
    block content

Test the Bootstrap integration

At this point we will modify views/index.jade that is the default template used to render the index

extends layout

block content
  div.top
    form.form-horizontal(method="post", id="loginForm")
      label Username
      input.span3(id="username", type="text", name="User", placeholder="Enter your username")
      label Password
      input.span3(id="password", type="password", name="Password")
      input.btn(type="submit", value="Log In")
  div.container
    div.content
      table.table.table-striped
        thead
          tr
            th Table
            th Heading
        tbody
          tr
            td Blah
            td Test
          tr
            td Hello
            td World

  div.footer

Now go back to the terminal and execute the app:

andrea@andrea-Inspiron-660:~/Documents/sviluppo/nodejs/node-bootstrap/nodebootstrap$ node app.js
Express server listening on port 3000

Open your favourite browse and visit http://localhost:3000 to see your first Bootstrap + Node.js application app and running.

sudo apt-get install python-software-properties python g++ make
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs npm

That's it!

Reference: https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/Installing-Node.js-via-package-manager

Doing this is quite easy and you don't need any specific plugin on QtCreator, but be sure to have at least version 2.6.x. Other than QtCreator you also need two Linux based PC (I used Ubuntu 12.10 for my development machine and Xubuntu 12.10 for the remote netbook) and an SSH account on the remote PC.

Add the remote device to QtCreator

To add the remote Linux device on QtCreator, use the Tools->Options menu and click on "Devices" item. At this point click on "Add" button and fill the fields using values similar to the screenshot. In particular specify a name for the device, the IP of the remote machine and a username and password that must already exist (I just created the user "andrea" on the Xubuntu machine and used the same password). I also had to set the timeout to 20 seconds, because I had some connection problems and the connection kept dropping after 10 seconds trying. To verify if everything is working fine, just click on Test button.

Add a specific Qt version

To write your application you may need a specific Qt version that is different from the one distributed by your Linux distribution. There's no problem, QtCreator let you add different Qt versions without any conflict. In my case I installed the Qt5 version distributed by Canonical Qt5 Edgers Team: https://launchpad.net/~canonical-qt5-edgers
Once it's installed, just click on "Add" button and select the qmake specific to the version you want to add (in my case it was in /opt/qt5/bin/qmake ).

Add a Qt Kit

QtCreator permits to add new Kit (development configurations) and these kits are used during project creation to specify what you want to target. In my example I added a new kit choosing an appropriate name "Qt5 Ubuntu", the device type, the actual device previously configured and finally the Qt version that we added before. With a kit I have a complete "toolchain" that allow me to write applications for a particular device, with a specific Qt version.

Putting the pieces together

At this point you just have to create a new "Qt Quick 2" application, and select the new kit you just created instead of the "Desktop" one. Please note that there is a little problem that I haven't fixed yet (but I'm working on it): if you create, for example, a project named "QtTest1" it will be deployed to the folder /opt/QtTest1/ on the remote machine. By default your user doesn't have read+write permissions for that folder so I manualy created the folder and I gave a chmod 777 on it, just for testing. There are two possible ways to fix this: you could create a specific user that has read+write permissions on /opt/ or you could modify the deployment configuration to have the app deployed to the user /home (I will investigate on this possibility and I will write something in one of the next posts).

Final thoughts

What all of this could be useful for? Well, do 2+2 and you'll easily guess In the next weeks I will post more specific informations and I will update everyone with my progresses. Any comment is welcome! If you want to contribute to this you're welcome too of course.

This is caused by a deadlock in the GUI and you can view the complete debugging informations here http://pastebin.com/zcKgXEqz
To fix this, you just need to open this file ~/.config/spotify/prefs and add these two lines:

network.proxy.addr="123.123.123.123:1234@https"
network.proxy.mode=2

of course substituting 123.123.123.123:1234 with your proxyip:proxyport.

Here comes Cloud9, a very nice service that you could define as the "Google Docs" for developers. C9 offers you a shared, always available on the cloud, environment to write your code. They also offer access to a Linux terminal (so you can install applications, like Django) and your websites are istantly available online for remote testing.

Installing and using Django on C9 is very easy. You just need to open a new terminal tab (ALT+T) in C9 and execute these commands

easy_install django
python ./../bin/django-admin.py startproject myproject
python ./myproject/manage.py runserver $OPENSHIFT_INTERNAL_IP:$PORT

After these commands, your Django website will be live and accessible using http://projectname.username.c9.io (where projectname is the name of the project you just created and username is your C9 user name).

source: http://support.cloud9ide.com/entries/21830983-django-development-in-c9

After a very pleasant experience in Finland (Tampere), I've finally come back to Italy. I had the opportunity to work for three months in Nokia as "Qt Expert" in "Nokia Developer Forum" and it's been an amazing job!

To be more precise I left Finland on August 31th, but I didn't have much time to blog about this. Finally I can use my desktop PC again and I'm not anymore limited to my small netbook. Trust me... spending 3 months with a 11'' netbook and pretending to work normally is really frustrating.

Now I have more spare time (too much :\ ) to contribute to Ubuntu and to play with some new technologies: I'm working on a project that uses Arduino, Android and some "robotic" parts, with people of Pistoia Linux User Group and it's really an amazing learning experience!

Talking about Ubuntu, if you have never contributed to it and you would like to start with something easy, I suggest you this interesting initiative https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuDevelopment/BugFixingInitiative

In the mean time I'm also looking for new opportunities and challenges (aka = looking for a new job), so if you think you may be interested in me, take a couple of minutes to give a look to my LinkedIn profile http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreagrandi

I will attend next UDS in Copenaghen (99% sure) and I already have a couple of topics I would like to work with, but I will talk about these later, first I want to properly create a blueprint in Launchpad so we will have a starting point.

Let's explain the basic idea.

From an UDS and the next one, it would be useful to have a development sprint where people can talk about assigned UDS blueprints, at which point they are on their tasks, if they have any problems and if they will finish them within the next UDS.

Of course Canonical cannot organize another meeting, it would be very expensive, so the idea is: why don't we use Google Hangout to organize the sprint? I has a limit of 10 people, I know, but we could select (for example) 5 from the community and 5 from Canonical. There would be parallel meeting and tracks, we would use the same blueprints used during the last UDS and we would add further notes. The attendees would be able to listen and watch the stream and make questions through the available chat.

I've also created a wiki page with more informations and you can find it here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuReleaseSprint

What do you think about? I know that Canonical is already organizing sprints and this could be a way to involve more the Ubuntu Community. Maybe we should schedule a session at next UDS to talk about this?

I hope to get some feedback from you.