Consilience

That’s right, the Michigan LoCo Team will again be participating in the Ubuntu Global Jam.

We’ll be at the always welcoming SRT Solutions location in downtown Ann Arbor (map) graciously provided by Jay.

We’ll be jamming from Noon to 5pm. Afterwards we’ll probably hit up one of the many nice beverage establishments close by.

What will we be working on? TONS! We’ll be testing, we be reporting bugs, triaging them, talking about StackExchange/Shapado/Launchpad Answers, and generally having a grand time with new and old LoCo members.

Remember, if you are coming, PLEASE REGISTER! (log-in and click on the “Register for this Event” link).

Today, Creative Commons has announced their campaign to support the new Catalyst Grants.

If you haven’t heard of it, the Catalyst Grant program is pretty awesome. It helps people who are working on great projects keep them going by providing the much needed funding. From the Catalyst Grant page:

Creative Commons is investing up to $100,000 to empower individuals and communities deeply rooted in the principles of openness and sharing. With the Catalyst Grants program, Creative Commons will seed activities around the globe that support our mission. Our goal is to scale our community’s efforts and support them in becoming self-sustainable. Through a rigorous public review and transparent evaluation process, the best proposals submitted by CC affiliates and the broader community, will be selected to receive $1,000–$10,000 to make their ideas a reality.

But, Creative Commons can’t do it all. And this is where you come in. By donating to Creative Commons you can directly help support the (no doubt) awesome projects that the grant program will select. Help support the commons by being a catalyst.

As you probably know, the Ubuntu Global Jam is coming up this weekend.

Well, along with this long list of US LoCo Teams, the Michigan LoCo is having an event on our east-coast. Our LoCo Directory event page has all the details.

I hope to see a lot of new faces!

[btw, that was really tedious to link to all of those US team events... glad there are so many, but ...]

And my email configuration addiction continues. As you may recall, I did an extensive (now out-dated) post about my email setup. I’m still using the basic configuration outlined there (all of the same programs) just some of my settings have changed a little. I tend to make little changes every now and then which I think will save me a tiny amount of time wet-ware processing my email. Below I outline how I am making the transition to new machines/installs easier for my email setup.

Restore Config Files

With the purchase of a new laptop, I have to re-setup my email’s (and other applications’) configuration. Luckily, I keep all of my configuration files in version control which is synced between 3 computers; my old laptop, my desktop, and my webserver (for mostly backup purposes, but also for imapfilter). All I had to do was run the following very basic commands:

mkdir src
cd src
bzr branch greg@my.server.net:/home/greg/src/dotfiles .
bzr branch greg@my.server.net:/home/greg/src/scripts .
cd scripts
./restore_email_apps.sh
./restore_symlinks_desktop.sh

The first 5 things are pretty self-explanatory: make a directory called “src,” go in there, then create 2 branches of the bzr repos for dotfiles and scripts.

Then, lets run two of the scripts in ~/src/scripts/.

restore_email_apps.sh is really just an easy way for me to remember which applications I use for email and its supported functions. The contents of that shell script is merely:
sudo aptitude install mutt-patched offlineimap msmtp abook
Yep, thats it.

The restore_symlinks_desktop.sh file is a little more involved. Basically, since I keep all of my dotfiles in a bzr repo called ~/src/dotfiles I need to tell the associated applications where to find those files. Well, I don’t really tell the applications, I trick them. I create symbolic links from where they are expecting the file to where I actually keep it. This is a common trick for these types of setups. In fact, if you didn’t want to use a traditional version control system to handle the versioning/syncing between computers you could store your dotfiles in your Ubuntu One folder and then they will be synced automatically. So, restore_symlinks_desktop.sh goes and creates all of those symlinks for me.

offlineimap

Now, you may have noticed that I use offlineimap with my email system. I won’t go into all of the benefits of offlineimap here, but the main ones that I enjoy are: local really fast storage of my mail (vs online) and brain-less email backups (its already backed up already).

However, using offlineimap creates one speed bump in this email setup; you need to redownload all of your email again, which, if you are like me and don’t delete anything (just put it in an Archive folder) then this can take a long time depending on your mail server. And, if you use gmail’s servers, they can lock you out of IMAP access if you download too much. Luckily, offlineimap is pretty robust and allows you to get around that problem fairly easily.

Note: I have only done this with offlineimap using the MailDir format so I don’t know what would be different for the other formats. Also, I haven’t seen any other guides like this online which is A) why I wrote this out and B) makes me wonder if this is bad for some reason [I did this over 5 days ago and haven't lost any email yet].

Anyway, here is what I did:

1) copy my .maildb folder from one computer which had a recent sync to my new laptop using a local LAN. I did this using rsync so it would compress during transit, because even at 10 megs a second, 6 gigs is a lot to transfer.
rsync -e 'ssh -ax' -auhvz --progress greg@192.168.1.102:/home/greg/.maildb/ /home/greg/.maildb/

2) rename the MailDir format email files to reflect the new computer’s hostname. The files look like this:
1264133355_0.24102.alexandria,U=3422,FMD5=e727b00944f81e1d0a95c12886ac4641:2,S
That “alexandria” part is the hostname of my desktop. So, I need to change that to “zen” so it looks like this:
1264133355_0.24102.zen,U=3422,FMD5=e727b00944f81e1d0a95c12886ac4641:2,S
But I need to do that for ALL of my email. find and xargs to the rescue!
find . -name '*' -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rename -v 's/alexandria/zen/'

3) setup offlineimap; ie: install and configure your email accounts. This is already done for me by running those two scripts above. Note: Make sure your ~/.offlineimap folder is empty (ie: don’t copy it over from your old computer).

3b) A big change from my last email setup is that I am now checking one of my mail account (grossmeier.net) over ssh. Basically, offlineimap ssh’s to the server, then runs an imap server (in my case, rimap). I followed the instructions set out here: http://eagain.net/blog/2007/02/09/imap-over-ssh.html (changing the pertinent parts about the imap service on the server, of course).

4) run offlineimap. You should see it SCREAM through your email archive as it adds the metadata to its .offlineimap folder from the local maildir you just copied to the machine.

There ya go. Now when you get a new machine and you use offlineimap to sync your email you don’t need to re-download all of your email again.

I finally broke down and purchased a new laptop.

My old trusty companion was a System76 Darter Ultra (revision 2). It was a great little machine with a 12.1″ screen, as much processor and RAM (4gig after purchase) as I need, and Ubuntu pre-installed. I can’t say enough about the people at System76; a small company out of Denver, Colorado where you know pretty much the whole company by first name. Carl is the owner; Tom is the guy answering your support questions; Erik is in charge of sales; and one of their daughters or nieces helps stuff envelopes on the weekends. I’m sure there are more people involved, but those three people I have had personal communication with via email and/or phone and every time it was great.

Why am I telling you how much I love System76? Because I feel bad not sticking with them for my latest purchase. I now have a Lenovo X200s. Another 12.1″ screen machine that is really light and works great.

Why did I switch my supplier? Honestly, because I wanted a machine that had a little better structural build quality (my Darter was a MSI barebones and started having structural issues near its 3rd year of life) and the X200s is just a little “better” (lighter and higher resolution).

So far, everything is working great out of the box*! The best part is I had a 160gig Intel SSD waiting to be put in it when it arrived. As soon as I replaced the harddrive I installed Lucid using a USB flash drive which was extremely quick. What that means is I never booted the original drive and thus never even saw the Windows 7 logo. :)

This machine, with the SSD drive, simply just screams. Best upgrade investment I ever made.

Action pics:

writing this blog post at my work office:

* The only thing not working correctly is two finger scrolling using the nipple and third mouse button (there is no trackpad). I tried the adding the hal quirk identified here, but it didn’t work. Haven’t messed with it too much, really.

Release Party Time!

Thats right, the Michigan LoCo Team will be hosting our biannual Ubuntu Release Party on April 25th in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The venue of choice is The Corner Brewery as it provides ample seating and ability to move tables around to have bigger groups. Plus, if you know where to sit there are power outlets!

And you know the Michigan LoCo can throw a party, we even had people come up from OHIO last time because they knew our party was better. I wouldn’t be surprised if this year we even had people from CHICAGO make the drive over. I don’t even see Ohio or Chicago on the list of Release Parties yet.

Important Details:
What: Jaunty Release Party!
Where: Corner Brewery
When: 7pm – ???
Why: Because Ubuntu is awesome! Because we’re awesome! Right on.
How: Need a ride? Join the mailing list.

Be sure to check out what other teams are having parties on the nice JauntyReleaseParties wiki page.

Hope to see you there!

There is a great event coming up at the University of Michigan, sponsored and coordinated by a great team of librarians: Open Access Week 2009.

Molly Kleinman, one of those great librarians, puts it into context for us:

I’m struck by how timely these events are, and how much we could conceivably do under the umbrella of discussing open access and the future of scholarship. … The confluence of circumstances nationally has made this the perfect moment to discuss what’s wrong with existing modes of academic publishing, and to start getting aggressive about making change.

You really should read the rest of Molly’s post for a wonderful explanation of why the current scholarly publishing system is failing for everyone except the Elseviers of the world.

Along with presentations focused on faculty and scholarly publishing models, there is also going to be a talk by my current boss, Nathan Yergler, CTO of Creative Commons. Nathan will be talking about the impact of Creative Commons (CC) licenses on Open Access, what challenges still exist for Open Access, and what the Creative Commons is doing to build and support an ecosystem of openness. Everyone is welcome to join this event, and all the events during Open Access Week. For the details about Nathan’s talk, check out the announcement on the OPEN:Michigan blog.

If you are in the South East Michigan area and are interested in what Michigan is doing to promote Open Access and make it really work, come by for any of the events; there should be a wide enough range to accommodate most interests.

I’ve been triaging bugs for Ubuntu for a while and I have always wanted an easy way for bug reporters to give me all the relevant information that is needed to help with finding out the problem. The way I usually did this was to add copy/paste-able requests to the Debugging Procedures Ubuntu wiki page. This was a pain for a few reasons: sometimes those copy/paste segments weren’t there and I had to add them and it also necessitated I have those wiki pages open (and wasting valuable tab-space in Firefox).

But now, thanks to the work of Matin Pitt, you no longer need to do anything as complicated! If the package already has some Apport Hooks then all you need the bug reporter to do is to run the command: “apport-collect 12345″ (substituting 12345 with the bug number in question, obviously).

apport-collect will then go find all the open tasks for that bug (just in case it is assigned to more than one package), run all of the apport-hooks for those packages, and attach that information to the bug report. It does all of this with out any other interaction with the reporter. To see which packages already have apport hooks available for them, see the Apport wiki page. Now, we all need to start adding more apport hooks so this is even more useful.

Be sure to check out Martin’s original announcement on the ubuntu-devel-announce mailing list.

First, a review of a neat new tool that provides a cool function for many academics:

GPeerReview is a very simple Open Source tool that lets you write a review of a work, embed a hash of the work in your review, and sign that review with your digital signature (using your GPG key). The last two things are pretty neat. The hash allows you to be sure that people know which version of a paper you reviewed. Or at least, they will know if the version they have matches the version you had. This would be useful in the case where major changes are made to the paper that contradict your review.

Then, signing your review so that the author (and their publisher/advisor/dean/what have you) knows it is actually from you is pretty neat, and an obvious use of gpg. In fact, GPeerReview is essentially just a wrapper around the GnuPG command-line tool (see the FAQ).

I think this is a pretty interesting tool that could have some great uses, especially if we integrate it with the work-flow of academics (somehow). Step one of that implementation would be to move it from the CLI to some sort of Word/OpenOffice.org plugin. Or, even better, would be to provide a web-based service for this.

Crazy Idea
Launchpad for Scholarly Articles and GPeerReview

Going back to my crazy idea of a Launchpad for Scholarly Articles: basically a service that provides users the ability to link published articles, whether open access or not, with pre-prints or author deposited versions in Institutional Repositories. The killer feature of this service would be to provide a way for people who DON’T have access to the expensive scholarly journals a way to read and be informed via the pre-prints written by the authors that are not restricted by the overzealous journal publishers.

Then, add on the ability for readers of those articles to make comments on and provide useful reviews of the material. Even adding this ability to places like arxiv.org would be great; it provides a mechanism to build community. And as we all know, the community is what makes any service an important resource for people. Without community the service is just a collection of tools.

But, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know all of the various web-based services out there for scholarly communication; maybe someone has already implemented something like this. Leave a comment if you know of anything out there like this.

So, I’ve spent a little over a week setting up my new email consumption/creation system. As you can see from the title of this blog post, there are a few parts to it. Why would I do something crazy like edit config files for 4 different apps JUST to read and write email? Well, I wasn’t happy with Thunderbird (yes, I’ll try 3.0 when it hits the repos) and Evolution wasn’t at all what I wanted. I do have gmail so why not just stick with the web interface? Because I am wanting to do more self-hosted solutions for web apps. Also, since I have more than one account, I want different messages to be sorted different and archived differently.

In Thunderbird I had an extension that allowed me to press “y” and the current message would be “archived” to the gmail All Mail folder. This was great, but it only supported one account. If I was reading my work email in Thunderbird (which is also hosted by gmail) and I hit “y” the message would go to my personal gmail account’s All Mail folder, not the work account one. Not good (and a dumb limitation).

So, what email program allows you to have complete control over those types of settings? Mutt. And yes, (Al)pine also. But, I have friends local to me who use mutt so exchanging .muttrc files and such is easier and we can meet in person to share tips.

What I want to do with this blog post, though, is not convince you that Mutt is the best solution for you. I do want to, however, share what I did to set everything up for use with Mutt. In fact, all the rest of the pieces of this setup can work equally well with some like Alpine or even Thunderbird.

(since it is a long post, I didn’t want to spam your reader, click for the rest of it)
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