The awesome Video Team at DebConf have set up, like every year, streaming video and audio for the talks and BoFs, so if you’re work allows it, you may want to watch some of the talks: http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/DebConf8/Streams

In about an hour (13hs UTC), Mark Shuttleworth is giving a talk on Debian and Ubuntu collaboration, which I’m sure is worth watching.

If you miss any of the talks, a few weeks after the event is over, the videos are provided for download, so keep an eye out for them if you missed any talks you wanted to watch.

A few days ago, James Westby worked on a branch of bzr-upload, that added the upload-on-commit feature to bzr-upload. It’s now part of trunk!

This means that now you can use the –auto switch, and from now on, your commits will automagically get uploaded.

To start uploading automatically:
bzr upload --auto

To stop:
bzr upload --no-auto

In other news, bzr-upload is now packaged and waiting in the Debian NEW queue to be uploaded, thanks to Jelmer Vernooij’s packaging, and Marcela Tiznado’s sponsoring.

So, some of you already know, and some of you, including myself, will be a bit surprised.
Starting Monday, I’m going to start working full time for Canonical.
I’ve been active in the Ubuntu community since very close to the beginning, then jumped to working on Bazaar and surrounding projects, which, btw, has one of the greatest community ever. So, working for Canonical is like going to Disneyland
I’ve been doing some contracting work on my free time (mostly for Loggerhead, which turned out great, and some UI in Launchpad), and things just got more exciting every day, until at some point things just started speeding up, and I got offered to work full time a few weeks ago. Having sorted out the remaining details yesterday, Monday is officially my first day.
I’m going to stop working actively as a lead developer at my company, have found some very qualified people to take over the work I’ve been doing, and I’m going to fully focus on making user interfaces mind-blowingly good.
I’ll also get to continue working on Loggerhead as part of my job, so expect to see the improvements to keep on landing regularly.

I’m really excited to start working full time with the smartest people in the world, doing a job that has the word revolution in it’s description!

I’ve been a happy customer of Serverbeach for quite a few years now. Really, those guys are amazing.
Unfortunately, we use CPanel heavily, and that only works on Redhat-based distros, so I can’t benefit from apt’s magic.
I was pleasantly surprised when I spotted a how-to-install-ubuntu-remotely post on their blog today.

Does this mean that they will start to provide servers with Ubuntu preinstalled?
I sure hope so.

Incidentally, I highly recommend them, and, if you sign up, you can punch in my referrer code (TTER8PAF7S) and we both get heavy discounts on the servers

I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Bazaar Sprint back in March, mostly thanks to Canonical sponsoring my entire trip across the globe
The sprint was interesting in all sorts of ways, and it got me working on several projects (some of which I’ll talk about in future posts), but there was one in particular that amazed me how fast it was put together. Bzr-upload.
It all started one night, while sitting across the table from Vincent Ladeuil, the guy who basically wrote transports in Bazaar, and I started complaining about how I had to work around bazaar to make it fit into my daily work flow (doing web development).
The problem was simple: bzr doesn’t update the working tree (the actual files) remotely, so there was no simple way for me to upload the websites I worked on a daily basis.

Long story short, Vincent asked some questions, sat down, wrote tests, wrote code to work with those tests (TDD, FTW), and after some fiddling, we can now upload websites (and anything else, actually) using bzr’s knowledge of what we’ve changed, and it’s solid transport libraries (ftp, sftp).

So… how does this work? Simple.
Assuming you already have bzr installed, fire up a terminal and do:
bzr checkout lp:bzr-upload ~/.bazaar/plugins/upload

Now that we have the plugin installed, go to the branch containing your website, and with a simple:
beuno@beuno-laptop:/mywebsite$ bzr upload sftp://beuno@host/path/to/http
No uploaded revision id found, switching to full upload
Uploading bar
Uploading foo

Done!

Did more work?

beuno@beuno-laptop:/mywebsite$ bzr ci -m'Random bug fix'
Committing to: /mywebsite/
modified foo
Committed revision 2.
beuno@beuno-laptop:/mywebsite$ bzr upload
Using saved location: sftp://beuno@host/path/to/http
Uploading foo

That’s it!

bzr-upload will remember the last revision you uploaded, and make sure it only sends what you’ve changed.

Project’s page: https://launchpad.net/bzr-upload

Comments, feedback, patches, etc are very welcome.

This just in, MySQL has migrated from BitKeeper to Bazaar. They also seem to be using Launchpad quite extensively, and have already updated their installation from source instructions.
Not only is it a big user base for Bazaar, but yet another move from Closed Source to Open Source software.

Congratulations to all the Canonical folks to helped with the move (I hear John and Elliot had a lot to do with it in particular), and welcome MySQLers

+1 to Robert’s suggestion.
Maybe make that optional? “email me my own comments and bug reports”

After half an hour of randomly re-reading xkcd strips, I thought I’d start a meme: Fun or weird aliases for commands.
Kick start, aliases for “sudo”:

simonsays apt-get install python2.5
please apt-get install python2.5
youdo apt-get install python2.5

I’ve just finished watching the short film sponsored by the Blender Foundation, and I really have to say, it just feels better and better being in the open source world.
It’s an amazing production, both in the quality of the rendering, sound, and amazing idea behind it.

The official site is currently down due to heavy digging and such, but I happen to have the torrent link stored, so here’s a direct link to it, and, the embedded YouTube version (if you read through the planet, you might have to click to the post to watch it).

It’s licensed under Creative Commons, so besides being encouraged to share it, you can download all the original material used for it and all the tools, for free.

Here at the Argentina LoCo, we have been avoiding requesting the LoCo CD pack, due to it getting stuck in customs for random reasons, making it sometimes impossible to retrieve it, and other having to pay a tax of over 100usd.

I’m curious if this is just a problem over here, or if other LoCos are in the same situation, and, if any, what workarounds have to found.