After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
-Debian Edu and Skolelinux
-community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is
-Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
-this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
-administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
-conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.
-
-
Who are you, and how do you spend your days?
-
-
I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
-in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
-university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
-Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
-IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
-got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
-labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
-the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
-training is anyway very important
-
-
I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
-SPSE school (secondary) is a very
-special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
-all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
-recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.
-
-
How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?
-
-
Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
-already several years ago. But since the system was still not
-Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
-use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
-next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
-hole.
-
-
What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?
-
-
Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
-very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
-the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
-engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
-and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
-can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
-platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
-head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
-hassle.
-
-
What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?
-
-
The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
-flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
-there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
-need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
-devices that have specific software packages for another specific
-distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
-Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
-and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)
-
-
Which free software do you use daily?
-
-
I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
-mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
-combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
-Perceus
-has the same...
-
-
For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
-only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
-something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
-statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.
-
-
Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?
-
-
I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
-cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
-just because they are normally not open to change.
-
-
Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
-to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
-don't.
-
-
We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
-laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
-we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
-machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
-reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
-repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
-Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.
+
+
18th December 2012
+
A few days ago I came across
+a blog post from Joey
+Hess describing ledger and
+hledger, a text based system for double-entry accounting. I found it
+interesting, as I am involved with several organizations where
+accounting is an issue, and I have not really become too friendly with
+the different web based systems we use. I find it hard to find what I
+look for in the menus and even harder try to get sensible data out of
+the systems. Ledger seem different. The accounting data is kept in
+text files that can be stored in a version control system, and there
+
+are at least five
+different implementations able to read the format. An example
+entry look like this, and is simple enough that it will be trivial to
+generate entries based on CVS files fetched from the bank:
+
+
+2004-05-27 Book Store
+ Expenses:Books $20.00
+ Liabilities:Visa
+
+
+
The concept seemed interesting enough for me to check it out and
+look for others using it. I found blog posts from
+Christine
+Spang,
+Pete
+Keen,
+Andrew
+Cantino and
+Ronald
+Ip describing how they use it, as well as a post from
+Bradley
+M. Kuhn at the Software Freedom Conservancy. All seemed like good
+recommendations fitting my need.
+
+
The ledger
+package is available in Debian Squeeze, while the
+hledger
+package only is available in Debian Sid. As I use Squeeze, ledger
+seemed the best choice to get started.
+
+
To get some real data to test on, I wrote a
+web scraper for
+LODO, the accounting system used by
+the NUUG association, and started to
+play with the data set. I'm not really deeply into accounting, but I
+am able to get a simple balance and accounting status for example
+using the "ledger balance" command. But I will have to
+gather more experience before I know if the ledger way is a good fit
+for the organisations I am involved in.
@@ -496,29 +467,38 @@ Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.
-
-
16th September 2012
-
Veldig morsomt å se at
-Naturvernforbundet Oslo og
-Akershus bruker kart fra
-OpenStreetmap.org i
-sine
-kalendere. Vidar Gundersen i kartgruppa
-forteller
-på den norske epostlisten til prosjektet at hvert blad i
-kalenderen har et turforslag på baksiden, med kart fra OpenStreetmap.
-Tidligere kjøpte de visst kart fra kartverket, men nå slipper de
-det.
-
-
Denne nyheten synes jeg er fantastisk bra, og jeg håper de får
-følge av flere, slik at det potensielle og fryktede inntektstapet for
-kartverket ved frigjøring av kartdata blir mindre, og forhåpentligvis
-til slutt så lite at frykten for å frigjøre data overvinnes.
+
+
11th December 2012
+
For noen dager siden omfavnet nok en kommune NUUGs
+FiksGataMi. Med 61 kommuner
+som lenker til FiksGataMi fra sine hjemmesider er «markedsandelen» 14%
+(av 429 kommuner). Siden
+siste
+oppdatering i november har kommunene Re og Vågsøy kommet til og
+slår følge med kommunene Askim, Askøy, Audnedal, Aure, Balestrand,
+Bærum, Eide, Farsund, Flekkefjord, Folldal, Gran, Grue, Hadsel,
+Halden, Halsa, Hamar, Hobøl, Holtålen, Hægebostad, Høyanger,
+Kongsberg, Kristiansund, Kvinesdal, Kviteseid, Levanger, Lindesnes,
+Luster, Lyngdal, Løten, Mandal, Marnardal, Moss, Namsos, Nissedal,
+Nordreisa, Randaberg, Rindal, Sel, Sirdal, Skiptvet, Sortland,
+Spydeberg, Stange, Stjørdal, Stord, Søgne, Sør-Odal, Tolga, Trysil,
+Tynset, Tysvær, Ullensvang Herad, Utsira, Vennesla, Verdal, Vågan,
+VÃ¥gÃ¥, VÃ¥ler og Ã
seral. Oppdatert liste er tilgjengelig fra
+NUUGs
+wiki. Kartet er dog ikke oppdatert med de siste kommunene.
+
+
Kanskje du bør høre med din kommune om de vil bli mer aktive
+brukere av FiksGataMi? Se
+en
+tidligere bloggpost med tips om hvordan det kan gjøres.
+
+
I snitt rapporteres det nå via FiksGataMi ca. 60 meldinger fra
+innbyggerne i uka om feil på offentlig infrastruktur.
@@ -526,37 +506,106 @@ til slutt så lite at frykten for å frigjøre data overvinnes.
-
-
15th September 2012
-
After the
-Opus
-codec made it into IETF as
-RFC 6716, I had a look
-to see if there is any activity in IETF to standardise a video codec
-too, and I was happy to discover that there is some activity in this
-area. A non-"working group" mailing list
-video-codec
-was
-created 2012-08-20. It is intended to discuss the topic and if a
-formal working group should be formed.
-
-
I look forward to see how this plays out. There is already
-an
-email from someone in the MPEG group at ISO asking people to
-participate in the ISO group. Given how ISO failed with OOXML and given
-that it so far (as far as I can remember) only have produced
-multimedia formats requiring royalty payments, I suspect
-joining the ISO group would be a complete waste of time, but I am not
-involved in any codec work and my opinion will not matter much.
-
-
If one of my readers is involved with codec work, I hope she will
-join this work to standardise a royalty free video codec within
-IETF.
+
+
6th December 2012
+
Where I work at the University of
+Oslo, we use the
+Cerebrum user
+administration system to maintain users, groups, DNS, DHCP, etc.
+I've known since the system was written that the server is providing
+an XML-RPC API, but
+I have never spent time to try to figure out how to use it, as we
+always use the bofh command line client at work. Until today. I want
+to script the updating of DNS and DHCP to make it easier to set up
+virtual machines. Here are a few notes on how to use it with
+Python.
+
+
I started by looking at the source of the Java
+bofh
+client, to figure out how it connected to the API server. I also
+googled for python examples on how to use XML-RPC, and found
+a
+simple example in the XML-RPC howto.
+
+
This simple example code show how to connect, get the list of
+commands (as a JSON dump), and how to get the information about the
+user currently logged in:
+
+
+#!/usr/bin/env python
+import getpass
+import xmlrpclib
+server_url = 'https://cerebrum-uio.uio.no:8000';
+username = getpass.getuser()
+password = getpass.getpass()
+server = xmlrpclib.Server(server_url);
+#print server.get_commands(sessionid)
+sessionid = server.login(username, password)
+print server.run_command(sessionid, "user_info", username)
+result = server.logout(sessionid)
+print result
+
+
+
Armed with this knowledge I can now move forward and script the DNS
+and DHCP updates I wanted to do.
+
+
+
+
+
+
28th November 2012
+
Mye interessant har skjedd de siste ukene. Her er noen dokumenter
+jeg har hatt glede av å lese.
+
+
+
+
@@ -571,6 +620,13 @@ IETF.
Archive
-
-