The 3rd and final day of the Birmingham Bug Jam, and it was much quieter this time around. Myself, Quentin, John Pinner and Chris "Baggers" were the only ones here to start. Chris was hardcore and actually spent the night in Linux Emporium though I don't know if he actually got any bugs triaged. Hellocatfood, from IRC, joined us later in the afternoon and got he managed to get a few hours of bug triaging in.
We set up the webcam stream so that the bug hunters in London could interact with us, and kudos to them (and Tim Williams) for setting up another webcam stream from London. We had two-way communication which really added to the atmosphere, and made it feel more of a global event. Having comments being shouted from London, and us laughing back made us really feel that we were part of a larger group, working together to the same ends. There were also others that joined in from home via the webcam and IRC.
Food wise, we had more tasty food this time a huge pizza that had to be halved so it fitted in the oven, burgers, and chocolate cake. Washed down by beers provided by Chris.
Chris got distracted again and started to juggle some penguins.
I felt that I got more bug triaging done today then yesterday. I felt more confident posting comments and changing status'.
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It's Saturday and we're hunting bugs in Birmingham! The day kicked off around 10 O'Clock at Linux Emporium (facilities kindly provided by John Pinner) with everyone getting stuck into bugs on Launchpad. Mez gave a quick how-to on bug triaging to a few of us. Unfortunately it seemed that everyone else on the interest was being just as enthusiastic and the Launchpad servers couldn't handle the load. The Canonical monkeys got it sorted eventually so we got back to bug zapping.
Tim Williams of Autotrain and SBLug set up the room with a streaming webcam, so that the whole world can watch - and listen! - to our bug hunting. This essentially meant we spent a good while irritating the London Bug Jammers by eating tasty lasagne, chocolate cake, drinking beer and juggling penguins.
I only managed to triage about 9 bugs today, it's still very much early days for me but I still think I helped. Most of the triaging I did was to file the bugs against what I thought was the correct package, and changing the status, asking for more info. Quentin and Nick were able to actually have a more in-depth stab at the bugs, because we had a wide variety available in the Linux Emporiums office, reporting back more specific information that should hopefully help developers when they come to fix the bugs.
Mez and Zeth also spent a bit of time interviewing the bug jammers for a podcast they are preparing to release.
Later in the day we had a surprise visit from Henrik Omma who helped me understand a little more about Launchpad, and helped me by setting a few bugs to "wishlist".
Hopefully tomorrow I will be more confident with setting bug status, and asking for more information.
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I've tried doing graph plotting in Linux before and found it to be a bit of a nightmare.
All I ever wanted to do was get data from a comma separated value (.csv) file and plot it.
I used Octave + Gnuplot, as Octave was designed for mathmaticians I thought it was the best tool for the job. Turns out being able to add numbers together does not give you the ability to use Octave.
Using Octave together with Gnuplot I was able to plot a graph in about 4 days. (Do not take this as a criticism of Octave, but of me.)
Thankfully inbetween times I began to learn Python and now the time has come again for me to try my hand at plotting graphs myself.
Looking in Ubuntu's repositories I found there was a Gnuplot package for python ready to install. After installing and trying the demo that came with it I managed to plot some graphs. Even better there is a csv module built into python itself.
All in all it took about an hour to get some graphs out. Whoop! Thanks Python you saved me 4 days of pulling my hair out.
Here's the code
#! /usr/bin/env python
import csv
import Gnuplot
import sys
data = sys.argv[1]
title = sys.argv[2]
results = []
f = open(data, "r")
reader = csv.reader(f)
g = Gnuplot.Gnuplot(debug=1)
g.title(title)
g('set data style lines')
for i in reader:
a = []
for j in i:
a.append(float(j))
results.append(a)
g.plot(results)
g.hardcopy(title+".ps", enhanced=1, color=1)
I plan on extending the file to do some data analysis for me (integration, linear regression etc), but that will require me learning to count a few more numbers.
Enjoy.
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There's a bit of an Ubuntu meme, meme 1,meme 2, spreading around the net, making sure that we have all done our "5-A-Day".
Try to triage 5 bugs, help with 5 new users forum posts, shoot down 5 current bugs with your mad programming skills, every day.
I took this as an opportunity to try my hand at triaging bugs. My 5 for today are, 123647, 148832, 149048, 151929 and 155352
I suspect that I won't triage 5 bugs a day, but I'll try!
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Useful information that's not very clear or easy to find.
The old iBook G3 Clamshell design, the very first iBook produced, cannot read new 700mb CD-R disks as the drive is too old. Yet it can read the even older 650mb CDRs.
This is very useful if you are trying out Linux isos you have downloaded, but make sure that they are small than 650mb!
The only distribution that I could try was Ubuntu as they were the only distribution to provide professionally pressed CDs.
I hope this is useful to others.
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