minus zero

Wandering around one of the squares in Helsinki this evening, I stumbled across an interesting installation in the side of a building, called CityWall. It's a large touch screen interface that displays photos taken around the city by inhabitants and visitors. You can interact with the display by 'grabbing' the photos with your hands and manipulating them as if they were real photos on a flat surface.

Shruti playing with the CityWall installation.

The interaction is quite intuitive doesn't present any real difficulty when using it. On occasion it would get a bit confused and stop responding for a second or two, or zoom a photo to fill the entire screen with nothing more than an accidental flick of the wrist, but on the whole it's very easy. The display is kind of tucked away under an awning, and I only noticed it because of the light being emitted from the screen. When we were playing with it, I noticed that lots of other people gathered behind us to watch, and a few stepped forward to have a go too. What's nice is that more than one person can use the system at a time, and the screen is wide enough to accommodate three people stood side-by-side.

From an HCI point of view, the project spans a lot of ground. The interface, while not entirely novel (see the Multi-Touch interface as pimped by Jeff Han for the most recognisable example), isn't something the general public are likely to have come across (yet, at least. The pending release of the iPhone will bring two-fingered touch screens to the masses). The user-generated content is another aspect, although it is curated and moderated by the project organisers as opposed to displaying unfiltered content directly from users. Pictures (and video, apparently) are sent to the screen as email or MMS messages, and certain items are selected to be displayed based on their relevance to current events in the city. I wonder how the system would be different if it allowed instant and unfiltered display of user content? That users can attach captions to photos draws some parallels with digital story projects, such as Story Bank. Currently there appears to be no way to retrieve content from CityWall to take away with you, it has to be experienced in-situ.

On a different note, we discovered a rather cool cafe just around the corner (everything seems to be 'just around the corner' in this town, I love it!). It's a vegetarian place that serves fair trade coffee (the first time I've seen that logo so far), has free WiFi access, a shelf full of books, board games and the like, and, best of all, a stand of Ubuntu Linux CDs! The CDs appear to be placed there by either Linux-tuki or Ubuntu Suomi, which makes sense as this place is the home town of the project we all know and love. There were only a couple of CDs left, so I guess there are some happy Ubuntu converts out there. On the other hand, they deperately need updating, as the CDs were version 5.10 (the "Breezy Badger" version, which was released in October 2005). Better still, they had a laptop sitting on a table which was running Ubuntu and free for all and sundry to use to check their email, surf the web, etc. Although the cafe was nice, I got the impression that it was very 'local', as I didn't see a single word that wasn't Finnish. We felt very welcome, however (although we got there 15 minutes before closing time, so didn't want to hang around too long).

Random observation: Since arriving, my mobile phone signal hasn't (that I've noticed) dropped below 100%. Apparently landlines are few and far between in Helsinki, so it makes sense that mobile coverage is above what Swansea has led me to accept as 'normal'.

Announcing my latest product of procrastination - pyClick 0.1

pyClick is a pseudo-driver for the Griffin AirClick USB for Linux. It's written in Python, and provides a mapping between keys on the AirClick remote and running user-configurable commands on the PC. By default, it is set up to control a media player such as Rhythmbox or Banshee by simulating X keypresses.

Get it now!

While procrastinating hard in the library, I was taken by a sudden desire to listen to some music from my ever-expanding collection. The only slight drawback was that I'd left my iPod at home, which made it somewhat difficult given that my laptop is devoid of any music.

Realising that my desktop PC has its music shared (using Samba) with the rest of the home LAN, I set about trying to connect to it from my laptop on the University's VPN.

On Windows, the process is as follows:

1. Execute net stop server from the command prompt (Win+R>cmd>OK). This stops Windows' Samba server on the local machine (we're effectively replacing the local server with the remote one).
2. Open PuTTY and select the 'Tunnels' option from the 'SSH' menu in the left-hand pane
3. For each of the following port numbers: 137, 138, 139, 445; enter the port number in the 'Source port' entry box and hostname:X (where hostname is the name of the box with the Samba shares, and X is the same port number you put in the 'Source port' box) in the 'Destination' entry box, and then click the 'Add' button.
4. Return to the 'Session' option at the top of the left hand pane and enter the name of the remote host you're connecting to (in general, the hostname of the internet gateway on the home LAN).
5. It's probably a good idea to save this little setup for future use, so give it a name in the 'Saved Sessions' box and hit 'Save'.
6. Click the 'Open' button, and enter your username and password when prompted (assuming you don't have SSH keys set up...)
7. You should now be able to enter \\127.0.0.1 in the Windows 'Run' box, and after authenticating with a valid Samba username and password you'll be presented with all the visible shares of the remote machine. These can be browsed and mapped to network drives, as with any Samba share.
8. That's it!

Of course, this makes several assumptions - you need to have a machine on the home LAN you can SSH into, for one. But it's a simple hack that seems to work. It's also got the added benefit of being encrypted.

Something like Icecast would probably be a more sensible long-term solution, but for a quick and easy way of listening to your tracks, it does the job nicely. :)

My holiday and the Google Summer of Code both ended on the 1st of September, and they were great fun.

I put together the final (as far as being accepted for my SoC submission) release of pyBackPack and it's the best yet.

Screenshots

Changes

• SSH Backups and restores
• When performing a backup, a progress indicator is shown.
• Increments on the restore page are listed most recent first.

Download

• .tar.gz: pybackpack-0.4.tar.gz
• SRPM: pybackpack-0.4-2.src.rpm
• RPM: pybackpack-0.4-2.noarch.rpm
• deb: pybackpack-0.4-all.deb

Update - The RPMs were re-rerolled with fixed dependencies, they should work OK now.

Bugs
If you come across any bugs or problems don't hesitate to get in touch, either by leaving a comment here, e-mailing me, or using the bug tracking system at http://sucs.org/~davea/trac

Thanks
I'd like to say a huge thanks to Elliot Lee (my mentor from Red Hat) for all his help, guidance and invaluable advice.
Also to Graham Cole (chckens) and Jeremy Katz for bug spotting, and pointing out some of my slightly weird interface design choices. :)
I almost forgot! My eternal gratitude goes to Jen for letting me take her laptop on holiday so I could work and for putting up with my hacking instead of relaxing by the pool. :D

Of course, it's not finished yet, and all you hundreds of faithful readers will be pleased to know that the future releases of pyBackPack will be documented right here. ;)

Here's the latest batch of updates, nothing too major - a more streamlined interface, better checks on overwriting files, etc.

Download
.tar.gz: pybackpack-0.3.tar.gz
SRPM: pybackpack-0.3-1.src.rpm
RPM: again, still on holiday so no RPM. Sorry!

Let me know how you like it :)

Fresh from the shores of Lesvos, I bring you pyBackPack 0.2.999.

No screen shots this time (I don't think my wallet could handle the GPRS bill :)), but here's what's new:

• Editable backup sets
• Nicer interface for including and excluding files/folders in a backup set
• pyBackPack now uses nautilusburn to provide a much nicer way of writing CDs
• Single-click backup of your home directory to a CD from the main pyBackPack window

Download
.tar.gz: pybackpack-0.2.999.tar.gz
SRPM: pybackpack-0.2.999-1.src.rpm
RPM: I forgot to install the right packages on the laptop before I left, so no RPM this time unless someone else is able to build one... :)

Bugs
I've run into a frustrating bug with rdiff-backup - namely that it doesn't like restoring from directories with a '.' character in their name. It throws an AssertionError. This bug seems intermittent, so any feedback you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Update - The problem disappeared when using pyBackPack on a different machine, so perhaps I screwed up rdiff-backup on the laptop. Ho hum.

The latest and greatest...

Screen shots

Changes

• User interface looks nicer and works a little more intuitively
• Can now restore from any increment, allowing the user to rollback to any point in time where a backup was made.
• Output logs now report something more meaningful
• CD backups/restores are now possible - This in particular needs lots of testing to see how it copes with different hardware combinations.
• It's now possible to do multiple backups/restores in the same instance of pybackpack.
• lots of other small improvements
• nb. Network (SSH) code is not yet active, should be done for 0.3

Download
tar.gz: pybackpack-0.2.tar.gz
RPM: pybackpack-0.2-1.i386.rpm
SRPM: pybackpack-0.2-1.src.rpm

As ever, if you've got any comments/questions/suggestions, don't hesitate to get in touch and let me know what you think about the tool. :)

pyBackPack is a user-level GUI tool to back up files.

It is written in Python, uses libglade and GTK+, and interfaces with rdiff-backup.

This is the first release so it's going to have at least 1 bug - your task is to help me find it. ;) I don't think it will chew up your home directory and trash everything, but if it does - sorry!

A few screen shots to whet your appetite:

Download: pybackpack-0.1.tar.gz

If you have any feedback/bug reports, you can either e-mail me or leave a comment here.

Enjoy :)

I just discovered a minor bug in pyBackPack (as it's now called):

• A user wants to backup her Firefox settings - so creates a backup set that just contains ~/.mozilla, and does a backup.
• Something screws up Firefox's settings, so the user restores her latest .mozilla backup to her home directory.
• The user then wonders where the hell the entire contents of her home directory have gone, and why only ~/.mozilla is left.

The Summer of Code is turning out to be pretty exciting stuff, and my project is progressing rather nicely. So far I've got a nice GUI written that can actually perform backups although there are a few major bugs that need fixing before I do a release (not to mention that being able to restore data might be nice ;)).

Integrating with rdiff-backup has been easier than I'd imagined, however its tendency to spew a fatal error and shutdown Python rather than raise an exception is frustrating.

Take a look at the video from this blog entry (via Planet GNOME)