Joey Stanford

Special 100th Issue of the UWN Coming Next Week

Joey Stanford — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:27:39 +0000

Don’t miss the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter next week as they celebrate thier 100th issue with the Ubuntu community. There will be interviews with community members, a retrospect, and insights from past and present UWN staffers. You definitely won’t want to miss this issue, so make sure your RSS feed is up to date, your email subscription is current, or the wiki bookmarked for a very special anniversary issue of the UWN.

Announcing the Community-Agile project

Joey Stanford — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:21:12 +0000

Ian Clatworthy has announced a new project that aims to extend Agile software development with successful practices used in the Open Source community. The goal is to create and support a process framework that teams and communities, both open source and commercial, can download and customize to meet their needs.

This is a direct offshoot of work that has been happening inside Canonical, especially in the bzr and Launchpad teams.

Intuition can be explained

Joey Stanford — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:41:31 +0000

A news article released on July the 1st carries an interesting title: Intuition can be explained.

It was an interesting read to me especially because of the people I work with. Time and again I see people’s intuition about things (potential problems, potential solutions, etc) come to pass. So much so that I have developed a good sense of faith in my colleague’s intuition and when expressed, consider it intensly during decision making.

Taking it to Tasque

Joey Stanford — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:50:20 +0000

Cool tool alert: My friends are up to something fun, so I thought I’d share it with you.

I use Tomboy religiously. Except for when I travel it’s all but replaced my moleskine notebook. One feature I’ve been waiting for in Tomboy has been task tracking. In lieu, I’ve been updating a Tomboy note called TODO with my TODO list items. I need something better though. Enter Tasque. Tasque is a simple task management app (i.e. TODO list) for the Linux Desktop. It integrates with RTM and exchange too. You can find the Ubuntu packages here. Give it a try!

Wanted: LP Interface Design and Usability Engineer

Joey Stanford — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:20:27 +0000

Lead the Revolution! Francis and I are looking for someone to do interface design and development focusing on usability and accessibility. Read more about this position in the job post.

ssh authorized_keys permissions (or, why ssh is smarter than you)

Joey Stanford — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 16:00:11 +0000

I use ssh key authentication to rsync data from my weather station to it’s website. Mysteriously it started failing a few days ago. After a bit of hair pulling and unhelpful ssh -vvv output, I found the cause. The permissions of the authorized_keys file on the server were incorrect.

-rw-rw-r– 1 stan4dnet pg478973 391 2008-05-07 12:14 authorized_keys

This file is readable by more than just you. Newer versions of ssh see this, recongize it as a security hole, and prevent you from doing something stupid. Lesson Learned: Make sure that the files in .ssh are writable only by you, on both machines, and non-executable by anyone.

Some people recommend a simple “chmod 644 *” in your .ssh directories. I don’t. I recommend:

chmod 400 *

OSCON Presentation

Joey Stanford — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:03:04 +0000

My Ubuntu Live presentation with the amazing Kikomonster has been moved to OSCON. Make sure you drop by to see our presentation and say hello.

Buntu Family Theater

Joey Stanford — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:37:44 +0000

Ever get confused as to the differences between Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and Edubuntu? In need of some humour? If so, check out this video by Shawn Powers. Don’t miss the bloopers at the end!

Where is Ubuntu-Bhutan?

Joey Stanford — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:59:26 +0000

Noticeably missing from our LoCo Team list is Bhutan. Bhutan currently runs Debian translated into Dzongkha. I hope that with Ubuntu’s increased ease of use, principles, unique community, and that it’s a Debian-based distribution, Ubuntu would find an equally favourable position at the DIT. Apparently it has with some of their users as we have a few forums users from Bhutan that run Ubuntu. If you’re a Dzongkha Ubuntu user, make yourself known!

RescueTime on Ubuntu

Joey Stanford — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:51:49 +0000

Published on: 25 April 2008 at 15:53 except it was published as a page, not a post. So, here it is for everyone:

A few of us on Launchpad have been playing with Angus’ RescueTime Linux Uploader which feeds data up to http://www.rescuetime.com/. RescueTime is billed as

Ridiculously Easy Time Management and Analytics.

So far, it’s been very informative. For me though it doesn’t count the time I spend talking on the phone when not actually taking notes on the computer. I’m currently only using the Gnome information applet and the firefox plugin and it works surprisingly well. You might give it a try if keeping track of time is interesting to you.