The next release of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn should be available shortly, October 23rd
To see the release schedule please go to
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UtopicUnicorn/ReleaseSchedule
OR
Why not sign up to the 15.04 testing team and help test 15.04 due for release in April 2015
In the mean time read what Mark Shuttleworth has to say about Full convergence of operating systems.
Lets help make this happen.
This is great news for the ToriOS team, we have now been mentioned on the Softpedia website
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Linux-Distributions/ToriOS-103625.shtml
If you want to join the ToriOS team and help out please go to the website below and get in touch
A School in Canada has saved thousands of dollars by ditching Windows 7 and adopting Linux
DATES FOR THE SPACE APPS CHALLENGE 2015 ANNOUNCED
On Friday 10th October Rick Timmis of the Exeter Linux user group will be presenting a talk on Rapid Application Development with Quickly (this comes with ubuntu or can be installed on ubuntu)
Meeting starts a 19:30
Exwick Old School -> Map
Exwick Road
Exeter
Devon
EX4 2AT
The first of our new format meetings, The kitchen will be open, for squash, tea and coffee.
There WILL be the opportunity for a “Fish n Chip” run, to the Exwick Fish and Chip shop, just around the corner.
Meet at the Exwick Ark Pre School (i.e LUG HQ) at 7:30pm
7:30 pm Arrival
7:45 – 8:30 pm Keynote session – Rapid Application Development with Quickly – Rick Timmis
Another opportunity for anyone who has the right skills and is willing to get involved
We're launching an emergency response "hackathon" this weekend to help Medecins sans Frontieres with a specific problem they're having in responding to the Ebola outbreak. They need a way to track patient information and more quickly find individual patients in their Emergency Treatment Centres. (more info in this Google Doc <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iv5VFdSsPnYyM7DcSrO8SoMMYsKov_8MhpJMi-6njNY/edit> ) *The solution may include a Raspberry Pi or Arduino Nano element which is why I wanted to ask you if you can help or know any really good developers who we should invite to the team?* We're forming a tight team of people from the Geeklist Corps of Developers + others in our networks who we know are good, to get together and work with MSF to build a solution that works and can be rapidly deployed. So far on the team we have Pim de Witte on back-end/Java, Gil Julio on Android app, and me on UX. We're going to have a kick-off call at 9pm BST / 10pm CEST tonight (Friday) to discuss more and form the team, then we'll likely get together in London this weekend. Can you help? - Dan
Dater : Saturday 20th September
Time : 2 pm (14;00)
Location: White hart, Holsworthy
Usual meet up come along to talk about techy topics, etc
The FCC must act in a clear and decisive way to ensure the Internet does not become the bastion of powerful incumbents and carriers, but rather remains a place where all speakers, creators, and innovators can harness its power now and in the future.
The Internet is a staple of our lives and our economy. The FCC should protect access to the Internet under a Title II framework, with appropriate forbearance, thereby ensuring greater regulatory and market certainty for users and broadband providers.
To ensure that the Internet fulfills its promise of being a powerful, open platform for social, political, and economic life, the FCC must adopt a rule against blocking, a bright-line rule against application-specific discrimination, and a rule banning access fees. These principles of fairness and openness should not only apply to the so-called last-mile network, but also at points of interconnection to the broadband access provider’s network. Likewise, strong net neutrality rules must apply regardless of whether users access the Internet on fixed or mobile connections.
The FCC’s proposed rules would be a significant departure from how the Internet currently works, limiting the economic and expressive opportunity it provides. Investors, entrepreneurs, and employees have invested in businesses based on the certainty of a level playing field and equal-opportunity marketplace. The proposal would threaten those investments and undermine the necessary certainty that businesses and investors need going forward. The current proposed rules, albeit well-meaning, would be far-reaching. Erecting new barriers to entry would result in fewer innovative startups, fewer micro-entrepreneurs, and fewer diverse voices in the public square. The FCC should abandon its current proposal and adopt a simple rule that reflects the essential values of our free markets, our participatory democracy, and our communications laws.
When the history of the Internet is written, 2014 will be remembered as a defining moment. This FCC will be remembered either for handing the Internet over to the highest bidders or for ensuring that the conditions of Internet openness remain for the next generation of American entrepreneurs and citizens. We urge you to take bold and unequivocal action that will protect the open Internet and the opportunity it affords for innovation, economic development, communication, and democracy itself.
You can build/design apps? Why not put your powers to good? Join us at #hack4good as we hack #ClimateChange together https://geekli.st/hackathon/hack4good-06
Global Pre-Event Webcasts Schedule is out!
We have exclusive webcasts all next week with Save the Children, WWF, Fauna & Flora International, Lead International, WeForest, WRI, King Tides Network and Forum for the Future!
https://twitter.com/dancunningham/status/507984989267296257
Please share and spread widely in all of your networks!
The Scratch development platform is a great way for younger coders to get into computer programming with it’s simple “lego brick” style of drag and drop code construction. However interfacing hardware to it can be a little bit tricky (although not totally impossible).
One feature of Scratch that can be very useful is the mesh network feature which provides a mechanism for broadcasting messages and sharing variables (as “sensor-updates”) via standard network sockets.
This feature means that practically any modern computer language (python,c,c++,java,php to name but a few) could be used to interface to a scratch session via the mesh. For example these languages can be used to directly interface other hardware such as game controllers (wii remotes, console game pads etc.), to scratch via the mesh network.
There are two little wrinkles in this plan however. Firstly because the program is acting as a proxy between the hardware and scratch via a network connection the response can be sluggish. Press button here and wait half a second plus before scratch responds. This isn’t the nanosecond responses that console games expect in “real world” game titles, but this is scratch games, not the next multinational block buster game.
The second wrinkle is that you have to turn on the Mesh networking. Not the hardest thing to do in the world, but one should be aware of what mesh networking is doing in the background. For one thing its allowing anything that understands the Mesh networking protocol (which I will be explaining later in this article) to access variables in your scratch session without a single nod or wink to authentication or security (because frankly mesh networking on scratch has none). If you think of a scratch variable holding one of your private emails then switching on mesh networking would allow another computer on the same local network to access that email. Worse still if you open up port 42001 on your firewall then potentially anyone on the Internet could access your scratch session. The good news here is that by default it is highly unlikely that your firewall will have opened up port 42001 to any machine on your local network (let alone one used by a primary school child). However it is possible to do this through your firewall management software and there maybe a point where you would want to consider a school-to-school project link. If that opportunity does ever arise, open up your firewall to port 42001, do the exercise, close down access to port 42001, job done.
Having said all that, the reality is that you will not (should not) be doing anything that sensitive with scratch. By making you aware of the minor risks and dangers in opening up mesh networking (when compared to the benefits that it brings to young coders discovering new ways to do things like inter process communication), I am hoping that you will be able to appreciate the issues involved and head them off in the more controlled environment of the classroom. The most likely scenario is when some bright kid realised that they can snoop on another kids classroom project by connecting to his/her mesh. If that happens credit them for having a deeper understanding of how mesh network works with Scratch… but also take some time to explain to them the ethical issues of doing such things “unannounced” with a hope that they will grow up to be network security consultants not master cyber criminals…..
Most importantly be aware of how it works yourself. If you know how to detect it (and hopefully this article will explain it well enough for you to understand) then it probably will never happen. And even an “up front” lesson on ethical computing would not go amiss. Give them the old spiderman pep talk “with great power comes great responsibility ….”
I could write a really boring sub section on this but frankly M.I.T’s own instructions for doing this pretty much cover it, after all they did develop Scratch so they should have an idea or two about how it works! See: http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Mesh
The only other thing I would add to this from my own personal experience is that while turning mesh networking on for Scratch on Linux based systems like the Raspberry Pi you will need to run it as root (sudo scratch) from the console. If you don’t do this it will probably freeze up as the “save” stage and you will have to follow the instructions all over again.
Once you have updated the image with mesh enabled you will be able to switch it on/off from within any scratch session started as a “normal” user via the usual desktop shortcut link.
My Python ScratchListener Class
I have adopted and adapted other peoples work in constructing my own “ScratchListener” class. The code is meant as a test piece framework for someone to add new features to or interface new devices to scratch
from array import array
import threading
import struct
import socket
import time
import sys
class Scratch():
def __init__(self):
PORT = 42001
HOST = 'localhost'
if not HOST:
sys.exit()
print("connecting...")
self.scratchSock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
self.scratchSock.connect((HOST, PORT))
print("connected")
def send(self,cmd):
print(cmd)
head = len(cmd).to_bytes(4,byteorder="big")
self.scratchSock.send(head + cmd.encode("utf-8"))
def broadcast(self,message):
self.send("broadcast %s" % message)
def update(self,variable,value):
self.send("sensor-update \"%s\" %s" % (variable,value))
def recv(self):
return(self.scratchSock.recv(1024).decode("utf-8",'replace'))
class ScratchListener(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
PORT = 42001
HOST = 'localhost'
if not HOST:
sys.exit()
print("connecting...")
self.scratchSock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
self.scratchSock.connect((HOST, PORT))
print("connected")
def run(self):
while(True):
data = self.scratchSock.recv(1024)
length = struct.unpack(">l",data[0:4])[0]
pdata = data[4:].decode("utf-8")
if(length != len(pdata)):
print("Data Length Missmatch on received data")
return
print("Data Received %d %s" % (length,pdata))
self.process(pdata)
def process(self,pdata):
if("sensor-update" in pdata):
print("Sensor Stuff")
parts = pdata.split(" ")
variable = (parts[1])[1:-1]
val = (parts[2])
exec("%s_temp = %s" % (variable,val))
print(external1_temp)
def send(self,cmd):
print(cmd)
head = len(cmd).to_bytes(4,byteorder="big")
self.scratchSock.send(head + cmd.encode("utf-8"))
def broadcast(self,message):
self.send("broadcast %s" % message)
def update(self,variable,value):
self.send("sensor-update \"%s\" %s" % (variable,value))
def recv(self):
return(self.scratchSock.recv(1024).decode("utf-8",'replace'))
# Main....
if(__name__ == "__main__"):
scratch = ScratchListener()
scratch.start()
external1 = 0
while(True):
#scratch.send("broadcast broadcast")
#scratch.send("sensor-update \"external1\" %d " % external1)
#scratch.send("sensor-update \"external2\" %d " % external1)
#scratch.send("set variable \"external1\" to %d" % external1)
#scratch.send("broadcast hello")
#scratch.broadcast("broadcast")
#print(scratch.recv()[4:])
scratch.update("external1","%d" % external1)
#scratch.broadcast("broadcast")
time.sleep(5)
external1 = external1 + 1