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Launchpad Translations terms of use change

Published by Matthew Revell November 24, 2008 in Notifications

We have changed the “Translations copyright” section of the Launchpad terms of use. Now we require that all translations submitted in Launchpad are licensed under the BSD licence.

You can find out more on our help page.

The new text of the “Translations copyright” section of the Launchpad terms of use is:

“All translations imported from sources external to Launchpad are owned by the translator that created them. In general, these translations are licensed under the same terms as the software for which they are a translation.

“All translations in Launchpad are the work of the translator that created them. These translations are made available to Canonical and in turn to you under the BSD license (revised, without advertising clause). We require this so that other projects can use these translations as sources for their own translations, without suffering licensing incompatibilities.”

Read the the full Launchpad terms of use.


4

Launchpad 2.1.11: OpenID support and now easier to contact other people

Published by Matthew Revell in Releases

The Launchpad team is proud to announce the release of Launchpad 2.1.11, which includes two major new features!

OpenID: log into other websites using your Launchpad identity

OpenID logo

How many website usernames and passwords do you juggle each day? Your Launchpad account now includes an OpenID identity, meaning you may be able to reduce the number of website login details you need to remember.

OpenID is an open standard that lets you use one online identity to access many different websites, such as SourceForge, Blogger, LiveJournal and thousands of others. Look out for the OpenID logo next time you log into or register for a website.

There’s more on our OpenID help page.

Get in touch with any other Launchpad user

Ever wanted to contact someone you’ve come across in Launchpad only to find they’ve hidden their email address?

Launchpad developer, Barry Warsaw, has the solution:

“You can now email up to three other Launchpad users or teams per day using the new Contact this user/team link on profile pages.

“Launchpad preserves the privacy of the recipient’s email address — unless they respond, when it becomes a normal email conversation — and you can choose which of your registered email addresses the message comes from.”

To give it a go, try it on your own profile page.

Find out more about contacting people in Launchpad and receiving email that’s sent using the contact form.

That’s all for this month

To get the full details of the Launchpad 2.1.11 release, have a look at its milestone page.

Launchpad 2.1.12, our final release of 2008, will be out on the 17th of December.

In the meantime, join us in #launchpad on Freenode and on the launchpad-users mailing list.


1

Launchpad offline 03.00 UTC 24th November

Published by Matthew Revell November 21, 2008 in Notifications

Launchpad will be offline for the second part of the roll-out of our 2.1.11 release from 03.00 UTC on the 24th November.

Going offline: 03.00 UTC 24th November
Expected back before: 04.00 UTC 24th November

We had originally scheduled this down-time for 03.00 UTC today (21st November) but it did not go ahead.


0

Meet Barry Warsaw

Published by Matthew Revell in Meet the devs

Barry Warsaw mugshotOur previous Meet the developers interview was with a man known by his irc nick rockstar.

On the Launchpad team we have another rock star, the bass playing Mr Barry Warsaw!

Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?

Barry: In general, it is my life’s work to see Zawinski’s Law fully realized in everything I touch. To that end, most of my Launchpad work has been to add spam vectors, er, I mean mailing lists to Launchpad. I don’t know why anybody would think I know something about mailing lists, but there you have it.

These days, the basic mailing list features are working pretty well, so I’ve been concentrating on other things, though often email related, such as the recent “Contact this user” feature.

Matthew: Can we see something in Launchpad that you’ve worked on?

Barry: If you’ve used the Launchpad mailing lists, you’ve used stuff I’ve worked on. If you try out the new “Contact this user” feature in Launchpad 2.1.11, you will be using my stuff. Well, that’s only if you like those features. If you hate them, someone else did it.

Matthew: Where do you work?

Barry: I work out of my home in Silver Spring, Maryland USA. Well, I did up until about a week ago, when I moved into a temporary rental house while we’re doing some work on our real house. I live about a mile walking distance from Washington DC.

Matthew: What can you see from your office window?

Barry: Right now, not much other than the side of my neighbor’s house, but when I’m back in my real home, I have a somewhat less boring view of the neighborhood. I can see all the way up the street leading to my house, so I’m always prepared when the Fedex truck drops off the latest awesome mugs and hoodies from the Ubuntu store (/me waits for his endorsement bonus check).

Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?

Barry: Directly before coming to Canonical I worked at a company called Secure Software, incidentally with Mailman’s original inventor John Viega, though we were not working on Mailman. Secure built products around static analysis of C, C++, and Java code for security vulnerabilities. It was very cool software and allowed me to do a lot of C, C++ and Java hacking as well as the usual big pile of Python. I also did more Windows development than I’d ever done before, and let’s just say it’s nice to be working for the makers of Ubuntu now! Unfortunately — or maybe fortunately — Secure did not overwhelm in the market and, here I am!

I’ve been pretty lucky to work at some great places, though my career has been pretty eclectic. I’ve been able to do a lot of open source and free software, both officially and incidentally in my career. I won’t bore you with the ten page resume though.

Matthew: How did you get into free software?

Barry: Well, I’m an old timer so I’ve actually been into free software probably before the term was even invented! My first real software job was as a summer intern at the National Bureau of Standards (now NIST), a US Federal research lab in suburban Maryland. I was hacking on homebrew graphics systems for robotic real time control and visualization, and most of the work was in FORTH. There was a pretty vibrant FORTH community and we shared lots of code, often by 8″ floppy disks, 9 track tapes and over the original ARPAnet and uucp. I continued with NBS/NIST after I graduated college and our lab eventually migrated to early SunOS systems. By that time I was learning C and hacking Unix, Emacs, window systems, etc. Back then at least, the software that US federal employees wrote was not subject to copyright (because it was taxpayer funded), so it was easy to give away, and it’s always seemed very natural for me to share code.

A few years ago I searched some of the various Usenet archives for early postings of mine. I think my first public post was of some Emacs trinket I wrote in 1985. It was probably what eventually became Supercite. In any case, tapping into that culture and its social interactions really got me hooked. I made a lot of friends online and I’ve been very luck to keep many of them and even meet some of them in the real world.

Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?

Barry: The Zen of Python says “Practicality beats purity”.

Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?

Yes, quite a few actually.

These days I’m most active in Python and GNU Mailman, though there are probably a dozen or so FLOSS projects I contribute to in various ways. I used to contribute a lot to Emacs and XEmacs, but these days I prefer to just be a (l)user. I also tend to scratch my own itch, and hosting projects on Launchpad and using Bazaar makes that just incredibly easy. For example, I needed an email robot on some of my public email addresses, so I wrote ‘replybot‘ which tries to do that totally anti-social job in the most standards-compliant way possible. Even though the package is published on the Python Cheeseshop, all the project management happens on Launchpad. In fact GNU Mailman itself is hosted on Launchpad now too.

Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about?

Barry: Merge proposals are my latest kick. We use them a lot on the Launchpad project, and I think they’re a great way to manage branches, review code, and link them to bugs, milestones and releases. I’m not yet sure how useful all that stuff is for smaller projects, but for a large complicated beast like Launchpad, merge proposals are really great.

Matthew: Four string, six string or fretless?

Barry: Ah, what a great question, but those are not either/ors! 🙂 I firmly believe that if you can’t play a 4, you have no business with more strings. Guitar players would be wise to heed that advice. 🙂 I played bass for almost 25 years before I got my first 5 string, and it’ll probably be another 25 before I get a 6. My grandkids will have to slap and pop that hi C string for me though.

Fretlesses are very cool, and I played a 4 fretless (with a hipshot) almost exclusively for many years, though I am no Jaco. A good “mwaahh” just makes me so happy. My main axe these days though is a fretted MTD American 535. Having that gut rumbling low B string is just too much fun, though you have to use it tastefully. I’m still saving up for a fretless 535 to match my main axe, but it’s much harder to sneak those things past my wife these days. 🙂

Matthew: Kiko‘s special question! You’re at your computer, you reach for your wallet: what are you most likely to be doing?

Barry: Okay, this is a family show, right?

I do purchase a lot of stuff online. I hate going to the malls and I really hate shopping so if I can get through the holidays without getting in my car, it’s a success. One of our favorite places is Zappos because you can just order like $10,000 worth of shoes, keep the one pair you like and send them all back for free. I do buy the occasional software, but not too much ongoing services, though I’m currently looking at encrypted, secure online backups. I do tend to like to roll my own though, since hacking is so much fun.

Thanks for listening!


0

Launchpad offline at 03.00 UTC 21st November 2008

Published by Matthew Revell November 20, 2008 in Notifications

At 03.00 UTC on the 21st November we’re making a secondary code roll-out as part of our Launchpad 2.1.11 release.

We expect the down-time to be around 30 minutes but it could be as much as an hour.


18

OpenID from your Launchpad profile

Published by Matthew Revell November 19, 2008 in Cool new stuff

As of today, you can use your Launchpad identity to log into any website that supports OpenID. Now, you need remember only your Launchpad username and password for thousands of websites.

Here’s how it works:

  1. You visit a website that’s an OpenID receiver and it asks you to log in.
  2. You give that website your Launchpad profile’s URL – e.g. https://launchpad.net/~fred-bloggs
  3. Launchpad asks you to confirm that you want to log in to the other website.
  4. Once you’ve confirmed, you’re logged into the website and can use it just like normal.

Launchpad's sign-in confirmation box

That works both for sites that support OpenID 2.0 and 1.1. If you ever need your explicit OpenID URL, that’s no problem: you’ll find it on your profile page just below your contact details.

There’s one thing to bear in mind: once you start using your Launchpad profile to log into OpenID sites you shouldn’t rename your Launchpad account. That’s not to say you can’t change the display name but rather the system name that appears in your Launchpad URLs. In my case, the system name is matthew.revell.

Want to get started and not sure where to find sites that support OpenID? Take a look at the OpenID site’s Where page. There’s more on our OpenID help page.


1

Get in touch with any other Launchpad user

Published by Matthew Revell in General

Contact this userNeed to contact someone who’s hidden their email address in Launchpad?

No problem. Launchpad profile pages now give you a way to contact that person without having to know their email address.

Over to Barry Warsaw — who worked on the feature — for more:

You can now contact up to three other Launchpad users per day, even if those users have hidden their email addresses. The recipient’s privacy is preserved (unless they respond) and you can choose which of your valid email addresses the contact message will come from.

So now you can get in touch with all prospective new team members, bug commenters, branch owners and so on.

Try it out on your own profile page.


3

Threaded development – Launchpad t-shirts

Published by Matthew Revell in General

Launchpad t-shirts for men and womenAt our recent get-together in London, we in the Launchpad team discovered a sure-fire way to turn heads: t-shirts emblazoned with the stylish new Launchpad logo.

Naturally, we want to share this milestone in sartorial expression with everyone who loves Launchpad. So, you can now buy your own Launchpad t-shirt from the Canonical store (women’s and men’s versions available).

We’re also giving one away in our competition. To enter, answer this question correctly:

What’s the average (mean) number of people per team in Launchpad?

Send your answer and UK t-shirt size (S, M, L, XL or XXL for men, XS, S, M, L or XL for women) to feedback@launchpad.net, with the subject line “T-shirt competition”, before Friday 12th December. The Launchpad team will select the winner from the correct answers.

The Launchpad team’s decision is final and we’ll need the winner’s postal address to send the t-shirt.

Good luck 🙂

Update: As more people join and register projects in Launchpad, the correct answer may vary a little.


4

Inkscape embeds Launchpad Answers

Published by Matthew Revell November 17, 2008 in Projects

Around this time last year I wrote about Inkscape‘s switch to Launchpad Bugs.

Since then, Inkscape have taken to Launchpad wholeheartedly, using Code and Blueprint as well.

As an Inkscape user — rather than developer — I was excited to see that when I click “Ask us a Question” in the Inkscape help menu I’m taken straight to Inkscape in Launchpad Answers to ask it!

Inkscape's help menu

If you’ve seen anything similar, I’d love to hear about it.


7

Launchpad plugin for Eclipse – using the Launchpad API

Published by Matthew Revell November 14, 2008 in API

Guillermo Gonzalez – the man behind the bzr-eclipse plugin – has recently been working with the Launchpad API to produce an Eclipse plugin that integrates with Launchpad.

That seemed like a pretty cool use of the API so I emailed him to find out more.

Matthew: What does your plugin do?

Guillermo: The user visible plugin allow the user to search the branches of a project. Basically it’s a view with a search field. This is going to become part of bzr-eclipse, as an extension, to allow searching for branches and branching into a new project directly from one of the results.

But actually it’s a set of plugins 😉

The heart of it is the launchpadlib plugin, it abstracts common features needed by others plugins that need to interact with launchpad, at this moment it provides authentication and access to projects and bugs.

Eclipse showing a list of branches hosted by Launchpad

Matthew: How are you accessing the API? Directly or using the Python library?

Guillermo: The first approach was to use the API via Java (and a java implementation of wadl), but as I was reinventing the wheel, I started to look on how to use launchpadlib from java. I’m currently using launchpadlib with an alpha version of Jython-2.5 and some extra patches/libraries missing in Jython and required by launchpadlib.

Matthew: Could you have done this without the Launchpad API?

Guillermo: Doing something like this never crossed my mind before knowning of the API and launchpadlib. Such a task would require screen scraping and all sorts of hacks to get things working … until something in the UI changes, and makes it useless. Also that would increase the load on Launchpad itself and maybe affect other users.

Matthew: How did you find both learning and using the API?

Guillermo: The API is straightforward to learn, also if you can use launchpadlib it’s far easier, just start the python interactive interpreter, import launchpadlib and start prototyping your app 🙂

Matthew: What do you like best about the API?

Guillermo: From my point of view the most important aspects are:

Matthew: What’s the worst thing about the API?

Guillermo: I don’t think there is a “worst thing”, the API is evolving quite well.

I’m pretty sure (and know that by experience), that if there is a missing feature that it’s required by a user, the ~launchpadlib-developers team would try to fix it. Obviously, it will require the proper bug report/feature request 😉

Matthew: What would you like to see changed or improved?

Guillermo: Back when I started to work on these plugins, there was no support for the code hosting bit, nor the possibility to search the bugs assigned on a specific project, but after reporting the issues the ~launchpadlib-developers team fixed them.

For more about Guillermo’s Launchpad plugin for Eclipse, see the bzr-eclipse project in Launchpad.


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