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.
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:
- You visit a website that’s an OpenID receiver and it asks you to log in.
- You give that website your Launchpad profile’s URL – e.g. https://launchpad.net/~fred-bloggs
- Launchpad asks you to confirm that you want to log in to the other website.
- Once you’ve confirmed, you’re logged into the website and can use it just like normal.
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.
Get in touch with any other Launchpad user
Published by Matthew Revell in General
Need 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.
Threaded development – Launchpad t-shirts
Published by Matthew Revell in General
At 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.
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!
If you’ve seen anything similar, I’d love to hear about it.
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.
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:
- it’s based on standards (wadl, http)
- there is a reference implementation in python (python is awesome to learn how things works)
- it’s well documented, and if you can’t find what you want it’s easy to check if it’s possible using launchpadlib and python interactive interpreter.
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.
Launchpod episode 12
Published by Matthew Revell November 13, 2008 in Podcast
Launchpod: the Launchpad team podcast!
Hosts: Matthew Revell and Joey Stanford.
Theme: Obscurity by Barry Warsaw.
- 00.36: The Launchpad team met in London at the end of October. Joey and Matthew spoke to Launchpad developers as they took part in an optimisation session.
- 10.57: Matthew talks to Gary Poster, who recently joined the Launchpad team, about his new role and what he did before.
Launchpad offline 19th November 22.00 UTC
Published by Matthew Revell in Notifications
Launchpad will be offline for up to two hours from 22.00 UTC on the 19th November. This down-time is for the roll-out of the latest version of Launchpad, 2.1.11.
Going offline: 22.00 UTC 19th November 2008
Expected back before: 23.59 UTC 19th November 2008
Meet Paul Hummer
Published by Matthew Revell in Meet the devs
Now it’s time to speak to Paul Hummer — the man known as rockstar — as he spills all about his life in the Launchpad team.
Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?
Paul: I help integrate Bazaar into Launchpad. Basically, anything under code.launchpad.net is where I am.
Matthew: Can we see something in Launchpad that you’ve worked on?
Paul: Much of the layout for Launchpad 2.0 was work I did. I’m currently working on making the import system better and exposing much of Launchpad’s merge proposal functionality through the API.
Matthew: Where do you work?
Paul: In the basement office of my home in Fort Collins, CO, USA.
Matthew: What can you see from your office window?
Paul: There’s currently a squirrel looking down the window well, teasing Choco (my dog).
Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?
Paul: Early on, I helped write a social networking webapp in PHP for the Bakersfield Californian newspaper. After that, I did a lot of independent consulting for everything from managing virtual machines and mobile payment processing to RFID research and embedded Linux development.
Matthew: How did you get into free software?
Paul: In a nutshell, I would dig old computers out of the trash when the Colorado State University students would throw them away at the end of the school year. Usually, none of them had a ton of guts, so Windows wouldn’t run well on them. I discovered Red Hat 4, and it was just momentum after that.
Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Paul: I think it’s quite possible to have both. I’m very much against extremes in either direction, but I think it’s good to have a good set of pragmatic principles.
Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Paul: It depends on your definition of “contribute.” Advocacy? Too many apps to count. Bug reporting? Quite a few.
As far as actually writing code, I think my first contributions were when I was 16, to apps that apparently aren’t around anymore. Recently, my contributions include loggerhead, cscvs, many Django apps, and a pretty new media center application called Entertainer.
Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about?
Paul: Ooh! Ooh! I have two things. First, merge proposals are AWESOME. We’ve been using them in Entertainer since very early on. They’ve come a long way, and I think they have an obvious role to play in increasing the quality of free software. I pity free software projects that don’t have a formal code review process.
The second is code imports. I feel like LP users have this wonderful opportunity to work on patches for other open source projects without having to do the “prove yourself” dance to get commit access. Hacka hacka on a bzr branch until your patch is ready, and then submit it to the core devs. This way, you get all your work versioned, instead of having a checkout of the svn or CVS from core, and just having one version of your patch (the one created with svn diff).
Matthew: Have you experimented with alternative keyboard layouts?
Paul: Yes. I’m a Dvorak user, although my netbook is still on Qwerty. One thing I’ve noticed is that more often than not, you get typo’d words that make other words. For instance, ‘r’ and ‘l’ are right next to each other, and so when I try to type ‘whole’ I often type something offensive by accident.
Matthew: Kiko‘s special question! You’re at your computer, you reach for your wallet: what are you most likely to be doing?
Paul: Let me just say that the most evilly genius thing Amazon.com does is SAVE my credit card number, so it’s too easy to spend money there. I buy A LOT of technical books, and recently, a lot of fiction books.
Meet Ursula Junque
Published by Matthew Revell November 12, 2008 in Meet the devs
Now it’s time to speak to Ursula Junque in the latest of our Launchpad developer interviews.
Matthew: What do you do on the Launchpad team?
Ursula: Well, my job title is QA Engineer. Each day I watch the OOPSes you sometimes see when using Launchpad, and try to find out what the problem is, then I open bugs, try to get people to fix them and the like. Besides that, I work on assuring that Launchpad versions will be well tested before released. Also, I love doing python scripts to enable my work. I love my job. 🙂
Matthew: Can we see something in Launchpad that you’ve worked on?
Ursula: Since I work with solving bugs in Launchpad, if everything went fine you won’t notice the object of my work. 😉
Matthew: Where do you work?
Ursula: I work from home, that is at the moment in Recife, Brazil.
Matthew: What can you see from your office window?
Ursula: I can see lots of other buildings, some windows already with Christmas decorations, and a school.
Matthew: What did you do before working at Canonical?
Ursula: Right before joining Canonical, I was in a Brazilian telecom company called AsGa, developing the embedded system of a network switch. Before that, I worked at IBM’s Linux Technology Center, in a project that was an overlay of Ubuntu.
Matthew: How did you get into free software?
Ursula: It was when I started my Computer Science graduation at UNICAMP. They had Windows and Linux in there, and also a free software enthusiasts group called GPSL (Pro-Free Software Group, in Portuguese). So, I had the opportunity to use Linux and learn about free software. Well, actually I tried to use Mandrake Linux before that (a really long time ago), but my PC was too slow at the time for KDE, and my family (the PC wasn’t only mine) needed a UI-clicky thing. 🙂
Matthew: What’s more important? Principle or pragmatism?
Ursula: Hmm, great question. I guess this is the point where Open Source and Free Software people disagree.
I’m more a pragmatic person than one that sticks to principles. I think we have to start somewhere, and having to follow a lot of “rules” sometimes stops you from starting something that would be really great – not perfect, but a start – and that could be “adjusted” with the time. I guess it’s important to have principles to help you to trace the path where you want to go, but being inflexible, in my point of view, is not such a good thing.
Matthew: Do you/have you contribute(d) to any free software projects?
Ursula: Yes, but not with code. All code I produced were scripts to help me (and people around me) to make life easier. I should have created one project or two from them, but thought, at the time, that it was not worthy to do so. Shame on me, lost pieces of handy code! 🙂
I did translations in Turbogears project documentation to Brazilian Portuguese, and also for a related project called Kid, but I think the major contribution is to stay online on Freenode’s #ubuntu-br and #launchpad trying to help people to get along with stuff. 🙂
Matthew: Tell us something really cool about Launchpad that not enough people know about.
Ursula: Well, I think the whole of Launchpad is great, but to talk about something related to my job, I’d like to talk about dupefinder. It’s that small piece of Launchpad that is there when we’re about to file a bug. After you fill in the bug summary, it smartly tries to find the most similar bugs, giving us a list of them so we can be sure that we’re not filing a duplicate. It’s simple but extremely useful. 🙂
Matthew: How do you take your coffee?
Ursula: In the first mug I can find among the clean dishes in my kitchen. 🙂
Matthew: Kiko‘s special question! You’re at your computer, you reach for your wallet: what are you most likely to be doing?
Ursula: It’s been a while since I started buying things online, so I’m almost sure I’d be taking out my credit card. 🙂
I always buy things from online stores such as eBay, Mercado Livre (an Argentinian, but huge in Brazil, version of eBay), and local online department stores, where I buy books, CDs, DVDs, eletronics and stuff. Also I have an account on Dreamhost, where I host my blog, that is the only actual online service I pay for.
