Like many people in the Ubuntu community, I use a combination of irssi and screen over ssh to access IRC. For a while, I have been using a notification script that displays a notification whenever someone hilights me. This has worked pretty well for letting me quickly see messages that concern me when I am sitting in front of my computer. However, I frequently miss messages if I am not staring at my computer screen, even though I might only be a few feet away from my computer. This is why I have recently, with some help from Johnathon Mlady, modified the script to read my notifications to me. It does this using festival. However, since I keep my computer in my bedroom, I did not want to have it talking to me while I was sleeping. I also knew that if I simply relied on me remembering to hit the ‘mute’ key before going to bed, that I would end up waking up in the middle of the night to a talking computer. This is why I decided to have the script only read my notifications when screen is attached. To use the script, you should start by following Aaron Toponce’s guide, but instead of using the bash script he links to, you will use the following script:

ssh remote-server.net ": > .irssi/fnotify ; tail -f .irssi/fnotify " |
sed -u 's/[&]//g' | while read heading message;
do /usr/bin/notify-send -i notification-message-im -- "${heading}" "${message}";
if [[ -n `ssh remote-server.net screen -list | grep '(Attached)'` ]]; then
echo "${message}" | sed -ur 's/^.*>//' | /usr/bin/festival --tts;
fi
done

Hopefully, some other people will find this script useful.

Ubuntu Open Week is off to a great start. Today, we had eight great sessions presented by members of the community. Here is a quick summary in case you missed them.

• Introduction: Jono Bacon started off Open Week with his traditional intro session. He talked about some of the “rules” to observe during Open Week in order to make the sessions as productive as possible. With some help from Jorge Castro, Jono also spent some time answering a wide range of questions.
• Be your neighbor’s Ubuntu Guru: Fabian Rodriguez led the second session of the day. He explained introduce neighbors, friends or colleagues to Ubuntu without becoming their 24/7 dedicated “computer guy”. He also mentioned a new Ubuntu Hour program that he started up, which is an easy way for Ubuntu users to get together for a quick get-together.
• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter: Or How To Achieve Organization Out Of Chaos: Craig A. Eddy held a great session about the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter (UWN). He explained how it is organized, how it has changed over the years, and how to get involved with the team.
• Scratch your own itch, learn how to write your own app: Rick Spencer talked about Quickly and how to use it to quickly develop applications for Ubuntu. He also explained how to create a basic applications, Searchy, using quickly.
• Ubuntu One: Joshua Hoover, Matt Griffin, Lucio Torre, and John Lenton discuss how to store, sync and share files, contacts, notes, and bookmarks with Ubuntu One. They also talked about some of the technology used to power Ubuntu One as well as their plans to provide developers with resources that will help them make use of Ubuntu One.
• What to do when things go wrong: Although we all wish that everything would simply work the way it is meant to all of the time, that is just not possible. Alan Pope did an excellent job talking about what people can do when things simply go wrong.
• Reporting Bugs: Brian Murray explained how to report bugs and how to make your reported bugs more likely to be fixed. Lucid will be a LTS release, so now is a great time to start reporting bugs so that we can make Ubuntu more stable
• Running a FOSS Event: Laura Czajkowski concluded the first day of Open Week. She talked about some tricks to help deal with planning events, booking a location, and handling presentations.

Tomorrow, we have another full schedule.

• Ubuntu Moblin Remix – Bill Filler and Crew
• Writing a book – Emma Jane
• Getting People Involved in your LoCo/Team – Jono Bacon
• Byobu – Dustin Kirkland
• ISO Testing Tracker – Ara Pulido
• Learning Project – Elizabeth Krumbach
• Writing Secure Code – Kees Cook
• Getting KDE 4 ready for LTS – Jonathan Riddell

I would also suggestions that you check out the wiki page and the booklet for more information about Ubuntu Open Week.

What?
Chicago LoCo’s Global Jam

When?
Sunday, October 4, 2009 from 12:00 PM until 8:45 PM

Where?
Schaumburg Township District Library – Central Library
130 S. Roselle Road Schaumburg, IL 60193
Map and directions

Why?
To unite all Ubuntu people in and around the Chicagoland area where everyone can come together to learn about Ubuntu, learn how to contribute to Ubuntu, as well as spending an entire day working on Ubuntu.

Who?
You and the Ubuntu Chicago LoCo Team

The following message was recently sent out to the loco-contacts mailing list. For those of you who might not subscribe to that list, I am reposting the message here.

—–BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—–
Hash: SHA256

Hello,

As the month is starting to reach its end, it is time to get your team
reports finished up. Last month, I proposed switching to a new style [1]
for team reports that takes advantage of include tags on the wiki. Since
then, over a dozen teams have switched to the new style. For those teams
that have switched, there is no longer a need to copy your reports to the
collective team report page for June [2]. However, you still need to ensure
that you have updated your report to include all of your team’s activities
for the past month. If you have not switched to the new reporting style, I
would strongly urge you to do so. It will make team reports easier for both
you and me. However, if you insist on using the older reporting style, please
remember to copy your report over to the collective team report. These team
reports will show up in the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter [3] and several blog
posts on the Planet. They are a great way to let the rest of the community
know what your team has been up to. If your team is currently not creating a
team report each month, you can read [4] to get started. The goal is to have
all teams produce a team report each and every month.

Thanks,
Nathan Handler

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BuildingCommunity/TeamReporting/HowTo
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/TeamReports/June2009
[3] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuWeeklyNewsletter
[4] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BuildingCommunity/TeamReporting
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In order to help get the word out, we are encouraging all users to blog about the Ubuntu Global Jam. This event used to be called the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam. However, in order to make the event even better, and to open it up to a wider audience, we have decided to rename it to the Ubuntu Global Jam, and to focus on more areas of contributing than just bugs. If your LoCo is interested in participating in this event, please add an entry to the correct table on the wiki. Even if you are unable to fill out all of the columns right now, please add an entry. This will allow us to get an idea for how many teams are interested and planning on participating. If you have never run a jam like this before, information is available on the wiki. There will also be meetings on the third Thursday of every month in #ubuntu-meeting on Freenode to help plan and prepare for the jam. These meetings are a great place to share any ideas that you might have on how to make the jams even better. Finally, there will also be several IRC sessions and live streams coming up in the next few months (thanks to Jorge Castro and Jono Bacon) about how to run a successful jam. I would strongly encourage anyone who is running a jam to try and attend at least one of these sessions. The dates for the sessions can be found on the bottom of this wiki page. Once again, please spread the word about Ubuntu Global Jam to as many people as you can. Blog/Tweet/Dent about it, send an email to your LoCo mailing list, tell people about it on IRC, or even tell people in real life. The more people that participate, the bigger a success this event will be.

For anyone living in or near Chicago, we will be holding a Key Signing / Planning event on Sunday, June 28th, from 2:00 pm untill 6:00 pm. The event will take place at onShore Networks: 1407 W Chicago Ave., Chicago, IL 60642. Here is the email that got sent out to the mailing list the other day

On Sunday, June 28, from 2:00 pm until 6:00 pm, we will be holding
the first Ubuntu Chicago event of the Summer [1]. This event will
serve two purposes. It will be a key signing party as well as a
planning meeting. Key signing parties are a great way to extend the
web of trust. This is very important if you are involved in
Ubuntu/Debian development, since GPG keys are used to verify your
identity and allow developers to upload to the repositories. In order
to ensure that this key signing event goes smoothly, please be sure to
bring some government issued identification in order to allow other
people to verify your identity. Also, please print out your GPG key
fingerprint, which can be generated with 'gpg --fingerprint <KEYID>'.
So for me, I would enter 'gpg --fingerprint 3933A7CE'.

Besides the key signing portion of the event, we will also be taking
time to plan some future events. These events will include
Packaging/Bug/Documentation Jams, as well as several other activities.
If you have some ideas for future sessions that we should hold, or are
interested in helping to lead one of these sessions, please let us
know at the meeting.

The owners of onShore Networks have kindly permitted us to use their
offices for our meeting. Therefore, the upcoming meeting will take
place at onShore Networks [2]: 1407 W Chicago Ave., Chicago, IL 60642.
We hope to see you all there.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ChicagoTeam/Projects
[2] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ChicagoTeam/Meetings/MeetingLocations#onShore%20Networks

If you know anyone who lives in the area and would be interested in attending, please pass this information on to them. The event is open to anyone, and we hope to see a nice turnout.

I have had an old desktop computer sitting on the floor beneath my desk for a while now. Since it did not have access to the internet, I was limited in what I could use it for. I recently got back my old 2Wire 802.11B USB Wireless Adapter, which I had lent to a relative. I have been spending the past few hours searching the web to try and get it working with Ubuntu 9.04. So far, I have been unsuccessful. I figured that I would try and ask the lazyweb for help. If anyone out there has gotten this wireless adapter working with Ubuntu, I would greatly appreciate it if you could outline what you did in the comments. Thanks a lot!

Andrew recently blogged about some Ubuntu-related Ubiquity Scripts that he made. I personally find that Ubiquity gets in the way of my normal workflow. For the past year or so, I have been using special Firefox bookmarks to easily and quickly access various Ubuntu/Debian resources. Let me start with an example.

In many debian/changelog entries, people will use (LP: #123456) to close a bug on Launchpad. I created a bookmark that would allow me to type ‘lp 123456′ in my address bar, and be instantly taken to that bug on Launchpad. This is what the bookmark looks like:

Name: Launchpad Bug

Location: https://launchpad.net/bugs/%s

Keyword: lp

Did you notice the %s in the Location field? That will be replaced by any text after the keyword. So in the above example where I entered ‘lp 123456′, the %s would be replaced by 123456.

Here are some other special bookmarks that I have created; please note, I am only going to post the bookmark Name and Location fields. It should be pretty obvious what the bookmark does, but if you have any confusion, please ask in the comments.

—————————————————–

Name: apt-url

Location: apt:%s

—————————————————–

Name: Search packages.debian.org

Location: http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=%s

—————————————————–

Name: Launchpad Person/Team

Location: https://launchpad.net/~%s

—————————————————–

Name: Report a bug

Location: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/%s/+filebug

—————————————————–

Name: Source package in Ubuntu

Location: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/%s

—————————————————–

Name: Bugs with Tag in Ubuntu

Location: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?orderby=-datecreated&field.tag=%s

—————————————————–

Name: Debian Bug

Location: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=%s

—————————————————–

Name: Debian Package Tracking System

Location: http://packages.qa.debian.org/common/index.html?src=%s

—————————————————–

Name: Search packages.ubuntu.com

Location: http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=%s

—————————————————–

Name: Ubuntu Manpage Search

Location: http://manpages.ubuntu.com/cgi-bin/search.py?q=%s

—————————————————–

Name: REVU Package

Location: http://revu.ubuntuwire.com/p/%s

—————————————————–

I hope that you all enjoy these bookmarks.

Continuing the recent internet speed meme, I decided to see what Speedtest.net had to say about my download/upload speeds. Here are my results: