Dear Adobe, Please Stabilize Flash

I continue to test Firefox 3.1 with Flash 10 and have found it to *extremely* unstable:

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
0xae6b610d in ?? () from /u/firefox_3100b3/firefox/plugins/libflashplayer.so
(gdb)

Frame rates and sound both seem better than 9, but it crashes constantly during testing. Right now there is no way I could deploy the most recent release.

Adobe: It's great that flash is so widely used, people must like using it for content development. But with this much content on the web, you always need to provide a quality player too. I understand that many companies have made cuts in staff, and I would be happy to help debug it for you. Please think about deploying bugzilla for Acrobat Reader and the Flash Player. Please, help us help you!

PS: Already tested swfdec, it's no where near ready for enterprise deployment.

Update: Having some better luck with FF 3.5B4, not crashing as much as B3; but still crashing more than it should.

Update2: Lots of ideas and things to try from the comments. I'm now testing older builds of Flash 10 to see if they provide better stability (current is r22, I have r15 here too). I'm also going to try using Firefox 3.0.X builds and see if that works better too. I had been using the 3.1/3.5 builds with the anticipation that it would be released the same time as this new server goes live. The video card we have is ATI 9250. I'll test over other video cards, and also test with a new version of pulseD.

Update3: OpenSuse 11.1 seems to have some GTK issues that are making the testing process difficult for me. Current plan is to blow the server and load with Fedora Core 10 and see if that works better. OpenSuse/Stable seems to still have some file manager bugs, with the GUI constantly bouncing around the screen and resizing.

Flash On Flash With Pulse

I think that I have gotten Flash working with pulse now to our thin clients. Here are my work notes in case this helps anyone.

From our old system, this was what the daemon reported when playing Youtube videos:

I: client.c: created 27 "Native client (TCP/IP client from 128.222.233.233:53650)"
I: client.c: client 27 changed name from "Native client (TCP/IP client from 128.222.233.233:53650)" to "flashplayer"
I: module-volume-restore.c: Restoring volume for
I: module-volume-restore.c: Restoring sink for
I: sink-input.c: created 20 "playback" on oss_output.dsp with sample spec s16le 2ch 44100Hz
D: memblock.c: Memory block too large for pool: 1048576 > 16376
D: memblockq.c: memblockq requested: maxlength=132300, tlength=88200, base=4, prebuf=87318, minreq=882
D: memblockq.c: memblockq sanitized: maxlength=132300, tlength=88200, base=4, prebuf=87320, minreq=880

Here is the same page on OpenSuse 11.1

I: client.c: created 31 "Native client (TCP/IP client from 128.222.233.236:38065)"
I: client.c: client 31 changed name from "Native client (TCP/IP client from 128.222.233.236:38065)" to "flashplayer"
I: module-volume-restore.c: Restoring volume for
I: module-volume-restore.c: Restoring sink for
I: sink-input.c: created 22 "playback" on oss_output.dsp with sample spec s16le 2ch 44100Hz
D: memblock.c: Memory block too large for pool: 1048576 > 16376
D: memblockq.c: memblockq requested: maxlength=4194304, tlength=44100, base=4, prebuf=44100, minreq=8820
D: memblockq.c: memblockq sanitized: maxlength=4194304, tlength=44100, base=4, prebuf=44100, minreq=1
D: memblock.c: Pool full
D: memblock.c: Pool full
D: memblock.c: Pool full
D: memblock.c: Pool full
D: memblock.c: Pool full

The sound would play for a short while, and then get choppy. The browser would start to gray out and eventually freeze.

I then started looking around and found that many people were mentioning that libflashplayer was no longer needed and to use the Alsa-Pulse "device" instead to increase browser stability. I straced aplay and could see that it was looking for /etc/asound.conf which it was not finding. I looked in the directory and noticed that asound-pulse.conf is what was loaded instead. I soft-linked it into asound.conf and aplay -Dpulse started to work as expected. I then removed libflashplayer.so and started up Firefox and it's working *much* better now. The pulse daemon is no longer getting hammered with spewage.

Things like this really make you want to put in a little classic Queen. :)

Staging Firefox 3.1 Again

The last few weeks have certainly kept me busy. I have been prepping and testing Evolution 2.24 and OpenOffice 3.1 for deployment here at the City.

My next major project is to get the new Firefox server finished and deployed for the whole City. I got some excellent feedback from people with some parameters to tune to lower the memory footprint of Firefox. I also am testing some new code that extracts out certain settings from the users prefs.js file and then merges those changes back into a global template. This will ensure that everyone is always given a working session each time they click on the icon and can't configure it in a manner which "breaks" it (i.e, disconnecting from the proxy server or whatever).

I also have globally installed FoxTab (shot below) which gives Firefox the features in Safari 4 for displaying thumbnails in 3D of opened pages. No flame wars please - I don't know who did it first. :) But regardless, it's cool and is working well even over remote display.

I also updated to the latest version of Flash, and am now starting to poke at the issue of Firefox crashing the PULSE daemon on the thin clients. It appears that there are some settings where you can tune the priority of applications pushing sound to the daemon, and I think possibly the stock OpenSuse 11.1 settings are anticipating PULSE to be running locally on the same computer; and not being pushed over the network. I'm certain I'll find it.

Anyway, this seems like it's going to be a good upgrade and that people will like it.

Pierre-Eric Rocks 2: Evolution PDF Drop And Drag

Being a Governmental agency, everything that we do is about record retention and long term storage. Citizens can request email messages at any time and we have to provide them in a format that can opened without cost based software. In other words, if someone wants email from 10 years ago we can't just simply give them a binary backup of the Groupwise 4.1 post office and expect them to get it loaded on SCO Unix and working. For ease of retention, we keep email messages in PDF format in project folders. More so in Evolution 2.6, but even in Evolution 2.24 there are a few steps and a requirement that users know how to navigate to the right folders in order to write out PDFs.

In order to make this easier, I starting poking at some ideas. I noted that currently Evolution drops and drags messages in mbox format only. I had some IRC conversations on #evolution with mbarnes, mcrha, chen and xkahn and created a scope of work and placed it on BGO here. Pierre-Eric (pepp_) was interested in the project and we agreed on the scope of work and we allocated some bounty money. An initial patch has landed. Default behavior of course will be to continue to write out mbox files, but with a gconf key change Evolution will now write out PDFs into Nautilus from a drop and drag.

I was only able to fund the areas required for our needs. I'm hopeful that in the future this functionality is expanded and moved into the UI of the Preferences screen.

This one small change will save our users countless hours of time (and frustration) in the future.

Obligatory screenshot

Having Problems With Acrobat Reader 9.1?

If you have started using Acrobat Reader 9.1 on Linux, there is a nasty little bug that took me a while to locate. It's leaking files into /dev/shm that don't delete, and cause problems on the next startup. We were getting calls from people that when they clicked on Reader, their whole Xserver would freeze until the stuck process was removed. After running strace, I was able to see that it was attempting to use /dev/shm right before the lockup; and found the leaking files.

I placed these lines into the script that calls Reader and things are working as expected:

rm /dev/shm/sem*$USER 2> /dev/null

Linux Motif Development Toolkit Update

Some of my coworkers have been busy testing new features and updating artwork for our development tool for custom applications. To this day, nothing else allows you to rapidly build business applications and everyone is pretty happy with it. Motif added anti-aliased fonts recently, and with some Tango artwork the programs really look much nicer. GNOME themes automatically set old X resources, so the applications are now coming up in the same colors that users have selected. Not a lot of time invested, and huge gains already in appearance.

The toolkit we use is called Panther, and is from a company called Prolifics.

Pierre-Eric Rocks

A while back I put out a blog entry about some bounty work with OpenOffice. I was contacted my new favorite hacker, and his name is Pierre-Eric. We built a machine with which to quickly compile OpenOffice, and he immediately started creating patches. We have been impressed with his professionalism, and his energetic approach to open source software. His first two patches were accepted by Sun and look to be merged into OOo 3.2.

The first patch creates a 2x2 picture layout for Impress:



The second creates a 3x2 picture layout for Impress.



He is currently working on a patch to add a "Sentence Case" option to Writer. We have a few more projects waiting in the wings, and are looking forward to continued bounty work.

Shuttle

Shuttles have been going up almost 30 years, and it's still amazing to me. It's even better now that I live in Florida and can see it in person!

Help With XWD

Since we went live on the new desktop we have had a nagging issue with screendumps. From time to time the "import" command once activated would log you off the server and return you to the XDM chooser. I have never been able to replicate it reliably for debugging until today. I had always suspect it was a crash of gnome-session or the parent dbus process. Turns out it's a crash of X on the thin clients, which makes it a lot harder to patch and fix. We are not ready at this point to push out a new build to our 550 devices.

So I have been looking at our good old friend, xwd. It would perfectly meet my needs, and doesn't crash in the same place as import. The problem is there seems to be an endian issue when using Compiz. The shot below shows what is dumped when Compiz is active. Ideas and technical information is appreciated. I don't mind using convert on a second pass to revert the original colors, but am not sure what exactly is wrong with the image.

ICS Based Document History Goes Live

A few months ago, I built a little prototype script that generated .ics files from .recently-used files generated by OpenOffice. Very frequently users know when they edited a document, but can't remember what they named it. The feedback was positive, so I made the script a bit more robust and submitted it to the cron for all of our employees. Some users were creating .recently-used.xbel files because they are making use of the GTK file picker, and the script was updated to take that into account as well. If you have a server and multiple users, the code is here . It's a bit hard coded for our environment, but should be a good start.

In the shot below, users are able to see the date and time that they touched files in OpenOffice; from within Evolution.

Best Things Are Free

I am always one to try new things, and certainly enjoy saving money. I have a NetFlix account that I use to rent Blu-Ray movies, and for a few months they have been promoting their streaming movies. A few weeks ago I looked at it, and it turned out that this feature was available in my current plan. I have a 768K DSL modem at home, and didn't expect it to work well. I was pleasantly surprised that it actually wasn't too bad on my Mac laptop. I had been paying 25 dollars a month for HBO/Cinemax; which I found I used mostly to watch older movies. I'm not one to watch movies on a computer, so I checked into the Roku Netflix box. It's a 100 dollar onetime charge and then movie playback is included in your Netflix account. So I turned off HBO/Cinemax and should now have a 4 month payback.

The box arrived and was amazingly easy to install. You plug in the power, and connect it to your TV and are basically done. A screen came up and found my SSID, asked for the password and downloaded the latest firmware. The Roku rebooted and the menu came up in HD/720p over HDMI. You add movies to your Instant Queue from a computer, and within 1-2 seconds they appear on your TV. With 768K the movies certainly are not Blu-Ray or even DVD quality, but they aren't much worse than the digital signals I was getting from the cable company.

All in all for me, it's working very well and just wanted to pass along the information.

Bounty, Contact Me

Please contact me email drichard at largo.com or dave_largo on the IRC if you might be interested in a minor bounty project. Apparently the Layout Slides in OpenOffice Impress are hard coded into the source. An example of adding another slide is displayed on this issue. We would like to add 2 more slides. One that is a 2x2 grid to hold photos, and the other which is 3x2. I have circled them in the mockup below. I would create the issue on openoffice.org, you would attach the patch. It would be my job to get it accepted and merged.

Keep The Changes Coming

One if the hardest things about working with users is translating theircomplaints about using open source software into something actionable. One of the things that we have heard before is that people sometimes didn't like how the charts work in OpenOffice. Chart2 helped that greatly. I'm now getting very positive feedback concerning the anti-aliasing found in OOo 3.1. (shot below: 3.0 vs 3.1). If you guys keep sending these things to those of us that implement software, it becomes easier and easier to deploy Linux and OpenOffice! Thanks to all involved.

Evolution Pleasantness

I feel like it would be easy to get into a rut of using a blog to vent about problems. I wanted to send out some kudos. I'm involved with the beta program for prepping Evolution 2.24 for use with Novell Groupwise. We are making progress and things are looking better and better every day. I look forward to completing this project and getting the features moved out to our users. I also am excited at the prospect of this being available for corporate customers who are considering Linux. Email, word processing and browsing are the core functions of any business/Government desktop and they are getting better and better all the time.

Quick Project Updates: Getting back into the pulse questions I raised in my last blog; testing Firefox 3.1 and all plugins, testing Openoffice 3.1, testing Groupwise 8, looking at thin client updates. ToDo List: Avant code re-sync, QA HP 5735 thin client testing, check out Nomad over low bandwidth on thin clients, re-sync with latest Compiz.

( shot: Evolution 2.24 with Groupwise and webcals)

Pulse Audio & OpenSuse 11.1

I'm not going to jump on the Pulse Audio bashing bandwagon, but have a real question for those with knowledge of the current status on OS 11.1

Our 550 thin clients all havePulse version 0.9.6 running as a daemon. I am in the process of building an OS 11.1 server to house Firefox 3.X for all employees. Youtube is one of my QA sites. When I play a flash video from that site, it starts fine and then after about 20 seconds starts to get choppy and then finally crashes the daemon on the thin clients. I was told on #pulseaudio that some timing patches might need to be merged, so I updated all pulse packages from the "Next" repository to the following release:

pulseaudio-0.9.14-43.7
pulseaudio-esound-compat-0.9.14-43.7
pulseaudio-lang-0.9.14-43.7
(all pulse packages were also updated to the same level).

It's still doing the same thing.

So unless there are some patches waiting to be merged, I have two bad prospects. 1) Trying to compile and install 0.9.14 for the thin clients (Debian Woody) -or- 2) trying to back out pulseaudio packages on OS 11.1 and recompiling version 0.9.6.

Anyone with more knowledge in this area have any thoughts?

Update: I just wanted to clarify that I don't think anything is wrong with OS 11.1. I believe the issue to be related to a mismatch of Pulse versions between the OS 11.1 server and the thin client. On OS 11.1, all libraries are the same version and things probably work fine. I also should have mentioned that I'm attempting to use Flash 10.

Merging Document Management And A Wiki

Recently we had a technology planning meeting to talk about future projects that will be coming in the next 3-4 years. I expressed my views strongly that unless we shake loose of our culture of paper, that IT would collapse under the weight of printer support. Up to this point, every software package that we have purchased has produced more paper than ever before. Anyone that supports printers know; they are a horrible amount of work to keep running. Users sometimes print documents to read them, and then throw it away. Or they take it back to their desk, stuff it into a folder and there it sits for 10 years.

This is very much a work in progress, but we have been experimenting with moving some of our work flow and document management into a Wiki. I have been telling people here how nice it was to see the GNOME wiki being used when I visited the Boston UI Summit. Notes were entered in realtime, documents were attached, thoughts were shared, white boards were photographed and loaded into pages.

After reviewing some of the Wikis, we picked MoinMoin. It not having a database backend was attractive to us, and the directory structure is very elegant. No flames please on this selection, for us it's a good fit at this time. :) The most important aspect of this test is the flow and not the software.

The image below shows our prototype plan on entering data. Project pages are created, and then meeting notes are recorded and linked into their corresponding project page. OpenOffice + OpenProj documents are uploaded right into the Wiki.



We have talked about buying some inexpensive netPCs for entry of information during meetings, and also have talked about setting up Kiosk style thin clients in meeting rooms that would allow meeting notes to be created immediately. This also would allow demonstrations and slides to be put into the meeting page *before* the meeting, and displayed to the rest of the attendees. It really promotes a collaborative work environment.

As part of our brainstorming, I created some mockups to demonstrate possible future uses of the Wiki. In theory, we could try and load most City documents into the Wiki; allowing users to create documents and actually store them has been a failure ever since the start of computers. No one knows where they are saving things, or how folders should be configured and set up. Perhaps an emerging perspective is that they *shouldn't* have to make those decisions. It's to the greater good of our City that in the future, documents are easier to find.

In this first mockup, I have built an idea of how Nautilus could interact with a Wiki. The Wiki would appear to just be a file system, and the document would load into the appropriate software package. When the user saves it, it would simply go right back into the same Wiki project page.



In the second mockup, I have added a button in Evolution so that when a meeting is scheduled, a corresponding page would be created in the Wiki. The attendees would then receive a message with the link and they could immediately begin adding notes and presentation documents.



I'm not sure of the exact directly that we will be moving, but it's great to see movement away from paper, and the inefficiencies of all meeting attendees taking their own notes.

Just For Fun

One of my coworkers built the fastest machine he could, and then tried to set a 'world record' Compiz benchmark. :)

The specs:

Hardware
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 3.33Ghz Overclocked to 3.7Ghz
Ram: 4GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer
Video Card: BFG 9800GTX+ 512MB
Drives: Dual LG DVD+/-RW, Dual 500GB 7200RPM drives
Case: COOLER MASTER HAF 932 Black Steel ATX Full Tower (3x 230mm Fans, 1x 140mm Fan)

Software
Xubuntu 8.10 running kernel 2.6.27-9, Compiz 0.7.8, Nvidia Driver Version 177.80 running @ 1680x1050 24bit color

And the results:

Firefox 3, Leakish And CPU Heavy?

We are still using Firefox 2.0 organizationally and it's very stable. We still have some sites that are not certified for 3.X, which I am monitoring closely. Like any forward thinking Admin, I have been running 3.0 and the 3.1 betas. I have found them to render faster, and they seem to scroll faster; however it seems to have come at great expense. CPU and memory usage is substantially higher. Can anyone else confirm this? I remember there was great debate concerning file handles and sqlite databases. Are these issues resolved? Right now, Firefox seems like it will be hard for me to scale to hundreds of people.

Here is a snapshot of my session on the server, with moderate usage for a few hours:

Webcals, Summit & Remote Evolution

Things around here have been busy. I have been QAing and testing Evolution 2.24 and its interaction with Groupwise heavily. We are nearly to a milestone where I can increase the pilot/beta and add more people. I also have been installing a MoinMoin Wiki instance for use by City employees. Right now IT is testing it and trying to create some work flow suggestions, and it looks excellent. I will be devoting an entire blog entry to our goals and ideas.

Intranet Webcals

Our internal use of Webcal files has exploded over the last few years, so I have been writing a new GUI to make it easier for users to add sources to Evolution. We have a lot of information stored in databases that is appropriate for people to view on their calendars. Examples of this are employee birthdays, hire dates, anniversaries and so on. So we create .ics files of this type of information and drop it into an internal web server. That makes them available for all employees. Evolution has the ability to add webcals from the command line, so the GUI passes the webcal:// on the command line and it appears right inside their running Evolution session. All they have to do is pick a calendar color. The current state of the GUI is below:



Summit 2009

I have gotten approval to announce the availability of our facility to conduct the 2009 Summit on our premises if there is interest. I know that Boston is the tradition, so I'm just making a humble offer that it can be held at our location if you wish. We have a building that is used for training and emergency operations, and we could conduct the hacking in that facility. The one thing that we could offer is real GNOME users for focus groups and study of new features. We are a short drive from the Tampa (TPA) airport on the Gulf of Mexico. Hit me up on the IRC if this seems like a fit for the community.

Remote Evolution & Miguel

Miguel posted a blog about wanting to gain access to his Evolution while traveling. That exact product existed, was purchased and buried by SCO and now is owned by Sun. Tarantella let us run Xwindows applications 10 years ago, and was one of those great ideas that came out at the wrong time. During that period, people were still excited about client/server computing and how many Ghz you had at your desktop to care about centralizing applications. We ran Tarantella on SCO and Linux and it worked *great* for us. All you did was lay it down in your Apache web server, and point it to your applications and they immediately worked in a browser. In the pre-Evolution-1.0 days I even ran Evolution in this manner. You would log in from any browser, and it started a Java applet, and you would see the gray/white X checker boxes for a split second and your X application would immediately open. No plugins to add to the browser, no client side software. I found this old picture describing how it worked. It's too bad these types of products haven't become more commonplace.

Not So Pleasant

Is it just me or does used bubblegum sound not so pleasant (shot below)? :)