Weather Applet Re-Wrapped

For a number of years we have used a global weather applet which has become very popular. The reason why this application is worth the time to develop is because otherwise you have hundreds of people during the day navigating around the Internet to look for information; this is especially true during inclement weather. Instead just one daemon runs and downloads all of this information ONCE and saves it to a shared directory. Then when users activate this applet, they load in these pictures and get current information. This greatly reduces Internet usage and helps our bandwidth.

I re-wrapped this application with greater flexibility and made it consistent with the new desktop helper MIME bars that I wrote. One of the biggest problems that users have is getting information around the network, "I'm looking at this image, but I have no idea how to get it to email or to print it". So there are now options to take the currently displayed image and save it, copy it to the clipboard for later paste, print it or email it directly from the UI.

I just pushed this live and bound it to the Super-F9 key, let's see what my early beta testers say. :)

Up next: Cleaning up other dialogs and screens from the older desktop, installing patches and poking for bugs and installing more icons with links to our internal software. Still on target for wider beta deployment in November.

Desktop Cleanups Continue

Still working on prepping GNOME 2.30 to replace our very aged GNOME 2.16 server and also on getting Firefox 4 ready. I have been testing different cache lockdowns in gnome-mplayer to find a good middle ground between the clip starting and having enough cache to play without interruptions. Obviously this depends greatly on the remote server, but testing it to find a good sane setting that will work most of the time. I don't want users tinkering with these settings; because they will randomly increase and decrease values and then wonder why things are broken. :)

In testing the workflow of the new Picture Options bar that comes up when you double-click on a picture, I decided to add two very basic features. EOG doesn't have a way to put the image into the clipboard, and it's a shame to have to wait for GIMP to start in order to perform this step. So I added a feature to send the image to the clipboard. It's very common for users to want to rotate pictures they have taken, and having to start EOG to perform this step was clunky. Since EOG doesn't copy to the clipboard, after rotating the photo they then have to save the photo and then double-click on it again. A simple 90 degree clock-wise rotation was added and works great. (seen in screenshot below). The python Image library is awesome and easy to manipulate photos. Did I mention something about clipboards twice? :)

With some help from the avant guys, I was able to get software to better sit under their corresponding launcher icon. This combines the launcher icon with the window list functionality nicely and provides more space on the panel. Next up is pondering the fact that all rdesktop instances come back with a WM_CLASS of "rdesktop". (current panel seen in shot below).

At this point the functionality is mostly in place and it's time to bring over the rest of the software packages and create artwork and icons.

I had to do something clunky to application-browser to get around a bug. In previous versions of GNOME if the user selected this software process again, it would connect to the already running process and reuse it. In the current release there is a bug and it keeps adding another instance to the process list. If a user clicks on this menu system 20 times during the day, they would have 20 processes. :| So the code below resolved that issue. Hopefully a patch is forthcoming; this is some serious nastiness.



Current desktop screenshot:

Panel, Browser Stress Test & Thanks

With some tinkering of lockdowns and gconf settings, I have gotten avant-window-navigator working well enough to push to some early beta testers. Very nice applets and a clean modern look. Let's see what kind of feedback I get back tomorrow. :)

Thanks to Kevin for your help with understanding that xrdb is a g-s-d plugin. Testing Motif applications right now to see how the themes are working.

So with that in place I'm giving mplayer, Firefox/Flash and Pulse Audio a stress test to try and get them to crash. So far sound is strong even running remotely over the network, frame rates are excellent. I think the user community will be pleased with these upgrades.

64 Bit Firefox + GNOME 2.30 Continues

Happy Monday,

Work continues on the new servers and things are making nice progress. I brought down the latest release of avant-window-navigator along with Extras to see how the project has advanced in the last few years. One of the cool things is that it now works on a regular 2D desktop. I'm testing the bare minimum of applets we need to go live and will push it to some beta testers later this week. One possibility is using it as replacement for the regular gnome-panel. I'll see what kind of feedback that I get in the coming days from the 'regular users'. (screenshot follows)



Sadly one possibility is that we won't be bringing the 3D (Compiz) configurations with us to the new server. 3D has helped users conceptually understand how to use multiple desktops to avoid opening and closing windows all the time. However my initial tests indicate that it's crashing the Xserver on the thin clients a great deal, and being that I have gotten no feedback whatsoever on my Debian bug report...I'm not sure that anything is coming in that regards. Trying to upgrade Mesa and all of its hooks into X doesn't seem pleasant. I'll continue to tinker and see if I have some ideas in this area. This is not a high priority feature; users can certainly work fine with the 2D desktop.

It seems like someone pulled out the code in GNOME that set traditional X resources to match your theme. I'm sure the thinking was that very few applications were still running in this regard, but actually we still use them heavily. The Citrix manager uses Motif, and our in-house applications still run this way too. I hacked a quick ksh script to try and read your current theme and get the *background and *foreground colors; but it's not pretty and the themes don't store these colors consistently. If someone wants to hack a little C app to dump the colors of the current theme to standard out, that would really help a great deal.

One idea that came up was to use the five seconds during login to display current calendar information about City events. So I built a quick mockup that displays during authentication. In theory we could cron the City global calendars to dump an image once a day with updated information and lay it over the top of this wallpaper. (shot below)




I finished the MIME helper applications on the GNOME desktop and have copied them over to the new Internet server and hooked them into Firefox. So the users get a consistent interface when interacting with content on the Internet. This helps them quickly and easily print, save and view such content. (shot below).



Since it seems like 32bit Acrobat Reader isn't going to wrap inside 64bit Firefox well, I have once again pulled it out and made it a helper application again. I have been testing those (nasty!) 3D PDF animations to ensure that a few of them being opened concurrently isn't going to clobber our server. Thankfully Reader doesn't seem to be using multiple-CPUs at once. In the shot below, the video is playing (propellers are spinning) and it's only using one of the cores.



Lots of progress and very happy with the results. A few more pieces being finished and I can widen the beta program and solicit more feedback.

Dear Adobe

Dear Adobe:

Thank you for the 64bit beta of the Flash player, it's starting to work better. Thank you too for the just released 9.40 version of Reader. But unfortunately it didn't put a smile on my face; the lack of 64bit support for Reader is absolutely making server upgrades miserable. As you can see from the message below, there is no ETA on making 32bit Reader work on 64bit Firefox 4.0. The Mozilla developers don't have the resources to debug it, nor should they have to. Your help in this matter is appreciated.



Disclaimer: Yup, I know about the open source readers...they aren't robust enough to use at this time.

MIME Update, Work Continues

I got a quiet day in today (no meetings!) to work on the new desktop design. I feel like the last major pieces are falling into place and once a good work flow is finalized, I can install the rest of the icons and increase the number of beta testers.

I'm testing some new ideas on the MIME bars that launch when you double-click on files. I wanted to try a "one stop shop" type approach. Everything you need to perform your task is on one screen. No further dialogs or hidden screens. I added a gtkcombobox with system printers. Once a printer is selected it 'sticks' each time a new document is double-clicked. This lets the user clearly see which printer will get their documents. With nearly 60 printers, people send things to the wrong printers *all* the time. I also have added a gtkentry widget to house a quick technique to send the file directly to the email post office. Very often we have users that have to email files to the same people over and over again. One click, and it's delivered; without having to wait for the Evolution composer and enter all of the details. I also connected the areas at the bottom that indicate the size of the file as a visual cue of file sizes.

I'm testing this dialog right now, and hope to have the rest (Pictures, Documents, Video) all finished by tomorrow.

Lockdowns, Flash & Text Files

Work continues on getting GNOME 2.30 ready for our employees and making great progress. One of the benefits of this project is that we will be able to save some money and resources by reducing our server count. Right now we have two identical GNOME servers and users log into one or the other. Both servers can run our highest concurrent load (350 users), and are in place so that if we have a failure the other server is always ready to go. We have to have a backup of some type -- You can't have hundreds of people sitting around because of hardware problems. But the fact is that in all of these years, the hardware hasn't had a single failure.

Our goal on the next upgrade is to only have one server on a nice multi-core, multi-CPU server with 64bit Linux. We then will create a physical-to-virtual copy once a week and have it ready to go. If the physical machine fails, we will put the users on the VM server until the problem can be resolved. As I an designing the desktop, I'm going to write code so that if it's running on VMware certain features will disable so as to provide the best possible speed. An example will be compiz, when running virtually, that feature will disable and drop back into 2D. Another example might be to turn off thumbnailing and so on. Hopefully the VM server will never need to be used, but we will be ready and save a good amount of money by reducing one physical server replacement every 3-5 years.

Lockdowns

Very often you find a great piece of open source software to use, but it allows the users to tinker too much and change settings. Often these settings will cause the software to fail or work in a manner that we don't want. Such was the case with using gnubiff. It works great, but one bad click while tinkering and it will no longer connect to the post office. Or another issue is where users think it's wonderful to check for new email every 1 second; which does wonderful to your post office. :) So what I do is get everything working as expected and then create a template and replace the things that are specific to users with variables. In this case their account name and password are the only two things that need to be unique. The shot below shows how I then implement this design. Grab from their current .gnubiffrc the stuff I need, and then use sed and merge it into my template and give them a fresh working configuration file before the software launches.



Flash & Firefox
There are days when you feel that all of your bug reports and efforts will never advance and then suddenly you start getting updates that actually work. Such was the case yesterday when I installed Firefox beta 6 running 64bit with the just released preview 2 of 64bit Flash. Preview 1 and the earlier 10.1 64bit beta were really pretty bad on our configuration. Frames and sound were choppy, playback would block the browser from scrolling. I was actually getting better results with a wrapped 32bit Flash release, but that's so clunky to me and I'm trying to run 100% 64bit. I'm happy to report that preview 2 is working MUCH better now. Sound is strong and frames are better, even with remote display and remote sound. This gave me a chance to test the volume control. It's working great...it detects the sound card on the remote thin client from the GNOME server and has no idea it's running over the network. Excellent.

In the shot below, you can see the video playing along with a zoom of the volume slider. SiS is the sound card on the thin clients.




Text Files
One of the things that users loved on the last desktop release was the use of thumbnails for all of their documents. It really does aid in finding what you are seeking. I have an eye for consistency, and always hated that text files (.txt, .ics and .csv) have never really been appealing in Nautilus. So it turns out that 'convert' very nicely can change a text file into a picture. I created a new schema for text/plain and pointed it to 'convert' and thought it would work. It turns out that Nautilus sends %o without a PNG file extension. So convert has no clue what file type to convert into, and it didn't work. So I whipped up a quick script called text-thumbnailer. This script also takes care of the issue that if the file does not end with .txt, convert doesn't understand the file type. The script softlinks a .txt file in /tmp and generates a PNG and then passes it back to Nautilus as expected.

In the shot below, you can see the thumbnail schema, the text-thumbnail script, and a Nautilus window which contains the resulting thumbs. Scrolling through the folders now is much cleaner and consistent.



So along with various other projects, this development will continue. I'm getting positive feedback on the results and am looking forward to the coming weeks and ongoing improvements.

Beta Testers On GNOME 2.30, Making Progress

Lots of things keeping me busy, but making excellent progress on building a new server to run 64bit OpenSuse 11.3 and GNOME 2.30. Now that gdm is working with XDMCP, I was able to get the logins working. Halfline (thanks!) once again helped me with turning off the animations that were displaying when the authentication screen appears and also then as it goes away and the users wallpaper appears. This type of animation is too slow over remote display, and caused you to have to wait while the screen blinked multiple times. I'm sure it looks great on a local video card, but not suitable for here and not needed in a business/work environment.

Very nice to see enable_esd no longer required. PulseAudio is hooked right into GNOME and once I selected a sound theme with a login clip, it worked immediately. The pulseaudio volume slider bar is working great, even though the sound daemon is running remotely on the thin client. Excellent.

I was able to get beta testers logged in Wednesday and they are using this server fulltime. It's obviously not fully functional, but enough icons and applications are working to do their work.

Previously we were using 3 different techniques to connect to the various Microsoft applications around the City. Some where using Citrix, some were using RDP/Rdesktop and others were using an old product (UIS, Unix Integration Services) that has been discontinued for years. The other System Administrator has been working magic and working on standardizing everything around RDP. This makes it easier for him...just one connection package. It also allows us to fully deploy the new connection method that I had blogged about previously. This has some disadvantages, but is MUCH faster and provides much better sound.

The old technique had rdesktop running on the GNOME server itself. Connection would then be made to Windows. Windows would communicate with rdesktop via RDP, and then we used X11 and Pulse to provide the screen and sound. 100% centralized, stable, easy to upgrade and make changes (blue boxes below). The way we are deploying on the new server, the GNOME server signals the thin client to start a rdesktop session and that session then talks to Windows with RDP. The user presentation is probably at least twice was fast (green boxes below).

So as he continues to get applications ready for RDP, I'll add more and more icons and get them to the beta testers. This is providing the same integrated Linux/Windows desktop we had previously, but with lowered network usage and far better user experience.

Always have to give a screenshot, right? So here is a shot of the current status. MIME handlers are working great for the various file types. Application-browser is starting to fill in nicely with our various City applications. And I launched Internet Explorer to demonstrate how cleanly Windows apps integrate and work right off the standard GNOME icons.



Huh? You are probably wondering why we run Internet Explorer. 99% of all Internet usage is done on Firefox/Linux. But many other Governmental agencies (state and federal mostly) designed pages that are hard coded to only work with Internet Explorer. Our tax dollars at work. :)

Thanks For Ideas Guys

Yesterday when I posted the MIME bar prototype, I was given some ideas to make the dialog easier to use and fit better into current UI designs. I was mostly thinking about the desktop flow, but UI ideas are always welcomed. I whipped up a new version in Glade and connected the signals to the existing code and it's already working. It's not something that I could release because it's hard coded for our software packages, but might be a good idea for a GNOME project in the future. I guess in theory some more X-Categories could be added so it knows where to place these items. I'll be creating similar ones now for word processing files and for Pictures.

Shot below, I like that it has a similar appearance to the main-menu.



Update: A quick dupe of the screen and change of the thumbnails and the Picture and Audio/Video dialogs are starting to work. Thanks again Kevin for the awesome 'nailer' program for the videos.

MIME Ideas Continue, Fulltime GNOME 2.30

Many things are happening at once, but I have made some changes to the new MIME bars to test ideas with our users. I'm now logging on GNOME 2.30 (OpenSuse 11.3) fulltime from a thin client. I have gotten all basic applications (Evolution + Firefox + OpenOffice) running. I can start the other applications manually easily. After I installed another group of icons for our beta testers, I'll start getting feedback.

I have always wished that Nautilus gave you a hover mouse page preview larger than the thumbnails that currently appear. If you have hundreds of thousands or millions of documents many of them are very similar, especially those on letterhead. So experimentally I have created a tabbed dialog that appears when you double-click on a file. The "Options" tab allows you to select your next step. (shot below):



The Details tab shows you a big preview of the first page of the document, along with the owner of the document and the file size. Very few people discovered the "properties" found in the right-mouse of nautilus. They call all the time to find out the owner of files; so hopefully this will help. And believe it or not, but a lot of people don't understand K, MB and GB acronyms; so I'm testing the idea of displaying the file size fully expanded with lots of zeros. :)



I'm looking forward to getting feedback, and think these minor tweaks of the UI will make the system easier than ever for our employees.

Testing GNOME 2.30 & Updates

One of the benefits of starting to poke at a desktop upgrade to GNOME 2.30 is being able to take what I learned the last time and making improvements. Certain types of specialized launch scripts that were developed are being merged into a core library which will run when any icons are triggered. One such example is the gnome-panel, which still apparently treats a double-click as two single-clicks. I thought this was changed at some point, but it's still working in this manner. Users tend to double-click (or more!) on icons and are launching multiple occurrences of the same application. So I brought over and improved the code from the old desktop. Gnome-panel now detects that someone is repeatedly clicking and disregards them for a few seconds. The popup below displays:



The MIME bars that were deployed on the previous desktop release have worked well. When users double-click on files in the file manager, it asks them what step they want to perform. The previous bars had buttons that were stacked left to right, and on certain monitor resolutions we were running out of real estate. I also wanted to better categorize them into middle level functions (Edit/View, Save, Print & Email). The screen below is my first attempt and I'm installing the MIME types this very second.

This design might seem odd at first glance, but think of this situation: You get a PDF file and you know you aren't going to read it online and for sure are going to print. With a single click, it's queued and already finished. Users like having steps 1-2-3 that are consistent and simple.



I hope to have some early beta testers on this server by Thursday or Friday of this week.

Still poking at the slow printer dialog on SLED 11/Evolution to figure out what's happening. My attempts to hack out certain polling areas of the code were not successful. I'm also looking at f-spot for use in a multi-user environment, working on making it easier to pass files back and forth to USB sticks, beta testing OpenOffice 3.3 and checking into connectivity between OpenOffice and the Oracle database.

Gnome 2.30 & main-menu

It's good to see GNOME 2.30 running on our thin clients (below). My thanks to those that helped me get this working and squash a few bugs. I have been removing all of the software that is automatically installed on OpenSuse and won't be used by our users. Next up will be connecting our core group of applications (Firefox, Evolution, OpenOffice) so that I can get some beta testers logged in. I also have been pondering some updated MIME bars based on feedback and things we learned from the last upgrade. These bars will launch when you double-click on a file in the file manager and ask you what task you want performed. Everyone has gotten used to them and people really like the desktop to flow in this manner. Sure would be nice to be able to put these into Nautilus as a single click.



One very interesting usability issue that I found when reviewing how we currently have the main-menu grouped is that most of the regular users never figured out that they can type software applications into the Filter....even though the cursor focus is there when it opens and it's blinking waiting for you to type. :| The users also didn't really figure out that you can click on the Groups on the left edge to reduce the number of packages displayed. Instead, most of them are scrolling down the entire list of software and looking for what they want. I really need to ponder this more, but sure sounds like an improvement area in the design.



I'm also excited to see NX 4.0 is coming out soon, and will allow you to log into our desktop servers from an iPad. How cool is that?

Project Updates

Just back to the office after a long weekend and I thought that I would create an update on the various projects.

Recreation System
The developer and business analyst are making progress on new recreation system. Now that IT got a signoff on the receipts, the final design has been implemented. A screen was designed to allow them to add coupons on the far right side of the printout. Following our internal goal of never having users obtain a file manager, this step is performed inside the GUI itself. All available coupons display and the user just has to click on it and hit the arrow which loads it into the printout page. They are beginning the process now of implementing more robust accounting principles at this time.

(shot below, sorry Steve Perry isn't coming to Largo) :)



Evolution Print Dialog
We have had some problems with libgnomeprint which will require me to change the source. We have about 60 printers, all HP using JetDirect. They are always in various states of function; paper jams, paper outages, toner shortages, waiting on paper tray, etc. Some of them are turned off, and some of them have latency from the Internet. When you hit the print button in Evolution the dialog will very frequently gray out and then block Evolution which grays out too. After a few seconds the dialog returns and everything works. Jeff Steadfast happened to be on IRC and gave me a few areas to try to improve this situation. I'm going to comment out the call for it to poll the printers. We don't really care about their statuses and users will just send the print jobs and await their completion. Sounds like a nice gconf key idea to me for future releases.



Debian Crashes
Does anyone want to backport some packages for me? This bug is really causing us some grief. It's causing our thin clients to crash for 3D/Compiz users and some people have gone back to 2D because they are annoyed by losing the Xserver. The last instruction was to upgrade Mesa, which will require an extensive upgrade of all of the X packages too which would take a lot of QA work. If anyone has any ideas, feel free to hang them on the bug report.

Halfline XDMCP Hero
XDMCP really hasn't worked for a while now in the latest OpenSuse releases and Halfline cooked a patch which I was able to get compiled and it's working! It's been submitted to Suse/Novell and Vincent already classified the bug report (thanks!). The production "Desktop" server is running Gnome 2.16 so there are many new things for me to test over remote display since that release. I also see the wallpapers now transition/animate with a .xml file and I need to check performance over the network. I built Compiz 0.9.0 and it's crashing the Xserver a good amount of the time (See Debian Crashes) above. There is a lot to review before I can get beta testers on here; but it's very encouraging.

Yup, the final login screen will be a bit more professional. When I am hunting down configuration files, I always change them so radically to leave no doubt that I found the right settings.

Photo Taking Hardware

In a previous blog I had described the security camera that we selected for taking pictures of our citizens for recreation cards. We found a low sitting tripod for around $15, which pivots the camera at a 90 degree angle. The pictures are taken sideways and then corrected via the 'convert' command line utility in scripts to rotate back 90 degrees and appear correct on the IDs. These cameras are completely self reliant and don't need any attached hardware or PCs to run them. Total cost including tripod + camera should come in less than $150.

Recreation System, Milestone 1

Our IT/Integration division was able to go live with the first milestone of changes to the recreation system on a new server. I haven't been working on the coding on this project, but have been helping with some technical aspects including cameras, mockups, printing and ideas.

The old recreation system used older Motif widgets and was first built in the mid-1990s. We already had thin clients at that point. In the mid 90s the remote sites were in 8 bit color, 800x600 and only had limited bandwidth. The screens were built with those limitations in mind.
(shot below)




For the first milestone the front page was changed to a 'portal' which displays a lot more information. Motif was upgrade to 2.3 which gave us anti-aliased font. The theming system was upgraded as best as possible to allow GNOME colors to alter the look and feel of the software and match the rest of the applications. All of the code from the old system came over without modification; the screens just had to be touched in order to accommodate the new font metrics.

(shot below, no GUI nazis please :) )



The developers are now starting to alter the code of the screens and add functionality. The biggest new features being implemented are membership cards with photos and bar codes, and better accounting integration. If you are a citizen of Largo, these milestones will slowly increase the quality of your experience at our recreation sites. Be assured that all of this technology is being developed with costs and long term impact in mind.

Java & Sun/Oracle Blaze The Way :)

I never thought that I would such high marks to anything related to Java, but as it stands right now this is the only piece of the puzzle working natively and well on 64bit Firefox 4.0. I wanted to draw myself a picture of the pieces (below) so that I could work out in my head how this will all work. There are 4 main areas where I need to run embedded plugins based on our users requirements. 4 of the 5 plugins have caveats and are not deployed in the clean manner that I would like. Some of them are still only 32 bit, some of them don't natively use PULSE and some of them are missing features when built natively 64bit.

Green indicates satisfactory techniques, red indicates problems.



I guess for now we tell our parents and grandma to keep installing the 32bit flavors.

64bit Browser Work Continues

I was pulled off of doing Admin work for a few days to help with some technical projects and assisting in getting some pieces together for our Integration Division. I had previously noted that a system was developed for taking citizens pictures for our recreation cards. I wrote a small ksh and perl script to create the new cards. (shot below). Integration staff will make final changes and add some colors and move the boxes around slightly to fit the perforated paper; but it's all essentially working. The Panther development toolkit we use has no runtime licenses at all on Linux. So that along with the inexpensive cameras and using perl to print the cards has kept the costs to a minimum.



So now I'm back working on the 64bit 'browser' server which will run our Citywide Firefox sessions. I got mplayer compiled natively and it's playing all of our media files correctly. Nice. Now I'll work on getting the multimedia plugins loaded into Firefox. We use the RealPlayer (Helix) to play our commission meetings, but sadly this too seems to be missing 64bit support. Will check for source code, maybe I can build it myself. I guess I have come to the realization that in the short term, I certainly won't have a nice clean 64bit implementation; I'll load as much as I can and upgrade as more packages are released in the future. It's all super fast, the users won't see much of a difference.

I tried loading Chrome as downloaded from Google and there were some dependency problems. I found a release from OpenSuse (11.3) and was able to get it installed natively. What is interesting is that I have found it to be very SLOOOOW. Firefox is very responsive on this server; cold starts in about 2-3 seconds and pages load quickly and spinning the mouse to scroll a page is crisp and works as expected...even over remote display. Chrome feels like page rendering is fighting mouse movement, and spinning the mouse wheel is slow and not very smooth. When you grab the scroll bars, they seem to be jerky and slow. Possibly no one is testing Chrome over remote display, but as it stands right now it's not even close to be usable in our environment.



Work will continue over the next few days with plugin testing and loading more software. I should be able to put on some beta testers in the coming week or so and begin testing printing and printers.

Friday Afternoon Adobe Rant

I have to join the voices today that are complaining about Adobe. I'm building a multi-year 64 bit server to run our Firefox sessions for hundreds of people. It should take me 5 minutes to install the PDF and Flash plugins. But guess what, it's 2010 and they still don't support 64bit platforms. So now I have to try and wrap them to run in 32bit mode which is uncovering bugs when used with Firefox 4. The beta 64bit Flash player seemed to show some promise, but I can't deploy it because it's too old in terms of security exploits.

So Adobe, you have a big market share with Internet content. You need to step up to the plate and make this content easier to deliver. If you can't, the world is going to move past you quickly.

Note: Yup I know about the open source projects to replace these products. They aren't a fit for us at this time.

Accessing Remote Devices From Centralized Hosts

What is interesting to me whenever we look at software and hardware to solve problems is the needless level of complexity and cost. Let me explain. When you meet with vendors, their first inclination is to add lots of hardware to your infrastructure....and other Cities must just buy lots of it because they seem shocked that we question their solutions and want to keep it simple.

In this particular case, we are adding the ability for our Recreation department to put photos of citizens on their recreation cards. When you review cameras, you begin to hear, "Well you will just add a PC at each remote site to connect to the camera and process the photos". What?!? Huh?? It's very clear that this is unneeded and adds support and upgrade costs. I think sometimes these vendors fail to understand that if you deployed in their design, you would have 100 extra PCs on your network in no time.

So how do we fit in something like a remote camera into a thin client environment? I'm a strong proponent of centralized software and only having very minimal hardware in the field. I didn't want to get a usb webcam that needed drivers and software on the thin clients. Too many problems, and keeping up with ever changing hardware is very difficult. Very often we buy a few devices, and within a few months that same model isn't available anymore. Touching and QAing thin clients and updating them with drivers is not a good idea. I also didn't want the hosts to communicate via USB to remote sites. We always use stateless connections to keep things simple and stable.

So I honed in on the Cisco/Linksys WVC80N Internet camera. Ok, so some problems were solved. We can use the motion sensors, and our employees at the remote sites won't have to push any buttons. All they have to do is sit down the citizen and the photos are taken automatically. Very cool. The camera snaps the photos on motion, and then uploads them via FTP. Because some sites are on lower bandwidth lines, I decided not to send the photos back to our servers. Otherwise anytime there was movement photos would be uploading constantly and possibly slowing their performance. Ever see how many kids run around at recreation sites? :) I wanted to only send the photos when they are really needed by our host software.

It was a logical progression of thought then to house the photos at the remote site until they are used. But where? It turned out that we could store them on the thin clients very easily. We already use FTP to transfer files back and forth from USB sticks to the server to ensure that all file transfers and connections are stateless. So what I did was create a "fake" USB stick in /media that is really a RAMfs (tmpfs) with 20MB of space. This was to avoid having to have a USB stick plugged into the thin client to house the pictures. It was not desirable to store the photos on the flash drive of the thin client itself, these drives have a fixed amount of writes.

When someone moves in front of the camera, it shoots the pictures and puts them on the thin client located at that site via FTP. When we then need those photos from our host based software, we FTP then off the thin clients and back to the server. Clean, solid state and hardware independent. When this camera is discontinued, all we have to do is buy the newer model and drop it into the same location.

Total cost to take photos of our citizens, $110.

Projects Keeping Me Busy

Life at Largo never slows down. When you push new technology live, there is always more waiting in the wings. Here is what is going on:

Evolution 64 bit: As I have reported everyone has been moved to release 2.28 on SLED 11 SP1. Still blazingly fast even with hundreds of people working. I moved the bug-buddy binary out of the way and inserted a custom script that dumps backtraces to flat files and into a common directory. I can see how many people, what people and why people are crashing in real time. Looks like we are hovering around 20 crashes a day that dump BTs and a few more that crash at startup. Around 400 unique people check email a day, so most people are having a stable experience. BTs are being shipped to Novell and we hope to start getting some patches soon. Those patches should also land upstream and help everyone else too.

OpenOffice 64 bit: 3.2.1 is working well and stable. It's still running so fast that even under a user load you don't see the splash screen at all. On a multi-user system you never really have a "cold start" but the UI opens in about 2-3 seconds at which point you can immediately start typing. Nice. We have identified that extensions are causing the memory leak, and hopefully Sun/Oracle will be able to work on it soon. In the meantime we just bought more memory (cheap) to keep everyone out of the swap device.

Firefox 64bit: Pavel Janik finished testing our new 48 processor (8 cpu x 6 core) server to try and set some new OpenOffice compilation records. I won't spoil the surprise and you can read his blog when it comes out. I'm downloading OpenSuse 11.3 right now and we will move that server back inside the DMZ and prepare it for our employees. I'm going to begin testing 64bit Firefox 4 and see how it works. Adobe seems to have pulled back 64bit flash, so I'll be experimenting with the various plugins and see how they work. I'll check on the state of the various media players and see which one works. We used mplayer last time and it works great, but I always keep an eye on other solutions.

Debian Lenny Xserver Crash On Thin Clients: I finally packed up a bug report on the crashing Xserver issue. It only happens about every 2-3 weeks, with compiz enabled and happens when you close a child window. Bug report is here

Verizon USB 760 EVDO Modems + Laptop Thin Client: Verizon released a nasty modem, the USB 760. They thought it would be a good idea to put software and a modem into one USB stick, nice. Linux sees it as /dev/sr0 and tries to automount what it thinks is a CD/DVD drive. The workarounds are not pleasant, you have to tell udev to then immediately eject the drive and then attempt to fire up your dialer. I'm poking around at some ideas to make it not so clunky. Note to Verizon: Please don't make hardware devices like this anymore!

GDM + XDMCP: Halfline and I are trying to get synced and have some time to experiment with newer versions of GDM and find out why it won't let thin clients connect with XDMCP anymore. Hopefully that will happen in the coming days.

Update: 2 second cold starts on Firefox on the 48way server. Obviously no user load, but promising. :)