Open Source – Page 5

Adobe Flash based uploaders have become fairly ubiquitous on the Web, mainly because of their multi-upload capabilities. Hurrah to no longer having to click-through ‘Add more upload bixes’ links in HTML forms.

It seem to me that in Linux at least there might be a bug in Adobe Flash specifically regarding Flash-based uploaders. I’m putting this post up in the hope that someone else may have a solution to this problem OR can confirm whether this actually is a reproducible bug on other Linux distros.

I’m currently using Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex with all updates installed. The browsers I tested on are Mozilla Firefox 3.0.6 and Epiphany (Gecko) 2.24.1. The issue that I’m facing is that whenever I’m uploading files using a Flash-based uploader, my browser hangs (in Ubuntu, the window gets greyed out). As soon as the upload gets over, everything goes back to normal. If I’m uploading multiple files using the same uploader then the browser alternates between its normal and ‘not responding’ state until all the files are serially uploaded. This happens across every Flash-based uploader. I’m using the latest version of Flash – v10.0.22.87 – installed using the adobe-flashplugin package in Ubuntu repository. I’ve also tried with uninstalling this and using the flashplugin-nonfree package (this one’s recommended for older Ubuntu versions, although it installs the same version of Flash). I later reinstalled adobe-flashplugin.

I have recorded some screencasts of this potential bug in Flash on Linux, which you can download by clicking here. The download is a bzipped tarball containing three screencasts – total download size is 9.9 MB. The videos are in Ogg Theora format (if you’re on Windows and want to see the problem, you can use VLC Media Player). I’ve chosen to demonstrate the issue on three different sites – my on own WordPress install, MediaFire, and Flickr. For the Flickr one, I’ve shown how the browser alternates between not responding and normal state for multiple uploads.

When uploading many files (say, around 5-) using a Flash-based multi-uploader, the constant switching of states causes the browser to lock up for good forcing me to kill the process. Once I was uploading a video once to Yahoo! Video (a considerably large file which took around an hour to upload) the browser was in a ‘not responding’ state for around an hour; despite that, when the upload finished the browser returned to its normal state.

I didn’t find any material regarding this from anyone else on the Web, so I’m not sure whether mine is an isolated case – and whether there are steps to solve this. Please leave your inputs in the comments section!

freed.in was held on 20-21 February 2009. You can find loads of pictures from freed.in on its Flickr group. As always, it was held at JNU. I arrived a tad late but found that the event hadn’t started. The official excuse for this year was ‘traffic’. At the registration desk, I found Abhishek – who was doing volunteer work for the event. Registered at the desk. Got a cool freed.in sticker which is of really high quality…and some ‘stickers’ printed on paper from Fedora which suck. Not even perforated, you need to cut them out with a scissor and then too you get only cheap stuff. Bought an ILUG-D T-shirt with a Universal Truth printed on it.

All Your Base Are Belong To Tux — Universal Truth

Goldwyn Rodrigues (works in software testing for Novell’s enterprise products) brought OpenSuse 11.1 DVDs for distributing; took one of those. Maybe I’ll OpenSuse 11.1 again some day in the future and will have better luck than last time I installed the same version, this time using the GNOME environment. Met @honeytech, @rajeshlalwani, @sepiaverse there. (Yes, people were tweeting live from the event. You can go through #freedin tagged tweets here.) The event started off with welcoming the ‘chief guest’…

That’s right. In the true spirit of a conference on free and open source siftware, the ‘chief guest’ at freed.in is You. Yes, you, you and you. And you too. All of you. Andrew Lynn, some professor from JNU started off talking about a project they’re spearheading called ‘Open Source Drug Discovery’ which uses idle time of computer labs in colleges across the country to analyze the stability of new molecules for drug development. (Phew, long sentence!) That was followed by a talk by Goldwyn Rodrigues on breaking into WiFi networks. Mostly about how weak WEP is as an encryption standard and how to use MAC ID spoofing + DNS forwarding to bypass authentication mechanisms on some networks. Shantanu Choudhary gave a talk on his efforts at creating an ‘offline Wikipedia‘. A lot of people kept asking him about “How will you incorporate the updates which are done on Wikipedia every minute?” I think that was completely missing the point because in places, say, like rural areas where they don’t have Internet connectivity even a static dump of Wikipedia can be a useful education resource.

JNU WiFi network login — "Fuck, it's a 4-letter password"

JNU’s WiFi network kept logging us out every few minutes. Everyone was getting exasperated and shouting “Blistering barnacles!” before Captain Haddock came along and fixed things by logging me into the network with a four-letter password. (I dunno what it was.) It was time for lunch soon…and it was surprising that 220 people turned up to eat when there were only 100 or so people attending freed.in. Or maybe not, given that it was held at JNU. A lot of freeloaders from the JNU staff, JNU students and assorted people who’d come for other seminars pounced on the buffet before freed.in participants did. As a consequence of which attendees like Jasdeep had to go without the delicious jalebis.

Animesh Kumar (from Abhishek’s college) spoke about how they’ve utilized old Pentium III processors which their school was about to scrap for parallel computing. Senthil Kumaran showed how to make text-based ping-pong using Pygame.

Next was Krishnakant Mane, a visually challenged guy who gave a talk on ‘RPC for modular programming’. It was touching to see this guy touching typing code all by himself and then waiting for his screen-reader software to read it out to him to check if was correct. His grit truly deserved the thunderous applause he got at the end of his talk.

Gagandeep Singh Sapra (who blogs at g-spot.in) spoke of data centers and open source software used there. You can see the complete presentation, but here, I present you an interesting bit…

After that there were two presentations from Fedora representatives on some tools they’re building / already using to a) automate RPM checking process b) measure software usage statistics.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend day 2 of the event since I was going for WordCamp. Some more interesting sessions were held on day 2. More about WordCamp India later.