Seneca BBB landing page and SSL Certificates on Ubuntu 10.04

Now that the landing page / application of BBB in Seneca is ready to be tested, I need to install a self signed SSL certificate to be able to test it securely. I haven't done any linux admin before but, So far installing a certificate in Ubuntu seems to be pretty easy. Now I need to learn about nginx / tomcat and see how can I set them up so they can use the certificate and protect the login page behind https protocol...

Food shortage and food fighting!

Watching the breakfast TV in the morning, I saw this traditional orange "food fight" in Ivrea, Italy. Thousands of oranges are thrown around in a food fight! This is just humanity at its best; Lets food fight when we have around a billion hungry people in the world!

Upgrading BBB VM 0.71a to 0.8 (continued)

After getting home I copied the VM downloaded from BBB VM setup page and then went through the steps of  upgrading 0.71a to 0.80.

I had a minor problem when using samba through windows. I created bash script files but they were in dos format so I had to run "fromdos" command to convert them to unix format. Then I just used textpad and save the files in Unix fromat, which saved lots of time.

Everything went through smoothly and the bbb conference page came up nicely.  I tried simulated conference through the LAN and everything worked perfectly. But I am afraid the recording is not working properly and I have few problems; first that The "uplaod presentation" button does not come up on the screen" and it only appears when several users are online and the presenter is switched and also the recording did not show up in the list. I think the problem could be that I was not patient and didn't wait long enough; it is a virtual machine after all and probably need much more time than a dedicated server to do all the process.

I'll try again the we'll see...

    

Upgrading BBB VM 0.71a to 0.8

So I followed the easy instructions on installing the (Big Blue Button)BBB VM 0.71a to be able to do BBB development on my notebook.

Problem is that, my team is doing their development on BBB 0.8, so I need to upgrade it to 0.8.

In the instructions in is stated that "when we ship BigBlueButton 0.8 (for example), you'll be able to upgrade your server with (these) two commands."

# sudo apt-get update
# sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

So I did it and I got:

Reading package lists...
Building dependency tree...
Reading state information...
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

which should mean no upgrades were done, and when I checked, that is exactly what happened. Then I noticed two lines later is says:

"Note: Best to always check the release notes for specific instructions to upgrade to a new release."

So now I am going to go follow the procedure of upgrading to 0.71a to 0.8 and see what happens.

(I should mentioned that I did it once before but the upgrade procedure failed, and since I "did" some fiddling with the setup before upgrading, I thought I will do it again from scratch and this time I will document what I have done so I have something to refer to if (and most likely when) I get into trouble.

Fringers crossed, let see what happens....

My first scrum

I am impressed;

Vacation is over and I am back to school for the second half of the summer semester and started in CDOT yesterday.

I attended my first scrum (a short meeting that happens every morning to share what was done yesterday and what will be done today) with Andor, Carl , Chris, Dave and Ladan.

I am not even going to try to say that I understood what they are doing but I know my work is cut out for the weekend to go through their blogs and find more about their work.

I am impressed to see how amazing all these current and former students are doing.

I feel like the role of teacher and student is swapped and this makes me proud....

Installing flash player plug in for Firefox and Chrome on Fedora 12 - x64

To install flash player plugin for Firefox or chrome(beta) on Fedora:

For Firefox

cd cd /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/

For Google chrome

cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins/

(if plugins directory does not exist, create it)

then:

1- wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

2- tar xvzf libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

3- rm -f libflashplayer-10.0.32.18.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz

Restart the browser and you are done!

I just programmed for 8 miles....

I just got back from POSSE (Professors Open Source Summer Experience) hosted by Red Hat. It was quite an experience indeed.

I met new people with the same goal, shared experiences and learnt the way open source communites work. It gave me many ideas that I am going to work on one by one and you'll read about it here as I go through them. (read them in my blog at http://seneblog.fardad.com)

It is true that I learnt many things about Open Source, but I saw something in Red Hat head quarters that I think it will change the way I work for rest of my life;

Like all other geeks I am always glued to my computer screen in worst posture possible. It gives me back pain, neck pain and after few hours of coding, I feel like I can not stand up straight any more.

Greg, during the final hours of POSSE was talking about how he walks and works on his treadmill at home and then he took us down to the offices of those working at Red Hat and there is was; a treadmill/desk hybrid!!!. It was literary a treadmill with a tall (with adjustable height) desk attached in front of it.

Taking Greg's advice on how it can cause neck pain because of looking down for a long time, I made few improvements and converted my own treadmill to a workstation; The notebook monitor is at the eye level, so while walking on treadmill I will look forward instead of down, I added an additional monitor for dual head (multiple screen) capability and also set two height settings for the keyboard (so my wife can use it too).

It took me a day and a half and 100 Dollars to build it and since then (24 hours ago) I burned 1300 calories!!

Here it is at work:

Now the only problem I have is to fight with my wife on who is going to jump on the treadmill to work(out)!!!

I will blog with closeup shots on keyboard stand and monitor stand, so if you like to convert your treadmill to a work station, you can get an idea of how it is done.