Nigel Babu has been working to spread the word about gathering some community steam around patches in Ubuntu. We have an incredibly fortunate situation in Ubuntu where lots of people spend their time and effort producing patches which fix bugs, and they share their gifts with the project to help make Ubuntu better. With so many awesome people sharing patches, we have got behind in reviewing and merging these contributions.

Recently we have spent some time trying to get better visibility on patches in Ubuntu, and you can read all about it here. We now have an awesome patch view so we can see these contributions easier, we now just need to get these wonderful gifts reviewed and merged.

This leads me on to Nigel’s efforts in raising awareness around this effort. He writes:

As of writing this post, there are 1801 bugs with patches attached in Launchpad that are not Fix Released or Fix Committed and do not have branches linked. This tells me 2 things: (1) There are some amazing contributors out there coming up with patches. (2) We have not been clearing up the backlog of bugs with patches attached.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to change this situation by reviewing some of the bugs with patches attached. Well, we need help and everyone are welcome, especially people working towards being an Ubuntu Developer (like me). Patch review needs your help. Right now, we’re focussing on all the bugs that have ubuntu-reviewers team subscribed. This helps us get any potential patch in Lucid.

If you want to help, check out the Code Reviews wiki. When stuck, pop by on #ubuntu-motu channel and mention you’re working on patch review and are stuck, I’m sure someone would be around to help you out.

PS: Hello Planet Ubuntu, my first post after being an Ubuntu Member.

Thanks to Nigel (nigelb on freenode) for being so awesome in focusing on this, and I would love to encourage everyone to get involved. I am sure that if you are stuck where to start, Nigel would be happy to help. This is a great thing to spend the Ubuntu Global Jam doing next week too!

If in doubt, just head in #ubuntu-reviews on freenode IRC and ask there. Also feel free to ask questions in the blog comments here. Let’s rock this thing!

MJ and I headed down to Fry’s last weekend. I didn’t actually need anything, it was more of a sight seeing tour – having lived on the east coast all these years I had to check out this great electronics store my west coast friends had talked so much about.

While wandering through the aisles MJ spotted this gem:

I bought two. There will now be no question as to which cables on our network go to my desktop!

I've started the transition of parted 2.2 to unstable. This is a major update needed for sensible support of newer hard disks with alignment requirements different from the archaic cylinder alignment tradition. I posted to debian-boot with a summary of the partman changes involved.

I have a twitter account and an identi.ca account… but I have not used Gwibber or any other social media program. I have to say that his client looks very cool. The ability of it to work with Facebook, Twitter and Identi.ca make it a solid choice. This is another application that should appeal to new Linux users. Bravo, again, to Canonical and the Ubuntu community.

For your eye pleasure, directly from the Desktop Help Summit, the 10 top things you shouldn’t do when writing documentation. Enjoy.

Hi guys,

Top 10 things not to do with your docs:

Reading the interface back
————————–
∘ Don’t document the entire interface – it’s safe to assume certain
things are obvious and don’t need to be discussed.
∘ Don’t read back the interface – people can figure out that the Open
button opens something.

Not aiming at a consistent level of technical expertise
——————————————————-
∘ Say something basic and something advanced in the same sentence, e.g.
“Click Open to open the document” in the same sentence as “you need to
install GRUB after you partition.”

Verbosity
———
∘ Explaining things at great length, in the same topic as where you give
the instructions.
∘ Just link off to a conceptual topic instead.
∘ Assume people will skim – don’t make them read loads of intro before
you get to the instructions.

Incorrect level of formality
—————————-
∘ It’s OK to use contractions.
∘ Still use reasonably formal language (i.e. don’t be crazy or overly
friendly), but don’t make it sound dry. it should flow.

Lack of context
—————
∘ Need to give context so people understand what is going on.
Confidence.
∘ Don’t just write a big list of commands.

Over-use of screenshots
———————–
∘ Only use them to illustrate a point.
∘ Don’t need to use them everywhere, the user is probably looking at the
screen anyway.

Leaving out steps or using too many steps
—————————————–
∘ Need to choose the appropriate level of detail. No need for one step
per mouse movement.
∘ Likewise, don’t miss things out if they seem obvious, just cover them
very briefly.

Documenting things which no-one cares about
——————————————-
∘ Document things that people need to know about, don’t just scratch an
itch.

Putting more than one topic in one document
——————————————-
∘ Results in long, rambling documents.
∘ Confusing, difficult to link to, overlap.
∘ Users confused by irrelevant, buried information.

Don’t talk down to or patronise your users
——————————————
∘ Using phrases like “obviously” can make people feel bad if it’s not
actually obvious.

If anyone can find one or two examples of any of these mistakes, that
would be cool.

Does anything come to your mind?

Oh, BTW, buttons are on the left.

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #185 for the week of March 14th – March 20th, 2010 is now available here.

In this Issue:

* Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 released
* Ubuntu Global Jam: time is ticking
* Call for Community help: Ubuntu.com Website Localization Project
* Ubuntu Stats
* Launchpad’s Bug Watch system and other animals
* Upgrade Jams – made easy!
* Server Bug Zapping – eucalyptus and euca2ools
* Nominate your favorite Ubuntu Server Papercuts
* In the Press & Blogosphere
* Full Circle Podcast #2: The Full Circle of Light (Brown)
* Upcoming Meetings & Events
* Updates & Security

And much. much more!

This issue of the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter is brought to you by:

* John Crawford
* Craig A. Eddy
* Dave Bush
* Amber Graner
* Liraz Siri
* And many others

If you have a story idea for the Weekly News, join the Ubuntu News Team mailing list and submit it. Ideas can also be added to the wiki!

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License BY SA Creative Commons License.

I am testing the beta release of Ubuntu 10.04 on 1.6Ghz process and 1.5 GB or ram. The first test was from power on to login and the second test was from ‘bios check complete’ to login. I did ten tests of each and the average times are below:

• power to login: 38 seconds
• bios complete to login: 29 seconds

Very nice — great job on this goes to the Ubuntu Canonical Team.

I am still exploring the beta, but I am impressed with it so far.

The fact that Ubuntu 10.04 (long term service) is converting the placement of the windows controls to the left side. I caught the issue when the theme was first posted on the forums. I have now read two community posts on it; they even say this change came from on-high because people were not talking about it.

Perhaps I will offend some Canonical folks with this then.

This change, in my opinion, is pointless. It makes nothing more user friendly. It makes nothing easier. In short the only reason I can see for this is Hubris. At the very least Ubuntu should allow this to be optional. These types of lock-in changes are the hallmark of Apple, not an open source community. Perhaps I am wrong… but currently I do not see any evidence that there is a compelling reason for this change.

Phil Bull, the amazing Ubuntu Documentation writer, says he wants stuff on the left and UDS on the moon, so this is just for him, while he waits for the manual to be released!

Free network services – A discussion session led by Bradley Kuhn, Mako & Matt Lee : Libre.fm encouraged last.fm to write an API so they didn’t need to screen scrape; outcome of the network services story still unknown – netbooks without local productivity apps might now work, most users of network office apps are using them because of collaboration. We have a replacement for twitter – status.net, distributed system, but nothing like facebook [yet?]. Bradley says – like the original GNU problem, just start writing secure peer to peer network services to offer the things that are currently proprietary. There is perhaps a lack of an architectural vision for replacing these proprietary things: folk are asking how we will replace ‘the cloud’ aspects of facebook etc – tagging photos and other stuff around the web, while not using hosted-by-other-people-services. I stopped at this point to switch sessions – the rooms were not in sync session time wise.

Mentoring in free software – Leslie Hawthorne: Projector not working, so Leslie carried on a discussion carried on from the previous talk about the use of sexual themes in promoting projects/talk content and the like. This is almost certainly best covered by watching the video. A few themes from it though:

• for anyone considering joining a community, they are assessing whether that community is ‘people like us’ – and for many people, including both women *and* men, blatant sexuality, isn’t something that fits the ‘people like us’ assessment. Note that this is in addition to offensive and inappropriate aspects of the issue.
• respect is a key element here: respect your community, respect potential contributors, and don’t endorse (even silently) disrespectful behaviour
• Codes of conduct might be a good idea
• The lack of support in the community has for at least one project led to a complete loss of the women contributors to that project – and they are still largely lacking many years later.

We then got Leslies actual talk. Sadly I missed the start of it – I was outside organising security guards because we had (and boy it was ironic) a very loud, confrontational guy at the front who was replying to every statement and the tone in the room had gotten to the point that a fight was brewing.

From where I got back:

• Check your tone
• help people be productive in your community
• cultivate creativity
• know yourself
• do not get caught up in perfectionism
• communicate – both big stuff, but also just take the time to talk – how are you going, etc.
• Share your mistakes
• Guide don’t order
• Recognition = Retention
• Recognition = Delegation – its ok to let other people be responsible for stuff
• http://bit.ly/MentorGuide
• http://bit.ly/MentoringArticle

Chris Ball, Hanna Wallach, Erinn Clark and Denise Paolucci — Recruiting/retaining women in free software projects. Not a unique problem to women – things that make it better for women can also increase the recruitment and retention of men. Make a lack of diversity a bug; provide onramps – small easy bugs in the bug tracker (tagged as such), have a dedicated womens sub project – and permit [well behaved ] men in there – helps build connections into the rest of the project. Make it clear that mistakes are ok. On retention… recognise first patches, first commits in newsletters and the like. Call out big things or long wanted features – by the person that helped. Regular discussion of patches and fixes – rather than just the changelog. CMU did a study on undergrad women participation in CS : ‘Lack of confidence preceeds lack of interest/partipation’. Engagement with what they are doing is a key thing too. ‘Women are consistently undervaluing their worth to the free software community’. ‘Its the personal touch that seems to make a huge difference’. ‘More projects should do a code of conduct – kudos to Ubuntu for doing it’ — Chris Ball.

I found the mentoring and women-in-free-software talks to have extremely similar themes – which is perhaps confirmation or something –  but it wasn’t surprising to me. They were both really good talks though!

And thats my coverage of LibrePlanet – I’m catching a plane after lunch . Its a good low-key conference, and well put together.

Here is my  Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 Desktop

Pretty good huh???

Ham Radio

Have you heard of Amateur radio, often called “Ham” radio? If you don’t have a positive perception of it, chances are you have an inaccurate understanding. Two common myths:

• “Ham radio is Ham radio operators using a Ham radio on Ham radio frequencies in order to talk to other Ham radio operators about Ham radio.”
• “It’s too hard and expensive to get the license and equipment and once you get it you can’t do anything of value.”

The truth is:

• Ham radio is been called the Original Open-Source Project
• When the power goes out and communication methods fail, Ham radio is there helping others
• There is something for everyone in Ham radio
• If you don’t have a license, no problem! It’s easy to get one now especially since there is no Morse code requirement any longer in many countries. In fact, a 5 year old boy in Boulder, Colorado, USA was just licensed. Similar stories about “young Hams” exist around the world.
• If you like to fiddle with hardware and software, there are plenty of ways to be MacGyver.  Speaking of which, let’s get on to the reason for this blog post…

Ubuntu Hams

Ubuntu has a Ham Radio community and we need your help!  We need help with packaging, bug triaging and fixing, software development, and kernel enablement.

Please join us:

* IRC: #ubuntu-hams on irc.freenode.com
* Launchpad team & mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-hams
* Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuHams

It is mothers day in the middle east and although I live in Germany I still would like to honor this day and the 2 mothers in my life. It is sad I am expressing my feelings on mothers day, I think this blog post should have been out a looooooooong time ago.

To mom number one:

Sorry for not being the best son out there, and sorry for not showing my gratitude enough. You really had a hard time raising me and my brothers. Sadly I was not always the good big brother, else it would have reflected on my 2 brothers behavior. I miss you a lot and I am sorry I can not visit Egypt as often as I would like to. After dad passed away you had a hard time keeping us together but u managed and I am very proud of you. Your determination to provide us with a very good life and putting us before everything else is an inspiration. I love you and miss you…

To mom number two:

I think I should start by saying “Hi Nini”. I love you and I hope you know that… Again I might not show it but I really do… You always were there for me and got me out of every crappy situation I got into. You and Bob taught me so many things, that there is nothing I do that I can not derive from something you helped me out with. I know my appearance and lifestyle does not make you happy but I am working on it to make you proud of me. I owe you so much and I cant express how much you mean to me…

You 2 are the best mothers any1 could wish for…

P.S: My mom taught me “if and else” conditions, when I was 13 or 14 based on her pascal experience and my aunt bought me my first programing book “Visuall C++ in 21 days” which took me a year back then (I was 15). So if you like my work then it kinda derives from their help and support. So a nice commt to them would be appreciated and a nice mothers days gift.

Just a repost of a blog entry originally published on Canonical's Blog.

A few weeks ago myself and Dustin Kirkland had the privilege of travelling to the Intel facility in Hillsboro, Oregon to work with Billy Cox, Rekha Raghu, Paul Guermonprez, Trevor Cooper and Kamal Natesan of Intel and Dan Nurmi and Neil Soman of Eucalyptus Systems and a few others on developing a proof of concept whitepaper on the use of Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud on Intel Xeon processors (Nehalem).

read more

Hi all,

An hour ago I upgraded my desktop to the latest updates available and after the upgrade, I noticed that some Folders I had in the ‘Desktop’ where missing. I tried to see if they were hidden or if it was just a weird bug that was not actually showing the files in my desktop but it wasn’t… so yeah I guess that something caused the data loss after the upgrade!! so BE CAREFULL!

This afternoon I took a little time to work on some changes in Acire; my little graphical front-end to a library of Python Snippets. I wanted to share this work as I think it will continue to help Acire be a useful little tool.

Today I added a new feature that helps you tie online documentation with a snippet. So, if you take a look at this screenshot:

You can see that in the snippet information (which I have changed the layout on a little) there are now a couple of link buttons. If you click on one of the buttons it will load up the documentation in your web browser. This documentation is added to the snippet like this:

[SNIPPET_DOCS: http://www.website.com, http://www.anothersite.com]

Acire will then grab the title of those sites and display the buttons underneath the snippet. This is a great way of including a link to the manual page for a given feature, tutorial links or anything else with a snippet. This is just a first cut of the feature and I am sure there some bugs to irk out, so merge proposals are welcome.

In addition to this I added some additional fixes and features:

• Alphabetized Lists – the list of categories in Acire and the list of snippets in each category has now been alphabetized which makes navigating available snippets much easier.
• HIG improvements – thanks to Matthew Pirocchi fo contributing a branch for helping Acire to fit in with the GNOME HIG better. The changes are subtle but really sleek.
• Number of snippets – the number of snippets that are currently available are now shown on the status bar.
• Link to how to add snippets – Acire is nothing without python-snippets, so I added a link in the Help menu to this page which explains how people can contribute snippets.

The python-snippets project which provides the library of snippets that Acire uses has been seeing some wonderful contributions across a range of categories. Here is a quick screenie showing the range of categories that we have snippets in now:

So, I am planning on doing a little more bug-fixing and then rolling a 0.5 release of Acire.

John Gilmore keynote – What do we do next, having produced a free software system for our computers? Perhaps we should aim at Windows? Wine + an extended ndiswrapper to run other hardware drivers + a better system administration interface/resources/manuals. However that means knowing a lot about windows internals – something that open source developers don’t seem to want to do. We shouldn’t just carry on tweaking – its not inspiring; whats our stretch goal? Discussion followed – reactos, continue integrating software and people with a goal of achieving really close integration: software as human rights issue! ‘Desktop paradigm needs to be replaced’ : need to move away from a document based desktop to a device based desktop. Concern about the goal of running binary drivers for hardware: encourages manufacturers to sell hardware w/out specs; we shouldn’t encourage the idea that that is ok. Lots of concern about cloning, lots of concern about what will bring more freedom to users, and what it will take to have a compelling vision to inspire 50000 free software hackers. Free software in cars – lots of safety issues in .e.g brake controllers, accelerators.

Eben Moglen – ‘We’re at the inflection point of free software’ – because any large scale global projects these days are not feasible without free software. Claims that doing something that scales from tiny to huge environment requires ‘us’ — A claim I would (sadly) dispute. Lots of incoming and remaining challenges. ‘Entirely clear that the patent systems relationship to technology is pathological and dangerous’ – that I agree with! Patent muggings are a problem – patent holders are unhappy with patents granted to other people . Patent pools are helping slowly as they grow. Companies which don’t care about the freedom aspect of GPLv3 are adopting it because of the patent protection aspects. Patent system is at the head of the list of causes-of-bad-things affecting free software. SFLC is building coalitions outside the core community to protect the interests of the free software community. We are starting to be taken for granted at the high end of mgmt in companies that build on free software. … We face a problem in the erosion of privacy. We need to build a stack, running on commodity hardware that runs federated services rather than folk needing centralised services.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya on GNOME Shell: Integrates old and new ideas in an overall comprehensive design. Marina ran through the various goals of the shell – growing with users, being delightful, starting simply so new users are not overwhelmed. The activities screen looks pretty nice The workspace rearrangement UI is really good. The notifications thing is interesting; you can respond to a chat message in-line in the notification.

Richard Stallman on Software as a Service – he presented verbally the case made in the paper. Some key quotes… “All your data on a server is equivalent to total spyware” – I think this is a worst-case analogy; it suggests that you can never trust another party: kindof a sad state of paranoia to assume that all network servers are always out to get you all the time. And I have to ask – should we get rid of Savannah then (because all the data is stored there) – the argument for why Savannah is not SaaS is not convincing: its just file storage, so what makes it different to e.g. Ubuntu One? “If there is a server and only a little bit of it is SaaS, perhaps just say don’t worry about it – because that little bit is often the hardest bit to replace.”  ”Lets write systems for collaborative word process that don’t involve a central server” — abiword w/the sharing plugin ? RMS seems to be claiming that someone else sysadmining a server for you is better than someone else sysadmining a time-shared server for you: I don’t actually see the difference, unless you’re also asserting that you’ll always have root over your’ own machine’. The argument seems very fuzzy and unclear to me as to why there is really a greater risk – in particular when there is a commercial relationship with the operator (as opposed to, say, an advertising supported relationship).

Two days after I left Pennsylvania the Ubuntu Pennsylvania Team helped Bryan Behrenshausen of Millersville University host a successful Open Options: Remix Computing with Open Source Software event at the University, details and photos are over on the team blog: Millersville University Open Options Event – Success! It was a delight working with Bryan during planning and I was sorry to be unable to attend due to my moving schedule.

I was fortunate enough to move from the state of one approved LoCo to another, now living in the golden state of California I’ve joined the Ubuntu California Team! I’ve also joined a few local LUGs, including BerkeleyLUG, which is a quick train ride across (under!) the bay from where I live. So when Jack Deslippe announced the planning of an Ubuntu Global Jam at Berkeley LUG I hopped on board.

Date: Sunday, March 28
Time: 12:00-3:00
Location: Bobby G’s Pizzeria, 2072 University Ave, Berkeley, California

Agenda:

• Grant Bowman will be demoing the Launchpad Ubuntu bug reporting, following and triaging process. This is a great way for new Ubuntu (and Linux) users to help improve the Ubuntu OS. Bring some bugs you have to report or follow up on.
• Elizabeth Krumbach will be giving an introduction on “Ubuntu Documentation – Finding it, Using it & Contributing to it”
• We will be working on the “I’ve just install Ubuntu, what do I do now?” tri-fold (download current version here)
• The folks at ZaReason will be stopping by to show off Ubuntu running on some of their great machines.
• There will be plenty of people around to share cool projects with, help with any Linux related problems you are having and to do installs.

For more, and to RSVP by email, check out the details on the BerkelyLUG site: http://www.berkeleylug.com/?page_id=67
If you have a launchpad ID, you can register for the event in the shiny new LoCo Directory here: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/team/41/detail/

Scott has posted an informative post on ureadahead and other boot related things on the forums. Recommended reading!

Tagged: boot, keybuk, ubuntu, ureadahead

No really. I prefer GNOME, so clearly pretty isn’t the biggest factor here. When I first started using Ubuntu, I would drag the top GNOME panel to the bottom and have  it sit under what is normally the bottom panel. It looked ugly as sin, but this is how, as (back in 2005) a recent Windows refugee, I was used to working and so this is how I chose to organise my space.

Most importantly, it wasn’t hard for me to do this. My most recent installs, almost 4 years later, primarily on laptops rather than desktops tended to be left as is — a panel at the top  and a panel at the bottom. I find this seems to suit laptops better, and I’ve become accustomed to it. However, had I not been able to move the panel from the start, I might even have ended up on Kubuntu. Well, if it were not for the silly single-click thing that fires stuff off even when you don’t want it to, like when you bump the mouse accidentally. Ok, truth be told, I probably would have stuck with Ubuntu, because, well, all the functionality was still there. Just in a different place to where I was expecting

As with most computer users, I’ve never owned a Mac. When I was little, my school had a some (iirc) Mac II’s but I am pretty certain that the number of times that I, at 28, have used a Mac since would barely exceed the number of digits on my hands, and OS X is nothing like the first Macs I used. I think the last time I used a Mac was in 2005; for about 20 minutes.

But now with the sneaky Lucid UI changes, I might as well be using OS X as far as my learned behaviours are concerned. And lets just hope that my laptop trackpad doesn’t jump at an inopportune time — like it does sometimes when I go to open the system menu and instead hit the firefox icon right next to it instead — as trackpads are prone to.

I work 100% from a laptop and use the trackpad 90% of the time. The chance this ridiculous UI change will not bite me hard is pretty slim. The only plus I’ve come across so far is that it made it easier to close out of the awkwardly oversized evolution setup wizard that launched on my eeepc701.

However, putting even that glaring risk aside, the one thing that I am absolutely hating the most about these sneaky UI changes is the abolishment of informative tooltips. This is a loss of functionality.

My battery icon, my wifi connection icon, my xchat icon — they now tell me nothing when I merely nudge them, I now have to smack them over the head with the cursor. I cannot tell at quick glance if I have enough charge for something, on the wrong wifi network, or whether I can ignore that xchat message I missed the notification for. I have to exert time, energy, and most importantly brain focus to get what used to be a simple matter of an effortless enlightenment. I now have to go through what is sometimes several clicks. Extra clicks are bad. Clicks add obscurity. Extra clicks are effort.

This bleeps me right off. I can learn to move a mouse in a different direction (though I’m not at all believing that new windows migrants will cope), but I really do not have the capacity to circumvent the application to read the bytes from the disk myself to find out what my battery level is without clicking through some dialogs. The software is supposed to do that for me.

Alas, my software no longer does this for me, and ergo, my software no longer works for me.

To get this information, I now have to do stuff for my software. I should not be working for my software.

Picking up where Fagan left off on the Quickly ubuntu-application tutorial, I'm writing a ubuntu-pygame tutorial using docbook format. The last time I tried available XML editors, the ones I found were crashy, or didn't offer much above and beyond Gedit, so I ended up editing XML in Gedit.

I tried again in Lucid, and found XML Copy-Editor in software-center. I love it! I'm getting statement completion for the schema currently in use (see screenshot above), and error highlighting when I make mistakes. It's also fast and rock solid on my mini 10v!



Interesting that it's built in wxWidgets. I wonder if they target this to be Cross Platform?

Yes, this is quite belated. I’ll explain why in a subsequent post.

linux.conf.au this year was in Wellington, New Zealand. It just keeps getting better! It’s always great meeting people you otherwise only know online. I was especially impressed by the OLPC NZ team.

Immediately following linux.conf.au, I jumped on a plane to Christchurch to embark on a week-long tour of the South Island. Long story short, it was the time of my life! I made some amazing friends. I also saw and did incredible things, including:

• awe-inspiring views of glaciers, glacially-formed landscapes, turquoise-coloured rivers and lakes, beautiful skies and more
• helihike: a helicopter trip onto a glacier, then hiking on it
• a night on a boat on Milford Sound, probably the most beautiful place on Earth
• every extreme activity I could get my hands on, including:
  • three bungy jumps (thrillogy combo): Kawarau Bridge (43 metres), Nevis (134m) and Ledge (47m)
  • two swings: two of the scariest jump styles — Backwards and Gimp Boy Goes to Hollywood
  • a 15,000ft skydive
  • the Triple Challenge: a Shotover jet boat ride, followed by a helicopter transfer to rafting on the Shotover river
    
  • a wilderness safari along the Dart River, including walks through forests and a scenic jet boat ride

I have most of my photos online now:

• 2010-01-24 New Zealand holiday, Day 1, pt 1
• 2010-01-24 New Zealand Holiday, Day 1, pt 2
• 2010-01-25 New Zealand Holiday, Day 2, pt 1
• 2010-01-25 New Zealand Holiday, Day 2, pt 2
• 2010-01-26 New Zealand Holiday, Day 3, pt 1
• 2010-01-26 New Zealand Holiday, Day 3, pt 2
• 2010-01-26 New Zealand Holiday, Day 3, pt 3
• 2010-01-27 New Zealand Holiday, Day 4, pt 1
• 2010-01-27 New Zealand Holiday, Day 4, pt 2
• 2010-01-27 New Zealand Holiday, Day 4, pt 3

I think what surprised me most was how adventurous I can be when I’m not in my ‘natural habitat’. I’m not normally a thrillseeker at all, but in NZ I made the decision to take a holiday from myself as well as from work and home. I even made a concerted effort to not touch computers at all. My phone was offline for most of the trip (I was using it as a camera). I never thought that being cut-off could feel so liberating.

©2010 Sridhar Dhanapalan.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence.

.

Ada Lovelace

On the 24nd of March – next Wednesday – the “Ada Lovelace Day” is taking place. If you don’t know Ada Lovelace so far – you should: She lived in the early 19th century, and is known today especially for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. Ada is regarded not only as the first female programmer, she is actually regarded as the world’s first computer programmer.

The “Ada Lovelace Day” celebrates the achievements of women in technology and science and pledges for blog posts about this topic. As the Ubuntu community tries to emphasize the involvement of women in the contribution to the project (e.g. see Ubuntu Women), there might interesting stories about an Ubuntu specific focus on this day’s topic.

I am looking forward the 24nd, there are over 1000 blog post pledges so far. In case you use twitter, have a look at the hash marks #AdaLovelace and #ald10.

That’s it, no text for you today.

So David C dented about Zeitbutton

#

Funny thing is … We support this functionality already as in “Get files commonly used with the other files”

In this case it would be “Get files most used with Recently Open Files”… It is just a WM hack as far as I know…

You can test the functionality with Zeitgeist(trunk) and GAJ(trunk) by right clicking an item in the journal and asking for “More Information”….

Lets make it happen… Thanks Dave for the inspiration…

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the first beta release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) Desktop, Server, and Netbook editions and of Ubuntu 10.04 Server for Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) and Amazon’s EC2. Codenamed "Lucid Lynx", 10.04 LTS continues Ubuntu’s proud tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop and Netbook Editions continue the trend of ever-faster boot speeds, with improved startup times and a streamlined, smoother boot experience.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server Edition provides even better integration of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, with its install-time cloud setup.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server for UEC and EC2 brings the power and stability of the Ubuntu Server Edition to cloud computing, whether you’re using Amazon EC2 or your own Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

The Ubuntu 10.04 family of variants, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Ubuntu Studio, and Mythbuntu, also reach beta status today.

Desktop features
————————

Social from the start: We now feature built-in integration with Twitter, identi.ca, Facebook, and other social networks with the MeMenu in the panel.

New Design: Cleaner and faster boot, new notification area, new themes, new icons, and new wallpaper bring a dramatically updated look and feel to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu One: Choose any folder in your home directory to sync, choose from millions of songs for purchase in the Ubuntu One Music store.

Please see http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/lucid/beta1 for details.

Server features
———————-

Cloud computing: The Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud installer has been vastly improved in order to support alternative installation topologies. UEC components are now automatically discovered and registered, even with complex topologies. Finally, UEC is now powered by Eucalyptus 1.6.2 codebase.

UEC and EC2: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS continues the tradition of official Ubuntu Server image releases for UEC and for Amazon’s EC2, giving you everything you need for rapid deployment of Ubuntu instances in a cloud computing environment. UEC images, and information on running Ubuntu 10.04 on EC2, are available at:

http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/beta1

Stability and security: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS brings many improvements over Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to keep your servers safe and secure for the next five years, including AppArmor profiles for many key services, kernel hardening, and an easy-to-configure firewall.

Ubuntu Netbook features
———————————-
Ubuntu Netbook Edition is optimised to run on Intel atom based netbooks. It includes a new consumer-friendly interface that allows users to quickly and easily get on-line and use their favourite applications. This interface is optimised for a retail sales environment.

It includes the same faster boot times and improved boot experience as Ubuntu desktop.

Kubuntu features
————————

Kubuntu 10.04 LTS will be the first LTS to feature KDE 4 Platform and Applications. KDE 4 has come a long way since its early releases and is now suitable for the high demands of LTS users. Being an LTS we have focused on bug fixing and stability for this release, but we did find time to add features such as touchpad configuration, Firefox KDE integration, Kubuntu notification improvements, and cross-desktop systray menu standardisation. Kubuntu features the Plasma Desktop while Kubuntu Netbook Remix comes out of preview status with the Plasma Netbook workspace.

See https://wiki.kubuntu.org/LucidLynx/Beta1/Kubuntu for more details.

Edubuntu features
————————-

Edubuntu in Lucid features a more complete live environment containing more software from universe and all existing language packs as well as our usual educational software in their current version. For Lucid the text installer has been removed and so is LTSP for the time being. We expect to have LTSP back on the DVD for the next beta. The DVD is then much smaller than it used to be but will still provide a complete education environment based on Ubuntu Lucid.

Also included on the Edubuntu DVD is a small repository containing the required packages to transform the regular Edubuntu desktop into a LTSP server or install the Netbook edition interface.

Mythbuntu features
—————————

Mythbuntu 10.04 introduces MythTV 0.23. This new version is significantly faster and should feel more responsive and stable than older versions. It also integrates better into the OS with better support for things like ConsoleKit and Upstart.

Please see http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/Release_Notes_-_0.23 for more details about changes introduced in 0.23.

See http://mythbuntu.org/10.04/beta for information about the Mythbuntu beta release.

Other
——-

* On the Desktop: GNOME 2.30, KDE SC 4.4, XFCE 4.6.1, OpenOffice.org 3.2.0, X.Org server 1.7.5

* On the Server: Apache 2.2, PostgreSQL 8.4, PHP 5.3.1, LTSP 5.2

* "Under the hood": GCC 4.4.3, eglibc 2.11, Linux 2.6.32.9, Python 2.6.5

The full release notes can be found at
http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/karmic/beta1

About Ubuntu
——————

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional technical support is available from Canonical Limited and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit http://www.ubuntu.com/support

To Get Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1
———————————————

To upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 from Ubuntu 9.10 or Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, follow these instructions:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LucidUpgrades

Or, download Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 here (choose the mirror closest to you):

Africa:

* http://ubuntu.saix.net/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (South Africa)

Asia:

* http://mirror.rootguide.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (China)
* http://ubuntutym2.u-toyama.ac.jp/ubuntu/10.04 (Japan)
* http://mirror.khlug.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Korea, Republic of)
* http://ubuntu.qualitynet.net/releases/10.04 (Kuwait)
* http://ftp.mtu.ru/pub/ubuntu/releases/10.04 (Russian Federation)
* http://tw.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Taiwan)
* http://ftp.linux.org.tr/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Turkey)

Europe:

* http://ubuntu.linuxbe.com/10.04 (Belgium)
* http://ubuntu.ipacct.com/releases/10.04 (Bulgaria)
* http://hr.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Croatia)
* http://releases.ubuntu.mirror.dkm.cz/releases/10.04 (Czech Republic)
* http://mirrors.dotsrc.org/ubuntu-cd/10.04 (Denmark)
* http://ftp.estpak.ee/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Estonia)
* http://ubuntu.trumpetti.atm.tut.fi/releases/10.04 (Finland)
* http://ftp.oleane.net/ubuntu-cd/10.04 (France)
* http://ubuntu.mirror.tudos.de/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Germany)
* http://speglar.simnet.is/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Iceland)
* http://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Ireland)
* http://releases.ubuntu.fastbull.org/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Italy)
* http://nl.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04 (Netherlands)
* http://no.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Norway)
* http://cesium.di.uminho.pt/pub/ubuntu/10.04 (Portugal)
* http://rs.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Serbia)
* http://ubuntu.cica.es/releases/10.04 (Spain)
* http://se.releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Sweden)

North America:

* http://mirror.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/ubuntu-releases/10.04 (Canada)
* http://mirror.pnl.gov/releases/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirror.yellowfiber.net/ubuntu/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirrors.ccs.neu.edu/releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (United States)
* http://mirrors.gigenet.com/ubuntu/10.04 (United States)

South America:

* http://ubuntu-cd.innova-red.net/10.04 (Argentina)
* http://mirror.pop-sc.rnp.br/mirror/ubuntu/10.04 (Brazil)
* http://ubuntu.c3sl.ufpr.br/releases/10.04 (Brazil)

Rest of the world:

http://releases.ubuntu.com/10.04 (Great Britain)

Please download using Bittorrent if possible.

The final version of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is expected to be released in April 2010.

Feedback and Participation
—————————————

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/

Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions will help turn this Beta into the best release of Ubuntu ever. Please note that, where possible, we prefer that bugs be reported using the tools provided, rather than by visiting Launchpad directly. Instructions can be found at

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

If you have a question, or if you think you may have found a bug but are not sure, first try asking on the #ubuntu IRC channel on FreeNode, on the Ubuntu Users mailing list, or on the Ubuntu forums:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/

More Information
————————

You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this preview release on our website, IRC channel and wiki. If you are new to Ubuntu, please visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

[Discuss Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Beta 1 on the Forum]

Originally sent to the ubuntu-announce mailing list by Steve Langasek on Fri Mar 19 16:32:05 GMT 2010

GNU Hackers meetups are a face to face meeting to balance the online collaboration that GNU maintainers and contributors do all the time. These are  a recent (since 2007) thing, and are having a positive effect within GNU and the FSF.

The LibrePlanet 2010 GNU Hackers meetup runs concurrent with the first day of LibrePlanet.

We started with some project updates:

• SipWitch – a project to do discovery of SIP endpoints and setup encryption etc. This looks quite interesting, and is looking for contributors.
• Bazaar – I presented an update on where Bazaar is at and what we’re focusing on now and in the future:
  • short term: merging and collaboration:
    • merge behaviour
    • conflict behaviour
    • develop a rebase that can combine unrelated branches
    • looms to be polished, or pipelines extended – something to manage long-standing patches for distributions, or other environments that need long lived patch sets.
  • long term
    • continuing optimisation of network and local perf
    • meta-branch operations – mirror collections of branches,
    • work with many branches at once (many branches in one dir (a-la git, hopefully less confusing)
    • easier ‘get up and go’ for new contributors
  • now and forever
    • keep fostering community growth
    • we’re aiming for negative bug growth- get on top and stay there

Felipe Sanches presented his list of things that should be on the high priority project list:

• accessibility since 1st boot
• reconfigurable hardware development (FPGA tools) – this is particularly relevant for handling e.g. wifi cards that have a FPGA in the card, so we can replace the non-free microcode.
• nonfree firmware issue

–lunch–

John Eaton on Octave. John compared the octave contributors – 30 or so over the years, and never more than 2 at a time. The Proprietary product Matlab that Octave is very similar to has 2000 staff working at the company producing it. Users seem to expect the two products to be equivalent, and are disappointed that Octave is less capable, and that the community is not as able to do the sort of support that a commercial organisation might have done. Octave would like to gain some more developers and be able to educe users more effectively – convert more to become developers.

Rob Myers, the chief GNU webmaster gave a description of his role: The webmasters deal with adding new content, dealing with mail to webmaster@, which can be queries for the GNU project, random questions about CDs, and an endless flood of spam. The webmasters project is run as a free software project – the site is in CVS (yes CVS), visible on Savannah. Templates could be made nicer and perhaps move to a CMS.

Aubrey Jaffer on cross platform. There is a thing called Water which is meant to replace all the different languages used in web apps – generates html, css, alters the DOM, does what you’d do with javascript. So there is a Water -> backend translator that outputs Java for servers, C# for windows, and so on. (I think, this wasn’t entirely clear). He went on to talk about many of the internals of a thing called Schlep which is used as a compiler to get scheme code running in C/C#/Java so as to make it available to Water backends in different environments.

Matt Lee spoke about GNU FM – GNU FM is a free ‘last.fm’ site. The site is running at http://libre.fm/.  24ish devs, but stalle after 6 months – whats next? Matt has started GNU Social to build a communication framework for GNU projects to talk to each other – e.g. for each GNU FM site to communicate on the back end, with a particular focus on doing social functionality – groups, friendships, personal info. The wiki page needs ideas!

GNU advisory board discussion…   too much to capture, but focused GNU wide issues – things like how projects get contributors, contributions, coordination. Teams were a big discussion point, bug trackers – how to coordinate teams followed up of that, and there is s ‘GNU Source Release Collection’ project to do coordinated releases of GNU software that are all known to work together.

Today I am pleased to announce two fantastic opportunities for two enthusiastic, motivated and energetic folks to come and join my team for a six month internship. You will join Daniel Holbach, Jorge Castro, and David Planella as team-mates and report to myself as honorary horse-folk, working on awesome solutions to help make Ubuntu an ever more compelling community to be a part of.

This is a fantastic opportunity to work inside a fast-paced, collaborative environment, solving important problems, working with awesome colleagues and adding Canonical as a rocking reference to your resume.

Before we get to the details about the roles, I want to be clear on a few general elements:

• These are internships: they are are not normal full roles.
• Like most internships, these roles are unpaid.
• Each role lasts for six months.
• Working hours are Mon – Fri from 9am – 6pm.

I want to be clear that my team is a fast-paced, hard-working, hectic environment. I am going to work you hard, and you should expect that, but my goal here is to help you squeeze every ounce of opportunity out of your internship. We will have 1-on-1 weekly calls, I will help guide you on what to work on, help you manage your work, solve problems, and be effective in your projects. In other words: when you sign up for your internship, expect a solid six month adventure, but an adventure that will sow the seeds for many great opportunities in the future.

So, I am looking for two roles:

• Ubuntu Community Documentation Author (Internship)
• Ubuntu Community Web Developer (Internship)

Let’s take a look at the job descriptions:

Ubuntu Community Documentation Author (Internship)

Job Title: Ubuntu Community Documentation Author (Internship)

Reports to: Ubuntu Community Manager

Job Location: Home with some travel engagements.

Job Summary: To produce documentation and online materials for the Ubuntu community and new contributors.

Key responsibilities and accountabilities:

• Produce a series of well-written and clear materials about a range of different topics in the Ubuntu community surrounding how to participate.
• Make these materials available on line and ensuring they follow style and quality guidelines.
• Work with the Ubuntu Documentation Team, Learning Team and Ubuntu Manual project to liaise around collaboration and best practise for materials production.
• Promote and raise awareness of this documentation inside and outside the Ubuntu community.
• Identify common needs and requirements for materials, prioritize them and build them into your workflow.
• REQUIREMENTS

Specific Job Skills: Excellent writing skills, strong networking and social networking skills, good relationship building abilities, process driven, able to manage multiple work streams, good prioritisation, independent, willing to travel potentially 25% of their work time, and able to resolve conflict.

Experience: Experience of working with community in Ubuntu and Open Source projects, experience of the upstream/distributor relationship, technical experience.

Key Qualities: Have strong social skills, a good networker and a good technical knowledge of Ubuntu and the Open Source and upstream/downstream development process. Candidates should be process driven, strategically minded and committed. Competent visual design and artistic talent is highly desirable. Other: Candidates should provide evidence of existing experience and work in the Open Source community and suitable references.

Ubuntu Community Web Developer (Internship)

Job Title: Ubuntu Community Web Developer (Internship)

Reports to: Ubuntu Community Manager

Job Location: Home with some travel engagements.

Job Summary: To design and develop web functionality across a range of Ubuntu community infrastructure web properties.

Key responsibilities and accountabilities:

• In conjunction with the team and the community, design new features and solutions for specific needs in our key web properties.
• Develop and implement such features and solutions using a range of appropriate tools.
• Provide solid testing and quality assurance over your work during the development phase and before deployment.
• Triage, fix and deploy bug fixes.
• Work with the community to collaborate together on projects and solutions.
• Report your progress to the team and the wider community.
• Be responsive to changing needs, emergency fixes and feature requests and be reactive to a range of different customers.
• Requirements

Specific Job Skills: Excellent web development skills (Python, Django, PHP, HTML, CSS and Database experience are a must), good experience of Launchpad, Bazaar and Ubuntu community infrastructure, strong networking and social networking skills, process driven, able to manage multiple work streams, good prioritisation, independent, willing to travel potentially 25% of their work time, and able to resolve conflict.

Experience: Experience of working on collaborative web development projects in Python, Django and PHP, strong development experience over a range of projects, experience of working with community in Ubuntu and Open Source projects. Key Qualities: Excellent developer, strong social skills, a good networker and a good technical knowledge of Ubuntu and the Open Source and upstream/downstream development process. Candidates should be process driven, strategically minded and committed. Competent visual design and artistic talent is highly desirable.

Other: Candidates should provide evidence of existing experience and work in the Open Source community and suitable references.

How To Apply

If you are interested in applying for these roles do not contact me directly, you should follow these steps:

• Ensure you have a recent, up to date resume (in PDF or OpenOffice.org format) that outlines your experience, education, your community achievements, technical background and information about your interests and ambitions.
• Send an email to alice.paul AT canonical DOT com with the subject Community Team Internship Application and the following details:

• Specify which role you are interested in.
• Your resume attached.
• A few paragraphs about why you would like to have the role.

Good luck and I will speak to some of you soon in an interview!

Steve Langasek sent an email to the Ubuntu Announcement mailing list a few minutes ago announcing the release of Ubuntu 10.04 Beta 1. 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) is a Long Term Support release.

I have been using 10.04 since the Alpha 1 phase, and absolutely love it. I truly do believe that Ubuntu is moving in the right direction to solve Bug #1. Please download yourself a copy and give it a try!

We have entered the Lucid end-game. Which is great. Sadly, there were a whole mess of things for Quickly that I wanted to get done this cycle. I know I won't get to everything, but I can still do a lot. I decided to set out a list of goals, and to work on the list each night, hopefully picking one item off per evening.
I always consider work on Quickly to be related to, but not actually part of, my day job. Thus I enjoy working on it in my free time, but don't typically commit to accomplishing anything specific, because it is my free time, after all. However, let's see how this works.
Here is my tentative list:

• Finish fixing pygame template indentation and comments.
• Refactor pygame template to put screen size in the configuration file.
• Create my own sample sounds for pygtame template.
• Make pygtame template actually a template (add the string replacement functions and derive from ubuntu-application commands).
• Remove CameraButton from quickly-widgets.
• Finish quickly-widgets documentation.
• Make quickly-widgets tests work (test apps currently work, but some of the tests fail erroneusly).
• Fix the ubuntu-application template tutorial to use quicky.widgets.couch_grid instead of desktopouch.couch_grid.
• Add PPA section to ubuntu-application tutorial.
• Write PyGame template tutorial
• Make new videos for ubuntu-application.
• Make videos for PyGame.
• Those 10+ things seem like good goals to start. If I missed something, etc... please provide a comment.