I bet at four o'clock this morning you weren't in a police station.
Or, at least, if you were I bet you were drunk and I bet it wasn't voluntary.
After the usual Friday night poor showing from my local pub (people who follow me on twitter will be aware that the torture of watching a hundred people think they're affirming their lives by singing Mr Brightside at the top of their voices is a regular part of my balanced weekly diet), I walked home, on a cold and cloudless night. I live about ten minutes walk from town, so the walk's no hardship, except that I was dressed in shirt and no coat and it was, as mentioned, cold.
I need to be clear about this. Ten degrees below zero, Celsius, is seriously chilly when you're standing in it in shirt-sleeves. I'm sure people in actually cold places like Canada or Minneapolis or Refrigeration, North Dakota will be laughing mockingly at this point, but firstly, bugger off, secondly I bet you lot bother to put a coat on when you go out, thirdly it's not two in the morning for you, and fourthly bugger off.
Anyway, I get home and... no door key in my pocket.
You know that feeling when the Fist of Fear grabs your balls when you realise something disastrous has happened? (I don't know what the Fist grabs for women. Feel free to fill me in, or actually maybe not.) Anyway: yeah, that. I went through the usual search-all-pockets-and-then-search-them-all-again routine, just in case a mischievous cold-tolerant leprechaun hid my key from the first search and then put it back, and... no door key. Oh dear.
I'll tell you this; the walk back to the pub again seems a much longer trek. Nowhere near as long as the second return to the house without my key, though, after it turned out no-one had handed it in. And now, what the hell to do, eh? I'm not prescient enough to hide a key in the garden, especially since that's a damned good way to come home one night and find no television where a television used to be, so... locksmith? Do they have 24-hour locksmiths? I can't be the first moron to have done this.
If you're bored today, I have a suggestion for you. Go and find a dude who claims to be a 24-hour locksmith and punch him in his stupid lying face.
Incidentally, how in Jah's name did anyone manage in this situation five years ago without a smartphone, huh?
Not that the internet helps when no-one frigging answers their supposedly-24-hour phone. Also, it turns out that about four of the local 24-hour locksmith companies are actually the same company, who did answer their phone, agreed to send someone, and then after an hour of me standing in the freezing bloody freezing cold confessed that they didn't actually have anyone to send.
It's now half three in the morning, and the shivering is starting to get on my nerves, and I can't get into my house without destroying something like a double-glazed plate glass window which will cost me hundreds of pounds to fix and my hands are shaking enough that I can barely light a cigarette, let alone throw a brick through a door that probably wouldn't break anyway, and I'd like to avoid the police showing up since I have no way of proving that I actually live here except for being able to describe where all the broken bits of skirting-board are, and everywhere is closed and the doors are all locked and it's really spectacularly bone-shudderingly mightily arse-clenchingly ridiculously psychopathically cold, and what to do? I tried sleeping in the shed. Now, cold is not like wind. Being inside a thin empty wooden building does not protect you from it. I was shivering like a jackhammer on a bouncy castle and it was becoming clear, even in my not-very-operational brain state, that lying on the floor at minus ten with only a shirt on could quite possibly lead to me actually freezing to death for real.
Well, if the police came, either I'd get into the house or they'd arrest me, and being arrested would at least make me warm, and right now I'd cut my right hand off if Pol Pot showed up as long as he brought a pair of gloves and some soup.
And then, through the frozen and frosty neurons came the sparkling thought that the police station would be open, wouldn't it?
I actually felt warmer just at the thought. Not much warmer, though.
Anyway, that's how I came to be sitting in the cop shop voluntarily at four am. One lovely copper even made me a cup of tea after I poured out my tale of woe in one long sentence, breaking only for my teeth to chatter together like I was trying to bite through the world.
Police stations: while I appreciate that you're generally there to deal with miscreants and so on, it wouldn't kill you to get rid of two screwed-to-the-ground plastic chairs and put in, say, a chaise longue. After switching my phone to airplane mode I managed to eke out enough battery life that I could sit and read while huddled up against the radiator for five hours until nine o'clock this morning, whereupon I went and fetched the spare key from my estate agent after the longest and coldest and most sleepless night I have ever experienced.
So, tips, for surviving a similar situation.
I think I might have a nap now.
Mandriva or as some of us remember it Mandrake is in it’s death throes yet again, it would seem they are in financial difficulties and may have to go into liquidation. At the time of writing this post they have had a reprieve till mid February thanks to a donation by the Paris Region Economic Development Agency however their future looks decidedly dicey to say the least.
Mandriva is like the Woolworth’s of the Linux world, everyone has heard of it, everyone has visited it , a small amount of people use it, but now it’s probably past saving EVERYONE is lamenting it’s demise. ”So why are you blogging about it Pete?” I’ll tell you why, I saw a story from Slashdot on G+ that was just such utter bollocks I felt the need to vent my spleen.
Released in 1998 and based on Red Hat 5.1 (RH being non proprietary at the time) Mandrake (Mandriva) was probably ahead of it’s time in respect of trying to get people to pay for Linux by running the Mandrake Club. Basically the club, which was closed in 2009, was a paid membership, yearly fee, in bronze, silver or gold, and optional corp status. It gave you access to releases before the public. Members also got access to the Powerpack edition for free, ( 2 releases per year). Powerpack have proprietary drivers, a (legal) DVD player and the offical Adobe reader. It also gave access to dedicated update and download mirrors, meaning better performance, It also provided a closed forum and support, help desk etc. Thereby being amongst the first to offer in effect support contracts for their products.
Like most people Mandriva was always my first choice when offering a Linux distro to a new user until Ubuntu became more stable around 2006 having first hit the streets in 2004 this, from a user stand point, Ubuntu may have been one of the first nails in the Mandriva coffin. Other distributions such as Red Hat focused on the Server and enterprise customer offering business support contracts from around 2003 onwards and also have one of the largest, extensive and professionally recognised training programs within the Linux community today. Canonical, which owns Ubuntu (Or as they like to term it “Canonical is the parent company of Ubuntu.”) has only recently within the last few years started to make some headway in the Server and support market. Mandriva never sought that business model, their aim was to support their desktop user base, this was innovative in that currently pretty much all the distributions leave desktop support to the community via forums and wiki’s.
Even a cursory search will reveal some of the main reasons for Mandriva’s problems have been managerial and poor promotional ability, contrary to the post on slashdot which seems to believe the only way for a successful Linux Distribution business model is to follow Red Hat’s path, Mandriva still has the right idea as nobody is offering an affordable desktop support package. True Mandriva tried it and failed but was that their fault? Or was it just that the community, at that time, was not ready to start paying for something that they had downloaded for free? Times are changing and so is the FOSS user base, maybe there’s still hope for them. My spies tell me there are whispers of a possible Russian deal that maybe brokered at FOSDEM, I certainly hope so.
Today (1st Feb 2012) I will be doing my live Ubuntu Q+A session at 12pm Pacific / 3pm Eastern / 8pm UK / 9pm Europe. You can join the videocast here (anyone can view, but if you want to ask a question you should register an account with ustream.tv first).
All questions are welcome!
A new Unity has been pushed into the Unity team’s PPA and we need testers to help give it a run for it’s money before it is accepted into Precise. Nick has all the details of how to participate in the testing right here. You will need to be running Precise to participate in the testing.
You can also find help if you get stuck in #ubuntu-unity on Freenode. Happy testing!
I am running it now and the multi-monitor improvements in Precise are so much better than they used to be.
Can’t see the video? Watch it here.
Just a quick note to let you know that this Friday, 3rd February in San Francisco we will be having the Severed Fifth CD Release Party. The new album ‘Liberate’ was funded by donations from the Severed Fifth community and will be released soon under a Creative Commons license.
As such, on Friday we will be releasing the album at Cafe Cocomo, 650 Indiana St, San Francisco, CA where we will perform a full, live set of the new record. We will also be supported by Ulysses Siren and My Victim. Not only this but everyone who comes to the show will get a free copy of the new album on CD and there will plenty of give-aways and prizes.
Tickets are $10 advance ($12 on the door). You can buy tickets for the show here as well as buying tickets on the door. Doors open at 8pm.
I would love to encourage you to come out to support Creative Commons and local music and have a great time.
Blimey, I've been doing these birthday posts for ten years.
Today I am a year older. This particular day will be a subdued day; last weekend I spent with Niamh and Birmingham geeks (not at the same time), the previous one with my parents, so there's not actually a lot left to do on this actual birthday day. So I'm working, heh.
When I first met Sam, I related the old joke about being able to say "eighteen happy years... and then I met her". Which was totally invalid since we only were eighteen. Today I could tell that joke legitimately. Well, except that we're not married any more, probably because of inappropriate jokes. Might give her a ring later.
It's an interesting age, this. I'm now over halfway to the days of my years (three-score and ten), and I am supremely unworried by this. At previous points in my life I've felt like I knew everything now, and it turned out there was always more to learn. Now, of course, I finally have learned everything. It's a good feeling.
(No, of course I haven't.)
Anyway, many happy returns to me. I have to get back to work now. I'm wearing the rosette that Niamh bought me, though.
I spent some more time this weekend hacking on the Ubuntu Accomplishments spec I blogged about recently. I just wanted to provide a little more eye-candy of some of the progress.
When you load the app it shows you a list of the available opportunities you can achieve:
(obviously a bunch of these are dummy ones).
You can use the combo boxes at the top to choose which types of opportunities (e.g. Ubuntu Community, Ubuntu UK LoCo Team) you want to view, as well as their category (e.g. Ubuntu Community could have categories such as QA, Development, Advocacy).
Some of the opportunities have padlocks on them. This means that you need to complete another opportunity before that one is unlocked. This helps provide more of a logical journey of things that you can do.
Part of the goal of the accomplishments project is to provide better, more contextual information for how to get started doing something. As an example, if you are curious about the Filed First Bug opportunity, you can double-click it to read information about how to complete it and where to find help:
Obviously this information can be improved (and particularly the links, they are just dummy links). We would also want to add nice things like clicking on an IRC channel and it loading in an IRC client.
The Filed First Bug is a real working accomplishment. When you run the scriptrunner (part of the prototype, but not tied into the GUI yet) it will run the accomplishment’s script and check Launchpad to see if you have filed a bug. If you have, a small notify-osd bubble appears and you can see your trophy in the My Trophies view:
In the real implementation the scriptrunner would run as a service without you having to run the app to start it.
I am pleased with the progress I am making. Next I want to get some more example accomplishments tied in and then I am going to start looking at building the verification service. Should be fun!
After my recent blog post about the lack of Python GTK documentation since the new era of GIR bindings, I was delighted to find this awesome online documentation.
I am certainly not presuming that this documentation was as a result of someone reading my blog post; I assume I didn’t see it online before, but thankyou to everyone who has contributed to it.
I just wanted to provide a quick update on how the team is doing on our set of commitments in the 12.04 cycle. Feel free to ask questions in the comments.
In terms of general team progress, this is how our burndown chart looks today:
I asked each of the guys on the team to follow up with their respective community members to start moving the needle on those work items. As such, if you committed to something in 12.04 for our team’s burndown, expect Jorge, Daniel, or David to come knocking on your door soon.
With Nick and Michael joining the team recently, their work is not reflected in this burndown – their work will appear in the 12.10 burndown.
Developer GrowthDaniel’s core focus in this cycle is developer growth. The first step here is ensuring that our developer processes are working effectively. Over the holiday period the sponsorship queue got a little out of shape, so I asked Daniel to work with the patch pilots to get this back on track. Good progress is being made:
You can see how the queue is falling back down at the end of the graph since Daniel started hammering on this over the last few weeks. Thanks to all the patch pilots for their hard work.
Daniel has also been fixing up some metrics so we can track this work more effectively, and putting together a developer outreach team to provide a more personal level of support to get developers through the process. He will be speaking more about this in the coming weeks.
Cloud and JujuJorge is focused on growing the Juju charming community and is making great progress. A tour of events is planned and Jorge has a hit-list of upstream projects which he is focusing on to get charms put together for. We are seeing good progress on this list and I am confident Jorge will hit his goals in this cycle.
Juju really is awesome. You should check it out.
App DevelopersDavid has been focusing on app developers in this cycle. A first chunk of work here is helping the App Review Board to get in shape. The ARB has a large queue of content to get through, so in Budapest we sat down and dissected the ARB process and made a bunch of optimizations. David has been coordinating with the team to help coordinate this work, and we are seeing progress happening.
We have recently seen three lenses get through the ARB, and David is going to be starting a regular cadence of queue reviews to keep the ball rolling. Thanks to the ARB for all your contributions.
David originally planned a Phase II set of additions to developer.ubuntu.com, but with some re-structuring from the Canonical web team, those plans have been put on hold a little. Instead d.u.c is now being put into maintenance mode and we identified a set of things that need fixing (particularly on the publishing side), and David is coordinating those changes.
The next chunk of work will be outreach to grow our app developer community. Stay tuned for more…and an up-coming competition…
Upstream RelationsMichael is the new upstream community coordinator, and will be focusing on Unity in particular as he gets started. I have asked him to first work with the Desktop Experience team to help get their community merge proposals in shape. There are a number of branches that have been sitting around for a while, and Michael is coordinating a patch pilot scheme to ensure these get reviewed regularly. We expect to see this in place over the next week.
Michael has also been performing an assessment of Mozilla’s SUMO for a potential solution for help in Ubuntu. He has put together an extensive report and a test instance to play with and he will be working with the docs team to continue assessing this as a solution. I am excited to see what work happens here.
Finally, next week we will be putting together an upstream target list for Michael to reach out to to start engaging app authors more effectively around our technology. I am excited to see this work progressing.
…oh, and one other thing: Michael is working with Didier to merge Singlet into Quickly. This should make creating Unity lenses a piece of cake. Bring it!
QAFinally, the latest addition to the team has been Nick Skaggs. Nick has been working with the QA around a few core pieces of work:
The former two items will take time to put in place, but the latter item should be in place in the next week. As such, you should see a regular stream of testing campaigns driven by Nick in 12.04. Be sure to keep an eye on his blog.
. . .Of course, there are lots of other things going on, but these summarize some of the key themes.
The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) is the most important event in the Ubuntu calendar. It is where we get together to discuss, design, and plan the next version of Ubuntu; in this case the Ubuntu 12.10 release.
The next UDS takes place at The Oakland Marriott City Center, Oakland, California, USA from the 7th – 11th May 2012. You can find out more about why UDS is interesting from the perspective of a member of the community, an upstream contributor, and a vendor. We also welcome everyone to participate remotely if you can’t attend the event in person. More more details on how to get there, see this page.
At the heart of a great UDS is a diverse group of attendees who can bring their experience and expertise to the discussions. You don’t have to be technical, or be a programmer or packager to attend – UDS is open to everyone (including non-Ubuntu folks) and free to attend. We encourage everyone with an interest in Ubuntu to attend.
SponsorshipFor every UDS Canonical sponsors the hotel and accommodation of a set of community members to ensure they are free to contribute and bring value to the discussions. We have a limited budget so we can’t sponsor everyone, but we are always keen to have a capable and diverse group to sponsor:
If you are participating in the Ubuntu community, we would love you to apply for sponsorship. This is how it works:
Simple! I look forward to seeing your applications, and seeing many of you in Oakland!
Today we announced the HUD that is landing in Unity. This is an awesome new feature. See Mark’s blog post, the coverage on PC Pro, and the interview with John Lea on OMG! Ubuntu!. Here is a video of the feature in action:
Can’t see it? See it here.
I wanted to point you folks at Nicholas’s blog post about how to test the HUD. You will need to be running Ubuntu 12.04 (which is still in development) to test.
We would like to encourage everyone to test so we can get this rock-solid for 12.04!
I am a pretty terrible programmer. Anyone who has read my code can see that. Unfortunately, I tend to have lots of ideas about how we can use technology in different ways, hence why I write some code. Examples of this have included Lernid, Acire, RaccoonShow, and Jokosher.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your view), I have had Python and GTK to serve my needs here. Python, with it’s awesome batteries-included range of facilities and GTK as a simple yet flexible toolkit has allowed me to create implementations of the ideas that I have dreamed of. I started using these tools many years ago, and they have always provided a simple and effective toolset for me.
My preferred toolset of choice. One day…
Having not written any code for a while, I got the itch this weekend to start writing the trophy helper app that I wrote about as part of the accomplishments system spec that I created with Stuart Langridge and Daniel Holbach. I thought this would be a good opportunity to brush up on my skills, given that PyGTK is dead and the new world is instead the GIR approach to GTK. In a nutshell, this is where the language bindings basically match the C API for GTK thus reducing the need for people to maintain different language bindings.
Of course, this is a good thing: less work for volunteers in maintaining multiple-language support for GTK and a consistent API is good. Unfortunately, I found getting started with this new world a little more complex than I imagined.
From reading the documentation it suggested that all I needed to do was to import Gtk from gi.repository and instead of creating widgets with gtk.<foo> that they would be Gtk.<foo>. The docs suggested a few other lexical adjustments, but not much more than that. There is even a pygi-convert.sh script that can convert older PyGTK code over to the new PyGI way. Unfortunately the script didn’t work for me, so I instead used it as a cheat-sheet for things that needed changing. Sadly, it seemed like some things were not covered in the script.
An example of this included when I was creating a ListStore. In PyGTK code I could add a gtk.gdk.Pixbuf to the ListStore for an icon, but I had a difficult time trying to figure out the new way to describe this. I tried Gtk.gdk.Pixbuf and Gtk.Gdk.Pixbuf but had no luck. Fortunately the awesome Ryan Lortie informed me that it needed to be GdkPixbuf.Pixbuf. Another example of this was gtk.SORT_ASCENDING in my original code and the new Gtk.SortType.ASCENDING in the new code. It seems like various functionality in GTK has been moved around and re-factored.
Unfortunately I could not find any documentation to help me with this. Sure, the C docs are available online, but I am not a C programmer; I am (in the most generous and understanding way) a Python programmer and where I previously had a pretty decent tutorial and reference guide to PyGTK, as a desktop app developer I no longer have these resources to help me. Even though I am not a fantastic programmer, I have written enough Python and GTK code to fumble my way through writing various apps, and if it stumped me as a relatively old hand, I wonder how a brand new developer would get on.
Pictured: old hand.
Now, this may sound a little critical, but it is not mean’t to be. I have tremendous respect for the GTK team, and I am hugely thankful to them for all their hard work. I am also thankful for the team that has worked on the GIR support so that multiple language support can be more efficiently provided. Thanks to all you folks for providing great tools that let a programming numpty such as myself be able to write Free Software.
I just wanted to share this because I feel like these tools are missing the final component: if we had a good solid set of reference documentation generated for each language (naturally, Python is the language I mainly care about), this would help novice and established developers use GTK more effectively. From my personal experience, my patience started wearing pretty thin when I felt like I didn’t have anywhere to find help as I navigated C documentation to try and figure out how the API fitted into my Python application. A good solid Python reference manual would have resolved this issue, and from what I understand, this could potentially be generated from the GIR files. Unfortunately, I don’t think I have the skills to help solve this problem, so I figured the best I could do was to share my story and see if anyone would be interested in helping to solve this problem.
If so, thanks in advance, and thanks again to the GTK team for all your hard work!
UpdateI found this excellent documentation after publishing this entry. This provides exactly the kind of documentation I was looking for. Thanks to anyone who helped contribute to this!
Arbitrary tweets made by TheGingerDog (i.e. David Goodwin) up to 24 January 2012
A little while back I mentioned that Nicholas Skaggs would be joining the Community Team at Canonical. Nick is now on board but is not an Ubuntu Member yet, so his blog is not appearing on Planet Ubuntu.
On his blog he will be talking about improving our QA infrastructure and documentation, building out manual test coverage, and growing a community of QA testers.
You can read his blog here. I am going to ask Nick to apply for Ubuntu Membership in a few months when he has provided a significant and sustained contribution, and then his blog will appear on Planet Ubuntu.
In the aftermath of the big protest against the US SOPA bill, I've seen a fair few people (including Joel Spolsky) ask the question: why are we not lobbying for laws? Why is it that other interests try and oppress the internet and we fight back; shouldn't we be taking the fight to them? Lobby and push for laws that make the net better, and have them fight us for once?
This thought, while it's got the fist-in-the-air fight-the-power undertones that go over well with the internet crowd, is a bit worrying.
The movie and TV industry spent ninety million dollars lobbying the American government in 2011. Where's our ninety million? Most of the tech industry is struggling to stay alive on VC money and the occasional payment; there's no central fund, and no-one with the expertise to do the lobbying anyway, especially when that's combined with the sneaking sense that paying money for attention and to get laws passed is Not Really Cricket.
Hang on, though; the big players have a whole ton of money. Ninety million is about two days profit for Apple, about four days profit for Google, about the same for Microsoft, about the same for Oracle. Seriously, if those four firms donated one day's profit, the tech industry could throw a hundred and fifty million dollars into the pot without serious effort. The MPAA have recently started demanding quid pro quo for their donated money; maybe this is the time to get in the game and outspend them. Any one of the four firms above, and probably others besides, could swallow up the whole movie industry without so much as a gulp if they wanted.
But then we hit the biggest problem. I've been talking about "the tech industry" like it's a thing. There is no tech industry.
The movie people get this right. No-one's lobbying for only movies by Twentieth Century Fox to get extra copyright protection. No-one's arguing that TV programmes should be blocked from being written to DVDs but only if they've got Martin Sheen in them. They work together. What we laughingly call "the tech industry" does not. Do you honestly think that if Apple or Microsoft or Oracle throw down a hundred million notes on a law that that law will benefit startups and Canonical and Red Hat and hobby programmers? If Microsoft throw down that money, do you think the resulting legislation will benefit Apple? Hell no. There's almost no sense of collaboration in the "tech industry" at all; we're a bunch of scratching yowling cats in a bag, too busy fighting one another to maintain a front against outside opposition.
What's the solution here? I don't know. But I'm wary of a world where the interests of the movie industry are less effective in the American Congress but have been replaced by the interests of multi-billion-dollar computer companies. That doesn't seem to benefit the internet all that much.
A little while back I blogged about an accomplishments system that Stuart Langridge and I designed when he came to visit a while back. The idea was simple: a de-centralized system in which we can easily define different types of accomplishments (e.g. filing a bug, submitting a patch, getting a patch sponsored, translating a string) and a means in which users can be rewarded trophies for these accomplishments as well as discovering new accomplishments and how they can be achieved.
The nice thing about the system we designed is that it is de-centralized, it uses Ubuntu One as a transport mechanism (which means we don’t have to build our own transport system and your trophies are visible across all your Ubuntu machines), and the system has a verification process to ensure that people can’t fake their community accomplishments.
I wrote this all up into a spec which you can find here.
We had an interesting session about this topic at UDS and Stuart put together a draft implementation which is at lp:~sil/+junk/libaccom-draft/. The implementation defines a set of sample accomplishments and provides a daemon that runs to maintain state on which accomplishments have been achieved and which are still yet to be completed. The system is neatly integrated into Ubuntu and accomplishments are displayed in a notify-osd bubble:
Stuart also wrote a small API (libaccomplishment) that client apps can use to query the system and present trophies achieved or those yet to be achieved. You can read more about this draft implementation here.
In the original spec there are two clients that would be in the system. A lens:
…and a helper app that is loaded when you click on a trophy in the lens which can provide more information about an accomplishment as well as showing the list of achieved accomplishments and those yet to achieve:
This weekend I decided to start writing this helper app (Michael Hall has expressed an interest in writing the lens). To get things rolling I wanted to display the list of trophies that have been accomplished. It looks like this so far:
This app is using the libaccomplishment API that Stuart provided in his draft implementation and this code could obviously used to develop the lens. There is obviously still lots to build into the app, but it provides a useful proof-of-concept for how it could work. This is a Quickly project and you can grab the code from lp:~jonobacon/junk/trophyinfo.
If you want to play with this, grab Stuart’s draft implementation (lp:~sil/+junk/libaccom-draft/) and run examples/demo.sh – this will start the daemon. You can then grab my branch (lp:~jonobacon/junk/trophyinfo) and run quickly run and see the trophies in the view.
Everything so far has been something of a proof of concept, but I wanted to see if anyone else was interested in participating. There are a number of things that we need to do:
Anyone interested in taking part?
UPDATESince I posted this I have made a bunch of improvements to the helper app. This includes:
I pushed all these updated to lp:~jonobacon/junk/trophyinfo if you want to play with it.
A week ago I flew to Budapest for an Ubuntu Engineering Team Rally. This is where we get the Ubuntu Engineers at Canonical and some other groups together for a week to work together, plan future work, have meetings and make progress on our existing commitments. It is in this week that I gather together with the guys on my team and we have the rare privilage of working together from the same office (we all work remotely usually).
Daniel Holbach, Jorge Castro, and David Planella were there, and we welcomed Nicholas Skaggs to the team who started his first day at Canonical on the first day of the Rally; a brave man! Unfortunately Michael Hall could not join us, but we had a tablet with his gleaning smiling face beaming into our room on Google+. He was there in spirit, if not physically.
Chris Farley was also there in spirit, if not physically.
We made some great progress and put quite a dent in our burn-down chart, but I wanted to summarize some of the work going on right now that might interest you:
Of course, there were many other things that happened, but these were some of the main ones. Remember you can keep up to date with out work on the burndown chart and in #ubuntu-community-team on Freenode.
At CES 2012, Bill and I were chatting about Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things and decided* that it was the best thing on the whole entire internet. To that end, we came up with the idea of Canonical People Looking At Things. Canonical people look at things a lot.
So, it was my job to come up with a way of creating a collaborative photo blog. After tweeting to ask how, I got a bunch of suggestions, like Wordpress, Posterous, Tumblr, and so on. However, all of these things require me to do all the posts, or to set up each author. Wordpress.com may not (thanks to a suggestion by popey), but you can't theme a wordpress.com blog to look like a photo blog without paying money, as far as I can tell, and it'd still require people to go to the admin console and then me to approve each post, which is way way too much effort for a joke.
Then I remembered Blogger. (Remember blogger?)
Blogger lets you set up a blog and then create a Secret Email Address for it. Anyone with the Secret Email Address can post to the blog by emailing the email address. Yay!
So, I set one up. A bit of tweaking of the templates (to use Canonical aubergine) and the HTML (to remove post titles, post footers, enforce that the captions (all "looking at X") are in lower case, that sort of thing) and it's done.
canonicalpeoplelookingatthings.blogspot.com
I can't stop chuckling.
Like many of you I get a lot of email, and like many of you I often struggle to keep up with it in the context of everything else that is going on. Recently I have been trying a few little experiments in adjusting my email workflow to see if I can be more productive. I am seeing some good results and just wanted to share a few small changes I have made that have impacted my workflow in the interests of them possibly being useful for you too:
Of course, while these things work for me, many of these won’t be of interest or work for you folks, but some may, and I just wanted to share them. I am sure there are lots of little tweaks to your own email workflow that you have found useful, and I would love to hear them in the comments. Happy emailing!
The always awesome didrocks posted yesterday to encourage the testing of the Unity PPA. In this cycle we have changed how Unity is deployed into Ubuntu by required a set of acceptance criteria tests before it enters the archive. As such, much of the testing of the new Unity releases is happening in a PPA and then when a new Unity release is ready, it is added to the 12.04 development branch.
Not only this, but the PPA includes a set of checkbox tests that you can use to provide solid feedback on many different elements of Unity. If you can take a little time to grab the PPA and run through the tests, that would be great.
I have tested this most recent release in the PPA, and I am stunned with how solid Unity feels.
I wanted to share didrocks’ post but his blog is currently down (he knows and is resolving it), so I wanted to republish below. Be sure to grab the PPA and test on 12.04!
Here is the post:
The Canonical ubuntu platform and product strategy teams are gathering in Budapest this week to tackle as much work as possible on precise pangolin. Despite the promise of snow and cheap beers, we are working hard on getting Unity 5.0 out of the door.
One of the goal of this release is to increase quality, precision, no regression on the work we push to the unstable version of ubuntu. The desktop experience team made automated and manual tests for that and we can already see the first benefits from it. We pushed an automated building infrastructure with public test reports to have commits automatically tested, pushed to the trunk of development branch as well as available packages in a ppa.
With all those news features and requirements, we needed to redesign the release process and that’s what we have done last Monday. Let me expose the few steps I will explain there.
And that’s it! Everyone will be able to enjoy the whole new shiny Unity 5.0, containing a bunch of bug fixes, as well, as all the layout and ground for being rock solid, speeded up and just… precise Unity version!