UK Linux User Groups

You're gonna catch a cold
From the ice inside your soul
Christina Perri — Jar of Hearts

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.

1. Have a spare key. Note: I do not have a spare key hidden in my garden, burglars, so don't go looking for it. I do not know how to have a spare key somewhere where you can get at it but thieves cannot; suggestions welcomed.
2. Have a girlfriend so that there's someone to let you back in.
3. Next time you see a policeman, be nice to him.

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 Growth

Daniel’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 Juju

Jorge 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 Developers

David 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 Relations

Michael 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!

QA

Finally, the latest addition to the team has been Nick Skaggs. Nick has been working with the QA around a few core pieces of work:

• Getting our manual test infrastructure in place. We are going to be piloting Case Conductor as a solution that will fit alongside Jenkins.
• Consolidating our QA community teams. Nick is evaluating our current QA on-ramp and then we will put together a proposal for bringing more efficiencies and consistency to the QA community.
• Building a take-and-bake testing process so Ubuntu Engineering can reach out to Nick to facilitate community testing more effectively.

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.

Sponsorship

For 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:

• We strive to support community members who are actively involved in Ubuntu and who are providing significant and sustained contributions to the Ubuntu project.
• We always welcome Upstream contributors who are bring value to Ubuntu indirectly via active participation in their upstream project, but who are keen to see quality support for that upstream in Ubuntu.
• Contributors are willing to actively participate not only throughout the full Ubuntu Developer Summit week, but also following with active contributions throughout the release cycle.
• We are always keen to welcome members of the community who have never been to UDS before and are keen to participate and experience the event.
• You don’t have to provide technical contributions to apply – if you have participated in the areas of advocacy, documentation, testing, art, design etc, you are encouraged to apply.
• UDS is an event that encourages diversity – we welcome everyone to apply for sponsorship, irrespective of gender, race, impairment, technical expertise, or other factors.

If you are participating in the Ubuntu community, we would love you to apply for sponsorship. This is how it works:

1. You can apply for sponsorship by following these instructions. Apologies for the different forms you need to fill in – we are going to consolidate these forms at the next UDS. The deadline for submissions is Wed 22nd February 2012 so be sure to get yours in!
2. When the deadline is reached we will assess the applications and finalize who we will be able to sponsor.
3. You will then receive an email outlining whether we can sponsor you or not.

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!

Update

I 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 cache miss storm with WordPress and dotdeb.org’s config file overwriting led to a crap day for one website today. (2012/01/24, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Someone said I have a bad memory. I’m not sure who though. (2012/01/22, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Hockey: Bromsgrove 3xi 3:2 Old Sils. Another win ( cc @bromsgrovehc ) (2012/01/21, Redditch, Worcestershire)
• RT @Oakley_J: Scrap metal dealers take note: The value of the metal in a pound coin is currently £1.08. #madeupstaturday (2012/01/21)
• “I want it to still be my birthday!” says Rowan. (2012/01/21, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• “Thank you aunty candy “(@moreteadoctor ) t.co/42XbcU6Q (2012/01/20)
• Today I had to reboot my mouse to get ‘right click’ working again. *sigh*. #apple #magicMouse (2012/01/19)
• RT @AndrewBloch: The awkward moment when you break the law you proposed #StopSOPA t.co/7M3lXZUs (2012/01/18)
• I support #wikipediablackout! Show your support here t.co/SawEkEyn (2012/01/18)
• Grrrr, software update available for my telly (Sony Bravia) but it doesn’t seem to add Netflix support. (2012/01/16)
• Postfix > 2.6.0 I needed : always_add_missing_headers = yes
  to fix missing message-id fields… shouldn’t assume all email has a message-id! (2012/01/16)
• “Monsters” 1&2 are sound asleep, gently snoring. Now to look into that postfix problem for work. (2012/01/16, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• RT @guardiantech: Toddlers get to grips with app design t.co/DOQBX1WE (2012/01/16)
• Lesson of the day: elephant seals are strong swimmers and you shouldn’t invite them into your octopod. (2012/01/15, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• I’m wondering why so many people are walking down Bromsgrove high street when nothing is open. (2012/01/15, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Hockey: Bromsgrove 3rd xi 4:3 Pershore. (cc @BromsgroveHC ) (2012/01/14, Wychavon, Worcestershire)
• RT @PalePurpleLtd: It’s amazing how rubbish Orange sales people are on the phone. “it’s out of stock… Phone back tomorrow!”. #LostSale (2012/01/13)
• Seven Trent’s website conveniently 404s when you click on “contact details”. That’s one way to stop people phoning you! (2012/01/13, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Evil Google – “Google, what were you thinking?” ← Mocality Kenya t.co/AzNPYJ3F via @mocality (2012/01/13)
• RT @PierreJoye: PHP 5.3.9 has been finally released! t.co/52GtIHgw Go update, now! t.co/IHlXLCch t.co/TNbRCEjV (2012/01/11)
• Trying to figure out why someone thought sticking QR codes around a high street to advertise to consumers was a good idea. (2012/01/10, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Ooh Bromsgrove has an electric vehicle charging point. Go us! (2012/01/10, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• My hoover is really sucking after cleaning the filter. Now, if only I could banish Monday night’s insomnia…. (2012/01/10, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• RT @jasoncosta: “Web server software NGINX is now bigger than Microsoft IIS” t.co/tq3Trc38 (2012/01/08)
• Why I’m not going to Bungee jump, ever. t.co/kxoTwzvO (ropes break). (2012/01/08)
• It seems my little princess no longer needs carrying down stairs. Soon I’ll be redundant. (2012/01/08, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• How can a four year old be so bad at hiding? Still, it makes my afternoon somewhat easier….. (2012/01/08, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Bromsgrove 3xi 4:2(?) west brom. (friendly). Big thank-you to the stand ins – Nigel, Charlie, Graham & Lawrence (cc @BromsgroveHC ). (2012/01/07, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Today I’ve created a Gantt Chart with @ganttproject – so far so good. #FunPackedLife (2012/01/07)
• Have the humans delivered their ultimate cup of coffee? …. *ergh* FETID. How dare they present this to me? … Prepare the attack! (2012/01/07)
• Good morning octonauts. (2012/01/07, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• It seems I wasn’t mistaken when I saw a car with a “real nappy cakes” advert on it the other day. Not my sort of cake. (2012/01/06, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• This morning it seems that petrol stations are the place to have domestic disputes. Perhaps there’s something in the air. (2012/01/05, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• RT @brucel: Facebook cited in over 2/3 of US divorce cases and 1/3 in the UK t.co/gcNZ5Yyj via @stoweboyd (2012/01/02)
• Eat all your dinner or the octopod goes away….. (2012/01/02, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Happy new year. Wishing you the best of health, wealth and happiness for 2012. (cue 101 SMS’s to ppl and one (cheap) message on twitter) (2011/12/31)
• Me: “we need to go into town to look for a present for grandma”
  Rowan: “can we get her an octopod like mine?”
  #octonautitis (2011/12/31)
• RT @snim2: Brilliant read – the state of UK trains: t.co/pbEYLG1N /via @pigworker (2011/12/31)
• Perl PHP python bash #code2011 (2011/12/31)
• RT @deadprogram: What programming languages have you used this year? Tweet using #code2011. Please do it, and RT! (2011/12/31)
• Cheese: yummy. Bread: yummy. Cheese and bread together: yucky. #kids (2011/12/31)
• RT @vuokko: new year’s resolutions: 640 x 480, 800 x 600, 1024 x 768 (2011/12/31)
• The Gup A loaded with treasure…. t.co/ffVflF1v (2011/12/31)
• I love my children – they pick up their chocolate coins, peel off the foil and force me to eat them. (2011/12/31)
• Sofa constructed. Now to find somewhere to dispose of the massive cardboard box. (2011/12/29)
• Ikea. It’s stressful. (2011/12/27)
• This morning’s run might be a bit slower than recent ones. #biscuits #cheese #turkey #chocolate etc. (2011/12/27)
• RT @anya_goodwin: The Gruffalo’s child is the best TV program ever. I can’t stop laughing and pointing! (2011/12/26)
• Q. What’s green and bounces around the garden?
  A. A spring onion. (2011/12/26, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Q. Why don’t elephants like penguins?
  A. They can’t get the wrappers off. (2011/12/26, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Lovefilm’s online streaming really is pants (rubbish selection). I’m glad I’m on a free trial. #DefinitelyCancelling (2011/12/25)
• Right now, at the North Pole, Santa is drinking this after a hard nights work. (Santa’s Swallie, via @myBrewerytap ) t.co/4WPjgcJK (2011/12/25, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• It’ll soon be time to put on the new socks and jumper and ride around on the new bicycle. #somethingsDoNotChange. (2011/12/25, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• RT @moreteadoctor: Mug, brain cell and MRSA. Is my brother hinting at something? (2011/12/25)
• RT @moreteadoctor: Thought I’d been given a lump of poo for Christmas, then I realised it was MRSA. How festive! t.co/mwS2lVAa (2011/12/25)
• Oooh. The Gruffalo’s Child is on BBC1 today. BBC++ (2011/12/25, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Seeing as it’s a blizzard outside and I’ve got a marathon to walk today, I’d better fuel myself accordingly … chocolate for breakfast. (2011/12/25)
• Christmas – when it’s apparently acceptable to smell as if you’ve washed in mulled wine (thank you @MoreTeaDoctor) (2011/12/25)
• RT @neiltyson: According to the song, Rudolph’s nose is shiny, which means it reflects rather than emits light. Useless for navigating fog. (2011/12/25)
• Cheap ploy to wake someone up on Xmas morning – send a text saying it’s snowed. #snow #Xmas (2011/12/25, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Nom nom. Turrón for breakfast. #chocolate #pig (2011/12/24, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• RT @StormySan: Hi think @thegingerdog‘s present didn’t turn out too badly t.co/9Q9XkkY7 (2011/12/23)
• I think it’s time to arrange a GoKarting event for @PalePurpleLtd and some hangers on for early Jan 2012. (2011/12/23)
• Today is time to panic that you do not have enough presents to give; thankfully(!) Bromsgrove is crap for shopping so it’s too late to fix. (2011/12/23)
• RT @_Victoria_T: Urgently seeking #PHP #Developer for permanent position based in #West #Midlands please pass my details to anyone looki … (2011/12/23)
• RT @oziesimmons: Xerox is on a list of pro-SOPA corporations. Let the irony of that one sink in for a bit. #copythis (2011/12/23)
• DANGER – The supermarkets will soon be shut for ONE DAY! Remember to stock up on the essentials (chocolate, sweets, cheese, wine, nibbles). (2011/12/22)
• Now to preempt excessive eating by excessive exercise (10km+ run, Stourbridge rd). It’s a shame our customers for trying to fatten us up… (2011/12/22, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Hopefully the antibiotics will help @rowangoodwin feel somewhat better over xmas #earInfection #crossingFingersAndToes (2011/12/22)
• Only 16 new answer-phone messages on my mobile. Oops. (2011/12/20, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• I think the chainsaw and pneumatic drill have succeeded in their evil quest. I am now awake. (2011/12/20, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Great karting with MrKarting (nr Leamington spa).
  I was 4th :-/ cold fingers and toes and tired wrists…. Thanks @ukscores (2011/12/19, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire)
• It’s raining (lightly) and the roads are frozen. Weeeeeeeee…. (2011/12/19, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Server migration complete. That seems to have taken up half of today. :-/ (2011/12/19, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Excellent. Another @mybrewerytap box has arrived. Now, do I share it with my
  employees …. (2011/12/18, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Shortcut found to work. It’s now ~2 minutes walk away (2011/12/18, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• “do you wont a window cleaner” … #Bromsgrove #fail t.co/9gOeXzkr (2011/12/18, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Get a free Xperia™ arc S for Christmas :: Anorak News t.co/wunx5MJu via @TheAnorak #competition (2011/12/18)
• It’s time for the country to grind to a halt. Killer snow pandemic !! t.co/eYo2Nay9 (2011/12/16, Barnet, London)
• Today: spectrum, micro, kvstore and eclipse+xdebug (#BBC training). After a nearly 2 year break my brain has refound some useful memories. (2011/12/15, Barnet, London)
• I think if you’re running speed is only a little faster than my walking speed, then you’re doing something wrong. (2011/12/15)
• Why do I have trouble sleeping every Monday night ? (2011/12/13, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• After seeing the weather alerts on BBC news I’m wondering if parking my car under a tree was the best idea … #NotSureWhereElseItCanGo. (2011/12/13, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Ooh. New release of wordpress (v3.3). It’ll be time to upgrade tomorrow. Thanks for the Xmas present @wordpress ! (2011/12/13, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Jeez mobile internet is so slow without 3G. How did we survive on dialup? And in 10 years time what will we deem ‘horribly slow’ – 5mbit? (2011/12/13, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• House move complete. It took ~5 hours. (2011/12/12, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• RT @mikko: Oops. Maybe nobody will notice. t.co/QTXos25N
  /pic via @Forensication (2011/12/11)
• Oh, #NewTwitter… again…. meh. (2011/12/11)
• “Give blood. Play hockey”. Says the T-shirt I’ve won via @bromsgrovehc‘s raffle. (2011/12/11, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Bromsgrove iix 5-4 vs Kidderminster iix. (friendly). #hockey (cc @BromsgroveHC ) (2011/12/10, Redditch, Worcestershire)
• Mutter mutter health and safety bollocks mutter mutter. (now to hope I don’t get injured on said icy pitch) (2011/12/10, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Typical! I’m back in Bromsgrove and get a phone call of “Kidderminster are pissed off re cancellation & want a friendly” Back to redditch… (2011/12/10, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Stupid all weather AstroTurf pitch is out of action due to frost. No hockey today #Bromsgrove (2011/12/10, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• The christmas spirit has hit the office … And we have (or are) crackers. t.co/V7Oi3aI1 (2011/12/09, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• RT @tapbot_paul: To get back the DM tab in Twitter for iOS just swipe up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. (2011/12/08)
• Octonauts Octopod – £47 quid on Amazon; Tesco online – £35. t.co/vvKMDvUR and t.co/Sz3Mnbw2 Bad Amazon. #SpoiltChildren (2011/12/08)
• 45 minutes in the oven at ~200′c is a bit much I guess. #fail #cooking t.co/E2Nzrnut (2011/12/08, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• I <3 legacy PHP code (Sql Injection, magic quotes, sprintf etc) t.co/L8PYhbNW (2011/12/08)
• Bromsgrove’s shoppers have clearly realised that parking restrictions are not enforced in the coop / retail park car park. #nearlyFull #free (2011/12/08, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• RT @schwuk: Stormtrooper Motorcycle Leathers – Awesome, but Scout Trooper leathers would have been perfect! t.co/xmSVD0pB (2011/12/07)
• I pickup keys to my new place on Monday – Here’s to hoping I still have a working phone line at home and BT/BeThere haven’t been over eager (2011/12/07)
• Sound the octo-alert vegimal style! (2011/12/06, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• RT @rowangoodwin: SQUIRREL! Come back down!! t.co/JkHZN9iG (2011/12/04)
• RT @WPBhamUK: Next WordPress Birmingham meetup is Weds 7th December, Old Joint Stock, 6.30pm onwards. t.co/LJ7egP3y (2011/12/04)
• Ten pin bowling scores: Anya 110, me: 96, Rowan 89. (2011/12/04, Birmingham, Birmingham)
• Slowly learning to scroll “the right way” #lion …. (2011/12/03)
• Bromsgrove 3xi 1:5(?) Droitwich. ( cc @BromsgroveHC ) (2011/12/03, Wychavon, Worcestershire)
• Using Solr for text searching with WordPress howto – for Debian Lenny – t.co/6sf56270 (tomcat5.5 + wordpress 3.x + Solr 3.4) (2011/11/30)
• RT @BromsgroveDC: Strike action: customer service centres are operating as normal. #bromsgrove (2011/11/30)
• I think I quite like Mockingbird for Wireframe designs/mockups. t.co/dKVfEeje (2011/11/29)
• Hopefully none of my websites are on this list – t.co/rWDjasPd (2011/11/29)
• RT @PalePurpleLtd: Our first android app for the mobile wearable watch – #imwatch – is complete. (2011/11/28)
• Now … What’s this about tram lady? Presumably a bit like cat bin woman? (2011/11/28, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• I’m surprised they didn’t specify a LED telly, xbox 360 and a tumble drier too…. (2011/11/28, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Today on Bromsgrove freecycle “…NEED SOFA, WASHING MACHINE,TABLE &
  CHAIRS,WARDROBES,TV & CABINET,COOKER, FRIDGE,FREEZER” #notAskingForMuch (2011/11/28, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• RT @guardiantech: Computer lessons are out of date, admits government t.co/bF6TImhS (2011/11/28)
• In other news, today’s coffee was probably stronger than redbull etc. #buzzing #hyper (2011/11/28, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Yippee. @simplylets are the bestest letting agents eva!!1! #happy #movingBeforeXmas (2011/11/28, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• The Life of a Software Engineer – t.co/6tftRG5c (“This time I will build a solid foundation … Oh, I’ve done it again haven’t I?”) (2011/11/27)
• Coo – just found out about sloppy backports – PostgreSQL 9.0 on Lenny “deb t.co/q2LR0a94 lenny-backports-sloppy main” #debian (2011/11/27)
• Bromsgrove 3xi 3:2 Evesham (cc @BromsgroveHC) #hockey (2011/11/26)
• RT @entrepreneurs4f: We are accepting applications for our next intake! Deadline 30th Nov, apply now to help launch your tech startup ht … (2011/11/25)
• Come on estate agent. Phone me back with good news. (hint hint @SimplyLets ). (2011/11/25, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Woke up and had a Nosebleed. I’ve not had one in ages. Hope this isn’t the first of many. (2011/11/25, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
• Forgetting the passphrase to my gpg encrypted password file isn’t my finest moment…. vim doc/passwords.asc … .oO( err.. oh crap ) (2011/11/24)
• Alcohol soaked tampons, perhaps not the way forward. t.co/nXsld2so (2011/11/24)
• RT @bhamsouthpolice: Good morning and welcome to the 3rd Birmingham South Police 24 hour Tweet-a-thon!We are looking forward to tweeting … (2011/11/24)
• varnish++ (of the geeky variety, not the girly variety) (2011/11/24)
• Denial of Service, the old fashioned approach – coordinated posting of Xmas cards … Take that Royal Mail! (1999/02/16, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)

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:

• Stuart’s draft implementation needs extending, and he would like to find a new owner for it. Currently the API is simple but might need fleshing out further.
• The helper app here that I created a first cut of needs expanding and functionality added. We need to provide different ways of filtering the trophies, providing information about a specific trophy and how to achieve it, and the other features outlined in the spec.
• Each accomplishment has a script that is run to see if you achieved something (e.g. if you filed a bug in Launchpad). In the spec, when one of these scripts returns that you accomplished the task, it creates a trophy, and syncs it via Ubuntu One to a validation server which runs the same script to verify you really did achieve the accomplishment. This then signs the trophy which then syncs back to your machine. We need someone to build this verification service.
• We need to evaluate and extend the .accomplishment format to include documentation for how to achieve a trophy. I know Jim Campbell expressed an interest in working on this and I would love to encourage others to participate too.
• We need to create a library of Ubuntu Community accomplishments. Stuart’s draft implementation includes an example script for filing a bug. See the list of ideas that Daniel has been working on.

Anyone interested in taking part?

UPDATE

Since I posted this I have made a bunch of improvements to the helper app. This includes:

• The app now displays trophies achieved on the My Trophies page and those not yet achieved on the Opportunities page.
• Locked trophies (i.e. those that need another trophy to be accomplished before it can be) now use a different icon (we will need new icons for all of these, so I am using stock icons right now).
• Trophy/opportunities status is now updated with each page load which means that trophies are updated more dynamically.
• Double-clicking an opportunities will take you to the WebKit page to display info about it. I just need to update the .accomplishment scheme to provide more useful info.

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:

• David, Daniel, and I spent quite some time opening up the ARB process and helping to get things back on track. We now have a flow of lenses coming through and the queue is looking in better shape. Thanks to the ARB for their work here and we will be continuing to build refinements into the process over the coming weeks.
• Nick got on-boarded at the event and met the QA team (Gema, John-Baptiste, Carlos, Pete etc). We discussed plans around putting in place a manual test case system (we will be piloting Case Conductor). We also centralized QA communication channels (#ubuntu-testing on Freenode) and Nick started cleaning up the documentation for how people participate in Ubuntu QA. I am excited by the progress happening here…more to come soon!
• Jorge made further progress on the charms front and we planned out a tour of events to run charm schools. Good progress is being made on upstream charm targets and awareness of Juju is growing.
• David and I discussed next steps for developer.ubuntu.com. Things will be on hold a little in this cycle due to the web team being re-assigned to other work. Instead we are fixing up chunks of developer.ubuntu.com, particularly around publishing apps and reference materials.
• Daniel (who just got back from an awesome holiday in Morocco) and I synced up on the sponsorship queue which has got a little out of shape recently, so Daniel is re-focusing on that over the coming week as well as building out the developer advisory group and identify prospective developers and providing 1-on-1 guidance to get them through the developer process.
• Michael is going to be putting in place a patch pilot scheme for the DX team to ensure community merge proposals are getting through in a timely manner. He also coordinated the move from #ayatana to #ubuntu-unity on Freenode.
• Michael also connected with Jorge regarding the transition of Unity responsibilities and he will be coordinating further relationships with upstreams. The goal here is simple: encourage more participation in Unity development as well as the consumption of our APIs by upstreams.
• I spent some time with the team on team-related workflow. Everyone is pretty happy with how we are working, are happy with the public IRC meetings and comfortable in how we are tracking our work and moving forward on projects.
• We discussed raising the awareness of cool things going on in Ubuntu and discussed how we can provide a more representative view of this work across blogs and social media. You can expect more blogging out of our team and other teams.

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:

• Using the GMail web interface – I back-end all my mail in GMail and traditionally use IMAP to access it via the default email client in Ubuntu (e.g. Thunderbird). While I love Thunderbird and Evolution, unfortunately GMail IMAP access is a touch slower than I would like (I have talked to Chris Coulson about this issue in Thunderbird who has looked into it) and the small delay in loading messages makes the email experience feel a little less sleek. Using GMail directly removes this slight lag, and it has made the email experience feel more satisfying (obviously for those of you who don’t have this lag, such as POP users, should be fine). Importantly, if you use GMail too, check out the GMail labs split pane view which makes GMail act like a traditional email client; I find that it makes GMail useful for me as opposed to the traditional view.
• Top posting – I realized recently how anal I am about laying out my messages and replies. I hit reply, say hi to the person, respond inline, make sure there is space between my response and the quoted text, add my name etc. For most 1-on-1 conversations this level of layout is not really needed (although on mailing lists I still bottom post), and just hitting reply and typing without all this laying out makes email feel so much more efficient.
• Don’t star mails to reply to – my traditional email workflow is that I wake up in the morning, grab my tablet, and while I wake up I read my email and star all the mails I need to respond to. I then grab breakfast, do all my calls, and then get to the starred emails to respond to. Instead of starring I experimented by marking emails unread that I need to reply to. For some reason this makes the urgency of replying more amplified in my head. I think that I just don’t like seeing unread emails, and it flips a psychological bit that makes me want to reply to them quicker as opposed to starring and my email just being another list of things to tend to. I know sounds a little strange, but this small change also affects how I handle my email.

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.

1. On Monday evening, we have frozen the trunk, which means, no more new code can enter unity at this point (as well for all the related components like unity-2d, nux, dee, libunity, bamf, unity lenses). Only selected branches can now get in, and those are picked only if they contribute to getting closer to this release quality.
2. Then, after ensuring on Tuesday that people can safely install the new release candidate, the unity-team ppa started to contain the whole latest of what will soon be the 5.0 version of unity. If you install from this ppa, you will see a kind prompt asking you to contribute when logging back to your desktop.
3. This prompts help getting to our main goal, which is ensurin the quality of the new release. Multiple things have been put in practice for that. The desktop experience team qualified the release using their manual tests and running automated ones again. Aurélien and I run our own manual tests (120 of them, trying to covering the whole Unity functionnalities). This finished on Tuesday evening (we rephrased some) and we rebuilt all needed packages again, as well as some other dependencies like update-manager, usb-creator, nautilus, empathy, and gwibber to still make them working when you install from the ppa (ABI bumps). From those test we spotted regressions and get them fixed/fix them, regenerate everything and such.
4. The manual test wrapper over checkbox is also automatically installed from the ppa. Which means that YOU can help too! I’m bootstrapping this process with the French Musketeers to ensure everything is correct and ready for the next release. How to help there will be widespread for Unity 5.2. More on that soon!
5. On Thursday morning, we will collect the results from the tests, see what’s still needed to be fixed (if it’s the case) and then cycle back on the previous steps.
6. At the same time, the bugs that are fixed will be milestoned, some cleanup will be done and everything will be then ready to format an explicit text of what’s in the new release.
7. Then, the process is well known: we will issue tarballs for every projects we need to upload
8. Packaging them properly, with the right build-dependencies and needed tweaks will be done, and upload to precise to share the love!
9. Finally, every non fixed bugs but targeted will be reported to the next milestones.

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!