Planet Wolves

Ubuntu 9.04 Developer Summit Sponsorship

2008-09-08T10:17:03+00:00

The Ubuntu Developer Summit is one of the most central events in the Ubuntu calendar. It is there that we discuss, debate and design the next version of Ubuntu. It is an incredible experience, filled with smart and enthusiastic people, fast paced and exhausting, but incredibly gratifying to be part of the process that builds the next Ubuntu.

Every time we run a UDS we re-think how we do things to ensure it is as effective as possible, and for the next UDS which takes place at the food-alicious Googleplex in Mountain View, California from Monday 8th - Friday 12th December 2008, we have decided to adjust how we sponsor people. For every UDS we (Canonical) sponsor a large number of community contributors, as well as sending our entire paid development team, so we can get as much out of the UDS as possible. Traditionally we have simply picked our list of sponsors, but this time round, we would like to have those of you who want to be sponsored submit a request for sponsorship.

How Sponsorship Works

At every UDS we have a set of key topics that most of us have in mind around a typical release. For this UDS we have taken a look at Ubuntu Brainstorm and determined that the key topics for Ubuntu 9.04 are:

Networking
Power Management
Desktop Experience
Booting
Hardware Support
Sharing and Backup
Desktop Configuration
Server Configuration
Network Authentication
Security
Community
Mobile
QA
Other

This time around we expect everyone we sponsor to lead at least one discussion around a topic that relates to one of the above topics - this means that you will schedule at least one session, lead the discussion and make notes about the outcome of the discussion. For sessions you are not leading, we still expect you to participate through the week and join in the discussions. The session you choose to lead should be based around an idea in the Ubuntu Brainstorm. We will also expect you to make the notes available at the end of the week so we can provide UDS proceedings for the wider community.

If you want to increase your likely-hood of being sponsored, the following helps:

Volunteer to become crew - we need lots of help to run the UDS, and if you volunteer to become crew you are helping to run the event and help our attendees. We like that. Also, we will give you a rather funky Ubuntu Developer Summit crew t-shirt to wow your friends and family with.
If you only need partial sponsorship (just travel or accommodation) you can specify this in your application.
We will be assessing your wider Ubuntu contributions - for example, if you have been keeping up with your 5-A-Day and have tended to the Sponsorship Queue, these are excellent additional factors that we take into account.

How To Request Sponsorship

Luckily, requesting your sponsorship is pretty simple, and we have built a rather snazzy system (thanks to the rather excellent Scott James Remnant) to handle sponsorship requests. To apply for sponsorship, just follow these simple steps:

Go to Ubuntu Brainstorm and pick out a bunch of ideas on there that you are interested in working on for the Ubuntu 9.04 release. Remember, we expect all sponsored participants to lead at least one discussion for a Brainstorm idea, but we also expect you to attend a number of additional sessions. Note down the brainstorm ideas you are interested in.
Go to summit.netsplit.com and log in with OpenID. When you have logged in, click the Request Sponsorship link.
On the first page, add your location and use the About yourself box to tell us why you should be sponsored and tell us about your work on Ubuntu - here you should tell us your vital stats - tell us your 5-A-Day numbers, your work on the sponsorship queue, what you have uploaded, which teams you are in, your LoCo involvement, any translation work and other work that you have been involved in. When you have done this, click the Next button.
On the next page, add each Ubuntu Brainstorm URL into box. Then select a topic that the Brainstorm idea most closely resembles and select from the Participation box what you would like to do for that idea. when you have added your idea, click the Next button.
On the final page, answer the questions and then click Finish to finish your sponsorship request.

All done.

Everyone should get their sponsorship requests in by Thursday 25th September 2008 to be considered. Good luck!

DIGG THIS!

Erm…

2008-09-05T10:11:28+00:00

Congratulations to the FSF for managing to get the legendary Stephen Fry to celebrate the anniversary of GNU. I am just somewhat surprised they decided to license it under a non-free license (Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States).

Boot’s on the other foot now, eh?

Two Years Going Strong

2008-09-04T10:04:15+00:00

Two years ago today I came to work at Canonical as the Ubuntu Community Manager. When I started at Canonical, it was just me working with Mark to define my role and focus and to determine what I wanted to do to help grow and facilitate our stunning community. Since then I have become part of the wider Ubuntu team at Canonical, and I have grown out my own team with my fellow horsemen Daniel Holbach and Jorge Castro. I am looking forward to continuing to grow the team and continuing to help our community to do amazing things.

Canonical is a fun and inspiring place to work, and it has a very distinctive atmosphere; an atmosphere that is driven by a workforce that has the bit between their teeth to get out there and really make a difference. With today marking my two year anniversary it has got my mind thinking about the incredibly smart people that I have the pleasure of working with each and every day. Firstly, this obviously includes Daniel Holbach and Jorge Castro - not only great staff, but my brothers in our Ubuntu journey, plus our close brothers in arms Graham Binns and Pedro Villavicencio Garrido. I also want to send props to the main man himself, Mark Shuttleworth, my immediate peers with Matt Zimmerman, Scott James Remnant, Colin Watson, Rick Clark, David Mandala, Pete Graner, Henrik Nilson Omma and the various people I have worked with closely at Canonical (including, but not limited to) - Malcolm Yates, Ben Collins, Steve George, Kat Kinnie, Michelle Surtees-Myers, Billy Cina, Cezzaine Haigh, Claire Newman, Gerry Carr, Jane Silber, James Westby, Matt Nuzum, Magdalena Lobodziec, Sebastien Bacher, Kenneth Wimer, James Troup, Chris Jones, Brian Murray, Claire Davis, Randy Linnell, Ted Gould, Mirco Muller, Chris Cheney, Alexander Sack and many more.

Of course, Canonical employees are only a fraction of my colleagues; they are augmented by our incredible community…a community that is brimming with the same kind of enthusiasm, excitement and commitment to the crusade, and our community is doing great. We are nailing bugs with 5-A-Day, getting more and more participants on Ubuntu Open Week and Ubuntu Develop Week, our LoCo teams are now 170+, MOTU is growing every month, and our UDSs are becoming breeding grounds for great contributors. I am also incredibly happy that Ubuntu is still fun - when producing an Operating System as large and well known as Ubuntu, there is a risk of us getting wrapped up in the less interesting side of popularity, but from what I can tell, we are all still having a blast.

I am hugely proud of our community, I am hugely proud of Canonical, and I am hugely proud to be both a member and employee. Here’s to another two years, and lets just see what is possible…

Links for 2008-09-03 [del.icio.us]

2008-09-04T05:00:00+00:00

The 50 greatest arts videos on YouTube
Observer list of arts footage gems

Denied By Reign Release Date Announced

2008-09-03T20:00:20+00:00

Bingo!

2008-09-03T14:22:01+00:00

Wow. Everyone loves Buzzword Bingo, but sometimes it gets a tad ridiculous. Back in July I got a gem via email. It started off with this zinger of an opener (identities censored to protect the innocent):

Program Focuses On Helping The Open Source Ecosystem Grow Sustainable Businesses By Implementing A Community-Leveraged Model

It then went on to say:

XXXXXXXXXX, a leading provider of commercial open source middleware solutions for database high availability, today announced XXXXXXXXXX. The program is focused on creating a rising tide for the broader open source ecosystem, and is focused on leveraging community-driven development and frictionless distribution to extend the ecosystem.

Shazzam!

It is interesting that when you remove the company and the specific announcement, the rest of the paragraph is completely meaningless. What exactly is frictionless distribution? Are the rest of us somehow lumbered with friction in our distribution? From what I can tell “focused on leveraging community-driven development and frictionless distribution to extend the ecosystem” is a lot of words for saying “focused on Open Source development“.

Don’t get me wrong, I completely understand that language is a tool and a facility, and it needs to be carefully selected and worded for your target audience - the choice of language for an executive director varies from the choice of language for a member of the IT team, and that varies from the choice of language for a typical community member. It would be naive to suggest that everyone should consume the same words, but we have to draw a line somewhere between spiritless generic text and meaningless bullshit.

When I was a journo and I was learning how to write effectively, I became a big fan of William Zinsser, the author of On Writing Well. This, combined with Strunk and White’s The Elements Of Style and a few books on journalism provided me with the chops for a career in writing. One salient point that Zinsser says is Don’t write like an institution, and it is something I have always taken as a core element in how I approach writing myself. His point is essentially the meat behind the point I was making above - don’t write meaningless institutional nonsense for the sake of it sounding professional - sure, write professional text that is carefully worded for you target audience, but there needs to be some real, accessible, understandable content in there

Lets look at this in practise. Lets take the original paragraph and re-write it:

XXXXXXXXXX, a leading provider of commercial open source middleware solutions for database high availability, today announced XXXXXXXXXX. The program is focused on creating a rising tide for the broader open source ecosystem, and is focused on leveraging community-driven development and frictionless distribution to extend the ecosystem.

My version:

XXXXXXXXXX, a leading provider of commercial open source middleware solutions for database high availability, today announced XXXXXXXXXX. The program is focused on growing the Open Source ecosystem by being a strong participant in emerging Open Source technologies.

…notice how I left in ecosystem and threw in emerging technologies to still play to the right audience.

Ding!

The Joys of SELinux on a server

2008-09-03T12:30:30+00:00

Having heard much about SELinux over the last few years, I thought I'd finally make an effort to use it on two servers I've been setting up for a customer. My main desire to use it is because the customer has a fairly large code base, which is programmed in a number of different styles over a number of years by different developers. I'm sure there are vulnerabilities in the code.

On one server, once I got over general teething problems (e.g. if I mount a disk to /var/spool, I'll need to get it relabelled) it seemed to work fine - so I've left it to do it's thing.

On the other server, unfortunately, I need to install Zend Optimizer (despite it's name, it's not an optimizer for performance, more of a code obfuscation/encryption thing to stop someone stealing your "valuable" PHP source code).

Zend Optimizer doesn't play with SELinux, and annoyingly, despite doing, what I assume is the SELinux dance many times, it refused to initially work. On retrospect this seems to be because if you apply two SELinux custom modules, the second replaces the first. Thankfully there's this which does work.

Next I had to fix Munin/ethtool, but this was straight forward enough. Thankfully.

So, so far - it's taken me a number of hours to get around SELinux, so it had better be worth the effort!

Book Review: PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects

2008-09-02T12:23:35+00:00

Some time ago, Packt publishing sent me this book to review. Here it is, being somewhat overdue!

ISBN: 978-2-847190-88-8
Author: Shu-Wai Chow
Title: PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects
Publisher: PacktPub.com
Number of pages: 278

My initial interest in this book was due to a requirement to "do" SOAP/XMLRPC etc. The book concentrates on creating a number of "mashups" (joining together remote web based services in one interface) which includes using :

Google Maps
Flickr
Amazon
Youtube
MSN Search
Yahoo!
Last.fm
411Sync.com

And to talk to these services, it uses the following protocols :

SOAP
REST
XMLRPC
AJAX

And data format's used when talking to the services are :

RDF
RSS
XML
XPSF
SOAP
JSON

The book is divided into 6 chapters, each of which covers creating a MashUp project, ranging from buying "stuff" on Amazon (Ch1) to mashing together Google Maps and Flickr to produce a London Tube Photos site (Ch6)

The PHP Code does possibly reinvent the wheel in a few cases (e.g. writing a REST parser class) whereas I'd probably use the Zend Framework's Zend_Rest client instead. But, given the publishing cycle, it's probable that the book was written before Zend_Rest was released. This same sort of complaint is true for e.g. the AJAX queries in Ch6.

I don't remember noticing any obvious typos in the code or the content of the book, aside from a few instances where " was replaced with a » sign.

While some of the mashups themselves didn't appeal to me, but the discussion of what was taking place and the explanation of how to use the protocols was very useful, and could easily be applied to different problems. So, even if you aren't interested in the mashups made, consider buying the book for it's discussion of the underlying technologies.

The book slowly builds up, and by the final chapeter we finally get to see AJAX in use - along with RDF and SPARQL. This chapter is somewhat more dependent on Javascript. Thankfully, the explanations of all of this is done very well, and the author stepped through the problem, explained the solution and new technologies and revealed the solution as you progress.

To summarise - it's a good book. I had no complaints (but then I didn't pay for it either). If you are looking for a book to help you write mashups, this is a good start (and probably all you'll need). It's easy enough to read, and has a good balance between code and text.

Get Your Work Seen, Ubuntu Style

2008-09-01T10:49:27+00:00

Just a quick reminder to all budding music and video artists that the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase closes for submissions on Thursday 4th Sep - get your entries in there now to have your work seen by literally millions of Ubuntu users.

Phone Decisions

2008-09-01T08:57:31+00:00

After taking some opinion and weighing up specs, features, functionality and expandability, I decided to get a Nokia N95 8GB. My mobile provider didn't have any and couldn't tell me when they would so I requested my PAC code and prepared to move to somebody that had them for the ...

Michael Dell has voted

2008-09-01T07:25:37+00:00

So the great Mini Laptop survey has got off to a flying start. I didn't realise just how far my readership reached according to one response it would appear the hallowed halls of Dell monitor my erratic output or at least Michael Dell who as far as I know is the only one running around with a Dell Mini for the minute?

Announcing Mini Laptop Survey

2008-08-31T04:02:15+00:00

I've spent some cash and purchased ijoomla_surveys I thought it might be interesting to do a few surveys with not many questions that may give an insight to what people use and are doing within the Linux/Open Source community. Its just a bit of fun really so why not have a go?

Either Go to the site direct and select Survey from the menu or select this link for direct access. http://cannon-linux.co.uk/surveys choose a survey from the list on the above left or if you just want to see some results so far choose from the list on the right.

There's only one survey for the minute and I think I have most of the 'Mini Laptops' but if you know of any others that are not in my list and don't want to take the survey please feel free to mail me so I can add your recommendations.

Enjoy.

Links for 2008-08-29 [del.icio.us]

2008-08-30T05:00:00+00:00

rodcorp: A chimney on one floor, Duchamp's final work
Rod points to the pattern of spatial interests in Duchamp's work
Photosynth : Microsoft Live Labs
Just launched: '...transform regular digital photos into a three-dimensional, 360-degree experience...'
YouTube - smack the pony - architects
Fly-on-the-wall documentary or comedy sketch? Who can tell? Added to architecture.vodpod.com (found via lewism)

Crazy

2008-08-29T10:11:16+00:00

Just wanted to provide a quick update on life - things have been absolutely crazy recently. Literally, a-grade crazy. There are some fairly hefty changes going on in my life right now, and this combined with nearly two months of solid travelling, finishing up LugRadio, an incredibly busy worklife and recording the debut Severed Fifth record has mean’t life has been hectic - its been tough to get all these things done when I have not been home a huge amount. All is good though, and although the Severed Fifth album has been delayed a little, it should be ready soon.

Launch launch launch

2008-08-28T15:32:00+00:00

OK, the new Capital Radio website, built on Django and full of loveliness, is now out. There’s six months of our lives that none of us are going to get back.

Actually, I’m pretty proud of it. Nice one, team.

EeePC ate my girls iPods

2008-08-28T06:38:39+00:00

I recently joined the ranks of EeePC owners, well my daughters did actually. I purchased two of the 900 Linux versions with 20GB drives and I have to say I'm pretty impressed.

So after a cursory "Cor thanks dad" off they scurried to their respective bedrooms, the next day I was presented with two disgruntled teenagers a pretty scary scenes ask any father.

"Dad our ipods have lost all its music! We followed the instructions in the the Laptop manual and it copied our music over but now we cant play our ipods and iTunes says it cant read them either". I tried the so called Restore feature with itunes but that failed I looked on the apple support page which was pretty useless next I tried Google with varying levels of success eventually I mailed the people at Wolves-Lug.

The general concensus was that the ipod's db file was corrupted and that deleting it or at the very least cutting and pasting it somewhere then re-syncing it would solve the problem. OK that worked although its not as straight forward as that when I get a bit more time I will write a short howto suffice to say you'll need another machine that does not have iTunes installed as every time you plug the ipod in itunes takes control which means you cant delete or move the db.

Links for 2008-08-27 [del.icio.us]

2008-08-28T05:00:00+00:00

space is the machine
PDF version of Space Syntax text (via adamgreenfield)

Facebook doesn’t really support IE6

2008-08-27T15:33:41+00:00

Blimey. I didn’t realise that Facebook are trending down support for IE6. The “new look” is disabled, and if you use the old look you get a big message complaining about your browser choice:

'You may want to upgrade your browser (from IE6)', says Facebook

Two interesting things here: first, they recommend that you try another browser, and give a list of Firefox, Safari, and Flock as well as “upgrade to Internet Explorer 7″. Flock? I bet the Opera people are a bit hacked off about that.

Second: there have been a few cases so far of people dropping support for IE6 (MobileMe, not that that really counts because all its users are Mac people, and 37 Signals, ditto), but nothing remotely as high-profile as Facebook. This is the boot starting to descend, I think. IE6 is already the bugbear of the industry (and has been for some time: I said “Internet Explorer is the new Netscape 4” in 2005 and I was hardly the first!); how long before we see support for it drop to Netscape 4 levels of “you get the unenhanced non-JavaScript version”?

I’d like to see more people publish browser stats for their websites. Yes, they’re unreliable, yes people change their user agent, blah blah blah. They’ll give us an indication, though; how many people out there are using IE6? Google Analytics tells me that 36% of my visitors are using IE, and 37% of those are using IE6, which means that IE6 visitors to my site are down to under 15%. (If you’re not using Analytics, analog -G -A +a +B <apache logfile> will give you a browser list, as will many other things.) Other people will doubtless differ, and I’d be thoroughly interested in seeing more of these percentages from sites with a different user-base to mine. If you’re a company, tell us what percentage of your users are using IE6! We’re not going to get stats out of Google or Yahoo or the BBC, but non-behemoths will do fine here. Everyone else, start thinking: where’s the cut-off point? How low does IE6’s market share need to go before it’s reasonable to not devote extra development time to it?

“Extra” is the keyword there — people thinking “hey, Opera/Safari/Firefox 3/IE8 has less than 15% market share in my statistics, let’s cut them off, Mr. Microsoft Hater” need to consider that modern browsers don’t (or at least shouldn’t) take any extra development time to work around their idiosyncrasies. (In practice, Safari does require more extra development time than I’d like, I find, but its market share is high enough (or the idiosyncracies are infrequent enough) that supporting it is broadly worth the effort.)

So: if you have IE6 stats, publish them. If you’re a web hacker: when should we cut off the ailing IE6’s life support? Speak now…

Arf. Arf.

2008-08-27T15:05:49+00:00

419 Eater always amuses me - it is a website scam-baiters follow through with those Nigerian scam emails. Today though I read a case where someone manages to persuade the scammer to tattoo Baited By Shiver on his leg.

Read it here.

Comedy.

Phone Choices

2008-08-27T11:57:11+00:00

It's that time of year when Jenny and I are due a mobile phone handset upgrade. I have a few choices: Sony Ericsson C902 A few Nokias Blackberry Pearl 8110 or 8310 Palm Treo 500 Possibly an iPhone. First thing is fuck the iPhone. DRM encumbered, no 3G access pile of arse. Secondly, fuck the Treo, ...

Ubuntu Developer Week II: This Time Its Personal

2008-08-27T10:32:44+00:00

DIGG THIS!

I am really pleased to see that Horseman Holbach has announced Ubuntu Developer Week.

Ubuntu Developer Week is a more detailed continuation of Ubuntu Open Week in which we have a week of IRC tuition sessions, but in this week very much focused on technical developer topics. The week runs from Mon Sep 1st to Fri Sep 5th and the fun happens in #ubuntu-classroom on irc.freenode.net.

The week is jammed with a range of incredible sessions, including Packaging 101, Upstream Bug Linkages, Introduction to MOTU, Soyuz and all that Jazz, Working with Ubuntu->GNOME QA (tips&tricks), How do I fix an Ubuntu bug, Introduction to BZR, Kernel module packaging with DKMS, Using the Launchpad Web Service API, Launchpad Hacks, bzr for packaging, How do I update a package properly, Introduction to PPA, Introduction to the Server Team, Various ways to patch a package, Automated Testing for the Desktop, A WebKit browser in PyKDE, Having fun with the Mozilla Team, How to avoid making Archive Admins unhappy, Ask Matt, Unit testing Python code, with code coverage measurement, Introduction to the Installer Team, Introduction to the Security Team, Kernel Discussion…

Daniel provides an overview of each session here.

Ubuntu Developer Week is just one of many initiatives that we have been working on to help the Ubuntu community grow and develop in the right direction. Others include Release Parties, Ubuntu Open Week, Global Bug Jam, Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase, 5-A-Day, Harvest, Brainstorm, Ubuntu Developer Summit and many more in the pipeline. I am really proud of the work the horsemen are doing, and I am looking forward to hiring the fourth horseman/woman - if you are excited at the prospect of working on my team and alongside Daniel and Jorge, do apply.

I look forward to seeing the new blood that comes into the project to join the existing, well-oiled, arse-kicking blood that we have right now. Rock and roll.

mdzlog

2008-08-25T00:44:18+00:00

The unstoppable Matt ‘mdz’ Zimmerman has caved in and now has a blog. He has posted some interesting stuff already, so go and check it out. He is also on Planet Ubuntu.

Whoa Yeah-yeah! Oah!

2008-08-24T20:33:28+00:00

Fellow horseman, Jorge, and I are both big Metallica fans. Although we largely agree on what constitutes a great Metallica album (Master Of Puppets and …And Justice For All), Metallica have seen such a diverse change in their style, that fans have many different views on what makes the perfect ‘tallica album. Metallica really started off as a balls to the wall thrash band, back when Kill ‘Em All came out, which was reminiscent of other Bay Area thrash metal bands such as Exodus and Testament and other bands such as Slayer, Annihilator and Overkill. They then refined their art with Ride The Lightning and Master Of Puppets, stepped into thrash-by-very-detailed-numbers with the super-technical and rhythmic …And Justice For All before heading in a more commercial chunky style of radio metal with their self-titled album, known as The Black Album to fans.

Then, it went downhill. After the stunning Black album, they toured like crazy and years later released their next full original album with Load which was about as exciting and metal as a toy soldier, wrapped in a roll of bubble wrap at a plastics convention. It was just booooring. Stock, very stock, predictable, not-all-that-heavy rock tunes - Metallica seemed to have really lost their way. But wait…we then received the good news that Load was actually only half of the songs that they recorded, and we would be treated to yet another bucket-of-dull with the rather imaginatively titled…Re-Load. Woo. Hoo. Ahem.

Then the Metallica hype machine started to roll again and we heard they were working on a new, angrier album, and Hetfield (their singer) had been a little too frisky with the ‘ol sauce and was in rehab for alcohol addiction, but was out and raring to channel his new-founded life experience and world-view into their music, with an undertone of anger…which would naturally translate well to metal. What resulted was St Anger, a pretty desperate attempt at sounding modern and heavy, complete with a snare drum that is reminiscent of the sound of a nun riding into a steel bin on a push-bike. Although it was heavier in places, it felt unimaginative and a bit of a reach - not like their previous works in which they knew how to push every button in your brain that makes you move to their music. It was just unnatural and desperate, and once again Metallica felt like they were losing their way.

So, Metallica have not released a decent album since The Black Album, and they have not released a decent thrash album (the reason why most of us love Metallica), since …And Justice For All - that is 16 years since a good album. Good grief.

Some of you may be wondering why on earth I have decided to blather on about Metallica today. Well, right now we Metallica fans, who have been treated to the audio equivalent of a train bacon sandwich for the last 16 years are once again getting our hopes up for the next Metallica album, named Death Magnetic, and due for release on the 12th September. Metallica have been treating the world to sneak peeks for the last few weeks and for the last half year or so we have heard the usual highly trumpeted reports that Metallica are back to their roots and once again the fans are hoping for a Puppets or at least a Black Album. So far, Metallica released a live recording of a song called Cyanide and their latest airing of a single called The Day That Never Comes as well as a bunch of 30 second or so snippets. So, are they any good?

So far it is a bit early to tell. I always like to let music sink in for a while before passing a firm opinion, but thus far I have to be honest that I am not exactly grabbed by the material. While I consider it a really great trait of a metal band to grab your attention within minutes (something which bands such as Hatebreed, The Acacia Strain, Heaven Shall Burn, Slipknot and All Shall Perish are great at), some bands need a good listening (such as King Diamond, Blind Guardian, Cannibal Corpse and Anata).

The main thing I am taking away from the situation with Metallica is that I am beginning to lose a little patience with them as a band. I totally agree that bands change styles, thats fine - I understand they don’t want to be playing speed metal any more, but I also listen to a bunch of bands that play the kind of music that Metallica seem to be going for (Black Label Society, Megadeth, Blaze etc), but I just don’t know if Metallica’s version of it is my cup of tea. Don’t get me wrong, they are a stunningly talented band, but I feel that the complexities in the band and the comfort they have carved out (as can be seen in Some Kind Of Monster) has mean’t that they have lost the hunger somewhat. It has long been known that more deprived surroundings have formed some of the greatest metal bands (as well as other artists such as Hip Hop and Rap). Of course, everyone wants to live a nice, lavishly comfortable lifestyle - I am no exception - but I get the impression that these comforts have overtaken their hunger for the music. This is not an endemic problem - there are plenty of bands who live great, comfortable lifestyles (just look at Iron Maiden for example) and still release rocking music, but Metallica feel distracted by it.

In my mind, Music is evolutionary, and we see different generations coming in, taking what went before and stepping up the plate. Metallica will always hold a place in my heart for releasing some of my most loved albums (in fact, I wore out my Master Of Puppets cassette from over-playing when I was a yoof), but I think these days I am more interested in checking out the amazing new talent with bands like *The Acacia Strain, Job For a Cowboy, All Shall Perish, Divine Heresy, The Red Chord, Blood Red Throne, Hatebreed, Arsis, Aborted, A Perfect Murder, Lamb Of God, Made Of Hate, Necrophagist, Nonpoint, Hatesphere etc.

On Sincerity

2008-08-24T15:57:12+00:00

Something struck me today and though I've always felt this way, I've never consciously been aware that it was anything more than another unlabelled facet of my set of morals and values. I prize sincerity in people almost as much as anything else. As much as I may be one ...

Big Beast

2008-08-22T13:30:39+00:00

Aside from Rowan getting bigger and noisier over time (and he slept for a record 8 hours last night in one "sitting"), my last week has almost returned to normality with the arrival of Bonzo (my sister's dog) to our household. He's visiting in order to get trained and neutered. Unfortunately for him, he's not fit enough to run my normal running route around Bromsgrove (but I'm sure this will change with time).

Because my mother and sister seem to think I'll be nasty to him (why?!) I've recorded a few videos of Bonzo, which are on Youtube - http://youtube.com/user/GingerDog - just look for ones with "Big Beast" in their title or something. (There are also a few newer videos of Rowan there too).

Links for 2008-08-21 [del.icio.us]

2008-08-22T05:00:00+00:00

The Eco-town of Tomorrow and it's planning.
Excellent piece from Kosmograd on the misguided Ecotown dreams - Poundbury meets Center Parcs

Readable non-harvestable email addresses with CSS

2008-08-21T20:30:31+00:00

Stupid hack I’ve just thought of. My email address is:

@silogenixkry.org

Spam harvesters looking at that will see the following code:

<p style="padding-left: 5em"><span>@</span><span
 style="margin-left: -2.5em">sil</span><span
 style="margin-left: 3.5em">ogenix</span><span
 style="margin-left: -5.3em">kry</span><span
 style="margin-left: 4.1em">.org</span></p>

Or, with HTML stripped, @silogenixkry.org, which ain’t an email address. It does it by breaking up the address into bits, putting the bits into HTML in the wrong order, and reassembling the bits into a readable order with judicious use of CSS.* It requires a certain amount of fiddling to get the margins right such that (a) the address shows up in the right order and (b) changes in font-size don’t screw it up. I’d write a tiny web-service to do it to a supplied address if I could be bothered; lazyweb, go for it. Of course, if everyone uses this, harvesters will learn how to interpret CSS (and this is relatively trivial to do in this case). Might keep your name off the lists for a little while longer, though.

Links for 2008-08-20 [del.icio.us]

2008-08-21T05:00:00+00:00

Falling Water model in SL
map and link to FLW's most popular work reconstructed in Second Life

Taxi Cab Deathmatch

2008-08-17T15:57:44+00:00

One of the fun aspects of my job has been the opportunity to travel and see the world. In the last few years I have had the chance to visit some stunning places - Brazil, Argentina, Turkey, Australia, Czech Republic, Portugal, USA, Spain, Germany, Belgium, Ireland and various other places. Of course there are many differences between all of these places - the sights, the sounds, the culture, the religion, the people, the food, the booze, the music, the weather etc, but there is one critical cultural variance that always strikes me when I travel - taxi cabs.

They vary on two critical levels - (1) how chatty and worldly cabbys are, and (2) how much they like to gently teeter their passengers on the edge of death.

So, first up it is how chatty a taxi driver is. Am I the only person who has noticed that particularly in London and the US (notably San Francisco and Portland), there are a large collection of frustrated academics driving cabs? The US particularly so - I have had conversations about Chinese politics, historical events in the UK, the industrial revolution, the development of the American constitution, the philosophical changes in the US since Bush came into power and various other topics. In London in particular, cabbys like to serve this kind of discussion with a garnish of comedy and sensationalism. I was once in a cab with Matt Revell heading to Millbank when a cabby expressed his not-particularly-happy views about David Cameron (current leader of the Conservative party) and then underlined them with the fact that “he had heard” that David Cameron takes Cocaine in very, very unconventional way. Matt and I were left stunned.

But the real gem is the second element - the variations in how a cabby likes to walk up to death and poke fun at it. Please, please don’t do that, think of the children. There are more than a few occasions when I have got into a cab and felt like my life was about to flash through my eyes. This was most notable in Porto Allegre in Brazil where it seemed the goal was to drive as fast as possible, discouraging the use of seat belts, and then drive as physically close to the car in front of you. I will be honest with you - I very nearly shit myself a number of times while in some of those cabs. I don’t mind hoying along at high speed, but holy mother of all that is good and sweet…that was just a whole new level. Oh, and then there was Istanbul. Aside from when a cabby drove Mirco Muller, Michael Dominik and I 30KM outside of Istanbul as something of a con, there was one particular incident when said cabby decided to overtake traffic by driving onto the wrong side of the freeway, swerving from on-coming traffic, and then driving back onto our side. I think I must have buried eight holes into the sides of that car seat with my fingers. My most recent trip in Argentina was pretty similar - it seems the goal there is to drive the smallest possible car in the world, with un-adjustable seats designed for children, equipped with some kind of jet engine in it to drive as fast as possible, and…and this is the important bit…brake as late as humanly possible. Oh fun. Believe me, after two days of solid travelling and getting to Mar Del Plato at around midnight, that particular experience bloody wakes you up.

Despite this world of academia, decedent exploration of the unusual, and rollercoaster-like fun, it most be difficult being a cabby - how many times do you really want to be asked whether you have been busy on your shift and what time you finish? I got a little concerned about this with the cabbys that drive me to the train station in Wolves when I travel to London or Heathrow, so I try to mix it up and ask more unconventional questions. Then again, maybe this is why I get myself into these odd conversations with cabbys. Hmmm…

Keynoting OhioLinuxFest

2008-08-17T15:42:06+00:00

I am pleased to announce that I will be keynoting at the Ohio LinuxFest. I have heard great things about the show, and never been there before, so I look forward to seeing everyone there.

The talk will be brand new, and I am just solidifying a bunch of ideas around it right now - I will be announcing the topic of the talk in the coming weeks.

Look forward to seeing those of you who are going in Ohio.

Links for 2008-08-16 [del.icio.us]

2008-08-17T05:00:00+00:00

Sustainable Development Commission UK (SDC): Low Energy Victorian House Project
Case study on refurb project with similar goals to ecoterrace.co.uk

Overkill. London. Monday.

2008-08-16T17:15:24+00:00

I am planning to go and see Overkill on Monday night in at Islington Academy in London, but…alas…all on my lonesome. Anyone heading down to the gig?

would be fun to meet any Ubuntu / LugRadio / Free Software or otherwise people there for a night of thrash metal.

Linking Bugs As Part Of Your 5-A-Day

2008-08-16T02:38:15+00:00

You know what, 5-A-Day is doing really, really well. The idea is simple - much in the same way people are encouraged to eat five portions of fruit or vegetables a day, we encourage our incredible community to work on five bugs a day. If everyone does five bugs a day, amazing progress gets made. And, amazing progress has been made by the 5-a-day volunteers so far.

So, when we talk of working on five bugs a day, you would imagine this typically involves triage, filling out bug details, fixing bugs etc. It certainly does include each of these elements, but it also includes one really critical way in which you can help with your 5-a-day - linking bugs - something we have not talked a lot about and something we feel is a really great contribution that we would love you amazing 5-a-day-ers to do as part of your magic.

Many bugs that are reported in Ubuntu are actually bugs that exist in one of the pieces of software that we package for Ubuntu (known as an upstream). A feature that has been built into Launchpad is the ability to say that a bug in Ubuntu actually refers to a bug in an upstream bug tracker. Rather cleverly, Launchpad can in many cases sync some of the information from that bug report back into Launchpad. This means that we can communicate with upstreams more effectively about their bugs. The Launchpad team are continuing to refine this functionality, but right now linking bugs is an excellent way of ensuring that the right people see the right bugs.

And the great thing is that you don’t need to be a packaging expert or a programmer to help with linking bugs - you just need to be able to find the bug on the upstream bug tracker and hook the Ubuntu one and the upstream one together, which is as simple as filling in a form in Launchpad. Simple…but hugely helpful.

So what is involved in linking a bug? Well, in a nutshell:

Find a reported bug in Ubuntu in Launchpad. Ensure the bug is not a duplicate.
Ensure that the bug is actually a bug in the upstream application, and if so, find a bug report for the same bug in the upstream bug tracker.
On the Ubuntu bug, link the bugs - this is as simple as filling in a form.

Instructions for linking bugs can be found here.

We are really keen to make this process as simple and effective as possible. If anything seems overly complex or unclear, let us know and we will fix it.

Balancing Respect and Diversity

2008-08-15T19:10:17+00:00

Just got back home from attending DebConf over in Argentina. I would like to send out a big thankyou to my Debian friends for making me feel incredibly welcome. I was there with a bunch of other Canonical people - Mark Shuttleworth, Jorge Castro, Matthias ‘doko’ Klose, Kees Cook, Steve Langasek and Celso Providelo. It was a really productive few days, and I had some great conversations with a bunch of people, while also sharing more than a few glasses of something hops-ee, or possibly tequila-ee. It was also an excellent opportunity to meet up with some Debian peeps I have been chatting with online for a long time.

Historically, the relationship between Debian and Ubuntu has been strained at times. There are various technical and social reasons behind this discomfort in our relationship, and while there is still work to be done to ensure we are working effectively together, the relationship has most certainly improved in recent years. I think there are many reasons for this, again technical and social, but I think you can boil it down to a critical evolution in our relationship - we have learned more about how a large derivative (such as Ubuntu) and Debian insect, mirror, and vary in different ways, and this takes time.

I am a firm believer in listening and learning from evolution in any distributed community. There are many, many examples where the theoretical blueprint of the best way of managing a community, software project or relationship makes perfect sense on paper, but the many variables in collaborative development result in the actual methodology being quite different. There are thousands of these examples everywhere in our fishbowl - distros should really ship pristine, unpatched upstream code, there should be a stable ABI, all bugs should be filed in the same place, there should be one primary desktop environment, there should be a set of standards across all desktops at a widget and user interaction level, all teams should report regularly - these are all examples of viewpoints that make sense on paper to different people, but in practise the reality is very different.

A relationship in general is no different, be it between you and your parents, you and your partner, you and your boss, different political parties or different distributions. The concept of a relationship on paper and the reality of that relationship can often be very different. On paper the core elements of the relationship are typically clear, but it is the execution of ideas, plans and decision-making as well as additional unforeseen variables that help the relationship really find its natural ebb and flow. Of course, this is fine - this is how things work, but the critical foundation needs to be there. When communication is strong, issues are discussed, with a sensitivity to the impact of those issues on both parties, a relationship can be strong and long-lasting. The greatest relationships have one consistent meme, irrespective of the hundreds of variables - a foundation of respect and openness between both parties to always discuss and drive to a conclusion that is a good medium for all involved.

And this is where we focus the microscope on the most critical ingredient in a relationship - an always present consciousness to find solutions to problems, discuss issues in a calm and focused way and to have a sensitivity for the other party at all times. The longest running bands, the greatest political partnerships, the longest marriages and the most incredible collaborations occur when these ingredients are present - they are not optional, they are required. People often talk about give and take in a relationship, and the above quality fundamentally defines the right balance of give and take - it solidifies the rules of engagement that form the foundation for two parties reading from the same page and moving forward together. This is the microcosm…the branch on the tree, at an atomic level…that when combined with other likewise relationships, connects together to form what we consider a community.

I feel this is where the relationship with Debian has evolved and needs to continue to evolve. There needs to be a fundamental requirement in engaging together on the same terms to foster a partnership where both Debian and derivatives in general are happy. We need to not only foster a close connection and commitment to exploring and respecting the goals of both parties, but we critically need to also not tolerate a culture of disrespect and criticism without evidence and rationale. Flaming is unacceptable - sensible, adult, evidence-led debate is glorious. Really…stunningly glorious. Flaming is the antithesis of the foundational attributes I discussed above - it demonstrates disrespect, arrogance and bad attitude. I have seen it in every community, Ubuntu included, and none of us should tolerate it. We are all together with the same ethos, however you label it, quantify and justify it - when we let this kind of flaming prosper, it weakens our crusade.

Debian kicks arse. Ubuntu kicks arse. They just kick arse in slightly different ways with a strong connection. DebConf, my first one, demonstrated such arse kicking, and I look forward to continuing to work with our friends there.

inputs and outputs

2008-08-15T09:29:15+00:00

Still here. Like a Norwegian Blue, I’ve just been resting. I return with some summer frippery.

First, another day in the life post, since the past one proved quite popular. This time delivered via twitter, an offering made even more poignant perhaps by yesterday’s news that they’ve pulled the plug on the UK.

So, from the bottom up¹:

I’m going to keep these up for as long as I see other blogs in this industry complaining about what a career in architecture is really like outside the cozy world of academia. Too many posts these days about how rarely you actually get to Design, or how undervalued the client makes you feel, or how rubbish everyone else is.

Cheer up you miserable buggers², your career is what you make it.

Next a repost of summer reading and listening suggestions that Phil Clark at Building magazine asked me to help with. You can see many more on his original post.

Books:

100 Houses 100 Architects: Editor - Gennaro Postiglione

Refreshingly critical coffee table picture book that even has some
floor plans. Worth it for Till/Wigglesworth house alone. Euro-centric
cast list means it misses Charles Moore though.

Bay Area Houses: Editor - Sally Woodbridge

Making up for lack of Charles Moore in previous with this one. Perfect
case studies in beautiful suburban housing. Effortless English Arts
and Crafts sensibilities jump the turn of the last century Atlantic
and learn to loosen up in the Californian sunshine. Expect to see
timber shingles in my next project.

This Is A Man - Truce: Primo Levi

There’s a generation of Italian writers who cannot be surpassed. Well,
two at least - Levi and Calvino. Levi tells the story of his time in
Auschwitz and in doing so defines the furthest corners of every human
soul in history. Nothing can prepare you for the visceral contents.

Music

The Red Album: Weezer

Flawless grunge is an oxymoron. If that’s so this the best damn
oxymoron I ever heard. Another perfect album from the guys who started
with little more than a poorly knitted jumper. Includes an ideal
soundtrack for architects: ‘I Am The Greatest Man That Ever Lived’.
That was a joke. Maybe.

Seldom Seen Kid: Elbow

I’m praying with all my atheist might that Elbow don’t get struck by
the Mercury Music Prize curse. If they win we all have to promise not
to make a fuss and let them carry on crafting such heart stopping
moments of metaphysical revelation. Not to mention the moments of
(less-than-meta) physical revelation that you can scream along with
them perfectly; as long as you’re in the car on your own. With the
windows up.

Piazza, New York Catcher: Belle & Sebastian

A novel in one track. I think I finally ‘get’ Belle & Sebastian. Took
me bloody long enough.

notes:
1. ‘designing a house for myself…’ - watch this space, I’m currently making a bid for a plot of land
2. this month’s Monty Python quote quota has now been met. Next month: The Two Ronnies

Links for 2008-08-12 [del.icio.us]

2008-08-13T05:00:00+00:00

Kevin McCloud and the Big Town Plan: a minute-by-minute report
Maybe this will save me having to watch it

On Potential

2008-08-10T21:37:26+00:00

Regulars of this ‘ere blog will be familiar with my abundant love of all things community. In fact, this has been a long running joke in the LugRadio world where I am accused of saying community way too often. Guilty as charged, m’lud. To this end, the always tiny and affable Gerv Markham sat in one of my recent presentations with a laptop facing me and flashed the word COMMUNITY on the screen whenever I said it. Cheeky sod.

The thing I find so exciting about community is the sheer potential it offers. I remember when I first got involved in Free Software and bought Slackware Unleashed, I opened up the book, so thick that I could barely pick the damn thing up, and when I started reading about the ethos and structure of the Open Source community, it got me really fired up. I was specifically excited by the fact that not only did so much potential exist, but the core tools for realisation of that potential (communication mediums, cost-effective hardware/Internet, free tools, intellect/skill) were all there. Potential combined with the tools to realise that potential is an exciting prospect.

Potential is not just about the combined ethos and realistic ability to achieve it though. I also find potential exciting because it is conventionally unrestrained by context or the seeming limitations of individuals - potential is the combined realistic opportunity of a collection of interesting minds and motivations. If we want political peace in a region and only an individual can bring it, it will never happen, but construct an environment in which a community prospers around the concept of peace, and the potential for actual peace grows, as does hope. Whether we apply this to political peace or to fundamentally shaking up the rules of engagement in the IT industry…potential is what keeps people of like-minds glued together on the same path.

Potential though is not a mystical hand-wavy substance that is only on-tap to the godly few, it is something that needs to be developed, grown and nurtured, and this requires us to build strong communities - whether IT communities, local communities, political communities or otherwise. When we boil a community down to its core raw material, the skill of creating community is in creating belonging. When people feel that they belong, that their interactions are of the mutual benefit of everyone, that they are enabled to do good work, and when they are respected, we not only get potential, but we actually get real, tangible, measurable results.

That is what gets me excited by community; it is not a theoretical exploration performed inside the minds of boffins of MIT professors, it is not just an academic exercise, it is a recipe for real change that is unbound by the limitations of the individual. Pretty darn exciting, eh?

Ubuntu Global Bug Jam and the value of face-to-face time

2008-08-09T02:51:58+00:00

Well, this weekend the Global Ubuntu Bugjam kicks off, with Bug Jams happening all around the world including Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Perú, Puerto Rico, California, Chicago, Michigan, Michigan, Maryland, Massachusetts, Portland, Seattle, Venezuela, India, Thailand, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

I am hugely proud of everyone involved in organising their local bug jams as part of the wider global bug jam, and I am really proud of my good friend and compadre, Daniel Holbach for pulling many of these threads together to coordinate everything. You folks are gonna have a blast this weekend - getting together, fixing bugs, having a great time and helping free software. Kick arse.

You may have noticed that we tend to harp on quite a lot about Bug Jams and Packaging Jams. Part of the reason for this is that we really firmly believe in onsite learning. Every release cycle I sit down with the team and we assess the entire timeline of contributor interaction - we look at what happens from when someone expresses an interest in contributing to Ubuntu, right up to them being a core contributor. We try to assess and map the different types of interaction that occur between these two points and use this as a basis for building strong community. A key element here is self education - helping the community to educate themselves in different ways. This not only involves skills education but also process education - helping our community get a good idea of how things work. This is why Bug Jams are so good - they help people get used to fixing bugs and watching other people fixing bugs. Packaging jams are more about skills education - showing people how they can package up applications for Ubuntu, and how it works.

The simple fact is that getting people in the same room to do something is a lot more fun than not being in the same room. Add to that mix a supply of drinks and snacks, and it is a recipe for a good time and a sure-fire formula for helping free software rock the world that little bit more. It is tempting to assume that because we are all so used to online collaboration that we should just expect it in all forms of collaboration and discount the benefits of face-to-face time. Generating some face-to-face time is important not only because it helps people more visibly interact - hovering over computers, pointing, drawing things on pieces of paper and chatting, but it also gives people a chance to reconnect important bonds. People, lets not forget we are people, and we love to hang out, be it in a pub, a restaurant, a conference or a bug jam. With over 170 Ubuntu LoCo Teams, we have a huge amount of hanging out potential.

So, my Ubuntu friends, have a wonderful time this weekend, kick the arse of some of those pesky bugs, and do let me know how you enjoy your bug jams - I look forward to hearing your stories.

Vacancy. Apply Within.

2008-08-08T22:05:39+00:00

I am a lucky boy. Well, I am a lucky boy for many, many reasons, but the particularly lucky-ness I am referring to today is that I have a wicked-cool set of peeps on my team at Canonical. Regular readers of this blog will have heard me mention the other horsemen - Daniel Holbach who works in Developer Relations and Jorge Castro who works on Upstream Relations. We have a great team and we love getting up every day to work with our incredible Ubuntu community.

Sounds good, eh? Well, how would you like to join us?

I am pleased to announce a new role that I am looking to fill - Ubuntu Translations Coordinator. Here is the job description:

Posting Date: August 2008

Job Location: Your home, as long as you have broadband. Some international travel will be required.

Job Summary: The role of the Ubuntu Translations Coordinator is to oversee, represent, guide and optimise the processes and workflow of the Ubuntu translations community as well as coordinating the LoCo Teams project. Applicants should have experience of working in a translations community and with computing user groups, be knowledgeable of the Ubuntu translations community, and be motivated and able to work in a fast-paced community team at Canonical.

Reports To: Ubuntu Community Manager

Key responsibilities:

Understand, measure and report on the Ubuntu translations community and be a point of reference in the community and at Canonical
Establish relationships with community translations leaders and upstreams, enabling a means to deliver quality translations to the Ubuntu platform in general and in key areas
Effectively translate Ubuntu in a distributed manner
Work closely with Canonical’s management, business and technical teams to advise and represent Ubuntu translations
Take a significant role in coordinating Ubuntu local user groups (LoCo Teams), working on projects and goals within that community, and acting as a liaison with user group community leaders

Required skills and experience:

Experience translating open source software
Experience of using the translation facilities in Launchpad
Strong community building skills and ability to resolve conflict situations
Ability to work in a highly distributed environment
Presentation skills a bonus

I am looking for someone with drive, motivation and experience, and someone with a passion for Ubuntu and making it available in everyone’s local language - this has always been a core goal of Ubuntu, and I need someone with the energy and insight to really make this rock. This person will also work with the business team to be a liaison for translation related opportunities and issues in our commercial agreements.

Sound interesting? Well, don’t contact me directly or leave a comments here, please check out the job ad and apply there.

Avoiding Burn Out

2008-08-08T01:17:26+00:00

Well, after all of the theory and contemplation of how to resolve burnout in companies, teams and communities, it seems that one link has the complete solution.

Ahhhh…

RIP Bob 'Jangles'

2008-08-06T15:58:08+00:00

This morning while on my normal morning run, Bob (who was on his elasticated lead) ran out into the road. Unfortunately a car hit him and his back legs were paralysed. Thanks to the kind builders working nearby, I was able to get him to the vets, and after an emergency call out, X-rays and so forth it was determined that his spine was broken. At around 8:30am he was put to sleep, and we took him to my mother's farm to be buried alongside Cassie.

Rest In Peace Mr Jangles, you'll be missed by us all. We had some excellent memories together.

Certification

2008-08-06T07:52:41+00:00

Lots of discussion on Planet Gnome about self-signed certificates and SSL and so on. I wonder if the Linux distros should get together and create a new CA, and then install that CA’s root certificate in browsers? So that way, things like various project bugzillas will have a legit SSL certificate without having to pay if they don’t want to. Of course, this new FreeSoftwareProjectCA would still have to go through the same verification processes to ensure that a given certificate is being asked for by the right people, etc, etc.

Obviously, the root certificate would only be installed in your browsers if you get them from your distro (because the distros would add them to their browser packages) — this means that people on Windows or who install their own copy of Firefox (or whatever) would still get the “this is a certificate I don’t recognise” warning. However, that’s no worse off than it is now, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that people who use bug-tracking sites for free software projects running on a free software OS are disproportionately people using that OS who will therefore have the certificate.

(Update: johnath says “StartSSL, in the Firefox 3 root store, offers [SSL certificates] for free“, which might have the same effect; I don’t know whether StartSSL’s root certificate is in other browsers, but that’s no worse than the idea that I propose above.)

Linux User & Developer is alive (again)

2008-08-05T13:30:48+00:00

It seems Linux User and Developer will have another issue out soon; which, if things go to plan will have a column written by me on whether being free (as in beer) is a good thing or not for open source adoption. I suspect after the magazine has been published, I'll publish the article on here too.

Own a LugRadio T-Shirt

2008-08-05T10:57:07+00:00

In the last season of LugRadio, we produced a limited edition of 50 LugRadio 'Don't Listen Alone' t-shirts which we gave out as a prize to the person who sent us the coolest email in each show. As we announced the end of the show a few weeks ago, we were ...

Fronteers 2008

2008-08-04T22:12:00+00:00

The site for Fronteers 2008 is now up — Fronteers is a group of web hackers in the Netherlands who are putting on a web conference in September. Lots of cool speakers (Bert Bos, Dean Edwards*, Christian Heilmann*, Nate Koechley, Tom Occhino, and me, among others). It’s good to see another addition to the conference calendar, especially one where they’re looking for in-depth treatment of subjects. This is hardly surprising considering that it’s being run by ppk, but they’re explicitly going for an intermediate-or-better audience. There are lots of speaking slots at every conference devoted to introductions: our industry is starting to mature enough that it’s reasonable to skip right over that. It was described to me by ppk as “a conference that treats a few important topics exhaustively instead of one that lightly touches on many subjects”, which I think is a great idea. At the moment I’m trying to decide between talking about closures and talking about event delegation: anyone got a huge preference? See you in Amsterdam.

Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is born!

2008-08-04T21:56:53+00:00

DIGG THIS STORY!

I am really excited to announce the very first Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

For a long time now we have been shipping a package called example-content with each release of Ubuntu. This package provides a bunch of different pieces of content including audio, video, PDFs, OpenOffice.org documents and more. The idea is that you can use this content to kickstart your new Ubuntu system and see what it can do. example-content has been really useful, but it has been languishing a little recently, and then we had a rather interesting idea…

Why not use example-content as a great way to show off audio and video from free culture artists? It can give artists a platform of millions of Ubuntu users to show off their work and it really excites me because we are applying the Ubuntu ethos to free culture.

The idea is simple:

Your submission must be either audio or video (we are not accepting documents/images) and no larger than 1MB for the audio and 3MB for the video. The submissions must be made available in either Ogg Vorbis (audio) or Ogg Theora (video). The submissions must be licensed as Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike.
Upload your submission somewhere online (there are lots of free hosting solutions available such as archive.org). Do not email any of the organisers or judges with your submissions.
Add your entry to one of the submission tables at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.
When the deadline for submissions closes, our panel of judges (Cory Kontros, Luis de Bethencourt, Luke Yelavich, Lydia Pintscher and Tony Whitmore) will pick a shortlist, and the Community Council will then pick the final winners from the shortlist.

The deadline is 4th September 2008 and you can read more about it at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase

This is a great opportunity for artists to get their work seen or heard. Lets make something cool happen. Good luck!

Setting an environment variable for all your apps

2008-08-03T19:01:25+00:00

In the New World Order, Linux apps should all store their user-specific data according to the FreeDesktop Base Directory specification, which in practice means that config details for myapp end up in $HOME/.config/myapp. All well and good. However, I don’t like having configuration stored in dotfiles; I like to be able to get at it more easily, so I want it in $HOME/Settings. The XDG spec provides for this: you set an environment variable XDG_CONFIG_HOME (which defaults to $HOME/.config) and then everything uses it. Great! But…where do I set this variable so that all the apps get it?

Some suggestions:

$HOME/.bashrc, $HOME/.bash_profile, $HOME/.profile — as far as I can tell, these aren’t run as part of the login process, so they’re no good. They get run when you start bash, which means when you first fire up a terminal.
$HOME/.gnomerc — gets run by gdm. Might be a Debianism, and doesn’t work if I change away from gdm a few months from now
$HOME/.xinitrc, $HOME/.xsession — get run if you’re in X but not if you’re running over SSH, and .xsession is a Debianism
/etc/xdg/user-dirs.conf — this will change it for all users on the machine, not just me
Something in PAM. Perhaps. It’s not clear what, though.
A file of my choice, which I then source from all of the above places. This is doable but seems stupid to me, and I’m bound to miss something.
Something else. This is where you come in; where am I meant to set the environment so that everything gets access to it?

Answers on a postcard…

Street Team Community Middle Ground

2008-08-02T02:25:33+00:00

Recently I have been taking my new talk around various conferences. Entitled Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants: The Coming Of The Linux Desktop, it discusses the different elements involved in desktop success and us achieving the so called year of the Linux desktop. At one point in the presentation I talk about how it is tempting to consider the Open Source community as a great example of community in action. Although we are without a shadow of a doubt a successful, impactive community, we are by no means typical.

Most community is consumer orientated - it is a collection of people united by an interest, a band, a book, a movie or something else. Take Trekkies (Star Trek fans) for example - they are a group of people who feel like they belong in an environment that has a primary unifying connection. This connection is clearly Star Trek, and possibly putting brown Play-Doh on your forehead and wearing over-sized shoulder pads. The Open Source community is different. We are not consumers, but creators. Our community actually builds things that the rest of the community uses, and this brings in a whole raft of complex interactions that would keep boffins at MIT amused for years. This kind of community is a web of modelling elements - just take each volunteer and their set of needs, requirements, concerns and opportunities, and then put hundreds of thousands of them in the same communication medium and all of the group interaction theory that applies, and then factor in project management issues of getting people on the same page to achieve a consistent outcome - it is a huge bag of variables, interactions and nuances in not just how people work together but how they achieve things. It is temping to be seduced into thinking that our hugely successful community, which is changing the shape of IT is typical; it is successful, but by no means typical.

A few months back I started my new Severed Fifth free culture project, and one of the core aims of the project is to build a Street Team community around the project that can go out and help communicate the ideals, values and aims of the project and free culture. At first I thought it was going to be a relatively cut-and-shut community building task - get people excited about the project, document what needs to be done, provide some materials and direction, and build some buzz. Interestingly though, this community is architecturally unusual. Here we are blurring the lines further between the Trekkies and the Open Source brigade. In this particular community the volunteers are not so much primary creators (they are not producing the music), but they are not purely consumers. The Severed Fifth Street Team is instead an unusual blend of the two - people in the project are creating materials that are designed for the purpose of the Street Team - to go out and make it easier to communicate the project. Take James Tait as an example - he wanted to produce a flyer that could be used t o put up in his local music shops, skate parks etc, and thus Cory K contributed and made a flyer which we now have on the Street Team Materials Page. This is a new and different kind of community for me - it is a different blend.

But, this is all part and parcel of why Severed Fifth excites me. It is not just about recording some music and trying to see how far I can take it with the free culture approach, it is also about learning all of these different nuances in how an artist needs to build buzz, awareness and growth around his or her project. I would love to hear your thoughts on how to build the best possible Street Team community.

HTML5 video element about to land in Firefox 3.1

2008-07-31T08:02:04+00:00

Firefox 3.1 is about to support the HTML5 <video> element, and Opera already does. This means that both those browsers will have support for inline video in the browser without plugins. As usual, Internet Explorer lag behind, and sadly Safari does as well — they’re fast at implementing lots of stuff over at the WebKit team, but Apple don’t like easy video that isn’t in a patented format, so the Safari <video> support only plays stuff that QuickTime can do. Hopefully both corporate browsers will come around, or perhaps the WebKit team can add <video> support for Ogg Theora and then the Safari team can take it back out again if they need to — since Epiphany, the Gnome browser, is going to be WebKit, it would be great to have native video support in WebKit. (Do the WebKit Gtk hackers have commit access to the WebKit source in order to add this, I wonder?)

I’ve just pinged the blip.tv people — since they already support Ogg Theora (via Fluendo’s Cortado Java applet), they should be able to add <video> support pretty easily. (Just wrap <video src=”/video/play/12345″>…</video> around the existing player, so browsers with HTML5 support will play the video inline and others will fall back to the current player.)

Nice one Opera and Firefox teams!