Planet Wolves

Jono Bacon: Respect in Community Discussion and Debate

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:30:19 +0000

Recently there was yet another storm in a teacup that distracted us from creating and sharing Ubuntu and our flavors with others. I am not going to dive into the details of this particular incident…it has been exhaustively documented elsewhere…but at the heart of this case was a concern around the conduct in which some folks engaged around something they disagreed with. This is not the first time we have seen disappointing conduct in a debate, and I wanted to share some thoughts on this too.

In every community I have worked in I have tried to build an environment in which all view points that challenge decisions or decision makers are welcome with the requirement that they are built on a platform of respectful discourse; this is the essence of our Code Of Conduct. Within the context of an Open Source community we also encourage this engagement around differences to be expressed as solutions with a focus on solving problems; this helps us to be productive and move the project forward. This is why we have such a strong emphasis on blueprints, specs, bugs, and other ways of expressing issues and exploring solutions.

Within the context of this most recent issue I saw three problems (problems I have seen present in other similar arguments too):

Irrespective of the voracity or content of an opinion we must never forget to be respectful and polite in the way we express and engage with others, irrespective of whether you are a volunteer, Canonical employee, or otherwise. Respect must always be present in our discourse, irrespective of the content of our opinions; without it we become a barbaric people and lose the magic that brought this wonderful set of minds together in the first place. There is simply no excuse for rudeness, and inflammatory FUD that has no evidence to back it up other than presumed ill-intent serves nothing but to demotive folks and ratchet up the flames, as opposed to resolve the issue and make things better.
Trust needs to be earned, but trust should always be built within the wider context of a set of contributions and conduct. Unfortunately some folks consider decisions they disagree with to be a basis for (a) entering into a paranoid debate about the “real reason” the individual or company made that decision (and typically not believing the rationale provided by said decision-maker) and (b) seemingly forgetting about all the other positive contributions that the person or company has contributed. I can assure you there is no nefarious scheme at place at Canonical; our goals are well known in the community. If I felt Canonical was fundamentally trying to demote and shut the community out, I wouldn’t work here; I have no interest in working for a company that doesn’t understand the value of community, and I am not worried about finding suitable employment elsewhere. I work at Canonical because I believe our goals with Ubuntu are just and the company’s commitment to our community is sincere.
Ubuntu is not a consensus-based community. Consensus communities rarely work, and I am not aware of any Open Source project that bases their work on wider consensus in the community. It would be impossible and impractical to notify our community of every decision we make, let alone try to base a decision on a majority view, but we do try to ensure that major changes are communicated to our leaders first (this is something we have been driving improvements in recently). We always need to find the right balance between transparency and JFDI, and sometimes the balance isnt’t quite there, but that does not mean there is some kind of illuminati-ish scheme going on behind the scenes.

Ubuntu is a community filled with passionate people, and I love that we have folks who are critical of our direction and decisions. If everyone agreed with what we are doing, we would not always make the right decisions, and our diversity is what makes Ubuntu and our flavors such a great place to participate.

As I said at the beginning of this post, it is important that all viewpoints are welcome, but we have to get the tone and conduct of some of these debates under control. The sheer level of sensationalist and confrontational language that is often in place in these disagreements doesn’t serve anyone but hungry journalists looking for page hits.

Now, I am not suggesting here that anyone should change any of their viewpoints. If you vehemently disagree with an aspect of what we are doing in Ubuntu or at Canonical, that is fine and of course, welcome. What I am appealing to everyone though is to treat others like you wish to be treated, with respect and dignity, and lets keep the sensationalism out of our community and focus on what we do best…building a world-class Free Software platform and its rich ecosystem of flavors.

Jono Bacon: Dogfooding the Ubuntu Phone: My (Early) Experience

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:38:11 +0000

As many of you will know, our goal is to get the Ubuntu phone in a state where it can be used on a daily basis for testing, and importantly, finding bugs, UI issues, and other details that help us to refine the overall Ubuntu Touch experience. Progress is on-track for the end of May.

I decided to start dogfooding a little early (please remember, we are shooting for the beginning of July to be broadly in shape for dogfooding, so if you try, don’t expect things to be ready right now), so today I put my SIM card in my Galaxy Nexus with Ubuntu Touch and things are working pretty well so far. It seems that my data is no longer getting wiped on image updates, which helps testing significantly, so I am regularly upgrading with the daily images.

As ever, if you decide to test, you are doing so at your own risk…don’t be surprised to see bugs, crashes, and potential data loss (although I have not seen any data loss so far).

Some notes about my experience dogfooding:

Making and recieving phone calls works well. I am using T-Mobile as my network.
Sending and recieving texts works well too. Messages appear chronologically.
Contact syncing is not in place but Sergio blogged about how to sync your contacts from Google. This has made my phone infinitely more useful and rather nicely, it pulls in the avatars too so I can see who is calling me.
Browsing and connecting to wireless networks works well.
The browser works well overall, although currently requires wifi (3G browsing coming soon).
Camera works well (for still photos, video not implemented yet) and I can browse my pictures in the gallery.
Many of the community-written core apps are present and working. Calendar lets me save and browse calendar events (although syncing with a calendar service is not there yet). Weather shows me the weather for my area right now and a week long forcast. Calculator is working and largely feature-complete. Other core apps are on their way to the daily image soon.
Overall the core Unity UI is working well. I can search for apps, load them, quit them, multi-tasting works well, and the indicators work (for adjusting volume etc).

The primary blockers in my way right now for normal use out and about are:

The screen does not auto shut-off. This means if the screen gets turned on in my pocket it never turns off and the battery dies.
Speakerphone not wired into the UI yet.
Can’t set the time on the phone yet. Also, the alarm feature in the clock doesn’t work; I need this to get me up in the morning.
Not so much a blocker, but the phone is still filled with example material and contacts. They need to be removed.

All of these are on the TODO list for completion by the end of the month.

I have been filing bugs for a bunch of the issues I am seeing on a day to day basis and the team are working hard to hit the end of May goal. Overall progress is looking good.

Although I have been using the daily images for quite some time on a phone without a SIM card, using as an actual phone is even more motivating than before. I can feel the phone coming together and when we get many of these issues fixed, it is going to deliver a far superior experience than the Android phone I was using before.

Dick Turpin: I'll give you piggin discount.

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Cannon) — Fri, 17 May 2013 08:50:00 +0000

Customer: "Can you quote me for two HP DC7700 and the other bits we discussed?"
Me: "Sure no problem, the 7700's are £145.00 each by the way."
Customer: "Ooh that price is really good, I might take nine instead. How much for nine, is there a discount?"

Hang on a sec, because it's such a good price you want seven extra but you want them even cheaper still? tell you what, just buy the two at the fair price I'm selling them at.

Jono Bacon: Getting the Ubuntu Advocacy Kit to 1.0

Thu, 16 May 2013 05:11:38 +0000

A while back I started a project called the Ubuntu Advocacy Kit. The goal is simple: create a single downloadable kit that provides all the information and materials you need to go out and help advocate Ubuntu and our flavors to others. The project lives here on Launchpad and is available in this daily PPA. If you want to see the kit in action just run:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:uak-admins/uak
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install uak-en

Now open the dash and search for “advocacy”. Click the icon to see the kit load in your browser.

We discussed the UAK this week at UDS and I want to get the kit to 1.0 level of completeness. This doesn’t require a huge amount of work, just getting a core set of content written up in a concise, simple, but detailed fashion. I want to complete this work and then get the kit up on loco.ubuntu.com as something people can download to get started advocating Ubuntu and our flavors.

I have created a blueprint to track this work and I am stubbing out a bunch of pages in the kit for pages that I think we will need as part of a 1.0 release.

And why are you telling me this?

Well, I am looking for help.

If you enjoy writing and have a knowledge of good quality advocacy, I would like to invite you to write some content. If you can just reply to this post in the comments (or anywhere else I tend to look, such as email or IRC), we coordinate who works on what and I will update the blueprint where appropriate.

Thanks for reading!

Jono Bacon: On Brainstorm

Wed, 15 May 2013 23:35:11 +0000

Recently the Technical Board made a decision to sunset Brainstorm, the site we have been using for some time to capture a list of what folks would like to see fixed and improved in Ubuntu. Although the site has been in operation for quite some time, it had fallen into something of a state of disrepair. Not only was it looking rather decrepit and old, but the ideas highlighted there were not curated and rendered into the Ubuntu development process. Some time ago the Technical Board took a work item to try to solve this problem by regularly curating the most popular items in brainstorm with a commentary around technical feasibility, but the members of the TB unfortunately didn’t have time to fulfill this. As such, brainstorm turned into a big list of random ideas, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous, and largely ignored by the Ubuntu development process.

Now, some folks have mused on the decision to sunset brainstorm and wondered if this is somehow a reflection on our community and our openness to ideas. I don’t think this is the case. While it is always important to build an environment where ideas are openly discussed and debated, ideas are free and relatively simply to come by, and the real challenge is converting that awesome vision in your head into something we can see and touch and deliver to others; this is not quite so free and simple. While Brainstorm provided a great place to capture the ideas, and we had no shortage of them, the challenge was connecting brainstorm to the people who were happy and willing to perform the work, and it didn’t really serve this purpose very well.

There were two problems with this. Firstly, picking up other people’s popular ideas is not how Open Source traditionally works. Open Source is built on a philosophy of scratching your own itch, traditionally fueled by programmers fixing their annoyances and building features and applications they want. Now, this is not to say a non-programmer can’t rally the community around their idea and build momentum around an implementation, but doing this requires significantly more effort than a fire and forget submission into brainstorm. In other words, just because an idea is popular doesn’t necessarily mean it is interesting enough for a developer to want to implement it. Secondly, brainstorm started to garner an unrealistic social expectation that popular ideas would be automatically added to the TODO list of prominent Ubuntu developers, which was never the case.

Today at UDS we had a discussion about these deficiencies in brainstorm in traversing the chasm between idea and implementation and Randall Ross had an interesting idea. With brainstorm retired we should re-focus the brainstorm URL and provide some guidance for tips and tricks for how to take an idea and rally support around it to develop an implementation. As an example, over the years I have discovered that taking an idea and building a well formed spec with detailed UI mock-ups and architectural diagrams, a detailed blueprint, regular meetings, and burndown charts, all significantly help to taking ideas from fiction to fandom. Equipping our community with the skills and tools to bring these ideas to fruition is a better use of our time.

So, the TL;DR of all of this is…brainstorm was a great idea at the time, but it didn’t effectively drive the most popular ideas in our community to fruition and delivery in Ubuntu. We want to help provide guidance and best practice to help our community be more successful in converting their ideas into development plans and getting people interested in participating.

Jono Bacon: Unity 8 Running on Mir on a Galaxy Nexus

Tue, 14 May 2013 20:49:32 +0000

Hot on the heels of my last post showing Unity 8 running on Mir on a Macbook Pro Retina, there were some folks who were curious about how well Unity and Mir work on a phone.

Well, thanks to your friend and mine, Kevin Gunn, you can see a video of Unity 8 on Mir running on a Galaxy Nexus (which is by no means a super-powerful smartphone these days):

Can’t see the video? See it here!

Again, just to emphasize, this has not been through a round of performance optimizations, so you can expect additional performance improvements in the future, but I think this demonstrates that we are heading in the right direction.

If you are interested in participating in Mir development, click here and if you are interested in participating in Unity 8, click here.

Jono Bacon: Video Demo of Unity 8 on Mir

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:00:02 +0000

Recently the Mir and Unity Next teams got Unity 8 up and running on Mir. Now, this work is still very early in development and neither Mir nor Unity Next are finished yet, but I reached out to Michael Zanetti, who is on the team, and asked him to put together a short video demo to show the progress of this work. This demo shows the phone/tablet part of the Unity 8 codebase; the final desktop version will come later.

Here is is:

Can’t see the video? Click here!

As you can see, impressive progress is being made; this demo is running on a MacBook Pro Retina utilizing the full resolution of 2880×1800 pixels and using Intel HD 4400 graphics. The performance is already looking great, and the team haven’t done a deep dive into performance optimization yet.

If you are interested in participating in Mir development, click here and if you are interested in participating in Unity 8, click here.

Jono Bacon: On Simplicity

Tue, 14 May 2013 03:50:24 +0000

As a pretty simple-minded person, I am a big fan of simplicity. The world is filled with too much complexity and too much detail. Many often feel the detail is necessary for particular outcomes or to solve particular problems. The lesson I have learned as I have gotten older though is that while the skill is in matching the level of detail to the mind of the observer, the real elegance is in delivering the same level of detail but in a way that feels simpler than expected to the observer. This results in delightful experiences.

Ross Gardler recently quoted Einstein who said “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler“. This so beautifully summarizes my view of the world; life should be as simple as we can make it, but we should not compromise in our goals merely to make things simple. In other words, if we can boil our projects, processes, interfaces, and ideas down into simpler parts that still let us be productive, they become more enjoyable to engage with and thus more successful. Of course, making complex things simple is…complex. It is though, worthwhile, and for many (myself included), a fun challenge. I am sure I am not alone.

As we step into our Ubuntu Developer Summit this week I would like to encourage everyone to think about ways in which we can simplify all aspects of how create and deliver Ubuntu to others as a means to further the project and experience. This doesn’t just apply to user interface design though. How do we make our teams easier to navigate and participate in? How do we make it easier to create your first app, charm, bug fix, translation, document, mailing list post, question, answer, or otherwise? If we can make in-roads this week in simplicity, I am confident it will continue the bold stride Ubuntu is making into the future of devices and the cloud.

Jono Bacon: Ubuntu Developer Summit: This Week!

Tue, 14 May 2013 03:47:33 +0000

Just a quick note to remind everyone that our next Ubuntu Developer Summit is taking place this week on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and is open and available to everyone to participate. This is the event where we get together to discuss, debate, and plan the next three months of work.

The event takes place online from 2pm – 8pm UTC. All sessions will run using a combination of Google+ streaming video hangouts and IRC, and you can see the full schedule on summit.ubuntu.com. Consequently, for those who cannot attend or might miss certain sessions, all sessions will be available pre-recorded from the session pages when the session is complete.

The event kicks off on Tuesday at 2pm with our keynote. We hope to see you there!

Jono Bacon: Sprinting In Oakland

Mon, 06 May 2013 01:46:30 +0000

Last week I traveled to Oakland to spend a week with my colleagues at Canonical for the Client Sprint. The aim of the sprint was to ensure the many different teams working on Ubuntu Touch at Canonical are in sync and working as efficiently as possible. This largely involves ensuring that the management teams are planning their work effectively, and that everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet.

To provide a little context, at Canonical we are working consistently to deliver a 1.0 Ubuntu Touch platform that is ready for October so it can then be delivered to customers for deployment on handsets in Q1/Q2 2014. This involves a wide variety of design, engineering, and service-delivery projects that currently involves 15 engineering teams, 5 design teams, and 5 services teams, totaling 150+ people. The aim of the sprint was to ensure these 150+ folks are aligned.

Now, some cynical people (who I suspect may need more hugs) think that the sprint is merely a Canonical-only UDS where we make a bunch of private decisions by explicitly excluding the community. Sorry, drama fans, this is not true. We spend our time discussing and managing Canonical staff and resources, talking about product review documents, staff assignments, hardware/IS requirements, reporting structures, stakeholder and customer requirements, and wading through endless spreadsheets to track all of this. We don’t do this at UDS as UDS is not a good event for this kind of team alignment work as we are all spread across multiple tracks (and most of our community would have little interest in these team discussions anyway), hence we have always had sprints to do this.

The sprint had a very definitive format. Every team has a defined set of responsibilities and projects and each team lead prepared a summary of their work, achievements, and blockers. As an example, one project my team has been working on is the skunkworks and core apps projects, and wider app development community growth. I gave a presentation that summarized this work and it provided an opportunity to update the wider team and identify areas in which we can work more efficiently (e.g. one outcome was opening up a more regular communication between myself and the head of the SDK team).

The good news is that things are running really well. The teams were well prepared, great progress is being made on the road to October, and any inter-team and inter-project issues that we did find were quickly and efficiently resolved. For such a large project with so many inter-connecting parts I was pleasantly surprised with just how coordinated everyone seems to be, and I want to thank the many engineering, design, and services managers and leads for their (often understated) leadership and planning. It is complex to coordinate so many moving parts when everyone works in the same office, let alone for such a widely distributed company working from home with so many different timezones.

Of course, there were many topics and projects discussed at the sprint, but there was one topic that resonated throughout the week: getting Ubuntu Touch into a form in which our community can start dog-fooding as soon as possible. In other words, right now you can download the daily Ubuntu Touch images, but you can’t really use it as your main phone; it still comes with a bunch of dummy data, some radio functions don’t work, and there is no way of saving data when you re-flash the device. In the next few months the teams agreed to expedite their work to make the Ubuntu Touch images ready so we can use them as our daily devices, thus opening more opportunities for testing, feedback, functionality edge cases, and more.

I have another sprint coming up this week (the Cloud sprint), but I have asked a number of people who joined the sprint to blog about their progress and updates. Keep your eyes peeled for more.

David Goodwin: Automated twitter compilation up to 01 May 2013

Wed, 01 May 2013 04:57:22 +0000

Arbitrary tweets made by TheGingerDog (i.e. David Goodwin) up to 01 May 2013

RT @funkatron: I thought this was pretty interesting on the cognitive dissonance tip t.co/t0hWaG45kx

(2013/04/28)
Iron man 3 had some flying robot things in it. And a few explosions. And a few references to The Avengers. Good film.

(2013/04/27)
Jacked up. t.co/ysHOg3min7

(2013/04/26)
RT @AndrewBate: @WooWebUk We’ve a vacancy at Talis for a Tech Lead – any chance of an RT? t.co/gqdppuz0ue

(2013/04/26)
RT @Nick_Greenhill: Ideally would also have expereince with SVN/Git, Mobile and responsive web, extra points for Node.js. Direct applicatio…

(2013/04/26)
RT @Nick_Greenhill: Right, I need PHP with experience in Yii or other MVC framework, Javascript and Jquery, MySQL, HTML, CSS (cont..)

(2013/04/26)
Apparently… I've given blood 10 times and now have a badge to prove it.

(2013/04/26)
RT @harrybr: SO USEFUL for dummy content in prototypes: in a google spreadsheet, create a series of two items, hold Alt & drag! http://…

(2013/04/25)
RT @PeteWilliams: @harrybr That is actual, bonafide, fucking awesome. Amazing what it works with too: t.co/BbBa7Ziqsq

(2013/04/25)
"You seem bored tonight …. Aren't you going running?" #hinthint #hintTaken

(2013/04/24, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
RT @yorba_org: 55 hours to go and we're seeing a huge surge in donations! Can you be a part of the last-minute push? t.co/THrjdv8x2b

(2013/04/23)
RT @Port80Events: Port80 2013 – web conference, Newport – 10th May – the running order t.co/YZ5nNuL5Of <– hot off the press (ple…

(2013/04/22)
RT @kelsojonesltd: Are you a #PHPDeveloper based near #Leicestershire? Looking for a new role? click here for more information t.co/…

(2013/04/22)
My car is faster than a Ferrari!

(2013/04/22)
The average learner's swimming pool is 10% spit, 10% wee, 10% vomit, 50% chlorine and 20% water. (cc @madeupstats ).

(2013/04/21, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
RT @alexmace: CONTINUE TESTING t.co/RGtquZSfvz

(2013/04/20)
Just read some interesting javascript form validation code for a postcode. Shame it's case sensitive. #fail

(2013/04/18)
I need to write a presentation.

(2013/04/18)
RT @bytemark: "If you run a hosting company… and want to help the industry, support Geary" – Bytemark Hosting MD – t.co/rr0RAJC …

(2013/04/18)
RT @ZombiesRunGame: We answer somebquestions about Zombies, Run! 2 in our latest blog post, including Season 1 availability – t.c …

(2013/04/17)
RT @anya_goodwin: Can't be bothered to wake up – so I'll cry in my sleep to make daddy feel useful. He needs something to do after all.

(2013/04/16)
RT @WooWebUk: Geek Night 2 is Thursday, 7:30pm at @TheHiveWorcs. Room for more speakers! Got something web related you can talk about fo …

(2013/04/15)
RT @ZombiesRunGame: It’s less than 24 hours until we raise the gates on Zombies, Run! 2 – are you all ready to run?

(2013/04/15)
RT @carlfish: IT security in a nutshell. t.co/Owih8Xzw0y

(2013/04/15)
composer++ ( t.co/0ykJCj1PyO etc ) #php

(2013/04/15)
RT @phalconphp: How to lose weight
in the browser? t.co/ZFIrGibt2w

(2013/04/14)
RT @AnthonySterling: +1 “@craigmarvelley: Fab tutorial on how to use Composer from @daylerees t.co/IZUh2bAnxb”

(2013/04/14)
RT @dogster24: Catch the thieving scumbags , please rt this everyone t.co/CvfdkNXeIi

(2013/04/14)
RT @RFU_RDO:

Dick Turpin: I fooking hate ZenCart

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Cannon) — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 10:34:00 +0000

So a customer came to see me to discuss yet more changes they wanted to make.

Customer: "See here on the final check out it's saying Tax 7%?"
Me: "So who changed the values?"
Customer: "I, I don't think we have?"
Me: "OK lets go Taxes--->Tax rates, change to UK 20%"
Customer: "Ooh was it that easy?"
Me: "Yep, but I'm still billing you for it."
Customer: "But? But?"
Me: "Hey, I knew how to do it and you didn't that's why you pay me."

Ker Ching

Ron Wellsted: Amateur Radio Progress

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:37:24 +0000

On Thursday, 18 April, I sat and passed the RCF Intermediate exam. After a delay due to a problem on the Ofcom website, I finally got the call sign 2E0RJW on Friday 26th April.

So I am now allowed to work on all the amateur bands at powers up to 50W.

Next stage, the Advanced exam.

Jono Bacon: Life Changing Mistakes

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 19:35:13 +0000

I have a theory (I know, I am full of them). Like most of you, as I have gotten older I have also tried to improve as a person. I am not just talking about being better at what I do with my career and hobbies, but I want to be a genuinely good person across the board; a good husband, father, son, friend, colleague, and dude who you bump your shopping cart into when buying milk. My theory is that people fundamentally improve by (a) making mistakes and (b) understanding and learning from those mistakes to not only prevent making the mistake again, but to also uncover the cause and effect of why the mistake was made, thus improving your life.

Now, the (probably illogical) logical continuation of my theory is that to make improvements (a) you need to make more mistakes (which opens up the opportunity for learning), and (b) you need to develop CSI-like capabilities in assessing those mistakes and their root causes. Continuing the theme, if we can figure out ways to identify ways of triggering making more mistakes in a way that doesn’t get you arrested and we can identify ways to help us understand why we screw up the way we do, we should have a golden ticket for rocking our lives. Incidentally, this theory was boiled in my head while driving out to pick up Thai food on Saturday night, so this is no Einstein’s Theory Of Relativity in terms of completeness.

While I am rather thin on the ground in terms of what is the next logical part of my theory, I suspect that the way in which we invite more none-life-threatening mistakes is to break out of our molds and take more risks; if we never take chances, we lower the opportunity for risk and mistakes, but also lower the opportunity for learning. Likewise, for the latter understanding our mistakes part I suspect the key is not figuring out ways to prevent the mistake (“I got angry and shouted at my dog today so I will try to keep my cool”) but more about understanding the cause of the mistake (“I am stressed from work and bringing that stress home and taking it out on people and animals”). Much as I love dogs, the goal here is not to stop shouting at the dog but to repair the root cause. So I ask you, dear friends, does my theory wash with you, and if so, how can we increase the number of mistakes and the quality of our self-assessment of those mistakes?

Jono Bacon: Ubuntu 13.04 Released

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:06:08 +0000

Ubuntu 13.04, the Raring Ringtail, was released today. Go and download it for Desktop, Server, Cloud, and for our Chinese friends, download Ubuntu Kylin. You can find all the details of what is new in Ubuntu 13.04 on www.ubuntu.com.

Ubuntu 13.04 is a fantastic release, and I just want to offer thanks to the many people around the world in our community who helped make it happen. Folks such as developers, app/charm authors, designers, testers, triagers, translators, sys-admins, support providers, governors, docs writers, advocates, and more, all contributed their brick in the wall to delivering Ubuntu 13.04 across Desktop, Server, and Cloud, and continuing to bring freedom and elegance in technology to more people. But this is only part of the story, as behind the scenes, but in full public view, we are continuing to evolve Ubuntu towards our convergence goals. This will be a common theme as we march forward to Ubuntu 13.10, the Saucy Salamander.

I know many of us are tired after a hectic release schedule, so take some time to enjoy the release, get together with other Ubuntu friends, and celebrate Ubuntu 13.04! I will certainly be blowing the froth off a few cold ones tonight.

Jono Bacon: Ubuntu Touch Progress

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 05:02:37 +0000

Ubuntu is on an exciting journey, a journey of convergence. Our goal is to build a convergent Operating System that brings a uniformity of technology and experience across phones, tablets, desktops, and televisions, and smoothing the lines between those devices in terms of interoperability and access to content. It is a bold vision, but Ubuntu has a strong reputation both in terms of our heritage in the desktop, server, and cloud, and with our passionate and capable community. I just wanted to provide some updates on work that is going on in delivering this vision.

There has been significant work going on in building Ubuntu Touch (the overall name for this convergent platform). The team have marked October in their calendars as the goal to have most of the primary components in the Ubuntu Touch code-base complete so we can deliver a fully converged system in Ubuntu 14.04. The Unity team have been working to centralize the different form factors into Unity Next, which you can play with now (weekly updates on progress coming soon here), the Mir team are making good progress in getting Mir ready for deployment on handsets with a technical preview on the desktop in 13.10 (see the weekly updates), and the Ubuntu SDK team are working towards delivering a beta in the next few months. We have also been working with our community to build the 11 core apps (of which three them are already shipping in the Ubuntu Touch daily development image), the Ubuntu Touch code-base has been ported by our community to and working on 40 handsets, with 25 handsets in progress, and across 19 different brands (of which the 4800+ posts in the XDA Ubuntu Touch forum has helped drive this work), and our app developer community has already grown to 1650 members on Google+ with a huge variety of apps in development, many of which we are pulling together in a PPA. We have also been working to automate the app submission process with a series of AppArmour sand-boxing improvements and tooling changes, we have an eight part tutorial series for writing an app from scratch, and have multiple training events and an Ubuntu App Showdown contest planned. On the business side we have seen tremendous interest from handset manufacturers and carriers, and the business team are in a marathon set of meetings across the world moving the discussions forward.

There is a lot to do, but we have an awesome team and community committed to the opportunity that lays before us. If we stay focused, stay on the ball, and take an organized and pro-active approach to problem solving, we could bring real technological change to the world with Ubuntu delivered via the very devices that form the fabric of most people’s lives. Let’s do it.

Dick Turpin: You fecking eejit

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Cannon) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:30:00 +0000

Me: "Why cant I ssh in?"
Me: "Helps if you use 10.165 and not 10.65 you cretin!"

Me: "Why is it not detecting index.php?"
Me: "It helps if you put the site in /var/www/ and don't put it in /root/ you amoebae!"

Jono Bacon: Three Point Blogging; An Experiment

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 22:48:28 +0000

I have an interesting idea I wanted to share that I am calling Three Point Blogging, and I am keen to get your input on this. Feel free to use that daintily prepared comment box, rummaging around at the bottom of this post, to share your feedback and ideas.

Blogging has lost some of its luster to me somewhat. I don’t enjoy nor have the time to read large swathes of text, and I don’t have the time to produce large swathes of text either. I suspect others feel this way too, hence the promulgation of tl;dr summarizing these wordy manifests. It is common theory too that most people take three points away from a presentation or article, and as such these textual overlords are somewhat overloading readers, who are often dipping into your blog in-between emails or meetings.

As such, I am inviting you folks to join me in a little experiment I am calling Three Point Blogging. Inspired by Twitter, and with a focus on content as opposed to word count, TPB blog entries should make three core points, spread across three paragraphs. This keeps entries short and sweet, focused on the core points, and more digestible. What’s more, this might encourage a little more playful word-smithing that is often lost when constructing the Berlin Wall of text. Now, this won’t apply to all posts, but I think it could apply to the majority of them, so I am giving it a shot. Anyone else interested in trying?

Jono Bacon: Congratulations to Microsoft Open Technologies

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 04:52:18 +0000

Recently Microsoft Open Technologies celebrated their one year anniversary. I just wanted to offer my congratulations on this important milestone.

Now, it could be tempting for some of you to become a little snitty about Microsoft wanting to engage more openly with people, but I believe that this project (as well as the OuterCurve Foundation; a different but similarly themed entity) should be celebrated. These are important steps in Microsoft evolving into a more open future, and folks such as Gianugo Rabellino from Microsoft Open Technologies and Paula Hunter and Stephen Walli from the OuterCurve Foundation are doing wonderful work in treading these careful steps forward. All three of these folks have been tremendously supportive of Open Source, community (including sponsoring the Community Leadership Summit multiple times), and demonstrate a real commitment to delivering those values in a historically proprietary culture. I can imagine that this is not particularly easy work, and I commend them for their commitment, and Microsoft for their evolution as a company.

Open Source has had a profound impact on the world, and for a company with such a philosophically different history to commit staff and resources to exploring a more open future, well, I think this is a fantastic step forward for Microsoft, Open Source, and wider interoperability.

The Microsoft Open Technologies team will be celebrating on Thursday in Silicon Valley with their anniversary party. Be sure to head over there; unfortunately I am unable to join due to another commitment.

Congratulations, Microsoft Open Technologies!

Jono Bacon: Valuable Lessons

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:13:02 +0000

Henry Ford, a great inspirational figure in the history of technological development once said that “when everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it”. Ford faced great technological challenges in building the Model T; a car that he wanted the average citizen to be able to afford back in the early 1900s. He committed his life to challenging the norm and bringing technology that touched the lives of real people.

While challenged with the status quo and at times by ignorance and entitlement, he merely saw “obstacles as those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal”. Ford’s commitment to making technology available to all resulted in more than 15 million Model Ts being sold between 1908 and 1927.

Valuable lessons.

David Goodwin: Fail2ban filter for WordPress

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:10:19 +0000

With the annoying brute force wordpress hack going round, one way to protect your site(s) would be to use fail2ban, with a configuration something like (which I’ve shamelessly lifted from http://blog.somsip.com/2011/12/protecting-apache-webservers-from-wordpress-admin-login-dictionary-attacks/ ).

The below seems to be working, and given it’s relative simplicity it’s obvious how you’d go about changing to protect other POST based scripts from brute force attacks. Obviously it’s not going to work if the attacker changes IP often (but from scanning the logs so far, it doesn’t seem to be the case that they are).

Obvious caveats :

Users who can’t remember their password(s) will get blocked.
It’s not going to protect you from a distributed attack (multiple IPs) very well
You may want to perform other counter-measures (like putting Apache http authentication in for URLs matching /wp-login.php)

In /etc/fail2ban/jail.conf :

[apache-wp-login]
enabled = true
port = http,https
filter = apache-wp-login
logpath = /var/www/vhosts/*/statistics/logs/access_log
maxretry = 5
findtime = 120

And In /etc/fail2ban/filter.d/apache-wp-login.conf :

[Definition]
failregex = <HOST>.*] "POST /wp-login.php
ignoreregex =

Jono Bacon: Community Leadership Summit, Training, and Talks

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 05:05:00 +0000

I just wanted to talk about a busy week of community management and leadership related content I will be involved in in July 2013 in Portland, Oregon.

Community Leadership Summit 2013

The Community Leadership Summit is the primary annual event that brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. The event pulls together the leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration to discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community.

The Community Leadership Summit 2013 takes place at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon on 20th – 21st July 2013, which is rather conveniently the weekend before OSCON.

At the heart of Community Leadership Summit 2013 is an open unconference-style event in which everyone who attends is welcome to lead and contribute sessions on any topic that is relevant. These sessions are very much discussion sessions: the participants can interact directly, offer thoughts and experience, and share ideas and questions. These unconference sessions are also augmented with a series of presentations from leaders in the field, panel debates and networking opportunities.

I can’t quite believe that this is the fifth anniversary of the Community Leadership Summit, and I am determined to make this the very best year yet! We already have an awesome list of pre-registered attendees, and this is shaping up to be yet another fantastic example of the primary place for community managers and leaders to get together to discuss, share, and learn best practice.

The event is completely free to attend, you just need to register first. I hope to see you there!

Community Management Training at OSCON

Speaking of OSCON, which takes place the week after the Community Leadership Summit 2013, I am also delighted to announce that I will be running my very first community management training class.

As some of you will know, I wrote The Art of Community published by O’Reilly (now in its second edition), which has rather fortunately become the best-selling book on community management and leadership.

For some time now I have wanted to deliver a training class that takes many of the concepts of the book, but extends them with detailed problem solving discussions, workshops, Q+A sessions, and more to provide an intense, detail-rich class about how to manage and lead communities, be them small and local or large and global.

On Monday 22nd July 2013, the day after the Community Management Summit 2013, I will be delivering this one day community management training class.

Topics in the class will include:

Welcome and Introductions
- Discussing how the class will work, student introductions, and facilities information.
The Core Mechanics Of Community
- Read/write communities.
- Understanding the social dynamics.
- Building retention and generational growth.
Planning Your Community
- Understanding where to focus community management.
- Gathering stakeholder and community requirements.
Building a Strategic Plan
- The importance of a crisply defined strategic plan.
- Structuring and documenting goals and objectives.
- Delving down to the work item level.
Building Collaborative Workflow
- Understanding the collaborative needs of your community.
- Building effective communication channels.
- Determining infrastructure and tooling needs and how to resource them.
Defining Community Governance
- The role of governance.
- Governance styles: dictatorship, delegated leadership, and enlightened dictatorship.
- Assessing the governance needs for your community.
- Building, codifying and documenting your governance structure.
- Growing effective leadership in your community.
Marketing, Advocacy, Promotion, and Social Media
- Assessing marketing, advocacy and promotional needs.
- Building a buzz cycle.
- Using social media effectively.
- Tracking publicity work and re-aligning for efficiency.
Measuring Your Community
- Knowing what to measure.
- Defining useful growth and health metrics.
- Understanding to how to read and react to metrics to provide more focused strategy.
Tracking and Measuring Community Management
- The importance of building credibility from good work.
- Planning for different visibility needs: stakeholders, the community, and your team.
- Tracking projects, using burndown charts, and reacting to project changes.
- Tracking growth and decline.
- Tracking community health and building a network

Find out more about and book your seat in the class by clicking here. Space is limited, so be sure to reserve your seat as soon as possible!

Burnout and Bickering: a Community Manager’s Guide to Conflict

I am also pleased to announce that I will be presenting a brand new presentation at OSCON on Wednesday 24th July 2013 at 2.30pm in D137.

The talk is entitled Burnout and Bickering: a Community Manager’s Guide to Conflict, and here is the description from the talk page

One of the most challenging aspects of growing community is managing conflict and burnout. While we often see the effects of conflict, getting to the heart of the issue is often more challenging.

In this new presentation from Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community Manager and author of The Art of Community, he presents a comprehensive guide to conflict and its many different causes.

The presentation explores how to identify these different causes (such as stress, personality differences, language/age/cultural barriers, and more), how to identify when problems are happening in a scalable manner, and how to resolve conflict in a progressive and repeatable way.

Bacon will also cover preventative measures to reduce the potential for both conflict, stress, and burnout, and wrap the content in a set of practical tools you can use in your own community.

All of this will be delivered in Bacon’s amusing anecdote and story filled style, delivering practical recommendations and techniques in a fun and contextual presentation.

I am excited about this presentation. As some of you will know, I have talked before about burnout and managing stress and conflict in communities, and this presentation provides extensive coverage of the topic. I am looking forward to presenting this at OSCON.

See more about the talk by clicking here.

As you can see, quite a week for community management and leadership! I hope to see you there!

Dick Turpin: Oh go on!

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Cannon) — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:22:00 +0000

Customer: "Hi, we have a printer that's off-line and I cant seem to get it back on. Also I have another printer I need adding to a PC."
Me: "OK but unfortunately you do not have a support contract with us so I'm afraid it's chargeable at £35 per hour."
Customer: "Yes I know we don't have a contract that's why we don't ring you very often."
Me: "Erm? OK?"
Customer: "Is there anyone there that can point us in the right direction?"
Me: "Yes, at £35 per hour."

Hello Mr Garage owner, you know you fitted a new wiper blade three years ago well I need some help with .........

Ron Wellsted: Telemarketers Beware!

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:13:35 +0000

I have finally reach the limit with unsolicited marketing calls (in spite of being registered with the TPS). So today I have implemented a couple of changes to the Asterisk phone system here.

1. All inbound calls with the number withheld will be presented with the number disconnected tones, then told that the call may be recorded (it will be!) before any phones ring.

2. If the call is from a telemarketer, I will transfer the call to sip:lenny@itslenny.com:5060

3. If they are already on my blacklist, they will automatically get transferred to sip:lenny@itslenny.com:5060

Aq: Gmail, the web, and yak shaving

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 21:46:08 +0000

A couple of days ago, someone asked me whether the Gmail website was any good on mobile. I said: it seems so, the couple of times I’ve used it, but I’m not really sure. I’ll find out, I said.

You’d think I’d know better by now.

once more into the breach, dear enemies

The way to actually find out whether it’s any good, with the gmail web app as with all things, is to use it for real for a bit. So I decided that what I’d do is exclusively use the web app to read my mail on my phone for a week.

There are two base criteria here which must be met. First: I have to be able to get at gmail from an icon on my iPhone’s home screen, and second I have to get notifications when I get a new mail. Those two things are axioms, here: if they’re not possible, then my answer is “the gmail web app is crap” because I can’t use it. The easy bit first.

the easy bit

Go to gmail.com in the browser: press the share button, press “add to home screen”. Done.

notifications for a new email

Web apps have a notification API, but it’s not useful on mobiles, because the whole point of a new mail notification is that you get it even if you’re not looking at your mail app. You wouldn’t want to keep the gmail web page open all the time, even if you were allowed to do so on a phone, which you are not. (The Nokia N9 allowed this. No-one else does; mobile platforms routinely decide to quietly kill your app and then raise it from the dead again when you want it back, and while it’s dead it’s not notifying anybody of anything, because it’s dead). So, we need a way for me to get a notification that I have a new email. This requires some sort of native app on the phone, fine, OK, but I didn’t want to have to write a native app to do it; someone must have written an app which can handle notifications and then open up gmail in the web browser. And indeed it is so: on the iPhone there’s Boxcar and Prowl. (I assume there are similar for Android.) Prowl costs money, so I looked at Boxcar first. Boxcar does, indeed, allow you to have it get notifications when you get a new email and then do some sort of user-specified activity when a notification comes in, hooray! (It does this by giving you a magic email address: you tell gmail to forward all your mail to that email address, and when it gets an email, it sends your phone a notification and then deletes the email. This requires trusting the Boxcar people, I agree, but the purpose of this exercise was to see if this could be done at all. If you want security, run your own webmail server, or your own server which monitors gmail and then send the notifications yourself, that’s fine; Boxcar can help with that too via their API.)

the easy bit… is never that easy

So, at this point, when I get an email, Boxcar shows a notification: I press the notification, and it opens my configured URL, which is gmail.com. This is great and I should be done by now, except…Boxcar opens my chosen address in a little in-built web view rather than my browser. Lots of iPhone apps do this — build in a webview rather than using the browser — and it really, really irritates me. There is no option to say “open this in the browser, damn you!” Grr.

But, after some poking around, I notice that the Boxcar changelog says “NEW: Add ability to open custom safari:// URLs in MobileSafari.” Aha! That sounds like what I want. So… I configure my custom URL to be safari://mail.google.com, right?

That doesn’t work. Nor does safari://http://mail.google.com, or any other combination I could think of. There is no documentation other than the above changelog line. Frustrated.

Then I thought: well, it doesn’t have to be Safari, per se. I have Google Chrome on the phone too. Maybe I can use that. The iPhone is set up so that apps routinely register custom URL schemes: it’s how they communicate. Is there, wondered I, some sort of custom URL scheme that I can use to force an https link to open in Chrome rather than Safari?

Indeed there is. Well done Chrome people. If I open googlechromes://mail.google.com it opens https://mail.google.com in Chrome. Yay! So I configure that as my link in Boxcar. Now when I get an email, I touch the notification, and gmail opens in Chrome! Hooray! We’re done!

We’re not done. Now, you see, my home screen link opens in Safari, and my Boxcar link opens in Chrome. That’s annoying and wrong. So, how do I edit the home screen link to be to googlechromes://mail.google.com?

You can’t. You can’t edit a home screen bookmark once it’s created. Bah. So, how do I make Chrome bookmark something to the home screen?

You can’t. Only Safari can do that, because it’s allowed the magic secret APIs and no-one else is.

So how do I put a Chrome bookmark on my home screen? Well, one way would be to have an HTML file which meta refreshes to the googlechromes: URL, and bookmark the HTML file in Safari. That way, I’ll press the home screen icon, that’ll start Safari, Safari will instantly start Chrome, and I’ll have a bookmark. Slightly inelegant, but not too bad.

I stuck the HTML page on my site, and tried it. Minor problem: the page refreshes before I can bookmark it! So, remove the meta refresh, open the page in Safari, bookmark it, put the meta refresh back in again. Ha! That works. (And add a nice home screen icon with <link rel="apple-touch-icon">.

New problem. Every time I hit the home screen bookmark, or the link from Boxcar, we open a new tab in Chrome with gmail in it. After ten minutes of testing this, I’ve got fifteen gmail tabs in Chrome. That’s no good. The Chrome links doc dictates how to explicitly say “I want a new tab”, but not how to say “I don’t want a new tab: reuse the previous one”. After a bit more poking around, though, you can use an x-callback-url-style URL with Chrome, and that lets you specify a source. So, instead of making my bookmark and my Boxcar URL be googlechromes://mail.google.com, I’ll make it be googlechrome-x-callback://x-callback-url/open/?x-source=boxcar&&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmail.google.com. That way, when you open that link a second time, it stays in the same tab as the first time! Hooray!

It’s not perfect. I can’t get Boxcar links and the home screen link to share a tab between them, so I end up with two Gmail tabs in Chrome. That’s annoying but not a total crisis. And this is now clean enough that I can stand to use it for a week. Now I get to actually try using the Gmail web app for a week and see what it’s like!

how annoying is the iPhone?

This all seems like a great big faff to me. Is that all the iPhone’s fault? Well… certainly some of it is. All that crap with Safari being the only thing that can bookmark to the home screen? You can’t add home screen bookmarks that aren’t to real URLs? Sure, these things are fairly technical, but they don’t seem like they’d get in anyone’s way if they did exist. Apparently in older versions of iOS you could bookmark (via a roundabout data URL procedure) weird URLs such as pref:something to open a Settings page directly, and Apple took that away. So that’s annoying.

But in general, I think that the approach of having a server monitor my email and then use the platform’s push notification service to tell me about it and open the webmail client…seems like a good approach. Android does seem to have a couple of IMAP notify apps in the Play Store, but they aren’t reviewed very well, and I don’t really want my phone to hang on an IMAP IDLE socket 24 hours a day. Avoiding that is precisely what push notifications (Google’s “Cloud to Device Messaging”) were invented for. (Note: there are lots of mail notification apps, but they poll. I don’t want polling. When I get an email, I want a notification. Not five minutes later.)

So, then… is this doable on Android? Is there an app like Boxcar where there’s a server component which can (somehow) monitor my gmail account and notify my Android phone, and then pressing the notification on my Android phone will open up https://mail.google.com in the phone’s browser? I’d be interested in hearing the answer to this, Android-using readers.

What about other platforms? How will Firefox OS handle this? (Maybe because they’re all web, they’ll just keep the web page open without ever suspending it, and let it use the web notification API?) I’d like to hear about other approaches. (I don’t want to hear “just use the native app”. Of course that’s the logical thing to do. The point here is to see whether I can set up my life so using a web app for email on my phone is a doable thing. If your answer is “you need to use the native app”, then I’ll take that as you saying “you can’t use web apps for this; you have to go native”. That’s a perfectly reasonable argument, but this post is not directed at you if that’s how you feel.)

Fun little project of gluing together technical bits, I must say. Constraints are the mother of inventiveness!

Dick Turpin: Coffee anyone?

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Cannon) — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:46:00 +0000

Customer: "Hi Pete, can I order two of your XP refurbished boxes please?"
Me: "Tell you what, if you order three I'll make you a nice filter coffee when you come to collect."
Customer: "But I don't need three?"
Me: "It's very nice filter coffee."
Customer: "Well I suppose I can put one in the warehouse, go on I'll take three then."

I do like a man who can be bribed with filter coffee.

Aq: Watching films on Ubuntu (in England)

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:15:37 +0000

So there I was last week at my parents’ house, and my dad said: I am thinking of getting Netflix.

“Oh?”, says I. “What brought this on?”

Questions like that end up turning into long discussions, and this was no exception. Those of you with the attention span of a four-year-old will find a summary at the bottom of the post.

He explained (in response to my question) that he likes the idea of watching films and it’s probably easier and probably cheaper and probably less hassle to do that in your own living room rather than the cinema, especially since the nearest cinema to him is probably 15 miles away. I pointed out that the available films will lag behind the cinema releases (so if you see an ad for, say, Star Trek Into Darkness ¹ on the side of a bus, you can’t watch it in your living room now) but that they lag behind a consistent amount (so all the films that hit the cinema 12 months ago ² arrive online at now, roughly, so all the films which were contemporarily released with one another are still contemporary with one another), and that there are multiple different providers of this sort of thing (Netflix, Lovefilm, Now TV). And I pointed out ³ that this would be a bit of a problem technically, because the computer plugged into the big TV in the living room runs Ubuntu, and you can’t watch commercial streaming video on Ubuntu ⁴ because it all requires MS PlayReady DRM ⁵ and there’s no Ubuntu implementation of that, and so this meant that we’d need to install Windows on that TV computer instead. ⁶

so, like, wassitallabout?

“How does it work?”, says my dad. “Well,” said I, settling into the chair and adopting a wise look, “you pay a monthly subscription, and then pick any film you want and watch it whenever you want for free, beyond the subscription. I think if you watch the very latest films then they might charge an extra cost because it’s a really recent film, but you’re already waiting 12 months before it hits Netflix at all; you might as well just set your clock to 18 months behind and watch a film once it hits non-pay-per-view.” A nod from Dad. “Oh, and I think occasionally there might be a film that Netflix doesn’t have: sometimes there are little wars between them and, say, Amazon or Lovefilm ⁷ or Hulu or whatever, and a film is a ‘Netflix exclusive’ or something.” ⁸

“We should check that,” says my dad, a man for whom “films I want to watch” has hitherto been Zulu and The Great Escape, but he’s right ⁹. Now we pause here for twenty minutes while, with increasing disbelief and shrillness, I discover that Netflix don’t provide a browseable list of their films. They don’t. That’s insane. Also: you know how shops that don’t display their prices are doing so because it’s all stupidly expensive? Anyone who doesn’t display a list of their products is doing so because that list is a lot shorter and less comprehensive than you think it will be. So we poke around some more (I was honestly, properly shocked by the absence of a list) and find a website that searches Netflix and gives you a link. Commence another twenty minute block of disbelief during which my dad names film after film after film he wants to watch, or wouldn’t mind watching, or has always meant to watch… and we find, I think, three. These weren’t all new films, weren’t all obscure films, weren’t all old films: there was a good mix. And hardly any of them were there.

and the rat was nowhere at all

Further research establishes that the rivals — Lovefilm, Now TV, Blinkbox — are the same. I was under the impression that every one of these online movie places had basically every film you’ve ever heard of, and they compete on pricing, or access to the very latest films. It is not like that. ¹⁰ Instead, Netflix and Lovefilm and Now TV have basically no films for streaming and then every now and again they might have one. That is: I thought that the model was “think on the bus of a film you fancy watching, then go home and find it on Netflix and watch it”, and the model is totally not that. Instead, the model is “decide you want to watch a film, and set aside two hours for film-watchy time, and then go to Netflix and choose a film from their list of films”. Or, in practice, from the subset of their list of films that you actually want to watch. That’s not necessarily a bad model — I’m sure new films come into Netflix’s list faster than you can watch them, and you could probably get quite a long way by just looking at their list and finding all the stuff on it that you like the look of — but I totally misunderstood (and so did Dad). I thought that Netflix were like Spotify but for films, and they really ain’t. ¹¹

father, I shall bring you only the finest blank tv screens

At this point he said, well, that’s crap then. I suppose I ought to go to the cinema.

I said: well, if you have to do the just-choose-off-the-list thing anyway, then why not just use a service who don’t charge a monthly subscription? What I mean is: do it all pay-per-view. So then you’re not paying when you’re not using it, and on any given day you can just do a search and see if there’s anything you fancy watching (and paying for), and if there isn’t, get in the car and go to the cinema instead. Best of both worlds. I’m sure that if you watched ten films a week that Netflix would be cheaper, but I don’t think that you’re gonna do that, daddy dearest.

OK, says daddy dearest. So, we do that, and put Windows on the computer, right?

Yep, I said. None of this stuff works on Ubuntu. Amazon Instant Video works fine, and does exactly what you want, but (check briefly on internet to confirm; briefly bitch on reddit about this; go back to dad) it’s US only. Soz.

the sacred art of stealing

We then have a little discussion about BitTorrent and theft of movies, during which I basically say: it is not the solution for you. First, it is really awkward and annoying. Popup ads, hundreds of different websites, being able to tell the difference between a “download the torrent” link which is real and one which is put there by an advert. Torrent sites are blocked by ISPs in the UK. Yes, gentle reader, stop sniggering at how this blocking approach is useless. Tt’s not meant to stop you, you filthy techie pirate: it’s meant to be a speed bump which makes it difficult for the unwashed masses to do this, to keep people like my dad out of the torrent gutter and in paid-for shiny Netflix territory… and it works.

I specifically recommended to dad that he not think about dealing with this stuff through theft, because theft is hard. Try it, next time you steal a movie: look at what you’re doing with the eyes of an inexperienced person. A person who doesn’t have Adblock Plus, who isn’t able to read through a list of search results and identify which ones “look legit” and which look like spam, who isn’t able to tell which links on a site are real and which download an exe. Theft is hard, and frankly it’s fairly close to not being worth the pain. It’s fairly close to it being easier to just pay the money. And that’s all the movie people want. They don’t want to make it impossible, they don’t want to studiously ignore that DRM doesn’t work, that blocking doesn’t work, that they can’t shut down every Pirate Bay proxy… all they have to do is make most people think “blimey, it’d be easier to pay the money than do this”. To me it feels like that’s now fairly close to being the case unless you’re a super techie (like most of the people reading this).

Also, y’know, stealing.

Also also: mkv. avi. srt. Do you really want to care about this stuff? Learn what a “BRRIP” is? Learn whether the thing you’ve got has Italian audio rather than English? Is "Incepcja - Inception DVDRip.XviD AC3 - ENG / Lektor PL" OK to download? ¹² Srsly, hassle. Avoid.

say that my glory was I had such friends

While explaining BitTorrent and why it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, a couple of very helpful people saw and commented on my Reddit post complaining about this stuff. Google Play, they said… that’s in the UK. Single-purchase pay-per-view videos, no subscription required. Dad’s got an Android phone so he’s already got a Play account… and Play Video works in Ubuntu?

Really?

It does, it turns out.

I was quite surprised by this.

he saved every one of us

You have to install hal to make Google Play work in Ubuntu ¹³: to do this, search for hal in Ubuntu Software Centre and then install it (“Hardware Abstraction Layer”) ¹⁴. This is the same thing that Amazon Instant Video in the US needs. It’s using Adobe’s Flash DRM stuff. This is good for us, we happy few, we Ubuntu users, because we have Flash. We do not have the PlayReady DRM which is in Silverlight ¹⁵, and which the movie studios are pressuring online video people to switch to — that’s why Netflix doesn’t work in Ubuntu, that’s why Lovefilm no longer works, why Now TV doesn’t work. Google Play, on the other hand, works fine. Dad likes the pay-just-when-you-watch-a-film model, and it works on his existing computer with his existing accounts; he didn’t even have to sign up for anything. Just click and he’s bought a film and can watch it. Right there in the web browser. No app required at all.

It was literally that simple.

People on other platforms, who are not only used to the idea that it’s that simple, but have hardly any concept that it might not be simple, are laughing themselves sick right now at me being so childishly, pathetically pleased by this. I personally am thinking: good work, Google Play. You made that easy.

The film that Dad chose to watch… was Twilight. Twilight. You’re not my real dad, dad.

dispatch war rocket Ajax to bring back his body

This is worrying. (Not the Twilight thing.) Flash still exists on Ubuntu, but Adobe have stopped making it. The DRM parts of it are already dependent on hal, which is basically deprecated: Adobe built the Flash DRM stuff into Flash and on Linux when hal was the thing, and since then hal has stopped being the thing, but Adobe didn’t update Flash to work with the replacement… and right at the moment it doesn’t look like they will at all, because they’ve stopped doing Flash for Linux. This means that at some point it will stop working. At the moment it is possible to legitimately, legally, happily, easily watch a Hollywood film on a stock, standard Ubuntu machine. Google Play can do it in at least the US and the UK; Amazon Instant Video can do it in the US. If Flash stops working, that goes away.

And HTML5 will not save us. It will not. They’re talking about putting DRM into HTML5 video right now, but either they won’t do it (and then there won’t be any commercial videos in HTML5, just like there aren’t now) or they will do it and they’ll likely pick a DRM scheme which is not implemented on Ubuntu and won’t be (highly likely to be something like PlayReady, because the whole industry is already familiar with it). A move away from Flash and towards anything else makes life measurably worse for Ubuntu users, because we have Flash, and don’t have anything else.

fight the work per unit time

But you’re missing the point, man! We must fight DRM! It doesn’t work and it’s evil and useless!

I agree with all that. But that’s a long-term fight. And no-one has yet convinced me that there is a way to do it without selling the whole world on the idea that they should just Stop Watching Movies until the DRM goes away. And we, the DRM-haters, have had little to no success convincing people to make that sacrifice.

The music industry is not a good guide here. What happened in music was that all the players fought one another with different DRM schemes, no cooperation, to try and beat out their rivals. And while they were doing that, Apple came along and built something which was slick and easy to use and had Apple-specific DRM in it and dominated the market. Then the music industry said: it is our music, you have to play by our rules… and Apple said: no we don’t. We really don’t. What are you going to do, music people? Go and sell WMAs? Not likely. Everyone’s got an iPod now. And Apple were right… and because everyone wanted to sell music to iPod owners and didn’t want to do it through Apple’s sales channel, they had to go DRM-free. Because that’s all that iPods would play. You could see this as a great victory for consumer power, if you squint a bit.

The movie people, though (and this is an important point) are not stupid. They have seen what happened to the music industry, have seen that it ended up with all viable saleable music being DRM-free, and have said: that’s not gonna happen to us. They are not going to fight and bicker amongst themselves while Apple builds a royal road to all the money. They are not going to knife one another. They’re going to get together, swallow their pride a bit, and cooperate because they recognise that one DRM system that everyone compromises a bit on is better than a million and the eventual arrival of DRM-free videos. And so they did cooperate: that’s what Ultraviolet is. And it does not matter that Ultraviolet hasn’t taken off yet: it does not matter that it is not a viable competitor to Netflix. The point is that it exists. The movie people will not be forced into offering DRM-free movies because they didn’t cooperate until it was too late. They have seen the mistakes the music industry made, and won’t get caught the same way.

Let’s talk about how, in the long term, the studios can be convinced to not use DRM: that’s a good conversation to have. But it’s hard to see how to do that now without telling my dad that he can’t watch Twilight on Ubuntu even if he wants to.

whataboutery

One of the things about this whole topic of movies and DRM and Ubuntu and stuff is that every sentence comes larded with a million caveats, oh-but-what-abouts, roads-not-taken, sidebars, and other ancilliary things. If you manage to find something where I said “and therefore X” and didn’t mention that Y and Z also exist as possibilities, do not assume that it is because I do not know about Y and Z. But tell me about them!

tl; dr

Summary: Google Play video works on stock Ubuntu, in your browser, and exists here in England. It is, as far as I am aware, the only legitimate, unhacky ¹⁶ way to watch a streamed Hollywood film on a standard Ubuntu laptop in England. I like it. So does my dad.

Notes:

not Star Trek: Into Darkness ↩
or 18 months ago, or whatever the time lag actually is ↩
a touch shamefacedly ↩
he wants instant gratification: being able to go from “I want to watch a film” to “I am watching a film” in seconds. This means that a DVD rental service is no good for his use case ↩
yes, Silverlight, but Silverlight itself is not the problem ↩
yes, I know about the Netflix-under-Wine stuff in Ubuntu. Read on ↩
yes I know Amazon own Lovefilm ↩
pause for brief explanation of how Netflix are remaking House of Cards in America ↩
and this is a massively unfair characterisation ↩
Maybe it is like that in America. It isn’t, here. ↩
this is not necessarily a complaint. I understand that Netflix are not Spotify for films, and it is not Netflix’s fault that they are not Spotify for films. You think the music industry is full of back-alley cheating and under-the-table secret deals? Ha! You should see the movie people. ↩
I’ll be honest: I’m not sure myself. Looks like it’s got English audio and Polish subtitles? Don’t know. ↩
if you don’t install hal, Flash obviously still works, but the movie just won’t play ↩
or sudo apt-get install hal from a terminal ↩
we could have. Microsoft have not “refused” to put PlayReady on Ubuntu. They just haven’t done it, and why should they? what’s their motivation? I wouldn’t do it if I were them, right now ↩
installing a custom Wine and a PPA is hacky; using a US-based proxy is hacky. If you think it isn’t, that’s fine; continue to think so, and we’ll agree to differ. ↩

Jono Bacon: On Vacation

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 23:39:46 +0000

Just a quick note: I will be on vacation this week in Australia. I will be checking in with work and email, but this will be more limited throughout the week.

Look forward to seeing everyone in a week! Lots of exciting things to focus on when I get back.

Dick Turpin: Enjoy the Easter holiday?

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Cannon) — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 08:32:00 +0000

Gaffer: "Hmm, I had to spend ages on Friday sorting out an email issue for a customer, great Bank holiday I had!"
Me: "Ah well, that's what comes of part owning the business."
Gaffer: "Hrmph, mutter, mutter, grumble."

David Goodwin: Automated twitter compilation up to 01 April 2013

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 04:57:24 +0000

Arbitrary tweets made by TheGingerDog (i.e. David Goodwin) up to 01 April 2013

Rowan heard the original batman theme song and then wrote this. t.co/3jahHp9Qnv

(2013/03/31)
Chick chick chick chickens … Lay a chocolate egg for me. t.co/y3RJ4AATNx

(2013/03/30, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
RT @mrsims82: I’ve been doing it wrong this whole time!! t.co/AApgL8Sc7k

(2013/03/30)
The snow man was off his head. t.co/oohVaBiEOt

(2013/03/30, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
Oh dear. The children have forgotten to wake up this morning. Whatever shall we do ……

(2013/03/30, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
It sounds like someone is bouncing a ball against a wall outside … And has been for hours. #GreatEscape

(2013/03/30, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
Why I try and avoid frontend web dev work – CSS etc – https://t.co/CQJXleJBSG

(2013/03/30, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
RT @MarkGoodge: If you haven’t already done so, please could you take my quick survey on salary perceptions: t.co/GnDMF2MUqc (and …

(2013/03/30)
The Easter Glendower dragon egg hunt was successful. t.co/08nIwLVDHp

(2013/03/29)
Superworm is super strong. Superworm is super long. Watch him wriggle, see him squirm. Hip hip horray for Superworm!

(2013/03/25, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
RT @cisnky: Mobile design: Avoid these 4 common user experience fails

Read more at t.co/s42wqluGGb – t.co/r8iiM93vwV

(2013/03/24)

RT @claireyrocks: Old school twitter. t.co/96dzBW3Dib

(2013/03/23)

Anya and the snow lady. t.co/v3yldzgLQ1

(2013/03/23, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)

The #snowpocalypse hits Bromsgrove t.co/UwII0tWEwR

(2013/03/23)

The children had a lie in, it’s snowing heavily enough to make it possible to make a snow man … It might be a good weekend !

(2013/03/23, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)

RT @googlenexus: Nexus 4 is now back in stock in the UK. Get the new smartphone from Google today: t.co/UJT2jzhdXh

(2013/03/21)

#snowpocalypse outside now. #uksnow 6/10 b60

(2013/03/21)

My old iphone4 seems like such a toy now I’m used to a “real” (larger) screen…. how did I ever manage / cope with something so small.

(2013/03/20)

CDs? DVDs? Videos? Paper books? We used to have some a long time ago…. Back when we were young…. #feelingOld

(2013/03/17)

I like the recent update for @whatsapp on android. Much nicer native feel.

(2013/03/15, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)

RT @AvoncroftMuseum: t.co/6WKnAZpb1I – Our stand @EducationShow with big thanks to @TigerTurfUK who donated the grass! Come & …

(2013/03/14)

Really need to : a) finish completing tenders. b) tweet from the right account. c) sleep.

(2013/03/14, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)

RT @pezholio: :facepalm: t.co/oTVQBHoZpN

(2013/03/13)

OH: “That’s done through Cron.hourly, which runs every 15 minutes … “

(2013/03/12)

Time to run away from some zombies (@ZombiesRunGame ). I finally figured out that I should sprint when the zombies are close. #niceButDim

(2013/03/11, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)

RT @uobcompsci: Interested in Raspberry Pi? Attend the Birmingham Raspberry Jam this weekend, run by @uobcompsci student @JackWeirdy, ht …

(2013/03/11)

RT @SciencePunk: This is just brilliant. t.co/j5XhHjd38B

(2013/03/10)

RT @CaseySoftware: #protip When you meet a woman at a tech event instead of assuming she can’t be a dev ask “what’s your role on the tea …

(2013/03/10)

RT @rowan_m: For devs thinking “enterprise” == hiding functionality behind >9k layers, this parody is way too familiar. t.co/ …

(2013/03/09)

Overheard a parent in a restaurant say “Look at the children [mine] over there who are behaving.” while theirs misbehaved. #win

(2013/03/09, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)

Excellent meal out at @TheStaggInn complete with edible ‘soil’ to gross out the kids t.co/gBU9HSOIO2

(2013/03/09)

RT @mikko: Details about the Android mobile malware creation toolkit called ‘Perkele’: t.co/c0kk9x6BSL
#mobilemalware
#google
#pe …

(2013/03/06)

RT @fabpot: .@bramus: @fabpot I’m teaching my students Bachelor ICT to work with #Silex. Course Materials are on GitHub: t.co/tWz …

(2013/03/06)

RT @serverdensity: In praise of “boring” technology from Spotify – t.co/VpsXMbK5mu

(2013/03/06)

RT @mmasnick: Yay. New Humble Bundle for Android… https://t.co/2pRqfDEqTE

(2013/03/06)

Updated my Google password after 4 years. Couldn’t switch to / from Google authenticator on the phone itself when trying to log in #fail

(2013/03/05, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)

I wonder how long 1&1 will take to fix a customer’s virtual server. Clock’s at 2 hours+. If only they used @bytemark ….

(2013/03/04, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)

RT @ukandrewtaylor: Ever need to create obfuscated MySQL data for use in your non-prod environment? https://t.co/H88q9kEg1L could help y …

(2013/03/03)

Jono Bacon: Smart Scopes Not Landing In 13.04, Will Land in 13.10

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 18:53:02 +0000

As some of you may know the dash team has been working to get the new smart scopes functionality in the dash ready for 13.04; this functionality delivers a far more comprehensive dash experience, performing searches over 50 or more different data sources. This feature makes the dash dramatically more useful by searching a far wider range of data sources and returning more relevant results.

The team has been working in a PPA to get the feature ready, and as we are past feature freeze, had filed a Feature Freeze Exception (FFe) to get this into 13.04. After an extensive amount of work to get the feature ready, unfortunately the dash team doesn’t consider it mature enough for 13.04 — it is nearly there, but doesn’t meet the quality needs for Ubuntu. As such the team has decided not to pursue landing in in 13.04 and to instead move it to the Ubuntu 13.10 cycle where it will be developed as soon as the archive opens. As I mentioned earlier, this feature has been developed in a PPA and has not landed in 13.04 yet, so there are no actual changes to the archive.

Some of you may have some questions about this so we have prepared a short FAQ below. I have also notified our governance boards to ensure they are aware of the change. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments!

The FFE (1154229) got a sabdfl override and is now being rejected, how come?

A sabdfl override always has high requirements regarding code quality and User Experience. After looking at the current status of the smart scopes project we decided that the User Experience simply needs more work and it does not meet the quality requirements for Ubuntu. We would prefer to delay the feature until the next release cycle to ensure that it is rock solid.

Why was this feature being pushed at the last minute?

We believe the feature does provide additional benefit to Ubuntu Users by improving the search experience in the Dash, which is Unity’s weak spot. Landing the feature in 13.04 would have given us 1 additional cycle on the way to 14.04 to train and improve the suggestions provided by the server and further refine the overall Dash experience.

When, if at all, will the feature make its way into Ubuntu?

We are planning to provide the feature in a PPA for Ubuntu Raring which will be always rebased on Unity shipped on Raring. It will land it as soon as we are confident enough on the feature quality in Ubuntu S.

What about the in-dash purchases feature? Will that be landing?

There were some final outstanding issues with in-dash purchases and we are striving to have a conclusion to this ready for early next week (week beginning 1st April).

What about the privacy enhancements that were part of the smart scopes project?

It is unfortunately not possible to get the privacy enhancements from the smart scopes projects without the larger project itself. Smart Scopes would have allowed to disable individual scopes and limit network access for searches at all. In Ubuntu 13.04 you will still be able to disable all server communications through the settings apps. You can also remove the scopes and lenses you are not interested in using them by directly uninstalling the corresponding packages.

Jono Bacon: Introducing BBQpad

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 04:48:50 +0000

Recently I have been working on a project with my best buddy Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge, called BBQpad.

I haven’t really talked much about it on my blog as we have been fixing up the rough edges, but I wanted to share a little about it now.

As some of you will know, I have been increasingly getting into BBQ as a hobby. I love being outside and cooking, I love cooking over fire, and the art and science of BBQ facinates me. Don’t think there is a science? Well check out amazingribs.com and see just how much detail, science, and engineering can be involved in creating awesome BBQ.

One of the tips people give you when you start learning grilling and smoking is to maintain a notebook where you track the details of your cooks. You can then refer to what you did, learn from what works and what doesn’t, and improve your ‘cue.

Being of the nerdy persuasion, I was not going to use no stinking paper and pen, so I wrote a web app to track my cooks.

Originally I wrote this as something just for me, and then it struck me that this could be of general interest. I was chatting to Aq one day and he loved the idea so we decided to build what you now see at www.bbqpad.com. The sites works on your computer, mobile, and tablet.

How BBQpad Works

So what does BBQpad let you do?

Well, with it you can create any number of cooks; each cook is a place you track the details of each cook session, such a meal for your family, practicing to improve your cooking, a party for your friends, a BBQ competition, or anything else. Go and see an example cook.

Within a cook you can add as many cookers and foods as you need (we maintain a database of cookers and foods to make this easy).

When you start cooking you can then track lots of different things:

The different woods and fuels you use (we maintain a database of woods and different fuel products).
When your food is added and removed from the cookers, and we automatically calculate cook time to make it easier to see how longs things take to cook. You can also track rest time for the different foods (if applicable).
All your food prep elements such as rubs, sauces, brines, marinades, and more. You can also add general notes about your food items such as the weight, quantity, where you bought it, the level of marbling, whether it is organic (good for veggies) etc.
The temperature of your cookers and any food items you are tracking internal temperature for. We use this to plot graphs of your cookers and foods; this makes it easier to track your temperature control and improve things where there are problems.
General updates to the cook. As an example, if you spritz your food with apple juice to keep it moist, you can track this and the time when it happened.

We also allow you to add photos for the final food products as well as photos through the cook to show how your food is evolving. Photos can be added from your desktop, or mobile devices such as your phone or tablet.

When you have finished cooking an item you can then rate it for taste, tenderness, and appearance; these are the same ways people rate food in a BBQ competition setting.

Continuing the competition theme, we then provide a cook score based upon the certified KCBS competition scoring format for each of your food items as well as an overall score for the cook. This provides a neat way of seeing which cooks or items were better than others.

An example cook.

Getting All Social

One of the goals of BBQpad is not just to provide a place to store cooks, but to also make BBQpad as social as the cooking itself. BBQ is all about cracking open a few beers, cooking some food over fire, enjoying the spoils with friends, and having a great time.

The social aspect of BBQpad is built right into the cooks.

On every cook page there is integrated discussion where people can leave comments and offer tips, advice, and other comments while you are cooking. We also have integrated social media to post your cooks to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Reddit.

One area where BBQpad is really handy is pointing people to the details of a cook. As an example, you may join one of the many BBQ forums/communities online and ask a question about an aspect of your cooking and you can easily point people to the cook page on BBQpad where people can get a good idea of the context of the cook. We have also seen many users tweet about their cooks so folks can follow along as they are happening, often leaving feedback and comments on the cook page.

Another neat part of BBQ is the community. Here you can see the latest photos from cooks, most active pitmasters, new users, active cooks happening right now, recently completed cooks, and more.

The community brings BBQpad pitmasters together.

Another feature is the most popular page which shows you the most popular cookers, woods, and fuels that the community uses in their cooking. We plan on expanding this page with other most popular items soon.

See what our pitmasters prefer.

Clicking on one of these products will also take you to a product page which shows you information about the cooker, the prices on various sites (right now Amazon, but we will add other vendors soon), and a place to have discussion about that product.

Product information for the Weber Performer grill.

Cooking Together

Another cool feature that we added recently is the ability to do online cook offs.

The idea is simple: there will be a number of cook off events on BBQpad in which everyone is welcome to join and participate in. The cook off will happen on a specific date period and cover a specific food, and pitmasters from around the world will all cook together, tracking their cooks on BBQpad.

To take part you simply go to the event page on the date(s) of the event, create a new cook as part of the event, and track your cook in BBQpad. As you and others cook you can see the latest cook updates from these different cooks all in one place, as well as discussion from those watching the cook off. We also encourage those of you who tweet to tweet about your cooks with the #bbqpad hashtag, and those tweets appear on the cook off page too. This provides a great way of cooking together and having fun with the cook off.

Congrats to Jason Perlow for winning our first cook off!

We did our first cook off recently and it was a lot of fun; go and see the The Ultimate Rib Cook Off. We plan on doing another cook off soon (most likely chicken).

Upgrades

BBQpad is completely free to use, and we want it to be a fantastic community resource for the wider BBQ community. Naturally we have some running costs, so we have added some discrete ads to the cook pages to help cover these costs. We also gather a small amount of affiliate revenue when someone buys one of the products linked on Amazon. As such, if you want to buy a cooker or charcoal, go and buy it from BBQpad.

We also have a few cheap upgrades people can buy. Our view is simple: all cooks by default are publicly available and thus shared with the wider community, and when people provide these cooks we feel they have earned the right to use BBQpad for free. Some folks (such as competition cooks, restaurateurs, or just private people) may prefer to have private cooks so they don’t share their techniques and recipes.

We offer private cooks as part of BBQpad Pro (which includes blocking ads) for $24/year, which is only $2/month. You can also just block the ads for $10/year.

The private cooks feature is pretty cool: you can choose whether cooks are private or not on a per-cook basis, so if you want to use the community features on the site (such as cook offs) you can make those cooks public, but if you want to practice for a competition and keep those cooks private, you can do so with the click off a button.

The Technology

Now, many of you in the technology world who follow me will be curious about the site and how it was built. In a nutshell, we are using the awesome Django platform (and the always lovable Python) as well as Twitter Bootstrap as our CSS library. We are managing the source code with Bazaar and hack on it on Ubuntu Desktop using Geany. All imagery was created using Inkscape and the GIMP. We test across a number of different browsers, and primarily use Firefox for debugging. The site is deployed and running on Ubuntu Server.

In terms of development methodologies Aq and I both hack on the site and we manage our work using Trello and drafted and reviewed UI designs using Balsamiq. We have also deployed staging and live servers and we each code review each fix before it lands.

The site is currently in beta and has evolved significantly since we first launched it. This has included two rounds of user testing that have proved to be tremendously valuable in refining the user journey on BBQpad.

I know some of you will want to know if this is Open Source or not. Right now BBQpad is not Open Source but is a free web service that everyone is welcome to use. We may consider Open Sourcing it in the future, but right now it is not a priority; we would rather focus on adding extra features and refining the site.

BBQ is a lot of fun and our hope is that BBQpad makes it even more fun and social. Come and join in the fun!

Go and see www.bbqpad.com and follow us on our Facebook page, on Twitter, and in our Google+ community.

Dick Turpin: Oh, Ooh? Umm?

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Cannon) — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 10:39:00 +0000

Colleague: "They need more memory, it's only got two sticks of 512MB."
Me: "What kind of memory? PC2? DDR? SDRAM?"
Colleague: "Oh, Ooh? Umm?"

Colleague: "Also they have a laptop and the 80GB HDD is full."
Me: "Easy, we'll snapshot it, transfer the image to an 120GB drive, jobs-a-goodun."
Colleague: "Good idea."
Me: "What type of drive is it? Is it SATA or IDE?"
Colleague: "Oh, Ooh? Umm?"

Jono Bacon: More Regular, Open, and Transparent Planning

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 00:39:07 +0000

Continuing with the work to refine and improve how we build Ubuntu in an open, transparent, and collaborative way, I want to take a few minutes to discuss some work going on to improve the regularity of our planning and the benefits this brings.

Traditionally planning for Ubuntu has worked like this.

We ship a release.
Shortly before a release we rapidly prepare blueprints for the next Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS). Everyone is welcome to participate.
We discuss topics at the UDS and jot down work items into blueprints.
We then execute on those work items over the course of the six month period.
We track this work on status.ubuntu.com and use burndown charts to visualize this progress.

While this has served us well, there are a few problems with this approach. The most notable issue is that we work in software, and a lot changes in software in a six month period. This means we define a set of work items, prepare the burndown, and then if requirements or direction changes it can be difficult to reflect those changes across our community and we have to go and postpone a bunch of work items and re-build our burndowns. This means that even though the changes are made to open blueprints, it can cause folks across our community to be out of sync. It also presents the misconception that everything at UDS is locked in for the duration of the six month cycle. If something changes in our strategy or a new opportunity opens up, it can be difficult to change course with everyone on the same page.

Solving this is part of our theme of making Ubuntu engineering as transparent and agile as possible.

One approach we are experimenting with in the Ubuntu Engineering Management team at Canonical is to increase the regularity and transparency of how we plan. Instead of locking in every six months we will do it like this:

We host the virtual UDS (vUDS) every three months and use the event as a means to plan out the next three months of work. All discussions are open, everyone is welcome to participate.
Blueprints will be used to track that work and work items will be divided up into monthly milestones.
On the last week of every month we will review the work performed in the last month to see how well it was completed and then plan the forthcoming month’s work. This provides an open opportunity to identify blockers, define new goals, and change coarse if needed.
A new burndown chart will be generated on status.ubuntu.com and we will host a Google+ Hangout presenting the goals for the next month to ensure that everyone is fully up to speed on what is going on.

Now, to set expectations clearly: this is just an idea for how to improve this workflow, and we are doing it for the first time this week, but the idea is that it will dramatically increase the transparency of which teams are working on what, making it easier for others to (a) know what is going on and (b), participate in areas of interest.

My team is currently preparing the work items for April and you will be able to see the final burndown here when it is complete. From there you will be able to see all the blueprints.

I will provide plenty of feedback on what is working well and less well, and your feedback is welcomed, as ever, in the comments.

Building Re-usable Processes

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, we want to make virtual UDS an event that is repeatable and useful for not just UDS but also for domain-specific events too (such as a LoCo themed UDS). The goal is that this event format is repeatable for our wider community.

Likewise, the monthly planning process is also designed to be repeatable for our wider community too, making it simple to get everyone on the same page for planning and executing on awesome projects.

As ever, feedback is always welcome, but I think this combo of a wider planning event every three months combined with monthly work item sync-ups and planning will result in a pretty effective formula for helping Ubuntu to be as effective, transparent, and collaborative as possible.

David Goodwin: Script to fix NFS (Debian Squeeze + Backports bits)

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 20:09:05 +0000

I have a NFS server running Debian Squeeze. Additionally it’s using the 3.2.x kernel from backports, and the nfs-kernel-server from backports too.

Sometimes NFS breaks, and gives helpful messages like :

mount.nfs: connection timed out

or just:

Stale NFS handle on clients.

While I’m confident that my /etc/exports and other configuration files are correct, it still insists on misbehaving.

Below is a random shell script I seem to have created to fix the NFS server -

#!/bin/bash
set -e
/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server stop
/etc/init.d/nfs-common stop
/etc/init.d/rpcbind stop

rm -Rf /var/lib/nfs
mkdir /var/lib/nfs
mkdir /var/lib/nfs/v4recovery /var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs

for f in /var/lib/nfs/etab \
/var/lib/nfs/rmtab \
/var/lib/nfs/xtab; do
[ -e $f ] || touch $f
done

/etc/init.d/rpcbind start
sleep 2
/etc/init.d/nfs-common start
sleep 2
/etc/init.d/nfs-kernel-server start

echo "NFS may now work"

exportfs -f

Yes… “NFS may now work” … that sums it up about right.

David Goodwin: Spam and Comic Sans.

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 14:13:03 +0000

Today, I received a spammy email from an unknown golf club. There was no obvious unsubscribe link or instructions, so I blindly replied with :

Hi,

Please remove 'xxxxxx' from your mailing list; we've no interest in golf…

Thanks,

David

They replied with :

REMOVED OK

But it was actually :

<FONT color=#0000ff size=4 face=”Comic Sans MS”>REMOVED OK</FONT>

i.e.

So I had to reply with :

<div style=”text-align: center;”><u style=”font-size: 144px; color: rgb(245, 236, 0); font-family: ‘Comic Sans MS’; “><b>Thank you!1!!</b></u></div>

I fear the intricacies of my reply were lost on them.

David Goodwin: A few months with a Nexus 4

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 10:16:23 +0000

So, I’ve had a Nexus 4 for a while now … here’s some findings :

The phone is symmetrical (or very close to it) – so I often pick it up the wrong way around – at least with an iPhone there was a button at the bottom which acts as an easy to feel guide so you can pick it up correctly in the dark. Adding a case to it helped.
You need a bumper/case for it… mine cost £3 on Amazon or something … without one it’s too slippery/slides off everything.
The battery life is both good and bad – while not in use, it lasts ages; but it has a big screen – so playing games or watching Netflix on it, will really kill the battery. I’m using Battery Widget Reborn – which does a great job at turning wifi/sound/gps etc all off overnight which helps a bit.
I came to use the Nexus 4 from using an iPhone – my main like is widgets – having something that updates in real time on your desktop (why did the iOS weather app never display today’s symbol?) is great.
I miss having a count of notification numbers next to the launch icons.
I kind of miss iMessage – in so far, as I wish Google had something similar. At the moment there is gtalk, google plus chat (or something) …. which don’t seem to be totally integrated … and I have to supplement this with WhatsApp which not all that many people use (here’s hoping for Google Babble)
I wish the Bluetooth integration was better – not being able to see track names etc on the £30 Sony MW600 thing I bought kind of sucks. I’m fairly sure that if my car was good enough to have a bluetooth capable radio, then I wouldn’t see any track names from it either :-/
I like Navigation – I’ve used this a number of times and it does a good job. If only I could make it’s voice louder though. Perhaps this is why I need a car radio with blue teeth.
I’ve not noticed that I’m missing any apps from iOS which aren’t available on Android – but I suspect I only regularly use ~10 (k9 mail, world war, twitter, whatsapp, bbc news, facebook, gallery, nagios, kashdroid, ZombieRun!).
The screen is a little too big to use it with only one hand.

Jono Bacon: Recent Ubuntu Community Refinements

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:39:20 +0000

Our community is at the heart of how we build Ubuntu. Recently there were some concerns expressed about some aspects of our community and I have been working with various community members and internally at Canonical to resolve some of these issues to make things smoother.

I just wanted to summarize some updates:

Regular, transparent planning – we want to improve how we plan the delivery of work items, and make that planning more nimble. While the major decisions are reserved for primary discussion at UDS, we want to regularly and transparently checkpoint progress on those projects, and ensure things are moving along. To do this the engineering managers at Canonical will perform this planning on a monthly basis with our community. An an example, with my team, we will decide at UDS what major projects we will work on and document the work items in those blueprints, and every month I will ask the team to commit to delivering an agreed set of work items that month and update the blueprints accordingly. This will make it easier to understand who is working on what, what needs to be done, and areas in which people can participate. This entire process will be completely open and transparent and I would like to encourage our wider community to use the same approach. As an example, this could be a useful technique for our LoCo community to use for planning their work too around advocacy campaigns. All of this work will continue to be tracked openly in status.ubuntu.com.
Training our engineers – our engineers at Canonical are expected to openly and transparently perform all work that is not considered customer/company confidential. While this expectation is clear, there are sometimes cases when this doesn’t happen (e.g. if someone joins Canonical without the experience of working in an open environment and isn’t really sure how to do this). I have prepared an internal slide deck with these expectations and workflows clearly laid out; my team will be working to ensure everyone gets the deck, reads it, and gets an answer to any of their questions.
Regular leadership problem solving meetings – one problem we have today is that we don’t have a regular problem solving meeting in our community in which our governing leaders are present at. Instead our different leadership boards (e.g. Community Council, Forums Council) tend to resolve issues pertinent to that specific board. We think it could be useful to have a meeting every two weeks that has representatives from our different governance boards and our community can join and raise topics for discussion. We are going to run the first one of these sessions tomorrow (Tue 19th March 2013) on Ubuntu On Air at 8pm UTC. We invite you to bring your topics there on IRC for discussion.
Online UDS refinements – as I blogged about last week we have released a survey to gather feedback about how to refine and improve UDS. We have already made some plans for some improvements but I plan on organizing a community meeting to discuss this more next week (I can’t later this week as I am at an event). I think there is an opportunity to refine the format of UDS into a form that becomes a useful and repeatable way of coordinating meetings in a community.
Weekly Updates – I have reached out to the engineering managers on some of the core projects at Canonical and asked them to provide weekly updates of work going on. We have already seen the first updates for Ubuntu Touch and Mir.
Prepping announcements better – while the major announcements are now out, one piece of feedback I received is that our community felt ill-prepared around things such as the Ubuntu Touch announcement, and people such as our IRC/Forums/Community councils were inundated with questions and didn’t have good answers to those questions. If we need to make future announcements in the same way again, I am going to ensure our core governance boards are clued up first and we provide a FAQ for our community to refer to when getting these kinds of questions. This should relieve this concern.
Improving our community on-ramp – one area where I want to drive some improvements is making it easier for people to join the community. We started some work a while back to improve the community landing page on ubuntu.com and I have asked Daniel Holbach to drive that work to completion. I am also working with the Ubuntu Touch and Mir teams to ensure that they have awesome documentation and guidance for how people can participate. A good example of the progress being made here is the Mir documentation. If you would like to help improve these docs, then feel free to dig in and help, or share your ideas on the mailing lists.

I want to get as much feedback on these steps moving forward as well as other ideas and areas in which we can focus. You can always grab me on IRC on freenode (my nick is jono) and I hang out in #ubuntu-community-team. Also feel free to drop me an email and join my regular Q+A session every week. Unfortunately, this week’s Q+A session is canceled as I need to be at an event, but I will be back in the regular slot next week on Wednesday at 7pm UTC on Ubuntu On Air.

Rob Annable: Institutionalised in the Black Maria

rob@annable.co.uk (Rob Annable) — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 13:10:15 +0000

Notes made on the 22:30 from Euston to Birmingham, whilst returning home to the provinces after treating myself to an evening of presentations and discussion with Dan Hill, Jeremy Till and Wouter Vanstiphout under the title Institutionalised…

Housed in the Black Maria installation at St Martin’s by Richard Wentworth/GRUPPE we were split into eager registrants who’d secured a ‘seat’ and lazy laggards who just turned up to freeload by taking a chair outside the installation and behind the projection screen. Proceedings get underway with the barrier between us raised and the talk show hosts/guests in the middle, then at the appointed moment when sufficient teasing has taken place, the screen falls (to the sound of a jet aircraft landing) and we become the privileged few allowed sole rights to the speaker’s attention and slides that are the right way round, whilst the rest get only sound piped through speakers and reversed images and text. It’s a privilege that is later slightly sullied by the numbness of our arses as they complain about the unforgiving plywood steps we’re sitting on. The fact that Richard Wentworth himself chose to sit on the chairs outside should have told us something perhaps.

It’s a beautiful thing though, and perhaps the very embodiment of what would during the evening be discussed as the conflict between the teaching of craft and ethics. Carefully crafted as it is to disrupt the usual ethics of oratory; thereby straddling both concepts perfectly.

The evening is introduced by Shumi Bose and the speakers are described as one qualified architect (Till) and two people who inhabit the ‘extended field of architecture’ (Hill and Vanstiphout). It’s this extended field that is of course the primary focus for the evening and a topic ripe for exploration in the UK at the moment given the widely discussed/lamented state of the profession and it’s utter lack of direction or worth. How does a mindful awareness of this extended field allow architecture to work within, against or for institutions?

Here are some (crudely paraphrased) sound bites and notes from each:

Jeremy Till – institutional irritant

1) provides a short intro and begins by reading the founding definition of the RIBA (quoted in his book Architecture Depends), part of which can be paraphrased thus: ‘architects are to be the arbiters of taste’ and he then states that this institute’s position is only legitimised by the support of other institutes i.e. universities.

2) he criticises architecture for becoming a spatial projection of imagination (or does he? see footnote)

3) acknowledging his position in the large institute of St Martin’s he describes himself as the institutional irritant that seeks to disrupts from within, but acknowledges that the more effective position may be on the outside

Wouter Vanstiphout – architect as figurehead

4) describing background and past work Wouter talks of his Design as Politics course

5) which leads to later studies on the politics of urban riots and the question of whether the fabric of the city itself is an accessory to the violence with the architect ultimately to blame

6) he proposes that the reason for this is in fact because architecture has merely become the visible garnish/figurehead/tip of the iceberg for the (massive) process of (brutal) urban renewal
beneath or behind it driven by institutions such as the state or the market.

7) underlining the power of the market he shows a picture of a city skyline filled with large buildings by internationally renowned architects, highlighting that their existence/creation is/was
dependent not on the people who inhabit them but the market that requires investment objects

Dan Hill – boundary operator

8) Dan starts by reflecting Wouter’s iceberg by showing Papenek’s triangular diagram with the designer’s share taking only a small proportion of the real problem beneath

9) he questions the ability of yesterday’s institutions to produce the necessary outcome for tomorrow

10) showing examples of projects from his time at Sitra and HDL he explores various examples of the networked city

11) suggesting that activity undertaken by a city’s inhabitants are less important for the actions themselves rather than the ability to make networked decisions about what to do

12) in turn suggesting that the culture of public decision making is the design challenge

13) and that in this networked city the government now has competition

14) thus returning to the question of whether 19th century institutions are capable of facing 21st century problems

15) Dan suggests that the experience he’s had in three different organisations of different roles and scales could be described as inside, outside and (during his time at Sitra) at the boundary of key institutions

16) in summary the goal should be to design the conditions that allow institutions to address meaningful public issues

Each had touched on a question of position relative to the institution or institutions that determine one’s role. Jeremy began by questioning whether it’s better to disrupt from within or beyond, Wouter described the dangers of unwittingly becoming a figurehead for the institution behind you and Dan demonstrated what might be possible at the boundary between the two. I think these positions were further contextualised by comments during the discussion at the end of the evening when Wouter (expanding on his comments about market driven investment objects) questioned the possible conflict of loyalties between the direct source of funding from a client vs. the city in which the work is carried out. How do you maintain the balance between civic responsibility and client loyalty? Following that a question from a planner in the audience about the panel’s view on how the UK’s NPPF and debate on localism might impact the institution brought an acknowledgement of the value of the neighbourhood forum. In there somewhere there were also comments about the market of supply and demand that suggested that the profession concerns itself too much with the supply side, when in fact it should work harder to raise and support the demand.

Neighbourhoods – the demand market – are the boundaries to institutions in which an architect’s loyalties must be invested.

It’s fitting then that the following 24 hours of media coverage in the UK built environment has provided much coverage of a growing interest in the power of self build and co-housing ideas and it’s certainly helping me form ideas about which direction I’d like to head in future with my practice.

Finally, I’d like to end by recording a wonderfully succinct and compelling description of the perils of what Wouter described as the neo-liberal myth of the benefits of rolling back the state. Rather than the space left over being filled by the common man, it’s simply claimed by the private market instead.

Horse meat lasagne anyone?

* Note: I appear to have heard Jeremy’s comment on the projection of spatial imagination entirely differently to the fellow on my left, Charles Holland off of FAT who wrote it down properly:

Jono Bacon: Refining and Improving Virtual UDS

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:13:23 +0000

Last week we ran our very first virtual Ubuntu Developer Summit. The event lasted two days and gave us an opportunity to try out a new format and to see how well it worked. Generally it seems we got some pretty favorable feedback, but there are definitely some areas in which we want to sand off the rough edges and improve the structure of the event.

I would like us to get the Virtual UDS format so tight and refined that it could be used to organize any kind of ad-hoc online set of meetings. As an example, I can imagine a similar event but focused explicitly on LoCo teams, or documentation, or translations. We want to make the format reliable enough and repeatable enough that anyone in our (or any other community) can use it. This will help our community to plan more regularly and get together more to do cool and interesting things.

We have been keeping an eye on some of the feedback, a combination of observations from comments and feedback send directly to the organizers. We had an initial chat today to discuss this initial feedback and we have a few changes we want to make already:

Wrap-up Session – Many folks seemed to miss a wrap-up session with a set of track summaries. We want to add this for the next event.
Remove Launchpad Registration – having to register in Launchpad seems rather futile and doesn’t service much of a purpose. We plan on removing this requirement for the next event.
After Hours Session – at the last event there was an ad-hoc free for all hangout session at the end of sessions. This was a fun time to just hang out and be social with each other. We would like to do the same again and publicize it more.
Improve Session Pages – the session pages (where you view each session) look rather cluttered right now. We want to tidy them up and also include features such as upcoming sessions and a Twitter stream so everyone can see what is going on at any time. Chris Johnston is currently working with our Web Development community to investigate better layouts.
Improve Prep Docs – we discovered lots of useful best practices at the last event such as using the lower third to show the name of the person speaking, checking mic levels, and muting when not speaking. We want to improve and better promote this prep docs for everyone who joins the event.
Encourage IRC Integration More – we noticed that in some sessions people pay attention to IRC better than others. I am going to update my introduction presentation to emphasize the importance of this more strongly, and we will build more awareness around the importance of doing this.
Fix Page Reloading on Early Terminations – we noticed that on a few sessions there was a problem with the hangout and the session would need to be restarted but the page would not auto-reload the new feed (as the Javascript stops checking when the first hangout is successfully running). We want to fix this.
Two Factor Auth! Be Gone! – no-one likes 2FA, it is annoying, so we want to see how we can remove it securely when you access the Etherpad so you don’t need to enter that damn code every-time-you-access-a-session.
Integrate IRC/Etherpad Into Hangout Console – for those people in the actual hangout, one problem is that you have to constantly flip between the session screen with the IRC/Etherpad and the hangout window where you are broadcasting from. We want to integrate IRC and Etherpad into the hangout broadcast window to make this easier (and make it easier to keep an eye on IRC).

We Want Your Feedback!

Although some of these conclusions presented here are a great start, we want to make sure we don’t leave any stones unturned! As such, I would like to invite everyone who joined the event to take a few minutes to fill in this survey. This will help us get a better idea of your thoughts on the event, what worked well, and what we can improve. Can I encourage everyone to fill this survey in in the next week so we can start putting some solid plans in place for the next event.

I would also like to organize a community meeting on IRC and invite everyone to join and provide further feedback. I think it would be most beneficial to organize this meeting in a few weeks when folks have had a chance to fill in the survey.

You can also join the UDS IRC channel at #ubuntu-uds and discuss the event there; we all hang out in there.

Want to Help Make Summit Rock?

Virtual UDS is a community event and we want to ensure everyone has an opportunity to contribute to making it as good as possible. One definitive area where folks can help is with our increasingly sophisticated summit.ubuntu.com.

The Summit project is Open Source, and always open to new contributors. It is written in Python and Django, with a large amount of HTML, CSS and Javascript work at well. If you have any of these skills, or are willing to learn them, we encourage you to come be a part of it.

You can get the code and look at bugs on Summit’s Launchpad page. The developers hang out in #ubuntu-website on Freenode IRC, and are available there to help you get a local development environment set up. If in doubt, go and poke mhall119.

Thanks, everyone!

Jono Bacon: Ubuntu Q&A This Week

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:24:40 +0000

This week’s live video Q&A is in a slightly later time slot this week on Wednesday at 8pm UTC (click here for the time in your location this week).

As usual everyone is welcome to bring any and all questions to the Q&A.

To join, head over to Ubuntu On Air at 8pm UTC on Wednesday and you can ask your questions in the embedded chat box.

Look forward to seeing you all there!

Jono Bacon: Thoughts On Recent Community Concerns

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:36:49 +0000

Recently there has been some fire flowing about Canonical in the community. These concerns started off as sporadic at first and then we saw a small blog avalanche (blogalanche, if you will) as a number of folks piled onto the ride.

I feel somewhat trapped in the middle of all of this. On one hand I work at Canonical and I believe Canonical are acting in the honorable interests of Ubuntu in helping to build a competitive and forward-looking Free Software platform, but I also feel a sense of personal responsibility when I see unhappy members of our community who are concerned with different aspects of how Canonical engages. Essentially, I sympathize with both sides of this debate; both have the best interests at heart for Ubuntu.

From my perspective there is a balance that needs to be struck. Our community needs to be transparent and open, but also nimble to react to opportunities (such as the convergence story), but also Canonical play an important role in helping us to drive Ubuntu to the masses. We need to be able to work in a way that maintains our Ubuntu values but also gives Canonical the opportunity to get our platform out to the market effectively to reach these users.

I believe one cannot exist without the other; Canonical cannot deliver this vision without our community and Ubuntu would be significantly debilitated if there was no Canonical providing staff, resources, and other investment into Ubuntu. Canonical is not evil, and the community is not entitled; we all just need to step back and find some common ground and remember that we are all in the circle of friends.

This symbol is as potent to me as it was back in 2004.

When I got interested in Linux back in 1998 and wanted to make it my career, my primary motivation was to bring freedom of technology to everyone. This is what attracted me to Ubuntu and ultimately working at Canonical. I don’t want to be rude to other distros who are quite happy within their remit of making a great OS for Linux enthusiasts, but I frankly don’t want to settle for that. I want Ubuntu to be the choice for Linux enthusiasts, but for us to not stop there and also bring Free Software to people who have not yet been blessed by it, and who may be new to technology and the opportunities it provides.

Achieving that goal is not just as simple as making the source code available for the platform and setting up a bunch of mailing lists. It means delivering simple and elegant user experiences built for the needs of our users, consistent and beautiful design, professional-grade quality, strong hardware and software partner relationships, certification across a range of hardware profiles, training, responsive security, diverse marketing and advocacy campaigns, and many other areas. Both Canonical and the community contribute extensively to provide these things that we need to get over that chasm, and importantly, each provides things that the other cannot.

It turns out that building this simple, ubiquitous Free Software experience for everyone is hard. We can’t just settle for the tried and tested approach of pulling the latest upstream software and integrating it into a single Operating System. That is tough, intensive and grueling work in itself, but to achieve the goals I mentioned above we need to be constantly challenging ourselves to innovate and go faster in how we deliver this innovation to our users. We need to always challenge the status quo…not for the sake of being different, but for the sake of not restricting ourselves to tradition and instead helping us to be better at what we do, and ultimately achieve our goals of getting Ubuntu into the hands of more people.

We saw this challenge with Unity: that was a tough, but necessary decision. While we suffered over the firestorm around Unity, I think it ultimately put us in a better position, and now we have a single convergent user interface that spans across multiple devices and we will soon have a single convergent Unity code-base across these devices too. In an era where desktop shipments are down due to the impact of phones and tablets, we are no longer trapped in a form factor that has had a decreasing scope of opportunity for us; the desktop is just one part of our wider convergence vision. This opens up the market for Ubuntu and the Free Software and Open Source values we encompass. While some people in some comment boxes will still bring the hate about Unity, I think that overall it has put us in a position to get Free Software in the hands of more people than if we didn’t make that difficult decision, and the sheer level of interest in Ubuntu for the phone, tablet, TV, and desktop is testament to that.

Put it in my pocket, on my lap, on my desktop, and hang it on my wall.

While making tough decisions is important, it is also important that we maintain our Ubuntu values too. One core value is that our platform and community are open for discussion and participation, so everyone is welcome to help put their brick in the wall. Our archive has long been open and there are many ways to contribute, and while some of these projects were secret before-hand, now everything is out in the open and available for participation. Some may disagree with the rationale of keeping things private, but particularly in the case of Phone and Tablet, the “big-reveal” helped us to have a big splash and generate more press interest and partner inquiries, and thus help us along to our vision.

Importantly though, we made the source and community on-ramp available as soon as we feasibly could. The code for Unity, Ubuntu Touch, and Mir is publicly available, and we are eager to invite people to join and shape those projects. This week we also ran our very first online UDS, with the goal of making the Ubuntu planning process as open and accessible to all as possible, not just those who could travel, and on a more regular cadence. All of the videos, notes and blueprints from that event are archived here. I am confident for the next event we will have an even smoother, better-run UDS, with even more participation.

We are now in a position with a clearly articulated vision around convergence and cloud orchestration, full source availability, daily builds of images, and public mailing lists and IRC channels to have those conversations. Everything is available in public blueprints and tracked at status.ubuntu.com, and we have many outreach campaigns to help our community participate in this vision, such as the core apps project, port-o-thon, regular cadance testing, charm quality improvements, SDK participation, and other areas. Our community should expect our projects to be open, accessible and collaborative, and if they are not, please raise your concerns with the Canonical engineering managers, or talk to me either publicly on my weekly Q&A video hangout at 7pm UTC every Wednesday on Ubuntu On Air, or privately at jono@ubuntu.com, or by contacting me on Freenode IRC – my nick is jono. My door is always open.

Things are never perfect in a community, and I am not suggesting we are perfect either, but I believe we are at the cusp of an incredible opportunity to get Free Software and open technology into the hands of the masses, not just by wishing it to be true, but because there is genuine market opportunity for it to be true.

Dave Morley: I think I have a solution to the rolling and releasing

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Morley) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:22:00 +0000

Post LTS. You start a rolling release. This gets all the goodness in that you want. 6 months in you take a fortnight out. Week one stabilize, week two ISO testing. The resulting ISO is then supported with security back ports for the next 6 months till the next ISO is stabilized and so on till you get to the 6 months for the next lts. Here you go back to the more tried and tested release method so this release is solid, stable and ready for the next 5 years.

This I think gives users a regular cadence they are used to. Gives people like system 76 a regular OEM install it has security back ports from the continuing rolling release. It gives app devs a set of libs for 6 months that won't change. And means there is only a fortnight slow down for the devs.

Plus the community driven derivatives can continue to use their current 6 monthly cadence. Everyone is happy :-)

Jono Bacon: Online UDS Day One: Feedback Welcome!

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:00:24 +0000

I just wanted to post a quick blog entry thanking everyone who joined the first day of our inaugural online Ubuntu Developer Summit today. Overall we didn’t see many glitches in our plan of how to run the event, and we also gathered some fantastic feedback for things we can improve and extend upon next time.

If you want to see what happened in the sessions today, you can view the schedule and view any of the recorded hangouts.

Before we get into the second day tomorrow, I just wanted to invite any comments and suggestions for what worked well, what worked less well etc, to see if we can make any adjustments for the second day. Thanks in advance for your suggestions!

If I don’t see you until tomorrow, we look forward to beginning Day 2 at 2pm UTC tomorrow! Be sure to see the schedule and join us in the sessions!

Jono Bacon: Getting Started With The First Online Ubuntu Developer Summit

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:32:52 +0000

Tomorrow we will be running our very first online Ubuntu Developer Summit. The event will take place over two days and span a range of different tracks: Community, Client, Cloud & Server, App Developers, and Foundations. We have never run an event like this before, but we have prepared extensively to deliver the best online UDS experience we can. When UDS is complete we will then review any rough edges and fix those up for the next event in May.

With this being a new event, I wanted to share some key tips about how to get participate.

For Everyone

UDS takes place on Tues 5th – Wed 6th March 2013 from 2pm UTC. Please note: the original time was 4pm UTC, but we brought the event forward by two hours.

The full event is taking place online and everyone is welcome to join, irrespective of whether you are an active contributor to the community, a partner, a business, an enthusiast, or anyone else. We will be using Google+ Hangouts On Air to stream video from the active participants in the session, and we also provide quick embedded access to IRC, note-taking, and more.

The event will kick off on Tuesday at 2pm UTC with a keynote session. There will then be two hours of sessions, then an hour of plenaries, and then another two hours of sessions. On the Wednesday we will kick off into sessions at 2pm, and have lightning talks in the normal plenary slot. Jorge Castro is taking care of the plenary talks and lightning talks; reach out to him if you want to run a lightning talk.

There are five tracks, with each (apart from Foundations) having two video streams. Each track has two track leads:

Client – Jason Warner, Sebastien Bacher
Server and Cloud – Antonio Rosales, Daviey Walker
Community – Jono Bacon, Daniel Holbach
App Developers – Alan Pope, David Planella
Foundations – Steve Langasek

You can find all sessions listed at summit.ubuntu.com. Just visit the session you are interested in at the time of the session to view it; everything is included on the session page. You don’t need anything other than a web browser to view sessions but you will need a Google+ account to actively participate in a hangout.

For Track Leads

You should have all received an email from me about how to schedule sessions and how to start and stop the video streams.

Remember to ensure your Google+ is verified (Michael Hall should have checked this with you).

You and your co-track lead should pick one of the two tracks you have for your track and take care of setting up those streams.

Five minutes before a session (e.g. 1.55pm) is due to begin you should start the video stream and update the session in summit.ubuntu.com with the hangout and broadcast URLS. Likewise, 55 minutes into a session (e.g. 2.55pm), be sure to stop the hangout. We need to start and stop the video streams to ensure the recordings are broken up into the different hour long chunks. Required participants will automatically see a link on the session page to invite them to join a hangout – this page does not auto-reload though, so you may want to ask them to refresh the page to join.

Please keep an eye on the sessions on your track and interact with the session leaders to ensure that any required participants can be invited to the session as needed. There may be times as the session is running that people will need to be invited to join the hangout (e.g. IRC participants) – you need to be available to do this when the session leader needs you. If you are not actively participating in the session, feel free to just mute your mic and keep an eye on IRC or listen for when you are needed.

Instructions for starting and stopping the streams is at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS/Sessions.

For Session Leaders

As a session leader your responsibility is to run a quality session, and to ensure that the topic gets a good level of discussion, work is planned and distributed, and the blueprint gets updated with the agreed work items.

Some tips:

Make sure your Internet connection and computer are working well in advance of the session. We recommend you stop any software or services that is using your net connection (e.g. switch off any downloads or other video streaming).
The video hangouts will be started and stopped by the track leads (see above) – if you need to invite a new person to a hangout, ask the track lead to invite them.
In your session you will have people in the hangout speaking as well as people on IRC offering their contributions too. Be mindful of the IRC contributors, and repeat comments and statements of interest from IRC.
Think of the hangout as the inner ring of the fishbowl at a physical UDS. Unfortunately there only 10 seats on the hangout, so we need to ensure the most active participants are in the hangout. People in the hangout should be speaking and actively participating. If you have an active participant on IRC and have free seats on the hangout, be sure to invite them to the hangout. Likewise, if you see someone who is not contributing on the hangout and there is someone active on IRC, ask the hangout person to move to IRC to open up a slot to invite the IRC person and bring them into the hangout.
At the beginning of the session, explain the goals and purpose of the session and encourage people to take notes in the embedded etherpad.
Have the discussion in the session, and be sure to help everyone participate as much as possible. Remember, you should try to keep the most active members in the hangout.
10 minutes before the end of the session summarize the key decisions and log work items on the blueprint that are assigned to people. This will provide a great set of next steps to move forward with that blueprint.

For Attendees

Joining a session is easy – just look at the schedule and click on a session to view it. On each session page you can see the video stream, the embedded IRC channel, and the embedded etherpad collaborative note taking. You can also see links to the blueprint and other related content.

You don’t need anything other than a web browser to view sessions but you will need a Google+ account to actively participate in a hangout.

If you want to chat to others in general about UDS, you can also join #ubuntu-uds on freenode.

All sessions will be recorded and available on the schedule when they are completed.

Jono Bacon: Make a Difference To a Three Year Old Boy With Cancer

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 20:52:55 +0000

I just want to echo Tony’s appeal to help three year-old Sam who was diagnosed with high risk neuroblastoma, a particularly aggressive cancer. It has spread from the main tumor into his bones and bone marrow. That makes it a class 4 cancer, the most advanced on the scale. The long term survival rate for high risk neuroblastoma is 40%.

As Tony shares:

The good news is that Sam is responding well to chemotherapy. But Sam’s oncologist at Manchester Children’s Hospital has recommended that Sam receives immunotherapy treatment so that his own body can recognise and attack the neuroblastoma if it returns.

The most successful treatment is not available in the UK because some of the drugs are still being trialled. It costs over £250,000 in the US. Which is why Sam desperately needs your help. Carl and Christine are trying to raise the money to send Sam for treatment in the US.

If you would like to donate to help Sam, that would be brilliant. In the UK you can just text SAMS67 and the amount you’d like to donate (£1, £2 £3 £4 £5 or £10) to 70070. Alternatively you can donate on-line at the Sam Shaw Just Giving page. It’s Sam’s fourth birthday this week, so it would be a great birthday present to give him.

Also be sure to join the appeal’s Facebook page.

Your donation to Sam will have an incredible impact on his life as well as his parents, Christine and Carl, who must be having a hell of a time right now dealing with all of this. Let’s all show them that we care by helping them to cover their son’s treatment.

Dick Turpin: More the merrier.

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Cannon) — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:00:00 +0000

Day 1

Me: "So as you can see the menu across the top already has six entries, I'm not sure there is room for a seventh one?
Customer: "It would be good if it was possible.
Me: "I'll try and see if it looks OK."

Day 2
Me: "OK the menu bar now has seven entries. We had to remove the language choice feature but it's done and amazingly does not look squashed.
Customer: "Brilliant."

Day 3
Customer: "Can you add three more entries please?

"Mummy, why is daddy smacking his face off the desk?"

David Goodwin: Automated twitter compilation up to 01 March 2013

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 05:57:23 +0000

Arbitrary tweets made by TheGingerDog (i.e. David Goodwin) up to 01 March 2013

Why do all network file systems suck so much?

(2013/02/26)
To do list : 1) benchmark NFS clients to stop the minions moaning at work. 2) phpunit + spell check generated html. “Hygine” FTW!

(2013/02/26)
I suppose I’d better stare at the women doing water-robics or something.

(2013/02/26)
Check out the #zombiesrun profile for GingerDog https://t.co/JiRnHMqxv0

(2013/02/25)
RT @phpclasses: PHP Job: Software Engineer (Mobile) (telecommute) t.co/B8b39UceNE

(2013/02/22)
Apparently generating SSH key pairs is too difficult for someone who claims to be a programmer. *sigh*

(2013/02/20, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
At the dentists again.

(2013/02/20, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
The boss of Iceland comes across as a tit in one clip on the BBC news website. #horse #fail

(2013/02/19, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
Scientific tests have shown it is possible to eat too much chocolate :-/

(2013/02/18, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
Today I’m 22. Sort of. 0×22.

(2013/02/17, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
Coo. All clear. For now. #AtLeastMyBloodIsRed

(2013/02/14, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
Stupid nose. Stop bleeding! I know I ran for 30 mins after it started. But even so …. Soldering iron welcome #DIYMedicine

(2013/02/14, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
For the purposes of science (content testing and to ensure they’re horse free) … (I blame @moreteadoctor ) t.co/0u6VFFtM

(2013/02/14, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
Going running has become fun after using @ZombiesRunGame … Not sure what my character is going to do with all the underwear he’s found

(2013/02/13, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
RT @mikko: TV Emergency Alert System in Montana hacked to interrupt the broadcast, warning that the dead are rising from graves: http:// …

(2013/02/12)
RT @DrunkRogue68: Resignation refused I think as lightning strikes St Peter’s Basilica as Pope resigns t.co/hRnoDGFF

(2013/02/12)
3/10 b60 #uksnow thin layer. Sticking. Falling reasonably well.

(2013/02/11, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
The trees and things outside are covered in a thin layer of dandruff again. I must remember to buy some better shampoo….

(2013/02/11, Bromsgrove, Worcestershire)
Perhaps I’ll stop listening to t.co/rSOONpOc soon … one day…. #Groovelectric

(2013/02/11)
It doesn’t seem ideal weather for kite flying. t.co/SsGCQurx

(2013/02/09)
So far this morning – “… You’re not a real [monster,] dad” and “you’re not a proper grown up!”. #children #noParentingBadgesForMe

(2013/02/09)
Weee… faster broadband (~18mbit) is appreciated @BeBroadband … but where’s your FTTC ?

(2013/02/08)
BeThere (ISP) are offering to renew my ADSL for £18/month (saving £4). Yet they have it half price (£11/month) on their front page. Hmm.

(2013/02/07)
It’s tempting to answer the PPI phone calls / texts – just to waste their time / money.

(2013/02/06)
RT @StackParenting: Should you let a toddler win? t.co/96WV3d9T #toddler

(2013/02/05)
I wish I hadn’t started making a work related to do list. It keeps growing.

(2013/02/02)

Jono Bacon: XDA Developers and Ubuntu Touch

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 23:16:59 +0000

Big shout out to the awesome community over at XDA Developers who have been getting involved in the Ubuntu Touch Port-o-thon to bring the Ubuntu Touch images to more and more devices. Daniel Holbach kicked off the port-o-thon the day after we released the code and images last week, and we are already seeing fantastic work going on.

When the initial announcement hit their forum it generated over a 100 posts within a day and there is currently 101 pages of posts on that thread. There is also an Ubuntu Touch Subforum which has seen over 4000 posts already. We are just blown away by the level of interest.

As you can see on the devices wiki page we are already seeing some fantastic work going on to port Ubuntu Touch to additional devices. Here are some great examples of this work (click each link to see the XDA Developers thread):

Awesome work!

I asked David Planella and Daniel Holbach on my team to kick off a regular engagement with XDA Developers to help us grow an great relationship together. The first call was today and we are kicking some ideas around of how to work more closely together. Stay tuned for more!

Jono Bacon: On Moving To An Online Ubuntu Developer Summit

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 21:40:11 +0000

Some of you may have seen the news about us transitioning to an online Ubuntu Developer Summit and running the event every three months. If you didn’t see the news, you can read it here. I just wanted to share my personal perspective on this change.

For a long time now I have been attending Ubuntu Developer Summits as part of my work, but for the last event in Copenhagen my wife was about to give birth and so I attended the event remotely. As someone who has been heavily involved in the planning and execution of UDS for the last 10 or so events, I was intimately aware of the remote participation features of the event, but I had never actually utilized them myself. I was excited to dive into the sessions remotely and participate.

For the sessions I dialed into I found the remote participation worked well, but not as well as it could. Sometimes it was a little difficult to hear people (despite us alway encouraging speakers to sit near the middle of the fishbowl), and for the sessions I wasn’t able to actively participate in (due to the timezone differences), only some of those sessions had videos available that I could review after the session had ended. As such, this made it something of a challenge at times to get an overall view of the event; it depended on attendees taking good notes (which generally happens), but I missed the specifics of the discussions.

Remote participation has always been a critical part of UDS and I think it worked efficiently as it could, but these issues were primarily due to the challenge of delivering an in-person event to an online audience and the practicalities therein.

Of course, the real challenge is getting you people to eat these things.

The move to an online event effectively solves the majority of these issues: every single session will be recorded and available for viewing after the fact (which is awesome for not only attendees, but also for the press, partners and others), and with everyone in the hangout facing a webcam and a microphone, the quality of the content should be better too.

For those people who can’t join the session hangout video stream, IRC participation is available, and those IRC discussions will be logged too and provided in addition to the video of the session and the Etherpad notes. This provides a great overview of all the content and discussion in the session.

An online event is also going to open up the event to more potential participants. There are many folks who either can’t physically travel or justify the travel expenses or time away from their work and family commitments who can now participate in the event by simply opening their web browser. With the wide focus in Ubuntu across the desktop, devices and the cloud, we need more specialists rather than fewer to guide us on our mission, and the online event will make it easier for those folks to attend. I think that this will result in wider and more diverse discussion, ultimately helping us to do a better job planning UDS.

Some folks have expressed a concern about not having as much face-to-face time as in a physical event. Of course, video-conferencing will never ultimately replace being in the same room as someone, but I think much of that personal connection is still shared via hangouts. As an example, my team at Canonical used to have team meetings on Skype or a Conference Call and ever since we switched to Google+ Hangouts the sense of personal connection and team spirit has skyrocketed. Sure, it doesn’t replace being in the same room, but when we balance out the benefits of an online event for the reasons I mentioned earlier, it seems like a reasonable trade-off to me.

Iterative Improvements

One thing that many folks don’t see from behind the scenes of planning the physical UDSs is that we have always taken an really rigorous approach to improving and refining the event. This not only includes the structure of the event, but we have iterated after every detail to improve room layouts, A/V needs, timing, remote participation requirements, scheduling patterns, and more. Every detail of UDS has been scrutinized after every event, and the survey we send out is reviewed with a fine tooth comb, all with the goal of squeezing out as much efficiency as possible so the time everyone commits to UDS is as worthwhile as possible.

We are still exploring the alleged productivity-enhancing benefits of light ping-pong.

With UDS previously happening every six months this has helped us to build a pretty bullet proof formula for the physical event, and many attendees comment at each UDS about just how efficient it is and how much gets done. This is largely due to this iterative refinement process.

The first online UDS takes place next week and I think we have a pretty good plan for it, but we are going to go through exactly the same process for reviewing how each event goes and buffing off the rough edges so that works better and more efficiently each time. With us now doing a UDS every three months it should not take too long to get us into a winning formula, and our community are an essential part of helping us to refine these different pieces. As I mentioned in the announcement blog, after the second event we are also going to take a general look to see if an online UDS is serving the needs of the project well in terms of how we plan Ubuntu development.

Got Questions?

I am sure many of you will still have questions about the new format of UDS. Tomorrow (Wednesday) at 7pm UTC. I will be doing my usual weekly Q+A videocast on Ubuntu On Air and will dedicate part of the session to covering how the online event will work and answering your questions. Feel free to bring your UDS and any other questions to the session!

Jono Bacon: Five Ubuntu Touch Facts

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 16:07:36 +0000

A few days ago we announced Ubuntu for Tablets; the next piece on our wider Ubuntu convergence story. The tablet joins the Phone, TV, Ubuntu for Android, and the Desktop. See an excellent hands-on video review of the current developer build from Engadget.

Today the source and images for Ubuntu for Phones and Tablets (collectively known as Ubuntu Touch) was released.

I know there is some anticipation regarding this release and I just wanted to share a few facts to ensure we are all on the same page:

Both Phone and Tablet code and images are available – today we are releasing two things for both the phone and the tablet. Firstly, if you simply want to run the software on a spare device, you can install the images on your device without caring about the code. If on the other hand you want to see the code (and contribute to it) we are also making this available too so that you can build, explore, and hack on it.
This is unfinished and in-development software – it is important to remember that this is in-development software and as such is not finished yet. You are going to find that some features and applications are missing, and you will likely find bugs. We wanted to release the code and images early so that our community can try the software, provide feedback, and be able to join the development effort. With this goal to get the content out early we just want to ensure everyone fully understands that this is not yet a final product. I strongly recommend you only install the code/images on a spare handset/tablet and not your main phone/tablet due to the fact it is in-development code.
A limited set of devices are supported – the images are only available for the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 7, and Nexus 10; these are the devices that our development team has been working towards. We appreciate that you may have a different phone or tablet, but unfortunately support for other devices is not currently planned. We will however be kicking off an outreach campaign soon to encourage and support our community in porting the code to other devices. Stay tuned for more!
A new SDK is available also – in addition to the release of the code and images we have also released a new version of the SDK which includes a number of new features, most usefully the ability to deploy a QML app to a device so you can run it!
- Ubuntu SDK application templates and wizard
- QML2 UI designer
- Templates for testing framework and internationalization
- Deploy QML applications on an Ubuntu Phone/Tablet device
- Basic terminal (ssh, adb) connectivity tools to the device
Know where to find help – if you have questions or queries you should post your questions to Ask Ubuntu by clicking here.

I am sure you are now chomping at the bit to grab the images, check out the code, and get the new SDK release! Go and find all the details here.

Dick Turpin: How much?

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Cannon) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:16:00 +0000

Customer: "I'm upgrading CAD and apparently I need 16 Grand of memory."
Colleague: "Bwahahahahaha"

16GB

Aq: Shot of Jaq (recovered)

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 18:48:45 +0000

Oops.
A few months ago, we (that is: Jono and I, the greatest sysadmin team the world have ever known) moved various things around on various servers. And in the course of this action, we completely forgot to put the Shot of Jaq website somewhere. So shotofjaq.org currently is down.
As I say, oops.
Anyway, we haven’t lost the audio (we’re not that bad), so I trawled archive.org for all the episode descriptions and threw them together into a brief listing of all the SoJ episodes with download links. You can therefore see Shot of Jaq again at http://www.kryogenix.org/shotofjaq.html.
Sorry about that, all. We’re rubbish. Let this be a lesson to you.

Iain Cuthbertson: Multi-screen with Ubuntu Unity

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 16:03:32 +0000

This tweet has to have been the most popular thing I have ever said. At time of posting it has gained 80 retweets, 25 favourites and many replies/questions.

Work recently bought me a new workstation, so the 1st thing I always do is to dual boot with Ubuntu.

Some might consider me an edge case user. Though as a developer, I like a rather particular set-up. That is, 3 wide screen monitors with the central one rotated 90 degrees for my IDE.

This is something that Windows gets right without having to dig about installing things. While Linux distros have always struggled (in my experience).

Because my tweet gained quite a few questions, I thought it best to reply to them here for everybody to see.

@ankitvad asks what specs. I use for Ubuntu.
Titanium Rimless Glasses from Spex4Less.com
Couldn’t resist, sorry

Dell Alienware X51
CPU: i7
Memory: 8GB
Graphics card: nVidia GeForce GTX 660
Storage: 1TB HDD (Windows) 120GB SSD (Linux)
Mouse: Logictech M570 trackball
OSs: Window 7 SP1, Ubuntu 12.10 64bit
Monitors: 2 x 22″ Dell, 1 x 22″ LG

All 3 monitors are connected to the one graphics card. Two by DVI and one by HDMI.

As I said, this is a working system from a fresh install without updates being applied or any 3rd party packages installed. So the default graphics driver is doing quite well these days

The only downside to this is that the default graphics driver is dog slow and won’t let me play games on Steam The next step will be to get the nVidia binary driver working.

Dick Turpin: Clean me.

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Cannon) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:58:00 +0000

Customer: "I've been sent an email from Russia but ESET Anti Virus has quarantined it."
Engineer: "And?"
Customer: "Well I want to read it."
Engineer: "But it clearly has a virus?"
Customer: "Can you read it?"
Engineer: "No, it has a virus."
Customer: "Should I get them to send it again then?"
Engineer: "You can but I suspect that too will be infected."
Customer: "Is there a way to stop ESET quarantining it?"
Engineer: "Yes, get the sender to clean the viruses off their machine."

Mankind has reached it's evolutionary peak.

Dick Turpin: No pleasing some people.

noreply@blogger.com (Peter Cannon) — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:34:00 +0000

Customer: "Is xyz there?"
Me: "I'm afraid he's at lunch."
Customer: "Well he was logged into my machine and I cant close the box."
Me: "Oh, well as I said he's at lunch. If you're desperate, reboot the PC that will sever the link."
Customer: "Cant you close it?"
Me: "I do not have access to his machine, I don't know the password."
Customer: "I need to sort some stuff out on my machine."
Me: "Well this is why I suggested rebooting. If you can hang on xyz will be back in say an hour."
Customer: "Nobody will be here, I need to go out."
Me: "Well reboot then?"
Customer: "But I don't want to do that."
Me: "Then wait for xyz"
Customer: "But I need this stuff now."
Me: "I have no other solutions for you."

/me smacks head off desk!

Aq: The ongoing story

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 22:07:23 +0000

I had this idea for a little fun literary project.

Tweet the first line of a story. Anyone can reply with what they want the second line to be. You choose the best one of those lines — the one which best fits your desire for how the story should go; this is what stops it descending into a big game of Consequences — and retweet it. It’s a collaborative literary thing. Then people reply with their choice of a third line; repeat until the story reaches a satisfactory conclusion.

Anyone can read the whole story by just reading the tweet stream of the story account. The first couple of tweets should explain the game.

I think this’d actually work, apart from a technical flaw: when the story account retweets a second line from someone, an @-reply to that goes to the someone, not the story account. (Well, it’ll probably go to both, but that’s still annoying and shortens the tweet too much. )

Nevertheless, if someone does this, I’d enjoy contributing a line now and then.

Iain Cuthbertson: Symfony2 pagination

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 14:42:03 +0000

Using Symfony2, DQL and knplabs/knp-paginator-bundle – how to get around “Cannot count query which selects two FROM components, cannot make distinction”

Jono Bacon: Community Leadership Summit 2013 Sponsorship

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 06:48:34 +0000

video platform video management video solutions video player

See the video here

The Community Leadership Summit 2013 brings together community leaders, organizers and managers and the projects and organizations that are interested in growing and empowering a strong community. The event pulls together the leading minds in community management, relations and online collaboration to discuss, debate and continue to refine the art of building an effective and capable community.

This year the event takes place on 20th – 21st July 2013 (the weekend before OSCON) in Portland, Oregon and is the fifth anniversary of the event and I am determined to make it bigger, better, and more valuable than ever. Over the previous four events CLS has become the primary annual meeting place for community leadership, and every year we get an absolutely wonderful and diverse attendance spanning technology, education, government, science and more.

Sponsorship

I am currently getting the wheels in motion for the sponsorship for CLS13 and I just wanted to invite any organizations reading this who might be interested in sponsoring the event. CLS is not a particularly expensive event to put on, but I want to expand the usual sponsorship this year to add a little more polish than usual to the event. As such, I am looking for companies or might be interested in supporting the event and getting exposure to community leaders across a range of industries, but with a strong focus on technology.

One of the messages I emphasize in my opening plenary is that the sponsors of the event don’t buy editorial direction or influence (as the event is very focused on being free, open, and attendee-content driven), and as such sponsorship of CLS is very much an affirmation of support of the event for the right reasons. As such, association with CLS as a sponsor has typically reflected very well on those companies who have sponsored in the past. Such companies have included Intel, Microsoft, Black Duck, Oracle, O’Reilly, OpenNMS, and others.

If you are interested in supporting CLS, please drop me an email to jono@jonobacon.org. Thanks!

Iain Cuthbertson: Chroot SFTP home dir

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:21:32 +0000

Example user ‘iain’

sudo mkdir -p /chroot/iain/home/iain sudo useradd -M -d /home/iain iain sudo passwd iain sudo chwon iain: /chroot/iain/home/iain

sudo nano -w /etc/ssh/sshd_config
# At the end of the file, add:

Match User paypoint
    ChrootDirectory /chroot/iain
    AllowTCPForwarding no
    X11Forwarding no
    ForceCommand internal-sftp

sudo /etc/init.d/ssh restart