Planet Wolves

Jono Bacon: Rest Well, My Friend

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 06:51:55 +0000

It was with great sadness that I read earlier that my friend and colleague Ian Clatworthy passed away after his fight with cancer. Although I never knew Ian that well, whenever I did work and spend time with him I always found him to be a fun, light-hearted, and always pleasant person to be around.

Words escape me.

You will be missed, my friend. Rest, well.

Jono Bacon: Incredible Stories Of Free Software and Open Source

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:12:11 +0000

A little while back I blogged about wanting to reconnect with our ethos. In a continuation of that theme I am keen to talk about stories.

I have talked about stories quite a bit in my writings on community management (particularly so in my book The Art of Community). Stories are important entities in communities – they are vessels in which we share ideas, lessons we have learned, our experience and more. Many stories come laced with these underlining nuggets of wisdom that we then take aware and help us to refine and improve how we interface with the world and the people around us.

Stories though encompass another significant benefit: they allow us to inspire and encourage others via real-world practical examples of our ethos being put into practice.

A story I share at every Ubuntu Developer Summit is that when I started working as the Ubuntu Community Manager I got a lovely email from a kid in Africa who would walk two hours to his local town where he would spend his own money to buy Internet time in an Internet cafe to contribute to Ubuntu and then walk two hours back home. This story was powerful to me. It told me that my job is to help that guy get the most out of his hour, to justify his investment of energy and expense to just get involved in the first place. His story was inspiring, encouraging, and an impressive example of commitment. I always share this story at UDS as an inspiration for us to get the most out of each one-hour session.

These stories benefit us all, and in the continued theme of reconnecting with our ethos, I wanted to ask you folks what are the most inspiring and encouraging stories of Free Software and community that you have heard? Which story have made those little hairs on the back of your neck stand on end?

David Goodwin: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-29

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:41:00 +0000

Hammer and chisel = superior fridge de-icing #
Well the new office's dsl connection seems to be 80% working. Just no dhcp response. :-/ #
Looks fun What's your role @schwukette ? (@schwukette)http://yfrog.com/n1x5ejj #
Wish the Chav family here could resist smoking in the playground. Grr. #arrowvalley #
I have swingers shoulder. #
Waiting for @rowangoodwin to wake up. Then buy lunch, duck food and stuff before invading the park and stealing ice cream. #
If only "attaching a screenshot" did not involve a word document. #
The train may soon go on holiday. #
http://www.kingtonlions.org/EventDetail.asp?EventNo=3781&Section=Information – Aberystwyth to Kington bike ride; 5th sept. #
Patiently waiting for @bitesms to release a fix for the facebook vs bitesms issue #

Jono Bacon: On Zareason

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:06:30 +0000

These views are my own, and not necessarily those of Canonical.

Some time back the always awesome Earl and Cathy from Zareason loaned me one of their Strata laptops to play with. I met them at an event some time before, and while I had heard of Zareason, I really knew nothing about them. Since then I have learned about their work and played with the Strata. I just wanted to share some thoughts.

Zareason are a company that I think really gets Open Source. They are a small organization and incredibly supportive of Open Source in the local area and wider USA. They pre-install Ubuntu on their machines, focus on open hardware, and one really nice touch is that they include a small screwdriver with each machine because they believe that everyone has the right to be able to open up their machines and peek inside. In this age of screwless, inaccessible boxes and restrictive end-user license agreements, this is a refreshing change. Like most, I would never actually use said little screwdriver…but it is a strong statement of Zareason and their culture. Kudos!

So, as for the machine, it is a zippy little monster and works great. The pre-installed Ubuntu worked great out of the box, with pretty much everything running as expected. One thing that really struck me, is regarding build quality. I consider build quality an essential ingredient in a laptop. Laptops move around a lot, they get thrown into bags, and they get picked up, dragged around and balanced in precarious ways. The Zareason Strata I tried felt incredibly durable…as in…Thinkpad durable. I absolutely adore Thinkpads for this very reason, so again, Kudos Zareason.

Finally, a big decider for me in a laptop is the keyboard. There are many great laptops with horrible plasticky keyboards. The Zareason Strata has a really comfortable, useful, and durable keyboard. It feels strong but not difficult to use. Again, kudos Zareason.

So, Zareason produce great, solid, hardware pre-installed with Ubuntu, they are actively supportive of the Open Source community, and they affirm openness in both the software and hardware. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me.

Richard Smedley: An open Web (via Liverpool)

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:12:41 +0000

To Liverpool Wednesday, for an enjoyable afternoon interviewing Aidan McGuire and Francis Irving of ScraperWiki, then an evening at Liverpool’s Social Media Café event. ScraperWiki is a code wiki that provides you with a maintained scraper to extract data from any public source on teh InterWebs, for any purpose. A great example is the map showing [...]

Jono Bacon: This Friday: Rockridge Ubuntu Global Jam In Berkeley

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:35:24 +0000

Just a quick reminder: as part of our awesome Ubuntu Global Jam I am organizing the Ubuntu California Rockridge Jam at A’cuppa Tea, College Ave, Berkeley. The jam is from 10am – 6pm – I hope to see you there!

Don’t live near me? Go and find your nearest jam or organize your own!

Jono Bacon: Rocking The Application Indicators

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:27:11 +0000

Some time back the Ayatana project introduced the Application Indicator Framework, based upon technology created by the KDE project. We have been shipping this technology in Ubuntu for a few releases now and it makes the top-right part of the desktop a smooth, efficient, and pleasant experience, getting over the inconsistent and limiting notification area we had before.

To help build integration in the GNOME panel for this indicator work we had Ted Gould, Cody Somerville, and Jason Smith produce an implementation complete with C, Python and C# bindings, had Aurélien Gâteau continue to perform his excellent work with KDE, and Jorge Castro to help spread awareness of this work. In addition to this we contracted some developers to port apps with notification indicators that we ship in Ubuntu to the new framework, and this included apps such as Brasero, GNOME Bluetooth, GNOME Power Manager, Gnome Settings Daemon, XChat-GNOME, iBus, Nautilus, Policykit GNOME, Empathy, Gwibber and more. All of these patches are publicly available if other distros would like to use them.

The community has really got involved with the technology too, with community patches for Lernid, Banshee, LottaNZB, and DejaDup, and System Monitor, Weather, Screenshotting, Workspaces, Device Mounting indicators, support for the indicator framework built into AWN and Lubuntu, and more. I am absolutely delighted to see so much interest from application developers in the technology.

Jono Bacon: Articulating IRC Contributions Concisely

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:16:43 +0000

Today I had a call with Jussi from the Ubuntu IRC Council. We spent some time discussing a range of different topics, but then Jussi raised an important question which I think could benefit from some community discussion.

Today we have many methods of providing free support for our users – the Ubuntu Forums, Launchpad Answers, Ubuntu StackExchange and of course IRC. With each of the web resources there is a method of identifying those who are providing a significant and sustained contribution when providing support by checking their account profiles.

Unfortunately we don’t have this today for IRC. The simple reality is that there are many community members who use IRC every day and provide fantastically valuable support for our community, but there is no way of sufficiently articulating their contributions in a way that could, for example, be assessed for Ubuntu Membership.

The outcome I would like to achieve here is that someone in the IRC community who provides support could apply for Ubuntu Membership and the Ubuntu Membership Board could take a look at a profile that accurately and concisely summarizes their contributions, thus identifying that such contributions are significant and sustained, and therefore suitable for membership.

One option I was thinking could be something that I am thinking of as a ‘thankbot’. Imagine this context

<jono> hey, how do I do X, Y, and Z on Ubuntu?
<erica> hi jono, all you do is click on the frizometer and select babang.
<jono> ahh, that is it, thanks so much!
<erica> jono, it would be
<jono> thankbot erica
<thankbot> erica got thanked by jono - erica has been thanked: 28 times

We could then provide a means for others to check how many times a given person has been thanked, and it could be even cooler to have IRC client plug-ins that shows the number of thanks next to the persons nick.

Of course, the bot would want to be armed with the ability to not be gamed (such as limiting the number of thanks from the same person, to avoid spamming the bot), but these would all be details.

Could this work, and if not, is there a better idea out there to solve the problem of providing better visibility on our contributors who provide great support?

Jono Bacon: Revisiting Ethos

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 03:40:49 +0000

When I first heard about Free Software in 1998 I was mesmerized by it’s potential. Sure, back then the software was complex and some would argue ugly, but underneath the rough edges was a thing of beauty — the opportunity for people to come together to make new things, and anyone with the inclination and energy could take part. Back then our community was small and intimate. Most people seemed to know each other, and there was a tremendous sense of family within Free Software.

Things are quite different today: while the ethos has remained unchanged, Free Software and Open Source are popular concepts and terms, we have many comprehensive Free Software platforms, and our small community has now become a huge, sprawling, global community that has diversified; inspiring everyone to bring their gifts and their talents to the community.

So, why am I talking about this? I think these days it is easy for us to purely focus on the ones and zeros, the bugs and patches, the squabbles, the emails, and the challenges that face Free Software. While these things are part and parcel of our community, I worry sometimes that we forget the very human reasons why many of us got involved.

I was reminded of this last week. I was having a pretty shitty day, I had spent most of the day on the phone, I had oodles of email and TODO items to get though, and I was just feeling a bit tired and worn out. As my day came to end I saw a tweet show up on my desktop from someone who had just used Linux for the first time and was expressing how excited they were at exploring their new system. When I read it it took me right back to 1998 when I felt exactly the same way.

My take away from that day was that I think it is healthy for us to remind each other why we got involved in Free Software and Open Source, and I wanted to ask you all what attracted you, and what still attracts you to our community. To be frank — I don’t care which community you are in, whether it is Ubuntu, Red Hat, Solaris, GNOME, KDE, X, OpenStreetMap, whatever — I am more interested in the ethos which transcends the borders if these different communities.

So, why are you passionate about Free Software and Open Source?

Jono Bacon: Getting More Developers Interested In Participating In Ubuntu

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 20:56:04 +0000

I am just beginning to get into the planning stages for the next cycle for my team, and as part of this cycle we would like to really focus on attracting more developers to participate in Ubuntu. We would like to see more people interested in getting involved in packaging, fixing bugs, and joining our community. Daniel Holbach on my team will be leading much of this work.

Right now the 11.04 planning slate is clean, and we are looking for what you all feel are the areas in which Daniel’s time and effort would be best spent in the interests of having more people participate.

Where do you think we should focus our efforts?

Jono Bacon: 11.04 Ubuntu Developer Summit Announced

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 17:24:58 +0000

Hot on the heels of the announcement of the Natty Narwhal, I am tickled pink to announce the details of the next Ubuntu Developer Summit taking place in Orlando, USA from 25th – 29th October 2010. We also have a brand new Ubuntu Developer Summit website which provides all the details about how to get there and why UDS is interesting if you are in our community, if you are an upstream, and if you are a vendor.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit one of the most important events in the Ubuntu calendar and at it we discuss, debate and design the next version of Ubuntu. We bring together the entire Canonical development team and sponsor a large number of community members across the wide range of areas in which people contribute to Ubuntu. This includes packaging, translations, documentation, testing, LoCo teams and more. UDS is an incredible experience, filled with smart and enthusiastic people, fast paced and exhausting, but incredibly gratifying to be part of the process that builds the next Ubuntu.

For every UDS, Canonical sponsors a number of community members to attend the event. We are looking for those who want to bring some real insight and expertise in their area of Ubuntu, be it development or community governance. If you feel you could offer this but can’t afford to cover your expenses of attending, you should apply for sponsorship. The deadline for sponsorship is 8th September 2010.

Rob Annable: Links for 2010-08-22 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

A User's Guide to Architectural Histories and Fictions

Jono Bacon: Help Colin Get His Kids Back

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 01:31:35 +0000

I don’t tend to blog about appeals, but I came across this terribly sad story and I really want to encourage you all too also pledge and support him. Here is what happened, written by a friend of Colin:

Colin & I have been close friends for 13 years when we started our MBA program together. We then both lived in London and our children played together. Colin moved back to his home town of Boston before I returned to the US and unfortunately he got divorced from his wife, an Egyptian national, in 2008. He was granted full legal custody by the US courts of his two young boys (US citizens). His wife created forged passports in a fake name and kidnapped his two children by illegally flying back to Cairo on Egypt Air. He hasn’t seen them in more than a year and she is in hiding.

Mirvat el Nady now has an arrest warrant in the US and is wanted by Interpol (see here). Colin is being supported by his Senator John Kerry and has received help from Vice President Biden and Attorney General, Eric Holder. The problem is that Egypt doesn’t support the Hague Convention and doesn’t have an extradition policy with the United States so they don’t recognize any of the international legal rulings in Colin’s favor. Colin has now won visitation rights in an Egyptian court, but Mirvat didn’t show up at the legally required meeting day / time in Egypt.

You can see an interview with Colin here about his ordeal.

I am not a father yet, but it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to understand how painful and heartbreaking it must be to have your kids taken away from you and to have no idea where they are…and no way of getting in touch with them.

I wanted to encourage you all to show your support for Colin, and contribute to his legal defense fund. You can also show your support by joining this Facebook page; I am sure kind words of support on that page will be welcomed.

We pledged today, and with him aiming to raise $25,000 for the legal defence fund, if we all contribute a little this could really help this family. Thanks, folks.

David Goodwin: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-22

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:41:00 +0000

Tonight I will be dreaming "single, double, king. £3". How can you keep shouting that continually for hours on end you horrible man? #
Come on. DVDs are £1… Roll up.. Roll up. #
A very fat woman just bought maternity trousers from. So glad I'm not her. #studley #carboot #
My poor toe. http://yfrog.com/7dsy0zj – moral: better trainers needed for hockey. #
Good hockey games. Body aching, toe nicely bruised. #
"hello? Happy birthday to you too. Bye!" #toddler #phoneconversation #
Why won't @rowangoodwin say "[flash] gordon's alive!"… #
-> RT @dick_turpin iphone users have more sex than Android users http://ping.fm/sRDjd <- oh really? Why do my employees want 'droids? #
Facebook places eh? 4sq might soon be made redundant. Wish the updated iphone app worked for me tho. #
We have a new weapon against automated sales calls. tt-weasels and tt-monkeys. Thanks #asterisk #
Why can't a uni compsci dept. put a form online? Must i really print, write on dead tree and scan it in to submit/email. Grr. #aber #fail #
Today I did a total of 101 pushups thanks to the Hundred Pushups iPhone app. (Week 3, Day 2, Level 3) #100Pushups #
#WhatWouldYouTellYour18YearOldSelf Here are the lottery numbers for the next month #
Who'd have known… Dodford is quite good for mountain biking Nutnells wood and Pepperwood -good evening http://osm.org/go/euw@v@f4- #
To cycle or run; that is the question of this evening. #

Jono Bacon: On Visibility And Change

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 05:45:55 +0000

OK, before I begin, this is going to be a terribly presented ramble. I have written it, proof read it, and proof read it again, and it still sounds like a child with a crayon wrote it. This is because my thoughts are unstructured, but I am keen to share them anyway. Patience is appreciated, friends…

Recently I have been thinking about how my work as Ubuntu Community Manager balances out between the work I perform with volunteers in the community, and employees of Canonical who contribute to the community as well as other business units. The reason for these thoughts is that recently I have been feeling that I could do a better job of spending more time with our volunteers and supporting them with their goals. We have a tremendous, inspiring, hard-working and excitable community…and I have just been feeling like I could improve in how much “face time” I have with our active contributors.

So, I have been evaluating methods in which I can do this. As I thought more about it, I came to the realization that part of the limitations on my time these days is because my responsibilities today compared to my responsibilities when I started this role are two quite different places.

Just under four years ago when I joined Canonical as the Ubuntu Community Manager, life was a lot easier. Back then it was just me, I had no team, the company was a lot smaller, and not only were there no direct reports for me to manage, but there were far fewer other departments, units, teams, and other entities that needed input from me. When I started I had three primary high-level responsibilities:

Provide leadership and guidance in a core set of community projects.
Help to resolve and unblock issues and problems across the community.
Provide inspiration and encouragement for the community to feel passionate about the problems we are trying to solve and the opportunities that we are seeking together.

The majority of time working on these goals was working with our volunteers. I certainly did have tasks and objectives within the company, but by and large the majority of my focus was with our volunteers. One might suggest I was “foot loose and fancy free”, if you can say that about someone who plays in a thrash metal band…

Today things are quite different. I now have four employees who report to me, I am now a platform manager (this means I am one of the managers on the Ubuntu team), and the company has grown significantly in size, which means far more departments, units, teams, projects, and other entities who have subsequently requested input and assistance from me. Of course, I myself have experienced this change and growth first-hand, and so have my colleagues, but I have also realized I have not done a very good job talking about this change with our community.

Today my role has evolved to include an additional three high-level sets of requirements:

Provide leadership and guidance in a core set of community projects.
Help to resolve and unblock issues and problems across the community.
Provide inspiration and encouragement for the community to feel passionate about the problems we are trying to solve and the opportunities that we are seeking together.
Manage a team to help them be successful in their own work and bring value to the community.
Provide guidance to other teams and units inside Canonical.
Provide a public face and representation for Ubuntu (and increasingly, Canonical).

The challenge that I have faced is that these latter three additions require a significant amount of work. As one such example, my team is very distributed — I am based in California, Jorge is in Detroit, Daniel is in Berlin, David is in València, and Ahmed is in Cairo. With us being so distributed, I consider 1-on-1 time with the guys as very important in helping them to be successful in their roles and feel a strong sense of team spirit and morale. As such, it is important to me that I have an hour each week with them on a voice call for 1-on-1 time. When we take those four hour-long calls and also add our team call, that already sucks up half a work day just for the team. When we then factor in all the other interaction between the team and the guidance the team rightly expects from me, “managing the team” takes up a significant amount of time. Of course, it is valuable time, and time well spent and important for our team, but it is also time in which I am primarily working with my colleagues as opposed to volunteers.

Another element has been the sheer growth of Canonical. We are much bigger than we were, and I see a core responsibility of my role and my team’s role is in helping those who join us, particularly those who don’t come from an Open Source background, to get a strong sense of our community values and commitments. This not only involves helping to on-board new team members, but with six times as many employees than when I started, it also significantly raises the number of instances in which such team members are looking for help and guidance to ensure that such community relations, which are so important to the company, are well executed. Again, this is important and valuable time well spent, but again time in which I am primarily working with the company and not volunteers.

Finally, Ubuntu has become a global phenomenon. It has become increasingly a house-hold name, a common sight in coffee shops and trains, and with this success has developed (a) a lot of press interest and requests for comment, and (b) an increasing level of critique and expectations from a wider demographic of users. As one of the more public personas associated with Ubuntu and Canonical, I am therefore often expected to provide input and commentary to the press and elsewhere, particularly with anything community-related (which is a pretty wide spectrum of content both actually within and often outside my domain). Again, important and valuable work, but time handling company responsibilities as opposed to working with volunteers.

Of course, while the scope of responsibility has increased with these additional three areas, my time available has not really increased (it increased a little as I work longer days now and I travel a lot less ever since I got married), and as such the additional areas of responsibility have naturally cut into the time that was originally devoted to the first three areas I outlined which were primarily volunteer-targeted. This is why some of you who have been following my work for a long time may have picked up that I am spending a little less time collaborating with our volunteers than I used to – I am basically knee deep in these other responsibilities.

Now, this is to be expected. I now have a team, and priority is my team and their success. Part and parcel of having a team grow up around you is that you end up spending more and more time being a manager and helping your team to enjoy a structured, safe, and enjoyable work environment. In traditional management, this is common and the manager becomes a little less visible to the team as she is focused on managing the team and the expectations of the team from key stakeholders in the company (and in our case, the community).

The problem is, I don’t want to be less visible.

I believe that having a close and hands-on relationship with the Ubuntu contributor community is important, and irrespective of whether it is “important” or not, I just enjoy spending time with our community; they are my friends, my peers, my colleagues, and in many cases people who inspire me.

So, after all this rambling I wanted this blog post to achieve two primary goals. Firstly, for those of you who have not seen me as much as you did a few years back, I hope this explains a little about why that is. Secondly, if you have any ideas and suggestions about techniques and approaches that I can use to continue to fulfill my expectations to my team and peers, but squeeze in more “face-time” time with our volunteers, I would love to hear. Oh, and before some smart arse suggests it…spending more hours in front of a computer is not really an option; I don’t want solve one problem (trying to find smarter ways of working to spend more time with our volunteers) and replace it with another (my wife get the hump that I am working too much).

Thanks for reading.

Jono Bacon: Thankyou, Debian

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 00:15:07 +0000

Debian is awesome. You know that, I know that, we all know that, and 17 years ago Debian entered into our lives. Before I joined the Ubuntu project I was an avid Debian user, and still am. Ubuntu owes a huge amount of thanks to Debian and it’s global family of contributors for all of their incredible work.

If you would like to find out more about Debian, here are some links:

You can download the latest Debian release from here, and be sure to go and thank Debian here.

Thankyou, Debian, and long may you prosper!

Rob Annable: Links for 2010-08-15 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 07:00:00 +0000

80 years of AD in 1100 words

David Goodwin: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-15

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:41:00 +0000

Sorcerers apprentice 7/10. Better than inception. #
pah, sorcerers apprentice.. i know what i meant. #
Internet: last airbender or the magicians apprentice? #
Today I did a total of 85 pushups thanks to the Hundred Pushups iPhone app. (Week 3, Day 1, Level 3) #100Pushups #
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-10965608 rise of the MAMILS (Middle Aged Men in Lycra) – middle aged men cycling…. #
Shopping for three items turned into three carrier bags of stuff. #fail #
Good morning sunny Aberystwyth. We are armed with bucket and spade. Beware locals. #
The wheels on the bus go round and round….. And I'm falling asleep. #
£3 for the largest starbucks hot chocolate which isn't very big. Tasted crap. Should stick to costa or buy my own galaxy. #grumpyoldman #
I'm so cool. I have a Thomas the tank engine ringtone. #hip #cool #dad #
Seaside today. Better wake up early for once…. #
Rowan says I'm Shrek. ROAAAAAR!! #
Chocolate: £6.50ish, envelope: £1.50, postage to Canada: £12. Lesson learnt: don't bet with foreigners. #
http://code.google.com/p/iphone-backup-decoder/ <- seems to work quite well. Win. #
Clearly now is a bad time to go shopping for take away lunch. #
Install wordpress from svn && firewall webserver to not make port 80 requests out from apache && modify class-snoopy.php -> perhaps secure? #
#phpwm meeting tomorrow; don't forget … Or BurgerWM as some are referring to it already… #food #faminearoundthecorner #
To think, I was pretty sure I'd turned off the twitter integration in those exercise apps. #fail on my behalf. #
Today I did a total of 126 situps thanks to the 200 Situps iPhone app. (Week 2, Day 3, Level 3) #200Situps #
Today I did a total of 86 pushups thanks to the Hundred Pushups iPhone app. (Week 2, Day 3, Level 3) #100Pushups #

Jono Bacon: Ubuntu Global Jam: We Need Your Events!

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:58:39 +0000

CornellÃ , Spain

Chicago, USA

Are you good folks aware of what is happening on 27th – 29th August 2010. But of course, it is the Ubuntu Global Jam!

In the last few cycles we have organized and run an event called the Ubuntu Global Jam. The idea was simple: encourage our awesome global Ubuntu community to get together in the same room to work on bugs, translations, documentation, testing and more. And they did, all over the world, as can be seen here.

One thing that I am keen that everyone remembers: you don’t have to be an official developer, packager or programmer to take part in the Ubuntu Global Jam. Also, lets not forget that Ubuntu Global Jam events are a fantastic place to learn and improve your skills: you can sit next to someone who can show you how to do something or explain something in more detail.

If this is all sounding right up your street and you fancy organizing an event, go and read this page and then add your event to the LoCo Directory by following these instructions.

Rock and roll: let’s make this one to remember. Start your engines, folks…

David Goodwin: Asterisk – setting the caller id through an ldap lookup

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 09:16:13 +0000

Having just upgraded to asterisk 1.6, I was faced with the problem of callerid lookup no longer working.
We’d previously used the external LDAPGet module to lookup against our internal LDAP directory – but the module doesn’t compile in 1.6, so here’s a quick and dirty workaround which requires you have ldap-utils installed on your server.

In my extensions.conf :
exten => _[a-zA-Z0-9].,9,Set(CALLERID(name)=${SHELL(ldapsearch -w thepassword -D “cn=admin,dc=mydomain,dc=com” -h ldapserver -b “ou=addressbook,dc=mydomain,dc=com” -s children “(&(objectClass=person)(telephoneNumber=${CALLERID(num)}))” cn | grep ^cn | cut -d: -f2 | xargs echo -n)})

Where I used to have :

exten => _[a-zA-Z0-9].,9,LDAPget(CALLERID(name)=cidname)

David Goodwin: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-08

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:41:00 +0000

Woke to the sound of lions roaring at 4am… (well I think it's the lions; not like the MGM lion) #
Campfire's burning .. Campfire's burning…. Draw nearer. http://yfrog.com/eqc4fj #
We're going to be camping at the safari park. ROAR! ROAR! #
Today I did a total of 111 situps thanks to the 200 Situps iPhone app. (Week 2, Day 2, Level 3) #200Situps #
Today I did a total of 75 pushups thanks to the Hundred Pushups iPhone app. (Week 2, Day 2, Level 3) #100Pushups #
Coffee + hot chocolate seems a good drink. Why do shops not sell chocolate coffee or hot choffee? #
"I design monkeys for zoos" … #pickupline #dayjob http://www.b3ta.com/questions/stupidity/post667972 #
Achilles tendonopathy (sp?). Exercises should fix it. Thanks to Taft physiotherapy, 46 new road, bromsgrove #
And now to physio-ize my ankle. I'm fed up not being able to run. #
Yey. Fixed a long standing sporadic bug … Silly soap data types. #
Today I did a total of 68 pushups thanks to the Hundred Pushups iPhone app. (Week 2, Day 1, Level 3) #100Pushups #
Jailbreakme worked first time. Quick. Exceedingly easy. Idiot proof. Well done @comex etc #
Jailbreakme looks excellent. Apple will be pissed that it appears so easy to do. I've so missed sbsettings and bitesms #
Toy story 3 …. Someone's transfixed by the big big big telly a least. Shame there's a head in my way. #

Jono Bacon: Making Ubuntu More Accessible

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 23:13:39 +0000

Today I had a great call Penelope Stowe who has been leading some excellent efforts with the Ubuntu Accessibility Team in conjunction with the (quite literally) always rocking Luke ‘The Muso’ Yelavich.

The reason for the call was simple: I felt like I didn’t have enough knowledge or visibility of the Ubuntu Accessibility Team and accessibility in general, and when Ubuntu was started, the project made a firm commitment to the core aspects of freedom such as freedom of access to the technology, the freedom to have Ubuntu in your language, and the freedom to experience Ubuntu in an accessible way. Penelope, Luke and others are passionate about bringing the focus back to accessibility more, and I wanted to echo this important ambition here.

Penelope, with some input from Alan Bell, articulated the goals of the project perfectly:

At the heart of Ubuntu’s philosophy is the belief that computing is for everyone, whatever your circumstances. Ubuntu was certainly hailed as one of the most accessible operating systems when it was launched however different approaches to accessibility APIs in the upstream projects have lead to some areas needing renewed attention to maintain a high standard of accessibility. The Ubuntu Accessibility team has existed from the start, providing support to those requiring assistive technology to operate the Ubuntu desktop. This year an effort started to bring the team together to take up a more active role than providing support. This led to a more defined leadership being selected at UDS-M. Penelope Stowe now heads the documentation and community engagement activities of the team and Luke Yelavich leads the development activities.

Penelope goes on to share what kind of work the team is focusing on:

Alongside the regular support activities we are working on updating documentation including the team wiki pages and information on how to use Ubuntu with assistive technology and we are running a project to create design personas that can be given to developers and user interface designers to bring to life the accessibility requirements of our users. This project is starting with a survey of a wide range of people who use assistive technology with computers (not just Ubuntu users) and we will use the results of the survey to create realistic but fictional characters who need Ubuntu to be better so they can use it.

the Ubuntu Accessibility Team are doing valuable and important work and I know they (a) want better awareness of the team (hence this blog entry as one such effort), and (b) they are keen to get more volunteers involved. Here is where you can find them:

Mailing List – ubuntu-accessibility AT lists.ubuntu.com (subscribe) and ubuntu-accessibility-devel AT lists.ubuntu.com (subscribe)
IRC – #ubuntu-accessibility on freenode
Wiki: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility
Forum http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=145

Keep up the awesome work Penelope, Luke, and co, and folks, if this interests you, do get involved!

Jono Bacon: Request For Candidates: Application Review Board

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 00:39:31 +0000

In Belgium at the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, we had a fantastic set of discussions about how we could create a process that empowers application developers to bring their applications into the Ubuntu Software Center much easier. Today our developer and packaging processes are more designed for a contributor who wishes to contribute to the Ubuntu Platform as opposed to an application developer who wants to get exposure for her specific application in Ubuntu. As such, if you are an application developer and want to get your app in the software center, the process is probably too complex and involved.

We identified this disconnect at UDS and Rick Spencer and I proposed a process in which application developers can propose an application for approval by a community-driven review board, and when approval is granted their application will appear in the Ubuntu Software Center. This review board will assess the application for technical merit, packaging quality, perform a code review and ensure it is safe.

Since UDS I have been working on a proposed process (which you can read here) and first engaged in a series of discussions with some community members and then proposed the process to the Ubuntu Technical Board (Matt Zimmerman, Colin Watson, Kees Cook, Mark Shuttleworth, and Martin Pitt); our governance body that discusses and evaluates technical policy in the Ubuntu project. I am pleased to report that after a series of modifications and clarifications, the Ubuntu Technical Board have approved the process.

It is important to stress, and I know the Technical Board would like to ensure this is clearly communicated too, that this process is very much a first cut. While a mature and well-discussed process, we fully expect it to refine and change, and at the next Ubuntu Developer Summit we plan on reviewing the process and improving how it works.

Finding Our Application Review Board

With the process approved, the goal now is to find members to join the new Application Review Board. We are going to be looking for 5 – 7 members who exhibit the following skills:

Strong technical experience.
Strong experience of the Ubuntu platform and the desktop.
Knowledge of packaging to effectively assess other people’s packaging work for quality.
Enough free time to commit to reviewing the applications and providing timely feedback.

As a bonus:

You would be a core-dev or MOTU.
A knowledge of programming, so as to perform a code review.

Anyone and everyone who satisfies the above criteria is welcome to apply. There are no specific requirements for location; you can be based anywhere in the world.

If you are interested in applying, head to this page and follow the instructions. The Ubuntu Technical Board will ultimately assess the applications and decide who the final board will be. For full details of the expectations of a position on the board, read the codified charter.

The deadline for applications is 31st August 2010.

Jono Bacon: Free Books For Approved LoCo Teams

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 22:18:39 +0000

Once again we have some wonderful free books to give away from Prentice Hall, the rather spanky-awesome publishers of The Official Ubuntu Book by Mako, Matthew Helmke and Corey Burger, and the brand new Official Ubuntu Server Book by our friend and yours, Kyle Rankin and Mako. These books were commissioned by Debra Williams-Cauley who has been awesome getting them on the shelves, and her sidekick is one Heather Fox who I have been chatting with recently to see if we can score some free copies for our rather fantastic Ubuntu LoCo Teams. Fortunately, Heather has been able to make the magic happen.

Prentice Hall are happy to send each and every approved LoCo team one free copy of The Official Ubuntu Book and one free copy of The Official Ubuntu Server book. To be entirely clear: this is one copy of each book per team. This will be a great addition to each team’s library of Ubuntu books!

To keep this as simple as possible, you can request your books by following these steps:

The team contact shown on our LoCo Team List (and only the team contact) should send an email to usergroups AT informit DOT com and include the following details:
- Your full name.
- Which team you are from.
- Your full address (including zip/postal code, region and country).
- Your phone number, including country and area code.
Heather will process your application and let you know if it is approved.
If approved, she will get your books in the post.

A few notes:

Only approved teams are eligible for the free copies of the books.
Only the team contact for each team (shown on this page) can make the request for the book.
There is a limit of one copy of each book per approved team.
Prentice Hall will cover postage, but not any import tax or other shipping fees.
When you have the books, it is up to you what you do with them. We recommend you share them between members of the team. LoCo Leaders: please don’t hog them for yourselves!
The deadline for getting your requests in Sun August 15, 2010.

If you have any questions or queries, don’t contact me or Canonical, contact Heather Fox at heather DOT fox AT pearson DOT com.

Also, for those teams who are not approved or yet to approved, you can still score a rather nice 35% discount on the books by registering your LoCo with the Prentice Hall User Groups Program.

All in all a pretty sweet deal, methinks. Enjoy!

Jono Bacon: At Home With Jono Bacon

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 05:44:31 +0000

Just a quick FYI: tomorrow (Wed 4th Aug) I will be hosting my weekly At Home with Jono Bacon videocast at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern / 6pm UTC and I will be covering the following topics:

CALL FOR EVENTS: Ubuntu Global Jam
HOWTO: Team Reporting
LoCo Council
Q+A

I hope to see you all there at the live recording!

Jono Bacon: Ubuntu Global Jam: We Need Your Events!

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 05:53:01 +0000

Are you good folks aware of what is happening on 27th – 29th August 2010. But of course, it is the Ubuntu Global Jam!

If this is all sounding right up your street and you fancy organizing an event, go and read this page and then add your event to the LoCo Directory by following these instructions.

Rock and roll: let’s make this one to remember. Start your engines, folks…

Jono Bacon: Severed Fifth Update

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 05:40:34 +0000

Hi folks, back again for a quick update on my Free Culture music project, Severed Fifth. As before, I just want to share a bunch of links to interesting things that are going on.

To kick off with, I put a few short videos on the Severed Fifth YouTube Channel from yesterday’s rehearsal. These are the first videos of the full band playing, and of course all the music that you hear and the rest of album will all be made available under a free license. Here are the vids:

Don’t see them? Click here.

Other things going on:

Severed Fifth interview on libre.fm podcast – I did a long interview with Elleo about the band, Free culture, Severed Fifth Fair Pay and more.
Companies that support Severed Fifth – a write-up about how Bytemark Hosting, Toontrack, and Microsoft have supported Severed Fifth.
Severed Fifth Android App – Rob is busily working on a Severed Fifth Android App and he tweeted recently that he expects to have a release out tomorrow. I can’t wait to see his progress! He did post this screenshot recently, which looks awesome!
New wallpapers! – Mario has been going wallpaper crazy and created a bunch of new awesome wallpapers, and new Severed Fifth Street Team wallpapers.

It was also cool to see Chris Kontos, who is currently playing with Attitude Adjustment but previously on Machine Head’s hugely successful first album Burn My Eyes, and has played with Testament, Konkhra, Attitude Adjustment, Exodus, Verbal Abuse, Custard Pie, Anti Trust, The Servants, Dog Faced Gods, Death Angel, Grinch and with James Murphy, wearing a Severed Fifth t-shirt at a recent show in San Francisco:

Finally, don’t forget that the new album is recorded from 11th – 15th Aug 2010 and the entire recording will be streamed live on our ustream.tv channel. Be sure to be there!

David Goodwin: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-01

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 16:41:00 +0000

Sea life centre – £10ish… Seeing your son run into a mirror twice in a hall of mirrors – priceless. #evildad #
Apple Grammar fail (their != they're) http://store.apple.com/uk/product/H0462ZM/A?fnode=MTY1NDA0Ng&mco=MTM3NTE4NzA #
Birmingham sealife centre for me today it seems. #
RT @madeupstats 16% of the residents of Newark are unaware that their hometown is an anagram of 'Wanker'. #
Ooh, look… fancy URL rewriting (e.g. http://…./Light_Therapy) … I wonder what'll happen when I put a ' in there… #sqlinjection #
Protip – Webdevs submitting a CV, check your reference URLs; today's example: 2 domains parked; 2+ have SQL injections in the URL #
I told Ofcom what's wrong with the #DEAct code It only takes 2 min http://bit.ly/reply-to-ofcom #
Thanks for the nits toddler…. #joysofparenthood #
Nom nom. 5 crunch corners for £1. 52p each. Crazy stuff @asda #
'ukathletics ltd' sent me some spam – 'london disability athletics challenge' … containing only remote images #accessibility #fail #
Why don't cows lay round bottles any longer? Is this a case of genetic over engineering? #
I wonder what people put in sandwiches before cheese was invented? #
The BBC's Sherlock (well first epsiode) was pretty good – glad to finally see some decent UK telly. #
while [ true ]; do echo 'thanks for waiting, one of our advisors will be with you as soon as possible'; done #onhold #hmrc #tax is-taxing #
I hope it's bromsgrove's air that smells of crap and not me… #
Email:"only 7 weeks to marathon… Get training". Me: that might be a problem as both legs voice displeasure. Stupid body. #
In other news, I'm now mayor of the cinema after two visits on 4sq. Guess no one plays it around here… #backwardsbirmingham #
Saw inception today. OK, but predators was better. End & plot twist too predictable #caveman #unculturedmanwhoprobablydidntgetit #

Jono Bacon: Fixing Ubuntu Software Center Descriptions

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 14:31:04 +0000

The Ubuntu Software Center is making some rocking progress, but as everyone’s favorite Dr Vish suggests, it is only a container for other content, and we need to fix and improve the descriptions of apps inside Ubuntu to make it easier for users.

This is a wonderful contribution to Ubuntu. Want to get involved? Simple, check out Vish’s awesome post.

Jono Bacon: Red Hat, Canonical and GNOME Contributions

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 03:39:09 +0000

Earlier this week at GUADEC, the always affable Dave Neary presented his GNOME Census work. Unfortunately, I was not there to see it, but I read his excellent post on the topic.

One of the reactions from the survey was that Red Hat are responsible for 16% of the contributions to GNOME whereas Canonical are responsible for a measly 1%.

Of course, this has generated some flame, such as a particularly angry post from Greg DeKoenigsberg and the rather pithy response from Jeffrey Stedfast. Greg is clearly pissed, and Jeffrey is clearly pissed at Greg being pissed, and I suspect Greg is going to get even more pissed at Jeffrey being pissed. The worse thing is that they are both going to be pissed at me for this blog post.

First I want to put these figures in perspective and then I want to talk about how we read the figures we do have.

I think the GNOME Census report is excellent, and it provides some excellent visibility into contributions in GNOME, but it only takes into account upstream contributions to GNOME itself. What the report doesn’t take into account are upstream contributions that are built on the GNOME platform but (a) not part of official GNOME modules, and (b) hosted and developed elsewhere, such as Launchpad. As such, while the report is accurate for showing code and contributions accepted into GNOME, there are also many projects built on GNOME technology that are not taken into account due to non-inclusion in GNOME modules or being developed outside of GNOME infrastructure.

As a general rule, Canonical staff develop inside Launchpad. The reason is simple; Launchpad and Bazaar provide a powerful development environment that was also built by Canonical and we therefore have lots of internal skills and best practice based on these tools. Launchpad is also a fundamental component in Ubuntu development and all the software we develop ultimately ships in Ubuntu, so using the same development forge makes sense. Finally, the site is a Free Software and Open Source project, so there really no philosophical reason to move, testified by the 18,000+ Free Software projects happily using Launchpad already.

Canonical is actively developing upstream desktop software, but doing it in Launchpad. Some examples include:

This is by no means the full list, and is other work such as Simple Scan, the Hardware Drivers tool, Computer Janitor, and more. Many of these contributions (such as Application Indicators and Simple Scan) could bring real value to GNOME, but they have not been accepted. I know that the Canonical engineers who work on them would be delighted if they were included in GNOME.

The above list also doesn’t include significant upstream investment in other areas such as Upstart, Bazaar, Launchpad, and a full team building Ubuntu. I don’t want to turn this into a “who contributed more” competition, but I think for some to suggest Canonical is a bad citizen who is not contributing upstream code is unreasonable. To suggest that Canonical has limited code inside approved GNOME modules is fair.

So that was the first thing I wanted to clarify; Canonical does invest heavily in upstream work, but GNOME is not the only home for upstream contributions.

If there is one thing that the GNOME Census has really outlined is that we should all be proud of Red Hat and their contributions to GNOME. You only have to take a look at all the red items on this image to get a feeling for the wonderful work that Red Hat is doing inside GNOME. Novell too. Look the green items in there; Novell has done a wonderful job maintaining many modules inside GNOME. In fact, there are many companies investing inside GNOME modules and inside GNOME infrastructure. I don’t believe it would be fair to undermine these contributions in any way; they are testament to the ethos of those companies and their commitment to GNOME. All of the people working at those companies are doing good work within the spirit of Free Software.

Likewise, I don’t think it is fair to undermine Canonical’s contributions just because many of them exist outside of GNOME. Our engineers are also doing good work within the spirit of Free Software. I have never claimed for a second that Canonical are equal to Red Hat and Novell in terms of our accepted contributions in GNOME; it is clear that there are far few contributions from Canonical staff inside accepted GNOME modules, but this does not for a second mean that Canonical is not (a) producing upstream contributions and (b) heavily invested in the GNOME platform. Ubuntu, our primary product is a GNOME desktop, and the vast majority of our engineers are GNOME users and developers and they work every day on a GNOME based product.

So in a nutshell, this is my take: both Red Hat and Canonical invest heavily in Open Source development, but they do it in different ways and different places. The GNOME Census clearly outlines that within GNOME modules, Red Hat are doing far more, but that doesn’t mean that Canonical are sitting on their thumbs and doing nothing, far from it.

David Goodwin: Grr…

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:50:03 +0000

Why would someone write Python and mix tabs and spaces. Do you really want to have random arbitrary bugs … grr….

:%s/^I/ //g

Grr. grr. grr. stupid programmer. Grr.. That’s my final moan. honest.

David Goodwin: Logging … and how not to do it.

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 10:44:46 +0000

One thing that really annoys me is when I come to look at the log file and I see something like :

blah blah did blah blah

blah foo blah random comment

fish blah some data

which spans many lines or does it?

This is bad, as I’ve got absolutely no idea where the messages are from (so have to grep around a code base), and I’ve no idea WHEN they were made. At best I can look at timestamps on this file and figure out a timeframe (assuming logrotate is in use so there is a definite (must be after X timestamp)).

What’s far better from a maintenance point of view :

2010/07/29 09:33 filewhatever.py:355 blah blah blah did blah blah

2010/07/29 09:34 filewhatever.py:355 blah blah blah did blah blah

2010/07/29 09:35 filewhatever.py:355 data received from x is {{{hello world…. }}}

Changes are :

Date and time stamps (in python: datetime.datetime.now())
Recording where the message came from (see the ‘inspect’ python module – inspect.stack()[1][1] for calling file, and inspect.stack()[1][2] for the line number, or debug_backtrace() in PHP)
Wrapping any interesting output (e.g. from a remote service) in obvious delimiters (e.g. {{{ and }}} ) - without e.g. timestamps or some other common line prefix, I’ve no way of knowing what’s from where, especially if the output spreads over many lines.

Other good ideas :

Different severities of log message (classic: debug, info, error type annotation with appropriate filtering).
Make sure logrotate is in use, or a simple shell script via cron, to stop the log file growing too large and causing problems.
Stop writing your own logging mechanisms and use ones provided by the system (e.g. Python has a logger built in which does all of the above and more)

EOR - EndOfRant

Jono Bacon: Ubuntu Global Jam: Start Your Engines!

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:25:55 +0000

Are you good folks aware of what is happening on 27th – 29th August 2010. But of course, it is the Ubuntu Global Jam!

To make the event as simple and accessible as possible, we have picked five topic areas and we are encouraging you lovely people to organize an event with one or more of them:

Bugs – finding, triaging and fixing bugs.
Testing – testing the new release and reporting your feedback.
Upgrade – upgrading to Maverick from Lucid and reporting your upgrade experience.
Documentation – writing documentation about how to use Ubuntu and how to join the community.
Translations – translating Ubuntu and helping to make it available in everyone’s local language.
Packaging – packaging software for Ubuntu users to install with a clock.
Other – other types of contribution such as marketing and advocacy etc.

With six primary methods of getting involved, there is something for everyone in this rocking global event.

If this is all sounding right up your street and you fancy organizing an event, go and read this page and then add your event to the LoCo Directory by following these instructions.

Rock and roll: let’s make this one to remember. Start your engines, folks…

Jono Bacon: Awesome GUADEC Espresso and Coffee Bar

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:05:32 +0000

I have always been a fan of helping in any way I can to encourage people to support small organizations and businesses who are doing their best to be successful by working hard and providing a friendly, honest service.

For the earlier part of this week I am in The Hague at GUADEC, and I stumbled across a small espresso shop that is the embodiment of these kinds of small business. It is impeccably clean, the food is awesome, the coffee is fantastic, it is good value, and the guy who runs the shop is the definition of kind and welcoming. Oh, and it has great wi-fi too.

So, I wanted to share with all my friends who are visiting GUADEC too to come and support this guy’s small business, drink some coffee and leach his Internet.

The address is: 7 o’clock Espressobar, Wagenstraat 187 2512 AW Den Haag and if you are walking back to the hotel before you walk over the small bridge you will see it on the left with a big Coca-Cola sign above it.

More details on the website.

Richard Smedley: Food from the city

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:25:31 +0000

As I prepare for the third Ignite Liverpool event, I found my first talk online, on urban food - from foraging to guerilla gardening. As a pecha kucha style talk it’s a bit of a gallop, but manages to cover a few points. (It also doesn’t jump after a minute like the Manchester recording did.)

Rob Annable: Links for 2010-07-26 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

VIVID - Inbindable Volume
'...The multiple screens journey through the Brutalist space of an empty library interior which unfolds in an assemblage of tracking shots...'

Jono Bacon: Team Reporting

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:50:55 +0000

Some time ago we created the Team Reporting facility in Ubuntu, and I am pleased to see that LoCo Teams are using Team Reports to kep us all up to date on the awesome progress going on across the community.

I just wanted to remind you good folks of where to find the reports and how to get involved.

Jono Bacon: The Five Horsemen

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:43:34 +0000

Last week I was in Prague with my team; the first with Ahmed since he joined. It was an awesome week and it was useful to checkpoint our progress.

We also took the first ever full team photos of us, first in our room and second at the end of the week having a drink:

Thanks to Gord for the photos.

This photo makes me feel incredibly to be part of such an awesome team. Rock and roll!

Peter Cannon: Chakra, you owe me four hours!

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 09:24:29 +0000

The volume of Chakra comments has been steadily increasing over the last month or so, for those who don’t know Chakra is a KDE module Linux distribution based on Arch Linux, I have installed it a couple of times and run it ‘Live’ from a USB drive but that was when it first came out. The previous method for getting the image on the drive was to use Unetbootin on Linux or Win32-image-writer on Windows however the project appears to had dropped that method and gone for a isohybrid based method.

For reasons that are not important I decided to go the ‘Windows’ method this required me to obviously download the iso then download isohybrid and dd for Windows I stuck them both in a folder C:\dd then opened a console and did cd c:\dd and ran the first command as per the Chakra wiki. OK so I got the ubiquitous Mr Anvin welcome screen and? Well that’s just it, and? There was no activity or progress bar and no blinking light showing activity on my HDD? “This is not working I’m sure of it?”, with a shrug and a sigh I issued the dd command back came the message “Get lost something else is using the file!” what? Maybe I shouldn’t have issued the isohybrid and dd commands separately maybe they was all in one go so to speak?

After 3 reboots, ergo three tries, I gave up and copied the iso over to my Dell Mini 10 that’s running Ubuntu Lucid and is the machine I wanted to have a look at Chakra on. The idea was that I would now try from Linux, having checked that I have isohybrid installed I discovered it is in fact part of syslinux, thanks for telling me, which was installed as was dd so it looked like we was good to go. I issued the isohybrid command “Never heard of it mate?” what? Yes apparently there is a bug #553581 which supposedly is fixed but I reinstalled and still had the problem.

I did try and get the patch but for the life of me couldn’t figure out how, oh and then couldn’t find my Launchpad login details and slowly the day went from bad to worse. Having wasted three to four hours I gave up true its possibly down to my machines but I would have thought the Windows method would have worked? Thing is I cant be bothered now so will probably have a play with openSUSE 11.3 instead which is sad for the project.

David Goodwin: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-25

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:41:00 +0000

Morrisons. You are the worst supermarket ever. Let me buy single bananas. #
Even with an iPhone and google maps etc I got lost around Bentley / webheath. #amireallyawoman #mapreadingfail #
Cycled to arrow valley park (redditch) and back, via lickey hill (out) and cycle route 5 on the way back….. #
Cycling with a dead weight toddler in a rear seat is hard. This might have to become a regular routine. #
Toddler cycling day (well I'm cycling, he's along for the ride) #
Hmm. Apple case app crashed my phone. Great. Shame there aren't more pictures or info provided to help me choose #iPhone4 #case #
Wish subversion would let me revert line ranges within a file so I can easily avoid committing whitespace changes etc. #svn #
FOOL WOMEN into thinking their opinions are valued by nodding occasionally and saying 'mmm' /via @VizTopTips #
Say the word and I'll be gone. Say the word and I'll be gone forever, and ever. #
Yey. Query time reduced from 2.5 seconds to 0 seconds. And a happy customer soon. #
http://www.myconfinedspace.com/2010/07/20/proper-use-of-your-and-there/ #

David Goodwin: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-25

Sun, 25 Jul 2010 16:41:00 +0000

Morrisons. You are the worst supermarket ever. Let me buy single bananas. #
Even with an iPhone and google maps etc I got lost around Bentley / webheath. #amireallyawoman #mapreadingfail #
Cycled to arrow valley park (redditch) and back, via lickey hill (out) and cycle route 5 on the way back….. #
Cycling with a dead weight toddler in a rear seat is hard. This might have to become a regular routine. #
Toddler cycling day (well I'm cycling, he's along for the ride) #
Hmm. Apple case app crashed my phone. Great. Shame there aren't more pictures or info provided to help me choose #iPhone4 #case #
Wish subversion would let me revert line ranges within a file so I can easily avoid committing whitespace changes etc. #svn #
FOOL WOMEN into thinking their opinions are valued by nodding occasionally and saying 'mmm' /via @VizTopTips #
Say the word and I'll be gone. Say the word and I'll be gone forever, and ever. #
Yey. Query time reduced from 2.5 seconds to 0 seconds. And a happy customer soon. #
http://www.myconfinedspace.com/2010/07/20/proper-use-of-your-and-there/ #

Matt Revell: Recording video calls in Ubuntu

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:12:27 +0000

Lately, I’ve been interviewing Launchpad users to learn more about how they work with Launchpad and what they think of new features we’re proposing.

Until now, this has been mostly face to face, either at the Ubuntu Developer Summits or Canonical’s London office. Talking in person seems to be the best way of doing this: as the interviewer, I can see exactly which part of a proposed page the person is looking at when they pull a certain face, for example.

However, doing it this way greatly limits who I get to speak to. Not everybody who uses Launchpad attends UDS or is within easy travelling distance of central London during the work day.

So, I’ve been looking at ways of doing this remotely. There are some important constraints:

pretty much anyone should be able to take part
no special equipment should be needed
it should cost nothing, or very little, to conduct.

Recording Skype video calls in Ubuntu

As it seems to meet my requirements, I’m going to give Skype video calling a go. And I say “Skype”, rather than anything else, for reasons that I’ll now explain.

I’ve spent quite some time trying to find a straightforward way to record video calls in Ubuntu. I’ve come up with nothing, so here’s one way that seems to work:

capture the audio using Skype Call Recorder
capture video using GTK-RecordMyDesktop (apt-getable)
splice the two together in a video editor.

Test calls have worked. I’ll post again with a report on how it worked in practice.

Andy D'Arcy Jewell: RedHat to Debian Translation Crib Sheet

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:29:33 +0000

I've recently been delving more deeply into Debian Lenny, and have had to learn all the package management and administration tricks all over again. I compiled a little table of command equivalents to help me remember how to do most of the things I need to do on a daily basis:

Package Management

Task

Red-Hat based

Debian based

Install updates

yum update

apt-get update; apt-get upgrade

Find package

yum search packagename

apt-cache search packagename

Install package

yum install packagename

apt-get install packagename

Uninstall package

yum remove packagename

apt-get remove packagename

List installed packages

rpm -qa|grep keyword

dpkg --get-selections|grep keyword

Service Management

Task

Red-Hat based

Debian based

List installed services

chkconfig --list

sysv-rc-conf --list

Enable service

chkconfig servicename on

sysv-rc-conf servicename on

Disable service

chkconfig servicename off

sysv-rc-conf servicename off

Start service

service servicename start

/etc/init.d/servicename start

Stop service

service servicename stop

/etc/init.d/servicename stop

Restart service

service servicename restart

/etc/init.d/servicename restart

Service status

service servicename status

/etc/init.d/servicename status

Configuration Files

Task

Red-Hat based

Debian based

Network interfaces

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-* one file per interface

/etc/network/interfaces one file contains all interfaces

Comments

Peter Cannon: You spin me round

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 09:25:29 +0000

The wife was involved in a car accident on Tuesday night, 20.7.10, my wife works 30 mile away from home she has done this trip for 15 odd years now and has already had one other car accident on that journey in all that time.

The normal routine is I take her part way and a work colleague takes her the rest of the way on this occasion I had to take her a little further as a new co worker was providing the transport. Everything seemed fine my wife said goodbye and got into her co workers car and they set off for work and I headed back home, I arrived back at about 9.30pm and settled down to watch some TV around 10pm my mobile rang “Pete your wife has been in a car crash and is on her way to Stafford hospital” Stafford is around 20 miles from our house.

Upon arrival
Me “Hi I’ve had a phone call my wife has been in a car crash”
Reception: “There is no one here with that name”
Me: “What?”
Reception: “Maybe they took them to Burton-on-Trent?”
Me: “What?”

The next thing an ambulance driver appeared clutching some documents;

Ambulance man: “Hi Mr Cannon? We have your wife she’s OK we’ll get you through in a minute”
Me: “Where have you been? I’ve come 20 miles and you done about 8 mile! How come I’m here before you?” (So much for the ‘Golden Hour’ my friends)

So as you would expect in these situations things look far worse than they actually are, my wife was on a stretcher on a back board with one of those orange Darth Vader head restraints she has heavy bruising, one of those seat belt marks and her neck was hurting but luckily no broken bones or cuts. As far as I could [can] tell the front tyre burst and they hit a concrete bollard which I suspect is one of the posts on the bridge over the reservoir, this sent the vehicle into a spin whereby the car rebounded off the opposite bridge wall thus spinning them a bit more before what remained of the car finally came to a halt. Given that the road was wet this actually worked in their favour as if the road had of been dry there was a greater chance of the car flipping and even possibly entering the reservoir! As there was four people in the car they had two ambulances, fire engines and of course the police. I suspect the road was closed for a fair few hours which would have been a nightmare.

The following day was when things started to hit home a bit, as you can imagine lumps and bumps have started to appear and aches and pains we went to see our GP who prescribed pain killers and rest arriving back home the phone calls started from my wife’s friends even her employer rang to see if she was OK which I thought was nice then the bombshell!

Now at the hospital I heard someone say “They (or we) had two cars and cancelled the insurance on one, I hope its cancelled on the right one?” I passed this off as some sort of stress relieving joke remember I was more worried about the wife at the time, the driver rang my wife to see if she was OK then said “The police have called there’s no insurance on the car!” now I’m sorry there is no excuse in my book, you check your certificate thoroughly when it comes through to make sure all the details are correct which makes me wonder if she knew she had no insurance.

We have contacted a solicitor but I suspect its going to get messy, fortunately nobody is dead or seriously injured, I doubt there is anything more to say other than say a court case for no insurance if there is I’ll update this post.

Rob Annable: Links for 2010-07-19 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Transverge! Marcos Novak responds to "Architects in Cyberspace, or not" | ARCH Virtual
“@ARCHVirtual: Transverge! Marcos Novak responds to “Architects in Cyberspace, or not” http://bit.ly/9Wni4A #secondlife” #bm

David Goodwin: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-18

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 16:41:00 +0000

Good morning world. #
. @ChairmumMiaow is on @BBcWm tomorrow
Morning (fri) to talk about upcoming breastfeeding picnic (Monday – http://bit.ly/brumbfpicnic) #
Breastfeeding picnic in Birmingham – monday 19th July 12-3pm http://bit.ly/brumbfpicnic see fb group. #Birmingham #bfpicnic #
Sblug html5 talk from @brucel might start soon. #
So much for an early night. Potential office viewing tomorrow…. *crosses fingers* #
Evolution is better than thunderbird for mail on Linux …. Except for address learning / completion. #
Interesting day – customer turns up unannounced for what turns into a near 5 hour meeting. Still he bought lunch #
Finding a wordpress virus thing (eval(gzinflate(base64_decode(….)))) on a site just before bed is annoying. Timestamp implies before us #
2 old ladies sitting in church 1 leans over and whispers to the other "my butt is going to sleep", other replies "i heard it snore 3 times" #
I love orange. O2 you sucked so much. #
Sweet. FETIDUS is back on podcast. Zombies. Yey. #
I'm not sorry to see the Food Standards Agency go #fsa #
Thanks mr postman for parking your bike right in front of me in the middle of the fricking pavement. #
This is excellent and should be seen by everyone: http://is.gd/doq8o /via @FellowAtheists – zombies religion venn diagram #
My 10km time – 42.38 (43rd, last year: 42.50 & 29th). #timberhonger #running #bromsgrove (results at http://timberhonger10k.co.uk) #
Back home from the launch party of Intimate Perfection. Go Jenny! Congrats on doing the England team! And the world cup winners get it free? #

Richard Smedley: Wordpress & the Voluntary Sector

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 14:18:23 +0000

I’m at WordCampUK - a conference for WordPress developers and users. There have been great presentations, from Accessibility & HTML5 to WordPress Themes. However the real value of any conference is the corridor time, face-to-face chat with peers, and people doing all sorts of unexpected and fun things with Free Software. WordCampUK has been a bit [...]

Jono Bacon: Community Leadership Summit 2010 This Weekend!

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 23:44:27 +0000

Hope all of you lovely people are doing well and are primed and ready for an awesome Community Leadership Summit 2010 this weekend on Sat 17th and Sun 18th July 2010! We have an absolutely incredible list of registered attendees and the event is shaping up to be an fantastic opportunity to discuss community management, strategy, building and development skills without the pressure of a vendor driven environment. We had a wonderful event last year, and I am confident that this year we are going to have an awesome event too.

I just wanted to share some information about the event that you will probably want to know. As ever, if you have any questions, feel free to let me know.

Getting there

Getting there is simple. The Community Leadership Summit 2010 takes place at:

Oregon Convention Center 777 NE Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. Portland, Oregon 97232

The event takes place in F150 – 152.

More details here.

Schedule

The Community Leadership Summit 2010 kicks off at 9am with the opening keynote starting at 10am. Do join us at 9am though, get to know some folks, have some coffee and get ready for the day.

As with last year, CLS is an unconference, so you good folks drive the content of the schedule. This first hour while people arrive and get to know each other is a great time to share ideas for sessions, plan how they will be run, share thoughts and experience and more. Last year we were blessed with some truly unique and innovative sessions, and I am excited to see what everyone wants to discuss this year!

The full schedule is here.

Pre-Event Gathering

On Friday night (16th July 2010) we have anointed the DoubleTree Hotel as the place in which we will get together and have some pre-event drinks. Everyone is welcome, so join us in the DoubleTree bar and get to know some folks! The address is:

DoubleTree Hotel 1000 NE Multnomah Street, Portland, Oregon, United States 97232

We hope to see you there!

OK, those are the key details and I look forward to seeing you all on Saturday morning! Oh, and as with every CLS, everyone is welcome, so feel free to bring along friends and colleagues who you think may be interested in joining us!

See you soon, and thanks for joining us again this year,

Jono Bacon: Ahmed Kamal Joins The Horsemen

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:33:36 +0000

I am pleased to announce that Ahmed Kamal has joined my team at Canonical to build the Ubuntu Cloud Community.

Although Ahmed’s formal background is Electronics and Communications engineering, he was always a Linux geek at heart. He touched his first Linux CD in 1998 with Red Hat 5.x and has been hooked ever since. He says:

“I think the main reasons why I fell in love with Linux was because it’s predictable! It doesn’t try to hide anything, you can always understand why things happen the way they do. Also the Linux community was mind blowing to me, to imagine those millions of people networking and helping each other move Linux forward was/is just amazing. This was especially true back in the days when Linux was not yet an enterprise rock-star. Over the years I had been involved with Linux one way or the other. I had worked at a great redhat partner in Egypt, where I had the chance to do consultation and Linux professional services work for some of the largest enterprises. I had also enjoyed evangelizing Linux and open-source to hundreds of people through various trainings. I started the Egyptian Open-Solaris group as well as engaged in various university talks to introduce open-source concepts in general. It is such a great feeling to introduce and excite minds about FOSS. For the past couple of years, I had been working with a bunch of extremely talented engineers building next generation cloud and virtualization management solutions. The technology base we were working on later got acquired by Sun Microsystems and later of-course by Oracle. Cloud computing is extremely exciting to me, while the term has been abused to fit almost anything, I am confident of the potential cloud computing has to offer. The cloud is not a single technology, it’s rather a paradigm shift of our expectations and how we use technology”.

Ahmed is hugely excited about being part of the team and helping to grow the community:

“What excites me the most about joining the Ubuntu community team is the far reaching impact of what that team’s work on the foss community at large. My role is to connect the Ubuntu cloud community with Canonical’s engineering teams making sure community contributers can find their way, as well as to ignite worldwide excitement about the great work Canonical is doing to innovate in the open-source cloud computing domain. What I find very exciting is that the result of our work with the community, is far more reaching than anything I could have ever done on my own”.

Ahmed is exciting about making the cloud accessible to all:

“Cloud computing is re-shaping computing as we know it. Ubuntu is easily the master of the Linux desktop, and is re-shaping the open-source desktop and server experience. Put the two together, and you can understand why I am tremendously excited about a cloud computing solution based on Ubuntu and open-source software. While Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud is an awesome product, that’s not where it ends. I’ll let you in on a little secret, Canonical’s server and cloud engineering teams are hard at work innovating on top of the cloud. And from what I’ve seen, it is going to be awesome. If you’re into open-source and you’re into cloud computing, you’re in for a treat, so stay tuned!”

All, please welcome Ahmed to the team!

Jono Bacon: Severed Fifth Update

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:26:51 +0000

I just wanted to provide another quick update on the latest goings on in my Free Culture music band, Severed Fifth. As ever, you can always get the latest updates on Severed Fifth on our website, in the forums, and on Twitter.

The New Album

The up-coming as yet untitled new album, which follows up from 2008’s Denied By Reign is scheduled to be recorded from 11th August 2010 – 15th August 2010. As with the previous album, I wrote all the songs and will be performing and recording all the drums, guitars, bass, and vocals.

The new album comprises of eleven songs and runs in at around 50mins of audio. It is a far richer musical experience than Denied By Reign, and much more accessible. It retains the heavyness of Severed Fifth but brings in more clean vocals and a mix of fast, slow, thrashy, chugging, and acoustic guitars. I have a great feeling about this new record and I think you folks will like it too.

What is exciting about this new record is that I will be streaming the recording of it live from the Severed Fifth studio on the Severed Fifth In The Studio UStream from 10am – 6pm Pacific from 11th August 2010 – 15th August 2010. This is going to provide an awesome opportunity to take a peek into the recording process, watch a Free Culture album evolve and interact with me while the recording happens.

The Band

More photos available here.

Over the last three weeks Severed Fifth has gone from being just me to becoming a full-fledged band. This all kicked off with the help of Chris Kontos from Attitude Adjustment and started with Ben Gibbs joining us on Drums, then moved on to Jim Adams from Defiance joining us, and on Saturday we recruited Ron Crockett on bass. I will be taking care of vocal and guitar playing duties.

In that three week period in which Ben, Jim and I have been together we have started working on our live set, focusing on six songs from the up-coming album. Four of the six songs are almost complete, we are going to now finalize the next two and then focus on refining them. Our goal is to be gig-ready by August 15th so we can get out there and break some necks.

Our primary live focus is going to be the California Bay Area and then we plan on moving further afield as the Severed Fifth presence grows.

The Community

The Severed Fifth community is rocking (pun intended). We have been seeing some great growth in the community and some awesome work going on in a variety of different areas. These include:

Oodles of wallpapers – torontomario and justnice have been rocking and rolling on the wallpaper front, and we now have an awesome gallery of wallpapers.
Severed Fifth Android app – Rob Kielty is working on an Android app for Severed Fifth. Be sure to keep up to date with the latest developments.
Street Team Content – the Severed Fifth Street Team continues to grow with a series of new flyers and website banners, and our street team forum rocking.
Frets On Fire: Severed Fifth Edition – work is continuing in charting all the songs, and I am excited about this release when we release the new album.

Funding The Project

You have read the website, listened to the music, watched the videos, and possibly even chatted on the forum. You may have even taken some Severed Fifth content and used it in your own music or videos, played it in your car, shared it with your friends or otherwise enjoyed the content. All of this requires money to invest and produce these things, and I am passionate about Severed Fifth fans having the opportunity to contribute to the project, but only paying (a) what they can afford and (b) what they feel is fair.

Importantly: Severed Fifth will never expect any kind of payment for this content or service; we will always provide an awesome free service with lots of awesome content to rock out to.

To achieve this there are two ways of supporting the project:

Severed Fifth Fair Pay – it is simple: you pay what you feel is fair and comfortable. If you download the music and enjoy using the website and services and would like to pay $1, that is awesome. If you decide to pay $50 that is awesome too. It is also awesome if you decide to pay nothing at all.
Severed Fifth Store – we are adding more and more products to the store and right now we have some t-shirts for sale. Stickers and more shirts are coming soon!

Contributions help power the Severed Fifth project and buy t-shirts and merchandise to reward awesome Severed Fifth Street Team members, to replace broken equipment in the studio, to invest in cool new products, to rent rehearsal space, put on live shows and tours and other elements that spread Severed Fifth further afield, putting Free Culture music in the hands of fans and setting a great example for the music industry.

Jono Bacon: Rocking The LoCo Council

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 18:06:36 +0000

I just wanted to take a moment to highlight the incredible work going on with the Ubuntu LoCo Council who are working hard to govern the Loco community and ensure everything is running smoothly.

The LoCo Council have also been two key IRC events in each month that everyone is welcome to attend:

LoCo Council monthly IRC meeting – on the 3rd Tuesday of the month in #ubuntu-meeting. See the agenda
LoCo Health Check – 1st Tuesday of the month in #ubuntu-locoteams – an informal meeting where anyone can add a topic to discuss and get some council feedback – see this page for more details.

…and of course, the LoCo council are always available in #ubuntu-locoteams.

Finally, when tweeting about Ubuntu LoCo teams, don’t forget to use the #locoteams tag.

Keep up the great work, folks!

Jono Bacon: Operation Cleansweep: We Need YOU!

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 22:47:11 +0000

One of the most critical components in any flourishing community is to ensure contributions that are offered in good faith are fairly reviewed in a timely manner. Unfortunately, the success of Ubuntu has resulted in more contributions than we have had time to review, and Nigel Babu is leading the way to encourage the community to review these outstanding patches.

This is important and worthwhile work, and I am really keen to encourage you all to get involved.

How do you get involved? Simple:

Read the Operation cleansweep wiki page to get an idea of what we are trying to do.
Read our Reviewers Guide that explains the process of how you review a patch.
Pick a patch from this list to review.
Review it and provide feedback.
Join #ubuntu-reviewers to ask for help.

To do this you don’t have to be programmer, you don’t have to have a degree in rocket science, and you don’t have to like metal. The only requirement is that you have the desire to make Ubuntu better, and if you are reading this, you clearly have that.

Thanks in advance to everyone who helps!

Aq: Introducing HTML5: a book review

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:45:38 +0000

There are two types of technical books. Reference manuals are useful; you always have them to hand, and you can jump in and find a particular page which gives you the stuff you need to know. They're an indispensable reference tool, unless, say, you have access to the internet. Then, well, maybe they're not as handy. On the other hand, there's the other sort of technical book; the sort that's a pleasure to read in itself, and you only realised you've learned things afterwards. Such a book is Introducing HTML 5, by Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp. As they say at the beginning of the introduction: welcome to the Remy and Bruce show. The book manages to be both a thorough introduction to the swathe of modern and new web technologies masquerading under the name of "HTML5", and a personal voice which comments on the state of web development today and in the near future. The tl;dr summary for people who don't want to read the rest: good web book is good. Get it.

The book successfully and intelligently covers the new markup in HTML5 (nav/header/section/article, new input types in forms, and WAI-ARIA accessibility) as well as the vast proliferation of new APIs available to modern web applications (canvas, multimedia, offline storage, workers, and geolocation, among others), drawing on the authors' experience of user questions and articles at their html5doctor site. Fortunately, it's not a hagiography, and they don't hesitate to stick the boot in where it's warranted; the current mess that is native drag-and-drop support in browsers and the ridiculous codec war inherent in online video both come in line for a justified kicking. Each chapter covers its material in decent detail, without devolving into a mere list of APIs; the book is full of both worked examples and links to relevant extra resources. Unusually for a book of this type, the examples are fairly real-world; instead of a contrived writeup to show off a feature, they show how to mark up the home page of the Guardian newspaper with HTML5 elements.

Conspicuously missing from the book are the major changes to CSS currently being implemented in browsers. A chapter covering the transform and similar CSS3 declarations (-webkit-transform, -moz-transform, and the like) would have fit nicely, and it's a shame that this wasn't covered -- yes, it's a book about HTML5, not CSS3, but the authors themselves admit that by "HTML5" they actually mean "HTML5 and related specifications that came from the WHATWG", and they throw in geolocation just because "it's really cool". Advances in CSS which give dynamic effects not only would fit well with the other subject matter but would also make a few of the examples perhaps easier.

The canvas chapter doesn't bring much more than innumerable web pages covering the basics of the canvas API for drawing, but it covers those basics well and in a readable way. Importantly, there's also a discussion of the difference between using the canvas element for drawing and using SVG, and when you'd choose one rather than the other. It's been difficult to find that sort of summary; it's equally difficult to decide yourself which to use for some new project, and the chapter's sidebar (or <aside>?) discussion of "when to use which" clarified the distinction well, especially when going beyond reimplementations of Super Mario Bros inside the browser.

All is not sweetness and light, mind. The data storage chapter, explaining how to use HTML5's new in-the-browser storage objects, breathlessly explains that this means an end to cookies (which are "rubbish" according to the authors). However, this is where their client-side bias seems to be coming through. Cookies are shared with the server, too; snazzy HTML5 storage is not. Any even reasonably detailed web application will have a substantial server component, and abandoning cookies will make it jolly hard to have the server and the front-end share data. This does seem rather like excitement over the new tech without thinking about how it can actually be used in real-world situations, and is disappointing from a book which goes out of its way to give suggestions that are actually useful to people.

Another area the book falls down is in its editing: there are typos scattered throughout the text (including in a heading in the introduction, for goodness' sake!) and these should have been caught by an editor; noticing them distracts the reader from the material, and it's a schoolboy error which damages the impact of the book.

I know both the authors, and they're both well-known and respected in the web development community; Introducing HTML5 does them credit, and it's worth your time. Go forth, get Introducing HTML5, and make great web stuff.

Jono Bacon: The End Of Shot Of Jaq

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 10:00:47 +0000

Today we published our final Shot Of Jaq. You can listen to it here.

Shot Of Jaq was our experiment into whether podcasting could be turned on it’s head a little and instead of being a long show (such as what we did with LugRadio, could be a short, sharp burst of content to start the discussion. We did this with Shot Of Jaq for nine months, put out around 70 shows on a twice-weekly basis, and had over 3000 comments as part of the discussions.

Although Shot Of Jaq had a fairly short life-span, I am proud of what we achieved with it. I feel like the format worked, and our final show which we released today talks about some of the lessons learned in a hope that others will continue the shotcasting format.

As for why we are stopping Shot Of Jaq? Well, Aq and are simply too busy with other things (such as Severed Fifth on my part) and we both have hectic work lives. We didn’t want the quality of the show to suffer, so we figured now was a good time to call it a day.

Thanks to everyone who was so supportive of the show!

Jono Bacon: Sound Indicator

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 06:03:57 +0000

I am totally digging the sound menu that is shipping in the development branch of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat:

It feels well designed, implemented and sleek. Great work mpt and Conor!

David Goodwin: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-11

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:41:00 +0000

BBQ time ! #
Timberhonger 10k race tomorrow; here's to hoping my legs are up to it. #bromsgrove #10km #run #
A woman says she's uncomfortable watching you wank. You A: need more time together B: she's a prude C: Tell her to sit elsewhere on the bus. #
I`m getting sick of these Tyneside gunman jokes. They`re not even raoulmoatly funny. #
Postfixadmin 2.3.1 live; .rpms and .debs etc; see http://postfixadmin.sf.net – virtual mail domain admin tool for postfix #php #mail #isp #
Turned on the radio to kerrang. Toddler demanded we danced. Fun times. Shame the radio reverted to talking after the song. #
Ooh. Thanks John truslove. Two potential offices to view bromsgrove ftw #
Bromsgrove … Where are the decent offices hidden.? Room for 4-5 required. #
Postfixadmin release 2.3.1 is almost here. #postfix #linux #sysadmin #
Paddy tells Mick he`s thinkin of buying a labrador. "F___ off" says Mick, "have you seen how many of their owners go blind?" #joke #
Women! They just don't have a sense of humour. The wife didn`t find it nearly as funny as I, when I replaced her tampon with a party popper! #
OH: "website ______ is crap it has BNP images in it…. " (I heard bnp, he did say bmp). #
I quite like my jabphone 4 but cant help think it's a bit like the emperors new clothes. Wish orange would port my number too. #iphone4 #
The estate has a scrap man who drives around in an ex-BT transit van. Failure on so many levels, and let's not mention his 'jingle' #
Sweet. Phone didn't loose 3G coverage walking home. Suck on that o2, orange ftw. #
Come on orange. Finish porting my number. #
Twitterific on my new phone seems to be having a bad day wrt authentication #
RT @CalEvans: http://bit.ly/a4MLMx #rofl Rasmus has the patience of Job. #php /via @akrabat #

David Goodwin: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-11

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:41:00 +0000

BBQ time ! #
Timberhonger 10k race tomorrow; here's to hoping my legs are up to it. #bromsgrove #10km #run #
A woman says she's uncomfortable watching you wank. You A: need more time together B: she's a prude C: Tell her to sit elsewhere on the bus. #
I`m getting sick of these Tyneside gunman jokes. They`re not even raoulmoatly funny. #
Postfixadmin 2.3.1 live; .rpms and .debs etc; see http://postfixadmin.sf.net – virtual mail domain admin tool for postfix #php #mail #isp #
Turned on the radio to kerrang. Toddler demanded we danced. Fun times. Shame the radio reverted to talking after the song. #
Ooh. Thanks John truslove. Two potential offices to view bromsgrove ftw #
Bromsgrove … Where are the decent offices hidden.? Room for 4-5 required. #
Postfixadmin release 2.3.1 is almost here. #postfix #linux #sysadmin #
Paddy tells Mick he`s thinkin of buying a labrador. "F___ off" says Mick, "have you seen how many of their owners go blind?" #joke #
Women! They just don't have a sense of humour. The wife didn`t find it nearly as funny as I, when I replaced her tampon with a party popper! #
OH: "website ______ is crap it has BNP images in it…. " (I heard bnp, he did say bmp). #
I quite like my jabphone 4 but cant help think it's a bit like the emperors new clothes. Wish orange would port my number too. #iphone4 #
The estate has a scrap man who drives around in an ex-BT transit van. Failure on so many levels, and let's not mention his 'jingle' #
Sweet. Phone didn't loose 3G coverage walking home. Suck on that o2, orange ftw. #
Come on orange. Finish porting my number. #
Twitterific on my new phone seems to be having a bad day wrt authentication #
RT @CalEvans: http://bit.ly/a4MLMx #rofl Rasmus has the patience of Job. #php /via @akrabat #

Peter Cannon: Well I never? Part III

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 17:32:56 +0000

The ipod touch is fixed “Hurrah” PC World rang and summoned our presence along with any paperwork.

Clutching a carrier bag containing the speakers we entered the mystical world of ‘Tech Guy’. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Dave break the 100 meters record and vault over the Mac display tearing down isle 4 to the bottom of the store and as far away from Hannah as possible, I could see in his terrified little face that the trauma of his last meeting with my daughter had still not subsided and I suspect he will be in therapy for many years to come.

“Hi we’ve come to collect our ipod” I said to Colin who apparently was here to serve me which was a novel idea given he was behind a counter with a till come computer on it. Colin said “Sign here” now that’s an even more novel idea sign before I’ve even seen the ipod let alone turn it on. “No I won’t sign for the minute thanks lets see if it is fixed shall we I have my daughters speakers here”. Colin of course no hated me with a vengeance and was probably wondering how he could gob in the ipod or wipe a bogey on my receipt.

Colin must have been taking lessons from Dave as he too snatched at the carrier bag and made a huff sound that definitely translated into ‘pain in the ass’ after going through the ritual instructions for switching on and listening we was happy, for the minute, and I duly signed Colin’s red tape.

Back in the car Hannah said “Where’s all me stuff gone? And what’s this rubbish wallpaper?” It would seem fixing the ipod consisted of formatting it! Oh and apparently smearing as many sweaty manky fingers as possible across the screen. Fortunately it was fairly straight forward putting her stuff back on and she can now leave it docked with no buzzing.

A couple of days later while on my way to bed I noticed Hannah’s bedroom was emitting a white light “Great she’s fallen asleep with her bedroom light on” like the good environmentalist I am I went in to switch the light off “Aaaarrrgghh Bright ligh bright light” no dear reader the bedroom light wasn’t on but the display on the speaker could have been used to flush out Manuel Noriega! how she can sleep with that shining out is beyond me.

Jono Bacon: Indicator Panel Menu Rocks The House

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 16:23:20 +0000

Recently we have been investing in creating an implementation of a panel-based menu that we are planning on shipping with the 10.10 version of the Ubuntu Netbook Edition. As with our other projects, this is entirely Open Source and you can download, test and play with it from this page.

So far for testing purposes we have been leaving on the in-application menu, but yesterday I switched it off to get the full experience. To do this I edited /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80appmenu to set APPMENU_DISPLAY_BOTH=0. I was aware of the design justification of having a single menu; it is easier for users to find it due to it’s consistent place, and particularly for netbooks, it saves on significant screen-real estate use. Now I can absolutely see and feel the benefits; I am loving having the menu there and my desktop feels sleeker and more consistent.

Of course, there is much to be fixed — such as the fact that GIMP crashes the menu — but most apps are working great and while this is not designed or scoped for the desktop, I think I might just leave it on.

What’s more, an added benefit of this implementation (and using the dbus-menu approach) is that KDE applications running in GNOME have their menu’s rendered as GTK widgets (and vice versa), helping to integrate GNOME and KDE apps better. Right now the in-app menus are still visible, but the following screenshot shows K3B’s menus rendered as GTK menus:

Awesome!

I just want to offer some kudos to Cody Russell for writing the menu, Aurélien Gâteau for his awesome work in ensuring all of this works with KDE, Jorge Castro for coordinating much of the testing, and for our awesome community of testers and bug reporters for helping to bang it into shape. You are going to help really make Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 really rock, and of course anyone who chooses to use it on their desktop.

Go and find out more and play with it yourself here.

Jono Bacon: Ubuntu Developer Week Coming Up!

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:22:18 +0000

I am pleased that Ubuntu Developer Week is now announced and ready for the masses. The glorious week of Ubuntu development tutorials and sharing of know-how happens from Monday July 12th 2010 to Friday July 16th 2010. You can see the timetable for the week here.

Throughout the week we have an awesome set of sessions:

Getting Started with Development — dholbach
Getting Started with Development — dholbach
Widgetcraft — apachelogger
Desktop Team overview — seb128
Authoring upstart jobs — SteveLangasek
Packaging like a Ninja — shadeslayer
«I Don’t Know Anything About Translations» — dpm
Developing with Qt Quick and QML — JonathanRiddell
How to work with Debian — IainLane & Rhonda
Setting up a small validation dashboard — ZygmuntKrynicki
Operation Cleansweep – reviewing patches — nigelbabu
Forwarding bugs and patches upstream — pedro_
Daily Builds and You — JorgeCastro
Making your application shine with application indicators — TedGould
Kernel Triage — JeremyFoshee
Create an application for Ubuntu with Quickly — didrocks
Improving Ubuntu In An Evening — vish
Contribute to Ubuntu Server, do Server Papercuts ! — ThierryCarrez
How to help with Xubuntu — CharlieKravetz
Merge proposals: life on the sunny side — MartinAlbisetti
Django and you — mhall119
Adopt-An-Upstream — JorgeCastro
How to help with Edubuntu — JonathanCarter
Me, myself & QA — warp10, gaspa, BlackZ

As ever ou can connect with Lernid or a normal IRC client. For full details, see this page.