Jonathan Carter - Rebel Without A Pause

Tuesday evening I attended Geekdinner Cape Town again, the food was good and it was a nice crowd.

I did a mini-talk on Anti-features. It’s something that I’ve been aware of for a long time but never quite put a label on it. Benjamin “Mako” Hill coined the phrase anti-features and presented it at LinuxConf Australia 2010, I watched the video and thought that it would be a great topic for a Geekdinner.  Geekdinner talks are supposed to be only 5 minutes long, so I tried to get Mako’s ~45 minute talk down to about 6 minutes for the talk. I think it was a bit longer, I went first instead of last so I don’t think it was much of a problem. I haven’t given a talk in ages so I’m quite out of practice, but everyone who talked to me about it afterwards said that they enjoyed it and that it was interesting, so I feel good about it. It’s also one of the few Geekdinner talks that didn’t have any mention of Facebook or Twitter, so I gave myself another 50 points for that

You can get Mako’s slides and slide notes from his website, and also the video (which I recommend watching). You can get my slides right here. Stefano took video footage, I’ll paste a link to it once it’s processed.

Joe Botha talked about TrustFabric, his joint-venture with Jonathan Endersby and I believe someone else too where they want to change the way everyone works with personal information. More information on that in these two blog posts.

We still needed a 3rd talk so Ben Steenhuizen threw together a talk on how bad people (which he protests heavily that he’s not) can abuse your public data and can make things very difficult for you.

Overall one of my favourite geekdinners, I’ll probably go to the Montreal Geekdinners when I get over to Canada (still waiting on Visa), but I’ll probably be back to catch one of the last Cape Town Geekdinners again towards the end of this year.

Ben Crisford is hosting an Edubuntu bug day on Tuesday, 6 April on #edubuntu and #ubuntu-bugs on freenode. The plan is to triage and squash some of the 330 or so bugs assigned to packages that we include in Edubuntu so that we can give Edubuntu some final polish before the release at the end of the month.

If you can drop by during the day for even just a few hours or minutes, please do so! And if you could even give one bug a little attention, that would be great.

Happy bug squashing!

Scottie posted an entry earlier about the new Ubuntu branding. I’ve been meaning to make a very similar post, but I’ve had lots more important things to do the last two weeks.

For those who have missed it, Canonical announced the new branding and artwork on the day of the User Interface Freeze for the Lucid development cycle. The decisions around the new branding have been met with some controversy, and as Scottie pointed out, some awkwardness around it. I’ll try to sum up my views about it in this post.

One of the major changes in the artwork is a change from the yellowy-brown colours to purple and orange. Most of the highlights are in purple, so is the terminal background. The aubergine (purple) is supposed to signify the corporate and the commercial aspects of Ubuntu, while the orange represents community.

I love the way the background is slightly transparent by default. The compositing capabilities in Ubuntu is powerful and should be showed off. The amount of transparency is also just subtle enough that it shouldn’t bother people who usually prefer a solid background. I think the colour is horrible though. I’d go as far as to say it’s offensive, I can write that off to personal taste though. The really bad thing about it is that it changes your default profile to the so-called “Ambiance” theme automatically without any warning. At least it was easy to delete and my older, much more aesthetically pleasing terminal was restored.

The button positions have been a bit more controversial than the actual colours. Personally, I didn’t like it at first but it only took a few hours to get used to it. It was the same when I used OSX for the first time, the positions feel weird at first but they grow on you fast. I don’t think the button positions will be a problem for users who use Ubuntu pretty much exclusively. Not all my machines are on Lucid yet, so it’s been a pain to move between machines that have the controls on the left and that have them on the right. I can imagine that having the controls on the left may be a major annoyance for someone who uses the one system at home and another at work.

Besides that, many applications are set up to have the close button at the top right, and it’s usually not configurable. Scott mentioned something similar with regards to tabs, here’s an example in an OpenOffice document:

Besides the announcement on the day of UI Freeze, the new Ubuntu font is still not complete either. This means that some derivatives (Edubuntu, for one), doesn’t have a new logo yet since the “e” and “d” letters haven’t been finalized yet. We’re also waiting for a new logo from Canonical, it’s a bit painful that this couldn’t have been better communicated or planned in advance.

Scott wonders why few other people have talked about this, but it’s not the first time Canonical has made big changes on or just before a freeze. It’s probably not the last either. I don’t think people are comfortable providing feedback, especially at the risk of being labeled as a bad apple that just wants to complain about stuff and especially if it won’t change anything.

Having said what I have so far, I’m all in favour of making big, bold changes. If Canonical puts this much effort into the design of every release, and if they can find a way to involve the community as well (turn their cold purple hearts a bit more orangy), then I think Ubuntu will make major strides in usability and design that ultimately, everyone else would want to copy.

Today marks the birthday of one of my favourite free software projects and software, the Apache HTTP server.  Why do I like it? It’s well supported on many platforms, well documented and it’s one of those pieces of software that almost never really gives me any hassles and does what it promises too. It was also one of the killer apps that drove Linux adoption in the early days before it had as many uses as it has today.

The Apache Foundation blog has a great entry on this birthday and the project’s history, detailing out some important dates and also memes that are now widely used in free software communities pretty much everywhere, for example, the -1/+0/+1 voting style was established by the Apache community that people in the Ubuntu community for one would be familiar with. Talking of Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth who founded the project was also the first person to package and maintain the Apache server packages in Debian. Today Debian (and its derivatives) is one of the greatest systems to run Apache on, especially since it’s configuration makes it so easy to drop in additional configuration using tools such as Puppet and also the Debian’s packaging system.

Happy 15h’th birthday Apache and thanks for all the years of great software so far!

For the past few months I’ve been working on the LTSP-Cluster team at Revolution Linux. Today we’re releasing the website so that we can tell the world what we’ve been doing!

LTSP-Cluster is a set of tools and plugins for LTSP that allows you to extend LTSP so that it can scale up to hundreds of servers and thousands of LTSP clients. It has a nice web interface for your LTSP configuration, does load balancing between your servers and more. It can even connect your LTSP thin client to a cluster of Windows terminal servers or NX servers, if you’re into that sort of thing. If you’re deploying LTSP soon, you’d probably want to investigate LTSP-Cluster, and I’m not just saying it because I’m involved in the project

It’s licensed under the GPLv3 license and supported by the LTSP community, you can also get commercial support *wink* *wink* from Revolution Linux where plenty of very skilled people are ready for your LTSP related needs.

As Scott posted before, the Edubuntu Bug day went quite well last week. This coming Thursday (21 January) we’re doing a Wiki Hug Day to to focus our efforts on fixing things in the Edubuntu wiki namespace, it includes:

• Fixing broken links
• Removing horribly obsolete or broken pages
• Moving pages which are in the wrong place
• Prettifying pages
• Mark pages that may need to be on the Edubuntu website instead
• Any other improvements we can think of

We’ll officially be starting the wiki hug day from around 12:00 UTC to accommodate the time-zones of our current contributors. It will be co-ordinated in #edubuntu on the freenode network. If you’re familiar with Edubuntu and know a thing or two about wikis, feel free to join in and get involved!

I’m not sure how I’ll ever top the 2000’s, it was quite an action packed decade for me, it’s sometimes hard to believe that in 2000 I was still in school

I haven’t made any big goals or plans for 2010 yet, I guess I’m happy with the direction things are going at the moment,  in short I plan to:

• Stay in Canada for a few months (probably over 2 visits)
• Get my motorbike license (appointment is for 1 March)
• Up my Ubuntu involvement more. Revolution Linux gives me at least a full workday a week for Ubuntu related stuff so this shouldn’t be hard
• Continue getting fitter- been doing great at the gym recently and I’ve been going 3-4 times a week for the last 2 months

I feel very good about this year, hope it turns out great for everyone!

I should really blog about Edubuntu more. The Edubuntu project initially kicked off nicely, but with time as things changed things ended getting somewhat stale. Earlier this year we decided to rebootstrap the project. Edubuntu Project 2.0 is real and we’re getting some really good momentum going. We now have a new Edubuntu Council voted in, of which I’m really happy to be part of again. Revolution Linux also gives me and Stéphane some time to work on Edubuntu related things which is really awesome!

Tonight we had quite a good meeting, I posted a dump of the notes to the edubuntu-devel list.

• Scott Balneaves is working on parental control features that will be included in upstream Gnome (he is now an upstream Gnome developer as well)
• Stéphane and myself will be the release contacts for Lucid
• Live LTSP session for the Live DVD, if this works in time for Lucid then many packages can be dropped from the alternate installation
• Menu editor based on groups
• We’ll attempt at revamping the artwork for Lucid, if we can’t get nice artwork in time we’ll fall back on Ubuntu artwork rather than have outdated Edubuntu specific artwork
• Sabayon is now in a really good state, Scott has done lots of work on it and it’s teachers should now find it very useful
• Nanny has been uploaded to the archives in the last week, it will be used to implement parental controls in Lucid
• With the Ubuntu archive reorganization, there will be an edubuntu-dev group with upload rights for the appropriate packages. We’ll sort out most of this after the holiday season
• Netbook edition: We’d like the option of installing a netbook edition from the Ubiquity, which basically entails installing a few UNR packages such as maximus and the netbook launcher. I’ll write a spec for this in the coming week

We’re planning some hug days! More details and announcements will follow on the Fridge, etc. For now write these dates in your diary:

• 12 January 2009: Edubuntu Bugs Hug Day
• 21 January 2009: Edubuntu Wiki Hug Day

We’ll spend some time specifically for documentation as well, most likely in February some time.

We want to extend to other projects more. Currently Stéphane is working with the Guadalinex-edu people. I’m going to be working with the Qimo project to get their packages in Ubuntu. Scott  is working to become a Skolelinux/Debian-Edu developer and David van Assche is an OpenSuse-EDU developer so we’re making some progress with our relationships to other projects. We need someone to liaise with the Sugar project, so if anyone is willing to get involved with that please give us a shout!

Our next Edubuntu meeting is on 29 December at 19:00 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting on the freenode network so if you’re interested in getting involved you’re welcome to join in. If you can’t make it, meetings times will be made available on the Ubuntu Fridge.

Happy holidays!