KILL THEM ALL AND LET A NORSE GOD SORT EM OUT

I’ve yet to really blog about what I’ve been doing this summer, not because it’s been top secret, mostly because I’m lazy and have been incredibly busy. I started off at UDS in Barcelona, thanks to Canonical. UDS was a blast, we got a lot done, and I can’t wait to see how Karmic turns out.

So what have I been up to since UDS? Well, I got stuck in Barcelona for a few days more than I had expected, which although expensive, was a lot of fun. I met a bunch of cool dudes from Canada (If you read this get in touch! Haven’t been able to find you guys on facebook!), and some other sweet people. Good stuff. Since then I’ve been in Paris, where I’m working for Jolicloud, where I’m putting my self-described usability expertise to good use. I’ve learned a bit of ruby, done some C, some Python, but mostly I’ve been working on making Do kick absolute ass on JoliCloud. Want to see what I’ve been up to? Check out this short screencast I made demonstrating the awesome. This stuff is a work in progress, and although I’m moving quickly some of this is brand new so expect to see some changes before the final release.

Or, if you’re getting this via a feed reader, here’s the link to YouTube.

The other day Twitter status IDs overflowed, and as such the GNOME Do plugin was broken. Maybe this kind of thing is why people should use identi.ca? I know I’m a hypocrite and use Twitter, but maybe I’ll switch someday, now that most of my friends have stopped using it in general. Anyway, I just wanted to let everyone know that this is fixed in bzr, and we’ve pushed an update to jaunty proposed. If you’re getting annoyed at Do telling you that your post failed when really it didn’t, please enable the proposed repository and comment on this bug saying that it works for you. https://bugs.launchpad.net/do-plugins/+bug/387525. Instructions for testing are in the bug report. Thanks!

This week I’m in Barcelona at the Ubuntu Developer Summit where I’m focusing mostly on the Desktop, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix sessions.  Netbooks are very interesting devices, unfortunately the Ubuntu Netbook Remix is really failing at making it’s mark on the netbook. The problem? Lack of vision. The Ubuntu Netbook Remix team (who I suppose are really the Ubuntu Mobile team, but since I know nothing of Ubuntu MID I’m going to call them the UNR team, they may be doing fantastic innovative work on MID; I’m in no position to say).

Netbooks are a fairly new class of device, and as of yet no one has really defined what the netbook experience should be. We’ve instead done a pretty great job of figuring out what the netbook experience shouldn’t be. Pretty much everyone is trying to jam a round peg into a square hole. While you can indeed use a netbook like a small laptop, it’s not what the device is designed to be. You might as well just buy a 12″ notebook so you can at least benefit from the more robust hardware. This is why the Ubuntu Netbook remix has failed to impress me. It’s another rehash of the standard desktop squished onto a netbook. This is my summarization of UNR: take the GNOME Main Menu applet, flatten it out, make it pretty with clutter, and then make it too big to fit onto a cd.  Congratulations, you’ve got UNR.

The point of a netbook is to use the net. A compelling netbook experience would integrate the net into the desktop environment so that your browser doesn’t feel like an external application, but an integrated part of the platform. In our imaginary ideal netbook our data would be living in the cloud, always available because we’re always on with ubiquitous wifi or 3G connections. We wouldn’t need an email client by default because we’re using GMail, or Yahoo! mail. The platform’s “e-mail” application would really just be a browser window to the webmail app that you’ve configured (by default, as always you can install whatever you want), ditto for documents.

At one of the UNR meetings, we had a brief discussion about how email clients all royally suck. This is absolutely true, however I don’t feel that the UNR team and I really agree on our reasons for this conclusion; I became aware of this when they followed up their complaints about email clients with remarks about how they wished Mutt could be the default email client.

Don’t abandon hope! There is a light at the end of the tunnel! Before I left for UDS, I installed the latest release of Moblin on my eeepc. It’s wonderful. Please no one leave any comments like “blah blah blah this bit doesn’t work.” That’s not the point. It’s extremely beta software, the point is that the net is integrated into the platform. The browser doens’t feel like a browser, it feels like part of the OS. I couldn’t get the messaging integration stuff working, but the concept is super nice; I have ideas of what it will look like based on how the other stuff works, but I’ve no idea if my ideas are accurate or not. Regardless, I’m sure they’ll continue their design of integrating these various web services into the platform so that you get a very cohesive online experience from your netbook. I’d love to see a custom interface for google docs or something similar.

My advice is for the Ubuntu UNR team to get behind Moblin, work on porting the interface to an ubuntu back-end so we can take advantage of the best package management around, as well as the (usually) great vision we have in this community.

Planets! I’m in a pickle!

After Ubuntu Developer Summit I will be taking the train to Paris where I will be staying for 6 weeks while I intern for JoliCloud. I haven’t been able to find a place to stay yet. I’ve been looking for a sublet, or room for rent from June 1 to July 15, but haven’t had any luck. If anyone in Paris has a floor, couch, room, bed, closet, anything that I could sleep in, or knows anyone I would be very thankful. I’m not necessarily looking to just mooch off of someone’s couch, I’d be willing to rent a sofa or a bed or anything at this point. I’m fairly tidy, open-minded, and a decent cook. Also, I think it goes without saying that if anyone does offer up their couch (even if just for a little, I can hop around!) they will at the very least be bought a couple of drinks at their favourite bar.

If you’ve got a couch/bed/floor/tauntaun I can sleep on (or in, in the Tauntaun case) please let me know! I’m still scouring paris craigslist and hostels.org, but I’d rather stay with a member of the community who I know I’ll at least have something in common with. You can reach me by

email: alex.launi@gmail.com

jabber:alex.launi@gmail.com

irc:lamalex on freenode

or leave a blog comment.

Thanks everyone, and even if you can’t lend me your sofa for a bit, if you live in Paris while I’m there, we should meet up for a drink.

edit: if someone could cross post, or reference this on planet.ubuntu-fr.com I would really appreciate it

A couple of weeks ago I was sent a craigslist posting requesting gingers to appear in a mockumentary about being a ginger. I, being a ginger, felt more than qualified and showed up for the shoot. Despite how sloppy the shoot was, the finished product turned out ok. That’s me at the end, I’m not in any of the stills. Enjoy.

Gingers

Someone stole some stuff from me at some point since I moved, and they left this note on the paper that what they stole was wrapped in; what the hell.

Welcome! Hopefully the loose ends in this place won’t come back to haunt you before the mold permeates your being? You turn this into a haven for soulless hipster creatures without sound mind & body to keep the world turning. You are the new world order if you chose to accept it, don’t turn on the TV & turn to your friends & the rest will come easy. In tuna, the tenants

Photo © lab604, cc-by-nc

What the hell does that mean. Seriously.

Saturday was the Ubuntu Pennsylvania Team’s Jaunty Release Party at the Manayunk Diner. It was a great time. We did some eating, chatting, advocating, a couple of installs, played around with the netbook remix (not on a netbook. Have you ever seen it giant? It’s sweet). I think everyone who came had a good time. We also had some new faces which was fantastic, I hope you all come back again! Total we had 17 which is smaller than normal. Not sure why this was, maybe the weather? Sad to say Pittsburgh beat us, but that’s ok; Pittsburgh still sucks.

Today was my own nerd party, I (finally) upgraded to Wordpress 2.7- AND IT RULES! The new admin interface is unbelievably sexy. Everything should be migrated, but if you notice anything missing, or anything broken please let me know! I’m going to try to not let myself get so behind again, I joined the wordpress release mailing list, and will svn up to that tag when the time comes. I’m gonna go play with this some more and find out what other goodies are in the new (well new to me) release. If I end up spamming the various planets I’m aggregated on, I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean to. If you can tell me how to avoid that in the future I will try to make sure I don’t; otherwise feel free to read my sage-like previous posts.

If you’ve been involved in GNU/Linux for any amount of time, you’ve almost certainly heard that THIS YEAR will be the Year of the Linux Desktop, and while adoption rates continue to increase, and the free desktop continues to improve, we never seem to have this epic breakthrough moment where all of the world’s users embrace their freedom, drop their proprietary operating systems, and join us on the greener side of the fence. Will it ever be the year of the Linux desktop? Probably not; at least not like the nerb-tabloids predict

Unfortunately reminiscent of the year of the Linux desktop debacle is the new theme that has been coming to Ubuntu since Edgy Eft (6.10). It seems like every release we’re told a new look will be unvieled, and every release we have the same orange and brown theme, with the same kludgy human icons. Finally for 9.10 Mark Shuttleworth told us:

The desktop will have a designer’s fingerprints all over it – we’re now
beginning the serious push to a new look. Brown has served us well but
the Koala is considering other options. Come to UDS for a preview of the
whole new look.

Finally! It seemed that this invitation to come see the new theme at UDS was an indication that there was indeed a new theme in Karmic, and work had begun, or at least there was a detailed mockup of what the new theme would look like. Oh but wait, just like the year of the Linux desktop, it seems that 9.10 will also not be the release of the new Ubuntu look. The other day during the OpenWeek Q & A session with Mark Shuttleworth, a question was asked about this new look. The response from Mark was less than thrilling:

it has taken a long, long time to pull together a design team
i had hoped to have that team in place six months ago, but it’s still forming
i think we will make good progress in the next cycle
you can already see a few things that have borne fruit from that team
notifications, time zone selector in installer, etc
but it’s fragmentary
i’m pretty darn confident we’ll have a new look for 10.04
but i think only pieces of that will emerge for 9.10

10.04?? We have to wait another release cycle? I’m starting to feel a little bit like Captain Ahab. I’m going to start collecting bets, which will come first- the year of the Linux desktop, or the new Ubuntu theme?

Just wanted to say congratulations to the newest GNOME foundation members, including myself! Proud to be a member of the foundation, and an official part of the GNOME community. You rule, we rule, and GNOME rules!

GNOME Do has had a long standing bug where with each upgrade we lost your plugins, this was due to our Mono.Addins usage. Tonight I finally fixed the bug! We’ve entirely removed the plugin repository. This fixes a lot of issues, not just the one where we lose your settings.

A major issue that I’m not sure many people were even aware of is that we totally ignored upgrades to plugins. This again was a side effect of our mono.addins usage. Now that we’ve removed the repo your plugins will actually be updated when your packager updates the package. Imagine that!

And for those trying to watch their weight, we can now split our giant monolithic plugins branch, which has some wild build dependencies such as Banshee and Evolution, into smaller branches so that people who want to build plugins don’t have to install Evolution and Banshee just to build.

0.8.2 is going to be sweet