Upstreams are very important to Ubuntu. Really quite very a lot of much important. So of course we would like to be very good friends with the projects responsible for so much of the awesomeness you can find on the Ubuntu LiveCD and in Ubuntu’s Software Centre. If we cannot be friends, then at the very least we want a good working relation.

You improve your relation with a project if you invest in it, and that is good for the quality of the project and Ubuntu. I would like to make you aware of a great way of being nice to upstreams: Adopt-an-Upstream. Slick name! But what is it? It is part of something a group of people from the community team lead by Jorge Castro have been working on ince the last UDS. The goal was to make it easier for upstream developers to find out how Ubuntu works and to improve the relations and synergy between up- and downstream.

At the wiki a starting point was created for upstreams where they can find an overview of the information that matters to them. Furthermore, a guide was created for upstreams that would like to get included in Ubuntu, but would like an overview of the requirements, the dos and the don’ts.

For members of the Ubuntu community there is something else: Adopt-an-Upstream is a way of taking care of a specific project that is included in Ubuntu. It’s mainly about being the communicational glue between up- and downstream. A comprehensive list of tasks:

• watch what’s going on upstream
• make sure new releases get to Ubuntu
• forward patches from Ubuntu to upstream
• communicate release schedules and announcements from Ubuntu to upstream

Summarised: act like a bridge between Ubuntu and the upstream project. Do you have an application you really like, or you really know a lot of, please consider to adopt it. Of course you don’t have to do it all on your own. Especially for large — be it in size, functionality or the number of bug reports — applications this can be a burdensome task. Those applications can be adopted by a group of people.

Next week Thursday 11 March at 17.00 UTC and on Thursday 18 March at 23.oo UTC Jorge Castro and I will be giving a one-hour session in #ubuntu-classroom at Freenode about Adopt-an-Upstream. We will explain the project more thoroughly and show how you can help out. Also, we will mention the Adopt-a-Package programme, which could be considered a part of Adopt-an-Upstream. If you consider getting involved in either one of these projects, please join one of the two sessions!

Questions? Please leave a comment!

UPDATE: I made a mistake. You actually want to use ppa:indicator-applet-developers/indicator-core-ppa and not my PPA since that causes dependency problems with the other indicators.

Are you still out there, lone Ubuntu Karmic user? You must feel quite deserted with all the awesomeness and shiny new stuff that draws everyone’s attention to Ubuntu 10.04 ‘Lucid Lynx’. I hope you can forgive us.

To make up for the lack of attention I decided to provide Indicator Application for Ubuntu Karmic. I’ve changed two dependencies in Indicator Application’s control file — back in Karmic we were still providing some pkg-config (.pc) files for Mono assemblies in their main package rather than in separate ‘-dev’ packages — and uploaded it for Karmic to a PPA: ppa:qense/appind-karmic.
If you want to add it you can add ‘ppa:qense/appind-karmic’ to your Software Sources in System->Manage->Software Properties=>Other Software=>Add and download the archive’s GPG key, or use the command sudo add-apt-repository ppa:qense/appind-karmic.

WARNING: I haven’t tested if it works, I just made sure it built correctly. Be careful and please report all problems here and not on Launchpad since Ubuntu Karmic isn’t supposed to run the Indicator Application.

Also make sure to reload your Indicator Applet after you’ve updated to make the service load.

Ubuntu Opportunistic Developer Week

OK, I admit it, I lied to you. I didn’t provide the PPA just to please those poor Karmic users. As you may already have seen in Jono’s blog post containing today’s UODW schedule — complete schedule at the wiki — I’ll be giving a session about using Indicator Application in your application at 19.00 UTC this evening. Because a lot of people are obviously still using Ubuntu 9.10 ‘Karmic Koala’ I wanted to provide a way for them to try it out without having to upgrade.

If you’re going to attend, are using Karmic and would like to see AppIndidcator in action on your computer, you can use this PPA to do that. If you’ve got any question, please don’t hesitate to ask here, on this website, or at IRC in #ayatana on Freenode; I’m ‘qense’ there.

Some of you are already on Ohloh.net, a website that imports code repositories for projects and analyses it. You can register an account to collect all your commits and get a nice overview of your experience.

When code is imported all contributors are not coupled to registered accounts by default, you need to manually claim a contributor’s role. Our beloved bot Launchpad Code Hosting frequently appeared in the list of contributors, but always remained unclaimed. I thought it would be interesting to collect all work the poor bot has been doing day in day out, night in night out.

I registered an account under the name ‘Launchpad Code Hosting‘ and claimed all contributors with the same name. Ohloh hasn’t updated the overview yet, but in time we will be able to see how much experience the bot has and how many that’s worth in dollars.

You can find the account at https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/launchpad.

It seems that Ohloh stops checking Bazaar branches after a while and that the import then keeps failing. It could be that the statistics are affected by this.

After 16 hours of discussing the future of its coalition the Dutch government finally announced at 4am this morning that the members of the PvdA — the Dutch Labour party — had resigned over what started as a disagreement on the future of the Dutch military presence in Uruzgan, Afghanistan.

I’m not going to repeat the various news articles on this event, but I would like to point you to the English article of the renowned Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad. Many foreign news papers don’t seem to fully comprehend the (little) rules and nuances of the Dutch political system — we’re a small country after all — so the article from the NRC could be interesting for those of you who would like to know more about it; at the bottom of the article you’ll find a short explanation of the formal and informal consequences of the move.

nrc.nl -International – Dutch kabinet, Balkenende’s fourth, collapses

(This was the fourth cabinet of prime-minister J.P. Balkenende and the fourth that didn’t make it to the elections.)

Have got an application? Add an Application Indicator to it! Jorge explains why.

We keep track of applications that need support for Indicator Application on Launchpad with the bug tag ‘indicator-application‘: the list of bugs against applications that need Indicator Application support. There are code snippets on the wiki page of Application Indicator but in this blog post for those who would like to use it in their application.

I recently added support for Indicator Application to Lernid, Bzr-Gtk and Transmission and am now working on getting it into Banshee. How do you help Ubuntu with adding support to existing applications? I’ll try to make that clear in this blog post.

#1. Find something to work on. That list of bugs against applications that need Indicator Application support is a great place to start looking. Don’t forget to mark a bug as ‘In Progress’ when you’re actively working on it!

#2. We’re adding support to an application that is most likely used on more places than just Ubuntu. Therefore you should keep in mind that not only enabling Indicator Application support should be easy, but also disabling it. This means you’ll have to do some Autotools magic in order to make sure libappindicator is present and it is wanted. At the AppIndicator wiki page there is an example autotools macro. This should be added to the ./configure.ac, which can mostly be found in the project’s source code root directory.You may have to adapt this in order to make it fit in the existing makefiles.
NOTICE: The previously mentioned autotools example was written with the programming language C in mind. When you’re writing in C# you can reuse the code, but please keep in mind that you should check for ‘appindicator-sharp-0.1′ rather than ‘appindicator-0.1′. The whole check isn’t necessary for Python.

#3. Now we can start writing the code. Finally! I’m afraid I have to disappoint you, because the code itself is the least work of the whole procedure. Again, there is a Porting Guide at the wiki page with examples for all supported languages. Those are pretty straightforward, so I won’t repeat them here, but if you still have questions, don’t hesitate to leave a comment. Important is that you should use the previously defined autotools variable HAVE_APPINDICATOR (when programming in C) to allow the application to be compiled with a GtkStatusIcon as well, on other systems. You can do that like this:

#ifdef HAVE_APPINDICATOR
 #include <libappindicator/app-indicator.h>
#endif

(other code)

#ifdef HAVE_APPINDICATOR
(Indicator Application code here)
#else
(leave the old GtkStatusIcon code here)
#endif

#4. Now that the code and build macros have been written — and the configure script and the makefiles regenerated — and you’ve tested it (naturally), it’s time to submit your wonderful patch. Of course you do this on the bug report we’ve got in Launchpad, but we also would like you to forward the patch upstream. If there was not yet a bug report in the bug tracker of the application you ported, report one and link it to the Launchpad bug report. In the upstream bug report, leave a comment with your patch.

After that you’re done. Congratulations, you’ve helped with making the systray cleaner and prettier and more consistent. This makes us happy!

Maybe you’ve already knew about the hilarious case of the ReadWriteWeb article “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login“. By a stroke of luck this article became the #1 result for ‘facebook login’ on Google. Immediately after this had happened thousands of Facebook users started to flood the blog, thinking that this was their Facebook login page. They didn’t look at the banner, they didn’t read the post, and the later visitors didn’t read the notification that was put on the website to warn visitors that the blog wasn’t Facebook, they just wanted to login.

When they found the first thing with the words ‘login’ and ‘Facebook’ in it they pressed it and ended up in the comment section. There are now hundreds of comments of angry and frustrated users demanding the old Facebook back with the use of Caps Lock and ugly language.

This generated a lot of attention from others blogs and even the Süddeutschen Zeitung wrote an article about it. The initial reaction of many people — including mine — was one of disdain; how could those idiots be so stupid that they would confuse a completely different site — ReadWriteWeb is red, and has got a very busy page layout — for the Facebook login page.

However, when I read the blog post of a ReadWriteWeb editor on the issue, and especially the last section ‘Reminder: If you are Reading this, You Live in a Bubble’:

[...]

Given that all of these people logged into Facebook, I managed to check out quite a few of their profiles. These are normal people – often with a basic college education – they could be your neighbors. But for them, the Internet is magic and while might consider Facebook as little more than training wheels for the Internet, for these people it’s just magic – and Facebook is the David Copperfield of the Internet that connects them to their old high-school friends and Petville.

This is something we should take into account when developing an operating system for ‘human beings’. Not all users know what a web browser is and not all people care to know. We cannot change that, instead we have to make Ubuntu easy to use, not only for novices willing to learn, but also for those that don’t want to learn, or cannot learn.

Have you always wanted to do something good for the world, but did you never know what to do? Here is your chance: adopt a package and help making Ubuntu rock where you want it!

Every day a lot of new bugs are reported on Launchpad, adding to the number of open bugs reported against Ubuntu. Currently there are 81259 open bugs in Ubuntu, of which 43775 are in the ‘New’ state. This means that roughly 54% of all open bugs in Ubuntu are not or were barely touched and when this post will have been published the number is already larger. When handling such large numbers of bug even the omnipotent BugSquad can’t keep up. How can we make sure the important bugs don’t get lost in this superabundance of support requests for writing good defect reports?

If you’re working with something — in the case of Adopt-a-Package an application — you like, you’re more productive. If you work on something you can keep an overview of, work is easier. This is what Adopt-a-Package purports. You choose an application you’re familiar with, or particularly fond of, and focus on getting it into shape on Launchpad. What does this mean? A small list:

• Triaging previously untriaged — ‘New’ — bugs
• Making sure no bugs are forgotten
• Moving Confirmed bugs to Triaged
• Forwarding bugs upstream

There are several ways to tackle the adoption. If you would like to adopt something as big as GDM[1] you’ll have a hard time if you’d try to do it all on your own, unless you have a lot of spare time. In such cases it’s better to form an AdoptionTeam and attack the bugs together with some other people. Smaller applications like ‘gedit‘ can be handled by one person, although it largely depends on your personal preferences and the amount of time you’re able or willing to spend on triaging. Of course you could always look for an existing group to join. As a matter of fact, I’m still looking for some more people to help out with Nautilus.

Adopt-a-Package is thoroughly explained on its wiki page, and it is that page you should use as your primary source of information. On this page you find a list of currently adopted applications and applications that we’d really like to see adopted. When you decide to adopt an application, whether you do it with a group or on your own, please check this page first to make sure you’re not duplicating efforts. After you’ve made up your mind about what you’re going to adopt, please add your name and the application to the list and notify the BugSquad maillist.

Are you interested but still have got some questions now you’ve read this? Don’t hesitate to leave a comment or drop by in the #ubuntu-bugs IRC channel. Also, in March there will be two sessions about Adopt-an-Upstream in #ubuntu-classroom, one by me at 4 March on 17.00 UTC and one by Jorge Castro at 18 March on 23.oo UTC. You can find them listed in the Ubuntu Classroom schedule.

Hello! I’m Sense Hofstede. Yesterday I was approved as an Ubuntu Member during the Ubuntu Membership EMEA regional approval board meeting. I’m very happy and the support I received was heart-warming. You may not know me, so let me introduce myself first.

Activities

Most people know me as a member of the Ubuntu Bug Control team, which I fist applied to in 2006, first joined in 2007 and then rejoined in 2008. That last year was the year I started to really contribute significantly to Ubuntu and slowly started to show my face at more and more different places. I’m a bug triager, foster-parent of Nautilus, and a Brainstorm Idea Reviewer.

Ubuntu Wanted is also a project I’ve started, but it’s really behind schedule for something that was discussed during UDS-J in Barcelona. I apologise for that; the Drupal module just grew too big and Launchpad integration was too hard for it to become something satisfying. However, I’ve restarted the project and am currently working on writing an implementation with Django when I’ve got some time on my hands. The code can be found in lp:ubuntu-wanted, but please bear in mind that I’ve already got something completely different on my own work-station. However, I wait with committing it until it works and doesn’t throw errors with everything you do. At the moment most work is going into writing Django Middleware that injects a connected and authenticated Launchpad object in the request object.

As you can see on the Classroom wiki-page there are two sessions planned about Adopt-an-Upstream; I will do the first at 4 March and Jorge Castro will do the second at 18 March. If you’re interested in working on a specific area or with a certain upstream, but would like to know more about it: come to the session!

Names
In spite of what (too) many people seem to think, is my first name not English nor a nickname. My full name is Sense Egbert Hofstede, but I usually just use Sense Hofstede, which should be pronounced like this: [ˈsɛn.sə ˈɦɔf.steːdə]. The first name derived from the Germanic derivation Sint and changed via Sent and Sens to Sense. It means ’sent’. My last name is the Dutch word for ‘homestead’. I’m the sixth Sense of the family, ‘Sense’ is common in my progeny.

My first name is often already taken whenever I need to pick a nickname, so in the end of 2005 I came up with ‘qense’. It’s close to my real name, but since the first letter is replaced with a not-so-common letter  usually available. At least it’s not used as the name for graphical interfaces, sexual education campaigns, margarine, companies, charities or bands.

In order to make fetching a the number of bugs in each status against a certain package easy I’ve written a small script called AdoptionStats. We’re currently working on the Adopt-a-Package project for the Ubuntu Bug Squad and if you want to be able to keep track of how a package is doing you need data: information about the current status and information about past statuses for comparison.

AdoptionStats generates a data list and constantly returns it in the same format and therefore the results can easily be manipulated by other scripts, e.g. for generating graphs.

Use

I’ve pushed to script to a Bazaar branch on Launchpad: lp:~qense/+junk/adoptionstats. If you haven’t done it yet, install Bazaar and download the code with the command “bzr branch lp:~qense/+junk/adoptionstats” .

The script depends on the package ‘python-launchpad-bugs’, execute the command “sudo apt-get install python-launchpadlib” python-launchpad-bugs or click here click here to install it if you haven’t installed it yet.
(now using python-launchpadlib, thanks to thekorn)

The usage is very simple, but make sure you’ve made the script executable — right-click->Properties->Permissions->check ‘Allow execution of this file’, or just “chmod +x ./adoptionstats” . For getting a report on the current status of the ‘nautilus’ source package you enter the command “./adoptionstats -p nautilus” in the directory you save the file. The result is like this:

2010-01-21 16:15 {'need_forwarding': 5, 'per_status': {'In Progress': 3, 'Confirmed': 0, 'Invalid': 2279, 'New': 34, 'Fix Committed': 1, 'Triaged': 583, 'Fix Released': 754, 'Incomplete': 158, "Won't Fix": 16}}

Since the application uses optparse you can get the help text with “./adoptionstats -h”, but the only other option next to ‘-p’ and ‘-h’ is ‘-v’, which enables the printing of debug-level messages to your commandline.

It’s still a bit too early to confirm the statement of the title — if you’d have a look at the release schedule (Where did the artwork drops go to?) you can see Alpha 2 is not going to be released until 14 January — and it is probably not wise to switch to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx already, but I still risked the chance and upgraded my production environment to the development release.

So far everything’s going quite fine actually, booting has become a lot less scary now the “Segmentation error” message that was the first thing you saw on boot is gone now and I found a way to solve the issues with the NVidia drivers.
Currently the package ‘nvidia-glx-185′ in Lucid is incompatible with the Xserver — ‘nvidia-glx-185′ provides the virtual package ‘xserver-xorg-video-5′, and that conflicts with ‘xorg’, which wants ‘xserver-xorg-video-6′.  Fortunately Collin Pruitt came to rescue with his blog post “Problems With Xorg and the nVidia Drivers“, which explains that you need to use the PPA ppa:nvidia-vdpau/ppa to get newer versions of the NVidia driver, nvidia-glx-195 is the latest release available from this repository, but legacy drivers are also available and should work on Lucid.

If you still get error messages from the Xserver and you can only run it in the safe-graphics mode you should make sure that the NVidia driver is enabled in System->Manage->Hardware Drivers and try again.

New stuff
Understandingly there isn’t much new in Lucid currently, the most striking difference I found was the new lay-out for the Users and Groups (‘users-admin’) configuration utility. The interface is cleaner and simpler and shows details that previously were limited to the About Me-dialogue. I reckon this is part of Canonical’ effort to make account managing easier and more consistent across the desktop, as outlined in the User Account Management-blueprint.

The Ubuntu Software Center is also being worked on, the most distinguished visual addition so far are the nice breadcrumbs that already received a lot of attention on other blogs.

Usplash is now definitely gone from the default installation and ‘libplymouth2′ is already a dependency of ‘mountall’, we’ll see probably more of that in the future. Currently there is no splash whatsoever before GDM is launched, but this is probably going to change. Keep an eye on the Boot experience work-blueprint for updates on the work being done.

I end this blog post with a Warning: the system might seem stable now, but this is because a lot of the changes still need to be made. Do not use a development release in a production environment unless you’re prepared to face the risks.

You may or may not have wondered why I was online for the most part of the day yesterday. Because it was a regular schoolday, the last regular school day before the Christmas Holidays, in fact. It was because in the North of a country where most people are already exited if there lies just one centimetre of snow that suddenly everything came to a standstill.

In the morning there was more snow than expected already, but transportation was still — somewhat — possible. However, it snowed a lot during the ample hour — just a few minutes slower than usual —  it took me to get from my home village Veenwouden — actually Feanwâlden, since the Frisian names have been made the official ones in our municipality at the beginning of this year — to the city of Leeuwarden, which is where my school is, and when I arrived at school I was one of the few people that had made it. Inside there was tea and coffee and outside students were throwing snowballs at each other.

It quickly became clear that it was not doable to give lessons and therefore the day was cancelled. A lot of the buses didn’t show up, or were very slow and the trains had delays as well — later on the day the public transport would be almost completely stalled — but a few friends and I were able to catch a train back home. I left my bike at school, where it will have to stay for the Christmas Holidays because today has been cancelled as well; the Christmas breakfast, the Christmas Service and the Christmas ball.

The morning rush hour was one of the five worst rush hours ever, with more than 670 kilometres of traffic jam in a country with 16-17 million inhabitants, 116.500 km of road and an area of 41.528 km² — 18% of that is water. Many people decided not to show up at work, take a day off or go home early.

This house is For Sale!

Handling the sync request bug #451864 I was confronted with the fact that the version of Devhelp included in Karmic is outdated. We’re still providing Devhelp 0.23-4, even though the latest stable release in Debian unstable is Devhelp 2.28.1 and upstream has already released 2.29.3. The Ubuntu Sponsors for main have been subscribed.

In order to allow testing of this new version I’ve uploaded both versions to a PPA. Devhelp 2.28.1 is in ppa:qense/devhelp and 2.29.2 — 2.29.3 was a mere version bump –in ppa:qense/devhelp-testing. If you find a bug in the first one, it should be reported against Debian since the only change I made there was adding an entry to the changelog.
For 2.29.2 I copied the ‘debian’-directory from 2.28.1 and removed all patches. Apart from that the only change I made was running ./autogen.sh before uploading to make sure the necessary files were there.

If you’ve got a question, please leave a comment.

Do you want to help Ubuntu, but don’t know how? Consider bug triaging! It is a very useful way of contributing, and because we’re being flooded with bug reports, we can use every hand. That includes you!

If you want some help with getting started, Ubuntu Bug Control has got a mentoring program designed for getting people acquainted with triaging. At BugSquad/GettingInvolved is explained how to request a mentor:

• sign the Code of Conduct
• Although not really required, read the How to Triage guide. It does help to read it 
• request a mentor, via an email to ubuntu-bugcontrol@lists.launchpad.net. In this email, please provide an area of specialisation, if you have any.

I would like to add that including the username of your Launchpad account is most helpful as well, since that makes it easier for us to scan what you’ve done so far.

As always, questions can be asked at our IRC channel, #ubuntu-bugs at FreeNode.

If you’re already quite familiar with triaging and want to help new people, you’re most welcome! Please sign up as a mentor by leaving a little note at the ubuntu-bugcontrol mailist and add yourself to the list at BugSquad/Mentors. This page contains also more information about what is expected of you.

The last two weeks were busy. Although I’ve started with getting Ubuntu Wanted in shape again and began a new programming project which I want to use to learn techniques used for developing Ubuntu desktop programs, most of the time had to be spent on school. Several teachers demanded reports and essays to be delivered just in time for the upcoming trip and the trip itself needed to be prepared as well.

Because all my work will be stalled for a week and a day starting tonight. Next week is the traditional ‘Classical Trip’ that is common for grammar schools, at least in the Netherlands, which is a bit in the spirit of a Grand Tour. Every year the fifth grade — the sixth is too filled with preparations for the exams — goes to either Rome or Greece. My year is going to Greece, where we will tour the country and visit most noteworthy places. We’re the tour guides.

I’m really looking forward to it. Not only is it currently 30 °C in Athens, whereas it’s 13 °C here, it’s also great to be away with friends. To the sun!

(We’ll be heading to Brussels Airport — cheaper than Amsterdam — at 23.30 this evening and depart to Athens at 6.00 in the morning. We’ll be back in the evening of Saturday the 17th.)

Although it’s a very good thing to point people at wrong and/or offensive choices of saying things, it is whole different thing to call it sexism and call for a boycott of the whole project the ‘offender’ participates in. I have not watched the video of Mark Shuttleworth uttering the controversial phrase, but I did read a few (semi-)transcripts and reports of people that did watch it.

What I’ve read about it didn’t sound like sexism at all. Some people definitely overreacted; boycotting is way over the top, asking for an apology is misplaced as well. I’ve always been told at school and by the media that sexism is “prejudice and discrimination based on sex” — source of the English description: Merriam-Webster. What Mark Shuttleworth said may have been wrong and offending to some, but it was not sexism. It would have been if he’d said: “I think that all women are unsuitable for FOSS.” That would have been gross sexism. But this was not. He just used bad wording.

Pointing people at the use of wrong and offensive phrases is an important task. If you want to get emancipation — I’m hesitant to use the word feminism since it has got such a negative sound here these days — to succeed you need to make sure the used language doesn’t exclude anyone. However, when overreacting you scare people away as well, and it’s at least bad for your image. How gladly do you think developers would like to participate if every tiny breach of gender neutrality and equal valuation, even if by accident, will be mercilessly punished?

Please do, really do, keep alerting us whenever we make a mistake and accidentally — or willingly as well — offend women, men, youngsters, elderly, programmers and non-programmers. It is helpful. However, please be reasonably. Without reason you won’t get far.

Recently I’ve joined the Ubuntu Bug Control team again. I’m not even close to bug triaging superstars like Pedro Villavicencio, but I’m contributing my small share.

A good way of finding tasks to work on is the list of packages without direct subscribers — people that watch a package for new bug reports and keep it in shape — composed by Brain Murray. The packages on this list don’t have someone to look after them, so they often have a lot of ‘dead wood’, bugs that are old and haven’t been commented on for a long time. You could ask if the problem is still there, and close the bug otherwise.

There are probably also a lot of old bugs that are fixed in the Ubuntu release on which development is focussing right now. These bugs, like all bugs that are fixed in the development version of Ubuntu, should be set to Fix Released, unless they are specifically about a bug in a specific package version in a stable release. Look at Bugs/Status for more information about the meanings of the different bug statuses.

Next to the dead wood there are the normal bugs, you can handle these like you would handle any other new bug. Because these bugs are often not frequently being looked after you’ll won’t have much trouble to find one that’s easy to start your triaging career with.

Some people would like to triage all bugs for a whole package. In that case you adopt a package, which means you first triage all bugs reported against your chosen package and then subscribe to the bugmail for that package to keep an eye on it. More information about that is at BugSquad/AdoptPackage.

Triaging bugs is a very good way to help Ubuntu, get involved!

Yesterday at about 19.15 we returned home after a two week holiday in Île-de-France and Bavaria.

We mostly went to France to see Paris and Versailles. Next to two trips to Paris — including the Louvre, free for citizens of the European Union under 26 and everyone  under 18, €9,- for adults — and one to Versailles — huge, but I like the Louvre better — we also went to see Fontainebleau, with its huge Château de Fontainebleau, though less large than the Louvre and Versailles.
Paris is a beautiful city and the public transparent. It’s far easier to go to a train station outside the city, but within Île-de-France and take the train to the city than to park your car in the centre. When travelling through Paris by car you won’t reach the maximum speed often.

Because two weeks of Paris would be a bit too much we went to Southern Bavaria as well. This region is quite different from Paris’s region. It’s a lot more mountaineous and the traffic is less dense. We went to see the famous castle Neuschwanstein for the second time — it was still worth it — and the cities of Lindau — a nice town at the shore of the Bodensee — and to the busy and clogged city of Munich. If you’re in the Alps I also recommend to go a day on a hike in the mountains, the view is beautiful.

Yes, that’s right. I’m off again for another holiday. This time it’s two weeks, rather than one, and it’s abroad. We’re going to a camp site near Paris in the first week and to a camp site at the edge of a lake in Southern Bavaria. We will depart tomorrow, early in the morning.

Since desktops aren’t that easy to take with you in your luggage, I won’t be reachable during those two weeks, apart for the lucky few that happen to know my cellphone number.

While planning this post I suddenly realized that maybe this post doesn’t have that much use. I’m not as much a part of the community anymore like I used to be. Not that I played a very important role or did a lot, but I did more for Ubuntu that I do now. Most of my contributions consist of bug reporting and an occasional suggestion or patch.

However, I would like to do more for Ubuntu. Maybe I should start working on Ubuntu Wanted again. When I’m back I’ll reconsider the project. Current options are: completely abandon the project, continue work on the current code and my favourite: examine the posibility of extending Launchpad to do what Ubuntu Wanted was ought to do.

Some of the changes to Launchpad could be:

• Extend profiles to include personal skills, both given by the user and measured on an Ohloh kind of way
• Extend team applying for moderated teams, e.g. to require certain skills, provide details about the application procedure and more
• Allow teams and people to create tasks and to assign them to projects, like the way branches already work

There is obviously much more that can be done , e.g. I didn’t include the mentoring system for example, but I will have a closer look on the possibilities and problems when I return. Meanwhile, if you have suggestions, please leave a comment. However, please refrain from spamming since I won’t be there to check if Askiment fails to filter everything.

The Mono-debate seams to get some attention again. I can’t help but feel a certain tiredness about all those people telling what to do and what not to do. It seems to be the tendency in the ‘community’ to be telling people what they can and cannot think, do and/or feel. Please stop it!

This doesn’t only apply to Mono, but Mono is the most high-profile example of this. For this I created a banner in the spirit of the ‘I’m not afraid of…’ banners that appeared on Planet GNOME:

You (don't) use Mono? I don't care!

(By the way, this image is hereby released in the public domain. Go become a billionaire with selling it if you want.)

I don’t care if you hate Mono and burn it’s source code at night with sacred rituals or if you are secretly working on porting the kernel to C#. I just want a good desktop. Is it written in Mono? That won’t kill my computer and won’t get me sued. If you don’t want to use Mono, please do so as you want.

But please, please, don’t bother me with what I should or shouldn’t do. I don’t believe in community parasites nor in the fact that using Banshee can make my eyeballs pop out.

Imagine what we could have achieved if e.g. we’d been discussing the 100 papercuts instead… Such a waste of time.

I’ve already been free from school for a week — longer if you count the week when we only had to go to school once of the year closure and the usual other free days during the last weeks before summer — but now we’re going on holiday.

We’ll be sailing the lakes near Grou for the next week, I won’t be reachable until Sunday. People who know me know how to reach my cell phone, but I won’t forward my bug mail to it.

I finally managed to get a package being built by Launchpad. This isn’t much of an achievement though, since all the packaging work was already done by the developers of Quickly, whose projected I uploaded to a PPA. My contribution consists of changing two names to my own and editing the version.

The PPA is located at https://launchpad.net/~qense/+archive/quickly

Unfortunately I made a mistake with the version, I’ve just added ~ppa1 at the end, but I want to add the Bazaar revision as well in newer versions, something I forgot here. Any thoughts on the possibilites of adding ~bzr{rev-nr.} somewhere?

I’ll manually try to update the package and the end of every day(CEST), provided there’s a new revision.

What is Quickly? According to the ‘Quickly Help Index’ it’s ‘a set of choices about writing apps for Ubuntu.’ Basically, it’s an application that creates a stub of a program for you based on a template. At the moment there’s only one template, which creates an Ubuntu project in Python.

If you’ve created a nice template that isn’t included in the branches yet you can always mail me with a request to add it to the PPA. But I’d recommend you to first try to submit it to Quickly.

(By the way, I’m not involved in the Quickly project, I just sent the source files to my PPA.)

Let’s just add another blog to the growing pile of posts about Mono. Adding something to the more positive tone the debate got lately can’t be bad.

For a while I also was a kind of anti-Mono. Not anymore, although I’m certainly not pro-Mono; I now see the framework as just another framework that you can use to write your application, which has, just like any framework, it’s pros and cons. However, it left me thinking why I actually didn’t like it at first.
I came with the following conclusion: because of the behaviour of some of its advocates.

Why? Well, after years of hearing how bad Microsoft technologies are it can come as quite a shock to see Planet GNOME filled with posts telling you how great those same technologies are. Of course it’s non-sense that everything from Microsoft is bad by definition, but acknowledging the presence of prejudices doesn’t make them go away. This wasn’t very bad, a part of me just found it irritating.

Worse was the attitude of some people; suddenly everywhere developers started claiming their solution, Mono, was the best and demanded applications to be ported to C#, blaming people of spreading FUD when they refused. Not everyone did this, but enough to add more concerns to the natural demur.

Then there was the release of Gnote and the insulting and the incomprehensible attack from Tomboy. Those very same people who said everyone was attacking them now started to attack other people. A little bit later was an article form Jo Shields published that didn’t sound very convincing for me, maybe because of some prejudices, but also because of the slightly arrogont tone some parts had.

This all gave me a bad feeling about Mono and the convinced me that it must be a Very Bad Thing(TM) — with emphasis on the TM.

The anti-Mono crew also behaved very badly, but it wasn’t as shocking to me because they seemed to more often live in the comments, rather than in the post self. I was shocked that it was spreading itself like some kind of virus in the heads of people that played a role in the community.

Of course it doesn’t hold up for long when you give it a good thought. First of all the patent problems seem to have gone away now — although I’d also like the attitude of the Technical Council, lets see if the patent system would hold — and secondly it’s a lot of

PSYCHOLOGY

A lot of people have grown to not like Microsoft and the fact that Mono is

- based on Microsoft technology

- implementing things like ASP, an concurrent of open-source PHP

- new and strange

makes it generate a lot of fraction.

However, those things don’t make it evil and shouldn’t be the reasons for a crusade against it and its users. If you don’t like Mono, go use GNU’s own implementation of .NET: Portable.NET. Yes, you read it correctly, GNU has an implementation of C# that RMS does like.