Ubuntu Pennsylvania Planet

GeekFest Montreal

2010-03-08T22:17:15+00:00

I went to the Montreal GeekFest today and met up with MagicFab aka Fabian Rodriguez and cyphermox aka Mathieu Trudel. Was really nice to finally put faces to names and talk.

Fabian did a little impromptu mini install fest on one of the organizers laptop. She already had Ubuntu 8.04 installed but never actually used it so it was pretty fresh. So MagicFab being the person he is, walked over and asked if he could boot his USB Live CD of 10.04 Alpha 3. She agreed and he quickly asked if he could install, again she was very cool about it and was like yeah sure!

So here it goes.
• step one: change the BIOS settings to boot from USB
• step two: reboot
• step three: delete existing ext3 partition using Gparted
• step four: click on the install icon

Then he filled in user name and all the usual info and 15 minutes later she had a brand spanking new install of 10.04. Yay!

Grub immediately recognized her Windows partition and added it to the boot list. We also did a quick and dirty boot time test, 15 seconds to boot to desktop.

Matt was asked a few questions by a Tech journalist and we had several people come and chat with us and grab a few CD's and he handed out pamphlets for the upcoming ubuntu-qc Bug Jam

I don't have any pictures of the event but I will be better prepared for the next one :-)

UPDATE:
I forgot to mention that both Matt and Fabian made me feel welcome right from the start. Like we knew each other for years already. Fabian also surprised me with a gift, he gave me a copy of The official Ubuntu server Book complete with DVD's.

Thank you both very much!!!

Docky has been removed from Do!

2010-03-08T03:00:10+00:00

Tonight I finally pushed the revisions to bzr that removed Docky from the Do source tree. For a while now Docky has been being developed as a stand alone application separate from Do. The two projects were limiting one another, so a decision was made to split them out. In the future there will be some of docky <–> do integration, but for now Docky is going to be the most kick ass Dock you’ve ever seen, and Do is going to be the most kickass launcher/everything-else-do-does you’ve ever seen.

In Ubuntu Lucid you can install Docky from the software center, otherwise the source is available at http://launchpad.net/docky. Today is the start of a new day in Do, development is going to start rolling again, and there should be a new kick ass release in the coming months. We’ve let things slide, but we’re kicking it back into gear.

Anything but the buttons, or how I learned to stop clicking and love Do

2010-03-07T20:00:34+00:00

I know this is a controversial opinion, but I want to be one of the few to publicly announce that they love the window controls on the left side of the window. They’re so slick looking! It takes about 10 minutes to adjust to the change, but the beauty is worth it. A very small price to pay for a major improvement of the look and feel of the desktop.

Now, for those who don’t want to adjust (which is fine, really!) I have a prescription for what ails you. Yes, this is a shameless plug, no this is not snake oil. This is real jawn which will make your left-side-window-controlled hell-of-a-life into the garden of eden you never dreamed it could be. 40 virgins? No.. Jimmy Hendrix and Neil Peart (yeah, I know he’s not dead, just bear with me) jam sessions? No… This isn’t religion, magic, mysticism, mass hysteria, or Minnesota swap gas. This the Do window manager plugin.

No video support? Try youtube.

And here’s a youtube version, if you’re not down with HTML5.

You can install it from apt://gnome-do and apt://gnome-do-plugins. Thw window manager plugin is enabled by default in Lucid (and maybe Karmic?)!

What are you avoiding working on?

2010-03-05T23:50:25+00:00

(Cross-posted from the OpenHatch blog.)

I remember working on my first big group programming project back in college. The project involved some web scraping work; I enthusiastically took charge of that part. But a few weeks in, my code just wasn’t working. I felt frustrated and helpless — I’m supposed to be the scraping expert, so why couldn’t I fix the problems? I retreated into hiding and didn’t want to think about the group of people or the project.

A week later, I feebly ran svn update to see how the project had progressed. “Oh!” I exclaimed to myself. “Someone made the data importer work!” I felt a rush of relief. (While writing this paragraph, I sighed again remembering it.)

When I talked to my teammate George, he mentioned off-handedly that he had fixed it. He didn’t feel any of the anguish I felt or assign me the blame I thought I deserved. I guess if I had just asked for help earlier, I could have skipped the feelings of inadequacy entirely and George would have just fixed the bug.

Half a decade later, I feel the same dread about the lack of Maildir support in Alpine. The bug is three years old! Ugh.

This time, I’m going to ask for help. So I listed the issue on the Alpine project page on OpenHatch. To put it there, here’s what I did:

I logged into OpenHatch and added Alpine to my list of projects.
I followed the link on my profile to the Alpine project page.
I answered the last question, “What is a bug or issue with Alpine that you’ve been putting off, neglecting, or just plain avoiding?”

For those of you who work on Free Software projects, what are the issues that drain you the same way?

No bug tracker I’ve seen has a field that says, “I’m avoiding working on this, and that sucks.” To say that, list the issue on your project’s OpenHatch page.

So join in! What are the issues you don’t want to think about? Once you share them, maybe a fellow developer or a new contributor will come by and help you out.

Head to OpenHatch and let the world know.

P.S. Do you have any ideas about how we can make these project pages more useful? Let us know!

P.P.S. Dear Joey Hess and everyone else, sorry that Alpine still doesn’t have Maildir support.

Feeling Good!

2010-03-02T19:20:28+00:00

I just wanted to share some words that describe how I have been feeling the past few weeks. I hope that they make you feel better also. :-)

Words by Dub_Fx

Well I woke up this morning I couldn’t believe my eyes
I opened up a window in my mind
And I saw that the rain was gone
The rain is gone
Ye the rain is gone

I could see all the colours of the trees
They were smiling at me
Well a rainbow symbolised the sun had come
And that the rain, Ye the rain is gone..

To many people out there Have got the rain in their minds
And it’s clogging up the sunshine
Yes indeed, with the warmth of the sunray
We could have a better place
For the children to play

Won’t you see out there
Look out the window
It doesn’t take a genius to realise
That when the rain is gone
There’s a smile on your face..
I can see the sun
I can see the sun light

The rain is gone…