There may not be a native solution, but Google Music All Access is available in Ubuntu 13.04 today as a web app.

Turn On Notifications

To fully enjoy the Google music experience, notifications should be present. I am only going to turn on notifications within Chrome but you may explore a more intimate integration at this webupd8 blog post.

The first step is to load Google Music using the Chrome browser. I am using the beta version 27.0.1453.81. Press the setting button located in the upper right quadrant of the browser window and select Music Labs.

Find Desktop Notifications from the list and click enable.

Add Google Music as a Web App

Although you may run this directly from the Chrome browser, the secret to an enhanced user experience is adding Google Music as a Ubuntu web app. For the details on how to accomplish this see; Ubuntu – A Replacement for Chrome OS.

Enroll In Google Music All Access

You can stream music in your library to any device or computer via a browser on which you’re signed in. You can also download music in your library to any authorized device or computer. You can authorize up to a total of ten (10) devices or computers at any one time. At this time, only two Google accounts per computer can be used to add music with the Google Play Music Manager.

Click the Try It Free for 30 Days button to begin your registration. For your awareness a list of Authorized devices will be displayed for your consideration and you will be prompted to enter credit card payment info.

Start Playing Music

Ubuntu Integration

Enjoy : )

The post Ubuntu 13.04 – Enable Google Music All Access appeared first on j-Baer.

Recently there was yet another storm in a teacup that distracted us from creating and sharing Ubuntu and our flavors with others. I am not going to dive into the details of this particular incident…it has been exhaustively documented elsewhere…but at the heart of this case was a concern around the conduct in which some folks engaged around something they disagreed with. This is not the first time we have seen disappointing conduct in a debate, and I wanted to share some thoughts on this too.

In every community I have worked in I have tried to build an environment in which all view points that challenge decisions or decision makers are welcome with the requirement that they are built on a platform of respectful discourse; this is the essence of our Code Of Conduct. Within the context of an Open Source community we also encourage this engagement around differences to be expressed as solutions with a focus on solving problems; this helps us to be productive and move the project forward. This is why we have such a strong emphasis on blueprints, specs, bugs, and other ways of expressing issues and exploring solutions.

Within the context of this most recent issue I saw three problems (problems I have seen present in other similar arguments too):

1. Irrespective of the voracity or content of an opinion we must never forget to be respectful and polite in the way we express and engage with others. Respect must always be present in our discourse, irrespective of the content of our opinions; without it we become a barbaric people and lose the magic that brought this wonderful set of minds together in the first place. There is simply no excuse for rudeness, and inflammatory FUD that has no evidence to back it up other than presumed ill-intent serves nothing but to demotive folks and ratchet up the flames, as opposed to resolve the issue and make things better.
2. Trust needs to be earned, but trust should always be built within the wider context of a set of contributions and conduct. Unfortunately some folks consider decisions they disagree with to be a basis for (a) entering into a paranoid debate about the “real reason” the individual or company made that decision (and typically not believing the rationale provided by said decision-maker) and (b) seemingly forgetting about all the other positive contributions that the person or company has contributed. I can assure you there is no nefarious scheme at place at Canonical; our goals are well known in the community. If I felt Canonical was fundamentally trying to demote and shut the community out, I wouldn’t work here; I have no interest in working for a company that doesn’t understand the value of community, and I am not worried about finding suitable employment elsewhere. I work at Canonical because I believe our goals with Ubuntu are just and the company’s commitment to our community is sincere.
3. Ubuntu is not a consensus-based community. Consensus communities rarely work, and I am not aware of any Open Source project that bases their work on wider consensus in the community. It would be impossible and impractical to notify our community of every decision we make, let alone try to base a decision on a majority view, but we do try to ensure that major changes are communicated to our leaders first (this is something we have been driving improvements in recently). We always need to find the right balance between transparency and JFDI, and sometimes the balance isnt’t quite there, but that does not mean there is some kind of illuminati-ish scheme going on behind the scenes.

Ubuntu is a community filled with passionate people, and I love that we have folks who are critical of our direction and decisions. If everyone agreed with what we are doing, we would not always make the right decisions, and our diversity is what makes Ubuntu and our flavors such a great place to participate.

As I said at the beginning of this post, it is important that all viewpoints are welcome, but we have to get the tone and conduct of some of these debates under control. The sheer level of sensationalist and confrontational language that is often in place in these disagreements doesn’t serve anyone but hungry journalists looking for page hits.

Now, I am not suggesting here that anyone should change any of their viewpoints. If you vehemently disagree with an aspect of what we are doing in Ubuntu or at Canonical, that is fine and of course, welcome. What I am appealing to everyone though is to treat others like you wish to be treated, with respect and dignity, and lets keep the sensationalism out of our community and focus on what we do best…building a world-class Free Software platform and its rich ecosystem of flavors.

I use RSS feeds to keep up with academic journals. Because of an undocumented and unexpected feature (bug?) in my (otherwise wonderful) free software newsreader NewBlur, many articles published over the last year were marked as having been read before I saw them.

Over the last week, I caught up. I spent hours going through abstracts and downloading papers that looked interesting or relevant to my research. Because I did this for hundreds of articles, it gave me an unusual opportunity to reflect on my journal reading practices in a systematic way.

On a number of occasions, there were potentially interesting articles in non-open access journals that neither MIT nor Harvard subscribes to and that were otherwise not accessible to me. In several cases where the research was obviously important to my work, I made an interlibrary request, emailed the papers’ authors for copies, or tracked down a colleague at an institution with access.

Of course, articles that look potentially interesting from the title and abstract often end up being less relevant or well executed on closer inspection. I tend to cast a wide net, skim many articles, and put them aside when it’s clear that the study is not for me. This week, I downloaded many of these possibly relevant papers to, at least, give a skim. But only if I could download them easily. On three or four occasions, I found inaccessible articles at this margin of relevance. In these cases, I did not bother trying to track down the articles.

Of course, what appear to be marginally relevant articles sometimes end up being a great match for my research and I will end up citing and building on the work. I found several suprisingly interesting papers last week. The articles that were locked up have no chance at this.

When people suggest that open access hinders the spread of scholarship, a common retort is that the people who need the work have or can finagle access. For the papers we know we need, this might be true. As someone with access to two of the most well endowed libraries in academia who routinely requests otherwise inaccessible articles through several channels, I would have told you, a week ago, that locked-down journals were unlikely to keep me from citing anybody.

So it was interesting watching myself do a personal cost calculation in a way that sidelined published scholarship — and that open access publishing would have prevented. At the margin of relevance to ones research, open access may make a big difference.

• “Open source is not a warzone. Not every man is a dick.” A lovely essay from Perl girls, I truly enjoyed reading it.
• “The water we swim in.” Valorie has nailed it with this: “most of the people discussing the issue seem to be talking past the folks they are hoping to connect with.” FWIW, I just think this whole shitstorm over the Community link is too overblown, too melodramatic, a whole tornado was created inside a small glass of water. The Hitler comparisons were ridiculous, unnecessary and embarrasing for the rest of us.

Healthy relationships. I've been thinking about them not in my personal life, but in terms of teams in free software. When I first began contributing, it was within a team creating an application (Amarok), so rather small. Then I became active in Ubuntu-Women, which is larger, but still not huge. Then Kubuntu, then the larger Ubuntu community, and now KDE, which is truly enormous.

In all of these projects, communication and trust are paramount. Dialog which fosters creativity and progress is only possible when people enlarge their trust in one another. Along the way to the highest trust levels, many barriers will come down, as people allow them. Sometimes these barriers are invisible, until someone points them out.

I thought I'd seen a cartoon illustrating this story, but a web search tells me it's a story by David Foster Wallace:
Two young fish meet an older fish, who asks them “How’s the water?” The younger fish look at each other and say, “What the hell is water?”I was reminded of this story recently while observing the various reactions to the removal of the Community link on Ubuntu.com, the portal to the Ubuntu project. The link is coming back, so I'm not complaining. However, what I've noticed is that most of the people discussing the issue seem to be talking past the folks they are hoping to connect with. The emotions expressed range from puzzlement, to shock and outrage, with little understanding on the other "side" on the perceptions causing these reactions.

So how is the water? To me, the drama played out completely predictably, because any time you have one company selling a product, and volunteers working in that same project, you will have class issues, and class is like the water fish swim in. People are often not aware of it, and thus have difficulty dealing with their emotions around it, because they have been taught to ignore it, or even that it doesn't exist. So when the designers removed the link, it was felt as a slap to the face of community members, while the designers see it as just a step to a clean, functional design. The conversation about this change at the recent vUDS clearly betrays this lack of understanding of the other on all sides. http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-1305/meeting/21740/community-1305-ubuntu-website-planning/

There is no such thing as a culture without class. There are always power imbalances, and privileges. However, that doesn't mean that class is the death of the Ubuntu project, or that volunteers and companies can't happily co-exist. They can, but the fact of class must be acknowledged, and those with privilege and power must realize what they have, and use them on behalf of the project.

A healthy culture has hierarchy, but not one based on domination. In fact, in FOSS that is part of what we are attempting to dislodge, right? We want our hierarchies to be constructed for function, not to rule over us. For instance, those who demonstrate their skill in packaging or coding are given the right to upload to the repositories. And those who grant them that right are those who already have built their reputations by using their skill and trustworthiness in that domain.

Recently there has been a breakdown -- or an apparent breakdown -- in that hierarchy of function in Ubuntu. And I think that both those inside Canonical and those outside, perceive that the other is the one causing that break. So, some repair is needed.

All of our differences can be overcome as we build (or re-build) trust. However, all sides of the issue will need to think about, process emotion about, and finally discuss openly what has gone on. The replacement of the Community link alone will not mend this breach, nor will brief virtual UDS sessions. In fact, I think the lack of in-person face-to-face interaction is allowing this divide to grow.

Folks, we don't want resentment and suspicion to grow, so we are all going to need to work on this if the Ubuntu project is going to continue to thrive as a free software enterprise. In my opinion, thinking about and discussing class issues are fundamental to that effort.

This blog appears on the Linuxchix, KDE and Ubuntu planets, and these issues of class appear in all teams. Health and progress are the goal, and honest dialog is the means. I propose we look one another in the eye and start a conversation. These are difficult dialogs, but our health is at stake.

For each Ubuntu release I spend a little time finding a toy or other representation of the codename animal to use at booths, Ubuntu Hours and other events. I wrote about Quetzals and Pangolins here and you may have seen Raring here.

When the salamander came up I was confident that a toy would be easy to find, and indeed they were! Even better, I found that the World Wildlife Fund offers a $50 Hellbender Salamander Adoption Kit that ships with 2 plush salamanders! Mine arrived yesterday, I’ll be keeping one to use at our events and will find a way to give away the other (perhaps as part of the Ubuntu Women contest we’re planning? Or at some LoCo event?).

Event decoration + helping to save the actual animal, hooray!

Oh, and it is a release late, but while I was in Mérida, Mexico we stopped in to Miniaturas where I picked up some adorable quetzal earrings:

I think I’ll wear them to our San Francisco Ubuntu Hour on June 12th, and bring along the salamander!

Globaleaks 0.2 Alpha is out.

Globaleaks is an open source project aimed at creating a worldwide, anonymous, censorship-resistant, distributed whistle-blowing platform. It enables organizations interested in running whistle-blowing initiatives to setup their own safe zone, where whistle-blowers and recipients can exchange data.

2 Years ago I helped out with the development of Globaleaks 0.1. And although I am not active anymore, I really support the initiative behind it. Now with the HERMES Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights backing it up, it has grown a lot and shaped up to be a very organized and thought through project.

TL;DR:

• Full rewrite
• More flexible and extensible
• Linux ready-made system and network hardened installation
• Written in python using twisted
• New Frontend

Try it out:

Try out the demo. It is pretty straight forward.

Help out:

As young project, Globaleaks can use some help fixing bugs. Just head to the wiki and read through it. It is pretty straight forward, and explains the modules, security concepts and set up instructions.

Globaleaks already has Debian and Ubuntu ready packages. An easy way to help out is to set up a  PPA for us on Launchpad.

Get in touch:

You can contact the Globaleaks team at info () globaleaks org or on IRC on #globaleaks at irc.oftc.net

Here are some screenshots of the new frontend

Congratulations you are using Tor

Receiver selection page

The submission receipt

Configuring a receiver

Configuring a context

As I’ve mentioned before, the 2013 Kubuntu Council elections are underway.  You’ve got just over two days left to vote, so if you’ve been procrastinating, mission accomplished, now go vote.

Last Saturday, the Catalan LoCo Team did its Ubuntu Raring Ringtail Party at the Escola del Clot of Barcelona with some 80 people present in the different speeches and installs.

The day started with a little presentation about Ubuntu and Catalan LoCo Team. After that, there were two lectures from Sergi Grau: HTML5 and Android 4.2.

Simultaneously, on other room, it was the speech about the Free & Open Source Software Outreach for Women Program with Mònica Ramírez, Debian Developer.

After that, there were the talks about Metadistributions based on Ubuntu using Remastersys with Jordi Binefa and ChameleonPI (a Raspbian versions with games emulators for the Raspberry Pi) with its author Carles Oriol.

Joan de Gràcia presented the Linkat Edu 12.04, the official Catalan public school GNU/Linux distro, for the first time based on Ubuntu, and Jordi Binefa showed Free hardware with Ubuntu.

Meanwhile, on the install room, people worked on installations and clarification of doubts and we sold some LoCo Team T-shirts and gave away some Ubuntu installation and using guides.

As always, we ended the party with a draw of some T-shirts and an Ubuntu Handbook.

As you can see, after the party was completed, some of us went to lunch.

Since I left for my wedding and honeymoon a bunch of things happened! Ubuntu 13.04 was released, 13.10 was given the code name “Saucy Salamander” and Debian 7.0 Wheezy came out. Plus lots of exciting OpenStack development discussion that came out following the Summit (I left right after it). When I got back into the country on the 12th I had a lot to catch up on! I did my best to cram before sessions and certainly had to limit involvement to a handful of sessions that I was particularly keen on attending and so could get up to speed with quickly.

This was the first virtual UDS I was able to participate in, so it was all new to me. Essentially the the “fish bowl” (as seen here, I took this photo from my spot in the wider attendee seating) is replaced by a Google Hangout and the “wider attendee seating” is an IRC channel. For the 4 sessions I participated in this worked very well, session leads were pro-active about asking who wished to participate in the Hangout so everyone who wanted to was able to. A great deal of attention in all these sessions was given to the IRC channel, which is a contrast with in person UDS where the channel can sometimes get a bit left behind (even though it’s being projected, it was easy to forget once you get talking). I didn’t use the summit.ubuntu.com page for anything aside reference, preferring to pop out the etherpad and use my standard IRC client, but I appreciated it all being there as a resource (and I’m sure it was super helpful for newcomers to follow along!).

Cheri Francis and others in the Ubuntu Women session

I found the sessions I participated in to be productive and focused and when applicable resulted in a solid list of action items. I hope that the event also lessened the experience gap that was always present for in person vs. remote participants, we all got the same experience. Now I have to admit to not being a fan of using Google Hangouts for this (I like Google, but it is still a proprietary, closed-source tool that we have no control over), but I understand that the ease of use and immediate availability of videos on YouTube makes a compelling case. Perhaps my only other complaint is lack of cohesiveness that comes from an online event, I didn’t watch the introduction or the wrap up. I also didn’t participate in the “beer hangout” – I didn’t even know it was happening, and sitting in front of my computer with a beer in the middle of the day wasn’t particularly interesting to me. I only attended a few specific sessions and there was no “wandering into something that looks interesting” (instead I just went back to work) or the regular social down time we get to relax or sit down to hack on things. I do hope we can find some kind of replacement for the in-person events, it would be great to see something on the LoCo team level at conferences where we seek to have an expanded Ubuntu presence focused on contributors (perhaps an Ubucon with a participant track?).

And the venue… it was at home! In order to participate in the hangout I did feel the need to leverage my multiple monitors.

My desk is a bit chaotic

Now the sessions themselves…

– Planning for Ubuntu Community presence on the Ubuntu Website –

This was not a particularly productive session as far as action items were concerned, but it turns out that while I was gone the removal of the “Community” link from ubuntu.com took on a life of its own (and boy was I surprised to see my name end up in a recent Datamation article about it). Personally I was satisfied with Daniel Holbach’s blog post on the subject a day after the change was made, but it was nice to speak with with some folks from the Design team and allow everyone to confirm that no ill will was intended and that plans for a new and improved community site were moving forward. The session was kept short given the more structured session about the community site specifically planned for the following day.

YouTube video of the session here

– Ubuntu Women UDS-1305 Goals –

Huge thanks to Silvia Bindelli and Cheri Francis for doing all of the leg work for this session while I was gone, I felt very comfortable reviewing their pre-session notes and found a really great, collaborative environment upon joining in. The discussion began talking about an information scavenger-hung competition that the team will be doing in the coming months, seeking volunteers to assist. It then moved into a topic that I was really happy to see on the agenda – a user poll to see how the team could be most effective in serving our audience of women interested in Ubuntu. I find that the project needs a bit of an adjustment every couple of years to refocus on our current targets as Ubuntu and the open source ecosystem evolves, so I’m excited that we’re doing this. Finally, much of the session was spent discussing our intention to further collaborate with other groups seeking to encourage women in open source (and in technology in general).

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

– Revamping ubuntu.com/community –

Picking up from where discussion left off the previous day, this session was a focused on on concrete things that need to be done to get the proposed community website that was under development reviewed and published. I admit that job change + wedding planning had my attention diverted this past cycle so I wasn’t able to contribute to this project, but I made sure to spend time the night before to do a review of the content so I’d be prepared. I was able to go through some of my suggestions during the meeting and took a few action items to continue with a more thorough review and to collect some quotes and photos from the community to make the site more personal and approachable.

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

– Shaping a plan for the future of Ubuntu Documentation Team –

I can’t begin to say how pleased I was to see this session land on the agenda. The Ubuntu Doc team has been a very small team for a long time, and new contributors have struggled to participate as the docs for writing the docs got stale to a point where they were not useful. We’re at a very exciting time now where we have limited support from a couple of the (very busy!) former drivers of this team and at least two strong contributors who have committed to moving the project forward. The first thing on the agenda was addressing the updating of docs so that more contributors can get on-boarded. I was able to pitch in with a couple action items to nudge things along a bit, but I’m hopeful that this is the beginning of an exciting new phase for the team.

YouTube video of the session here and I uploaded session notes here

A Slimy Salamander (wait, you said Saucy?)

– Xubuntu –

Since the event was online, the Xubuntu team took advantage of the flexibility and ended up pulling their sessions from UDS proper and scheduling our sessions for the hour after UDS each day to tackle a series of blueprints designed for the coming months. I was able to use my YouTube account + Hangouts to replicate that portion of what main UDS was doing.

Discussion of most interest to me centered around our testing+release plans (should we do alphas? betas? which ones?) and documentation, but discussion of our limited developer force (want to grow it!), a proposal for a shortcut overlay and default applications also were discussed. A much better summary was posted on the Xubuntu website yesterday: Looking towards Xubuntu 13.10. Pasi Lallinaho also wrote bullet-point style summaries of Night 1 and Night 2 which include links to their respective YouTube videos.

In all, a productive UDS for me, I have a lot of work to do… :)

Thanks to DoctorMo for the hilarious photo. It’s just so good.

We’ve got Classes working, the usual fixes from the ‘crew, and native macros. Huzzah! 

I’ve had to take the site down for now (well, stop updating it) because of a vulnerability I introduced (macros allow arbitrary code to run), which means, if anyone’s keen, they should add the sandboxing code to the Hy Site as well!

More coming soon!

Ubuntu Ohio Leader Notes for 2013-05-17 Continuing Attacks on freenode

Prior to the start of the recently concluded Ubuntu Developer Summit many saw freenode become subject to Denial of Service attacks. I first noticed such on May 11th. There recently has been a blog post made explaining the situation on freenode's administrative side.

As a bit of a contingency I am encouraging members of Ubuntu Ohio to update their Launchpad profiles by editing their listed Jabber (otherwise known as XMPP) IDs so that we have a bit of a roster there. We may end up considering a fall-back XMPP Conference Room if freenode hits heavier pockets of turbulence. For now the implementation of that conundrum is left as something for us as an interesting hypothetical to consider for the moment. Anybody who has ideas about how to implement such an XMPP Conference Room is encouraged to edit https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OhioTeam/XMPP on the Ubuntu Wiki Infrastructure to further collaboration.

Podcast Resumption

The two week suspension of Burning Circle should be wrapping up this week and a new episode is expected to be released on Monday, May 20th.

Ubuntu Developer Summit May 2013

The proceedings of Ubuntu Developer Summit May 2013 have concluded and I urge you to view the resulting YouTube videos created from the various Google Hangouts. One thing that was noted was that having this happen at the same time as Google I/O was a bad thing. The Xubuntu folks held some parallel sessions and published a blog post with summaries and an outline of their work plan for the Saucy Salamander cycle.

If this scheduling pattern continues the next summit should be held in August 2013. That will place it one month before Ohio Linux Fest 2013.

Ohio Linux Fest 2013

I have received a communication from Robert Ball concerning getting a table at Ohio Linux Fest 2013. I would like to deputize someone in our community located outside Ashtabula County to sign the contract for such and to handle that matter. Please contact me directly at skellat@ubuntu.com and we can discuss the matter.

An offer was received from Jorge Castro during a UDS session to bring in some people to assist with presenting an UbuCon. I still encourage members of our community to think of what they would like to present as we will get close to my issuing a call for topics. I do not currently have confirmation that space is available yet for us to do this but will be following up with Ohio Linux Fest organizers.

Ubuntu Ohio Projects For The Saucy Salamander Cycle

As a community we have three or four projects to consider during the Saucy Salamander cycle.

1. Consider the creation of a fall-back XMPP Conference Room
2. Prepare for Ohio Linux Fest 2013
3. The Ubuntu Advocacy Kit
4. Mentoring & Shepherding Community Members To Become Ubuntu Members

The first two items have been dealt with above. Jono Bacon and I engaged in a colloquy during an Ubuntu Developer Summit session about our community perhaps assisting in the development of the Ubuntu Advocacy Kit. Jono discussed further on his blog about the need for help with bringing the kit to version 1.0 and provides some basic instructions on how to get started. If there are community members who are interested in participating please follow the directions and dig in. If we need to spend time going over the mechanics of contributing using Bazaar, please let me know so that I can schedule an educational session.

The last project matter is one that I am taking on which is to help mentor and shepherd members of our community through the process of attaining Ubuntu Membership. Across the planet there are only 784 Ubuntu Members in the relevant Launchpad group at the time this is written. I want to help people grow in the community and become increasingly responsible for its growth and maintenance. This is an important step.

AND FINALLY...

NewsChannel 5 WEWS in Cleveland reports that the State of Ohio's average unemployment rate dropped by one-tenth of one percentage point to seven percent. The Ohio Department of Job and Family Services has a press release posted which provides a break-down of where employment shifted between March 2013 and April 2013. A table showing the changes by industrial group is also posted.

As many of you will know, our goal is to get the Ubuntu phone in a state where it can be used on a daily basis for testing, and importantly, finding bugs, UI issues, and other details that help us to refine the overall Ubuntu Touch experience. Progress is on-track for the end of May.

I decided to start dogfooding a little early (please remember, we are shooting for the beginning of July to be broadly in shape for dogfooding, so if you try, don’t expect things to be ready right now), so today I put my SIM card in my Galaxy Nexus with Ubuntu Touch and things are working pretty well so far. It seems that my data is no longer getting wiped on image updates, which helps testing significantly, so I am regularly upgrading with the daily images.

As ever, if you decide to test, you are doing so at your own risk…don’t be surprised to see bugs, crashes, and potential data loss (although I have not seen any data loss so far).

Some notes about my experience dogfooding:

• Making and recieving phone calls works well. I am using T-Mobile as my network.
• Sending and recieving texts works well too. Messages appear chronologically.
• Contact syncing is not in place but Sergio blogged about how to sync your contacts from Google. This has made my phone infinately more useful and rather nicely, it pulls in the avatars too so I can see who is calling me.
• Browsing and connecting to wireless networks works well.
• The browser works well overall, although currently requires wifi (3G browsing coming soon).
• Camera works well (for still photos, video not implemented yet) and I can browse my pictures in the gallery.
• Many of the community-written core apps are present and working. Calendar lets me save and browse calendar events (although syncing with a calendar service is not there yet). Weather showes me the weather for my area right now and a week long forcast. Calculator is working and largely feature-complete. Other core apps are on their way to the daily image soon.
• Overall the core Unity UI is working well. I can search for apps, load them, quit them, multi-tasting works well, and the indicators work (for adjusting volume etc).

The primary blockers in my way right now for normal use out and about are:

• The screen does not auto shut-off. This means if the screen gets turned on in my pocket it never turns off and the battery dies.
• Speakerphone not wired into the UI yet.
• Can’t set the time on the phone yet. Also, the alarm feature in the clock doesn’t work; I need this to get me up in the morning.
• Not so much a blocker, but the phone is still filled with example material and contacts. They need to be removed.

All of these are on the TODO list for complettion by the end of the month.

I have been filing bugs for a bunch of the issues I am seeing on a day to day basis and the team are working hard to hit the end of May goal. Overall progress is looking good.

Although I have been using the daily images for quite some time on a phone without a SIM card, using as an actual phone is even more motivating than before. I can feel the phone coming together and when we get many of these issues fixed, it is going to deliver a far superior experience than the Android phone I was using before.

Inspired by Rick's recent blog posts, and keen to write a blog post with a ridiculously long title, I've been reading up on QML recently. Still bearing the scars from the XML horrors of working with J2EE in the early days, that 3-byte acronym ending in "ML" initially subconsciously somewhat filled me with trepidation. However, as soon as I actually saw some QML, I could see these fears were unfounded (! :-)  And in fact I now love QML. It's clean, elegant, powerful, declarative and (OMG YAY!) you can even "%-bounce" on the braces in vim! :-) That said, the qtcreator IDE is extremely good, managing to provide just enough of what you want without requiring endless additional configuration.

But it doesn't stop there. The Design Team have done some incredible work in creating the Ubuntu SDK components: not only do they look fantastic (if you have the ubuntu-ui-toolkit-examples package installed, try running /usr/lib/ubuntu-ui-toolkit/demos/launch_componentshowcase), they are also extremely flexible and powerful.

As Rick has mentioned, it does take a while to grok the "QML-ish" way of doing things. And if like me you spend most of your time writing in imperative languages, initially you just think "all this QML is wonderful, but where do I actually put the code?". But then you have the epiphany moment when you realise you're already writing "the code" - in many cases, you don't need anything beyond the declarative QML itself.

I Need an Itch to Scratch
The only real way to learn a new language is to use it. But what to do? I wanted to code something simple and fun, like a game. There are already few games on the Collections page so I needed to think of a really simple one that is also fun to play. How about a game that even children can appreciate? Of course - Noughts and Crosses (aka tic-tac-toe)!

• https://github.com/jamesodhunt/qml-noughts-and-crosses (GPLv3)

Note that the code is pretty rudimentary right now, but it's just about usable ;-)

Design This is a simple game so we only need a few objects: Cell, Game and MainView.

The MainView is the container for the application and includes a Page and the actual Game object. The only property we specify for the game is the boardSize of 3 giving us a 3x3 board. Technically, we don't actually even need to specify this since -- as we're about to see -- 3x3 is the default board size anyway. So, the Game object could be specified minimally as "Game {}". However, I've left it specified as a reminder to myself that ultimately I'd like to pass a variable to allow the board size to be specified at game creation time.

Here is a slightly simplified version of the MainView (noughts-and-crosses.qml):

import QtQuick 2.0 import Ubuntu.Components 0.1 MainView { Page { title: "Noughts and Crosses" id: page Game { // change this to whatever value you want for an NxN-sized board boardSize: 3 } } }

The Game object is a Column and comprises a Label, to show some text relating to the game, and a Grid to actually represent the game. There is some magic going on in the grid as it uses the very cool Repeater object to make laying out the grid easy: for a 3x3 board it creates 9 Cell objects and packs them into the grid. Here's a cut-down version of the Game object:

Column { property alias boardSize: gameGrid.boardSize Label { id: text text: "Noughts goes first" } Grid { id: gameGrid // Default to a 3x3 board (we only support square boards). property real boardSize: 3 // toggled between "O" and "X". The value specified below denotes // which side goes first. property string player: "O" columns: boardSize rows: boardSize // layout the appropriate number of cells for the board size Repeater { id: gridRepeater model: boardSize * boardSize Cell { width: 100 height: width } } } }
Note the property alias for boardSize in the Column object - it exposes a boardSize variable which is just a way to access the real variable of the same name within the Grid object. Note too that we tell the Grid object its dimensions by setting its columns and rows properties.

The Game object also contains a chunk of Javascript in the form of the checkForWin() function to determine whether a move resulted in the game being won.

The Cell object is the most interesting object. A Cell represents an individual location on the board. It is constructed from a Rectangle and comprises a Text value. The text value is either a middle-dot (to denote the cell has not yet been selected), a "O" or a "X". It also includes a MouseArea that specifies the new cell state to apply when the cell is clicked. Initially, the state is middle-dot but when the cell is clicked, the state is changed to the value of the parent (Game) objects player property. The Cell object specifies 3 states to represent every possible value a Cell can display. What's neat here is that changing the cells state also toggles the parent (Game) objects player property which allows the game to proceed with each player taking a turn. Clicking a cell also calls the checkForWin()function to determine if a particular turn results in the game being won. Here's the complete Cell object:

Rectangle { id: cell state: gameGrid.defaultText property alias textColor: cellText.color Text { id: cellText text: parent.state color: "silver" anchors.horizontalCenter: parent.horizontalCenter anchors.verticalCenter: parent.verticalCenter font.pointSize: 48 } states: [ State { name: cell.parent.defaultText PropertyChanges { target: gameGrid; player: "" } }, State { name: "O" PropertyChanges { target: gameGrid; player: cell.state } }, State { name: "X" PropertyChanges { target: gameGrid; player: cell.state } } ] // when clicked, MouseArea { anchors.fill: parent onClicked: { cell.state = (gameGrid.player == "O" ? "X" : "O"); gameGrid.numberTurns += 1 gameGrid.checkForWin(); } } }
Winning Algorithm The approach I've taken is very simplistic: just scan each row, column and diagonal looking for a winning run. This isn't particularly efficient (we're scanning the board multiple times) but that's not a problem for small board sizes. However, it has two fairly compelling attributes:

• It's simple to understand
• It works for arbitrary-sized boards.

My favourite alternative algorithm is to make use of the properties of Magic Squares. Using these, you can scan the board a single time to determine if a player has one. This is achieved by determining if a cell has been selected by a player and if so incrementing their counter based on the magic square value for that index. For a 3x3 board, if a players total equals 15, they win!

Screenshots So, what does it look like at this early beta stage...?

Start of a new game:

We have a winner!


Another winner on a 7x7 board (the person playing crosses needs more practice me thinks :-):



What's Next

• The javascript code is currently horrid and needs to be refactored with dynamite.
• Add ability to play "the computer".
• Config option to allow variable-sided playing grids.
• Once the game is stopped, we need to disallow further board clicks.
• Leverage more QML facilities to simplify the code further.
• Visual improvements (animation for a winning run maybe?)
• Ability to change player that starts.
• Score-keeping and "best of 'n' games " support (particularly useful when the kids beat you repeatedly ;-)
• Menu to start new game.

The code is on github, so get forking!

In Conclusion My "clean-room" implementation is far from perfect at the moment, but it's been a fantastic learning exercise so far and a lot of fun!

There are of course other QML noughts-and-crosses games out there. They come with varying licenses, some use C++ for the game logic, and most -- if not all -- are hard-coded to produce a 3x3 board only. Additionally, they generally use graphical representations for the noughts and crosses whereas here, I'm just using styled text. If you're interested, compare my github code with, for example, the Qt version to see the different approaches taken:

• http://qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/declarative-toys-tic-tac-toe.html

See Also

• Ubuntu Touch Collections page
• Ubuntu SDK documentation
• https://qt-project.org/doc/

At the end of April, we set the goal to have Ubuntu Touch be dogfoodable on the Nexus and Nexus 4 phones. By that we mean, the goal is to make it so that we can use our phones exclusively as our phones. Today I chatted with some of the engineering managers involved to see how much progress we have made towards that. I am happy to say that it looks like we are still on track for this goal. However, there do appear to be some risky parts, so I am keeping my fingers crossed.

• You can make and receive phone calls: Done!
• You can make and receive sms messages: Done!
• You can browse the web on 3g data: Tony had been blocked on some technical issues, but thinks he's through them, so is in the debugging phase. He expects to have this done by end of May as per the dogfooding goal. For me, personally, this is the only missing part for me to be able to use the phone as my main phone around town. So, if Tony cracks this nut, then I will put away my old phone and start using my Ubuntu Phone exclusively.
• You can browse the web on wifi: Done! This has actually been done for quite a while.
• You can switch between wifi and 3g data: There are 2 parts to this work. There is low level networking code to get done, and then there is UI to enable it. That means that the Phone Foundations team and the Desktop team both have work to do. Both teams expect to get it done for May, but the work is not started yet.
• The proximity sensore dims the screen when you lift the phone to talk on it: There are two parts to this also. Gather the sensor data and then making the phone app use the sensor data. Work has not started for this part either.
• You can import contacts from somewhere, and you can add and edit contacts: There is some work done on this that imports from a *.csv file. I expect there will be some crude support for this in time for the May goal. It might be fun for someone to try out a more elegant implementation. Ubuntu Phone is using Evolution Data Server for the contacts store, so there may be folks out there who already have the experience to do this easily.
• When you update your phone your user data is retained, even if updating with phablet-flash: Done! This part being done makes the contacts import less important to me because as I add contacts they won't get blown away. On the other hand, it means it is worth it to import contacts, since you won't have to re-important as you update your phone each day (while it is in development).

LTTng (Linux Trace Toolkit - next generation) is a highly efficient system tracer that allows tracing of the kernel and userspace. It also provides tools to view and analyse the gathered trace data.  So let's see how to install and use LTTng kernel tracing in Ubuntu. First, one has to install the LTTng userspace tools:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install lttng-tools LTTng was already recently added into the Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy kernel, however, with earlier releases one needs to install the LTTng kernel driver using lttng-modules-dkms as follows:

sudo apt-get install lttng-modules-dkms It is a good idea to sanity check to see if the tools and driver are installed correctly, so first check to see the available kernel events on your machine:
sudo lttng list -k And you should get a list similar to the following:
Kernel events: ------------- mm_vmscan_kswapd_sleep (loglevel: TRACE_EMERG (0)) (type: tracepoint) mm_vmscan_kswapd_wake (loglevel: TRACE_EMERG (0)) (type: tracepoint) mm_vmscan_wakeup_kswapd (loglevel: TRACE_EMERG (0)) (type: tracepoint) mm_vmscan_direct_reclaim_begin (loglevel: TRACE_EMERG (0)) (type: tracepoint) mm_vmscan_memcg_reclaim_begin (loglevel: TRACE_EMERG (0)) (type: tracepoint) .. Next, we need to create a tracing session:
sudo lttng create examplesession ..and enable events to be traced using:
sudo lttng enable-event sched_process_exec -k One can also specify multiple events as a comma separated list. Next, start the tracing using:
sudo lttng start and to stop and complete the tracing use:
sudo lttng stop sudo lttng destroy and the trace data will be saved in the directory ~/lttng-traces/examplesession-[date]-[time]/.  One can examine the trace data using the babeltrace tool, for example:
sudo babeltrace ~/lttng-traces/examplesession-20130517-125533 And you should get a list similar to the following:
[12:56:04.490960303] (+?.?????????) x220i sched_process_exec: { cpu_id = 2 }, { filename = "/usr/bin/firefox", tid = 4892, old_tid = 4892 } [12:56:04.493116594] (+0.002156291) x220i sched_process_exec: { cpu_id = 0 }, { filename = "/usr/bin/which", tid = 4895, old_tid = 4895 } [12:56:04.496291224] (+0.003174630) x220i sched_process_exec: { cpu_id = 2 }, { filename = "/usr/lib/firefox/firefox", tid = 4892, old_tid = 4892 } [12:56:05.472770438] (+0.976479214) x220i sched_process_exec: { cpu_id = 2 }, { filename = "/usr/lib/libunity-webapps/unity-webapps-service", tid = 4910, old_tid = 4910 } [12:56:05.478117340] (+0.005346902) x220i sched_process_exec: { cpu_id = 2 }, { filename = "/usr/bin/ubuntu-webapps-update-index", tid = 4912, old_tid = 4912 } [12:56:10.834043409] (+5.355926069) x220i sched_process_exec: { cpu_id = 3 }, { filename = "/usr/bin/top", tid = 4937, old_tid = 4937 } [12:56:13.668306764] (+2.834263355) x220i sched_process_exec: { cpu_id = 3 }, { filename = "/bin/ps", tid = 4938, old_tid = 4938 } [12:56:16.047191671] (+2.378884907) x220i sched_process_exec: { cpu_id = 3 }, { filename = "/usr/bin/sudo", tid = 4939, old_tid = 4939 } [12:56:16.059363974] (+0.012172303) x220i sched_process_exec: { cpu_id = 3 }, { filename = "/usr/bin/lttng", tid = 4940, old_tid = 4940 } The LTTng wiki contains many useful worked examples and is well worth exploring.

As it stands, LTTng is relatively light weight.   Research by Romik Guha Anjoy and Soumya Kanti Chakraborty shows that LTTng describes how the CPU overhead is ~1.6% on a Intel® CoreTM 2 Quad with four 64 bit Q9550 cores.  With measurements I've made with oprofile on a Nexus 4 with 1.5 GHz quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor shows a CPU overhead of < 1% for kernel tracing.  In flight recorder mode, one can generate a lot of trace data. For example, with all tracing enabled running multiple stress tests I was able to generate ~850K second of trace data, so this will obviously impact disk I/O.

What does every development team want? New contributors!

I'd like to suggest a simple process that can turn visitors to your website, list or IRC channel into a successful part of the development team. When people actually contribute, they quickly feel like a valuable part of the group. New people bring fresh energy, and new ideas.

At your next sprint or meeting, start dreaming. Is your user documentation well-written and up-to-date? Do you need promotion, or video guides? How about art or diagrams for your website? Speaking of your website, when was the last time all the links were tested, and it was checked for spelling and grammar? Create a nice, friendly list of tasks for your newcomers.

Could your codebase use some grooming, for common misspellings, for instance? (EBN is a great source for these). When you run across a bit of code which needs pruning or refactoring, or normalizing signal-slot stuff, the easy thing is to fix it while it's in front of your eyes. Instead, consider which of these small tasks can be filed as a "Junior Job", created for the purpose of getting those knowledgeable people to move from faithful user, to part of the team.

The Bugsquad and Quality Control teams can likely suggest more ideas, too.

KDE Junior Jobs can be easily found: http://kde.org/jj. Teams can create their own shortcut links too, such as Amarok has done, listed in the #amarok IRC channel topic: http://tinyurl.com/amarokjjs. Other tasks can be blogged about, posted on a trello, on the Community wiki; whatever your team likes to use. For more ideas, see http://community.kde.org/Getinvolved.

The Kubuntu team has a list of tasks in Trello, which works well.

So, when you feel like not fixing a little issue, don't feel lazy. Feel responsible! File a bug, make it a JJ, and call attention to those issues when new folks show up and ask, how can I help?


PS: Thanks to the #kde-www team for suggesting this blog. Einar77, neverdingo, mamarok; you are wonderful.

PPS: How LibreOffice does it: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks

After three Nights of Xubuntu, the Xubuntu team is able to present you a quick overview of some of the planned features and improvements for Xubuntu 13.10. Enjoy!

Software and development

On the software side, apt-offline will be included in our default installation after a few cycles of preparing and writing documentation for it. This will help our users who have impaired-bandwidth situations and usage documentation is already present in the 13.04 offline documentation. The team is also considering the possibility to add a keyboard shortcuts overlay to help new (and why not old) users with their shortcuts-fu. Finally, the team is looking to improve the Pavucontrol user interface to make it more intuitive.

The team also discussed if a heads-up display (HUD) would fit to the Xubuntu paradigm and if it would be viable to implement. The team decided that including or working with one should be postponed until after the long-term support (LTS) release since there isn’t a proof of concept of a HUD suitable for Xubuntu ready and developing one would take a lot of developer time. Further inquiry can take place, though.

Besides the additions and improvements to software, the team roughly discussed including a Xubuntu core meta package which would include only a basic system without various applications seen in the current default installation. Some team members are working on drafts for the contents for the package as you read this article. The meta package would be installable instead of the Xubuntu desktop package during installation.

Documentation

The team is keeping the pressure up on the documentation improvements. The team is looking to extend the re-written Xubuntu documentation from a few releases ago even further as well as to get the infrastructure rights to enable translations for the documentation.

In addition, another goal is to get started with the 12.04 documentation review to supply a more up-to-date version via a stable release update for the LTS users as well.

Community

As with the previous cycles, we will keep on focusing on community. One of our targets this cycle is to get several people new upload rights to the Xubuntu package set. We also hope the prospective developers can help create processes with the newly appointed QA team lead to help reinforce the QA team as well as help with their testing duties.

Milestone participation

As usually, Xubuntu is following the Ubuntu release schedule. While the release schedule is far from final, the Xubuntu team is planning to release one alpha and both betas. At the moment the alpha participation looks pretty certain but the details depend on the Xfce 4.12 release. We will keep sending updates as soon as we have any news.

Summary

In the end, this is a final tune-up before we head into developing the LTS release that is expected to be unleashed in April 2014.  Xubuntu presents a conservative desktop choice among the Ubuntu flavours.  As we head into the Saucy Salamander development cycle, we will be striving for excellence once more.

To read the full notes from the three meetings, refer to the following URLs: night 1, night 2, night 3. If you are interested in the original agenda for the nights, refer to the following URLs: development and milestone participation, forward-looking issues, software.

It feels like Friday! Why? I think it's because I am tired. I am tired because Virtual UDS turns out to be surprisingly intense.

Power to PeopleSo, that is to say, the second Virtual UDS is over. After experience my second vUDS, I think vUDS is really a boost for the transparency of the Ubuntu Project for a few reasons.

• Frequency. We can do it every 3 months instead of every 6 months. As I mentioned in the opening plenary, this is important because we don't actually plan only every 6 months anymore. Like any modern software project, we are continuously planning. The 3 month cadence for vUDS means that there will be less time between detecting a need to change plans and discussion about how to make those necessary changes. I pushed very hard to have the first vUDS quickly, because there was a lot of planning for Ubuntu Touch that was backed up and needed proper discussion. If we waited until now, a lot of the work would have started without a good opportunity for discussion.
• Access. Folks don't have to travel to wherever UDS is. People with specific interests can rock those interests with a laser focus, without having to dedicate a whole week away from home. Let's face it, traveling for 2 weeks a year to participate in UDS is something that only a few privileged people can swing. Many many more people can join a hangout.
• Persistence. The sessions are streamed live, but then instantly available for reviewing, along with the white board, links to blueprints, etc... Try it. Go to Summit for the UDS that just ended. Find a session. Click on the session. It's like you are there live. Discussions that used to exist only in the memories of a select few with some written traces are now persisted and available.

Personal FavesI won't go into a run down of the results, because that job is taken. However, here are some of my personal favorite discussions at this vUDS. These are my favorites based only on personal interests of mine. These are by no means the most important decisions or discussions. Just things that interest me a lot personally.
Rolling ReleaseAfter the unfortunate kerfufle last cycle when I pushed hard to move Ubuntu to a model of LTSs with rolling releases in between, it was niceto close in on one nice outcome. Namely, Colin has a technical solution that will allow users to subscribe to essentially the tip of development. Instead of using "raring" or "saucy" in your sources lists, you'll subscribe to a new name which is symlinked to whatever is the current development release. In this way, each day you will be on the latest. Even the day after a development release becomes a stable release, because the symlink will just point to the next development release.

I ended up with a couple of action items from this session. Mostly, to come up with a name and bring it to the next Tech Board meeting for approval. I'm very much leaning to "rolling", but I am open to discussion ;) This would mean you could say "I am on Raring", or "I am on Precise", or "I am on Rolling". "I am on Rolling" means that you are on the tip of development. Fun!
Touch Image TestingI've been very keen to get Ubuntu Touch out of "preview" mode and into our standard development processes so that they inherit all of the daily quality tools that we have in place. This means moving all the code of out PPAs and into the real archives, so that we get the benefits of all the efforts we have put into place around -proposed and archive maintenance. It also means getting smoke testing and regression testing automated on the Touch images. I loved hearing from the Phone Foundations team and the QA team about their vision for "not accepting regressions". We should have dog-foodable touch images as early as the end of this month. Then if we can keep the images fully usable with minimal regressions each day, we will go very fast towards completion.
Ubuntu Status StrackerI am partial to this topic because the status tracker started out as a labor of love for me. The first real bit of code that I wrote after joining canonical was to render my version of burndown charts. If I am not mistaken this code is still in use. In any case, status.ubuntu.com is critical to maintaining our planning, and ensuring that the status of the project is visible to all.

Unity 8 in 13.10While 13.10 is very very focused on Ubunty Touch for phones, we all know that the real prize is the fully converged client OS. With that in mind, I think it's important to get the code up on as many device types as possible as soon as possible. There was a rich discussion about the steps to offer Unity 8 on top of Mir as an option in 13.10. Now, keep in mind that the result will only be the Phone UI on the desktop, and the default will be the Unity that we know and love today (with Smart Scopes and other enhancements of course!). Still in all, I am betting that basing Unity 8 on QML means that it will be surprisingly functional on a desktop even though it won't have any real desktop support in terms of things like workspace switching, etc..

Back in 2010 I packaged Google’s ipaddr module because I needed a light weight IP address manipulation library that supported both IPv4 and IPv6 and (at the time) python-subnettree was IPv4 only.  Well, ipaddr is all grown up now and included in python3.3 as the ipaddress manipulation module in the standard library.  You can find details, as well as some description of the differences, in PEP 3144.

I just converted one package that I’m upstream for to use either ipaddr (for python2.6/2.7/3.2) or ipaddress instead of some custom code.  It turned out to be pretty easy to make it work with either.  Other than the name, the only difference I ran into was the removal of the common, generic IPAddress and IPNetwork functions that are replaced by ip_address and ip_network.

…
-import ipaddr
+try:
+    import ipaddress
+except ImportError:
+    import ipaddr as ipaddress
…
-    address = ipaddr.IPAddress(ip)
-    if isinstance(address, ipaddr.IPv4Address):
+    try:
+        address = ipaddress.ip_address(ip)
+    except AttributeError:
+        address = ipaddress.IPAddress(ip)
+    if isinstance(address, ipaddress.IPv4Address):
…

Currently, python3-ipaddr has no reverse-dependencies in the archive (python-ipaddr does).  Once python3.2 is dropped from Jessie, I think I’ll drop the python3-ipaddr binary on the assumption people newly coding for python3.3 should use ipaddress.  The python-ipaddr module will stick around for use with python2.7.