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I love maps — something that became clear to me when I was looking at the tag cloud of my bookmarks a few years back. One of my favorite blogs (now a book) is Frank Jabobs’ Strange Maps.

So it’s no coincidence that a number of my favorite MIT Mystery Hunt puzzles are map based. Trying to connect the two worlds, I sent Jacobs a write-up of the hunt and of a particularly strange sound-based map puzzle called White Noise that I worked with Don Armstrong to solve in the 2006 hunt. While I wasn’t paying attention, Jacobs did a very nice writeup of my writeup of the puzzle for Strange Maps!

There has been much teeth gnashing about the removal of the ‘Community’ link from the top of the ubuntu.com site. As a member of the Ubuntu Community Council I have tried to gather my thoughts before blogging about this. Recently, I read an article that got me rather upset.

The Community Link:
First I want to layout my thoughts on the primary issue of the ‘Community’ link being moved to the footer. It is my opinion that the importance of the change is elevated by the recent mis-communications between Canonical and the community. Some have pointed out that promises have been made, but not kept. I can categorically state that I, as a member of the Community Council, have seen an improved effort from Canonical to inform the Community Council. As an example we were informed prior to the public discussion of the suggestion ‘click packages’. From my perspective ‘click packages’ are much more likely to have an impact on Ubuntu than the placement of the ‘Community’ link.

There is a UDS session scheduled to discuss this and if you are interested I would suggest you attend. In that blueprint I made a suggestion that some data on page views should be looked at. Peter has posted the following:

AFTER Apr 15, 2013-May 9, 2013 compare to BEFORE Mar 21, 2013-Apr 14, 2013

Pageviews
-32.69%
90,700 vs 134,740

Unique Pageviews
-31.54%
76,853 vs 112,261

Avg. Time on Page
33.75%
00:01:24 vs 00:01:03

Entrances
2.68%
52,548 vs 51,174

Bounce Rate %
-1.04%
60.54% vs 61.17%

it appears to be a 1/3 drop-off in page views, with a 1/3 equal increase in time on page.

With this data it would appear that there is a drop off and the traffic to the page has decreased. There is a session at UDS to discuss this and if it is important to you I would attend the session and subscribe to the blueprint.

The Community Response:
I want to clearly indicate that this IS NOT aimed at the broad community, but those that historically over-react in a dramatic negative fashion. There have been multiple instances of community members invoking the Hitler meme in regards to Mark Shuttleworth and the Nazi party in regards to Canonical. I can not fathom any rational person invoking this imagery in regards to Mark or Canonical. In all my dealings with Mark he has been respectful, thoughtful and compassionate. When I analyze what Mark values it is the success of Ubuntu. He understands that difficult decisions will need to be made for that to happen. When the Code of Conduct was revised it was to help ensure that the pitfalls other open source projects have been derailed by can be avoided by the Ubuntu project. I will echo that I have yet to work with a Canonical employee who has not been willing to listen to feedback or been disrespectful.

As a community member I find such attacks a violation of the Code of Conduct and as a person I find the comparison to be completely unacceptable. It is one thing to disagree respectfully, but making comparison’s to Hitler or the Nazi party is not acceptable.

Yesterday in the Ubuntu Community Roundtable session and idea was put forth by Jono Bacon to remove the term ‘approved’ from the loco team lexicon. It was further suggested to remove the boundary restrictions currently in place. These ideas have been floating around in the community since, my first UDS, UDS-N in Orlando Florida.

For me one of the first things that I notice is that there are already exceptions to the ‘rules’. For example, there are city teams (Chicago and Dallas), but new city based teams are not allowed. I am in New York State so I might be a bit biased, but I would personally think having an Ubuntu New York City team would be good thing. New York City is the 8th largest city (population) in the world. It is also 342 mile from where I live so there is little chance that people from my area would travel there or vice-versa. In my city we actually have two Linux user groups; one at a prestigious technical university and one for the general community. The technical university focuses more on development, and the general community group on specific implementations of applications and general use. Two different groups with two different needs. Both groups exist and thrive separately as well as cooperate when interests overlap.

I want to be clear; I do not think this should be forced, nor do I think it should be something that requires approval.

It is my personal opinion that the challenges that face teams are each unique; they will vary based on culture, language, geographic distance, population density and other variables. Ubuntu users should be able to choose how to organize themselves without artificial organizational boundaries placed on them.

From my understanding the original structure was put in place to control the flow of resources like CDs, conference packs, etc. There will still be a need for some control in regards to resources, and this is an issue that must be discussed and worked out. I feel strongly that this need should not inhibit the freedom of Ubuntu users to organize and grow in a way that best suits the needs of their area or group.

If you are interested in having input on this discussion please attend the UDS session this Thursday and subscribe to the blueprint.

RT @TarekElTabey: “freesoftware” is a matter of liberty,not price. To understand the concept,U should think of “free” as in “free speech,”n…

In case you haven't heard about it, Colibri is an alternative to KDE Plasma notifications.

Colibri notifications are completely passive: when you move the mouse over them, they fade out and let you click the content behind them. They also have the handy ability to concatenate multiple notifications if they come from the same application (think about your friend who likes to press Enter every five words on IM...)

It has been a long time (2 years!) since I last touched Colibri code: mainly because it was working for me, so I spent my time on other projects. With the release of KDE SC 4.10, I noticed a problem though: there was no shadow behind the notification bubbles anymore.

This is fixed in 0.3.0. The nice thing about this fix is I was able to drop code I duplicated from Plasma internals by refactoring Colibri to use Plasma::Dialog. Less duplicated code should result in a more robust implementation, hopefully Colibri should be usable without patching for 2 more years :)

Another change I made was moving the project from Gitorious to git.kde.org, this brings you more translations.

You can get the source code from download.kde.org. Kubuntu 13.04 users can also get it from the Colibri PPA.

#LibreOffice (and other #freesoftware) started to be shipped on Extremadura's #Spain 40,000 PCs http://t.co/O9M4PAlNRT

“freesoftware” is a matter of liberty,not price. To understand the concept,U should think of “free” as in “free speech,”not as in“free beer”

Add a Modern UI-style Start menu to Windows 7 or 8 http://t.co/iLwAlogxL8 #Article #FreeSoftware #KnowYourPC #Windows8

@RegioneVeneto buone idee, specie per le infrastrutture. Peccato che non ci sia il #freesoftware, nonostante le norme nazionali

RT @perugiagnulug: Linux Night Maggio 2013 http://t.co/LUWH8CV96z #perugiagnulug #linux #opensource #freesoftware

After a very productive kick off, we’re back with the second day of the Ubuntu Developer Summit on the App Development track and the summary of sessions for today. Thank you everyone who participated in the sessions yesterday, either in hangouts or in IRC.

Here’s the list of app development sessions for today:

• At 14:00 UTC: App Development Roundtable
• At 15:05 UTC: SDK Tools and Qt Creator
• At 16:05 UTC: The Next Ubuntu App Showdown
• At 18:05 UTC: New API Documentation Website
• At 18:05 UTC: QML Friends API and UI Components
• At 19:05 UTC: Core Apps in Ubuntu Touch Preview Images
• At 19:05 UTC: Calendar Application and Backend for Ubuntu Touch

See you there!

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