Shutter lets you schedule automatic PC shutdowns and more:... http://t.co/egANv501 #Article #FreeSoftware #KnowYourPC |http://t.co/rBRuAeYo

KTouch Touch Typing Tutor

One of the perks of doing the release notes for the upcoming KDE SC 4.10 is that you get to try a lot of new applications. One of the highlights of tonight’s webmonkeying certainly is KTouch. It’s actually been around for a while, now Sebastian Gottfried has taken it under his wings and modernized the user interface. KTouch welcomes the user and takes it through the lessons, I’ve got to say that it’s all works rather spiffy, easy to understand and quite fun to use.

The user interface is done in QML, it uses Plasma’s QML Components, transitions and subtle animations. The application also nicely presents statistics about your performance and progress, it guides, but doesn’t restrict the user. Well done. :)

The new version of KTouch will be available with the KDE Applications 4.10, to be released on February 6th.

Changes:

dput-ng (1.4) unstable; urgency=low [ Arno Töll ] * Really fix #696659 by making sure the command line tool uses the most recent version of the library. * Mark several fields to be required in profiles (incoming, method) * Fix broken tests. * Do not run the check-debs hook in our mentors.d.n profile * Fix "[dcut] dm bombed out" by using the profile key only when defined (Closes: #698232) * Parse the gecos field to obtain the user name / email address from the local system when DEBFULLNAME and DEBEMAIL are not set. * Fix "dcut reschedule sends "None-day" to ftp-master if the delay is not specified" by forcing the corresponding parameter (Closes: #698719) . [ Luca Falavigna ] * Implement default_keyid option. This is particularly useful with multiple GPG keys, so dcut is aware of which one to use. * Make scp uploader aware of "port" configuration option. . [ Paul Tagliamonte ] * Hack around Launchpad's SFTP implementation. We musn't stat *anything*. "Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wabbits" (Closes: #696558). * Rewrote the test suite to actually test the majority of the codepaths we take during an upload. Back up to 60%. * Added a README for the twitter hook, Thanks to Sandro Tosi for the bug, and Gergely Nagy for poking me about it. (Closes: #697768). * Added a doc for helping folks install hooks into dput-ng (Closes: #697862). * Properly remove DEFAULT from loadable config blocks. (Closes: #698157). * Allow upload of more then one file. Thanks to Iain Lane for the suggestion. (Closes: #698855). . [ Bernhard R. Link ] * allow empty incoming dir to upload directly to the home directory . [ Sandro Tosi ] * Install example hooks (Closes: #697767).

Thanks to all the contributors!

For anyone who doesn’t know, you should check out the docs.

Sometimes I wonder, given all the things that have ever lived, what would scare me the most?

In today’s world we have Orcas and white sharks in the water, lions and tigers on land. And though not really scary, you probably don’t want to mess with a Cape Buffalo. There are definately extinct species that can really scare you, any kind of Tyrannosaurus or Spinosaurs are scary. If you don’t want to be eaten by one large dinosaur then being mauled by a bunch of large pack hunting chickens doesn’t sound like a particularly fun way to go either.

But there’s one thing that just frightens the hell out of me, Dunkleosteus. A large bony fish from the Devonian (~370mill years ago), this guy is the honey badger of extinct fish; first off, look at this skull:

Norwood Matt

(Wikipedia)

This thing is just a swimming nightmare, I mean, come on, ya gotta be kidding …

I even found this (uncredited) pic, not my idea of a good time:

So basically you take an Alien’s head from Alien and attach it to a fish. It doesn’t even have teeth. Those “teeth” you see are actually extensions of it’s skull; it’s basically skull teeth.

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@sil happy birthday! Also, no blog post this year?
Rob “‏@dealmeida” De Almeida

This will make the tenth of these little celebrations of me inching one year closer to death.

And people are already being nice to me on Twitter, even though it’s after midnight and you should all be in bed before you turn back into pumpkins.

It’s my birthday. This year I am thirty-seven. This seems, all of a sudden, to be old. Thirty-six… well, that’s a nice mathematical number, the square of six, the number of possible dice throws, the number of gallons in a barrel of beer. All this makes it seem closer to thirty. Thirty-seven…that’s basically forty, isn’t it?

Forty. Dammit. At some point I wasn’t paying attention, and while I wasn’t paying attention I got all old and responsible and stuff.

On the other hand, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Most of the things I dreamed of when I started writing on this site have come to pass. Or, as someone famous didn’t quite put it, this isn’t victory, but you can see it from here. I have a fabulous daughter, I have a present from my girlfriend sitting in the kitchen waiting for me to open it (which I am itching to touch but I promised her I wouldn’t), my job is great, the entire world’s knowledge is at my fingertips, the internet is available to me even when standing in a field. I’ve learned that the 2003 me was mostly a moron but had the kernel of some good ideas. I’m even learning to cook. Tickets at the Arsenal cost sixty-two quid and we’re once again fighting about DRM (this time in HTML5) and weathering the storm of uneducated commentary, but in the last thirty days we’ve seen the first 3D-printed building planned, facial recognition software defeated, and the Ubuntu phone released. It’s an exciting time to be alive, even if you’re nearly forty.

Happy birthday to me.

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The Ohio Local Community Team helds its inaugural educational session on Monday, 28 January 2013, in #ubuntu-us-oh on FreeNode IRC. The topic covered was "The Joy of BeagleBoard" and after the main presentation a lively discussion ensued. The transcript of the session has been posted with PNG graphic exports of the slides interleaved to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OhioTeam/IRC20130128.

There is not a known plan for what may be in store for February 2013 yet.

RT @jgbarah: A year with the master on #freesoftware http://t.co/h2mtgHSn Another blog by one of our #MSWL students

A year with the master on #freesoftware http://t.co/h2mtgHSn Another blog by one of our #MSWL students

The War on Time

Whoosh! I’ve been incredibly quiet on my blog for the last 2-3 months. It’s been a crazy time but I’ll catch up and explain everything over the next few entries.

Firstly, I’d like to get out a few details about the last Ubuntu Developer Summit that took place in Copenhagen, Denmark in October. I’m usually really good at getting my blog post out by the end of UDS or a day or two after, but this time it just flew by so incredibly fast for me that I couldn’t keep up. It was a bit shorter than usual at 4 days, as apposed to the usual 5. The reason I heard for that was that people commented in previous post-UDS surveys that 5 days were too long, which is especially understandable for Canonical staff who are often in sprints (away from home) for the week before the UDS as well. I think the shorter period works well, it might need a bit more fine-tuning, I think the summary session at the end wasn’t that useful because, like me, there wasn’t enough time for people to process the vast amount of data generated during UDS and give nice summaries on it. Overall, it was a great get-together of people who care about Ubuntu and also many areas of interest outside of Ubuntu.

Copenhagen, Denmark

I didn’t take many photos this UDS, my camera is broken and only takes blurry pics (not my fault I swear!). So I just ended up taking a few pictures with my phone. Go tag yourself on Google+ if you were there. One of the first interesting things I saw when arriving in Copenhagen was the hotel we stayed in. The origami-like design reminded me of the design of the Quantal Quetzel logo that is used for the current stable Ubuntu release.

The Road ahead for Edubuntu to 14.04 and beyond

Stéphane previously posted about the vision we share for Edubuntu 14.04 and beyond, this was what was mostly discussed during UDS and how we’ll approach those goals for the 13.04 release.

This release will mostly focus on the Edubuntu Server aspect. If everything works out, you will be able to use the standard Edubuntu DVD to also install an Edubuntu Server system that will act as a Linux container host as well as an Active Directory compatible directory server using Samba 4. The catch with Samba 4 is that it doesn’t have many administration tools for Linux yet. Stéphane has started work on a web interface for Edubuntu server that looks quite nice already. I’m supposed to do some CSS work on it, but I have to say it looks really nice already, it’s based on the MAAS service theme and Stéphane did some colour changes and fixes on it already.

From the Edubuntu installer, you’ll be able to choose whether this machine should act as a domain server, or whether you would like to join an existing domain. Since Edubuntu Server is highly compatible with Microsoft Active Directory, the installer will connect to it regardless of whether it’s a Windows Domain or Edubuntu Domain. This should make it really easy for administrators in schools with mixed environments and where complete infrastructure migrations are planned.

You will be able to connect to the same domain whether you’re using Edubuntu on thin clients, desktops or tablets and everything is controllable using the Epoptes administration tool.

Many people are asking whether this is planned for Ubuntu / Ubuntu Server as well, since this could be incredibly useful in other organisations who have a domain infrastructure. It’s currently meant to be easily rebrandable and the aim is to have it available as a general solution for Ubuntu once all the pieces work together.

Empowering Ubuntu Flavours

This cycle, Ubuntu is making some changes to the release schedule. One of the biggest changes made  this cycle is that the alpha and beta releases are being dropped for the main Ubunut product. This session was about establishing how much divergence and changes the Ubuntu Flavours (Ubuntu Studio, Mythbuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu and Edubuntu) could have from the main release cycle. Edubuntu and Kubuntu decided to be a bit more conservative and maintain the snapshot releases. For Edubuntu it has certainly helped so far in identifying and finding some early bugs and I’m already glad that we did that. Mythbuntu is also a notable exception since it will now only do LTS releases. We’re tempted to change Edubuntu’s official policy that the LTS releases are the main releases and treat the releases in between more like technology previews for the next LTS. It’s already not such a far stretch from the truth, but we’ll need to properly review and communicate that at some point.

Valve at UDS and Steam for Linux

One of the first plenaries was from Valve where Drew Bliss talked about Steam on Linux. Steam is one of the most popular publishing and distribution systems for games and up until recently it has only been available on Windows and Mac. Valve (the company behind Steam and many popular games such as Half Life and Portal) are actively working on porting games to run natively on Linux as well.

Some people have asked me what I think about it, since the system is essentially using a free software platform to promote a lot of non-free software. My views on this is pretty simple, I think it’s an overwhelmingly good thing for Linux desktop adoption and it’s been proven to be a good thing for people who don’t even play games. Since the announcement from Valve, Nvidia has already doubled perfomance in many cases for its Linux drivers. AMD, who have been slacking on Linux support the last few years have beefed up their support drastically with the announcement of new drivers that were released earlier this month. This new collection of AMD drivers also adds support for a range of cards where the drivers were completely discontinued, giving new life to many older laptops and machines which would be destined for the dumpster otherwise. This benefits not only gamers, but everyone from an average office worker who wants snappy office suite performance and fast web browsing to designers who work with graphics, videos and computer aided design.

Also, it means that many home users who prefer Linux-based systems would no longer need to dual-boot to Windows or OS X for their games. While Steam will actively be promoting non-free software, it more than makes up for that by the enablement it does for the free software eco-system. I think anyone who disagrees with that is somewhat of a purist and should be more willing to make compromises in order to make progress.

Ubuntu Release Changes

Last week, there was a lot of media noise stating that Ubuntu will no longer do releases and will become a rolling release except for the LTS releases. This is certainly not the case, at least not any time soon. One meme that I’ve noticed increasingly over the last UDSs was that there’s an increasing desire to improve the LTS releases and using the usual Ubuntu releases more and more for experimentation purposes.

I think there’s more and more consensus that the current 6 month cycle isn’t really optimal and that there must be a better way to get Ubuntu to the masses, it’s just the details of what the better way is that leaves a lot to be figured out. There’s a desire between developers to provide better support (better SRUs and backports) for the LTS releases to make it easier for people to stick with it and still have access to new features and hardware support. Having less versions between LTS releases will certainly make that easier. In my opinion it will probably take at least another 2 cycles worth of looking at all the factors from different angles and getting feedback from all the stakeholders before a good plan will have formed for the future of Ubuntu releases. I’m glad to see that there is so much enthusiastic discussion around this and I’m eager to see how Ubuntu’s releases will continue to evolve.

Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are a lot like punk-rock songs. When it’s good, it’s really, really amazingly good and fun. When it’s bad, at least it will be over soon :)

Unfortunately, since it’s been a few months since the UDS, I can’t remember all the details of the lightning talks, but one thing that I find worth mentioning is that they’re not just awesome for the topic they aim to produce (for example, the one lightning talks session I attended was on the topic of “Tests in your software”), but since they are more demo-like than presentation-like, you get to learn a lot of neat tricks and cool things that you didn’t know before. Every few minutes someone would do something and I’d hear someone say something like “Awesome! I didn’t know you could do that with apt-daemon!”. It’s fun and educational and I hope lightning talks will continue to be a tradition at future UDSs.

Social

Stefano Rivera (fellow MOTU, Debianista, Capetonian, Clugger) wins the prize for person I’ve seen in the most countries in one year. In 2012, I saw him in Cape Town for Scaleconf,  Managua during Debconf, Oakland for a previous UDS and Copenhagen for this UDS. Sometimes when I look at silly little statistics like that I realise what a great adventure the year was!

Between the meet ‘n’ greet, an evening of lightning talks and the closing party (which was viking themed and pretty awesome) there was just one free evening left. I used it to gather with the Debian folk who were at UDS. It was great to see how many Debian people were attending, I think we had around a dozen or so people at the dinner and there were even more who couldn’t make it since they work for Canonical or Linaro and had to attend team dinners the same evening. It was as usual, great to put some more faces to names and get to know some people better.

It was also great to have a UDS with many strong technical community folk present who is willing to engage in discussion. There were still a few people who felt missing but it was less than at some previous UDSs.

I also discovered my face on a few puzzles! They were a *great* idea, I saw a few people come and go to work on them during the week, they seem to have acted as good menial activities for people to fix their brains when they got fried during sessions :)

Overall, this was a good and punchy UDS. I’ll probably not make the next one in Oakland due to many changes in my life currently taking place (although I will remotely participate), but will probably make the one later this year, especially if it’s in Europe. I’ll also make a point of live-blogging a bit more, it’s just so hard remembering all the details a few months after the fact. Thanks to everyone who contributed their piece in making it a great week!

Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software http://t.co/vgBmb4y5 #freesoftware #FSF #GNU #opensource

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Mi nueva joya... Happy Hacking by Richard #Stallman en mi HP mini. #excited. #gnu/#linux #fsf #freesoftware #freedom http://t.co/lLMQHRbw

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.@CyanogenMod now uses a non-free bug tracker that is gratis for #FreeSoftware initiatives. Learn from #BitKeeper! http://t.co/FGJr6Bmh

It’s official. I’ve signed the paperwork. I’ve told everyone at CC.

On February 19th I begin as Release Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation.

I can say a ton more about my time at CC; experiences, what I learned, who I worked with, all that. But instead saying too much, and not enough, I’ll just say:

Looking forward to the future.

(potentially) related posts:

1. Change of venue