At first I thought it was just a cute Christmas gift. Among a whole heap from my Mum and Dad, nestled next to a coconut (yes, that’s right, an actual coconut). What looked like a Canon lens was actually a mug, carefully crafted to look like a Canon lens. There are a few differences between the mug and the lens it apes if you look closer (“ESF” rather than “EF-S”) but it’s certainly convincing at a glance. And the lens cap/hood can be used as a biscuit holder! Not that I’d know of course… *ahem*

I started using the mug last week, carrying it to the water cooler and back. But it turned out to be refreshing in a whole different way. Almost every time I walked down the corridor someone commented on it. Thanks to this marvellous mug, I met two or three photographers, including someone who also photographs weddings in Hampshire! I never imagined that a piece of plastic, a simple simulacrum, would start great conversations and lead to new friendships. Thanks, Mum and Dad!

P.S. I’ve been blogging every Saturday since the start of the year. From next week, new blog posts will appear on a Monday. Happy reading!

No! Not the Battle of Waterloo. Not the Abba song. We are talking Jammin’ at Waterloo, Canada. Home of the University of Waterloo. Today I interviewed dscassel of the Canadian Loco Team about holding an Ubuntu Global Jam in the hopes of inspiring others to ‘Jorge Castro It!’

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It appears amazingly easy and immensely rewarding to hold an Ubuntu Global Jam.

resources:

While improving GNOME’s servers Nagios Notifications,  I ended up working on a nice way to notify the relevant folks through GTalk in case something could go wrong on any of the hosted services. Looking around on the web, I found Seth Vidal’s script, modified it to suit my needs and made it working with GTalk, here’s the result:

!/usr/bin/python -tt

import warnings
warnings.simplefilter("ignore")

import xmpp
from xmpp.protocol import Message

from optparse import OptionParser
import ConfigParser
import sys
import os

parser = OptionParser()
opts, args = parser.parse_args()

if len(args) < 1:
    print "xmppsend message [to whom, multiple args]"
    sys.exit(1)

msg = args[0]

msg = msg.replace('\\n', '\n')

# Connect to the server
c  =  xmpp.Client('gmail.com')
c.connect( ( 'talk.google.com', 5223 ) )

# Authenticate to the server
jid  =  xmpp.protocol.JID( 'example@gmail.com' )
c.auth( jid.getNode( ), 'yourgmailpassword' )

if len(args) < 2:
    r = c.getRoster()
    for user in r.keys():
        if user == username:
            continue
        c.send(Message(user, '%s' % msg))
else:
    for user in args[1:]:
        c.send(Message(user, '%s' % msg))

I, then, added the command definitions on the relevant Nagios configuration file:

define command{
        command_name    host-notify-by-xmpp
        command_line    /home/user/bin/xmppsend "Host '$HOSTALIAS$' is $HOSTSTATE$ - Info : $HOSTOUTPUT$" $CONTACTPAGER$
        }

define command{
        command_name    notify-by-xmpp
        command_line    /home/user/bin/xmppsend "$NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ $HOSTNAME$ $SERVICEDESC$ $SERVICESTATE$ $SERVICEOUTPUT$ $LONGDATETIME$" $CONTACTPAGER$
        }

And in the end on contacts.cfg:

define contact {
        contact_name    admin
        use             generic-contact
        alias           Full Name
        email           example@gmail.com
        pager           example@gmail.com
        service_notification_commands   notify-by-xmpp
        host_notification_commands      host-notify-by-xmpp
}

When done just reload the configuration files with:

sudo /etc/init.d/nagios3 reload

Enjoy your new XMPP Nagios notifications!

Update: if you don’t want the script to store your username or password, you can use the following modified script together with a nice config file like this one:

[xmpp_nagios]
username=example@gmail.com
password=yourgmailpassword

Then you can invoke xmppsend this way:

xmppsend -a config.ini

There is tons of advice on the Internet (e.g., on the academic blogs I read) for prospective doctoral students. I am very happy with my own graduate school choices but I feel that I basically got lucky. Few people are saying the two things I really wish someone had told me before I made the decision to get a PhD:

Most People Getting Doctorates Probably Shouldn't

In most fields, the only thing you need a PhD for is to become a professor -- and even this requirement can be flexible. You can have almost any job in any company or non-profit without a PhD. You can teach without a PhD. You can write books without a PhD. You can do research and work in thinktanks without a PhD. You don't even always need a PhD to grant PhDs to other people: two of my advisors at the Media Lab supervised PhD work but did not have doctorates themselves! Becoming a tenured professor is more difficult without a doctorate, but it is not impossible. There are grants and jobs outside of universities that require doctorates, but not nearly as many as most people applying for PhDs programs think.

Getting a doctorate can even hurt: If you want to work in a company or non-profit, you are usually better off with 4-6 years of experience doing the kind of work you want to do than with the doctorate and the less relevant experience of getting one. Starting salaries for people with doctorates are often higher than for people with masters degrees. But salaries for people with masters degrees and 5 years of experience are even higher -- and that's before you take into account the opportunity costs of working for relatively low graduate student wages for half a decade.

PhD take an enormous amount of time and, in most programs, you spend a huge amount of this time doing academic busy work, teaching, applying for grants or fellowships, and writing academic papers that very few people read. These are skills you'll need to be a successful professor. They are useful skills for other jobs too, but not as useful as the experience of actually doing those other jobs for the time it takes to get the degree.

Evaluating Graduate Programs

If you are still convinced you need a doctorate, or any graduate degree for that matter, you will need to pick a program. Plenty of people will offer advice on how to pick the right program and trying to balance all the complicated and contradictory advice can be difficult. Although I love my program and advisors, I've known many less happy students. Toward that end, there are two pieces of meta-advice that I wish everybody was told before they applied:

Doing these two things means you don't have to worry about trying to think of all the axes on which you want to evaluate a program or pour through admissions material which is only tangentially connected to the reality you'll live for a long time. What matters most is the outcomes, of course, because you're be living the rest of your life for a lot longer than you'll be in the PhD program.

It’s time for another update of what is happening in the sub-forum.

Some of the members are having problems with font rendering:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1919448

We have had several calls for testing in the past week, we love to see these types of posts, as we feel the feedback we give to the developers will help them make things better.

Compiz Testing
Clickpad (multitouch, “button-less” trackpads)
Unity 5.4 with HUD
Upstart 1.4
Alsa 1.025

We also saw an interesting thread, on testing the non-pae mini.iso

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1924455

There was a blast from the past, with a user wanting to use LILO with Precise:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1926142

He finds it more secure for what he needs, rather than using grub2.

As always if you are having a problem with Precise, check the sub-forum, as you problem may have already been solved.

We have uploaded a new Precise linux kernel. Please note the ABI bump.
The most notable changes are as follows:

* Disable RC6p (deep RC6) for Sandy Bridge
* Enable plain RC6 by default on Sandy Bridge
* Add NumaChip support
* Update Yama patch set with upstream v3.3
* Update Hyper-V storage, network, and mouse drivers with patches slated for v3.4

The full changelog can be seen at:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/3.2.0-17.26

Microsoft Windows gets a new Logo for Version 8. It no longer tries to be a window or group of windows and a flag at once. My first impression was that the perspective looks off. I found out it is because the 2 columns have different width in the prespective, but with a rather subtle [...]

The White House website has been down for the first 8 days of my petition being on it.  It only has 4 days left to get 25,000 people to sign.  If the petition page doesn’t load, please comment on my blog.

The text of the petition [Sign it here]:

We believe that the corn subsidy is making the US weaker economically, making American’s less healthy and more dependent on oil. It costs tax payers billions of dollars a year to subsidize corn and what do we get in return?

High Fructose Corn Syrup in our food. Corn ethanol is not working, other alternatives like sugarcane aren’t being looked at. Many of our farmers grow only corn, which results in higher prices for other fruits and vegetables.

And more (reasons) at endcornsubsidy.wordpress.com

[Sign it here] [Share the short link wh.gov/K1t]

On February 5th several people from the Ubuntu California team headed over to Redwood City for dinner with Ubuntu-loving attendees from the Linaro Connect conference.

It was Super Bowl Sunday so we lucked out at a pizzeria that lacks a television – they seemed to be doing a brisk delivery service but the restaurant was pretty empty! Thanks again to Chris Johnston for contacting me prior to the event to arrange a time so I could find a venue and we could organize this.

I also hosted had another Ubuntu Hour and Debian Dinner evening the following evening. It was a lot of fun, even managed a small GPG keysigning at dinner.

Finally, I love animals, but I didn’t know what a pangolin was until Mark Shuttleworth announced Precise Pangolin as the 12.04 release name. He explains his selection of the pangolin:

What an interesting creature! Now I haven’t yet met one (San Diego Zoo does have some tree pangolins, but that’s pretty far from here), but I have had a chance to learn about them over these past few months. The first thing that is abundantly clear is that they’re now endangered due to loss of habitat and poaching.

The SavePangolins.org site is an aggregation of information about pangolins and organizations that folks can donate to to help the preservation of them and other animals sharing their Asian and African habitats.

I bought a spiffy t-shirt, 100% of profits go to support pangolin conservation.

The pangolin toy came from Amazon.com, great for booths when people ask what a pangolin is!

Our two year old LTS release has had an update, 10.04.4. It adds all the current bugfixes and security updates to keep your systems fresh. Download now.

The Ubuntu Global Jam is coming soon. To be exact the Jam will run March 2nd through the 4th all across the globe and that is roughly two weeks away. When I first think about Global Jam events I think technical:

Recently, though, I realized that the Ubuntu Global Jam must engage others in the community of Ubuntu users. The Creative. Those that create beauty. The artists! There are some easy ways to contribute:

Why contribute?

Here are two places to upload your artwork:

You can also use flickr or twipics and just announce your art via twitter using the #ubuntu hastag. Let the world of Ubuntu users see your talent!! Its time for an Ubuntu Art Jam. Speaking of that… there is a need for some artwork that represents the Ubuntu Art Jam!!

This is something you can do on your computer fairly easily, provided you have OpenSSL installed, which I would be willing to bet you do. Take a bitmap image (any image will work fine, I’m just going to use bitmap headers in this example), such as the Ubuntu logo, and encrypt it with AES in ECB mode. Then encrypt the same image with AES in CBC mode. Apply the 54-byte bitmap header to the encrypted files, and open up in an image viewer. Here are the commands I ran:

$ openssl enc -aes-256-ecb -in ubuntu.bmp -out ubuntu-ecb.bmp
$ openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -in ubuntu.bmp -out ubuntu-cbc.bmp
$ dd if=ubuntu.bmp of=ubuntu-ecb.bmp bs=1 count=54 conv=notrunc
$ dd if=ubuntu.bmp of=ubuntu-cbc.bmp bs=1 count=54 conv=notrunc

Now, open all three files, ubuntu.bmp, ubuntu-ecb.bmp and ubuntu-cbc.bmpp, and see what you get. Here are my results with the password “chi0eeMieng7Ohe8ookeaxae6ieph1″:

Feel free to play with different passwords, and notice the colors change. Or use a different block cipher such as “bf-ecb”, “des-ecb”, or “rc2-ecb” with OpenSSL, and notice details change.

What’s going on here? Why can I clearly make out the image when encrypted with EBC? Well, EBC, or electronic codeblock, is a block cipher that operates on individual blocks at a time. ECB does not use an initialization vector to kickstart the encryption. So, each block is encrypted with the same algorithm. If any underlying block is the same as another, then the encrypted output is exactly the same. Thus, all “#000000″ hexadecimal colors in our image, for example, will have the same encrypted output, per block (thus, why you see stripes).

Compare this to CBC, or cipher-block chaining. An initialization vector must be used before the encryption can begin. Because I chose AES in 256-bit mode, AES is operating on 256-bit blocks at a time. The password in our case is our initialization vector. It is hashed to provide a 256-bit output, then AES encrypts the hash, plus the first block to provide a 512-bit output, 256-bits for the next vector, and 256-bits encrypted output. That vector is then used to encrypt the next 256-bits. This chaining algorithm continues to the end of the file. This ensures that every “#000000″ hexadecimal color will have a different output, thus causing the file to appear as random (I have an attacking algorithm to still leak information out of a CBC-encrypted file, but that will be for another post).

Hopefully, this simple illustration convinces you to use CBC, or at least to not use ECB, when encrypting data that might be public.

Firmware Test Suite Live (fwts-live) is a USB live image that will automatically boot and run the Firmware Test Suite (fwts) - it will run on legacy BIOS and also UEFI firmware (x86_64) bit systems.

fwts-live will run a range of fwts tests and store the results on the USB stick - these can be reviewed while running fwts-live or at a later time on another computer if required.

To install fwts-live on to a USB first download either a 32 or 64 bit image from http://odm.ubuntu.com/fwts-live/ and then uncompress the image using:

 bunzip2 fwts-live-*.img.bz2  

Next insert a USB stick into your machine and unmount it. Now one has to copy the fwts-live image to the USB stick - one can find the USB device using:

 dmesg | tail -10 | grep Attached  
 [ 2525.654620] sd 6:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk  

..so the above example it is /dev/sdb, and copy using:

 sudo dd if=fwts-live-oneiric-*.img of=/dev/sdb  
 sync  

..and then remove the USB stick.

To run, insert the USB stick into the machine you want to test and then boot the machine.  This will start up fwts-live and then you will be shown a set of options - to either run all the fwts batch tests, to select individual tests to run, or abort testing and shutdown.


If you chose to run all the fwts batch tests then fwts will automatically run through a series of tests which will take a few minutes to complete:


and when complete one can chose to view the results log:


if "Yes" is selected then one can view the results. The cursor up/down and page up/down keys can be used to navigate the results log file.  When you have completed viewing the results log, fwts-live will inform you where the results have been saved on the USB stick (so that one can review them later by plugging the USB stick into a different machine).


A full user guide to fwts-live is available at: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareEnablementTeam/Documentation/FirmwareTestSuiteLive

To help interpret any errors or warnings found by fwts we recommend visiting  fwts reference guide - this is has comprehensive description of each test and detailed explanations of warnings and error messages.

Below is a demo of fwts-live running inside QEMU:

Kudos to Chris Van Hoof for producing fwts-live

ecryptfs-utils-96 has been released, with upstream tarballs (and signatures) available on Launchpad at:


And now in the Ubuntu precise development release.

Special thanks to first time contributors Colin King and Eddie Garcia!

[ Dustin Kirkland ]
  * CONTRIBUTING:
    - added a new file to describe how to contribute to ecryptfs
  * === added directory img/old, img/old/ecryptfs_14.png,
    img/old/ecryptfs_192.png, img/old/ecryptfs_64.png:
    - saving the old logos/branding for posterity
  * debian/copyright, img/COPYING:
    - added CC-by-SA 3.0 license
    - use the text version
  * img/ecryptfs_14.png, img/ecryptfs_192.png, img/ecryptfs_64.png:
    - added scaled copies of images used for Launchpad.net branding
  * src/utils/ecryptfs-recover-private: LP: #847505
    - add an option to allow user to enter the mount passphrase,
      in case they've recorded that, but forgotten their login
      passphrase
  * src/libecryptfs/sysfs.c: LP: #802197
    - default sysfs to /sys, if not found in /etc/mtab
    - it seems that reading /etc/mtab for this is outdated
    - ensure that ecryptfs works even if there is no sysfs entry
      in /etc/mtab
  * src/key_mod/ecryptfs_key_mod_tspi.c: LP: #462225
    - fix TPM and string_to_uuid 64bits issue
    - thanks to Janos for the patch

  [ Tyler Hicks ]
  * CONTRIBUTING:
    - clarified how to contribute to the ecryptfs kernel module
  * tests/lib/etl_funcs.sh:
    - created eCryptfs test library of bash functions for use in test
      cases and test harnesses
  * test/etl_add_passphrase_key_to_keyring.c:
    - created a C helper program to allow bash scripts to interface to
      the libecryptfs function that adds passphrase-based keys to the
      kernel keyring
  * tests/kernel/tests.rc, tests/userspace/tests.rc:
    - created a test case category files for test harnesses to source
      when running testcases of a certain category (destructive, safe,
      etc.)
  * tests/run_tests.sh:
    - created a test harness to run eCryptfs test cases
  * tests/kernel/miscdev-bad-count.sh,
    tests/kernel/miscdev-bad-count/test.c:
    - created test case for miscdev issue reported to mailing list
  * tests/kernel/lp-885744.sh:
    - created test case for pathconf bug
  * tests/kernel/lp-926292.sh:
    - created test case for checking stale inode attrs after setxattr
  * tests/new.sh:
    - created new test case template to copy from
  * tests/userspace/verify-passphrase-sig.sh,
    tests/userspace/verify-passphrase-sig/test.c:
    - created test case, for make check, to test the creation of
      passphrase-based fekeks and signatures
  * configure.ac, Makefile.am, tests/Makefile.am, tests/lib/Makefile.am,
    tests/kernel/Makefile.am, tests/userspace/Makefile.am:
    - updated and created autoconf/automake files to build the new tests
      directory
    - added make check target

  [ Eddie Garcia ]
  * img/*: LP: #907131
    - contributing a new set of logos and branding under the CC-by-SA3.0
      license

  [ Colin King ]
  * tests/kernel/extend-file-random.sh,
    tests/kernel/extend-file-random/test.c:
    - Test to randomly extend file size, read/write + unlink
  * tests/kernel/trunc-file.sh, tests/kernel/trunc-file/test.c:
    - Test to exercise file truncation
  * tests/kernel/directory-concurrent.sh,
    tests/kernel/directory-concurrent/test.c:
    - test for directory creation/deletion races with multiple processes
  * tests/kernel/file-concurrent.sh,
    tests/kernel/file-concurrent/test.c:
    - test for file creation/truncation/unlink races with multiple
      processes
  * tests/kernel/inotify.sh, tests/kernel/inotify/test.c:
    - test for proper inotify support
  * tests/kernel/mmap-dir.sh, tests/kernel/mmap-dir/test.c:
    - test that directory files cannot be mmap'ed
  * tests/kernel/read-dir.sh, tests/kernel/read-dir/test.c:
    - test that read() on directory files returns the right error
  * tests/kernel/setattr-flush-dirty.sh:
    - test that the modified timestamp isn't clobbered in writeback
  * tests/kernel/inode-race-stat.sh, tests/kernel/inode-race-stat/test.c:
    - test for inode initialization race condition

 -- Dustin Kirkland  Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:23:18 -0600                                                                                                                                                                                                        

:-Dustin

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS, the fourth maintenance update to Ubuntu’s 10.04 LTS release. This release includes updated server, desktop, alternate installation CDs and DVDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures.

The Kubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Kubuntu 10.04.4. This release includes updated images for the desktop and alternate installation CDs and DVDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures.

This is the last planned maintenance release for the 10.04 LTS series. Future security updates and bug fixes will be individually downloadable from the Ubuntu archive in the same way as before, but no further updates to installation media will be provided for 10.04 LTS. The next LTS release, 12.04 LTS, will be released in April 2012. We recommend that users installing Ubuntu after April install the latest LTS release.

To Get Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS

To download Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS visit:

desktop: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download
server: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server/download

We recommend that all users read the release notes, which document caveats and workarounds for known issues. They are available at:

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/1004

To get Kubuntu 10.04.4 visit:

http://www.kubuntu.org

About Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS

This is the fourth and last planned maintenance release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, which continues to be supported with maintenance updates and security fixes until April 2013 on desktops and April 2015 on servers.

For the first time, this point release includes backported updated hardware support. In addition, numerous post-release updates have been integrated, and a number of bugs in the installation system have been corrected. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

See http://www.ubuntu.com/usn/lucid for a full list of Ubuntu security updates that have been applied to 10.04.4

See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu for specific information about a particular bug number. A complete list of post-release updates since 10.04.3 is available at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LucidLynx/ReleaseNotes/ChangeSummary/10.04.4

Helping Shape Ubuntu

If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways you can participate at:

http://www.ubuntu.com/community/participate/

About Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for desktops, laptops, netbooks and servers, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.

Professional services including support are available from Canonical and hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information about support, visit:

http://www.ubuntu.com/support

More Information

You can find out more about Ubuntu on our website:

http://www.ubuntu.com/

To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu’s very low volume announcement list at:

http://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce

Originally posted to the ubuntu-announce mailing list by Kate Stewart on Thu Feb 16 22:23:38 UTC 2012

It is release day in Phonon land and the Phonominals are singing in joy of the new releases of Phonon VLC and Phonon GStreamer.

Phonon VLC 0.5.0 may be obtained from KDE’s servers as usual.

For more information on Phonon GStreamer 4.6.0 head on over to Trever’s amazing blog post.

Phonon VLC 0.5 is the most stable release yet to see the light of day!

Almost the entire code base was redone to be faster, more efficient, more maintainable and of course more reliable. Additionally this release introduces compatibility with the upcoming VLC 2.0 release as well as improved support for more advanced video features such as subtitle and audio channel selection.

Enjoy your multimedia!

Harald and the Phonominals.

Participa, colabora, comparte, disfruta...

How is Unity designed?  How can I contribute to this process?  Why did you make thus and such decision? The Unity Design Team is frequently asked these questions, and this article aims to de-mystify our design process and highlight the different ways in which volunteer contributions can help improve the Ubuntu user experience.

Before diving into the design process, let’s take a look at the types of contributions Ubuntu receives.  Ubuntu contributions can be divided into two equally valuable categories: whole project contributions and piecemeal contributions.

Whole project contributions are autonomous projects created by a single developer or a group of community developers and designers working together.  One example of such a project is the excellent http://ubuntu-tweak.com.  Some user experience design tasks require frequent ongoing high bandwidth dialogue between design team members; this is easier to achieve when a small group of contributors take responsibility for the end to end delivery of a project.  Whole project contributions empower the project contributors to take complete control of all aspects of the user experience design.

Piecemeal contributions are contributions that help one individual aspect of a larger project.  Examples of piecemeal contributions include bug reports, small patches and suggestions on how to improve public design specifications.  Coordination is required to ensure that the piecemeal contributions fit together into a coherent whole.  Thus some of the user experience responsibility is ceded from individual piecemeal contributors to the project’s steering team.  In the case of the Ubuntu desktop, the design decisions are coordinated by the Unity Design Team.  In this environment, many elements are contributed by external designers and developers, but the areas of user experience design that require high bandwidth, frequent communication are dealt with by the Unity Design Team.

 

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1. Divining the future

Before we get started on designing anything, we need a long term vision and strategy of where we want to be in several years time, and a high level roadmap of what we need to do in order to get there.  My personal take on the Ubuntu vision is that Ubuntu aims to “help humanity by creating a fully open source free software platform that becomes the platform of choice for all computing devices and form factorsâ€.  By virtue of reading this article you are probably one of the small minority of the population who cares and feels passionately about the benefits of open source computing.  But when the majority of people consider buying or using a product, they make a decision based on cost, personal utility, and user experience.  ‘Open source’ versus ‘closed proprietary software’ doesn’t often come into the equation.  So if we are going to succeed in making Ubuntu the platform of choice for the world, one of the things we need to do is deliver a user experience that surpasses the standard set by our closed source proprietary software competitors.  And to do this we need a vision to aim for, of where the world is going to be in 2, 5, and 10 years time.

To help shape our strategy and roadmap we listen to what the brightest minds are saying by:

 

 

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2. The first step in designing a feature; what problem are we trying to solve?

The development of a feature starts as soon as resource becomes available.  After selecting the next appropriate item from our roadmap, the first questions we ask are “what problem(s) are we trying to solve?†and “what are our objectives?â€.  One useful tool to help define the problem is to explore the problem using user narratives, and think about the impact of the problem on different personas (user archetypes which represent patterns of behaviour and common goals).  Another useful tool is to undertake requirements capture with members of the target audience.

 

 

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3. What thinking has already gone in to trying to solve this problem?

Once the problem that we are trying to solve is clearly defined, the next step is to assemble the previous thinking that has gone into the problem area.  Understanding what has gone before and the current state of the art is the starting point from which new connections can be made, concepts built upon and extended, and new ideas created.  Mailing lists, bug reports, and forums are scoured for pertinent information and products relevant to the problem space are examined.  In addition to the collation of previous thinking, fresh research can also be conducted to generate new insights.  This solid understanding of the existing problem space is a elemental ingredient of the design process.

 

 

---

4. Ideation

Ideation requires high bandwidth communication between all participants, both for the rapid expression and debate of ideas, and to ensure that everyone in the multi-disciplinary group rapidly gains and retains a shared understanding of the problem space.  When starting a new project at Canonical, we have found it very beneficial to get all the developers, visual designers, UX architects, etc… who will eventually work on the new feature together in a single physical location and spend a week brainstorming and exploring ideas.  In addition, these design exploration sessions help gel the feature team together, and the interpersonal bonds that are established improve team communication and set a positive tone of discourse that persists throughout the entire course of the project.

During these ideation sessions, we:

At the end of this stage we will have a collection of ideas for solving the problem.  And this collection of ideas will have been discussed and examined by the whole feature team.

 

 

---

5. User Experience design

User Experience design starts with the ideas generated in ideation, and through an iterative process evolves the concepts and fleshes out the interaction details.  Typically a UX architect will take the lead on designing a feature, and as they work through this process they will continually bounce ideas off other members of the feature team and other designers.   User testing is also utilised to provide feedback and inform the evolution of the design.   The UX architect’s work will also be reviewed with the overall UX lead to ensure consistency and linkage with all the other projects that are being designed and developed in parallel.

User Experience architects have a number of tools at their disposal for designing and defining the functionality of a feature or product.   Multiple tools are used simultaneously in order to approach the design from different perspectives; for example wireframes show grouping and hierarchy of elements at a specific moment in time, so they are frequently combined with use cases or sequence diagrams to ensure that the user journey centric viewpoint is also considered.

For very tactile and interactive elements, designing through prototype iteration is an invaluable technique.  An example of this in action is the recently released launcher reveal prototype.   In addition to defining the functionality, user experience design also involves taxonomy, association mapping, and personas.

 

 

---

6. Visual design

Visual design is the marrying of form and function, it affects user confidence and comfort and makes for a compelling experience.  As we work through each level of the design process, we are both iterating the design and adding further detail.  We start with coarse brushes making wide strokes and work our way to the point where we are using fine brushes to refine the final intricate attributes.  Human beings perceive visual information before they perceive analytical information, and Visual design is about reducing the mental workload for our audience whilst delivering a delightful and cohesive aesthetic experience.

 

 

---

7. Implementation

Development resource is the biggest bottleneck to getting new features implemented, so the most valuable way you can make piecemeal contributions is by taking items from the bug list and submitting patches.  Implementation is also part of the design process, because as a feature is built even more understanding is gained and further refinements are iterated.

 

 

---

8. Identifying user facing bugs and QA

After a feature lands it is time to start identifying bugs.  A good starting point is to look at the UX specification of a feature, and check that the implementation matches design.  Where there is a divergence, citing the relevant part of the specification in the bug report is both useful and will also raise the bug’s priority.  On the other hand, designs are never perfect and it may be that there is a bug with the design itself.  In this case it is also useful to cite the issue in the relevant UX specification as part of the bug report.  Unity UX specifications are available at http://design.canonical.com/the-toolkit/ , and we are currently working to increase the number of specifications that are publicly available.  Also all the design bugs that are currently queued for implementation are publicly available at underneath the “Upstream projects that can be worked on†header at http://people.canonical.com/~platform/design/upstream.html .

 

 

---

9. User testing

This will be coming soon in a subsequent article…

Development Update

And again we are in the most interesting time of the release cycle. Today we will hit Feature Freeze at around 21:00 UTC. The time where we stop introducing new features, packages, and APIs, and concentrate on fixing bugs in the development release. Today marks the end of a couple of very busy weeks for the various Ubuntu Development Teams as they rushed to meet the deadline for the Import Freeze. From now on testing, fixing and solidifying is in the cards.

Next week is User Interface Freeze, the week after we will hit Beta Freeze, so yet a week later we can release Beta 1. Exciting times indeed.

Letting developers speak for themselves

With this being feature freeze week teams have been hard at work trying to finish off as many new things as possible. Jonathan Riddell gives an update on Kubuntu’s last minute work on features they hope to ship in 12.04.

Jeremy Bicha, Desktop hacker extraordinaire, highlighted some of the work which went into gnome-control-center recently. This kind of gives you an idea how much work, by lots of people, goes into Ubuntu every day.

Now is a great time to have a look at pastebinit again. It is a great tool to quickly share public data from the command line. Stéphane Graber just got out pastebinit 1.3, with heaps of new features and supported sites.

Many people have heard of Linaro already, but don’t really know what they are doing. Its website says “Linaro is a not-for-profit software engineering company investing in core Linux software and tools for ARM SoCs.†and that they “deliver software consolidation and optimization to our members, and provide ARM tools, Linux kernels and builds of key Linux distributions including Android and Ubuntu on member SoCs.†This admittedly makes it a bit hard to get excited about what these fine people are working on. To get really excited, watch this video in which Kiko Reis is talking at Linaro Connect.

In previous development updates we always talked about how this release is getting more and more testing and how 12.04 is going to be an exciting and super-stable release. If you want to be part of these efforts, Nicholas Skaggs has posted a number of blog posts, where you can easily get involved with testing. Here are the posts for Unity 5.4, clickpad devices and compiz 0.9.7.0-beta1. Testing and giving feedback is easy, just make sure you read the instructions carefully.

In the testing world there is always manual testing and automated testing. Check out this blog post on the OpenStack blog detailing how the test lab is put together. Especially for everyone interested in Ubuntu Server, this is a really interesting article explaining how a big team of people put all their excellence into this effort.

When “making hardware workâ€, a lot of what is happening behind the scenes is in bits called firmware. Read this excellent blog post explaining how the fwts package (Firmware test suite) can test your firmware by running a huge number of tests on it and even tell you how you can fix things if necessary.

Events

On the weekend of 2nd-4th March 2012 it is time for the Ubuntu Global Jam. Local Community teams around the globe meet to make Ubuntu better. For example we have these lined up right now: Australia working on localisation, the wiki, Ubuntu materials, and translations. In Europe there are jams in the Czech Republic, Italy, Slovenia and Spain. In the Americas there are jams in Mexico and the USA. In addition to that there is a “virtual jam†planned to work on the Ubuntu websites together. This is a great time to meet new friends, talk Ubuntu, learn something new and make Ubuntu better. If there is no jam near you, set one up, it is not hard.

Things which need to get done

If you want to get involved in packaging and bug fixing, there’s still a lot of bugs that need to get fixed:

 

First timers!

We had a lots of new contributors last week who got their first direct contribution into Ubuntu. Thanks a lot to Bas van den Dikkenberg, Fabio Pedretti, Lars Uebernickel, Atul Jha, Adam Stokes, Hans Joachim Desserud, Alexandre Rossi, David Weber, Pojar George and Paul Belanger. Awesome!

Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre has been contributing to Ubuntu for a long time and has done a great job with packages like network-manager. He joined the ranks of the Ubuntu Core developers this week, this means access to all parts of Ubuntu. Good work Mathieu, keep it up!

New contributor: Roth Robert

Benjamin Kerensa talked to Roth Robert, here’s what he has to say:

How did you get involved?
I have first started with some translations, switched over to bug triaging (marking duplicates mostly) after some time (one month or so), and while triaging bugs, reading bug reports I have found bug reports which seemed easy to fix, so I have started fixing them. First string-fixes, bite-size bugs, until I have found the package set which I loved working on and started to better understand (package management tools like update manager, software center and software-properties) and fixed more and more bugs. My main reason for working on these tools was that the source for these is handled in launchpad entirely, thus proposing a merge with a help of a reviewer with commit rights will help to get the fix in both the upstream and the downstream(Ubuntu) release, and I did not have to do any packaging. I have only learned some basic packaging tasks recently, when I wanted to update GNOME System Monitor in Ubuntu to the latest upstream version, and this fortunately also involved updating librsvg, so I had both reasons and possibilities to exercise.

What was your experience like?
My experience was a quite pleasant one, most of the times it was quite easy to find helpful people to patiently review my fixes and point out my mistakes to avoid them next time (special thanks to Michael Vogt – mvo for his patience, reviews, advices and help).

What did you like most about it?
I like the most that there are endless possibilities to contribute, and anyone can find the area to contribute to which challenges him/her the most but which is not beyond his/her power, so that he/she can continuously progress. I have learned a lot this way since I have started contributing, and I still have a lot to learn. I have learned some new programming languages, found a new favorite programming language, I have managed to get to an Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS-O) where I have met/talked to a lot of interesting and inspiring people, lots of “day-dreamers”, who are even more helpful in real life than they are on IRC

Is there anything that should have been easier? What do you recommend to other contributors who think about starting to get involved?
Packaging seemed quite hard for me actually, as I wanted to learn debian packaging a long time ago, but got scared from the amount of documentation related to it, and I have not found any short guides on how to do it. For example the Ubuntu Packaging Guide was and still is a good resource, however beginners like me might get scared from the amount of documentation required to read to do a simple fix.
The good news is that the community is actively working on making things easier, so for the other contributors who think about starting to get involved, the http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved is a nice place to start at. However, if you are a developer, I’d better suggest developer.ubuntu.com, and don’t be afraid to ask people on IRC

What do you do in your other spare time?
In my other spare time I play the guitar, I spend time with my wife and read about Linux game development and experiment with game ideas, as I have always been interested in game development and I would like to help Linux gaming somehow, only I haven’t found the best way … yet.

Get Involved

Find something to work on

Pick a bitesize bug. These are the bugs we think should be easy to fix. Another option is to help out in one of our initiatives.

In addition to that there are loads more opportunities over at Harvest.

Getting in touch

There are many different ways to contact Ubuntu developers and get your questions answered.

(Brought to you by the Ubuntu Development News team.)

The Gazzang office at 502 Baylor Street in Austin, Texas is one of the destinations of the 2012 SXSW Startup Pub Crawl, on Thursday, March 8th.

Join us between 4 and 10 pm for an open house, drum circle, and some awesome live music from the Lost Pines bluegrass band!  Please RSVP here.  Come talk to us over free beer and food about Cloud security, data privacy, encryption, eCryptfs, key management, Linux, and Ubuntu.  Meet the entire cast of the Sh*t IT Security Guys Say short film.  And tap into the vibrant tech start-up culture that's rocking downtown Austin by day, juxtaposed against the awesome live music culture that rocks downtown Austin by night.

View Larger Map

Come get your bang on!

:-Dustin

Two weeks ago I posted this call to remove ccsm from the Ubuntu repositories. Three things precipitated this posting.

My proposal was picked up by some sites and some drama ensued. The discussion on -desktop was quite useful to me, I had no idea that ccsm was so crucial to our a11y story, and as Chris Coulson points out it’s really quite embarrassing that we don’t have this in our a11y tools to begin with. Unfortunately many people thought I was being anti-power user, which is not the case, I like it when I have the ability to modify stuff, but it would suck if by customizing your desktop we irrevocably crash a user’s desktop. That’s not choice, that’s just being mean!

I’d like to highlight the work of two people in particular who worked this problem. The first was Alan Bell, who not only pointed out some of the a11y problems that ccsm solved, but submitted a fix almost right after my posting fixing the scrollbar/slider behavior.

This was followed by two fixes by Andrew Starr-Bochicchio. One to add a warning, and another (which I think is more crucial) is to make it so you can’t accidentally uncheck the “crash my desktop” checkbox, which for some reason exists.

Thanks to Didier Roche for being responsive to these fixes and shipping them in 12.04. As someone who supports end users, I salute the work all three of you have put into making this suck less.

I admit I had an alterior motive. I knew that by proposing the removal of this tool that I would stir a pot, and I knew if people actually cared about it someone would fix it. I even dared Alex and Didier: “No one has maintained this tool for years, if people really cared about it, someone would fix it, since no one has fixed it, no one cares, so let’s just remove it.” But alas I was wrong, out of 487 comments on OMG Ubuntu and the replies on the mailing list and a bunch of “holier than thou” comments; two people had to ruin my plan.

I still think the tool should be removed, but hey, the decision was never mine to make. Two people have stepped up to the plate to make it suck less, which is a much larger number than 0. And that’s good enough for me.

Since this turned out decently enough for my next trick I plan to complain about gnome-settings-daemon. That’s the thing that when it doesn’t work it makes your desktop look like Windows 95. Awesome.

Nota Bene: The discussion outside the mailing list was unfortunately not as polite. I originally felt like posting some of the mean, inappropriate things I’ve received in emails and other media as an example on how horrible people can be, but in the end I think it’s important to not let people like this hijack our community. If you don’t like that I post things to fight for users then you’re just going to have to deal with it.

The last time I posted about my little project I shared a video demo of the work so far. I am pleased to report that I have made some further progress.

A key part of the design of the accomplishments system is that it supports two types of accomplishment:

Although support for the former works, I have been really focusing on the latter Machine Verifiable accomplishments. I am pleased to report that this works fully end-to-end now. It works like this:

With the exception of some loose edges, this is all basically working, and even runs on someone else’s machine than mine.

To get this rolling I wrote a bunch of additional accomplishments that use launchpadlib to give you a trophy if you have certain roles in the community (currently, Ubuntu Member, MOTU, core-dev, and a member of a LoCo Team).

A pretty cool feature here is that these accomplishments have dependencies. As an example, you need to complete the Register a Launchpad Account accomplishment before you can complete the File a Bug accomplishment (as you need a Launchpad account to file a bug). As such, accomplishments that you can’t access yet are listed as locked and unlocked when you have satisfied their dependencies. This helps us to develop a journey for how people learn new experiences and participate in the community.

You can now filter available opportunities by locked or unlocked – this makes it easier to see what you can do right now. I also prettified the interface somewhat and ripped out some of the clunky pieces of my very first implementation. With the addition of the extra accomplishments you can also see the additional categories.

This is how it looks so far:

I am hoping to release a video demo of this soon.

I will also be opening up a call for testing and accomplishment contributions when I nail a few final bugs. Stay tuned, folks!

Thanks to William Grant for his launchpadlib help recently.

One of the most requesting things since I first introduced Singlet was to have a Quickly template for creating Unity Lenses with it.  After weeks of waiting, and after upgrading Singlet to work in Precise, and getting it into the Universe repository for 12.04, I finally set to work on learning enough Quickly internals to write a template.

It’s not finished yet, and I won’t guarantee that all of Quickly’s functions work, but after a few hours of hacking I at least have a pretty good start.  It’s not packaged yet, so to try it out you will need todo the following:

How is it that in 2000-frickn’-12 that it’s actually more complex to write an ncurses UI then GTK or Qt? I mean, c’mon.

I want a full-blown toolkit with tons of baked in goodies for hacking up simple ncurses UIs, and in an easy way.

Oh an in Python.

I mean, let’s be honest here, writing an app using ncurses is like doing raw X calls in a lot of ways.

I really don’t want this to turn into another side hack of mine, but it might just end up being one.

Oh well :)

Dived Japanese Garden and White Rock yesterday, after refreshing my Scuba diving skills. I’m doing that at New Heaven Diving on Koh Tao, Thailand, a smallness diving operation who do a lot of work in marine life conservancy. I really dig their regular reef cleanup efforts, and their mission to turn more diving schools into marine life conservancy agents. In the process of experiencing the fantastic underwater world, it gives a lot of background to environmental (and underlying socio-economical) problems.

Among yesterday’s highlights were a blue-spotted stingray, porcupine fish, trigger fish, various scorpionfish and thousands of other cute and sometimes curious sea creatures.

I’ve also started using my underwater camera with so far very promising results. I need to work a bit on handling of the cam, but over the course of today’s photos, I am quite thrilled of the results after about just one hour of diving with it. As I didn’t bring my laptop or tablet, uploading those will have to wait until I’m back home in early March — until then some impressions from my phone camera will have to suffice.

So if you have used Spotify on Linux you will notice that there are often times where it will crash on start or act very broken after a launch and that seems to be primarily due to unwanted data being left in cache or config temps which seem to cause hangups.

Here is a special little bash script that makes Spotify work more smoothly and this especially makes the latest Beta with Spotify Apps work very nicely but can work in earlier versions as well:

For those who want to run this script as an application shortcut so it does tidying and then launches Spotify then simply do this from terminal:

1. nano spotify.sh

2. paste above code

3. chmod +x spotify.sh

4. Now sudo nano /usr/share/applications/spotify.desktop and paste this in but make sure to edit the “Exec” path to match the location of the Spotify.sh location on your system:

Now whenever you click the Spotify icon in the Unity launcher or whatever DE on Ubuntu you happen to be using it should execute the spotify.sh script which will tidy up and then run Spotify.

Hope this is useful for some!

 

 

 

Originally Posted At: Benjamin Kerensa dot Com

I’m a fan of how GNOME Shell is working out (mostly). At least enough for me to use it full time.

I also am afflicted with the same vertical pixel issue on my x220 many of us are complaining about. To combat this I already do certain things like use Tree Style Tabs in FireFox nightly and get rid of the gnome-terminal menubar when maximized (even though there is an annoying bug where Unity and GNOME Shell don’t play nice together).

One thing I just added, thanks to the pointers from Jonathan Palacek is to remove the redundant info in the title bar and top bar of GS. To do this you simply need to install a couple extensions and edit a text file.

The two extensions are:

To get rid of the window title bar when maximized is a bit difficult right now. I followed this guide to do it for Adwaita (GNOME Shell’s default theme) but since I use Ambiance I had to make some modifications.

Here’s the diff (since the whole file is pretty long):

greg@x220:/usr/share/themes/Ambiance/metacity-1$ diff metacity-theme-1.xml ~/tmp/metacity-theme-1.xml.ambiance
39c39
< <frame_geometry name="geometry_maximized" rounded_top_left="false" rounded_top_right="false" rounded_bottom_left="false" rounded_bottom_right="false" has_title="false">
---
> <frame_geometry name="geometry_maximized" rounded_top_left="false" rounded_top_right="false" rounded_bottom_left="false" rounded_bottom_right="false">
43,47c43,47
<   <distance name="left_titlebar_edge" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="right_titlebar_edge" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="button_width" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="button_height" value="0"/>
<   <distance name="title_vertical_pad" value="0"/>
---
>   <distance name="left_titlebar_edge" value="10"/>
>   <distance name="right_titlebar_edge" value="10"/>
>   <distance name="button_width" value="18"/>
>   <distance name="button_height" value="20"/>
>   <distance name="title_vertical_pad" value="12"/>
49c49
<   <border name="button_border" left="0" right="0" top="0" bottom="1"/>
---
>   <border name="button_border" left="0" right="0" top="1" bottom="1"/>

I may have done a couple extraneous edits in that file as I did this while on a plane and couldn’t look up documentation (or even that guide I used before); it was all from memory. If you see something wrong, please share!

Maybe this will help you out maximizing the scare vertical pixels on your new laptop.

Please join us on 8th March at 5.00pm GMT for a live juju Charm School webinar:

To sign up click here: Juju charm school webinar. This charm school will cover how to create charms and use them with juju, and how to submit charms to the larger server community so that your software is easily deployable in the cloud. If you are deploying to the cloud or have software that you’d like to make easily available to Ubuntu Server users then this is the event for you!

Attendees are encouraged to watch the first webinar so that we can concentrate on more advanced topics for this Charm School.

Can’t make it? We’ve got in person Charm Schools throughout the year if you’re interested in attending, or you can just contact us.

Under Linux, there are a number of related features around marking areas of a file, filesystem, or block device as “no longer allocated”. In the standard view, here’s what happens if you fill a file to 500M and then truncate it to 100M, using the “truncate” syscall:

The important thing to note here is that in step 3 the block device has no idea about the released data blocks. The original contents of the file are actually still on the device. (And to a certain extent is why programs like shred exist.) While the recoverability of such released data is a whole other issue, the main problem about this lack of information for the block device is that some devices (like SSDs) could use this information to their benefit to help with extending their life, etc. To support this, the “TRIM” set of commands were created so that a block device could be informed when blocks were released. Under Linux, this is handled by the block device driver, and what the filesystem can pass down is “discard” intent, which is translated into the needed TRIM commands.

So now, when discard notification is enabled for a filesystem (e.g. mount option “discard” for ext4), the earlier example looks like this:

While SSDs can use discard to do fancy SSD things, there’s another great use for discard, which is to restore sparseness to files. Normally, if you create a sparse file (open, seek to size, close), there was no way, after writing data to this file, to “punch a hole” back into it. The best that could be done was to just write zeros over the area, but that took up filesystem space. So, the ability to punch holes in files was added via the FALLOC_FL_PUNCH_HOLE option of fallocate. And when discard was enabled for a filesystem, these punched holes would get passed down to the block device as well.

Take, for example, a qemu/KVM VM running on a disk image that was built from a sparse file. While inside the VM instance, the disk appears to be 10G. Externally, it might only have actually allocated 600M, since those are the only blocks that had been allocated so far. In the instance, if you wrote 8G worth of temporary data, and then deleted it, the underlying sparse file would have ballooned by 8G and stayed ballooned. With discard and hole punching, it’s now possible for the filesystem in the VM to issue discards to the block driver, and then qemu could issue hole-punching requests to the sparse file backing the image, and all of that 8G would get freed again. The only down side is that each layer needs to correctly translate the requests into what the next layer needs.

With Linux 3.1, dm-crypt supports passing discards from the filesystem above down to the block device under it (though this has cryptographic risks, so it is disabled by default). With Linux 3.2, the loopback block driver supports receiving discards and passing them down as hole-punches. That means that a stack like this works now: ext4, on dm-crypt, on loopback of a sparse file, on ext4, on SSD. If a file is deleted at the top, it’ll pass all the way down, discarding allocated blocks all the way to the SSD:

Set up a sparse backing file, loopback mount it, and create a dm-crypt device (with “allow_discards”) on it:

# cd /root
# truncate -s10G test.block
# ls -lk test.block
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10485760 Feb 15 12:36 test.block
# du -sk test.block
0       test.block
# DEV=$(losetup -f --show /root/test.block)
# echo $DEV
/dev/loop0
# SIZE=$(blockdev --getsz $DEV)
# echo $SIZE
20971520
# KEY=$(echo -n "my secret passphrase" | sha256sum | awk '{print $1}')
# echo $KEY
a7e845b0854294da9aa743b807cb67b19647c1195ea8120369f3d12c70468f29
# dmsetup create testenc --table "0 $SIZE crypt aes-cbc-essiv:sha256 $KEY 0 $DEV 0 1 allow_discards"

Now build an ext4 filesystem on it. This enables discard during mkfs, and disables lazy initialization so we can see the final size of the used space on the backing file without waiting for the background initialization at mount-time to finish, and mount it with the “discard” option:

# mkfs.ext4 -E discard,lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0 /dev/mapper/testenc
mke2fs 1.42-WIP (16-Oct-2011)
Discarding device blocks: done
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=0 blocks, Stripe width=0 blocks
655360 inodes, 2621440 blocks
131072 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=2684354560
80 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632

Allocating group tables: done
Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done 

# mount -o discard /dev/mapper/testenc /mnt
# sync; du -sk test.block
297708  test.block

Now, we create a 200M file, examine the backing file allocation, remove it, and compare the results:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/blob bs=1M count=200
200+0 records in
200+0 records out
209715200 bytes (210 MB) copied, 9.92789 s, 21.1 MB/s
# sync; du -sk test.block
502524  test.block
# rm /mnt/blob
# sync; du -sk test.block
297720  test.block

Nearly all the space was reclaimed after the file was deleted. Yay!

Note that the Linux tmpfs filesystem does not yet support hole punching, so the exampe above wouldn’t work if you tried it in a tmpfs-backed filesystem (e.g. /tmp on many systems).

© 2012, Kees Cook. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

I’ve been a fan of Twitter’s Bootstrap project since it was announced. It’s basically a set of HTML, CSS, and Javascript that is good looking and ready to be molded into something you want.

Today I ran into Bootswatch, which are a set of themes that people are working on for bootstrap. Then I ran into the United one:

Looks pretty close to the Ubuntu style, even uses the right fonts! I thought I’d bring this to the community’s attention because we have a collection of resources around design and I think United is a great way that we can have prepackaged tools like this for Local Teams and people working on their own Ubuntu-related things. Perhaps we should work on having a design team-blessed swatch that teams can consume?

We are reimagining the nature of privacy in Launchpad. The goal of the disclosure feature is to introduce true private projects, and we are reconciling the contradictory implementations of privacy in bugs and branches.

We are adding a new kind of privacy called “Proprietary” which will work differently than the current forms of privacy.

The information in proprietary data is not shared between projects. The conversations, client, customer, partner, company, and organisation data are held in confidence. proprietary information is unlikely to every be made public.

Many projects currently have private bugs and branches because they contain proprietary information. We expect to change these bugs from generic private to proprietary. We know that private bugs and branches that belong to projects that have only a proprietary license are intended to be proprietary. We will not change bugs that are public, described as security, or are shared with another project.

This point is a subtle change from what I have spoken and written previously. We are not changing the current forms of privacy. We do not assume that all private things are proprietary. We are adding a new kind of privacy that cannot be shared with other projects to ensure the information is not disclosed.

Launchpad currently permits projects to have default private bugs and branches. These features exist for proprietary projects. We will change the APIs to clarify this. eg:

    project.private_bugs = True  => project.default_proprietary_bugs = True
    project.setBranchVisibilityTeamPolicy(FORBIDDEN) => project.default_proprietary_branches = True

Projects with commercial subscriptions will get the “proprietary” classification. Project contributors will be able to classify their bugs and branches as proprietary. The maintainers will be able to enable default proprietary bugs and branches.

Next part: Launchpad will use policies instead of roles to govern who has access to a kind of privacy.

We’ve been busy listening to all your submissions, it’s been a challenge, but the sound samples have been whittled down to a shortlist (of startup sounds only, for now) that we feel meet the pitch brief (or are close to meeting it) and we’d like to hear your opinions.

Since last time…

With a tight deadline (let’s get this in for 12.04!) we played the submissions, both startup and notification, to a select group of participants who were asked to record feedback on a structured form. Firstly we discussed the brief that was set and what we were looking to achieve; participants then rated the submissions using a simple likert scale, measuring agreement with statements such as “Does this feel like Ubuntuâ€.

We now need your help to decide and critique the shortlisted sounds. Remember these are not final, so we want to know which you see the most potential for developing our sound theme.

The Shortlist : Startup Sound

Please use the fields provided in the form for critiquing what and where improvements could be made; e.g. change of pitch, addition of notes, audio mastering, change of instrument; we need to remember this is a starting point, so the more feedback we receive, the better informed the rebrief.

No.1

No.2

No.3

No.4

Please get your friends and family to have a listen and let us know what they think too – the more the merrier, we will do the same

Next steps : we hope to choose one finalist whose sound can mature through further iterations, and tune it to fit with the login experience for the 12.04 release.

Those of you who don’t see your sound up here (and remember we are keeping it anonymous so don’t tell anyone if yours is there!) thanks again for your efforts, we hope to involve everyone in the decision making process for the theme as it progresses, so there will be plenty more opportunity to have your opinion heard!

Link to survey

Update : Survey Full!!! Over 2000 responses – wow! New blog post to follow  

One of the most popular feature requests on AOL’s AIM UserVoice forum was for AIM to have a client available through the Ubuntu Software Center and although this feature request received hundreds more votes than any other feature request it was declined recently by AIM’s Product Manager  with the following response:

As you can imagine it is quite a weak and disappointing response considering that AOL has the resources to develop a client for Ubuntu (Linux) if they so chose and even get help if they open sourced it but instead of fulfilling one of the highest voted feature requests they decided to decline.

All in all I think Pidgin does an excellent job as a all-around IM client anyways but when you have demand for a AOL produced client for Linux that exceeds demands for all other features it just seems natural to follow the desires of the masses?

All I can say is Adam and his team have failed at doing the right thing for their users which is giving them what they want.

Originally Posted At: Benjamin Kerensa dot Com

 

After a relatively long hiatus, I’ve return to my blog!

My new year gift to you is……

Apps for the Masses!

A new (and free) community - driven guide reflects the new look and features present in Ubuntu 11.10:

Click here for full size.

Thanks to the always amazing David Callé who has created this lens for the Ubuntu Accomplishments system. David was also the first person to brave running the Ubuntu Accomplishments system other than me (complete with the server verification pieces). It worked!

This week I expect to have another update on Ubuntu Accomplishments. My evenings have been tied up with finishing The Art of Community but the deadline for that is tomorrow.

Stay tuned!

This week is feature freeze in Ubuntu land and the Kubuntu community have been working hard to get in as many as possible before the deadline.

Telepathy-KDE is working nicely. We're still deciding if it's better to go with the new-but-not-much-tested Telepathy-KDE or the old-but-unmaintained Kopete by default.

LightDM Plasma Theme, not likely to replace KDM yet for lack of testing but a promising way to get a login manager with all the features

Oxygen-GTK3 theme, so your GTK apps fit in with the Plasma desktop.

Calligra office suite featuring Krita the world's best painting app. Handy for updating hackergotchis. MS Office file import/export is reported to be better than LibreOffice because of the top work by KO GMBH. Not the default yet but the signs are good for fixing the "we don't have a KDE office suite by default" bug in the next year.

Rekonq 0.9 and Owncloud 3.0 are both in progress.

Plasma Active! Could a Kubuntu Active remix be around the corner? We'd be the first distro with a free software tablet UI if we can get it done.

If you want to know how my health is doing see my personal blog entry Recovery from Severe Traumatic Head Injury.

Two changes to the contact team email feature were recently released that make communication more reliable.

Non-team members now see the “Contact this team’s admins” link. Previously, non-members saw a link to contact the team owner. The owner is often one person, and some team owners delegate the running of the teams to the team admins. There are often more admins then there are owners. So the message is more  likely to reach someone who is involved in the day-to-day team management.

Team members see the “Contact this team’s members” link. Previously, members might have seen a link to contact the team, but that email when to the team email address that the team might not respond to. Many teams still use bogus email addresses to avoid emails from the days before Launchpad had great bug subscription filters. Launchpad has an anti-feature that prevents team mailing-lists from contacts all the team members. Team admins found it impossible to notify the member about issue ranging from policy changes, polls, meetings, to security issues. So members can now trust that their messages will be sent to the team members.

The feature is a convenient way to contact a user or team. Sometimes the feature is the only way you can contact a user or team that does not have a public email address. A user may use the contact user/team feature 3 times each day. The limit ensures no one can spam Launchpad users. The limit also means the feature is not a substitute for mailing lists.

So I spent the better part of an hour physically cleaning out my laptop, what a PITA. Why so long you ask? It seems these days that laptop manufacturers like to toss in 30-plus screws just to open it up, and then bury the fan, which required the removal of more screws. A common thing I notice on my laptops and other laptops out there, is how easy it is to get to the hard drive or the memory. Why can&apost the manufacturer do something like that for the fan? It shouldn&apost take me an hour to clean the fan on my laptop. It shouldn&apost take more than 2 minutes.

OK, the point of the above rant was this: LAPTOP MANUFACTURERS, LISTEN UP! YOU NEED TO MAKE IT EASY FOR US TO CLEAN OUT OUR FANS!. Our laptops shouldn&apost need to follow Nelly&aposs Hot in here, and I should have to take off all of my laptop&aposs hypothetical clothes.

I know I can&apost be the only one who cleans out their laptop fans. I know there isn&apost anyway possible I am the first to think about making it as easy to clean out the fan as it is to replace memory or a hard drive. How many of you clean out your laptop fans? How much time do you spend on it? Do you just normally blow some air into it, or you do take your laptop a part and really clean it out?

Another pain is the keyboard, though I doubt this one would be an easy fix. Right now, I remove the keyboard from the laptop, flip it upside down, and gently smack the bottom of it to get the big stuff to fall out. Then to clean out the smaller particles I use a business card or something similar (folded up piece of paper) to get in between and under the keys. This actually works pretty well, but I would recommend against it while the keyboard is still part of the laptop, as you might drive that stuff into the laptop itself. Speaking of the keyboard, that is just as easy for me to get to and remove like the memory and the hard drive. Lightly pry off the top panel, remove 3 screws, and lightly pry out the keyboard. This takes me 2 minutes to remove at most, and then I spend the next 10 minutes cleaning it out.

Anyone know of a laptop manufacturer that makes it easy to clean out the fan? Is there a such thing? Google wasn&apost my friend on that one.

Cleaning Out My Laptop – What a PITA is a post from Richard A. Johnson's blog.

Meeting Minutes

IRC Log of the meeting.

Meeting minutes.

Agenda

20120214 Meeting Agenda

ARM Status

P/omap4: nothing new to report this week

Release Metrics and Incoming Bugs

Release metrics and incoming bug data can be reviewed at the following link:
Release Metrics.

Milestone Targeted Work Items

If your name is in the above table, please review your Beta-1 work items.

Blueprint: hardware-p-kernel-power-management

No update this week.

Status: Precise Development Kernel

We’ve recently rebased to upstream stable v3.2.6 and uploaded. Please
note that Beta Freeze is next week, Thurs Feb 23. I ideally want to
upload our final Beta-1 kernel by the end of the week, but no later than
Monday. If there are any patches which need to land, submit them now.
Important upcoming dates:

Status: CVE’s

Currently we have 73 CVEs on our radar, one new CVEs were added this week.
See the CVE matrix for the current list:
CVE Metrics

Overall the backlog is unchanged this week, though we have closed a couple
of hardy CVEs and one CVE across the board:
CVE Linux

Status: Stable, Security, and Bugfix Kernel Updates – Oneiric/Natty/Maverick/Lucid/Hardy

Here is the status for the main kernels, until today (Jan. 24):