There has been a little bit o’chatter on the tubes recently regarding quality and our recent release, Ubuntu 9.10. There we were on Thursday, champagne in hand, kicking a new release out the door and while I have seen countless reports of happy users with effortless upgrades and hardware and software working better than ever [...]

> Read More... | Digg This!

The Tokyo Linux UG will have a technical meeting & nomikai on Saturday November 14th. Stop by.

> Read More... | Digg This!

Thanks to my friends over at ZDNet for allowing me to post another guest article on their Between The Lines column. This time I have written an article discussing the importance of a productive, pleasant and pleasurable community that rewards great work and celebrates the exchange of both agreeable and challenging opinions, ideas and views, [...]

> Read More... | Digg This!

It may have changed by the time you read this, but The Art of Community has now hit the #1 slot for the Business and Culture category Amazon.com: You can see it on this page and you can check out the Art of Community Amazon page here. Go and buy a copy and support the project, [...]

> Read More... | Digg This!

Just a quick note: I am doing a webinar on my book The Art of Community at 9am Pacific today. You can join us here.

> Read More... | Digg This!

> Read More... | Digg This!

Here at Canonical we are all big fans of the Creative Commons. For those of you unfamiliar with them, they have created a set of Free Culture licenses that make it simple for people to release open content. They also run a variety of resources to make finding and remixing content simple and empowering. In the [...]

> Read More... | Digg This!

Last year we wrapped up LugRadio after five seasons, over 2million downloads and six live events. For over a year now Tony Whitmore from the excellent ubuntu-uk Podcast has been working on a documentary chronicling the history of the show, and packed with interviews, behind-the-scenes footage of how we planned a show, the studio, LugRadio [...]

> Read More... | Digg This!

One thing which recently made it into my reverse-culture-shock impact list is the widespread use of incomprehensible (read: broken), mixed-language expressions, potentially due to many reasons (to name a few: innocent show-off, following the mainstream, or just trying to look more "educated"). It starts with an easy one, like denoting the printer cartridge types as "black" and "color", i.e. in English, although we have good Indonesian words for that ("hitam" and "warna", in case you can't recall). The worse part is yet to come, it kills me when someone starts to sprinkle English words in an otherwise perfect sentence, e.g. "tapi you mesti ngajak aku to follow your, ehm [can't find the English words], kegiatan, which is sebenarnya quite interesting". This wonderful fragment is ridiculously non-sense for both foreigners who never learned Indonesian and for my fellow countrymen who do not know English at all.

Of course it won't surprise you if I say that you can easily find flyers and other promotion materials exactly using the same pattern. Just today we found a state-sponsored, free Shopping & Travelling Guide booklet featuring dozens of pages with English headings. Again, the contents are written in Indonesian. This leads to a number of striking typos and mistakes, one of which is shown here:

I have nothing against foreign languages (I have my share by learning few of them), but I also still love my wonderful mother tongue, Bahasa Indonesia.

> Read More... | Digg This!

Not sure what's happened, but the intersection of Sydney Rd and Albion St in Brunswick is currently closed off with police barricades. Police and Fire in attendance. As well as two news crews and about a zillion bystanders. It looks like a building has collapsed, it's taken out the #19 southbound tramstop.

> Read More... | Digg This!

In a few weeks the Ubuntu Developer Summit kicks off in Dallas. There will be discussing a wide range of topics across seven tracks: community, kernel, desktop, qa, foundations, mobile and server. We are about to begin scheduling sessions, and I just wanted to invite those of you who are attendting to propose a sessions for [...]

> Read More... | Digg This!

Now that the mention of the Firefox KDE integration I've done has reached also the dot, I guess it's time for a couple of things that don't quite fit into an article but I should probably say them somewhere anyway.

First of all, this is nothing against Konqueror. I still use Konqueror. In fact when a couple of months back there was a wave of "let's ditch Konqueror" voices on the planet and kde-core-devel, I was one of the people opposing that (and I still think it's not an option, as Konqueror is still the best KDE browser there is - Aurora is Qt-only, Rekonq is at version 0.<somesmallnumber>). For the next openSUSE release we will evaluate the possibilities again and Konqy may end up as the default again if it's considered to be up to the job. Speaking of which, Konqueror has never really been 100% default in openSUSE, as the desktop icon, which is what the common user uses, has always been Firefox, so we can also say the we just fixed the inconsistency (and it's really simple to switch it back). But the real reason was that many people are simply not satisfied with Konqueror, so we decided to try to not ignore the reality for a change. I myself use Konqueror, but if somebody else wants to browse the net on my home machine, they get Firefox. I don't like this, but what the hell, c'est la vie.

So, when we decided to make Firefox the default, we also faced the problem that we switched to something that from KDE user's point of view sucked in pretty much all aspects except for the browsing itself. The idea of Firefox desktop integration on Unix ranges from not bothering with it at all, over using generic not-really-desktop stuff like mailcap, to thinking Unix==GNOME. Normal Firefox in KDE offers to open PDF files with Evince, shows /usr/bin in a filedialog when you decide you'd like to open the PDF in some other application, has inconsistent (not just reversed) button order in dialogs and other yummy things. There have been attempts to solve this e.g. by creating a Qt version of Firefox, but those AFAIK have never led to something usable in practice, and with WebKit now part of Qt I somehow fail to see the motivation for anybody to try once more. And in this situation we had just a short time before openSUSE 11.2 feature freeze.

The trick, of course, was using magic. The Firefox with KDE integration is still the same Gtk Firefox, just with a bunch of hooks calling an external helper. I don't have the ability of some other KDE developers to have clones, and I'm not crazy enough to try to mix Gtk and Qt in one process (which, despite the possibility of a shared event loop, should be nowhere near trivial). So it's nowhere near the extent of the Qt port, and maybe that's why it has worked out (as we all should know, perfect is the enemy of good).

The helper and the patches at available in a Gitorious repository, they are made to match the openSUSE package so they may not possibly apply cleanly to upstream sources, but feel free to play with it. Actually, you are more than welcome to do anything you want with it (wanna be the maintainer of it? no problem). With the problem more or less solved, and with other things to do, I don't have any further big plans for it. I will try to push this upstream if possible (I have no idea what faces will Firefox developers make when they see it), but besides that, there are still many other areas that need some magic. And, after all, the ultimate plan is still that Konqy will one day rule the world .

> Read More... | Digg This!

Just a quick note to let you good folks know that the Shot Of Jaq website is now open at www.shotofjaq.org – come and join the beginnings of our community. If you have no idea what Shot Of Jaq is, read this. The very first episode of Shot Of Jaq will be released on Tuesday 24th [...]

> Read More... | Digg This!

A few weekends back I was in Wolverhampton for the power and glory that was LugRadio Live 2009 and I just wanted to write up a quick blog entry about someone who never ceases to impress me with her work: Laura Cowen. As usual, Laura was knee-deep in crew responsibilities at the event, and she could [...]

> Read More... | Digg This!

It took more than expected but it has been finally integrated!

PSARC 2009/571 ZFS Deduplication Properties
6677093 zfs should have dedup capability

You can find code changes here.

> Read More... | Digg This!