DoctorMo's Blog

When looking at the front page of my Mozilla Firefox web browser today I notice a curious thing:

Teach your old fox new tricks by upgrading to Firefox 3.5 today.

With a nice link to downloading Firefox, the only problem with that is that when I clicked on this download for Firefox 3.5 it downloaded a tar ball. My first response what “what the hell” and my second “A common user is not going to have a bloody clue what to do with that”.

There are a couple of things that are on my wishlist for Mozilla Firefox in Ubuntu, getting it so that upgrade links from mozilla themselves are not tar balls is a new one for the list:

• Not using the gnome or kde keyrings for password management.
• Not using XDG directories (freedesktop.org) for cache or configs.
• Not using a user wide cookies system.
• Not using the apt packager for plugin management.
• Hiding user data (bookmarks, tags, history) in a config directory.
• New! Advertising new version of Firefox and expecting “Linux” users to download tar balls
• From Comments Profile-Guided-Optimization, so Firefox is faster
• From Comments 64bit TraceMonkey and more time spent on 64bit FDO release.

Purely my own thoughts though, your thoughts are welcome.

I’ve put Awakenonlan into launchpad to try and encourage getting it packaged. I’ll add a needs-packaging
bug.

https://launchpad.net/awakenonlan

The idea of this package is to enable Wake On Lan features of ethernet ports by executing ethtool according tot he configuration in /etc/network/wakeonlan

but it’s proving to be quite hard to package because it needs to have something that runs every time to the computer boots. And there isn’t a defined way to do this from motu (as far as I can tell). If any of you in the community know how to get this packaged up, I’d be most grateful.

Some times you have good days, and other times you have bad days. Today was bad.

At the SETC where we are attempting to put together (slowly) a Lab with various technologies we have lost printing. We don’t know why printing has decided all of a sudden to take a leap off a building from every Ubuntu computer, and all of the Windows or Macs can still print. there in lies the mystery.

On Wednesday 23rd September the Minolta C350 network printer at the SETC was known to work from every one of the Ubuntu machines. It had a global configuration which was set centrally. Then the following Thursday, no one could print anything.

The problem is prints say they are being processed, but actually just drop down a black hole. that is after spending 12 minutes in the queue “processing”. The error longs point to some kind of error returned from lpr and perhaps some kind of connection error.

But this is madness because cups is able to get good status reports and everything is automatically configured.

It could be blamed on some update which could have theoretically killed it, but shouldn’t there be other companies with the same problem? It could be some printer setting “Turn off Ubuntu support” but I don’t think this printer has that option available.

I’d get logs up here tomorrow. Lets just say that Ubuntu lost a lot of reputation this week in this community center, and we don’t even know why. How annoying.

The new Ubuntu App Center is an interesting addition/replacement to the old Add/Remove Applications program and the complicated synaptic package manager. It promises to bring simplicity to installing new apps to Ubuntu. It’s main function will be to unify several smaller apps into a common and manageable interface. (Add/Remove, Synaptic, Update Manager, etc)

The Ubuntu App Center used to be called the “Ubuntu Software Store”, with lots of the concepts shaped around the idea that this was a shop where we can buy “for free” all the programs we want to install. It’s a nice idea, and it does fit with the operating mode of chasing Apple even when Apple are copying Ubuntu. But it did lead to an awful lot of confusion and thankfully it was changed to something that didn’t sound like “We’re going to selling proprietary applications and take away all your hard won Freedom” *read this with tongue firmly in cheek*

I’m going to leave aside the thorny question of weather Ubuntu really needed a whole new app installer.

This does bring up an important question though: If Ubuntu ever offers the ability to channel money into the pockets of developers, should the focus be on rewarding proprietary vendors, or supporting a Free Software economy through it’s software deployment channel?

This is a thought experiment on my part.

If products must be sold, why then must they be proprietary ones?

Why not channel money back into the software projects that support Ubuntu?

Upstream the money.

If software is to flow downstream, then with bug reports and ideas we should be also able to send a golden stream of coin to help those up there, doing all the coding work, cope with the realities of a real life.

To support Free Software projects we could have optional amounts selectable on installation a kin to Jamendo in Rythembox, everything from Free to $200. So support for a project can be channeled directly through the operating system. Or better if someone has tried and liked a software package, provide them an easy way to pay the developers with money (or time).

I could also see this in things like the Flash player, want to install flass-nonfree? we’d like $20 please, we’re going to give it to the Gnash Foundation to make sure work moves forwards on the free replacements. If you don’t like it, then install flash-nonfree from a PPA or from source (I know, crule, but it’s supposed to be a thought experiment).

For the sake of argument let us say that Adobe saw the error of their ways and starting selling proprietary Adobe Illustrator through the Ubuntu Store. I would then like to see Inkscape get some money every time it was sold. Why? because channeling software products is a valuable service and Canonical should not sell it’s values in Freedom so lightly as to ignore the nature of the products it channels.

Anyway, this thought experiment is pure fantasy so long as Ubuntu doesn’t handle money in any way. Once it does however, the questions must be asked about weather we believe in Libre Software or Gratis Software.

Today is a special day dear blog reader. Today is 1000 days after I said “I do” to my lovely wife.

Far from it being a typical alter, I mean our apartment was the setting on the first January day with a dearest non-religious friend of ours who officiated. As Me and my wife are quite unnatural in almost all social ways. In fact it was our down to earth, yet fancy ideas that brought about our homely, 30 something guest wedding directly after the chimes of the new year had rung out.

If ever you need to do a wedding, make sure your vows are at the end of a night of drinking, music and merriment. Every one of your guests will swear that it’s the best wedding they’ve ever been to, even those that can remember it. It may seem cheap (it was) but that wasn’t the real reason for doing this kind of wedding, it just suited our styles.

For those not in our loop; as well as exchanging rings, we also exchanged the books and stories that had changed our way of looking at the world. How much more nerdy can you get?

Well what about celebrating metric demiversaries? Our Anniversary is on January first, too easy to remember. But what about every 100 days? that’s a bloody pain in the neck and just perfect for us geeks. OK so the computer helps get the dates right. But think about it, roughly 3 chances a year to celebrate being together and every 3 or so years (1000 days) you get to have a big bash to really celebrate being together.

Today was our first bash, 1000 days and we went all out. Got dressed up to go out to Lock Ober and then a movie at the Lowes Cinema. You can see what we looked like going out this evening, utterly divine. My wife is really very good at picking out well fitting vintage clothes and I have my suite and hat (and stick) like any fine gentleman celebrating a night out.

I know what the first reaction will be to the news I hear on the grape vine that VT are pushing for Open Source. VT isn’t a normal state, the people there are much more sensible than the rest of the country. After all they elected Bernie Sanders, a self declared socialist as Senator.

But I’d argue that schools up and down the USA are much like each other, facing the same problems and generally with the same kinds of pressures from parents, teachers, government and big businesses. So to see Burlington School District issue this information (as part of a general update) on Open Source was surprising:

Open Source:
This year we are beginning our large-scale testing of open source software. Both the City Council and the School Board have requested this as part of ways to save costs. In addition to our web services, which have been running open source for several years, we have moved our main storage and printing systems to an open source operatins system. On all replacement computers we are using Open Office instead of Microsoft Office, and Open Office is available on all district computers. Although this is a small step, it represents a saving of 10% per new computer, or about $20,000 this year. In addition, Open Office is freely available to any home that wants it, so all of our students can have it, which is a saving of over $200 per copy for the parents. Of course, the savings would be irrelevant if the software wasn’t useful, but Open Office has virtually all of the functionality of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and can open any of those Microsoft files (even docx). Stay tuned for more information on using OpenOffice.

If we read this right it means there is real local government preference for Open Source. Now right now they’re going into because of costs instead of control, but I think a taste of freedom tends to stick around once you’ve deployed a FOSS solution and it’ll be more difficult for Microsoft or even IBM, Novell etc to get back in without offering serious concessions.

I also like that they are informing people that students can take advantage of OpenOffice, because it’s free too and supports all the same formats. That’s very good news as it’s an aspect of Free Software in schools which is often overlooked (that what is taught can be taken home without pressuring poor students to buy expensive software).

I’ll keep my ears open for any other news, because they are looking at a whole bunch of things as part of the review.

A letter came today to confirm that I am now a real, lawful, bonafide US permanent resident. This means I can travel without restrictions and it’s more stability.

It’s unlikely I’ll go for citizenship in the USA, but that’s just a personal choice. I want to live here with my wife, work here and help the community with my volunteerism. But my UK citizenship is like a mooring for me, no matter how far away from BBC headquarters I get, deep down, I’m still tea drinkly British.

Even if I do want to get rid of the Queen and replace the system of government with a democratic republic

I’ve just got back from Harvard University Extension School where I was a guest speaker for a systems administration class. I’ve attached the 6 quick slides I used to support my presentation, but the main meat was in what I said and in the questions I answered.

I was there to talk about Gnu/Linux and Ubuntu, about the stack of software and each project and so on. Interestingly, before the class began I didn’t know that 5 of the students present were actually existing Windows admins and the meat of my talk was trying to focuse on aspects of the industry that they might not have been exposed to yet. Things like Free and Open Source principles, the history of it, why Linux and Gnu projects exist and how it works economically.

I even showed them launchpad bug #1 when explaining why Mark would want to invest so much money into Ubuntu as a project and because of a few of the questions we did get to talk about a couple of the misdeeds of Microsoft and why any monopoly abuse is bad for business (Novell, Samaba, IE were all topics).

Some of what I was explaining was around control. You want to control your technology right? Well if you don’t have access to the code, if you don’t have a license that permits you some freedom with that code. Then you have very little control over all and you certainly can’t find alternative suppliers to develop new functionality into existing products.

We also touched upon open standards and data formats (i.e QuickBooks bad) and it wasn’t until afterwards that I was told that I’d been speaking to Microsofties… actually they were pretty good and I didn’t spot any funny looks even when I slagged Microsoft off.

I do seem to be doing too many talks these days for a programmer/community persona and I don’t think I’m even that good at it, but people keep on asking me to do them.

Source SVGs are Here

I figured I should post these for anyone who is interested. But I compiled a bunch of slides of Software Freedom Day so I could give a very brief introduction to some of the economics of Free and Open Source Software.

Download here.

A few weeks ago we started really getting into which formats might be better for learning materials for the Ubuntu Learning project. Currently I’ve been writing each class in ODF (Open Document Format) but it became apparent that while it was very easy to edit documents like this, it was very hard to integrate them into translations, diff generation, style guidelines and so on.

So I asked a very good contributor to the Ubuntu Learning project, BiosElement to do some research into various formats and he’s reported back with some findings. I want to distribute these findings to the wider community because I know how useful they will be to other documentation groups. This is a very basic summery:

And now for the meat of the report:

Open Document Format

ADVANTAGES: Pre-Installed on Ubuntu, Open Format, Ease of Editing

DISADVANTAGES: Currently impossible to use with bzr or version control, Difficult to keep consistent styling, Any changes to styles will result in large amounts of labor to update previous courses.

SUMMERY: .odt would be very difficult to keep updated and consistent but is very easy for course creators.

Plain Text

ADVANTAGES: Universal format, Everything from a cell phone to an expensive toaster can read text files. bzr and VCS systems can highlight per-line changes Text-to-Speech works well with it and it is more accessible for those with disabilities.

DISADVANTAGES: Dull, sometimes hard to read, doesn’t support any kind of styling.

SUMMERY: Easier to maintain then .odt but the lack of styling makes it a poor choice.

Sphinx

ADVANTAGES: Same as those of Plain Text with the addition of styling using Restructured Text.

DISADVANTAGES: Limited translation support, Must be compiled into .html.

SUMMERY: Not a bad choice but it has limited use outside python projects. Lack of translation support is a major future problem if used.

DocBook

ADVANTAGES: Universal format used by many book publishers. Very supported for conversion into other formats.

DISADVANTAGES: XML is very difficult to write, very complex, hard to read and simply not user-friendly.

SUMMERY: Good choice, but the difficult syntax and lack of WYSIWYG Editors creates a massive barrier to entry.

AsciiDoc

ADVANTAGES: Same advantages of DocBook with the addition of text editing and an easier to read format. Can be converted into DocBook.

DISADVANTAGES: Some may find editing .txt files hard, but I’m not sure there’s any way around this.

SUMMERY: IMO the best choice as it gives all the advantages of DocBook without the difficult syntax or learning curve.

There you have it, please get in touch with us on our mailing list or irc channel if you’ve got any additional ideas and formats to try out.