DoctorMo's Blog

Today there has been a lot of talk about common functionality that attempts to replace lots of existing replicated functionality.

When you have a problem that everyone has to solve, it’s worth considering making a standard version available which all programmers can take advantage of. For instance, every program can take advantage of files, files are so important that they usually form a core part of many programming languages. But could you imagine a system where each program writes data to the disk in it’s own way?

Common Printing Interface

The Linux Foundation is working on a common printing interface which allows all programs to utilise this single and may I saw awesome interface.  One that will hopefully be used via dbus (most things are going this way) by all applications that want to print, this will move printing up a step in design and coherence.

Common Contacts Data Store

The Canonical Online Services team appear to be heading up a move towards having a local content database using CouchDB. In this they would like to store contacts and discussions today were around all the considerations of the system. Obviously there are already lots of projects attempting to solve these set of problems, some on KDE and some on Gnome; but the hope is that this system will be a unified way of talking to the system of contacts and hopefully reproduce the ease of intergration and functionality available in the Apple system.

The big functionality improvements other than common access to data will be the ability to share your contacts over the online services.

I expect (although I’m being totally speculative) that if the contacts development is successful that the system will be expanded to include other databases. I’d like to see meta data, calendar and note systems being brought into a shared infrastructural system.

Thoughts?

Today I attended a session close to my heart, user content management on the desktop.

The project I have proposed my Central Services project (formally User Data Services) to meet the needs and supply access to all content library features to the very core of Ubuntu.

First I will explain the problem. Every media and content system has library programs, editing programs and viewing programs. Sometimes their all in one, for instance Rythembox is a good library and viewer of audio content. But the core features that you want to find in all these applications is the same:

• Listing and Opening
• Metadata and Tagging
• Indexing and Searching
• Event Logging
• Online Service Support
• Hardware Device Support

The only thing that separates these generic features is the content type and the kinds of applications that will display the content. It seems natural then that we should aim to get content library infrastructure in place so programmers don’t have to re-invent all of these things (some of which are none-trival), these are some content type examples:

• Images / Galleries
• Audio / Albums
• Contact / Address Book
• Event / Calendar

Imagine a time when you no longer have to hunt around for a picture to attach to your email but instead select a “pictures” tab and are presented with all images availble even if they are on your Google Picassa account or on your ipod without having to first sync them, imagine being able to access your contacts from facebook, gmail and your blackberry all from the same application and then deciding for yourself how they should be sync’ed (it at all).

I think it would be awesome and I’m trying to complete the implimentation details for the metadata and indexing, working with the Zeitgeist project and learning from the mojito moblin (intel) who are also hear and trying to solve a similar set of problems.

Breaking news from the summit of Ubuntu geeks currently being held here in Barcelona. The supply of coffee, the drug that keeps many geeks going throughout the morning, has dried up with the swift removal of all coffee dispensing machines.

Landscape Dev Mourns

It happened on a warm May day at 9:30, half way though the first morning’s UDS sessions. Buoyed by the day’s early supply of coffee all was going well. Until tragedy struck for all those hoping to get a second or third cup before the second session line-up. According to sources the summit venue is rather strict with coffee and only the persistent demands of Clair Newman could persuade them to deliver much needed coffee relief at all. But instead of this wonderful bean drink persisting, it instead was swiftly removed shortly after being put out causing many sad faces and some on the verge of tears as they looks mournfully into their empty cups.

Without the much needed drink the morning’s sessions will likely be slower and perhaps filled with the sounds of gentle snoring. For the love of improving Ubuntu, bring back the coffee for these souls!

Although this reporter only drinks Tea, so isn’t so bothered by all the fuss.

Update: 10:17am the coffee has returned, only the continued demands and sad, grey faces in the halls could have prompted this 180 degree policy change. Rejoice for the coffee is back.

The Community is Now Happy

Today’s UDS (as promised to Jono) will be recorded here in my blog.

Each LoCo team has to as some point run events, it’s a natural part of what Local Community teams do to reach out, promote, teach and connect their local users together. So it seems fitting that a LOT of LoCo team people were at UDS today to talk about how we can make organising events and global co-ordination better.

First on the list is the Bug Days and how the general ideas can be coordinated and how we can use best practices to organise and execute days that everyone will be organising. This also includes translation-days and my suggestion, marketing days. Think of a single day where every LoCo team in the world decided to market in a public way, hand out flyers and CDs, hold placards and have some fun.

We also talked tools, using the existing sprint functionality in launchpad it might be possible to expand to make it handle local community events, both those that we organise and those of other groups that we attend. This way our team’s data is available via a standard API with standard authentication, community tools can then be built to automagically add things to google calendar, facebook events and other awesome community awareness.

We also talked about making sure other LoCo teams are aware of what is going on in some other LoCo teams. For instance, did many of you know that the Massachusetts LoCo team organised a team spirit event to watch the new Star Trek film at the iMAX picture house? A very good event that was not well publicised outside of our LoCo and some other people were expressing their lament that they could have joined in the fun themselves and had a whole load of LoCo teams attending on the same day.

There is also work going on in the teams-db world, data is going to be removed from the wiki and we’re going to have a website which will hopefully handle the team information in a much more cohesive way.

That’s it for now, Beunos Nochos.