Category Archives: Personal

Congratulations Moblin on the 2.0 release

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Let the integration begin

Here are things I hope to see in future Moblin releases:

  • Better integration of instant messaging in the Moblin UI, having to drop an empathy window on an empty zone doesn’t feel very “mobliny”
  • Wordprocessing with collaboration features ala Sugars Write activity
  • ARM support
  • An integrated browser using process separation like Chrome for stability as well as having the UI rethought to maximize the usable work area. Hopefully a rewrite for WebKit could also happen.
  • Stop this Anjal silliness (yes we did debate that before, I remain unconvinced that this is even remotely the right direction)
  • I would love to see some version of Banshee in there, I have not had a good experience with homebrew media library.

A more general problem I see in computing today that Moblin and the type of device it is designed for reveal. I have probably a good TB of data lying around. Music in FLAC, a sufficient number of podcasts to make me look obsessed and naturally video. In fact I hope to add to this collection and have a centralized collection of all my movies. Now I have little desire to carry all that data with me and besides SSD drives should really not need to be more than 64 gigs tops. Yet the flaw in this plan is that we have no good means of transparently letting a nice little machine with some hardcore storage and a suitable Linux appliance act as if it is a seamless overlay on the filesystem when connection can be had be that my wifi or any secure means of calling home when I am away.

All our applications seem designed for local use and expect your full collection to be available on disk at all times and with this amount of storage required that is not possible. The popular solutions such as dropbox or Canonicals Ubuntu One all focus on synchronization which is not possible due to size and even if it was it would be impractical but worse still more certainly undesirable. If I was to lose my netbook and it had 700-800 gigs of my personal data on it, even with encryption I would feel pretty damn scared. I just need access to my data I don’t need it in my pocket as such.

I think we need to tackle this problem soon, I even suspect there is a business here in selling such devices capable of talking the quited protocols. A NAS on crack type device you put in a closet and which then via some nice open standards allow all your devices to have storage and data sharing, at home or out. There is e.g. no reason why my cellphone shouldn’t be able to use it’s 3G connection to stream my music or handle podcasts with storage being done in the safety of my home. Essentially I believe outside the storage taken up for applications and the OS on any device, in this scheme should be thought of as a cache for frequently used data on that device to allow it usefulness in situations without connection.

As a bonus for the redundancy seeking people one might add a paid service involving cloud storage. There are also promising p2p based systems like this which we could easily let the device act as a client for when the network is idle.

This would probably all be some Linux appliance homebrewers could slap on an idle clunker but there would definitely be a business in selling devices with extendable storage for this purpose as well.

The idea sounds vaguely like a cloud concept the average person should be able to follow and trust.. surely it is venture capital friendly.

Why Miguel is my hero

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As was recently reported by Martin Owens, at this years Software Freedom Day Richard Stallman took his behaviour to a whole new revolting level by calling Miguel de Icaza a traitor. This wasn’t related to anything except Miguels recent decision to sit on the Codeplex foundation board, a foundation whose stated mission it is to further Open Source in business. It is no secret that Microsoft is the seed of this our newest member in the family of Open Source promotors, even earmarking a million dollars to that aim and dedicating time and personnel to let the foundation reach its lofty aim. In fact in recent years Microsoft has gotten quite involved with Open Source by releasing code of their own, getting licenses approved from the OSI and donating substantial amounts of money to existing projects. In a highly published move they even recently submitted 20.000 lines of code to the Linux kernel. They are no longer the bully of the 90′s, they are changing but their transformation is not complete, and it certainly will not be the instantaneous conversion some people expect of them.

Now Miguel is no stranger to abuse, in a personally shameful moment right after the famed Novell-Microsoft collaboration agreement, fueled by Bruce Perens’, fallacious, claim that the deal was in violation of the GPLv2 even I send the Novell Open Audio podcast an angry mail asking them to dedicate time debating this on the show. Miguel kindly wrote me a lengthy personal mail calming my fears and he never used a harsh word despite what I now realize were words far outside of rational discourse. I have since that moment had a tremendous amount of respect for Miguel as a person, he is probably the person in the community who faces the most opposition and abuse despite the amount of work he has done historically and continue to do to improve the free desktop. You might disagree with his methods of improvement but I have never seen Miguel use a tone of aggression in rebutting his opponents.

If I live to be a thousand years I will never master that level of calmness while under fire, I realise that with some degree of sadness. Had Richard viciously attacked me the way he did Miguel I am sure at tirade would have ensued, I know it to be my style. Miguels reply is nothing short of admirable. It is a constructive polite call for civility in the views on how to improve our community.

I am glad our community has someone like Miguel, I am glad he does the work he does and I believe that it fills a vital piece of the puzzle to get Open Source everywhere and turn former opponents into new friends. Utopia won’t be built in a day but Miguel certain laid his fair share of rocks to let it happen.

I’m not dead

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Some friends have started wondering why I stopped blogging. It’s not that I ran out of things to talk about, in fact recently outside starting a blog to talk about one of my other great passions pen and paper roleplaying (check out Pawn your wand), I have also been spending a bit of effort looking at gnome-shell. So far impressions of both the design reasoning and the application itself are utterly poor. But every time I sit down to write, the anger swells up inside me over the whole anti-mono crusade which is going on and I am tempted to add my say to the debate, yet I know that no matter how often the lies and slander of the anti-mono crowd is pointed out the very same points will return days later. It is like debating creationists, something long years experience has told me I do not have the stomach to do.

So I have spend time focusing on things I do like, I have been playing with Moblin (more on this later I promise), I have finally settled on a distribution – Ubuntu though part of me really wants to use openSUSE I just can’t get over their horrible  yast thingy and all this multiple repos which always seem to be poorly managed and in constant conflict. I also looked at Foresight, and was invited to join the team but Foresight just doesn’t deliver the integrated computing experience I have come to enjoy. E.g. why should I need to manually unlock the keyring upon login (btw. openSUSE you are guilty here as well). Aside that Foresight is very nice, just bear with Conary for being slow and instead spend your, lenghty, upgrade lounging in their IRC channel and you will discover the side that really sells Foresight. They have the nicest developers of any distro out there, always ready to help and to randomly shoot the breeze. I suspect superior tools gives you that calm edge and really I do want me some of that.

The one thing I dislike about Ubuntu is that they above all suffer from extreme cases of not invented here. They have their own bugtracker implementation (which makes me want to pull my hair out), they reject existing technologies such as plymouth and then go ahead and announcement their own basic reinvention of rhgb. They reject PackageKit and again write their own aptdaemon. It feels very much like they are positioning themselves intentionally to be as incompatible with other distros thus creating a lockin which is put mildly extremely uncool. I do love pkg-mono though, they know their stuff and are very helpful. In the end the presentation Ubuntu gives users is probably also the best we have to offer on a general desktop, there are still gapping holes to be filled but it’s a solid offering for which they should get praise.

Windows 7 mini review

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I got my hands on the Windows 7 RC 64 bit build, and having tried it for a while I have to say that for the most part I really like what Microsoft has done. Unlike Linux on this laptop it feels smooth, the audio settings are easy and works a charm for managing and testing 5.1 setups like my own.

I think Microsoft did good work, for an RC it is very stable and the only application I have found that doesn’t work unfortunately Google Chrome. I have though only used the OS for a few hours, more extensive testing will be needed to weed out all the little trouble spots but the initial presentation is very pleasant. 

I love the audio settings and testing, I hope Pulseaudio gets to a stage where we can universally offer such UI enabled testing and preferences. It’s really that easy and comfortable in use. It just works(tm).

The little UI enhancements are great, unlike Compiz which seems more focused on making things burn, beam up or worse these really make a difference in use. E.g. when you click and drag a window to the top your cursor gives a little sonar blip and the window border is shown expanding to fullscreen. It is those little things that make it pleasant to the eye and adds to the experience. A good UI should aid the user and explain functionality, Windows 7′s revision of Aero does this very well and it remains smooth while doing so. 

Much has been written on the new taskbar and I have to say it is the sexiest new UI design Microsoft has done in a while. Peek is excellent in use, it is a visually pleasing way to solve the problem of application launching and task listing. Something in my opinion that has yet to be done either in Linux or OS X. The one problem I have seen is that there is a tendency for dialogs to pop under which leads to missing them for a while. I am very impressed.

I do miss the ability from metacity (and other window managers to put a window “always on top”. I use this a lot when chatting with the webcam on while working, it is nice to be able to see the person I am talking to on skype (I use a rather complicated setup where I have msn for the webcam on the laptop but I use skype on my nokia n810).

All in all Windows 7 RC is a very solid OS, it performs very smoothly and feels good in use. Windows users will see this as a nice upgrade. They have applied some of their prior successes more extensively e.g. users will find the Ribbon toolbar from the last Office release in Wordpad.

Some might remember that I wasn’t at all fond of Vista at the same stage in the game, and as a someone who has used nothing but Linux for more than a decade I am not familiar with the “Windows experience” but Windows 7 strikes me as being a nice solid offering. I am very pleased that Microsoft decided to bring their A game, hopefully this will spur competition and innovation.

And we take a short commercial break

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Well, not really commercial but a few of my friends, started their own company Jenruno last year and they just launched their first product called SpamTask. In case anyone is in the market for a good WordPress spam filter this might be worth a try, but from here a big round of congratulations to Rune and Richard on the launch. The best wishes for the future.

The distro tour, the values that matter

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For already, surprisingly highly covered, reasons I have decided to look for a Fedora replacement. As such I wanted to outline a list of things I like to see in distros and also why I like Fedora so much.

  • Performing your duty to mankind

I love making the world better, I am a strong believer in leaving the world in a better state than I got it. One of the most awesome moments of my life was definitely the day I looked at the usage statistics for Fedora and realised that millions of people potentially depend on my work. It inspired me to do better, to make things better, to invest more of myself in what I did for my own pleasure. For distributions to me this translates into fixing the underlying problems in computing, e.g. instead of plastering in proprietary driver over the problem which in return causes more problems of an undebugable nature we should invest time and effort in figuring out a real solution. It is my opinion that no distribution currently does this better than Fedora, it does mean that Fedora isn’t always suitable for all users currently but in the long run this is the only way to ensure a stable, vibrant platform.

  • Openness over all

Everything should be as transparent as possible, solutions should be designed in the open with upstream. This ensures adoption and correctness. It is potentially slower and one cannot use it as a special sales argument for ones distro since everyone will have this work. This doesn’t matter a bit, if you build it they will come, and don’t be afraid to remind people that you make things happen – you deserve the positive press. Fedora deserves much more credit for the current state Free Software is in than they get, the investment in values of openness has payed off in all areas except public relations.

  • Must have vibrant community

In a community there must be space for everyone, e.g, while I personally find python code vomit inducing to look at I don’t oppose people working on it. There are billions of people out there, we should be happy that people will work to make this the best possible platform for all manners of use cases. If the people you disagree with do good work, everyone wins, you included. A vibrant community also helps make things fun, it makes things easier, there is always someone to turn to for input. There is always someone to care for bugs. Fedora has a generally very good community, sadly not free of blemishes, it is fun to be part of at least 300 days out of the year – sadly on the rest it is a sad reality of ad hominems, character assassination and generally without focus on technology and friendship.

  • Plan for tomorrow, live every day

We should be innovating, thinking new exciting thoughts. We should aspire to greatness and work hard at making it happen. There are people out there who think big thoughts but are unable to get them beyond mock ups and design documents, there are engineers who know how to implement things but think the same way about computers we have since the 60′s. There are fundamental problems not being able to see beyond classic computing, be the Einstein to the Newton of the present, be the next big thing, figure out what the next big thing is. Software engineers and real people rarely think alike, getting them together and learning to leverage these multiple sets of expertise to devise the best possible solution is important.

  • Climbing Mount Probable

Progress should be as smooth as possible. There are literally millions of people willing to help testing specific areas if you make it easy, just go look at the feedback from the Nouveau test day, with specific test cases and an easy non destructive way to perform these tests we can rally pretty much anybody to spend an hour making sure everything is in good shape. The same is true for the innovations we put in the platform, as much as possible we should avoid flag day breakage. Let things be parallel installable, leverage testers to assess the current status. Know where you are, know where you are going, know how to get there. It is my opinion that currently, nobody does this better than Fedora, starting in the F11 cycle and hopefully extending to infinity.

  • Superheroes need apply

Every community needs superheroes, we are not all equal beings. Some are just great and we should let them know. Fedora would not be the distro it is without Brian Pepple and Dave Jones e.g.. In the same way that Jo Shields is a superhero in the Ubuntu realm of things, Miguel and Fredrico are for Novell and Owen Taylor is for the desktop. Superheroes help us think about things the right way, instead of blindly solving problems they help us think about why and how to make things better. Superheroes invest their time to make our lives fundamentally better, often without pay or much love.

  • There is a life after death.. of the server and desktop

Today computing is changing, it is in your phone, on your desktop, it powers the tasks you do every day online, it’s with you always. It wakes you up in the morning and helps you through your day. We need to think beyond the desktop and server, continuing to focus only on those two use cases and variation thereof is limiting. We need to run on interesting devices, we need to rethink interfaces to let people do their work on their netbooks, smart phones and other devices. We probably also should take appliances seriously as a deployment tactic, it helps people get their work done and helps us provide a smooth experience that is supportable. One size does not fit all. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t provide the very best desktop and server experience we can now, it means that is not the future.

Lack of updates

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I know I haven’t been updating as often as I promised to. There is though a good reason, I appear to have gotten poisoned by the medication I take for my Tourette’s. Once I stop throwing up, and otherwise partaking in the joys of altering my body’s chemistry in a most undesirable fashion and get back to normal I will probably be out of touch.

In the search for a more normal life, this happens occasionally. My main problem right now is with retaining nurishment which tends to make me a bit weak and irritable for which I apologize to my surroundings.

Me blog you long time

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It’s been a while since I blogged last, I think I go through cycles, occasionally I am very energized and want to share every cool thing or thought that pops into my head. At other times, weeks can go by without the urge to blog hits me.

However here goes what has been happening lately, big changes. I have decided on 2 things, one is to live by the promise I made my fiancée and take better care of myself so I have started going to a gym. I try to make it 3 times a week for a 25 mins intensive cardio session plus some weight lifting, the effect is starting to be measurable as I have lost 2 kilos the past few weeks.

The other promise was to get more actively involved with Fedora again, so I submitted Mirage for review and it is currently available in Rawhide (and F9+10 once Banshee 1.4.2 gets pushed, which hopefully will be soon). Mirage is a plugin for the Banshee mediaplayer that offers spectrum analysis to generate automatic playlists based on song similarity.

I am also working on Moonlight packages for rpmfusion, so Fedora users might avail themselves of this technology despite the official Fedora stance. However there are issues getting the 1.0 release to compile against our system copy of cairo.

There is though a bit of sadness attached to coming back, as soon as I decided to come back. The assine and occasionally childish mono hate postings returned to the mailing lists. Jos,  Nicolas, Kevin and Jesse, I hope you are proud of yourselves for making it unfunny to contribute to Fedora working on perfectly valid Free Software. Additionally, Jesses comment specifically makes me worry that Red Hat might pull Mono from Fedora. Taking such action would make Fedora entirely useless to me and I would have to go look for a new home, something which I do not much feel like doing.

Little hopes for Fedora 11 and beyond

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Now that Fedora 10 is out of the door, I´d like to look ahead 6 months to things I wish to see on my Fedora 11 desktop (and beyond).

  1. The beginnings of a consistent all enveloping theming, I feel that Fedora develops software that improves gradually with each release and our artwork starts from scratch pretty much every 6 months. I would love to see a consistent professional look that we can carry for a 2 years or so with gradual improvements. Something like this might also be able to push innovation in the technology we have so we can do the things visually gifted people can invision. OpenSUSE and Ubuntu already do this and I think it does them a world of good in terms of presenting the technology we have to the users.
  2. Acceleration for my r600, with work progressing the way it is on the radeon driver I don´t know if this is in the scope for F11 but I have my hopes. Especially since unaccelerated my desktop is pretty useless perticularly for playing back video (HD content makes the matter even worse).
  3. Suspend and resume for both my machines, I mean where does one even begin to file a bug. Really good guides to weeding out the information developers need would be excellent. I feel bad generally just filing bugs with the title ¨dies on resume¨ it just seems like poor style and a technique likely to waste developer time which I am not a great fan of.
  4. btrfs preview support, I am a glutton for punishment, this seems like cool technology and with the way work progresses towards 1.0 I am hoping we can see a preview similar to what we have with ext4 currently. Not sure F11 is the right time frame but I have hopes ( idealistic vain hopes but still hopes).
  5. Banshee as the default media player, with it´s aggressive development plan and responsive developers it seems to make a lot more sense to me as our default. It also presents much nicer bling and cooler features. I like that we can count on releases happening often with major improvements happening each time. E.g. in the pipeline now is things like rockbox integration meaning we might be able to offer users a way to convert a player to use only free software and free formats soon (something that seems like an issue for some due to codec patents). 
  6. A netbook spin, as is evident from existing data nebooks are not a good target for our default desktop. The screen size is not perfect for the existing interface (maybe time to look at sugar here?) and they have different requirements for their partitioning to not wear out the SSDs needlessly. Many little tweaks to be done.
  7. An equvilant to SUSE Studio I am starting to believe heavily in applicances and while Fedora was early to the table making this possible we haven´t really taken the work much further since then.
  8. I´d like to see our Mono stack improve, there is a SIG now but we have yet to plan the first meeting and there are other failings in this area such as getting more maintainers and getting a complete stack so developers can rely on things being there instead of having to bundle them. One important step would definitely be getting Moonlight into rpmfusion since RH Legal have blocked it in Fedora proper. (this item I will likely invest a lot of time in during the next 6 months along with Banshee as always).

As a personal todo list aside the Mono work, I would love to do the developer/feature interviews as podcasts for the Fedora TV feed. I just have no idea where to start but I have a lot of time on my hands and it seems like a good time to do things like this now that free tools like Jokosher are coming of age.

Things I wish Google Reader did

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I love Google Reader, I use it for all my news needs but it´s far from perfect.

  1. Remove duplicate posts, I am subscribed to a lot of different planets where some people are duplicates (like the magnificent Richard Hughes who is on Planet GNOME as well as Planet Fedora). Removing such duplicates should not be hard and it would greatly improve the usefulness of the application.
  2. Give me an option to only read posts in languages I specify as being ones I understand (this might make me miss posts where there are 6 words in chinese followed by lots of useful screenshots.. to bad) or give me an option to let Google Translate handle posts where it can guess the language and give me content in english.
  3. Let me exclude people, there are certain people who are on a number of planets who post solely on distributions details specific to products I don´t use nor like or other things I consider off topic. Not neccesarily an option to remove them but put those posts on a b-list for a day when I am really bored and can be bothered to read lenghty postings on such subjects.
  4. Get me related blog posts, if I am starring a lot of posts on PackageKit e.g. I would potentially like more news items on the subject, create me a feed of related postings.. you´re google, you know everything including what I had for breakfast. 
  5. Let me tag postings easily and expose these tags for the purpose of writing blog posts or articles. So that when I am in wordpress I can add a widget that gets me the current list of exposed subjects in my feed. I can pick one and write my own post with these as references more easily. There is nothing worse that having to dig through a starred item list to dig out those few postings I need. In the end I tend to omit adding references because it´s to much work, regardless of how bad style that is. This might not be enough though since not all references will be from blog postings but also from mailing lists so maybe a nice Google Chrome plugin to tag such things where ever I go (this would also be useful for social bookmarking purposes, something I never used before since I have yet to find a solution that integrates well).

I really wish Google Reader would be part of helping me create good, easily referenced content,  in short being a more active service than a passive one. This is not a simple task and it will require a dip into the larger ecosystem of software and web services but at least a few of these should be doable.