Matt Jones’ Blog

You know, I really thought that the people in the Canonical website were real employees. Now my vision of Canonical HQ is shattered. I got this add for phone-service in my inbox today, and realized that the woman looked familiar.

Ok. So I really didn’t think they were employees, but it is kind of disturbing to have pictures of fake employees on your website like that.

When I got back from SCALE on Sunday, I decided to let it digest a little before posting anything about it. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I’m really excited to present my findings.

The Good:

1. I met some amazing people. My faith in humanity went up a little. After my daily-dose of people that just don’t care, it was very refreshing.
2. Untangle presented their all-in-one network. It has everything you need to run a small business or home network: Firewall, spam filter, virus scanner, phishing filter, email filter, web filter, et cetera. And the best thing is that it is trivial for non-network admins to configure. I’m very anxious to set this up at my home. I just need to assemble a low-power machine that has 2 NIC cards.
3. The “A Quick and Dirty Intro to User­Centered Design in Open Source Development” presentation by Celeste Lyn Paul was very interesting. I’ve always been interested in usability, but sadly it is like still a foreign language to me. You can see the presentation slides on her blog.
4. The “Linux Entertain Me!” presentation by Cecil Watson was a good showcase on how much more usable MythTV has gotten. I’ve been blowing it off for a few years and anxiously waiting for Elisa to get a little more polish. But I’m definitely going to give it another go on a media center box.
5. There were tons of OLPC XOs and Asus Eees floating around. I brought my Eee and had to give everyone my little review on the unit. I wish I had brought my XO too. I could have done some testing with the mesh network collaboration.
6. There was free WiFi! My Eee has about half the signal strength of a normal laptop, but it was still usable.
7. Again the people were bad ass. I met tons of new people (If only I could remember all their names), and had a good time just chatting-it-up in the sitting/dinning areas.

The Bad:

1. The name tags were crap. They were the kind that hangs around your neck on a lanyard. The problem is that the tag was connected to the lanyard by a swivel, so the tag would always flip around backwards. The text was also way too small. I can’t tell you how may times I had to scan someones torso from a few feet away (front and back) to find their name. As you could imagine, some women were like WTF after I did that a few times. Forever awkward Matt strikes again.
2. Parking was almost non-existent at the Westin Hotel. I first tried parking in their self-parking, but after driving up and down both sides of their bee-hive I had to use the valet parking. Even thought the structure was full, it still let me in, and charged me $5 on exit!
3. The expo floor was very crowded. I only walked though a few times to check out some booths that I had passed due to crowding. I really hope they find a venue that has more space (Part of the reason why I paid the full $70 was to help fund this thing as much as I can).

I hope that gives a good taste to the people that didn’t make it. I would definitely recommend SCALE again.

I got my XO in yesterday. I wanted to know how a regular Gnome/Python app would work on it. So I decided to see how the newest MeMaker performs. The results were pretty good. Here are some screen caps and comments:

First as a reference, here is MeMaker on Ubuntu with the Human theme. Notice that the box that lets you pick a head style has 2 columns. Notice the standard icons on the ‘New’, ‘About’, ‘Remove’, and ‘Save As’ buttons. Also notice that the window has a decoration, with minimize and close buttons.

As for running MeMaker on the XO, my first observation is that it actually works without any code changes. It is a little slow to start up (but we have some experiments that fix that greatly). The only real bug, is that the face panel on the left is smashed, and the feature panel on the right should be limited to 2 columns instead of 6.

A few minor user interface issues reveal themselves: Although you can’t see them in any of these pictures, the tool tips are a dark gray, that makes them not standout from the widgets. And the selected tab, or page in this picture, is not highlighted. Below, the ‘Head’ page is selected, so it should be highlighted. You can get it to somewhat highlight, by clicking the page twice.

The only real other difference, is that the window does not have a decoration or close button. You have to go back to the XO’s Home menu and close it. This sounds cumbersome, but actually works well.

Here is the About dialog on the XO. It is so big that it takes up the whole screen. On a regular Gnome desktop, it is bigger than average, but not that big. (Hmm. If we made the url to launchpad a link-button, wold it work correctly on the XO?) Also, thank reason that someone added working code to the close button. Rather than relying on the window decoration’s close button to be present.

Here is the Save dialog. Pretty standard Gnome stuff. Although I’ve only played with Sugar for a bit, nothing seems to use save dialogs. So we would should research what the other Sugar apps do, and copy them. We could possibly just save the avatar directly to the place it will be used. IE: the icon that represents the XO. But I have no idea if that is even possible or desired.

This is the main Hame panel of the XO. All the running apps show up as an icon in the circle. There are two apps other than MeMaker running in there. The terminal and the Journal. They each have their own icon. MeMaker does not have an icon, so it shows up as a gray circle.

The programs also have a black menu that pops up when you mouse over (as seen below). This lets you perform app specific functionality, as well as start and stop the program. It should also show the name of the app in the top of the menu. But it is blank for memaker.

I’m very impressed with this machine, and how close standard Gnome apps are to just working. I look forward to testing other apps on the XO in the future.

I just downloaded the new Ubuntu release. It took a whopping 29 minutes to download the near 700 megabytes. That’s a very good speed to download any OS, on release day. And it is all thanks to the 2344 seeders.

That’s right. there were thousands of people seeding this thing. And to top it off, there were 969 leachers. So that is almost a 3 to 1 ratio. That is unprecedented

And the best thing about it, is that it didn’t cost the Ubuntu much money in bandwidth (assuming a tracker is cheap)

Here is a picture

Also, You may notice that I am using KTorrent, instead of the default Ubuntu torrenter. It is the only torrent downloader on Ubuntu that “just works”. If you ask me, it should be the default. That is if it does not require too much KDE to install.

While donating to another of my favourite artists on Jamendo. I noticed that in the last few days, I have spent more money on Creative Commons Music, than all the music I bought from the media cartel in the past 5 years. Here is a picture to prove it:

And no. I don’t pirate music.

I just noticed the new album by Lonah called “Au fond du temps”. Very nice.

And remember. Please support artists you like.

Bye Bye Subversion. Hello Bazaar.

bzr branch http://intuitive-desktop.org/bzr/main/

Merging is SOOOOO much easier in Bazaar.

Also. I stumbled over a tool called Meld Diff that is very useful when you need to perform complex merges that can’t be performed automatically.

Look at the pic. You can click the little arrows to merge each section, one-by-one.

I don’t care if the problem is Dreamhost or Subversion. All I know, is that I get home from work at 7 PM and have to go to bed at 10PM. In that small window, (where I am alive, and cease bing a cog in a really antiquated machine) I want to get work done on my project.

And I can’t. For the past week, I have been trying to simply compare two branches. I’m not even at the fucking merge stage. Just comparing. It either takes 30 minutes, or fails with some strange error (possibly a timeout):

svn: PROPFIND request failed on '/intuitive_desktop/!svn/bc/209/trunk/IntuitiveFramework/Models'
svn: Processing PROPFIND request response failed: required string: "lp1:version-name" (/intuitive_desktop/!svn/bc/209/trunk/IntuitiveFramework/Models)

I keep having to push the release of 0.5 back, because of shit like this. So close and yet so fucked in the side of the head.

Whew! Making a screencast is a huge pain in the ass. But here it is! The first screencast describing the Intuitive Desktop. It is a little messed up though. But watch it. It should be enough to get started with the documents. Comments are welcome.

(20 MB OGG) -

And for the love of Reason. Please mirror this of you are going to link it to a high bandwidth site.

I found this picture today. Hysterical.

I think there are more than seventeen pirates in the world though.