Not waving but drowning

Ivan provides some insider perspective on the OLPC discussions that have been in the news lately, explaining some of the backstory behind public statements. It’s a great post, well worth reading. Absolutely any time you see news about open source software projects, companies around open source, etc., its good to remember that there is always a backstory to the facts that are stated. “The software is green”. Well, is the software green because there was a secret rebellion by one engineer the night before the release? There are always arguments on some train somewhere, secret power struggles, defiant engineers causing problems or huge successes despite their orders, personalities that simply cannot work together, any imaginable kind of extenuating circumstance. No matter how much we like being engineers and formal and precise, software is still concieved and built by flaky, moody humans who are driven by whim. I wouldn’t change that for the world. And no, I won’t be publishing my collection of backstories, not anytime soon That will have to wait for my memoirs.

3 days left until the release of Ubuntu 8.04. This release means a lot to me personally, because even though I don’t work on the distro team, I started running this version of Ubuntu almost immediately after the archives opened last year, before the first alpha release. There were some times during the development cycle when my laptop didn’t work at all (as you would expect while reworking important parts of the system), and I learned a lot troubleshooting, reporting bugs, even trying to fix one or two.

Another reason that this release is interesting is the number of commercial ISVs that will be supporting it.

More applications: More than 30 commercial ISVs plan to support and distribute their applications on the 8.04 LTS desktop platform, including Adobe, Google, Real Networks, Nero, Skype, Corel, Parallels and Fluendo.

I try to minimize my dependence on closed software, but I also like to have more choices. Currently I have 3 closed source applications running on my Ubuntu laptop: VMWare, Skype, and ActiveState Komodo IDE. ActiveState has recently made a FLOSS version of their editor (but not their debugger), I should really find an alternative to Skype, and I’m planning to try using kvm more than VMWare this year. However, I’ll probably buy Nero, as the existing DVD authoring solutions on linux are still pretty bad. I think buying a copy of Nero to use on Linux so that I don’t have to use iDVD in OS X to author DVDs is still a good step forward, and I hope that these applications being available on Ubuntu will help get even more people switched over to Linux, where they can continue the transition to using free software.

Finally, I’m excited about 8.04 because it means upgrades in our hosting environments all over the place – we had been running 6.06 on a lot of servers, and getting to upgrade to 8.04 will be a nice refresh.

By the way, I work for Canonical, but nobody asked me to blog about Ubuntu, or any of the stuff I have been blogging about like Launchpad or Bazaar. Inevitably, if someone asks me to blog about something, I just stop blogging. Dunno why I have such a strong reaction like that, but I really hate IZEA astroturfing. I won’t normally publish something negative about my current employer, because I think it is more responsible to try and fix problems directly rather than complaining in public, so thats why you normally see positive, enthusiastic posts. If I’m talking about it, it’s something I like personally (usually).

Wow, for some reason today I discovered a lot of very cool things in a very short period of time. Time for a tab sweep, in a weak imitation of Tim Bray.

First I discovered RescueTime, was about to dismiss them because I use Ubuntu, then discovered a linux client on launchpad.Ridiculously easy time management here I come. This app sounds like exactly what Monty was asking for a couple of years ago, and I dismissed it as being too hard.Wow, Monty has a blog!

Next, the stackoverflow.com announcement sounds very promising. I still read a lot of books, but we need a better way to share information between programmers.

I talked to Tim Penhey in New Zealand today about how things are going in the Launchpad code hosting world, and there are some cool enhancements going into PQM that should make it a lot easier to run your own.

Also stumbled across tipjoy, which is a micropayment system that looks interesting, I’ve been pondering how to do micropayments for pro bono projects that I work on in my spare time and will be giving this a try.

A lot of folks seem to be using Get Satisfaction for doing customer support. I wonder how this compares to Launchpad Answers – I suspect that there are advantages in both systems.

I’ve also been pondering how to make it easier for people to interact around projects. I’ve got a link to a Java applet IRC client in my launchpad profile, and am wondering how useful it would be for more projects to do this on their home page. I think there are a LOT of developers that just never use IRC because they’ve never tried it. I’ve asked the Florida Ubuntu Team to add a link to this, I guess we’ll see if anyone uses it.

Finally, I ordered a book on Puppet, the system administration scripting toolkit. Since I work from home, I end up doing a fair amount of sysadmin type work keeping my own systems running (usually on various beta versions of ubuntu), and I’ve never really done enough to automate things, which has led to me doing things like abandoning the PQM announcer bot I used to run for our internal code trees. Maybe puppet will get me back on track with keeping my computers better maintained.

As regular readers know, I work on Launchpad during the day, which is about the coolest job imaginable. It’s pretty exciting to me to see the gradual shift in thinking as more and more people discover distributed development, and start to realize the need for tools to enable incidental or drive-by contributions. It’s also eye-opening to hear from real world projects that have very specific needs and workflows.

If you could have any imaginable feature you wanted in Launchpad to make it easier for your project or company to collaborate with others, what would it be? We have a pretty broad spectrum of things now, from enabling support communities to form in peoples native language, to enabling people to contribute software translations through their web browser, to a pretty sophisticated bug tracking and code hosting system, personal package archives for distributing customized packages, and more. Still, sometimes the big features aren’t enough, and there is some specific thing missing that would make the system a lot better for a particular project. If you have looked at Launchpad in the past, or are using Launchpad now, I would love to hear your wishlist. Comment here or you can mail me elliot at canonical.

Slow start today, long drive to the doctor and back. On the way home I stopped in at the bookstore, as they often have interesting books that the stores near my home do not. Picked up a copy of Implementing Lean Software Development (From Concept To Cash), very excited about reading it. Last year we were privileged to have Mary and Tom Poppendieck train the whole launchpad team in Boston, and it was very interesting to hear the real life examples from PatientKeeper. This book seems to have even more, and it’s certainly much more complete than my notes from those two days are.

Now to get some work done!


emurphy@jitter-shadow:~$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
93 sudo
85 cd
53 ls
36 apt-cache
33 vim
32 ssh
30 bzr
12 ..
11 make
9 start-bluetooth-network


Sean tipped me off about mailbucket, it’s a way to turn a mailing list into an RSS feed for people who lurk on high-volume mailing lists. After I posted on the Bazaar mailing list about this, Aaron told me that Gmane had a very similar feature. I’ve used the Gmane web interface to mailing lists before, but had not seen the RSS feature.

Now I’ve tried both, and for plain-text emails so prevalent on software development mailing lists, the formatting that comes through in mailbucket is much nicer than Gmane RSS. Of course, if I want to give someone a link to an old mail thread, Gmane is the obvious choice.

last night signed up for some slices from http://www.slicehost.com/. It was amazing, I was logged into my clean ubuntu install within 3 minutes of requesting it. The thing I’m most looking forward to with these slices? Running all kinds of crazy software without any regard for stability. My goal is to get some hands on experience actually running some of the various distributed computing software I always hack on and read about.