July 18, 2008
freesoftware, gnome, guadec, maemo
1 Comment
It’s been a hectic week, but I really wanted to write up some notes from this year’s GUADEC for posterity, and to share some of the great stuff that happened that people might not know about.
GNOME Mobile
After arriving late (very late) on Monday, I was up early to go & lead the GNOME Mobile BOF in the nice luxury bar on the top floor of the building.
The meeting location had been changed the day before, so we left people an extra half an hour to find the room. Unfortunately, we were a couple of days late to appear in the printed program once we’d decided when to hold the BOF, so some people who really wanted to be there found out afterwards.
The BOF went well – some really interesting discussions, and, I hope, some momentum to carry us through to a successful 2.24 GNOME Mobile release and a productive collaboration effort over the coming months.
We will be working on updating the website to list the active participants, collect and publish success stories from GNOME Mobile developers and users, and provide a more fruitful collaboration forum for participants.
Keynotes
I loved Leisa Reichelt and Matt Webb‘s keynotes. Since I was the one who invited them, I’m glad that they seemed well received by those who attended. Matt’s keynote suffered a little by being at 10am, but unfortunately he had to fly away early in the afternoon, being the FOO that he is. Interesting factoid: the book that Matt co-authored for O’Reilly, “Mind Hacks”, was not for sale at the ORA stand. I bet that we could have set up a signing session if she had some 😉
I also enjoyed Chris Blizzard’s keynote, and Alp Toker and Kristian Reitveld’s sessions were choc a bloc with interesting technical stuff.
Unfortunately, I didn’t see Federico’s talk as I was already at the airport, and thus I also missed the closing plenary, the foundation meeting, and (with great regret) the lightning talks.
Presentations
I did get to catch some great presentations though. Clutter Guts was great – really fascinating stuff, and as always, pippin gives a mean demo.
I caught Travis Reitter’s Soylent talk, and I think I missed most of the feature presentation & demos in the first 5 minutes… which was unfortunate. It seems to me like libsoylent is aiming to provide the type of API I was kind of expecting from Telepathy… I don’t know if that’s a pair representation.
I also caught Owen Taylor presenting Big Board and the GNOME Online Desktop – promising stuff, and it seems like it’s almost at that inflection point you get in a project where it goes from a small project to one that gets adapted everywhere. It seems to be, as I tweeted at the time, like Gimmie, brought through to completion.
I think the only other presentation (outside of keynotes) I caught was my own, which seemed fairly well received. I managed to give Chris 20 minutes break before his keyboard too, which was great.
GTK+ 3
I’m not going to take any part in the whole GTK+ 3 discussion, though, except to share my own experiences with third party developers. Having worked with a company that had a GTK+ 1.2 interface that we were supporting for years for a client because the client didn’t want to pay to have it ported to GTK+ 2.x, I see where Miguel is coming from. I also understand that it would be good to have some idea of the things people don’t like in the current platform before committing to an API freeze for at least 2 – 3 years again.
Perhaps that would be a good first step – going beyond the initial rant to say “OK, what features do people not like? What do we need to change/add to the current platform to address the needs application developers have?”.
Like I said, I’m going to mostly stay out of it, except to reiterate one point I made on the marketing list – I think it’s a bad idea to connect a change in major version number in GNOME to a change in the API of the platform. GNOME version numbers indicate compelling new features to users, API version numbers convey something about the API, which users (and, by extension, press) don’t care about. We need to concentrate on the user when talking about GNOME versions.
GUADEC selection
I was happy to sit in with the board on the discussion with KDE eV when the three bids for GUADEC/Akademy 2009 were considered. Based on what I’ve learned from being involved in GUADEC organisation every year since Kristiansand, I recommended that the final cost to attendees (with particular thought for companies sending many developers from the US) be the primary deciding factor, the organising committee and their community credentials second, with the location itself being third.
While I’m happy to see the Canaries chosen as the final choice, I don’t think that my suggestions were particularly given precedence in the decision making process. In any case, I hope I’ll be able to help make GUADEC 2009 a success.
Stormy
I know what she’s thinking – “I’ve had enough publicity at this stage, let’s get people talking about GNOME” – but I am really really pleased to see Stormy come on board as the new Executive Director. When I mentioned it to her back in April, I really didn’t think that she would be interested, but I saw from that first spark of interest that she has wanted to work with the GNOME project for a long time. The stars were aligned and it has come to pass.
I know, when we decided to hire for the role a couple of years back (yes, it’s been that long) Jeff had major concerns about the title – he wanted to set different expectations to those we had of Tim. I agree with that – and I think that the board have done a good job of setting those expectations with Stormy. She is our relationships person, and we direly needed one working full time.
Outside the conference
The FreeFA World Cup has its third running this year, with 3 teams battling it out in the Turkish sun (I’m still trying to work out if we were mad dogs or Englishmen) before battling with Turkish rush-hour traffic (for some reason, Istanbul rush hour seems to be around 8pm). Others have written about it already. In spite of the considerable handicap of wearing the most heat-absorbant t-shirts, the black team won through against the red & white teams, thanks to a rock solid defense. There’s no praise like self-praise they say.
SMASHED was again a great success – this is the third time I’ve brought a bottle to a conference, after buying a Glenrothes 10yo on my way to China for the Linux Foundation Developers Summit and bringing a bottle I’ve completely forgotten to Austin for the Collaboration Summit in April.
This time, I will definitely not forget – the Glengoyne 12yo cask strength I brought was a lovely bottle among other lovely bottles. We spread the whisky love around, I hope that all the whisk[e]y lovers on the boat got at least one wee dram. Karl & John Carr were feeling a little worse for wear at the end of the evening. I managed to be a little more reasonable than those two… but only slightly. And the nightcap of reki on the pillows put paid to any hope I had of making it into the conference the following morning.
I really enjoyed getting some quality time with Luis, jrb, Lefty, vuntz and Stormy, and the many discussions I had on the rooftop, in the hallways, and on the boat. The really best thing about GUADEC is the conversations happening all the time.
July 16, 2008
freesoftware, gnome, maemo
12 Comments
I hate to give attention to Sam Varghese, but he is, after all, my favourite free software Shock Jock – always looking for conflict, or the controversial angle on the most innocuous statement.
This week, he wrote:
Is Mr Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, slowly warming towards KDE?[…]
Given the amount of flak that the recent KDE release – 4.0 – has taken from the pro-GNOME pundits at sites like linux.com, you would think that the worst possible thing any supporter of GNOME – as Shuttleworth is perceived to be – could do is to speak out in support of anything associated with KDE.
But you would be wrong. Shuttleworth is now floating the idea that there can be a QT-based GNOME.
So we look farther, and see that Sam is referring to the article in derStandard.at which Andreas wrote in GUADEC. Mark says, and I paraphrase: “GNOME’s platform licencing is company friendly, QT’s isn’t, but if QT were to change their licencing strategy to a company-friendly licence, GNOME would have some hard choices to make”.
To be fair, let’s get the direct quote in here:
A lot is going to depend on what Nokia is going to do from a licensing point of view. And separately what GNOME is going to do if Nokia makes the QT-licenses effectively compatible with the GNOME vision, can they embrace QT as a platform? […] I think it would be perfectly possible to deliver the values of GNOME on top of QT. There are licensing issues, GNOME is very much built on the LGPL, allowing companies to build their own products on a free software system, giving them some freedom and flexibility in their choice of licensing. That’s very frankly been a huge drive for the adoption of GNOME by corporate ISVs.
So, let me read between the lines (well, in fact, I’m just reading *on* the lines): if QT became LGPL or X11 or BSD, that would instantly make it a more attractive platform for commercial developers. Mark thinks that it’s possible to bring the GNOME vision of universal access through a beautiful, simple, accessible, internationalised, integrated user experience to the QT platform.
I may be nuts, but isn’t that more an indictment of KDE than a recommendation? Isn’t he saying “the KDE guys should be more like GNOME”? Isn’t he suggesting that if QT were available as LGPL or more liberal that we all become C++ hackers and port GNOME over to QT?
As it happens, I think that’s extremely unlikely, given the investment in C that GNOME has already made – changing the underlying platform would mean re-writing every single application, and leaving a lot of dead & wounded behind. Plus, I have a lot of faith that through improved bindings and a less shackled GTK+, combined with the 2-3 year “vision” arcs that the release team proposed at GUADEC, that we can inject a healthy dose of adrenaline into the heart of GNOME over the next couple of years.
July 5, 2008
gnome, guadec, running
1 Comment
So when’s the Malt Appreciation Society meeting this year? I have a bottle of cask strength 12yo Glengoyne I picked up today & was planning to bring along – no idea if it’s any good. So… when do I get to find out???
Also, anyone interested in going for an early morning run (not the day after the Malt Appreciation Society meeting) drop me a line, especially if you’re in or near the Golden Horn Sirkeci… we can do some early morning tourism at about 12km/h.
July 4, 2008
gnome
1 Comment
I rebooted my computer and went out for lunch with some friends. When I came back, it was particularly unresponsive, so I went hunting, and top showed me this:
19055 root     20  0 1343m 453m 1524 D 0.3 45.3  1:46.13 rsvg-convert
A quick ps…
dneary@sligo:~$ ps -ef | grep 19055
root    19055 19054 0 12:25 ?       00:01:45
/usr/bin/rsvg-convert -o /var/log/bootchart/hardy-20080704-1.png
/var/log/bootchart/bootchart.svgz
Ouch!
Does bootchart run until you log in? Is this normal behaviour? 1.3G of virtual memory is an awful lot…
July 3, 2008
francais, freesoftware, gnome, guadec, marketing
No Comments
I’m coming to the end of my two days in Mont de Marsan (and, as it happens, to the end of the charge in my laptop battery). I think the GNOME Accessibility presentation I gave went very well, certainly people seemed to get a lot from it. I’ll put my slides online at some stage (before the weekend), and I was filmed, when I have a link to the video I’ll throw that up too.
As usual, the great thing about conferences is meeting old friends, and making new ones, and there are a lot of familiar faces around.
One thing that did come out of my presentation is the need for those storyboards I proposed a while back. In particular, I tripped up when demoing Orca (no real plan to show off its functionality, other than turning on TTS, and “doing stuff”, then turning on magnification, and “doing stuff”, etc…), Dasher (it’d be handy to have a few phrases to type rather than coming up with something on the spot), and sticky & slow keys.
I hit a few problems with the keyboard a11y. When I had both sticky & slow keys activated, I got double letters (I’m sure it was a configuration issue, but anyway…). And when I used the keyboard shortcut to navigate to the top bar, I hit two bugs – if I open a menu in the top menubar, I can’t navigate away with the keyboard (Ctrl-Alt-Tab doesn’t work any more), and I can’t navigate to the notification area with the keyboard. And I got some comments on MouseTweaks (“we need a way to temporarily disable it for times when you’re reading a document or a web page, for example”) and Dasher (“not really suitable for certain classes of users” – I’ll try to get more information).
Yesterday’s presentation “Building bridges” went less well – it was a dry run for my GUADEC presentation, and I’ve taken away 3 or 4 good ideas for improvements. But like all the English presentations here, attendance was poor – I have about 10 or 12 attendees. And at 9am this morning, there was one person who turned up for my presentation in English on accessibility in GNOME – lucky enough, since when I tested my laptop with the projector, I had a bunch of problems! Many thanks to Claude Paroz, who helped me identify the problem (old driver + options which were necessary in Ubuntu 6.06 and 7.04, but have since been deprecated) and the solution (dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg). My laptop works with projectors! Yay!
June 30, 2008
gnome, marketing
No Comments
This week, I will be travelling to Mont de Marsan, near Bordeaux, Agen, Bayonne and Pau (or let’s say, equally far away from all of those) to give a few presentations, meet a few friends, have a few drinks, and hopefully survive a 9am presentation slot on Thursday morning.
My three presentations (really, two, but they’re taking advantage of my bilinguality) are:
- Bridges between projects : 16:45 on Wednesday. A dry run for my GUADEC presentation, presenting a variety of ways that different projects are co-ordinating, and what we’re talking about, that most people don’t know about.
- Digital Ramps and Handrails: 9:00 on Thursday (in English), and 11:45 on Thursday (in French). It’s with some trepidation that I proposed a presentation on GNOME usability for the conference, since I’m by no means an expert. But I feel that we’ve done such good work in this area, and I’m so impressed with the passion of the accessibility team, that I felt that we definitely needed to talk about it more, so I’ll take my chances. I plan to give a low level overview of the accessibility tools built into GNOME, including keyboard shortcuts, accessible themes, audio events, sticky keys, slow keys, mousetweaks, alternative input methods (Dasher, on-screen keyboard), and of course a short description of Orca and our support for screen readers and GNOME Magnifier. I’ll also mention the surprising side-effects of having an accessible desktop – graphics application test frameworks Dogtail, LTSP and Accerciser. When I get to talking about AT-SPI, that’s where I get nervous, because I’ve had some trouble with gok in the past where my keyboard got disabled when I launched it… I’m going to avoid demoing gok.
Did I miss anything important? Please let me know if you saw anything braindead that I should talk about that I haven’t yet.
Unfortunately, I can’t really afford to travel for the full week, so I’m heading off tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday), eating with friends in Bordeaux tomorrow evening, and spending Wednesday and Thursday at the conference, before heading off again Thursday evening.
If anyone else overlaps and would like to meet up Wednesday evening, drop me a line!
June 29, 2008
gnome, guadec
5 Comments
I got a definitive answer today from the Golden Horn in SultanahmetSirkeci as to why I hadn’t yet received a confirmation of my reservation: I don’t have a reservation.
I have contacted the hotel by phone, filled in the online form, and following instructions, patiently awaited a confirmation, which never came. At that stage, after waiting perhaps a little too long, I tried the hotel again (the person I talked to didn’t know anything about the group code, the online reservation system, and to be honest, didn’t speak English very well), and asked Baris to look into it. Which he did. And got confirmation yesterday that myself and at least one other person who had registered online did not have reservations.
So if, like me, you reserved online at the Golden Horn SultanahmetSirkeci, and like me, you have not yet received any confirmation of your booking, then like me, you’ll need to find another hotel. Bummer.
Update: Baris informs me that the Golden Horn in Sirkeci has made more rooms available under the group code, so there’s hope for me yet.
June 28, 2008
gnome, guadec
No Comments
It’s with great disappointment that I just found out that Eric Sink is cancelling his GUADEC keynote. Eric’s been told by his doctors not to take the trip for health reasons, and while I’m disappointed (I was really looking forward to his keynote), I can of course understand his decision, and I wish him a full & speedy recovery.
I only just found out, and let Baris and the programme committee know, so I don’t know yet what we’re going to do given Eric’s cancellation. I’ll keep you all posted, of course, when I know more.
June 25, 2008
gnome, maemo
6 Comments
With the recent discussion in blogs around the GNOME world, it can be easy to forget that there have been some great new applications for GNOME appearing recently. Many of these are written by a new breed of GNOME developer, young students with none of the weight of history sitting on their shoulders, and they are great!
If you haven’t tried them yet, then you should. Most of these aren’t in the GNOME desktop suite, and could probably do with some more exposure.
Here’s a few that came to mind without me having to think too long:
- GNOME Do: This is an amazing application! Its plug-in system is what makes it really great – add all music by an artist to your Rhythmbox playlist, tweet that you’re at your computer, send an IM to a contact, all with just a few keystrokes
- Hamster: I discovered this app recently, and have been very impressed. A plug-in for GNOME Do, and it’d be perfect 😉
- Tasque: For the GTD wannabe that I am.A clean, small app to handle TODO lists.
- Cheese!: Now that this is in the desktop, I guess everyone knows about it. A PhotoBooth clone with an authorwith a sense of humour – especially on April 1st.
- Vagalume: My absolute favourite Last FM client.
- Pimlico: A mobile suite of applications. I tried out Dates and Contacts on my N810, and was very impressed. Everything I personally want in a PIM – simple, functional, intuitive, beautiful.
- Transmission: After using the old GNOME bittorrent client for so long, I was really happy to see someone put the work into making a sensible BT client for GNOME, and Transmission is it. Bravo.
Some of these apps have come from people working in companies like Igalia, Opened Hand and Novell, some of them from students, some of them from hack weeks, all of them have some things in common – a sense of aesthetics and attention to the user experience, lightweight user interfaces ruthlessly focussed on a core usecase. And all serve their users well.
Another thing that many of them share is a sense of humour – when using Hamster or Cheese, you can’t help but feel that the author was having a ball.
Nothing in particular set me writing this, I just wanted to point out that there are many new applications aimed at the end user coming out of GNOME, humour and creativity still live here.
June 12, 2008
gnome
2 Comments
This IRC conversation, in some sense, sums up all my feelings about the recent decadence wave running through GNOME.
Me:
It seems like there are lots of interesting directions to go, which would add transversal functionality to GNOME which would be really new & useful. And they’ve been around for years.
Think of a geographically aware desktop, presenting contextual data based on where you are. Or something like Dashboard, presenting contextual data based on what you’re doing. Or something like the project-based desktop, showing only data which is related to a particular project/topic. Or person-based, where your contacts are first-class objects and you’re always aware of who’s around. Or integrating with existing online RESTful services, and (why not?) creating others that meet our standards.
And we have libraries for all of this stuff – GeoClue, Beagle, LeafTag (or something similar), Telepathy.
All you need to do (!) is add useful features based on that information to all of the applications that people use, from email through web, office, communications, games, …
Simple!
ozamosi
I Would do that myself, but I’m busy writing a blog post about that someone should do it.
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