Safe as Milk

Maemo Summit day 1: Meeting people, learning stuff

Coming to the end of the first day of the Maemo Summit in C-Base in Berlin. From just outside, you have a view of the antenna of the space station that the C-Base group have been mapping out for the past few years. For those who don’t know, this is the terraforming space station which brought life to earth, and which crashed in what is now Berlin 4.5 billion years ago. Only the central tower, now in use as a television tower, is visible above ground.

The two days in OSiM World were useful and educational. I got to meet people from companies trying to learn how to work well with Free Software, which gave a great opportunity to affect real change by talking to the decision makers in those companies. I also got to meet some Maemo people who came to OSiM to meet up and hang out at the Maemo/Nokia stand (by far the most active stand in the conference, by the way).

But the Maemo Summit is a refreshing counter-weight to that – some of the observations that people made this morning were:

• We got better wireless and power for free than at the high-powered conference people paid thousands of euros to attend (given that the CCC is involved in C-Base, that was not surprising to me)
• The vocabulary has totally shifted. We’ve moved from value propositions, cost-benefit analysis, return on investment and fragmentation to people getting excited about tracemonkey, PowerVR, OMAP3, Clutter, hacks, crashes and bugs… the people who are down in the trenches and know what free software is are here.
• Less suits, more t-shirts

It has been an amazing day so far – some big news from Peter Schneider this morning that the interface for the Fremantle will be Clutter based – Rodrigo Novo  went into more details:  Nokia are funding new tablet-oriented widgets and off-screen support for GTK+, the integration of Clutter, and more.The lightning talks were fascinating for the breadth and depth of things which people are doing with Maemo – everything from using them in police cars to porting PyPy through running Debian in a chrooted environment as a Maemo application (presentation given in OO.o running in said Debian on an N810!!!).

As usual, what’s most impressive at these things is meeting old friends and making new ones. I’ve got to spend lots of time with Stormy, Paul Cooper, Jim Zemlin, Lefty, Bdale and others, and today I had a chance to have a good chat with Rob Taylor, Philippe Kalaf, Murray Cumming, Simon Budig and more. I was very happy to put a face to Tero Cujo’s name, the latest addition to Nokia’s maemo.org team. I’m a little disappointed not to have met anyone from Nemein here yet after working with them for so long – but Henri is in Korea for an international Haedong Kumdo competition, and getting his 23rd Dan (or something like that) confirmed by a master while there.

In addition to the summit, there is also a desktop search hackfest happening over the next two days, with people involved in Tracker, Beagle and Xesam getting together to agree on interfaces and work on implementation, to bring rocking search to desktops and tablets of the future.

There’s a heavy GNOME influence at the conference, which makes the various noises I hear about Nokia backing away from GNOME seem exceedingly over-stated. It looks to me like Nokia are using more and more of the GNOME and freedesktop.org stack, and are more than any other company right now setting a direction for GNOME in the future with investments in technologies like Clutter.

So far, great stuff! Looking forward to the party tonight, and day 2 tomorrow.

ACCESS Pub Quiz at OSiM World

Last night, “the Roaming Gnomes”, a team I put together, participated in the ACCESS pub quiz at OSiM World, organised by Lefty Schlesinger.

Lefty ran a Jeopardy-type quiz which was raucous, fun, energetic, competitive, and replete with a Windows Vista crash and a Flock bug. A bunch of teams had a go at questions in categories that included “Open source personalities”, “Comics and Movies”, “Mobile industry history”, “History of computing” and some general knowledge categories. And in the end, the best team won.Us! (Update: Now includes a photo of the winning team – Bdale and Jim got shy, and Niels had to leave early, and I think it’s Heikki who also missed the photo).

The Roaming GNOMEs

So here’s the role call of the Roaming Gnomes heros who helped bring the huge trophy to GNOME.

• Dave Neary
• Stormy Peters
• Paul Cooper (a two-time winner!)
• Alejandro, Alberto and Juanjo of Igalia
• Thomas Jansson
• Richard Rojfors
• Heikki Paajaken
• Bdale Garbee (our resident computing historian)
• Jim Zemlin
• Niels Breet (special mention for knowing the answer to which country has a wife-carrying race)

Congratulations to Lefty on running a very successful quiz – it was a good range of questions, and the rules change mid-game definitely contributed to the animation of the competition. And thanks once more to all the members of the team.

Community management

On Thursday I’ll be participating in a panel at OSIM World – “Effectively Building and Maintaining an Open Source Community”. It was a happy coincidence when I saw Matt Asay writing about the issue on Friday, and again today – it gives me a chance to think a bit more about the issues involved, and provides a data point which is very close to the experience that I have repeatedly seen when companies decide to use free software, be it peripherally or strategically.

On several occasions I have seen a lone developer decide to use a free software library to do some job for him. It doesn’t quite fit his needs, but he hacks up the extra feature or two in a couple of days, finds a few bugs that he fixes along the way to make things work as he needs them to, and ships it to a client as part of a larger solution.

At this point, one of two things will happen. The external project either stays as-is in the SCM of the company, awaiting a future upgrade request from the client, or the developer (usually because he is “the Linux guy” in the company and knows about these things) bundles up a couple of patches, heads along to the bug database for the project, signs up for Yet Another Bugzilla Account, and creates three or four bug entries with bug fixes attached, and another one for the new feature he hacked up. All told, he spends maybe half a day cooking up patches, navigating account creation, and submitting his work.

Usually, the patches will sit there for weeks or months before being reviewed. In most projects, if you don’t go onto a mailing list or IRC channel and ask the right guy to take the time to look at them, you can expect to wait. He has a backlog, gets lots of bugzilla nag mail already, and anyway, he’s working on a new feature he wants to get done this weekend between playing with the kids and doing the grocery shopping.

When they do get reviewed, the code base is likely to have shifted, so the patches don’t apply cleanly. Perhaps they don’t conform accurately to the coding conventions of the project. The feature, while useful, was done quickly (since it was only a minor part of a larger project), wasn’t accompanied by unit tests, and has a couple of issues that need resolving.

Of the four or five bug reports that our hacker created, one gets marked INVALID, another one is a DUPLICATE, and one patch gets applied and the bug fixed. The feature request status gets set to NEEDINFO, since there are some open issues to be addressed, but our hacker is now 6 months away from the code, 3 projects down the line, and has less time to write unit tests, review and resubmit the code.

Maybe he’ll do it anyway – and maybe he won’t.

In fact, I would say that the vast majority of the features people code up for free software projects  never make it into an upstream bugzilla – developers are perfectly happy shipping a 10 year old version of GNU Kermit with hairy patches sticking out all over the place. And of those patches that do make it into an email or bugzilla, a small percentage ever make it into the upstream code base.

I would argue that when a project is strategic to a company product (as Lucene is to Alfresco), then the company has every interest in having someone who is regularly contributing to the project, who knows the key people in the community, and who is a trusted member of the community themselves. This ensures that your code is getting the care and attention it deserves when submitted upstream, and helps contribute to reducing your maintenance cost long run (as well as giving you influence over a project you depend on).

All this is to say that reducing the argument to “throw code over wall bad, participate good” is slightly over-simplifying – in the case where the project is a core part of your business, I agree wholeheartedly. If you’re using free software libraries as product, and merely tweaking to your needs, then the cost of participating outweighs the benefits in most cases. Reducing that cost by lowering the barrier of entry to participating is key to developing a vibrant community. But increased availability and a very low barrier to entry also incurs a cost on the community. Like most community-related issues, the balancing act is not an easy one to get right.

Congratulations to the new Maemo community council!

With the Maemo community council elections over, I’d like to congratulate the newly elected council. Good luck to Eduardo Lima, Andrew Flegg, Ryan Abel, Simon Pickering and Tim Samoff, who will make up the inaugural community council.

The council serves for a six month term, so they have a big job in front of them to define its role, and ensure it’s relevant to the Maemo community for years to come.

McCain picks Palin: A Smart Move

After pvanhoof opened the floodgates earlier, I guess I’ll follow up with some thoughts from across the pond…

McCain’s spent the last 8 months being painted by the hard-right nuts in the US republican party as an independent moderate Republican – I think this is an election ploy to make him appeal more to the swing voters.

And now, McCain’s chosen Palin as his VP pick. Where some people see a woman, I don’t think that’s why she was picked. She’s anti-abortion, pro-guns, anti-environment (she doesn’t believe that global warming has been proven, and even if it has, doesn’t believe it’s man-made): all in all, she’s a woman who has nothing in common with Hillary Clinton, and has no chance of picking up any disillusioned Clinton democrats. Sure, she appeals to the right wing of the party, and will consolidate the base.

What’s been interesting after this pick is the way the entire election campaign framing has changed. What people see in Sarah Palin is inexperience. And that’s suddenly become the centerpiece of the election.

The republicans are masters at framing the discussion, at making the democrats play defense. Kerry was a flip-flopper, Gore and Bush were “essentially the same”, the list goes on.

The Republicans almost always win when the most important thing in the campaign isn’t actually the candidate’s platform.

And so, by picking Sarah Palin, McCain’s trapped the democrats. “She’s inexperienced”, they say. “She’s got more experience than Obama”, say the republicans. “Biden’s got more experience than her”, say the Democrats. “McCain’s got more experience than Obama”, say the voices in the voter’s heads.

When you put Obama against McCain and measure experience, McCain wins. When you allow the debate to be framed as “who’s got the experience?”, Obama loses.

What the Democrats need to do is talk less about experience, and more about what you do when elected, where you want the country to go. “I may not have the experience of my opponent, but that just means I haven’t had to cut as many deals as he has,” he should say. “I haven’t had to compromise my ideals. I know where I want to take this country, and it’s a good place, where we take care of our sick, give our children the education they need to survive in the world, and where we use our position as a world leader to make the world a better place, instead of bullying the regimes we don’t like.”

If he speaks to their hearts, Obama will win.

Last chance to vote in Maemo Community Council election

The Maemo community council election has been running for 5 days now, and voting closes at midnight Wednesday – I’ll be announcing the new council (subject to any contestations, protests, etc) on Thursday the 11th, one week before the Maemo community gets to meet in person in Berlin for the Maemo Summit.

If you think you should have a ballot, and you haven’t received one last Wednesday, please drop me a line.

If you have received a ballot and haven’t voted yet, please do so – there is only a little more than 2 days left to the election closing.

While I’m talking about the election, I’d like to thank GNOME for the election software we stole^Wborrowed and got working^W^Ware using for the election. I hope that the instructions which I wrote for the module are useful, and end up getting included in the foundation-web module.

Thanks also to Henri Bergius from Nemein, who got the software installed and has been my hands and eyes for the past few days on  a server to which I don’t have access.

Maemo profile changes and community council

A couple of major things are happening around Maemo just before my holidays (oooh, scary) – first is that we recently rolled out some improvements to Maemo profiles – there are many new fields, including IM and IRC usernames, and the possibility to enter multiple email addresses for karma, and in general we prettied things up.

One new field is the company that people work for – and this is particularly useful in the newly spruced up  profile ranking page – previously this page listed only usernames and karma, it now includes company and real name, allowing you to see at a glance where contributions are coming from. Of course, for this to be really useful, now that the fields are there, we need more people to fill them in

The second big thing is the inaugural Maemo community council election. The entire Maemo community will be electing 5 people from among the most active community participants to represent the community’s interests to Nokia, and to co-ordinate community initiatives.

Nominations are open now – anyone with over 100 karma points can nominate themselves by sending a mail with their name, company affiliation and motivations for running to maemo-community@maemo.org before 23:59 UTC on the 2nd of September. The full list of eligible candidates is in the wiki.

Testing Alfresco

I’ve been evaluating Alfresco over the last day or two, and I’ve had some trouble getting started.

The main problem I’ve had is that there doesn’t seem to be any docs specifically for people trying out the 30 day hosted evaluation. All the docs I’ve seen have, at some stage, entries like “If you are unable to map your drive, contact your system administrator or refer to the topic Setting up the CIFS server in the Installation Guide”. There seems to be an underlying assumption I’m self-hosting.

So in spite of my best efforts to try and use CIFS or WebDAV to copy content, play with versioning, etc, I have no idea what to enter for server name, share & directory for a file share in Nautilus, and the links “View in CIFS” and “View in WebDAV” don’t work for me in Firefox.

I also downloaded AlfrescoEnterprise 2.2.0, which suffers from the typical problems I’ve seen most Java enterprise software suffer from – it doesn’t seem to work out of the box. I have a JDK installed, and OpenOffice, but the various install scripts fail at various points because @@ALFRESCO_DIR@@ hasn’t been replaced during installation, and once I’ve edited the scripts to handle that, one script (start_oo.sh) looks for an soffice binary in “~/Alfresco/openoffice.org2.1/program/”. So, not heard of “which” then.

End result of several hours of playing around is that Alfresco looks like a nice web application, but I’m not in a position to recommend it to Linux users because the client software doesn’t install properly, and I can’t figure out how to use the file shares in Nautilus.

Lazyweb, can you help me out, please?

PS. Why does Nautilus’s “Windows share” dialog have all 3 of server, share and folder? I’d really like to be able to follow docs for windows that talk about entering \\YourMachineName\alfresco\Users\YourSpaceName as the share (s/\\/\//g;s/^/smb:/), and let the client software work out which bits are the share, and which bits are folders. Idem for WebDAV.

Update: I thought I’d hit the motherlode when I chose ” Custom location” and put in dav://community.alfresco.com/alfresco/webdav/Trial%20Spaces/dneary%40free.fr and got asked a username and password – but Nautilus gave me an error: “Response invalid”. No idea what that response was, or any indication of how I can fix it, though.

SSL security & Firefox

Federico:  Completely agree. In fact, you’re now training people to go through a whole new “ignore security” conditioning – previously it was just “Add exception” or whatever. Now it’s “Next, Next, Add exception, Get certificate, Next”.

From that presentation you link to, this statistic stood out:

SecuritySpace survey found that 58% of all SSL certificates were invalid (expired, self-signed, unknown CA, incorrect domain, etc)

The presentation also said that “most people only see the valid certs from big sites, so this problem isn’t very visible,” which is the point that MoCo makes.

I discussed this with Gerv during OSCON, and his take on it was toweing the party line:

• Your cert is expired? Fix it already
• Your cert is from a different domain? Fix it already
• You’re self-signing a cert instead of paying $10 a year for one signed by a CA? Spend the money!
• If you’re running a volunteer site, and want a self-signed cert just to encrypt usernames & passwords, your visitors represent less than 1% of the internet population, sucks to be you!

(this is a paraphrasal of my memory of the conversation).

I may be an edge case, but I seem to run into an awful lot of sites where the absolute correct thing for me to do is “Add exception Next Get certificate Next Next”. Sucks to be me, I guess.

New maemo.org community logo

As part of the judging panel for the maemo.org logo contest (along with Peter Schneider, Tim Samoff and David Greaves) I had the daunting task of choosing the winner from the long list of entries to the maemo.org contest. There were 62 people who submitted logos for consideration, and a total of around 120 logos to choose from (excluding variants of the same logo), we had our work cut out for us.

In the end, we went for  this logo from glaolivier:

The judges (that includes me!) liked the modernity of it, the clean typeface, the call-out to the current maemo.org colours, and the mixed metaphor of the a and e joined – infinity, a meeting of minds, and openness. And it was pretty. There are a bunch of single-colour and flat variants for things like monochrome print, t-shirts and so on.

We’re very happy with it, and we believe that everyone else will be too.