Crew Reassignment

HMS (His Mark Shuttleworth’s-ness) Ubuntu

Ship’s Log: February 2009

At six bells on the evening on February 6, HMS Ubuntu encountered the Monty, a vessel of Finnish registry transporting forked code to Open Source markets.

Per standing orders of Admiral Shuttleworth, the craft was hailed to determine her intentions. Monty‘s captain, an affable Finn named Widenius, satisfied the deck watch through semaphore that she was a craft in the Free Software armada, and was brought alongside.

Captain Widenius expressed interest in Ubuntu’s detachment of Marines, as their performance in both the user and paid support customer theaters is well known; having served with distinction through the recent Dell Campaigns. Widenius asked that Lieutenant von Finck be released from service aboard the Ubuntu to provide ground command services to the Monty, its crew of developers, and its users in port.

Admiral Shuttleworth having been consulted, the Lieutenant was re-assigned, and will begin organizing campaigns once the Monty and her code reaches safe harbor.

Lieutenant von Finck is hereby released from active duty aboard HMS Ubuntu and commended by his superiors to the service of the Monty.

Admiral Shuttleworth has expressed interest in completing the crew exchange expeditiously, as he plans to continue the hunt for the white whale.

—–

🙂

So … yeah. I’m leaving Canonical and joining my friend Monty organizing the developer and user communities around the new Maria storage engine. My last day will be February 27.

I’m still in Free Software. I still use Ubuntu. I’m still an Ubuntu member, and plan to keep doing what small part I can to help. I’m not really going too far. Sorry ’bout that. 😉

Reset Your Password With Recovery Mode On The Dell Mini 9 Netbook

Excuse the long title, but I want to make sure search engines get this one.

So, you bought a swell new Dell Mini 9 with Ubuntu, ran through the first-boot account configurator, and promptly forgot your password? You’re not alone. Resetting it is done the standard way from a recovery mode kernel boot, albeit with a quirk. Here are the steps.

1). You’ll need your username. If you have auto-login enabled, open a Terminal (Applications > Accessories) and type whoami and that’s your username.

2). Reboot. When the Dell logo appears, begin tapping [Esc]. Continue tapping until the boot process stops, displaying a MBR 2FA: prompt.

3). The boot process is now halted. The GRUB bootloader has a 0-second timeout before booting, so sit quietly, prepare yourself, and reach out with your feelings and dominant Jedi hand and …

4). Press [Enter] and then [Esc] as quickly as possible. Note the “and then.” You must press one, then the other, not both at the same time. And you must be fast.

5). If successful, padawan, you will have a GRUB boot menu. Using the arrow keys, choose recovery mode. Press [Enter] to boot.

6). At the resulting prompt, type passwd $USERNAME (replace $USERNAME with your actual username). You’ll be asked to type a new password twice, and nothing will be displayed on-screen as you do.

7)). Type reboot and press [Enter]. The job is done.

No one endorses this procedure as actual Jedi training, and machines used for such may lose [Esc] and [Enter] key functionality as a result. Please only use this mind/hand exercise to reset your password.

Ubuntu And Your Money

This is the subject of a session I’m conducting as part of Ubuntu Open Week. Many thanks to Jono, Jorge, and the Ubuntu community of developers and users for making this happen, and allowing me to be a part of it.

I plan to discuss how to make smart buying decisions as a user of Free Software, and Ubuntu in particular. I’ll cover hardware, software, support, services, etc etc.

So, do you plan to attend? If so, are there subjects you’d like to see covered, or specific questions you want answered? Please let me know via comments and I’ll do my best to work such issues and questions into my session notes.

Of course, you’re always welcome to ask questions during the session. However, you may get a more researched and thoughtful (and therefore cogent) response if you give me a little time to prepare. So, have at the comments and let me know what questions you might have.

See you all at 2200UTC on Thursday!

Ubuntu Has No Stepchildren, Only Independent Siblings

This recent post is not the first time that the Ubuntu project and its sponsor, my employer, have been accused of neglecting Kubuntu. And it may not be the last. But please allow me to make some points.

Full disclosure: I am a Canonical employee and a GNOME Foundation member.

Caveat: The opinions expressed in this post are solely my own, and should not be construed as representative of Canonical’s corporate policy or ethos, nor as representative of the Ubuntu or Kubuntu projects’ ideals or policies.

This recent post is not the first time that the Ubuntu project and its sponsor, my employer, have been accused of neglecting Kubuntu. And it may not be the last. But please allow me to make some points.

First, Ubuntu is a project. If Ubuntu “ignores” Kubuntu, the reason is simple. They are different projects. I’ll be attending the GNOME Boston Summit 2008 this weekend. If I don’t find a lot of KDE developers there, can I then posit that KDE “ignores major trends and issues related to the free Unix desktop?” Clearly not. And I wouldn’t expect to find large numbers of GNOME developers at Akademy. Although GNOME and KDE have similar aims, there is no reason to expect the two projects to mutually support each other in absolutely everything they do. When such mutual support happens, it’s very, very nice. I value my friendships with many people in the KDE community, but I wouldn’t seek out a KDE developer when I have issues with GNOME. By extension, I wouldn’t blame Ubuntu developers and packagers when things break in Kubuntu. If Kubuntu is broken, then Kubuntu developers, MOTUs, bug triagers, and all Kubuntu community members are responsible for fixing it.

Second, looking at the issue of Konqueror and the Ubuntu wiki, I am unable to find Jonathan Thomas’ reports, suggestions, or potential fixes. In fact, I can’t even see that he’s subscribed to the bug. It’s one thing to complain about an issue not being addressed. It’s quite another to complain about an issue you yourself have not taken the time to address. If the issue is that important to you, get involved. Not to belabor the “separate projects” point, but it’s not the responsibility of GNOME developers to make sure their stuff works in KDE (and vice versa). Thus, at the desktop/UI level, it’s not the responsibility of Ubuntu developers to ensure their stuff works in Kubuntu. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fantastic when this happens, and we should always strive to allow this kind of cooperation. But demanding that one project alter its needs and the needs of its users based on the requirements of a different project does a disservice to both projects involved, never mind the users that depend upon them. Now, be aware, if the Linux kernel deployed in Ubuntu breaks KDE functionality for Kubuntu, that’s the responsibility of the kernel team. But if GNOME features do not translate well to another desktop environment, that’s not necessarily GNOME’s, and by extension the distros that use GNOME, problem.

Finally, I don’t see any suggestions from Jonathan as to how things might be improved in the future. Criticism is always difficult to hear, but when such criticism is in no way constructive, it’s difficult to find a reason to listen at all. Not to mention that unconstructive criticism probably violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Ubuntu Code Of Conduct. Simply put, “lead, follow, or get out of the way.” It’s also especially interesting that two-thirds of the issues Jonathan cites (Konqueror vs. Moin, KNetworkManager vs. NetworkManager) are actually already fixed, and were prior to his post.

I apologize if this post comes off as somewhat harsh, it is not my intention to be so. But clearly it is not the responsibility of the Camry assembly plant to ensure the Prius meets delivery requirements, despite both being owned by Toyota. In the case of Ubuntu and Kubuntu, this distinction is even more clear, as no single company “owns” either. Kubuntu belongs to you, the Kubuntu community of users and developers. If something is missing, broken, or needs polish in Kubuntu, it is the responsibility of the Kubuntu community to address these issues. While it’s always desirable for the different desktop environment projects to work together, this obviously cannot happen all of the time. And GNOME is not going to ask “How does this affect KDE?” every time a feature is added to GNOME. Conversely, I wouldn’t expect KDE developers to worry much about GNOME’s needs.

Jonathan, I understand your frustration. But be aware, Kubuntu is not a product as much as it is a project. You’re able, at any time, to get involved and make the changes you deem necessary. If you don’t, it’s a bit unfair to ask other people to address your specific needs and issues without your involvement. I’m aware of this because I often have to censor myself when I encounter a piece of missing or broken functionality. For instance, the UPnP browser plugin in Rhythmbox simply does not work with MediaTomb UPnP shares. It really annoys me, as I have to run both MediaTomb and Firefly/mt-daapd on my media server. But I don’t have the time or skills necessary to address this issue myself, so I find myself having to squelch my dissatisfaction to some degree. I’d love to file bug reports, participate in triaging of these bugs, and test potential fixes. But my work and personal commitments have thus far prevented me from doing so. Thus, since I’m not part of any potential solution, complaining about this broken functionality simply would make me part of the problem.

Personally, I don’t think that’s helpful or constructive. Flame on.

Bad Hotel Cookies

I’m in Minnesota this week doing some work for Canonical. The hotel I’m staying at outsources their networking, like most hotels do.

I have always maintained that the only people that know less about Internetworking than hotel IT departments are the outsourced firms they use. And the Oak Ridge Hotel and Conference Center is no different.

I don’t know what company the hotel outsources to, but they have made some horrible decisions with regards to guest usability, privacy, and security.

Example 1: You can connect to the wireless network, but you need to visit a page in a Javascript-capable browser to actually activate your network connection. I have a Playstation Portable, and use it while on the road to conduct business and personal IP telephony with Skype. The PSP browser does not support J-script. So I had to call the ISP to get an exception added for the PSP’s MAC address. The PS3, Xbox, and and any other devices (including most handhelds) that do not have Javascript-capable browsers will have similar issues. And I’m in the 5% of hotel guests that understand the root cause and know how to ask the ISP to engineer around it.

Example 2: This is the killer. The hotel’s website sets a cookie in your browser. This cookie has two effects. First, it repeatedly opens pop-up windows. Repeatedly. Like, several per minute. Here’s an example:

popup1.png

Pop-ups are irritating, a harbinger of malware to the technically unsavvy, and very, VERY 1997. Don’t do that.

The second effect is that the cookie places interstitial pages as you browse! I noticed it when I clicked the “Back” button in Firefox and instead of my previous URL I was directed to

http://216.167.216.11/superclick/popup.php?popup=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbmneptok.com

After a few seconds, my “Back” request was honored, and the page I expected in the first place was loaded.

Needless to say, I am not amused by hotel ISPs playing traffic cop with my browsing habits. I certainly don’t want a hotel ISP’s cookies monitoring my URL visitation habits. I phoned the ISP, who told me “Yes, we could monitor browsing habits, but we don’t. Trust us.”

OK, how about I pay my room bill when I get home? Trust me, I’ll call you with my credit card number. Since you assume I’ll trust you, I think I’ll make the same assumption.

To their credit, they disabled the cookie for my IP. But thank whatever gods your family worships that I actually noticed. If I hadn’t, I’d be relying on the ISP having no disgruntled or morally deficient employees during my stay.

Look, I’m your customer. I don’t expect CCTV cameras in my room, peepholes in my shower, or invasive browser cookies that monitor my web surfing habits. And I certainly expect that IP-capable devices that work at home and with coffee shop access points to work in a premium hotel without the need for a phone call and request for MAC exemption in their routing tables.

Needless to say, I won’t be staying at any Dolce properties any time soon, if I can help it. And I recommend you avoid them, as well. At least until someone can explain this invasion of my privacy to my satisfaction.

Dolce, you listening?

Web 2.0 Prototype

I’m at the Googleplex this week for the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit. Across town the Web 2.0 conference is in full swing, and as a nod to the emergent new web, I have prototyped an example of Web 2.0 technologies.

This is what the web will become. A conduit for your creativity. A canvas that will, instead of feeding you the content a provider wants, allow you to design an experience tailored to your needs and desires. An ultimately rich and yet utterly simple springboard for the latent artist in all of us. The web defined by users, for users.

Click here to see my interpretation of Web 2.0. And prepare for the web your way!

Thanks to Allison Randal for the inspiration!

Giga Bite Me

My desktop machine has a Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra 939 motherboard. It’s been great; rock-solid and performs exactly as expected.

One of the nicest things is that it has the ability to update the BIOS from within the BIOS. You bring up the BIOS, tell it to find a new firmware revision on a floppy, and it updates itself. No OS needed. Fantastic. No longer is a user required to have a specific OS in order to update their BIOS.

Except Gigabyte distributes the firmware as a self-extracting Windows executable. That’s right. The firmware comes as a .exe file that will only expand under Windows (and yes, I have tried to unzip it with Linux’s unzip with no luck).

How farking brain-dead is this? There’s no need to compress the BIOS image, it’s small enough for even modem users. But then to compress it and lock users into a specific OS in order to decompress it is just idiocy. Any benefit provided by the BIOS being OS-agnostic and being able to update itself is rendered completely useless by some idiot engineering manager’s decision to distribute a self-extracting Windows executable. And not even provide a .zip file for people that might not run Windows.

Gigabyte, are you listening? Do you care about your customers that choose not to run Windows? Do you yourselves really understand the benefits of a self-updating BIOS?

Morons.