Planet ubuntu-uk

Soul Calibur IV

2008-08-08T11:31:43+00:00

On of my all time favourite games just got better.

And here are the reasons:

Avoiding Burn Out

2008-08-08T01:17:26+00:00

Well, after all of the theory and contemplation of how to resolve burnout in companies, teams and communities, it seems that one link has the complete solution.

Ahhhh…

Discrimination?

2008-08-07T21:00:34+00:00

Some of you may know that I’m looking for a new job.

Well, anyway, I had a Phonecall from Kalamazoo Reynolds earlier, who, 3 questions into the interview asked.

“Do you smoke?”

“Yes”

“Ok, then please feel free to re-apply if you ever give up, we have a company policy in place that we do not employ smokers”

Is this legal?

This week in Kubuntu

2008-08-06T23:41:38+00:00

Haven't blogged for a while, so here's some of the changes that have happened in Kubuntu recently.

I finally found some time for the KDE port of system-config-printer, still far from feature parity with the Gnome version and needs plenty of tidying up but should be usable.

mornfall got back to hacking on Adept 3 featuring super fast xapian search.

In other packaging news the Dist Upgrade tool got a pyQt 4 port.

And gdebi, the .deb installer, got a pyKDE 4 port.

We're turning on the Apport crash handler for KDE programmes. Unlike the KDE crash handler it creates a full backtrace with debug symbols thanks to Launchpad. Will have to see if the bug team will manage to forward relevant reports upstream.

We finally got a shiny new website, thanks to Ryan.

I turned on compositing by default in kwin, still needs a patch to Compiz so we can use the same blacklist as it does. Not sure it'll stay on for final, just depends on how reliable it is out in the wild.

Worlds finest distributed revision control system, bzr decided to go with the world's finest toolkit for their GUI, I uploaded qbzr today.

Next week

Finally, congratulations to John and SakiFlux.

2008-08-06T18:13:03+00:00

Testing 2.6.27-rc2 with the current released (not development) BIOS on the Foxconn G33M reveals the following:

There are no ACPI errors on boot, other than the (irrelevant) OEMB table (there are in previous kernels, stuff's clearly been fixed in .26 or so. Can't really be bothered digging through to find out what)
The system fails to reboot if it has been suspended and resumed. The fix is three lines long, one of which is a comment and one of which is blank.
The system is otherwise perfectly stable.

Summary: Almost all problems caused by bugs in Linux, one problem caused by BIOS vendors interpreting the ACPI specification differently to the Linux implementation and trivially worked around. No sabotage.

Thanks very much to Carl at Foxconn for being able to get me information about what was causing the reboot issue - I spent significantly longer putting the system together than I did fixing it.

Exploring Freedom: the book!

2008-08-06T13:34:18+00:00

Coming later this year -- Exploring Freedom: the book, by Matt Lee and Rob Myers.

I'm pretty excited about this. It'll be our first product, my first published book and it's a great addition to this blog. Head over to the announcement and sign up to receive more information when it's available.

Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase is born!

2008-08-04T21:56:53+00:00

DIGG THIS STORY!

I am really excited to announce the very first Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase!

For a long time now we have been shipping a package called example-content with each release of Ubuntu. This package provides a bunch of different pieces of content including audio, video, PDFs, OpenOffice.org documents and more. The idea is that you can use this content to kickstart your new Ubuntu system and see what it can do. example-content has been really useful, but it has been languishing a little recently, and then we had a rather interesting idea…

Why not use example-content as a great way to show off audio and video from free culture artists? It can give artists a platform of millions of Ubuntu users to show off their work and it really excites me because we are applying the Ubuntu ethos to free culture.

The idea is simple:

Your submission must be either audio or video (we are not accepting documents/images) and no larger than 1MB for the audio and 3MB for the video. The submissions must be made available in either Ogg Vorbis (audio) or Ogg Theora (video). The submissions must be licensed as Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike.
Upload your submission somewhere online (there are lots of free hosting solutions available such as archive.org). Do not email any of the organisers or judges with your submissions.
Add your entry to one of the submission tables at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase.
When the deadline for submissions closes, our panel of judges (Cory Kontros, Luis de Bethencourt, Luke Yelavich, Lydia Pintscher and Tony Whitmore) will pick a shortlist, and the Community Council will then pick the final winners from the shortlist.

The deadline is 4th September 2008 and you can read more about it at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuFreeCultureShowcase

This is a great opportunity for artists to get their work seen or heard. Lets make something cool happen. Good luck!

All that for just £5

2008-08-04T17:02:11+00:00

What does £5 get you these days?

…maybe two pints of beer, or four litres of diesel. It won’t buy you a Linux magazine, it may get you a 1Gb SD card. In other words, you can’t get much for a fiver these days, so think about donating one to those fine, hard working people at the Open Rights Group

“The Open Rights Group is a grassroots technology organisation which exists to protect civil liberties wherever they are threatened by the poor implementation and regulation of digital technology. We call these rights our “digital rights”.”

They’ve advised the decision makers on such subjects as DRM, copyright, intellectual property, net neutrality and RFID. Have a look at what else they’ve been up to, and consider giving them that £5, they could certainly use it for great things.

LSB 4

2008-08-04T12:56:24+00:00

Any views or opinions expressed here are my own, and not that of my employer or any project I am a member of.

InternetNews ran a story last Thursday (picked up via LWN) asking whether LSB 4 will standardize Linux? In it, they interview Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, and the article expresses the feeling that if only the distributions would adopt it, the world would be a better place.

To those that know me, I may sound like a skipping CD, but I just don’t see anything in LSB 4 that will change the current situation because they have not addressed the fundamental problem with the LSB.

The failure of the LSB to actually engage with the distributions it’s attempting to standardise.

This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if the LSB attempted to document existing practice in the form of standards, while acting as a forum for development of new practices which could be trialled before standardisation. Much as the IETF does, now.

Instead, the LSB sees itself as a development group that decides on future direction itself and dictates that to the distributions. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s pretty much the way that the W3C works. But to work successfully, you must represent everybody that you expect to follow the standard.

To this day, the LSB still feels like an RPM-only club. The core specification specifically requires RPM, and in fact much of the other system-related pieces are based on the layout and design of RedHat and its derivatives.

That is, except for those bits that the LSB invented all by itself, such as the Init Scripts section.

While much of the LSB can be hacked into a different distribution through compatibility layers and tools, such as alien, what ISV or other vendor wants to provide a support contract against a distribution that has such kludges?

The whole point of the LSB is that ISVs and other vendors feel confident being able to simply target their software or platform to the standard, and safe to honour support contracts on any deployment to an LSB-certified operating system.

If the distributions themselves don’t directly implement the LSB specification, there will never be the confidence to deploy against it directly and we’ll remain in a world where vendors directly target the distributions.

And until the LSB invites all of the distributions to the table to fundamentally redraft the specification to provide a common base that they are all happy to implement directly, they’ll still conform through hacks, kludges and compatibility layers.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

2008-08-03T23:21:00+00:00

It’s an essay which most people in the Open Source Software World have read. Yet it’s one that I’ve never got round to reading - that is, until tonight.

It’s alot easier than I expected it to be. Non-technical people should have no worries in attempting to read it (though the motivation for doing so may be reduced by at least an order of magnitude). I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone with 30 minutes free.

The best thing about it, for me, is that it’s simple. It is in effect an empirical review of Linux’s development through the eyes of the ‘fetchmail’ project.

For those of you new to ubuntu (reading this on planet.ubuntu-uk.org) - I’d thoroughly recommend reading it if you’re a non-technical user. It’s a nice explanation as to why the effort you’re making in switching to Ubuntu is a step in the right direction.

It’s probably a conspiracy

2008-08-02T21:49:39+00:00

I have an 8Mbps ADSL service with my ISP, PlusNet (formerly Force9, now owned by BT.) Except I don’t. It’s never run anywhere near 8Mbps. In fact, I thought I was still on a 2Mbps service until I enquired a while ago about an upgrade, only to be told I was already experiencing the thrill of an 8Mbps service.

The promise of this fantastic service sadly has not matched my experience with PlusNet. I have never seen my connection exceeded 1.6Mbps down. It has, in fact, got slower over the last couple of years, to the extent that the heady days of 1.6Mbps downstream seem a dim and distant memory. Every couple of months I’d lose another 200kbps or so from my connection speed. Once in a while I’d open a support ticket to see what my ISP could do to help me about it. Bugger all, is apparently the answer. BT (who own PlusNet) won’t investigate bandwidth issues on 8Mbps lines until the speed is 400kbps or less. Let’s just reiterate that. BT consider an ADSL service that reaches 6% of the advertised capacity to be working properly.

Well, today I noticed my connection crawling slower than ever before. Upon checking my ADSL modem, it reported that it was connected at just 224kbps. Even by BT’s rather pathetic standards this is classified as a fault, so I headed to my ISP’s support pages to log yet another support ticket. They have revised their reporting procedure for speed faults and now I have to run BT’s speed tester. This is a website which one visits but requires Java to be installed. This presented a problem as I run a 64-bit version of Linux and Sun (who make Java) haven’t bothered to make a version of their plugin for 64-bit Linux yet.

Fortunately I was able to find a 32-bit install which I could use, however the java application hangs at 96%. It seems I am unlikely to be able to progress my support request without this test having been run (as BT log the results of the tests on their servers and use it to check whether a line fault should be investigated.) It’s also worth mentioning that the speed tester site is a “stress test” for bandwidth. It times how long it takes to download a given amount of data and uses that to calculate the performance of the line. This sort of test is quite silly as it is easily affected by other applications or network resources using some of the bandwidth. However, the connection speed reported by the modem is always accurate and represents the maximum theoretical throughput the line can give in that session. So really that should be enough proof that the line is too damn slow, especially when the theoretical maximum is so pitiful. Here’s a screenshot from the web interface for my ADSL modem which should clearly communicate the state of my connection to someone who knows what they’re talking about:

That’s right, I have more upstream bandwidth than I do downstream. I decided to plough on with my support request and started to work through the broadband fault checker on the PlusNet website. First of all it asked me which Operating System, checked for known faults on the line and asked me what make of ADSL equipment I am using. All fair enough. It then asked me whether my issue was that I couldn’t connect at all, or whether it was a speed issue. I happily selected “speed”. The next question was whether I had ever been able to connect to my ADSL service. As if I was going to be complaining about the speed of an ADSL service to which I had never connected.

Pressing on, I was asked what date the service had last been fully working. Well, by BT’s metrics presumably sometime in the last week when it dipped below their magic threshold of 5% performance. However I consider the issue to be the gradual and continued degredation of my ADSL service, which started, as near as I can remember, back in September 2006. So I entered 01/09/06 in the date box, using the DD/MM/YY format requested. Next question was “On what date did the problem start?” Well, by logical extension this must be the day after the service was fully working. Surely? Unless I’ve missed some fundamental nuance in the question. So, I entered 02/09/06 as the date the problem started. Fail.

It seems there are some rather large usability flaws in the fault reporter. At this point I was left wondering which dates would be acceptable to PlusNet. Clearly the logical answer isn’t valid. I progressed the month and year values through the ages until I found one which the reporter accepted. Apparently January 2007 is the earliest a problem could have occured. Well, sadly, PlusNet is wrong in this case. The next suggestion was that a virus may be causing the problem. Well, a virus, or more accurately a network worm, might well be responsible for consuming upstream bandwidth and causing performance issues. However a virus wouldn’t cause the line to connect at such a slow speed in the first place. Also, while it is a worthwhile question for Windows users, all the machines in the house run Linux where there is no real virus threat at the moment.

The next step was the tenth of an undisclosed number. It required 3 completed speed tests using the BT speed tester site. You’ll have read already how this failed to work for me, and how, given the session connected as such a slow speed, a stress test of this particular fault is not hugely relevant. So I plumped for the option which said I’d completed the tests, figuring that I can explain the failure to actually run them once I’d opened the ticket. Constant or intermittent fault? Constant. I was able to give my explanation of the BT speed tester site in the futher comments box.

I continue to be amazed at the reliance of companies like PlusNet and BT on shoddy applications like this. I’ve been PlusNet’s customer for 6 years and yet they won’t help me resolve this issue despite their own logs showing a gradually decreasing connection speed. In fact, they seem intent on putting barriers in their customers’ way by using things like Java applications which exclude sections of their customer base. You really, really would think they’d know better. Right now, I’d be prepared to move to any ISP who charges about the same as I’m currently paying and would work with me, BT and whoever else to get my service back to what it was two years ago, because PlusNet don’t seem able to do so.

Maemo has a new logo

2008-08-02T21:00:00+00:00

OK so I'm late to the party please go easy as I've had to endure a 10 1/2 hour trip back from Disney Land Paris where I took the kids for the last 8 days, 'pooped out' isn't a good enough phrase!

Anyway, I wholeheartedly agree with the final choice of design for the new Maemo logo. It oozes potential for merchandise and is both simple and elegant. I liked a lot of the other designs too but this just stood out as a solution that fitted the problem perfectly.

Congratulations to glaoliver (no Maemo wiki user page to link to unfortunately) and I hope to be proudly parading my new Maemo t-shirt soon.

Street Team Community Middle Ground

2008-08-02T02:25:33+00:00

Recently I have been taking my new talk around various conferences. Entitled Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants: The Coming Of The Linux Desktop, it discusses the different elements involved in desktop success and us achieving the so called year of the Linux desktop. At one point in the presentation I talk about how it is tempting to consider the Open Source community as a great example of community in action. Although we are without a shadow of a doubt a successful, impactive community, we are by no means typical.

Most community is consumer orientated - it is a collection of people united by an interest, a band, a book, a movie or something else. Take Trekkies (Star Trek fans) for example - they are a group of people who feel like they belong in an environment that has a primary unifying connection. This connection is clearly Star Trek, and possibly putting brown Play-Doh on your forehead and wearing over-sized shoulder pads. The Open Source community is different. We are not consumers, but creators. Our community actually builds things that the rest of the community uses, and this brings in a whole raft of complex interactions that would keep boffins at MIT amused for years. This kind of community is a web of modelling elements - just take each volunteer and their set of needs, requirements, concerns and opportunities, and then put hundreds of thousands of them in the same communication medium and all of the group interaction theory that applies, and then factor in project management issues of getting people on the same page to achieve a consistent outcome - it is a huge bag of variables, interactions and nuances in not just how people work together but how they achieve things. It is temping to be seduced into thinking that our hugely successful community, which is changing the shape of IT is typical; it is successful, but by no means typical.

A few months back I started my new Severed Fifth free culture project, and one of the core aims of the project is to build a Street Team community around the project that can go out and help communicate the ideals, values and aims of the project and free culture. At first I thought it was going to be a relatively cut-and-shut community building task - get people excited about the project, document what needs to be done, provide some materials and direction, and build some buzz. Interestingly though, this community is architecturally unusual. Here we are blurring the lines further between the Trekkies and the Open Source brigade. In this particular community the volunteers are not so much primary creators (they are not producing the music), but they are not purely consumers. The Severed Fifth Street Team is instead an unusual blend of the two - people in the project are creating materials that are designed for the purpose of the Street Team - to go out and make it easier to communicate the project. Take James Tait as an example - he wanted to produce a flyer that could be used t o put up in his local music shops, skate parks etc, and thus Cory K contributed and made a flyer which we now have on the Street Team Materials Page. This is a new and different kind of community for me - it is a different blend.

But, this is all part and parcel of why Severed Fifth excites me. It is not just about recording some music and trying to see how far I can take it with the free culture approach, it is also about learning all of these different nuances in how an artist needs to build buzz, awareness and growth around his or her project. I would love to hear your thoughts on how to build the best possible Street Team community.

2008-08-01T18:47:15+00:00

Coincidentally, I had the opportunity to poke at a machine that actually does deliberately treat Linux differently in its ACPI tables today. Jeremy was poking at an Acer Aspire One before installing Fedora on it, and Dave noticed that it printing a bootup message indicating that the firmware was testing for _OSI("Linux"). A bit of poking later, and we have the following:

            If (_OSI ("Linux"))
            {
                Store (0x03E8, OSYS)
                Store (0x0A, \_SB.PCI0.LPC.S4TM)
                Store (0x43, \_SB.PCI0.EXP2.PXS2.LSMP)
                Store (One, \_SB.PCI0.EXP2.LL0S)
                Store (One, \_SB.PCI0.EXP2.LLL1)
            }
            Else
            {
                If (_OSI ("Windows 2006"))
                {
                    Store (0x07D6, OSYS)
                    Store (0x06, \_SB.PCI0.LPC.S4TM)
                    Store (Zero, \_SB.PCI0.EXP2.PXS2.LSMP)
                    Store (Zero, \_SB.PCI0.EXP2.LL0S)
                    Store (Zero, \_SB.PCI0.EXP2.LLL1)
                }

Other OSes get the same values as Linux, other than the OSYS field. Now, what do these writes do? They're all to PCI config space, so since the machine in question is a 945/ICH7 machine we have publically available docs. A bit of digging later and it shows that the firmware is disabling PCIE active state link control and programming more conservative timings for entry into the C4 processor idle power saving state. In other words, certain bits of power management functionality are compromised if it detects that it's running anything other than Vista. Weirdly, it also flags the HPET as present but invisible on Linux, but I suspect that's an oversight rather than anything deliberate.

Why would they do this? I've no idea. I suspect it's something to do with the degree of platform validation performed rather than a subtle attempt to degrade Linux's battery life on the hardware (frankly, we do a good enough job of that ourselves right now), but this is exactly the kind of reason we removed _OSI("Linux") support from the kernel. Vendors will do stupid things with it.

Software fail

2008-08-01T13:07:41+00:00

Update: It has been suggested that it is not productive or collaborative to talk negatively about some developers releasing software for unixy operating systems without really trying to integrate it with the versions of widely deployed software available in those operating systems.

It is a fair point. It’s not productive or collaborative. It may be true, but ranting about it doesn’t help anyone but me.

More productive and collaborative would be to nicely ask these ISVs to establish a less isolated packaging process with our communities and companies (but I don’t mean LSB or a new package format). Clearly some people won’t work with them on ethical grounds, but a more pragmatic position will accept that commercial software exists, so it might as well not make our lives unnecessarily hard. And the companies shifting Linux are hot on ISVs.
Jorge: No, I don’t like having multiple JVMs, but I have been in corporate situations before where it has been necessary because specific applications have required different versions :(