Ubuntu ZA - Ubuntu South Africa LoCo

Unfortunately we had a very small turn out, but it was still fun. I met another linux geek that lives close by (Johan left), and got to hang out with Leon (right) again. We had lots of interesting conversations.


I'm on the left pretending to braai:


Not sure why the turnout was this bad, either a) the day/date/time wasn't suitable b) people are not really excited about ubuntu any more :( c) I didn't advertise well enough and widely enough d) should have aimed it more to general linux folk not just ubuntu lovers e) all of the above. I still think it was worthwhile. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve for the next time, please let me know in the comments. I'm thinking we should do it at a restaurant again next time, maybe people feel safe and less awkward there.

Leon's twin brother had a green hat on so that we could tell them apart..
✝

For those who didn't know, I started working for a company called Nomanini at the beginning of last year. Nomanini manufactures an airtime point of sale terminal for use in the informal sector (taxis, spaza shops, etc).

I'm excited to say that my boss will be speaking at ScaleConf 2013, which kicks off tomorrow, and myself and my colleagues are going to be there too. See you there!

We are only human, descendants of Homo Habilis the tool user, and we get emotionally attached to our
tools and memorabilia, loath to discard anything that has use or value or recalls memories.  In time this causes clutter as we acquire more durable goods than we donate, recycle or discard.  When I chose to move from Cape Town to Ireland, I also desired to strip away clutter and start afresh with only things I would actually use, plus a few sentimental or beautiful items.  In the process, I've refined a trivially simple but effective method to cut down clutter and prevent accumulation sometimes called the Outbox Method.

Letting go
The insight I (and many others) had is that it is stressful to let go of a many of your belongings at at once, or to let go of a belonging quickly. So, the trick is to let go gradually, both in number of items and taking time over it. To this end I placed a box by the front door, and every now and then I would look through my clothes and belongings and put the least-wanted items in the box, no matter if they were perfectly functional or could fetch money on Gumtree.  It didn't feel like I was throwing them away, more like I was segregating the things I wanted the least, and I could always pick it out of the box if I needed it or changed my mind - and sometimes I did.  After some time, the box gets full, and this is when I would make a trip to the local charity shop and donate the whole lot.

Over the 4 months preceding the move, I made a trip to the charity shop roughly every two or three weeks, both hands holding bags of clothes and goods.  In the end, I brought 29kg on the plane, 106kg in airfreight (of which 22kg were books), and left 65kg of filing in a cupboard at my parents' home.  Since arriving in Ireland, I have donated yet another bag of clothes and three bags of goods - the latter bulked up with a lot of hangers I have no closet space for.

One in, one out
The outbox has worked great for a mission to cut down clutter, but how does one prevent it accumulating with every trip to the mall?  For the last year or so I've been applying a "one-in, one-out" principle, that if I buy something new, I should put some equivalent amount of items in the outbox, preferably a similar item.  Unless I am desperately short of t-shirts, for every new t-shirt I buy an old shirt goes in the outbox.

Dress better without buying anything
An aside on wardrobes: they tend to be tiered, with house clothes, casual clothes, work clothes, clothes for going out, and formal clothes.  I've found that if you donate your house clothes, you don't suddenly find yourself with nothing to wear - rather your oldest casual clothes become your house clothes, and some evening-out clothes become casual clothes.  In other words, you can improve your wardrobe not just by buying new items, but by donating old ones.

Right now I have very little clutter, everything fits in the cupboards, and I intend to keep it that way.  Yes, that is my living room.

A few weeks ago I started a new job that calls for a lot of training, and I chose to take notes using a dead-tree notebook instead of a notebook computer (gasp!).  The notebook itself was conference swag dating from 2011, and happened to be a a Moleskine Ruled Soft Notebook Large (13x21cm, 192 pages). I have since grown fond of it and finished the last page today. Yesterday I bought another despite the disturbingly high price per page (on Amazon it's about 30% less and still pricey).


The last time I did weeks worth of note-taking was 2005, so when I started again a few weeks ago my notes were messy with little structure, lacking ways to find notes or identify the subject of a page without reading it.  But I've re-learned and refined some techniques over the many training sessions. Here are some methods I favor at the moment:

1. Write the title of the session in centered block capitals, keeping some empty space around it.
2. Write the date in the page corner (I write them like 2013.03.14) - these do double duty as a form of page numbering besides answering "When the hell did I write this?"
3. Adjacent the date include a compressed form of the title of the lecture or meeting, this labels the rough subject of the text and makes it easy to riffle to an entry.
4. Use colored pens to make important text stand out. The scheme I use is roughly:
1. Black: most text and section headings.
2. Red: newly-defined term or paragraph subject, and also key terms and points.
3. Blue: external references like URLs, and later annotations.
5. Use first 6 pages for a table of contents.  Why 6?  This leaves 192-6=186 pages, and I get about 23-25 titles per 30-line page, so 6 pages gives 140-150 titles.
1. For each entry, write the date in red followed by the title in black.
2. For conferences, put the conference title on it's own line, with dated talks indented on the following lines.

For later notes at least, I have a nicely indexed, easy to find-and-identify sequence of notes in which the subject keys and external references stand out clearly.
But why did I opt for the notebook technology state of the art in 1800 C.E., when I was also issued with a lightweight, latest-model 13" MacBook Air on my first day? Well, I did use the MacBook at first. But the first time I did so, another attendee tapped me on the shoulder to tell me the sound of typing was breaking her concentration. I suppose I was typing too fast and too much: the temptation for a fast typist is to take down nearly-verbatim what the speaker is saying as they say it.  But I want key concepts, not a complete dictation! Quality over quantity. With digital notes I also feel like editing them during the session, or I'm tempted to quickly search on something the speaker mentions - when I should be paying attention to what the speaker is saying. Afterwards. even though I rarely revisit the notes, they take up visual space in my notes folder, vying for attention and turning up unwanted in search results, becoming clutter.  And they're still editable, with the temptation to tend them later.

With a paper notebook, the slowness of handwriting forces me to stick to key concepts, the permanence of pen and paper prevents me from turning my attention to editing, and the linear succession of notes is it's own form of organisation.  And using an attractively-bound notebook makes me feel like keeping the notes around instead of tossing them in the trash.

Stefano provided a list of things the group accomplished at the Global Jam last Saturday. Thanks again to Julian Taylor and codebridge for sharing their space. Here is the email Stefano sent to the ubuntu-za list: Follow up (as requested my Miles): * General documentation for people getting started in Ubuntu Development: - http://developer.ubuntu.com/packaging/html/ * Graham finished the SRU [0] uploads for the CUDA stack in quantal [1, 2]. These were prepared beforehand, but I hadn't got around to reviewing them before the jam. * Raoul, Grant, and I had a look through the packages that are failing to build in raring, but didn't see any obviously easy ones to fix. The list from the most recent archive rebuild [3] is littered with multi-arch python fallout, which has been fixed [4] * We then reviewed the RC bug fixes from Debian [5]. I cleaned up a bunch of spam on that page We reviewed the bugs for accessodf, elilo, hamster-applet, imswitch, rawstudio and found that they didn't affect Ubuntu. The clang bug seems to affect Ubuntu but was far too complex for our jam. The ncpfs bug affects Ubuntu. It's already been synced [6] but isn't installable in Ubuntu [7] because it depends on a newer initscripts version. The libticonv bug affects Ubuntu, but the libticonv package in Ubuntu has a totally different ancestry to the Debian package. It should probably be merged but that'd be a non-trivial job. * Reviewing Debian RC bug #700315 [8] for rawstudio pointed us to flickcurl 1.23-1 which we synced [9] from Debian experimental, to fix Debian bug #700050 [10]. * I updated my build failure report for precise [11], for Graham, to see what other CUDA related things hadn't built yet. * Julian Taylor (a MOTU who happened to be around on IRC, during our jam) suggested that Graham look at SRUing bug 1113356 [12]. Graham prepared a patch, which Julian sponsored for him. * We were about to start writing some autopkgtests [13] for some of my packages in Debian, but decided we were hungry, and went to Hudsons for beer, burgers, and coffee. Thanks, Graham, Grant, Raoul, and Maia! SR

We looked at Debian bugs that needed to be added to the release or not, as the case may be. Thank you Stefano for organizing,  mentoring and driving the coffee machine. Thanks to everyone who donated a couple of hours to make ubuntu better. Thanks codebridge for having us.

Many of you know that I am the project leader of an open source worship presentation program called OpenLP. Yesterday evening, as I was doing something on OpenLP's project page on SourceForge.net (a popular repository for open source projects), I glanced at the reviews page and the one below caught my eye.

Now, I don't normally worry about negative reviews (they lend your project a certain amount of authenticity), I couldn't help but notice the reference AND link to a commercial product. I then simply did a search for the reviewer on Google and one of the first few hits was the reviewer's blog. I went to the About page, and sure enough, not only was it the same person, I found out some interesting facts about him.

Establishing that the blog did indeed belong to the reviewer was easy. Firstly, the reviewer didn't even bother to use a different photo for his profile on SF.net, and secondly his domain name, Twitter account and SF.net username were all identical. Lastly, the product he was promoting over OpenLP was the very same product he is the executive director (or somesuch inflated title) of.

I just couldn't believe my eyes. Here is what I would presume is an upstanding Christian man, and he directly slates a competitor's product without so much as disclosing who he is. I don't go around telling everyone how awful EasyWorship, ProPresenter and MediaShout are. It just is not something you do. If your product is better than the others then let it speak for itself.

This reminds me of Microsoft a few years ago who didn't know how to handle open source software, so they paid people to conduct absurd studies to prove how great they were.

Seriously, are you so scared of OpenLP that you have to pretend to be an unhappy user? I highly doubt you've ever even downloaded OpenLP, nevermind actually used it.

Incidentally, I marked his comment as spam, so it is no longer visible.

We have two events planned for Global Jam week. One BugJam in Cape Town. Thanks Stefano for getting the ball rolling with this one. Sat 2 March, 10:00-15:00 at Codebridge in Cape Town.

The second event is an Ubuntu Hour in Centurion with a specific focus on checking out what an Ubuntu Jam could be so we'll call it Jumpstart to Jamming. Thanks to Dewald for organising this one and for reading up on possible Jam activities. Sun 3 March, 12:00-14:00
If you want to print or re-mix these banners you can find them at spreadubuntu.org Cape Town here and Centurion here.

For those ubuntu-za people who aren't near a Jam location, you can hang out with us on #ubuntu-za on irc while you help make ubuntu better. Some ideas for people who aren't in the mood to fix bugs: Why not help to translate your favourite application? Maybe answer or improve an answer on askubuntu.com or see if your hardware is ubuntu friendly. Have a little bit more time, you could help test such as doing an iso test.

The death of Gnome Panel

Gnome Panel (or more properly, gnome-panel) is the main dock that you would see in the Gnome 2 series desktop, and in the Gnome Fallback session (also called Gnome “Classic” in many distributions) in Gnome 3.

To provide the typical desktop experience, it’s also accompanied by Nautilus and Metacity along with a few other libraries (hence forth, gnome-panel’s friends). Gnome Panel and friends have recently been deprecated so that developers have more time to focus on Gnome Shell, the new default shell for Gnome that has a vastly simplified (and better) technology stack. Last November, Vincent Untz announced that he would stop maintaining Gnome Panel and friends beyond the 3.6 release, which means the death for it unless anyone else takes it up.

Then What

I’ve been an avid user of the Gnome 2.x series and also Gnome Fallback in the 3.x series. I’ve gotten rather good at supporting it too. We include it by default in Edubuntu, and even have an option in the installer to make it the default for installations over Unity. It provides a low-footprint, fast and simple desktop experience with very reasonable usability, while being very configurable and lockdownable. (my spell check says that’s not a word, but I don’t care).

I’ve been considering whether we should switch to having Xfce or LXDE as an alternative to Unity, but after discussing it with other Edubuntu contributors, it became clear that if I wanted to do that, I’d have to be willing to maintain it for Edubuntu by myself. In Edubuntu we’ve been pretty good at having at least 2 people being interested in any side-project we pick up and I like to keep it that way if we can. It means that if someone gets a bit busy, there’s someone who can pick up the slack for a little while. Also, Xfce and LXDE had big holes in usability, especially when it came to things like having multiple displays and running on laptops. I decided to put that project on the backburner a little since Ubuntu 13.04 will still be using Gnome 3.6, which meant that we’d have the Fallback session for one more release anyway.

The Inevitable Fork

Ikey Doherty forked off Gnome Panel to create a new environment called Consort. Metacity is forked to become Consortium. The website where the Consort desktop environment used to live seems gone now, but here’s a link to some screenshots from Google+.

This caused a bit of a stir, Vincent Untz posted a good chronology of what lead up to it and why he believes that a fork is a bad idea when the Gnome project has effectively put the upstream code up for adoption.

I’ve been interested in the Consort family since it could potentially be something that we could use in Edubuntu once the upstream gnome-panel is no longer in the archives. Also, while Gnome Shell, KDE Plasma Desktop and Unity are great and have come incredibly far in terms of stability and performance, it’s just not always for me. I want to be able to use it for myself in virtual machines, older machines and some other special cases (most notably, on LTSP).

Josselin Mouette, maintainer of Gnome in Debian, approached Ikey after some requests have been made for it in Debian. If you’ve read the post and the IRC logs linked, then you’ll probably agree that it could’ve gone a lot better. I’m not on the SolusOS IRC channel so only saw the conversation after the fact, but I was disappointing since it would need to go into Debian if I’d want to support it in Edubuntu. I think both Josselin and Ikey could’ve handled it better, but humans are just that and emotions and misunderstandings happen.

And so I Bite

I was chewing a bit on Josselin’s comment on how the former maintainer “maintainer decided to give the key to anyone who wanted to” and it’s been several weeks since Vincent invited people to take over maintainership. I decided that I’d at least be willing to do the absolute minimum just to keep the project releasable every six months so that it can be included in distributions, maintain its online presence pages, bug tracker status and keep up with component changes in the stack. So I e-mailed Vincent and explained what I’m willing to do. I had very little resistance, Vincent sent an email out to other people who are steakholders in the gnome-panel project and after a week, there were no objections. So here I am, brand new maintainer of the Gnome Fallback session and its components!

This means that the project is, at least for now, alive again. It’s not going to be part of the official Gnome 3.8 release (I still have to figure out exactly what that means), but there will be a 3.8 release of Gnome Panel and friends as tarballs and for people who maintain it in distributions, things will continue to work exactly as it did before.

Short-term Goals

• My complete primary goal for this at the moment is to ensure that gnome-panel, metacity, etc is releasable alongside the Gnome 3.8 release. This basically means making sure it builds, including any patches that we can and releasing.

Medium-term Goals

• Do something about the long buglist. The Gnome bug tracker has an ugly long list of gnome-panel bugs (939 at my last count). I want to eliminate all the stale Gnome 2.x gnome-panel bugs of which a very large amount of them are no longer relevant (at least on first glance). Then I’d like to do some regular posts to the mailing list and blog about a few prominent bugs every now and again and try to fix them and get people involved.

• Porting Metacity to GTK3. So here’s a bit of really good news. Josselin is also involved with this and one of his mid-term goals is to port metacity to gtk3. It’s something that I know would have to happen, but I don’t have the skills to do that (yet) and I’m glad that he has took this up. Josselin’s mid-term goals also include possibly adding support for the new notification  system (if necessary) and adding support for the new Gnome global menu.

• Create a nice project page with goals and to-do list, who’s envolved and what they’re doing and encourage more people to get involved. The current page is rather outdated so it would be nice to fix it. For now that mostly involved bringing the Gnome Panel Gnome Wiki page up to date.

Long-term Goals

• My pet peeve…  intelligent launcher icons. Windows 7, Mac OS X, KDE, Unity and Gnome Shell have docks that work very similarly in many ways. You click on a launcher and those same launcher entries are recycled as your window list. Gnome Panel is a bit old fashioned in this regard. Many people use 3rd party panels and launchers just to get around this. I have thought for a long time that this should be fixed in Gnome Panel and long-term, it’s something that I’d like to see happen.

• Make the stack as downstream-friendly as possible. Regarding Ikey and Consort, I don’t actually think it was a completely horrible idea at the time. We live in a free world where we use free software and anyone is allowed to do whatever they want and fork whenever they want, and while that doesn’t necessarilly mean it’s a good idea, it also doesn’t mean that we need to get all hissy about it. I’d actually be very interested in working with people who want to fork and find out why they want to fork and try to reel them in closer to upstream. In the case of Consort, I think it would be most beneficial for both projects and all their users if Consort was a branch of Gnome Fallback, rather than a fork. Both projects use Git, FFS. I’ll reach out and try to minimize duplication of effort while not blocking anyone on experimenting with new features or implementing distro-specific changes.

• More metacity features. Metacity’s compositing features have come quite a long way, there are still a few bugs that need to be sorted out, but more than that, there are many window manager features that users have become accustomed to in pretty much all the other environments. Ikey has indicated previously that he wants to do this for consortium. It’s one of the reaons I’ll be super-nice to him because I’d really prefer that he submit as much of that upstream as possible.

• Make everything worth configurable and lockdownable. There are some settings that I get requests from from the users I support so often that it’s just getting boring. The Gnome 2.x series proved to work well in educational and corporate environments. I say we should play on that strength and make it even more  so, while sticking 100% with the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines, of course.

Very Long-term Goals

Well, the fact is, Gnome Fallback will die. There’s a new project called Gnome Legacy, it implements a Gnome 2.x-like experience in Gnome 3. As time goes by, older machines become more powerful and the missing pieces will be implemented and eventually there would be no more good reason for anyone to want to run what we now know as Gnome Fallback. I think it could still have a good 3-5 years or maybe even more in it. Who knows, by then Gnome 4 might even be in development and all of this will be ancient history.

So, my very quick “Eek, I’m now maintainer of Gnome Panel!” post has become quite lengthy post, if you have any questions, I’ll respond to it in the comments.

The War on Time

Whoosh! I’ve been incredibly quiet on my blog for the last 2-3 months. It’s been a crazy time but I’ll catch up and explain everything over the next few entries.

Firstly, I’d like to get out a few details about the last Ubuntu Developer Summit that took place in Copenhagen, Denmark in October. I’m usually really good at getting my blog post out by the end of UDS or a day or two after, but this time it just flew by so incredibly fast for me that I couldn’t keep up. It was a bit shorter than usual at 4 days, as apposed to the usual 5. The reason I heard for that was that people commented in previous post-UDS surveys that 5 days were too long, which is especially understandable for Canonical staff who are often in sprints (away from home) for the week before the UDS as well. I think the shorter period works well, it might need a bit more fine-tuning, I think the summary session at the end wasn’t that useful because, like me, there wasn’t enough time for people to process the vast amount of data generated during UDS and give nice summaries on it. Overall, it was a great get-together of people who care about Ubuntu and also many areas of interest outside of Ubuntu.

Copenhagen, Denmark

I didn’t take many photos this UDS, my camera is broken and only takes blurry pics (not my fault I swear!). So I just ended up taking a few pictures with my phone. Go tag yourself on Google+ if you were there. One of the first interesting things I saw when arriving in Copenhagen was the hotel we stayed in. The origami-like design reminded me of the design of the Quantal Quetzel logo that is used for the current stable Ubuntu release.

The Road ahead for Edubuntu to 14.04 and beyond

Stéphane previously posted about the vision we share for Edubuntu 14.04 and beyond, this was what was mostly discussed during UDS and how we’ll approach those goals for the 13.04 release.

This release will mostly focus on the Edubuntu Server aspect. If everything works out, you will be able to use the standard Edubuntu DVD to also install an Edubuntu Server system that will act as a Linux container host as well as an Active Directory compatible directory server using Samba 4. The catch with Samba 4 is that it doesn’t have many administration tools for Linux yet. Stéphane has started work on a web interface for Edubuntu server that looks quite nice already. I’m supposed to do some CSS work on it, but I have to say it looks really nice already, it’s based on the MAAS service theme and Stéphane did some colour changes and fixes on it already.

From the Edubuntu installer, you’ll be able to choose whether this machine should act as a domain server, or whether you would like to join an existing domain. Since Edubuntu Server is highly compatible with Microsoft Active Directory, the installer will connect to it regardless of whether it’s a Windows Domain or Edubuntu Domain. This should make it really easy for administrators in schools with mixed environments and where complete infrastructure migrations are planned.

You will be able to connect to the same domain whether you’re using Edubuntu on thin clients, desktops or tablets and everything is controllable using the Epoptes administration tool.

Many people are asking whether this is planned for Ubuntu / Ubuntu Server as well, since this could be incredibly useful in other organisations who have a domain infrastructure. It’s currently meant to be easily rebrandable and the aim is to have it available as a general solution for Ubuntu once all the pieces work together.

Empowering Ubuntu Flavours

This cycle, Ubuntu is making some changes to the release schedule. One of the biggest changes made  this cycle is that the alpha and beta releases are being dropped for the main Ubunut product. This session was about establishing how much divergence and changes the Ubuntu Flavours (Ubuntu Studio, Mythbuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu and Edubuntu) could have from the main release cycle. Edubuntu and Kubuntu decided to be a bit more conservative and maintain the snapshot releases. For Edubuntu it has certainly helped so far in identifying and finding some early bugs and I’m already glad that we did that. Mythbuntu is also a notable exception since it will now only do LTS releases. We’re tempted to change Edubuntu’s official policy that the LTS releases are the main releases and treat the releases in between more like technology previews for the next LTS. It’s already not such a far stretch from the truth, but we’ll need to properly review and communicate that at some point.

Valve at UDS and Steam for Linux

One of the first plenaries was from Valve where Drew Bliss talked about Steam on Linux. Steam is one of the most popular publishing and distribution systems for games and up until recently it has only been available on Windows and Mac. Valve (the company behind Steam and many popular games such as Half Life and Portal) are actively working on porting games to run natively on Linux as well.

Some people have asked me what I think about it, since the system is essentially using a free software platform to promote a lot of non-free software. My views on this is pretty simple, I think it’s an overwhelmingly good thing for Linux desktop adoption and it’s been proven to be a good thing for people who don’t even play games. Since the announcement from Valve, Nvidia has already doubled perfomance in many cases for its Linux drivers. AMD, who have been slacking on Linux support the last few years have beefed up their support drastically with the announcement of new drivers that were released earlier this month. This new collection of AMD drivers also adds support for a range of cards where the drivers were completely discontinued, giving new life to many older laptops and machines which would be destined for the dumpster otherwise. This benefits not only gamers, but everyone from an average office worker who wants snappy office suite performance and fast web browsing to designers who work with graphics, videos and computer aided design.

Also, it means that many home users who prefer Linux-based systems would no longer need to dual-boot to Windows or OS X for their games. While Steam will actively be promoting non-free software, it more than makes up for that by the enablement it does for the free software eco-system. I think anyone who disagrees with that is somewhat of a purist and should be more willing to make compromises in order to make progress.

Ubuntu Release Changes

Last week, there was a lot of media noise stating that Ubuntu will no longer do releases and will become a rolling release except for the LTS releases. This is certainly not the case, at least not any time soon. One meme that I’ve noticed increasingly over the last UDSs was that there’s an increasing desire to improve the LTS releases and using the usual Ubuntu releases more and more for experimentation purposes.

I think there’s more and more consensus that the current 6 month cycle isn’t really optimal and that there must be a better way to get Ubuntu to the masses, it’s just the details of what the better way is that leaves a lot to be figured out. There’s a desire between developers to provide better support (better SRUs and backports) for the LTS releases to make it easier for people to stick with it and still have access to new features and hardware support. Having less versions between LTS releases will certainly make that easier. In my opinion it will probably take at least another 2 cycles worth of looking at all the factors from different angles and getting feedback from all the stakeholders before a good plan will have formed for the future of Ubuntu releases. I’m glad to see that there is so much enthusiastic discussion around this and I’m eager to see how Ubuntu’s releases will continue to evolve.

Lightning Talks

Lightning talks are a lot like punk-rock songs. When it’s good, it’s really, really amazingly good and fun. When it’s bad, at least it will be over soon :)

Unfortunately, since it’s been a few months since the UDS, I can’t remember all the details of the lightning talks, but one thing that I find worth mentioning is that they’re not just awesome for the topic they aim to produce (for example, the one lightning talks session I attended was on the topic of “Tests in your software”), but since they are more demo-like than presentation-like, you get to learn a lot of neat tricks and cool things that you didn’t know before. Every few minutes someone would do something and I’d hear someone say something like “Awesome! I didn’t know you could do that with apt-daemon!”. It’s fun and educational and I hope lightning talks will continue to be a tradition at future UDSs.

Social

Stefano Rivera (fellow MOTU, Debianista, Capetonian, Clugger) wins the prize for person I’ve seen in the most countries in one year. In 2012, I saw him in Cape Town for Scaleconf,  Managua during Debconf, Oakland for a previous UDS and Copenhagen for this UDS. Sometimes when I look at silly little statistics like that I realise what a great adventure the year was!

Between the meet ‘n’ greet, an evening of lightning talks and the closing party (which was viking themed and pretty awesome) there was just one free evening left. I used it to gather with the Debian folk who were at UDS. It was great to see how many Debian people were attending, I think we had around a dozen or so people at the dinner and there were even more who couldn’t make it since they work for Canonical or Linaro and had to attend team dinners the same evening. It was as usual, great to put some more faces to names and get to know some people better.

It was also great to have a UDS with many strong technical community folk present who is willing to engage in discussion. There were still a few people who felt missing but it was less than at some previous UDSs.

I also discovered my face on a few puzzles! They were a *great* idea, I saw a few people come and go to work on them during the week, they seem to have acted as good menial activities for people to fix their brains when they got fried during sessions :)

Overall, this was a good and punchy UDS. I’ll probably not make the next one in Oakland due to many changes in my life currently taking place (although I will remotely participate), but will probably make the one later this year, especially if it’s in Europe. I’ll also make a point of live-blogging a bit more, it’s just so hard remembering all the details a few months after the fact. Thanks to everyone who contributed their piece in making it a great week!

Thank you, Marius for making these stickers. So nice to get a parcel in the post. If anyone in ubuntu-za wants to get stickers from Marius at a small fee, put a request on ubuntu-za mailing list.

2012 was one of those years that was not that bad (well the world did not end) at all but I cannot say that it was great either.  So what happened during the year:

• Work — I changed jobs.  I started the year off working for Fundamo/VISA and during the first half decided to make a change.  I got an offer from Internet Solutions and accepted the offer and started working for them on 1 July.  Must say that it was probably the best decision I made all year.  I have a great team and IS is a great company to work for and I am very excited to be part of them.  To see how the internet in SA operate is a real eye opener and I believe over next year or so we will see lots of change particularly around Fibre and wireless technologies like LTE and WiBand.
• Children – My son completed his Chemical Engineering degree at Stellenbosch University and obtained his degree on 13 December.  Was a very proud moment for myself and I am so proud of my son.  He is now looking for work but it is tough going so if anybody has some contact or know of something, then please contact me and let me know.  My daughter is still studying for her B.Sc (Human Sciences) degree and hope to complete next year.  I am so lucky to have 2 great kids that is doing very well.
• Personal – My son was in an accident with my car and the car was written off, my son was fine.  This meant that I had to go car hunting and eventually decide on a Kia Rio 1.4 TEC Sedan and must say that I am very surprised how well it is behaving.  It has all the bells and whistles as standard and after driiving it for about 8 months, I do not have any complaints.  Little bit loose on the road in windy conditions but I have now got used to it with all the wind here in Cape Town.
• Social – On the social front nothing realy changed.  Now that work has been sorted out and children are mostly done with studies, I want to spend some more time in 2013 socially and have a more balanced life.  Time to meet new people and make new friends.
• I have to add something (and the people that know me will enjoy this) about technology.  2012 was the year I started using a Mac (MacBook Pro 13inch) and must say, I am getting used to it and it is way better than Windows I used for work.  I am a Linux person and the Mac allows me to still get to the underbelly where I can tinker and where I still have some control over what I do on my machine.  On the cellphone side, I upgrade to a HTC One X and am very happy with the phone itself.  However I am very disappointed with the support from HTC South Africa particularly in rolling out Android Jelly Bean to their user in South Africa.

I am looking forward to 2013 and make it the year where I spend more time on myself and what is important to me. I do not make new year resolutions since we break them in any case.  I just want it to be a year of happiness and prosperity.  Oh and hopefully will get some time to take out my golf clubs and get on the course again.  This is something I realy neglected in 2012.

To all my friends, family and whomever read this, I wish you all the best for 2013 and may it be a great year.

Who can use these laptop and netbook touchpads, trackpads, whatever you call the thing you-accidentally-tap and lose-focus-and-type-into-the-wrong-spot.

Specialized layout keyboard navigation is the way to go!

Customized Conky to a top horizontal bar, always visible by setting my desktop margins. Installed Pytyle to organize my windows running on top of Openbox, with vi-like keybindings relying on the Super key, And then hacked in a few Openbox global shortcuts for easy volume management and frequently used applications.

 

Crash course in navigation

So far I can manage 99% of tasks using the keyboard layout I set out below.

The Super is also known as the Winkey

Window shortcuts

cycle the focused window, Super-J/K

move the active window between panels on the screen, Super-Ctrl-J/K

move the active windows to another desktop, Super-Shift-J/K

switch desktops, Super-Alt-J/K

Change master tile size, Super-H/L

Add/remove master tiles, Super-./,

Media shortcuts

Ctrl-Ins, up volume

Ctrl-Del, down volume

Ctrl-Backspace, pause/play music

Super-V, alsa volume mixer

Super-M, mocp music player

 

CLI Mode

When it comes to flash in websites that steals your focus, I feel like screaming. Due to bandwidth limits I use the text-mode CLI browser Elinks, and the CLI mail client Alpine.

I rebound many Elinks shortcuts for a vi-like experience to scrolling the page, within the page, browsing history, selecting links and so forth.

 

First we had the Ubuntu Hour then Maia , crew and I went to out for more Ubuntu Hour and we found….

So I guess it is becoming more  common for me to blog about what Maia has been doing. This time how ever this is an update on cool stuff she has orignised for our Loco and meeee.

Firstly way cool shiny bubble like puffy stickers for laptops. Then comes to awesome business cards as Ubuntu Members we can get  cards printed.

Here is a pic of mine. These are possibly the geekiest things I have ever owned they even have my GPG fingerprint on them

So today I was happy enough to be greeted with a nice shiny brown box . Filled with new books Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Desktop.

These books were a present to our Loco from Heather Fox and Debra Williams-Cauley see for more details.

Problem with this is that the idea behind these books is they were supposed to be shared among the Loco and every one was supposed to have a chance. Our loco Ubuntu-ZA is spread all around and way way across the county.  So sharing doesn’t seem like a realistic option. So I am looking for suggestions as to what we can do with these snazzy new books.

Before I requested them  Maia suggested we will decide when we get them so now it is time. Possible options are

• Random raffle and give them out to the winner.
• Make it a prize for a competition such as designing our new Ubuntu-ZA T-Shirts(or any thing else we can think of)
• ….
• Insert your ideas here?

Any how I am never very good at these type of things so for now I will keep them safe until we can decide what to do with them.