Search Results: "Ross Burton"

9 October 2020

Jonathan Dowland: New Bike

I grew up riding bikes with my friends, but I didn't keep it up once I went to University. A couple of my friends persevered and are really good riders, even building careers on their love of riding. I bought a mountain bike in 2006 (a sort of "first pay cheque" treat after changing roles) but didn't really ride it all that often until this year. Once Lockdown began, I started going for early morning rides in order to get some fresh air and exercise. Once I'd got into doing that I decided it was finally time to buy a new bike. I knew I wanted something more like a "hybrid" than a mountain bike but apart from that I was clueless. I couldn't even name the top manufacturers. Ross Burton a friend from the Debian community suggested I take a look at Cotic, a small UK-based manufacturer based in the peak district. Specifically their Escapade gravel bike. (A gravel bike, it turns out, is kind-of like a hybrid.)
My new Cotic Escapade My new Cotic Escapade
I did some due diligence, looked at some other options, put together a spreadsheet etc but the Escapade was the clear winner. During the project I arranged to have a socially distant cup of tea with my childhood friend Dan, now a professional bike mechanic, who by coincidence arrived on his own Cotic Escapade. It definitely seemed to tick all the boxes. I just needed to agonise over the colour choices: Metallic Orange (a Cotic staple) or a Grey with some subtle purple undertones. I was leaning towards the Grey, but ended up plumping for the Orange. I could just cover it under Red Hat UK s cycle to work scheme. I m very pleased our HR dept is continuing to support the scheme, in these times when they also forbid me from travelling to the office. And so here we are. I m very pleased with it! Perhaps I'll write more about riding, or post some pictures, going forward.

17 May 2013

Rob Bradford: GNOME in Moblin: Myzone

Howdy, i m sure most people are aware of the recent release of Moblin 2.0; a user experience for netbooks. I m going to write a few blog posts about how the Moblin user experience is built on the awesome technologies in the GNOME platform. So first up, let s look at the Myzone, we re starting here since this is the first thing I really worked on in the Moblin UX and i ve been able to see it through from early ideas to the 2.0 and 2.1 releases. So, deep breath, the idea behind the Myzone is to provide a springboard to things that matter to you most: your recent files and web pages you ve visited, your upcoming events and things you need to do, things that are happening on social web services and your favourite applications. Now then, that s the theory, how does it work:

27 January 2012

Raphaël Hertzog: People Behind Debian: Josselin Mouette, founder of the Debian GNOME team

Josselin Mouette is one the leaders of the pkg-gnome team, he takes sound technical decisions and doesn t fear writing code to work-around upstream issues. He deserves kudos for the work he has put into packaging GNOME over the years. He can also be very sarcastic (sometimes he even enjoys participating to flamewars on debian lists), and there are quite a few topics where we have long agreed to disagree. But this kind of diversity is also what makes Debian a so interesting place Read on to learn more about the pkg-gnome team, its plans for Wheezy, Josselin s opinion on the GNOME 3 switch, and much more. Raphael: Who are you? Josselin: I am a 31 years old Linux systems engineer. I started in life with physics, which I studied at the ENS Lyon. I started a thesis on experimental and numerical models for optoelectronics, but when it became clear that research was not for me, I abandoned it and accepted a job at the CEA, which holds the largest computing center in Europe. Working on these machines has been the most awesome job ever (except for it being near Paris). After that I worked a bit on system monitoring technologies. I am married, currently living in Lyon, and working for EDF (the French historical electricity company) on scientific workstations using Debian. EDF is using Debian on more than a thousand workstations and holds the fastest Debian supercomputer in the world (200 Tflops), which makes it another obvious place for Debian developers. Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian? Josselin: I discovered Debian in 1999 while studying at the ENS, which is one of the biggest nests of Debian developers while being a small place, it is producing almost one Debian developer per year on average. After wondering for a while what it could be useful for, hacking on a slink snapshot made me think that it was for, well, everything except for gaming. Later, in 2002, when I was working on optoelectronics computing codes, I started to package them for Debian in order to make them easier to install, for us as well as other labs over the world. I started the NM process, and it was going smoothly but also going to take time. However, at that moment, the frozen-bubble game went out and made quite some buzz. Since I knew a guy who knew the game s developer, he asked me to package it. The package found 3 sponsors in a very short time and was fast-tracked into the archive at a speed that was unseen before. After which the NM process was completed very quickly. At that time, I was a heavy WindowMaker user, but I didn t like the direction the project was taking (actually, I wonder if there was one). GNOME was starting to become attractive, but its packaging in Debian was very ineffective, with many inconsistent packages maintained by people who didn t ever talk to each other some of them didn t speak English, and some of them didn t talk at all. Together with awesome people, among which Jordi Mallach, Gustavo Noronha Silva, JHM Dassen, Ross Burton and S bastien Bacher, we started the GNOME team in 2003, introducing consistent packaging practices, and initiating synchronized uploads. Releasing a completely integrated GNOME 2.8 in sarge was a considerable achievement; proving (together with the Perl team) that a team was the best way to maintain large package sets changed the way people work on Debian.
Proving [ ] that a team was the best way to maintain large package sets changed the way people work on Debian.
Raphael: You re one of the most active contributors of the team which is packaging GNOME for Debian. What would you suggest to a new contributor who would like to help the team? Josselin: There are several ways to contact the team, but the recommended one has always been IRC. We hang on #debian-gnome on the OFTC network, so just come around and ask for us. The real question is what you want to do in the team. Of course, most new volunteers want to help packaging the latest and greatest version of GNOME into unstable as soon as possible, but unless they already have Debian background, this is not the easiest task. Since there are already people working on this, the big packages are usually waiting on dependencies. I used to direct newcomers towards bug triage, but it is a tedious task and I m now convinced that our huge bug backlog will never be dealt with. The most useful thing to do for newcomers now is probably to find a GNOME or GNOME-related package that needs improvement or is lagging behind, and simply try to work on it. You can also come and fix the bugs you find annoying. Find a patch on the GNOME bugzilla, or cook it yourself, propose it, and if it s worthy enough you ll soon get commit access.
Our huge bug backlog will never be dealt with.
At this point I feel worth mentioning that if no one answers in 10 minutes, it doesn t mean that no one will answer in 2 hours, so please stay on the channel after asking. Raphael: There s been some controversy about GNOME 3 and the direction that the project is taking. What s your personal stance on GNOME 3? And what s the position of the pkg-gnome team? Josselin: The controversy is not new to GNOME 3, but the large-scale changes made with it have put it more prominently. The criticism usually boils down to a few categories:
  1. General lack of configurability
  2. Strange design decisions
  3. Red Hat centric development
  4. Hardware requirements
  5. Change resistance
The lack of configuration options has been an ongoing criticism since GNOME 2.0 has decided to rip off most of them. Of course, when the control center was redesigned again for 3.0, there was a surge of horrified exclamations from people who missed their favorite buttons. On this topic, I fully concur with GNOME developers. The configuration option that is useful for you is not necessarily useful for someone else. Of course, sometimes developers go a bit too far, but the general direction is right. At work, we found that only a minority of users actually configure anything on their desktops: they just want something that works to launch their applications. Apple and Google have sold millions of devices by making them the simplest possible and without any configuration. Design decisions are, on the contrary, individual decisions, and each of them, while having reasons behind it, can be questioned. I remember seeing a lot of complaints when the OK and Cancel buttons were reversed in dialog boxes, something that nobody questions anymore. GNOME Shell is full of such changes; some are easy to get accustomed with, some others just make eyebrows raise. The most obvious example is the user menu in GNOME 3.2, which contains an entry to configure your Google account, but no entry to shutdown the computer. Both decisions were taken independently, each of them with (good or bad) reasons, but the result is simply ridiculous. The default configuration in Debian will contain an extension to make it a bit better, but on the whole we don t intend to diverge from the upstream design, on which a lot of good work has been done.
On the whole we don t intend to diverge from the upstream design, on which a lot of good work has been done.
Point 3 is more complex. Red Hat being the company spending the most on GNOME, it is obvious that their employees work on making things work for their distribution. An example is the recurring discussions about relying on system services that are currently only implemented by systemd. Since there is a lot of (mostly unjustified) resistance against systemd in Debian, and since it won t work on kFreeBSD anyway, someone needs to develop an alternative implementation of these services for upstart and sysvinit. Everything is in place for someone else to do the job but it has to be done, and this can be frustrating. Especially since it can also be hard to integrate changes needed for other distributions . Hardware requirements are mostly a consequence of the previous criticism: there s hardware that most distributions just don t want to bother supporting. We ve seen it in squeeze with the introduction of a hard dependency on PulseAudio. The Debian GNOME team (together with the Gentoo maintainers) made this dependency optional, carrying heavy patches, in order to cover the cases where it does not work. Now that it has gained more maturity, making this effort obsolete, the new tendency is to require 3D acceleration. For various reasons, it is not available to everyone . On this matter, the position of the Debian GNOME team has always been to support as much different configurations as possible with reasonable effort. Thanks to efforts from the incredible Vincent Untz, upstream supports a so-called fallback mode , which is the GNOME panel from 2.x with a lot of its bugs fixed. We intend to support this mode for as long as reasonably possible in Debian, possibly even after upstream ends up dropping it. However, other applications are going to require 3D because GStreamer is moving to clutter too, affecting video playback performance on non-accelerated systems . For epiphany this is not a problem; only embedded video will be affected. But for totem, this is a major issue; because of that we will probably keep totem 3.0 in wheezy. Finally, there is a natural human tendency to dislike change (I have it too), and it applies a lot to desktop users habits. Needless to say a change of such a scale as introducing GNOME Shell can trigger reactions. However, I don t think it is reasonable, because of this resistance, to keep gnome-panel 2.x in Debian. This would be a lot of work on obsolete technology, and would prevent the upcoming removal of a lot of deprecated libraries. This time is much better spent improving gnome-panel 3.x in Debian and keeping the fallback mode great. One of the change that was made in Debian was to make it easier to find, being available as GNOME Classic directly from the login manager, instead of having to find it in an obscure configuration panel. In all cases, I would recommend to actually try GNOME Shell for a few hours before ditching it. I had never been accustomed to a new environment as quickly ever before.
In all cases, I would recommend to actually try GNOME Shell for a few hours before ditching it.
Having seen several of my GDM patches reverted without a warning, I know we are not finished with carrying patches in Debian packages.
Scientific workstations are a non-trivial example, since there is a measurable effect of using 3D in the window manager on heavy 3D applications.
On the other hand, on accelerated systems, this feature should end up improving performance a lot. Raphael: What are your plans for Debian Wheezy? Josselin: The first goal of the GNOME team is, of course, to provide again a great desktop environment to work on. For wheezy it will probably be based on GNOME 3.4. There also needs to be some work on package management interfaces. Upstream bases everything on PackageKit, but it is not as featureful as the aptdaemon Ubuntu technology. If I have time, I would also like to improve HTTP proxy support, since currently it is based on a stack of terrible hacks. Raphael: If you could spend all your time on Debian, what would you work on? Josselin: Obviously I would like to make GNOME in Debian even better. That would imply working on underneath dependencies (what we now like to call plumbing) to make sure everything is working great. This would also imply working more as GNOME upstream to make it more suitable for our needs. I would also work on large-scale improvements on the distribution, like conditional recommends which I d love to see implemented , or automatic build-dependency generation. I would also work on the installer to make it better for desktops machines. The idea is to automatically install language packs, or glues between two packages when both packages are installed. Raphael: What s the biggest problem of Debian? Josselin: The obvious answer is the same as the one most people you interviewed before gave: not enough members in core teams. A lot of developers join Debian to work on a small number of pet packages, and don t necessarily want to be involved with existing teams. It is probably still not obvious enough that the primary way to start contributing to Debian is to join an existing team. But if there is one thing that is preventing Debian from gaining more momentum now, it is a completely different one: the too short support timeframe. 3 years is really not enough for corporate users. One year to migrate from one version to another is too short, and it is not possible to skip a release. It is definitely possible to change that with reasonable effort: the long-term support after 3 years doesn t have to cover the same perimeter as the short-term one. For example, we could upgrade the kernel to the version in the current stable release, and stop fixing all non-remote security holes. The important thing is to cover the most basic needs: companies are ready to take the risk of having less support if it allows skipping a version, but not the risk of having no support at all. And even more important is to say that you do something. Red Hat says they support a release for 10 years, but of course after 5 years the supported perimeter is extremely small.
3 years [of support] is really not enough for corporate users.
Long-term support will not magically fix all problems in Debian, but it will bring more corporate users into the picture. And with corporate users come paid Debian developers, who can work on critical pieces of the system. Debian was built on the synergy between individuals and companies, and in recent years perhaps as a reaction against what happened with Ubuntu we ve kind of forgot the latter. A lot of individuals have joined the project, and they are actively working, for example, on shortening the release cycle, which goes against the interest of professionals. We should embrace again such users and developers, and that means adapting to the current needs of larger entities. Raphael: You re the maintainer of python-support, a packaging helper that was competing with python-central. Both helpers are now deprecated in favor of dh_python2. Does this mean that the situation of Python in Debian is now sane? Or are there remaining problems? Josselin: dh_python2 (and the Python3 version, dh_python3) has a sane enough design. It fixes a lot of issues in python-central and also python-support, at the expense of somehow reduced functionality for developers. However, just like the previous tools, it merely works around design mistakes in the Python interpreter. For example it is not possible to split binary modules, pure-Python modules and byte-compiled modules in different directory trees, like Perl does although PEP 3147 introduces a way to do so. There is still no sane and standardized way to deal with module versions. There is no difference made between the module (which is a part of language semantics) and the file containing it (an information which depends on the implementation). Developers heavily rely on introspection features and make assumptions based on the implementation, that make it impossible to work around problems with module files. Such problems are not restricted to Python. Those who fought against Ruby gems could tell even worse stories. While introducing GObject introspection packages in Debian (they can be used in JavaScript and Python to provide modules based on GObject libraries), I was pleased to see a clear distinction between file and module, but I was again struck by the fact you are not forced to declare API versions in your Python/JS code. In all cases, there is no reliable way to detect runtime dependencies in a given Python or JavaScript file, which leaves the maintainer to declare them by hand, and of course, often be wrong about them. Add to that the fact that most errors cannot be detected before runtime. For all these reasons, and while still being fond of Python for scripts and prototyping, I ve become really skeptical of using purely interpreted languages to write real applications. Some GNOME developers are moving away from Python and JavaScript, mostly towards Vala; I can only approve of that move and hope the same happens to other projects. Raphael: Is there someone in Debian that you admire for their contributions? Of course there is the never-sleeping, never-stopping, Michael Biebl who can upload a whole GNOME release in a single week-end. But there are a lot of awesome people who make Debian something that simply works. I could talk about Cyril Brulebois from the X strike force, Julien Cristau from the release team, Sjoerd Simons for his sound advice and work on plumbing, Luca Falavigna who is so fast at processing NEW, to quote only a few of those I work with frequently. And of course, Jordi and Sam for their humor.
Thank you to Josselin for the time spent answering my questions. I hope you enjoyed reading his answers as I did. Note that you can find older interviews on http://wiki.debian.org/PeopleBehindDebian.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get my monthly summary of the Debian/Ubuntu news and to not miss further interviews. You can also follow along on Identi.ca, Google+, Twitter and Facebook .

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18 January 2012

Ross Burton: Volunteers Needed!

Those lovely people over at Flickr have finally bitten the bullet and are turning off FlickrAuth in the summer, meaning that all applications that use the Flickr API need to use OAuth. This is something I totally agree with, whilst FlickrAuth works and was clearly an important influence on OAuth, it's a single-service protocol when OAuth has managed to get massive adoption and a huge developer base. The problem I've got is libsocialweb, which has a Flickr module that allows both fetching of your contact's recent photos and uploading images. This uses FlickrAuth so at the end of July will suddenly stop working. I've got enough on my plate at the moment and would love for more people to understand how the entire social spagetti works, so this is a call for a volunteer to work on this, for which I'll obviously be available to offer any guidance and mentoring required. There are two ways of approaching this, the easy way and the slightly harder way. The easy way is to update libsocialweb to use an OAuthProxy instead of a FlickrProxy, and update the module metadata so that Bisho uses the generic OAuth flow instead of a Flickr-specific flow. This should be fairly simple and needs to happen soon so that any distributions that are using libsocialweb don't break in the summer. The harder way is to add Flickr support to gnome-online-accounts, using the Twitter service as an example, and then port the Flickr service in libsocialweb to use gnome-online-accounts to authenticate. I've a proof of concept for the librest-goa integration which will be a useful starting point. This is more of a proof of concept for libsocialweb, we've been looking at moving away from Bisho but haven't done anything substantial yet. Ideally both of these happen, so the current code will continue to work in the future and the GOA work demonstrates how GOA and libsocialweb would work together. So, anyone interested?

17 November 2011

Ross Burton: iPhoneApMon in Shell

This really isn't how it should look, but it's a 15 minute hack in Javascript to give me something that doesn't involve a terminal. One day I'll find the time to integrate this properly into the network menu...

6 July 2011

Ross Burton: iPhone Connection Status

Just a little Python hack...
$ ./iphonemon.py 
Found Ross Burton s iPhone
3 3G
1 3_75G
2 3_75G
3 3_75G
2 3_75G
3 3_75G
2 3G
Next step: a visual interface.

4 July 2011

Ross Burton: System Defaults in GSettings

Note: Florian in the comments points me at the documentation (albeit rather concise) for this in the API documentation under Vendor Overrides. GSettings, like GConf before it, allows the administrator of a system to override the default settings or lock down keys to particular settings. This is well documented in the GNOME wiki. However GConf didn't really have the concept of vendor patches. Traditionally if a Vendor wanted to change a default (say, the wallpaper) they'd have to patch the GConf schemas directly. Luckily for people who maintain distributions, GSettings provides a way of installing vendor overrides directly. It's not documented as far as I can tell so consider this a first draft at the manual... First, find the setting you want to override, dconf-editor is useful for this. Say you're making a work-orientated custom distribution so you want the shell's popup calendar to show the week number by default. Some digging in dconf-editor leads us to the org.gnome.shell.calendar folder (the "schema") with a boolean key show-weekdate that defaults to false. By changing the default of this to true, all users will have work week shown unless they explicitly set it to false. Now we've found the information we need we can write the override file. Create a new file with the extension .gschema.override, such as mydistro-tweaks.gschema.override. This file is a .ini-style keyfile, logically mapping schemas to groups and key/value pairs to (predicable) key/value pairs. The value needs to be in the GVariant serialisation format, but for things like booleans, numbers and strings these are fairly obvious. So we'd have a file that looks a little something like this:
[org.gnome.shell.calendar]
  show-weekdate=true
Note that you can set multiple keys in multiple schemas in the same override file, so if we also wanted to show the date in the panel we'd have this:
[org.gnome.shell.calendar]
show-weekdate=true
[org.gnome.shell.clock]
show-date=true
Now the file is ready to be installed. Put it in a package, install to $prefix/share/glib-2.0/schemas and finally run glib-compile-schemas $prefix/share/glib-2.0/schemas in the post-install/post-remove hooks. Done! (many thanks to Ryan Lortie for telling me how vendor patches work)

19 April 2011

Ross Burton: AirPlay/UPnP Synergy

You know, it would be really good if someone could take ShairPort, glue that to gst-rtsp-server, and then implement the Rygel MediaServer specification, letting me play music from my iPhone on my Raumfeld UPnP speakers. I'd actually like this so much that I'm willing to put up some of my own hard cash to see it happen. Are there sites that will let people pledge money towards projects like this? NP: Central Reservation, Beth Orton

22 February 2011

Ross Burton: Contributions to libsocialweb

Thanks to those nice people at Novell and Collabora, libsocialweb now supports Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, Plurk, Sina, SmugMug, Twitter, Vimeo and YouTube. As if that isn't enough, there are patches queued to bring back MySpace. Thanks Novell and Collabora!

18 February 2011

Ross Burton: Tasks 0.19

Shock news: a Tasks release! Announcing 0.19: Yeah, it's all go on the Tasks front... Tarballs on the Pimlico site, or gnome.org. NP: Yanqui U.X.O. - Godspeed You! Black Emperor

27 January 2011

Rob Bradford: Work with us!

Are you graduating this year? Or recently graduated? Do you want to work in Open Source? Do you have the right to work in the UK? Do you want to work with some of the best minds in the field: Chris Lord, of Happy Wombats fame; Damien Lespiau, the Clutter GST mastermind; Emmanuele Bassi, our Clutter super-hero; Jussi Kukkonen, who puts the clue in Geoclue; Ross Burton, our EDS magician; Srini Ragavan, Evolution shiny-thing maker; Thomas Wood, of the MX and control-center massive; Tomas Frydrych, our Antarctic naming scheme generator and of course pippin. Interested? Take a look at our job entry. I should be around as FOSDEM so feel free to corner me to talk.

13 November 2010

Ross Burton: Welcome

Say hello to Isla Daisy Burton. Isla Daisy Burton Born at home (planned) on Thursday 4th November 2010 at 19:08, weighing 6 pounds 14.5 ounces. Both mother and baby are well. I'm now on leave until the end of December, so expect delayed responses to my personal email and vacation autoreplies to my Intel email.

Ross Burton: Code Dump

I finally got around to clearing out my ~/Programming and publishing a number of the silly toy projects I've built up over the years that might be useful to someone, somewhere. A brief overview of what I've basically thrown over the wall to GitHub:
flickrest
A Python/Twisted library for the Flickr API. This was written for use in Postr, although I suspect now that I don't maintain Postr any more they have forked. Maybe now this is in Git we can merge any changes.
evo-known-contact
A small tool I wrote for someone years ago that takes an RFC2822-formatted email on stdin, extracts the sender, and sets the exit code depending on whether that email address is in the address book.
feednotify
Display notifications when a RSS feed is updated.
Zebu
A tool to manage Debian chroots using cowbuilder.
Tumblrss
Screen-scrape your Tumblr dashboard and generate a RSS feed. This has bitrotted but was very useful.
gupnp-scrobbler
Listen to announcements over UPnP of music being played and submit the tracks to Last.fm.
ephy-gupnp
Dynamically generate bookmarks from UPnP devices that expose a web interface. Probably doesn't work with recent Epiphany releases because I've switched to Chrome.
ephydeli
An action to add the current page to Delicious.com. Probably doesn't work with recent Epiphany releases because I've switched to Chrome and Pinboard.
eds-tools
Some tools I wrote when working on EDS such as a dummy addressbook backend and command-line access to the libebook API.
cdscrobbler
Submit the current CD (or an arbitrary MusicBrainz album ID) to Last.fm as if you'd just finished playing it.
Out of all of these hacks I only actively use flickrest and Zebu now, so I wouldn't be surprised if there is some serious bitrot in the others. Hopefully something here is useful to someone, somewhere though!

12 July 2010

Ross Burton: Tasks 0.18 (and 0.17)

Whilst Tasks isn't exactly under active development, I'm still maintaining it because I actually use it (unlike certain other projects, ahem). So, Tasks 0.18 is released. Tarballs and more information as usual are available at the Pimlico Project web site. In related news, we're slowly migrating over to the GNOME infrastructure. We've migrated the source code, next up is the tarballs and bugzilla.

9 June 2010

Ross Burton: Gypsy 0.8 Released

As acting release engineer of the Gypsy project (a GPS mux, if you didn't know) I'm proud to announce the release of Gypsy 0.8. So, what's new? Many thanks to Jussi Kukkonen for patch review, and Bastien Nocera for patch review and new features. The big question of course is what of the future? So far we've got some rough ideas. An overhaul of the device interaction layer is definitely required as actaully getting NMEA is becoming more complex: for integrated 3G/GPS chips you need to talk to oFono/ModemManager to get a socket, for some embedded GPS devices you need a proprietary binary that writes to a pipe, and so on. There are some new features we're considering too: server-side proximity detection and update rate limiting.

25 November 2009

Ross Burton: Sound Juicer "I Got Nobody On My Side And Surely That Ain't Right" 2.28.1

Sound Juicer "I Got Nobody On My Side And Surely That Ain't Right" 2.28.1 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Props to Bastien for doing most of the work here. Bastien originally called this release Not the maintainer, lalala, plug ears but we all know he is, right?

12 November 2009

Ross Burton: New Maintainer for Postr!

After months of neglect by myself, Postr has a new maintainer! Step forward Germ n P o-Caama o, everyone's favourite Chilean, who has been hard at work migrating to git.gnome.org, merging patches and fixing bugs (the Upload button works!), and creating a new project page. Now all I need is for someone to adopt Sound Juicer...

23 October 2009

Rob Bradford: GNOME in Moblin: Myzone

Howdy, i m sure most people are aware of the recent release of Moblin 2.0; a user experience for netbooks. I m going to write a few blog posts about how the Moblin user experience is built on the awesome technologies in the GNOME platform. So first up, let s look at the Myzone, we re starting here since this is the first thing I really worked on in the Moblin UX and i ve been able to see it through from early ideas to the 2.0 and 2.1 releases. So, deep breath, the idea behind the Myzone is to provide a springboard to things that matter to you most: your recent files and web pages you ve visited, your upcoming events and things you need to do, things that are happening on social web services and your favourite applications. Now then, that s the theory, how does it work:
Myzone in action
Myzone in action

27 September 2009

Ross Burton: London Transport Stab Stab Die Die

Sometimes I really, really hate London. A trip to London on Saturday, in theory: Leave Ely 16:26, arrive Kings Cross 17:34, change to Piccadilly line and arrive Covent Garden at 17:54. Dinner then the 21:52 train back home, arriving 23:10. A trip to London on Saturday, in practise. Leave Ely 16:26, arrive Kings Cross 10 minutes late. Change to Piccadilly line and stand outside the closed barriers for 15 minutes because of overcrowding. Give up on the tube, catch a number 59 bus to Aldwych: 10 minutes to reach Euston (faster to walk) and gave up after sitting in gridlock on Russel Square for 15 minutes. Eventually get rather empty Piccadilly line from Russel Square to Covent Garden, arriving 18:50. Oh, and then the restaurant said it would be a two hour wait for a table for four. That said, the return journey wasn't exactly a barrel of laughs. The tube was behaving so that took the expected ten minutes, but then we just missed the train back home and the next train wasn't for over an hour. Jump into a taxi to Liverpool Street to catch the 22:26... to discover there are engineering works and we'd have to get a bus for two hours. Attempt to get the tube back to Kings Cross... more engineering works so that was out. Another taxi back to Kings Cross and we finally get on the last train home, arriving at 00:35. Just for extra fun I'm in London for the Moblin 2.0 Release Party on Monday and there are yet more engineering works, so if I miss the 22:15 I'll be on a bus for half the journey. Stab stab stab.

22 September 2009

Ross Burton: Sound Juicer "And It Ain't Even 9 In The Morning, Sorry I'm Late" 2.28.0

Sound Juicer "And It Ain't Even 9 In The Morning, Sorry I'm Late" 2.28.0 has been released. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Very little in the 2.27 cycle... Did I mention that SJ could really do with a dedicated (co)maintainer?

Next.