UK Linux User Groups

Just saw a car with an Obama ‘08 bumper sticker. I’m in the UK.

When you tap a link to a file that MobileSafari can’t display, it should give you the option of bookmarking for later or emailing the file.

Yesterday (I rule at this Daily Update thing) was the birthday of Benoît Mandelbrot, creator of the Mandelbrot set fractal, possibly the single most recognisable fractal image there is.

So popular is it, in fact, that a Mandelbrot generator is one of the classic computer science “Look, I can do this with this” problems. For example, someone’s created a Mandelbrot generator from flickr images and there’s even an implemention in four lines of bash, but to save your sanity I can’t find it.

It’s also one of the few mathmatical concept implementations with a song written about it

Mandelbrot Set you’re a Rorschach Test on fire
You’re a day-glo pterodactyl
You’re a heart-shaped box of springs and wire
You’re one badass fucking fractal
And you’re just in time to save the day
Sweeping all our fears away
You can change the world in a tiny way

Whoa, the Queen is visiting my university next month. She’s opening the new library.

Last night John Pinner gave a talk at SBLug covering Search Engine Optimisation.

Here is an exceedingly random collection of points, as a collective, we came up with.

• The obvious - give your documents structure and use html tags appropriately - Use titles, headings, alt text, link titles.
• It helps if keywords appear in the domain name or URL
• You can overstuff content with keywords, which will have a negative effect
• The longer a title/url etc, the less weight keywords within it will probably have
• Use a robots.txt file, and make sure this links through to a sitemap.xml type file
• Use mod_rewrite (or whatever) where possible to have static looking URLs where possible
• A new site effectively gets sandboxed for the first few weeks/months - over time it will get 'trusted' more, and any new changes will appear quicker. Google may trust domains which are registered for a long period more>
  ?
• If you're devious, you can add keywords into e.g. <noscript> tags, which the search engines may incorrectly pick up on
• You need to consider what people are searching for, and answer their queries - not your own ego. For example, there's probably little point in saying what a great holiday place you are - instead you should probably be using sentences that match what people are looking for - e.g. French Cooking holiday
• Try and make valid [x]html pages... see the w3 validator
• Sometimes Google will use your meta description tag, sometimes it will take a chunk of text out of the page body.
• Try and get links to your site - but ideally they need to be relevant (e.g. from the same industry sector) - e.g get python.org to link to your python training page(s)
• Get entries in dmoz.org / google local / wikipedia ?
• Do Linux like things get a better rating?
• There are other search engines out there - dogpile, snap, msn, yahoo, ask - they are all slightly different, and worth keeping an eye on as google may not be dominant forever
• Ideally find out what your potential customers would search for - this may not be keywords/phrases you're using
• Remember Google.co.uk will return different results from google.co.fr! Server location matters.
• Use the various Google webmaster tools - e.g analytics, webmaster tools, adwords (if you have spare cash!) etc
• Google have released an SEO guide of their own - this pdf

That is all...

Ubuntu 8.10 comes bundled with a wide variety of tools, utilities and programs on the CD, as does Windows Vista. In this blogpost I’ll be looking at some of the bundled tools of both.

Text editing

Windows Vista comes with two basic programs to do text editing: Notepad and Wordpad. Notepad is an application to edit plan-text documents, whereas Wordpad is capable of some formatting. Both tools lack certain features the Ubuntu 8.10 included version has such as syntax highlighting and spellchecking. I’m also not entirely sure why both tools are included, as there is nothing that Notepad does that Wordpad can’t do but there are a lot of things Wordpad CAN do that Notepad can’t, such as opening text files with non-windows line endings.

Webbrowsing

See my previous post about Internet Explorer

Mail

See my previous post about Windows Mail

Video DVD creation

Windows Vista comes shipped with a tool called ‘Windows DVD Maker’, which is quite a nifty little tool which makes it very easy to create video DVDs from various movies on the harddrive, it comes equipped with various menu styles and themes and is a generally well-thought out tool. Windows DVD Maker is very easy to use and I can see how people would like using it. Ubuntu 8.10 comes without any such facility.

Movie editing

Another application included with Windows Vista, but missing from Ubuntu 8.10 is the ‘Windows Movie Maker’, it is a simple application but it is incredibly easy to use. Although it is a bit slow and a tad unstable it is miles better than what Ubuntu 8.10 comes with, which is nothing. For simple home-video editing Windows Movie Maker seems to be sufficient.

Graphics editing

Ubuntu 8.10 ships ‘Gimp’ or ‘The GNU Image Manipulation Program’, Windows Vista ships with paint. There is simply no comparing the two. The Gimp is a fully-fledged foto retoucher, image editor and comes with loads of plugins and effects, whereas Paint is hardly usable. Although, other than with the Gimp, it’s really easy to draw a circle in MS Paint

Games

Both Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows Vista come with a variety of games, it is hard to ‘compare’ these but both base installs come with enough games to waste many, many hours of the boss’s time.

Office productivity

There is no office productivity suite installed with Windows Vista, and it appears that it is always a separate download or purchase. Ubuntu 8.10 comes with the highly-regarded OpenOffice.org office suite which has a Word processor, Presentation, spreadsheet, vector drawing and a database program. It also comes equipped with import and export filters for all currently popular file formats such as OpenDocument and Microsoft Office.

Photo management

Comparing the Windows Photo Gallery and Ubuntu 8.10’s F-spot seems to lean slightly in favour of F-spot as it can save to multiple on-line galleries. Otherwise functionality of both programs appears pretty similar and I doubt any user of either program would have any problems switching between the two.

Conclusion

Windows Vista does come with a lot of programs installed, but a lot of them seem to be watered-down versions of what Ubuntu 8.10 has to offer. The lack of office-suite, decent webbrowser and mail client are very noteworthy. Whereas Ubuntu 8.10 has everything a casual computer user uses on a day-to-day basis Windows Vista seems to require installation of several third-party products to make it a fully complete desktop.

Comparing the price-tag of an Ubuntu 8.10 license (free) and Windows Vista Ultimate (270 euros) the ‘value for money’ for Windows Vista seems very poor. Even more so because every additional piece of software is likely to cost another substantial amount of money. It is of course possible to fill the gaps with OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird and Firefox for Windows but at that point installing Ubuntu 8.10 would have been less work.

The good

• Pretty decent multi-media offerings
• Ability to draw circles with Paint

The bad

• All other included tools are sub-par to their Ubuntu 8.10 counter-parts

The ugly

• No office suite in the default install, separate purchase or download
• Value for money is very bad compared to Ubuntu 8.10

Overall verdict

2/5

Most tools that are included are extremely basic or entirely missing. Adding other tools will either be expensive, or would be more work than installing Ubuntu 8.10

In the past I have talked quite a bit about diversity in this blog. Diversity is critical to the future development and growth of communities, and the strongest communities are ones with a strong sense of equality and diversity, and a governance infrastructure that supports and celebrates that diversity.

Importantly, diversity is closely connected to evolution. The essence of diversity is in all of us, but the social acceptance of said diversity is a slower moving animal. There are obvious large social progressions in diversity - gender and race equality being one such example - but within every community and human grouping we see diversity and evolution moving forward, hand in hand.

Typically when talk about diversity, we use these common examples. Gender. Race. Sexuality. Class. Although important, these poster-children of diversity can sometimes focus the attention away from more subtle and potentially potent forms of diversity that we can encourage, explore and celebrate.

George B. Graen, author of Dealing with Diversity talks about these different types of diversity that we have before us. His interesting hypothesis is that not all differences are equally relevant or important in all circumstances. He broadly divides this diversity into surface-level diversity which are readily observable characteristics such as the one we have just discussed — race, gender, or age, and deep-level diversity which points us towards important but less readily transparent entities such as personality, values, and attitudes.

Now we are rolling.

I am really keen to explore how we can build diversity in these areas of personality, experiences, perspectives and beliefs. Often these more hidden kinds of diversity teach us life’s most valuable lessons, and we typically learn these lessons for whom we share a deep-level of diversity. I am not suggesting surface-level diversity is unimportant, and I want to be clear here, I am not talking about equality, all equality is important, but I am keen to explore how we can grow this sense of deep-level diversity.

But is deep-level diversity a productive and pro-active area in which to focus our efforts? The cards may well be in our favour - Graen suggests that surface-level diversity appears to be waning:

“In a study of 45 teams from electronics divisions of three major corporations, Pelled, Eisenhardt, and Xin (1999) found that the effects of surface-level diversity (age) on emotional conflict diminished as a function of team longevity. Similarly, Chatman and Flynn (2001) found that demographic homogeneity (race and gender) was less predictive of team cooperation as team members interacted with each other”.

Interestingly, at the same time, and in another research study, deep-level diversity is growing:

“In a study of 144 student project teams, Harrison, Price, Gavin, and Florey (2002) found that surface-level diversity negatively affected early cohesion in the team. Over the course of a semester working together, surface-level diversity became less predictive, whereas actual deep-level diversity (measured by conscientiousness, task meaningfulness, and outcome importance) and perceptions of deep-level diversity became increasingly important to team social cohesion and performance”.

Although the experiment may seem a little abstract, Graen suggests that “as team members interact, attributions about underlying differences based on race, gender, and age are likely to be minimized; however, the underlying differences in terms of personality, values, and attitudes are likely to have an increasingly negative effect on team cohesion and performance“.

In a nutshell, as a community, diversity is everywhere. We have so many opinions, viewpoints, perspectives, recommendations and other reactions to stimulus, and at every step we need to foster and encourage open and frank exchanges of debate, and to bring balance to this debate. The Ubuntu Code Of Conduct, one of the most important documents in the community that I frequent most of the time, draws attention to understanding and respecting this deep-level of diversity, but the Code Of Conduct is sometimes misinterpreted as simply” don’t be an asshole“. It means far more than that - it encourages us to not only take responsibility for our actions and our reactions, but to also use this diversity as an opportunity to learn and grow; turning differences into opportunities for personal development and learning. If we are ever going to win this fight, we need to cherish and respect this deep-level diversity. The importance of this is not something we can enforce with actions, bullet-points, success criteria or other organisational devices - it boils down to us always remembering why we are doing what we are doing, and standing shoulder to shoulder, connected by our diversity to help us grow and take on the challenges before us.

Fuck you Apple Mail. I don’t *want* an “Apple Mail To Do” folder on *every* IMAP account I have.

Inspired by many other lists I've seen. This one is mine.

1. Play with it
2. Configure it the way you want it, not the way some list on a blog tells you
3. Play with it some more
4. Join our Community *
5. Turn the computer off and spend some time with your friends and family

* But only y'know, if you want to.

The Open Rights Group is 3, and now has reached over 1000 fivers a month. To celebrate ORG have issued each of the first 1000 members with web badges, I have added my ORG badges into the sidebar.

If you care about any of these:

* Automatic Vehicle Tracking
* Copyright
* Creative Commons
* Data Protection
* DRM
* e-Voting
* Freedom of Information
* Identity
* Intellectual Property
* Net Neutrality
* Open Geodata
* Open Source
* Police Records
* Privacy
* Public Domain
* Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
* Release The Music
* RFID

visit the site and sign up to help reach them target of 1500 fivers a month by December.

Over the course of the last two days there are a couple things that struck me, both positively and negatively. This is just a short post detailing them. I won’t be giving a ‘conclusion’ or a score in this post.

Overall look

The visual presentation of Windows Vista is a bit of a mixed bag, some of the applications really look quite nice such as Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, the file manager and the welcome center. Other bundled applications look entirely different and gives overall unpolished look. To illustrate this, I have made a screenshot of parts of the screens of (in my mind) the worst offenders (click to enlarge)

Here we see ‘Windows Mail’ with it’s blue toolbar, Wordpad with it’s windows 9x style toolbar, paint without any toolbar and Internet Explorer with… Something else, I believe that Internet Explorer is what Vista applications were supposed to look like.

Driver updating

I had some problems with some games (more on that later) and I was advised to update my drivers. I was kind of surprised that Windows Update does not update the drivers shipped with the OS. Upgrading the driver did help, by the way. But did not solve the stability issues I’m having with Aero (read below).

Security prompts

Although there’s a lot of bad press about the security prompts, I did not encounter TOO many of them this far and I don’t think they are all that annoying. They are, however, somewhat uninformative: some pages require plugins and just navigating to those pages will present the user with a security prompt which does not specify what plugin is about to be installed. I don’t see how this adds to security, as the user has no way of knowing what plugin the site requires or even what site is being navigated to.

One other thing that struck me as incredibly odd was that updating my Radeon drivers from the AMD setup did NOT require an UAC prompt other than the one asking me wether or not I wanted to start an application I downloaded.

Stability

Overall system stability has been good thus far, I have not experienced any complete OS meltdowns. Having said that, both switching Windows Media Player to fullscreen and back and UAC prompts causes my Aero interface to crash from time to time with no way to restart it. After a crash I get a balloon in the bottom right of my first screen that fades before I can read it, but I believe I could make out something about ’switching to basic mode’. Without Aero the 2D fillrate of my screen is absolutely abysmal and the only recourse is to either reboot or logout/login.

Copy/Pasting

Copy/paste in Ubuntu 8.10 is just a matter of selecting the text, and middle clicking in the control where you want the text pasted. In Windows Vista it is required to explicitly copy by pressing ‘Ctrl-C’ and pasting is done with ‘Ctrl-V’. I’m sure this is just a matter of what you’re used to, but for me this is a continuing annoyance.

Scrolling

The scrollwheel can only be used in applications that have keyboard focus, and will then only work in the part of the application that has keyboard focus. On Ubuntu 8.10 I am used that every application, and every part of every application will scroll when my mouse is over it. Switching focus is not required. This allows me to use one screen for reading and scrolling while simultaneously typing code/comments or chatting in another window.

Start menu

I find the Windows Vista start menu to be somewhat confusing, it is basically a file browser and finding the application I’m looking for often requires both clicking and scrolling. Sometimes it requires scrolling to even find the correct ‘folder’ in the start menu. This might be another ‘getting used to’ thing, but I find it to be fairly unintuitive and time-consuming to use.

“May the HOF be with you” - Obi-Wan Kenobi

A few months back I met in London with Daniel Holbach, Graham Binns and James Westby for a short sprint. I had flown Daniel over for the purposes of a face-to-face catch-up and to record some MOTU videos for the Ubuntu Developer Channel. It was a productive few days, and in our many meetings we sowed the seeds for an idea which I am proud to announce today.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, one of the most important aspects of community management is in breaking down workflow and understanding how to improve it. We have done this in a number of areas in the Ubuntu world with bugs, patches, LoCo Teams, events and key parts of the wider community picture. When we launch any initiative we pay close attention to the growth and impact of that initiative on the community and this often gives us an insight into the rock stars in our community - the contributors who do lots of good, measurable, referencable work.

When I meet with the horsemen, we regularly talk about these rockstars in our community. On every call we get jazzed about their contributions to Ubuntu. Although we knew about many areas of contribution - people who are rocking on 5-A-Day, new MOTU and core-dev developers, people who are doing great work in the forums etc, our approach was somewhat incomplete. Although we horsemen focus on these rockstars and none of this information is private, the figures and statistics that show off this good work is spread across different places. In addition to this, we were concious that we are always only seeing part of the picture - what about rockstars in translations, upstream bug triage, the sponsorship queue, Launchpad contributors etc? Every time someone rocks a part of our community, they should be recognised.

This raised another issue - some people can be measured as rockstars - we can count their contributions in the community, but some people span a range of different kinds of contribution, many of which can’t be measured statistically. We wanted these people to be recognised as well and write a more personal showcase of their efforts. With these driving considerations, it was now time to be inspired by Guitar Hero. I know, I know, that may seem a little odd, but stay with me…

There are many fascinating communities out there outside of Free Software, and gaming comunities offer many insights. One such example is Guitar Hero - the online collaborative play aspect of Guitar Hero an interesting part of how they have built a faithful following of players. Where this really piqued my interest was in how high scores play such an encouraging role to members of that community. Players really put in the time to practise and get their scores up and enjoy the sense of peer respect that results from this in the Guitar Hero fishbowl. Interestingly, when we launched 5-A-Day, complete with the contributor and team rankings, we also picked up on a strong sense of pride by participants in their scores. We have also seen similar results from pride over karma in Launchpad. Our community is built on pride and respect, and I was keen to explore how we could centralise this.

While in the meeting room, I grabbed a pen and started fleshing out a design. Daniel, James and I then set to refining the functional and visual design and I took a snap of my penmanship:

After a number of follow-up calls, a functional specification and some testing we are now proud to announce the Ubuntu Hall Of Fame:

Many thanks to Stuart Langridge for producing the design, Daniel Holbach for plumbing in the data from Launchpad and Kenneth Wimer for producing the snazzy Rockstar button.

Let me explain a few elements of the Hall Of Fame. Firstly, as you can see, the Hall Of Fame includes a number of boxes that look like this:

Each box contains the statistical data about the topic for the box, but it also contains a simple single-line description detailing what the data shows. To find more data that is related, there is a More… link - click that to drill into more stats. The final point to note is the (i) symbol in the top-right of each box - this links to a page that outlines how to get involved in that part of our community.

Another key feature of the Hall Of Fame is the Featured Contributor. Here we will be showcasing contributors across the community that are doing excellent work. Here we will write a little blurb about what they have done, their achievements and their personality. Importantly, we have added a feature in which you can click the Thank button and the Hall Of Fame will look up your Launchpad account and add your profile picture to the article to show that you would like to thank that contributor. This was an important feature - we wanted to make it as easy as possible to show featured contributors that you appreciate their work. Now it is just one click away! Oh, and for you RSS lovers, there is a feed for Featured Contributors available with the big orange RSS icon. When thinking about who we would showcase for the first Featured Contributor, one of the first names that sprung to mind was Nick Ali, an excellent contributor and friend to everyone. Go and check out the Featured Contributor article about him.

My hope is that the Hall Of Fame will quickly become a showcase in which the wider community is proud to be featured on, either as a Featured Contributor or inside one of the many boxes. We have many ideas about how we can expand and improve on the site to foster this sense of pride, but we are keen to hear from you all with your ideas about additional features that you would love to see, and importantly, what additional HOFBoxes (those boxes with stats) that you would like to see. Which areas of the community should we be showcasing, and how would you measure them?

Online movies

In my course of browsing around, I came across a post on Ted Haeger’s blog. This page has downloads for three movies in both mpg and ogg formats (linky). There also appears to be flash versions of these movies embedded, these did not work however. Internet Explorer also did not offer to download the required Flash player, it just displays the ‘broken image’ icon.

Because I am still a freedom lover at heart, I decided to first click the ‘.ogg’ links, this prompts Internet Explorer to ask me to either save the file, or find an application to open it with. I chose to find an application to open my movie with.

This directed me to a page on the Microsoft site in Dutch, while my operating system’s language is English, this must be very confusing for people who live in The Netherlands but don’t speak Dutch very well (yet), furthermore there is no link on this page to translate it into another language, but I digress.

The page says that the file type is ‘unknown’, but offers me to go and use Live search to find answers. Totem on Ubuntu 8.10 offers to download codecs automatically for whatever filetype I have thrown at it thus far, and this is a somewhat disappointing experience so far. I clicked the ‘Windows Live search’ button, this brings up a page with search results, the top result being http://filext.com/file-extension/OGG. This page has two related links:

• Windows Player Setup
• Directshow Filters for Ogg Vorbis

Since I don’t know what a ‘DirectShow’filter is, I decide to opt for the first option. This directed me to a page on vorbis.com that gives me an explanation of what ‘directshow filters’ are and apparently that IS what I want. So I download. Three confirmation dialogs, one UAC prompt and a setup later I have the ‘directshow’ filters installed. I try clicking on the .ogg file again, but I am presented by the same dialog. After clicking the .ogg link again, I chose to download the file and then press ‘open’ in Internet Explorer. Windows still does not know what to do with the file, so I decide to manually select ‘Windows Media Player’.

Windows Media Player prompts me for ‘initial settings’, I decide to go for the ‘recommended’ option. A player screen opens, and the media starts playing, well… the audio does anyway. I decide to give up and close Windows Media Player, this crashes it.

After this, I decide to give up (what I imagine any user would do) and select the ‘.mpg’ links. This immediately opened Windows Media Player and it started buffering “5%…10%…15%…8%…9%…20%…18%”. In other words, the progress indicator was somewhat less than impressive. During the movie I ‘maximized’ the Windows Media Player window and after it mysteriously started to buffer again I finished watching the movie ok. The movie was pretty funny, so I downloaded the second one. Windows Media Player opened again, maximized but this time the movie was only a small square in the middle of the player window, I un-maximized the window, buffering, then maximized the window again, buffering. The same thing happened for the third movie.

DVD Playback

Since I’m reviewing media, I can’t ignore DVD playing. After inserting one of my trusty “Sam and Max: Freelance Police” DVDs I was prompted for what I wanted to do with it, I selected ‘Play in Windows Media Player’ and the DVD started without any more fuss. This is an improvement over Ubuntu 8.10 where due to legal reasons it is required to run the script /usr/share/doc/libdvdread/dvdcss.sh before commercial DVDs will start playing.

The only downside appears to be that it is impossible to skip over the movies accusing me of piracy and other trailers, something that totem does allow. All in all this was a very positive experience.

 Conclusion

While eventually most media will play, it is hardly a smooth experience. The .ogg files were not recognized at all by Windows Vista, and the codecs that were available for download are somewhat less-than-stellar. Although I can’t really blame Microsoft for this, it is still not a very nice experience especially not since it would have costed Microsoft absolutely nothing to include these in the base install of Windows Vista. The shipped player (Windows Media Player) also appears to be somewhat unstable. Playing DVDs however was a breeze and I can’t see anyone having any trouble with this.

Overall: playing random media downloaded from the web is easier in Ubuntu 8.10, playing DVDs is harder.

The good

• Out-of-the-box DVD support
• Clean media player interface

The bad

• A bit unstable
• Opening a movie in a maximized window gives unexpected results
• Resizing an online movie results in rebuffering
• Unable to skip DVD trailers

The ugly

• No support for .ogg files
• Bad/no progress indication

Overall verdict

3/5

The media experience in Windows Vista is adequate, but somewhat less than I had expected of a self-proclaimed ‘media-centric OS’

Windows Vista ships with an email client aptly named ‘Windows Mail’, the email client I normally use is called ‘Evolution’ and comes standard with the Gnome desktop, and most distributions that come with a Gnome desktop installed.

Just as with Internet Explorer and Firefox, Evolution is the email client I have been using the last year or two and thus is the only client I can fairly compare Windows Mail to.

Some of the people I have told about Windows Mail all said I wasn’t supposed to actually USE it and install Outlook 2007. I shall do so this evening, but I can only agree with the assessment of even my Microsoft certified colleagues, the bundled mail application is absolutely pants.

After first starting the application, which is prominently displayed at the top of the Vista start menu, the first thing that I noticed was the complete lack of polish. Where Internet Explorer looked like it belonged on the Vista desktop, Windows Mail stuck out like a sore thumb. The ‘toolbar’ is dark blue, and it has a menubar, the rest of the application is NOT blue and it makes the whole thing look rather silly.

Now, looks aside, I run my own IMAP server that only accepts logons through SSL and refuses to authenticate any other way. In the default mail account setup started when first launched it is not possible to configure this. I was unaware of this limitation, imagining that ports/encryption would be confirmed in a later configuration step. I was wrong. After entering my server’s name, login and password Windows Mail immediately sent my password in plain-text unencrypted to my IMAP server, which loudly complained.

Now, for all the UAC prompts and other warnings I had to allow or deny so far, it didn’t occur to the developers of Windows Mail that sending unencrypted password BY DEFAULT is not a good idea? Let me repeat that there is NO WAY of configuring IMAPS or SMTPS from the mail account wizard, and that it will immediately send out your username/password unencrypted.

At any rate, I found an ‘accounts’ menu and configured Windows Mail to use IMAPS and SMTPS, although it did not know what port to use for SMTPS.

Windows Mail then proceeded to download the message headers from my IMAP server, it correctly identified all the folders I made (I use server-side filtering rules to organize my mail per mailing list so it is always consistent regardless of me using webmail or a fat client) and all looked well.

Until it decided to scan all my mail for ‘junk email’, at which point around 20% of all mail from all my folders were moved to ‘Junk mail’, and I got several popups warning me of phishing attempts. Although the explanation of what a ‘fishing attempt’ is was very good (and I must commend Microsoft on that) the Junk mail filter and Phishing filters are absolutely horrible, and actually harmful because I had literally HUNDREDS of false-positives in the first 5 minutes of using it. Note that this is enabled by default!

I now have to use another client to put my mails back in their respective mailing-list folders.

Windows Mail is also incapable of changing it’s ‘default folder names’, for instance, my IMAP server already has a ‘Junk’ folder, which both Evolution and my webmail client can use, because it is configurable. The same goes for a ‘Sent’ and ‘Drafts’ folder which I also share between my clients. I have found no way of configuring this in Windows Mail.

Conclusion

Windows Mail is a really bad email client, it eats mails, sends your password over the internet without warning and is generally hard to use and configure. Furthermore, it does not look like it belongs on the Vista desktop. The good thing about it is the way in which it informs users of the potential harm of ‘phishing’ (with a very nicely done illustration). I feel that documentation to inform the user of the potential hazards on the internet is something that is sub-par on the Ubuntu 8.10 desktop, and I really must commend Microsoft on their effort there. This surprised me, as it was in stark contrast with the way Windows Mail handles encryption by default.

The good

• Warning documentation
• Included with the OS

The bad

• Does not know the encrypted port-numbers of the mail services
• Does not fit in with the Vista desktop
• Unintelligible menu structure and toolbars

The ugly

• Sends unecrypted passwords without warning and per default
• Spam filter is horrid, and yet is still turned on by default
• Spam filter moves mail without asking the user
• Unable to configure existing folders for ’special use’

Overall verdict

0/5

A mail client that throws out 20% of my mail, and moves it, does not offer encryption and looks as bad as Windows Mail requires no further explaination.

The Open Rights group founding was interesting.

At a talk just over a couple of years ago, organised by NTK, someone suggested that an organisation to protect the rights of people in the UK would only cost a few hundred people a fiver a month, and that there must be enough that this would be possible.

Having fairly publicly put my money where my mouth was a year or so ago, live on Hashlugradio, I’ve yet to regret doing so. And now it’s three years old, and already getting other people schooled.

It’s been a bumper year for digital rights. From HMRC posting half the nation’s bank details to the Darknet, to the ongoing campaign against Phorm, to three strikes and the rightsholder lobby’s so-far thwarted attempt to take control of your internet connection, this year was the year digital rights went mainstream. (ORG is 3, Nov 08)

So if you give a damn about protecting your rights online and off, I’d recommend throwing a couple of starbucks worth of change at the ORG each month, in return for a warm glowy feeling, a christmas party with no karaoke, and the possibility that the rights you’re guarding are your own.

But the leap from 750 to 1000 fivers received each month is not yet enough to guarantee us long term financial stability. We must reach our target of 1500 fivers before the end of the year. And we can’t do that without you. (ORG is 3, Nov 08)

Go now. Go quickly. We only have a few months to save the world

Just a quick note to let you all know that I am still looking for a fourth horseman or horsewoman to join Daniel Holbach, Jorge Castro and I. The role involves reporting on the progress and growth of the Ubuntu translations community, growing and expanding the community, working with LoCo teams and working with upstream translators and projects. If you are smart, hard-working and think outside the box, we want to hear from you. Also, just for the record, an appreciation of death metal is not a pre-requisite.

Curious? Well, go and read the job description and follow the instructions to apply. Please no not contact me directly to make your application, just follow the instructions.

There’s a delightful little tool included with Windows Vista called ’snipping tool’, I WAS looking for a screenshot tool and then I wondered what the ’snipping tool’ was, turns out it is a screenshot tool. Imagine that.

When you first start it, it asks to be placed in the quicklaunch area, a very useful question to ask for such a tool, it then opens a little window and colors the screen dark gray. The first second I thought it was another UAC prompt, to be honest.

You then select a region of the screen, the part of the screen you want to ’snip’ turns it’s normal colour and a ’snip’ is then presented in a separate window. It’s a very neat little tool that is very user friendly.

Conclusion

The ’snipping tool’, although somewhat unintuitively named, is an awesome little tool for making screenshots. I’d have included a screenshot, but the only application that it is incapable of ’snipping’ is itself

The good

• Does exactly what it’s supposed to do, no fuss
• Can save in PNG

The bad

• nothing that I could find

The ugly

• Well, it is a bit of an ugly app

Overall Verdict

  5/5

Great little tool, much nicer than the ‘gnome-screenshot tool’ included with Ubuntu 8.10

Windows Vista comes, rather unsurprisingly, with the ubiquitous Internet Explorer. Vista ships with version 7 of this browser. I personally got used to Firefox 3 as shipped with Ubuntu for quite some time. I had also upgraded my browser to firefox 3 sometime during the Ubuntu 7.04 cycle. It is only natural that this is the browser that I will be comparing Internet Explorer with, as it is the only browser I use on a day-to-day basis.

I am typing this blogpost using Internet Explorer, and I have been using it to browse my favorite newssites and other non-working sites

First of all, Internet explorer has a ‘fresh’ look that fits in very well with the rest of the Vista look although I wonder what happened to the menu bar, it doesn’t seem to be missed much. One odd thing is that on my 1680 pixels wide screen the internet explorer ‘toolbar’ still presents me with two “>>” signs that present a popup menu with just the ‘help’ option. It seems to me that a help icon would have taken up the same amount of space. This in itself is not really a big problem, but I felt obliged to click the symbol expecting the menu bar, or other options to appear. Not just a ‘help’ option. The buttons on the toolbar are somewhat cryptic and pressing them yields the same result as a menu-bar that everybody knows. I am not sure this is an improvement over the ‘old’ system. It feels a bit like the so called “mystery meat navigation“.

Otherwise, the web browser seems to browse fine, but appears to be miles behind Firefox in most respects, the font rendering isn’t as nice as Firefox’s, moving back and forth between tabs often results in one of the tabs getting corrupted until it is redrawn (either by scrolling or a reload).

Zoom deserves it’s own paragraph: Firefox has a feature called ‘full page zoom’ which intelligently zooms a page as far as you like, re-rendering the fonts and images. On Internet Explorer this is not quite the same, the page is actually ‘zoomed’ from an apparent bitmap, making the fonts look horrible and zooming in on a page always produces a scroll bar on the bottom of the screen, even when there’s nothing to scroll to. In my mind, on a wide-screen high-resolution monitor, zoom is an almost required feature to be able to comfortably read a website. Most sites these days only utilize a ‘narrow’ part of the screen, some are centered (The Register) and some are justified to the left (The Inquirer). And I don’t have big-ass screens so I have to squint to read my sites! Furthermore, the ‘zoom’ is per tab, so once a tab is zoomed it STAYS zoomed until the tab is closed, or otherwise manually zoomed. The zoom level per site is also not remembered, so it has to be done again for each visit. These are things that Firefox does ‘just right’ and it makes Internet Explorer fairly painful to use.

Internet Explorer’s address bar is just that, an address bar. The Firefox ‘Awesome Bar’ is indeed quite a bit more awesome, if I visit a site about ‘kittens’ and I forget the URL. I can just type ‘kittens’ in the awesome bar, and more than likely Firefox will have remembered the URL for me. Internet Explorer can only search in the URLS of the browser history.

Conclusion

Internet Explorer browses, but that’s about it. It’s got none of the advanced features that makes Firefox such a breeze to use. The only real reason to be using Internet Explorer would be because it is bundled with the operating system. I am sorry for this harsh verdict, but Internet Explorer really is sub-par in every way to my usual webbrowser.

The good

• Comes bundled with the OS

The bad

• Routinely corrupts tabs
• Routinely corrupts entire screen when switching applications
• Address bar is limited to searching for URLS only
• Font rendering not very good

The Ugly

• Page zoom is horrible
• Page zoom not remembered per website
• Page zoom sucks

Overall verdict

1/5

 It is without a doubt a browser, but that’s about it.

 

 

Andreas writes about some of the work going into the GTK CSS Engine.

“Back at GUADEC in Birmingham, when Garrett proposed using css-markup for widget themes, I thought it sounded a bit too cracky to be doable. Rob’s recent work, however, looks really sweet and since every designer and his mother out there knows css, this is a great way to lower the barriers of theme creation”.

The basic idea is that GTK (and as such GNOME) themes can be created using the well established Cascading Style Sheets technology that web designers the world over are familiar with. This is something I was blogging about back in 2005 after some discussion in the Tango project (unfortunately, the original link to the discussion seems to be dead).

What excites me about this is not the seemingly obvious technical coolness of the idea, but the fact that it breaks down the barrier to implementation and experimentation in an important, creatively fuelled part of the desktop experience - themes.

Themes are objects produced as a result of artistic creativity. Great themes are constructed by those with a strong eye for colour, interaction design, and aesthetics, and an understanding of the emotional and practical effect of this sandwich of visual considerations. The problem is that different brains work in different ways, and visually creative thinkers typically communicate their art via more direct means - painting, sculpting and drawing - they use their hands to produce the art directly. Abstraction and interface typically has no place in the traditional creative arts. Computers have made this kind of artistic expression insanely more complicated, with paint packages, 3D modeling software and other applications, all expecting the artist to understand the rules of interaction defined by the computer. We have since produced a generation of artists who have figured out how to squeeze their creativity into this computer shaped box.

What excites me about the CSS GTK engine is that it makes logical sense to build on a body of knowledge that the creative community has already worked hard to aquire. Artists and designers the world over have spent years learning CSS and figuring out how to represent their creative intentions via this language. The language and its structure has been refined over the years based on feedback, and is now an elegant and well understood means of visually depicting content for different types of media - screen, print, mobile and more.

I believe that a CSS driven theming engine is going to open up GNOME theming to a whole new demographic of potential contributors, and sites such as GNOME-Look are going to become the bubbling pot of exciting new visual potential in the desktop. I hope that our friends in the Qt and KDE world are going to do the same.

Even though I am not a part of the work going on in GTK CSS support, I would urge the developers of this support to focus their efforts on one key area though - soliciting feedback from artists. To make this a success, artists need to help drive the CSS support to be as flexible and complete as possible. Andreas talks about this intention already:

“Rob is in great need of designers to test these things out in the wild though, so if you’re a designer with css knowledge who always wanted to create widget themes, don’t hesitate to check it out from svn and give it a shot”.

The key here is going to be simplicity - artists need to be able to test the software easily and communicate their thoughts just as easily. I would urge you folks to produce distribution packages so you can bypass the expectation of using svn, and have a clearly defined process so artists can share what challenges they face and how support could be built in to improve this. This could be achieved by website forms, artist interviews, assessment of CSS themes and surveys.

There are so many areas in which we can make the many collaborative opportunities with Free Software easier, and I am excited that this important area is getting such quality focus. Great work folks.

Ubuntu is a big project. Hundreds of teams, thousands of contributors, millions of users. Every day the project grows by a fraction of a percent, but the fraction is bigger than you might think. With such a wide ranging and diverse community, growth in the project happens at an intense rate. We are not the largest collaborative project in the world, but we are not small, thats for sure.

In addition to this existing Ubuntu-focused diversity, now let us roll into the mix the deep relationship that Ubuntu has with a great many other Open Source projects. There is the obvious connection to Debian, but we also have an extensive relationship with a range of upstreams - GNOME, KDE, X.org, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla and more. With thousands of Ubuntu contributors interfacing with thousands of upstream contributors and millions of users, the jigsaw puzzle is rather large. With so many interconnections between communities, one of the problems is that a person can only see so much of the picture any one time. Part of the skill of a community manager is to try and see the full picture.

This has been something on my mind for a long time - how can we see the great many interconnecting lines between different parts of community. In effort to make progress this area, I have worked closely with my team to build some metrics to understand our community. These metrics are mostly based around bugs, but they give us a solid idea of how to see additional parts of the picture. But metrics are one thing - they show progress and they show the timeline of progress, but they don’t provide good solid feedback. They don’t help us to fix things.

Like any Open Source project, we get our fair share of criticism about what we do. Although I cannot guarantee that we will always make the right choices every time, I can guarantee that we make every effort to make the right choices based on informed evidence. The work that my team and I have been working on recently is to help better make those choices. To achieve this we have been on something of a feedback shopping spree.

Much of this started back when Jorge and I started work to improve our upstream bug story. As I talked about in previous entry, bugs are an important mechanic in how Open Source projects communicate and we want to make all of the points of interaction as painless and as smooth as possible. We broke down the workflow and discovered we needed to know about the problem, and with this mind we threw out an upstream survey to some upstream projects that we work closely with, and a general survey that anyone could contribute to. We then evaluated some of the comments from the survey and continued work to develop the upstream report. The feedback helped us to craft a tool (the upstream report) which has helped us focus our efforts in the right areas. Subsequently, we have seen a marked improvement in linked bug reports between Ubuntu and upstream.

As part of this feedback, we were told that our patches could be better. Patch quality typically falls into two key areas - quality and discoverability - people want quality patches that apply easily and they want to be able to find them intuitively. We have since made this a priority and I asked Jorge to post a patch survey to a number of upstreams and also solicit more general feedback. Jorge did an excellent job here, and this survey will help us drill down in more detail how we can improve our patches. The aim here is to firstly produce best practise around patches - to help our community and our staff at Canonical not only produce technically proficient patches, but to understand what upstreams like to see in a great patch. Thanks to everyone who has participated so far. I am looking forward to the outcomes of this research and its impact on how we work with upstreams.

Feedback is a useful tool and I recommend all Open Source projects to make use of it. When sitting down and exploring ways in which you improve your governance, processes and methods of interaction, it is tempting to become to wrapped up in technical processes. It is tempting to try and produce technical solutions to social problems, but many of the problems and issues we can face within a specific community or the wider Free Software world are cultural, social and habitual divergences in practise. Feedback, and the simplicity of providing objective feedback can be a fantastic antidote to the production of unnecessary processes that attempt to solve half-understood problems. Bureaucracy is the ultimate enemy, but decisions without enough feedback from those who your solutions will affect, are just as potent an enemy.