Hello, Interwebs!
It dawned on me today that I’ve been harboring a bunch of pent-up anger at Canonical, and I’m not really sure why.
I think I have it mostly figured out.
In the end, it comes down to rewards. I don’t see Canonical rewarding good @ubuntu’ers on a regular basis. Hear me out —
Here are some things that I think should be done to help foster some good ole’ fashioned community love:
The whole idea is to simply validate people’s hard work with small (very small) tokens of thanks.
I mean, minimum wage for a community member to do superstar-level work for that month is going to be far less then the cost of a t-shirt, mug or other random bit of SWAG.
Hell, I’d really be super thankful if I got a few bucks on my Ubuntu One account for a new song or something after a long month of hard work.
Feedback? Ideas?
For some reason, whenever I call myself an “Ubuntu Hacker”, people seem to think I mean that I’m a super-enthusiastic user (who, as one redditor pointed out, likes wireshark a lot).
So, why the term “Ubuntu Hacker”?
Well, I’m not MOTU. Even if I was, I’d not call myself a “Developer”, since I really don’t like the idea of calling the process maintaining the debdir development. If (in some crazy world) I was MOTU, I would say that I was an Ubuntu Maintainer.
I also really don’t like the term “Ubuntu Member”, either. it sounds like a fan club.
I understand using “Ubuntu Member” helps us eliminate this class issue of technical vs non-technical contributions that exists in other projects (and trust me, I value non-technical contributions tons, LoCos rock!) which is a good thing, but it just sounds so bland.
What’s left? I have always self-applied the term Hacker (not cracker) to myself, so I figured “Ubuntu Hacker” is about as good as it gets.
No, I’m not a 12 year old who plays with wireshark. I’m an Ubuntu Hacker.
I’m fed up with people flaunting how great their machine is because it’s 64 bit. I’ve had 64 bit machines since 2004, when I got a Athlon 64. It’s not new, and it certainly does not mark some “great” revolution in über-processing.
Here are some cool things about 64 bit:
You’ll notice, of course, that the NX bit has been built into most modern 32 bit CPUs as well.
PAE ( a sort of intel-esque duct-tape hack to add additional bits to a 32 bit arch ) has been implemented in most modern CPUs. This means that we can up the old RAM cap of 4294967296 bits. PAE lets you address more RAM without going all the way to 64 bit mode.
PAE can also be extended up to 52 bits to address around 4-5 petabytes ( 4.50359963 × 10^15 ).
So, 64 bit users, do you have more then 5 petabytes of RAM? If not, why are you using 64 bit arches? With a 64 bit address, you may end up using more ram then 32 bit mode, so you can store those extra zeros.
I’m going to leave this post off with a qualification: If you’re a developer who works on creating new applications, or working on maintaining old software, please use 64 bit machines.
Since we will have to switch once we go over that 4 petabyte cap, we need to ensure that our code will run on that platform. Just because it sucks right now does not mean it has to suck when we’re forced to migrate.
Endusers: Use 32 bit with PAE.
Hope this puts an end to some bullshit.
kthx.
Hello, World
I hate spam so much. An ungodly amount of hate. It sure does not help that current F/OSS’d spam-fighting techniques can’t keep up.
My idea? You know that little “Mark as Spam” button in gmail?
If you try and hit that on a post that came from a ML, it will offer to un-subscribe you from the list. Great if you’re stuck on a list, but it sucks if you want to be on it ( and it’s legit spam ).
Why not create an open API for Mailman ( and so on ) for whitelist’d entities to submit the “report”. If we have a shortage of data for spam-fighting, let’s get it!
Hello, World! Well, this is my first time uploading anything to Debian, and It’s been in the NEW queue for a few days now. I checked it out, and found ( to my surprise ) that there were packages in the queue as old as one year ( 11 months ). Holy hell! There are 258 packages in the Queue, and I’m in line 20th from last. Looks like I’ll be standing around for a while. In the spirit of the FTP NEW package review process, here’s a song ( Here’s the link if the embed below is not working ).
I love KDE.
I have used KDE since 3.1 on Mandrake 9.1. Since then I have used it on Debian, Gentoo and Ubuntu. Then KDE4 came around. The 4.0 RC was buggy, feature incomplete and hard to use. I felt alienated and switched to Debian and GNOME. The 3.x branch was outstanding in so many ways, it was endlessly configurable, stable as a rock, and ( at least somewhat ) attractive. I understand why we needed KDE4, and I understand why the change had to happen. I even understand why it was called “4.0” even though it was nowhere close to that. They needed developers, press, market share.
KDE is a second class citizen in the world of debian based distros. Why is this? Is it really because the call was made to stick with GNOME? Is it because GNOME is better? More stable perhaps?
I don’t think so. I just switched back to KDE, with 4.3. So far it’s liveable. It’s not finished by any means. It’s not even as feature complete as GNOME. That, however won’t be hard, given GNOME’s past of removing functionality every release.
The fact is, we can’t compete yet. I was infuriated by the loss of some of the applications most dear to me, I coded religiously in gedit, now replaced with vim and geany. I miss gnome-do, replaced with the stock KDE launcher. gnome-terminal by konsole. Rhythmbox by amaroK ( and then by mplayer. No offence to the amaroK guys, but that latest release is a major regression ). Ubuntu One is a MAJOR issue. I can’t use it any more. I looked into plug-ins for Dolphin, only to find it’s not very hack-able. Same goes for Dropbox. I did, however, get dropbox working as a daemon.
On the up side, I can finally configure my machine! I can edit settings for a screensaver ( and don’t for one minute claim that it’s not something that should not be configurable ). Widgets are incredibly integrated these days, and as a whole, KDE looks much more put together.
So, the state of the KDE union, as it were. Solid. There is direction for sure, but work still needs to get done. I, for one, will be using the 4.x branch moving forward. I urge you all to not only think about supporting KDE, but to try using KDE. I think you will be impressed.
Hello World!
In a recent discussion with a good friend of mine, I can’t help but reflect on the idea internet anonymity. We’ll call him James. That’s not his name, but I figure in the spirit of “anon”, I’ll leave it out.
A lot of people share data at will and really get careless with where they leave their data. They go on with their life and forget about it. That data is still in a computer system and being processed and indexed. Take something like Facebook.
Facebook keeps an absurd volume of data about your person on it’s system, but we don’t think twice about it.
I have also noticed a bit of a stigma with not using your name in the Ubuntu community. Since we’re all so very tight-knight and friendly, we feel that we have to share our government names with everyone. Usually the name protocol is something like John Hacker <jhacker@domain.tld>. It looks a lot better then <awesomeskidude2k5@domain.tld>, after all.
What not too many of us realize is that we leave a huge Internet footprint, almost all of our actions are publicly indexed ( IRC, mailing lists, package uploads, bug reports ).
I think we need to bring back the global rule that if you don’t want something to go on your “permanent internet record”, don’t share it or say it. We can’t all be little layers and sue for the take-down. The best course of action is to not share such data as to allow it to be attributed to me.
If you would not care to have your Ubuntu actions on google, the best and most advisable course of action is to not share personal data. Mailing Lists are public, IRC is public, package uploads are public. Keyservers are public. We are, after all, an open and welcoming community.
After all, if you’re in the yellow pages, then your full name is enough for an address and number. People far too too often forget such minor details.
In short: Be smart about what you share! Don’t share anything you’d not share to a stranger!
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