Peace, Love and C++

In playing with some tools I’ve run into at $work, I’ve tried loading in some Ubuntu datasets in some fun and interesting ways.

Today, I’ve chosen to map all Ubuntu Members with a public lat/lon, sized by Karma.

The sizes relate to if the Karma is greater then:

1: 10

2: 50

3: 100

4: 500

5: 1000

6: 2000

7: 7000

8: 15000

9: 25000

10: 50000

So, without further adieu, here’re some maps!

Package uploaded to Debian, and a few oneiric builds into my PPA

Get it while it’s hot - report your bugs!

Ex-Ubuntu’ers and active Ubuntuers are more then welcome to join #ubuntu-expats on irc.oftc.net — just because we’re on oftc doesn’t mean we have to ditch the community!

It’s an off-topic social channel, and a great way to decompress.

Howdy, World!

Here’s the announce email! I can’t wait!!

HUGE shout-out to James for getting my old ReLoCo back up on it’s feet! You rock my socks!

This year’s focus will be Bugs and Documentation. I’m so stoked to see it start up again, and I sure as hell can’t wait to read about how much work my friends back out in Cleveland did!

Rock on, ya’ll!!

To: Ubuntu Ohio LoCo Team From: James Gifford Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2011 21:16:28 -0400 Heya folks,

In an attempt to both increase the “presence” of the LoCo in Cleveland as well as make it a little easier to make sure we don’t have too many people in a venue for an event, I made a meetup.com[1] group for Cleveland - sounds a little weird, but it’s (hopefully) going to make things a little easier (in theory at least - if nothing else it’ll get some people interested).

I will still be announcing things here.

On that note, our next thing (which I’ve been meaning to send out but haven’t until now) is another Ubuntu Hour where we’ll just discuss Ubuntu, Linux in general, and if we want to do something for the Global jam, as well as how often we want to have something happen - we need to get some sort of a regular meeting schedule setup. That will be on Tuesday, August 23rd, at the Shaker LaunchHouse, 3558 Lee Road, Shaker Heights at 7PM until about 8:30 PM or so.

There will be wifi available.

Cheers, James Gifford http://jamesrgifford.com [1] http://www.meetup.com/Cleveland-LUG/

Howdy, folks.

Well, it’s been a crazy ride. I’ve learned a lot since I first joined the Ubuntu community, and done some cool things. I’ve seen people come and go, features get added and then removed, and people move from team to team.

So, now it comes time to renew my membership again.

I see it as a promise between me and the community, a pact of sorts. Since I’m going to renew it, I’d like to say what I’m going to do on my half to ensure I maintain a significant and sustained contribution to the Ubuntu community.

• I plan to continue my LoCo Council work, and continue to ensure I’m available for help, support, or just to talk.
• I plan to continue my work Upstream in Debian, and to improve the relationship between Debian and Fluxbox, as well as Ubuntu and Debian.
• I will work to make myself more available in general to the Ubuntu community.

Thanks for a killer 3 years, folks. Here’s to another! :)

Hello, World!

I’ve just got me a copy of “The Official Ubuntu Book”, Sixth Edition. I have a copy of the fifth as well, and I’ve always loved the series, if you can call it that.

It’s got a brandy new foreword by sabdfl, and even a little blurb on page 0 (praise for the Ubuntu book series) by itnet7 (Chris Crisafulli), which I was stoked to see. Literally the first thing you see.

I was shocked to see my own name in this edition (sweet!), let’s go LoCoCouncil!

Besides all that, the bulk of the changes have been polish and love, updates for Natty, and brandy new screenshots (by the fantastic Amber Graner) that maintain this series’ reputation for usefulness to everyone from the greenhorn Windows convert to the distro-hopping hacker.

Reading through the book gives you a really nice overview of Ubuntu, while at the same time diving right into detail where it requires it. It’s a great refresher for someone who’s been away for a while (looking at you, ex-Ubuntu Fedora converts!), or someone who’s looking to get into Ubuntu for the first time.

The book even features a chapter on GNOME 3 (take THAT, FUD’ies!), and a really unbiased review of how well it functions on Ubuntu.

In short, this book is something that I can honestly recommend to anyone using Ubuntu. It works great as a reference and equally well as a howto guide. I respect the work that’s been done, and I can’t overstate how knowledgeable the authors are, as well as the reviewers. The book has a sense of Ubuntu community, and it’s really on-target. Well done, everyone, well done.

It has my +1, anyway!

Hello, World,

I’m writing this in the hopes an over-worked Debian Developer catches this point.

If you’re a DD, and you need some help with your packages (or have a cool idea for a package that you’d be willing to sponsor), I’d love to help.

Gimme an email :)

edit: I think i’ve committed a bunch of time. If you really really need help, still email me :)

Heyya, Internets,

So, I’ve had a couple of days to think about what I’ve said, talk it over with some folks and really work through some of the practical issues with maintaining a high standard in the community.

I’ve broken it down to two core points:

• We must continue to motivate (through validation and acknowledgement) already active folks
• We must inspire those who wish to become members of the community to kick up their standards to above and beyond

Let’s start off with the biggest one first. Firstly, we must make it our goal to continue to motivate (through validation and acknowledgement) already active folks. This is critical to keep people from going elsewhere, after all, no one wants to spend all this time and effort (as a hobby, basically) to have it wasted on deaf ears.

My solution before was to send folks a bit of thanks (in the form of an Ubuntu One gift card or whatever), which is clearly something that would be absolutely outstanding.

However, the practical issue with this is that the goal (to motivate everyone) can actually de-motivate (when you don’t get it that month) everyone else.

I think it’s a great idea, but I was also doing my thinking from the viewpoint of someone who actually received the award. There are countless people out there (from the LoCo Members and Leaders to the folks who translate Ubuntu into the hundreds of languages it’s in) who do stellar work every month, and see no thanks for it, and sadly, picking one person a month is really not do-able.

So, I will say this (get ready, once in a life time moment): I was wrong to have thought that this was not talked about before, and I was wrong to pick on Canonical. I’m sorry that my post insinuated Canonical does not care (after re-reading it, I think that’s in there), and I’m sorry that I decided to post so rashly.

That aside, what I was driving at (the lack of “thanks”) does still stand, though.

So, here’s what I’ll propose:

An ad-hoc network of Ubuntu Members that make it their job to watch out for good work. Being careful to watch for good work, and being sure to go out of their way to make sure that person knows what they’ve done is something exemplary.

I plan to formalize this a bit more, but not too much. If we have a big Ubuntu-official team that goes around doing this, we run into the same issue as a monthly T-Shirt, namely, someone (who in theory may have worked as hard as you) gets an award from the “award people” and you don’t.

Who knows, maybe someone will pitch in for a few shirts to send around ;)

I’ll post again when I have something interesting on this front. In the meantime, do your part, thank someone!

Oh, and hey, you! (Yeah, you, the one reading this), THANK YOU!

edit: I’ve GPG signed the bit below and put it someplace with a bit of authority.

http://people.ubuntu.com/~paultag/OnTheRecord/blog-post-bug-1-defaced.asc

Hey Internets.

Bug #1 on launchpad was subject to a bit of defacement from a new launchpad user (account created today).

The unnamed user took it into his own hands to decide to change an active and accepted bug to make it seem like we’re working to fix a bug that we’ve not talked about.

I’m not saying that his change was a bad change (He changed the bug to read that nonfree software has the majority market share, not that Microsoft does), nor that it won’t happen (after we finish off bug #1), but the idea that someone outside of the Ubuntu community changed this is unacceptable.

This was done without review, discussion or community involvement. Ubuntu’s goals have not changed as a result of this edit — let me emphasize that no Ubuntu member had a part in making the change to the bug in Launchpad.

I reverted the change, and I hope that we can all be grown-up enough to stop this now.

Much love, keep hacking!

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 —

• UDS is for people who will do good work next cycle, not a reward for last cycle, so sponsorship to UDS is out.
• You get your Ubuntu email when you get approved (e.g. not motivation to keep working, just motivation to maintain)
• planet.ubuntu.com is a nice way to reward active contributors, but again, nothing to keep rockstars rocking.
• hall-of-fame.ubuntu.com is really outdated, and does not reward anyone except technical contributors (not a problem for me, but the point stands).
• @ubuntu’ers lost shippit :(

Here are some things that I think should be done to help foster some good ole’ fashioned community love:

• Second-tier Ubuntu One accounts for @ubunter’ers — This has the added bonus of @ubuntu’ers dogfooding Ubuntu One, and promoting it, rather then letting it flounder.
• Discount on Ubuntu SWAG. — I’m shocked it’s only Canonical employees that get discounts on Ubuntu swag. Hell, anyone @canonical doing good Ubuntu work is @ubuntu as well, what’s the problem?
• Reward awesome hackers monthly with a free T-Shirt. Heck, even delegation councils can put forward outstanding community members that month and have a quick lottery on who gets it. A post to the planet would be nice, too.

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?