Alongside working, I’m also still reading Computer Science. So I will be a lot busier from now on! Please keep that in mind when you try to contact me.

Download: Draaiboek verkiezingen Ubuntu Nederland

In my local community, Ubuntu Nederland, we have a team that occupies itself with just that: educating the community. The team of Ubuntu NL Mwanzo is very active in reaching out to newcomers to our LoCo. A part of their pursuits concerns giving workshops just like the Ubuntu Developer Week I mentioned earlier. They usually employed IRC to hold these sessions, following the familiar #*-classroom/#*-classroom-chat paradigm. However, they thought it could be done better and a group of interested people got to work.

The application, available in both English and Dutch, has three IRC-based chatrooms: one for the teacher, one to ask and answer questions and one for the general chatting. The fourth pane shows a schedule and displays links mentioned in the classroom. People who want to follow the course with their IRC client can choose to do so too. Teachers are authenticated using the Ubuntu SSO Service. Students only have to give a user name.

The Dutch instance is live on http://communityserver.ubuntu-nl.org/justforlearning/. As you can see, the interface is very simple and easy to use. When you hold your event, all you need to do is provide a link to the site and your audience can join in from any browser on any device with internet.

If you or your team is interested in using this, or have any questions, please look at the project’s Launchpad page or leave a comment here. You may also try the #Ubuntu-nl-mwanzo IRC channel. The code is located in the Bazaar branch lp:justforlearning. The code is still not stable!

In case I changed the theme again, this is the 'new' look.

A few months ago my site received a much needed overhaul. I updated the structure and looks and went crazy on Googly Web 2.0 mark-up stuff. Considering I am not a webdesigner, I am quite pleased with the result.

There are probably many more non-designers like me, also looking to build their own personalised WordPress site, so I thought I’d share my experiences. This post is aimed at amateurs who want to give their personal site an own look without too much hassle.

Don’t start from scratch

The previous theme was written entirely from scratch, using a few pieces of code copied from the default TwentyTen theme. What I learned from that enterprise is that it is very hard to do everything yourself, if you’re not a professional. Many rough ends will make your theme look less tidy and your lack of skill results in a theme that is harder to navigate and read.

So, I decided to go with an often forgotten feature of WordPress theme development: child themes. The TwentyTen is a very solid base to build upon, the way it presents texts is very easy on the eyes. By using a good theme as a starting point for your child theme, you have all its advantages. Because you’re creating a child theme and not forking TwentyTen directly, updates to the original theme will automatically benefit your theme as well.

The simple start

The only file you really need is the CSS file. Create a new directory with the slug name of your theme in wp-content/themes/ and add an empty file to it named style.css. I added the following header:

/*
Theme Name: seh
Theme URI: http: //www.sensehofstede.nl/
Description: Theme for SenseHofstede.nl, child theme of Twenty Ten
Author: Sense Hofstede
Author URI: http: //www.sensehofstede.nl/about/
Template: twentyten
Version: 0.1.0
Tags: blue, white, threaded-comments, translation-ready, microformats,
custom-menu
*/

@import url("../twentyten/style.css");

With a stylesheet containing just these few lines of code, you’ve already got a working theme. It does look quite similar to TwentyTen though. But now you can start working on adapting the style. Make sure that you place all your own CSS after the @import rule, so you will override existing entries in the stylesheet of TwentyTen!

If you only want to make a few adjustments, just adding the stylesheet will do the trick. Maybe all you want are a different font and some changes to the default colour palette. If you want more, however, you will have to add PHP files.

WordPress processes child themes like this: it first looks for files in the child theme’s directory, then in the directory of its parent theme. When you don’t create a custom header.php, your theme will continue to use the TwentyTen header. This rule, however, does not apply to the important functions.php file. Every file with that name present in both the child and parent theme will be loaded, the child theme’s first. This behaviour gives you a very powerful to adapt important parts of the theme without having to create new template files.

Playing with functions

If you look to the top of this blog post you will see that underneath the title the date and time this post was published are shown. The function responsible for this is defined in a specific way that allows overriding.

if ( ! function_exists( 'twentyten_posted_on' ) ) :
function twentyten_posted_on() {
    STUFF
}
endif;

If you write your own twentyten_posted_on() function in your child theme’s function.php, TwentyTen will not try to define it again, but instead use yours. You can change more parts of the theme without having to create your own template files.

Template files

But if you want to do more, you will have to dive deeper in the code. I wanted to change my header a lot from what TwentyTen offers, so I created my own header.php file and used that. As soon as I placed it in the child theme’s directory, it replaced the default header. This can be done to replace all PHP files you find in the parent theme’s directory.

Interesting template files you could consider replacing, are loop.php and loop-single.php, which are used everywhere to display a post or lists of posts and searchform.php, which is used to display the search form when available.

Here another advantage of child themes becomes clear: you can create template files for the most common pages and leave the rarely used ones to the parent theme. Also, if WordPress decides to add a new page, your theme will automatically support it as soon as the update arrives.

Important to notice

There are some things to keep in mind while working on the child theme. By default you would use bloginfo(‘template_directory’); to print the base path when embedding images. But when you want to use images in the directory of the child theme, you will have to use bloginfo(‘stylesheet_directory’); instead.

I wrote this post for the TwentyTen theme, but since then TwentyEleven has been published. Although it probably works just as well for the greatest part, there might be some minor differences. Also check the new template files like content-*.php.

You use Benjamin Dobell’s Heimdall. It does not only work on Linux, Mac and Windows, but it is also open source. The code is available from GitHub.

Howto

When you want to install a custom MOD like CyanogenMod or MIUI, you need to have the ClockwordMod ROM Manager to install. That requires a rooted kernel anyway, so whether you just want to root your phone or do more, the initial steps are the same.

First you need to pick a rooted kernel. The XDA Developers forum forum for the I9100 is a good place to look. I always use the CF-Root kernel. It already includes ClockwordMod, so you don’t have to install that from the Android Market. Download the kernel here.

Download Heimdall from here and install it. There are *.debs available. If you wish, you can use the frontend, but I have found the command line interface (CLI) to be more reliable.

Unpack the previously download kernel: you will end up with a file named ‘zImage’. That is your kernel.

Shut down your phone. Now start it in download mode by holding the home, volume down and power buttons down at the same time. Press volume up to confirm and connect your phone to your PC with its USB cable. Realise that your (extended) warranty is void once you’ve flashed.

Open your terminal of choice and navigate to the directory you unpacked the kernel image in.

Execute this command:

sudo heimdall flash --kernel zImage

After it is done, your phone will automatically reboot. Congratulations, your phone is now rooted!

If you want to use a custom ROM, now place the downloaded ROM archive on the phone’s storage, shut the phone down and launch it in recovery mode by pressing volume up and the home button during boot. Choose the ‘install from sd card’ option. Make sure you delete the Dalvik cache and user data before restarting, or your phone will be stuck in an endless boot loop!

Restore

If you want to restore your phone to its original state, you need the official firmware and a backup of your data you naturally made before starting. On the XDA Developers forum, a great person maintains a thread with a collection of official firmware.

Unpack the download archive, open a terminal and navigate to the resulting directory. There execute this command:

sudo heimdall flash --kernel zImage --cache cache.img --factoryfs factoryfs.img --hidden hidden.img --modem modem.bin --param param.lfs

Make sure you delete the Dalvik cache and user data before restarting, or your phone will be stuck in an endless boot loop!

De uitslag was als volgt:

1. Sense Egbert Hofstede:    34 punten, 51% van het puntentotaal
2. wandarooze:                        23 punten, 34% van het puntentotaal
3. femke86:                                    9 punten, 13% van het puntentotaal

Van de 46 stemgerechtigden hebben in het totaal 22 mensen hun stem uitgebracht door punten te verdelen over de drie kandidaten. Dat is een opkomst van 47,8%.

Als je alles zelf nog eens na wilt kijken, kijk dan naar de (opgeschoonde) database dump van de stemwebsite.

Ik ben blij om te kunnen melden dat Tom Rooze en ik verkozen zijn om de gemeenschapsraad van Ubuntu Nederland te versterken. Ik hoop dat we een positieve bijdrage zullen kunnen leveren aan de lokale gemeenschap.

Daarnaast wil ik ook femke98 bedanken voor haar deelname aan de verkiezingen. Helaas zijn er bij een verkiezingen ook verliezers, maar dat neemt niet weg dat ook femke98 een belangrijke bijdrage levert aan de gemeenschap. Ik hoop haar nog vaak te zien in de gemeenschap.

De eerstvolgende raadsvergadering is donderdag 10 november van 20.00 tot 21.30 in #ubuntu-nl-meeting.

Apart from changes in my personal life, I was also affected by a sense of purposelessness. I had no idea what I was doing in the community anymore, so I just quit. I feel that this is a general problem in the community. A successful and happy community needs something to do. It needs a responsibility, something it can focus on. For the greatest part of the five years that I have been an active part of the Ubuntu community, I felt part of a group that was working together on creating the best distribution. There was a clear goal: making the best operating system of them all.

The difference with today is that the primacy of innovation, of change, appeared to be much more in the community back then. We were all excited about the upcoming changes and the direction we were heading towards, because we all knew what those changes and directions were. For people to be excited about something, they need to know what to expect.

Ubuntu has matured enormously. Canonical has acquired so many skilled people that I do not fear for the quality of Ubuntu. It is only going to be better. However, that maturation has come with a price: as Canonical moved more and more to an Apple-style secrecy surrounding its plans, the community has been robbed from the vital basking in the glory of the upcoming changes. Because of the way the plans are announced, the community also doesn’t always feel them to be theirs.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. I believe that Canonical’s approach will probably lead to better designs. However, the atmosphere in the community needs to be improved if we want to keep everyone motivated and give the people a sense of purpose. Currently, the responsibility of the community is quite uncertain. On the one hand, Canonical makes it appear in its communications that the community has more influence than it actually has. It says that all employees are community members, whereas many are in fact not. It decides many things on its own, but then says it involves the community. But Canonical seems to steer the Ubuntu project on its own.

I do not disagree with the way Ubuntu is run. However, I do believe that it is vital that the truth is not denied, like the political ‘leaders’ of Europe currently do when talking about Greece. Saying that Ubuntu is created by the community does not make that true. Stop it. Honesty will improve a lot, because it will reduce unrealistic expectations.

With the fallacy of the community running the project removed, the community does need something to replace that. To return to the beginning of my post, what I believe is causing the leadership lethargy that was mentioned in the Community Council, is uncertainty about the responsibility of the community. It should be made clear exactly what role the community plays in creating Ubuntu. What decisions can it make? What can it contribute? What is the reach of the authority of the Community Council over the project? Once that is clear, the roles of the different leaders can be defined within that responsibility. Then they know what their purpose is. Having a purpose, having influence motivates people.

Somewhat related: maybe it would be a good idea to make in every team somewhat responsible for community and contribution management. For example, if you as a community volunteer contribute code to the desktop, who will look after you? Who will make sure that your work doesn’t go to waste? Such a change would also take of stress from the shoulders of the community team, which should not be used for such wide purposes.

Hoewel ik zelf helaas één van de redenen ben voor de tussentijdse verkiezingen, wil ik toch opnieuw iets betekenen voor Ubuntu Nederland. Daarom stel ik mij kandidaat voor de gemeenschapsraad. Op de stemwebsite heb ik de volgende motivatie gegeven:

Ondanks mijn misstap eerder dit jaar wil ik toch iets blijven betekenen voor Ubuntu Nederland. Dat denk ik te kunnen doen door mij kandidaat te stellen voor de gemeenschapsraad.

Als gemeenschapsraadslid hoop ik mee te kunnen denken bij de verschillende uitdagingen van onze lokale gemeenschap: de herkeuring, het oprichten van een stichting en het zorgen voor een aanwezigheid op zoveel mogelijk plekken on- en offline.

Ik heb veel ideeën en meningen en een duidelijk beeld van wat in mijn ogen een goede richting zou zijn voor de toekomst: professionalisering van het bestuur en versterking van de banden binnen de gemeenschap. Alleen dan kunnen we er zijn voor elkaar, alleen dan kunnen we naar derden Ubuntu uitdragen.

Met meer dan vijf jaar ervaring in de internationale Ubuntu-gemeenschap en grote betrokkenheid bij de organisatie van Ubuntu Nederland zelf, kan ik mijn weg goed vinden in de wereld waarin de lokale gemeenschap zich bevindt. Canonical Ltd. heeft mij in 2010 voor beide Ubuntu Developer Summits gesponsord en toen GUADEC in Den Haag was, was ik betrokken bij de organisatie.

De kennis en contacten die ik opgedaan heb met die activiteiten komt goed van pas bij een functie in de gemeenschapsraad. De mix van technische en bestuurlijke activiteiten geven mij een brede basis.

Denk jij dat je ook bij kunt dragen aan de organisatie? Je hebt nog een week om je kandidaat te stellen voor de gemeenschapsraad van Ubuntu Nederland. Heb je al stemrecht, ga dan naar de stemwebsite en geef je op. Heb je nog geen stemrecht? Vraag het dan eerst aan bij de gemeenschapsraad.

Teken van leven

Beste raadsleden,

Het is lang geleden sinds ik voor het laatst mijn Ubuntu-mail geopend heb. Het zal ergens in de laatste week van april zijn geweest dat ik mijn IRC-cliënt voor het laatst afsloot en vanaf dat moment heb ik alles van Ubuntu zoveel mogelijk genegeerd. Het heeft nu ongeveer vijf maanden geduurd.

Dat is onacceptabel.

Gezien mijn duidelijk vertoonde ergenis over de afwezigheid en onbereikbaarheid is mijn eigen gedrag hypocriet en slecht. Ik wil dan ook mijn oprechte excuses aanbieden aan de gemeenschapsraad en aan de gehele gemeenschap van Ubuntu Nederland. Ik hoop in deze mail wat uit te kunnen leggen en dingen te kunnen regelen. Ik hoop dat ik nog een paar dingen recht kan zetten. Over mijn eigen positie heb ik wel mijn twijfels. Dat ik verdween was al erg genoeg, maar dat ik dat deed zonder iets te zeggen was onvergefelijk.

Het is best wel raar dat net nadat ik verkozen was tot voorzitter van Ubuntu Nederland volgens het door mij uitgedokterde organisatievoorstel, ik plotseling verdween. Waar sloeg dat op? Het proces werd in gang gezet door school: in de laatste week van april namen we afscheid van onze middelbare school, de eerste twee weken van mei waren een vakantie die we gebruikten om te leren voor de eindexamens die in de tweede helft van mei waren. Daar was ik erg druk mee en het was op zichzelf niet raar om vanwege de eindexamens een tijdje wat rustiger aan te doen bij Ubuntu Nederland. Maar dan had ik dat natuurlijk wel aan moeten geven.

Er speelde echter meer. Ik ben actief geweest voor Ubuntu vanaf het begin van 2006. Tot begin dit jaar ben ik actief gebleven voor de internationale gemeenschap. Gedurende die tijd wisselde mijn motivatie sterk, maar ik bleef wel steeds actief. Mijn eerste echte betrokkenheid bij Ubuntu Nederland kwam pas relatief laat, toen ik met Sebastian Schauenburg en Jan Claeys sprak over onze nationale LoCo tijdens de UDS in Brussel, in mei 2010. Ik ben vanaf dat moment steeds meer betrokken geraakt bij Ubuntu Nederland, omdat ik werk zag liggen en dat oppakte, want ik vond dat bepaalde dingen beter konden en heb over veel dingen wel een mening. Terwijl ik zo steeds verder betrokken raakte bij de organisatie van UNL negeerde ik wel steeds een knagend gevoel dat het mij aan motivatie ontbrak.

Tijdens het laatste jaar van de middelbare school veranderde ik als persoon ook behoorlijk. Met die veranderingen verschoven ook mijn interesses en Ubuntu verdween daarbij meer en meer naar de achtergrond. Toen ik eind april dus ineens mijn volle aandacht richtte op school en op de sociale dingen daaromheen, had ik ook al een motivatieprobleem. Eigenlijk had ik mij al liever niet kandidaat willen stellen voor het voorzitterschap, maar omdat ik vond dat er niemand anders was die het stokje op zou pakken zoals ik dat wilde, besloot ik er toch voor te gaan. Dat wreekte zich, want toen ik eenmaal een tijdje de Ubuntu-mail gesloten hield, voelde dat eigenlijk best wel goed. Een rust daalde over mij neer en ik bleef het maar afstellen om naar de mail te kijken.

Omdat ik het zo wegduwde en omdat ik druk bezig was met school, verdween het uit mijn hoofd. Voor ik het wist waren er zo een paar weken voorbij. Op dat moment wist ik dat er een hele dikke stapel mail op me zou staan te wachten wanneer ik terug zou komen. De rust van een Ubuntu-loos bestaan trok me ook nog steeds en ik bleef het maar afschuiven. Uiteindelijk kon ik mijzelf er niet meer toe bewegen mijn mail te openen. Ik had er geen zin in en ik schaamde mij. Toen was het zomaar september.

Ik schaam mij nog steeds. Ik heb mij gedragen op een manier die in gaat tegen wat ik wil zijn. Ik bied nogmaals mijn oprechte excuses aan.

Hoe nu verder? Ik heb de logs van de vergaderingen vluchtig doorgelezen en ik moet zeggen dat ik erg blij ben met hoe het toch nog gaat. De gemeenschapsraad laat zien dat ze zich goed kan redden zonder de voorzitter. De dingen gaan gewoon door en volgens mij zijn we inmiddels zelfs succesvol van hoster gewisseld. Mijn complimenten. Het regelmatig vergaderen binnen een vaste structuur lijkt zijn vruchten af te werken. De gemeenschapsleiding is echter onzichtbaar zonder hoofd, dat verrast me niet, want dat is het gevolg van de natuur van de leiding. Daarnaast valt me op dat het vooral Thomas lijkt te zijn die aan dingen trekt. Dat is geweldig van Thomas, maar het zou gezonder zijn wanneer meer mensen de kar trekken.

Ubuntu Nederland kan dus prima zonder mij. Nu is de vraag, wat moet er gebeuren met mij? Het organisatievoorstel dat ik zelf geschreven heb is niet mild over wat ik gedaan heb: jullie hadden mij 10 juni al er uit mogen gooien. Toch is Ronnie slechts vervangend (interim?) LoCo Contact gemaakt en Thomas voorzitter van de vergaderingen. Op Launchpad sta ik nog als voorzitter.

Ik vind dat ik het recht verspeeld heb om zelf te beslissen of ik in functie wil blijven. Dat is aan de gemeenschapsraad, misschien zelfs wel aan de stemgerechtigden. Ik vraag dus aan jullie wat jullie willen met mij. Ik twijfel of ik het in me heb een actieve voorzitter te zijn die overal aan trekt, ook bij promotie e.d.. Ik zou best willen blijven bijdragen aan de organisatie van Ubuntu Nederland in de gemeenschapsraad of gemeenschapsleiding of misschien als digitale voorzitter. Door mijn studie informatica aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen heb ik mijn motivatie nu wel weer herpakt. Maar ik zal wel iemand zijn die misschien minder hard achter evenementen aan zou rennen dan bijvoorbeeld Thomas, ik zou dat aan anderen over laten. Maar goed, dan moeten jullie mij nog wel willen. Het ligt bij jullie. Ik zou het begrijpen wanneer jullie het vertrouwen in mij verloren hebben.

Het spijt me.

Met vriendelijke groeten,
–
Sense Hofstede

http://www.sensehofstede.nl/

The number of bugs reported every day is huge. It’s a continuous flow of problem reports, Apport crash reports, wrongly placed support requests, trolling, feature requests and distress. Heroically fighting to stem the flood is Ubuntu Bug Squad. Together with specialised bug triage teams for certain packages, like the kernel, they try to process as many useful bug reports as they can. However, there are too little triagers for too many bugs.

The current situation is not good for the people who work so hard to process all the reports; many leave the team soon after joining. It also causes relevant bugs to be lost in a sea of unprocessed or half-processed bogus bugs that clog up the system. It has been proposed before, but maybe we should once again seriously consider discouraging non-technical users from reporting bugs.

If we’d decide to do so, regular users would be kept away from the bug tracker. Only for automatically generated crash reports from Apport should be allowed, because the process is such that bogus reports rarely happen and many triage steps for this particular kind of bug can be automated. We would remove the ‘Help->Report a bug’ everywhere, including alpha releases. Links to reporting a bug should be removed from the documentation and the official sites. Launchpad could be adapted to make the ‘Report a bug’ button less obvious.

All this should lead to less bug reports and a higher average quality of the reports. If we focus only on the technically capable and interested users, then we’d have less clueless reports. It would save the time, energy and motivation of the bug triagers, which could then focus on making sure every bug that would be reported, would be processed quickly.

However, we should not forget that one of the things Ubuntu often is credited for is the large amount of bugs forwarded to upstream. Furthermore, an even more important argument in favour of bug reporting for the masses, is the fact that technical users use their computer different than non-technical users. They might miss bugs that non-technical users do encounter or see no problem in a feature of the system that is terribly confusing for non-technical users.

Limiting bug reporting would deprive us of this and that seems sufficiently bad to me to doubt whether we should limit bug reporting at all. I really don’t know what’d be the best. Making it harder to report bugs would make managing the bugs easier, but wouldn’t that also make the bugs we manage worth less? What do you, oh dear reader, think?

The large success of Ubuntu we’ve seen in the recent years has come mostly due to the fact that Canonical is very good at adding polish to the functionality that was already there. It made the great tools of the free desktop software usable by everyone. They still do this wonderfully and I have full confidence that the Canonical Design Team will continue to make Ubuntu suit its users even better.

However, while reading OMG! Ubuntu!’s post about the music and document file browsers mock-ups something struck me. Something that started to bug me while trying out GNOME Shell now became clear. Canonical may be very good on polishing, it may be very good at innovating user interfaces, it cannot do without GNOME. It lacks content.

Now, I don’t mean this in a demeaning way. I have great respect for the vision that speaks from Unity. However, I would like to emphasise that working within GNOME would be much better for Ubuntu on the long-term, no matter how hard it will be in the short-term.

When comparing Unity and GNOME Shell, I noticed right away how clearly a philosophy speaks from GNOME Shell. When using GNOME 3, you can really notice how its developers have purposely worked together to create a coherent experience. It feels nicer than Unity. Plus: it uses GNOME technologies and that improves its integration in the rest of the desktop tremendously.

But after a while you start noticing a few things. GNOME Shell is less stable than Unity and it feels less solid and responsive. Moreover, whereas Unity’s rough edges are at its rough edges, GNOME Shell has rough edges spread equally all over. GNOME 3 looks less slick and sharp than Unity, GNOME 3′s default theme is less crisp than Ubuntu’s Ambiance.

It is a terrible shame that the huge effort Canonical made to get Unity to the high level it currently is, was not spent on making GNOME Shell even better. Canonical may be stubborn, but the company has great ideas and it could have done so much to make GNOME Shell really slick.

Canonical is not a very huge company. It does not have enough employees to create and maintain a whole desktop. This is already showing in the stalled innovation of Notify OSD and friends; I am absolutely jealous of GNOME Shell’s notification area. While GNOME is working on expanding and improving its GNOME 3 desktop, Canonical is still very busy with its own shell. The consequence of this is that the shell does not integrate as much in the rest of the applications as you’d hope. There is a lot to improve in the GNOME project, but when you improve it, you are sure that it fits with the rest of the desktop and that it will look and behave the same.

The Documents and Media file browsers I mentioned earlier can be great ways to give users access to their files. However, every time you implement a way to access stuff like this, you make a paradigm choice. If you want to satisfy the user, it should be consistent. Unity also gives the user access to files, but it does so in a different way. This causes a collision of paradigms. If Canonical wants to do it right, it should ensure consistency across all applications. This is a lot of work and will probably require the development of its own file manager, etc, in the long term.

Canonical does not have the workforce to fully maintain its own desktop. By creating its own shell, it may improve things in the short term, but it will only make things worse in the long run. While GNOME progresses along a different path, the two desktops will diverge even further. In the end, if we ever want to beat Mac OS X, Ubuntu will have to to get rid ofGNOME and Canonical will have to have grown substantially.

GNOME needs Canonical as well. There is no other company in the Linux distribution world that focusses on regular consumers and regular consumers are the target group that shape the OSes of today. I’m not sure how much longer Novell’s remains will stay around, Nokia seems to be on a suicide mission and Red Hat is a business oriented company. GNOME 3′s magnificent user interface philosophy is in need for a good set of clothes and proper manners and of all companies that are in existence today, Canonical is the best candidate to look after that.

My ego is not so large that I believe this blog post can change Canonical’s company policy—which naturally wasn’t thought out in one hour—but I do wish to add my voice to the chorus that say: Ubuntu should return to GNOME 3!

When I bought it, I got a driver CD as well as warnings for Windows Vista. I hadn’t checked for Ubuntu compatibility, so I did expect some troubles and braced myself for hours and hours of fiddling with JACK to make it work. So I started with installing Ardour and trying if I could get anything recorded there. Nothing.

Then I remembered my system was sporting the flexible PulseAudio. So, I went to volume control, saw the Audiolink listed under input devices. After I had selected it, I opened the GNOME Sound Recorder, pressed record and started to play. Bingo! Everything just worked. No fiddling needed. All you have to do is to select a different input, using the default volume control.

This really demonstrates the power and user-friendliness  of PulseAudio. I know that with JACK it is possible to do quite a lot with input sources, but that is too much for what I want. I just need something simple and this is working great for me! Thank you PulseAudio developers!

In Burgum kun je vanaf 10.00 terecht bij de Volkssterrenwacht om meer te weten te komen over Ubuntu, maar vooral om bij te leren hoe je bij kunt dragen aan het besturingssysteem. Ben je geïnteresseerd in Ubuntu in het Fries? Kom dan zeker ook!

In Nijmegen openen de deuren om 11.00 bij First8. Na kennismaking met andere Ubuntu-gebruikers kun je samen uitvinden hoe het is om mee te helpen aan Ubuntu. Deelnemers aan beide evenementen worden verzocht om zich aan te melden voor het evenement in de LoCo Team Directory. (Zie links bovenaan.)

Als je een laptop hebt, neem hem mee; wij zorgen voor internet en de aardige mensen.

We willen namelijk de vergaderingen zo zinvol mogelijk maken door de discussies vooraf te voeren op de openbare maillijst. Niet alleen kun je dan veel langer en uitgebreider over dingen praten, ook kan de hele gemeenschap meedoen. We hebben een tijdelijke maillijst aangemaakt voor de gemeenschapsraad op Launchpad. Helaas kan niet iedereen aan deze lijst meedoen, maar het archief is wel openbaar. Ik probeer zo snel mogelijk een lijst te regelen waar iedereen zich voor kan inschrijven.

De volledige notulen van de vergadering van gisteren staan op de wiki, maar ik wil even twee belangrijke zaken noemen.

Als eerste hebben we gisteren de gemeenschapsleiding vastgesteld. De gemeenschapsleiding is verantwoordelijk voor de dagelijkse leiding en bestaat uit de voorzitter en twee andere leden die door de gemeenschapraad uit haar midden gekozen zijn. Ik ben blij dat ik de komende tijd met Thomas de Graaff en leoquant samen zal kunnen werken in de gemeenschapsleiding. Ik hoop dat we veel voor Ubuntu Nederland zullen kunnen betekenen.

Daarnaast hebben we besloten de gemeenschapsraadsvergadering te verschuiven van 19.30 naar 20.00. Om te zorgen dat we onszelf in de hand houden hebben we afgesproken dat het raadsdeel tot 21.00 mag duren en dat het openbare deel vervolgens nog een half uur duurt.

Zijn er nog mensen met vragen, dan hoor ik dat graag. Laat een reactie achter, of stuur me een mailtje.

De uitslag is nu bekend!

Ik ben erg blij dat ik als voorzitter gekozen ben. Bedankt voor het vertrouwen dat jullie in mij hebben gesteld! Ik hoop dat ik als voorzitter van Ubuntu Nederland veel zal kunnen betekenen voor de gemeenschap.

De resultaten voor de overige gemeenschapsraadsleden zien er erg goed uit. Ik wil alle kandidaten bedanken, ook zij die niet gekozen zijn. Dankzij jullie viel er iets te kiezen! Met de groep die nu gekozen kunnen we volgens mij flink wat werk verzetten!

Morgen is al weer de eerste vergadering, om 19.30 in #ubuntu-nl-meeting. Het eerste gedeelte is voor de gemeenschapsraad alleen, hoewel iedereen mee mag luisteren lezen. Het tweede gedeelte is openbaar, dan mag iedereen punten inbrengen. De agenda staat op al op de wiki.

Misschien dat sommigen graag nog de uitslag zouden willen controleren. Het spijt me dat we niet de hele database openbaar kunnen maken, maar dat zou het stemgeheim teveel in gevaar brengen, omdat de tabel met gecodeerde OpenID’s van de mensen die hun stem uit hebben gebracht, met brute-force aanvallen gekraakt zou kunnen worden. Ook voel ik er niks voor om bijvoorbeeld de tabel met id’s van actieve sessies te publiceren.

Van de 42 stemgerechtigden hebben 33 hun stem uitgebracht. Dit is een opkomst van 79%! Niet slecht voor een eerste keer. Ik hoop dat we voor de volgende verkiezingen het aantal stemgerechtigden kunnen vergroten. Denk je dat je recht hebt op stemrecht? Kijk op de wiki-pagina voor meer informatie.

Omdat ik wel graag zoveel mogelijk openheid geef, sluit ik een gedeeltelijke export van de database bij. Download 33654unl-deel.sql om het te controleren. Je kunt de stemmen vinden in de tabel bij de kandidaten. De stemmen werden niet afzonderlijk opgeslagen, maar opgeteld bij wat er al was aan stemmen.

Rest mij enkel nog om iedereen veel succes te wensen. Er moet nog wel wat gebeuren aan Ubuntu Nederland, maar dit is een grote stap!

Inspired by that, I also blogged about what I would love to see in GNOME 3: ‘My wish for GNOME 3: better configuration tools‘. My gripe was the huge amount of tiny little configuration utilities that swamped the Preferences menu. Not only was it confusing to spread the settings across so many different windows, but it also looked bad and navigated horribly. The settings were spread out and not always easy to find.

A few days ago I installed the GNOME 3 LiveCD on my system to give GNOME Shell a try. I was amazed by the great progress that has been made with the GNOME Control Centre. Not only does it look much, much better than its previous incarnations, it also works much better.

Everything is now by default in one place. Navigation has improved. The way the configuration ‘capplets’ are designed is a lot more intuitive. It is not as cluttered anymore as it used to be and is easier to control. It is really a shame that it is not in Ubuntu Natty, because it is a tremendous improvement over what you currently get when pressing System Settings in the Session Indicator.

Looking back at the blog post I wrote in 2008 I can say that GNOME 3 has fulfilled my wishes for better configuration tools. It’s a great release, congratulations on this milestone, GNOME!

Let us first take a look at the defined purpose of the ‘local community teams’. The ‘About Local Community Teams‘ page at the Loco Directory has the following to say about it:

With the incredible success of Ubuntu around the world, the LoCo project is here to help groups of Ubuntu fans and enthusiasts work together in regional teams to help advocate, promote, translate, develop and otherwise improve Ubuntu.

Local community teams are supposed to cater a definite geographic area. In the United States and the Russian Federation they ought to cover a state, in the rest of the world a complete country. This geographic constraint is important to notice, since we will see later that it doesn’t always fit well in the case of ‘local communities’.

Within their geographic area, local community teams are expected to advocate Ubuntu, organise local activities and informal meetings. This is all ‘in real life’, the internet presence is often very limited. Teams that behave according to this description, are what I would like to call ‘local teams’. Basically all local community teams from the English-speaking countries are of this type.

Since the international Ubuntu community is English-speaking and provides excellent support via the Ubuntu Forums, Ask Ubuntu and the #ubuntu IRC channel, the internet communities of the English-speaking local community teams don’t have to have a broad own community online. They are limited to small forums that are mostly used to discuss the activities that take place ‘in real life’ and to complement social contact. For the most part they are integrated into the international community.

Virtually all other local community teams, however, can be classified as ‘local communities’. Because many, if not most, of its members do not speak English, they cannot use the online support from the international community. The main focus of these ‘local communities’ is not so much activities ‘in real life’, but instead the management of a language-specific Ubuntu community. Running a community is not easy, so it takes a lot of resources.

The local teams have much more time and energy to spend on organising local activities and meetings, because there already is an online community for them, the international one. You can call the local teams a team because they often consist of equals, working together to spread Ubuntu and enjoying each others presence.

A local community, in contrast with a local team, does not consist of equals working together on the same things. There are many more different functions within a community: there is support to be given, documentation to be translated and written, interface text to translate and all of this needs to be organised. Furthermore, those who come to ask for support are a fundamentally different kind of community member than new computer enthusiasts who joins a local team to help out. Many of the people who come to ask for support are regular users who don’t have the desire to become an active contributor, they only want help. The spirit of a local community is therefore very different from that of a local team.

What makes this even more complicated is that language boundaries and geographical boundaries often don’t match. For example, Spanish is spoken in a lot of different countries by many people across the whole world. Therefore, having one Spanish support channel and forum makes sense. Add to that the Spanish translators of Ubuntu’s interface and documentation and what you get is a very large community, separate from the international one, transcending geographic borders. The difference between this conglomeration of several ‘local community teams’ and, say, the local team of the US state Massachusetts, is one of day and night. Countries like Belgium, where they speak Dutch, French and German, are even more complicated, because you have multiple language communities within the same borders.

Local communities and local teams both do very valuable work. I think it is a shame that many local communities are not locally as active as local teams often are. But this does have a reason: founding, building and running an full-blown online community puts a hefty toll on your volunteers. If you are small, like Ubuntu Nederland, you don’t have a lot of spare persons left to organise social activities ‘in real life’.

Duplicating the international Ubuntu community in your own language is hard, it requires skill to do it successfully. Good documentation can help with that. Unfortunately, most of the documentation—written in the English-speaking international community—focuses on local teams instead of local communities. Also, the requirements of the LoCo Council put a lot of emphasis on local activities, whereas it can be a tremendous achievement already to ‘only’ have a solid online presence.

I should add some nuance to this. Of course there are local community teams that under my classification would be local communities, but which do have a strong local presence; there are probably also local teams that have a large own online community. I acknowledge this and think that the definition of a local team and a local community should be stretched enough to suit this. However, the general observation still applies.

What to do with this analysis? Firstly, I think that the international community should be more conscious of the fact that non-English local community teams are distinctively different from English-speaking local community teams, because of the boundary created by language. We should be aware that there are several parallel Ubuntu communities in other languages that over time may have grown own identities. They may see themselves not as a localised annexe of the international Ubuntu community, but instead as the equivalent for their own language of what is often perceived to be the English Ubuntu community, but is in fact the international one.

Secondly, there also is a task for the leaders of the local communities, who could make their people more aware of the way things work in the Ubuntu project and explain what more there is to do if you learn English. They can help to bridge the gap between the different language communities.

Thirdly and finally, the LoCo Council should take into account when judging the performance of local community teams that not all of them have the extra burden of having to build a complete new community from the ground up.

One could argue that Americans—no, I’m not going to write USanians—derive a large advantage from the fact that the default locale is their English variant. All software is understandable for them right from the beginning. They never have to wait for translations. However, in this piece I would like to argue that actually it is a disadvantage.

The Disadvantage

Why would it be a disadvantage to Americans that all software automatically suits their customs and follows their local quirks? Well, for that I would like to do a game of compare and contrast. Mostly contrast. You see, the US English strings are the only texts written by the developers themselves.

Development attracts people who like to develop, not people who like to write. They do not necessarily come from the United States, often are not native English speakers and many of them can’t see the use of arguing about -ize vs -ise, or have own opinions about it. The consequence is that the US English strings are written by people whose primary interest is writing code, not human language. This is detrimental to the quality of the texts, the suitability of the chosen phrases and spelling and grammar in general.

Translation teams, however, attract people who are interested in language. In the world of perfect localisation, all typography nuts, grammar enthusiasts and spelling bees will join together to form a team with Super Language Powers. This means that the people who will write the text you see every day on your computer are fond of language, know how to use it and have experience to say it, if you speak any language or dialect other than US English.

The Consequences

All languages—except US English—have a corrective filter between the developer’s work and the end-user. There is one community that oversees all use of language in the product. Translation teams often work with word lists, style guides and selection of contributors based on their quality. This allows them to guarantee quality, make sure that all text on the system follows the same conventions and warrant consistency across the desktop. You can correct for overuse or underuse of capitalisation, distinct between the computer and user in events by using different verb conjugations and so on.

Consistency is an important issue. For example, a computer can have a screen, a display and a view. These words are near synonyms, but the X server uses them to distinguish between three different things. It is hard enough for a user to understand what the system is talking about already, it becomes even harder when words can have different meanings in different applications. When there is no central organisation of the terminology, this does happen. Translators could correct for this by adapting the translations to the context, but Americans are out of luck.

There are no people looking after the typography, grammar, capital use and readability of US English. But there is more to localisation: translation teams also make sure that the system is using the correct date format, currency, decimal delimiter and so on. Each country has its own conventions here. No one has the job of nitpicking about the American conventions, so they’re missing a watchful eye here as well.

The result is that the US English desktop can often be inconsistent in style, word choice and spelling. This makes our product less appealing to Americans and to other people using the US English version. If we want to pursue perfection, we should not miss this out.

It has also consequences for the translations. The translations are translations of the original English texts. Although I did say earlier that translators can correct for inconsistency and bad wording, they don’t always do. It is a lot of work to manually check the context of each and every string, many translators just stick to translating every word with the same phrase. Badly used capitals and dots will often find their way into translations as well. Vague US English results in vague translations.

Solutions?

Improving the quality of US English will mean large improvements for all languages if it is done properly, by sending patches with corrections to the developers. I am convinced that we need an American ‘localisation team’, consisting of all American typography nuts, grammar enthusiasts and spelling bees who want to contribute to Ubuntu and FOSS in general. They could work together with other projects to establish conventions and methodically go through all applications to check whether they comply with these conventions.

We cannot ask from all the localisers to understand programming language and patching systems. However, with the current state of technology, I am afraid that writing patches directly for the code is the only option. In the long term, something like a POT editor and a reverse POT generator could improve things.

It would also require infrastructure. Many languages have project-agnostic communities for translation in FOSS that provide various language-related services; examples are the French Traduc and the Dutch OpenTaal. These relations are often not formalised, but they are really helpful in making sure everyone is somewhat following similar rules. As part of FreeDesktop an American initiative could be started, which could keep a list of the standard meanings and uses of words.

The solutions above are just ideas for ways to deal with a problem that we should give much more attention than we have done so far. Admittedly, it is easy for me to talk from the sideline, knowing that I—being a native speaker of the Dutch language, not of US English—will never be doing much of the work I propose. But I do hope that some people will be inspired by this piece and do something with it.

Those poor Americans deserve localisation too!

Removed from locoteams-approved at 2:06 on March 28th, 2011. Re-apply as
soon as you feel ready!

Dit houdt in dat Ubuntu Nederland nu verwijderd is uit het ‘Approved LoCo Teams’-team op Launchpad. We zijn nu ook officieel niet meer gemarkeerd als officieel goedgekeurde lokale gemeenschap, nadat eerder al in Launchpad bug #693178 de stemming niet goed uitviel voor Ubuntu Nederland.

Wat houdt dit in? Ten eerste dat we geen stempel van de internationale gemeenschap hebben, dat is jammer. Daarnaast krijgen we ook geen grote hoeveelheden CD’s meer opgestuurd en sta je minder sterk.

Het is jammer dat het zover is gekomen, maar na alle onrust en gebrek aan organisatie kwam het niet geheel onverwacht. Het lijkt me goed om nadat we de verkiezingen gehad hebben weer bezig te gaan met een nieuwe poging. We kunnen ons ieder moment weer opgeven voor herkeuring. Ik weet niet of het nog lukt voor de Linux-themadagen eind mei, maar we kunnen onze best doen.

Vandaag kreeg ik een e-mail van een een lid van de LoCo Council waarin de beweegredenen van de raad werden uitgelegd. Ik ga deze e-mail niet letterlijk publiceren omdat het geen openbare communicatie was, maar vat de belangrijkste punten hier samen.

Er zijn drie dingen waar de raad naar kijkt bij een herkeuring:

• Laat het team activiteit zien?
• Heeft het team plannen voor de toekomst?
• Hoe helpt de officiële erkenning hen bij hun werk?

De raad vond dat er te weinig activiteit te zien was op het moment van de afkeuring, dat er onduidelijkheid was over de toekomst en dat er teveel onrust was in de gemeenschap. Daarnaast wilden ze door het intrekken van de erkenning een signaal afgeven, hopend dat het zou leiden tot bezinning.

Ze willen de volgende keer boven alles vooruitgang zien. Als we kunnen laten zien dat we hard gewerkt hebben om de genoemde problemen te verhelpen en dat er toekomst is, dan moeten we snel weer goedgekeurd worden.

De wereld vergaat niet, we zijn niet definitief afgeserveerd en ik heb goede hoop dat we al snel weer een nieuwe poging kunnen wagen om goedkeuring te verkrijgen. Maar dat is aan de gemeenschapsraad.

You see, I wrote that blog post in a very short time, directly after the idea came up in my head. Without doing any fact-checking, without even proofreading, I had written a piece on a sensitive issue and published it without making sure I wasn’t talking complete crap. Not smart.

First of all, I should have realised when writing that blog post—and previous pieces on the Canonical-Banshee issue—that I am a mere external commentator who has only circumstantial experience with the events surrounding the issue.

I should have also known that you should never say something you cannot prove. I stand corrected on my assumption, which became an allegation when I published it, that GNOME is a USA-dominated project. I confused company/project culture with human culture, as one commenter on the flawed post pointed out correctly. There are in fact many, many Europeans at key positions in the GNOME community, just as much as there are Americans fulfilling pivotal roles for the Ubuntu project. I could have learned that only by going to GNOME’s Wikipedia page.

I learned my lesson and I would like to sincerely apology to my readers for breaking their trust by publishing such a badly founded piece. I assume that no one was insulted by incorrectly being called American or European.

GNOME was founded by two Mexicans and currently seems to be predominantly dominated by people from the United States, with the foundation itself being based in the States. The most important companies behind it, RedHat and Novell, are both from the United States too.

Ubuntu was started and Canonical was founded by a South African based in London, where the company has its headquarters. Although there is again a very high American presence within the community and company, the leadership is much more eclectic than GNOME’s. Furthermore, the Canonical Design Team seems to be predominantly British.

Why would this matter? Our differences aren’t very large after all, the open source community is dominated (unfortunately) by white, Caucasian males and they have a lot in common. I think it may play a more important role than we have thought so far. Communication is very culture-bound and it seems that it is communication that has been causing most of the problems.

If we look at the rejection of ‘libappindicator’ as an external dependency, we may be able to see this more clearly. Canonical, say some people in the GNOME project, failed to push its inclusion thoroughly enough. They may have done what was formally required, but didn’t show the initiative that could have resolved the issues that were raised. They say that you need to find the right people to talk to, not expect a machinery to process your request once you’ve delivered an appropriately tagged package.

Canonical reiterates that it did what was required to propose a module as an external dependency. They say that they want to have someone to talk to, to have someone in charge who makes the decisions and can be phoned up if necessary.

Both parties expected different things from the other. This may be what caused the unease. Each party feels that it did enough and the other too little, so no one is to blame.

Strikingly, it seems that the cooperation concerning the application indicators/status notifiers with KDE—founded in Germany, its foundation still being based there—was very productive. Was this because of the persons involved, or because of the cultures? The communication ways I described above do seem to reflect the stereotypes of the two continents.

What should be said that the above is a gross generalisation. Generalisations can usually only be used, with great care, when you talk about large groups. In this case it might be better to talk about individuals instead.

I don’t think that what I said above is the whole explanation. I do think, though, that it is something we should keep in our minds. It may not only have played a role in worsening the unease and misunderstanding here, but it affects all communities that are truly diverse. Traditionally, FOSS seems to have been dominated predominantly by people from the US. Now that is changing, more people learn English—as an example, my father’s generation learned German, not English, as the most important foreign language at Dutch secondary school, for me it is English—and ‘developing’ countries are catching up.

Cultural differences will be more visible in communities, we need to be aware of the different ways different cultures communicate if we want to make sure no contributions go to waste.

However, what if that philosophy of yours is hindering you while achieving your goals? What if your morally better culture is closed and looks down upon people who behave differently, scaring them away? What if your right is the wrong in someone else’s eyes and there is no way to prove that wrong objectively?

Doesn’t your moral perfection, your superiority to all those inferior hypocrites make it harder to enjoy what you like to do, to reach the people you want to reach, to have success where you want to succeed? Doesn’t that make your moral perfection useless? Doesn’t it mean that those people with their flawed human nature might be achieving more with their sensible, flexible, pragmatic approach?

Heb je stemrecht? Denk je dat jij een goede bijdrage zou kunnen leveren aan de organisatie van Ubuntu  Nederland? Lijkt het je leuk om mee te praten en mee te helpen? Ga naar de stemwebsite van de Ubuntu NL Verkiezingen 2011 en stel jezelf kandidaat! Denk niet te snel dat je geen kans maakt, doe het gewoon en geef jezelf op!

Je kunt kandidaat zijn voor het voorzitterschap en voor de gemeenschapsraad tegelijkertijd. Er is geen voor- of nadeel verbonden aan het al of niet kiezen om jezelf kandidaat te stellen voor meerdere functies tegelijkertijd. De gemeenschapsraadsstemmen die op de winnende voorzitter uitgebracht zijn, zullen genegeerd worden.

Verloop van de verkiezingen

Deze eerste periode van kandidaatstelling duur vier weken, van het begin van 2 maart tot en met het eind van 4 april. Vanaf vijf april kan iedereen met stemrecht stemmen op de kandidaten. Vanaf 9 april zal de uitslag online staan.

Je moet twee keer stemmen: één keer breng je een stem uit op de voorzitter, en één keer verdeel je zes stemmen over de gemeenschapsraadskandidaten. Hierbij heb je aflopend zes, vijf, vier, drie, twee en één punten te verdelen. Hoe hoger het puntenaantal, hoe liever je een persoon terug ziet in de gemeenschapsraad.

Meer informatie staat op de wiki-pagina over de verkiezingen. Voor vragen kun je ook altijd hier een reactie achterlaten, of contact met me opnemen via de mail.

Ik heb iedereen met een Launchpad-account toegevoegd aan het ‘Ubuntu Nederland stemgerechtigden’-team. Er zijn nog vier personen zonder Launchpad-account op de wiki-lijst. Weet dat je een Launchpad-account nodig hebt om te kunnen stemmen! We gebruiken Launchpad als de authenticatie-bron voor het stemsysteem.

Heb je hulp nodig bij het gebruik van Launchpad, heb je bezwaren of opmerking, laat het weten! Reageer hier, of neem direct contact met me op. Denk je ook recht te hebben op stemrecht? Het is nog niet te laat. Zorg dat je voor 5 maart op de lijst staat.