May 2011
4 posts
1 tag
Advert team survey
The Ubuntu Advertisements Team is running a user experience survey. You can find it here:
http://bit.ly/lZk5xw
1 tag
Cleaning up after ourselves...
At UDS I gave a lightning talk called “I’ve had enough and so have you, a plea for sanity”, where I argue that misinformation on the internet is harming the Ubuntu project and brand.
Here’s the video:
(Direct Link)
So, now that you’re motivated to clean up this mess, I’d like to clear some things up.
This isn’t a carte blanche to delete everything,...
2 tags
Official UDS-O Group Photos now available
Sean Sosik-Hamor, our group photographer and IS sysadmin, has published the official UDS-O group photos on his blog, along with the details on the setup and equipment. Enjoy!
2 tags
Mobile support for UDS
Thanks to the tireless work of David Mandala, we’ve got some pretty nice mobile integration this UDS with Guidebook.
Not only do you have the schedule, but there’s a MAP of the venue right in the application as well and even the list of after hour social events.
Thanks also to Michael Hall for integrating support into Summit, which gives us a nice rememberable URL for your...
April 2011
16 posts
1 tag
Michigan Team release party, photographer...
We fail at photos…
2 tags
Road tripping with U1 Music
I took a trip out to see the folks at the Indiana LoCo team to talk about 11.04. That means ROAD TRIP! (Note how we avoid Ohio):
One thing I totally suck at is remembering to sync my phone with new music before I go on a trip. For the last 6 months or so though I don’t really have to, since we have Ubuntu One Music Streaming.
The basic idea is that since I keep all my music in the cloud...
2 tags
The Power User's Guide to Unity
Well, we’re a week away from 11.04 so I decided that I would collate the information about Unity on the web and put it into one nice page for everyone to find. Got some more tips you’d like to add? Add them in the to the answer!
2 tags
Giving space back to applications.
One of the (great) trends that browsers are doing these days is “getting out of the way”. That is, less “chrome” more space for content. I was curious to how we’ve been improving in this area, so I asked Jason to do some math, and here’s what we came up with.
So, given a desktop that you log in, how many pixels do we consume and how much do we leave for apps?...
2 tags
Living in the Limelight!
Went to see Rush this weekend….. I had pretty good seats (and I should hope so the way ticket prices are these days):
As a bonus I was on Geddy’s side, so I got to see all his basses lined up. See if you can find the distinctive Orange amps. All of his basses were Fender J’s.
As you can expect, the performance was pretty immaculate. Alex’s guitar cut out during one...
3 tags
Lenses + Zeitgeist
David Calle has been working on a Books Lens, which lets you search for free books on the internet. The workflow is like this. Super, “Dune”, enter, start reading Dune in Google Books. Neat huh?
Well wouldn’t it be cool if a lens knew what you were looking for before you even start typing?
(Video Link)
The zeitgeist integration isn’t ready yet, but David’s...
2 tags
I need to spend more time on reddit
Someone’s made a reddit lens!
Here’s the code. I need a volunteer to grab the packaging from the Ask Ubuntu branch and package this up and PPA it. Find me if you want to do this (no time to do this yet, but maybe one of you can help us out)
Puppet Shirts!
My memory is hazy, must have been that strong Portland microbrew…
(me) You know if you do it right, Puppet makes it so I never miss hitting the pub at 4pm, every time.
(Luke) I should put that on a shirt some day ….
Thanks for the shirt guys! (He must have adjusted for DST, heh)
1 tag
More quicklists ....
Aha clever Jamie, he put two and two together so he can add SSH shortcuts to quicklists. Here’s my setup to the three machines at home:
Here’s the .desktop file:
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Name=Remote Servers
Comment=Login to my servers
Exec=gnome-terminal --disable-factory --sm-client-disable...
2 tags
Ubuntu Open Week, Call for Instructors
We’ve sent out a call for instructors for Ubuntu Open Week. Open Week runs from 2-6 May in #ubuntu-classroom (the week after release).
Since Developer Week is already off and rocking I’m looking for some more end-user-y type sessions. Want to dig in? Then sign up and let me know!
2 tags
Demystifying Unity's Graphics Hardware...
Jay Taoko has put up a blog post talking about Unity’s hardware requirements. You can find the information on the wiki page too.
On the wiki page we talk about the OpenGL features we use and the hardware we test on, we hope to grow this over time.
1 tag
Ancient whales are great
My wife got me a pretty unique birthday present this year. Instead of a normal gift she sponsored the restoration of a whale rib.
This weekend the donors participated in the unveiling of Basilosaurus isis reconstruction at the University of Michigan’s Paleontology Museum. We are talking about a massive animal here, 45 feet long, it didn’t really fit in the range of my camera.
I...
2 tags
How I use the Unity Dash
I’ve already talked about how I multitask with Unity. Today I’m going to talk about how I use the Dash.
(Unfortunately the flicker is way more annoying in this video than before. Jason tells me it’s my nvidia driver, I’ll need to hunt down a non-nvidia machine to rerecord this video, but it gives you a general idea)
( ogg / mp4 )
2 tags
How I multitask in Unity
I have made a video of how multitasking works in Unity to demonstrate some of the more advanced features.
(ogg / mp4 )
Glitches are from the recording, it’s smooth on my actual desktop, also, when I say something in the video and it doesn’t happen it’s because I am fat fingering it, unfortunately we haven’t found a solution for that yet.
This is a guest session version...
1 tag
Jamming in Michigan
We’re doing some Unity testing this weekend.
Luckily we had Jason Smith handling user questions…
1 tag
Quicklists for webapps.
One more wall down. Here’s what evolution looks like in Natty. You can right click on the icon and do stuff.
Well thanks to Unity Quicklists I can add this to webmail too:
Here’s the excerpt from the .desktop file, tack this into the bottom of your existing Chromium GMAIL .desktop file:
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=Compose;Contacts;Calendar
[Compose Shortcut...
