Advert team survey

The Ubuntu Advertisements Team is running a user experience survey. You can find it here: 

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, be smart. You should probably not delete things that belong to other teams unless it’s way out of date.
  • We don’t have anywhere to place old Specs, and they are useful to keep around, so don’t mess with them. 
  • help.ubuntu.com isn’t the same as wiki.ubuntu.com, there’s a separate workflow for tagging pages as deleteable material.
  • Even so, there are tons of crap you can just get rid of:

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!

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 friends: http://summit.ubuntu.com/mobile and QR codes on the schedule itself.

Michigan Team release party, photographer wanted…

We fail at photos…

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 anyway I can just stream it back to myself, so when I buy a new album it’s just there, so I don’t have to remember to sync my phone or whatever.

But on a 3.5 hour trip with varying network conditions? Surely this won’t work. I’ll have to switch to more conventional ways to rock out for sure. Let’s find out.

The first step to any road trip is preparation:

I have Bluetooth audio support in my car, so the first thing I did was pair my phone, this was pretty straightforward. Then I fired up the application, queued up Alice in Chains’ Jar of Flies and hit the road. At this point in my trip I was on 3G.

One of the nice things that the application automatically does is cache songs for you. That way the next time you want to listen to it you don’t have to hit the network. I told the music app to store 10GB of cached songs. So basically instead of my usual “Sync 10gb of songs to my phone” smartlist I just use these settings. When a song is cached the application shows a little yellow asterisk:

So as I’m listening to the songs the U1 app is caching the next songs for me. While the Alice was cranking I went ahead and queued up more albums. Since the app integrates with last.fm you can see what songs I listened to on the way there and on the way back. And since they’re my songs it’s at a nice high bitrate.

The queuing works well, the only interruption was when I was north of Fort Wayne, where I spent a while on a “G” network, which is apparently even worse than edge. I had finally caught up to the queue. This is also where I discovered the “unlimited” setting for caching songs. On longer trips where you know you’ll be far from 3g you probably want to turn this on instead of the default 3 songs.

Other tips:

  • You’ll need power. You have the bluetooth and data radios on, and if you’re using the map, GPS.
  • The phone gets quite warm. It was uncomfortable sitting on my lap, for a longer trip I am mulling a bracket for the dash.
  • All of a sudden I want to replace my car radio with a tablet that runs this.
  • The app has an offline mode, if you’re totally without network it just functions as a music player playing the songs you have cached.

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!

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 working on it. In the meantime enjoy the current lens and all the books it finds, here’s the PPA.

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)

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 --class=remoteserver
Terminal=false
X-MultipleArgs=false
Type=Application
Icon=utilities-terminal
StartupNotify=true
StartupWMClass=RemoteServers
X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=Server1;Server2;Server3;

[Server1 Shortcut Group]
Name=SSH into bondigas.local
Exec=gnome-terminal --disable-factory --sm-client-disable  --class=remoteserver -x ssh -t bondigas.local
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[Server2 Shortcut Group]
Name=SSH into xbmc.local
Exec=gnome-terminal --disable-factory --sm-client-disable --class=remoteserver -x ssh -t xbmc.local
TargetEnvironment=Unity

[Server3 Shortcut Group]
Name=SSH into miggytop.local
Exec=gnome-terminal --disable-factory --sm-client-disable --class=remoteserver -x ssh -t miggytop.local
TargetEnvironment=Unity

Though maybe I should assign the one I ssh to the most under the first Exec and save some space. Of course, if this was a dynamic quicklist that just autopopulated the list based on what avahi says is around that would be slick.

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!

Demystifying Unity’s Graphics Hardware Requirements

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. 

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 )

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 of how I work to give you an idea of the things you can do (my normal session is a cluttered mess so I tried to go for more of an out of the box experience). Feel free to share your tips in the comments!

Jamming in Michigan

We’re doing some Unity testing this weekend.

Luckily we had Jason Smith handling user questions…