This blog post is solely to commemorate the day that I first contributed to Ubuntu packaging. Today, Daniel Holbach uploaded the fix to Bug #516744, which is a Tahoe 1.6 update for Lucid. I did the update, and there was only one real change that Daniel had to make.
So yes, this makes me happy. Carry on.
I went out and bought a Cricket a600 modem for the cases where my internet goes out. There are all sorts of howtos on getting it working, including one my friend Sean wrote. However, these were really complicated, and there's no way around that. It's not something an end-user could do.
Enter the Koala. Setting it up on Karmic is a snap. First, apt-get install usb_modeswitch. I think there might need to be a reboot in there, but I'm not sure. Then, plug in your modem, and right click on "Edit Connections..." and click on the "Mobile Broadband" tab. Add a connection, walk through it, and you'll find that Cricket is one of the options. Then that's all there is to it.
My one request is that when I plug it in, it would disconnect the wireless connection when it connects to the mobile network, just because if I'm connecting with the Cricket modem, it means that wireless is flaky. Currently, I just go up and disconnect it manually, but it'd be nice if it was automatic.
Tonight I acquired a Korg Nanopad midi drum pad while at Guitar Center (I actually only went in to look at 4 track recorders, walked out with plenty of cables, a Boss BR-900CD recorder, and the previously mentioned Nanopad). I made sure of the return policy on the Nanopad, since I really hate buying gadgets only to find out they either don't work with Linux or work with more coercion required than I am willing to spend.
Luckily, I plugged this little guy in, and it was immediately detected by the kernel, and showed up in lsmod as Bus 006 Device 002: ID 0944:010e KORG, Inc. I usually then Google the USB ID to see if anything might come up, but nothing interesting did. I was hoping there'd be software in the Ubuntu repos that might work with this, as I was feeling particularly stoked about compiling or packaging something myself.
A quick apt-cache search midi drum yielded some candidates. I installed the first one, Hydrogen. I'd played with it before, but didn't find it particularly compelling. I started it up and started hitting the pads on the Nanopad. Nothing. Of course it wouldn't be that easy. So I went to File->Preferences, clicked on the "Midi System" tab, and, as an option to "Input", I saw "nanoPAD MIDI 1". After selecting that, I was making beats.
Linux has come a LONG way.
I spent this past week in Barcelona with all the other Canonical employees at a meeting we call AllHands. I have the opportunity to travel to all sorts of nice places with Canonical, and experience lots of conferences. None of those other experiences hold a candle to last week's events in Barcelona. I'd like to share my experiences, notes, feelings, and overall energy in this post (and try and start a new flow of regular interval posts).
First off, I need to say something about my method for taking notes here. Prior to leaving for my trip, I picked up two Moleskine notebooks that have unlined pages in them. I'd seen them used by many of my colleagues and friends, but never really saw why they had such hype behind them. After looking through my notes, there was something about the Moleskine that absolutely changed the way I write notes. The diagrams, blurbs, and quotes I wrote down last week were in a completely different and amazing format that allowed me to actually capture a lot of the thoughts I usually just try to reference and hope I remember.
Collaboration has been on my mind for a while, and there are a lot of thoughts I have that are arranging themselves into blog post as we speak. I'm amazed at how much Canonical and its employees are thinking about collaboration. There was an overwhelming amount of questions like "How can we make X better?" and "What if we did Y like this? Would it be easier?"
Launchpad and Bazaar are two humongous examples of us trying to make collaboration easier. Launchpad has created this workflow for handling your code, doing merges of other people's code, getting bugs fixed, getting your code translated, releasing tarballs, and allowing people to easily install software into Ubuntu based machines. Launchpad has a rich code review system, which I am convinced is the best way to make open source software better.
The Ayatana Project excites me beyond my ability to express. Free software is generally written, tested, and (unfortunately) designed by geeks. This usually means that to find a tool with great design and usability is a gem. To have a team that is completely and totally devoted to making free software easy to use for my mother is amazing. Take your app (you know, the one you think is just amazing), get someone's attention in #ayatana on Freenode, and ask them (ever so nicely) what you can do to make it stellar. Do it. Do it now.
UbuntuOne is going to end up being a great service, and I would venture to say it will be a reference guide to the web services of the future. No data lock-in, open protocols, standards-based implementations, and the sky is the limit. UbuntuOne isn't about file sharing (although that is a cute first feature). It's about sharing data in any form, and as it fills out, it really will make collaboration even more social.
Finally, I wrote an open ended question to myself to think about, and thought that maybe I'd throw it out here as well. For context, Jono Bacon was talking about community (y'know, plugging his book and all that :), and I wrote "Open source thrives on a meritocracy - how can we prevent feelings of entitlement?" I see this a lot in open source communities: people earn their "commit rights" and then start behaving like everyone owes them something. Collaboration is about peers, not about hierarchies.
A highlight of the talks I attended was a talk by Jono Bacon on recognizing and avoiding burnout. It was on eye opener for me. I spend a lot of time writing code, and I have now recognized that at some level I'm getting burned out by it. I'm doing a lot of things at the same time, and doing them absolutely terribly.
The biggest thing that hit me was that my methods for staying organized are terrible, and they aren't working. When this happens, one may be working hard, but not accomplishing much of anything. I've since restructured what my daily planning is like, and will report when I have data on its success or failure.
This was my greatest experience at AllHands. The nature of Canonical is that most of us work from home. This means that we can easily miss out on the social aspects of co-located work, like going out for a beer (Coke for me thanks) after work, shooting Nerf guns at each other, etc. However, because we work with these people on a daily basis, we form these incredibly strong bonds, so much that when we actually meet on this physical plane, we're old friends that would bend over backwards for one another.
Daniel Holbach epitomizes the Canonical culture at the very core with his hugs. I think of my direct manager more as my friend than as my manager. I enjoy seeing the rest of my team in person, because they are all really great people. There is absolutely no difference in social status between Mark Shuttleworth himself and the newest hire. We all work together. There isn't this idea of "What I do is more important than what you do" but more that "What you do is so helpful that I want to make sure what I do is helpful in return" Canonical is really about Ubuntu, the product, and the meaning of brotherhood and working together.