fidzu : Ubuntu

Amber Graner: Today we talk to Emma Jane Hogbin, Technical Author, HiCKTech creator, Drupal Guru, Ubuntu Member and the list goes on. Before I want to say thank you for taking the time to tell us about your journey into the Ubuntu Project. Emma can you tell us a little about when and how you got involved in FOSS? Also, How and when did you get involved with the Ubuntu Project?

Emma Jane Hogbin: When I first graduated from university I chatted with various companies to find out what kind of work I wanted to do. (My degree is in Environmental Science, but I took a job as a project manager for a Web design company that specialized in web sites for environmental groups.) One of the companies that I met with had an entire shelf of Adobe software boxes. I made a comment about warez sites, and the owner of the company responded by saying that carpenters don't steal their hammers. My father is a wood worker, so this hit home in exactly the right way for me. From that point on I started looking into free and open source tools.

I spent a year using only FOSS software on Windows before making the final switch to the Linux desktop (Debian). I immediately had problems with my laptop and had to patch and recompile my kernel. The Debian mailing list encouraged me to write up the steps I'd taken to fix my problem. Werner Heuser (tuxmobil.org) encouraged me to publish them with the Linux Documentation Project. From that point on I have been at least peripherally involved in the desktop communities for the distro that I use.

AG: Emma you are involved in so many wonderful projects; you took part in Ubuntu Open Week (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuOpenWeek) with a session on "Writing a Book" (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MeetingLogs/openweekKarmic/WriteBook). Can you tell us about your Drupal Book and other technical writings you have done.

EJH: Front End Drupal, my first book with a Real Publisher, has been a fantastic journey. I love teaching. It isn't so much about being the authority though. I love it when my students leap beyond what I've said and make their own predictions about how things work. Front End Drupal isn't your typical computer book. It has lots of little bits to keep the reader interested. From ponies, kittens, and ducks to pirates, orks and hobbits, Front End Drupal is actually a "readable" book.

I don't always inject my sense of humour into my technical writing though. When I'm contributing to a collected work (such as a documentation project) I tend to be more "straight" in my writing style. This makes it easier for other contributors, and also for the reader who may be jumping in and out of the documentation at various points. To date I've contributed documentation to a number of open source projects including Bazaar, Drupal, The Linux Documentation Project, and Ubuntu.

AG: Your HiCK Tech site is full of amazing classes? First what is HiCK Tech the conference? What is HiCK Tech the Company? How did you come up with the idea behind it? And What Classes are offered there.

EJH: HICK Tech the conference is a one-day rural technology forum that addresses How the Internet Connects Knowledge. The goal is to highlight the amazing achievements in rural technology (including bovine breeding, and linking remote hospitals to track disease); but also to share some of the innovative "high tech" things that happen in the big city. I live in a rural community and felt isolated from all of the conferences that were happening in big cities. Instead of being upset about what I didn't have, I decided to throw myself a conference that had all the elements that were important to me.

From the one-day conference an entire consulting company has emerged (HICK Tech the company). The things that I deal with as a small business in rural Canada are not unique. Open source software can solve nearly all of the problems that are presented to me by my clients. HICK Tech tries to figure out how to pool resources to make technology even more affordable. I've given several talks on my 100 Mile Client Roster and have started to collect this information at www.100mileclientroster.com in an attempt to help other small businesses earn a living in their communities.

The classes that HICK Tech offers all help small businesses get more from technology. The students are small business owners who need to learn specific skills to keep their own Web presence up-to-date. I've also had interest from designers who want to learn open source tools; and entrepreneurs who want to learn how to launch their own Web design business.

AG: The first time I spoke with you was in the Ubuntu Women IRC Channel on Freenode, so I know you are involved in this Project, can you tell us about your involvement with this Project and also are there any other teams/groups/projects that focus on Women in Open Source you are involved in or could recommend.

EJH: My initial involvements with the UW project were focused on moving beyond a gendered social space. While I think these spaces are incredibly important, we are at risk of never moving beyond them to participation in the broader community. Within the UW project I have mostly worked on community advocacy. I encourage other women to step up to their passions and take part in the larger FOSS community. I have actively encouraged women to present at conferences, and to apply for sponsorship to events. I help squash the "I'm not good enough" bug and empower women to feel confident about their abilities, and to ask questions when they need help.

Women should feel welcome in any community they want to be a part of. The reality is that not every community welcomes newcomers with grace. Every contributor to open source projects needs to be able to feel their time and opinions are going to matter. Sometimes it can take a couple of attempts to find someone in a project who will be a good mentor. I encourage everyone to be persistent when they are passionate; but to move on when the fit doesn't feel good.

AG: Are there any other FOSS projects, such as your documentation work, that you are involved in that you would like to take the time to share with everyone?

EJH: I'm really excited about all of the great work that's been happening in the world of documentation. This year I hosted what I believe is the first ever open source documentation conference. We had contributors from many different open source projects and participants from four different countries. Usability is getting a lot of attention these days, and I think it's only a matter of time before people realize how important user help and documentation are to the user experience. The conference will be running again in 2010. People who are passionate about user help and documentation are encouraged to create an account at www.writingopensource.com.

AG: When I read about how you released the pattern for you one of your knitting projects a bell went off for me anyway: GPL can be used for many things only one of which is Operation Systems and Code. I have seen first hand the brilliant and complex knitting projects you work on, and I have seen pictures of the now famous Drupal Socks you have knitted as well. Any plans for some Ubuntu socks, other items? Can you tell us about the GPL license you released the pattern for the socks under?

EJH: Not all community contributions have to be made in front of a computer. It's true, I did knit the Drupal socks. A friend of mine had given me countless hours of free tech support to help me with some Drupal problems I was having. As thanks, I knit him a pair of Drupal socks.

Druplicon, the mascot, is licensed under the GPL. I felt it was only fair to release my "code" back into the commons under the same license that made it legally possible for me to knit the socks. The pattern is available from http://www.emmajane.net/craft/drupal. It has been featured at many DrupalCon conferences as well as in CRAFTzine (http://craftzine.com/). I don't have any plans to knit other logo items, and if I did it would only have to be an open source image that I was replicating. Crafters who are interested in creating logoed items may find knitPro (http://www.microrevolt.org/knitPro/) useful. This software was definitely part of my toolkit when I first created the sock pattern.

Crazy things like socks are a great way to show people that it's not just the code that matters, the part that really matters is the passion to volunteering in whatever way suits you best. Knitting the socks has given the Drupal project far more exposure than if I'd contributed the same amount of time in code patches. We need to embrace all positive contributions-no matter how wacky they seem.

AG: Also can you tell folks about the award you created and the process in creating the award.

EJH: This fall I created a tech award at my local high school. It was remarkably easy. This year's recipient, Sadie Hewgill, is now enrolled in Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. She was granted the award for demonstrating creative use of technology. I created the award because I wanted a simple way to make one girl feel proud of her technology-related accomplishments. The only way to affect real change is when each person you reach out to feels personally connected to the change you are seeking.

The award I created isn't about having the best marks or winning buckets of cash. It's about being excited about technology; creating award winning technologists; and about having an entire gymnasium of people clap because you did something special. On my blog I wrote up the steps I took to create the award (www.emmajane.net/howto/create-award). I hope it will inspire others to find creative ways to encourage even more girls to stay interested in the skilled trades and IT.

AG: FOSS contributor, Author, Conference Planner, Mentor, Savvy Businesswoman, to Community Contributor both in your hometown and the FOSS communities, is there anything I have left off of forgotten to mention that you would like to tell people about?

EJH: I think you've covered everything. As always, you've asked great questions. Thanks, Amber!

AG: Emma thank you so much for taking the time to wear yet another hat in the roll of interviewee and spend some time sharing a little about you and your adventures in, and around the Ubuntu and FOSS Communities. I always walk away having learned something from every conversation we have. It is my hope that others will be inspired by the things that you do and are involved in, just as I continue to be. Thank you for all you do and thank you again for your time with this interview series.

[Discuss Emma Jane Hogbin's Interview on the Forum]

Originally posted by Amber Graner in Full Circle Magazine Issue #32 on January 1, 2010

08 Mar 2010 10:20pm GMT

Some time ago I bought a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 laptop. At the time it was the fastest thing I could buy. It was also the heaviest! With a 17″ 1920×1200 screen and all the toys, it's a bit of a dead weight. It was always intended to be a desktop replacement, so it mostly sat on my desk all of its life so the weight wasn't an issue. Having nice big screen was lovely for desktop use and playing the odd game.

It has a 1.8GHz Pentium CPU and an nVidia 6800Go video card. Not long after I bought it, the video card failed. I blogged about the issue and the rubbish Dell Support.

Well, it happened again just after the warranty ran out. Convenient, huh? Exactly the same problem as previously happened - corruption on the screen indicating hardware failure. I contacted Dell and they basically said they couldn't help, but if I wanted they would sell me a new video card for £200. I was torn and frustrated. I could get a cheap entire laptop for not much more than that, but not one with a decent 3D card and 17″ 1920×1200 display. I was irritated that they couldn't see that this was a recurrent issue with the machine which made me less inclined to pay more money to them.

Whilst on the phone the guy asked me at the end if I was 'satisfied' with the support. I said 'no' of course which he was surprised at and after trying to argue that I should change my mind, he forwarded me on to his manager. The manager then proceeded to argue that I should change my answer to 'yes' because the agent had provided me with the correct answer - which was that he couldn't help me. I was pretty peeved by this point that someone asked for my opinion of whether the transaction was a success and when I voiced displeasure, was badgered for a further 20 minutes to change my mind. I didn't.

So since then (October last year) my dell laptop has sat in a drawer, unused, wasted. I have jumped on ebay now and then to try and get hold of a 2nd hand video card - it's a modular MXM 6800Go - but never bought one. They're quite rare and command similar prices to what Dell quoted me.

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a co-worker about his broken Playstation 3. He'd read threads online about how the fault he has may be a common one, where many online suggest slamming the motherboard in the oven for a bit to 'reflow' the solder. Many reports online say this works.

I was in one of those moods yesterday, and dug out the laptop and managed to figure out how to take the thing apart and get the video card out. I wound the oven up to 200 degrees C and put the card in for 9 minutes. I figured I had nothing else to lose. If all those posts online were a massive conspiracy to get thick people such as me to put delicate electronics into a hot oven then they succeeded!

30 minutes later the card was cool enough for me to put it back in the machine. I carefully put it all back together and booted it up. It worked! The video corruption had gone. Well, almost. I was left with one vertical purple line about 3 pixels in from the left, which I can totally live with. In the drive was an old Crunchbang CD which booted up just fine.

So now, have I joined the ranks of the internet crazies who say putting electronics in the oven might cure it? Yup. Don't do it though, because it might all go horribly wrong and I wouldn't want you to blame me would I?

08 Mar 2010 9:51pm GMT

Today is International Women's Day, and it provides an opportunity for the world to focus on women's rights, and society's attitudes towards women. International Women's Day has been celebrated since the early 1900's and has been a key milestone through many key events that have affected women's rights and is now recognized as a national holiday in China, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.

When I first heard of International Women's Day, I was unsure of how I can contribute to celebrating the day and raising awareness of women's rights. On the website one approach it advises is:

The tradition sees men honouring their mothers, wives, girlfriends, colleagues, etc with flowers and small gifts. In some countries IWD has the equivalent status of Mother's Day where children give small presents to their mothers and grandmothers.

I think this is wonderful opportunity inside our global communities to do exactly this: to not only celebrate the contributions of women in our projects, campaigns and passions, but to also talk about ways in which we can break down the barriers and attitudinal prejudices that some women still face, particularly in largely male dominated software communities. Today is a great day for equality: let's all make the most of it.

As part of International Women's Day, the Ubuntu Women team have been running a competition to gather a collection of stories that share how women discovered Ubuntu and their experiences of joining our community. I thought this was a wonderful initiative: it really speaks to strong experiences of how Ubuntu can enable women to join a collaborative community, and how technology can be a true enabler.

Of the many stories submitted, there were to be two winners: one picked by the community, and I was given the honor of picking the second. Thankyou to the Ubuntu Women team for involving me in the unveiling of the winners, and this morning I announced both winners, read out their stories, and also read out a third that I thought was excellent too. Congratulations to Elvira Martinez and Karen Y. Perez for winning, and to Jen Phillips for getting read out too.

The video from this morning is below:

Can't see it? Click here!

With today being International Women's Day, I just want to share a few quick words on the women in my life. I have the privilege of having some incredible women as part of my life. In my family there is my wife, my mum, auntie's, cousins and other relatives, the many wonderful female friends both online and offline, and every day I have the pleasure of working with some truly remarkable women in the Open Source world, throughout the various communities I am part of. There has been much discussion, particularly in the Open Source community, about how we can encourage more women into our communities, and there has been some friction between different approaches. I don't see today as a day in which those debates should flourish, but as a day in which we should celebrate the women in our lives who help us flourish. Everyone single one of us has women who contribute so much to our lives and empower us every day, and I am thankful for all the women who bring color to my life, and give me the strength and energy to be who I am.

08 Mar 2010 7:49pm GMT

Fellow Ubuntu Triagers!

This week we're having a special Bug Day on Wednesday 10 March 2010, the target is...! Samba!
Yes! it's time to help our friends on the Ubuntu Server Team so If you have a spare minutes please join us!

* 5 New bugs need a hug
* 35 Incomplete bugs need a status check
* 75 Confirmed bugs need a review

Bookmark it, add it to your calendars, turn over those egg-timers!
* Wednesday 10 March 2010
* https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20100310

Are you looking for a way to start giving some love back to your
adorable Ubuntu Project?
Did you ever wonder what Triage is? Want to learn about that?
This is a perfect time!, Everybody can help in a Bug Day!
open your IRC Client and go to #ubuntu-bugs (FreeNode)
the BugSquad will be happy to help you to start contributing!

Wanna be famous? Is easy! remember to use 5-A-day so if you do a good
work your name could be listed at the top 5-A-Day Contributors in the
Ubuntu Hall of Fame page!

We are always looking for new tasks or ideas for the Bug Days, if you have one
add it to the Planning page https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/Planning

If you're new to all this, head to
http://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs

08 Mar 2010 6:01pm GMT

I asked last week if anyone knew of any cool podcasts I should subscribe to. I had a few suggested, one of which I'm now hooked on. Hacker Medley is a fairly new podcast started by Alex Graveley and Nat Friedman.

So far they've cranked out 3 episodes and in my opinion they're all great. They're all quite short but nicely packed with useful geeky information. Many Supreme Overlord geeks will probably say the content isn't geeky enough, but it's pitched at the right level for me. I learned plenty from all three episodes which covered quite different subject matters.

The first went into a little detail about the GSM vulnerability that's been talked about recently, and how one might exploit it in practice with some amusing and alarming suggestions. The second episode gave an introduction to NoSQL which I'd heard about and roughly knew the basics, but didn't appreciate why they existed or how widely they were used. In the third Nat and Alex talked about Web Sockets which again I had a slim passing knowledge of, but nothing I'd put on my CV.

I listened to all three episodes on the way to work this morning, and was left 'wanting more' which is always a good position for a podcaster to be in. The short duration (10-15 mins) and conversational style make for easy listening. The sound quality is great and the content is nicely paced. The presenters clearly know their stuff so can speak authoritatively on the subjects they discuss, which makes for a refreshing change from some podcasts.

I hope they can find time to crank out more episodes and sustain the quality. I'll certainly be looking out for more of these and prioritise them accordingly in my player queue.

08 Mar 2010 5:40pm GMT

Last week I was having a conversation with a friend, and while we were discussing some things I mentioned some Ubuntu tools that were completely natural for me since I use them every day in Ubuntu development and for my work, but he was completely amazed by them, so I decided to blog on the subject so more people can know about them.

I'm going to start with the one that impressed him the most: qa-regression-testing branch

The QA and security team maintain a test suite to check for regressions in packages they are updating. These tests are written with python unittest. Most of this test suite can be a little harmful for a production system, so it's recommended to run it using a chroot environment or a virtual machine and to help with that there is a make-test-tarball script. From the script:

export HOSTS="sec-intrepid-amd64 sec-hardy-amd64 sec-dapper-amd64″
export TEST=test-glibc-security
./make-test-tarball $TEST.py
for i in $HOSTS; do
scp /tmp/qrt-$TEST.tar.gz $i.local:
done
for i in $HOSTS; do
ssh -t $i.local "hostname; rm -rf qrt-$TEST; tar zxf qrt-$TEST.tar.gz; cd qrt-$TEST && ./$TEST.py -v"
done

As you can imagine HOSTS are the hostnames of the virtual machines where the tests are going to run.

Writing those test isn't rocket science, you just need a little knowledge of the package and the functionality you want to test and python unittesting, there is even a skeleton script that can help you start writing your test.

Hope this information is useful for you! And as usual, patches are welcome!

08 Mar 2010 4:52pm GMT

I just added apache 2.2.x daily builds to the Ubuntu Server Daily builds project. It is currently pulling the latest tip from Apache's SVN repository so results may very. You can get it at the PPA. If you have any questions let me know, and please report bugs in launchpad. [...]

08 Mar 2010 4:02pm GMT

A few days ago I released simple-scan 0.9.6. This version is the 1.0 release candidate.

There are two things I'd like to fix before 1.0:

• 
  
• There may be some issues with scanning from an automatic document feeder (ADF). Please comment on bug 512553 if you are having problems. (I don't have an ADF to test).
• 
  
• The generated PDF files do not JPEG compress the images. This is because the Cairo renderer does not support it. If you know of a C accessible library that can do this or even how to hard code this (the PDF files are just a single image per page) then please comment on bug 534122.
• 
  

08 Mar 2010 2:31pm GMT

Take a close look at this beautiful image of the Austin skyline ... Do you see some purple? Maybe some orange? How about a few clouds? Reminds me a bit of the new Ubuntu color scheme...

Well the Texas Linux Fest committee has accepted my proposal to demo the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud!

So if you're interested in seeing a demonstration of the 10.04 LTS Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud in action, join me in Austin, Texas on Saturday, April 10, 2010 at the first ever Texas Linux Fest.

In my presentation, I will use:

• One free Ubuntu Server ISO (10.04 Beta2 64-bit) burned to a USB stick
  
• Two laptops, and
  
• Twenty Minutes
  

And you will witness the ease of deploying an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), Canonical's open source implementation of an Amazon EC2-compatible cloud that you can run locally, in your own data center and on your own hardware.

In this presentation, you will learn about the UEC, Eucalyptus, Cloud topologies, the installation process, registering nodes, running and terminating instances in the Cloud, and the UEC Image Store.

Bring a blank 1GB+ USB key and I'll even burn you a copy of the same ISO I use in my presentation.

Cloud Computing is here, and Ubuntu is a phenomenal platform on which you can construct your private Cloud today. Since 2004, Ubuntu has revolutionized the Linux desktop. Attend this session and learn how Ubuntu is changing the landscape of the Linux server.

:-Dustin

08 Mar 2010 12:03pm GMT

We have entered the Lucid end-game. Which is great. Sadly, there were a whole mess of things for Quickly that I wanted to get done this cycle. I know I won't get to everything, but I can still do a lot. I decided to set out a list of goals, and to work on the list each night, hopefully picking one item off per evening.

08 Mar 2010 10:17am GMT

I bought lemonade and a granola bar from a sidewalk lemonade stand yesterday. Yes, spring is here. This (hopefully) means less computery time and more outsidery time. Yes, I just made up the word "outsidery." Coining new words should be part of my curiosities this month...

As for actual things I want to explore:

• Jetpack - Last month I switched back to Firefox from Chrome because Chrome just didn't hack it for me as a web developer. One thing that Chrome had that I really liked was the extension mechanism. Basically. it was just some javascript. Jetpack is an extension that provides similar support for Firefox. After diving into Firefox extensions a few times and needing a lifeguard to get out, I thought I'd explore Jetpack to create simpler Firefox extensions.
• Android SDK - I offered to help a friend create an Android App. No pay was involved, but I have been provided a more recent Android phone to replace my Android Dev Phone, so I actually have something of an obligation to complete and app for Android as opposed to just poking around in it.

08 Mar 2010 6:37am GMT

At 10am PSt / 1pm EST / 8pm UTC/GMT on Monday I will be doing another live videocast, and this one is a really special one. That day, March 8th, is International Women's Day and the Ubuntu Women team have been running a competition to gather a wonderful collection of stories about how women discovered Ubuntu. I have been given the honor of picking one of the two winners and the community has picked the other. The two winners will receive a fantastic collection of prizes.

I want to thank all of the awesome entries to the competition and thanks to the Ubuntu Women team for asking me to participate and share the winners. I look forward to see you all then!

Go and watch the live cast here.

08 Mar 2010 5:37am GMT

Don't forget if you're in the Columbia, MD area March 10th and want to learn about contributing to the KDE project in a non-technical manner come and join us for the Columbia Area Linux Users Group meeting!

Justin will be presenting his talk "Making the leap from KDE user to contributor". Justin will discuss simple ways for KDE users to become contributors, even without knowing a thing about developing code. His talk will provide specific details about various teams that exist within KDE, what you can do to help them out, and who to talk to if you have questions.

Justin Kirby is an active contributor to the KDE Promo team. He has been a user of KDE for about 3 years but more recently got actively involved in giving back to the community in July of 2009. You can learn more about the KDE Promo team on their wiki.

We will be meeting at the Columbia, MD offices of Tenable Network Security from 6:30-9pm. From 6:30-7 we'll be enjoying pizza and soda provided by Praxis Engineering. The entrance is at the back patio with the blue tables.

08 Mar 2010 3:19am GMT

Tonight I finally pushed the revisions to bzr that removed Docky from the Do source tree. For a while now Docky has been being developed as a stand alone application separate from Do. The two projects were limiting one another, so a decision was made to split them out. In the future there will be some of docky <-> do integration, but for now Docky is going to be the most kick ass Dock you've ever seen, and Do is going to be the most kickass launcher/everything-else-do-does you've ever seen.

In Ubuntu Lucid you can install Docky from the software center, otherwise the source is available at http://launchpad.net/docky. Today is the start of a new day in Do, development is going to start rolling again, and there should be a new kick ass release in the coming months. We've let things slide, but we're kicking it back into gear.

08 Mar 2010 3:00am GMT

If you're still wondering what happened during the Usability hackfest, then you clearly missed a lot of blog posts. The good news is that you can catch up with all the links being collected on the Hackfests, or you can cheat and go read Máirín's coverage, since she did an amazing job writing about what was being discussed.

I was there only for the last two days; the original plan was to attend a bit more of the event, but the travel from France to London took an unexpected 12 hours. I still had some good and useful time there, that I mostly used to get a good overview of what people are working on, and how this can be integrated in a GNOME roadmap. Here are some highlights:

• While I missed the discussion about nautilus, it seemed most people at the hackfest agreed on streamlining the nautilus user interface. I'd love to try the prototypes that were worked on: most of the proposed changes make sense to me. But getting rid of tabs and/or the split view will certainly trigger various reactions, and that's something that we cannot ignore...

• Thomas je parle français couramment Wood was kind enough to let me use his laptop charger nearly all the time - I had one, but not for the right laptop...

• Charline reported about a usability review of empathy, and this was definitely instructive. It's always fun to look at a user interface and finds what's wrong and what can be improved. In some way, it reminded me of some usability reviews that the usability team was doing for various applications a few years ago. That's an effort that we've been missing lately, and I'd love to see someone revive this!

• The work on the new control center seems to be moving along nicely. We should see the results in the next development cycle; don't be afraid to help Thomas if you're interested in this!

• While discussing preferences, and removing some of them that we think most (as in a huge percentage) people don't use, we mentioned the fact that when we remove some settings from the various configuration tools, a lot of people get unhappy, to say the least. This is understandable, but we also always pointed out that it should be easy to write a small tool to enable people to change those settings graphically again. That never happened, but we'd like to avoid further unhappiness. This is how the idea of GNOME Plumbing was born. And I foolishly proposed to implement this.

• It was funny to see Garrett breaking his openSUSE installation. Except that it shouldn't break this way when using GNOME:Factory on 11.2. Oops.

• I had a good chat with Jon about GNOME 3. There's so much we can deliver during the whole GNOME 3.x cycle... We're focusing on 3.0 right now, but we need to prepare the following releases too. It was motivating to get reminded of the various areas we should explore, and motivation is something that was most welcome :-)

• It was good to catch up with Lucas, just a few days before Julia magically appeared :-) He's still one of my heroes.

• On Friday morning, Bastien told to Mairin, Garrett, Jakub and Hylke: okay, you want tools for designers; we're a bunch of hackers here, but we need you to design the tools you need. This resulted in a good discussion. Except that now, we really need some people to sit down and implement this. I guess this could be an interesting Summer of Code project!

• Seeing Willie get hopes for usable accessibility support in GNOME Shell was a real pleasure. It's been a hard topic for months, and knowing that there might be some light at the end of the tunnel is already good news.

• Matthew invited me to a card sorting session about settings and how to group them. It was a new experience for me, and seeing someone struggle to organize settings was eye-opening: I got the feeling that even with just one person doing this seriously, we can improve the overall experience for many users. I'm intrigued how usability people deal with different people having conflicting behaviors, though.

Many thanks to Canonical and Google for sponsoring this hackfest, and also thanks to Klaas and Novell for letting me go on a short notice :-)

I have high hopes that putting all those designers and usability people in one room together during one week will also make the GNOME Usability team move forward again. Usability is an essential part of our DNA, but we've been slowing down our efforts there, instead of accelerating as we should have done. This hackfest should put us back on track!

08 Mar 2010 2:15am GMT

Here's a photo of Iain, design team project manager, edited to expose his love of colour:

08 Mar 2010 1:00am GMT