fidzu : Ubuntu

The second of a 13-part series created by Tony Whitmore detailing how to mix a podcast in Ardour on Ubuntu. It was created initially so that members of the Ubuntu UK LoCo team could take part in the Ubuntu UK Podcast. However it was decided to release it because it may be useful to other podcasters, or those wishing to learn more about mixing in Ardour.

In part 2

• Some tips regarding jack and realtime kernels
• Sessions in Ardour
• Adding tracks
• Add audio files to tracks

Note: This screencast was originally recorded at a resolution of 2560 by 1024, so is in a very wide screen format. If you have a small screen we recommend you view the lower resolution versions of the video.

Duration 8m20s.

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23 Jul 2008 9:48am GMT

OK, so I previously wrote that perhaps we should reevaluate the stated mission of Planet Ubuntu, which is currently:

Planet Ubuntu is a window into the world, work and lives of Ubuntu developers and contributors.

The point being that we've now got so many blogs being aggregated as well as quite a diversity of opinions and sensibilities towards what is appropriate content, that maybe we should reduce the scope to posts pertaining (at least somewhat) to Ubuntu. I've seen quite a few "I read Planet Ubuntu to learn about Ubuntu, not …" comments. The other approach to dealing with "offensive" posts is to make a claim of Code of Conduct violation and take the offending party to the Community Council. Here's a couple reasons why I think these two approaches fail:

• limiting the scope of Planet Ubuntu doesn't guarantee unoffensive behavior. It is true that most offensive posts are nontechnical and not about Ubuntu specifically, but it's certainly not all of them.
• limiting the scope of Planet Ubuntu takes away a certain amount of the "humanness" of the community. Ubuntu is not only "Linux for human beings", it is also developed by human beings.
• trying to legislate morality is both undesirable and incredibly difficult for the Community Council to do. They are trying to represent a community made up of people from nations and cultures all over the world, and it's essentially impossible to satisfy both the moral sensibilities and personal liberties of everybody at the same time. I'm also fairly sure it is neither their right nor their charter to tell people what is and is not offensive.

OK, so what do we do? Is the status quo healthy and desirable? Well, I personally don't think so. Obviously some people are getting offended (rightly or wrongly), other people don't like being censored (rightly or wrongly), and still other people just want to read about Ubuntu and be informed about what's going on.

On further thought about what the root cause of the current discontent may be I've come up with two possible reasons, IMO:

• the repurposing [yes, I took that long to explain the title] of Planet Ubuntu into a news delivery medium. Planet Ubuntu is currently a mixture of Ubuntu news, announcements, activity, reports, team blogs, personal happenings and opinion pieces. I know if I want to let everybody know about something, I put it on Planet. Reader expectations play heavily into whether a post is deemed "appropriate" and what you would say in a newspaper article is generally going to be quite different from what you're going to say friend after work over a drink.
• the non-technical nature of Planet Ubuntu. More than most planets around the open source world, Planet Ubuntu is fairly non-technical. This is a reflection of the fact that it's not an aggregator of Ubuntu developers, but of Ubuntu Members, many of whom contribute to Ubuntu by way of support (LoCo teams, IRC support, forums) or other "non-technical" avenues.

So, a couple of conclusions I've come to:

• The Community Council will not solve our problem
• We should try to separate "news" from the "window into the world, work and lives of Ubuntu developers and contributors" by pushing for an easy to use and effective Fridge. Fridge should be our primary web news outlet, not Planet. I think the result would be a shifting of reader expectations back towards the original purpose of Planet Ubuntu.
• There will always be offensive (to somebody at least) posts on Planet occasionally, but as long as people aren't publishing illegal or other clearly unacceptable content (which the Community Council has already ruled on) we should favor freedom of expression. I believe we can do this because the expectation of the reader should be that of peaking into Ubuntu Member lives, warts and all.
• That same freedom of expression should allow people to respond critically to offensive posts. Open and respectful communication is going to win out over rules, censorship, and governance pretty much every time. We're all friends here, we can tell each other when we mess up

Anyway, not sure if this will be helpful for anybody or accomplish anything, but I at least feel good having said it

23 Jul 2008 7:07am GMT

Me and some friends are currently organizing an event for Ubuntu enthusiasts in Manila, called Ubuntu Love Day Manila, tentatively scheduled on the 23rd of August. The venue is still for confirmation, but we plan it to be at the University of the Philippines campus in Diliman, Quezon City. We plan this to be a half-day [...]

23 Jul 2008 5:43am GMT

OK, so rather than my usually long and boring posts I'm going to try to do some smaller/quicker posts just so I can get some thoughts out without it turning into some boring epic that nobody wants to read

• the latest discussion about appropriateness of Planet Ubuntu posts - even though Stephan can't seem to stay out of trouble I really feel that the problem is with this one little sentence: "Planet Ubuntu is a window into the world, work and lives of Ubuntu developers and contributors." I think we've perhaps grown too large to not limit aggregation to Ubuntu-related posts. [Edit: After some further thought I think I might change my position a bit. I'll give more info in a follow-up post]
• upcoming Ubuntu QA team meeting - tomorrow (23rd) at 17:00UTC we'll be having a meeting in #ubuntu-meeting. There's a few agenda items that people might be interested in so if you'd like to contribute feel free to drop by.
• hiking this weekend - my wife and I hiked Mt. Rose this weekend with some friends from church. Total the hike was ~10.6 miles (17 km) and had a ~1,900 ft. (579 m) elevation gain. We started at 8,900 ft. (2710 m) and it took us 7 hrs to hike to the summit, eat a quick lunch, and get back to the trailhead. You skinny hiking fanatics might not be impressed, but it was the longest/hardest hike I've done.
• related to the previous item, anybody have a good suggestion on a place to put pics of my hike and other events? I've heard both good and bad things about Picasa and Flickr, what would you suggest? I'm looking for a pretty easy, simple, storage and sharing site.

23 Jul 2008 5:16am GMT

Congratulations to members of our newly approved LoCos: Lithuania and Tunisia!

The Japanese Team continues doing excellent work as it passed its yearly review with flying colors!

23 Jul 2008 4:24am GMT

As said on the previous post, I attended LUGradio Live last weekend. I'm still very, very, VERY tired, flying isn't exactly an enjoyable experience ever, and this time the return flights were delayed because of bad weather conditions in Amsterdam.

Anyway, I left home on Friday around 0100 in the morning. The first flight to Amsterdam left at 0615 local time and I was in Wolverhampton about 13 hours from leaving home. I've never been to England if you don't count the two times at Stanstead Airport on my way to and from GUADEC'06 in Spain, so it was really fun to take a train to Wolverhampton from Birmingham International - seeing some scenery on the way with English houses, canals and red brick buildings! (Yes, one has to take the most of everything!) I was lucky enough to have someone guide me around the whole weekend, and I guess Mez really thought I was insane oohing and aahing about the scenery - yes, it can amaze someone who has seen double decker buses and attached house rows and canals and such since age 3 watching Postman Pat on telly but never actually seeing them!

Anyway, after checking into Hotel Britannia it was time to head out for the preconference drinks. Finally a chance to meet so many people I've not met before! It was also time to dispense some of the "Greetings from Finland" gifts I had brought with me, so for example ompaul got one of the cloudberry liqueur bottles to spice up ice cream with. The time flied and I remember giving out my business cards, crocheting and walking back to the hotel…

To wake up to ompaul's SMS "Goin 4 breakfast" with a mild headache wasn't fun. Then again, him telling a joke that he doesn't use emacs because he doesn't lisp was excellent :-P <emacsfangirl />

To wrap up both days talks with a few words:

• I loved emmajane's talk. All of the stuff in her speech was exactly as I think too.
• OpenKnowledge is a thing that should be encouraged more - I should know, having been Wikipedia activist for years
• Now I understand why Wubi might be such a problem - we really need a better way to clear out the dirty flag from ntfs with Linux
• History of Samba is somewhat amusing
• I guess I *should* go to Assembly this year
• Respect to mjg59, AGAIN
• When shall I have time and energy to start cycling again and to log the routes to OpenStreetMap?
• Oooh, ooh, I'm on the top ten contributors of Terminator!

Meeting the people behind the voices of LUGradio was cool. Chinny Raccoon was kyuuuut. Crocheted a lot since had no wifi. Bought stuff from O'Reilly desk again (Learning Python and Craft: Fashioning Technology), drank way too much coffee to stay awake, enjoyed the little karaoke I listened to before heading to sleep, and am considering ordering Linux Magazine again.

not related to the conference itself:

• Black pudding at hotel breakfast table tasted more like blood pancakes than mustamakkara
• Had my first curry and first fish and chips
• Will not drink Strongbow for a while, it got boring after a while
• OMG things is so cheap in UK! example01 vs. comparison01, example02 vs. comparison02
• OMG the variety of food in restaurants and shops! Vegetarian and organic choices everywhere!

hmhm. I want to move to England. I've fallen in love with something there :-)

23 Jul 2008 1:41am GMT

23 Jul 2008 12:43am GMT

(c) 2008 Barbie barbie.missbarbell.co.uk

So, this weekend just gone was the weekend of LugRadio Live. Here's how it went for me. Friday morning, I got up, finished packing my stuff into my suitcase and headed off to the airport to go and pick up Myrtti. After missing a couple of buses, eventually got there, just in time to meet her as she was coming out of Arrivals.

We then headed off to Wolverhampton, with Myrtti being amazed by English houses (don't ask me - I don't know either) arriving in Wolverhampton 20 minutes before we could check into the hotel. So we went for food. Well, actually, I went for food, and Myrtti came with me. Moon Under Water has nice food, as do most Wetherspoons.

Anyway, from there on, Myrtti and I went and checked into the hotel, and then had a bit of a chat (and checked on the CaveyCam) while waiting for the evening events to kick off.

The evening events… god. well… I don't remember a lot of it. I remember coming in, sitting down, and sitting down with Daviey, ompaul, and a couple of other people (I can't remember who!) and well - the night went on from there.

Left the Evening Events @ around midnight, and walked back with ompaul and Myrtti to the hotel. Couldn't sleep, as there was a dry-riser next to my room, so at 4am, I gave up, and registered on flickr, uploading the photos from the night that I'd taken.

Then, at 6am, I went hunting for breakfast, had a little walk round Wolverhampton, and found that Spar had food, so bought a couple of sausage sandwiches from there (and a couple of cans of Relentless). Went back to the hotel room, answered the wake up call, and headed to the venue just before 7.

I was the second person there after Chris (Proctor) - am proud of that, and spent the morning setting up all those lovely banners that you people saw (and chasing after some that had gone missing).

Did anyone notice that the can of relentless I'd thrown in the bin had been used to help stick up the Main Stage schedule poster? No? Good… twas amusing though.

Thanks to Mrs Ron for providing the Bacon Sarnies though

Anyways, sat down and started to film the intro, then moved onto the first talk in the Atrium (I signed up for the morning sessions on crew - why oh why?). I had to try and keep myself from falling asleep due to no sleep in the first one, but towards the end, the caffeine kicked in, and I started to wake up.

Next up was Bruuuuunnoooooo's talk… it was "tres amusant" … I enjoyed watching it, and am glad that the audio isn't coming from the camera, or all you'd have heard was my laughing.

After that, It was lunch. Woo. Headed off to the Moon Under Water for what was meant to be an SBLUG gathering, but, couldn't find them in the packed pub, so ended up sitting with Barbie and JJ and chatting to them while we had food.

Came back and scoped out the Exhibitors for a bit (and yes, played some TF2) before going to watch the gong-a-thong… mrben… raccoon pants… I won't say anymore, or my mind will explode. Though I must say, I did love Matthew Garrett's talk on how he hates the community.

After that, I went back and gamed for a bit, before heading to the Live and Unleashed recording. Found Myrtti again there, and gave her a bit of a shoulder rub while watching it (and laughing my ass off too!)

So. There brought an end to Day 1… except, it wasn't over. By this time, I was feeling pretty crap… no sleep. So went and packed up, then headed back to the hotel, slept for a bit, then headed to Karaoke.

I didn't stay long, and was on the soft drinks all night, but managed to fit in a rendition of "Summer Nights" - I do a mean Olivia Newton John. I'm kind of dissapointed that the guy I was singing it with (my Ex Boss) didn't know the words, but I've had a promise from froodie that next year she'll do the John Travolta, and I can do the Olivia Newton John. Speaking of froodie - great rendition of "Sweet Child O' Mine" - I was singing along in the back of the venue (and drawing funny looks by air-drumming/air-guitaring)

Sunday morning. I was still tired, but due to exhaustion - I'd actually managed to sleep. Though - I think the fact that the following comment was made in IRC means that I didn't look as fresh-faced as I'd have like to believe I was.

<+ompaul> Mez, on sunday you looked like someone had eaten enough of your brain not to kill you but to stop you from understanding there was sunday

So yeah. Once again, set up at a ridiculously early time (this time 8am though) - I managed to be one of the people on the Coffee Run to Starbucks, so that worked well for me. I didn't have to do much.

Started off the morning upstairs in the Lightning talk room, watching Barbies talk (and getting told off for raising my hand to answer his questions). Was still a good talk the second time round. And some of the stuff I forgot the first time, I've now seen again. I must apologise to Barbie for laughing to myself towards the end of the talk though. When you have a crew radio on, and you can hear Jono telling everyone he's in the toilet with a speaker, you can't help but laugh (I so wish that the LCD display in the atrium was something we could send messages to - I would have sent "FlashHug Jono now - he's in the loo!")

Next was Agostino Russo's talk about Wubi - which was quite interesting. I've not actually used wubi myself, but to see it working in situ, and to hear about the geekyness behind it was actually quite cool.

Lunchtime again, where I spent outside eating sandwhiches and munch provided by MrsRon again, before I came back in, scoped the exhibitors again, and generally mingled talking with people until it was time for Chris Jones' (Ng) talk about terminator.

Next was the goodbyes… Sad to see them go - but - they WILL be back next year! (YAY!). Sad to see the podcast end, but it was a good ending to a good weekend.

Then we packed up, and found out that the bar we'd arranged to goto afterwards… was closed…. FAIL. Got it sorted out in the end, and after food, ended up at the Novotel bar, where there were quite a few people. Twas good talking to people there, a nice friendly relaxed atmosphere, and a nicely stocked bar. I must say though - I don't think I've laughed so much in a long time than I did with standing outside smoking with Xalior, Daviey and a few others (failhat!). Xalior is an extremely funny guy.

Anyways, from there, it was time to head home, after another night in the hotel, and taking Myrtti on a whirlwind tour of Birmingham's Music Stores

To me, it'll be a weekend to remember. There were a lot of firsts for me, and a lot of fun.

I must say though, thumbs up to Tony Whitmore and Ron Wellsted for doing an amazing job at organising everything this year. And to all the rest of the crew who made everything run so smoothly (and Tig for the trousers! and barely leaving the sound desk!)

22 Jul 2008 11:34pm GMT

The second evening/weekend meeting will be held on Saturday the 26th from 2-4pm at the Common Grounds Cafe. It should be a good time of caffeine and geekery. Parking is located behind the building off of Grand Blvd.

If you need directions then see this.

22 Jul 2008 11:17pm GMT

This just came across the email, courtesy of Nick Ellery:
---
This week's Hug Day will be focusing on Apt! There are currently about
127 New bug reports regarding Apt and we will be focusing on reducing
that number in addition to looking at some outstanding Incomplete and
Confirmed bugs. We'll do this by following up with reporters,
documenting test cases, and confirming bug reports. The event
will be held in #ubuntu-bugs on Freenode. The list of targeted bugs
and tasks is posted at:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay/20080724

Our goal is to deal with all of the bugs on that list.

So on 24 July 2008, in all timezones, we'll be meeting in #ubuntu-bugs
on irc.freenode.net for another Ubuntu Hug Day.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UbuntuBugDay
--

So if you have some time and want to help out, come join us!

22 Jul 2008 10:06pm GMT

After declaring inbox bankruptcy, changing the way I collect and manage my email, and tweeting a few times about my attempt to embrace the zen of Inbox Zero, I decided to automate the process, removing any potential editorialising between email client and reporting of the project status. I've set it up to post at 22:00 every night.

Here's the script if anyone else wants to play (it also demonstrates how to post to twitter with wget, which may be handy for other automation projects):

#!/bin/sh
MB_POST="http://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml
  http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml"

MB_USER=state your username
MB_PASS=state your password

IZ="$(find Maildir/cur/ Maildir/new/ -type f | wc -l)"
if [ $IZ -gt 0 ]; then
  IZ="$IZ"
else
  IZ="ZERO"
fi
IZ="inbox zero status: $IZ"

for MB_HTTP in $MB_POST; do
  wget -qO- --delete-after 
    --user="$MB_USER" --password="$MB_PASS" 
    --post-data "status=$IZ" $MB_HTTP > /dev/null
done

Update: Fixed script to use any Twitter-style microblog API, and included example URL from identi.ca. Go freedom!

Update: Even better, just post to all of them at once! Also fixed anchor… Despite switching to the visual editor weeks ago, I'm still not 100% used to the convenience of it.

22 Jul 2008 9:47pm GMT

Hello launchaders!

I am pleased to announce the opening Bug 250952 which provides the required integration of a Away system for developers in Launchpad!

Thanks for your support Barry Warsaw, and good work!

22 Jul 2008 9:21pm GMT

I know everyone reading this is thinking "you know, I sure would like to join some more IRC channels." We'll here's your chance!

The Free Software Foundation has just registered the channel #fsf-members on Freenode. This channel is specifically for communication with other FSF associate members. So come on in and hang out! If you want to speak with a more general audience on FSF topics, #fsf is, and has been, available.

And as a teaser: if you are a FSF Associate Member, you can ask to get a FSF cloak on Freenode. Just send your member number and registered IRC nick to campaigns@fsf.org

Hope to see a bunch of the Ubuntu people there!

22 Jul 2008 9:00pm GMT

The first of a 13-part series created by Tony Whitmore detailing how to mix a podcast in Ardour on Ubuntu. It was created initially so that members of the Ubuntu UK LoCo team could take part in the Ubuntu UK Podcast. However it was decided to release it because it may be useful to other podcasters, or those wishing to learn more about mixing in Ardour.

In part 1

• A brief introduction to the applications used
• Some tips on setting up the environment

Note: This screencast was originally recorded at a resolution of 2560 by 1024, so is in a very wide screen format. If you have a small screen we recommend you view the lower resolution versions of the video.

Duration 5m06s.

Stream (requires flash player)
2560x1024 Flash
1280x512 Flash
640x256 Flash
(Video will play in a pop-up window)

Download
2560x1024 Ogg/Vorbis/Theora

Download
2560x1024 Flash Video
1280x512 Flash Video
640x256 Flash Video

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.

22 Jul 2008 8:29pm GMT

Looks like drizzle is announced now. I've spent a bit of time after work and on lunch breaks helping out here and there, and I'm excited about working on a database project again. Why am I working on the project? Average time from when I write a patch to when it goes into the tree has been measured in minutes, not in hours/days/weeks/months. Yes, I'm running the test suite first. Yes, I'm getting another person to review the code first. This is an example of how adding people to a project can slow it down, and how getting out of the way of the engineers can have amazing results. We set up bug tracker, code hosting, team organization, package build system, mailing list, IRC channel, and more in a matter of minutes, and it has been amazing to see how fast the code is coming in from all over the world. There was truly a pent-up demand for somewhere to be able to freely work on ideas.

If you haven't read Ian's paper about the community-agile process, you should. You can see many of the ideas there in how the drizzle project is run. There is lots of work to do, and I think it's going to be great fun to see how far we can push drizzle. And the code is safely in a FLOSS distributed version control system that I have mirrors of, so nobody can put the code behind a corporate firewall and seal it off - it's alive and growing and unstoppable. If anyone wants to mirror the code, that is fine and I'll help you do it.

Sometimes people look at databases as boring, as a solved problem. I'm here to tell you that building interesting applications that have any kind of persistent state is not a solved problem, there are a lot more fantastic ideas to try, and some ideas that have only recently become practical. Check out the code and put up a branch with some ideas of your own!

We don't have packages for ubuntu yet, but we will be putting up a PPA soon. As you can imagine, there is still a fair amount of work involved in finishing the renaming and making packages that don't conflict with existing mysql installs.

22 Jul 2008 7:43pm GMT

Was at Barnes and Noble with my wife and I always check on the Linux computer book section to see what's new there. The section is always surrounded/swamped by the Microsoft Press books, but found the Official Ubuntu Book 3rd edition, special Barnes and Noble edition.

As mentioned earlier this edition has an entire chapter dedicated to the Ubuntu Forums but also contains a Kubuntu 8.04 CD showing off KDE. Only disappointment is the Kubuntu version is not the KDE 4 version but the official KDE 3 version.

Go out and pick up the book today.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Official-Ubuntu-Book/Benjamin-Mako-Hill/e/9780137151028

22 Jul 2008 6:54pm GMT