Matthew East

I recently posted about the Water Aid 6 Peaks Challenge that I am taking part in. The challenge starts this Friday, 4 July 2008.

The fundraising effort is going well - we have now raised over £3000 towards our target of £4000 for Water Aid! However we need more support, so please donate if you can.

I’ll try and report progress with the Challenge here! Meanwhile if anyone has any last minute tips for avoiding blisters and generally staying in one piece, post here!

As some may know I have entered, together with a team from my company, Holman Fenwick Willan, in this July’s Water Aid 6 Peaks Challenge.

This is a challenge to visit the summits of the highest peaks in each of the six regions of the British Isles, all within 72 hours: Snaefell (Isle of Man), Snowdon (Wales), Scafell Pike (England), Ben Nevis (Scotland), Slieve Donard (Ulster) and Corran Tuathail (Republic of Ireland). The walking amounts to a total of 50 miles with climbs of 20,000 feet, two sea crossings, not to mention 1,000 miles of driving in our trusty camper van. In 72 hours…

Our team is made up of 6 walkers and 2 drivers.

The challenge is in aid of a very worthy charity, Water Aid, and we have undertaken to raise the very significant sum of £4000.

We would be very glad of your support, which can be given at our Just Giving website page.

The more donations we receive, the more inspired we will be in our training! Please also feel free to pass these details directly onto any family, friends, colleagues or total strangers who you think may be interested in supporting us in this challenge.

The Community Council has recently implemented some changes to community governance processes which it believes reflect a significant improvement in one area of community governance: applications for Ubuntu membership.

The Ubuntu project is rapidly expanding and the previous process for approval of new Ubuntu members has been struggling to keep up with the increased participation. The list of pending membership applications was so long that the Community Council cannot focus on other issues. Also, it is often difficult or impossible for potential new members to attend Community Council meetings which do not coincide with their availability in a particular timezone.

As a result three regional membership boards have been created to consider applications from contributors to the project for Ubuntu membership. The boards are:

• Americas
• Europe, Middle East and Africa
• Asia / Oceania

These boards will meet each week at staggered times and days, to ensure that as many candidates as possible have a chance to attend a meeting which fits their schedules. If necessary, candidates from one region may attend a meeting of a board for a different region, if this suits their schedule better.

The Community Council will continue to oversee the process for the first few months of its operation. New members will be reported in the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter.

For more information, and if you are interested in applying for Ubuntu membership, please visit the membership wiki page.

The change will leave the Community Council free to take a more active role in its review of other aspects of the community. The Community Council now meets according to a fixed timetable every two weeks.

Seriously long time no blog… life has been incredibly busy recently.

Ubuntu appeared on Italian terrestrial television yesterday, by way of a short piece on the program “Neapolis”, broadcast by RAI 3. RAI 3 is a state run television channel in Italy, and is popular for having plenty of interesting programs on culture and current events.

Congratulations to the members of the Italian local community team who made this possible: Fabio Marzocca (who appears in the clip), Milo Casagrande and Flavia Weisghizzi.

Watch the clip here (Italian language).

Since my Thinkpad T43 came back from IBM having been repaired, I can no longer run Ubuntu on it: the hard drive is no longer detected. This is pretty disastrous…

I’ve posted the details of the problem to the Ubuntu forums.

If anyone reading this can help I’d be much obliged!

Someone on the United Kingdom Ubuntu mailing list pointed out this excellent interview with Mark Shuttleworth on the show “Open Season”. I hadn’t listened to the show before but it was very well done. One thing that didn’t get quite answered was a point about how Ubuntu manages to ensure that every package is reliable despite the high proportion of volunteers who have commit access. The show’s hosts seemed totally blown away by the fact that around 50% of people working directly on Ubuntu’s core packages are volunteers not employed by Canonical.

It’s worth explaining just a little further how Canonical and volunteers fit into the Ubuntu ecosystem. Although the show’s hosts were kind of looking at the Ubuntu project as “Canonical’s project”, that’s only true to an extent. Although Canonical provides the majority of resources that drive the Ubuntu project and keep it healthy (so, the engine of the project), the Ubuntu project’s governance processes (the design of the project) are independent and community based. This allows volunteers to work alongside Canonical employees with equality.

So how does that work? Each person contributing to Ubuntu packages goes through a rigorous process in order to get access to the core packages. The first step is to contribute to the Masters of the Universe team (”MOTU”), who take care of the “universe” component in Ubuntu, when the non-core packages are kept. This is a hugely important team in the Ubuntu community, and is almost exclusively volunteer based. When the team is satisfied that the quality of a person’s contribution is consistently good, commit access to the “universe” component is granted (and a person joins the ubuntu-motu team - currently 76 members). The strength of the processes and the individuals involved is so good that the MOTU team (through the MOTU Council) now takes that decision on its own. So this process is basically handled exclusively by volunteers. To gain access to the core packages, in the “main” component, a further period of contribution is required, during which existing Ubuntu developers can assess the quality of the work being put in. If appropriate, the Technical Board (which is again a community body, although it is currently made up of 3/4 Canonical employees) will take the decision of whether to grant commit access to the main component (and a person joins the ubuntu-core-dev team - currently 46 members).

Each Canonical employee goes through the same process that a volunteer contributor goes through.

This process (and the others which make up the Ubuntu community) is what makes Ubuntu a special project, and is in part the secret of its success.

More information is available at the Ubuntu Developers wiki page and for more information about the Ubuntu project’s community governance processes, see the processes page on the website.

I’ll be away in Crete with little internet access from 18 to 28 September. I’ll be checking email occasionally, but not too frequently

If you need to get hold of me, phone, sms or my work email address are the best ways.

I’ve finally got around to organising the photos from our wedding in Italy on 30 June and the subsequent party in England on 4 August. We’re still waiting for the photos from the official photographer but in the meantime it’s nice to have a collection of photos from the people who came along.

I’ve also added some photos of the long weekend in Paris we spent at the end of August. We spent quite a lot of time walking around and seeing the main sites: we really liked Paris which has an amazingly uniform architecture in the centre, really beautiful. The metro is pretty horrendous but otherwise we had a great time. The highlight for me was the Sacre Coeur Basilica, just spectacular.

I use webmail fairly frequently to supplement thunderbird for email. I run an imap server with squirrelmail as the front end. However, partly as a result of server-side loads and partly because of the software, webmail is a painfully slow process and my workflow is ridiculously impeded.

As a potential solution I’ve recently been tinkering with gmail. The speed with which I can access my email is vastly improved and with it my productivity. However, I’m going to have to test it quite a lot more to see if it’s compatible with my email workflow. I’ve already got a number of gripes, although (so far) none of them are prohibitive. Here are some comments on the experience: if anyone can help out with overcoming these problems, I’d be pretty grateful. On the other hand, I’m interested in hearing other people’s experiences with gmail, with both good and bad feedback.

Spam filtering: pretty good, seems to recognise most of my spam (doing a better job than the spamassassin installation I run) and due to the increase in speed it’s easier to mark spam. I’ve found one genuine email in the spam directory so far.

Mailing lists: the failure to automatically reply-to-mailing-list is annoying; the complete absence of Reply To List is a major problem.

Lack of IMAP support: is annoying because messages I’ve read in gmail still appear as unread in my mail client and I can’t share my draft and sent messages from thunderbird with gmail. It also means I can’t import mailing list archives (minor annoyance).

Filtering: another minor annoyance is the absence of being able to filter on precise message headers; however the labelling/tagging system (instead of folders) works well and it’s nice to have a workflow where messages which trigger more than one filter have multiple tags rather than being forced into a single folder. Because of the need to filter on the to: field, there doesn’t appear to be a way to separate out the approach to messages sent to a mailing list (which I want archived/tagged) from those sent to both a mailing list and me personally (which I want in my inbox).

Multiple accounts/identities: when responding to a message gmail fails to correctly preserve the identity that an email was sent to as the identity from whom I wish to respond.

Absence of GnuPG support

Space: I’m not sure that the 2800MB of space is going to be sufficient for handling large numbers of mailing lists, in the long term.

Look forward to hearing more experiences.

The mentoring project for Ubuntu documentation is going really well - the mailing list has sprung back to life after several slow months and a number of new aspiring contributors with ideas and enthusiasm have come on the scene.

Phil Bull, who was the brain father of the mentoring project, deserves serious credit for taking the idea, making it work, and galvanizing the team generally.

So, if you’d like to get involved with writing and contributing ideas for the Ubuntu documentation, head over to the mentoring project wiki page.

Even if you’re not interested in contributing content, there are lots of things we’d like your feedback for; here are a few examples:

• Do you actually use the Ubuntu Help System? (In particular, we want to hear from you about this if you’re a regular computer user, rather than a person with existing substantial technical skills). If not, how would you suggest increasing users’ awareness of this resource?
• What would you like to see included in the Ubuntu Help System that isn’t there already?
• How can we improve the online community wiki? (Clue - there are a lot of different answers to this one, we’ve drafted some of our own thoughts at this spec).

Feel free to post your thoughts on this blog, on the documentation mailing list, or as bug reports (please do a quick search to see if we’re already aware of them).