Matthew East

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).

I’ve seen a growth in the amount of people blogging about how to do particular tasks on Ubuntu. The material is excellent, but isn’t available to users who are searching the official Ubuntu documentation.

This post is to encourage those people to contribute directly to the documentation website. Doing so has huge advantages, both for end users (who get to have all their questions answered in one place, which they know they can trust), and for the documenters themselves (who get to work together, and become massively more efficient as a result).

Collaboration is what makes free software ultimately a better model for quality than proprietary software, and free documentation can benefit from the same principle. But it needs people to work together. I’d encourage all those who post documentation to their blog to read this document, which sets out (on behalf of the Ubuntu Documentation Team) the reasons why collaboration is so powerful:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DocumentationTeam/IndependentDocEfforts

If anyone wants to discuss the issues around this, please contact me or the documentation team.

Congratulations on the Italian lower house of Parliament on their recent Linux adoption (article in Italian). Any member of Parliament who so wishes can have our favourite operating system installed on their computer. They have chosen SLED, rather than Ubuntu, unfortunately, but in any case it’s a significant adoption story for Italy. The article is also a striking example of how powerfully the Tux penguin symbol is associated with Linux, at least in Italy.

The reasons for the adoption have been cited as “to save money and in the name of pluralism and flexibility”. Good for them. It would be nice to see the UK giving some recognition to open source software in the same way.

I haven’t blogged for a long time now, having been pretty busy with various things, so it’s time for a quick update.

I’m now married. The wedding (in Fano, Italy) went spectacularly well, I think, mainly thanks to my new sister in law and her husband, who worked incredibly hard on organisation. The weather was perfect, church was beautiful, service memorable, food incredible, and generally people seemed to have a good time. I might post some more detailed info when I get some pictures together. Now we are racking our brains trying to decide on a honeymoon venue…

This is old news now, but I’ve been appointed to the Ubuntu Community Council. It’s quite an honour as well as a responsibility and I’m excited to be working with the rest of the Council on the issues which are going to affect the growing Ubuntu volunteer community and the direction of Ubuntu in general.

Even older news – back in February we bought a flat, so since then have been working hard trying to make things look nice. We’re enjoying living in Rotherhithe (pictures), which I still maintain is the nicest place in London to live if you like being close to the centre of London but want to forget that you live in a huge and busy city. The area used to be completely made up of docks where ships would come off the Thames and unload their various goods. Relatively recently they filled in a number of the docks and created a residential area. But the beauty of the area is that a lot of the docks have been left, and there is an abundance of parks. It’s by the river too so there are lots of places to stroll around. I like being around water. There is even a farm here (pictures).

That’s all for now.

Finally we’ve managed to get the online documentation for Ubuntu 7.04 up and running. Check it out at help.ubuntu.com. The documentation for Ubuntu 7.04 is the product of some serious restructuring of the way we present documentation in Ubuntu, and the documentation team hopes that users will find it useful.

It’s been pretty heavy regenerating all the various parts of this website and we’re hoping to do some serious thinking over the next release cycle to improve the way the online documentation is presented. Related specifications are here and here.

This morning I finally got round to sending off an email to all contributors to the Ubuntu documentation wiki about the change of licensing policy. For anyone who didn’t receive it (I’ve had well over 900 bounces already) and who is reading Planet Ubuntu, here is an explanation of the change.

Dear Contributor to the Ubuntu Wiki,

You may recall we emailed all contributors to the Ubuntu wiki some time ago asking for views on a potential change of the Wiki copyright policy.

This email is sent to you to inform you of the outcome of that consultation process and the resulting change to the licensing policy on the documentation wiki.

NOTE: this change applies to the documentation wiki only, at https://help.ubuntu.com/community, and not to the Ubuntu development wiki at https://wiki.ubuntu.com. In the future we will be considering the scope for a similar change to be made to the Ubuntu development wiki.

= Decision =

After discussion among the Ubuntu Community Council and an initial consultation period, it has been decided that new material on the documentation wiki should be licensed under a free license, CC-by-SA. The documentation wiki will be changed to make this clear to those creating or editing pages, and of course external links from the Wiki to documentation under other licences will continue to be welcome.

This decision is not intended in any way to underestimate the value of contributions, but rather to ensure that the material on the documentation wiki complies with the same standards of openness as the Ubuntu project as a whole.

= Rationale =

The documentation wiki is a collaborative resource, and the product of the Ubuntu community as a whole. Its content, put together by many contributors with different knowledge and points of view, is immensely valuable to us all. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is no clear definition of what rights contributors to the documentation retain over the material that they post, or the extent to which other persons are entitled to copy or modify the material. For example, it would be very useful to ensure that community contributed documentation may be copied into documentation in the Ubuntu distribution without complex licensing issues, ensuring that those working on documentation can concentrate on producing the best documentation possible rather than legal negotiations.

= Feedback =

We would again like to make a good-faith attempt to ensure that contributors of existing material are happy with this change. We invite any contributors who have any questions or concerns about this plan to contact us at . Given the consultation that has already taken place in relation to this change, we hope that the vast majority of contributors will welcome it.

In the absence of substantial numbers of objections, this change will be made to the documentation wiki after approximately one month.

More details can be found here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WikiLicensing

Many thanks for your contributions to the Ubuntu documentation, and we hope that you will continue to help!

This whole Linus vs GNOME debate is really strange. Can someone explain to me why Linus cares?

I can only think of two reasons:

• An exceptional amount of passionate and selfless concern for GNOME’s userbase;
• Because he himself uses GNOME.

If the latter, why doesn’t the tone of his messages show any respect for the development that has gone into GNOME? I mean, I personally use GNOME and also have a fair amount of gripes with it, but the fact that I’ve chosen it above other desktops means that I have sufficient respect for it that I would always seek to be respectful and constructive when filing bugs or posting to mailing lists. His complaints about the difficulty of contributing seem to be wholly gratuitous.

I don’t get it.