Matthew Revell

It’s not long now until Ubuntu Live! July 22 - 24 in Portland, Oregon.

Ubuntu Live will be a great opportunity to learn more about the technical and business background to both Canonical and Ubuntu and how Launchpad and Bazaar fit into that.

So, if you’re particularly interested in Launchpad and Bazaar, the sessions to look out for are:

• How Ubuntu uses Launchpad - Matt Zimmerman, Paul Alexander
• An introduction to Launchpad for collaboration and hosting - John Meinel
• Tutorial: Collaboration and code hosting with Launchpad and Bazaar - John Meinel

It probably goes without saying that the Ubuntu project is the largest user of Launchpad. Hearing Matt and Paul’s tale of how Ubuntu uses Launchpad will give you a practical understanding of what makes Launchpad unique.

John Meinel’s talk will be a great way to see how Launchpad and Bazaar - together - can work for your project. In John’s tutorial session, he’ll then show exactly how Launchpad and Bazaar work together, with plenty of opportunity for attendees to learn the ins and outs.

Now’s a good time to book, if you’re thinking of going, as you can get a fat discount with the super-special-Canonical-discount-code Enter the code ubu07ucm to get a 35% discount.

Last night we recorded my last LugRadio as a full-time member of the team.

The past three years have been amazing. What started as a silly idea at a Wolves LUG meeting has brought me many new friends, taken me to strange and exotic places - well, Limerick - and helped shape my career.

I love LugRadio and love spending time with the other gents. However, a couple of months ago it became obvious that I don’t have time for everything I want to do. I also realised that so as long as I’m doing LugRadio, I don’t have as much motivation to try new things because I’m already doing something pretty cool.

Last night was very sad and, because it hadn’t sunk in that it was my last show, I couldn’t quite express how I felt. LugRadio has been about friendship, learning and a having a lot of fun. It’s changed me for the better. I will miss being so closely involved but, in the light of morning, I think it’s right to have stepped down.

So, thanks to Ade, Aq and Jono for being good mates and for making LugRadio such an enjoyable experience. Thanks to all the listeners for your emails, your crazy community action and for being one of the nicest and funniest bunch of people around.

There was only one serious contender for my replacement. He has long been an unofficial member of the team, he’s a great bloke and he lives round the corner from Bacon: Adam Sweet. Adam’s going to bring a fresh perspective and new ideas to the show, which I think will help it get even better.

Of course, I’m not leaving LugRadio entirely. If one of the guys can’t make it, I’ll stand in and I’ll also be at LugRadio Live! These blokes are some of my best mates, so it’ll be difficult to keep me away entirely
Wow, it’s sort of over.

See Jono’s photos.

BBC News has the story of a student who, whilst using a sat nav to aid her journey from Redditch to Camarthenshire, drove onto a railway line directly into the path of an oncoming train.

The good news is that Paula Ceely is alive and well, having stepped back from the car when she heard the train’s horn.

What astonishes me is that, according to the BBC’s quote, Paula commented, “I can’t completely blame the sat nav because up until there, it did get me where I needed to go”.

It seems it went like this:

1. Paula followed the sat nav’s directions until she came to a gate with a sign saying to proceed if the green light is lit; the BBC report doesn’t tell us if it was lit or not.
2. Paula opened the gate, drove her car through and stepped out to close the gate behind her.
3. As she was about to open the next gate, she heard a train and noticed the tracks in front of her and, presumably, realised she was on a level crossing.
4. After briefly considering getting back into her car, she stepped back as the train smashed into her car and took it half a mile down the track.

We’ve all made mistakes whilst driving and it’s good to read that Paula escaped unharmed. It’d be nice to think that Paula will now be a safer, more cautious driver but do her comments to the BBC suggest that she’s learnt from the experience?

“I’ll never use a sat nav again. You rely on them and if it all goes wrong, you’re horribly stuck.

“People should be more careful with them - you never know where they might lead you.”

Come on, it’s a sat nav, not an autopilot. It says, “Turn left in 200 yards”, not “I can’t do that Michael“.

It’s comforting to blame someone or something else for our mistakes. Surely, part of adulthood is the realisation that most of the time you shouldn’t look for someone to blame: you should learn from your experiences.

It would be unfair to highlight Paula’s story without also mentioning the “I tripped over a bit of wood that shouldn’t have been there” testimonials in “no win, no fee” accident claim ads and the numerous other, “it wasn’t me guv, it was the sat nav” stories of incompetent driving.

I don’t want to be harsh or to laugh at other’s misfortune. Instead, I want us to shake off the tendency to find a whipping-boy because once we acknowledge our failings we can work to fix them and have a better life.

Thanks to Techdirt for highlighting the story.

George Orwell set six rules for writers:

• Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
• Never use a long word where a short one will do.
• If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
• Never use the passive voice where you can use the active.
• Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
• Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

When writing for the web, follow Orwell’s rules to communicate clearly without boring your reader.

Taking your first steps into a free software project can be intimidating.

Whether you want to code, write documentation, help with marketing or whatever, there’s a learning curve to overcome.

Launchpad lets people help each other

Launchpad is all about making it easier for free software people to work together. Recently, we introduced a new feature to do just that: mentoring.

Mentoring is simple: it provides an easy way for new participants to learn the ropes of a Launchpad team that they want to join.

An example scenario

It works like this:

• Daniel is a member of the Telepathy team. He wants to encourage more people to join the team but knows that new participants need to learn some basics. He offers mentorship for some bugs that he feels would be easy for new people to tackle and would help them learn the ropes.
• Sarah is interested in Telepathy. She visits the team’s mentoring page and sees a list of bugs that she can get help with.
• Sarah has some questions, so contacts Daniel using the details on his Launchpad profile page. Daniel answers her and Sarah gets to work.
• Sarah produces a number of patches, with iterative improvements thanks to Daniel’s feedback. The conversation takes place in the bug’s comments, meaning other people can easily take part.

During that process, Sarah learnt how to contribute effectively to the Telepathy team. The Telepathy team not only got one of its bugs fixed but gained a new member. Daniel found satisfaction in helping Sarah and the team, whilst having time to work on other bugs.

Mentoring is easy to manage

Importantly, the only people who had to give time to the process were Daniel and Sarah. Although offers of mentorship are linked to teams, team administrators don’t have to become involved. Mentoring is about relationships between individuals who choose to work together, so there’s no need for time-consuming bureaucracy to manage it.

Mentoring for Ubuntu

You can find all the offers of mentorship, that are related to Ubuntu, at:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+mentoring

There, you’ll see how recent each offer is, which team it’s linked to, who made the offer and which bug or blueprint it relates to.

You can find out more about mentoring in our guide at:

https://help.launchpad.net/MentoringManagement

What do you think?

I’m really keen to hear what you think of mentoring. To me, its simplicity is its strength. It’s so easy for both sides to use that I can see it quickly becoming a core way for communities to encourage and develop new members.

Comment here, drop me a mail, or join us on the launchpad-users mailing list.

Tomorrow, most of the UK has some form of local election, whether it’s for local councils, the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly.

If you have the opportunity to vote tomorrow, use it. If you’re in an area with a BNP candidate, use your vote to make sure they don’t get in. If you’re unhappy with your local government, vote to change it.

I plan to vote first thing - yes, I can vote for myself

It’s no secret that Dell will soon ship Ubuntu pre-installed.

This is fantastic news and reflects the quality of both the community Ubuntu team and the business development guys here at Canonical.

Congratulations to all involved!

Neighbours - the Australian soap - could soon leave the BBC after a 21 year run.

Some people think this would be bad - they’ve created a petition. The truth is, this can only be good for us, the licence fee payers.

ITV, Five and the BBC are all negotiating with Freemantle - Neighbours’ distributor - for the rights to broadcast the show over the next five to ten years. Media Guardian reports that Five has bid £100,000 per episode and ITV £80,000, with the BBC coming in at £70,000.

An episode of Neighbours runs for 22 minutes. The BBC has bid £3,182 per minute: that’s equivalent to 23 and a half years of your licence fee payments for one minute of Australian kitsch. Over ten years that’s £182,000,000 of our money, assuming five episodes per week.

Back in 1986, Neighbours was great value. The BBC was desperate to fill its new daytime schedule and nabbed Neighbours for next to nothing. It made international stars of its actors, offered a new casting pool for pantomime and attracted 18 million viewers at its peak. You could even argue it helped strengthen ties with Australia.

Assuming there’s a single antique vase left to auction or a house somewhere that still needs a glaringly inappropriate makeover, the BBC is no longer stuck for lower quality daytime programming.

If advertising-funded broadcasters believe they can make money from showing Neighbours, the BBC should step aside immediately. Audience size equates neither to income nor success for the BBC. That £70,000 per day should be invested in programming that the BBC’s commercial rivals could never produce.

Despite its many faults, I admire the BBC greatly. My love, though, is waning. I don’t dispute that it produces some wonderful content but when it bids £70,000 per episode for Neighbours - a show that commercial broadcasters would ensure remains on-air in the UK without the BBC - or gets into bidding wars over sports rights, then something has gone wrong.

The only justification for funding the BBC through taxation is that it fulfils a role commercial broadcasters could not or would not.