FLOSS Foundations

So when’s the Malt Appreciation Society meeting this year? I have a bottle of cask strength 12yo Glengoyne I picked up today & was planning to bring along - no idea if it’s any good. So… when do I get to find out???

Also, anyone interested in going for an early morning run (not the day after the Malt Appreciation Society meeting) drop me a line, especially if you’re in or near the Golden Horn Sirkeci… we can do some early morning tourism at about 12km/h.

I rebooted my computer and went out for lunch with some friends. When I came back, it was particularly unresponsive, so I went hunting, and top showed me this:

19055 root      20   0 1343m 453m 1524 D  0.3 45.3   1:46.13 rsvg-convert

A quick ps…

dneary@sligo:~$ ps -ef | grep 19055
root     19055 19054  0 12:25 ?        00:01:45
  /usr/bin/rsvg-convert -o /var/log/bootchart/hardy-20080704-1.png
  /var/log/bootchart/bootchart.svgz

Ouch!

Does bootchart run until you log in? Is this normal behaviour? 1.3G of virtual memory is an awful lot…

For anyone who has experienced pain when upgrading to a more recent version of Ubuntu with X and xrandr on Intel hardware, consider running this fabulous command.

This goes in particular for anyone who needed i915resolution before for wide-screens, and had a “ForceBIOS” option in xorg.conf. The driver to use for the hardware changed, and the xorg.conf got about 100 times smaller since Ubuntu 6.06 or 7.04.

This is the major weakness in the Ubuntu upgrade process, really… if hacks are needed to work around falings in previous versions, those hacks are (silently, IIRC) kept after an upgrade, even though they’re no longer necessary (and are, in fact, harmful).

Many thanks once again to Claude Paroz, wo helped me work through the projector problem & got me moving towards the fix.

I’d like to keep improving the ways we describe Mozilla in general. It would be helpful to have some greater specificity around some key concepts we use regularly. “Community” is one such concept.

We talk about “community” at Mozilla all the time. A lot of other people talk about “community” as well. People use the word “community” to mean many different things. Sometimes “community” is used to describe a coherent, structured group and sometimes a diffuse, permeable set of people.

To get greater specificity I started with dictionaries and encyclopedias. The Wikipedia discussion of “community” is very long, and has many sub-parts to it. At first I thought it was too complex to be helpful. But as I’ve started talking more with people about the Mozilla identity and goals, I’ve come to think that some of the Wikipedia characterizations of  different types of communities might actually be really useful. I’m about halfway through describing Mozilla communities and will post that as soon as it’s coherent.

If anyone has definitions of “community” they think are helpful to understanding Mozilla, please leave a pointer.

Two great pictures brought to you by Wordle in combination with my blog and Planet SUSE.

Beautiful.

I’m coming to the end of my two days in Mont de Marsan (and, as it happens, to the end of the charge in my laptop battery). I think the GNOME Accessibility presentation I gave went very well, certainly people seemed to get a lot from it. I’ll put my slides online at some stage (before the weekend), and I was filmed, when I have a link to the video I’ll throw that up too.

As usual, the great thing about conferences is meeting old friends, and making new ones, and there are a lot of familiar faces around.

One thing that did come out of my presentation is the need for those storyboards I proposed a while back. In particular, I tripped up when demoing Orca (no real plan to show off its functionality, other than turning on TTS, and “doing stuff”, then turning on magnification, and “doing stuff”, etc…), Dasher (it’d be handy to have a few phrases to type rather than coming up with something on the spot), and sticky & slow keys.

I hit a few problems with the keyboard a11y. When I had both sticky & slow keys activated, I got double letters (I’m sure it was a configuration issue, but anyway…). And when I used the keyboard shortcut to navigate to the top bar, I hit two bugs - if I open a menu in the top menubar, I can’t navigate away with the keyboard (Ctrl-Alt-Tab doesn’t work any more), and I can’t navigate to the notification area with the keyboard. And I got some comments on MouseTweaks (”we need a way to temporarily disable it for times when you’re reading a document or a web page, for example”) and Dasher (”not really suitable for certain classes of users” - I’ll try to get more information).

Yesterday’s presentation “Building bridges” went less well - it was a dry run for my GUADEC presentation, and I’ve taken away 3 or 4 good ideas for improvements. But like all the English presentations here, attendance was poor - I have about 10 or 12 attendees. And at 9am this morning, there was one person who turned up for my presentation in English on accessibility in GNOME - lucky enough, since when I tested my laptop with the projector, I had a bunch of problems! Many thanks to Claude Paroz, who helped me identify the problem (old driver + options which were necessary in Ubuntu 6.06 and 7.04, but have since been deprecated) and the solution (dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg). My laptop works with projectors! Yay!

John Eckman of Optaros sat down with Jeff Whatcott, Acquia's Chief Communicator, to talk about Drupal and Acquia. Rock on, Jeff.

If you can't see the video above, you can view it directly at blip.tv.

Matthias Vandermaesen released a Mollom plugin for Wordpress. You can read more about it on his blog or you can download WP-Mollom from the Wordpress.org plugin directory. Thanks for all the hard work, Matthias!

The Interaction Design and Information Architecture program at the University of Baltimore and a team of eight graduate students have completed a usability study on Drupal. The result is a great report (PDF) and an incredibly valuable video which they shared on drupal.org. It is too important not to share, so the video is also embedded below.

The results are consistent with the results from usability tests done at the University of Minnesota.

The results can't be ignored.

I printed the report, taped it on my wall, and I won't release Drupal 7 until I crossed of at least 90% of the problems they identified.

The folks over in IETF land recently had a nice long discussion thread about the use of RFC 2119 requirements terms like “MUST”, “SHOULD”, and “MAY”. Even though I’ve written a few RFCs myself, I found the discussion illuminating. Here are my lessons learned:

• If you mean must, should, or may in their special requirements sense, capitalize them.
• If you don’t mean must, should, or may in their special requirements sense, don’t use them (instead, use words like “ought”, “might”, “can”, and other such constructions).
• It’s better to say MUST do A unless Y occurs than to say SHOULD do A but without explaining why, so avoid SHOULD.
• Changing SHOULD to MUST may leave older implementations in non-compliance, but that is the fault of the spec writer, so just admit you were wrong, change the SHOULD to MUST, and note that older implementations will follow the old SHOULD so newer implementations MUST accept the old behavior.

I’ve been updating rfc3920bis along these lines (I finished this evening) and next I’ll do the same for rfc3921bis.

So the buzz today was all about Identi.ca, a new microblogging service. What has microbloggers all a-twitter (pardon the pun) is not the fact that Evan Prodromou and his friends at Control Yourself have launched yet another microblogging silo, or even that it has built-in support for OpenID logins and XMPP notifications. No, the fun part is that Evan and company are releasing the source code to the underlying application (called Laconica) and will enable Laconica instances to federate using something they call OpenMicroBlogging. Although passing lots of small messages between inter-connected Laconica instances sounds quite a bit like a special-purpose version of XMPP, so far OpenMicroBlogging uses OpenID, OAuth, and YADIS instead. I’ll be curious to see how that approach scales, because IMHO there will be an awful lot of HTTP GET requests and 200 OK responses involved. Instead of having 10 or 20 or 100 subscribers send in a polling request every 10 minutes (or less!) to see if I’ve generated a new post, it strikes me as much more efficient to push out a notification only when I’ve posted. We’ve done this in the Jabber world since 1999 for presence (network availability) information, and we’ve extended that model over the last few years to build out a generalized infrastructure for publish-subscribe notifications. Evan knows a thing or two about XMPP so it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s already thinking along those lines. But the most important thing is that, no matter which technologies are used, I think we’re seeing the emergence of a standardized, federated, open microblogosphere, which is just super. :)

The Open Rights Group has published its report on the e-counting of votes cast in the London Mayoral Elections in May. I was an Electoral Observer for ORG at these elections, at the Alexandra Palace count centre.

The report finds that:

...there is insufficient evidence available to allow independent observers to state reliably whether the results declared in the May 2008 elections for the Mayor of London and the London Assembly are an accurate representation of voters’ intentions.

Jason Hunter just let me know that the myriad Jabber/XMPP email discussion lists are now easily searchable at jabber.markmail.org, a service of the good folks at markmail.org. He also pointed out to me that I have ten times as many posts to these lists as the next person. :)

In the past, I have written a report about the fate of the Mozilla Summer of Code projects, six months after the projects closed. In this case, due to delays on my part, it's more like ten months, and the SoC 2008 is already up and running. Still, better late than never. For reference, here are the reports from the 2006 and 2005 SoCs.

In 2007, we had ten projects. I've spent some time looking into the current status of all of them, and thought I would share those results with you.

I should say before I start that the following assessment is just how I see it, sometimes based on limited information. People with better knowledge should feel free to post corrections.

So of the 10 projects from 2007, 8 or 9 had happy mentors at the end, 4 had code which was immediately and directly useful to the project, and several people are still part of either the Mozilla or another open source community. This is about the same proportion of happy mentors as 2006, but a smaller proportion of projects produced directly useful code. There could be several reasons for this. At least one project foundered on issues outside the control of student or mentor; a couple more got stuck at the review stage (one because of the student, another because of us). So a mixed bag - but I guess we can't have total success all the time :-)

Next week I’ll be at EuroPython 2008, in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I’ll be moderating a panel on Jython. If you have questions that you’d like to put to the Jython committers, leave them as comments on this post. I’ll make sure that I post answers for any of those questions.

After the conference ends, I’ll be spending a few days at Sun’s office in Prague, which is where much of the NetBeans team is located. I’ve never been to Vilnius or Prague, so suggestions for things to see, etc., would also be great comments.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about DTrace, and Tim Bray’s tweet finally got me moving. It looks like some people are trying to make DTrace a topic for this year’s Linux Kernel Summit. I hope they succeed. I also hope that those folks pushing for user level tracing have their voices heard. I was amused to read one of the messages which claimed that DTrace is:

DTrace is more a piece of sun marketing coolaid which they use to beat us up at every opportunity.

My experience at Sun thus far is that people generally don’t really appreciate the benefits of DTrace. It stems from a view that I also saw in the LKS threads, which is that DTrace (and tools like Systemtap) is a tool for system administrators, because it reports on activity on the kernel. That’s not how I look at it. DTrace is a tool for dealing with full system stack problems, which initially manifest themselves as operating system level problems. The fact that DTrace can trace user land code as well as kernel code is what makes it so important, especially to people building and running web applications. Because of all the moving parts in a complicated web application (think relational database, memcached or other caching layers, programming language runtime, etc), it can be hard to debug a web application that has gone awry in production. Worse, sometimes the problems only appear in production. Tools which cut across several layers of the system are very important, and DTrace provides this capability, if all the layers have probes installed. When a web application goes wrong in production, you see it at the operating system level - high usage of various system resources. That’s where you start looking, but you will probably end up somewhere else (unless you are ace at exercising kernel bugs). Perhaps a bad SQL query or perhaps a bad piece of code in part of the application. A tool that can help connect the dots between operating system level resource problems and application level code is a vital tool. That’s where the value is.

One of the cooler features of DTrace is that you can register a user level stack helper (a ustack helper), which can translate the stack in a provider specific manner. One cool example of this is the ustack helper that John Levon wrote for Python, which annotates the stack with source level information about the Python file(s) being traced. On an appropriately probed system, this would mean that you could trace the Python code of a Django application, memcached, and your relational database (PostgreSQL and soon MySQL). That would be very handy.

I’d love to see DTrace on Linux, because I have it on OS X and it’s in OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, but I’d also be happy to see SystemTap get to the point where it could do the same job.

There seem to be growth cycles that photographers go through. One of them is related to postprocessing of photographs. When I started taking pictures, I didn’t really do much to my pictures, on the belief that a good photographer ought to get things right straight out of the camera. I only shot film as a consumer, and not for very long. While I had a brief exposure to a photographic darkroom, I didn’t leave with the right impression about the role of the developing and printing process. Until I got Aperture, I never adjusted a picture. After I got Aperture, I mostly made small exposure, contrast or saturation bumps, never more than that. Now I am using Lightroom rather than Aperture, and I am still doing mostly the same sorts of things, although I’ve started to work more with adjusting the black point and contrast curves of pictures. In the last 6-7 months, I’ve started to use Photoshop on pictures. I was able to do a bit here and a bit there. I checked out books from the library, I bought a few books on Photoshop CS3 when it came out. My friend Ogalthorpe, sat with me once and showed me how he works some of his magic on his pictures.

It seemed like things were going in one ear and out the other, partially because I didn’t have a good idea of what I was trying to do or why. That made retaining the “how” pretty difficult.

I recently picked up The Creative Digital Darkroom by Katrin Eismann and Sean Duggan. This is the first Photoshop book that actually tries to walk you though the reasoning behind why you are doing what you are doing, and that does it in language that can be understood by someone with zero darkroom experience. I really appreciated the emphasis on the creative aspects in the middle of all the pictures of curves, layers, layer masks, and all the usual Photoshop stuff. The book is very recent, so it covers Photoshop CS3, and in places where Lightroom can do the same thing, there is coverage of Lightroom as well.

My skill level is such that the two chapters (out of 10!) “Toning and Contrast” and “Dodging, Burning, and Exposure Control” will probably keep me busy for a good long time. I am sure that as I start to apply some of these principles, I will grow into material in the other chapters. But for now, I am happy to have what feels like a basic footing that I can work from. Now all I need to do is spend some time making images good enough to process a lot.

Late last week a colleague expressed dismay that we didn’t have either a recorded version or a text version of the brief comments I made from Seoul via Air Mozilla on the release day of Firefox 3.  So I took my notes and put them together into something that is close — certainly in spirit — though not exact.

+++++++

Every once in a while — for those people who are really lucky — we get to experience a moment where everything comes together. A period where dreams and hard work merge together with remarkable results.

This is such a time for Mozilla.

It’s based on hard work and execution of course. The number of people who have done something unexpected in the last few months, something that changes the outcome, is very high. But that’s only part of it. And there are plenty of times in life — most of life for most people, in fact — where people work hard and pour themselves into their effort but don’t experience the lift and buoyancy of sense of validation.

The periods that are so memorable often involve a team of people, and something that makes that group of people cohesive and satisfying. Sometimes these periods involve working on something that seems giant, hard to achieve and meaningful. Often then involve many things coming together in a way almost didn’t seem possible. And they involve a response from the world at large that demonstrates all the work and energy was worth it.

It’s incredibly fortunate to experience this at all. And it’s intensely gratifying to see these things come together for Mozilla.  It’s not just Firefox, it’s the entire Mozilla community. Firefox reflects the Mozilla community, giving us a chance to see how broad and deep the Mozilla world is, and how much can be accomplished. Eight million people — not only aware of a piece of software but acting on that awareness — in a day is astonishing.

The excitement isn’t all about a piece of software. The real activity is about the Internet. It’s about people not just using but also creating the Internet; creating an experience that is fun, safe, and productive. The Internet is a big deal. The ability to participate in creating it is a big deal. It’s rare that such a fundamental resource can be created by voluntary individual participation.

We can see that people sense the opportunity, want to participate, want to build and are more willing to share than might have been expected. We see this in the open source world, we see it in activities like Wikipedia, we see it in the growing range of activities using an “open source” model.

Mozilla has a role to play here.  What a great place to be.

This week, I will be travelling to Mont de Marsan, near Bordeaux, Agen, Bayonne and Pau (or let’s say, equally far away from all of those) to give a few presentations, meet a few friends, have a few drinks, and hopefully survive a 9am presentation slot on Thursday morning.

My three presentations (really, two, but they’re taking advantage of my bilinguality) are:

• Bridges between projects : 16:45 on Wednesday. A dry run for my GUADEC presentation, presenting a variety of ways that different projects are co-ordinating, and what we’re talking about, that most people don’t know about.
• Digital Ramps and Handrails: 9:00 on Thursday (in English), and 11:45 on Thursday (in French). It’s with some trepidation that I proposed a presentation on GNOME usability for the conference, since I’m by no means an expert. But I feel that we’ve done such good work in this area, and I’m so impressed with the passion of the accessibility team, that I felt that we definitely needed to talk about it more, so I’ll take my chances. I plan to give a low level overview of the accessibility tools built into GNOME, including keyboard shortcuts, accessible themes, audio events, sticky keys, slow keys, mousetweaks, alternative input methods (Dasher, on-screen keyboard), and of course a short description of Orca and our support for screen readers and GNOME Magnifier. I’ll also mention the surprising side-effects of having an accessible desktop - graphics application test frameworks Dogtail, LTSP and Accerciser. When I get to talking about AT-SPI, that’s where I get nervous, because I’ve had some trouble with gok in the past where my keyboard got disabled when I launched it… I’m going to avoid demoing gok.

Did I miss anything important? Please let me know if you saw anything braindead that I should talk about that I haven’t yet.

Unfortunately, I can’t really afford to travel for the full week, so I’m heading off tomorrow afternoon (Tuesday), eating with friends in Bordeaux tomorrow evening, and spending Wednesday and Thursday at the conference, before heading off again Thursday evening.

If anyone else overlaps and would like to meet up Wednesday evening, drop me a line!

I've been meaning to blog about this for months. So in case you haven't noticed yet, our friends at Jabber are using Drupal for jabber.org. They are also using Mollom to protect their website against spam.

I still want my Drupal to talk to my Jabber. Think "Drupal → Mollom → Jabber/XMPP → instant messaging client" to get notifications about new comments or other important events, for a example. Lots of other XMPP-Drupal opportunities as well ...

I just filled in descriptions for a load of mailing lists which didn't have them. Please check that the description of lists you care about matches reality. If not, let me know.

Drupal continues to rock the newspaper and magazine world. Femina, a women's magazine, recently switched to Drupal. Femina is owned by Edipresse, one of Europe's biggest media and communications companies. They publish more than 200 titles, including some leading European newspapers (i.e. Le Matin, Le Temps, 24 heures).

Edipresse is known to use eZ publish for many of the group's websites. In fact, Femina used to run on eZ publish as well. I don't know the details but maybe more Edipresse websites will be Drupal-ized?

I got a definitive answer today from the Golden Horn in SultanahmetSirkeci as to why I hadn’t yet received a confirmation of my reservation: I don’t have a reservation.

I have contacted the hotel by phone, filled in the online form, and following instructions, patiently awaited a confirmation, which never came. At that stage, after waiting perhaps a little too long, I tried the hotel again (the person I talked to didn’t know anything about the group code, the online reservation system, and to be honest, didn’t speak English very well), and asked Baris to look into it. Which he did. And got confirmation yesterday that myself and at least one other person who had registered online did not have reservations.

So if, like me, you reserved online at the Golden Horn SultanahmetSirkeci, and like me, you have not yet received any confirmation of your booking, then like me, you’ll need to find another hotel. Bummer.

Update: Baris informs me that the Golden Horn in Sirkeci has made more rooms available under the group code, so there’s hope for me yet.