jorge's stompbox

Banshee 1.0 Alpha 2 available for Ubuntu

Aaron Bockover announced the second Alpha of Banshee last week, which garnered a bunch of attention; unfortunately for Ubuntu users there was no easy way to get it running other than compiling it, which led to this thread in the forums.

Random .debs on the internet are troublesome because they tend to be transient and linked to from digg and there's no real control on the quality. You're basically trusting that the .deb is done right and won't hose your machine. So ... over the weekend I mailed the people making these debs and linked them up with Sebastian Dröge, who maintains the stable branch in Ubuntu and already had packages for the preview in Debian Experimental. The result is this:

https://launchpad.net/~banshee-team/+archive

Since we've formed a team in launchpad, there is now a group of people who care about Banshee working together in one place - as a bonus, since Sebastian is upstream in both Debian and the Banshee project itself, there is now group collaboration between all interested parties.

Users win because they get to play with Banshee. Since the team is using Launchpad's PPA feature, binaries for AMD64/i386 for both Hardy and Gutsy are generated. Banshee upstream wins because they now have more people being able to use the Alpha and report bugs (and hopefully send patches), and the new packagers win because they can learn how Ubuntu works and get more involved in Ubuntu development. So overall, a good weekend!

Remember that all these features are available to anyone working on an open source project; so if you stumble across "random .deb on the internet" for a cool upstream; don't hesitate to find the people involved, talk to the upstream and Debian developers, and make cool things happen!

Laptop Bags ... aka. Tom Bihn rules.

There is a thread on the Ubuntu Forums discussing laptop bags. I just got a new bag and decided to write about it, since I am starting to become a Tom Bihn collector it seems.

I have been toting around a Buzz (the sling bag on the left) for a few years now since it was recommended to me by Scott Collins. Like many other Bihn fans, Scott is very committed to the brand and evangelizes it to anyone he talks to. Since then many of my friends have been infected by the Bihn bug. (And yes, some of us are starting to become pretty zealous in recommending them to other people).

For some events I have been outgrowing my Buzz, specifically shows where I would buy shirts and carry around a coat (like FOSDEM), so I picked up the Id. (The one in the middle of the picture). I can't say anything bad about the Id, it's a great messenger bag. But even then I was running out of room at FOSDEM.

Yesterday I was hanging out with a friend who has an Empire Builder, and preferred it to his Super Ego, which was sitting in a closet doing nothing; so I bought it from him. (The one on the right, all black). This bag is pretty large, it can easily hold a 17" notebook and a few day's worth of clothes.

So now I have a new plan, for local events I'll continue to use the Buzz, then for larger events I will use the Id, and for really large events when I am abroad I will use the Super Ego. I can also mix and match, for example when flying to San Francisco for 2 nights I can put the laptop in the Buzz and clothes in the Super Ego without having to bust out the carry-on luggage. This seems like a super expensive way to solve a traveling problem doesn't it? Heh.

At our last mug.org meeting I noted that Jim McQuillan had picked up the Zephyr as his new briefcase. It looked very nice but I'm not a briefcase-using person, so I am still unfamiliar with it. I look forward to hearing what he has to say about it.

Note that they are expensive when compared to other bags. I think it's worth the price considering they have a lifetime guarantee and you really don't need to ever buy another laptop bag again; unless of course you buy multiple bags .... ;)

Discuss.

I can't shut up about GNOME Do...

David Siegel has just blogged about the new release of GNOME Do.

The GNOME Do team has done a great job so far, they've packaged the right stuff for feature freeze getting it into hardy; on top of that they've been fixing tons of bugs. Chris Halse Rogers has done a fantastic job as a MOTU leading the effort to get it into hardy (8.04). He's filed a feature freeze exception to get the latest version into 8.04.

For my part I am proud that I had a a small part in getting things done. In many ways I hope that David's conclusion/thesis to the project involves mentioning the community aspect to the project. I really look forward to reading his findings.

I think it was really gutsy of David to do his senior design project in open source. He could have taken the easy way out and just done some other stupid thing that everyone else is doing. Instead, he put his cards down and did GNOME Do in an open manner.

His code is being shipped in universe for 8.04; he's got a lively mailing list full of contributors submitting code all the time, there are a bunch of branches in launchpad full of even more code ... GNOME Do is all over lifehacker, and a bunch of of other enthusiast sites; so what am I trying to say?

• David filled a niche. People wanted quicksilver-like functionality in linux.
• David could have spent weeks picking infrastructure to host his project. He picked launchpad, which means he spent a small amount of time picking infrastructure, and most of the time getting things done.
• David quickly took the role of "benevolant dictator" and ran with it. In the beginning, Rick and I had some pretty crazy ideas of where Do should go. And David was quick to say "NO".  This was frustrating to me, but, he had an idea of where Do should go, so he had the guts to tell us to get bent.
• On the other hand, David was very receptive to ideas ... and listened to them. He was able to look at wishlist bug reports and determine what was important, and what wasn't feasible. When he told us to "get bent", he was able to communicate why ... that's really important.
• David delegated well. Rick and I had tons of things to do, but we like GNOME Do. So we did the usual, "What do you need?" posts. David never let us skate, he didn't care what we did for a living, he just delegated, and we did what he said. Tough love. If we couldn't do it, he would find someone else to do it.
• David didn't discriminate: At first GNOME Do was a GNOME launcher, that ran on Ubuntu; as other people showed up from other distros and other desktop environments he made sure they were taken care of. He removed desktop-specific dependancies, and all the like.
• David encouraged people to make new branches in launchpad. This is so huge. When people wanted to do things David just told them to create a new branch in launchpad and run with it - I find this a total opposite of the the standard status-quo. You want to work on something? Fork it. Let David know when you're ready ... and he'll merge it.

There are more factors, but I consider these the big ones. GNOME Do is awesome. If you're having problems ... post below ...

Edit: No, I'm not a total fanboy, I just think that David has done a pretty awesome job so far, if you think he hasn't, then post in the comments.

Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun

Birthday DVDs I enjoyed today:

• Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii
• Queensrÿche: Building Empires

I am laughing at the early Queensrÿche videos, particularly "Queen of the Reich".

Banshee 1.0 Alpha 1

Aaron Bockover has just announced the alpha pre-release of Banshee 1.0. This is a result of the heavy refactoring that has been taking place in Banshee trunk since October.

Obviously there is still a bunch of stuff missing, notably hardware player support, and a bunch of plugins still need to be ported - but it's good to get this out there as a baseline for people to get started playing with Banshee and help out.

I'm heading to Chicago for the weekend where I'll link up with Gabriel Burt, who has implemented the last.fm plugin. I will be buying him a bunch of beer:

Gabriel has made it trivially easy to add custom stations based on any of the last.fm criteria. So I can follow my friend's individual stations, group stations (like the Banshee and Ubuntu stations), and songs based on tags. Gabriel talks about this release here. 

Thanks to Jonathan McDowell for mentioning that you can listen to songs tagged as "cover" to get a station of nothing but cover songs. Awesome.

Other improvements include dramatically reduced memory consumption and real FAST searching. Read more about the release in the release notes. The Banshee folks have been putting in tons of overtime on this new release, so kudos to them.

GNOME @ Lugradio Live USA 2008

I will be organizing the GNOME Booth at LRL Live USA 2008. I am looking for volunteers to help run the booth, answer questions, and provide a friendly face for the GNOME project. The ideal candidate will love GNOME and be ready to work hard. :) Send me a mail or post in the comments if you want to help be part of the cult of awesome.

Also, if you register for LRL and want to be nice to me, please fill in my name for your reference. If you do so I will personally buy you a beer. (proof needed) I am willing to lie, cheat, bribe, and steal to win that Eee.

Join the Pulse

Pulse is not only an excellent live set by Pink Floyd, it's also a good name for the idea that the guys behind pulse of open source came up with. Actually I don't know if it's their idea, but it's pretty cool. Twitter is to blogs what IM is to email, or so they say (I guess).

Pulse of Open Source is sort of like Planet, but for twitter. One random day Christer Edwards said something along the lines of "we should organize all Ubuntu people on twitter and put that to good use." Poor Christer made the mistake of having a great open ended idea, so I convinced him to implement it. :)

Pulse of Ubuntu is a twitter account that follows people around from the Ubuntu community. As you can see, there's already a good list of people being followed. So if you use twitter and want to check out what people are doing, then follow @pulseofubuntu. If you use twitter and want to microblog about Ubuntu-stuff, then let us know and you can pulse with us. Send spam to jorge (at) ubuntu dot com and christer.edwards (at) ubuntu dot com. EDIT: Don't forget to tell us your twitterID.

Sign up and follow along, we want to see what 5 bugs you're touching every day!

I am 33 today...

...But we celebrated on Saturday, since having a birthday party on a Monday is bad.

Announcing FOSSCamp 2008

I am proud to announce FOSSCamp 2008, to take place Friday 16 May and Saturday 17 May 2008 in Prague, Czech Republic. You can sign up here.

The aim of FOSSCamp is to provide a means for Open Source projects to get together to discuss and debate how to work together and how to improve the Open Source desktop, server and embedded space. This is about opening up the channels of communication between different projects to see how we can work together. Whats more, you don’t have to be a huge project like Mozilla, X.org, GNOME or KDE to attend - smaller projects are more than welcome!

Although Canonical are providing the venue for this event, this is a vendor neutral show and all distributions, projects, vendors, and contributors are welcome to attend. The event is at no-cost to participants.

This event is an "unconference", meaning that it is run in a FooCamp/BarCamp-style. This means that there is no set schedule, just an empty piece of paper with rooms and time slots. At the beginning of the event attendees start filling in the empty slots with topics they want to discuss, leading to a wide variety of sessions:

You can sign up by letting us know you're coming. Hope to see you all there!

Images courtesy of Ryan Paul

Ghosts I-IV

I love NIN so I was happy to see the announcement about their new album. Their website has been slammed so I wasn't able to purchase it directly from them, so I just bought it from Amazon using their new downloader for Linux.

I hope Trent follows up in the future and blogs about how the album did sales-wise. It will be interesting to see how many people supported the band and how many just downloaded the free album.