Never forget
This blog gets syndicated round the houses these days, and I am sure some of you were touched personally by 9/11. My sympathies, and thoughts are with you all.
We will always love you
This has got to be the hardest blog entry I have ever written, as tears stroll down my face. I never ever thought I would need to write this so soon.
Last night our sweet little dachshund Banger passed away. As we got to our friends house for her to look after Banger and Frankie this weekend, Banger started having difficulty breathing. We took him to the emergency vets where it turned out he has a collapsed left lung and twisted stomach. The vet recommended an emergency operation, but said it would be risky. Alas, it was not to be. He passed away last night at around 10pm.
The vet asked if we would allow an autopsy so find out what went wrong – we have no idea what happened, and even more so now I work from home and I sit in the same room as Banger and Frankie all day long. After the autopsy it turns out he had had a diaphragm hernia that was an old injury, possibly from running around, or jumping up and down, like puppies do. The vet said that anything, even something as small as exercise could have triggered the problems last night. It is very rare, and the vets had never seen it in their experience.
I can’t tell you enough how much we love our dogs, they really are members of the family, so right now we are feeling a pain that is unbearable. However, what keeps us going is knowing his short live was filled with happiness and he knew how much we loved him. We went to see him this afternoon, and it was nice to give him a kiss goodbye. This isn’t a goodbye though as we know he is with us now. 🙂
We will always remember the good memories with Banger, and I am sure he is looking over us right now. Take care sweet puppy.
*Banger as a puppy*
Jokosher Day this Sunday
This Sunday we have a *Jokosher Day*. The idea of the day is tidy up some chunks of Jokosher and do the following:
* Go comment-crazy and comment uncharted chunks of code.
* Write docs
* Update the wiki
* Fix bugs
Importantly, the day is a great opportunity for those who are interested in getting involved in the project to come along and get to know the team and ask questions. We are screaming out for more developers, so do come along and get involved. 🙂
The whole shebang takes place in #jokosher on `irc.freenode.net` all day on Sunday. 🙂
Interview download
Last night I did an interview with the [Linux Link Tech Show](https://tllts.org/) and it was great fun. They are a good bunch of guys. We talk about Ubuntu, Canonical, my new job, Jokosher, GStreamer, Fluendo, LUGRadio and various other sane and insane subjects. Never, ever, follow a link they suggest you should read. 😛
Download it:
* [Ogg](https://tllts.org/audio/tllts_156-09-06-06.ogg)
* [MP3](https://tllts.org/audio/tllts_156-09-06-06.mp3)
* [IRC chat log while the show was on](https://tllts.org/audio/tllts_156-09-06-06.chatlog)
Life predictions…
My parents kept this drawing from when I was five:
Maybe I work for the wrong company… 😛
Appearing on TLLTS tonight
I forgot to mention, tonight I am a guest on [The Linux Link Tech Show](https://www.tllts.org/). It begins at 8:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, or at around 1.30am in the morning for me. 😛
Listen in by clicking:
* [https://www.binrev.com:8000/main](https://www.binrev.com:8000/main)
* [https://media.sysop.ca:8000/techshow](https://media.sysop.ca:8000/techshow)
* [https://wdsmn.com:8000/techshow](https://wdsmn.com:8000/techshow)
Do the LoCo-motion
(sorry, that was an awful pun for a post title)
This morning I got added to [Planet Ubuntu](https://planet.ubuntu.com/), so hello!!
Since starting as UCM this week, I have been getting my feet wet in many different parts of the Ubuntu community. One particular area that I am concentrating on now are the LoCo teams. For those of you un-familiar with the lingo, a LoCo team is a collection of Ubuntu enthusiasts within the same geographical area. LoCo teams have sprung up all over the world, and you can see the [comprehensive list of teams here](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LoCoTeamList). These teams are doing some awesome work with translations, advocacy, marketing and more.
LoCo teams are similar to *Street Teams* in the music world. Street Teams are typically set up by a band or label as an on-the-ground, grassroots advocacy team. Many of these teams would canvas record shops with fliers, promote the band at venues, get promo discs to DJs, promote the band on local radio and more. Essentially, the team uses its ingenuity and enthusiasm to use its limited resources to make a big splash. You can see some awesome examples of advocacy if you look at local music scenes. The techniques tend to span from the normal to the insane – I remember [we](https://www.seraphidian.com/) once did a gig and took along a few fake beard wigs. We took a photo of *every single* person in that venue wearing the beard when they came in and put the photos up on the big screen when we played. Not only did it add some humour to the evening, but news of the stunt spread far and wide and we got more fans because of it.
LoCo teams are just like Street Teams and share many of the similarities, but like street teams, they are less organised outside the scope of the immediate region. The Ubuntu project seems to have a stack of awesome LoCo teams, but they don’t really interact together, share ideas and experiences and consult together on how to best run a team. This is totally understandable, and exactly the same happens with many other types of user group. But, in the same way we discovered that working together makes great software, I am positive that working together can make great teams. 🙂
So, I am working to help these teams work together and collaborate a little more. I outlined some of my thoughts in a [mail to loco-contacts](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/loco-contacts/2006-September/000429.html) and also kicked it off [asking people for introductions](https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/loco-contacts/2006-September/000430.html). From chatting to many of these different groups over the last few days, we have some really great personalities in the many different teams, and some great is going on. I am really looking forward to working with these teams. 🙂
Are you ready?
Start your engines
Well, this is day one of my new role at Canonical. I am just setting up chunks of infrastructure and getting things up and running.
I just wanted to post a quick entry to say that if anyone wants to get in touch with me regarding anything regarding the community, you can contact me at `jono AT ubuntu DOT com`. You can also catch me on `irc.freenode.net` with the rather unimaginative nick `jono`. Maybe I should change my nick to `l33t-mad-skillz-666`?
Cairo-fied effects dialog
As some of you will know, recently I have been hacking on effects support in Jokosher. Well, it is all working pretty well, and figured I should try and make the dialog a bit nicer and roll in some Cairo goodness. Now, I am completely new at Cairo, so this effort has been my first shot. I thought it might be nice to stick a few shots online to show you the current progress.
When you want to add an effect to an instrument, you see the Effects Dialog. This dialog allows you to add a bunch of effects, and this is what it looks like with some effects added:
Let me explain what is going on here. The top left combo box lists the effects on your system, and you can select an effect and click the Add button and it will add one of those little orange boxes. In the image above we have three effects added. The little red circle will eventually have an ‘X’ in it and delete the effect. You will also be able to drag each orange box and re-organise the order of the effects, which is crucial in many situations. Finally, you can double-click each orange box and tweak the individual effect settings. When you click it, you see a settings window pop up:
Here you can adjust the sliders in the settings dialog, and if you clicked the Play button in the first dialog, you will hear the effect change in real-time as you configure it. This makes it simple to get the effect just right. Oh, and the Preview button in the image above will be removed by the way, thats a little cruft left in to make sure those of you at the back are awake. 😛
In both images there is a presets combo box where you can easily load and save effect settings as a preset. In the first box the presets are on an instrument basis, so you can easily view all of your guitar, drum, vocal presets etc. In the effect settings dialog, it will list presets for that individual effect. All the presets code is complete.
So, still plenty to work on and bugs to fix, but its really starting to sit well now. As ever, we need more helping hands with the project, so if you fancy getting involved, do get in touch. You can test this code by heading over to our Subversion server [here](https://svn.jokosher.python-hosting.com/) and check out the development site at [here](https://jokosher.python-hosting.com/).