Sooz has been away in Bedford for her sisters birthday and I could’nt go due to some pre-rehearsals before we (Seraphidian) go into the studio to record our debut album. While Sooz has been away I have caught up on some work and I went over to Aq‘s last night to hang out. While there, we discussed Linux, Open Source, cool hackers and we also fixed up a broken Debian machine that Aq has. We also fiddled around with SSH and talked about printers and Samba. It was good to hang out with Aq – we have failed miserably to meet up for a few weeks as we have both been so busy.

I got up today and sent off some work to O’Reilly and I am now working on the first part of a LAMP series for Linux User & Developer. I need to write three articles this week, tech edit some work and also get on with my presentation for the O’Reilly camp that I am going to in the Netherlands at the weekend. We also have a gig in Brighton on Wednesday. That is going to be one hell of a drive. Ugh.

It seems that X.org is building up to their first release. Scheduled for the 25th August, it should be interesting to see if they make it. It is a little concerning that the release page says nothing is happening – maybe this is just because everyone is so busy getting the code ready. What is encouraging is that the Composite extension seems to be in the CVS and working. There is also general agreement that the XFixes and Damage extensions are ready. This is great. It is these features that are encouraging people to push over to X.org. We will now just have to wait for the desktops to use the extensions that have been added.
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Well, I am finally back from my traveling spree. The last ten days has been an incredible time spent with some incredible people. Some memorable moments are now fixed in my mind.

Just over a week ago we went to Wacken in Germany. For the uninitiated, Wacken is a metal festival that has some of the more interesting bands on the bill. At Wacken you don’t get typical british/american bands such as Slipknot, The Hives, Metallica etc, but you get bands such as Nevermore, Arch Enemy, Cannibal Corpse, Saxon, Gravedigger and others. Wacken is not just a great opportunity to see bands though, but it is a fantastic festival from start to finish. Around 43,000 people descend on the small village of Wacken and the organisers really know how to run a festival. There is no violence, the toilets are pretty decent, the beer is not too expensive and the atmosphere is fantastic. Speaking of beer, they sold these big German steins at Wacken with a litre of beer. Great stuff. We brought some steins back with us.

As much as I love Wacken, and I have been going there for the last three years, the biggest annoyance is the coach trip. About 20 hours on the coach is pretty exhausting. On the way there it was not too bad – I slept through Belgium and we actually got there a bit early. On the way back it is a whole new world of pain though. I honestly believe that my posterior is now square because of sitting in that seat for so long. Not good.

After the trip to Wacken we went up north for a big family get together. It was great for everyone to be with each other for a few days. We got back yesterday and I am just working on a few things before I head out to gig tonight in Leicester.

Eagle eyed readers will notice that there is a new speakingevents link at the top of the site now. This page has also been updated with three scheduled talks at various events. I have a fourth event that I will be speaking at too, but I am still waiting on the confirmation of the date before I add it to the site. If you want me to talk at an event, just get in touch with me.

What a busy time it has been recently – and you can probably guess this from the lack of updates to my blog. I have plenty to say and share, I have just been finding it difficult to grab a few minutes to post something.

This busyness has all been related to a number of trips I have had lined up. Recently I have been working overtime to get a lot of work out of the door before I go away. The first event on the agenda was my pal Jaymez’s stag do in Nottingham. It happened last weekend and it was great. We stayed in a lavish hotel, did paintball/karting/bowling/snooker, a medieval banquet and lap dancing. It was great fun and you can see the evidence in the Gallery. I got back on Sunday at about 2.30am, watched some West Wing on DVD and then got up early to finish off some outstanding work before we go to Germany on Wednesday. We are going to Wacken for two days of coach travel and two days of blistering metal fuelled by beer and German hot dogs. We get back on Monday and then on Tuesday I am visiting family for a few days. After this I then head over to the Netherlands for the Friends Of O’Reilly camp in Enshede. At this rate I am going to need September just to rest.

I saw on Slashdot that Sun are considering buying Novell. If this happens, this could really be a bad thing for the Linux community. I am concerned about the position that Sun seems to be moving into regarding its approach to Linux. This is partly because they are massively unclear on their views of Open Source and how they apply it across their range of products. On one hand they go and Open Source StarOffice, Project Looking Glass and eventually Solaris, but on the other hand they are quivering behind the sofa with the idea of Open Sourcing Java. What is it to be Sun?

Aside from Sun’s two sided PR policy, I have concerns for hackers who are part of SuSE and Ximian. I have some good friends at both SuSE and Ximian and they really do have some talented developers there. I was a little concerned when Novell bought them up, but it seems that the Novell guys have helped to foster the culture and innovation that has been part of SuSE and Ximian. I have this uncomfortable feeling that Sun would not foster this environment and simply try to force Java down everyone’s throats as per usual. Yes, I am a cynic, but this cynicism is stemmed from the fact that Sun seem unwilling to pursue to a consistent view and Sun seem to misunderstand much of what the Open Source community stand for. Schwartz seems to be worried that the community will simply take Java and fork it. To me this seems to be the thoughts of someone who does not truly understand how Open Source development works. Schwartz believes that the GPL encourages forking Java. He also believes that if you GPL Java it will result in a number incompatible versions.

Although I agree that there is the potential for a fork, I also feel he is being overly paranoid about this. If the GPL encourages forking so much, why do we have software that people work together to standardize on? Why are there not a thousand forks of KDE and GNOME (yes, I know GoneME is a proposed fork of GNOME, but that is one fork), and why are there not forks of Qt, GTK, gcc and other core development tools? The reason for this is the supporting resources and flexibility of the software. The reason why Qt is not forked is because Trolltech are open to patches and suggestions from Qt users and they keep working on the product and maintaining it. Trolltech have also positioned developers as open to feedback and they have also provided good technical facilities for working with Qt.

If Sun were to Open Source Java and provide a complete framework for allowing people to contribute changes, suggestions, patches and other material, Sun would certainly continue to be the mainstay for Java based technology. The problem is that if Sun want the benefits of Open Source, they need to contribute too, and they need to allow others to contribute. As an example, I am pretty sure that a number of developers would want to allow Java applications to use a GTK/Qt theme so the applications mix in with the desktop environment – Sun should expect work in this area and foster it to extend Java. This is a collaborative community, and collaboration can only work with two sides.

You know, I have been working pretty hard recently and last night it pretty much all caught up with me. After working to get some articles ready before I go to some booked events, I also spent a few days getting up at 6am, getting in at 7pm and going to sleep at 12am. I have had five hours sleep each night for a while and last night I virtually collapsed when I got in. I had been down at the LUG meeting and I was beginning to flake as the meeting continued – this was not the good company I was with, it was simply my body saying “listen Jono, you need to sleep, and you need to sleep now. Is it going to be with your face in a chicken tikka masala or at home in bed?”. I got back in at about 10.20pm and Sooz got in from work shortly before. I then had the best sleep for quite a while. I am still tired now, but beginning to wake up. 🙂

Thanks for interesting feedback on my last blog entry by the way. I am pleased that people are thinking about some of these usability troubles in our software. Nordle, you were busy – three posts! Speaking of posts, I am deleting the forums soon. I have heard no major complaints about this (mainly because they never get used :P), so they are going to be wiped when I have got some work sent out today.

Nothing much to say today as I have been away from all of my email, blogs, news sites and things, so I need a few days to digest it all. I am sure I will be rambling about something soon though…

Sorry for the lack of updates – I have been down in Elstree training a chap and doing some consultancy work. This work has involved creating a project management system in PHP and MySQL and I have also been helping him get started with Linux. He got a copy of SuSE 9.1 and installed it on his Toshiba Satellite laptop and the experience has been interesting in a number of ways. Firstly, SuSE seem to have made some pretty great strides with regards to installation and setup. The distribution installed with around two clicks of the mouse and the choices it made were sensible and worked well. Pretty much everything on the machine works and it looks great. It is impressive to see ease of use playing a primary role in Linux and I was impressed with SuSE’s efforts.

Despite all this good work, there are still some fundamentally simple problems with SuSE 9.1. I am planning on covering some of this in further detail when I have managed to garner more research, but from a usability perspective SuSE have allowed some issues through the net. There were two problems cited by Lee (the chap I am training) with his new Linux machine. The first was finding network configuration settings and adjusting them. Lee mentioned that it makes perfect sense to him to access his network settings from Internet Explorer in Windows, and he could not do that in Konqueror or Firefox. Although I have a gut feeling that the usability cognoscenti would have a fit with locating configuration functionality in a third party application, this strikes me as simple integration. The problem with integration with KDE on SuSE is that you have the KDE Control Center and YaST as two separate and not hugely interlinked configuration outlets. Why are these separate, and what value does this separation offer? None. SuSE should have a single, unified configuration center withe everything in it. I would personally suggest YaST for this as the KDE Control Center is a bloated mess. Maybe the SuSE usability people could work the KDE Control Center modules into YaST; this may be a wise move considering YaST is Open Source now.

Another problem that Lee mentioned was that his DVD player just did’nt work. He stuck a DVD in the drive, used the default media player (Kaffiene) and he found it unfriendly and that it simply didn’t work. I don’t know the specifics of how a DVD drive works, but I would have assumed that it fairly straightforward to play a DVD in Linux now. I might be barking up the wrong tree but I assumed this was written and stable a few years back.

Although Lee has found SuSE 9.1 to be mostly impressive, these little niggles are slight scuffs in the paintwork. I am sure that these little problems can be further refined and worked out in future releases, but it is still pretty impressive to see how simple the Linux desktop is getting. Five years ago I would have never thought that someone could use Linux and not touch a terminal or command prompt. I honestly believe Linux is going to be a great desktop OS, but the only way we continue to push it is to engage in quality and constructive criticism and work out these little issues. Good work SuSE, and I am going to get a list of these issues from Lee and forward them on.

Some good feedback on The path to unified interaction has come through, and I was interested to read the comments when it was linked at OSNews. Although I was pretty much expecting this to turn into a KDE vs GNOME flamewar, some people did get the spirit of my article and discussed it where they could.

One of the comments posted was by modalaci and cited two core barriers that we need to overcome in creating a system such as this:

• The lack of abstraction: Every desktop has its own more or less well defined standards on how things should work. Yes, I’m talking about policy. As I see this issue, most developers think in terms of policy, instead of mechanisms.
• Another significant problem seems to be the lack of cooperation between desktops to define standard interfaces to doing thigs. It’s like every projects wants to create their own universe, while excluding or ignoring others.

I agree here. Policy and co-operation are key problems that need to be focused on, but I am confident that there are real and technically viable methods in which these issues can be overcome.

If we are looking at a technical solution to this problem, we have two core options to allow this kind of integration between the toolkits:

• Standardise of middleware. To do this you will need to manage the drawing engine, configuration management, resource management (such as dialog boxes and icons) and other common entities. Graphical environments will need to rely on this middleware to be compliant.
• Build software bridges. Another option is to build a middleware bridge that maps from one system to another. An example of this would be mapping the configuration from the GNOME configuration store to the KDE configuration store. This method strikes me as error prone and would still rely on API stability on both sides of the bridge

This is an area where freedesktop.org have the chance to play a critical role. If some form of middleware technology is developed to manage these abstracted layers, there is no excuse why the different desktops should not use them. With all honesty though, I can certainly foresee that they will not use them. If there is one thing that annoys me about the free software world, it is that people preach endlessly about not re-inventing the wheel, and then they go and develop yet another framework. Why do we have so much duplication? KParts and Bonobo, DCOP and dbus, GNOME panel and Kicker, aRts and ESD – framework after framework after framework. The only people that care about this are developers, not users. I am all for choice and competition, but we do need at least a modicum of co-operation, and I don’t just mean drag and drop.

I think these problems are critical to the adoption of Linux. I would be interested to hear more thoughts on the subject and less KDE vs GNOME bitching.

I just submitted a feature request to the GNOME Bugzilla. I don’t tend to file feature requests that often, but I am really after a status bar word count. This would make the life of a humble freelance writer so much easier. 🙂

Today I wrote an article about the problems facing the Linux kernel with regards to the ever expanding requirements for device drivers. It will be appearing on the O’Reilly Network. I also wrote a new entry for my O’Reilly Weblog entitled The path to unified interaction. The article explores the importance of abstracting out functionality from an application and ensuring that the application merges in fully with the native desktop environment. Your comments are always welcome. 🙂

Thanks must go out to Thomas ‘ange’ Riboulet for translating The end of imitation and The attitude of openness into French. Thanks very much for this. You see the translations by clicking here.

It has been a busy and tiring day so I am off to drink some wine and relax. 🙂
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Sorry for the lack of updates; it has been a busy few days. Friday was a crazy day – got an article handed in, spoke on the phone to Erik Dasque at Novell about the Mono project and sorted some other things out. I then spent the weekend with my pals having a BBQ on saturday and having some Pizza on Sunday evening. Last night I finished off an article on Project Utopia, some tips and I am now working on a Mono review.

Tomorrow I am interviewing Jon Harris from Macromedia about their views on Linux as a platform. I am looking forward to what they have to say; they seem to be offering generally quiet but positive feelers out to the press, and I am going to find out what their position is as best I can. I get the impression that Macromedia are intrigued about the take up of Linux, and as the resident rulers of interactive media creation tools they could capitalise on the platform. Macromedia are one of those trendy companies that people with rectangular orange glasses work at; I am sure the current fashion of Linux will work well alongside Macromedia’s angle on the industry. Well, I will find out tomorrow.

I downloaded some of the GUADEC videos yesterday that were encoded with the Ogg Theora codec. I used the unofficial Debian packages from Michiel Sikkes but it doesnt seem to work; all I get is audio. I plan on poking it with a stick later in the day if I have time. I also downloaded the Bruce Perens video. I like watching videos of these community leaders – do let me know of any interesting ones that you are aware of.

I just confirmed another three days consultancy in Elstree and it should be fun. I will be working within spitting distance of the Big Brother house. OK…OK…yes, I do like Big Brother; it is interesting. I try not to write about it on here, but for the record, get out Nadia. She is an annoying tantrum infested excuse for a housemate. I want Victor to win – he is a funny guy who is straight with people. I also like Dan; he seems quite a balanced guy even if his haircut looks like a bird decided to relax itself on his head. Nice.

Oh, and I can now confirm that I will be speaking at an event to promote the use of Open Source/free software in charities on the 15th September 2004. Details are yet to be confirmed, but I will keep you posted. The event will be held in London.

Well, my latest article has gone live on Newsforge. The article is called Mozilla and the future of the Web. The article basically discusses where Mozilla is heading, what challenges it faces and it also includes an interview with Chris Hofmann who is the Mozilla Foundation director of engineering.

Good LUG meet last night. Very busy with a few new people coming down and a bunch of the Birmingham Perl Mongers coming down. There was about 19 of us packed into a smallish room and the restaurant needed to bring in an air conditioning unit. Good night though, and I think everyone had a good time.

The situation with Debian seems to be getting even more concerning. I subscribe to Planet Debian and there seems to be quite a few disgruntled developers who are getting itchy feet about various issues. Obviously I am no Debian developer, but I would be interested in seeing what the actual process is going to be with these issues. If there is no one who is willing to take a stand, it could simply result in two sets of annoyed people. I don’t think the issue is a huge one, but I think some resolution needs to be made regarding critical decisions. If there is one thing that really annoys me, it is red tape slowly getting wrapped around organisations and projects. I really hope the Debian crew can shed this red tape.

Seth Nickel has provided (as usual) a great write-up of his thoughts on some applications. The victims in question are indexing systems, and it includes Medusa, Spotlight and Beagle as well as the Storage and WinFS document stores. Seth goes on to identify good and points about the varying systems, but in general there seems to be quite a difference between the commercial and free alternatives. Examples of this include Beagle and Medusa requiring a crawler to update the cache as opposed to the on the fly updates in Spotlight. To me it seems that a crawler pretty much defeats the purpose of all this. With this software you essentially need the information on hand straight away. If there is a daily lag before crawler kicks in this could cause a problem with currency.

Now, don’t be nasty and take the mick out of my lack of knowledge of EXT3, but doesn’t a journaling filesystem provide some form of journal or cache? Is that not the whole point? As I say, I am ignorant on this subject, but it strikes me that this kind of functionality could be worked in at that lower level. This seem like something that should be at a filesystem level and not layered on top of a desktop or something. If anyone can clarify me on this, do let me know. 🙂

Oh, and for readers of my Linux Format series on KDE Development, I submitted the fifth part yesterday (which will be in stores in a month or so), and just look at where we will be:

(click for a bigger view)

Dan and I after a few too many at the Linux Expo in London.

OK, before chastisers come out from under their rocks, yes it does say No picture loaded and yes it is quite simple, but this is a tutorial and we are still making our way through the fundamentals.
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I was reading Jordi Mallach’s blog and I agree with his latest entry about Debian. The basic story is that it looks like there will vote on if AMD64 is added as a supported architecture in Debian. Jordi mirrors Joey Hess’s view that this concept of voting on such fundamental issues as important new architectures such as AMD64 is madness. As much as I love Debian and run it on all of my computers, the project does need a firm boot up the posterior with regards to making decisions. The biggest enemy of the Debian project seems to be the overstated decision making process, and anything else to slow down releases is a bad thing. AMD64 is an important architecture to support and it seems that everything is in place to build packages for it.

I think the challenges Debian faces are the typical challenges that face any collaborative development community. Any project that is powered by volunteer contribution needs to tread on eggshells regarding the demands you can make of your volunteers. As much as I respect that Debian needs to be conscious of not burning the developers out, the project also needs to be conscious of not boring or limiting the developers. To me this seems like a classic case of social conflict within an ordered group. The last thing Debian needs is to loose developers like Joey Hess, and if some kind of methodology for managing changes to the Debian culture is not implemented, it could drive such people away. When I started out in Linux myself, I was originally put off Debian due to the amount of zealots that seemed to use it and populate the typical Debian community areas. I really hope Debian does not continue to portray this image.

I have booked my hotel room for EuroFoo and I have proposed a talk on the future of the Linux desktop and its emerging technologies. Some of the Foo campers are interested in the presentation, and I hope I get a chance to do it. The only downside to attending EuroFoo is that I was originally planning on going to a friends wedding party. I feel a shit for not going, but everyone understands that I need to go to EuroFoo. I am pleased I have such supportive and encouraging friends.

Oh, and I now have Skype installed now on my main Linux box and it is incredible. The quality of the sound and its ease of use is fantastic. I am now going to use Skype as the main mechanism to discuss things over the Internet by voice. If you want to call me, my username is jonobacon. I have also updated the contact page to reflect my use of Skype.