Thanks Ubuntu

Mark Shuttleworth recently responded to criticism of the Ubuntu project with a very thoughtful piece: "Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption"

As someone who has been using Ubuntu for mary years (since Breezy Badger), I have nothing but admiration for what Mark has enabled the Ubuntu people to achieve.

Sure, there have been problems along the way, but the result is an operating system that is a pleasure to use. A few years back I introduced my sister to it, she's been running it fine on her laptop for some time. Just this weekend I helped her fix a printer issue using the desktop sharing in empathy (she is in the UK, I'm in Canada).

This weekend I installed Ubuntu on a friends laptop and an old pc tower. The laptop was taking 15 minutes to boot into windows (probably malware issues, but I'm not the person to fix that). So I installed Ubuntu along side, had it import the user's documents and settings and now they are delighted: 30 seconds and they have a machine that is snappy and fun to use.

The pc tower was her son's. Or at least that was what I thought. It was failing to boot at all. It booted fine from a Lucid Lynx disc, so I asked if it was OK to wipe the disk and install. He said, "Yes, go ahead". So about an hour later it was up and running. Only later that day did I discover her son had two pc towers, one was his, one a friend's he had in his room. No prizes for guessing which one I'd upgraded. Oops. Happily, the friend came by later and was delighted with his new, snappy computer, loaded with useful software.

Thanks Mark and everyone involved in Ubuntu.

Nexus One and Orange UK pay as you go

I am currently in the UK. Last time I was here I bought an Orange UK pay as you go card.

First off, the deal with Orange is pretty good if you are an occasional visitor here. I can get 250MB of data for £5.00. In fact, if I'd subscribed to Dolphin as my Orange animal I'd get this for free with a £10.00 top up each month.

However, when I put the SIM card in the phone I got no data connection. The display just showed the signal strength indicator with no 3G, G or E indicator.

Initially, I assumed this was due to incompatibilities with the frequencies that Orange uses and those my handset can use. I have the version that works on the Rogers network in Canada. See this article for more information on that.

However, when I put my Rogers SIM in the phone, selected Orange as the network and turned on data I got a GPRS connection.

So it seemed the problem was something to do with the Orange SIM card. A long support call didn't provide any solutions, just lots of frustration. The Nexus One wasn't on their list of phones and the support person hadn't heard of it, so I was pretty much on my own.

Today, I made it into an Orange shop. Initially, things weren't going much better, but just as I was about to give up the resident Android expert came to help.

He was excellent and explained I needed to configure an Access Point Name for the 3G and GPRS to work. Sure enough, once I went to:

Settings->Wireless & Networks -> Mobile Networks -> Access Point Names

and added an access point with Orange WEB as the name and orangeinternet as the APN, the phone got a full 3G connection.

So, I can confirm that the Nexus One, Rogers Canada version works fine on the Orange network.

World Cup miscellania

Happily, CBC has the World Cup coverage here in Canada.

This leads to my "Getting things done" tip of the day: watch the football in the gym.

If I head for a run 20 minutes from the end of a game I can watch the game and run at the same time.

Only problem is I have a slight tendency to try and kick or head the ball, not ideal when on the treadmill.

Tim Bray's blog is an unexpected source of good World Cup punditry.

Music industry: how being sensible makes you money

So this morning I came across this Ubuntu video.

Someone asked in the comments if the Twisted Sister track is available in the Ubuntu Music store.

Sure enough it was. With the music store nicely integrated with rhythmbox on Ubuntu it was trivial to purchase.

So, this video has achieved at least one sale.

No doubt there'll be a take-down notice shortly ;)

Electoral reform

With the UK election likely to produce a hung parliament there is likely to be much discussion of electoral reform there. Indeed, the Liberals are likely to demand this in order to form a coalition.

To my mind, this is long overdue. I'm not sure of the exact figures, but for the last few elections a 30% share of a 60% turnout has given a huge majority in parliament. Now, whilst you can argue that those that don't vote don't deserve their views to be represented, it can't be right that 80% of the population end up with their views not represented by the party in power.

Proportional representation would be a good start. A single, transferable vote system would certainly improve things. One key benefit of this is that it largely eliminates the need for tactical voting, each voter can express their preferences, in order of preference, rather than have to guess which parties actually have a chance of winning and voting tactically.

PR though is just a beginning. The opponents of PR point out that it will lead to hung parliaments. Well, yes it will if there is no clear majority for any one party in the population. Now the problem here is that a minority party can then have more influence than maybe they should in a coalition.

A second problem is that even with PR, suppose there are just two parties sharing most of the votes, one has 52% share, the other 48% share. The 52% party will get a majority in parliament, the significant minority won't have their views represented.

The problem is that once in parliament, simple majority rules.

How can you address this?

Well one way is as follows. Once the election is complete, any group with 5% of the MPs can select a representative to go to a meeting. At this meeting the 20 representatives come up with an agenda for parliament and pick a prime minister.

Each MP is allocated a number of votes for the session. The MP can place as many votes as they want on each issue, so if there is one issue they really care about they can put all the votes on that issue.

In this way, minority issues can get an airing and can get pushed through once on the agenda.

The key to this working is of course the meeting of the representatives. At this meeting there will be a need for debate, consensus, compromise etc. I'm not sure current politicians are capable of this, but if they were I believe it would result in much better goverment.

350% increase in Ottawa Ubuntu in just 6 months

Last night was the Lucid Lynx release party for Ottawa.
The attendence was up a massive 350% on the Karmic party, just 6 months ago.
At this rate we'll need to book the new Ottawa congress centre for the 11.04 release.
Here are some photos from the party.
A good time had by all celebrating a great release.

Lucid Lynx Beta

I upgraded my primary machine to Lucid the other day.

So far I've been pretty impressed.

I'd heard a lot of stuff about the 'me' menu and the messaging integration, without really knowing what it is all about.

Under karmic, my experience with empathy had been more than a little disappointing.

With Lucid, things are much better. The envelope in the top panel which goes green when a new message comes in is working really well for me.

The Super-m keyboard accelerator takes me to the messaging indicator and allows me to switch easisy if I want to talk to a contact.

I took a look at the code, the Super-m key binding is hard-wired into the indicator code, so I've had to re-train my fingers which, since I've had that bound to minimize windows.

Super-s takes you to the logout menu, again no way to configure this though.

On balance, I'm a big fan of keyboard support for everything.

This is probably one reason I don't really care about the buttons moving to the left. I don't use the things as a rule (I use the keyboard). One thing I do like on the buttons is the close window one is red -- easy to spot and hit if I need to.

In other news, so far sound has behaved itself. Hopefully the days of 'killall pulseaudio' are numbered.