People join communities because communities get stuff done.

I love ducks. In a professional way.

If you missed the memo, the next UbuCon is happening in a few short weeks. The schedule is still being built but it should be as interesting as always. Are you close the City? Be sure to be there.

I hear they have a few special folks who’ll be showing up.

I’ve been somewhat remiss as a current OpenOffice project lead in spreading news to the Ubuntu community. So, here’s my first attempt to do better.

Please welcome two new OpenOffice incubator projects:

ODF Toolkit
http://odftoolkit.openoffice.org
led by Dieter Loeschky with Juergen Schmidt and Michael Brauer

User Experience
http://ux.openoffice.org
led by Lutz Hoeger with Matthias Mueller-Prove

For those local, it appears that I’ll be speaking in March to CUGG. More details on CoLoCo page.

I’ve also run across an interesting non-Ubuntu project that is worthy of note. Open Street Map is a project to collect GPS data and make public domain (GPL/CC) maps.
It already has a fair number of entries for Europe but needs some help for other country, especially the USA which is almost non-existent. For any serious GPS user, especially those who are Geocachers like myself, this is great way to help others. I encourage everyone to go have a peek at what they are doing.

I’m a big IPV6 fan. I’ve been using it as a user (vs developer) since before they invented NAT to fend off the inevitable shortage of IPV4 addresses.

What’s so cool about IPV6? I like Alex Lightman‘s hypothetical version the best:

1. Great return on investment: “At Oracle we invested $50,000 to IPv6 enable our database software, and were able to sell millions more to the Dept. of Defense instead of repeatedly asking for waivers.”
2. Lives saved: “After Major Ros Dixon’s company started using IPv6 on all equipment and warfighters, as well as sensornets that enabled Marines to better recognize friend or foe, friendly fire accidents dropped to zero, and the ratio of enemy casualties to coalition casualties has soared in America’s favor.”
3. Sales growth: “Hexago’s revenue from sales of its $35,000 IPv6 tunnel broker doubled from Q1 to Q2 as ISPs all rushed to add IPv6 offerings.”
4. Credibility increase: “When the Dept. of Defense completed its transition to IPv6 in late 2007, a year ahead of its own target date, it gained the admiration of the US Congress, and received funds allocated by Congress beyond the DoD’s own requests, to build on the new potential for Network-Centric Warfighting.”
5. Lives saved: “By IPv6 enabling ambulances and mobile medical equipment, European Union nations were able to triple the number of people treated before getting to hospitals, and double the lives saved in Golden Hour interventions.”
6. Sales growth: “The Consumer Electronics Association reported that IPv6-enabled products returned because purchasers could not figure out how to configure and begin using them was only 10% of purchases vs. the industry standard 32% return rate.”
7. Reduced crime: “Electronic fraud complaints have been cut by over 80% per capita for mobile commerce users using phones with IPv6 and mandatory IPSec compared with mobile commerce users using (private) Network Address Translation.”
8. Better performance: “New customer satisfaction at T-Mobile in Germany has increased from 70% to 85% after IPv6 stacks were added to new phones, doubling their battery life while doubling the average talk minutes as well.”
9. Government Respect: “Japan’s government has impressed the world by successfully transitioning its entire society to IPv6 years ahead of any other country, and is starting to build on new capabilities in hundreds of industries.”
10. Public excitement: “Hundreds of new products and public companies that didn’t exist in 2004 are being unleashed to the two billion Internet users, creating energy, publicity, and enthusiasm for the Internet industry that hasn’t been seen since the mid-nineties, when the Internet accounted for 1/3rd to 1/2 of GDP growth.”

Ok, so we know these are hypothetical examples but they are achievable with IPV6. What are some of the practical things you can use IPV6 for now?

1) IRC6 – connect to IRC via IPV6 and get a wicked cool mask:

* [Rinchen] (~Rinchen@2001:4830:152d:0:20e:cff:fe74:b250): Rinchen
* [Rinchen] #ubuntu @#ubuntu-colorado
* [Rinchen] plasma.oftc.net :The Netherlands
* [Rinchen] 2001:4830:152d:0:20e:cff:fe74:b250 :actually using host
* [Rinchen] idle 00:28:10, signon: Mon Jan 22 23:39:15
* [Rinchen] End of WHOIS list.

2) USENET – connect to news://newszilla6.xs4all.nl and read your news via IPV6

3) Play Quake

4) Go MUDing at Fatal Dimensions. To connect, just telnet to port 4000 on mud.fataldimensions.org.

5) Media – e.g. ICECAST2 and Netherlands TV and Radio

6) Surf IPV6 sites or perhaps abstract your surfing via a Gateway

7) Sync your time via NTP

8) IM over IPV6 with Jabber – e.g. use amessage

9) VOIP and IPTV – watch this space for announcements in 2007

10) Setup an IPV6 website. One of the easier ways is to be afraid.
…and more

My local ISP doesn’t provide native IPV6 although there are several out there that do. I’ve tried just about every tunnel broker and have found SixXS to be the best. Did you know that the SixXS IPV6 infrastructure currently in place has lots of available bandwidth? Translation = speedy!

I am very happy with my own personal setup. I have one my servers in the basement setup as the IPV6 tunnel and router. I use it to vend out my IPV6 subnet addresses to my IPV6 ready devices. One day I hope I can get native IPV6 service. I’ve considered forcing all of my traffic over IPV6 but some of my apps that I use for work haven’t got their head out of the IPV4 world.

If you’re interesting in giving IPV6 a whirl, head over to SixXS and follow the 10 easy steps to IPV6.

Get yourself some water and a napkin because this is a drool-fest. Gizmodo eat your heart out.

I stirred up quite a bit of excitement with my previous post concerning a new System76 laptop prototype that I spotted at my CoLoCo presentation to NCLUG. I am now able to release some of the backstory and details.

A few days before the presentation I emailed Carl from System76 with my dream specs for a laptop. He replied the same day that he had just gotten a prototype of their new machine that matched my specs to the letter minus a DVI-out connection. Carl brought it up to the presentation. I was so impressed I, like others, asked when I could put my order in. I shot Carl an email the next day and he did something special. As many of you know System76 is not only a big Ubuntu supporter but they also very much support LoCo teams. I’m fortunate enough to be currently running the LoCo where System76 resides. As a special favour he allowed me to place an order before the company was tooled up to take regular customer orders on this new model. I thought, “wow, that’s really nice!” so I put in my order about a week ago expecting it to be mid-February when the first production run completed and I would take possession.

Imagine my surprise when Carl called me today, Saturday, and told me my laptop was ready. System76 did a final production ready test run this week and Carl was able to snag me one of those machine. (You rock Carl!) I understand they are still tooling up the manufacturing floor (and their website) to handle this new model so right now I am the luckiest geek on the planet for about two more weeks.

If you follow the System76 Board on the Ubuntu Forums, you’ll know that System76 has recently announced updated specs for many of their Ubuntu laptops in the last week or so. Be sure to check those out when you are done reading here.

Ok, I can’t keep stalling. Here’s what I know of Specs and Pricing. I don’t have all of the details but I will tell you what I believe I know. Keep in mind this could change or I could be flat out wrong.

• It’s a laptop
• It’s call the Darter
• Base model is under $1000 USD
• Weighs a smidgen over 4 pounds
• It’s 3.5 cm thick at the widest point
• 13″-ish display
• 5 hours of battery life, probably more if wifi and bluetooth are disabled and CPU scaling turned on
• Should be available to the public in the next two to four weeks.

My machine (which is probably mid-way above the base model):

• Core 2 Duo T7200 2.0GHz 4MB 667FSB
• 1.5 GB DDR2 667 MHz
• 60 GB 7200 RPM
• Intel 802.11 a/b/g Wireless
• Bluetooth
• SD Card slot
• Intel 945GM
• CPU scaling works
• Network manager works
• Suspend/Hibernate works
• It screams compared to my 3ghz P4.
• I told my wife I’m sleeping with my Darter tonight.

Thumbnails – Click for 800×600 res (so much for my bandwidth)

Perspective Shot against my workstation:

Edit: This story has been dugg and also hit News 2.0

Thanks to the MOTU for putting out Gajim v0.11 in Edgy’s Universe. There have been a number of nifty changes posted in this update, however a few really stand out for me personally:

• Support for link-local messaging via Zeroconf using Avahi (XEP-0174)
• IPV6 support to connect to server – very useful with sixxs.net
• GNOME Keyring Support
• Support for notify-python – so if the notification daemon isn’t running you still get pop-ups
• Support for Privacy Lists (XEP-0016)
• New translations: Croatian, Esperanto, British English, Belarusian

If you haven’t given Gajim a whirl lately, now is your time to grab it and have a go.

Sean Moss-Pultz has announced the availability dates of the OpenMoko Phone that we’ve been drooling over. Click “read more” for the full story.

read more | digg story

For those that want to try the new Jabber-based Firefox XPI for Me.dium, you’re in luck. Here’s your invite:
http://me.dium.com/from/f21b184

Edit: ignore any warnings you may get about the link being invalid. It’s valid. Add me as “Josxko” if you want a friend.

vs

Richard Cobbett vs Mark Van den Borre

Discuss.