Half year ago at UDS-O in Budapest Michael Opdenacker interviewed some people from Linaro. I remember that at the end of event Kiko asked him did he talked with me cause he thought that it could be interesting for someone.

Then we had another Linaro Connect (in Cambourne) and nothing happened. But in previous week I got an email that there will be interview with me in Orlando and that I should choose time slot for it. So I did and here is the result:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajNSrQfFcPA

What we were talking about? Check it yourself. And please comment did you enjoyed.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
I got interviewed during Linaro Connect was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

If you’ve been doing anything with Ubuntu lately, chances are you’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about Juju.  If you’re attending UDS, then there’s also a good chance that you’ve been to one or more sessions about Juju.  But do you know it?

The building blocks for Juju are it’s “charms”, which detail exactly how to deploy and configure services in the Cloud.  Writing charms is how you harness the awesome power of Juju.  Tomorrow (Friday) there will be a 2 hour session all about writing charms, everything from what they do and how they work, to helping you get started writing your own.  Questions will be answers, minds will be inspired, things will be made, so don’t miss out.

http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-p/meeting/19875/juju-charm-school/

(Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/slightlynorth/3977607387/)

Are you both an Ubuntu user and a bibliophile?  Want to keep your ebooks synced between all your connected devices, including bookmarks and reading position?   If so, join us for this UDS session Thursday, Nov 3rd, where we’ll be talking about how to add that functionality to Ubuntu One.

http://summit.ubuntu.com/uds-p/meeting/19820/other-p-u1-book-sync/

It is not often when I am writing about just announced things but today Calxeda company has announced their EnergyCore cpu modules.

Imagine processor which takes 5W energy, has 4 ARM cores, 4MB of L2 cache, 4 Serial-ATA connectors (lot of 4s ;D) and 5 10Gb links for connecting with other cpus. Then put four (again :) such chips on card. Then take 4U rack case and put 4 trays of cpu modules (72 cpus) and you have insane amount of nodes in small space. And all of that will take really small amount of power (5W per cpu, no network switches, no cables).

In HP announcement they wrote that first servers will be available in 1H of 2012 — no pricing anyway. Presentation shown that half of rack of HP Redstone servers will take 9.1kW of energy and can replace 10 racks of x86 machines (eating 91kW). Of course that’s for situations when there is no need for more then 4GB of ram per node (which is limit of ARM cores used by Calxeda).

I wonder when one of such beasts will land in Canonical build farm. It would make Ubuntu port of ARM flying when it comes to building software.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Calxeda announced ARM server product was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

7 years ago, The Ubuntu 4.10 “The Warty Warthog” was announced. A huge congrats to the community, Canonical, and especially Mark for getting so far from “there” to “here”.

This brings back old memories of my first conference in Oxford in August, the great-great-grandfather to what is UDS these days. Back then, there was no company, no Launchpad, no Blueprints, no work items, no detailled plans, just a bunch of ideas, BoFs, and this was a third of the entire crowd:

Back then we worked on the famous TRLS technology (“Totally Rad Laptop Support”) and were proud when we got the ThinkPads to suspend once. During that conference I wrote pmount to provide automatic mounting of USB sticks in a safe manner. Those were the days…

But I can also safely say that there are some things that haven’t changed. Even though both the community and the company (which changed away from www.no-name-yet.com recently) grew by two magnitudes since then, we still have the same serious attitude, stern look, and formal attire as we had back then:

We are professionals, really!

The guidebook mobile schedule for UDS-P is now ready, install it here:

And just search for UDS in the application. Then you’ll have the UDS schedule, events, sponsorship information, and maps in your pocket:

The schedule updates every 10 minutes, and there’s a convenient QR code on each schedule page so at UDS itself you’ll be able to just take a shot of one of the scheduling monitors, or from the QR codes we’ll have plastered around the venue.

We’re less than a month away from the start of UDS-P, which means we’re winding down the development pace on the Summit project. It’s been a very, very busy 6 months for us, we’ve done more work on Summit this cycle than I think it has ever seen before.  As I mentioned in previous posts, our main focus this cycle has been on stabilizing both the code, and the development process, and I think we’ve done an excellent job of meeting those goals.

During this cycle we have developed an easy to reproduce development environment that allows new contributors to get started hacking on Summit much faster than the could previously.  At the same time we’ve implemented stricter code reviews, requiring accompanying test cases in most instances, and have configured Tarmac to help us keep approved branches landing without delay.  We have also handed the task of maintaining our production environment and production deployments to Canonical’s IS team so that Summit will be managed by the same professional team as any other Ubuntu website.  We have also added 3 new contributors during this cycle, and hope to add more even more in the next.

From the end of UDS-O to the time of this writing, the Summit developers have closed 37 bugs, landed 89 merge proposals, and added 118 test cases (which is 118 more than we had before).  I can’t even begin to say how proud I am of the team of developers that have contributed to this project, and the amazing results that we have achieved in so short a time.  It is even more incredible because this is truly a community project, we all contribute to it in our spare time.  So thank you to everybody who has contributed to the success of the Summit project this cycle.

Below is the full list of bugs, branch merges and test cases from this cycle.

Bugs

Branch Merges

193: Michael Hall 2011-10-02 [merge] [r=james-w] Optimizations to reduce the number of database queries on the summit and schedule pages.
192: James Westby 2011-09-22 [merge] [r=mhall119] Apply the same transform as etherpad to meeting names when generating pad urls.
191: Michael Hall 2011-09-22 [merge] [r=mhall119] Allow linaro tracks to be scheduled in adjacent slots in the same room.
190: James Westby 2011-09-21 [merge] [r=mhall119] Don’t escape URLs before putting them in the HTML.
189: Michael Hall 2011-09-21 [merge] [r=james-w] Change user_private_ical to use Schedule.from_request, add test case for private ical.
188: James Westby 2011-09-21 [merge] [r=mhall119] Allow + in track, room and attendee names without causing url lookup errors.
187: James Westby 2011-09-21 [merge] [r=mhall119] Fix the 500 error pages to not crash when displayed.
186: Michael Hall 2011-09-19 [merge] [r=james-w] Exclude attendee secret key from the API
185: James Westby 2011-09-19 [merge] [r=mhall119] Allow “+” in a meeting name without crashing on the url lookup.
184: James Westby 2011-09-17 [merge] Make it a single query, rather than doing a few queries per meeting.
183: Michael Hall 2011-09-18 [merge] [r=nigelbabu] Fixes problem with old cache on track view schedule
182: James Westby 2011-09-18 [merge] [r=mhall119] Add some tests for constructing a Schedule object.
181: Nigel Babu 2011-09-17 [merge] [r=james-w] Initial run at pep8 and pyflakes complaints fixing.
180: Michael Hall 2011-09-17 [merge] [r=james-w] Adds read-only REST/JSON API to the schedule data
179: Michael Hall 2011-09-17 [merge] [r=james-w] Adds the ability to download or subscribe to an ical containing your public *and* private meetings
178: Michael Hall 2011-09-17 [merge] [r=james-w,nigelbabu] Fix tests that were looking for a hard-coded SITE_ROOT in urls
177: Jamal Fanaian 2011-09-16 [merge] [r=mhall119] Updating the description of a meeting from the LP blueprint.
176: James Westby 2011-09-16 [merge] The autoscheduler will now reliably not require someone to be in two places at once.
175: Michael Hall 2011-09-16 [merge] [r=nigelbabu] In unit tests, specify that all Meeting instances are requires_dial_in=False unless explicitly testing that functionality.
174: James Westby 2011-09-16 [merge] [r=mhall119] Add fields on rooms and meetings for dial-in.
173: James Westby 2011-09-16 [merge] [r=mhall119] Remove the code to display the track in the room title if there is only one.
172: James Westby 2011-09-16 [merge] [r=mhall119] Add tests for the reschedule command, and make it do something again.
171: James Westby 2011-09-16 [merge] [r=mhall119] Fix a javascript error when a meeting has no participants.
170: James Westby 2011-09-16 [merge] [r=mhall119] Revert r50 which was a band-aid to fix a bug that can no longer be reproduced.
169: James Westby 2011-09-15 [merge] Fix percent sign escaping in render.py
168: James Westby 2011-09-15 [merge] Add support for using multiple Launchpad sprints to populate a single Summit, which will allow separate UDS and Linaro Connect sprints
167: Michael Hall 2011-09-14 [merge] [r=james-w] Adds test cases to make sure % signs are being properly escaped in render.py
166: James Westby 2011-09-14 [merge] [r=mhall119] Update the location of the linaro theme branch.
165: James Westby 2011-09-13 [merge] Add headers to avoid caches on the +temp-meeting-export fetch.
164: Michael Hall 2011-09-14 [merge] [r=james-w] Fix to allow periods in records names
163: James Westby 2011-09-13 [merge] Stops the auto-scheduler from acting on private meetings.
162: Chris Johnston 2011-09-13 [merge] [r=james-w] Updates linaro link to match uds.u.c
161: Michael Hall 2011-09-13 [merge] [r=nigelbabu] Fixes 2 typos in the get_edit_link_to_pad method
160: Michael Hall 2011-09-13 [merge] [r=james-w] Fix for the PrivateSchedulingTestCase
159: Michael Hall 2011-09-12 [merge] [r=nigelbabu] Adds a new TestCase for building tests of the schedule conflict resolution.
158: Michael Hall 2011-09-11 [merge] [r=chrisjohnston] Adds a new ‘color’ field to the Track record, this contains a 6-char hex color code that will be used as the background for meeting blocks on the schedule.
157: Michael Hall 2011-09-02 [merge] [r=chrisjohnston] Check that at least one plenary room exists before trying to use 156: Michael Hall 2011-09-02 Add back in what was lost on rebase
155: Michael Hall 2011-09-02 Add back in what was lost on rebase
154: Chris Johnston 2011-09-02 Adds ability for schedulers to schedule private rooms.
153: Chris Johnston 2011-09-02 Adds private rooms to edit page
152: Chris Johnston 2011-09-02 Adds display of private rooms on UDS page for staff
151: Chris Johnston 2011-09-02 Adds def private_rooms
150: Jamal Fanaian 2011-09-02 [merge] [r=mhall119] Created a method to get an attendee’s full name. Showing crew
149: Chris Johnston 2011-09-02 [merge] [r=mhall119] Removes stray }
148: Michael Hall 2011-08-27 [merge] More XSS fixes
147: Michael Hall 2011-08-27 [merge] Fix XSS vulnerability
147: Michael Hall 2011-08-22 [merge] Check with launchpad to see if an entered username is valid on sponsorship suggestion form
147: Michael Hall 2011-08-22 [merge] Fix errors when converting sponsorship scores to unicode strings
146: Chris Johnston 2011-08-22 [merge] [r=nigelbabu,mhall119] Updates the version of light-django-theme and fixes bzr apps after an update.
145: Chris Johnston 2011-08-22 [merge] [r=nigelbabu] Moves admin link to masthead due to wrapping in main-nav
144: Chris Johnston 2011-08-19 [merge] [r=nigelbabu] Changes Linaro link to match uds.u.c
143: Chris Johnston 2011-08-14 [merge] [r=nigelbabu] This will set debug to true when running locally.
142: Chris Johnston 2011-08-12 [merge] [r=nigelbabu] Switches summit to using bzr_apps by running init-summit.
141: Chris Johnston 2011-08-12 [merge] [r=nigelbabu] Adds a link to the page for editing an etherpad
140: Chris Johnston 2011-08-01 [merge] Adds today link to main-nav
140: Michael Hall 2011-07-22 [merge] Adds the meeting id to the meeting_page_url, and uses only that as the lookup parameter
parameter
139: Nigel Babu 2011-07-30 [merge] [r=mhall119] Reset the theme of the documentation to default.
138: Chris Johnston 2011-07-30 [merge] [r=nigelbabu][] Remove translation tags, summit is not translated.
137: Nigel Babu 2011-07-30 [merge] [r=][] Create a docs so that it shows up in rtfd.org
136: Chris Johnston 2011-07-25 [merge] [r=mhall119][] Removes old migrations and adds new initial migration
137: Michael Hall 2011-07-20 [merge] Adds 960px style to all pages except the wide schedule
134: Chris Johnston 2011-07-20 [merge] Fixes lpupdate. Props mhall119
134: Michael Hall 2011-07-20 Make sure we don’t have periods in meeting names when trying to form the meeting page url
133: Michael Hall 2011-07-20 [merge] point logo link to http://uds.ubuntu.com
133: Michael Hall 2011-07-20 If meeting has no name, we can’t form a proper URL for it, fallback to returning no URL
132: Chris Johnston 2011-07-19 [merge] [r=mhall119][] Adds update-openids script to summit to fix usernames.
131: Chris Johnston 2011-07-19 [merge] [r=mhall119][765031] Adds private room as an option for a room status.
130: Chris Johnston 2011-07-19 [merge] [r=mhall119][793020] Modifies links to match uds.ubuntu.com
129: Michael Hall 2011-07-19 [merge] [r=mhall119][781117] Changes /today url to /summit_name/today
128: Chris Johnston 2011-07-18 [merge] [r=chrisjohnston][] Fixes a minor spelling issue in fields.py
127: Chris Johnston 2011-07-18 [merge] [r=][] Updates required version of south
126: Chris Johnston 2011-07-11 [merge] [r=][] Fixes minor spelling error
125: Chris Johnston 2011-06-26 [merge] [r=nigelbabu][chrisjohnston][798822] Adds a print statement to provide feedback
124: Chris Johnston 2011-06-17 [merge] [r=mhall119][chrisjohnston][798826] Displays information in the name field error message more clearly.
123: Maris Fogels 2011-06-17 [merge] [r=nigelbabu][mars][] Added a tests.py module and an in-memory sqlite database for running the test suite.
122: Nigel Babu 2011-06-12 [merge] [r=james-w][nigelbabu][782062] Remove the ‘.’ from the name of the meeting and replace it with ‘-’
121: Nigel Babu 2011-06-10 [merge] [r=james-w][nigelbabu][790675] Stop the screen scape and use the json API instead.
120: Nigel Babu 2011-06-11 [merge] [r=chrisjohnston,james-w][nigelbabu][783291] Removed the brainstorm code out of
119: Penelope Stowe 2011-06-11 [merge] [r=james-w,nigelbabu][Penelope Stowe] try-catching the launchpad requests with 5
118: Nigel Babu 2011-06-09 [merge] Removes Attendees list from the meeting page if the session is a plenary. Props Nigel Babu
117: Nigel Babu 2011-06-09 [merge] Adds spacing around the QR code to avoid overlap. Props Nigel Babu
116: Nigel Babu 2011-05-22 [merge] Fix authschedule to not modify anything in the past
115: Chris Johnston 2011-05-22 [merge] Add prev/next day links to schedule view
114: Michael Hall 2011-05-22 [merge] Add full path to meeting page in the ical feed
113: Michael Hall 2011-05-22 Fix errors in template, add settings option to have django serve media files even when DEBUG=False
112: Chris Johnston 2011-05-22 [merge] Disable debug mode and give better error messages
111: Nigel Babu 2011-05-22 [merge] Fixes to reschedule command
110: Michael Hall 2011-05-22 [merge] Updated setup.py and requirements.txt to match current production environment

Tests

test_sponsorship_display
test_nonlaunchpad_display
test_suggest_valid_username
test_suggest_invalid_username
test_sponsorship_review_display
test_sponsorship_about_paras_filtering
test_sponsorship_about_urlize_filtering
test_sponsorship_xss_escaping
test_sponsorshipsuggestion_review_display
test_sponsorshipsuggestion_xss_escaping
test_passing_nonexistant_summit_raises_error
test_meetings_can_not_be_scheduled_in_closed_slots
test_participants_are_in_another_meeting
test_check_schedule_errors_on_no_dial_in
test_check_schedule_errors_on_same_track_in_previous_slot
test_check_schedule_errors_on_same_track_in_next_slot
test_check_schedule_no_error_on_different_track
test_check_schedule_no_error_on_same_track_for_plenaries
test_check_schedule_no_error_on_same_track_for_ajdacent_sessions_allowed
test_try_schedule_into_refuses_room_without_dial_in
test_try_schedule_into_allows_room_with_dial_in
test_link_to_pad_with_pad_url_set
test_link_to_pad_with_pad_url_unset
test_link_to_pad_with_plus_in_meeting_name
test_edit_link_to_pad_with_pad_url_set
test_edit_link_to_pad_with_pad_url_unset
test_edit_link_to_pad_with_plus_in_meeting_name
test_ical_meeting_without_name
test_ical_meeting_name_with_period
test_private_ical
test_meeting_page_url
test_meeting_name_with_period
test_room_name_with_period
test_track_name_with_period
test_participant_name_with_period
test_meeting_name_with_percent
test_meeting_name_with_plus_sign
test_room_name_with_percent
test_room_name_with_plus_sign
test_track_name_with_percent
test_track_name_with_plus_sign
test_participant_name_with_percent
test_participant_name_with_plus_sign
test_etherpad_edit_url
test_meeting_check_schedule_no_conflict
test_meeting_check_room_conflict
test_meeting_check_schedule_participant_conflict
test_private_meeting_schedule
test_no_available_public_room
test_no_available_private_room
test_required_participant_in_private_meeting
test_percent_in_meeting_name
test_percent_in_meeting_title
test_percent_in_meeting_description
test_percent_in_spec_url
test_percent_in_wiki_url
test_percent_in_room_title
test_percent_in_meeting_track_title
test_percent_in_meeting_track_slug
test_percent_in_attendee_username
test_cache_cleared_on_meeting_change
test_cache_cleared_on_agenda_change
test_track_cache_cleared_on_meeting_change
test_track_cache_cleared_on_agenda_change
test_default_read_only
test_editable
test_read_only_for_public_summit
test_read_only_for_non_edit_request
test_read_only_for_unauthenticated_user
test_read_only_for_user_without_permission
test_default_not_personal
test_personal_if_specified_in_get
test_date_set_from_date
test_date_parsed_from_string
test_dates_set_from_summit_if_not_passed
test_room_set_from_room
test_room_set_from_summit_if_not_passed
test_rooms_include_private_if_user_is_staff
test_rooms_include_private_if_show_private
test_track_is_none_by_default
test_track_set_from_track
test_nextonly_false_by_default
test_nextonly_set_from_get_parameters
test_fakenow_none_by_default
test_fakenow_set_from_get_parameters
test_fakenow_set_to_none_if_invalid
test_calculate_unscheduled_does_nothing_when_read_only
test_calculate_unscheduled_includes_unscheduled
test_calculate_unscheduled_ignores_scheduled_meetings
test_calculate_unscheduled_ignores_meetings_in_tracks_not_in_this_room
test_calculate_unscheduled_includes_meetings_without_a_track
test_calculate_unscheduled_includes_all_meetings_in_room_without_a_track
test_calculate_unscheduled_includes_meetings_of_the_right_track
test_calculate_unscheduled_includes_meetings_with_one_right_track
test_calculate_unscheduled_ignores_plenaries_in_the_room_view
test_calculate_unscheduled_ignores_talks_in_the_room_view
test_calculate_unscheduled_ignores_specials_in_the_room_view
test_calculate_unscheduled_shows_plenaries_in_the_plenary_room_view
test_calculate_unscheduled_ignores_non_plenaries_in_the_plenary_room_view
test_update_meeting_skips_no_name
test_update_meeting_trims_name
test_update_meeting_accepts_existing_meeting
test_update_from_launchpad_response_empty
test_update_from_launchpad_response_handles_no_name
test_launchpad_sprint_import_urls_uses_default
test_launchpad_sprint_import_url_uses_one_summit_sprint
test_launchpad_sprint_import_url_uses_two_summit_sprint
test_update_from_launchpad_gets_info_for_all_import_urls
test_update_from_launchpad_does_the_update
test_update_from_launchpad_deletes_unseen_meetings
test_update_from_launchpad_doesnt_delete_meetings_with_no_spec_url
test_update_from_launchpad_updates_last_update
test_reschedule_does_nothing_on_empty_schedule
test_reschedule_removes_missing_participants
test_reschedule_removes_unavailable_participants
test_reschedule_removes_insufficient_slots
test_reschedule_leaves_old_slots
test_reschedule_leaves_manually_scheduled

Summit is the code that runs the session scheduler for the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) and, as of last cycle, the Linaro Summit as well.  Summit has had a rather troubled past, being passed from one maintainer to another, evolving organically as it went.  But during UDS-N, it started gaining a team of community contributors, specifically Chris Johnston and I.  This expanded further for UDS-O, when Nigel Babu took the helm as the project manager.  We were also joined by Linaro developers who wanted to make Summit support two simultaneous events, using the same schedule, the same rooms and the same attendees.

Many changes were made in the run-up to UDS-O, and by “run-up” I mean all the way up to the first day of sessions.  Unfortunately, nowhere along Summit’s organic growth did it gain the proper test suite and deployment processes that are a necessity for a project of this size.  In fact, one of the bugs that was discovered during UDS-O was a script running on the server that wasn’t even part of Summit’s revision control tree!

Well this part of Summit’s history is coming to an end.  After UDS-O, the community developers started to plan out how to stabilize Summit, both it’s code base by adding testing, and also the deployment process by strictly managing how new code gets into production.

Bug Fixes

The bug fixing started early this cycle.  Nigel was submitting merge proposals by the end of the week of UDS-O, and Chris and I were pair-programming on the flight from JFK back to Orlando.  So far there have been 30 branch merges into the summit tree and fixes for 20 bug reports.  Nigel gives the full list over at his blog.

Setup and Development

Summit can now be easily setup for development using Virtualenv, which makes getting started with development significantly easier.  LoCo Directory recently gained a script that fully automated the setup of a development environment, and this will soon be coming to the Summit code.  At the time I’m writing this post, Jorge Castro has even begun work on an Ensemble formula, that will make deploying a fully configured instance of Summit on Amazon’s EC2 platform a matter of a few simple commands.

Making development setup easier lowers the barrier to new contributors, and we hope this will encourage more community members to get involved in such a fun and important project.  Making sure we’re all using the same development environment, and having it easily replicated for others to develop and test, will help improve the accessibility and stability of our code.

Testing

During UDS-O we got some help setting up and writing the very first testing code for Summit.  From now on, writing test cases for new features or bug fixes will become a normal part of our development process.  We recently held an online classroom session about how to write test code for Summit (and LoCo Directory too).  There is still a lot of Summit code that needs tests written for it, but we’re going to cover as much of that as we can while continuing to move forward with development.  More than any other change this cycle, I’m excited about the huge improvements to stability that we can gain through aggressively testing our code.

Branch based deployments

Summit has always used branch-based deployments, that is our production server has a copy of our bzr tree that it runs from, instead of a package that gets installed.  Unfortunately, up until last week the only branch we really had was trunk, which made it harder to properly track emergency fixes when we already had revisions committed to trunk that weren’t ready to be deployed.  To fix this we’ve split off a production branch, which is the only branch we will deploy from, and will always have a copy of the exact code that is running in production.

We will also, for the short term, have two branches for development.  The 1.x branch is our “stable” tree, that’s where we will make any changes that will be ready to deploy in the coming days or weeks.  This means that we can use our trunk branch for long-term development, where we can perform some much-needed refactoring and code cleanup, without worrying about blocking deployments while these changes settle into place.  There are some major and necessary changes coming to parts of the Summit code, and this development setup will let us start landing those quickly so that we can test them and build off them, without destabilizing the currently used code tree or blocking minor fixes from being deployed.

Ubuntu Website integration

If you visit the Summit website today, you’ll already see some of our recent changes.  To better integrate with the WordPress instance running uds.ubuntu.com, we have changed our main navigation and 960px width to match. Once the WordPress theme updates are rolled out, both sites will have the new community top navigation bar too.  No longer will it feel like you’re being thrown from one site to another without a means of getting back.  This should lead to a less confusing user experience for both sites, and much happier UDS attendees all around.

Sean Sosik-Hamor, our group photographer and IS sysadmin, has published the official UDS-O group photos on his blog, along with the details on the setup and equipment. Enjoy!

So, new Ubuntu cycle and time for a fresh translations videocast!

Join me tomorrow at the Ustream Ubuntu Translations channel, where I’ll give you a summary about the great sessions we had around translations last week at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest, where we discussed the plans for the next cycle: the Oneiric Ocelot. As usual, feel free to come along, ask your questions and have a chat around translating Ubuntu.

• WHAT: Videocast - UDS O Translations Highlights
• WHEN: Thursday, May. 19th, 15:00 UTC
• WHERE: Ustream Ubuntu Translations channel

Talk to you all tomorrow!

Note that if you wish to participate in the online chat, you’ll need to sign up for a ustream account (it doesn’t take more than a couple of minutes), but I’ll also be answering your questions on the #ubuntu-translators IRC channel on Freenode.

This past week I had the pleasure of travelling to Budapest, Hungary to attend the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) for Oneiric Ocelot. Even better, my wife and baby daughter came along (my other two children had the *ahem* pleasure of staying at home and going to school).

This trip marked a number of firsts:

• It was my first UDS as part of the Platform Services team (I attended previous summits as part of the QA team)
• It was my first time in Budapest (and Hungary)
• It was my first time flying with “budget” airline Jet2

Let’s dive into these in reverse order.

Jet2 does the typical budget airline trick of advertising extremely low prices, and then hiking them as you actually try to book a realistic trip. In my case, I just wanted to get from Manchester to Budapest without transferring. The rest of it was organised by Canonical’s travel agent, so I had no interest in the choice of airline.

However, we were pleasantly surprised (especially compared to our trip to Dallas earlier this year with American Airlines). The planes were clean and comfortable, all staff incredibly helpful (I suspect our baby daughter helped get people on side) and the whole experience a lot better than we expected. We would happily fly with them again.

Budapest was an interesting place, but not somewhere I’d rush to visit again. The hotel was fantastic, but the city itself was less so. I can’t put my finger on it, we just didn’t enjoy it as much as Prague last year.

UDS itself was its usual, hectic, draining-but-rewarding experience (and it’s been a while since I attended one). As I mentioned, this was my first as part of Platform Services, and the attention on certification related topics was significant. Sessions that were basically just the certification team at previous summits were standing room only this time. Even our daily roundtable was packed out!

Our big push this cycle is the Ubuntu Friendly community hardware validation programme that will enable all Ubuntu users to help identify and promote hardware that works (well) with Ubuntu. I thoroughly enjoyed leading the various discussions around the programme, and the feedback we’ve had from the community has been overwhelming positive so far. Now we just need to make it happen!

Other highlights for me were the numerous design-related sessions that I attended, a number of the lighting talks on Friday, the “how do we pronounce Oneiric” improv session during Mark’s keynote, and the random Ubuntu user I met in the lift who just happened to be staying in the hotel - the sight of ~500 Ubuntu developers/users was a bit overwhelming for them!

One big realisation for though was how much my (non-certification-related) contributions to the Ubuntu community have dropped off in my time at Canonical. Hopefully I can do something about that this cycle too.

I just got back from UDS-O (Ubuntu Developer Summit, Oneiric Ocelot) in Budapest, Hungary. It was my first UDS, and my first time in Eastern Europe.

I was really worried that the time-change and jet-lag going to eastern Europe would mess me up. However, I felt really good the entire trip and adjusted almost instantly. My mood was good and I was ready to hack.

Some quick comments about the summit:

• Budapest was fun and interesting, with beautiful weather and historic architecture.
• The Ubuntu summit is a very well run event, where important decisions are made and work gets done.
• Our Community rocks!
• Ubuntu rocks!

I was able to attend a few UDS sessions throughout the week, but my main mission was an on-site sprint with my team at Canonical (ISD). Our team is globally-distributed, and this was my first chance to meet and work with all of them in person. While the entire summit was awesome, my most lasting memories will be of sitting crammed in a hot hotel room with a dozen of the finest hackers/colleagues I have ever worked with. As a new member to ISD, they made me feel welcomed and let me jump right in.

Can't wait until next UDS!

After the success of the improvements of PowerNap in Ubuntu Natty 11.04, we will be having another session st UDS-O Thursday the 12th at 15:00. In this session we will discuss the following:

• Second Stage action when running in PowerSave mode.
• Support for port-ranges in Network Monitors
• Changing the polling monitoring system to an event based system.
• Client/Server approach to monitor/manage PowerNap “client machines” over the network for data center wide deployments
• Server ARP network Monitoring for Automatic Wake-up of Clients.
• API like approach for Integration with other projects.

Everyone who’s interested are more than welcome to join! For more information, the blueprint can be found HERE.

This past weekend was Ubuntu Global Jam, where Ubuntu users and contributors all over the world get together to work on improving the project.  Jams come in many forms, code hacking, bug triaging, translating, documenting, or even just promoting Ubuntu in their community.  In my own corner of the Ubuntu community, a few of us got to together to work on improving the Summit project

This is the code behind http://summit.ubuntu.com, which provides the UDS scheduler and sponsorship application forms.  Summit is a Django application, released under the AGPLv3 license, and is primarily developed by community members.  Joining me were Chris Johnston,  a frequent community contributor who I’ve also worked with in LoCo Directory and other projects, and Elliot Murphy, my 3rd-level boss as Canonical (no pressure there!).

Here’s a list of what we managed to accomplish:

Switch to the new ubuntu-community-webthemes, which will give us the “mothership” top-navigation links as seen on planet.ubuntu.com and wiki.ubuntu.com

Started work on integrating Summit with Django testing framework.

Bug #643012: Register Interest should only show currently available tracks

Currently when you register your interest in a track, the form shows tracks for previous summits.  This will restrict it to just the tracks for the summit you’re registering for.

Bug #668532: /today page to display current day’s schedule

A new, permanent URL which will show the current day’s schedule, so you can bookmark it once and re-use it for each day of the summit, and even future summits!

Bug #745378: Empty sub-nav exists on sponsorship page

Removes the gray sub-navigation bar from pages where there aren’t any linkes in it.

Bug #462793: Add slots for videographers

Up to two videographers can not be assigned to a UDS session and their names will appear on the schedule.

Bug #747296: Add plenary flag to iCal feed for conventionist.com

We have been working with the makers of Conventionist, a convention management application, which will allow you to track your session schedule on your Android or iPhone, even getting directions to the correct room.  This fix was necessary for them to distinguish plenary sessions from regular ones.

Bug #747301: Add daily Crew list

Allows Summit to schedule which UDS attendees are willing to act as event crew, with the current day’s crew assignments listed on the daily schedule which is displayed on the large monitors during the event.

Bug #747303: Auto-add slots to schedule

This solved an administrative headache for those organizing the summit.  For past events, every available time slot had to be entered manually, which was a very time consuming task.  This provides them a quick way to pre-populate the time slots, with the ability to fine-tune just the ones that need it.

Bug #747419: Fix login redirect

Several features of Summit require that you log in using your SSO/Launchpad account.  However, after login you are currently redirected back to the main Summit page instead of the page you left.  This sends your current page URL as the path to redirect to after a successful login, so you no longer have to go find that page again.

There is one good thing in 2011 year — I know when I will have to travel for company meetings and which conferences I will have to forget due to this…

So in May I will attend Ubuntu Developer Summit which is a place where we discuss what we want to have done in next release. Event is also known as Linaro@UDS-O cause Linaro people will be there for same reason. Location: Budapest, Hungary. Time: 9-13 May 2011.

Then there will be Ubuntu Platform Sprint which I may be attending but this was not yet decided. This event is Canonical internal and this time will be without Linaro people (which were present on two previous ones). Location: Dublin, Ireland. Time: 27th June – 1st July 2011.

As Linaro has grown we got own sprint — Linaro Platform Sprint where we will work for a week in one place instead of being spread all over the world. Location: near Cambridge, UK. Time: 1-5 August 2011.

And finally another Ubuntu Developer Summit will take place (again) in Orlando, Florida. This will be more interesting UDS because 12.04 will be LTS so more discussions about long term things will probably take place. Location: Orlando, Florida. Time: 24-28 October 2011.

So this year no LinuxTag for me (UDS-O time), no ELC-E (UDS-P). I was thinking about attending Desktop Summit in Berlin but I lost faith in both GNOME and KDE so looks like there is no sense in going there. Will have a look to be somewhere and meet some people from outside of Ubuntu and Linaro worlds.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
Trips in 2011 was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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1. Jetlagged ;(
2. Ubuntu/Linaro platform rally in Dallas, TX
3. UDS-O

Along with the last set, here are more videos from UDS that might be interesting to upstream projects:

• Thunderbird on Ubuntu
• Launchpad and Upstreams
• OpenStack Packaging
• Thunderbird in Message Indicator
• Ubuntu One Integration with Shotwell
• Transition to Firefox 4 in Natty - I posted this one already but you can never have enough Firefox!

The last set of videos from UDS have been posted! This includes my favorite part of UDS, the Lightning Talks. Remember we kick people off after five minutes so they’re kind of high stress. Apparently my crutch word is “ummm”. Aurelien did a Qt Creator demo, but also make sure you see Ryan Paul’s Qt demo, I talk about askubuntu.com with Robert Cartaino, Colin Watson does one on libpipeline. KDE daily builds, and what I call “The Rescue” by Dustin and the rest of the server team.

Along with the lightning talks we have: 

Unity Architecture - http://ubuntudevelopers.blip.tv/file/4432282/

Firefox 4 for Natty - http://ubuntudevelopers.blip.tv/file/4431119/

Improving the Sponsorship Queue - http://ubuntudevelopers.blip.tv/file/4414615/

Unity 2D fallback - http://ubuntudevelopers.blip.tv/file/4412246/

… and a bunch more!

Here’s a bunch of summaries from the UDS Proceedings. Sorry they’re not more organized.

UPDATE: As many of you have pointed out, these are raw and in some cases don’t even make sense since they’re pasted in from people furiously typing into gobby documents. They’ll be polished as the week progresses.

Last day of UDS-N is today. I am tired and decided to skip last sessions slot and summary. It was good event and for me it was far better then previous one. Even with jetlag…

I attended lot of sessions. Mostly toolchain related ones but some just for fun (like “git for bzr users”) or to add something from me. My session was on Wednesday — a bit too late for people in Europe but even without Wookey it was success. We defined what is do be done for next months and I have all I need to write specification + work items.

But there are few things which I want to note before I forgot (mostly related to organization):

• IRC screens on sessions should have local timezone instead of random one
• all sessions (except private meetings) should have blueprints attached so there will be a possibility to subscribe for them
• would be nice if blueprint page would have information when and where it will be discussed
• when session is moved then subscribers should get notification
• sessions with essential participation should be marked as such on schedule view (and in iCal) — saves time when you have all slots occupied (sometimes even with few sessions at same time)

Some people will say that I am complaining but week before UDS I had huge amount of sessions subscribed (some as essential) and did few cleaning attempts before and during event to be present at as many as possible.

But summit is not only sessions — it is also people. I met some Polish people from ARM, Canonical, Ubuntu, had occasion to speak with new people from Linaro’s toolchain working group or from Linaro or Ubuntu. It was good time. And next time I will take small photo camera because at the end of day my cellphone was discharged so not so many photos taken :(

And I learnt few new things :D How to switch devices connected to hotel wifi by cloning MAC address in laptop or phone, that my x86-64 laptop works quite good as access point (but next time I will rather use WPA instead of open network) and that Skype from time to time decides that microphone which worked does not work anymore. SkypeOut is great thing btw — was the only connection between me and my family.

So this evening we have a party, tomorrow I have to do something with time and then “24h” trip home (about 18h in real but 6 timezones add some + DST change night). I hope that next week will be jetlag free ;D

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
UDS-N is ending was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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Yesterday Konstantinos Margaritis from Genesi USA was giving out about 40 Efika MX Smartbooks and few Efika MX Smarttops. I had that luck to became owner of one of those Smartbooks.

That’s nice device. Powered by 800MHz Freescale i.MX515 cpu with 512MB ram has enough juice to be used as web/email netbook. After charging I got nice message from kernel’s power supply subsystem: 427 minutes of battery life — nice value for just 3-cell battery (6-cell is an option according to box informations and website). What else inside:

• 10.1″ TFT-LCD, 16:9 with LED backlight, 1024 x 600 resolution
• 3D Graphics Processing Unit
• Multi-format HD video decoder and D1 video encoder
• 16GB Nand Flash
• External MMC / SD card slot (up to SD v2.0 and MMC v4.2)
• Internal MicroSD slot
• 802.11 b/g/n WiFi (with on/off switch) – Ralink chipset
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• 2 x USB 2.0 ports
• Phone jack for headset (audio in / out)
• Built-in 1.3MP video camera
• Built-in microphone
• Built-in stereo speaker

That “16GB Nand Flash” in reality is 15GB Flash-on-module connected to PATA controller. According to “hdparm” tests it makes 22-24MB/s which is quite for this type of devices. My class 10 SD card managed to get 14MB/s (compare it with 5.3MB/s in BeagleBoard) so storage options are nice. Ah… there is also MicroSD slot behind the battery but I did not tested how fast it is.

Note one thing: by default Smartbook boots from internal PATA drive but if there is SD card in slot then it is used for booting. This allows to test development kernels without need of getting to U-Boot. I got hit once by that because card which I used to transfer some data had OMAP3 kernels on it… As you can imagine it did not booted properly…

After I think hour or two I got it upgraded from Ubuntu 10.10 “maverick” to “natty” and got hit by some modifications done by Genesi. After copying “/boot/” from other Efika MX I got it working again. Next days will bring me working KDE 4.5.2 desktop (will have to rebuild some packages for it).

My plans for it? Mobile ARM test platform + laptop replacement for events where I do not need more then email + web + IM.

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz
I got Efika MX Smartbook from Genesi was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

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