If you haven't heard, today at 1700 UTC, Firefox 3 will be released. The Mozilla foundation are celebrating this with a cute marketing campaign, to try and break the Guinness world record for the most downloads of a piece of software in 24 hours. If they've got the bandwidth to burn, and it helps get some coverage of FOSS, why not? I'll certainly be getting it.
I got my degree result yesterday… drumroll…
Yay!
I'm going to start a series of posts where I walk through various things that I do as part of my Ubuntu development work with the MOTU team. I'm currently trying to get myself up to a level where I can apply to the Ubuntu Universe Contributors team, and then at some point in the future for MOTUship.
This article describes the process for merging a package from Debian to the development version of Ubuntu, currently the Intrepid Ibex. If you want to see how I generally go about doing this, follow the jump.
I've had a lot on recently. Mainly a never-ending stream of coursework followed by the inevitable dissertation panic. This is all over now, however: all that remains to be done are 3 exams starting in 8 days (better get revising!). The last lecture of my degree has been and gone in the biggest anticlimax ever. Talk about going out with a whimper instead of a bang! I don't know how I feel about finishing my course. To some extent it's not so bad as I'm staying on to do a PhD here (that was another thing which occupied my time and I neglected to post about) starting in October, but this will still be a very different experience. The last three years seem to have flown by, but then when I think back to the sheer amount of things I've done, and the stuff I've learned then perhaps it wasn't so quick after all.
I managed to sort myself out a job for the Summer which will allow me to stay in Nottingham, which I really want to do. It's weird how for half of my University life I considered home to be back in Alconbury, but then something changed and now I feel more at home here than back there. Perhaps it's because most of my friends have moved on, or maybe I've simply become more used to life here. I'm definitely not going to complain. Notts may have its problems, but it feels like it's on the up to me, and is definitely somewhere I'm happy to stay. That's not to say that the choice between York and Nottingham for my PhD wasn't one of the hardest I've had to make. It really tore me up for a number of weeks, but for a few reasons which I won't go into here I plumped for Nottingham in the end. I'll probably keep wondering how different it would have been had I chosen York though.
Anyway, enough about life. What about nerdy stuff?
The Hardy Heron was released not long ago, and I'm very proud to be able to say that I played a tiny role in its development. My goal is to up my participation levels for the Intrepid Ibex. After my exams are over in a few weeks, I'll find myself with a lot more free time which I'll be able to spend working on the distro. My beady eye is already on a few merges to get the ball rolling, and then who knows? I'd say my goal for this cycle is to get to "Contributing Developer" status, once I've learned enough.
Overall Hardy seems like an incremental improvement over Gutsy. I upgraded (using update-manger) to the beta during development, so the major changes aren't that visible to me sadly. Perhaps a fresh install is in order to see the major changes stand out. It's good to have newer versions of most software too, even if there are some regressions that I've found thus far. Such is life. My linux-fu has definitely increased since I started using it 100% of the time. Prior to using Ubuntu, I'd been using Linux on-and-off every few months but always returning to Windows after some annoying problem forced me to give up. Not so this time; my new PC was (almost) fully compatible from the get-go, and I'd decided to have the resolve to see any problems through. It's been a blast so far.
I'm coming out of hibernation to celebrate this announcement. Finally I will be able to watch TV in my room again; there's no aerial signal up here.
An early version of the service is available from 9 April.
Woohoo! I'll be trying this. The only downside is that it's apparently only available in the internet channel. It would be much cooler to have an iPlayer icon on the Wii's dashboard. Can't have everything I guess.
I can only laugh at how the ISPs will moan about the increased bandwidth from this. Seriously, it seems that they're only going after the BBC on this one because they have an identifiable target; with filesharing there's no one individual to go after. Shut up and start improving your networks, please. There are only going to be more and more bandwidth-intensive applications like this coming out and ISPs are not going to stop this. They need to roll with it.
I'm sure that most everyone has heard about the Phorm + BT/Virgin Media/TalkTalk debacle by now, but If not here are some useful links. The point of this post is to encourage you to sign this petition over on the PM's website. You'll at least get a response when the petition closes, if nothing else 
(which seems to be stupidly long for some reason, but hey…)
A little while ago I uploaded my first patch to Launchpad, closing bug 159727. This is one of the easiest bugs there is – someone even provided the icon file needed to fix it! Nevertheless, I'm still pleased to have taken my first small step in Ubuntu development.
<crimsun> Laney: thanks, uploaded.
ROCK ON!
This week has been great for me. Awesome things that have happened:
Phwoar!
A little while ago I blogged about problems that I was experiencing in Ubuntu, one of which was that the display would blank regardless of what was set in gnome-power-manager (System -> Preferences -> Power Management). I'm happy to report that I found a workaround for this, thanks to Michael Holloway on the ubuntu-uk mailing list. If you find that your display is blanking inexplicably, try appending this to your xorg.conf (hit alt-f2 and type gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf):
Section "ServerFlags"
Option "BlankTime" "0"
Option "StandbyTime" "0"
Option "SuspendTime" "0"
Option "OffTime" "0"
EndSection
Save and restart your computer (or log out and restart X by hitting ctrl-alt-backspace), and everything should be fixed. Play a video and leave it and marvel at how you don't have to move the mouse once every 10 minutes to keep it displaying! Also, I noted that on Xubuntu gnome-screensaver wasn't started by default, meaning that no power management settings would work any more. This is easily solved by going to Settings -> Autostarted Applications and adding an item to start /usr/bin/gnome-screensaver when you login.
Here's the launchpad bug for anyone interested in tracking the issue.
This is me joining in the new years fun. Here are my resolutions for 2008, unordered:
Not many, and not too ambitious, I hope. Except maybe the PhD bit.
Anyways, I'm really enjoying my eee so far. The only things that annoy me a bit are the small keyboard (with weird right shift placement, on the right of the up arrow key, wtf?) and the flakiness of the built in wireless manager, which just seems generally hard to use. Oh, and Thunderbird isn't very enjoyable on such a small screen. Usable though. The folks over at eeeuser.com seem to have done all sorts of crazy things with theirs, and it is fast becoming my first port of call when I want to do anything. After I get back up to uni tomorrow I'll be able to pick up my new SDHC card and RAM and install eeeXubuntu, which should (barring any problems) make it perfect.
Now I'm off to pack and revise. Oh, what joy.
alexdb on 
