Archive for February 20th, 2008

Posted on February 20, 2008 - by jono

Support Him

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Posted on February 20, 2008 - by jono

The Intrepid Ibex; Bring It On

Well, it is announced. Mark delivered the news:

With Hardy now past feature-freeze it’s time to start to plan features that are being lined up for inclusion after Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is released in April.

And so I’d like to introduce you to the Intrepid Ibex, the release which is planned for October 2008, and which is likely to have the version number 8.10.

During the 8.10 cycle we will be venturing into interesting new territory, and we’ll need the rugged adventurousness of a mountain goat to navigate tricky terrain. Our desktop offering will once again be a focal point as we re-engineer the user interaction model so that Ubuntu works as well on a high-end workstation as it does on a feisty little subnotebook. We’ll also be reaching new peaks of performance – aiming to make the mobile desktop as productive as possible.

A particular focus for us will be pervasive internet access, the ability to tap into bandwidth whenever and wherever you happen to be. No longer will you need to be a tethered, domesticated animal – you’ll be able to roam (and goats do roam!) the wild lands and access the web through a variety of wireless technologies. We want you to be able to move from the office, to the train, and home, staying connected all the way.

The Intrepid Ibex will take shape at our next Ubuntu Developer Summit, an open event to which members of the Ubuntu community, upstream communities, corporate developers and other distributions are all invited. That summit takes place in beautiful Prague, in the Czech Republic from 19th – 23rd May 2008. Together we will draw up detailed blueprints for Ubuntu 8.10. Please join us there to help define the Intrepid Ibex:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UDS-Intrepid

Ubuntu 8.10 will be our ninth release, and the fourth anniversary of the first release – 4.10. In those four years, Ubuntu has grown as a project, an ethos and a community. The Ubuntu community have worked to set the benchmark for open, inclusive, and collaborative development processes. We have open specifications, open governance structures and a willingness to empower everyone to make their unique contribution to the success of the project.

This has created an extraordinary diversity in participation; a depth of talent including packagers, programmers, translators, writers, testers, advocates, technical support, artists and many others. Those contributions come as much from the corporate world – Canonical and other companies that have embraced Ubuntu as a core of their offering – as from a huge number of individual professionals. It is this combination of expertise and perspectives that makes it such a pleasure for me to be part of this project, and I thank all of you for your continued passion, participation, and energy.

Hardy is our best development cycle yet, delivering on our promise of reliability and stability for the Heron. We must stay focused on that goal. To the extent that you have a brilliant idea for the future, you now have a peg to hang it on – the Intrepid Ibex. When the Hardy Heron has taken flight we will engage fully with the Ibex. Give it horns!

The Intrepid Ibex is coming, and I am extremely excited about it, and so should all of you.

This leads me onto the Ubuntu Developer Summit that Mark outlined in his post – this event is critical in the Ubuntu release cycle, and is open to everyone to attend. It should be stressed that a UDS is a technical discussion event, it is not a conference with presentations and people waving their hands around – it is rooms full of Ubuntu developers discussing the next release, community processes, plans and direction for the Intrepid Ibex. If you want to attend, you are more than welcome, and make sure you add yourself as an atendee to the Launchpad page.

As usual, we (Canonical) will be sponsoring a number of community members to the next UDS, and this group of community members has been decided and will be hearing from us in the next few days. I look forward to seeing you all there!

Posted on February 20, 2008 - by jono

More on the BBC meeting

A few people have been asking me for more details about my meeting with Ashley Highfield from the BBC. I figured I would elaborate a little more.

The meeting took place in his office and we discussed a range of topics. George had a HP laptop for Ashley that he started a new install on, and while Ubuntu installed, Ashley and I discussed a range of issues. We started discussing Ubuntu, its history, where the project started, how the community fits together, how people contribute, its size, and the success of Ubuntu throughout its history. We then moved on to talk in more detail about the Open Source philosophy in which I explained how this incredible worldwide community works, and how distributors take upstream software and release it. I explained the concept of “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow“, and Ashley asked specific questions about how Ubuntu compares to other Operating Systems and other distributions. He had a keen interest in the community and was asking what kind of things I do as part of my work, and where the line is drawn between the community and Canonical. He also reminisced on his programming days with the kind of nostalgic pleasure that many of us feel when looking back to those dim, distant days in technology.

I also sat down and ran him through the Ubuntu desktop, showing it off, demonstrating some applications, and he seemed quite impressed with how it worked. I also explained some of the benefits of the Linux desktop in terms of reliability, security, viruses etc. We transferred to a separate room at the Beeb to get a network connection and we discussed some of the network aspects of Ubuntu, such as the huge range of installable packages available. The meeting then concluded, we shook hands and agreed to talk further.

Ashley is a pleasant, engaging guy, and I look forward to meeting him again.

There we go.

Posted on February 20, 2008 - by jono

Five. 5. 5ive.

Trying to look fly.

5 (five) is a number, numeral, and glyph. It is the natural number following 4 and preceding 6.

Five is between 4 and 6 and is the third prime number, after 2 and 3, and before 7. Because it can be written as 2^(2^1)+1, five is classified as a Fermat prime. 5 is the third Sophie Germain prime, the first safe prime, and the third Mersenne prime exponent. Five is the first Wilson prime and the third factorial prime, also an alternating factorial. It is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 3n − 1. It is also the only number that is part of more than one pair of twin primes.

Five is conjectured to be the only odd untouchable number.

Surely these wonderful people can’t be wrong?