Archive for September, 2008

Posted on September 27, 2008 - by jono

The Validity Of 5-A-Day

Yesterday my buddies over at the excellent Ubuntu UK Podcast did a segment on 5-A-Day where they were debating the merits of the initiative. I just wanted to weigh in with some comments.

The debate spawned into a few areas which I want to address separately.

Firstly, in terms of the success of 5-A-Day, it has been a roaring success so far. I have a graph that measures the workflow of the 5-A-Day team and the curve is constantly growing with over 14000 bugs being touched in 7 months; that is over 2000 bugs on average a month. That is touched bugs, but in terms of actual bona-fide closed bugs, that is over 8000 in 7 months. Daviey mentioned the number of members contributing to 5-A-Day seeming small; interestingly the number of people who are involved in the team fluctuates a lot – this is common with most community teams and groups, and auto-expiration of people from the team also contributes to fluctuating figures. Despite the team adjusting in size, the number of bugs touched with 5-A-Day has remained consistent, which suggests that people are doing more and more bugs each day and not limiting themselves to the suggested five. This quells any worries that five is an unobtainable figure – if it was, our stats would say otherwise.

It is also important to get the purpose of 5-A-Day in perspective. 5-A-Day is not intended for everyone. It does require a certain level of technical know-how. It does require someone to know the bug-tracking facilities in Launchpad. It does require someone to run the development version of Ubuntu. The purpose of 5-A-Day is to put a manageable figure on daily bug contributions. It sounds overly simplistic, but it works. When encouraging any kind of adoption or mass direction, it is essential to set fair expectations – this is what governments have done with the fruit and vegetable 5-A-Day – if you set a base-level of expectation, it provides a simple metric for people to strive for in their daily lives. Just think about all of the places this happens – counting calories in a diet, working out for a certain amount of time, running a certain distance three times a week, carbon offset expectations. Admittedly these are all measurements for a healthier and more balanced life, but that is the point of 5-A-Day in the Ubuntu world; getting our contributor community comfortable with a reasonable daily contribution so we can manage the bug list that we have. Not everyone will be able to do 5 bugs a day, some may only do one a day. Not everyone will be suitable for getting involved, but there are a large number of people who are suitable…between 140 and 200 who can make use of the initiative.

So, in a nutshell, 5-A-Day is not for everyone, but it is a great contribution for a good number of people, and with 5-A-Day we are 14000+ triaged bugs better off.

Another element of the discussion was the suitability of our resources in getting people skilled to contribute to 5-A-Day. Again, I want to set fair expectations here – to do 5-A-Day from no development or triaging experience will require quite a bit of perseverance, but it can be done. I think we have a pretty good set of resources in what we offer to help people get involved:

• Extensive documentation covering how to join the scheme, how to triage, different types of bugs and scenarios, and recently we have been working hard to get our general bugs documentation fixed up.
• For those who don’t like to read documentation, a stack of videos on packaging and other developer resources at the Ubuntu Developer Channel.
• A bunch of general IRC tuition sessions at not only Ubuntu Open Week but also Ubuntu Developer Week which happen every cycle. In addition to these two solid weeks of tuition we have weekly MOTU Q+A sessions, general help channels and mailing lists.
• We also appreciate the value of face-to-face time so we are encourage individual Bug Jams as well as the Ubuntu Global Bug Jam which happens on every cycle.
• We also have a panel applet and 5-A-Day client to make reporting easier about bugs tended to as part of 5-A-Day and share these achievements on blog entries and elsewhere.
• Oh, and 170+ LoCo Teams to offer local help, support and in many cases…pub visits.

Without sounding arrogant, I think this is a pretty compelling roster of help and support for budding Ubuntu contributors. Again, this will not convert every potential contributor into a super mad-skilled Ubuntu rockstar developer, but it gives people a good start to get involved.

Finally, Daviey mentioned the sponsorship queue. Admittedly, the sponsorship queue has seen some tough times with items languishing there for a while. To help resolve this, I sat down with Daniel Holbach and we fleshed out some plans to resolve these issues, and part of this is that Canonical is requiring that every paid developer spends at least one hour a week tending to items on the sponsorship queue – this time commitment alone (around 25 hours a week) will be a significant contribution in getting the queue in shape. We still need the community to look after the queue too, and we have plans to help encourage this in the coming months.

Hope this helps clarify the situation a little.

Posted on September 25, 2008 - by jono

Call For Intrepid Release Parties and Ubuntu’s 4th Birthday!

Ladies and Gentleman who love and adore the world most lovable and adorable Operating System, Ubuntu, we plan on releasing Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex on October 30th. Now, this release is a pretty special release because not only do we kick out another kick-ass Ubuntu, but October 20th is Ubuntu’s 4th birthday!

As such, it is time to par-taaay. Seriously. The Beastie Boys faught for your right to partaaay, so show some dignity and respect to these rights, and get out there and do it.

So, what is the skinny, I hear you ask? Well, I think it is time for us to put our collective minds together and organise an incredible series of release parties all over the world. On our last release, we had over 60 parties, largely organised by our incredible worldwide LoCo community, and I would love to see us hit nearer to 100 parties for this release, particularly with a birthday to celebrate!

Organising a party is pretty simple:

• Pick a date – I would recommend either Thu 30th October or the following weekend…Sat 1st Nov and Sun 2nd Nov. Pick a date when you can arrange for a bunch of Ubuntu enthusiasts to be in the same building.
• Pick a venue – this can be someone’s back yard, a pub, a university room, a school, a parking lot…wherever. They key thing is not the venue, it is the people. With a venue and date, you are all set to let the world know about it.
• Add your party to this wiki page – this is the big list of Ubuntu release parties.
• Let the world know – blog about it, make up some fliers and put them in computers shops / libraries / cafes / educational establishments etc. Encourage a stack of people to come along to your party.

We have a longer guide to organising a release party here. You can also discuss organising your party on the ubuntu-event-planners mailing list.

When it comes to running your party, there are a bunch of things you can do on the day/evening itself:

• Have a cake – it is a birthday, after all! If you can’t bake a cake, find someone who can.
• Hang out with other Ubuntu people, meet new faces and get to know each other.
• You may want to perform installfests.
• You may also want to organise a few talks and speeches for the event itself.
• Why not make some merchandise to give out? Maybe some badges, stickers or t-shirts?

I will be in San Francisco then, and I am thinking of organising something there too.

Posted on September 24, 2008 - by jono

Improving Ubuntu/Upstream Bug Workflow

Today we launched the beta of our Ubuntu Upstream Report. Jorge has more details on how upstreams and Ubuntu contributors can make use of the report, but I wanted to spend a few moments telling the story behind the report.

Quite some time ago, we set ourselves up with the job of improving how we work with upstreams in a range of areas. To do this we hired Jorge to implement this work, and we decided to focus on bugs as our first action area. When trying to improve the relationship between two people, areas, or things, it is important to first define the mechanics of interaction. When thinking about the mechanics of interaction between Open Source projects, bugs offer a really exciting opportunity. Bugs are not only a common language between Open Source projects, but they also have a broadly similar schema – bug summary, description, state, associated patches, assignment etc. In a world with thousands of Open Source projects, bugs offer an interesting means of defining the connections between the thousands of dots. It is this kind of interconnected data that can be interesting in community improvement projects such as this.

Before we could begin improving our bug story though, we needed to understand more about the problem. Sure, we had ideas about how we could improve bug workflow, but the reality was that we were really just clutching at ideas and assumptions – we simply did not know enough about bug culture and the different approaches to bugs taken by upstream projects. Our first step was in understanding upstream bug workflow better. One key question here was:- exactly how can upstream projects make best use of our bugs?

To explain better, let me summarise the problem. Imagine you are using Ubuntu and something goes wrong. You suspect it is a bug, so you click Help->Report a Problem and you file a bug. We now have a bug in Launchpad in the Ubuntu project. Now, this bug is reasonably likely to actually exist in an upstream project. Imagine the bug was present in the GEdit text editor that we ship with Ubuntu – there is a distinct possibility that this bug is a bug in GEdit itself as opposed to a bug that we introduced while we build Ubuntu. It therefore makes sense to ensure that this distinction is noted, and to make this easier, we have a rather cool feature in Launchpad in which we can link an Ubuntu bug to a bug in an upstream bug tracker. In this particular example, if we found a bug in GEdit in Ubuntu and the bug is present in the upstream GEdit bug tracker, we can link the two bugs together. This link is also called a watch. This means that bug status changes in the upstream bug tracker will be reflected in the Ubuntu bug inside Launchpad. The goal here is that there should be one set of bug information that can be accessed from the upstream bug tracker and in Launchpad, and the two should be synced; multiple eyes on the same bug. Nice.

There were however two specific unknowns:

• Firstly, we had an suspicion that not that many Ubuntu bugs were getting linked to the upstream bug tracker. We had no fixed idea of this, but it was a hunch that we needed to quantify.
• Secondly, if we do link a bug upstream, we had no firm idea how useful an upstream actually find our bug data. Our discussions suggested very mixed reactions – a small project is likely to have a very different perspective on bugs than a large project. Just think about this in purely quantitative states – a small project will likely get fewer bugs, and these bugs can probably be dealt with by a small collection of volunteers. This is unlikely to scale to something like the Linux kernel or OpenOffice.org.

To help understand the latter problem more, we conducted an upstream survey, which some of you may have filled in. Surveys are a funny old beast, and a general issue survey can sometimes not yield particularly useful results, so we issued the same survey twice – first to an invitation-only range of upstreams who we knew would provide some objective commentary, and secondly we opened it up to anyone. A key element in this survey was asking about perspectives on bug workflow. We got a decent set of results (it is recognised in research that the magic number is 24 sets of results, so you don’t need hundreds of participants) and we assessed each set of results as well as combining the surveys. In addition to this we sat down and assessed other areas of bug workflow – watching how Ubuntu developers fix bugs and taking notes, developing bug jams further and improving our bug documentation.

But anyway, back to the upstream report specifically…

With every project that I approve on the community team at Canonical I want to see metrics. This is something we apply across the board. I have to admit, I am a bit of a graphing obsessive; it is interesting which conclusions and patterns that you can identify when you track a set of data, and this is particularly interesting when you match your data to your initiatives in the time-line. Of course, not everything can be graphed, but a lot can, and it really helps us build our community more effectively.

In terms of this project, I was keen to see graphs that show the number of upstream bug linkages going on, the total number of open vs. upstream bugs and how many bugs are fixed elsewhere. We could use these graphs to determine our progress in improving our bug workflow, but this was not enough – we also needed raw data about which projects needed the most focus. Which projects were struggling the most with bug figures? Which projects were not forwarding bugs upstream? Which projects didn’t have an upstream bug tracker registered in Launchpad? We had all the answers to these questions in Launchpad, but no means of gathering them. To fix this, we created the Ubuntu Upstream Report.

The Ubuntu Upstream Report that has hit beta today is the result of us sitting down and determining exactly what kind of data we wanted to know about upstream bug culture, and presenting this data in a means that helps us focus our efforts more effectively. The most critical focus with the report was to identify the Top 100 projects that need the most assistance with bug work – these projects are organised by open bug counts. We could then produce figures for each of these projects to identify how many upstream tasks are registered and how many of these tasks are links to upstream bugs. Combining these figures, it gives us an idea which projects are sucking at linking to upstream bugs.

With this kind of data available, it gives us the ability to drive our other initiatives that we have been building such as Bug Jams and 5-A-Day. In fact, 5-A-Day is a key driver in how we can improve our bug linking story. Right now you can look at a project on the upstream report and click the number in the far right column to provide a list of bugs that have upstream tasks but no upstream link. A bug with an upstream task but no upstream link is likely to be considered an upstream bug, but it really needs the link to be made. All you need to do is find the upstream bug in the upstream bug tracker and link to it in the Ubuntu bug in Launchpad; this is a really useful and simple contribution to your 5-A-Day – nail five of these suckers a day, and you are flying. How cool is that – we can let our incredible 5-A-Day community know exactly what easily needs fixing in the Top 100 projects that need attention. That is pure class in a glass.

This is just one of a number of projects that we are working on to improve how we work with other entities in the Open Source world. We are really, really keen to not only build a strong and effective Ubuntu community, but to also ensure we can work as effectively with other projects and contributors too. Sure, we have some things to fix, but I am determined for us to resolve these problems and really drive through new opportunities to improve how we work together. This is one element in how we want to improve our relations with upstreams, so stay tuned for more as we develop our ideas.

Posted on September 23, 2008 - by jono

Meme(me)

From Blizzard.

• Take a picture of yourself right now.
• Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
• Post that picture with NO editing.
• Post these instructions with your picture.

It is my natural working posture. Honest.

Posted on September 22, 2008 - by jono

Building Belonging

Just wanted to let you know that I am confirmed for a keynote at Ohio Linux Fest and I am working on a brand spanking new presentation called Building Belonging. Should be a corker. Well, I hope so.

Look forward to seeing you all in Ohio next month.

Posted on September 17, 2008 - by jono

29 Today

Today I turned 29 years old. Wow.

Last night Horseman Holbach flew in from Berlin and we blew the foam off a few cold ones and eventually got submerged into a surprisingly fun bunch of people from The Courier Awards. No, not the font, the package delivery people. I know, I never imagined they had upmarket awards ceremonies in hotels either. Tonight it is out with folks from work for tapas and drinks.

Also, thanks to those of you on Facebook who have already posted some messages. That was really nice to wake up too.

Posted on September 11, 2008 - by jono

Seven Years Ago

Never going to forget. Never.

Posted on September 11, 2008 - by jono

Denied By Reign Completed

Well, at 2.48am, Denied By Reign, the debut Severed Fifth album, is finally complete and I am really proud of it. It has been by far my most ambitious project yet – eight songs, 39m 57s of music, 91 guitar riffs, 35 instrument tracks, 5.35GB of recorded audio and all recorded in about two solid weeks of studio time spread out over a few months due to traveling. This project was not only ambitious in the amount of material to record, but also in the timescales to get it done with everything else going on. It was also my most challenges production project – I have never recorded so much audio before, and it really pushed the limits of my set-up – my (what I thought was a pretty studly) dual processor PowerMac G5 with 4GB RAM was really creaking under the load of so many tracks complete with EQ and effects. In fact, it was so heavyweight that I had to mix the instruments in sections and could only listen to the full song properly when I mixed it all down. Safe to say…quite taxing!

Anyway, October 21st is the release date when the entire album will be available for free, and in the meantime some sneak peeks will be on their way soon, complete with more updates on severedfifth.com – I was tempted to do a formal update now, but I am going to bed.

Posted on September 9, 2008 - by jono

No, Malmsteen. No!

Wow, Yngwie Malmsteen, notable guitar virtuoso, who I have been a fan of for years has just announced the cover for his new album Perpetual Flame:

Oh dear. That is very bad indeed.

Notable reaction from the album-buying public includes

• “Wow that’s bad…the chest hair and all..wow…“
• “The Hoff called and wants his chest hair back.“
• “That’s gotta be fake…my 12 yr old niece could make a better cover than that in Photoshop.“
• “Big hairy chested playful bear seeks boy toy for long walks on the beach, cooking tofu, and long sensual massages; are you the one I’ve been looking for?“
• “Why not call it ‘Donut Magnetic’“
• “Do you really need your nipple on there, Yngwie?“

Posted on September 9, 2008 - by jono

The Jaunty Jackalope

I am really happy to see Mark’s announcement of the codename for the 9.04 version of Ubuntu – the Jaunty Jackalope.

I am really excited for the new challenges and opportunities we will be facing with Jaunty. Ubuntu is stepping up to the plate in a number of areas – the desktop, the server and importantly, the hugely exciting mobile space. And, being the community guy, what makes me most proud is that the core ideals and importance of the Ubuntu community remain as uniformly critical to Ubuntu as they have since day one. The sheer, gritted determination of our community is simply breathtaking, and this is going to be no different for Jaunty.

Now is an incredibly exciting time to be involved in the Ubuntu story, and every single one of us can help to make that story memorable. Bring it on!