Canonical and Codethink at Bostom GNOME Summit

Today is the second day of the Boston GNOME Summit, and the second day of Canonical providing morning sustenance for the hackers here. Codethink and Canonical coordinated these efforts, with Codethink sponsoring food later today. It warms my heart that we can do this sort of thing.

Yesterday Cody Russell and I held a session about getting a gesture API into GTK 3.x. There were a great many questions about the uTouch framework, how we're handling multi-touch in the absence of MT support in X (coming in XInput 2.1), and what sort of dependencies would be needed (none! if GEIS is present on the system, gesture support will be added at build-time). At the end of the session, there was a consensus for Cody to present his plans to the GTK developers list and then to start getting branches reviewed for merge. We're hoping to make it for GTK 3.2.

In this vein, Cody and I have been hacking on libgrope for GTK compatibility, and this is serving as the sandbox for the GTK 3 gesture API development. My efforts have been focused on creating the GTK 2 Python C extension for grope. Given that the last time I coded C was in 1989 (and then a bit later in the mid-90s, when I had to hack a slackware driver to get ethernet working), this has been quite an effort. However, after a night and morning of hacking, I've got a handle on C extensions and am using the example code I wrote as the basis for pygrope. I've even managed to rope Barry Warsaw into reviewing the C extension code for us, to be sure we're not doing anything too crazy :-)

The Python C extension will be of immediate use to us in our test harness for gestures and exercising the stack. We will be creating a GTK app for recording user gestures for later playback and inclusion in test suites.

Probabilistic Input for uTouch?

Well, it seems to be the season for a flurry of multi-touch posts. Guess that's helped along by the release of uTouch in Maverick and next week's Ubuntu Developer Summit multi-touch buffet :-)

One of the talks that John, Mark and I enjoyed greatly at UIST was Julia Schwartz's presentation on "A Framework for Probabilistic Input". Julia's an HCI PhD student at Carnegie-Mellon and works in their exciting dev lab. The UIST paper was written by Julia, Professor Hudson, Professor Mankoff, and Andrew Wilson (the latter of Microsoft Research).

One of the reasons I was personally so deeply appreciative of the paper was that when we were building the uTouch framework, Henrik Rydberg and Chase Douglas brought up issues around input uncertainty, and started proposing ways that might be employed to counter this. Getting plugged into folks who are working on this actively and thoroughly is phenomenal.

Since UIST 2010, the uTouch team has been in contact with Julia, sharing ideas and asking questions. Today we had a call with her and Professor Scott Hudson; as such, we have now started exploring possible avenues of development for probabilistic input support in uTouch. Scott and Professor Jen Mankoff will be attending part of UDS this year, and we've set up a session where they can share their research with us and engage in discussions, Q&A, etc., about it, and explore ways in which we can start moving forward on this in Ubuntu (and Linux in general).

The UIST talk slides and related paper are available here:

• https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Multitouch#Probabilistic%20Input

A Visit with System76

Earlier today, I had the pleasure of visiting Carl Richell and part of the System76 crew in their Denver offices today. Pictured to the left is their very sweet Starling NetBook. I became an instant fan, due to the sleek good looks, a fantastic keyboard, and a flawless installation of Ubuntu. Carl also showed me the Starling EduBook, which I completely fell in love with. There's a charter school in Colorado that bought a whole mess of these guys, and the kids at school adore them... and how could they not? A rugged, easy-to-use Linux netbook with Edubuntu installed on it? Total win.

Before getting a device, personnel, and facilities tour, Carl and I talked shop: uTouch, the future of multi-touch in Linux, Unity, Ubuntu on a plethora of devices. You know, the usual good stuff. I asked him what he'd like to see in Ubuntu that he feels would be necessary to totally rock out the tablet experience. His list of top picks echoes the sentiments of many people with whom I have had similar conversations. In no particular order, the list goes something like this:

• fully-working auto-rotate
• a great on-screen keyboard
• browser, music, video, photo, and document apps -- all with a user interface designed for touch
• the ability to deliver and play games
• a sweet note taking app that integrates with email
• TV remote control support

Much of this is already scheduled for discussions in UDS sessions next week :-)

Carl's excited about UDS and the continued conversations that will take place there. As am I. But I also can't stop thinking about that Starling NetBook... I'm going to be replacing my ailing AspireOne with System76's gorgeous offering...

Multitouch and Qt

It's been 11 days since the Qt announcement of new gesture support, and I wanted to blog about it right away... but alas, now will have to do. The folks at Qt have been working on multi-touch support for a while now. They blogged about gestures, multi-touch, Mac support, Windows support, and then at UDS in Brussels (May 2010), they shared their 4.8 plans for multi-touch with the Ubuntu community.

Until recently, there has been no MT stack for Linux. The great news is that the folks at Qt are very interested in getting Qt to work with uTouch. Stephen Bregma has been working on the GEIS API that toolkits will have the option of taking advantage of, and we were delighted to hear from Zeno and Denis that the Qt API they have envisioned and planned is very similar to GEIS, and should make for an excellent match. They are going to be talking with the community about this at UDS two weeks from now, in fact :-)

In support of Qt's commitment to multi-touch and gestures, I wanted to encourage folks to take a look at their post about Qt Quick, Qml, and Gestures. The source code is now available for viewing, and we've started to dive into it ourselves, and it seems that others are as well (I know some GTK guys who are double-checking their own plans by looking at what Qt has done so far).

Also, if you haven't taken Qt Creator for a drive yet, do so; it's an impressive GUI editor/IDE for Qt, and I've really enjoyed it so far. You can enable GUI visual design for Qml projects by going to the "Help" menu and selecting "About Plugins..." after which, you will need to check the box next to "QmlDesigner" (under "Qt Quick"). Also, a nice cherry on top: the Qt Quick design interface looks stunning with the Ambiance theme in Ubuntu -- the color scheme is a perfect match :-)

Q & A: The Ubuntu Developer Summits

Last week I had a nice email exchange with a good friend of Ubuntu, Professor Michael Terry at the University of Waterloo. We met at UIST 2010, but he and Ivanka Majic have been conferring about design and usability in Ubuntu for a while. Delighted with UIST in general and specifically with conversations Mark, John, and I had with Michael and one of his students, we invited them to UDS in Orlando at the end of October.

Coming from an academic institution (and an HCI lab in particular), Micheal had some questions about UDS, how to prepare, and the ways in which it might be different from various academic conferences. I asked him if it would be alright to share our conversation with the wider open source, academic, and professional communities, many of whose members will be attending UDS in Orlando for the first time. He was only too glad our conversation might benefit others :-)

I've edited the content slightly for a blog format (and for improved clarity), but it remains in essence unchanged:

Q: Since we're all kind of new to UDS, could we pick your brain a bit? :-) As we plan for attending, we're trying to envision how to best use UDS.

A: UDS is very practical in spirit, so it's actually fairly straight-forward to make good use of it. The purpose of attendees is to:

1. Engage with developers, community members, users, etc., on well-defined topics for software in Ubuntu, the software that builds Ubuntu, Ubuntu itself, the community, or the prominent tools and technologies that are build on Ubuntu.
2. Assemble and execute. After each discussion, each topic should have enough information and feedback such that the direction forward in any given project is clear. Next steps can be taken immediately (whether that's actual development, coordination, etc.).

The enormous amount of discussion that takes place there is recorded (some sessions with video, all with shared notes), so very often folks formalize this information as a spec.

For a list of the wide range of categories covered at UDS, check out this page (still in progress): http://uds.ubuntu.com/tracks/

To give you more of a sense of things:

• There are lots of rooms, each with two projected screens: an IRC channel for that physical room, and a network-shared communal notes screen.
• Sessions are about 50 minutes long, with breaks every few sessions.
• Large monitors are placed in the halls with the schedule for the day displayed, so that folks can more easily find the sessions/rooms they want to be in.
• There are topical plenaries for two hours after lunch that take place in a auditorium so that all who want to attend, can.

In other words, it's very active :-) Lots of moving about. Lots of intense discussion in short sessions.

Q: What is an ideal outcome from your perspective (and from our perspective)?

A: The ideal outcome is consensus on the discussed topics, unblocking all involved, and moving forward with a shared vision.

Q: What kind of work or goals do we want to accomplish while we're there?

A: In general, you want to attend the sessions that are meaningful to you, share your views during the discussion, and hopefully convince those present of the necessity of what you envision :-) If your vision needs adjustment, then UDS is the perfect place to get it tweaked and reach a mutual agreement with community members about a form suitable for an action plan.

Q: You just saw us in our "native" environment -- an academic conference; how is qualitatively different from such conferences?

A: Yes, that sort of scenario is a prototypical academic environment: disseminating of memes for processing and adoption in a particular field. The essence of that exists in the open source world: meme's are very important to us, but often implicit in nature; they arise as generalizations of practical experiences with implementation. However, they are only the first step (or a supporting factor for other steps).

The primary focus of the attendees at UDS is pragmatic: "Let's do X." As such, UDS attendees partake in a meme-disseminating event, the object of which is to generate project plans, task lists, direction changes, etc., within each given project (be it software, governance, or others).

Q: Any ideas/guidance on how to think about and plan for UDS?

A: Hopefully what I wrote above should give you enough of an intuitive feel for the environment that you'll have a good idea of what you can do... but just in case, I'd focus on doing the obvious, like putting together notes/supporting material for the sessions that you are interested in. In addition, though, you want to spend some time thinking about how to engage session attendees such that they are motivated to attend the session(s) and speak up while attending.

Well, that's all there is to this Q & A. I hope folks new to UDS will find this conversation useful.

We look forward to seeing Micheal and the rest of you at UDS!

Ubuntu 10.10 Multi-touch Video

As many are aware, we released our maverick Maverick a few days ago. Part of what comes with Ubuntu 10.10 is the new uTouch stack. We been having lots of really great talks in the public IRC channel (#ubuntu-touch, Freenode.net) and on the general multi-touch mail list (subscription info at the bottom of that page). More and more folks are trying it out, experimenting, and contributing.

As part of the "Maverick Movies" initiative, fellow employees Gerry Carr, John Lea, and Neil Patel worked on getting this little gem produced (embedded to the left; here's the full-sized version). Gerry has written an excellent blog post about it here.

This video shows off most of the touch capabilities that were integrated into Unity for Maverick. Neil Patel (fellow Big Lebowski fan) and John Lea will be working very closely together during Natty to expand this feature set to take more advantage of the gesture capabilities of uTouch. Simlarly, Henrik Rydberg will be working with them to enhance the uTouch gesture engine. And all of us will be working on the newest addition to the uTouch family that Mark mentioned in his blog post: a gesture language. More on that later :-)

For right now, let's check out this video! For the impatient, the target list of gestures in Unity is available in a gestures guidelines document, lovingly put together by John Lea and Mark. As one might expect, there's a lot there. If you skip to section 5, you'll be able to get a nice visual overview of most of the gestures with some descriptive text. For those who chose to watch the video first, here's what you saw:

• single taps (i.e., a touch "mouse click")
• a window grab (three-finger touch, let one up)
• moving the window (three-finger touch, let one up, move it around)
• drag up to maximize
• drag up and right (or left) to fill the right (or left) half of the screen
• un-maximize (use the drag gesture on the maximized window)
• bring up the dash (4-tap)
• bring up all windows for one app (three-pinch)
• bring up all windows (three-pinch again)

Have fun playing with Unity on your touch devices! There's lots more to come...

Multi-touch at UDS-N in Orlando, October 25th-29th

The up-coming UDS in October is looking to be quite fantastic. The community around the Ubuntu distro is, as always, deeply involved, passionate, and eager to break new ground... but lately there seems to be even more than the usual anticipation. We're seeing folks getting involved for more than Ubuntu, and this is an interesting change.

At UDS people tend to focus on Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community. As the "Ubuntu Developer Summit" this makes obvious sense :-) Maybe it's just my own perceptions, but it seems that when we engineers get deeply involved in something, less and less of the outside world makes it through the filters, potentially leading to situations of isolated development. Reflecting on how our interests are connected to others' can open the view back up, and I think lots more people are doing that these days.

Ubuntu is not just a community; it's also part of a community. Part of many communities, in fact -- very large and thriving ones. The obvious candidates come to mind: Linux, GNOME, KDE, GTK, Qt, the massive collection of upstream applications. But there are more and subtler ones.

All the work that Ivanka and the Design team have done over the past year and a half has brought open source software into a new place with regard to aesthetics and how to make our applications more appealing to people across the globe, folks who don't have the same engineering-based perspective on software that we have. This is hugely important and I personally feel that I owe the Design team a HUGE debt of gratitude for what they are doing for something I hold dear to my heart: open source software.

The other big change I've noticed (perhaps mostly because I'm neck-deep in it!) is the rallying that has happened around multi-touch. Hackers, academics, industrial researchers, casual enthusiasts and business folk alike are interacting on IRC and the multi-touch mail list to a greater and greater degree. Amazing cross-project cooperation is taking place, and setting really excellent precedences. It seems that the field of Human-Computer Interaction is starting to find and hold its own in the larger open source community. And we're reaching out more, too -- some of us from Ubuntu recently attended UIST 2010 in NYC and had fantastic discussions with the other attendees there. I expect that we'll be more and more present at events like these.

There are other examples of this sort of thing happening elsewhere in the open source world, within projects as well as companies that sponsor them. It's very encouraging to see such new forms of growth and evolution in our midst :-)

Now down to business! If you can make it to UDS, you'll be in for a treat. The Platform team has been hard at work refactoring the UDS experience. Tracks are no longer based on and named after teams inside Canonical who are primarily responsible for the tech. Instead, a series of brainstorms have resulted in a very natural and organic approach to community discussions: areas of interest. This was done in such a way as to encourage very strong cross-pollination of ideas and development strategies. Projects from all across the open source world, team members inside and outside of Canonical, and passionate individuals will have new opportunities to impact decisions about the software that not only goes into Ubuntu, but which gets incorporated into many other distros and projects as well.

The tracks are listed at this UDS page, but I will duplicate that here for the lazy :-)

• Application Developers
• Cloud Infrastructure
• Performance
• Multimedia
• Hardware Compatibility
• Application Selection and Defaults
• Ubuntu the Project
• Other

As a particular example, the sessions focusing on multi-touch technology in Linux and its toolkits, applications, etc., intersect with many of these (Application Developers, Performance, Multimedia, Hardware Compatibility, Ubuntu the Project, etc.). The same is true for other projects. Tracks that used to be dedicated to Desktop, Server, Foundations, etc., are now going to be exposed to a more diverse audience that focuses on individual's interests, brining community members even closer to the goodness they love :-)

If you're interested in tracking multi-touch sessions, you can watch our session planning evolve at the link below:

https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu?searchtext=hci-n

We've still got one more blueprint coming: A Gesture Language. I haven't had a chance to compile my notes about this yet, but when I do, there will likely be another blog post just discussing the exploration we want to do around the idea of such a language at UDS.

If you can't make it to UDS, remember that we broadcast live streaming audio and project IRC channels for each room up on a screen so that all present can read remote comments and respond to listeners' questions.

Hope to see you there!

The Growing Linux Multi-touch Community

There has been a lot happening with the intersection of the Linux and HCI communities of late; it seems that the Linux community is getting more and more involved in not just multi-touch, but human computer interaction as well. It's not just for researchers anymore :-)

X.org

The X.org recently held XDS in Toulouse, France and by all accounts it was absolutely fabulous. I hear folks had some great discussions a day or two prior to the event and hope we get to hear about those :-) I'm watching Peter's blog for an update and hope that Chase will do the same when he gets back from Taiwan.

Point-of-Sale

A few weeks ago, I was delighted to hear from Gene Mosher (inventor of touchscreen point-of-sale) on the multi-touch mail list. We had a good conversation about his use case and I am really looking forward to checking out the work he's done.

Community Support

Folks have been popping into IRC (#ubuntu-touch on Freenode) on a more regular basis, asking everything from beginners' questions to exploring deeply involved technical issues. Fabián Rodríguez has been helping out with community support, as have the core developers. In combination, the team is able to get most folks up and running, sometimes even with non-supported hardware. (Oh hell, they're gonna hate me for saying that publicly! Here comes the flood...)

PyMT, Qt, and GTK

Of particular note, we've been having really amazing interactions with PyMT and Qt folks, and it's great to see those relationships growing. Mathieu Virbel of PyMT has done some fantastic work on adding Python support to mtdev and is currently running PyMT on those bindings. Christopher Denter (another PyMT-er) has shared some really great stuff about Movid, a project he co-founded and one that we're keeping a close eye on.

On the Qt side of the house, Denis Dzyubenko and Zeno Albisser have been making great strides in MT development. Originally working on the gestures API for QT, Denis has recently taken over for Bradley Hughes on the multi-touch support in Qt. Zeno is a project lead for improving the gesture API. Stephen Webb from the DX multi-touch team will be working with them closely in the coming cycle.

Cody Russell has started chatting with Carlos Garnacho, Ryan Lortie, and others in the GTK community about getting full support of MT in GTK (continuing on Carlos' excellent work). These conversations are expected to ramp up at GTK Hackfest in Spain, and continue at UDS in Orlando, FL. With most of Cody's Maverick work done now, he's been able to pick up some prototyping he did last month and run with it some more. I can't wait to see the results :-)

Ubuntu on the Phone?!

And for dessert, I have saved this amazing bit of info: we recently received an email on the multi-touch list from Lukas-David Gorris who is working on the HTC Linux project. It turns out, he is running Maverick on the HTC HD2 (Leo) and is testing the uTouch framework with this device. Henrik Rydberg is helping him debug issues in his spare time. We were completely stunned to not only to hear about Maverick running on an HTC, but attempts to use uTouch on it!

The HTC Linux project looks really awesome. I hope they get more community interest, as this is the sort of project that gives Linux its power base: development and support from the community that large companies rarely invest in themselves. HTC Linux is a major step towards the prevalence of Linux on phones.

Though not Ubuntu, this is also a perfect time to mention MeeGo: another effort being made with the Linux community, and a rare exception to the "rule" of big companies not putting their money on the line. MeeGo is a joint effort between Nokia and Intel to produce a Linux distro for phones (and other devices). MeeGo has a focused touch effort, as well (I'm subscribed to the mail list).

This is a huge boon to Linux, and like the HTC Linux project, very, very cool stuff.

HCI at Canonical

uTouch

Back in March, I blogged about future possibilities (in a blue-sky sense) of multi-touch, mentioning the project management I was doing for MT hardware kernel driver support in Lucid (and then proceeding to dive into the deep end of speculation). It's now an Ubuntu cycle later, and holy crap... I'm having a hard time finding the words. I think the blog title says it all. But I'll try to elaborate :-)

Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably noticed the big announcements we made a few weeks ago:

• uTouch mail list announcement
• Mark Shuttleworth's blog post
• The Canonical uTouch announcement
• Chase's blogging extravaganza (uTouch, MT architecture, Magic Trackpad, Trackpad update)

For the next few days, we were all over Google news. This was quite a shock, given that we'd been heads-down into the project for so long and hadn't really come up for air nor fully anticipated the impact (to others or ourselves). Needless to say, after the intense amount of work that the team had engaged in over the previous couple months, this was quite gratifying, if somewhat unexpected.

There has been a lot of discussion in blog posts, mail lists, IRC (#ubuntu-touch on freenode.net), Launchpad bugs and merge proposals, etc., so much so that touchscreens now pursue me feverishly when I sleep at night. I'm really not interested in writing more of the same :-)

As such, I want to mix things up a bit...

HCI Remixed

I've been reading an amazing anthology of essays on human-computer interaction. I still haven't finished the book (yeah, I've got about 10 in-progress titles on my nightstand), but am relishing every word in this particular collection. The book is HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works That Have Influenced the HCI Community.

While doing some research at the beginning of the Maverick development cycle, I came across HCI Remixed at the local library -- the title intrigued me and I couldn't resist. Weeks later, after having maxed out the number of times I could renew the book, I just purchased it -- I simply couldn't get enough of the book. Every essay I'd read up to that point was fantastic; each one provided volumes of information, experiences, insights, ideas for follow-up, etc. Whenever I finished one essay, I spent days and sometimes weeks reading up on references, pondering the past and future of human-computer interaction.

Due to the unusual nature of the book, describing it is surprisingly difficult. That being said, the MIT Press page gives you a great taste:

Over almost three decades, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has produced a rich and varied literature. Although the focus of attention today is naturally on new work, older contributions that played a role in shaping the trajectory and character of the field have much to tell us. The contributors to HCI Remixed were asked to reflect on a single work at least ten years old that influenced their approach to HCI. The result is this collection of fifty-one short, engaging, and idiosyncratic essays, reflections on a range of works in a variety of forms that chart the emergence of a new field.

If you're into HCI, learning from others, and discovering new sources of inspiration for your own work, this is simply a must-have book :-)

A Small Piece of History

By the time I checked the book out of the Golden public library, it was May and we had begun building the MT team. By July -- once it became clear how astounding the team's work was -- I realized that in 10 or 20 years I could very well be writing an article about Henrik, Chase, Stephen, Ikbel, and Rafi. Much like those in the book, I could be sharing the conversations I'd had with Stéphane Chatty, Mark Shuttleworth, Neil Patel, David Siegel, and John Lea. And that's only the crew which which I was collaborating or discussing directly. There are a lot of folks who've been working very hard on multi-touch infrastructure solutions and exploring ways of integrating these for several years (e.g., Peter Hutterer and Carlos Garnacho).

Though many foundations have been laid, as of yet (to the best of my knowledge), no Linux distribution has released a multi-touch stack that integrated gestures in a unified manner across everything from applications to window managers and beyond. This was something that Mark wanted us to provide to the open source world. In this spirit, the multitouch team hasn't just hacked things together to get a product out in time. A lot of generative, creative thought and care has gone into uTouch. A lot of original problem solving has taken place. Physics PhDs, kernel hackers, X.org hackers, driver creators, application integrators, toolkit gurus -- all of this knowledge was concentrated, applied, and used to distill a first approximation of what a gesture stack in Linux could look like, using the latest available technology and methodologies.

To be honest, we weren't really sure we could pull it off. There was a very good chance we could have failed at our task, quietly chalking up the loss as a lesson learned. Now that we've managed to shape these ideas into actual software, taken the threads of dreams and woven something real, we are thrilled to be engaging with others to see where all of us can take multi-touch and gestures from here.

Thanks to expert input from the wider open source community, we're already looking at ways in which we can improve upon the first version, ways of bringing new ideas and experiences to developers and users of multi-touch hardware running Linux. Things are only just warming up, and the greatest contributions have yet to be made. Every single person in the community has before them a world of possibilities for getting involved and creating the future human-computer interfaces for the free and open source world in the coming weeks and months. These are indeed exciting times.

Ubuntu Foundations and Maverick Meerkat 10.10

Introduction

For those that don't know, The Ubuntu Foundations Team is responsible for delivering the core Ubuntu system, which is common to the whole Ubuntu family of products and services. For the past couple months, I had the pleasure and honour to work with the Foundations team, assisting in preparation for the Foundations Track at UDS and planning for the 10.10 cycle.

Below I will give a brief summary of the major topics covered at UDS which, in turn, generated scheduled work items. They are listed in alphabetical order.

Boot Work

Several boot-related areas were identified for work during Maverick. These include the following:

• cd boot - by converting CD boot to use grub2 with its new graphical goodness, we will only need to maintain use of a single bootloader
• continued performance improvements
• grub2 framebuffer - the end goal being a near flicker-free graphical boot splash experience
• UEFI - support booting on systems that use UEFI firmware

Related blueprints:

• foundations-m-cd-boot
• foundations-m-boot-performance
• foundations-m-grub2-boot-framebuffer
• foundations-m-uefi-support

btrfs

In Maverick, we will be adding support for btrfs. Our tasks include such work as making ureadahead work with btrfs, adding btrfs support to grub2, integration work, and features support.

Related blueprint:

• foundations-m-btrfs-support

Cleanup

Just after an LTS release is a perfect time to clean house. We will be taking this opportunity to do so, with such work as dropping unused/unneeded packages from the base system, double-checking package dependencies, and investigating space-saving measures.

Related blueprints:

• foundations-m-spring-cleaning
• foundations-m-package-culling

Installer Redesign

The installer is getting a serious make-over. Foundations and the Design team are working very closely together, improving the workflow, minimizing user clicks, improving the look-and-feel, and providing utility with increased ease of use.

Related blueprint:

• foundations-m-installer-redesign

Software Center

We want to get new applications into the Software Center, ideally providing developers with a means of generating revenue with the applications. For the former, we need to define some good social and technical processes to ensure ongoing quality and excellent producer/consumer experience. In conjunction with that, we need to work on getting a billing system in place.

Related blueprint:

• foundations-m-software-center-roadmap

Upstart

Upstart is getting major work this cycle. New and improved features include the following:

• Manual mode
• Resource limits
• Dependencies
• Better support for UIs that want to use Upstart
• Simple skeleton to make life easier for sysadmins
• Provide an API for services and tasks so that folks don't have to think about the event-based model if they don't need to
• Explore the conversion of conf files into jobs
• Possibly extend the debug capabilities into an interactive mode
• Improve job disabling

Foundations will also be working closely with the server team to get their init scripts converted to Upstart. Conversely, the Kernel team will be providing new features that will allow Foundations to fully develop the planned Upstart features.

Related blueprint:

• foundations-m-finish-upstart

Miscellaneous

There is lots of other work we'll be doing, some of which are highlighted in the following:

• i686 Default Compile
• Stop building the ia64 and sparc community ports
• Multiarch Support for gcc, binutils, dpkg, and apt
• Foundations Python improvements
• Upgrade and install testing

Related blueprints:

• foundations-m-686-compile
• foundations-m-drop-ia64sparc
• foundations-m-multiarch-support
• foundations-m-python-continuous-integration
• foundations-m-python-versions
• foundations-m-robust-python-packaging
• foundations-m-upgrade-and-install-testing

References

• Foundations Work Items for Maverick
• Maverick Release Schedule
• btrfs
• Upstart

Some Thoughts on the Mobile Device Interface

Smartphones: Yesterday's News


As some of you know, I started 2010 by working in a new position at Canonical: Ubuntu Project Manager. I've been having an absolute blast; working my butt off has never been more fun, challenging, or interesting. I'm finding that nearly every side-interest I've had in the past several years is coming to the forefront in my project management work.

There were all sorts of adjustments I needed to make before PM'ing again, and one of those was catching up on communication technology. I now live by email, calendars, IRC, Skype, and phone conversations. Gone are the days of going heads-down into some code for a week or two. I need to stay connected, 100% of the time. I needed to get a smartphone.

What I really wanted was a Nokia N900. Sadly, T-Mobile's not offering one, so I got an Android phone with a physical keyboard instead: a new G1. Yeah, out of date, but considering that I was still using a Razr, the G1 is cutting-edge ;-)

I gotta tell you, this little phone has changed my life. The craziest thing is not the apps, the Market, the features, etc.; it's the touchscreen that has made me a believer.

You Can Touch This


I can't believe how radically the touchscreen phone has changed my computing habits and preferences. When I sit down at my laptop or desktop to do something quickly, I don't want use the keyboard or mouse. I want to point, swipe, and tweak with my fingers. When I'm on the phone, my brain has my speaking and text-processing faculties tied up. To easily multitask while talking, I need to be able to use a different part of my brain: that part involved in motor control.

I like using the touchscreen so much that I will often use my G1 for tasks that are better suited for my laptop, merely because of the joy I get from using the interface.

Touch, tap, drag, push, swipe. I love it. Can't get enough of it.

The best thing of all? This is really silly: I love the virtual desktops and being able to navigate between them with a swipe. Whose idea was this? That designer or engineer needs to be promoted! I have never experienced a more intuitive way of switching virtual desktops. I didn't even know how much this was important to me until I used the G1. I want this for my laptop!

Having such a positive bias towards tactile technology, you can imagine my joy when I saw this Ubuntu blueprint. And then when I was asked to work with Bryce and Andy on the PM portion of multi-touch support, I was quite delighted. This will give application developers and device engineers what they need in order to start creating new exciting stuff for the Ubuntu world. You will be able to have an iPad-like experience on your Linux devices (that have the proper hardware).

The thing is, as much fun as tactile interfaces are, I want way more now. I've been given a taste... now I want the banquet.

An Interface for the Future


So the iPad has been getting lots of press. It's bigger than a phone, I like that: I could replace my pen-and-paper medium-sized Moleskine with one. The thing I like the best though? Yeah, you guessed it: the interface. Curling pages and apps that have been re-worked specifically for the new format/size. I love it when a device lets me use it in a way that is natural and intuitive, and provides visual (or other sensory) feedback on my use.

Apple has made, in my opinion, a good and interesting product. But certainly not a revolutionary one. It's a natural progression from what folks are already doing with smartphones and netbooks.
So let's talk about revolutionary :-)

Imagine you've got a crazy new shirt, one whose fibers convert your movements to electrical current and can power your devices. Perhaps it comes with a "battery net" for literally flexible power storage. Now imagine that some clever sod has equipped your shirt with sockets for micro-SD cards (or something similar). If you've read my "After the Cloud" posts, then you probably know where I'm going with this :-)

Now add some embedded micro-controllers, and bluetooth, a smart phone with cloud-controller software, and you've got a personal S3 with potentially terabytes of light-weight, wearable storage. And your phone controls the nodes, redundancy, failover, etc. Maybe your phone runs Ubuntu and you're pushing backups of your personal cloud onto your U1 account.

But how do we interface with all this great storage? Here comes the banquet I mentioned :-)

I want to be able to reach "into" my phone, grab an icon (application, file, contact, whatever) and put it where I want. But I mean really put it: I can pick up some data off my desktop, and throw it over my shoulder or at my feet. With appropriate sensing equipemnt on the power shirt's sleeves, my arms and hands are now the perfect "mice."

In fact, there's no more virtual desktop (that's old skool). One of the new primary functions of your mobile device is to peer "into" the halo of data that surrounds you now. You can either spin your virtual storage space around you like an inverted, 3D lazy susan, our you can physically move your phone around, like a diving mask peering into the water.

Closing Thoughts


The more data I have, the more I feel that I live in it. The problem is that our current tech forces us into tiny sardine cans and we have to consume our data with the equivalent of a single chop-stick. If I'm going to live in my data, I want to have the best possible experience of immersion that I can. I want an interface that can handle my future.

I could go on and on... I love this sort of thing. The important thing to know now is that the community is working on the building blocks for our technological future. The first steps are being made in open source software that will allow us to take giant, insanely cool steps in the not-to-distant future.

7 Years of Blogasmic Action

Earlier today, I was looking through old blog posts, reminding myself of issues and topics that I want to continue reflecting on actively. When I got to the end of the posts, I looked at the earliest date and realized that my seven-year blogiversary was this past Wednesday. At my vocalized comment to this effect, Marjorie asked what got me started on blogging. Interestingly, it ties in with my professional life over the past twleve years...

As a physics undergrad and employee of the University of Maryland, I was hired away by a large internet startup for my systems and programming background. Already a fan of Office Space, I got to experience the reality of cubicle life as the not-so-funny, real complement of that classic movie. However, it wasn't my personal experience of cubihell that had the biggest impact upon my psyche; it was the corporate atrocities suffered by various customers and partners of dot-boom era, high-rolling companies.

Already a passionate open-source user and contributor, it become one of my personal goals to make sure a greater number of people (especially those making decisions in companies) were informed about the software freedoms that were within their reach. Within two years of this epiphany, I had my own company and was open-source consulting for everything from small businesses to large international corporations and the Federal government. Everything I did was open source; all of it saved my customers from spending millions of dollars unnecessarily and the enslavement of proprietary lock-in.

It was at this time that I started blogging. My primary interest was to be a voice in the wilderness of consultants, finding other like-minded programmers, project managers, sales engineers, etc., who believed in "open business", transparency, and accountability. As time progressed, my blogging habits adapted to fill other needs in various communities. However, all of my professional decisions have remained true to that initial desire to work on technology that was not only free, but actively prevented the bondage of its users.

For the past year and a half, I've been working at Canonical, the company that funds and actively supports Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Community. Every time I work with a different engineer or a new team, I am blown away by two things: the incredible talent embodied in each interaction, and the dedication that each person has to improving how free technology is delivered to the world.

My blog posts have definitely changed in character over the past seven years. But I'm delighted that, where I once felt alone with my ideals, I can count true giants in the field among my fellow community members, cooworkers, and mentors.

txAWS 0.0.1 Released!

The first version of txAWS just made it out the door, thanks to prodding from Scott Moser, who is helping to get txAWS into Ubuntu Lucid Lynx. It's been uploaded to PyPI now too, so you can do the usual (easy_install txAWS), or you can download it from Launchpad.

For those interested in writing async code for the cloud, txAWS is the library for you :-) What's more, if you're interested in contributing to a Twisted-based project, this could be just the thing to get you started. The use of Twisted is pretty basic in txAWS (though we do adhere to various coding idioms pretty strongly, to enhance maintainability), and would be a nice introduction. What's more, there are lots of exciting features and work still to do, and you could really make a difference.