Subversion Repositories blog

Title: Goal Setting

Date: 2009-04-20

Ubuntu 9.04 will mark the [tenth release][1] of Ubuntu. Rather than party and

engage in self congratulation, I'd like to engage in a retrospective.

## The rocky trail traveled

In November I helped facilitate a collaboration between a [Fedora Board

member][2] and the organizers of Ubuntu Brainstorm, to test some social

network datamining. I'm assuming the conclusion was that the votes were too

sparse to draw any strong conclusions about niches interested in specific

subjects. Certainly, there's an element of privacy that restricts what can be

done here even if it is viable.

[I joined MetaFilter][3] and started following the [ubuntu][4] and [linux][5]

tags on AskMeFi. So far, I've racked up four or five "best answers". It's a

very similar project to [Answers][6], except there's a five dollar sign up fee

that appears to boost the coherence of the questions and replies. And it has

RSS feeds, which is nice for turning down the rate of flow out of the

firehose.

In January, I tried to get ubuntu CDs in the local college library. They

refused a free donation, citing a budget crunch. They also feared a slippery

slope where once they started accepting some software, they'd have to start

buying other programs for circulation. Amusingly, the library already carries

Ubuntu books, and provides the CDs they come with. I believe the reason it was

refused was political rather than fiscal: officially accepting software means

budgeting for software, which would likely slant the budget in favor of the

technology librarians over other subject areas.

Where I specifically fell down over the past six months was in testing and

fixing Jaunty. Traditionally, I use my TabletPC to test tools in ubuntu+1 that

support the TabletPC hardware. Fingerprint readers, wacom, handwriting, and so

on. Unfortunately, I had to loan that device out to a family member who's

computer has gone out of commission. Add on top of that a new job with far

less spare time, as a system administrator, and triaging and testing fell

behind.

## Blazing a new way forward

I don't feel like I've accomplished much in the past cycle. To better motivate

myself, I'm going to publicly commit to making some changes. For the future,

it's time to right-size my goals. I'll do some new stuff, and drop some of

old.

### For sure:

  * **Promote Ubuntu**. I've volunteered to present the Ubuntu netbook remix

at an upcoming LUG meeting. Hopefully I'll have enough CDs and stickers to go

around.

  * **Evaluate desktop backup tools.** We have a lot of backup tools in

Ubuntu. Newly minted Ubuntu Member mterry even wrote and packaged one. We

always tell people to make backups before upgrading, but there isn't a lot of

attention paid to it by the community. I'm taking notes on 8 backup tools thus

far. Since I've got a desktop that's been running Ubuntu, and upgraded from

warty through the ages to jaunty, keeping around the accumulated changes

interests me.

  * **Share-alike.** I'll revisit the library's policy on software and try the

public libraries instead if they still can't accept free software.

### Maybe:

  * **Address bug #290159**. There's a patch, I forwarded it upstream for

review, and it sorta stalled out. Unfortunately, the upstream author is also

the Debian maintainer, so there's no extra opportunity for collaboration and

peer review there.

  * **Test and triage wacom.** Without 24/7 access to hardware, triaging

reports is hard and testing is even harder. If I get it back, I'll be in a

better place to dedicate some time to handle it.

  * **Pitch in for the Ubuntu education project**. I have experience with

popular existing web courseware tools, but not Moodle. Helping out with that

may be interesting. I'm not sure where exactly this is being organized though.

  * **Package KeePass 2.0** In a [previous post][7] I asked about software for

managing team secrets. [Keepass 2.0][8] fills a niche we need at work, so it'd

be nice to have it available on Ubuntu workstations. Upstream is dicey though;

a single developer who doesn't publish a public source repo, just binaries

with corresponding source. Hopefully he'll publish a new version that fixes

one or two bugs we've encountered and reported in testing.

### Step Down Considerately:

  * **Fingerprinting in Ubuntu.** This is a bad idea who's time has come.

Unfortunately, there's too much bad to unwind. Thinkfinger in Ubuntu is an SVN

snapshot of a dead project, who's packaging I don't fully understand. fprint

is potentially the replacement but I haven't had time to read how PAM changed

since Hardy. But basically, now that I know that it can work, I'm not sure it

_should_.

   [1]: http://daniel.holba.ch/blog/?p=391

   [2]: http://jspaleta.livejournal.com/

   [3]: http://www.metafilter.com/user/82435

   [4]: http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/ubuntu/rss

   [5]: http://ask.metafilter.com/tags/linux/rss

   [6]: http://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu

   [7]: http://pwnguin.net/group-password-management-suggestions.html

   [8]: http://keepass.info/