UK Linux User Groups

As some of you may know the dash team has been working to get the new smart scopes functionality in the dash ready for 13.04; this functionality delivers a far more comprehensive dash experience, performing searches over 50 or more different data sources. This feature makes the dash dramatically more useful by searching a far wider range of data sources and returning more relevant results.

The team has been working in a PPA to get the feature ready, and as we are past feature freeze, had filed a Feature Freeze Exception (FFe) to get this into 13.04. After an extensive amount of work to get the feature ready, unfortunately the dash team doesn’t consider it mature enough for 13.04 — it is nearly there, but doesn’t meet the quality needs for Ubuntu. As such the team has decided not to pursue landing in in 13.04 and to instead move it to the Ubuntu 13.10 cycle where it will be developed as soon as the archive opens. As I mentioned earlier, this feature has been developed in a PPA and has not landed in 13.04 yet, so there are no actual changes to the archive.

Some of you may have some questions about this so we have prepared a short FAQ below. I have also notified our governance boards to ensure they are aware of the change. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments!

The FFE (1154229) got a sabdfl override and is now being rejected, how come?

A sabdfl override always has high requirements regarding code quality and User Experience. After looking at the current status of the smart scopes project we decided that the User Experience simply needs more work and it does not meet the quality requirements for Ubuntu. We would prefer to delay the feature until the next release cycle to ensure that it is rock solid.

Why was this feature being pushed at the last minute?

We believe the feature does provide additional benefit to Ubuntu Users by improving the search experience in the Dash, which is Unity’s weak spot. Landing the feature in 13.04 would have given us 1 additional cycle on the way to 14.04 to train and improve the suggestions provided by the server and further refine the overall Dash experience.

When, if at all, will the feature make its way into Ubuntu?

We are planning to provide the feature in a PPA for Ubuntu Raring which will be always rebased on Unity shipped on Raring. It will land it as soon as we are confident enough on the feature quality in Ubuntu S.

What about the in-dash purchases feature? Will that be landing?

There were some final outstanding issues with in-dash purchases and we are striving to have a conclusion to this ready for early next week (week beginning 1st April).

What about the privacy enhancements that were part of the smart scopes project?

It is unfortunately not possible to get the privacy enhancements from the smart scopes projects without the larger project itself. Smart Scopes would have allowed to disable individual scopes and limit network access for searches at all. In Ubuntu 13.04 you will still be able to disable all server communications through the settings apps. You can also remove the scopes and lenses you are not interested in using them by directly uninstalling the corresponding packages.

A few weeks ago I bought a pair of Devolo 500AV Ethernet over mains units to replace/extend a pair of 200AV units I already had. Someone asked if could use iperf to see how much faster they were.

To baseline what I had I ran the test from my desktop to my server over a 1 Gig switch and the most I could get was a feeble 333 GBit/s. I then tried from my laptop to the server on the same switch and that got a much better 740 GBit/s. The Marvell Yukon card on my desktop is a PCI device and the JMC250 in the laptop is a PCI-e so that may partially explain the differences.

Trying my laptop to the server via a 200AV/500AV/Gig-E switch gave a throughput of 56 GBit/s - about what you would expect. I then tried the laptop through a combination of 500AV/500AV/Gig-E but that wouldn't work as the JMC250 refuses to detect the 500AV. I then tried the laptop with different switches, it refuses to talk to my second Gig-E switch or my old Ethernet hub.

After some Goggling it turns out that the JMC NIC is a bit fussy and often fails to auto-negotiate with some "green" Gig switches, such as in the 500AV or my newest GBit switch, but is happy with older switches and plain Fast Ethernet. If you manually set the speed with ethtool then it's okay. I downloaded the latest driver from JMC and that is a bit better but while it will connect to my 500AV and my newer Gig-E switch automatically, it won't negotiate the correct GBit speed, falling to the older 100 MBit setting.

Footnote: The JMC250 is a 1 Gig Ethernet NIC from JMicron Technology Corporation, not something from the Jupiter Mining Corporation...

Recently I have been working on a project with my best buddy Stuart ‘Aq’ Langridge, called BBQpad.

I haven’t really talked much about it on my blog as we have been fixing up the rough edges, but I wanted to share a little about it now.

As some of you will know, I have been increasingly getting into BBQ as a hobby. I love being outside and cooking, I love cooking over fire, and the art and science of BBQ facinates me. Don’t think there is a science? Well check out amazingribs.com and see just how much detail, science, and engineering can be involved in creating awesome BBQ.

One of the tips people give you when you start learning grilling and smoking is to maintain a notebook where you track the details of your cooks. You can then refer to what you did, learn from what works and what doesn’t, and improve your ‘cue.

Being of the nerdy persuasion, I was not going to use no stinking paper and pen, so I wrote a web app to track my cooks.

Originally I wrote this as something just for me, and then it struck me that this could be of general interest. I was chatting to Aq one day and he loved the idea so we decided to build what you now see at www.bbqpad.com. The sites works on your computer, mobile, and tablet.

How BBQpad Works

So what does BBQpad let you do?

Well, with it you can create any number of cooks; each cook is a place you track the details of each cook session, such a meal for your family, practicing to improve your cooking, a party for your friends, a BBQ competition, or anything else. Go and see an example cook.

Within a cook you can add as many cookers and foods as you need (we maintain a database of cookers and foods to make this easy).

When you start cooking you can then track lots of different things:

• The different woods and fuels you use (we maintain a database of woods and different fuel products).
• When your food is added and removed from the cookers, and we automatically calculate cook time to make it easier to see how longs things take to cook. You can also track rest time for the different foods (if applicable).
• All your food prep elements such as rubs, sauces, brines, marinades, and more. You can also add general notes about your food items such as the weight, quantity, where you bought it, the level of marbling, whether it is organic (good for veggies) etc.
• The temperature of your cookers and any food items you are tracking internal temperature for. We use this to plot graphs of your cookers and foods; this makes it easier to track your temperature control and improve things where there are problems.
• General updates to the cook. As an example, if you spritz your food with apple juice to keep it moist, you can track this and the time when it happened.

We also allow you to add photos for the final food products as well as photos through the cook to show how your food is evolving. Photos can be added from your desktop, or mobile devices such as your phone or tablet.

When you have finished cooking an item you can then rate it for taste, tenderness, and appearance; these are the same ways people rate food in a BBQ competition setting.

Continuing the competition theme, we then provide a cook score based upon the certified KCBS competition scoring format for each of your food items as well as an overall score for the cook. This provides a neat way of seeing which cooks or items were better than others.

An example cook.

Getting All Social

One of the goals of BBQpad is not just to provide a place to store cooks, but to also make BBQpad as social as the cooking itself. BBQ is all about cracking open a few beers, cooking some food over fire, enjoying the spoils with friends, and having a great time.

The social aspect of BBQpad is built right into the cooks.

On every cook page there is integrated discussion where people can leave comments and offer tips, advice, and other comments while you are cooking. We also have integrated social media to post your cooks to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Reddit.

One area where BBQpad is really handy is pointing people to the details of a cook. As an example, you may join one of the many BBQ forums/communities online and ask a question about an aspect of your cooking and you can easily point people to the cook page on BBQpad where people can get a good idea of the context of the cook. We have also seen many users tweet about their cooks so folks can follow along as they are happening, often leaving feedback and comments on the cook page.

Another neat part of BBQ is the community. Here you can see the latest photos from cooks, most active pitmasters, new users, active cooks happening right now, recently completed cooks, and more.

The community brings BBQpad pitmasters together.

Another feature is the most popular page which shows you the most popular cookers, woods, and fuels that the community uses in their cooking. We plan on expanding this page with other most popular items soon.

See what our pitmasters prefer.

Clicking on one of these products will also take you to a product page which shows you information about the cooker, the prices on various sites (right now Amazon, but we will add other vendors soon), and a place to have discussion about that product.

Product information for the Weber Performer grill.

Cooking Together

Another cool feature that we added recently is the ability to do online cook offs.

The idea is simple: there will be a number of cook off events on BBQpad in which everyone is welcome to join and participate in. The cook off will happen on a specific date period and cover a specific food, and pitmasters from around the world will all cook together, tracking their cooks on BBQpad.

To take part you simply go to the event page on the date(s) of the event, create a new cook as part of the event, and track your cook in BBQpad. As you and others cook you can see the latest cook updates from these different cooks all in one place, as well as discussion from those watching the cook off. We also encourage those of you who tweet to tweet about your cooks with the #bbqpad hashtag, and those tweets appear on the cook off page too. This provides a great way of cooking together and having fun with the cook off.

Congrats to Jason Perlow for winning our first cook off!

We did our first cook off recently and it was a lot of fun; go and see the The Ultimate Rib Cook Off. We plan on doing another cook off soon (most likely chicken).

Upgrades

BBQpad is completely free to use, and we want it to be a fantastic community resource for the wider BBQ community. Naturally we have some running costs, so we have added some discrete ads to the cook pages to help cover these costs. We also gather a small amount of affiliate revenue when someone buys one of the products linked on Amazon. As such, if you want to buy a cooker or charcoal, go and buy it from BBQpad.

We also have a few cheap upgrades people can buy. Our view is simple: all cooks by default are publicly available and thus shared with the wider community, and when people provide these cooks we feel they have earned the right to use BBQpad for free. Some folks (such as competition cooks, restaurateurs, or just private people) may prefer to have private cooks so they don’t share their techniques and recipes.

We offer private cooks as part of BBQpad Pro (which includes blocking ads) for $24/year, which is only $2/month. You can also just block the ads for $10/year.

The private cooks feature is pretty cool: you can choose whether cooks are private or not on a per-cook basis, so if you want to use the community features on the site (such as cook offs) you can make those cooks public, but if you want to practice for a competition and keep those cooks private, you can do so with the click off a button.

The Technology

Now, many of you in the technology world who follow me will be curious about the site and how it was built. In a nutshell, we are using the awesome Django platform (and the always lovable Python) as well as Twitter Bootstrap as our CSS library. We are managing the source code with Bazaar and hack on it on Ubuntu Desktop using Geany. All imagery was created using Inkscape and the GIMP. We test across a number of different browsers, and primarily use Firefox for debugging. The site is deployed and running on Ubuntu Server.

In terms of development methodologies Aq and I both hack on the site and we manage our work using Trello and drafted and reviewed UI designs using Balsamiq. We have also deployed staging and live servers and we each code review each fix before it lands.

The site is currently in beta and has evolved significantly since we first launched it. This has included two rounds of user testing that have proved to be tremendously valuable in refining the user journey on BBQpad.

I know some of you will want to know if this is Open Source or not. Right now BBQpad is not Open Source but is a free web service that everyone is welcome to use. We may consider Open Sourcing it in the future, but right now it is not a priority; we would rather focus on adding extra features and refining the site.

BBQ is a lot of fun and our hope is that BBQpad makes it even more fun and social. Come and join in the fun!

Go and see www.bbqpad.com and follow us on our Facebook page, on Twitter, and in our Google+ community.

.

Starting in libguestfs ≥ 1.21.23-2, bash tab completions of guestfish, guestmount and virt-* tools have been rewritten and greatly improved.

Note you will need to install the libguestfs-bash-completion package to enable this feature.

You can now tab complete all long options on most tools:

$ virt-df --[tab] --add --domain --human-readable --uuid --connect --format --inodes --verbose --csv --help --one-per-guest --version $ virt-resize --[tab] --align-first --help --no-extra-partition --alignment --ignore --ntfsresize-force --debug --lvexpand --output-format --debug-gc --lv-expand --quiet --delete --LVexpand --resize --dryrun --LV-expand --resize-force --dry-run --machine-readable --shrink --expand --no-copy-boot-loader --version --format --no-expand-content

Where appropriate, the -d option will now expand to the list of libvirt domains:

# virt-df -d [tab] archlinux20121201x64 f19rawhidex32 f18x64 f19rawhidex64

Finally, guestfish commands are expanded on the command line:

$ guestfish add /tmp/disk : run : list-[tab] list-9p list-events list-md-devices list-devices list-filesystems list-partitions list-disk-labels list-ldm-partitions list-dm-devices list-ldm-volumes

To make this less intrusive, so you can really use it daily, I left the default readline expansions enabled. This means that filenames and so on can continue to be used in every position on the command line, and should mean that bash completions won’t try to be cleverer than the user.

Libguestfs bash completions are also demand-loaded now, so that if you’re not using them, they don’t consume any resources in the shell.

Colleague: "They need more memory, it's only got two sticks of 512MB."
Me: "What kind of memory? PC2? DDR? SDRAM?"
Colleague: "Oh, Ooh? Umm?"

Colleague: "Also they have a laptop and the 80GB HDD is full."
Me: "Easy, we'll snapshot it, transfer the image to an 120GB drive, jobs-a-goodun."
Colleague: "Good idea."
Me: "What type of drive is it? Is it SATA or IDE?"
Colleague: "Oh, Ooh? Umm?"

Someone asked me to test the speed of some Devolo 500AV ethernet over mains units I have as compared with some older 200AV units. In preparation I ran a simple test from my desktop box (that I plan to replace) to my server showed a throughput of about 333 MBit/s over a GigE switch. My younger laptop to the same server with a more modern (but still cheap) NIC gets 727 MBit/s to the same server over the same switch.

The desktop is using the common (at the time) Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8001 Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 13) and the skge driver. ethtool reports all is well and that it's running at 1000 Mb/s as expected, but it clearly can't manage that on a simple iperf check.

Now I am planning on replacing the box anyway but just wondered if anyone knows and good tuning tips for Gig Ethernet?

Tags: ethernet, skge

We have asked Moray Allan, one of the three candidates for DPL elections 2013, to tell our readers about himself and his ideas for the Debian Project.

You can also read the interviews to the other two candidates: Lucas Nussbaum and Gergely Nagy.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

I'm Moray Allan, from Edinburgh in Scotland. I'm 32. After working in academic research for a few years, I'm now working freelance on a wide mixture of topics, with recent projects in Indonesia, Romania and Kuwait. When I'm not working, I'm likely to be found walking through a city or the countryside, or otherwise relaxing at home reading a novel in French or Spanish.

What do you do in Debian and how did you started contributing?

In recent years, most of my Debian time was taken up organising the annual Debian conferences. But I still have a load of packages, mostly connected to an upstream Linux-on-handheld-computers project I was working on before I joined Debian to create packages for it.

Why did you decide to run as DPL?

I've been involved in Debian for about 10 years now, including working for the last few years in DebConf in a way similar to how the DPL acts within overall Debian. Previously I'd ruled out running due to lack of time, but currently I'm in a more flexible work situation. It seems the right time to put myself forward, and see if the ideas in my platform interest project members.

Three keywords to summarise your platform.

Transparency, communication, openness. (Three ways I'd like us to think about teams in Debian.)

What are the biggest challenges that you envision for Debian in the future?

I think the biggest challenges are for free software in general.
End-users are moving to more closed hardware -- will our software be able to run on the phones and tablets people are shifting towards? At the same time, end-users and server users are moving to "the cloud", and often depending more heavily on non-free infrastructure outside their own control.

What are, in your opinion, the areas of the project more in need of technical and/or social improvements?

In my platform I give a few ideas about teams and delegations, coordination and mediation, and both internal and external communication, including more organised fundraising. These are areas where I think relatively simple changes can give big benefits.

Why should people vote for you?

I have proven leadership experience within Debian, as I've been working on coordination and mediation tasks for some years already. At the same time, I do regular packaging work, and work in other parts of Debian like the press and publicity teams, so I'm in touch with the experience of normal Debian contributors. People should vote for me if they support my platform, which is about coordination-level changes that I would have no mandate or authority to push through unless I am elected.

Name three tools you couldn't stay without.

APT, emacs, ssh.

What keep you motivated to work in Debian?

I've used Debian on all my computers for a long time, and by now working on the distribution myself feels a natural part of that.
Fortunately I'm constantly positively surprised by Debian and by the Debian community.

Are there any other fields where you call yourself a geek, besides computers?

Certainly history (such as the eastern Mediterranean region in late antiquity), languages (including dead ones) and music (especially Josquin to Monteverdi).

We have asked Lucas Nussbaum, one of the three candidates for DPL elections 2013, to tell our readers about himself and his ideas for the Debian Project.

You can also read the interviews to the other two candidates: Gergely Nagy and Moray Allan.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

Hi! I'm a 31 years old french computer geek. In my day job, I'm an assistant professor (Maître de Conférences) of Computer Science at Université de Lorraine.

What do you do in Debian and how did you started contributing?

Like many, I started contributing to Debian by creating and maintaining packages for my own software, in the Ruby team. Then, I discovered that, even if it's not so obvious from the outside, there are a lot of areas in Debian that could use more contributors. So I just started to contribute to more and more things.

There's a list of things I did in Debian in my platform. What I have been doing recently is:

• rebuild all packages in Debian on a regular basis in order to identify packages that can no longer be built, and file bugs accordingly. In order to do that efficiently, I use cluster and cloud resources (more info)

• develop and maintain Ultimate Debian Database, a data aggregator that collects data in most Debian services so that it is possible to expose it in interesting ways (e.g. find release-critical bugs affecting popular packages).

• write and maintain a Debian Packaging tutorial, (packaging-tutorial package), to provide an easy-to-read introduction to packaging in Debian.

Why did you decide to run as DPL?

Two main reasons:

• Most of my Debian contributions aim at addressing problems at the distribution scale (cross-distro collaboration, Quality Assurance, data-mining). Being DPL is a great way to contribute to Debian at this level.

• the DPL campaign is a great time in Debian where we discuss the project's problems, politics and visions. Being a candidate is in itself a way to contribute to Debian (though it would be better if we had those discussions outside DPL campaigns too).

Three keywords to summarise your platform.

(re-)make Debian the center of the Free Software ecosystem; foster innovation inside Debian; reduce barriers to contributions

What are the biggest challenges that you envision for Debian in the future?

I often have the impression that the project is losing momentum, positive energy, and slowing down. It feels like we are living on the benefits of the past. A lot of very cool things happen in the Debian ecosystem, but very often outside the Debian project (in derivative distributions).

Debian should aim at reinforcing its position in the center of the Free Software ecosystem: it should be the main active intermediary between upstream projects and final users. To achieve that, we need to reinforce the visibility and the impact of Debian. This is extremely important because the values we fight for as a project are often neglected by our derivatives.

What are, in your opinion, the areas of the project more in need of technical and/or social improvements?

Fostering innovation inside Debian: we should be more welcoming towards innovation and experiments inside the project. Often, we merely tolerate them, and bureaucracy makes them hard and slow to conduct. As a result, people tends to innovate outside the Debian project.

Making it easier to contribute to Debian: we compete with more and more projects to attract contributors. While we are already quite good at welcoming new contributors with good documentation and mentoring (much better than people usually think), there's still a lot of room for improvement.

Why should people vote for you?

A great thing in Debian's voting system is that you don't vote "for" or "against" a specific candidate. Instead, due to our use of the Condorcet method, you rank candidates (and also indicate those who you consider suitable for the role by ranking a virtual "None of the above" candidate).

Why am I a good candidate? My previous contributions to Debian show that I have a pretty good understanding of the inner workings of the project, and that I have a track record of managing projects successfully inside Debian. I think that those are two required qualities for a DPL.

Name three tools you couldn't stay without.

vim, mutt, ssh.

What keep you motivated to work in Debian?

Debian is a fantastic project from a technical point of view (focus on technical excellence, lots of interesting challenges), but also from a social point of view: the Debian community is a great community where I have lots of good friends. Also, what's great when you contribute to Debian is that your work has a real impact, and that you see people using stuff you worked on everywhere.

Are there any other fields where you call yourself a geek, besides computers?

I'm not sure this really qualifies as "besides computers", but I've gotten very interested in the OpenStreetMap project lately. I very much enjoy exploring unmapped areas on a mountain bike. It feels like being Christopher Columbus or Marco Polo, but 20 minutes from home. ;) The OpenStreetMap and Debian projects also share many values, such as a great attention to quality and details.

We have asked Gergely Nagy, one of the three candidates for DPL elections 2013, to tell our readers about himself and his ideas for the Debian Project.

You can also read the interviews to the other two candidates: Lucas Nussbaum and Moray Allan.

Please tell us a little about yourself.

I was born in Hungary, a little bit over three decades ago, as a son of a biochemist and a pharmacist, who gave me the name Gergely Nagy (however, online - and offline too by now - I'm mostly known by my nickname, algernon).

I went on to study human arts (hungarian grammar & literature, in particular), and to support this passion, I work as a software engineer, one who gets paid to work on free software. As such, I'm in a fortunate situation where my hobby supports my passion, and my hobby aligns well with my Debian work too.

What do you do in Debian and how did you started contributing?

At the moment, apart from maintaining a few packages, I'm doing a few other, mostly invisible things, like reassigning misfiled bugs so they don't end up being forgotten; or review newly uploaded packages before they enter the archive, making sure we are allowed to distribute them, and that their quality is up to our standards. I used to do quite a lot of other things, but I chose to spend the past year mostly invisible, learning.

I started contributing by packaging an editor I was using at the time, but quickly ended up adopting another package - things escalated from there quickly.

Why did you decide to run as DPL?

There were two reasons that motivated me to run: one is that I believe I can bring something new to the table, that I can help Debian expand in new directions. The other reason is that I'm always on the lookout for new ways to contribute back to Debian, and being the project leader is a position where I believe I could contribute most at this point in time.

Three keywords to summarise your platform.

Non-technical contributors.

What are the biggest challenges that you envision for Debian in the future?

The biggest challenge is growing up, to become more than a group of computer geeks creating an amazing distribution. To become a community of a wide variety of people, where both computer geeks and art geeks feel equally at home. Yet, at the same time, where we as a project, keep our focus straight, and be the champions of Free Software.

We just need to realize that there's much more to Free Software than the software itself.

What are, in your opinion, the areas of the project more in need of technical and/or social improvements?

I believe that while we do have many areas where we could use technical improvements, we are reasonably safe there, because we do have very skilled technical people to help us solve these problems. We can make our tools better, we can develop our infrastructure better to aid us even more - and so on and so forth. While we need work on many areas, we're on the right track there.

However, when it comes to social issues, we're at a loss. We have serious trouble keeping certain topics civilised on mailing lists, we have trouble attracting women, and we have trouble reaching people who are not naturally exposed to Debian (or Free Software). We could really use a more diverse community, but that requires us to overcome quite a lot of social roadblocks, so to say. Outreach is one particular area where we need much more technical and social improvements.

Why should people vote for you?

People should vote me, because they found my platform, my answers on debian-vote@, and my ideas and goals convincing and worthy to pursue. People should vote me, because they trust I'll be able to serve the project well.

Name three tools you couldn't stay without.

Emacs, git and a pencil. Because with these three, I can pretty much do anything.

What keep you motivated to work in Debian?

The community. Over the years, I had the good fortune to meet with a lot of people I hold in high esteem, whose enthusiasm and motivation I found inspiring. For any other common goals Debian and I may share, in the end, it is the people within Debian that keep me motivated.

Are there any other fields where you call yourself a geek, besides computers?

I'm not quite there yet, but I'm working hard on becoming a human arts geek, or at least a geek of the hungarian language.

Alfred, one of my favourite Mac apps, has been updated to version 2. If you have been waiting for it to be updated in the app store, be warned it’s only available through the Alfred website (see also Alfred and the App Store, and Alfred and the future of OS X).

There are some good workflows available for version 2 already. They are a crazy blend of catnip, napalm, and rocket fuel. You need to buy the Powerpack before you can use workflows, but given the functionality boost this brings, it’s well worth it.

Some particularly delightful workflows include:

• Open with Sublime Text 2.
• Compare Finder Items in Kaleidoscope (Kaleidoscope is an awesome diff/merge app).
• Remove Duplicate Contextual Menu Items: it’s funny and sad that this is even a thing. Finder “Open with” is a persistent annoyance with OS X.
• Dial with your iPhone from Alfred. Works with (and requires) Prowl and Growl.
• Top processes based on memory or cpu usage (see top workflow on github).
• Timezones.
• SSH with smart hostname autocomplete (see usage instructions; see how to set iterm2 as the default SSH handler).

And there’s more … www.alfredworkflow.com via @twleung. 

We will be meeting in the Courtyard Theatre, in Hereford on the Mezzanine Floor again this month.

The meeting will start at 7:30pm as usual. The meeting will be an open meeting but will also consist of discussions on:-

* New meeting venue suitable for Workshop style events for the LUG
* Update on new website and change in HLUG hosting currently taking place. We are keen to know what members want from the new website and what they also want to put in.

Everyone is welcome including our new recent members. (don't worry we don't bite ;-) )

read more

You’ll recall that Nokia Connects invited me to Trial a Nokia. I previously wrote about my initial thoughts on the Lumia after one day with the phone.

Here’s some thoughts after just over a week with the phone, a timeframe which captured fairly typical activity: going to the shops, going to the pub, going to a business meeting, and nipping across to Germany to spend a few days with family. All in all, a good opportunity to road-test the device.

Some random observations:

• It was nice being woken up by a different ringtone. I think I’ve got really sick of the iPhone kicking me out of bed every morning.
• I missed Siri, especially when cooking. “Countdown 20 minutes” (or however long those potatoes take to boil) is the most. useful. feature. ever. The Windows Phone 8 speech recognition doesn’t seem to cover this yet.
• Installing multiple apps is really tedious: go to app store, find an app, click the app, click install, get a weird pause, get shown a download screen, get taken to app list, curse, hit the back button until you’re back at the app store. It’s almost as jarring as the iPhone dumping you out of the app store and onto the home screen so you can see the progress of your app download.
• The one stand-out feature so far is the here.com maps. This is good, because it’s Nokia’s differentiation on top of stock Windows Phone 8. Of course, you can download HERE Maps on other Windows Phone devices (and iOS), but it was great to have them installed by default.
• Microsoft must have a ton of designers, and yet they still use a floppy disk icon to indicate Save? And worse, sometimes they don’t, they use a tick instead. Consistency? Not so much.

And that brings us neatly to the crux of the problem with the Nokia Lumia 920: any review of the device has to take into account Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8. And no matter how good the device may be, it is frankly hobbled by the Windows legacy.

So on with the review. I made this review by taking screenshots on the phone whenever something struck me as noteworthy, and by keeping a longer-form log in Microsoft OneNote.

~

WP8 has a very strong design, which at times works against it. For example, I hated the Kindle app’s presentation in the app store and in the app list; I was forever looking for the person reading under the tree. 

Incidentally, I also had problems with the Kindle app; it would occasionally try to sync twice on startup, which usually resulted in it crashing. Several launch attempts later, it finally settled down. Some work required there, I think.

Over the course of the last week, I downloaded several apps from the store (mostly free or trial, but a couple of paid apps too). Aside from the ugly path error during download, there was only one occasion when this didn’t work, when trying to install the Kindle app:

Most of the apps you’d expect to see were available, but not always in the way you’d expect to see them. For example, Fruit Ninja was available, but it looked very fuzzy on the Lumia’s screen.

That’s a real shame, as the screen is one of the standout features of the Nokia hardware. It’s also an old version – from early 2011 – and many of the store comments are requesting updates. The iOS version of Fruit Ninja is just a few months old. The Android version of Fruit Ninja is from March 2012.

The situation may be different for other games, but Fruit Ninja was the first to catch my eye, and is a game I know well.

~

Let’s talk more about maps. I tried them out on several occasions:

• finding a route from a train station into central London for a meeting
• finding a route from a tube stop to a restaurant for brunch
• trying to find a nearby pub
• finding the location of my holiday apartment in Berlin
• tracking my location across Berlin’s metro system

Only searching for a pub was less successful than it could have been – based on experience and a race against an HTC Android device, Google Maps would have been more effective.

A standout feature of HERE maps is the ability to download maps for offline use. Google Maps offers limited caching, but not quite as effectively. This Nokia Maps vs Google Maps Youtube video demonstrates it nicely. Given o2 only give you 25mb of data per day in Europe, being able to download 601mb of German maps before I set off was a real life-saver.

The maps also looked good, and felt like the best bits of TomTom’s navigation and Google Maps combined into one. A couple of examples of using the navigation:

The map overlays also worked very well, in particular the public transport overlay. Here’s what they look like in Berlin:

It was also really nice to be able to pin locations to the phone’s home screen for quick and easy access. Note also my XBox avatar in the screenshot, offering some great personalisation by leveraging different Microsoft properties:

I did notice a few glitches. During my travel across Berlin, I kept losing the data connection. At one point, the phone was very convinced that I was in fact in London – even claiming to have established a GPS lock:

Another glitch was frequent updates to the terms and policies for using the maps. These would be displayed and required confirmation, but as they were shown in white text over the top of the map, it was impossible to read them:

The final glitches are more of a user experience fail:

• Every time I launched the maps app overseas, I got reminded to download maps. The first time was useful, but if you’re using the maps frequently abroad, it gets really annoying – especially if you’ve downloaded the maps for offline use.
• The compass icon for launching maps from the home screen was less than obvious, and the name “HERE Maps” doesn’t have sufficient recognition (yet). I asked a couple of people to start the maps app, and both struggled to do so.

All in all, despite the glitches, I was impressed by HERE Maps and the navigation experience on the Lumia.

~

Some things didn’t work so well.

Voice recognition is handy on a mobile phone, and although I couldn’t set a countdown timer for my spuds, I was happy to try it out for searching bing. Because I’m a sadist, I tried this in a crowded and noisy pub on St Patrick’s Day. Accessing voice recognition is just like the iPhone – you hold down the equivalent of the home button until prompted to speak:

We were having a typical pub conversation, involving rivers running green in the US in honour of the Irish saint. So my voice search was “Saint Patrick’s Day Chicago”. How was this interpreted?

Windows Phone decided to search for “patrick stacey croyden”. This was excellent entertainment value (and possibly some clever geolocation optimisation), but needless to say did not deliver the required results. A couple of additional attempts failed, and so I gave up. A friend tried on an HTC Android handset, and was successful on the second attempt.

WP8′s version of Internet Explorer in some ways is really very good: fast loading, smooth scrolling, good rendering, and a wonderfully uncluttered browsing experience that maximises the visibility of page content.

There were a few sites that didn’t work for one reason or another. Surprisingly, the BBC was subject to unfortunate wrapping of headlines. Unsurprisingly, the excessive crap on forbes.com didn’t render properly, and ended up messing with some page content. Frustratingly, I was unable to enter start or destination airports on Easyjet’s website. Those were the only significant glitches I noticed, despite doing quite a lot of browsing.

However, it’s not all roses with WP8 IE. The minimal UI has a few drawbacks: extra taps required to access tabs (I recommend changing the “address bar button” in settings to display tabs), extra taps required to get to favourites, inconsistent back navigation (sometimes it goes to the previous page, sometimes to the previous app) and no forward navigation.

The browser is also poorly-integrated into other apps. The mail app is a particular example. It would be wonderful to be able to open emailed links in the phone’s browser, but long presses on links only offer the option of copying the link. This seems very odd. If you want to open an emailed link in a browser, or share the link to social networks, or bookmark a link or pin it to the start screen, then you have to manually copy it and paste it into the browser’s URL bar:

The mail app is broken in other ways, too. Microsoft have pursued an admirable security policy of not downloading any email images by default. But there’s no setting to change this. Unfortunately, this means that almost every email you receive looks rubbish, until you track down an image and click “Download pictures”. And that includes emails from Microsoft themselves:

 

As I was travelling to Germany, I needed to send some text messages in German, so I wanted to swap keyboards. I had to RTFM to find out how to add language packs, and once I did find out, I was surprised by how large they were. This was particularly annoying as the first attempt to download failed, requiring me to go back in and restart each language pack download.

I was unsurprised but disappointed that installation of the language packs required a phone restart. I was rather surprised that the installation took over five minutes to perform (although in fairness I was warned of this).

Once installed, the language packs worked fine. Switching language worked just the same as on iOS. Predictive text was predictable.

~

It’s not all doom and gloom. There are some great things about this phone and this platform. The things that stand out so far about WP8 specifically:

• It has a unique and interesting user interface, that stands out from other platforms (and actually works, unlike the Windows 8 desktop train wreck).
• It uses gestures in some places, and I can only hope for more in the future (for example swipe up to close apps in the tasks view).
• Pinned apps and live tiles are useful and look great.
• WP8 had most of the apps I wanted to use (I think London Tube Deluxe was the one I most missed).
• The browser capably handled most sites I threw at it, and there are websites to cover most of the missing apps (e.g. TfL and traintimes.org.uk for Tube Deluxe)
• The integration with bing is useful and well thought out.

And about the Lumia hardware in particular:

• The battery took a hammering and lasted well (including several hours of non-stop browsing and twittering).
• The screen is amazing (and I say that as an iPhone 4S and a Retina iPad user): bright, startlingly clear, vivid colours.
• The bright yellow case makes the phone easy to find (seriously) and injects some fun into the day. It’s not another boring black or aluminium or plastic slab.
• The camera is magic – I’ve never seen a phone camera work so well in low light situations.

One of my favourite features of the phone was the ability to automatically pull a new image for the lock screen every day. They were all beautiful. For example:

And with that, I’m going to duck out of doing a final summary. I have a few more hours to play with the phone before I pack it up and send it back to Nokia, so I’ll save my final conclusions for another post.

I was seeing 500 errors when posting to my blog. Trial and error seems to show the problem was the Social plugin or possibly Twitter tools. I’ve turned on debug, let’s see what happens …

According to tweepsmap.com/!savs 44% of my followers are from UK,24% from USA & 18% from London.

Continuing with the work to refine and improve how we build Ubuntu in an open, transparent, and collaborative way, I want to take a few minutes to discuss some work going on to improve the regularity of our planning and the benefits this brings.

Traditionally planning for Ubuntu has worked like this.

• We ship a release.
• Shortly before a release we rapidly prepare blueprints for the next Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS). Everyone is welcome to participate.
• We discuss topics at the UDS and jot down work items into blueprints.
• We then execute on those work items over the course of the six month period.
• We track this work on status.ubuntu.com and use burndown charts to visualize this progress.

While this has served us well, there are a few problems with this approach. The most notable issue is that we work in software, and a lot changes in software in a six month period. This means we define a set of work items, prepare the burndown, and then if requirements or direction changes it can be difficult to reflect those changes across our community and we have to go and postpone a bunch of work items and re-build our burndowns. This means that even though the changes are made to open blueprints, it can cause folks across our community to be out of sync. It also presents the misconception that everything at UDS is locked in for the duration of the six month cycle. If something changes in our strategy or a new opportunity opens up, it can be difficult to change course with everyone on the same page.

Solving this is part of our theme of making Ubuntu engineering as transparent and agile as possible.

One approach we are experimenting with in the Ubuntu Engineering Management team at Canonical is to increase the regularity and transparency of how we plan. Instead of locking in every six months we will do it like this:

• We host the virtual UDS (vUDS) every three months and use the event as a means to plan out the next three months of work. All discussions are open, everyone is welcome to participate.
• Blueprints will be used to track that work and work items will be divided up into monthly milestones.
• On the last week of every month we will review the work performed in the last month to see how well it was completed and then plan the forthcoming month’s work. This provides an open opportunity to identify blockers, define new goals, and change coarse if needed.
• A new burndown chart will be generated on status.ubuntu.com and we will host a Google+ Hangout presenting the goals for the next month to ensure that everyone is fully up to speed on what is going on.

Now, to set expectations clearly: this is just an idea for how to improve this workflow, and we are doing it for the first time this week, but the idea is that it will dramatically increase the transparency of which teams are working on what, making it easier for others to (a) know what is going on and (b), participate in areas of interest.

My team is currently preparing the work items for April and you will be able to see the final burndown here when it is complete. From there you will be able to see all the blueprints.

I will provide plenty of feedback on what is working well and less well, and your feedback is welcomed, as ever, in the comments.

Building Re-usable Processes

As I mentioned in my previous blog entry, we want to make virtual UDS an event that is repeatable and useful for not just UDS but also for domain-specific events too (such as a LoCo themed UDS). The goal is that this event format is repeatable for our wider community.

Likewise, the monthly planning process is also designed to be repeatable for our wider community too, making it simple to get everyone on the same page for planning and executing on awesome projects.

As ever, feedback is always welcome, but I think this combo of a wider planning event every three months combined with monthly work item sync-ups and planning will result in a pretty effective formula for helping Ubuntu to be as effective, transparent, and collaborative as possible.