It didn’t end well. I cancelled my contract within a month and vowed never to do that ever again.

Well, it’s been nearly seven years, which isn’t exactly never. But I bought a smartphone.

Keen observers of culture and technology will be the first to tell you that things have changed a bit in the meantime. Pretty much everyone I know has a smartphone. My sisters have smartphones.

Thing is, I have wanted access to email and IM ever since I held one of those LCD RIM email pager thingies back in 1998. But the combination and hatred and distrust of cellphone providers, coupled with a distate for the direction general purpose computing is being taken by device manufacturers has kept me out of the game.

This isn’t something I wanted to rush into. I’ve been thinking about it for months, mulling over the various options and trying to figure out what I’d be comfortable with.

The provider was a toss-up between Wind and Koodo. Koodo has the cheapest smartphone plan at $30/month with a sort of pay-as-you-go thing for data. But they’re tied to Telus, one of the Big Three cellphone providers in Canada (admittedly, the least offensive one, not that that’s saying much). Wind is a new entrant, and I have no small desire to help support new entrants in the market. Being new, however, they don’t have great coverage. Meaning I’d be without data service whenever I went home to Belleville.

For the phone, I really wanted something with a keyboard, but I also wanted to get the newest Android version, Ice Cream Sandwich. That, coupled with the recommendation of the awesome online comparison tool Sortable (and local startup), I decided to get the Galaxy Nexus.

Koodo doesn’t offer the Galaxy Nexus and it’s $600 unsubsidized, which tipped the balance towards Wind. And, honestly, not having to worry about data usage is pretty nice.

A few observations:

• A smartphone makes eating out alone slightly less socially awkward, but walking down the street slightly more.
• Twitter was made for smartphones, but I kinda knew that already.
• Podcasts work better this way, but podcast client software isn’t nearly as good as I’d like it to be. It’s better than my previous (mostly manual) process, and frustrating close to what I want, which makes the gaps that much more noticeable.
• Angry Birds Space! Woo!
• I miss having a physical keyboard. I’m using Swype, and it’s pretty cool, but auto-correct makes me sad.
• Another drawback of the Galaxy Nexus is the lack of an SD card and USB mass storage access. This probably isn’t a big deal to most people, but I like having access to file systems. And there are a whole bunch of apps that seem to expect you can access an SD card directly for import or export.
• Those are the only two faults I can find with the phone, really. I don’t have much to compare it to first hand, but it’s a great little machine.
• I’ll probably post a round-up of apps I like once I’ve done some more exploring.

I tried out their prototype. Their solution involved putting a launcher on every monitor. Okay, sure. But what surprised me was by default they caused the mouse to stop at the monitor boundary unless you move the mouse above a certain speed.

I didn’t like this very much. Good thing I was involved in the design process and caught it early! They asked for feedback in blog comments, so I left one.

Please, I asked, provide a way for me to disable this feature. I don’t use the launcher very much and it’s more important to me that I can move smoothly and seamlessly between applications on different monitors. I like Unity because it gets out of my way and lets me work. This will get in my way.

I upgraded to beta1 today for the Global Jam. I was disappointed to see my request seems to have been ignored. So I’ve posted a bug. And I’ve changed the request slightly: please just give me a config setting somewhere that allows me to pass between monitors without being hindered. Maybe it’s really hard to implement an option to turn off per-monitor launchers and that’s why my suggestion was ignored. Who knows?

To illustrate the issue (since it’s easier to show than to explain), I made a short video using a two-monitor setup. It’s a bit rambly and could probably use editing, but I think it eventually gets the point across. Also, you probably want to watch it in at least 720p and full-screen.

Click here to watch video on YouTube.

PS: To the Unity hataz: I know that by posting something like this I’m going to get a tonne of “Unity/Canonical/Ubuntu/all y’all sucks!” and “You should use $FAVOURITE_WINDOW_MANAGER!” comments. I use Unity and I like it. I want to keep using Unity. Thanks, though. If you’ve found something you like better, great! Keep using it! I’m glad you’re happy with it. I’m aware of the alternatives. But maybe you could post your on your own blog saying that $FAVOURITE_WINDOW_MANAGER has some cool feature or other or some annoying bug you don’t like, and I can learn more about it that way. Maybe even with a cool video! That’d be great!

Wouldn’t it be cool if the video lens gave Canadians access to videos from the CBC, CTV, NFB animations and documentaries or Comedy Channel shows like The Colbert Report? I think it would!

Now, I foresee a number of possibly insurmountable problems from the start.

1. I have no idea how the Ubuntu video lens project is managed or how welcoming they are of contributions.
2. Or what sort of guidelines they’re looking at for adding content channels.
3. Or how ridiculously complicated they’ve made it to add new channels.
4. I will be very surprised if any of the above-mentioned sites have publicly-accessible APIs I’d likely need to support this.
5. Or what policies they might have that would that prevent using their content in this way.

Other than that, it should be easy!

Does anyone out there in Ubuntu Planet land have any suggestions or insight that might help overcoming the difficulties above? Comment here! Or poke me (dscassel) in #ubuntu-ca on Freenode.

The Waterloo Region Chapter of Ubuntu Canada will be jamming at Kwartzlab in Kitchener

What’s an Ubuntu Global Jam, you ask? Well! This video may help give you an idea:

Or you can read this interview I did with Charles Proffitt of the New York LoCo Team.

Basically, we’ll be trying out the first Ubuntu 12.04 beta (to be released this week!), triaging bugs, fixing things, working on artwork and promotional materials and anything else that we feel can help Ubuntu be better than ever. If you don’t have a computer you can bring, we have some at the lab you can test with.

We’ll also have drinks for sale, order out for food and maybe break out a game of Hedgewars or Teeworlds. Because games need testing too!

See you there!

Larry Lessig is something of a hero of mine. He’s a Harvard law professor who started out campaigning against modern intellectual property extremism that is locking up our culture and making creativity and innovation more and more difficult and more and more expensive. He created the Creative Commons to give artists a way to contribute to a free culture that they benefit from, despite laws which make that increasingly difficult.

A few years ago, though, he stopped fighting the battle against copyright extremism.

He stopped because he realized that increasingly overreaching copyright laws were merely a symptom of a much larger problem. It, along with inaction on climate change, pizza being classified as vegetables, ruinous deregulation and subsequent bail-outs of the financial industry and hundreds of other dysfunctions in American government were going to continue unless it is addressed.

The problem, as he sees it, is that people in government spend nearly as much time seeking campaign contributions as anything else. That large contributions grant access to the political process that ordinary citizens can’t hope to have. And that cynicism about this is so widespread, no-one in America believes that government can solve any real problems anymore.

I’d encourage you to watch the video above. He makes a very compelling argument.

And if we’re feeling smug as Canadians, well, we do do at least some of this right. The Harper Government has already erased some of the Crétien era campaign finance reform, however. And the US State Department exerts considerable sway in Ottawa, enough to get US-style copyright legislation like Bill C-11 passed. We are not immune.

Even if SOPA and PIPA are defeated, it’s inevitable that something like them will be passed eventually. Because Congress will eventually obey their paymasters as soon as it politically expedient to do so. It’ll happen unless the system is changed. Unless we are persistent and vigilant.

Just like every other desktop environment recently, the GNOME desktop environment has been looking to update its WIMPy interface. GNOME 3 brings with it two prominent options: GNOME-Shell and Unity. Which interface will be the ultimate victor?

In the left corner, wearing orange trunks, is the Unity Upholder, Darcy Casselman. In the right corner, wearing aubergine trunks, is the GNOME Shell Gorilla, Chris Irwin. In this desktop deathmatch, Darcy and Chris will battle to the.. wait a minute. They aren’t fighting! They’re standing together weaving daisies into each other’s hair! (Where did they find daisies in January?) They aren’t going to fight at all! Instead, they will be demonstrating the strengths of the two desktops, discuss their goals, and address some common complaints. They will start spreading the love at 7pm.

If this sounds too touchy-feely for you, how about using your brains? This month’s FLOSS Fund nominee is MusicBrainz, a project to develop an encylopedia/database of music information, all released under open licences. You can use MusicBrainz to tag music or build website that play with data via web services. If you are so inclined, you can make a donation at the meeting, or by getting in touch with me.

The meeting will be held at our usual location

St John’s Kitchen
97 Victoria Street North
(Corner of Victoria and Weber Streets)
Kitchener

There is some Hippie Bus parking in the Worth a Second Look parking lot, and if you are crazy you can park your bike along the side of the building. Photos and maps of the location are on the website.

I don’t think I have enough time to grow my hair long enough to get daisies in there. Come out and watch Chris and I sing the free software desktop environment equivalent of Kumbaya tomorrow night.

• Back to school (sort of): I sat in on the two UW computer science compiler courses over the winter and spring terms. This has become rather useful at work, as I’m now on OpenText’s compiler team. I also helped recruit my CS444 instructor to help us out.
• Speaking of work: it was a happy change for me to move teams so that I no longer work with OScript and started working on OScript to make it better for developers. OScript is OpenText’s proprietary programming language–something of a twist of history that was probably a great idea at the time is was conceived twenty-some yeas ago, but the developer experience of which has been sadly neglected over the years. We’re looking at rectifying that. The nice thing for me, is I’m doing fun and interesting things with Eclipse and with the language design, and I’m looking forward to getting the beginnings of that work in front of other developers in the next month or two.
• Clutter: I gave my first KWLUG talk in 2011 on Clutter. I gave it again at Dev House Waterloo as well. I’ll be giving my second KWLUG presentation a week from Monday, this time on Unity.
• #LRTAwesome: Following on from 2010′s involvement in Northdale, I gave a delegation to the Waterloo Regional Council in favour of the region’s LRT project. It was gratifying to me to feel part of a community effort that, in spite of opposition from the local media, was able to get that back on track. As it were.
• Hail to the chief: Somewhat unexpectedly, I became President of Kwartzlab. It’s been a great experience, really. We pulled off a pretty amazing Hacky Halloween event, and brought in a grant to buy an awesome new laser cutter. But it has meant that I’ve had to prioritize my time a bit more than I’m used to. It has meant that I’ve had to pull back a little bit on Ubuntu stuff.
• Circle of friends: However, Ubuntu Canada hasn’t suffered all that much from my being distracted with Kwartzlab. In fact, we now have two monthly Ubuntu Hours hosted by Charles and Bob on the first Friday and third Wednesday of the month respectively. And we had the usual Global Jams and release parties. And I even finally got my Ubuntu membership.
• FSOSS: And, I went to FSOSS in October to give a talk about Ubuntu Canada, the Ubuntu community and how people can get involved.
• I’ve been doing a lot of public speaking lately.
• Ellen: Continues to be awesome. She really inspires me by being able to remain positive in spite of everything. We got to spend a whole bunch of time together doing some pretty amazing things: concerts, Perimeter lectures, Stratford plays, a trip to Montreal, her cousin’s wedding… I’m quite pleased with myself that I was able to get some of our friends down from Ottawa to jam with Ellen at her house for her birthday. We made sweet music together. Literally!
• A surfeit of blogs: One thing that really fell off the map this year was this blog. With all the things I’m doing, it just hasn’t been as much of a priority. You’d think that would mean I’d have lots of things I’d be eager to talk about. And it does! But with Twitter, a weekly coffee meetup with friends where I can just tell them things, Ellen being very patient with me as I work out problems or tell stories on the phone where I might have otherwise done that here, I don’t feel the need to take the time to compose something. And I feel bad about that, but I acknowledge that the blog has become an unfortunate victim of prioritization. One thing that I really do feel guilty about is that I feel like I’m shirking my responsibilities and should be blogging more about Kwartzlab, Ubuntu Canada and the Agile P2P (especially after I’d agreed to blog about sessions for Communitech. I only did one of those; I’d have done more, but I’ve had to miss nearly all the sessions since the summer). For Ubuntu Canada, I have actually done of few of those, more than anything else this year.
• Agile Book Club: Was a fantastic experience, but unfortunately now seems to be in the past tense. The principle members have either gone off and started a consulting company, Lean Intuit (I love the name), got themselves elected moderators of Stack Overflow or they’ve been whizzing around the world giving talks at Agile conferences. So the book club becomes another sad victim of prioritization. My one real regret is I’d just brought Eric on board just before it faded. He always has great insights and I’m sad he couldn’t have been a part of the club as it was in 2010 and early 2011.

All in all, I think this was another pretty fantastic year in a whole bunch of areas. I’m looking forward to 2012, but (hopefully, if I get my slides done for the KWLUG presentation), I’ll talk about that later.

Ever wonder why nearly every LoCo team centres around a single urban centre? The team nominally covers a large geographical area, but with a few (admirable and welcome) exceptions, a state team or a national team is a city team that just happens to be in that state or country. One of the main raison d’etres for LoCo teams is getting people to meet up in person; to grow the community face-to-face. If the closest face-to-face meetup is a six hour drive away, you’re probably not going to be meeting anyone, ever.

From my own experience, growing new city teams in a LoCo outside the initial centre is tough to do. If you found a LoCo, though, you (likely) get a sweet title like “LoCo Contact,” and you get to basically run the show if you want to (not that you should…). What’s in it for someone to do the same sort of work in another city, only to be overshadowed by someone else who got their first? Sure, some people will take on the job for its own sake, and those guys are awesome. If we want Ubuntu LoCos to spread to more cities within LoCos, we need to think about what motivates people.

And I think recognition and acknowledgement would help. I think people need something to rally around and be proud of if they’re going to go to the effort of building that thing. I think we need city teams.

I do not think we should dissolve the current LoCo team structure and recognize only city teams.

Regional LoCo teams come with a lot of overhead. There are websites, forums and mailing lists to administer, team reports to write, regular IRC meetings to run. That’s not even considering re-approvals and other maintenance by the LoCo Council and CD shipping costs from Canonical. It’s not feasible for every city team to have the rights and responsibilities a LoCo team has today.

But it’s entirely feasible to recognize and manage city teams within regional LoCos. It’s possible (and cheap!) to acknowledge their leaders.

And it’s not something the LoCo council or the LTP developers need to do much of anything about. I think the recognition might mean more to a lot of people if it came from the central governance bodies, but I acknowledge these folks have a lot on their plate already. This is something LoCo teams can do themselves.

So something I’m going to push for this cycle, with our website refresh, is to acknowledge the people doing the work in Ubuntu Canada’s two current city teams–Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo–and any new ones that might spring up, to ensure they have their own space and they get their due. And maybe that’ll encourage more people to take up the mantle.

How do you feel about bullets? Maybe in reverse-chronological order.

• I dressed up as The Blue Screen of Death for Hallowe’en. Blurry MySpace shot.
• I spent a chunk of the weekend at FSOSS. Yeah, that’s Ubuntu-related. See the previous post. But it was cool and I got to hang out with some really interesting people, like one of the engineers working on the Raspberry Pi. I also made some contacts and got some ideas for future Ubuntu things, if I ever have the time.
• Hacky Hallowe’en was awesome apparently. I’m sad I wasn’t there. Wait, that’s about Kwartzlab, not me…
• I got a cold a couple of weeks ago and have been mostly quarantined from seeing Ellen. This makes me sad.
• I’ve become mildly obsessed with Dragon Age. I got the game because a bunch of co-workers liked it and figured it would be a modest distraction, but I ended up getting sucked in. I’ve played Origins and all the DLC. I haven’t played Dragon Age II yet. I’ve been too busy to afford resurrecting the time vampire. I have, however, bought the first volume of the tabletop role-playing game (which was a little disappointing) and I’ve just finished reading the first novel. I started the second last night.
• Speaking of obsessions, have you seen the Doctor Who toys they’ve announced recently?! My most recent order (including Idris, River and Scaroth, last of the Jaggaroth) should be arriving soon.
• I should write about what I’m doing at work sometime. I’ve become a language designer as well as an IDE developer. It’s all pretty cool. My employer encourages us to blog about what we’re working on, but I still feel weird about it (hence not referring to said employer by name; not that it’s a secret or anything).
• I didn’t get to do nearly as much gardening as I wanted to do this year. Nearly every weekend was booked up with something: Ubuntu release parties, Stratford plays with Ellen, SoOnCon, Toronto International Film Festival, Ubuntu Global Jam, our trip to Montreal, Car Free Sundays, Kwartzlab cottage weekend… If not one of those, I was most likely spending time with Ellen or playing Dragon Age. I did a little bit to enact my gardening plans, but I’d hoped I’d be further ahead.
• Still, it was a pretty awesome summer. I can’t say I really regret all the stuff I’ve been doing.

“The most important thing folks like you can do to help Ubuntu get to 200 million users is join your LoCo team. LoCo teams are critical to the future growth of Ubuntu.”

I was scheduled to give a talk about Ubuntu Canada at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium on Saturday. That comment made me change my focus a bit.

The reason is I don’t think the things that we as a LoCo team do will make any sort of dent in that 200 million target. That’s not to say I’m not very proud of what we do. I think we do a great job of supporting and energizing the community that’s already here. Ubuntu Hours, Global Jams and release parties are fantastic opportunities to meet, work with and get to know other Ubuntu users. But besides perhaps making the community more vibrant and thus more attractive, I don’t think they do much to recruit new users.

So I put the challenge out to the people at the conference: what should Ubuntu Canada be doing to help us meet the ambitious 200 million goal?

There were a few suggestions:

• Raise money for marketing campaigns and advertisements
• Develop and discuss concrete ways Ubuntu solves specific problems real people have
• Encourage entrepreneurs to start businesses to support Ubuntu
• Do more to make people aware that commercial support is available from Canonical
• Work with groups like GOSLING to help get Ubuntu into Canadian governments
• Work with the universities (particularly in my town of Waterloo) to promote Ubuntu there
• Provide training seminars in libraries and community centres
• Get involved in local events like the multicultural festival

And all those ideas are great, but it seems to me it’s still scratching the surface.

If LoCo teams are going to be a significant force in recruiting 200 million Ubuntu users, we have to become a movement. Something that permeates the culture.

I don’t have a lot of experience starting movements. Who’s with me? What should LoCo teams be doing to make Ubuntu a household name?