To celebrate this achievement we decided to scratch an old itch and package the NDG server for Debian. It was fun learning about the state of Java packaging in Debian and the awesome work of the Debian JBoss team. Jon and I managed to get some of the work done at Debconf in NYC (thanks Nokia) and the rest, well most of it in fact was done by Rodrigo, a new member of the NDG Open Source team.

http://people.debian.org/~jbernard/debian unstable/

/etc/apt/sources.list

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ndg

Reaction to the source code release has been great with a nice review up on Mobile Active and a lot of new users on our playground

The positive feedback has inspired us to be creative and we have some great ideas for the future of data collection on mobile devices including porting the mobile client to Series 40, scoping out the design of a 'legacy connector' to talk with existing data sources and integrating Bluetooth sensor support into the server and mobile client.

In the second half of 2010 we will also further develop our university collaborations, particularly in Africa. Here the University of Lagos is already working to select 15 - 20 of its more promising students to work on a data gathering project to assess the extent and nature of patronage enjoyed by alternative medicine practitioners in Nigeria.

Indeed the university collaborations have already been a great success. Rodrigo was one of my students at the INdT/FUCAPI Mobile Linux Development Center and his application Tweego recently won the Maemo Coding Competition.

His prize is a trip up to Ireland to the Meego conference. Well done Rodrigo, for sure you deserve it and watch out for great things from him (and NDG Open Source of course) in the future

I need someone to work on my team creating, maintaining and supporting a community of open source developers and implementers around the world. The full job spec is pasted below but the most important skills are experience working with open source development, fluency in English and some experience working with social projects in the areas of Education, Health or the Environment.

Please, if you would like to be considered either send me your CV or get in contact directly with our human resources department at INdT.

Please pass this opportunity on to anyone you think might be ideal for this role and I am looking forward to meeting some really cool people at the interviews :).

Mandatory

Education Level: Degree - but exceptional candidates without will be considered
Desirable Experience: 0-1 year
English: Fluent
Must Have: Demonstrable open source community involvement preferably as a committer to an open source project.
Would Like But Not Essential: Java, Debian, MySQL, ECMA script, Previous voluntary work in the fields of Education, Health or the Environment

Job Role

You will evangelize the adoption of our developer products and support implementations of our solutions worldwide. You will bring strong and well-rounded coding skills in a wide range of open source technologies along with excellent writing, presentation and support skills. You will be measured on growth in adoption of our developer products and customer satisfaction in our implementer communities. You need to be able to work equally well answering simple questions with NGO's, highly technical ones with developers at our partner companies as well as reporting accurately to senior managers.

Key Responsibilities

• Actively tweet, blog and write sample code, developer articles and tutorials for our products as well as provide support online through our forums.
• Provide on-line support and advice.
  
• Advocate for and evangelize our developer products and APIs in multiple mediums.
• Participate in architectural,design and support discussions with strategic partners to speed adoption and ensure best practices during implementation.
• Influence our developer product strategy by working with product management, engineering, marketing, business development and operations.

We are building an outstanding team around our social investment projects here at INdT - if you want to be a part of this write and tell us why.

Good Luck!

• Rootstock/Rootstock gui – integrated with oem-config
• Qemu-arm-static
• ARM/Thumb2 support - the archive in lucid is built for the ARMv7 architecture with thumb2 support.
• EFL 2D Launcher

Rootstock is a graphical (and command line of course) set of tools to create a fully configured tarball or VM image of an ubuntu rootfs from scratch

so that you can extract it to a root device. One nice thing about this is that various tasks can be included in the image. This is very useful when working with ARM. Other tools such as Moblin Image Creator exist to do more or less the same thing but Rootstock is leading the way in innovation at the moment IMO. If you want to really customize an image then you need to use seeds and germinate a set of packages - for this you will need to read our book ;)

The binfmt-misc module in the Ubuntu kernel makes it possible to execute binaries of foreign arches under linux. This means it is possible to have an arm eabi enabled chroot on a i386 system :) - this is as simple as running

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install qemu-arm-static
$ build-arm-chroot karmic eabi-chroot

ARM/Thumb 2 is the instruction set underlying the ARM Cortex architecture which provides enhanced levels of performance, energy efficiency, and code density for a wide range of embedded applications.The whole Ubuntu archive is being ported to Thumb 2 and we still have some some build failures- if you can help with ftbfs (failed to build from source) please help out here.

This has already been covered extensively elsewhere but the new UI for ARM based Ubuntu devices will rock hard for Lucid. The tool will detect hardware and if a device does not have 3D capabilities it wall fall back to the EFL launcher   It is hard to stress why this is rocks so much but a unified user experience across i386/Atom and ARM devices should ring a few bells in marketing departments everywhere, right.

Exciting times.

After this the major tasks came down to packaging plasma mobile and modifying kwin and kdm for a mobile device.These are the most important things we need to do before Feature Freeze in mid February. We also of course need to do the meta package, default-settings and work on the theme but we can do this right up to the Lucid release of Liquid

I have been travelling and otherwise occupied since UDS so have not had as much time as I would like to hack on this.

Luckily Rodrigo wanted to 'tocar a bola' for a while and he has been working with the rest of the Ubuntu Mobile team on some fancy liquid moves. This included setting up an icecc compile farm which meant that today we managed to finally get plasma-mobile compiled, packaged and put up on REVU for some feedback. The obligatory screenshot on Ubuntu Lucid is here

Any designers looking at this screenshot will I imagine have lots of ideas about how this 'user experience' could be improved. The nice thing about plasma is that according to Caio the whole interface can be changed very easily using just a qml template. If you feel excited by this then join the Liquid Hackers team on Launchpad or if you feel really inspired come to the Bossa in the Jungle in March where more mobile madness is sure to go down.

After an uneventful trip up to Dallas from Manaus the first thing I did was check out the skyline

photo courtesy of Timo Jyrinki

No UDS would be complete without the customary 'Future of the LPIA port' session which kicked off the week. It would have been killed off there and then I think but I raised the issue of some interesting results I got when writing the testing chapter for our book. There was a 30% improvement when running a 2GB file encryption test on the LPIA kernel when compared to the generic one which I think warrants more investigation. My action point is to re-run all the tests and put the Ubuntu QA team in the loop

Another perennial mobile track favourite @ UDS is the state of ARM soft bootloaders. The problem to be solved is that the current solutions are  limited and mostly incompatible with each other. For the Lucid cycle a new small (<2MB) ARM bootloader will be written which will be easy for device manufacturers to install and which will be placed as the main bootloader option for Ubuntu ARM

Next up was a session to choose the default lightweight browser for ARM. Any potential solution needed to have the following qualities in order of priority

• Quick on ARM
• Touch screen scrolling
• Fast javascript
• Support for Flash
• Good extension support
• Java

as well as a small memory footprint and a responsive upstream. After much discussion of the options (Firefox - good but no ARM optimisation yet, Midori - frustrating to use at times, Epiphany - works but a bit limited, MicroB - great but closed source UI and WebKit - multipleupstream sources) the team decided that it will package Chromium and upload it to the archives. The thinking being that Google for sure will want their browser working well on ARM and judging by the number of people running it @ UDS (80%-90%) it is starting to gain significant traction at least amongst developers. This decision was reinforced later in the week with the news of extensions support in Chrome and the news that Canonical are working with Google on Chrome OS

Midweek saw a session on Ubuntu Liquid. The principal objective of this community based mobile release is to support devices which do not have hardware accelerated graphics and to bring to these devices the latest updates available in the Ubuntu world. It will be built using the Ubuntu infrastructure and so will drop the 'Remix' namespace for the Lucid cycle. There was some considerable interest in the session about creating a common framework for running Android and WebOS applications on Ubuntu and also using QT libraries for this. I am involved in this project in my free time along with some other guys from INdT so we expect to have some long weekends hacking in the coming months.

A definite highlight of the week was the 2D netbook launcher for ARM. This is an EFL based application launcher (soon to be released on Launchpad) which runs well on platforms that do not have accelerated OpenGL drivers for X. It was written in a collaboration between the Canonical OEM team and Profusion. For the Lucid cycle the guys will work on building some intelligence into the launcher to probe X and install either the 3D or 2D launcher at install time depending on device capabilities. It was great to see such innovation @ UDS and to know that Brazilian guys were involved.

Speaking of innovation Friday saw a fascinating demonstration of Ubuntu Server and Cloud on ARM. There was a quad core Ubuntu ARM server running away in the room which created some considerable excitement . The ultimate goal for this project in the Lucid cycle is a build system, bootloader, and installer that supports ARM v7 architectures such as Cortex A8/A9. A question was asked during the session about the benefits of Ubuntu server on ARM and the answer was astounding.

I ran the quad core processor at 90% server load for some hours

and I could comfortably leave my finger on the processor.

Also Friday saw some lightening talks during the plenary sessions where I got up the courage to give a short talk. As far as I am aware our book is the first technology book *ever* written by authors living in the Amazon and for sure it is the first book on Ubuntu Mobile. I got up, said all that and invited everyone to come and visit us and to see our work in Manaus. The recent news then that Bossa 10 conference next year will be

Bossa in the Jungle!

Yet it is being built today. The stakeholders are known, the debate has yet to start. The European Commission published its action plan for IOT in June of this year. In hundreds of years our real needs have not changed. We want to be loved, feel safe, have fun, be relevant in work and friendship, be able to support our families and somehow play a role - however small - in the larger scheme of things.

So what will really happen when things, homes and cities become smart? The result will probably be an avalanche of what at first looks like very small steps, small changes.

Currently IOT applications, demos and infrastructure are rolled out from negative arguments only. For logistics, it is anti-theft. For ehealth it is the lack of human personnel that requires the building of smart houses. From a policy view it is the ensuring of safety, control and surveillance of both items and in public spaces. For retail it is shelf space management.

Council thinktank aims to grow into a positively critical counterpart to these negativities in focusing on the quality of interaction and potentialities of IOT for social, communicative and economic (personal fabrication, participatory finance, alternative currencies) connectivity between humans, humans and things and humans and their surroundings.

The wrestling with ambient technologies - the noise - is rapidly going out of corporate memory. A new young generation growing up at ease with 'total' connectivity, will enter IOT territory as simply another layer, another iteration of something they are comfortable with.

Therefore the launch of Council will highlight a personal history of locative media & hybrid spaces, by professionals of the i3 (Intelligent Information Interfaces) days, as well as the latest tools and applications, workshops on key issues, short keynotes and time for debate and discussion.

Where: Imal, Brussels

When: December 4 2009 0930:2200 (public evening from 20:00) Workshop 185 Euros (including lunch and dinner)

Register ]]> http://ianlawrence.info/random-stuff/ubuntu-liquid-remix Liquid moves in a changing world vern Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:17:13 -0500 Mer Ubuntu Liquid Remix Ubuntu Mobile Coming hard on the heels of the news that our mug shots have thankfully been removed from the front cover of the 'Professional Ubuntu Mobile Development' book to be replaced with a Formula 1 racing car (WTF!) comes the news that the Ubuntu MID distribution will have a community release codenamed Ubuntu Liquid Remix during the Lucid Lynx cycle.

We are still fleshing out the goals and the work plan for the Liquid Remix and I expect that this will gain more traction at the Ubuntu Developer Summit this November. We have had a discussion with the Mer guys about maybe using the Open Build System for packaging although we will continue to use the Ubuntu infrastructure and seeds to actually germinate our image.

It seems that there is a great opportunity for collaboration and synergy between Mer and Liquid Remix so I am looking forward to the next 6 months of working together.]]> http://ianlawrence.info/random-stuff/i-am-now-a-member-of-the-open-web-foundation The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies. vern Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:45:33 -0500 Open Web Foundation

What is Open Data and the Open Web?

The Web as the Platform

What is the Open Web Foundation?

http://openwebfoundation.org/2009/05/the-open-web-foundation-is-growing-our-ranks.html

This is an initiative led by the Institute of Entrepreneurial Endeavor with the objective being to stimulate the entrepreneurial spirit which exists within everyone.

For INdT the event happened at an ideal moment as the Institute is currently implementing an innovation management system as one of its key 'pillars' of corporate entrepreneurship.

'This event was yet another way to spread our culture of innovation'

During the event there was a week long Workshop in Python Programming (Python is a programming language for mobile phones), as well as a day of talks run by members of the Institute which covered such topics as Good Techniques for Project Management, Your Role in Business Management, Agile Methods for Design and Interface Projects and Innovation and Mobility

Source... Nokia Você

Translation...Ian Lawrence

If you want to create a theme:

1. Download the design sheet. (.psd)

2. Download the guideline (optional but recommended)(.pdf).

3. Replace the images in the sheet. Note that some images are going to be resized inside Canola (like the scrollbar) and the graphic needs to be designed with that in mind. Consult the "Stretch axis" column of each image for details. Also, when replacing the images in the sheet make sure to respect the sliced areas (View > Show > Slices).

4. Save your images(File > Save For Web & Devices) using the PNG-24 preset. A dialog is going to appear asking where you wanna save the files. Select a folder and hit the save button.

5. Open the selected folder on finder/explorer/terminal/etc, you are going to see a subfolder called "images", open it. If you properly follow all the step until now, your theme's images are going to be here.

6. Compact all the archives inside this folder(zip or tar.gz). Here lies the trick, compact only the images, not the whole folder. In other words, if your open you zip package IT MUST ONLY CONTAIN IMAGE FILES.

7. Go to Theme Maker site and upload your package.

8. Enjoy your new theme

This service allows *anyone* to create (and publish if they would like to) a theme for Canola. All you need to do is read the guide (PDF), create your images,zip them up and upload them to the site. The service then handles the creation of the Debian package and offers a choice of Creative Commons licenses should you want your new theme to be submitted for inclusion on the gallery. The resulting .deb can be downloaded and installed on any Maemo powered device

The site was conceived by handful, the UI was designed by giselle, the CSS written by hugo and I did the Django and the Python work (based on a prototype made by Eduardo Fleury). It was really great working as a team and web work really lends itself to working in a distributed manner (in this case between Manaus and Recife)

The Ubuntu Golden Theme written by Marcello Mendes (rapadura) from Debian Amazonas is already in the gallery for you to download!.It is licensed under CC ATTRIBUTION NON-COMMERCIAL (by-nc)

Enjoy!

This year it will happen again on March 8 -11 in the

beautiful North East of Brazil

with the focus definitely on QT, Gnome and the 'plumbing'  of a distro.

So this came from Planet  Debian and it sort of fits with some things that I have been worrying about recently. We need to solve some big problems in the world and urgently  (global warming, population control, cancer etc) but the innovation which I see around is about putting some beeer on a beer wall or BuddyPoking someone with a ninja kick .

All well and good right, we are breaking down the walls between people, OK...I am a CAMRA real ale guy through and through too so I am good to go.. but this is not new stuff...this is not real innovation , innovation like ' shit geezer, how did you do that?'

I think this web 2.0 thing (apart from being like 'cloud computing' some marketers wet dream) is great if you are in the business of consumer goods. Let the community innovate and participate and the world turns. But what happens when we want to work out the hard stuff?

This used to be called Blue Sky research apparently when this sort of thing had a market value.... I read this too recently

Where is the Future We Were Promised?

Five years into the 20th century, Einstein was living his Annus Mirabilis. Where is our patent office today? Who is our Einstein? Are we the first generation in many years incapable of true innovation? And let’s not just talk about things as complicated as the theory of relativity. I remember complaining about the drill when I was young, and my dentist telling me that when I was grown up he would have to find another job because we would have a vaccine against cavities. Where is this vaccine against cavities? Where are the cures for catarrh and AIDS? Where is that future devoid of poverty in which robots were going to do everything for people and we were going to dedicate ourselves to art and culture?

Unfortunately, when I look around me today, during the end of 2008, I see humanity leading an unsustainable life based on technology that should already be obsolete. I believe that it is time for us to engage in some serious self-criticism and start to invest in science again, because the list of unsolved problems grows longer every day. If we continue on like this, not only are we not going to have a future, but we are going to end up without a present.

This is I think too negative but sometimes I wonder if my generation will just be remembered as the last one before some global 'gaia' of collective intelligence is harnessed and we will ne talked about by future generations as those old geezers in black and white chase films from yesteryear moving really quickly but going absolutely nowhere