Richard A. Johnson

I forget where that title name comes from, but I think it suits my current mood and post. Over the past few months I have been rather quiet around here due to various reasons. Plain and simple, I was shit on months back and I haven’t overcome the hurt I received from this. I was pushed away and because of this I took quite a bit of time off to collect my thoughts and see where I wanted my future to go.

Many of you know that I have decided to spend more time on cycling than anything Ubuntu and I think this was for the best, and still think it is. Jono has been talking about burnout recently, however my reason for my so called burnout episode isn’t covered by his talk (yet?). Over the past few months I kept trying to fit in again and found it difficult on many levels. Since 2005 I have been working pretty much non-stop in the Kubuntu community and this has been my best experience ever. I have made a ton of new friends that I hope to keep forever. Everyone there is just truly amazing.

So where was I? Well, when I started in Kubuntu I was that documentation dude to help out my buddy Jonathan Jesse. I did this for a few months before I wanted more. I had done Debian development for many years prior helping out where I could, so I decided to go ahead and work on some packaging for Kubuntu. After 2 years of pestering enough people I finally did the whole MOTU and Core Developer thing. From there I served on various councils such as the Kubuntu Councils, MOTU Council, Regional Membership Board, and I am sure some others. I have written various pieces of code, fixed bugs upstream, and run the whole gambit of what I thought a good community member would do for a project he loved and cherished deeply.

In my time off, I missed so much. There have been so many changes that I haven’t been able to keep up with, and believe me, this is a good thing. Ubuntu and Kubuntu are maturing faster and better than I could have ever imagined. Because of this, and my time away riding the hell out of my bike, I don’t know where I fit in anymore. I am working with Scott and others on the Kubuntu Netbook edition and attempting to get the state of Kubuntu Documentation back up to par again. Thanks to the amazing Rick Spencer for fitting me into a slot helping out with the Netbook stuff, and for that I will be forever grateful. Hopefully we will have an amazing presentation for the Kubuntu Netbook Edition to show everyone for Karmic.

So with that, just know that I might be down, but I am not out. I will no longer stick my nose into the politics and bullshit that has knocked me down in the past, but I will put my nose to the grind stone and continue working on making Kubuntu #1 anyway that I can. I apologize if I have neglected any email from you in the past. I am working on fixing all of that and it will take a little bit of time. I also apologize for making some commitments and not following through on them. I have contacted most of you on this already. I regret that I have to turn down any requests outside of Kubuntu and KDE to help you, but that is how it has to be right now. I am currently working on repriortizing a bunch of things so in the future I am sure I will be able to lend you a hand, so don’t hesitate to keep in touch. My number one priorities right now are obtaining stable employment as this consulting crap is for the birds and continue my cycling adventures. Cycling has helped clear my mind to levels I could never imagine. I guess 300 miles a week can do that to a person

Thanks to those of you who provided support and the confidence I needed in order to try and continue on, and thank you to everyone who has sent many well wishes and to those who messaged me on IRC and listened to me whine. Now when you message me, I will probably try and get you to help us out on making Kubuntu #1, so be ready!

Recently I have really gotten into cycling, not just for recreational use, but also for competitive reasons. I am definitely new to their community unlike I have been in the free software community now for more than 15 years. The one thing I noticed is that their community is exactly like ours. Everyone is very welcoming and friendly and it is easy to find a spot just for you. I have done my first 3 group rides within the past week. A group ride is where a bunch of road cyclists get together and do a nice long, fast paced, ride in a group, or what is commonly referred to as a pace line in cycling.

The first ride I went on was with what are called leg shavers. People who are about as close to Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, Alberto Contador, and others. They ride super fast and they know what they are doing. Well, I definitely didn’t fit in with this crowd but they didn’t discourage me from trying to ride with them at all. Actually some of these semi-pro to professional cyclists took some time with me to teach me the basics, something they probably learned many years ago.

The second ride I went on was with leg shavers as well with a local racing team, which I will probably join in the upcoming months. On Monday they went out for what is called a recovery ride. This type of ride is a slower paced ride with very high RPMs, or cadence in the cycling world. After racing on Saturday and Sunday, these athletes need to keep their legs, lungs, and hearts fresh, so they do a somewhat easy ride. This ride was considered a “no-drop” ride. This means that they will not let you drop off and will always help you through. Now those of you who know me, know that I am a fairly large guy. I am not obese, but I used to play football, did wrestling and martial arts, lifted weights forever. I was always into getting bigger. Well because of this, my cardio is absolute garbage. I can ride for 100 plus miles, but I can’t do it all that fast. This ride was my fastest paced ride at the distance we did to date. There was a woman who made sure I didn’t drop the entire time, her name was Sandy and I am forever in her debt as she was not only patient, but she was a ton of help teaching me the ropes.

The third ride was last night. A nice 31 mile ride that is by far the hilliest ride I have done to date. I didn’t even know we had hills like this in the Chicagoland area. I was great with rolling hills, flats, and downhills. Because I have a solid 220 plus pound body, I can easily toast a lot of people down hill that we were riding with. Now, what goes down, must come up, and my lord did it ever come up. There were 3 hills, and all of them had those scary movie names too. Devils Back, Heart Attack Hill, and I can’t remember the other. Well, those hills kicked my ass. I dropped into the lowest gears I had, and I run triples thankfully. I had dropped from doing 18 mile per hour to about 7 miles per hour, I pushed and I pushed, I saw dots, I felt sick, and my legs were on fire. To my rescue to help me up the hill and make sure I didn’t fall back, another woman cyclist. Sandy was also riding with us that night, but I told her to not fall back because of me, I know the route and I will catch up. Thankfully she listened and got a good workout. The lady who did help me was just as friendly, very motivational, and a lot of fun to ride with.

Since these 3 rides, the last 2 I have made some cool friends and already they are emailing me asking me to come out for a bike ride this weekend and a barbecue. Really cool, and this is the type of stuff I really need, the motivation and camaraderie that will help me from burning out in the open source community. There you go Jono, add cycling to your list of burnout preventors As you can see, they welcome me with open arms the same exact way the open source community has as well. Cycling and Ubuntu are so darn close in community representation that I am falling in love with both more and more every day now.

Another moral to this story, which has become somewhat of a hot topic over the past couple of years deals with women. I am here to tell you that women can be as strong and even stronger then men, in so many ways. When I say stronger, I don’t necessarily mean strength. The past 2 rides I have done has given me even more appreciation for the women in our communities. I am proud to say that I was at the brink of quitting and had women come to my rescue. For those of you out there that want to bash women and say they don’t belong, I know some on bikes that are waiting for you to mount up, and I know plenty who have their IDEs fired up ready to code you a paperbag to crawl into. So I had 2 women stick with me during my rides and help me through it, help me succeed. I had women in the open source community do the same. One of them is my good pointy stick buddy Sarah who probably helped me more than Jonathan Riddell, Brandon Holtsclaw, and Daniel T. Chen put together.

COMMUNITY! COMMUNITY! COMMUNITY!

How many cyclists do we have in the house? Did you know there was an Ubuntu Cyclists Team? We are made up from a few hipsters, you know those silly kids who roll up their pant legs, wear funny colored shoes, and those silly cycling caps, similar to the one I am wearing in my Planet Ubuntu hackergotchi, and ride a bike called a fixie. There are some that are leisure riders or commuters, and then there is me, the road cyclist who loves when his legs bleed in pain. I know there is another one, as you had your bike at UDS in Mt. View. Can’t remember the make, it was white though. You had that leg shaver look about you as well. I think Tony Yarusso is also a road cyclist as well, which I have been meaning to make my way up to him and do some riding this summer.

I am looking for more cyclists in our community, and if you fall into this category, hang out with us on #ubuntu-cyclists on IRC (Freenode). I am looking for some road cyclists in or around the Chicagoland area. Tonight I am going out on a training group ride in almost 100°F temperatures. Tonight is attack of the hills out in the western suburbs of Chicago. I am currently planning on entering some Cat 5 races this summer.

So, if you are a cyclist, use Ubuntu, come and join us. I would love to see Mark Shuttleworth, Mr. Athlete himself, get into it and lets create a real licensed and sponsored Team Ubuntu! It would be about the only non-blank cycling jersey I would wear

Come on Mark, I saw you running at Mt. View. You passed us twice, and then the third time you came up with a whole tray of Starbucks, impressive

Cycling also prevents burnout, right Jono?

Just come across this link on IRC (thanks patriconway). I could do nothing but chuckle. My buddy who is an avid web developer and avid anti-Linux and Microsoft guy, wet his pants from laughing so hard. Here is the breakdown of how IE is better than Firefox and Chrome, per Microsoft of course:

Security

Internet Explorer 8 takes the cake with better phishing and malware protection, as well as protection from emerging threats.

If this were true, then I guess all of those manufacturers out there creating Anti this and that software are going under. Thanks Microsoft for contributing to the destabilization of the economy. Maybe this is true, but only so because IE really has to worry about these sort of things far more than either Firefox and Chrome does.

Privacy

InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering help Internet Explorer 8 claim privacy victory.

Prove it! Put up or shut up, let us see your code! Until then, this is nothing more than a marketing gimmick which the FCC should attack with their whole Truth-in-Marketing bull hockey.

Ease of Use

Features like Accelerators, Web Slices and Visual Search Suggestions make Internet Explorer 8 easiest to use.

Oh my, just asked my mom how she likes the Accelerators, Web Slices, and Visual Search Suggestions in Internet Explorer 8. Her response? “I use Firefox now because I couldn’t play Yahoo Games with IE 8 and it kept crashing.” I guess if all you have to do is click that funky ‘e’ on the desktop over and over, then that is pretty easy.

Web Standards
No need to quote it, they pretty much say, “Hey, who cares about CSS 3, we are making IE8 world-class with CSS 2.1″ Though they admit that Firefox and Chrome have more support for emerging standards such as HTML5 and CSS3. You know, the future of the web, that’s what Firefox and Chrome care about now. So when HTML5 and CSS3 become mainstream, you IE8 users will be stuck utilizing, yet again, a useless browser.

Developer Tools
No quoting, but IE8 has the advantage with tools like HTML, CSS and Javascript debugging right in the box. Ya, they got Firefox beat out of the box, but Firebug is far superior to their tools, my opinion of course, and it seems like the opinions of others as well. Oh, and I am sure Chrome will have these features in the future, you know, like when it is READY TO BE USED BY THE MASSES!

Reliability

Only Internet Explorer 8 has both tab isolation and crash recovery features; Firefox and Chrome have one or the other.

I guess this is kind of true, as Firefox only has the recovery portion, and Chrome has the tab isolation (does Chrome have crash recovery?). But! Of course there is a but. Using these 2 features as your reliability foundation isn’t saying much. “What mom? You had to click on the ‘e’ again because it just closed?” I really wish she would use Ubuntu!

Customizability

Sure, Firefox may win in sheer number of add-ons, but manyy of the customizations you’d want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 - right out of the box.

Weather alerts? User Scripts? OK, it isn’t customizable enough for me, but I guess it is for dear ol’ mum.

Compatibility

Internet Explorer 8 is more compatible with more sites on the Internet than any other browser.

Well, IE 8 is of course 2 browsers in 1. When it doesn’t work in IE8, which is most of the time, you go to “Compatibility Mode” which is IE7 and hope that it works there. When it doesn’t, fire up Firefox, it will work then. This really is a lie of course, and if it were true, it isn’t saying much. What you just said is, “Hey, we have a bunch of uneducated code monkeys writing IE only websites.” I would really love to see the proof in this one.

Manageability

Neither Firefox nor Chrome provide guidance or enterprise tools.

Umm, OK. Have no idea what they are really referring to, but the suits up at AIG just said, “OH WOW! We gotta get IE8, they said enterprise.” Oh wait, sorry about that, the suits in AIG are all gone, my bad.

Performance

Knowing the top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.

Yay, you just proved that the other 2 browsers are bloated, slow as all hell, garbage. Oh ya, consumers who are out to buy a fast car don’t worry about top speed, they worry about how fast they can get through rush hour. Come to Chicago, your browser will be just like the parking lots we call highways. And here in Chicago, fast automobiles are useless if they don’t get 30+ miles per gallon. We like a bit of efficiency with our speed, and we want to make sure that it will last us a few years too. To bad you can’t say speed, efficiency, and last a few years when it comes to IE 8, or Firefox or Chrome really.

<end satire>

Yes, I just wanted to have a little writing fun right now and maybe put some humor out there as my day in Chicago thus far has been nothing but severe weather I am scared, somebody hold me! What I find interesting is the fact they compared themselves to just Firefox and Chrome. Of course Firefox is #2 in browser land, but what about #3? Isn’t that Safari?

I say we all do our own comparison, really dig into the code and find out who is really the better browser. Uh oh, I just disqualified IE from this comparison, can’t dig into the code and see if they are really telling the truth, or just spewing buzz word here or there. I really wish that consumers were a bit educated and realized that 99.9% of the time, they are being lied to. So, if you just happen to run across this post trying to figure out Accelerators, Web Slices, and Visual Search Suggestions, then let me teach you about alternative choices. There is:

• Firefox (duh, we know that already)
• Chrome
• Konqueror
• and others…

I am really just adding this so I have it documented in case I forget it in the future or need to reference it. One thing I like to do when messing around with web development is when I use a table to hold something, instead of a silly div (really on wiki pages and such to create cheap button-like objects), is use a round border. So here are the example on how to use round borders for tables, utilizing border-radius and CSS.

Firefox

/* 5px radius on all 4 corners of the table */
-moz-border-radius: 5px;
/* 5px radius on top left and bottom right corners only */
-moz-border-radius: 5px 0 5px 0;
/* 5px radius on bottom left and top right corners only */
-moz-border-radius: 0 5px 0 5px;
/* 5px radius on the top left corner only */
-moz-border-radius-topleft: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the bottom left corner only */
-moz-border-radius-bottomleft: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the top right corner only */
-moz-border-radius-topright: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the bottom right corner only */
-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 5px;

CSS 3

/* 5px radius on all 4 corners of the table */
border-radius: 5px;
/* 5px radius on top left and bottom right corners only */
border-radius: 5px 0 5px 0;
/* 5px radius on bottom left and top right corners only */
border-radius: 0 5px 0 5px;
/* 5px radius on the top left corner only */
border-top-left-radius: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the bottom left corner only */
border-bottom-left-radius: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the top right corner only */
border-top-right-radius: 5px;
/* 5px radius on the bottom right corner only */
border-bottom-right-radius: 5px;

Webkit

/* Just add -webkit- in front of the CSS 3 styles */
-webkit-border-top-right-radius: 5px;

KHTML (Konqueror)

/* Just add -khtml- in front of the CSS 3 styles */
-khtml-border-radius: 5px;

And with that said, Why is there 4, count them 4, different ways to skin the same exact cat? Come on browser devs, lets come together and accept 1 solution and implement it. I have been noticing Ajax-like functions out there to do rounded corners, and now I see why. With like 10 lines of JavaScript, you get this same functionality. Now do this in your style sheet, and 1 table could have as less as 4 lines if it is a simple table, or as many as 16 lines for a bit more complex layout. Anyways, just wanted to keep this documented instead of Googling for it all of the time when I need it, and pass it on to all of you fine folks who are unfortunate enough to read my blog. Plus, I also wanted to pass on how web developers, when utilizing border-radius, can now make a KHTML friendly site

Yesterday I did a quick, well not so quick, post on some new tasks concerning Kubuntu QA and Feedback. I created a very crude plasmoid that would connect to a web survey so people could provide feedback during the development cycle. The first revision of this plasmoid had a hardcoded URL to the survey in question. So that meant that for every Alpha or RC release during the cycle, we would have to update the plasmoid with the new survey URL. This would become a pain. So I went forward trying to figure out a way to automagically handle this stuff.

My first initiative was to keep the plasmoid super simple and not have it do a lot of processing and stuff to figure out what to do. So enter PHP. I added a script on the server that the plasmoid will connect to. The only processing the plasmoid has to do is with lsb_release. When used with the flag -d, lsb_release will return only the “Description” of the current release of your system. This can be used to determine if the release is a stable release, or if it is a development release. Here are 2 example outputs to show this:

Stable:

Development:

QUIZ: Can you figure out the names of my computers from the 2 screenshots and how or why I named them? Jono, Jorge, and a few others over there in Michigan and here in Chicago, don’t answer! See if you can do this without Googling

So with the stable version, you can see the last bit in the line is the version number, in this case 9.04. In the development version instead of having the 9.04 it instead has karmic. So which ever value that the plasmoid gets when doing this it sends to the script like this:
http://foo.bar.com/foo.php?ver=9.04
If it is a development release, then it connects with ver=karmic.

Once the script gets that, it then does its magic. It first checks if the $ver is a string or a float. If it is a string, then it takes the string and looks over http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/$ver. It parses the HTML and looks for the latest release under $ver. That then returns whatever the latest release is on the development side only. If $ver is a float, then it parses the HTML of the public survey list and matches up version numbers. Once either of these are complete, the $SID is returned, which is the last part of the URL to the respected survey. Then the PHP script magically redirects the plasmoid to the correct survey.

So with that, I think the Kubuntu Team is in good shape to have this as part of the Alpha 3 release, and possibly even sooner. I would still like to take this beyond a plasmoid and look at creating some sort of application for the desktop that can do everything for everybody, this way here we can pass it around to the rest of the distros so they can use it during their development cycles as well. If you have any ideas, please pass them on, or start hacking on it. I would be willing to lend a hand when the time warrants.