Neil Gaiman continues to be one of my favorite authors (and tweeters). I bought a print of his poem “The Day the Saucers Came” in 2007 when it first came out and finally have gotten around to having it framed. (And I have #69 of 750 made, a nice low number!)

“The Day the Saucers Came” was originally published in Neil Gaiman’s short story collection, “Fragile Things” and was one of my favorite stories included. The fact that it became the first print available illustrated by Jouni Koponen was even better.

(This is reposted from an email earlier this evening)

Hi all, I wanted to give you a brief update on the GNOME Sysadmin team.

Last April, Owen sent out an email outlining changes to the Sysadmin team and a goal of hiring a part-time System Administrator to help coordinate the Sysadmin team. (And we’re getting closer to be the goal every day!)

Last year John Carr oversaw the team and the Sysadmin team was able to work on a number of improvements to the GNOME infrastructure, including a Bugzilla upgrade, installing a CRM system and web analytics application for the Marketing team and Plone, a CMS for a new www.gnome.org.

In October I volunteered to help with coordinating the team as John stepped down and with a new year starting a couple other members have indicated they don’t have time to help right now as well.

We have lots of improvements planned for this year such as bringing a brand new server online (thanks to Jeff Schroeder’s donation!) and migrating services from older servers to the new one, Git and Damned Lies integration, integrating all GNOME servers with Puppet and scoping Tomboy Online. That’s just to name a few – we also have a number of tasks open in Bugzilla in the sysadmin component.

We are looking for two volunteers to join the team to help with these projects and more. As Owen mentioned last year, team member responsibilities include:

• Attending the IRC meetings
• Regularly spending time handling routine tasks
• Volunteering for infrastructure development projects as needed

We have a number of projects planned for this year, so that 3rd bullet is important!

If you are interested in joining the team, please join the gnome-infrastructure mailing list and introduce yourself, why you want to join and any relevant skills or experience you have. It is helpful if you have been active in other GNOME teams and can have someone vouch for you. (We are talking about giving you root access to GNOME servers, after all!)

If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email, email the infrastructure list or stop by the #sysadmin IRC channel on GIMPNet IRC.

I followed through and canceled my DirecTV service today. My MythTV / Boxee setup has been running great the last couple of weeks and I kept DirecTV through yesterday just as a backup as I hosted a Super Bowl party.

This all started due to extremely poor customer service from DirecTV. My high-def DVR was dying in November, specifically the hard drive, as I could hear it grinding from twelve feet away over the sound of my speakers and the buffering and audio / video playback was terrible.

I had to reboot my DVR every 2-3 days, and performance would be better, then degrade. Calling DirecTV, they made me jump through a number of hoops to diagnose it which resulted in it taking almost a month and three phone calls before they agreed to replace it. Now, I don’t own this HD-DVR receiver – I lease it from DirecTV. When I first signed up for DirecTV 11 years ago you had to buy your hardware, now you just lease it from them for $5 / month.

They finally agreed to replace it, but they were going to charge me a $20 shipping & handling fee. My wife runs a small business out of the house, and I know it doesn’t cost $20 to ship one of those, especially in bulk. To say I was livid that I had to pay to get a receiver repaired that they own is an understatement. Each time I called in, they also tried to “upgrade” me on the last receiver that I actually owned – so I’d have to pay them another lease fee. I always told I’d only upgrade if it was a DVR, not just a standard receiver, and they always declined. (I had been able to take advantage of this a couple years ago, so I know they can upgrade old receivers to a DVR).

I emailed and called their customer service to complain – and their response was: “Sorry, that’s our policy”.

So now they’ve lost a customer. I may have had their lowest tier of service, but I also bought the March Madness and NFL Sunday Ticket packages each year, so from a revenue per customer standpoint I was above average.

When I called to cancel, they offered me $20 per month off for the next twelve months and a free DVR upgrade. Too little, too late. When they asked why I was cancelling, I said poor customer service for my HD-DVR experience this past November. So the customer service rep processed my cancellation, and then let me know I’d be receiving a box with pre-paid shipping to send my HD-DVR back to them. Where exactly was this pre-paid box when I needed to get it repaired? (The state of Washington is suing DirecTV over hidden fees).

What gets me is the focus DirecTV, cable companies and cell phone companies have on customer acquisition rather than keeping existing customers happy. Even though I had already contacted them and complained they weren’t willing to do anything about it until I actually cancelled. In my opinion, they need to keep a balance between these two groups of customers. This wasn’t the first customer service incident I’ve had with them over the years, but enough was enough. Thanks to innovations like Boxee I can make up some (but not all) of the content I’ll be missing from going over-the-air only. A loyal customer will pay dividends – do you think I’ll be recommending DirecTV to friends in the future?

The Mutliplayblog today published the results of a survey measuring customer satisfaction levels in satellite, cable and telco TV subscriptions:

Low Perceived “Value for Money” among all Digital Pay TV customers

Virtually across the board—and irrespective of platform—respondents reported low satisfaction in the metric of `Value for Money.’ There was very little measurable difference by platform among respondents, and in all cases, fewer than 22% of respondents felt the service “exceeded” or “greatly exceeded” expectations of value for money.

This is among the most important findings of study, as it underlines the vulnerability of pay television in its current state. Indeed, in a report published in 2008, we found that over 50% of US digital pay television customers would be willing to scale back or completely drop their television service if household budgetary circumstances dictated.

I highly recommend reading the rest of the blog post, as these companies are at a tipping point. We’ve seen it in the music industry, the video industry is feeling it, and now pay TV services will be feeling the pressure as technological innovations will put their business models at risk. Will they embrace their customers and these new technologies or will they become extinct? First they need to look in the mirror and see if they’re keeping their existing customers happy before trying to sign up more. And I’ve already had a few people ask me about my setup and express interest in ditching pay TV…

Just in time for your weekend reading pleasure, GNOME Journal #18 is out. Issue 18 is a special edition focusing on Multimedia & GNOME, as well as recap of the recent Boston Summit.

• Writing Multimedia Applications in Vala by Jim Nelson
• Pitivi by Jono Bacon
• What’s new with Banshee by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier
• An interview with Jonathan Thomas, creator of the OpenShot video editor by Paul Cutler
• Boston Summit Recap by Jason Clinton

This issue features four (4!) new authors and the GNOME Journal team is thankful for their contribution. We also couldn’t have done it without our editors: Stormy Peters, Sumana Harihareswara, and Jim Hodapp.

Go read it now!

A few weeks ago I blogged about buying the hardware to set up a MythTV PC to record off air high def TV and integrate it with Boxee.

The hardware arrived and I’ve been working on on the setup off and on over the last few weeks. Some random thoughts:

• The HD Homerun tuner is pretty cool. Fedora has the HD Homerun configuration tool in their repos. Installing that through PackageKit and yum made it easy to test out that it was working and had a good signal.
• I had to install MyTV 3 times before I could get it to work. On a vanilla Fedora 12 install and then adding MythTV from the repos, only one tuner of the HD Homerun would work. Trying Mythdora, my MythTV front ends on my desktop PC and my laptop wouldn’t connect. Also there was a nasty bug in Mythdora’s kernel that wouldn’t let me mount a NFS share. Using Mythbuntu everything just worked.
• Schedules Direct is a pretty cool service. I remember hearing about the story a couple years ago when it all went down, but when Zap2It started charging users for the scheduling data, a group of MythTV users started Schedules Direct and licensed the data. $20 / year is more than reasonable to pay to get all the scheduling data.
• I love the fact that I can browse to the IP address of the MythTV PC from any computer and see the scheduling data and record a show. It took a few minutes to find the setting to only record new episodes, but it’s there!

  Obligatory screenshot:
  

• The first recordings I made were the second night of the 24 season premiere and an episode of How I Met Your Mother. A one hour recording is about 6 GB.
• I only have a 100GB hard drive in the MythTV backend, so I mounted my NAS via NFS . I would then in Boxee use the File Browser and surf to my tv recording directory. One downside to this method is that MythTV records the file, such as last week’s 24 as 1091_2010011819000mpg. The File Browser also displays a PNG file so it’s easy to tell what show is what, but it’s not intuitive at all.
• There are plugins for XBMC, such as MythSExx and MythicalLibrarian that will rename your TV recordings into a S01E01 format and create a symlink for you to make it easier to browse your recordings. I couldn’t get the former script to run, but I didn’t spend a lot of time troubleshooting either.

And then yesterday while idling in #boxee on Freenode IRC, user SpaceBass mentioned that MythTV support was working for him in the Boxee Beta. There are a number of threads in the Boxee forums that the “mythtv://” protocol doesn’t work – but it appears to be working now.

In the Boxee settings, add a manual souce, and make it: myth://IPADDRESS where IPADDRESS is the IP address of your Myth backend and give the source a name – I used “DVR”.

Now use the File Browser in Boxee and when you first choose it you’ll have a list of your sources:

Select DVR and you’ll be presented with “All Recordings”, “Guide”, “Live Channels”, “Movies” and “TV Shows”:

Note: Guide doesn’t work for me.

If you choose “All Recordings” you’ll see everything that MythTV has recorded:

(TV Shows and Movies will just show the MythTV recordings based on those filters). I haven’t looked into using MythTV’s built-in commercial skip as Boxee has a 30 second skip that just works too. I also like that Boxee remembers to resume where I left off watching if I stop playback.

To watch Live TV streaming from your Myth backend to Boxee, choose Live TV from the menu I mentioned above. You’ll be presented with a list of TV channels by station ID, not number:

And here’s a screenshot of the NHL game on NBC in HD earlier this afternoon:

There are two bugs I’m experiencing that I need to spend some time with:

• When playing back a recording or starting a live TV stream, it will sometimes start as if it’s being fast-forwarded, including the audio. Hitting pause and then unpausing fixes it.
• I think this may be related to signal strength as I’m seeing it on NBC and CBS, but not Fox, but I’m seeing jagged edges around an object, such as a person, when it’s moving quickly. If it’s a fairly static image, there are no jagged edges. But even someone quickly sitting down will have the distortion. But I don’t see this problem when accessing the recording from a Myth frontend on another computer, so it needs more investigating.
• My other theory is it could have something to do with saving the content on the NAS and not on a hard drive in the Myth backend, so I bought a larger hard drive to throw in there too. I’d also rather have it on a hard drive than the NAS just to save wear and tear.

I’m almost done – if I had to guess, I’m about a week away from telling DirecTV to pound sand. I’ll poke at the distortion issue some more and install that hard drive when it arrives but this has been a pretty cool project to work on so far.

A few different things going on:

• Tomboy documentation is almost done in Mallard. I’ve really enjoyed using the Mallard syntax – so much less complex than Docbook. Every time I have to look up an element reference, I shake my head and think, “Duh! That makes so much more sense I should have figured that out!“. Nice work Shaun.
• I triaged some docs bugs in GNOME Bugzilla. Want to get involved with the GNOME Documentation team but don’t know where to start? This wiki page has a list of projects looking for help with their documentation.
• We had a Marketing team meeting earlier this month and we’re having another next month.
• We’ll be having Sysadmin Team meeting soon too. (Surprise Sysadmin team members!)
• We’re having a Snowy meeting tomorrow. I know it’s short notice, but I love the potential of Tomboy Online – if you can’t attend I’ve volunteered to post the log and meeting minutes. We need web designers, web developers, CouchDB folks (whoops!) – you name it there’s probably a role for you. Come get in on a project at the ground level! GNOME needs a web service likes this.
• Rumor is we’ll have the beginnings of Banshee documentation showing up next week, stay tuned. (Though I have no idea where these rumors start, really!)
• We’re in the final throes of pushing out a new GNOME Journal. Soon, I promise you, soon!

It’s that time when we need to start thinking of all the new cool and exciting features that GNOME 2.30 will bring. If you’re a GNOME Developer, please add a brief description of new features or benefits to the Release Notes page on live.gnome.org.

Thanks!

Martin Pitt mentions in his latest blog post that it took only 4 hours to get a GNOME git account after requesting it.

And that’s all do to the work of one person: Andrea Veri.

I’ve done some poking around on the status of the Accounts Team and whether it’s active or not, but after Jeff Schroeder on the Sysadmin team sponsored Andrea last month, Andrea joined to help out specifically with GNOME Accounts and has done an awesome job. He’s cleaned up Request Tracker, stayed on top of new requests, and helped with some outstanding and older requests. (And a big thanks to Olav and Jeff and everyone who has helped mentor Andrea).

I can’t thank Andrea enough for all of his help and chances are if you’ve requested git access, mango password resets or anything else Accounts related in the last month, it was Andrea helping you.

Friday I wrote a blog post kicking off a wiki page on debunking GNOME 3 myths. The dozen or so comments left on that blog post highlight perfectly why we need a wiki page that debunks myths – and it’s a good place to start to add to the wiki page. (And refine it, I think some of the comments are valid).

If you’re a GNOME developer, please give the GNOME 3 Myths page a look over and add any questions that you have been asked.

Thanks!

Change is hard. People go through six predictable stages as they adjust to change, which I learned at a former company. From Changecycle.com:

People react, respond and adjust to change in a sequence of six predictable stages. The Change Cycle model identifies the thoughts, feelings and behaviors associated with each stage of change.

1. Loss
2. Doubt
3. Discomfort
4. Discovery
5. Understanding
6. Integration

With GNOME 3.0 coming out later this year, there is certain to be fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with the changes in GNOME’s user interface and applications.

Diego had an awesome idea that we should start a PR campaign and / or meme to start debunking this myths. It’s best to get out ahead of these things, and with that I give you: Debunking GNOME 3.0 Myths.

Please consider this page just a stub at the moment, but if you have heard of any misconceptions around GNOME 3.0 or you’re a developer on a project and have an idea or myth to debunk, please add it! It will take all of us through the year to keep this page up to date and help our users and journalists informed of what the changes in the GNOME experience entail.

Thanks in advance!

I probably should have blogged this sooner, but the GNOME Marketing Team is having a meeting today at 22:00 GMT / 17:00 US EST.

The meeting will be held in #marketing on GIMPNet IRC. The agenda is here.

See you there!

I’m an entertainment junkie. I own hundreds of music CD’s, books, movies and am an early adopter of Blu-Ray. My usual routine once my two youngest children are in bed at 8 pm is to plop down on my couch, put my notebook on my lap and use that while watching my pretty 60″ TV.

I’ve received my TV content from DirecTV for the last ten years since we built this house – primarily because I’m a huge (American) football fan, and my team, the Green Bay Packers, are out of market where I live and DirecTV has a monopoly on the NFL package to be able to watch my team.

I’ve been happy with the television service (even though it’s the most compressed of all high-def signals) but their customer service is atrocious. About once a year I have a run-in with them that gets my blood boiling, but the other 364 days of the year I don’t have to think about them – it just works.

Almost a year ago I got a great deal on a Mac Mini and bought it to try out Boxee. I’ve ripped my music and movie collection to my NAS and Boxee gave me the ability to stream that straight to my TV plus their collection of Internet content I could stream as well, such as The Daily Show, Hulu and more. My best friend uses Plex, and both Plex & Boxee are based on the XBMC upstream code which does an awesome job of playing back any file you throw at it.

I’ve loved Boxee – the user experience has only gotten better from the Alpha to the Beta that launched today (the screenshots don’t do it justice). I’ve thought about, but never very seriously, getting rid of DirecTV and going Internet only. With Netflix streaming (both in Boxee and on my Xbox 360), Hulu and other apps available in Boxee, there’s a lot of content I can get if I’m willing to be patient for DVD releases of my favorite shows that I can’t watch in real time.

And then in early November, my DirecTV high-def DVR started to die. And it was a painful experience having to call in to their tech support once a week, rebooting my box every few days until they finally agreed to swap it out a month later (I pay $5 / month to lease the box from them – I don’t even own it!) I was pretty frustrated with the entire process, and this is a long enough story as it is, so I won’t go in to all the details, but when I received my bill in early December and found out they charged me $20 to replace the box, I was livid. They never bothered to inform me of the charge or asked for permission in charging me, and you may think “It’s only $20!” – but when I called to ask them to refund it, they refused – so I asked them to refund my $100 monthly charge for November as my box didn’t work and I didn’t feel that I received the service I paid for and they still refused, I started to think about all these options.

After a long conversation with my wife on the advantages and disadvantages of not having cable or satellite (she doesn’t watch TV anyway) I’ve decided to cut the cord. I’m lucky enough to have a nice HDTV antenna on my roof right next to the satellite dish and all the coax terminates at one spot in the basement, so re-wiring won’t be tough.

We spend just under a $100 month on DirecTV (cheapest package, 3 boxes for 3 TVs, DVR service and HD service). I figure with a small investment in buying some new hardware it will pay itself back in 3 months (considering I had already bought the Mac Mini a year ago):

• HD Homerun: Dual tuner off-air HD tuner with a network jack that any PC in the house can connect to for watching or recording live TV: $150
• HD amplifier & terminators: $35
• Digital converter boxes for the other 2 TVs in the house to get off-air: $20 each off Ebay
• Elgato EyeTV PVR software for Mac: $80 (maybe, see below)

The one kink in my plan is I realized that if I buy the EyeTV to record TV on to the Mac Mini it can only record one show at a time, even though I have a dual-tuner HD Homerun. There are a few shows like NBC Thursday night comedies and Fringe on Fox that I like that air at the same time, so that’s a challenge. One of the major reasons I bought the HD Homerun is the fact that’s dual tuner but also that it has a network jack and works on Linux. One option is to install MythTV on an older computer and use that. MythTV has native support for the HD Homerun and I can mount my NAS via NFS and just point Boxee at it, though there are some questions whether Boxee and XBMC can read the .nuv files that MythTV records in.

It’s a pretty cool time seeing these convergence devices come to life. The Internet is evolving to add video content, whether it’s TV shows like Hulu or movies & DVD on Netflix. CES is happening this week and seeing the Boxee Box, Popbox and Iomega set top boxes only support this point. There are still some challenges – I’m going to have to give up watching my favorite football team, live sports on ESPN, and waiting to watch some of my TV shows until they release on DVD, but I think it’s worth trying.

The content companies are going to have to evolve. They’re going to need better customer service and better ways to allow consumers access to content. (And I’m willing to put up with the movie studios stupid rental window on Netflix if it means more streaming content). My hardware arrived today and now I’m off to start installing all this stuff….

I’ve been wanting an eReader for a while. When the Kindle first launched, I was in awe. I quickly sat down and calculated the number of books I buy in a year and compared that against the cost of a Kindle and the savings of buying an e-book for $10 vs. the hardcover price. Let’s just say there wasn’t much of a savings. I finally got to touch a Kindle at GUADEC this summer, and my mind was made up that I had to have an eReader in the near future.

I love tech gadgets and am an early adopter. I also love content and media, and own hundreds (if not over a thousand now) music CDs, hundreds of movies (including Blu-Ray that I bought over 2 years ago), and tons of books. My bookshelves are full to bursting in my office, and I have boxes of books stored in my closet without room to display them.

I’ve waited patiently debating an eReader. I travel once or twice a month for work, and having an eReader would definitely save space. This week, my flight was delayed hours on Tuesday, and then canceled later that night. I had finished the book I had brought an hour after getting to the airport, and then bought another one swearing in my head the whole how I wished I had a an eReader.

The good news is that when Barnes & Noble announced the nook last month that I pre-ordered one. As much as I love Amazon (I buy almost everything there now – movies, music, books and electronics) I found the nook more aesthetically pleasing as well as it was running Android, and the formats they’re using seem a bit more open than the Kindle. (My nook is supposed to ship tomorrow, still crossing my fingers with all the delays they’ve had for the last week or two!)

But now comes word that the publishing industry doesn’t get it and is fears change and the changing financial models. It’s rumored that Amazon loses $2 per eBook bought, and now we are hearing the publishers want to delay new releases 4 months after the hardcover comes out but before the paperback comes out. When will content companies figure out that not giving consumers what they want is bad for business?

There are authors (Iain Banks, Chuck Palahniuk, Neal Stephenson, Neil Gaiman) that I will always buy the physical copy. I want to continue to build on my collections and there is a tactile difference in having a physical book. But I will buy many more books once I have my nook. I’ve already been adding to wishlist on bn.com for the moment my nook arrives. I have dozens of posts tagged “books” in my RSS reader that I want to buy. The fact that they’re slightly cheaper as an eBook and no shipping is nice, but having immediate wireless delivery right to my eReader is even better.

So the publishers are worried that Amazon (and to a lesser degree Barnes & Noble) have set a pricing ceiling of $9.99 per book. We’ve been through this argument before – the record industries felt Apple had set a similar ceiling that songs were only worth $0.99 and now we’ve seen new releases and popular tracks increase to $1.29 this year. And that’s ok. I worked in the retail industry for 15 years and have been through anti-trust training a couple of times. The publishers can set their price and the retailer can sell it for whatever they want.

If the publishers are so worried, why are they not raising the cost of the books? If Amazon is losing $2 per book, that means the cost to Amazon is $12. If the publishers raise it to $15, it will make the retailers re-consider whether losing more money is acceptable. While the publisher can’t dictate the actual retail price sold, they do have options. And lowering the cost after it’s been released a while happens all the time across all retail categories. There is no reason that months after the release the cost comes down and the retailer can re-price, at say, $9.99. This is seen all the time in the movie space, though rarely in music. Now that we are starting to have competition in the eReader space there are all kinds of tricks the publishers can do to partner with the retailer to save the retailer money on the back end as well, including marketing development funds, sell through credits and more.

But for the publishers to flatly state “We won’t release an eBook for 4 months” won’t make consumers happy. Nor, in my opinion, will it make consumers buy a hardcover once they’ve invested $200-$400 in an eReader. I’ve learned this lesson – I rarely buy a movie on new release day for $20-$30 when I subscribe to Netflix and know if I wait 3-6 months I can probably get it for $10-$15 on sale (I just got Watchmen on Blu-Ray for $10 last week!).

At this point, it’s difficult to read the future. These statements from the publishers could just be posturing as they dig in for negotiation with the retailers. But I’m not hopeful. There are plenty of lessons for content providers to learn from in the music battles of the last 10 years. And if there is one lesson they should employ, it’s to extend and embrace the new models rather than try to prop up a dying business model. Change is hard – and if consumers want to buy more books because they have an eReader, it’s in the publisher’s best interest to figure out how to do that, rather than making it harder for consumers to buy from them.

I’ve been working on Banshee documentation on and off for the last few months (ok, more off than on) but as I get more comfortable writing in Mallard and the recent discussion in getting Banshee on the GNOME release cycle I am motivated to get this to done.

The most important part of writing documentation (or writing in general) is the planning phase. A few of us on the Docs team did a first pass at planning the topics that should be in the user help of Banshee in Google Wave, and I’ve copied that over to the GNOME wiki.

If you use Banshee, please give it a look – are there any topics missing that you think a user would want help with? Writing user help in Mallard gives us the ability to organize topics into groups – for a good example, check out the Empathy help. What’s missing? What would you organize differently?

Do you want to help? Have you written about Banshee features before? Let me know – either add content to the wiki page or post a link as a comment on my blog. If you have written a howto for Banshee, we’d love to include it – the new GNOME help is CC 3.0 licensed, so it’s easy to add from other sources, as long as it’s licensed as CC-SA 3.0. Please don’t feel you have to know how to write documentation or use Mallard – you can create a sub-page on the wiki for the topic and I will be more than happy to help edit it, convert it to Mallard and commit to git. Right now the important thing is to make sure we have the topics right and get some first drafts of the actual help created. I appreciate all help and would rather not do it all myself if at all possible!

There is a Banshee Docs branch on Gitorious – if you do know Mallard and want to help let me know and I’ll get you added to the team. If you don’t know Mallard, let’s start writing some howto’s in the wiki!

I’m two days late blogging about the latest release of GNOME Journal (and thanks to Danni for mentioning it!).

This is a very special issue written by women in the open source community. It’s the first time we’ve done a themed issue and all articles are by women in the open source community. Also, with the exception of Danni and Stormy who have written for GNOME Journal before, all are first time writers for GJ!

Women in open source (and the IT industry in general) is a topic I’m passionate about, having seen it first hand in a few different ways. My wife worked in the IT industry (at the same employer I did) for 8 years and I also helped manage the Geek Squad at Best Buy for a number of years before leaving 2 years ago. Having over 10,000 computer technicians there was definitely a lack of diversity and talent, including women, which is / was a focus area for the organization.

I’m proud to have helped manage the release (though it was a bit later than I had hoped due to my lack of time management skills). The idea for this issue came from the GNOME Women community, and they found the writers and drove this issue. Thank you!

We have eight articles in this issue (a record!):

• Telepathy, Empathy and Mission Control 5 in GNOME 2.28
• Telepathy Overview
• The Un-Scary Screwdriver
• Where are they now? The Participants of the 2006 Women’s Summer Outreach Program
• Easy Breezy Beautiful GNOME Shell
• GNOME desktop testing automation and how to use Mago
• Epiphany from a – not so experienced – user perspective
• An Interview with Leslie Hawthorn

We also had a number of new editors help out, and I’d like to personally thank Zonker and Sumana for all their help in making this release happen.

Go read it now!

Almost two months ago, Nigel Tao posted on his blog offering Google Wave invites to the GNOME community. I commented and requested some invites for the Documentation Team, with Nigel graciously granting the request, and he asked for some feedback after using Wave for the last month and a half or so.

Some of the feedback that I shared with him, in no particular order:

• We in the Docs team have used Wave to do document planning. (Before writing anything, the most important thing you can do is plan, plan plan). Wave has been really useful that each member of the team will edit the Wave with the topics for the help file we plan to write, and then use the reply feature in the Wave to add comments. Especially being a distributed team, with two of us in the US and 2 in Europe, it’s been helpful. A wiki page would work about the same, but the fact that you can have the main Wave used for the document and see the feedback and comments in-line is nice.
• We really haven’t used Wave for real-time collaboration, with the exception of doing last month’s meeting minutes for our monthly team meeting. I do like Wave for a use case like that better than Gobby, especially with Wave’s ability to add bullets and formatting.
• One nice thing about Wave when doing documentation planning was how easy it was to add the lead developer of an app we were doing the planning for. He was then able to review what we were planning, and add feedback and suggestions.
• One of the challenges in using Wave at this point in time, is the limited number of people using it. I think as it expands and grows, the use cases and adoption will grow exponentially.
• Other things I’ve used Wave for include some of the GNOME Marketing hackfest planning and projectmallard.org planning. It’s helpful, and as mentioned above, I prefer Wave over a wiki, especially when formatting text such as bullets.

One thing that took me a while to figure out, which I finally figured out with a suggestion from a friend via Twitter, was how to do public searches. I’m interested in buying a Droid phone, and I did a search for “Droid” waves which was pretty cool when the search results came back and I could see all the public Waves about Droid.

Is Wave an email killer? In my opinion, not yet, but it has potential. Wave, to me, has awesome potential for group communication, but I’m not sure I’d use it over email for one to one communication.

(And yes, I’m aware of the irony of using a “proprietary” tool to do open source work. It was a test, and I like doing stuff on the cutting edge, so no comments in the blog about this please).

Thanks again Nigel!

I’m overdue in recapping some of my thoughts of the Marketing Hackfest. Overall, the hackfest was a success and now we begin the hard work in recapping everything we talked about, making it actionable and doing the work!

One of the best things about the hackfest, in my opinion, was the cross-section of people who attended. Each individual had different strengths and views of GNOME and it served to remind me of the different groups who use GNOME and how they use it.

I spent a lot of time at the whiteboard helping facilitate and I’m still sorting through all the notes we discussed. Somewhere Shaun has some video as well.

A lot of our discussion was centered on GNOME 3.0 and how we can communicate to our users and our downstream partners of the features and benefits of GNOME 3.0. If you think back to the email Vincent Untz sent this past April on behalf of the Release Team, GNOME 3.0 has three goals:

• Revamp our User Experience
• Streamlining of the Platform
• Promotion of GNOME

That third goal is why we got together and the bulk of what we discussed. We touched on what GNOME 3.0 is; GNOME’s overall branding; marketing GNOME to users and how to improve our partnerships with downstream distributions such as Fedora, OpenSolaris, openSUSE and Ubuntu.

But it wasn’t all just discussion ’round the campfire! We did a lot of work on creating materials for volunteers who host a GNOME booth at a conference. We wrote the copy for a new brochure explaining what GNOME is; created a Frequently Asked Questions for those hosting a booth with answers to questions they should expect from conference attendees; and wrote core messages and speaking points when talking to attendees.

We also discussed in detail the Friends of GNOME program and did some work on an upcoming fundraising drive.

And lastly we’ve started to work on presentation materials for volunteers who may want to give a presentation on GNOME. We still have a ways to go to finish this work, but using the awesome template Vinicius created, we envision having a number of presentations available that can be used as building blocks for someone who wants to give a presentation on GNOME. Some of these include:

• GNOME History (5 minutes)
• GNOME 3.0 (5 minutes)
• Getting started using GNOME (5 minutes)
• Getting started developing GNOME (5 minutes)
• GNOME 3.0 (45 minutes)

And lots of others – the above are just examples of templates with content someone could take and mix and match together to put together the bulk of a presentation they might want to give.

Lastly, we also spent some time talking about the GNOME Marketing community and how we can work together, communicate effectively, mentor new members and tackle some of our action items. We’ll start by having IRC Meetings where we can recap some of the discussion topics from the hackfest, discuss ideas from the community on improving how we market GNOME and hopefully have some of the community members volunteer to tackle some of the action items and next steps in creating marketing materials for GNOME. Look for the announcement in the next couple of days to help pick a time for that meeting, and similar to the Bug Squad, we’ll use Doodle.com to try and find a time that works for as many people as possible.

More to come!

My scheduled talk at the Penguins Unbound LUG in St. Paul, MN has been moved up one week to this Saturday, November 14th at 10:00 a.m. (Minnebar, the Minnesota Barcamp was recently announced for November 21st conflicting with the meeting).

I will be presenting “An Introduction to GNOME 3.0″ talking about GNOME, its history, and where GNOME is going with the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release next year. If you’re in the Minneapolis / St. Paul area come join in the fun.

I look forward to seeing you there!

We are just days away from the Marketing Hackfest in Chicago, IL. Thanks to Novell and Google’s sponsorship, nine of us are converging in Google’s Chicago office for two days.

While we’re there, we’d like to invite any Chicago GNOME users and developers to join us for a drink or bite to eat Tuesday night at 6:30 p.m. at the Rock Bottom Brewery at One West Grand Ave.

I look forward to seeing you there!