A Programmers Conundrum: Doing the same thing in a completely different way

I've begun to embark on a quest to understand development in Ubuntu and make myself a more active user.  This quest led me to getting involved with guys that develop the Loco Team Portal and Summit site.  Its python, django, sql, and bazaar.  Three of the four I have never used before.  I've done web development before.  I've used C#, Java, and PHP.  I've used Asp.NET, Grails, and CakePHP.  I've used Visual SourceSafe, Subversion, and Git.  On paper this is simple, similar task new frameworks for doing it.  Reality is much more difficult.

Ubuntu Development Tutorial

A while back I was trying to remember everything I needed to setup for developing things on Ubuntu.  How do I set up bzr?  What keys do I need to setup on the machine?  Then a friend of mine sent me a link to several articles on omgubuntu.co.uk.  They are the perfect guide for getting started or for just remembering everything you need to setup when moving machines.  For that second reason I'm putting all of them up here.

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5
• Part 6

The articles were written by Daniel Holbach at OMG Ubuntu.  If you are ever considering developing on ubuntu or just wanting to learn more about its development I suggest you check them out.

The Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS-P)

Precise Pangolin Sign borrowed from tipforlinux.com

I attended the Ubuntu Developer Summit last week in Orlando Florida.  While its my second UDS, the first I attended more as a guest, an outside observer who used Ubuntu and was developing an open source application.  Luck has it that UDS was held in Orlando one more time and with this UDS a chance to finally get involved.

Now a co-worker and I both decided to go and at first we figured we'd drive down and back every day.  The theory was its 10 dollars cheaper than the cheapest hotel and we'd get to sleep in our own beds.  By Wednesday that was out the window and we stayed at the hotel next door (60 dollars cheaper a night and right next door).

Day 1

The opening keynote went well, Jono stood up and talked for a bit about UDS and then Mark came up and talked about Ubuntu and someone from Linaro (sorry it was a week ago and I forget his name) talked about Linaro's progress.  Mark dropped the plans for 2014, Ubuntu on everything (phone's, tablets, TV's, computers, etc).  The most amazing thing about this plan isn't that its Ubuntu running on each of those devices, but his second image had Ubuntu running on a phone driving the other devices.  Kind of what Motorola has faked in my phone where I plug into a monitor and suddenly my dual core 1GHZ, 1GB of RAM cell phone is a desktop PC.

Morning Sessions

I first attended the Community Round Table. Jono, or whoever thought it up, had a great plan to hold round tables every morning. I didn't get to attend all of them, but they set the stage for the rest of the day. In this first round table, several community sessions were added to the weekly scheduled based on items from the round table. Next up was the Software Center Roadmap. I barely remember a thing, I need to write these closer to the actual event next time.

Afternoon Session

In the afternoon, I went to Unity Desktop Integration and Ubuntu and Tablets. Ubuntu and Tablets was the most interesting. The discussion became very detail driven. The kernel needs to be smaller, faster, less of memory hog, less of a power hog. Several topics brought up Android as our Java Desktop Linux cousin. There was some discussion of the user interface that unity had to change. Talk of tile menus vs the current layout. My hope is that with 2 years we can do something better than duplicate the tile system of android and ios. Unity to me, seems like it would work. The top menu bar would need to be something else, like a button driven menu ala android (I know I'm already picking apart the others). I didn't get to point out my webdesign thought for the desktop. Think css zen garden. Ubuntu would detect the screen size and apply the "css" style for the desktop size. The background and actions would all stay the same, only thier presentation would change. If you plugged into a bigger monitor, new layout specific for that screen size.

Afterwards

We stayed for the evening social event, I met up with a couple of people and then began the long drive home.

This is the end of part 1. Part 2 coming up soon ....

Where did all the creativity go?

I'm watching TV this evening and a commercial comes across the screen. A village is being invaded, a boy with an overly large sword, long hair, and no shirt. "Oh no" I exclaim. My wife doesn't know yet. More scenes, poor english, more shirtlessness, more massive sword, then the title. My wife now exclaims "What!". It's "Conan the Barbarian."

What happened to creativity? Have all the creative writers died and my generation is just too lazy to think up anything original? Are executives forcing cheap remakes to keep up the bottom line?

Part of me thinks I'm just being cantankerous before my time, especially when I go looking for information about this topic and I find a similar article in the Christian Science Monitor. All I have to do is think of Top Gun 2 and I realize I'm not being as irrational as I think I might be. Do we need a "Top Gun 2"? Couldn't you have made a fighter plane movie in this era without relating it to Maverick? Oh I forget, "Stealth" was such a epic failure that obviously it wasn't the poor plot idea or so-so acting, it was the fact Maverick wasn't in it.

T-minus 6.5 hours

48 hour film project starts in six and a half hours .....

University of Florida's VIVO running 1.2 SDB

We did it, after a couple of late nights and alot of planning, the University of Florida's VIVO is running 1.2 in SDB. SDB, or Sparql Database for JENA, has been best described to me as Jena's second iteration on semantic data stores. The first iteration, RDB, stored two tables for every model, one for general statements and one for reified statements. The SDB focuses on a single table for all triples. Main model triples are stored in "Triple" while named graph triples are stored in "Quad". We're very excited to see the new performance with VIVO 1.2. You can see the site here, vivo.ufl.edu.

Harvester Webinar: 1st Presentation

Today was the first day of the Harvester Webinar's. We've got about 34 people scheduled, and they evenly split between Tuesday 11am and Wednesday 1pm EST. The webinars are about 2 hours long, focusing on the basics of setting up the Harvester Library and using building a script for harvesting people and publications into VIVO.

Tuesday's webinar was well attended, 7 non-harvester team connections were watching the webinar with several of the connections have 2+ people. Alot of great questions and good feedback. Primary concerns seem to be performance and perhaps usability/accessibility. We'll be addressing these over the next 3 iterations as we begin to integrate with the VIVO code base for User Interfaces. We'll be posting everyone's questions and posting a copy of the webinar on vivo.sf.net very soon.