J5’s Blog

Hey everyone, my two roommates are moving out to be closer to the city. Those who have been to my place know it is an amazing apartment in North Cambridge, MA with a five minute walk to the Alewife T station. If you are looking to move or know someone who needs a place let me know. The lease is for a year and is super inexpensive at $635 a month per person plus utilities.

Oh and you will have to like dogs since Ty is staying too

Since Mozilla decided to back ogg Vorbis and Theora as a baseline standard, Monty committed to leading the charge for a better encoder, Edward Hervey has been kicking butt and taking names with PiTiVi and now Blizzard has blogged about Dailymotion using open codecs, everything seems to be falling nicely into place. One can’t help but admire building momentum.

I don’t think it fits in the true definition of ironic because after finding out that Google bought a defunct paper mill I would have expected they would change it into a data center. What would have been ironic is if they had continued to make paper. No this is not ironic but it is highly symbolic – something which I am sure was not lost in the decision to buy the mill. When we look back in better days at the sudden economic downfall, we will be saddened by the upheaval and toll it took on many lives, but we will also be buoyed by the fact that with every great shift comes positive change. Hopefully we will be looking back from a world that wastes less and has more opportunities for all those living in it. 

For awhile now the year of the Linux Desktop has been trumpeted – year after year after … Here I present a list of my own thoughts of what is needed for the Linux Desktop to succeed. Feel free to agree or disagree as some of my thoughts may be controversial and some of them may seem negative but you can’t be introspective if all you do is think about the things that we did right:

#1 Mobile is the only way forward – if you aren’t thinking of mobile with every decision you make you are designing for the past. Even desktops can go in power saving modes, sleep and hibernate.

#2 Instant off/on is becoming a reality and something that doesn’t have to be bolted on given that we have access to every layer of the OS. This is not enough by itself to be compelling over entrenched Desktop OS’s but combined with some other advantages and it becomes a killer feature.

#3 Super battery life – Get beyond the 5 hour mark of heavy use and you start to get a full day of passive use on one charge – you can watch 2 DVD’s, a student can take notes in all of their classes, etc.

#4 Single 3rd party application format – e.g. I write software for one class of mobile devices, it runs on all devices with the same security profiles. I don’t care about where the bits come from or how they are stored, just that a person can write something and submit it to multiple vendor’s app stores and have it just work.

#5 Forget about the general purpose desktop – ok don’t forget about it upstream but when making a product you are going to run into the “this doesn’t work like Windows” syndrome. Don’t even mention the Mac because they have been around for a long time and are just figuring out how to push their desktop – and that is through targeted devices like the iPhone and iPod. Even their desktop is geared towards media creation and viewing. The general purpose desktop is just too big a target and will always get compared to the current leader. Guess what, it won’t be the areas where it is better that will get talked about, it will be the areas that don’t quite measure up. In my opinion (brace for it because people will hate me for saying this), all of the Netbook makers putting out general purpose desktops do a disservice to the market by saturating it. Companies coming out with truly innovative products based off the Netbook/Linux combo will be drowned in a sea of Windows wanabe’s. See the next thought.

#6 Products need to be targeted – no one cares you can’t run a full word processor on your phone but they do care when you are selling them a “computer”. Why, because phones do a couple of things really well and every year they can add more computer like functionality without the expectation that it should run like a full computer. Netbooks come from the opposite direction – they are expected to run like full computers but fall short of that goal. Pick a target audience and make it work really well for them and they won’t care that it doesn’t do all the other stuff. In the long run your costs are lower because support is confined to specific functionality. Oh and whatever it does make sure it hooks up to the Internet in some meaningful way.

#7 Change the form factor – if it looks like a laptop, sort of quacks like a laptop, it will be expected to work like a laptop. See above for the issue with that. 20/20 hindsight being what it is I wish the gen 1 OLPC’s were designed like the gen 2 is (it looks like a book), because more than a computer, the XO was a learning device. That kind of got drowned out, first because the project was named One LAPTOP Per Child (catchy but totally forcing us into a box where the rest of the project was thinking outside of it) and secondly because people were asking things like “does it run Word?”. It really should have done a couple of things really well – surf the web, act as an eBook reader and facilitate communications. To be truthful there are a lot of great application written for the OLPC project but by not focusing on targeting the device nothing was highlighting the advantages (of which there were many). The discussion started to revolve around what it couldn’t do instead of what it could (we get back to the fact that phones don’t suffer this phenomenon).

#8 Shed the cheaper is better mantra because while inexpensive can be a selling point that is a different beast than cheap. Inexpensive implies getting more value than what you are paying for, cheap implies getting what you paid for. I hate to say it but the Linux Desktop is considered the cheap alternative. Why was the Linux Server able to avoid this trap? It really is all perception but as they say, perception is reality.

#9 Stop trying to compete in such a small market segment. All of the mobile developers need to work closer together to grow the market, solidify the technology, set meaningful standards and bring down prices while adding value.

#10 Differentiate yourself through the services you offer – if you are targeting a specific group of people there might be some overlap with competitors but the truth is there are so many target groups these devices can appeal to that as a whole the market will have a higher chance of flourishing. Having too many similar choices will just confuse people and they will end up going to what they are familiar with. By tying to services that are of interest to your target group you give them a reason to acquire your device over another and have a vehicle to keep them engaged (e.g. you have a potential continuous revenue stream as opposed to a oneoff)

Feel free to flame me but imagine this scenario – you are going on vacation and you don’t want to lug your work laptop with you. You know there is always going to be waiting involved so you buy a $300 Travel Companion Netbook. You just happen to be a member of Netflix and the box says it works with Netflix. You set it to download a couple of movies and since you also like to read on the plane so you buy a couple of e-books from Amazon. An alert notifies you that you have three hours until your flight but there is a delay so make that four. This is because you configured your Travel Companion to hook up to your travel service provider. You get into the checkin area of the airport and you don’t have to wait for an open kiosk because your Netbook can check you in and the barcode on your screen can be scanned for the ticket. You get on the plane and start watching one of the movies you downloaded but the flight attendant tells you to turn off your device for takeoff. You close the lid and instantly it turns off. As soon as the flight is in the air you flip it open and instantly you are watching the movie you had paused. You read some books on the device, catch some sleep and then wake up checking the flight status which get updated from the plane’s onboard server. You notice the flight is playing that movie you were dieing to see so you stream it from the plane’s server and watch it in full HD. Once landing you pull up a map of the current terminal and directions to the baggage claim. While you wait for your bags you start making reservations for dinner and notify the hotel that you are on your way. You are looking forward to well deserved rest and relaxation and take some pictures of yourself with a big grin, adding a nice “You wish you were here” banner on it. You then send it off to all of your co-workers who are picking up your slack back at the office.

If your Netbook could do half of what I described in the above scenario, no one would be asking, “but does it run Word?” And to think, travellers are only one target audience.

One of my biggest pet peeves is this argument:

You’ve done ***************** this much “good” so you are obligated to do more (and to my benefit first). If you don’t do so the world will implode.

I especially hate it when the person making that argument benefits from that good but doesn’t think they should contribute to it.

I do however agree with this argument:

You have done ******************* this much “good” and as a result have benefited from that good on average more than others, you have an obligation to keep putting in as much as you can. I am a beneficiary of your good and will try to add to it but I may lack the ability to contribute in any meaningful way.

On the philosophical side:

Is it more moral to get paid for the above arguments’ “good”, which frees you up to do more of the “good” or to do something else for a living with results being the scope of your “good” contributions are less than they would have been?

Those questions I don’t think there is a real answer to.

And no Spot, I’m not going to suddenly quit, I just sometimes wonder why I chose to be a public free software developer when it means I have to deal with anonymous idiots or break my own moral code on censorship.

Ah the recent spate of technology bashing reminds me of when D-Bus, Hal and udev were young and inexperienced.  Many people yearned for the days of automounter, cried bloody murder when Wine couldn’t find their cdrom and their favourite command line tool just couldn’t grok the new device syntax.

What’s that? The technology matured and now people would rise up in arms if we ever reverted to the old days? To be fair we do try not to break things but some things are broken already and are being barely held together by dead kittens and fairy dust.

As I said when we completely broke D-Bus to move to the new wire protocol (0.2x-0.3x) – sure there are growing pains involved but in time people will just get on with their lives and it will become another layer of the system that nobody cares about because it just works. It pays to take the time to fix things right even if there will be pain in between.

Yesterday I tasked Dan Winship, who recently joined Red Hat on the OLPC project, with porting WebKit as a Sugar activity when he had free time. Today I came into the office to find an e-mail with a link to the activity.  Here are some screen shots.  Ignore the different scaling as we have tweaked  XULRunner to better utilize the XO’s screen.

XULRunner

WebKit

My initial reaction is it shows promise but needs some work to become really usable. On the plus side it uses on average 10 megs less in resident memory according to Dan’s testing. It also starts up five seconds faster. In my qualitative tests WebKit feels a bit more responsive when scrolling.  The biggest problem with WebKit is the gtk port is just not finished yet and as such it is not a usable browser, but it is close.

Why are we looking at WebKit?  In my mind it is another Open Source project that is just more aligned to our needs as a small and fast  browser.  The issue I see with the Mozilla comunity is that they are mainly chasing the fat desktop market.  Every effort I have seen to make an embedded focused project based off of Mozilla has fallen in one aspect or another.  WebKit’s specific claim to fame is to be small and light while not sacrificing needed functionality.  For instance the Gtk port of WebKit uses cairo and pango which we need for nice antialiased and internationalized fonts.  The last embedded mozilla project I talked to spent their time blaming cairo and pango for their performance problems.  Instead of fixing their issues they opted to pull them both which gives you a slightly faster browser with no real internationalization support to talk of.

To be fair I have heard that Mozilla upstream is fixing the issues with cairo rendering in their next major release and have been getting friendlier when dealing with Linux distributions.  This is all good signs of progress.  The question is what is the direction Mozilla is looking to the future and will it line up with our requirements for low powered computing?  Can a project as large as Mozilla serve both the embedded and power desktops equally well or do we look to other projects like WebKit which have more focused goals?  For that matter, what is to say WebKit doesn’t spiral out of control and go in directions which are unsuitable for us?

For now we are using XULRunner, which works and has many benefits along with some pitfalls.  We will keep an eye on the development of the WebKit Gtk port as it is shaping up to be a worthy contender.  In the end it will come down to which offers the best experience on our platform.

Rock on Collabora. These guys are really building a great Free Software company and are an asset to GNOME and FOSS. If you have a need in the collaboration space I highly suggest hiring these guys. Apart from rocking on OLPC video conferencing they have Simon McVittie rocking out the next generation of D-Bus python bindings which replaces the Pyrex backend with a pure C implementation that should be easier to work with going forward.

My next task is setting up a repository where developers can contribute and host application bundles which can be downloaded directly to an OLPC machine and installed. This will allow people to try out the different application that will be available and make it easier for countries, teachers and kids to get involved in developing targeted content for the device. As it stands right now they have to go through me to get activities into the builds and believe me, taking myself out of the equation will make things run a lot smoother.

I’m going to have a release party for D-Bus 1.0 at the Peoples Republik starting at 8:00pm on Wednesday November 15th. If anyone wants to grab me for dinner before hand you can find me on irc in #dbus on freenode or by e-mail if you happen to know my address.

F.A.Q.

1. What is a release party?

It is an excuse to drink and be social with people in the community and celebrate a project milestone, but mostly it is an excuse to drink

2. I don’t hack on D-Bus can I come?

See first and last part of answer 1. Hint. the answer is yes

3. Is there other D-Bus release parties going on outside of Boston?

That is up to people who live outside of Boston. I would hope the people who worked hard on D-Bus would take a second to congratulate themselves on a job well done and then throw a party to unwind a bit.

See you there

According to news.com.com.com… when Fedora Core 6 was released it was downloaded 10,000 time in 5 hours. I would like to take a moment and thank everyone that was involved with this release including the people at Red Hat, The Fedora Project, GNOME, KDE, GNU, fd.o, Mozilla,all the other distributions and companies who work on upstream projects and everyone else I didn’t mention whose code, intelligence, energy and tenacity went into this release. Keep up the good work and I’ll continue to do the same.