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  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

  ---

The IRC Council meetings have public meeting minutes of course, but some of our practical work is never discussed in these public meetings and tends to go unnoticed. Some of this boring behind-the-scenes mundane work has implications to users and operators on our channels, and I decided to write about it here.

So, what has been going on outside the spotlight?

Wiki reorganization

One of the janitorial jobs we’ve done is the reorganization of our IRC related wiki pages. Wikis by nature evolve organically, pages being created by many people over time, and they end up being largely unorganized. So we moved all pages to an old fashioned, boring hierarchy under a common IRC/ name space, and the result is something like this:

IRC/Bots
IRC/Cloaks
IRC/Guidelines
…
IRC/IrcTeam/
IRC/IrcTeam/Scope
…
IRC/IrcCouncil
IRC/IRCCouncil/MeetingAgenda
…

You get the idea. All old pages redirect to the new pages, so we can hope we did not break any of your old links and bookmarks. If something is broken, you can report it, or even better, fix it! It is a wiki after all :)

We have updated several core documents, most notably the operator guidelines and the description of the IRC Council itself. We also created a calendar that will nag us periodically to review all wiki pages, one at a time, to make sure they don’t become too out of date.

Operator teams on Launchpad

Ubuntu’s IRC universe has become very, very large and keeps growing, and so has the need for operators. We can’t possibly know all the potentially awesome individuals who would make great operators, so there’s a need to define a better process to nominate operators than simply giving access to friends that we know will do a good job.

Terence did a terrific job at converting the access lists on our channels into Launchpad team memberships. This makes managing them much easier for everyone. It also makes it possible for people to offer help easier: they will be able to apply for team memberships as a way to announce their willingness to serve as an operator. We will soon have this new process in effect, and it is documented on the wiki already.

IRC Council access in channels

The Council should now have access to all core channels for easy maintenance. Additionally, we strongly recommend adding the UbuntuIrcCouncil and the freenode staff cloaks into your LoCo channel’s access list, so that they may intervene in case of serious disruptions on your channel while your operators are asleep or attending a release party. This is documented in the wiki page for channel creation. When creating channels, make extra sure to have a good read of the document, to ensure your channels fit nicely in the #ubuntu-* name space.

How you can help

Is IRC not working well for you? Do you have a great improvement on your mind that will make it work even better? The IRC Team is easy to contact on #ubuntu-irc, and via e-mail. Most importantly, have fun and help to keep our IRC channels friendly and useful! :)

Ploughing through my feeds today, I came across Jonny’s post about the Telepathic goodness he’s playing with on his N900. Very nice.

Which brings me to one simple question. Why can’t we, with our powerful computers and full-blown GNOME desktops have any of these nice things? We run the same stuff: evolution-data-server, D-bus, mission-control and the Telepathy connectors. Yet, we have an address book that doesn’t know whether or not our friends are online. Nor can we send IM and email from the same application based on this presence information.

Nothing has happened since I last pondered this question in November 2008. Maybe I should start running Maemo on my desktop? Does the N900 support high resolution external displays? Clearly it is superior.

What is the Web 2.0? Friending, voting, and above all, comments! In the first installation of the new decade of tales from the offtopic, meet the luddite gord, and 2.0 enthusiasts Pici, rww, and mc44.

Via Torrentfreak:

The IFPI (read: Hollywood) is increasingly pushing for placing the onus of prosecuting infringements of their imaginary property to internet service providers. I am happy to see Telenor refuse to do someone elses business. If I build a road, I should not be responsible for drunk drivers who might drive on it. Or as Telenor puts it,

“This would be the same as demanding that the postal service should open all letters, and decide which ones should be delivered.”

The court ruled in favor of Telenor’s sanity, against IFPI’s distorted view of society, property, justice, and business. The ruling is not about whether or not the Pirate Bay may remain online in Norway, it is about Norwegian and every other country’s critical infrastructure.

Applause!

Update: now the Danish Antipiratbyron is throwing in the towel, for another reason: courts in Denmark still require evidence before convicting anyone, and they remain unable to acquire it. This is a good move as well. Let’s spend the money to producing some good art instead of suing fans.

Note to self: when organizing a debate, pick a subject on which some of the participants disagree.

The supposedly big news yesterday was Skype suggesting that their Linux client will be liberated shortly. However, I feel that in communications, open, standard protocols are more important than client implementations, so the news did not make all that big an impression.

The correct way to handle VoIP calls is using open protocols such as SIP or XMPP, no matter how the client side is arranged. Gizmo and Google have gotten this right: both have their own respective desktop and mobile clients, while the protocols are standard enough to allow us to hack together our own client implementations such as Empathy or Ekiga.

I wanted to see how our distinguished community feels about this and decided to start a debate on #ubuntu-offtopic. I failed miserably, and the discussion ended up being rather short. Please allow topyli and gord to demonstrate, if you will.

This article is a humble opinion piece of a GNOME user who wishes to stop using communication software and just be in touch with people. I want to write mail to, chat with, talk to, and have video conferences with real people without worrying about applications and technology. All my suggestions are doable with existing technology in GNOME, no extra magic is required. I write as a user, not as a developer, just in case maintainers and developers of relevant software are in need of ideas, as well as to discuss this issue with interested people.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Sorry, but I do think our current comms gear is broken.

I guess it is not a big secret that I am a strong advocate of task-based approaches when it comes to using computers. I don’t care what my web browser or my text editor are called, but I do care a lot about browsing the web and editing text files. In the GNOME menu, the Gedit text editor appears as “Text editor”, and at least in the past, the Epiphany web browser appeared as “Web browser”. On Ubuntu, it seems to appear as “Epiphany web browser”, probably because it is not the default browser in Ubuntu.

GNOME apps in general are quite well behaved in this respect. I do not like selfish applications which make a big noise about their own excellence. In fact I don’t even want to know they exist. What I am interested in is the document I am working on, not the software. Selfish apps distract users in two ways: branding and design. By renaming Slashdot to “Slashdot – Mozilla Firefox”, Mozilla does get a point across, as well as with trying to make the user use Firefox as much as possible. The point being, “look at this awesome application! we are mozilla! you are user!” Tabbed browsing helps: the whole web is just a feature of Firefox! The huge number of extensions is another: want to play a game of Tetris? No need to leave Firefox, your web browser is advanced enough to provide you with games, media players, blogging tools, whatever you need!

What I actually wanted was just a web page. Thank you.

The worst area of task-based computing on the GNOME desktop is currently communication. You choose your email, instant messaging, VoIP, and IRC software very carefully, and spend your evenings debating their excellence on various forums and group chat spaces like IRC. Few seem to be happy with the defaults and applications get much more attention and affection and antipathy than they deserve. We must put an end to that. The Telepathy communications stack is becoming mature, and we have a great opportunity to upgrade the way we communicate with fellow humans and forget applications.

What do we have?

The ingredients of my communication heaven are

• The Telepathy framework
• The Evolution data server
• D-bus

Telepathy handles all Instant Messaging protocols, IRC, and VoIP (both Jingle/Google Talk and SIP) already. The Evolution data server does a very good job at handling not only calendar and tasklist data, but also your address book, and most relevant GNOME apps can talk to e-d-s. All GNOME applications communicate nicely through D-bus, and if i understand correctly, Telepathy is in fact not much more than d-bus calls, protocol handlers, and Mission Control for handling presence information.

What do we need?

If we can telepathize the Evolution-data-server, the world will immediately gain the potential of becoming much less annoying place to be and to communicate with friends in. I see no reason why e-d-s could not poll Telepathy for the presence information for people in your address book – should be easy through d-bus calls. Your address book could, and should, always show you all the communication options available for each person, at any given time. Is this person taking SIP calls? Is she available for IM chat? Is she logged onto any of the same IRC networks with you at the moment? Perhaps she is offline and your best option is to send email.

To handle the actual message, we need simple, task-specific user interfaces, each doing one thing only.

The central hub for all your communication and people-related activities should be a simple Presence applet in the panel. It would offer an option to set your own presence to Available or Busy, perhaps separately for voice/video communication and text-based chat. (Setting your status as Away and Offline have never made any sense to me, since while at your computer you obviously are neither.) The Presence applet would also present you with presence information of all your online friends, much like Instant Messaging and VoIP applications do now. Offline contacts could be accessible through clicking a “Show all contacts” button, like in this mockup based on the current Empathy roster window:

The button should not bring up Evolution, but a simple address book similar to the Contacts app in the Pimlico suite, with presence information added:

The chat, call, and email buttons should be real buttons of course :)

The Email button should not bring up the whole Evolution either, just a simple mail compose window. Ultimately, I would like to see email handled with only message windows and a “mail browser”. Also, the rest of Evolution might as well vanish altogether as a monolithic application and be replaced with something like the little Pimlico applications.

Empathy is well on the way to become a good, simple tool for person-to-person communication (IM, VoIP, video). Group chats on Jabber and IRC need a better UI, similar to IRC clients, but the actual communication and presence information should be handled by Telepathy.

What would we gain?

An approach as described above would have the great benefit of letting users concentrate on the task: “contact this person”. Instead of fiddling with several applications, each different, and each more complicated than the other, we would in effect fiddle with zero applications. We would end up doing the two essential tasks that actually are of interest: handling our own presence, and communicating with people we care about. The units of operation would not be applications, contact lists, account settings and so on, but people and messages.

I would like that.

My experiment with replacing irssi with Jabber clients is over for now. There are a few reasons for this of course.

• Mobile Jabber clients simply are not there yet. There is no way they can compete with a screened irssi over PuTTY. Notifications are nice, but the cost in RAM usage (for Java apps) and usability (for native clients) is too high.
• 24/7 connectivity is too hard to achieve with Jabber clients.
• I like being available on IRC at all times without people having to find out my Jabber ID or email address. This is for making myself more available, not to keep my contact information  more private (that’s not my cup of tea anyway.)

Bottom line: old school server/client solutions still rule in chat, just as I’ve found with email (IMAP) and PIM data (SyncML servers).

I still love Jabber though, and my Bitlbee session is open. Running Jabber over my irssi session may make my Jabber presence less exciting and featureful, but it also makes it client-independent and more reliable.