• Search for:

• Tags

  bluetooth bureaucracy camera cartoon chat communication community design desktop evangelism events free software friends fuse future GNOME google history howto hunger internet irc jabber kde laser cannons law life marketing mobile nokia offtopic random science silly site support system topaz troubleshooting ubuntu usability vim web web2.0 work

• Archives

  Select Month February 2010  (1) January 2010  (2) December 2009  (2) November 2009  (2) June 2009  (1) May 2009  (3) February 2009  (1) January 2009  (1) December 2008  (2) November 2008  (1) October 2008  (1) September 2008  (1) August 2008  (1) July 2008  (2) June 2008  (1) May 2008  (2) April 2008  (2) March 2008  (3) February 2008  (1) January 2008  (2) December 2007  (4) November 2007  (2) October 2007  (3) August 2007  (3) July 2007  (2) June 2007  (4) May 2007  (2) April 2007  (2) February 2007  (5) January 2007  (3) December 2006  (9) October 2006  (5) September 2006  (4) August 2006  (1) July 2006  (5) June 2006  (2) May 2006  (12) April 2006  (21) March 2006  (8) February 2006  (3) January 2006  (5) December 2005  (1) August 2005  (1) July 2005  (2) June 2005  (1) May 2005  (2) April 2005  (3) March 2005  (2) February 2005  (3) January 2005  (1)

• Subscribe

  
  Entries Feed
  Comments Feed
  

• topyliweb

  • Bookmarks
  • Music charts
  • Official homepage
  • Photos

• Lifestream

  • Don't IRC and drive! http://is.gd/acb2A 4 mins ago
  • I still sometimes make the mistake of trying to use openvpn via network-manager. Years of experience isn't always enough. 10 mins ago
  • "Nation Shudders At Large Block Of Uninterrupted Text. - The Onion http://icio.us/osopkz 15 hours ago
  • I subscribed to collegehumor's channel on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/user/collegehumor?feature=autoshare_twitter 22 hours ago
  • ♺ @myrtti: RT @ymb: funny cos it's true RT @samin: "Meanwhile, in Finland..." http://i.imgur.com/qlrHy.jpg /via @21five 24 hours ago

• Talkback

  • oliver on The superior, tinier desktop?
  • ethana2 on The superior, tinier desktop?
  • Carl on The superior, tinier desktop?
  • bruno on The superior, tinier desktop?
  • anonymous on The superior, tinier desktop?

• Desktop Porn

  
  
  Wed Feb 17

• Propaganda

  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  Protect your freedom!

  
  
  
  

• Small print in big fat letters

  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! :)

Yesterday, I announced my official approval of the “inverted” Clearlooks theme to be included in the list of usable things. Everyone was happy, no doubt. I hope the theme creators are recovering from the resulting party nicely. Always concerned with the quality of Ubuntu’s IRC services, elky inquired about the certification status of #ubuntu-offtopic. I hope this installation of tales from the offtopic clears everything out, and everyone can continue enjoying their time on the channel!

Edit: I guess you’re probably thinking, “pffft there’s no such thing as a topyli starburst sticker of approval!” Guess again! Of course there is one, kindly (and 100% officially) created by mc44.

Today, nickspoon was unhappy about the fact that the last installation of tales was published so long ago. I guess regular releases would be better since Ubuntu users are used to them! Sorry about that, but like LjL noted, quality matters as well. (Ubuntu does get good quality regularly because they’re supported by such an awesome community quality assurance, but alas, great art such as tales from the offtopic can only be achieved by lonely geniuses.)

Like any respectable author however, I do take notes continuously, which means that when being tied to the Whipping Post, as i was today, I was able to search my trusty Tomboy archive for worthwile discussions I had thought funny in the past.

Here’s one from December 2, 2007 then! mc44 advocates Web apps, but will still give IRC to Chatzilla since while it’s not a Web application, at least it comes from Mozilla. He can also back his opinion up with evicence. wobblywu is suspicious, topyli is confused as ever.

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.

Today, I logged off of Google Talk and logged in on jabber.se exclusively. See the updated About page. The reason is simple: real Jabber has better Jabber support (no surprise there!), and I’m cutting down on recreational IRC usage. Jabber transports can easily handle the few channels I need to be on (unlike Google Talk). Proper MUC support is also a plus.

What this means is a change in priorities. I like having all my chat in one place. This means you have to compromise. I’ve enjoyed irssi’s awesome IRC capabilities but suffered from Bitlbee’s (and gTalk’s) poor Jabber support. Now I’m trying full Jabber with poor IRC support. Lets’s see how it goes.

Before: All-In-One, Always-On remote irssi session on my server.

On the desktop I’m now using Gajim because it lets me enjoy every feature provided by the server. On the mobile phone I’m trying out BombusMod. It’s very complete, but it’s also Java. Couldn’t find a better option. Tips for a good Jabber client for S60 phones are welcome. Needs to have MUC and transports at least, preferably account editing with full vCard support.

After: All-In-One, On-Demand, local Gajim session. The Gnome Do build on the background has nothing to do with it :)

Which reminds me, while the jabber.fi domain is fortunately secured by a cool Finnish Jabber and Free Software fan, we don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know of any concrete plans about a server. This needs to be fixed.

This installation of tales from the offtopic is a snippet from a discussion between malv and nanonyme last Friday night. Scary stuff really.