SWAT's blog

At the community track we talked about burn-outs, they happen too often and we have to look out for eachother. What do we find fun about Ubuntu: people, technology, choice, helping others, the mission. What we dislike: bureaucracy, secrecy.

There was a nice review of the current governance, who do what they supposed to do, a great talk about the upcoming ext4 and the new user interface design team was announced.

In the evening, we went to the Museum of Computer History, which was just a 25 minute walk away. A healthy pre-dinner walk.

So, it’s Tuesday and the UDS continous. Facts of the day: the ubuntu server community is mostly active on IRC and they have a blog to make them more visible for non-IRC people, Ubuntu developers rock and compiler flags are important. I also followed a quite long sessions about making LoCo teams rock. A few things you can do to make your LoCo rock are: regular events, publicize what you are doing, meetings, install fests / release parties, keysigning and social events.
After the long day we kicked back with Ubuntu unplugged and I enjoyed a nice dinner at the buffet place right across the street (only $23.99 *wink*). I’ll probably upload the pictures once I’m back home (which can take a while).

Today the UDS starts which takes place at Google in Mountain View, CA. They have nice office buildings, lots of parking space, a lot of green (grass, trees, flowers etc.) and it all stimulates creativity. It almost feels like a geek’s home. Bean bags, wifi everywhere (I still have to find a black spot), great food, post-it space invaders, non-stereotype geeky employees, they have got it all.

I followed a community track and at some point the question was asked “So why do you do Ubuntu?” Some of the answers included: it feels like doing charity work, fixing bug #1, equality, learning, great people, freedom of speech/technical/accessibility, sexy.

In the “Enabling 3rd party repositories” session the concensus was that you will still require root for installation and that one uses /opt/vendor if it can’t be built as a normal Debian package. When these repositories are implemented, they will probably also be backported to Hardy (if it catches on).

After a long day I decided to go to bed early, I did not feel well.

So I flew to San Francisco on Saturday (which is an 11 hour flight). After the first two movies (there was a great selection available), your brain turns mush and boredom hits. Just 8 more hours… To cut a long flight short, I finally arrived at the WildPalms hotel.

After a good “nights” rest (waking up at 05:00 due to jetlag), waiting for the breakfast to be served and eventually having breakfast, I find went for a nice long walk. ( pictures ). I saw the main office of Apple and had a good cup of coffee at StarBucks. When I got back to my room, I relaxed a bit and prepared for the Ubuntu Developer Summit which will start tomorrow

The title of this blog post, pretty much says it all. Since reading “long” documents or manuals is an extremely hard and time-consuming occupation for most people, I just made this ‘how to’ for all the really lazy people .

Note: Only register your nickname and get a cloak if you tend to use IRC on a very regular basis
Why should you care about getting a cloak? A cloak hides your hostname. A hostname can be used to the IP address which belongs to it. So if you do not want everyone to know your IP address, get a cloak. Furthermore, a cloak enables IRC channel operators to give a someone an ‘invite’ based on it, instead of a hostname invite. This is extremely usefull if some users have dynamic IP addresses and the operator does not want to change the invite list on a regular basis.

1. Choose and switch to your (not already registered or occupied) nickname.

   /nick your_nickname

2. Register your nickname.

   /msg nickserv register your_password your@email.address

3. Hide your e-mail.

   /msg nickserv set hidemail on

4. Change to your alternate nickname. I suggest you use, your normal nickname appended with an underscore.

   /nick alternate_nickname

5. Link your alternate nickname to your nickname.

   /msg nickserv group

6. Switch back to your normal nickname.

   /nick original_nickname

7. Check who is currently on-duty.

   /stats p

   If nobody is on duty, you can get a list of the staffers who could help you out.

   /who freenode/staff/*

   If nobody is on duty, go to #freenode, ask politely for an unaffiliated cloak and wait. Do not request such a cloak repetitively if you do not get an answer immediately, but wait at least 3 hours between requests.

8. Ask the staffer politely for an unaffiliated cloak.
9. Set up your IRC client to automatically identify (log in) yourself to nickserv. You can also do this manually:

   /msg nickserv identify

Source: http://freenode.net/faq.shtml