I like to think of it this way: Twitter is a bunch of friends sitting around a table, all shouting at the same time — and shouting mundanities at that.

The summary came from this paragraph:

To proceed: the “this context” I mentioned above is simply that tweets are broadcast indiscriminately. I think this further devalues them; an otherwise acceptable message (”Brunch at Hi-Spot at 1!”) becomes impersonal and meaningless when it’s sent to so many. Yes, there is @ for specifying another tweet or Twitterer (would that they had called the site something else, this accursed bird-based jargon drives me mad), but that just exacerbates things. I like to think of it this way: Twitter is a bunch of friends sitting around a table, all shouting at the same time — and shouting mundanities at that. The @ function just means you shout somebody’s name before the mundanity. Everyone else still has to listen. Conversation is impossible; every exchange is telegraphic (as is, unfortunately, increasingly true in other media).

Which came from the article Why I Don’t Use Twitter on TechCrunch.

The summary is pretty succinct I think.

1. Lack of participation
2. Dissemination of information

Whilst 1) can only truly be overcome by having the right people, both can be improved by collaboration – something which is tackled by many pieces of software.

A charitable organisation I run at the moment – an after school club at my children’s school – suffers from both these problems, and one way we are seeking to address them is by becoming a virtual or shudder egroup. Physical meetings will always be required, but things like distributing minutes, drafting and review of documents etc. are perfect candidates for solving online.

However the options on offer aren’t that great. Google Apps is the main one, but complete overkill for what we want which is a mailing list and document sharing/editing/review capabilities. Google Docs is perfect for the latter, but we don’t really want hosted e-mail, calendar, chat etc. I know you can turn them off, but the mailing list requirement still isn’t met. Even if I keep e-mail enabled, people don’t always want yet another e-mail address/account to worry about.

Personally I would just set up a wiki and mailing list and be done, but while this is perfect for a technical project e.g. software (that’s how Ubuntu got started), there are more problems:

1. (Lack of) technical knowledge
2. Administration

Of course there’s a learning curve to anything new. Google Docs gets rid of some of this by behaving in similar way to other applications, but it is still a new way of working. A wiki – although completely natural to me – will be completely alien to some if not all the other members. Compounding this problem is that I intend to step back from the organisation this autumn (after three years), and don’t really want to remain as sysadmin.

Having written all this, I’m now coming to the conclusion that for this particular problem sticking to the old way is the best solution, but I’m still interested if any decent (and hosted) solutions that help run groups exist, or if you help run a non-technical group (i.e. LUGs don’t count!), what do you use?

…and I didn’t have to look far – there’s a question and bug for exactly this problem, with a simple 2-step fix:

1. Make sure you don’t have the WebKit Team PPA enabled
2. Make sure you downgrade the libwebkit package is version 1.0.1-2 (the default version in 8.10), not 1.0.1-4 (the WebKit Team version)

That’s it – restart Gwibber, and it should be working again.

New Year resolutions and I have a chequered history, so my plan for this year is to “just do it” (and probably get sued for trademark infringement while I’m at it!).

One of the things I struggle with is procrastinating, and social networks are a great way to waste time. On the other hand, there’s very few people I want to catch up with from school and I prefer the “old fashioned” tools of e-mail and RSS for keeping abreast of what my friends are up to, so without any further ado I have kissed goobye to:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Note that I have actually deleted the account, not just stopped using them.

identi.ca is on its way as well out as soon as I can figure out how to delete the account. You never know – dumping these might give me more time/inspiration for updating this site!

Happy New Year!

First of all I’ve moved to the Distro QA team here at Canonical. This means that I’m now working directly on Ubuntu, and my work will be much more visible – both in the distribution and here on this blog. I’m working with a great team here within Canonical – Henrik, Leann, Brian, Steve, Ara, Pedro, and Marc – and the wider Ubuntu QA community, as well as the rest of the Distro team and of course the whole Ubuntu community. At the moment I’m focused on hardware testing, and you’ll be seeing a lot more attention given to testing in Ubuntu over the next few releases.

Apart from working I attended the “last” LugRadio Live – see you all again next year! – and had a great holiday in the South of France. I also spent a long weekend in the woods in Wales at the Bushcraft UK Bushmoot where I got the chance to meet Mors Kochanski who is an amazing, inspiring and above all friendly guy. The ‘moot itself was well worth the trip, just like LugRadio Live is, but meeting him made it absolutely worthwhile.

Last November I pondered moving to 64-bit. Last week after a few stability and performance problems (entirely self-inflicted) I decided to bite the bullet, wipe Vista from my hard drive forever (it came with the laptop, and I left it around “just in case” but it never really got used) and perform a fresh install. This was my first “real” install (if you ignore my testing work) since I first put Feisty on the laptop when I got it, and the install experience is really nice these days. Since I had the opportunity I decided to go with 64-bit, and I’m pleased to say that I’ve had zero problems with it. Flash is commonly criticised as being difficult under 64-bit, but it installed via the package in Synaptic and has worked since. If anything Firefox + Flash has been more reliable than it was under 32-bit.

In August I succumbed and got myself an iPhone 3G, even though I’m months away from the end of my current contract with my N95. So far I have been seriously impressed with it – browsing is excellent, and it is by far the best e-mail experience I’ve had on any mobile device to date. Oh, and it’s a decent phone too! I’ve not really encountered any of the performance/stability problems many others have complained about, except when I had it configured to sync OTA with Google via NeuvaSync when it would occasionally get a bit sluggish. That was with the 2.0.2 firmware, and I’ve not re-enabled OTA syncing since upgrading to 2.1 yesterday. This is my first iPod as well – the only other current iPod in the house belongs to Schwuklet #1, although Schwuklet #2 has put an order in with Santa Claus for a 4th generation Nano. The iPhone has increased my podcast consumption as well, which can only be a good thing.

That’s it for now, but I’m sure I’ll think of more things to post soon.

If you haven’t heard of identi.ca by now you must be living under a rock. Although my Twitter usage has been, well, zero for a while now I’ve made sure that my nick has been registered at identi.ca. Who knows – I might even get around to using it…

Of course the age-old problem is that I need to maintain accounts on Twitter and identi.ca (and all the others, but I’ve ditched most of those) whilst they remain walled gardens.

Much has been said already by others about identi.ca, so I won’t rehash any of that here. Of course they get brownie points for being Open Source and supporting OpenID. Once they add SMS and API support I think it will really start to take off.

Whilst browsing feeds today I came across the announcement for Nokia Chat. Initial reaction: oh great, another IM/Twitter clone. Their USP is the location information. If your phone has a GPS (like mine) it knows where you are, and with Nokia Chat you can let others know that. Nice, but there’s still something missing… So I read the FAQ and found this little nugget:

Can I connect with my friends on other IM services?
You can add friends who have Google Talk™ and other XMPP/Jabber based IM services to your friend list, see their statuses, and chat with them.

Now that’s a win. Chat with location services that’s not in a walled garden. I’m going to download the client and see what it is like.

The upgrade was pretty painless, apart from a weird bug that happens if you’re (like me) using the K2 theme. Everything works, except the admin dashboard. I’ve been meaning to develop my own theme anyway, so maybe this will be impetus I need to do so.

photo credit: nocklebeast

Now I have come across someone stealing the content from my site – and anyone else who is aggregated in Planet Ubuntu – and seeking to profit from this through the use of Google Adverts.

The culprit? http://linuxindex.com

I have sent an e-mail to the domain contact asking them to cease reproducing my content without permission immediately. I have also reported the policy violation to Google AdSense. I would urge anyone else on Planet Ubuntu to do the same.

It started off with a post from Jorge about integrating Launchpad with GNOME Do. I’d been aware of GNOME Do for a while, but never got around to trying it. Well now I have, and I love it. I do have to keep reminding myself it’s there, but I’m getting used to it.

A quick side note – PPAs rock. Major props to Celso, Julian and Kiko for making them part of Launchpad. They make obtaining packages for new projects so much easier.

I can’t remember what prompted me to try it, but I’m now using the Avant Window Manager (also known as AWN). This combined with GNOME Do lets me have a minimalist desktop.

Following a discussion about Flock I’m now trying that out again (see here and here for my previous experiences with it). I’ll post some updated opinions in a few days, but at the moment I’m ambivalent. As always when playing with a new toy, this post has been written with Flock.

Finally I’m back on Jaiku again thanks to Jaiku Invites. I’m not quite sure why when I’m getting increasingly bored with social networks, but we’ll see what happens.

Another side note – my machine hung completely while I was originally writing this post. After the reboot both Firefox and Flock restored their sessions as I have become used to. I was also pleased to the see that Flock restored this post.

Blogged with Flock

For many web workers, there’s email, and then there’s Gmail. You can use a different email client, but prepare to be mildly teased/socially ostracized

What?!? Are they serious?