Colin Charles Agenda

Aza Raskin from Mozilla, spoke largely about usability and user interface design. Judging from his Wikipedia entry, he’s been doing this for a long time and is very passionate about interfaces. It was very hard to see his slides (noted problem, too much sunlight), so I just attempted to make random bits of notes from his talk. His slides, may or may not be available, but he did mention that searching for a talk titled “Don’t Make Me Click”, was the basis for his LugRadio Live USA talk. Turns out, it was a Google Tech Talk, available on Youtube – Don’t Make Me Click (~65 minutes). Now for the sparse notes…

You already use a command line interface. Typed pine before? Or slrn? Now you just type gmail.com or nytimes.com. This is an interesting analogy… the command line and the location bar.

Intuitiveness vs. ease of use? There’s a difference. The iPhone interface isn’t exactly intuitive, but with all the advertising available around, when you got one, you knew what to do, and you got ease of use.

“Don’t copy, do something else”

1. Interface design is about how your software is used.
2. Usability is architectural (pretty interfaces/devices, you will use better)
3. Well designed command lines are good for usability. “Your users don’t know what features they want” – architect well, for your user. Learn a lot from Microsoft Word print dialog (which allows you to choose which pages to print)
4. Don’t blindly copy, find another box to think in
5. Don’t design separately for users and experts. Make things intuitive for all

Technorati Tags: lugradio, lugradio live usa, aza raskin, usability, interfaces, mozilla

I paid great attention to Ian Murdock’s talk at LugRadio Live USA 2008, as he’s an important person at Sun in terms of the open source community, and I’m community facing as well. It was also the first time I got to meet Ian (after his talk), and we hit off a conversation really quickly. I look forward to working alongside Ian more… Now to the talk notes.

A Bit About Ian
– Linux user, developer, and advocate since 1993
– Founder of Debian, co-founder of Progeny
– Joined Sun in March 2007, Chief OS strategist (launched Project Indiana), and now since February 2008 is VP Developer and Community Marketing

What’s a Linux guy doing at Sun?
– When people say they want Linux… they don’t actually mean that they want Linux. You don’t only want the kernel, but you want the userspace as well. You really want a distribution, not Linux itself. Ian is more of an open source guy. So create a business model behind OpenSolaris?
– Solaris ships all userland utilities you’d expect from Linux. GNU Utilities vs. UNIX Utilities. Where the real differentiation is, is Linux Kernel vs. Solaris Kernel.
– Its the kernel where you drive change for the OS. Look at ZFS, Dtrace, containers, etc.
– Linux has multiple configurable platforms with expanding ecosystems. OpenSolaris, is an integrated operating system, with binary compatibility.
– Where Sun wants to go with OpenSolaris? Have binary compatibility in the core platform, and have the expanding ecosystem in it.
– Project Indiana has Solaris innovation with the “distribution” model of the Linux world, i.e. have package repositories. Also, to close the “familiarity gap” so that there is a GNU userland, a package management system, etc. And of course, focus on the unique Solaris capabilities – upgrade rollback via ZFS snapshots, AMP stack with integrated DTrace probes (MySQL in OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 already has this capability), binary compatibility, etc.
– Remember, people deploy what’s accessible to them. This is a whole new deployment model. This is how Linux got into the Enterprise. This is the reasoning behind OpenSolaris… Solaris itself is great in the Enterprise, but lacks a user community. Follow the Linux (and largely, Microsoft) model…
– One Solaris Platform, two delivery mechanisms – Solaris: enterprise class, support, long release cycle (3-5 years); OpenSolaris: latest Solaris innovations, short release cycle (6 months), much easier to use, network economy, support from Sun also
– Adoption-Led Market is what its at now. Users become customers. Give users something of value. That’s the basic business model at Sun, around open source.
– Volume drives value! New consumers/communities on the network will drive infrastructure demand. Reach the developer community through massive volume, get it in use as many places as possible, then sell software/storage/servers/services/etc.
– Just spent $1 billion on MySQL. Databases are often deployed on other middleware, say identity management. Sun sells identity management software.
– Developer platforms of choice are moving up the stack. Traditional Sun platforms are increasingly invisible infrastructure. New platforms remove barriers to entry and hide complexity so developers can focus on getting to market quickly.
– Remember, no one “owns” the web. The Web 2.0 world is like open source in the 90s.
– Hot new platforms are silos – you write your application to Google APIs or Amazon APIs and there’s only one place to deploy it. Sun is a leader in open standards for 25 years, how do you take this leadership into the new platform world? One needs the ability to deploy on a number of different platforms, and take your application from one to another. Sun strategy?
– Where do down the stack technologies, like operating systems, fit? Do they still matter? Yes.
– Solaris 10 is free today (you just have to register to get it)

On the packaging system
– OpenSolaris package system is new. Needed to build own for a few reasons, despite studying apt/yum/conary.
1) platform is very different from Linux; use ZFS and you get rollback, and this is Solaris specific
2) zones/containers, single shared kernel, multiple application environments, which is intelligent for resource sharing, and the package system is fundamentally aware of zones
3) an opportunity to innovate; Sun’s all about innovation. Package managers haven’t changed much in over 10 years (apt, yum)
4) the notion of customisation, i.e. have a version control like facility for patches, etc. so that changes can be reconciled when you rebase with upstream, is something the new package management system can use. This is kind of like Conary?
5) All customers tend to customise, even (especially) in Enterprises. IPS helps them (refer to 4)

Questions & Answers
– OpenSolaris and Solaris, how is it in sync? Codebase is in sync, generally. Solaris 10 is one codebase, and there’s a development version (i.e. the next release). There is a Solaris “train” and an OpenSolaris train now. How will these two trains come together? Solaris Next based on OpenSolaris? OpenSolaris with Enterprise support? Questions that are being asked now, and there’s no real decision yet. Wait till 2-3 OpenSolaris releases first, before finding out more.
– What is Sun doing to make OpenSolaris work better in a virtualized environment? I.e. working better in Xen, QEMU, VMWare, etc. Linux naturally has better device support than OpenSolaris, so virtualization is very important. Mentions the innoTek purchase, so that VirtualBox could be used for bundle delivery.
– Is Linux and OpenSolaris in par, security wise? Solaris has a slight edge at this point… They’re fairly comparable, but there’s more maturity in the Solaris product.
– OpenSolaris on PowerPC – unknown status, there’s been some work at Sun Labs to port it to PPC, you can boot it and do some basic things, but unsure if its ready for users or not.

Technorati Tags: lugradio, lugradio live usa, ian murdock, sun, opensolaris, linux, distributions, IPS, packaging system

Miguel de Icaza from the Mono project, tells us more about Moonlight, and where the Mono project is headed, at LugRadio Live USA 2008.

– shows us about Silverlight 1.1 (Moonlight is the Mono equivalent)
– works a charm in Firefox, but there’s issues with the implementation in IE (something JavaScript related)
– Demos the chess application
– Microsoft will provide a Media Pack (they will incur the licensing costs for the media codecs) for all Moonlight users on Linux. Microsoft will also provide regression test suites, and complete specifications for implementation. Novell will deliver a 100% compatible Moonlight and will support it on all major Linux distributions (contractually, only the top 3 Linux distributions – no mention of what the top 3 are). This is the Microsoft/Novell agreement, as of last September 2007.
– The codecs come with a restriction – you can’t use it outside Moonlight. Its only for the in-browser experience. If you use Totem, you’ll need to make use of gstreamer, etc…
– The MSPL is better than the X11 license. Miguel would like to change the Mono license to the MSPL, but everyone that hates him now, will hate him more because of the “Microsoft” substring! Why is the MSPL better? It has a patent clause, so that the code you use there, if covered by a patent, you will not be sued, ever. That in a way, is similar to the Apache license.
– Self-contained applications – traditional GNU software is spread out, quite unlike Mac OS X applications where you drag an application into the Applications folder, and everything is contained in one directory. Mono has an application guideline, where everything is also in one directory.
– Like all good demos, something broke. Miguel starts debugging on stage, and fixes the problem, and the demo works!
– “Programmers have no taste for design”
– “I have a roadmap, but I don’t think anyone gives a fuck, so lets just go to questions”
– How long will it take to get mixed-mode assembly working? If you are Chris Toshok, it will take 2 weeks. If you’re not, definitely longer. He spoke to Dan Kegel from the WINE project :) Patches are being accepted… The aim is to allow WINE to run Windows applications on a fully open source stack

Technorati Tags: lugradio, lugradio live usa, miguel de icaza, mono, moonlight, microsoft, patents, media pack, licensing, codecs, mspl, wine

With moving my workload to two laptops (one for work, on OS X and one for play, on Linux), you invariably have issues with being as productive as you should be in the software that you use. I dumped Apple Mail.app after about 2 weeks of solid usage (more on that, at another time), for Mozilla Thunderbird. It isn’t free of warts, but with the excellent plug-in architecture, it surely helps. Here are some plug-ins (add-ons in Mozilla speak) I can’t live without.

GMailUI
This tool is simply amazing. Ctrl+J for Junk, Y for moving to the archive, and so much more. Its keyboard shortcuts are similar to GMail, so if you also happen to use GMail, this is a worthy tool to have. Even if you don’t, the shortcuts make so much sense, its a wonder why its not on by default.

Lightning
I certainly like having a built-in calendar in Thunderbird, and more importantly, it works with my Google Calendar. It could improve with offline support, and a bit, but for a fairly recent full review, read Lightning, Google Calendar, and calendering in Thunderbird.

Nostalgy
Need to move a message quickly? Need to copy one? Need to jump to a folder? Nostalgy provides some nifty keyboard shortcuts to change/move to/copy to folders, and it has auto-completion. Paired with GMailUI, Thunderbird becomes even more keyboard friendly.

Plaxo
Address books are a pain in the butt. On every platform (save for OS X), there are so many standards, none of which really work. Plaxo, takes the pain out of this, by synchronising with a server on the Internet. Now I can use many machines, and get Plaxo to sync my contacts. It has its limitations (3,000 contacts), but it does sync the “collected addresses” in Thunderbird (a killer feature, if I may say so).

Provider for Google Calendar
If you want to get Lightning to use Google Calendar, this add-on is required.

QuickQuote
Clicking Reply to Sender or Reply to All, now allows me to quote some text, and only reply to that quoted text. Saves me from deleting all the unnecessary parts of email. Its surprising that this isn’t the default behaviour in Thunderbird – after all, Evolution has had this for ages.

Quicktext
Templates, to improve efficiency. Need a canned email? Need to insert a file as text? This is a truly useful add-on, if you have a lot of repetitive email to write.

Remember Mismatched Domains
This is a most useful add-on, especially if you’re tired of seeing “Security Error: Domain Name Mismatch” everytime you start Thunderbird. Some mail servers have this issue (including some that I run – i.e. a machine with multiple hosts), so this helps remember the ones that I’ve “white-listed”.

Remove Duplicate Messages
Sometimes you get email in the form of a To: or a CC: and it also goes to a mailing list that you’ve filtered out. This helps remove duplicate messages, so that you only have one copy in your archives. It also helps, in the days of using POP mail (what days, I still have accounts where I POP my mail), and breaking connections – i.e. pulling down 2 copies of the same message.

Sync On Arrival
This doesn’t work with Thunderbird 2, but is a useful add-on to have (and I hope it starts working). Thunderbird has an annoying feature of not downloading/syncing IMAP mail, on folders that you haven’t clicked on. I’ve sort of worked around this by using Offline -> Download/Synchronise Now and ensuring all the folders I care about are subscribed to. I’m including this on the off-chance that the author wakes up and fixes it for Thunderbird 2 (and the upcoming 3).

While not a must-have add-on, I also have the British English Dictionary. Your mileage may vary here, as you might not be interested in said language.

These are the add-on’s that keep me productive. What add-on’s do you use?

Technorati Tags: mozilla, thunderbird, add-on, productivity, sync on arrival, remove duplicate messages, remember mismatched domains, quicktext, quickquote, provider for google calendar, google calendar, plaxo, nostalgy, lightning, gmailui

Today I tried to register for LugRadio Live USA 2008, seeing that I will be in San Franciso this Friday. Apparently, their payment provider doesn’t like my IP address (or ISP).

Declined: We do not currently process transcations from the country your Internet Service Provider is located in.

Yes, I could login to a foreign VPN (servers in Sweden for my employer), or I could tunnel via SSH and use a SOCKS proxy to the various machines I have access to around the world. But I think that’s just too much effort, for silly Nochex. Welcome to the globalised 21st century.

Instead I’ve emailed Jono Bacon. I hope that suffices as a pre-registration. I can fork out the ten bucks in cash ;)

Technorati Tags: nochex, silly, ISP, ip, transactions, lugradio, lugradio live usa, ecommerce

Licensing tends to be a common question, when it comes to giving a talk on MySQL. More recently, some have asked me if MySQL will be relicensed under the CDDL? Some ask why we’re GPLv2 and not GPLv3 yet? And some, genuinely want to know the merits of writing for BSD-based software (PostgreSQL) or GPL-based software (MySQL).

While I am not a soothsayer, I am pretty sure we will not be relicensing MySQL under the CDDL (might make for a good April 1 joke though?). What seems like a logical progression is to probably go GPLv3, from our current GPLv2 stance.

And Sun supports the GPLv3 just as it does many other licenses. Take for example, the recently released Open Service Tag. Its released under a GPLv3 license. Contributing to it, requires signing the Sun Contributor’s Agreement (SCA), which is largely similar to MySQL’s current CLA.

So, what is Open Service Tag? Its a small application, that provides a network-based product identifier, and it speaks XML. You can tag a device, and the information automatically becomes available over a network. It looks like inventory management made easy. Read more at Steve Wilson’s blog entry, about IT asset tracking.

It runs on Linux, and Mac OS X (release notes don’t mention OS X 10.5, Leopard, but it worked on my laptop just fine), and soon it will run on Windows too.

I can envision myself using it, when my lab is setup again (still waiting for some furniture to arrive, so most computers are still in boxes), to keep track of what kind of hardware I own…

It probably helps the MySQL DBA or sys-admin keep track of large installations just as well. Asset management and tracking is important, in these days where IT budgets are being cut, and as IT becomes even more efficient (think virtualization, more cycles on newer hardware, et al). What do you currently use for asset management?

Technorati Tags: open service tag, sun, gplv3, mysql, licensing