Message to FOSS4G-Europe 2018

This is a message sent to the plenary of the FOSS4G-Europe 2018 conference. This conference took shape largely from my initiative and I was part of the Local Organisation Committee. Click on the logo for the conference web site.

Dear all,

The history of this conference dates back to August of 2016, when the international FOSS4G was held in Bonn. Seven Portuguese attendants gathered in that conference, most of which are OSGeo charter members. However, only one of those actually lived in Portugal at the time. The financial crisis sent many professionals abroad and our community seemed particularly affected.

Slowly the idea formed in the back of my mind: why not turn the issue on its head and bring FOSS4G to Portugal? As the conference moved on from presentations to code sprint, me and Jorge Gustavo were left as the last Portuguese at the BaseCamp in Bonn. The discussion started: while the international conference would possibly be too much for the modest OSGeo-Portugal, the European edition looked feasible. And with the international conference taking place outside of Europe in 2018, there seemed to be a nice gap for OSGeo-Portugal to fill in.

Why Gnome 3 can not replace Unity 7

For a few seconds I thought it was just an April Fool's prank, but the date of the article dismissed any doubts. Canonical is to put an end to user interface development towards the vision of Convergence. The arguments are pretty compelling: the market does not exist. Four years after the Ubuntu Edge campaign it is indeed startling that not a single carrier joined in to experiment the novel concept.

Together with this shock announcement there was something far more overreaching: Canonical is to drop Unity 7 from Ubuntu in 2018. The desktop environment developed in house is to be replaced by Gnome 3. Further news reinforced the trend: staff to be laid off and the CEO stepping down. Canonical seems to be abandoning user interface development all together.

It was great while it lasted, but after almost five years using Unity 7 it is time to move on. But where to? Is Gnome 3 really an appropriate replacement? Below the fold is a detailed account of my experience of two days of work on Gnome 3.

Time is ripe for open source labelling

In what is largely an acknowledgement to the influence open source has today in the software industry, it is becoming increasingly common for corporations to promote commercial products as open, when they are anything but.

Beyond the obvious ethical objections to this practice, the negative impact it has on the industry is to no one's interest. Open source products are often developed with public money, be it through research programmes, public administration initiatives or local authorities. These initiatives have created an implicit open source brand, synonym with freedom of development and local based support and maintenance.

By misleadingly identifying their products as open, corporations cash on the open source brand, essentially promoting monetary flows that invariably end outside Europe. This is a complete subversion of the economic and social dynamics of open source software.

Presenting the Fix Ubuntu script set

The upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 has been the most problematic between Long Term Support (LTS) releases of this Linux distribution that I have experienced. The system itself is stable enough (apart from the usual hiccups with cutting edge hardware) but when it comes to applications problems mount. I have had difficulties using almost every one of the programmes I most rely on. In the majority of cases the root cause is an important loss of features and functionality.

Every time I install or re-install Ubuntu 16.04 there is now a long list of tweaks and fixes to do in order to achieve a minimally usable desktop system. I eventually developed these fixes into a set of shell scripts to automate these tasks. I am now releasing a first tentative version of this script set gathered in a project christened Fix-Ubuntu. More details under the fold.

Convergence Preview - 03 - Progress

Pretty amazing, I am actually writing this from a Chrubuntu install on the Tegra K1, and more spectacularly, with the Unity desktop environment. There is still a number of things malfunctioning, the road ahead is long, but this is a capital step in this project. Below the fold I detail this latest chapter of the story.

But already one of the most important milestones in this project has been achieved: performance. As a matter of fact, I feel no difference in terms of interface usability in contrast to my usual work environment. Moving windows around, sending them to other workspaces, shifting between workspaces, using the HUD and Lenses, all is fast and fluid. The Tegra K1 is proving an able CPU for desktop work, but for a fraction of the cost, space and power.

Convergence Preview - 02 - Frustration

I will start this note with a worn cliché. I was not expecting it to be easy, but I was certainly not expecting it to be this hard. Almost one month later and dozens of hours spent, I still do not have a fully functional Linux desktop operating system running on my Chromebook.

I now feel I have reached a turning point and must try a different approach to this project. Here I report the various methods I tried to get Ubuntu (my desktop system of choice) running on the Acer CB5-311 Chromebook 13, and how they all failed.

Convergence Preview - 01 - Unpacking

I was one of the subscribers to the Ubuntu Edge crowd-funding campaign and advertised it here in this space. I believe Convergence is the future of personal computing, the secular electronic miniaturization trend will eventually lead to a single personal computer unit, instead of the myriad devices that litter our workspaces and pockets today. Convergence entails an unprecedented reduction in resources and energy required to manufacture and use a personal computer.

But that was all a long while ago, two years on and the hardware landscape remains pretty much the same. Both Canonical and Microsoft are public in their efforts towards Convergence, but it is yet to materialise.

A couple of months ago Guido Stepken posted the specifications of a laptop computer powered by an ARM mobile processor, the Nvidia Tegra K1. On a first look, the Acer Chromebook 13 provides the same or better than my much battered x86 laptop: a four cores processor, 4 Gb of RAM, a 1080p resolution screen, USB 3.0 ports. Only the 32 Gb of SDD storage leave something to be desired for.

But the most impressive of all is the price: 285 € (VAT included). After some more reading I decided to acquire the damn thing. The goal is to understand how far such architecture can reach in replacing my current laptop.

Impressions from FOSS4G-Europe 2015

Last week I was at the beautiful city of Como in Italy to attend the European FOSS4G conference. In case you do not know FOSS4G stands for Free and Open Source Software For Geo-Spatial. These days my career pretty much revolves around developing and applying this sort of software in research. I presented a poster promoting the upcoming version 4 of PyWPS.

The conference can only be called a success, fully booked with 400 attendants. This even created some logistic challenges with long food/coffee queues and packed conference rooms. And of course it was great to meet or re-meet the faces behind many useful tools and learn about new software coming down the pipeline.

Here I leave an account of some emerging trends in this field, that may show were FOSS4G is headed.

Ubuntu Shopping Lens deemed legal by UK data privacy office

It was almost two years ago that the infamous Shopping Lens feature was added to a beta preview of Ubuntu 12.10. Plenty of folk did not like the idea of having their Ubuntu suddenly transformed into an online shop; the inadvertently fashion in which the feature was announced only dumped more wood on the fire.

Throughout the following weeks the row focused on the awkward matching of unsolicited advertisements with free and open source software. In the meantime I started wondering if something far more serious could be at stake. Regarding previous experiences with data collection in my professional career and after carefully re-examining the European Directive on data privacy, I made public a series of concerns that lead me to a mini-saga, and Canonical to consider the matter in a totally different way.

This is a short story of this mini-saga and how it finally came to an end last week.

An Introduction to LaTeX

Writing my MSc thesis document was one of the most painstaking experiences I ever had in the computer world. Once the document went over four dozen pages it became very unstable and would wreck the formatting almost every time any substantial text was added. I have the feeling I spent as much time correcting the formatting as I did writing. The worse would come at the very end, by some strange reason Word decided to change all occurrences of the word bacia (Portuguese for basin) to bacio (Portuguese for pee pot); I never noticed it in time and the document went that way for printing. Such frustrating experience compelled me to try a different word processing system; I knew some folk at the Faculty were using LaTeX and decided to give it a try. I never used Microsoft Word again, and almost a decade later, could not possibly conceive going back.

Some weeks ago I administered a short introductory course on LaTeX to a few of my colleagues. Most of them had never seen anything other than Word, but it went quite well nonetheless. Here below I reproduce the contents of this course.

Help! My blog was plagiarised

Have you ever experienced that feeling when you reach for you briefcase and something is missing? Or arriving at home and understanding someone had been there before you? That feeling of being burglarised was what I felt when I accidentally bumped on an article with the breif title: The real problem with Solar: Panel Prices in Free Fall, and the Fuel is Free: Corporations don’t Know how to Make Money Here (Oprisko). It is published by an Australian web site named The Zero Room and its authorship attributed to George Oprisko, Executive Director of the Public Research Institute in the US.

As it happens, about one third of this article reproduces ipsis verbis parts of The Price of Solar Power post, one of the most popular in this blog, that was also published by the EuropeanTribune and TheOilDrum. Even section titles were copied, but I'm nowhere acknowledged as author. This is in clear breach of the EUPL v1.1 licence under which the contents of this blog are published.

Why aren't software companies releasing their products for Linux?

I have recently developed an addiction for AskUbuntu. The Ubuntu Fora have always been my preferred lieu d'exchange with the community, where I dealt with the initial struggles of a novice user trying Ubuntu on a novice piece of hardware. One day though a particular issue proved harder to solve than usual; out of despair I ended up leaving a question at AskUbuntu. Although not entirely convinced with the apparent community division along two different crowd support technologies, I finally got a solution there.

Some weeks ago I ended up at AskUbuntu again from some random web search. Lo and behold, alongside my user name there were these numbers and a funny icon. It happens the question I left had in the mean time got over 1 000 views; in consequence I was warded reputation points and "badges". Isn't that just great? In the fora only the number of messages is recorded, there is no interaction quality feedback. Suddenly AskUbuntu became a challenge, and I end up spending 10 or 20 minutes everyday helping anyway I can: answering questions, editing, commenting, all along piling up reputation points (this is in essence how a gift economy works, but I'll leave that for another time).

One of these days a user left a question that I imagine many Linux newbies probably have: why aren't software companies publishing their products for Linux? The answer was a bit longer than usual, thus worthy of logging.

Why I had to quit using Chromium

Firefox or Chromium, which is better? I like both, and have used both in parallel for years. Chromium's interface is slightly more appealing, lean and easy to use. But Firefox has all those useful extensions, most especially Firebug, and other utilities like BYM. I got used to do programming related stuff on Firefox, like web app debugging, and leaving the personal or recreational stuff for Chromium. I was quite happy with this, until one day.

In one of those much-longer-than-could-possibly-render-it-useful meetings I noticed the laptop battery being drained much faster than usual. On light work it can last up to 8 hours; with more intensive tasks and internet browsing it can still last 4 hours. This time in two hours the battery was empty. It was easy to find the culprit: a Chromium process was cannibalising the CPU at 100%.

Solar Power Cost Calculator - SPCC

The Solar Power Cost Calculator (SPPC) is a web application intended to help investors assess the end cost of electricity generated by a solar system. Using a series of inputs that characterise the system it produces a final figure in €/kWh, the same units used by grid operators to charge households and consumers in general. With this result the investor is furnished with a direct comparison to the cost of tapping electricity from the grid. This application is conceived for Photo-Voltaics (PV) but can also be used for other technologies that have similar cost structures.

SPPC is open source, released under the EUPL v1.1 license; the code is publicly available at GitHub. This post is presently using SPCC v1.1.

Ubuntu at the Edge of Technology

Shared work in a SVN versioned folder with Linux

Here's a test case: two (or more) users work on a common project that is versioned through SVN. Each user has the project checked out on their own environment and regularly commits to the SVN repository. Now the project has to be deployed to a server, being checked out at a particular location where some of its assets are served from. Both users must be able to regularly log on to the server and update the contents of the project folder from the repository. The catch is that neither of the users have admin rights over the server. With the default file system permissions every time a user checkouts the project from the repository the files are re-writen and its permissions attributed to the user, blocking access from other users, and most importantly, from any services depending on these files.

This post presents a recipe for this issue based solely on basic file system permissions. In the end both users should be able to work on the project folder without blocking access to each other.

Migrate a SVN repository to Git preserving tags

I've used SVN for code versioning for as long as I can remember. Both on Windows as on Linux, it has been perfect to manage and store source code and documents, especially in a context where few users commit changes and public access is only considered at the later stages of a project. In the MUSIC project the context has been quite different, there's a multitude of code projects that compose a larger system and public access to the code has been a requirement early on. One of my collegues suggested us to start using Git for the purpose. I remember when initialy reading about it that Git was like colour TV, once you've seen it you'd never want to go back. Although Git is far more complex than SVN, making it easier to mess up, it is indeed quite more powerful. Beyond that, the GitHub web/social repository gives coding a whole new meaning.

So here's a use case: migrate a local SVN repositoy to Git, correctly keeping tags identifying releases and then push it to GitHub. This happened to be not so easy, so here's this log entry for future reference.

Ubuntu phone OS: a glimpse of the future

I came late to the laptop world. A couple of years into my first job I inherited a battered portable machine from a senior colleague. It weighted over 3 Kg and had a 14 inch screen, but had a profound impact on my relation with computers. It had all the CPU power I needed for my work and in a backpack it could be carried everywhere. Beyond that, at home I could use it to read books, or I could plug it to the Hi-Fi or the TV and use it as a CD/DVD player. Soon I understood that I'd never buy a desktop computer again.

That was some 10 years ago, and this past week I got the same feeling again. With the relatively surprising announcement of the Ubuntu phone OS I'm pretty sure I wont buy a laptop again. A new age in personal computing is dawning and Ubuntu seems to be riding on the crest of the wave. Below the fold is the video announcement of this new OS by Mark Shuttleworth, something that might have a serious impact on personal computing in the following decade.

Petition for a Better Ubuntu

In this post I introduce an online petition addressed at Canonical requesting the removal from Ubuntu of all default data collection features. The following paragraphs detail a bit further the reasoning that lead me to create this petition. To immediately read and sign the Petition for a Better Ubuntu, please jump to Avaaz.

Not much has happened since I reported on the potential incompatibilities of Ubuntu 12.10 with the European data protection legislation. At the time I got the impression Canonical was not even in tune to personal data protection and the company remained almost silent on the issue, avoiding to address it directly. I find this somewhat strange, for Mark Shuttleworth, the company CEO founder, claimed to have the root password of all Ubuntu users some good weeks before that. When Ubuntu 12.10 was officially released it portrayed an important small change to the Shopping Lens, the addition of a privacy policy note. It addresses some of the concerns I raised, but at the same time confirms that personal user data is being collected and stored by Canonical. This is the crux of the matter and Ubuntu 12.10 effectively does it without user consent.

Update: The text of this petition has been kindly translated into French by Vince.

Legal questions on the Ubuntu Shopping Lens

Several developments have followed the announcement of the default inclusion of the Shopping Lens feature in Ubuntu 12.10. What seemed at first a surreptitious inclusion of adware in Ubuntu turned into a full blown row when Mark Shutleworth, founder of Canonical, the company that coordinates the Ubuntu development, lit afire the blogosphere claiming that the company had administrative access to every computer running Ubuntu. From there we got to know that even the users that could benefit from the feature are not happy, since the results can not be filtered or customised. A further consequence of this is the possibility of adult oriented products showing up in the results, which puts at risk Ubuntu's usage by children and in professional environments. Answering to all the backlash, Canonical has decided to include settings that allow the user to switch off the Shopping Lens, but it will still be switched on by default.

Actually, this may be just the tip of the iceberg. The inclusion of this commercial oriented feature, more over by default, has the potential to open an unheard of conflict in the FOSS universe.

Update:In consequence of the questions raised in this post I created a petition addressed at Canonical requesting the removal of automatic data collection features.