Yes, thanks to the excellent Valessio Brito I already put the “I’m going to DebConf10” button on my front page. Absolutely stoked!

Rodrigo and I were invited to talk about Ubuntu Mobile at the Bossa Conference this year in Manaus.The finished presentation is here but what follows is a short rundown of what the Lucid release means for Ubuntu. Some highlights are

• Rootstock/Rootstock gui – integrated with oem-config
• Qemu-arm-static
• ARM/Thumb2 support - the archive in lucid is built for the ARMv7 architecture with thumb2 support.
• EFL 2D Launcher

Rootstock is a graphical (and command line of course) set of tools to create a fully configured tarball or VM image of an ubuntu rootfs from scratch

so that you can extract it to a root device. One nice thing about this is that various tasks can be included in the image. This is very useful when working with ARM. Other tools such as Moblin Image Creator exist to do more or less the same thing but Rootstock is leading the way in innovation at the moment IMO. If you want to really customize an image then you need to use seeds and germinate a set of packages - for this you will need to read our book ;)

The binfmt-misc module in the Ubuntu kernel makes it possible to execute binaries of foreign arches under linux. This means it is possible to have an arm eabi enabled chroot on a i386 system :) - this is as simple as running

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install qemu-arm-static
$ build-arm-chroot karmic eabi-chroot

ARM/Thumb 2 is the instruction set underlying the ARM Cortex architecture which provides enhanced levels of performance, energy efficiency, and code density for a wide range of embedded applications.The whole Ubuntu archive is being ported to Thumb 2 and we still have some some build failures- if you can help with ftbfs (failed to build from source) please help out here.

This has already been covered extensively elsewhere but the new UI for ARM based Ubuntu devices will rock hard for Lucid. The tool will detect hardware and if a device does not have 3D capabilities it wall fall back to the EFL launcher   It is hard to stress why this is rocks so much but a unified user experience across i386/Atom and ARM devices should ring a few bells in marketing departments everywhere, right.

Exciting times.

Even after the long session at UDS it took us some more time and lots more caffeine to get Liquid finally down on the wiki. We thought we were the crazy mobile heads until Adenilson showed up at one meeting raving about plasma mobile!.

After this the major tasks came down to packaging plasma mobile and modifying kwin and kdm for a mobile device.These are the most important things we need to do before Feature Freeze in mid February. We also of course need to do the meta package, default-settings and work on the theme but we can do this right up to the Lucid release of Liquid

I have been travelling and otherwise occupied since UDS so have not had as much time as I would like to hack on this.

Luckily Rodrigo wanted to 'tocar a bola' for a while and he has been working with the rest of the Ubuntu Mobile team on some fancy liquid moves. This included setting up an icecc compile farm which meant that today we managed to finally get plasma-mobile compiled, packaged and put up on REVU for some feedback. The obligatory screenshot on Ubuntu Lucid is here

Any designers looking at this screenshot will I imagine have lots of ideas about how this 'user experience' could be improved. The nice thing about plasma is that according to Caio the whole interface can be changed very easily using just a qml template. If you feel excited by this then join the Liquid Hackers team on Launchpad or if you feel really inspired come to the Bossa in the Jungle in March where more mobile madness is sure to go down.

After getting the great news that Canonical would sponsor me for the Lucid Lynx developer summit in Dallas, I wanted to let people know about our book and the good reviews we are getting and find out what we could look forward to in the mobile world for this next LTS release.

The Internet of Things (IOT) is a vision.

Yet it is being built today. The stakeholders are known, the debate has yet to start. The European Commission published its action plan for IOT in June of this year. In hundreds of years our real needs have not changed. We want to be loved, feel safe, have fun, be relevant in work and friendship, be able to support our families and somehow play a role - however small - in the larger scheme of things.

So what will really happen when things, homes and cities become smart? The result will probably be an avalanche of what at first looks like very small steps, small changes.

Currently IOT applications, demos and infrastructure are rolled out from negative arguments only. For logistics, it is anti-theft. For ehealth it is the lack of human personnel that requires the building of smart houses. From a policy view it is the ensuring of safety, control and surveillance of both items and in public spaces. For retail it is shelf space management.

Council thinktank aims to grow into a positively critical counterpart to these negativities in focusing on the quality of interaction and potentialities of IOT for social, communicative and economic (personal fabrication, participatory finance, alternative currencies) connectivity between humans, humans and things and humans and their surroundings.

The wrestling with ambient technologies - the noise - is rapidly going out of corporate memory. A new young generation growing up at ease with 'total' connectivity, will enter IOT territory as simply another layer, another iteration of something they are comfortable with.

Therefore the launch of Council will highlight a personal history of locative media & hybrid spaces, by professionals of the i3 (Intelligent Information Interfaces) days, as well as the latest tools and applications, workshops on key issues, short keynotes and time for debate and discussion.

Where: Imal, Brussels

When: December 4 2009 0930:2200 (public evening from 20:00) Workshop 185 Euros (including lunch and dinner)

Register

Coming hard on the heels of the news that our mug shots have thankfully been removed from the front cover of the 'Professional Ubuntu Mobile Development' book to be replaced with a Formula 1 racing car (WTF!) comes the news that the Ubuntu MID distribution will have a community release codenamed Ubuntu Liquid Remix during the Lucid Lynx cycle.

We are still fleshing out the goals and the work plan for the Liquid Remix and I expect that this will gain more traction at the Ubuntu Developer Summit this November. We have had a discussion with the Mer guys about maybe using the Open Build System for packaging although we will continue to use the Ubuntu infrastructure and seeds to actually germinate our image.

It seems that there is a great opportunity for collaboration and synergy between Mer and Liquid Remix so I am looking forward to the next 6 months of working together.

Just set up a blog just for maemo related things.

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

You wanted big, fat, lazy "business." We want small, responsive, micro-scale commerce.

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today's markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn't care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

The Full Article

I was elected today by the foundation to become a member of the Open Web Foundation.

What is Open Data and the Open Web?

Open Data is increasingly important as services move on-line, indeed data is becoming as important as the actual source code itself.
The Open Web then is all about the data and protocols behind web services - an Open Web needs Open Data and Open Data needs Open Specifications.

The Web as the Platform

Some initiatives such as Microformats, OpenID and OAuth have come about recently and gained popularity.
Although they come from different backgrounds they share some of the same goals and have gained widespread adoption on the web. They are also characterized by an agile (for want of a better analogy) development process -OAuth for instance was a matter of weeks between the drafts and the actual specification shipping. As well as sharing goals they also share some of the problems too - there is no clear licensing for specifications, no standard way to deal with Intellectual Property Rights and no overarching community that transcends the projects with a social contract for all to adhere too.

What is the Open Web Foundation?

It is a non-profit foundation, largely modeled after a hybrid of the Apache Software Foundation and things like the OpenID foundation which will create new open specifications for the web.
It will also importantly think about how to create community responsibility and recognition for defending the "Open Web".
 It already has considerable industry and community support and I am incredibly proud to become a member. I am looking forward to working with everyone on our important tasks!.
More about the foundation is here

The Open Web Foundation was conceived last year to create a framework which helps communities behind open web specifications navigate the non-technical organizational and legal challenges that successful specifications are bound to encounter. Many community-driven standards efforts falter when it comes to the heavy investment of time figuring out how to work within our existing intellectual property laws and are often forced to create their own non-profit organization just to support a ten page specification.