UDS Jaunty - My Two Day Replay

The last two days have been very busy indeed, so much so that I missed blogging about Day 1, hence the "Two Day Replay".

Day 1:

I awoke at 6:40AM, not to my alarm, but just by mere fluke. A certain roomie (who shall remain nameless), made certain to set the alarm for 6... AM, but missed the fact that the clock itself was not set correctly for AM. So, when I awoke, the clock was actually showing 6:40PM. The day was off to a great start, as luck was apparently on my side.

After a much to large breakfast, we headed outside to get the bus to Google. I was really excited to be a part of this great community and be afforded the opportunity to go to UDS.

The summit began with an introduction, and a brief overview of things to come. Mark provided some keen insights on where we are headed, what the market is doing, and how we are going to get there. Now I was really getting pumped.

Here's how the days sessions ran for me...

Desktop Experience Plans
The Ubuntu Desktop team outlined their plans for notifications in Jaunty, which are similar to what we have in Kubuntu with KDE 4. While not terribly exciting to most, it does show their interest in both usability while adding in some nice bling.

Debian / Ubuntu Relations
We had a great discussion here about how the various Ubuntu flavors could work together to foster better relations and involvement for the core/motu Ubuntu developers. A lot of ideas were presented, and hopefully, something good will materialize.

Upcoming Launchpad Features
Kiko gave a great talk on Launchpad 3.0. Lots of upcoming features and of course, the big one, open sourcing Launchpad.

NetworkManager connection policies
There were some discussions about how to handle 3G, wireless, and wired and how best to setup policies on creation and tear down of these connections. Currently NM will keep up multiple connections, but there was a con-census that this is not our desired behavior. We discussed some use cases to present upstream.

Kubuntu Jaunty Gap Analysis
A lot of items got covered in this one, like auto-installing flash for KDE 4. The discussion then lead to the whole kubuntu-restricted extras and the fact that the user generally doesn't know to install this package to get flash, mp3, etc, unless they read it in some wiki or forum. So we decided to add this as a check to update-notifier-kde, and provide the user a chance to install some or all these packages. This is a great thing for our users. There were a lot of other things discussed, so feel free to review the spec

The day ended with a great meal at a local Tai restaurant. I had Tom Kha soup and Spicy Peanut something or other. It was pretty good. Some found it spicier than others (/me points to Tonio).

Day 2:

Ubuntu Developer Process Review
A great session by Daniel. It has inspired me to seek developer (MOTU or "insert new name here") status in the near future. I think once I get past Jaunty release, that will be the time to apply, as I will have gone through a complete development cycle, having only started near the end of Jaunty.

Jaunty Ubiquity Usability
We discussed a few UI changes to the installer to improve usability. One of the major changes is to the timezone chooser, which should definitely be an improvement over the existing one.

Kubuntu Jaunty documentation
We need lots of help getting the docs updated, both in upstream KDE as well as for Kubuntu specific packages, etc. If you can use a text editor, you can help.

Tonight I had one of the best burgers, from Chili's. 3 different cheeses, thick back bacon and a pattie which was about an inch thick. After supper, we had a great jam session at the hotel. Everyone sang, played guitar, drums, etc. I'll try and post some pics later, but it's late now and I must get some sleep for Day 3 is fast approaching.