Why?

First of all, it’s a huge job. Keeping your collection at least somewhat up-to-date in Amazon takes time. The different editions in Amazon are a burden as well. Should I mark them all owned, or just keep with one edition, and which one is the right one?

Since you can’t remove any purchased items from your Amazon collection, I’ve left all my purchased items as they are, with their ratings, so I’ll still keep getting recommendations based on them. It is still clearly better and easier to work with than with a huge, 500-item, collection.

Just as a remark, I’ve bought all in all 83 items from Amazon for myself.

Getting back to what it is about

I realized that constantly looking for recommended items in Amazon is taking up my time with my music, narrowing the selection of bands I will ever get to know as well as little by little adapting me to a more mainstream selection. (Also, Amazon undeniably tries to make me buy more and more from them, or via their service.)

While the recommendation system is generally good, it just can’t deliver the genuine joy of doing elaborate research on new artists and finding a hidden gem. (To be fair, Amazon hasn’t recommended me even a tiny bit shinyish, way too popular, charcoal bits lately.)

Now that I have one obsession less, I hope to be able to focus more on things that matter. Most of all I hope that I could spend even more time away from my computer.

What is microblogging about?

From what I’ve read, seen and thought, I conceive microblogging is all about sharing and in the best of the situations, benefitting, cooperating and creating something new. Who you follow and who follows you is much about who you respect and think is worth listening to, and vice versa.

While microblogging is also used much to share something that’s happening in your life, I don’t really think you’ll get the most out of it like that – and so doesn’t your followers. Of course, you are free to use microblogging for this as well, but I think other utilities, like Facebook statuses, are better for that.

Jim Campbell has actually written a pretty good article about how to write a good tweet at a conference, but I think those guidelines work with pretty much anything, if you use common sense to adapt them to said situations.

Bring the micro of microblogging to IRC

While IRC is a place of long-term discussion sets, there is no reason why it could not be a place of microdiscussions or lightning discussions, as I humorously nicknamed the concept.

It stroke me that I’ve been doing these kind of short-length discussions with various people for years. I did not know them all before bumping into them in IRC and with some, these lightning discussions were almost the exclusive way for communicating. This was my way to microblog before microblogging existed!

Later on, I realise now, when working in Open Source communities, a big part of the communication is a series of lightning talks between two or more people. While development should be as transparent as possible, it doesn’t need to be as upfront as possible. Logged and web-published IRC channels are as transparent as possible, but they are not overwhelmingly visible. From my point of view, this makes IRC a perfect place for communicating inside the developer community and demonstrates, how the micro of microblogging actually takes place in IRC.

It’s funny though how #xubuntu-devel is still not logged and published correctly to the Ubuntu IRC logs on web.

Does this prove anything?

I really like to avoid overhead on anything, and so do many people. Why would you need yet an another tool to be able to accomplish something that you can accomplish with your current tools? What’s the benefits of microblogging and IRC in relation to what I’ve covered earlier?

Okay okay, real microblogging can present the timeline of discussions better. Microblogging exposes you to a far wider possible audience. Microblogging is made comfortable to do even with your phone (so is IRC, though). Microblogging also reaches people better, considering they know how to subscribe to RSS feeds (because without those, microblogging appears as useful and lively as a real life bulletin board for the follower).

However, microblogging does not scale as well as IRC, when you need or want a broader discussion. Microblogging also does not deliver the same kind of feelings of connection and belonging to something as IRC does. While IRC does not reach a wide audience, it pretty often reaches the desired audience at least in Open Source communities. This is also as often enough, and it does provide a safe feeling that everything you say is not evaluated by the whole world. (Even crazy ideas and painful facts need to be said.)

Summa summarum

While microblogging is a new, powerful way to communicate, it’s not for me. IRC has served me microdiscussions for years, and that’s the way I’ve learned to quickly sort things out and announce things. In addition, the discussions in IRC can easily be extended to as big as I need. If I need something to stick around for a longer time, I can always update my proper blog.

Go have a lightning discussion.

Thank you for your understanding. Stay tuned, more rants about Thunderbird are going to follow.

This is my “All Folders” -view with the default Thunderbird 3 folderpane style.

There’s no hope that I am able to see all of my folders at once with the default style. The font size is also quite big, smaller will work for me. My first contact with TB3 leaves me a bit confused, because there is so much going on with all the folder icons. This takes way too much space, I’m thinking.

Another thing I dislike in the new default folderpane is the fact it misses the tree lines. Fortunately getting them back is well documented, so no worries about that.

My general experience for searching documentation from the web or live support from IRC for tweaking the folderpane is not that good. Too many times I was getting my earlier blog entries as the top 5 search results when trying to find documentation or maybe even examples. The #thunderbird IRC support channel is somewhat unresponsive whenever you pop in there – I might be asking hard and/or weird questions, but you pretty rarely even see anyone saying anything. If I was asking the wrong channel, I of course expect somebody point me to the right direction. Come on, Mozilla community!

Anyway, in addition to those issues mentioned, I also played around a bit with the overall feel of the folderpane and tried to make mail reading a nice task rather than a confusing one. These include some nice background coloring as well as shrinking the icons. I think I even made some progress in contrast to the TB2 folderpane tweaks.

The tweaks are still work in progress, but here’s a screenshot.

You can see that some of the folders do not handle padding correctly (yet). There’s also a few other glitches, like the Trash folders, which seem to be visible on TB boot, but disappear when you hover the folderpane.

Here’s the userChrome.css as well as envelope.png for showing the envelope symbol for the folders that have unread mail. The envelope icon is from the default Thunderbird 3 icon theme, but at least for now I had to split it out from folder-pane.png to be able to show the icon correctly.

To hide the Local Folders, I used the Mail Tweak -extension.

Basic Maths seems to be a complex but beautiful and definitely working WordPress theme based on the Grid layout. Even if you are not going to buy it, I think it serves a few very interesting ideas. Inspire yourself!

Stacey CMS is something I should look closer.

As of my email to the Xubuntu Developer mailing list some minutes ago, I’m no longer contributing to Xubuntu as the Xubuntu Marketing Lead. I will continue contributing to Ubuntu and Xubuntu as well through functional teams. This probably also means that I will keep sending some updates to the Ubuntu category of my blog, which is aggregated to Planet Ubuntu.

I hope you’ve had a pleasant journey this far. I have, and I look forward to our future adventures together.

But that’s not the complete story. I’ve rated pretty much every record, DVD and book I own, on Amazon.co.uk. That’s a few items over 500 (on Amazon.com, I have about half of that). Naturally Amazon doesn’t have all the Finnish music I’m into, which explains the ever so low number. Even that is not as far as it goes. I have about 13750 (5500 on .com) items marked as not interested. You read it correctly, that’s almost fourteen thousand.

I visit Amazon pretty much every day, and immediately mark any new items I won’t be buying, from Today’s Recommendations, All Recommendations and those Recommended by Browsing History. Usually this isn’t a big amount of clicks, but pretty much every time I add a new item to my Amazon owned list, I’m gonna do more work. And every time I browse at any item on Amazon; .co.uk or .com – I do them both. At the end of the day, I usually have at most 5 items that I’m not going to mark, which means I’ll buy them at some point. At the moment I’m recommended 1-3 items, depending a bit on the day.

Some of the Amazon recommends are still silly; why would I be interested in a coffee machine if I’ve rated a board game? Some of the recommends are pretty good, and I’m recommended almost every new record/item I’m going to buy anyway plus some records, which sometimes raise my interest. All in all, it’s a pretty useful tool for me, also considering I buy a big proportion of my music from Amazon because of their and/or the Marketplace sellers’ low prices.

Sometimes I still wonder though – am I too much into Amazon? Should one really be using the Amazon recommendation system this much? How many marked items do you have?

As the Xubuntu Marketing Lead I was invited to a meeting with the design team and some key members of the community at Canonical offices in London. We got to see the new branding stuff already in Monday, and the new stuff is pretty much exciting. I had a great time there and got to meet nice people from the community, with whom we discussed the new brand and how it could be incorporated into the community efforts, such like Xubuntu or the forums. Thank you Mark, Iain and all of you who were there!

As you can see on the wiki page, we’ve already produced a draft of the new Xubuntu logo as well as a draft for our new website. You can start seeing the new logo on daily images anytime soon, and we’re working hard to get the new Xubuntu website published well before the Lucid release.

Feel free to browse the wiki page and see the new branding yourself. More news on refreshing the Xubuntu branding, artwork and website to come.

A small introduction…

The Ubuntu community is definitely not the worst there is. However, there is lots of room for improvement. I’ve always felt that the Ubuntu community lacks communication. That’s very much what Steve said earlier, but what he said is not the complete truth. Even the Xubuntu team lacks communication and even once we have the contact with each other, probably the majority of us lack communication skills, more or less.

The freedom to speak and to be heard

Xubuntu has come a long way from when I started, and it’s totally because every individual in the team now and then. We all share the same passion – to make Xubuntu better. Developers come and go, but one could expect at least some natural growth for a project that has improved as much as Xubuntu has done. So why is the Xubuntu team as small as I started, or even smaller?

Steve mentioned the lack of information/communication making starting contributing really hard for a newcomer and a possible future contributor. I think Steve agrees with me that this comprises both technical and the more subtle, emotional, human-oriented communication. Getting the technical information out more efficiently would only need a bit more work, but fixing the human-oriented communication is way harder, probably even impossible via online methods only.

Getting the developer-user -communication working is a completely different story. While some of our contributors are seemingly spread amongst the community, there has been debates on how much “official” information they can output for example in their blogs. While I understand that an opinion of a single developer is not the official opinion, who can tell the users what the developer community has been working on and what kind of ideas we have?

The words we don’t have a community Steve promptly said (referring to the fact the Xubuntu developer community hadn’t actually grown at all) actually mean way more than just that. In the end, we’re just individuals who work together, enjoying each other’s company more or less. If our communication doesn’t work or we use our time arguing, where’s the community then? None of us is completely innocent, and I plead my own guilty as well. Sometimes we just don’t have a community at all.

What I’ve learned from my social service studies is that listening is not hearing. The fact that the Xubuntu team has now lost two contributors due to bad communication does tell everything is not alright. To grow our community and get things done in the future as well, we need to communicate better and actually hear each other.

Respecting volunteers

As you all probably know, Xubuntu is not sponsored financially by Canonical. We are an official derivative, using the same repositories as Ubuntu and all the other derivatives. This leads to many technical details and problems in addition to the communication problems inside the project. (The technical details are described in Steve’s blog, if you want to read more about those.)

While the Ubuntu project has a specific governance that the Xubuntu project also has to obey, nobody is saying how we should organize our inner governance. We definitely need a project leader that is well aware of the project overview, but I don’t think we need a project leader who can use a veto-vote everywhere.

With all respect to Cody, our former project leader, I regretfully have to say I’ve experienced a bit too much micromanagement for quite a long time. Weighting this and some recent discussions, I’m left with the feeling I’m not heard and especially that my skills are not valued. Comments like “you can be replaced” and “we don’t have to use your work anyway” are totally true, but tell a lot about the communication and relationships between community members, especially as long as there is no-one else in the sight replacing anybody and as long as the community like what you do anyway. Once you hear these comments from your own leader, who originally appointed you to take care of some area of the project, you will lose part of your motivation. That motivation is really hard to build up again.

Our vision…?

I was really excited to be building a new kind of Xubuntu community, based on council rather than a single project leader with complete dictatorship. Our meeting about the new governance went actually pretty well and we made some nice progress; the main direction seemed to be that experts (people who are given the responsibility for a specific area in a project, for example marketing, artwork, documentation, or packaging) and leaders on their subjects should have somewhat more weight in their words than other developers, since they most probably know their subject better than someone else in the team, including the project leader.

The sad truth is that after this meeting we’ve kind of reversed back to the old way of working. Right now I don’t even know if there is a possibility to get the council-type approach at least partially as our new governancy structure. Are people too afraid to do something wrong, to fail, to admit they were wrong? Is it better to go the “safe way” and continue struggling with the ever-decreasing amount of developers, with the Xubuntu project eventually diminishing for the lack of developers – or passion? What do we have to lose here?

Taking the next step

What do we need to do now to be able to step to the next level and bring more sustainability for the Xubuntu developer community and in consequence of it, the whole project?

Get the rest of the Ubuntu community communicate with us.

Again, this is mostly what Steve already described in his blog. As long as Xubuntu is part of the larger Ubuntu family, sometimes referred as hugebuntu, we need to get the latest news from the rest of that community. Many things affect us directly or indirectly and we could save the diminishing amount of developer hours if we knew most of the changes and plans the broader Ubuntu community did beforehand.

Too bad I don’t know where to start. As long as there are even a few people who are almost hostile about any cooperative efforts between the derivatives, not even talking about all the different core teams, our possibilities to work on the subject are very limited. I already tried to rant about communication in the Jaunty developer summit, but the outcome was pretty bad. I’ve heard a few efforts with similar ambitions have greatly failed before.

All this just leaves me thinking there is a big problem inside the Ubuntu community – lack of communication. I don’t know what would be the best solution for this, but the first step to get rid of problems is to acknowledge them. To be fair though, there is also people who get the community working better, but sadly enough their scope can’t cover all of the project.

Communicate more with users.

While I’ve already had some good feedback on listening what our users want and being available for them, it can’t be a one-man show. The developer community as a whole needs to reach out for our users. Our users are giving us valuable information on what could be better on Xubuntu and what already is awesome. Communicating with our users is the only way to build up a decent user community.

We also need to keep our work as transparent as possible, giving the users as much information on what we do and what is going on. This also means we shouldn’t do all we can to hide the negative vibes our community is having. Listening to our users first gives us the possibility to get them listening to us – whatever we want to say.

Communicate more with each other.

Any developer community needs communication. We’ve made progress on this already, but we have to start thinking what is the correct kind of communication. We are working on the project together and we should encourage and cheer each other as much as possible. We need to respect the fact that we are all volunteers and we all are pretty good in what we do for Xubuntu.

Good communication means people can throw suggestions around and give constructive criticism without anybody feeling they are not valued. We should trust our developers work according to the responsibility they got when they were appointed as team leaders and became part of the Xubuntu team.

Now that all this is said, it’s time to start taking actions. Let’s continue the discussions about new governance, start communicating more efficiently and attract new developers. If we can do that, it’s very likely that the Xubuntu community will be more powerful than ever.

The Logitech LS1 is a better mouse than I dared to hope. It is definitely not too small, but actually quite perfectly sized. It’s also way more precise than my old mouse. I even have had to turn the mouse acceleration to near minimum. The sound the new mouse gives was also important for me, and I have to say that the LS1 is even more quiet and doesn’t rattle like cheap plastic as the MS mouse.

The horizontal scroll is still a bit weird feature, and the scrolling isn’t as smooth as vertical. To be fair, the scrollwheel is more stiff generally, so maybe it’s just the newness. Even if it didn’t loose a bit, I’d still be happy with it. At least it’s not that easy to accidentally scroll sideways. I had to tweak the horizontal scroll in Firefox to be able to scroll more lines per one “click”. The settings I changed from about:config were:

mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines = 10
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines = false

Now horizontal scrolling works as I want. Obviously you could change the first value to whatever you wanted to get even more radical scrolling. 10 seems to be quite right for me, though.

Would I recommend this mouse for my friends? Yes I would, especially if they were thinking of buying a mouse for their laptop, and didn’t want a mini-sized mouse. In that case I’d actually even point them to LS1, even if they asked generally about mice. I personally like corded mouse, but if you are a cordless mouse fan, this might not be for you.

Just for comparison with some other modern mouse from Logitech: As I bought the LS1 for myself, I also bought an MX205 for my mother as a present. What I’ve learned from the few times I’ve used it, it’s even smaller than LS1, probably below my threshold – I wouldn’t be able use that mouse for hours.

Farewell, Microsoft mouse. I’ve finally got rid of all of my MS hardware. Next on the drop list is Windows XP, which I only run under VMWare because of Adobe Photoshop CS2 and testing websites with various versions of IE. Lately, Inkscape has started to replace PS, but I still need it for a few things and I don’t expect this thing to change in the near future. You never should let go of your dreams.