Photo Credit: Toro Mojado

I just want to congratulate the Ubuntu team on their best release yet!

The focus on quality for the past six months has really paid off. I’ve been running Precise since the first alpha and it has remained solid throughout the cycle.

You can take a tour of Ubuntu on the web here, or just go get it yourself. You won’t be sorry.

As for me, I’m itching to get cracking on Quantal Quetzal!

Next thing I knew I was at an open grave where MacGyver’s (not Richard Dean Anderson’s) frozen corpse had been split in half, with the bottom half missing. As the corpse began to thaw his gore spilled out and formed new skeletal legs. Then he got up and started walking toward me and I could tell that the look he was going for was that his whole body apart from his head was a skeleton, but it just looked like a really bad prosthetic (I could see his real arms behind the skeletal ones, etc.)

So my question to you, gentle reader, is what the hell did I eat last night?

(via Wil Wheaton. Yes, that Wil Wheaton.)

As I (gracefully) exit my 20s I find fewer and fewer reasons to go to the South Side after dark.

It was time for a standing desk!

I was looking for something that would let me work standing up, but not lose all the storage of a traditional desk. After trolling the web a bit looking for ideas, I found a promising design where else but at ikeahackers.net.

The Expedit standing desk looked to be exactly what I needed, so Emily and I headed off to IKEA to pick up the parts:

• 2 x 2×2 Expedit shelving unit (601.352.99)
• 2 x 5×1 Expedit shelving unit (901.162.75)
• 1 x 73″x10″ Lack shelf (401.037.51)
• 1 x 4-pack 6″ CAPITA Leg (000.545.64)

I went with the brown-black color rather than the “birch” and used the legs rather than laying the top shelf on some blocks of wood.

After an epic struggle to fit all of this stuff in Emily’s Honda Civic (in the rain!) we got it all home with only mild discomfort (I had to lean so far forward that the steering wheel knows what I had for lunch).

After gathering all the parts in the living room it was time to start building.

After two nights of assembling furniture and a quick trip to Lowe’s for some brackets to hold the whole mess together I ended up with a pretty sweet setup:

Cat included to show scale

I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now and after adding some anti-fatigue mats from Costco I’m officially in love with working upright.

Next up for me was a discussion on making sure that there is a base set of packages which will be cross-compilable to ARM. This is a big one for my group since much of our target hardware is ARM-based and our current options for building packages (slow ARM hardware or even slower virtual machines) make development challenging. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing this one accomplished. (blueprint, notes)

After lunch were a set of “lightning talks”, 5-minute talks about whatever interesting subject the speaker could come up with. I could detail them here, but it’s likely that you won’t care. On the off-chance that you do you can watch them yourself:

The only other session I attended was on finding and fixing the regressions in boot speed in the last couple of releases. Martin Pitt showed off some boot charts from lucid and maverick looking for specifics on where things have slowed down. It looks as if compiz and nautilus are the worst offenders, but there will be plenty of cleanups to go around. (blueprint, notes)

In the evening was the much-beloved after party which had a super hero theme this time around. I spotted The Hulk stomping around the room and our CEO gave her “thanks for all the hard work” speech dressed as Supergirl. The party itself was loads of fun, with the Ubuntu All-Stars playing some classic tunes (can’t go wrong with “Wish You Were Here”) and lots of alcohol-inspired dancing.

After an exhausting week it was time for one more sleep then the a short plane ride home.

Next was the makeup session discussing the relationship between Linaro and Ubuntu. Since Ubuntu’s ARM support comes from Linaro it’s important that the two projects maintain some sort of synchronization even if their main release cycles differ quite a bit. There was some discussion about how the two projects can maintain solid communication and some talk about how to get fixes, etc. synchronized between them. (blueprint, notes)

After lunch was a plenary with a few interesting talks. The first was about how OpenStack integrates with Launchpad and how they use continuous integration. The second was an introduction to the Ubuntu Friendly project, and the third was about how UEFI Secure Boot affects Ubuntu.

Next session was a tech preview for the Wayland compositor, which will supposedly replace the X server sometime in the future. The “preview” consisted of a hilariously short, very crashy demo of the software, which is to be expected in a “tech preview” since the “tech” doesn’t quite exist yet. I think that Wayland will be very useful in some cases, as in portable or other low-power devices where X is overkill, but I’m not sure that it will end up replacing X across the board.

After that I went to a session discussing GNOME session saving for power users. There are some users who would like to have the desktop remember the running programs and their window layouts between logins. The team came up with a list of pitfalls and pain points with this feature as it exists now and they will be working this cycle to resolve them. (blueprint, notes)

Due to some scheduling errors, the last session of the day that I wanted to attend was on power management from a whole-system perspective. The session had actually happened earlier in the week but was left on the schedule for reasons unknown. Since I had some time to kill I helped new recruit Matt debug a video driver problem.

In the evening a few of us caught a shuttle to Pointe Orlando for dinner. We settled on Maggiano’s where we ate family style. Four courses involving chicken, pork, and salmon with crème brûlée and tiramisu for dessert. Quite tasty.

After dinner it was back to the hotel and a (relatively) early night.