Author Archive

Today I was reminded of this quote by Jane Goodall:
If everyone could think a little bit about small choices they make every day: What do you eat, does it result in animal cruelty? What do you wear, how was it made, does it damage the environment? When people start thinking like that they do change. [...]

This week I am at Guadec in Den Haag. For those less familiar with working on open-source projects Guadec is the annual gathering of developers, users and businesses primarily focused on GNOME. GNOME, for those of you who don’t know is the core desktop element of Ubuntu.
Explanations for the uninitiated now delivered, I will proceed [...]

It is time to extend the Ubuntu Font Beta Testing. We need to make sure that the Ubuntu font is being fully exercised beyond the English language and I do not want to rely on accidental incidents but rather explicitly add people from the translations teams for various languages (and alphabets). Today we have started [...]

Having read some of the comments and bugs I thought it might be useful to add some clarification on a couple of terms. What we have released so far is only the regular weight of the font. Fonts – in general – come in many weights from ultra-light to ultra-bold. The fact that regular is [...]

Ladies and Gentlemen, Today we are kicking off the Ubuntu Font BETA testing. This is a happy day! Today all Ubuntu Members will have access to a private PPA so that they can use, test and enjoy the font. The first four variants of the font family are scheduled for completion 8 August 2010 and [...]

Are you a musician? Do you make beautiful illustrative wallpapers? Do you take amazing photographs? Do you make clever and inspiring videos or animations?
You may be interested in the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase.
Do you make open-source tools for creating any of the above?
I hope you will be interested in the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase.
Do you [...]

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

One of the first things I did when I joined Canonical just over a year ago was conduct some user research. The idea was to identify some broad areas that needed to be addressed and so I devised sessions that included topics like dealing with music and photos, browsing the Internet, chatting with friends, etc. [...]

Abstract Interpreting compiler errors and exception messages is challenging for novice programmers. Presenting examples of how other programmers have corrected similar errors may help novices understand and correct such errors. This paper introduces HelpMeOut, a social recommender system that aids the debugging of error messages by suggesting solutions that peers have applied in the past. [...]

While at CHI earlier this week, I went along to a session with the same title as this blog post. I was looking for some inspiration, something to take to a UDS (Ubuntu Developer Summit) session perhaps, something to turn into a blog post, food for thought.
The session at CHI included a food critic, a [...]