This is the new look Ubuntu or rather the new default theme in Ubuntu 10.04. I’m not totally convinced, I prefer my own sand and jade themes but its good to see the brown theme will go away.

Ubuntu seems to be one step closer to a semantic desktop with the use of Gnome Zeitgeist is Gnome Activity Journal, zeitgeist-filesystem and other bits…

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’s activities and events (files opened, websites visites, conversations hold with other people, etc.) and makes relevant information available to other applications. It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

Nice (check out this great video) but can I get the thing working? Well I got the engine running but I can’t get the activity journal working. Luckily it looks like it will make its way into Gnome 3.0 (which we will have to wait for 10.10). If your a KDE user don’t worry there’s also a Semantic desktop strand coming your way.

Me menu is like a idea I had a long time ago. I always wondered why you couldn’t set your status in one application and for the others to also pick that up. So from memory the picture I mocked up was me editing my status in Gwibber and it automatically updated my Skype and Pidgin statuses too. Well now Me menu pretty much does that. Oh and did you see the next generation of Gwibber? Kind of looks like Tweetdeck but not.

So its the evening after Fosdem 2010 and I’m knacked. I overall enjoyed myself but don’t know if I’d go back again or not. The conference was well put together and included a lot of talks I wanted to go to but couldn’t due sometimes because they would clash. It seems the conference was formatted around the individual tribes of the open source world. So for example if you were totally into KDE, you could sit in a room all day and listen to nothing but KDE stuff and when you felt like taking a breath, you could hang out at the KDE stand. I’m not picking just on just KDE, this was true of Gnome, Debian, FreeBSD, Mozilla, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc, etc.

I guess even XMPP was true of this but I felt the programming was a little more diverse as to attract more people. And thats my main point, I felt a lot of the rooms were full of people who were not very friendly or even cooperative. For example the rooms would get filled very quickly and so people were asked to moved to the centre of isles so later comers could sit in the spaces and use all the chairs available. But still people wouldn’t move even when you ask them.

Talking of rude, I can’t understand when was it ever ok to start a conversation in the middle of a session? I heard that a few times in a few sessions and it certainly wasn’t about the subject matter in question. Worst still when the Q&A would start most people would use that as there chance to have a good old natter. It was so bad during Richard Clayton’s talk that you couldn’t hear the amplified questions and answers.

I don’t want this to sound all negative but there was certainly a lack of friendliness in the air. Even during the Friday drinking event people were not very good about talking to new people. I certainly wouldn’t recommend Fosdem by yourself unless you know people going along very well. I can’t work out if its the amount of people (5000 they estimate) or the language barrier?

The venue I didn’t like that much but it grew on me the 2nd day. It was a university campus but some of the rooms were quite a distance away and almost not worth the bother to see if they would be open or full. The campus reminded me very much of the BarCampBrighton’s I’ve been to in the student Uni buildings (actually if you were to do a Fosdem type event in the south east, the university of sussex would be the perfect place).

The whole conference runs pretty much off donations and sponsorship which is amazing because its that big. You have to pay for everything including food and drink but its perfectly fine as the conference is very well put together. For example the network usage was flawless every time I used it, no problem with the wifi either. They were using some very well placed wifi base stations which supported multiple airels. Each box had 6 airels stick out the top and in a large room they had them in 6 different locations across a massive rooms. No interference, no problems both days no matter where you sat. The setup across the board for networking was better than I’ve seen almost anywhere else. I even saw a sign saying use more bandwidth, challenging us all to try and break there network. Amazing…

So what did I see which was worth talking about? Lots of bits and pieces but one which stood out was the session Mirabeau, creating personal media networks. They ran through how they could extend Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) over any network via XMPP to share anything you have attached to your UPnP pool. And because XMPP is mainly being used for Jabber right now, that means you can extend UPnP to your friends very easily. And because its UPnP to UPnP, it would connect to something like a PS3, Xbox360, something with a screen. So in practice I could share any media on my network with anyone who is on my buddy list. I’ve already got experience of doing this with Hamachi VPN at work but this is great because its very simple to do multiple adhoc connections with friends and family plus it goes straight to there screen. Where this gets very interesting is the fact that I could have streaming stuff play with UPnP and the streaming point would be the host connection, which basiclly renders GeoIP unless. So all in all, Mirabeau have just created a software only version of a Slingbox.

I had a discussion with the guys afterwards about the whole thing and decided that there is a lot more to this a Slingbox. Theres actually some very interesting editorial propositions which I’d rather not give away at this moment, although they should be pretty easy to imagine, if you think a little deeper. Here’s one idea, imagine this with a UPnP resolver for Playdar.

Elsewhere, I saw some interesting things like some semantic desktop stuff like GNOME Activity Journal which I’m going to install at some point soon. Vodafone Betavine’s One social web looks of interest too. The scaling sessions by Facebook and Status.net were also of interest but I don’t really have that problem right now. I was actually thinking why isn’t someone from the BBC doing a session about scaling? I missed Apache Hadoop, HTML5, SIP Communicator sessions along with all the Haiku sessions but I did manage a few of the Mozilla sessions including Firefox mobile and Thunderbird. I’ve decided I’ll give Thunderbird another try in the near future.

So all in all, it was good but with the cost of the travel and hotel, I’d certainly like to see what other conferences are on the table before going back. No reflection on the conference or the amazing job the organisers do, just maybe the way the FLOSS community is right now.

I’m already impressed with the Boxee DLink box specially after finding out that the machine has a Tegra 2 chip which means it will play anything and almost everything including Flash 10.1 and heavy weight h.264 content at 1080p resolution. But I also see XBMC is on the NUU player which was recently announced at CES 2010.

But interestingly enough you don’t need to invest in a new hardware box to get the best performance out of XBMC or even Boxee. I already talked about the amazing performance I’m getting out of the Intel X300 graphics processor unit along side a dual core processor. However theres some more great news from the XBMC camp in the form of Broadcom Crystal HD Hardware Decoder (BCM970012) which is a decoder card which can be put in Express card slots.

Through hard work and the joint efforts of several TeamXBMC/Redhat developers and the Broadcom Media PC Group, cross-platform hardware decoding of mpeg2, h.264 and VC1 video content up to 1080p will be coming to XBMC on OSX, Linux, and Windows via the Broadcom Crystal HD Hardware Decoder (BCM970012). The Broadcom Crystal HD is available now in a mini-PCIE card with ExpressCard and 1X PCIE form factors to follow. This means that the AppleTV and all those lovely new netbooks, Eee Boxes and older Intel Mac Minis have exciting new potential.

This solution has a common programming API, so many 3rd party developers and applications will be able to leverage hardware accelerated video content playback across OSX, Linux, and Windows platforms with minimal source code changes. Best of all, this is an open source solution with full source code for driver and library available for OSX and Linux under a GPL/LGPL license. Wow, this indeed is the Holy Grail and a major score for the open source community as this means no more tainted Linux kernels! Support has already been added to XBMC under the svn trunk.

More information can be found under the blog post under XBMC.org, but it certainly looks like 2010 is going to be the year when XBMC, Boxee and Plex really shine through. I’m actually planning to build a XBMC system just for work, maybe I’ll stick Boxee on it too.

Oh and good on Bytemark for sponsoring XBMC.

So I’ve already done a review of 2009, so its time for my 2010 resolutions.

1. Go skiing on real snow
   This is a carry over from 2009. I really need to just go do this, specially since there is a fake skiing place in Manchester’s Trafford Centre.
2. Blog more
   Since Twitter, i’ve been blogging a lot less. This needs to stop as this is my base and twitter isn’t. Although I can aggregate with things like storytlr, i’m very interested the support for the twitter/open-microblogging api by wordpress/automatic.
3. A better routine and live more healthy
   Goes without saying really but I’m already signed up to PureGym the 24hour Gym but need a doctors note saying I’m not going to die of a asthmatic attack if I use a running machine before I can go for the introduction. I’m also attempting to go to sleep before 2am every night and wake up at a decent time. I need to go to more comedy clubs too.
4. Kick off Manchester werewolf night again
   We started playing werewolf in Manchester at the start of last year as a monthly thing in the BBC bar but moved it out to Space soon after as we got more people. I want to grow it a little and run a couple special one-off’s around events like FutureEverything and other conferences in the city. Actually the 1st one of the year will be Wednesday 3rd Feb if your interested.
5. Find my perfect development stack
   I was meant to be learning Python but it just didn’t feel right for me. Apache Cocoon 2.1 is still my baby and I use it for all types of little bits and pieces but Cocoon 2.2 and 3.x are completely different. I could/maybe should learn how use them and the new Maven approach, Maven also seems to work well in Eclipse and Netbeans (didn’t I mention I like Netbeans).
   I like the idea of XQuery specially because it does most of the things I want to do in my web applications. Add in Exist DB the open source xml database and I got a complete backend stack. I’m also still liking the idea behind ZK to ease with the front end, although I know everyone is loving a javascript library over a complete framework. Lastly I’m looking more and more into XProc but I don’t feel this will help with my development stack.
6. Playout live more
   I’m going out clubbing more which is great but I’m feeling the need to playout/dj out loud. There’s not many trance clubs in Manchester and I’ve already tried to join the Rong Trance night via a competition. So heck why not setup my own night? Well it looks like I found a venue (TV21 in the Trendy Northern Quarter) and a couple other djs who also want to play out live. So who knows…
7. Use even more graphics
   Inkscape, napkin sketches, raytracing are all working for me. Now I’m sketching on my ebook reader in some meetings so I just need better ways to integrate them into my presentations and work.
8. Upgrade sooner if it makes a noticeable difference
   Sometimes I wait too long to upgrade software and hardware. For example I waited till my old battery only holds 12% charge before getting a new one. This is fine but having to go to meetings next door with a power adapter is a pain. I should have bought a new battery ages ago. I also waited too long to upgrade to Gwibber 2.0 for sure. This also extends to other stuff for example I just bought some new trainers after 3+ years of wearing the last one to near collapse. All this stuff is worth just buying earlier to avoid all the stresses which go into keeping the previous generation alive. Talking of which I really should upgrade my camera to a DSLR soon.
9. Be involved in a regular podcast
   I started one with a few friends but we never really got it off the ground due to our pretty hectic lifestyles. However now I know I can do skype over my Orange HSDPA connection and it still sounds great, I should be able to do it from anywhere I am. So its just a matter of being committed really.
10. Buy a flat in Central Manchester
    People have been wondering what happened with this. Well it was all happening then the mortgage deposits when from 10% to 20% across all lenders, which ruled me out of buying a 2 bedroom place. However this year I’m confident that I’ll be on the property ladder again. Although I’m thinking maybe I should consider one bedroom places too.
11. Avoid all online services which don’t perform to my acceptable levels of data portability
    Its 2010, theres no need for closed systems which don’t talk to anything else. No OpenID or OAuth? You won’t see me signing up in the future. Can’t get my data out on to my own site via some API? forget about it, I’m not even going to venture near it.
12. Play more games
    I love games but never play enough of them. There’s a whole selection of great games which I’ve not played which I think I’m missing out on. For example I bought Portal the other day for a day when I’m sick and need to stay in. Theres some amazingly inspiring games out there which must be played.