If you're filing bugs: please don't be selfish!

<rant>

If you're filing bugs, I understand that you feel strongly about the issues you're seeing, and that you feel like your problem is important and deserves immediate attention. I also want "my" bugs to be dealt with as soon as possible, and as a Ubuntu contributor I also want *your* bugs to be fixed in a timely manner. However, you usually should not just add information to an existing bug because the symptoms are vaguely similar.

My point is, if you're seeing that something is wrong with your hardware (because this type of issue is quite frequent with hardware-related bugs), please don't hesitate to open a new bug. Developers will often be quite pleased that you did, and will be happy to mark something as a duplicate of another bug for you. Other bug reporters will also be happier, because it allows their own, often unrelated issue to be dealt with rapidly. Your own bug will also likely be fixed earlier, since developers need to sift through less information related to a specific issue: they then need to decide whether a specific attachment or comment is relevant in far fewer cases.

It just helps making the experience more enjoyable to everyone.

Also, if you're suggesting in a bug report against a specific package to use another package, you're not being helpful. Sure, you help the reporter by fixing their immediate problem, but you're not helping the underlying issues being resolved. What we want is to have all projects improve and squash their bugs, which cannot be done if you, say, suggest using Wicd in a bug against NetworkManager for a broken wifi driver.

I like both of these projects, I want both to succeed equally, which means that bugs need to be reported and respected so that we can fix the issues that arise and deliver a better user experience to everyone; while allowing all projects to grow and improve. This is what suggesting that project X is a failure (that's usually not the words used, but you get the idea), and that project Y is better (because it doesn't have that specific issue), will never achieve.

It all boils down to being nice to others. Nice to other bug reporters, because everyone has the same chance of getting their bugs fixed, and nice to other projects because they all get their share of bugs and success stories.

</rant>

You're invited: Montreal Lucid Lynx release party!

The Ubuntu-Quebec team is having a party here in Montreal (and in other cities too!!!) once more, this time to celebrate the release of Lucid Lynx. This will once again be held at the Bar Le Saint-Sulpice:

Bar Le Saint-Sulpice
1680, Saint-Denis,
Montréal, Québec,
H2X3K6,
514 844-9458

Everyone's invited to join us there this Thursday, April 29th.

Lots of people have already either RSVP'd using the wonderful LoCo Directory event pages, and many others have confirmed their presence already...

There's going to be a couple of other parties going on this time in the province: another one in Montreal on May 20th, Dummondville and Quebec city on the 5th and 6th of May; if you want to know more, don't hesitate to visit our wiki page for the Lucid release parties organized by Ubuntu-Quebec: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuebecTeam/LucidParty

Join us and have a chance to meet other Ubuntu enthusiasts like you :)

In retrospect: the good and the bad about the Global Jam event in Montreal

Well, it's better late than never. The bad is obviously how it has taken me more than a week to get to writing this blog post about how well our Global Jam event went :)

Seriously though, I did notice there were slightly fewer people this time around, but this can be inputed to a number of variables, so I really have no reason to complain, we had a great time, found a great number of bugs that were reported (and/or triaged), and it's essentially a clear success. Thanks to all those who participated in making this a great event.

If you want to look at the pictures for our event, you can see them here. There was also a live video made by r2mxr, but I can't find the link to it anymore... I promise I will update about it soon.

Thanks to Fabian Rodriguez and David Bensimon who joined in and helped out a lot in finding bugs, testing, reproducing, and confirming bugs.

Thanks to Philippe Gauthier who did a terrific job at a number of things, including setting, at least in my eyes, the record for the quickest testing process ever. Wine with a Windows app, as well as other Linux applications installed in record time :)

Obviously, thanks to the presenters for a great time: Ronan Jouchet, Michael Faille, Jeff Fortin... You did great, and I learned a lot. I'm sure a lot of others did as well.

Thanks to the SUPInfo students for visiting, you boosted our numbers and gave us a new and different outlook on various issues, which was a clear benefit.

Thanks to ETS, and in particular to Oleg Litvinsky for doing an awesome job at the logistics. I've never seen a room get set up so fast, I felt useless :)

Finally, thanks to those who came in to join us to see presentations or help out with bugs, it was great to see you all and meet new people, or others who we discuss with on the mailing list but rarely have a chance to talk to, face-to-face.

News about the Global Jam in Montreal

I'm amazed by the amount of interest we're gathering here in Montreal for the Global Jam and the new version Ubuntu in general. I'm very eager to put in lots of work on triaging and helping people understand how to create packages or prepare patches to packages, but I've been contacted by a few people and thought it would be good to share on the awesome presentations and presenters we'll be able to see here this weekend:

• A presentation MythTV and video capture, by Marc-André Gingras
• Club Capra / a robotics project that was migrated from Windows to Ubuntu, and how that was done, by Michael Faille
• An overview of PiTiVi and video edition, by Jeff Fortin (surely along with a bug jam blitz on PiTiVi?)
• A presentation on UbuntuStudio, JACK, and Ardour; by Ronan Jouchet

To get all the juicy details, check out https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QuebecTeam/GlobalJam10.03

I seriously can't wait until Friday!

A Global Jam event in Montreal again

It's always nice to see the amount of interest that just a simple table at say, Geekfest Montreal can generate. We gave out a couple of CDs, showed off 10.04, and generally got a very nice amount of support and interest for the Ubuntu-QC LoCo and our Global Jam event.

And about this event?

Well, preparations are going quite well. With the location secured (thanks ETS!!!) (and thus the audio-video equipment, since our rooms are already fitted with a project in one real nicely done table), we'll be ready to host a few presentations. Already one of the confirmed ones will be a student of ETS presenting a robot his team built, and how it's OS was migrated from Windows to Ubuntu.

What's left to decide is much of the little organizational details. For presentations, when will we have them? How do we deal with the fact that WiFi will probably fail? How about the relatively few power sockets available? Do we split the weekend into sessions on different tasks or subjects, and if so, how?

We've had great support from LAN-ETS last October when they helped us out immensely by lending us power bars and wicked cool ethernet cable bundles and a switch. I hope they will agree to help us out once again.

We're also in discussion to get two additional presentations going: MythTV on Ubuntu and PiTiVi. Like last time, I may give a quick crash-course on patching applications and preparing packages.

Of course, we're not just going to focus on showing stuff -- we do plan on getting much more involved than last time in triaging and patching bugs. With our success in October, I'm very confident that the Ubuntu-Quebec team will rock at the UGJ! PiTiVi is already one aspect we will most likely be looking at in detail, and I do hope there will be more: I will obviously be very happy to help out poeple (and have people help me) with giving some love to NetworkManager. I can already think of usb-creator as another pet project that will likely receive some attention.

With the responses we got from the quick installfest we set up last time, the idea of an upgrade Jam is another that seems to be a big hit for the people here. Lucid is sure to be a great release, and we're very eager to give it another big round of testing with all the cool toys people could bring to our Montreal event!

One of the big challenges this time around will be gathering more people from farther around the province. It would be great if people from Quebec city could join us, or even from Chicoutimi or elsewhere. It's also one of the reasons why we try to have as many things going around at the same time as possible, so trips to Montreal would be easier to schedule.

If you're in the Quebec province and more specifically in the Montreal region during the March 26-28 weekend, don't hesitate to come join us!

Global Jam à Montréal: on récidive!

Il me fait plaisir d'annoncer que la participation des utilisateurs Ubuntu montréalais au Ubuntu Global Jam se fera encore une fois, un peu avant la sortie officielle de Lucid Lynx (la version 10.04, présentement en développement), à l'École de Technologie Supérieure!

Les locaux ont été officialisés: du 26 au 28 mars, nous pourrons passer la fin de semaine dans les locaux de l'ETS, soit les salles de classe A-1300 et A-1238 (en haut des escaliers de l'entrée principale, puis à gauche). N'hésitez pas à consulter la page wiki QuebecTeam/GlobalJam pour l'horaire exact ainsi que les directions pour s'y rendre!

Un gros merci à l'administration de l'ETS pour bien vouloir supporter l'événement (et donc Ubuntu!), et à Clod Patry et Oleg Litvinski pour leur aide avec les détails administratifs.

Vous êtes donc invités à participer à des efforts d'identification, de tri et de "patchage" de bogues avec nous, ainsi qu'à venir poser des questions, essayer la nouvelle version "live" ou l'installer, ou même simplement essayer Ubuntu pour une première fois sur votre ordinateur, dans un environnement convivial où vous pourrez vous sentir bien à l'aise de demander de l'aide si vous en avez besoin... Où simplement venir rencontrez d'autres utilisateurs pour discuter de tout et de rien!

Quelques présentations devraient être planifiées d'ici fin mars. Entre autres, un élève de l'ETS, Michael Faille, nous fera la présentation d'un projet robotique réalisé pas un groupe de l'ETS et roulant sur Ubuntu (depuis sa migration de Windows!). On prévoit certainement encore présenter de façon survolée l'entrée de bogues dans Launchpad, ou alors le tri de ceux-ci si vous voulez aider les développeurs.

Cette fois-ci, beaucoup d'emphase sera mise sur le travail direct en équipe sur les différents bugs qui pourront avoir été soulevés. Il reste à déterminer la formule exacte, mais le but sera de démontrer l'intérêt de notre équipe dans la qualité de la distribution :)

D'ici là, il reste un tas de choses à planifier. Si vous voulez aider dans la réalisation de l'événement ou vous avez des idées, n'hésitez pas à en faire part sur la liste de distribution Ubuntu-QC ou sur notre canal sur Freenode: #ubuntu-qc.

L'École de Technologie Supérieure (ETS) est située au 100 rue Notre-Dame Ouest, soit à deux minutes du métro Bonaventure, au coin Notre-Dame et Peel.

Starting my first book review

I read a lot, that's clearly not the problem -- although sometimes I wish it was fewer technical documents and more fiction...

It somewhat surprised me when I was contacted out of the blue by someone from Packt Publishing to ask me to review a new book on Cacti: Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring, by Dinanhkur Kundu and S. M. Ibrahim Lavlu (ISBN 13: 978-1-847195-96-8).

I love Cacti, it's clearly one of those network monitoring tools that are both easy to implement and easy to configure, and does a terrific job at aggregating historical information on what happened on machines. I had it implemented on roughly 200 systems with sometimes easily 40 graphs per system (switches, firewalls, etc), and although speed can be an issue, it is one that can be easily solved with Spine.

Back to the book: at first glance, it looks well written. I can't speak for its physical aspect since Packt won't ship to Canada, but it seems clear and to the point, with a good amount of background information on SNMP, which is often just what someone will be lacking when first trying out monitoring and Cacti. I'll write of my final opinion after reading the book in full though ;)

If there's at least one very good point: anyone could start with just this and a Ubuntu or Debian system and very quickly get rolling, since it mentions all the prerequisites of a Cacti install and the basic tricks on how to deal with installing, patching, and upgrading Cacti.

Expect my full report on it in a later post!

Update: I forgot to mention you can also check out this free chapter excerpt: http://www.packtpub.com/files/5968-cacti-sample-chapter-4-creating-and-using-templates.pdf