jonathan carter

On the road again

// October 28th, 2011 // No Comments » // Free Software, Jonathan

Some updates form the world of Jonathan…

• LTSP BTS2011: Yesterday Marc, Stéphane and myself drove down to Southwest Harbour in Maine for the LTSP By The Sea 2011 hackfest. It wasn’t a long road trip, but it’s been fun, we picked up 4 other people at Bangor airport and the minivan we’re hiring was like a party bus from the airport to the harbour. The hackfest itself has also been really fun so far and productive, I’ll blog about that some time.
• UDS Precice: On Sunday I’m off to Orlando, Florida for the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 12.04. It will be my first time in Orlando, and the first time I get to attend a UDS in the US. Previously my visa got approved too late so I couldn’t attend, this time I received a 10 year visa so I should be fine for a long time, I’m really happy and relieved about that.
• Holidays and stuff: The week after UDS I’m back in Canada for a week to organise some things and report back at the office about what happened at BTS/UDS and then I’m off to South Africa for 3 months. I’ll be working from there for the period and also taking most of my year’s holidays during the end of December and early January. I’m the best man for a wedding and will be organising a road trip for the bachelors party, my friend in South Africa also got my motorbike fixed so we might end up going there by bike, the weather should be really good around then.
• Back in Sherbs: On 15 February, just after my 30th birthday, I’ll be back in Sherbrooke. I’ll probably end up having some form of birthday party in both countries. After that… the adventure continues!

For that kind money…

// October 12th, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Free Software, Project Mayhem, Rants

“Damage Control”

I just read an article on CNN about Americans complaining that their bank fees are too high. It’s not unique to them, the same thing is happening here in Canada. Last week I got notification from Bank of Montreal about their price increases. The ad on the Internet banking site made it sound very pleasant, so much so that I decided to take a peek at the PDF to see what’s actually changing. The details were shocking, they are implementing a heavy increase in banking fees in December. I don’t have many services at BMO so the debit card fees will affect me most. I decided to innocently tweet something about it…

I didn’t give it much thought again after that. Today I received this tweet reply from BMO:

“please feel free to DM me your questions and concerns”

Really? What kind of half-assed reply is that?  I’ve put my concern out clearly and concisely in my tweet. What exactly do you want me to direct message you? I doubt they really have any intention of addressing my concerns. I highly doubt they’ll actually reduce any fees just for me. It seems that all they want is for me to DM them anything I have to say about their pricing instead of publicly saying it. Perhaps they should’ve read today’s Seth Godin before composing their tweet.

Come on, you can afford it

For the kind of money the banks charge us, I’m kind of disappointed at how cheapskate their marketing is. I would at least expect some creativity or some form of trying to win people over, or maybe even some kind of decent justification (I guess they just don’t have any and they know it). Instead all we get is “We have a right to make profit too” (Bank of America). How lame is that?

Gnome Summit Montréal

// October 8th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Education, Free Software

A Gnome summit just 2 hours away from where I live? Awesome!

A few weeks ago I noticed that the Gnome summit that usually takes place in Boston is happening in Montréal this year!  Being a Gnome user for more than a decade and having provided support for it to many people since then, I thought it would be great to pop in for a few hours and see what it’s about. The first session is just about to start and I hope to be back tomorrow as well.

Gnome Stuff in Edubuntu

In Edubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) that’s being released next week, we’ve had to drop Nanny, Pessulus and Sabayon. That’s quite painful since they were great tools, but they didn’t work so well with all the Gnome 3 stuff and they don’t seem to be very actively maintained upstream at the moment. I would’ve gotten involved with those tools if I wasn’t already over-committed, I even considered doing something from scratch that integrates with the Gnome System Settings manager. My goal for now is just to get to know some people and learn more about the Gnome project and its goals. Maybe in a few months my situation will be different and I can commit some time to it. There’s really a need for administrating what desktop systems look like, how they work and how they are locked down in schools and other large deployments.

In Edubuntu, we’ve had to make some tough choices regarding the Gnome desktop since the 11.04 release. We want to keep Edubuntu a great system for schools, but also not stray too far from what a default Ubuntu system gives you. For 11.04 (natty) we decided not to use Unity by default, but provide it as an option in the installer so that early adopters could give it a try. For 11.10, we now install Unity by default and provide the Gnome fallback session as an optional installation. Our aim for Edubuntu is to support Gnome fallback mode as well as Unity. I’m really glad to see that Debian has decided to support Gnome fallback mode as an equal to Gnome shell in Wheezy without having to activate it in system settings first. It would be nice if Gnome upstream could stop calling it the ‘fallback’, but I guess they want to push Gnome Shell as the default as far as possible. Happy hacking everyone!