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There’s no end to geeky computer operating system release parties, it seems.

Debian Wheezy is being released on the weekend of 4-5 May 2013, and KWLUG will be holding a party after the regular meeting:

What: Kitchener-Waterloo Debian Wheezy Release Party
When: Monday, 6 May 2013 at 9:00pm (after the regular meeting from 7:00pm to 9:00pm) iCal 4
Where: St. John’s Kitchen, 97 Victora Street North, Kitchener, Ontario Map 4
Bring: Party snack or beverage
Info: Follow the mailing list discussion (April, May)
Online: IRC channel #kwlug on Freenode Web Chat

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In Guelph the Diyode makerspace is the venue for another Ubuntu 13.04 release party:

What: Guelph Raring Ringtail Release Party
When: Friday, 10 May 2013 7:00pm to 10:00pm iCal 3
Where: Diyode Community Workshop, Unit B, 71 Wyndham St. S, Guelph, Ontario Map 3
Online: #ubuntu-ca on Freenode Web Chat
Registration: Guelph Raring Ringtail Release Party on Ubuntu Canada LoCo Events

The KW chapter of Ubuntu Canada is having a release party for the latest version of Ubuntu, named “Raring Ringtail” on Thursday, 25 April 2013 at 7:00pm at the Kwartzlab Makerspace.

You’ll meet Ubuntu people from all over Canada during the IRC meeting from 7:00pm to 8:00pm; the Kwartzlab Radio team will be recording a podcast at 8:30pm; and there will be a live installation demonstration on a fancy new Lenovo laptop with UEFI and SecureBoot. And, of course, there will be cake, deviled eggs, and we may order out for pizza…

What: KW Raring Ringtail Release Party
When: Thursday, 25 April 2013 7:00pm – 10:00pm EDT iCal 1
Where: Kwartzlab, 33 Kent Avenue, Kitchener, Ontario Map 1
Online: #ubuntu-ca on Freenode Web Chat
Registration: KW Release Party on Ubuntu Canada LoCo Events (Registration is optional, but appreciated)

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There is also a Toronto Raring Ringtail Release Party. Join Michael Kaulbach for a bottomless cup of coffee and free Ubuntu cupcakes!

What: Toronto Raring Ringtail Release Party
When: Thursday, 25 April 2013 8:00pm – 11:00pm EDT iCal 2
Where: Alio Lounge, 108 Dundas Street West, Toronto, Ontario Map 2
Online: #ubuntu-ca on Freenode Web Chat
Registration: Toronto Release Party on Ubuntu Canada LoCo Events (Registration is optional, but appreciated)

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And there are rumours afoot of a Raring Ringtail Release Party in Guelph. More details as I unearth them….

Updated 26 April 2013: It’s here!

What: Guelph Raring Ringtail Release Party
When: Friday, 10 May 2013 7:00pm to 10:00pm iCal 3
Where: Diyode Community Workshop, Unit B, 71 Wyndham St. S, Guelph, Ontario Map 3
Online: #ubuntu-ca on Freenode Web Chat
Registration: Guelph Raring Ringtail Release Party on Ubuntu Canada LoCo Events

Alan Marshall, known online as the Elmira Advocate, recently blogged about the lack of data transparency:

What I do know is this. Environmental data is not shared with the public. What I do know about Waterloo’s water scares me but perhaps not as much as what I don’t know.

The Region of Waterloo is gradually making its collected data available to the public in Open Data sets. This means that citizens can use and re-use the data for mapping, tracking trends, and correlating it with other data sources. The data is licensed specifically to encourage its re-use, not restrict it.

The Region of Waterloo data sets are available at http://www.regionofwaterloo.ca/en/regionalGovernment/OpenDataHome.asp

There is a citizens’ group called OpenDataWR that encourages governments to make their collected data available in standardized, re-usable formats. They meet occasionally to work on new applications utilizing Open Data resources.

OpenDataWR recently held a hackathon, where groups of people worked on new projects that makes uses of Open Data. It was mostly computer programmers at the hackathon, but we need advocates like Alan with deep knowledge of the data, science, and the meaning of the data so that the programmers can write better applications. We also need publicists to make the existence of Open Data more widely known, as well as the applications that make use of it. We need lobbyists to advocate for more Open Data from governments, and from commercial organizations such as Conestoga Rovers. For instance, the University of Waterloo has an Open Data project as well.

As far as I know, Woolwich Township doesn’t have an Open Data project, or even a policy about making its data available in open formats. For example, even something so fundamental as the Woolwich Council meeting calendar is not made available in a standard calendar format, so you can’t easily add Council meetings to your own iPad or Outlook calendar.

It would be nice to have an Open Data advocacy group in Woolwich Township. There’s certainly enough data, just no good way to get at it.

Call to arms!

If anyone is interested in setting up an Open Data Woolwich Township citizens’ group to encourage and guide the Township into opening its data, please leave a comment below or contact me at bjonkman@sobac.com.

–Bob.

On International OpenDataDay four teams of hackers from OpenDataWR gathered at Kwartzlab to work on Food Premise Inspection Data, modelling new transit routes and route changes with GTFS data, improving the server for the Catchr transit app, a proof-of-concept pushbutton app for Android, and creating a Get Map button for OpenStreetMap in the Thunderbird Lightning add-in.

 

William and I worked on the Get Map button. Although we had hoped to create some working code, we got only as far as making a mock-up of Lightning’s Edit Event screen:

 

The first hurdle we ran into is that Lightning source code is kept in a Mercurial repository. Although William was familiar with Perforce (another code revision system), I haven’t used Mercurial until now. And the repository contained all of Thunderbird, Firefox, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla addins. We certainly didn’t want to clone the entire Mozilla code base! So William found the Lightning tarball, which I unpacked in a new folder. This let us poke around the source files to find where our new code should go.

Then we found that Lightning isn’t straight Javascript, it’s mostly XUL. XUL is close enough to XHTML, CSS and DTD files that we could figure out what needed to be done. But we had a limited amount of time, and I didn’t want to spend it waiting for source code to build. So I created a new profile in Thunderbird, installed a fresh copy of the Lightning add-in, and we hacked at the installed files directly. This gave us instant feedback on the changes we made, just by restarting Thunderbird and running Lightning. Some of the changes were in plain text files, but others needed to be made to files in JAR format. One of those was the localized language file. We weren’t sure which language file we were using,
en-GB

or
en-US

. Of course, we picked the wrong one to start with, and spend maybe two hours trying to debug a misleading error message about a missing entity definition while we were working on the wrong file.

But it all turned out OK in the end. Now we need to take the work we did on the installed files and replicate it on the source files from the Mercurial repository, properly build Lightning from source, and offer our changes to the Mozilla Calendar project. And, once we’ve got it working, we’ll make the changes available on this site too.

–Bob and William.

Jon Newton writes:

Goodbye Twitter

Twitter […] has become a hard-core marketing vehicle, with all that implies.
[…]
With several hicups and false I’ve been posting on identi.ca for quite a while; but I can’t see any point in continuing with Twitter.

On identi.ca I can at least be fairly certain people are following because they’re genuinely interested

That’s a principled, honourable, and brave move.

I’m as strong an advocate of Free, Libre, and Open Source Software as anyone, but I’m still making use of Twitter because of the network effects — there are so many people I find interesting on Twitter that the pain of using it is less than the benefit. On the other hand, the people I find interesting don’t use Identi.ca because there aren’t enough other interesting people there…

Of course, I’m not seeing much of the promotional material on Twitter because I use other software such as Pidgin and Mustard to view the messages. More F/LOSS applications to keep me safe from commercialism.

Another reason I probably won’t abandon Twitter altogether is because I’m also an advocate of keeping a (low) profile on the mainstream services (such as Facebook and Google Plus), simply to prevent others from acquiring my username and hijacking my identity. So I only post to Identi.ca, but Identi.ca sends those messages to Twitter automatically, and again I don’t have to deal with Twitter’s rampant commercialism.

Hopefully your good example will encourage me (and others) to take the next step and reject Twitter completely. You’ve given me something to think about.

–Bob.

No Twitter Logo is based on twitter-logo by The Daring Librarian, modified by Bob Jonkman. Used and re-licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

This is so simply and beautifully stated:

Simon Phipps:

“Free” is the ethical construct; “Open” is the practical method; “liberty” is the shared objective.

 

18 November 2012 from web at Southampton, England, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in context

Simon Phipps is President of the Open Source Initiative, blogs at Wild Webmink and writes a column at Infoworld.

The Ontario government has announced it is shutting down the ServiceOntario kiosks.

Closing the kiosks won’t do any good if the web site is no better secured. ServiceOntario had control over the hardware and software running on the kiosks, but they have no control over the computers people use to access the ServiceOntario web site. User PCs will have all sorts of malware running on them, and malusers can far more easily spend time breaking into a web site than a kiosk. Unless ServiceOntario has much better security on their web site, it is far more vulnerable than a kiosk.

In his article Government to discontinue ServiceOntario kiosks, Sameer Vasta asks if the ServiceOntario web site is ready to pick up the slack. His conclusion is yes, and although the web site user experience could be improved, he considers closing the kiosks a prudent move. But if the kiosk interface was so much easier to use, then the web site could use that interface too. Security isn’t created by the user interface — security needs to be built into the servers. Malusers are unlikely to use the web interface to launch their attacks; they’ll have more sophisticated tools to try to break into the servers.

Of course, since the ServiceOntario web site was already in place while the kiosks were operational it has been a potential vector for attack all along. Closing the kiosks doesn’t increase that vulnerability. And the vulnerability that prompted the government to shut down the kiosks was card skimming, which is not an issue on a Web site accessed from home. But shutting down a fully managed kiosk to be replaced by home users’ PCs that are full of malware does not look like a prudent move to me.

However, it should be cheaper to manage security on one web site than on 72 kiosks. The government reports that shutting the kiosks will save taxpayers about $6.3 million in one-time upgrading costs and $2.2 million in annual maintenance costs. The Star reports that Minister of Government Services Harinder Takhar says the kiosks cost $4 million to deploy, and it will cost $250,000 to remove them.

And shutting down the kiosks has one other benefit: If a security breach occurs as a result of using our own computers then ServiceOntario has successfully shifted blame, hasn’t it? Surely there will be a disclaimer in the fine print on the website somewhere!

–Bob.

The picture above shows a ServiceOntario kiosk with a notice indicating the kiosk is temporarily shut down. A new notice has been posted, which reads:

ServiceOntario Kiosks Are Now Permanently Closed.

After a thorough investigation into the safety and security issues surrounding ServiceOntario kiosks, it has been decided to permanently shut down the network.

All former kiosk services are conveniently available online, including:

• License plate sticker renewal
• Address change
• Driver abstract

Fermeture permanente des kiosques ServiceOntario.

À la suite d’une enquête approfondie sur les problèmes de sécurité survenus dans les kiosques ServiceOntario, il a été décidé de fermer le réseau de façon permanente.

Tous les services anciennement founis dal les kiosques son offerts en ligne, notamment les suivants:

• Renouvellement de la vignette d’immatriculation
• Changement d’addresse
• Résumé de dossier de conducteur.

We look forward to serving you.
For these services, and more than 40 other online services, or for a complete list of our locations and available services, please visit ServiceOntario.ca

Au plaisir de vous servir.
Pour ces services, et plus de 40 autres services en ligne, ou la liste complète de nos centres et de leurs services, visitez ServiceOntario.ca

In spite of the controversy, the Windows 8 Modern Interface will do just fine. Some people are saying that Microsoft is making a mistake by radically changing the Windows user interface, and that people will not be able to get used to it. I don’t think so.

When I teach Windows to people who have never used a computer, they learn everything from how to hold a mouse, pointing and clicking, dragging and dropping, opening and closing windows, to using applications after about an hour of instruction and a couple of hours of practice. Lots of people are still hesitant, but after a three-hour class they have functional computer skills.

The same is true when I teach Microsoft Word for beginners. After about an hour of instruction and a couple of hours of practice, they can create a letter or write a story, colour the text, change the font, and format paragraphs. They may not be proficient enough to join a secretarial pool, but they have functional word processing skills.

I’ve also taught Microsoft Word to people taking the Microsoft Office Specialist certification. Often these people are familiar with older versions of Microsoft Word (which used toolbars and menus) but now they’re learning the new interface, which uses the Ribbon. After about an hour of instruction and a couple of hours of practice, they can find most of the functions to colour, size and format text. They may need many more hours of instruction and practice to pass the certification exam, but they’ve adapted to the new interface.

So, by analogy, I expect that people first introduced to computers on Windows 8 will take about an hour of instruction and a couple of hours of practice to become competent with the Windows 8 Modern Interface, and people with experience on Windows XP and Windows 7 will take about an hour of instruction and a couple of hours of practice to become competent on the Windows 8 Modern Interface. The difference? People used to previous versions will grumble and complain about it a lot more. I’ve done that myself; after spending well over two decades using toolbars and menus I still occasionally flounder to find the equivalents in the Ribbon. It is frustrating to unlearn old habits, or to learn new things. But Microsoft is not just making changes for the sake of making changes. The Windows 8 Modern Interface works perfectly well on desktop computers, and much better on touchscreen computers, tablets and phones. The old desktop interface that requires scrolling and clicking with a mouse just doesn’t work with a touchscreen. But for people who don’t want to make the switch the old desktop interface is still available.

While it may be funny to see people using Windows 8 for the first time without any instruction, it’s not a very real scenario. Someone who has never used a computer is unlikely to buy one without getting help, either from the retailer, a community course, or helpful friends and relatives. People who have used a computer before may struggle a bit, but if they already know the basics (scrolling, clicking, dragging) they will figure it out after a couple of hours of practice.

–Bob.

Update 27 Oct 2012: At the Windows 8 Launch Party it was made clear that the word “Metro” is no longer to be used; it is now called the “Windows 8 Modern Interface”. So I’ve updated this post.

The Kitchener-Waterloo chapter of the Ubuntu Canadian Team had a wonderful Ubuntu Release Party today. Laurel Russwurm baked a cake and I made some devilled eggs:

Quantal Cake and Devilled Eggs

If you squint a little you can make out the Ubuntu logos…

Ralph brought the official Ubuntu banner:

At the Kitchener Quantal Quetzal Ubuntu Release Party

That’s Jeff, Sergiane, Raul, Ralph, Karim, Bob, and Henrique.

Then it was time to cut the cake:

Cutting cake is serious business!

And the second shift finishes it off:

The rest of the partygoers

That’s David, Gord, Bob, Ralph, and Darcy.

Many thanx to Paul for hosting and The Working Centre for the use of St. John’s Kitchen!

Pictures taken by Laurel L. Russwurm and used under a CC-BY license

Pictures!

Hello Everybodee! I’m happy to announce that we’ll be having the Kitchener-Waterloo Ubuntu Release Party for the version named Quantal Quetzal, v12.10 at St. John’s Kitchen this Saturday.

The best parties always happen in the kitchen. Although we won’t have access to the cooking facilities, bring along some snack food to share, maybe some blank DVDs, and your laptop or netbook.

Here’s the details:

Saturday, 20 October 2012 from 4:00pm to 8:00pm iCal

St. John’s Kitchen Map
97 Victoria Street North
Kitchener, Ontario Canada

Automobile parking is available through Heit Lane in the Worth A Second Look parking lot; bicyles can be locked to railings at the entrance to St. John’s Kitchen.

Event link: http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-ca/2029/detail/
(Registration is optional, but appreciated)