Shane Fagan » google

Why 2010 has been a great year so far for open source

Shane — Thu, 20 May 2010 11:25:56 +0000

2010 so far has been awesome.
1. Ubuntu 10.04 was released and its the best Ubuntu yet.
2. Google released WebM (Vorbis+VP8).
3. Steam began porting their engine to Linux.
4. WebGL and other HTML5 technologies are gaining ground.

What all this means is the barrier is lowering and lowering for full open source adoption. With all these great technologies in the browser and on the desktop that support our open source efforts we can rest assured that regular users can move away from proprietary software. Oh and porting steam to Linux lowers the barrier to moving to Linux so although its proprietary software itself it helps users to not get regressions from moving and we should be very very happy about any help we get.

The innovations in web technologies support everyone but mainly this support helps Linux.
If everything on the web is inter-operable then why pay for an crap OS? If all the awesome innovations happening is open source how can Microsoft compete? The answer is even with all of its money Microsoft cant compete long term and with this web innovation happening no one should pay for an OS.

The challenge to Ubuntu is to leverage web apis on the desktop but build fantastic desktop applications for the times when you aren’t connected. Integrating the web into the Ubuntu desktop experience is the challenge for the next 10 years.

Packaging and ppa firsts (for me at least)

Shane — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 02:31:53 +0000

Today I spent the day messing about with local packaging and manually uploading to my ppa. I had already done some ppa and packaging using quickly but its a lot easier than I thought to do it manually. So what I ended up with is jorge’s chromium google apps package but one that works with chrome from google itself. You can find it in my ppa and the code for it is in my bzr. Oh and I found out something cool, apt url works in chrome (dont ask me how it just does and it doesnt work in the omnibar) Try it out here if you want.
Update: just realized that it uses xdg-open to open the link which explains why apturl works. Its still awesome that google got it working.

Oh OGG when will it be your time….?

Shane — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:56:42 +0000

I’m an optimist, specifically for ubuntu and the open source/free software world. One thing that puzzles me is OGG Theora and Vorbis. We see Wikimedia (Wikipedia, wikidictonary…etc) using OGG technologies as well as mozilla, google and opera embracing it. It is included by default in nearly all linux distributions (I say nearly all because I cant think of any that dont but id say some don’t have it). They are the only freely distributable codecs around.

So why am I still unsure about OGG being used worldwide as the standard for audio/video files?
1. It wont be standardized as part of HTML5
2. MP3 although outdated are still installed on more devices sold on the market.
3. No big company is pushing its adoption
4. Even people who support free software have no reason to encode their library into free formats.
5. The ubuntu one music store (going by the meeting at the UDS) more than likely wont offer OGGs as a download option.
6. Google bought On2, so they might push VP8 to the main stage by using it in Google Chrome (the browser and the OS) and on Youtube as embedded HTML5 video.

I think at the moment more can be done to encourage the use of OGGs, comparing sizes and emphasizing the free part is all well and good but it doesn’t push it to the users. Its an aggressive market, MP3, MP4 and WMA all are pushed to the users by massive companies like Apple and Microsoft. Ubuntu, Fedora, Open Solaris, FreeBSD and Opensuse (there are loads i’m not going to list them all) all distribute OGG codecs but it just seems that not many users use them and thats a shame.

Me personally I don’t use them because I have way too much music and video to convert and there wouldn’t be much point because if I convert it all I will have a degradation in quality because each codec removes different parts of the tracks. Plus I have an iPod and that doesn’t play OGGs. (before anyone asks I looked into it and I couldn’t find any OGG players in any of the shops I visited in Ireland)

One thing I have to say as a great side note is that FLAC is the most used lossless codec around and that is such a awesome example of how a free software product can dominate just because its great.

Google chrome weirdness with basic html

Shane — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 02:37:42 +0000

I just looked at my site and google chome doesnt understand height or width tags for images. I only use it for the ubuntu logo for my link to the ubuntu website but it looks really large in Chrome. Firefox and internet explorer handle dimension changes fine but chrome has some trouble.
On the website front I added a cool timeline for (almost) everything I do online looks nice and its really easy to set up.

Update: Alls fixed now, I was using the native dimensions to set the size for me. Firefox and IE both managed to use the image small but chrome must render the image differently on the page so it wasnt the height and width tags after all. I was just being dumb.

Theora and Vorbis, HTML and Google

Shane — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:38:39 +0000

What an interesting company Google is they announced that they are buying On2. On2 is the company that provided the basis for OGG Theora by open sourcing the VP3 codec. Google, Mozilla and Opera all supported the addition of Theora to be included in the HTML 5 standard because they are free (Libre and Price) but were shot down by Apple and Nokia. Have a look here for more info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg_controversy
Nokia’s opposition confuses me because they support Qt and the KDE project and they are open source. Apple support H.264 and dont want to use anything but H.264. Microsoft are even more interesting to me because they are completely missing from the HTML 5 discussion altogether. Maybe they dont need anything new because they will just use silverlight (and their users will use adobe flash)
For anyone who hasnt read the spec for HTML 5 look here.
Here is the quote that is causing all the trouble:

It would be helpful for interoperability if all browsers could support the same codecs. However, there are no known codecs that satisfy all the current players: we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies. This is an ongoing issue and this section will be updated once more information is available.

If Google open sources the On2 codecs or simply offers an assurance that they wont sue for patents (This seems kinda similar to Microsoft’s community promise) there wont be anything stopping Theoras inclusion in HTML 5. The even more interesting thing is this http://www.youtube.com/html5. It is a HTML 5 prototype of youtube using the video tag with an mp4 file.
So Google is looking into replacing the Flash video with something different and maybe buying On2 will free Theora from the “submarine patent risk”. Its already been included in Firefox and its coming soon on Chrome and Opera so its gaining ground but still its a shame that Internet Exporer (Which is the default for Windows and is the most used in the market) and Safari (Which is the default for Mac) dont support it.
Google is a great supporter of Open Source so hopefully we will hear some good news from Google soon about Theora.
The only thing I want is to not use Adobe Flash anymore its way too heavy and should die with the introduction of not only the video tag but also using Java Script and SVG files.
On the Ubuntu front we should really make use of HTML 5 in http://video.ubuntu.com/ and http://screencasts.ubuntu.com/

Update: Found this post to the W3 mailing list from a Microsoft employee have a look http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2009Aug/0389.html

Google Wave

Shane — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 12:54:28 +0000

I got an invite to test out wave in the sandbox. Its very good but the main thing I have to say is it has a very steep learning curve. You can use it (kinda) just like an email but thats not the only functionality that wave has. The collaboration between people on the wave is the main idea. I think that would be the most useful for me personally because I do a lot on mailing lists and that could be done in a much easier way using wave I think.
Like for brainstorming an idea, an example would be the ayatana mailing list. I think that would be an excellent candidate for using wave. They could have a collaborative discussion, polls, embed pictures and videos of their ideas, this would make the discussion a lot more creative I think.
Then for ubuntu-docs for the docs team they can put whatever document (system docs and wiki pages…etc) they are working on in a wave and invite a few more people to help in the drafting which would help a lot.
Its all in the preview video on http://wave.google.com/ Its still not perfect yet but the bugs are only small ones.
I like it though and I have checked the network usage in system monitor and its not too bad. I look forward to using it full time because its very impressive.
Oh ive already got rickrolled in a wave