Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

Making a splash

As you probably know by now, even if you’re not following the karmic development closely, Ubuntu has gained new splash screen software called xsplash.  This is the hard work of Cody Russell and Ken VanDine of the Ubuntu Desktop Experience team.
There’s been some press coverage of this already, and various comments from different people raising [...]

The fallacy of high-level languages

There’s been a meme going around the open source community for a while now.  That programming in C is somehow dirty, distasteful and worst-of-all inefficient compared to programming in a high-level language such as C# or Python.
Its detractors will tell you how it takes much longer it takes to program anything in C.  They’ll point [...]

Ubuntu Desktop Developer

Continuing my mission to put together a kick-ass team to develop the Ubuntu Desktop, the following position is now up on the website:
Posting Date & ID: September 2007 UDD
Job Location: Your home with broadband. Some international travel will be required.
Job Summary: To adapt and develop the GNOME desktop to improve the Ubuntu user experience.
Key responsibilities [...]

The Edgy Dance

Last week, a few of us gathered at Canonical’s London offices to oversee the final release preparations. This basically consists of testing the various candidate CD images and performing both install and upgrade tests on them.
As you can imagine, three people performing repeated tests of edgy means that the fabled startup sound got many, [...]

Parallel Peer Programming

Here at Canonical Towers we have several staff who worship at the altar of Extreme Programming, and as such many of the methodologies and rituals prescribed by that religion find their way into our day-to-day working practices. A few of these came together in an interesting way a few weeks ago, and it was [...]