Muthajoeshawin’ Snakes on a Plane

I daresay that I think our beloved Beagle Boy has gone Bananas.

SoaP is a movie so powerful, I daresay it will bring a generation together. Moreso than 9/11, this will define the quintesential moment of our time.

Comparing to Citizen Kane? Joe, have you no respect for fine art? Were Citizen Cain any measure to SoaP it would still be known today as Citizen Muthaf’n Kane. The best Orson Wells had to offer was “Rosebud.” There’s certainly none of Samuel Jackson’s wry subtlety in that, I’ll say.

Congratulations to Brother Jono

Brother Bacon has recently accepted a position as community manager for Ubuntu. His description details a lot of focus on the developer side of community, which is very different from my role at Novell. Jono is an outstanding person for the job, and I think the Ubuntu community very fortunate to have him, so I also congratulate Canonical on a fine choice.

Shave Your Bacon

[Aug 3, this post is the 30th 24th 17th 15th 11th hottest (English language) post on WordPress.com. People are fascinated by Brother Jono's chin!]
Alternate Titles for this post:

• “Joe No-Beard”
• “My Little Slice of Bacon”
• “Chin. Not Beard.”

Synopsis.

For those of you who missed LugRadio Live, I can attest to it having been, simultaneously, the most fun and most intense community: Linux event that I have every been attended…the kind of event from which you really want a souvenir.

Some took home new skills and techniques. Some took home Linux media to try out. Some took home severe hangovers.

Two SUSE/Novell adherents took home a Sony PSP, 1 GB memory module and game. One person took home a 60GB iPod. Two took home a very cool Swiss Army wristwatch. (Well, they didn’t take them home so much as won a commitment from me to send them these items. There was as DHL shipping delay that prevented the goods from arriving at the show.) These fine swag items were all courtesy of your pals at Novell. (That last sentence is what we call “pandering.”)

What did Erin and I take home from LugRadio Live? For a £55 donation to Amnesty International, we got to take home Jono Bacon’s beard. In the LR forums, the lovely JetLag Jen linked to the flickr photo pool for the event. Here are some de-bearding highlights.

Before.

Assessment & Preparation.

The Deed.

A Souvenir.

Jono, Without. (Aq, too.)

Your Right Reverend, With.

A Girl Named Spike

I’ll be quite happy to see the statistical spike fall off my blog hit statistics on Monday evening. One extreme day managed to flatline everything I have posted since. Perspective will soon be restored.

The Man who is Killing Linux

I finally found him.

This man, an Intel employee living somewhere around Portland, Oregon, joined us for dinner one evening during GUADEC.

I think I need not impress upon my readers exactly why and how he is single-handedly killing Linux.

___
[for those who don't get the joke]

Comments Re-opened

My apologies to everyone who has been frustrated by the “login required” for comments. I finally found the obscure setting and turned it off.

So, please comment, comment, comment.

By the way, I’m on vacation until July 17. I’ll try to moderate and approve during that time, but there will be little Internet access where I’m going.

Macros and Bacon

Pursuant to my last two posts, in order of earliest to latest:

Excel Macros:
The reply back from Michael Meeks about the first file submission response to my “Excel macros” post was, as expected, genuine and appreciative. One Robin Small of Fresno, California, submitted a .xls file used for tabletop gaming. Meeks’ enthusiastic reply:

“This is a great test ‑ we found a new ‘Like’ operator that we are (apparently) missing‑ which is cool; exactly the type of thing we’re looking to find & fix.”

But before saying that, he made sure to redirect the credit I had paid him to where it was actually due.

“My Virtues? It’s all Noel’s work [Noel Power] you know :‑)”

See? Gracious. And, following Michael’s fine example: Noel, I apologize for attributing your achievments to Michael. Please forgive my error.

Banshee, Hold the Bacon:
Unfortunately we must now head on over to the opposite end of the spectrum. What’s the opposite of “gracious,” anyway? How about, “Surly and ham-handed?” That about hits it on the head.

Of course, you can probably see that this is building toward Bacon’s unfortunate reply to my courageous public disclosure about how I had deceived him for a longer period of time than use in the immediate joke at hand would require. [If I ever contruct another sentence like that again, shoot me.] I even went so far as to admonish the entire world for hating him. There really ought to be some kind of medal. But alas, there is nothing of the sort, as his reply demonstrates. It reads:

“In addition to such crimes against reason, he denies his part in the grand-bacon-conspiracy (to which he has worked with Messrs Bockovich, Cooper and Nocera), and has also participated in the act of senselessly launching non-descript chunks of fruit at salad dodging GUADEC participants with orange hair. Is there no limit to the depths this man will stoop to?”

First of all, Brother Jono, I believe that the grammatically correct question is, “Is there no limit to the depths to which this man will stoop?” [ready...aim...] Secondly, what with your immediate readiness to hurl barbarous invective at the solitary person on this planet who does not actually hate you, well, it’s little wonder that everyone (except me) hates you. [fire!]

I suppose now that I have to get Aaron Bocktoverfest to testify for me.

Everyone Hates Jono Bacon

Except me.

But it could be construed that I hate Jono Bacon. See, it went kind of like this. When Jono complained that the mighty Aaron Bockover had committed code to Banshee specifically to disallow music feeds containing the letters “jono,” I mused aloud, “I wonder who could have put him up to that?” To which Jono replied with a narrowing glare, “You bastard.” I was quite satisified with my deceptive coup, figuring that it would sort itself out in due time.

Now, I find that Jono is still under the impression that I was part of some vast cabal who put Aaron up to his crime. So I’m here to set the record straight: I did not put Aaron Bockover up to his deed of inspiredly brilliant subterfuge.

Unlike the rest of you people, I do not hate Jono Bacon.

[This debate continues.]

I am Klin-Tohn

So I says to myself, I says, "Alright, Mauricio, I'll play your silly game."

(Mauricio is one of the PlanetSUSE bloggers who apparently aspires to gas his own people.)

As it turns out I'm like…

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

Can somebody please tell me whether I'm upset or pleased at this news?

In other news…Scoble has returned to the top

Alas, my 15 minutes of unexpected fame is now entering its inevitable senescence.

/me sighs wistfully.

SuSamurai Chameleon for my Custom Laptop…

I couldn't hold back any longer. I wanted to keep it a surprise for when it's actually sprayed on my laptop. But it's too cool.

I'm getting 2500 window clings made for shows I go to. I'll have some at various events… GUADEC and UKUUG? Maybe. LugRadio Live and LinuxWorld San Francisco? Definitely.

Show Me That New GNOME Main Menu

[Update: Please refer to "Show Me That Updated GNOME Main Menu" to see the latest info on the Main Menu, including a video.]

[Audio: There is an interview with developer Jimmy Krehl about this topic on Novell Open Audio.]

[Follow-up: I have posted a follow-on called "Customizing the Main Menu" to answer some questions posted on digg.com.]

[Note: Since tuxmachines.org seems to have picked up this post, I should clarify up front that I do not know whether this has been or will be accepted into the main source tree of gnome.org. This is just the menu that I have been showing in public demonstrations of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. The possible implication that it is indeed the stated direction of gnome.org is not intended. As I am heading to GUADEC next week, this clarification may spare me much flailing from many of my colleagues who are deeply invested in the health of the GNOME community. 21:46 MDT 17-06-06]

A lot of the people I have spoken to at various shows and events have wanted to see more of GNOME’s new Main Menu which Novell aims to deliver with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10. The newly overhauled navigation resulted from studies in Novell’s desktop usability labs. (See BetterDesktop.org for some of the information on the findings, methods, etc.) So let’s take a moment to examine it.

The menu is accessed from a single button, labelled “Computer.” There is no “My Computer” on the desktop, as our testing found that newer computer users expected anything but a file system browser to come up when they clicked on the one on Windows. We also found that having a name like “Start” (as Windows does) confuses users when presented with tasks like “shut down your computer.” Nevertheless, a lot of users look to the bottom left for a single all-access button. Hence the Computer button. That’s how the origins of the Computer button have been explained to me.

The Main Menu that pops up from the the Computer button contains:

• Search linked to Beagle
• System tools that offer the functions that users need most often
• Disk space and network connection status indicators
• A selector for “Favorite Applications”, “Recently Used Applications”, “Recent Documents”
• A “More Applications…” button which takes you to the Applications Browser that I showed in a recent post.

So, I provide two screens shots of the menu, one of Favorites, and the other of Recently Used Applications.

(Apologies about the layout. I have not had a chace to work out the kinks in my WordPress template.)

Revelling in Marketing

In related news to my previous post, and with uncanny timing, LugRadio's Matt Revell sends me a link to his article on Marketing Open Source and Free Software. In it, Revell does a good job at explaining the actual meaning of marketing, as well as well as its implications in the community of open source advocates.

Matt, you may enjoy some of Seth Godin's irreverence.

Advocacy. Not Marketing

While on the UK LUG Tour, Brother Bacon and I discussed effective open source advocacy from many different angles. Around that time, I started considerinng stripping "marketing" from my blog's title and using "advocacy" instead.

Yesterday, Martin Buckely called my attention to Jem Matzan 's claim that the nature of open source advocacy has changed. Or, rather, diminished.

Matzan's points about the two kinds of trolls is dead on the money. We have all seen the behavior types that Matzan identifies ("just use my preferred distro if you have a problem" bigot trolls, "i'll stop using this distro if I don't get some help" grifter trolls). But I disagree with Matzan's big premise about the decline in advocacy.

Trolls aren't advocates, effective or otherwise. Clearly, they are detrimental to advocacy because they put noise into the advocacy signal. Matzan makes that point well.

Counter to Matzan's eneral assertion, I say that advocacy is thriving. Planet Advocacy aggregates several the blogs of several open source advocates (including Yours Truly). FLOSS Weekly, Chris DiBona's franchise within Leo Laporte's TWiT.tv empire, follows open source well. LugRadio constantly looks at various angles of advocacy. The Linux Linux Tech Show valiantly broadcasts live weekly. Journalists like eWeek's Steven Vaughan-Nichols and Network World's Phil Hochmuth keep the media drumbeat going. Legends like Jon "Mad Dog" Hall are out there. I'll forget too many if I try to make a comprehensive list, so I conclude by saying that we should absolutely not forget the hundreds of Linux User Groups who tirelessly advocate at local and regional events all over the world.

So, maybe it's time to shed the marketing name from my blog's title. My work these days is more like advocacy anyway.

Catching up on The Linux Link Tech Show

And heard this awesome song.