Articles

Face painting and historical Web development

I spent my last two weekends working with ancient web technologies. Anne decided she wanted to update her Happy Faces web to attract more face painting business. I agreed to create a form for customers to inquire about rates and availability. The hosting service only offered Python 2.4,  CGI …

Karma means action

I not only hack on Launchpad, I use it everyday for my personal projects and for the 1100+ projects I maintain as a registry administrator. I see hundreds of pages each week where my first question is "what has this user or project done recently"? Launchpad cannot easily tell me …

Recovering Ubuntu after an OS X Lion upgrade

I updated my Macbook to OS X Lion over the weekend and had a nasty scare. I could not boot back to Ubuntu, nor could I see my Ubuntu partition. That is the moment where you think, "Is everything baked up? What will I loose?". I remember that I switched …

A Practical Guide to Bug Triage

Or: "Why I don't classify bugs as medium"

The process of triaging issues (bugs, features, and tasks) has one crucial principle: Prioritise the work according to need and certainty.

Work is prioritised because there are not enough engineers to do all the work. Some features will never be completed, some …

Encouraging contribution on the project page

I met with Vish at UDS-N to discuss encouraging contributions to the One Hundred Paper Cuts project. The issues he raised demonstrate that the page design is not meeting the requirements we set in the Launchpad 3.0 UI designs. You will see a common layout in Launchpad pages where …

Launchpad Answers at UDS-n

While attending UDS-n, I was invited to two separate and contradictory conversations about Launchpad Answers.

Jorge Castro is considering Ask Ubuntu as the official Ubuntu service for managing user questions. It is a nice service. The question refining and member reputation features are compelling. I think there are two changes …