Ubuntu 11.10: Oneiric Ocelot Party in Kitchener!

[The Oneiric Ocelot] Ubuntu 11.10–the Oneiric Ocelot–is set to release this week. As usual, we’re hosting a release party at Kwartzlab to celebrate.

Join us Saturday, October 15th at 4pm (till late) and celebrate the latest and greatest release of Ubuntu! Release parties are a fantastic opportunity to meet other Ubuntu users face to face. And, hey, it’s a good excuse for a party.

We’ll have cake, devilled eggs, commemorative collector’s CDs and a fast repository proxy to help with upgrades!

For any other Canadian Ubuntu users reading this, if you’re not in Kitchener-Waterloo (or Toronto) and there’s no party in your area, you should host one! Join the Ubuntu Canada mailing list and let us know where and when your party is. Tell your friends and post on local message boards. We’ll help do what we can to announce it to the Canadian Ubuntu community.

If you are in KW and want to help publicize the event, please print out some posters and paste them up around town.

Another election

It’s a provincial election time. I hate it when people say “Oh, there’s an election, but I just can’t bring myself to care.” But this time, I can kinda relate.

Thing is, I *do* care. There’s a lot of provincial stuff I care about. It’s just that from what I can tell, my local race is a foregone conclusion, I don’t think any of the candidates are awesome enough for me to feel like I should be personally sticking my neck out for any of them, and I’m a little bit annoyed with every one of them for one reason or another.

I actually mostly like the Liberal government’s record. I think the HST is a fantastic idea. I like green energy and I think they’ve been doing a reasonably good job of investing infrastructure. They’re taking credit for uploading services off of municipalities, which I think is a very good thing, but it’s taken them an awfully long time to do it, and they’re only just getting started at the end of their second term.

I also don’t like aspects of the campaign they’re running, but it’s not like any of the rest are much better. I’m really annoyed about the G20, but it’s not been an election issue, other than some noises from the NDP, and as there’s been no inquiry, I have no idea how much of that to lay at the feet of the province.

I would like to see people talking about building a new deal for cities, creating a sustainable funding model to get them less dependent on property taxes, which create perverse incentives and disproportionately hurt the elderly, of whom there will be many more in the near future. Other than talk of uploading and downloading, we aren’t getting any of that. And that’s thinking way too small.

I’d like to hear more about public transit infrastructure than just the Liberals patting themselves on the back for things like the LRT and the NDP promising to freeze fares (with no discernible plan to fund ridership growth).

I’d like to hear actual *innovative* ideas about how to solve Ontario’s problems. That’s probably too much to hope for.

So I don’t know. I’ll probably vote Liberal. I’m not a huge fan of the candidate, but I’m not a huge fan of any of the candidates. Not even the Greens. That just leaves me with my [algorithm](http://www.flyingsquirrel.ca/index.php/2008/09/08/ugh-election/).

Ubuntu Global Jam in Kitchener-Waterloo

Kwartzlab is hosting Ubuntu Waterloo‘s Global Jam a week from Saturday (Sept. 2).

{ first jam / premier bœuf }

Along with the usual upgrade and install testing, bug triage, documentation work and so on, Ralph has a project idea. We’re going to run a hackathon to build a new GUI packaging tool, starting with the relatively straight-forward process of upgrading an existing package to the latest version.

So if you’re interested in learning about packaging, GUI development in Qt or Ubuntu development in general, be sure to come by!

If development isn’t your thing, we still need lots of people trying out Oneiric Ocelot on their hardware and submitting any bugs they might find.

Come out and see how you can contribute to make Ubuntu better!

Hi, Planet!

[ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED: Ubuntu Membership]As of last night, I am an [Ubuntu Member](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Membership). Which means I have a bunch of new readers on [Planet Ubuntu](http://planet.ubuntu.com).

Hey, guys. :D

I’m one of the LoCo contacts for [Ubuntu Canada](http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/ubuntu-ca/) (along with [Ralph](http://drupal.txwikinger.me.uk/). I live in the lovely and exciting city of [[wiki:Waterloo, Ontario]] and I’m president of [Kwartzlab](http://kwartzlab.ca/) the local hackerspace. I throw awesome, nerdy Ubuntu release parties, complete with cake. Because all parties need cake.

[Me at our Karmic release party. With cake]

You can read more about the stuff I’ve done on my [wiki page](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/dscassel/).

As for what I’m doing, tomorrow I leave for Montreal, and I’m looking forward to meeting [Fabián](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FabiánRodríguez), [Eric](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/sipherdee) and other folks from [Ubuntu Quebec](http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/ubuntu-qc/). If you’re in Montreal, [you should come too](http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-qc/1161/detail/)!

And we’re only two weeks away from the Ubuntu Global Jam. If you’re in KW or the surrounding area, you should [join us at Kwartzlab](http://loco.ubuntu.com/events/ubuntu-ca/1103/detail/), Saturday, September 3. We have a [development project idea](http://drupal.txwikinger.me.uk/content/ubuntu-ca-loco-project-global-jam-september-2011) which, if we’re successful will help package maintainers with future Ubuntu upgrades. And, of course, we’ll have the usual testing and triaging if coding up packaging tools isn’t your thing.

So stay tuned! And, Planet, it’s a pleasure meeting you at last.

A functional language

Listened to the latest This Developer’s Life yesterday. “[Education](http://thisdeveloperslife.com/post/2-0-3-education)”. I enjoyed especially the Seth Juarez interview.

Along with a bunch of useful advice and insight on how to think about school, Seth recommends every programmer should learn 3 languages: a strongly-typed compiled language, a dynamic language and a functional language.

I’ve got the first two well covered with multiple languages for each, but besides a bit of Scheme in school (nothing more than the usual trivial toy problems they give you to supposedly learn anything), I’ve never really delved into functional languages.

So learning one might be a good goal to set for myself. That leaves me with two questions to get started: what language? and what project?

I can kinda learn a language by reading books or whatever, but that’s a pretty shallow surface understanding. I need a project to really get into it. Now I don’t particularly *need* more projects to get into, but maybe it’s something I can putter around with when I’m just hanging out at [[Kwartzlab]] making myself accessible to people.

The problem is what project? I actually understand why and how functional languages are useful these days, but none of the half-dozen or so project ideas I have backburnered jump out as screaming for a functional implementation. So what to do will require a bit of thought.

The more fun problem is picking a language. I can hear [Eric](http://eric.gerlach.ca/)’s voice screaming “Haskell!” right about now. I’ve also heard good things about Scala. And Erlang. Then there’s OCaml and Lua and good ol’ Lisp.

Have to think about it. I have a Python project I’ve been slowly getting started on that would really help me out at work when it’s done. After that, I’ll look at functional a bit more, I think.