http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CBeQur7VBDM

Now go back and read the spec that I told you to read earlier, but all the way to the end this time.

In the video from left to right is Alan Bell (me), David Callé, Jono Bacon, Michael Hall, Roberto Alsina and Stuart Langridge, all discussing this new framework for searching. It is coming soon, to the Ubuntu Raring desktop and then to phone and TV and tablet etc. The objective is to make searching really really effective and helpful to the user, but as with the previous efforts in this direction there will be some concerns around how it is implemented.

In short, Canonical will be running a server much like the existing productsearch.ubuntu.com server which will accept queries and return a bunch of results as json. The current implementation searches Amazon and the Ubuntu One music store and a few other places. The new one will do the same, plus more server-side searches, plus a new feature altogether which is a list of good scope names for the client to search. Your client will now send a list of all locally installed scopes to the server (actually a list of scopes you have added and a list of scopes you have removed or turned off from the standard set) along with your query. The server then returns results it found and wants to put in your dash, plus a subset of the local scopes you sent it, in order, that the server thinks would be good places to hunt for your search term. This means that your client might have 100 or more locally installed search scopes, but the server will advise it which are likely to give good results. Now for the scary bit, once you have looked at the results and perhaps clicked on something then your client pings the server again to tell it which scope produced the most relevant result. This means that the server can learn from this feedback about which scopes produce high quality results for that keyword, and perhaps rank that one a bit higher in future recommendations lists.

• Lenses are now called master scopes
• You control each individual scope that you want to search in or not search in, not the master scopes so you will have 100 or so things to turn on or off.
• You can still have locally installed scopes that search authenticated data sources
• You could in principal run your own search server if you write one to implement the API and patch the home master scope to look at your own server
• The server isn’t open source
• You can’t opt out of the feedback process (without turning off the smart scope altogether – which you can do)
• If you install a local scope then your client will tell the server the name of that scope
• Every query to the server is going to include a list of locally installed scope names (100 or so perhaps?)
• You can focus a search at a particular scope by using a keyword, for example “omlet: chicken house” to only search the Omlet scope and not the chicken stuff master scope.
• The rather poorly thought out remote-content-search checkbox to disable local scopes from doing online searches remains in place – however you don’t need it as you have per-scope controls.
• There may be some code quality checks introduced to stop scopes that don’t pay attention to the remote-content-search setting from getting into the Ubuntu distribution. – but you don’t need it.
• This probably won’t put more adverts on your desktop while you are trying to do work.
• This is probably a more private way of searching for stuff than googling for it.
• This won’t be opt-in, all the good stuff in Ubuntu is turned on by default.
• Your IP address gets logged on the web server logs, but not in the database of the smart scopes application running on the server. The developers working on the smart scopes don’t have access to the web server logs.
• It would be relatively trivial (I could do it in a day or so if I felt like it) to write a gnome-shell client for this smart scopes server to display the remote results, however doing something with the scope recommendations list would be a bit of a struggle.
• The home master scope (dash) search box will contain the help text “search your computer and online sources” to make it clear that it isn’t just a local search.

Now to the big question. How much are people going to freak out about this? Well if they read the spec all the way to the end they will see all the stuff that is being collected, how it is aggregated, how much or how little privacy this is costing them and why it is being done for the greater good of having decent search results. The feedback data collection process is likely to be slightly freakout causing. I can see why the developers want this turned on and I can see why it is antisocial to turn it off, like leeching on bittorrent while downloading an Ubuntu iso or whatever. I think they would be wise to have a checkbox in the privacy settings dialogue so that antisocial people can turn this off. I imagine the developers will stick with the current policy that if you want to use smart scopes you have to participate in the feedback process to make it better.

I think we need to do some education around the lack of an applications launcher though. Currently people think that Super + name of application is a replacement for the Gnome 2 applications menu. It isn’t. Super+a + name of application is how to start applications. This is going to focus the search on just applications and will work a lot faster than doing an omniglobaleverywhere search which is what the superkey does by itself.

For me this is a good development overall. The privacy debacle will be solved to my satisfaction when you can locally and personally blacklist scopes. This will mean that I can write a scope without it being co-dependent on all the other online scopes and I don’t have to worry about whether intranet access constitutes internet access. All scopes can simply stop if remote-content-search is set, but nobody needs to set it, the flag will basically just break all searching and be a bit pointless.

You can do cool things with Gnome Shell extensions, they are written in Javascript and can manipulate the user interface in quite flexible ways. One particular type of extension is the search provider – which corresponds pretty well to the Unity lens. There are search providers for wikipedia, virtualbox, ssh and a few other searchable things and today my shopping search provider for Amazon was approved and published.

In simple terms to get the thing running visit the extension page using chromium or a supported version of Firefox whilst running Gnome Shell. This should give you a slider on the left that you can use to activate the extension, this will download and install it in ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/shopping@libertus.co.uk (that looks like an email address, but it isn’t). Once installed you can hit the settings icon on that very same web page to configure the extension – or just hit super and type “a toaster” to search for “toaster” on Amazon (“a” is the default search prefix to tell it you want to do an Amazon search)

Configuring it looks like this:

If you set the keyword to blank then it will function like the Unity shopping lens does – it searches as you type for everything you type. I kind of like the prefix, I know when I want to search on Amazon and when I don’t actively want to do that I am not interested in the performance hit of a redundant search, but you can make up your own mind about that.

The shop domain is the bit after www.amazon and it can be any one of:

• co.uk
• de
• com
• ca
• fr
• co.jp
• it
• cn
• es

Different stores return different products and prices and descriptions.

The affiliate code can be set to anything, gnomestore-20 will give money to Gnome as you shop, electronicfro-20 will give money to the EFF, and leaving it as theopesou-21 will give money to the LBF (Libertus Beer Fund).

Why this is not very evil

• The user is given control over the affiliate code
• It is opt-in for each user of the machine as it is installed in the user home directory.
• There is a user controllable keyword prefix for searching
• It uses https for transport client to server and server to Amazon
• The client side is fully open source
• I am being transparent about how it works
• It does not use geoIP to decide what Amazon store to use, it does not pass your IP address to Amazon or anywhere else.
• I am not interested in logging searches or IP addresses, I plan to monitor logs for a few days to check it is working OK for people then turn off logging altogether for the server.
• Enabling this does not require you to enable other online search providers, they are not co-dependent.

Why it is a little bit evil

• The server side is not in the control of the user – or published source (it is about 5 lines of code, but includes secret API keys) it is now published in the repository with the client side code, the API keys are in a separate file.
• It uses my affiliate ID as a default
• It is sending search queries off the local machine – and has the capacity to log or do evil with all queries typed into the search box (check the code to make sure it doesn’t. The code starts executing on every single keystroke, but it gives up if the regular expression with the keyword doesn’t match what you typed).
• It gets pictures from Amazon and they could data mine the logs for those and indirectly track your searches that way (highly unlikely – they track you in much more useful ways as soon as you click through to anything you are interested in. Image logs have little informational value.)
• It advocates for a materialistic society based on the existential nihilism of unfettered consumerism

How it could be less evil

• If someone wants to fork it and run a server on behalf of some foundation that is considered less evil than me then feel free to do so, it is GPLv2 code. What I don’t want you to do is fork the extension and change the default affiliate ID but keep it pointing at my server by default as a back end.
• You could run your own local search provider and register for your own API keys if you want to trust nobody but yourself and Amazon. I don’t think you can earn money purchasing items yourself on your own affiliate code so don’t think there is a magical discount facility waiting for you to set it up.

Future enhancements

I would like to make the store list  a dropdown selection – maybe auto selected based on locale or something. It would be good to provide a list of common affiliate IDs for charities and organisations that people might want to support, but I want to retain the ability for a user to type in one of their own choosing. Maybe it could take a list of affiliate IDs that it uses at random. If you have suggestions then do leave a comment, or fork it on github https://github.com/AlanBell/shopping-search-provider

Happy shopping (it is the reason for the season) and have a happy new year!

Shell has two modes, normal and overview, and you get to the overview mode by hitting the super key (that is the one with the anticompetitive Microsoft advert on it in all probability). Overview mode allows you to see a launcher on the left (a lot like the unity launcher) and a workspace switcher on the right which flips workspaces for your primary monitor only, secondary monitor stays static, which actually works rather well for me, I prefer the 1 dimensional list of workspaces to the 2×2 grid that unity has by default. Also in overview mode at the bottom of the screen is a notification area, where you can see notifications that have happened, I like this too. Notifications seem to have a good balance between being ephemeral and reviewable, plus when you click on notifications in shell you actually get to the thing that made them – so you get a notification about an email and decide to go read it, click the notification and you activate Thunderbird rather than having to go and find it yourself. The menu bar  has cool looking speech bubble menus on the indicators and best of all it has an accessibility indicator in the menu bar so it is easy to turn on the various interesting assitive tools we have.  There isn’t a global menu which is great, after two years of using it I never really understood the benefit or got used to having the menu in a different place to the thing it belongs to. Overall it seems quite polished, quite productive to use and really rather pleasant.

So this is all rather fun, but is there cool stuff I am missing out on? I can see the HUD has gone, and the dash with it’s lenses and omni-global super search. Or are they? Gnome shell has extensions https://extensions.gnome.org/ and they can do rather a lot. I haven’t seen a HUD extension yet, but I think that would be entirely possible. As for Lenses, well yes, they are absolutely there, have a look at the Wikipedia search provider. You type stuff in overview mode and as you type it searches both your local applications and Wikipedia, returning article summaries that you can click on to open them fully in the browser. When running gnome-shell you can install the extension right from that web page with a little slider control, it then automatically downloads (into ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions) and starts working, no sudo access required as it is just your session, and you opted into it personally as these are not installed system-wide (you probably can install them system-wide by putting them somewhere else). They are written in Javascript and have quite a lot of control over the user interface and can do all kinds of things, in fact looking at the capabilities of extensions it strikes me that pretty much all of the Unity features could be re-implemented as gnome-shell extensions. Right now I am mostly interested in extending the search provider area and the overlap of that with lenses. I want to see if the gnome-shell approach has the same problems as Unity with regards to privacy or different ones. I have been doing a bit of tinkering and in the next post I should have something to show.

There they are!

Imagine you are searching for your socks, this is like looking in a drawer that normally contains socks and at the same time phoning up all your friends and asking them if they have seen your socks anywhere. This is not ideal and when people started noticing this (after about a year of it having this behaviour – people only noticed when there was obvious money involved) a switch was added to “implement privacy”. It was a rush job, nobody is arguing with that, and it satisfied most people at first glance. There is now a switch in the privacy controls that can be flipped to turn off online searches. Sounds good right? Well diving a little deeper this just sets a flag, and the individual search scopes (the things that put results in the lenses) have to be modified to check for that flag and not go searching. To stretch our sock analogy this is like contacting each of your friends individually and saying “when I set this flag, and phone you, please just hang up on me”. If you acquire a new friend you have to remember to tell them this important condition of friendship.

Now if you want to ask each of your friends “have you got my Justin Beiber CD?” you have a problem, because they will just hang up on you. So you have to unflip the flag to perform that search – your friends are entirely useless with the flag set because they will just hang up on you – or they will ignore the flag and might end up spying on your morning sock related searches if you accidentally phone them. You do still have the option of doing a focussed lens specific search rather than using the home lens omni-global everywhere search. Using lens specific searches you can “search in my sock drawer” or “ask that friend if they have seen my socks” without other friends finding out about your sock related issues.

A lot of people got hung up over whether the shopping lens should be opt in or opt out. This is a bogus thing to get hung up about, the problem isn’t the default setting, the problem is that it isn’t granular enough. Lets say you install the shopping lens and opt-in to online searches. Awesome, you can now have lots of fun purchasing toasters and shoes and better CDs than that Justin Beiber one that you lent to someone or other. Now lets say you install the rather fine Google Docs lens you would expect that to be opt-in too right? Well, bit late, sorry you opted in to online searches already and there is no more fine grained control (as it happens the Google Docs lens is one of those friends that doesn’t know about your flag and it totally ignores it and picks up the phone).

So, there are issues, the developers know about them and they are a clever bunch, I am sure that they will come up with a more considered and comprehensive approach to this by the next version of Ubuntu. In the mean time I am not particularly comfortable writing lenses because they either have to depend on all other online search lenses being turned on, or they have to ignore the flag. Both options kind of suck, so I have been exploring other interesting things that are similar to lenses, one of which is the topic of my next post.

If you want several of them to hand out at an event then please get in touch and we can sort that out.

As usual there is one special CD that gets upgraded each release, the one my chickens peck at! They were using Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS before, but today I upgraded them to Ubuntu Server 12.10 the Quantal Qetzal. I think they were pleased at the bird themed code name and they have been getting quite familiar with the command line over the last few months. I tested the retired 12.04 CD and it still works great in a computer after washing the muck off it.

Would you put that in your chicken run?

It might have Long Term Support, but would you put it in your laptop?

OpenERP is probably my favourite web application to work on, and this is a typical application you might install to help manage a business, it is a modular framework that covers accountancy, logistics, sales process, project management, manufacturing, HR etc. The web server is largely python based, but as it happens this integration just uses javascript. After you install the module and visit your OpenERP server you should be prompted to allow integration, if you accept this you will get a notification (bubble in the top right of the screen) to say it is activated and from then you can use the alt key to bring up the HUD and type anything you might find in an OpenERP menu somewhere, such as “Invoice”. You don’t have to type all of the word, it will search as you type.

You can grab the code from here and the module as a standard module zip file from here. I am thinking of adding some more features, possibly messaging menu integration and notifications. I might do a separate theme module that is mostly CSS and cosmetically adjusts the user interface to match the unity desktop. Right now most of our customers running OpenERP use it on an Ubuntu server, but use a mixture of Windows and Mac on the desktop, what I want to show with this kind of integration (this is just the start) is that Ubuntu can simply be a better platform for business than other operating systems, especially as things move away from dedicated client applications to web based interfaces.

The camera can move in diagonal directions, it would be nice to get it to smoothly move to a new location smoothly first by panning and tilting, then the rest of the way on one axis. Might be nice to have something round the outside of the image to allow you to move double the distance, at the moment you can move a half frame in one click would be nice to be able to go a whole frame away.

The camera stream has a maximum of 4 concurrent viewers, a few more if I drop the resolution to 320×200. For lots of viewers I would use ffmpeg to reencode from mjpeg to something else on the fly and possibly pass it to a streaming server of some kind, the overlay control should work just as it is over a multicast video stream. In reality, if you are expecting more than a couple of concurrent viewers they are going to argue over control too much.

Source code is on launchpad and I will tidy it up somewhat as time goes by and make it more of a collaborative project (starting with some installation instructions, it uses apache and mod_python at the moment). Please share ideas for features in the comments here.

This is an image from the camera when you loaded this page, click through for the live steerable video

If you can’t see the video, try coming back later, it probably hit the limit of viewers.

As is traditional with Ubuntu releases there will be a party in London where users, enthusiasts and the Canonical release team get together to consume some adult beverages and generally have a fun evening. This release is no exception to the tradition and you are most welcome to join us at the George Inn from about 7ish (or whenever you can). There is an optional sign up sheet with more details, anyone on the list will probably have a name badge waiting for them (this is based on feedback from previous events).

If you want to get your hands on an official Ubuntu 12.10 DVD we are now taking pre-orders for the UK local team allocation just send in an SAE they will probably arrive around the end of the month or early November.

If you have a spice collection that is small or large, minimalist or chaotic, conventional or exotic then please Share your Rack and vote on the racks that other people have shared. Here is mine by the way: