This would be our 100,000th question:

What Unity Lenses and Scopes are available to add?

_{*Funnily enough, this question is actually a duplicate of another question already asked.}

Here’s a rough graphical representation of how Ask Ubuntu has fared since its launch in terms of questions asked:

Clearly, there are still tons of questions that are unanswered. To be accurate, there are about 25,000 questions yet to be answered. Unfortunately, bringing this number down cannot be achieved without help from people like you. If you think you have what it takes, please consider taking a look at our list of unanswered questions and answering them as you see fit.

It’s been wholly four months since we started development on unity-tweak-tool and two months since it was available for wider testing. And now, finally, it is in the Ubuntu repository for 13.04 release!

Many thanks to the MOTU reviewers Daniel Holbach, Michael Terry and Bhavani Shankar, who also sponsored the package. Also extending the cordiality to Adam Conrad (~infinity) for a final review on the distributability of the package as an archive admin. And, last but not the least, thanks to the Ubuntu community for their feedback during the development, which was really helpful in shaping this product for the better.

Now that I have gotten that out of the way, we are going to start work for the s-cycle (or is it rolling?). That includes finishing the rewrite of the backend for better maintainability and making it easier for us to extend the current set of features.

We also have some exciting plans in our mind for the s-cycle (or rolling, depending on how that discussion ends up), that includes:

• Ability to preset settings (switching settings based on context)
• Sync the settings — potentially across various computers — using Ubuntu One
• Back up and restore settings, for those feeling adventurous yet unwilling to compromise their current setup.

Also in the to-do list for the upcoming cycle includes some relatively boring items:

• Search bar
• Installing and removing themes from tarballs
• Unit tests to prevent any new bugs from creeping in and to increase the quality of the code
• Autopkgtests — Automatic testing for packages
• Extensive debug logs for better bug-hunting.

Please do keep in mind that these plans are tentative in nature and it very much depends on how Unity development pans out over the next year or so. We’ll try our best to create a tweak tool for the Qt/QML based Unity as and when it becomes available for users.

Ask Ubuntu had some tremendous growth in the year 2012 and the stats only prove that:

• Over 50,000 questions,
• 60,000 more users and
• more than tripling the daily traffic to 217k visits/day.

If you are one of those nice blokes (like the current set of moderators ) and is willing to help make Ask Ubuntu an even better place, please do consider nominating yourself for the upcoming moderator elections. The nomination phase runs for the next 7 days followed by the voting on the nominees. Do note that the nominees are required to have at least 300 reputation. Anyone with over 150 reputation will be part of the electorate and can vote on the nominees during the election phase.

People interested in discussing the election or any of the nominations, please consider joining the chat room for Ask Ubuntu elections.

Or, we can always use some help with answering the questions. Here’s a good place to start.

UPDATE:

Ask Ubuntu moderator election 2013 is now over and the following community members have been elected as moderators:

• jokerdino
• Rolandixor
• Luis Alvarado

The two months of developing unity-tweak-tool had its fair share of fun and frolic. Unity-tweak-tool was born as Mechanig but was renamed twice to this very name. Reasons for the renaming varies from being too witty for the users to naming issues with the Unity developers.

As if naming wasn’t the only issue, I had goofed up the apport hook and pointed the hook to Novacut project instead. I realized I didn’t carefully vet the single line of code that I copied from Jason DeRose’s blog post regarding using Apport in daily PPA. Jason identified the faux pas and fortunately, we managed to fix the issue within a day. It made me realize the necessity of carefully reviewing any piece of code that we write from this rather embarrassing mistake.

I would like to use this moment to thank my fellow team members at Freyja Development team namely Phani Mahesh, Amith kk, Georgi Karavasilev, Sam Tran, Sam Hewitt and Ángel Araya for their continued efforts on unity-tweak-tool.

Also to be thanked are Jason Gerard DeRose, the talented developer behind the wonderful Novacut project, who helped us immensely by setting up the packaging for unity-tweak-tool, David Planella, whose input on Gtk and Glade were of great help when the project was still in infant stage as well as Benjamin Kerensa for interviewing the entire Freyja development team for OMG!Ubuntu!

There has already been 519 downloads on quantal and 46 downloads on raring from the daily PPA and that makes us quite excited. If you are equally excited, you can try and test the package from our daily PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:freyja-dev/unity-tweak-tool-daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install unity-tweak-tool

Alternatively, if you are interested in reviewing the code or contributing to the project, you can obtain the code from GitHub.

This makes it much easier to keep track of interesting data queries and Jorge Castro shares some of them here. If you could spare some time, go through some of the data queries and flag the questions and review the posts and what not. It would help us improve our currently flailing answered rate.

Self-learners
We have users who run into a problem and then eventually find a solution on their own and then come back to document the solution themselves. As an attempt to reward such users by reviewing and upvoting quality answers from them, Jorge Castro blogs about how to “hat tip” to them.

Top contributors
Following are the top five contributors who have accrued the most reputation points in the month of November.

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of November:

• What is the command line equivalent of copying a file to clipboard?
• Why limit the number of open files and Running processes in Linux?
• How do I throttle a command in a terminal window?

If you are looking to help, the featured questions should be a good place to start. If you are interested in the site, you can sign up for the newsletter and you will be kept informed of quality questions and answers every week. In case you are struck and is looking for help on how to use the site, feel free to ask your doubts on the Ask Ubuntu meta or join us in the chat*.

_{*Requires 20 reputation to participate in the chat.}

Having Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) would allow developers to create applications that blend with the platform instead of sticking out like sore thumbs. Like myself, there are many other developers who don’t have any idea about properly designing applications for Ubuntu. The closest we have to a HIG is a bunch of links to Ubuntu wiki, API and documentation.

Surely, if we were to compete with well-established developer platforms like Windows, iOS and Android, having a neat set of HIG for developers to refer to would go a long way in helping them create software that are well integrated with Ubuntu itself.

To my surprise, it so happens that other open-source projects do have a HIG. Some of them may not be complete but it is nonetheless better than nothing. KDE has it. XFCE has it. GNOME has it and by extension, distros with pretty much unmodified GNOME software like Debian and Fedora are covered as well. Even Ubuntu downstream Elementary has it and a pretty good one at it too. If I may add, it shows that these platforms care about creating a unified experience for the users. Ubuntu being one of the major Linux distributions seem to have forgotten about HIG altogether.

I do have to point out the default applications themselves aren’t very much consistent. That might very well have to do with the fact that there are at least 5 different toolkits (Gtk, Qt, Xul, Nux and whatever that LibreOffice uses) being used but that discussion is for one other day.

Anyway, I figure Canonical was looking for an interaction designer earlier this year to create HIG for Ubuntu among others but I am not sure what came out of it. With the added focus on developing a Ubuntu SDK sometime in the foreseeable future, I hope Canonical doesn’t overlook the need to create a HIG at least this time around.

Ask Ubuntu’s second birthday

It might come as a pleasant surprise to many as Ask Ubuntu celebrated its second birthday earlier this month. Having been launched to the public on October 10, 2010 along with the release of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, the site has since seen significant growth keeping in tandem with the rising popularity of Ubuntu across the world.

New milestone: 100,000 answers
Second birthday notwithstanding, Ask Ubuntu clocked yet another milestone of 100,000 answers this October. With over 70,000 questions and 80,000 users, Ask Ubuntu is fast growing into the go-to place for all your questions about Ubuntu ranging from the recent Ubuntu Nexus project and application development to the juju charms and the general troubleshooting.

Ask Ubuntu session in UDS
We have a separate session in UDS-R to discuss the continued Ask Ubuntu integration and other Ask Ubuntu related tasks. The session is scheduled to be on November 1st in the evening and everyone who has a keen interest in Ask Ubuntu is invited to attend either physically (if you happen to be in Copenhagen, Denmark) or remotely through IRC. Given that the current scheduled time is subject to changes, you are advised to keep an eye on the UDS-R schedule.

StackIRC – IRC bot that posts questions from Stack Exchange sites
We are glad to announce that our wonderful community member George Edison has written an IRC bot that posts questions of a particular tag in IRC channels. The bot is already running in IRC channels #juju, #ubuntu-community-team and #ubuntu-app-devel with plans to cover more channels in the near future.

You can also set up your own bot if you are interested in tracking specific tags in Ask Ubuntu or other Stack Exchange sites in IRC. Instructions for setting up and using the bot can be found here: https://github.com/nathan-osman/StackIRC

Top contributors
Following are the top five contributors who have accrued the most reputation points in the month of October.

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of October:

• What are the differences between sudo, su, visudo, chroot and gksu?
• How can I instruct Nautilus to pre-generate PDF thumbnails?
• Find directories that DON’T contain a file

If you are looking to help, the featured questions should be a good place to start. If you are interested in the site, you can sign up for the newsletter and you will be kept informed of quality questions and answers every week.

In case you are struck and is looking for help on how to use the site, feel free to ask your doubts on the Ask Ubuntu meta or join us in the chat*.

*Requires 20 reputation to participate in the chat.

Marco Ceppi’s interview with OSS Watch
Marco Ceppi, one of the community moderators of Ask Ubuntu, was interviewed by Mark Johnson for OSS watch. Marco Ceppi explains the target of the site are “those people who have a problem, go to a search engine, then click a link and expect a fix.” Marco also notes that there were resistance to Ask Ubuntu initially but the general Ubuntu community has fully accepted Ask Ubuntu for what it brings to the table.

Top contributors
Following are the top five contributors who have accrued the most reputation points in the month of September.

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of September:

• How to get an email notification when an USB storage device is inserted?
• What is the purpose of the -9 option in the kill command?
• How do I lock the screen from the terminal?
• What is the equivalent of the “tracert” DOS command?

Wikipedia page
The Wikipedia article for Ask Ubuntu has been updated to include the updated Alexa page rank as well as the number of users and questions on the site. As it is on Wikipedia, if you think the article could be improved upon, feel free to edit it and add more information as you see fits. We are always looking for more help.

Time and again, someone starts to wonder if Jorge Castro is a human or really a robot disguised as one. With the amount of things he does in Ask Ubuntu, I think it is only fair that someone wonders the true nature of him. With the need and curiosity to dig out the truth behind the greatest mystery of all time in Ask Ubuntu, I set out to collect some hard hitting facts about some of his activities in Ask Ubuntu.

Of the 161860 posts that are on Ask Ubuntu, Jorge Castro has managed to edit a staggering 14605 of them and vote on a good 18588 posts. If you can’t comprehend that, here’s the deal in a much simpler way: Jorge edited 9.02% of all posts on Ask Ubuntu and vote on 11.48% posts.

Pretty graph of Jorge Castro’s roller coaster reputation:

Now, if you are wondering why the reputation seems to have stopped after a while, it is because Jorge Castro has turned into a true altruist, giving away his hard-earned (!) reputation as bounties. He has given away nearly half of what he has earned overall, to the point that he now has given away more than what he has currently. A staggering 191 offered bounties for a lump sum of 22,550 reputation.

Here’s the not so full set of stats about Jorge Castro (it took a good couple of minutes to populate the data):

Statistics for Jorge Castro (235):
- Reputation: 21761 ⚫ 36 ⚫ 168 ⚫ 340
- Member of askubuntu.com since Thu Jul 29 19:07:34 2010
- Last activity on Tue Sep 25 22:29:36 2012
- 20818 views of profile page

- Asked 109 questions
- Answered 735 questions (336 accepted answers, 45.71%)
- Commented 2682 times (received 919 'great comment' votes)
- The average comment received 0.34 votes (min: 0, max: 8)

- Voted on 17696 posts (16764 upvotes, 932 downvotes)
- Edited 15709 entries (13213 without re-tagging)

- Total votes received: +5457
- Received 5475 up-votes (1362 on questions, 4113 on answers)
- Received 18 down-votes (2 on questions, 16 on answers)
- Average score 6.47 (12.48 on questions, 5.57 on answers)

- Views of questions: 385218 (min/avg/max: 29, 3534.11, 52034)
- Views of answers: 1809185 (min/avg/max: 15, 2461.48, 212807)

- Reputation from questions: 7012
- Reputation from answers: 46138
- Average reputation per day: 27

Without needing to say, I think Jorge Castro is indeed a bot.

_{By the way, we are in the midst of getting askjorge.com aliased to askubuntu.com.}

Earlier this month, one of our community moderators Marco Ceppi was asking for feedback on how Ask Ubuntu is working for most of the users. The feedback received has been generally positive, suggesting that Ask Ubuntu has been nice and helpful for the general public. Not possible without the kind contributors. Here’s a flower for your generosity:

Top contributors
Following are the top five contributors who have accrued the most reputation points in the month of August.

And this month’s special mention goes to msPeachy for helping the site by improving the posts with her edits:

Hottest questions
Some of the hottest questions for the month of August:

• Is “laptop-mode-tools” still relevant for 12.04 and the 3.x kernels?
• Why isn’t VLC the default Video player?
• How to prevent my screen from dimming when watching YouTube?

New review system
The new beta review system that has been doing the rounds in other Stack Exchange sites has finally landed in Ask Ubuntu. It promises to make reviewing the posts less painful than ever before. One caveat though: You need at least 2000 reputation to review at the moment.