BryceHarrington
Contact Info
Email: "bryce at bryceharrington dot org"
IRC: bryyce at irc.freenode.net
About Me
I am Bryce Harrington, I've been involved in Open Source since 1994, Ubuntu specifically for about a year, and Mandrake and Gentoo in years prior. I am currently focusing on maintaining Xorg, through packaging, bug triaging/fixing, and spec work as Canonical's Xorg maintainer. Thus I am eating and breathing all things X lately. Outside Ubuntu, I am one of Inkscape's founders and I enjoy woodworking. Professionally, I worked for the Open Source Development Labs building automated test harnesses, web app development, and NFSv4 testing from 2001-2007. Before that I designed spacecraft propulsion systems.
My efforts revolve principally around keeping Xorg and Inkscape packages up to date, and triaging/fixing bugs in the same. I also am a big believer in the role of process documentation and statistics tools to help make software communities more effective, and so have created/maintained several web docs and tools:
Created web interface for [http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/Plots/ Ubuntu Bug Plots]
Coded up [http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/Xorg/versions_current.html X Merge Status page]
Wrote Xorg Debugger's Handbook: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Debugging
Collected Xorg documentation at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/X
Ubuntu Gutsy Contributions
During the Gutsy development cycle, I cut my teeth deeply on packaging, from small X apps to large, complicated things like xorg, xserver, mesa, and linux-restricted-modules. I also invested a lot of time into trying to get caught up with the huge backlog of untriaged Xorg bugs.
For two of the Gutsy specifications, I implemented Bulletproof-X, and helped glatzor integrate his displayconfig-gtk GUI tool for xorg configuration.
When I started with Canonical, magazine reviews of Feisty invariably reported that in their tests Ubuntu failed to select the correct monitor resolution. Since this seemed to be an extremely high profile (and embarrassingly bad) X issue for Ubuntu, I took this as my primary objective. After much experimentation, I fixed all the issues in xresprobe, with the result that when Gutsy was released hardly anyone reported monitor resolution detection issues. (There are still issues, they're just far more obscure things now.)
Ubuntu Hardy Contributions
- -intel driver
- bug triage
- Screen Resolution tool
I also participate in the ubuntu-mobile team maintaining their Xorg components, including their git-head copy of libdrm, the Poulsbo video driver, and various patches to xserver that they need.