Ubuntu Wiki

Documentation guy, wiki editor, Mallard evangelist, DocBook wrangler, former bug triager, occasional en_GB translator, erstwhile .desktop file meddler, and Ubuntu user (of course). My interests are in documentation, user assistance, and usability.

I graduated with a Masters' in Physics with Astrophysics from the University of Manchester, UK, in July 2010 and I'm going on to study for a DPhil (PhD) in Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Oxford, UK. I'm interested in dark energy, and will be looking at inhomogeneous (non-FRW) cosmologies which reproduce the observational effects associated with dark energy.

Book

I co-authored the 4th edition of Ubuntu for Non-Geeks, with Rickford Grant. It was published by No Starch Press in July 2010, and is available from all good bookstores!

You can find out more about the book (including details of parts of it that I released under a Creative Commons license) in this blog post.

Links

• Launchpad

• LiveJournal

• Flickr

• Last.fm

• philipbull on Twitter

• philbull on Identi.ca

Documentation

I'm an active member of the Doc Team, and spend most of my Ubuntu-time committing patches, closing bugs and helping-out mentoring students. I also work with the GNOME Documentation Project, and am a member of its Steering Committee.

Bugs

I was a member of the bugsquad, but haven't been very active recently.

• Bugs I'm subscribed to.

• Bugs I've reported.

Responsibilities

• Currently a member of the GNOME Documentation Team Steering Committee.

• I'm a maintainer of the Ubuntu documentation and member of the documentation committers team.
• I greet new members of the documentation team and help them find tasks.

Current Projects

• Writing and editing the new GNOME desktop help
• Planning for the coming renaissance in the GNOME developer documentation
• Numerous GNOME application manuals (Evolution, Evince, GNOME Color Manager)

• Working on the system documentation and TopicBasedHelp

• Helping out with Project Mallard

• Analysing IRC logs, forum posts and website statistics to try and gauge the demand for certain documentation

Past Projects

• MOTU Science .desktop files

  • ubuntu-science Completion announcement

  • ubuntu-art request for icons

  • Project files and icons

• Switching from Windows guide

  • SFWGuide

• System documentation

  • https://help.ubuntu.com/

  • System -> Help and Support

• GNOME manuals

  • Substantial updates to the GNOME User Guide

  • Coordinating the writing or updating of several GNOME manuals

    • Empathy

    • Deskbar-Applet

    • Rhythmbox

• DocuMENTORS

  • Worked on setting-up the DocuMENTORS programme

  • Mentoring new contributors

• Welcome Centre

  • Playing with the Welcome Centre concept (it never came to anything)

Testing

Some pages I'm using to test new ideas:

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