Maverick Meerkat is two weeks away

The final countdown is well underway for the next Ubuntu software release, Maverick Meerkat. The expected release date is October 10th, and Canonical have a very good track record of achieving their dates, so I think the release is pretty likely to arrive around this date.

There is a wealth of information available about the upcoming release, so much information that I made no attempt to study it all. One of the most intriguing projects is the "paper cuts" project, which you can read about here. The paper cuts project has been around for a while: Ars Technica did a great article on it during the summer of 2009. The core idea is to try to fix a lot of small problems, with the intention that, by paying attention to these details, the overall experience will be dramatically improved. As Siegel describes it:

This is a very small detail, and it was extremely simple to remedy, but it slipped through the cracks for two successive releases before I sat down to fix it. Part of the reason I put off fixing it is because it seemed inconsequential, as the amount of programming required to fix it was so small compared to other bugs in the application. Also, as with many other paper cuts, users (myself included) became habituated to this annoyance, learning to ignore and work around it.

In many ways, this is quite similar to the "Broken Windows" philosophy that I described last summer. I think that the paper cuts team has been doing great work over this last year, and I'm looking forward to seeing what arrives in Meerkat!