DoctorMo's Blog

I wanted to post an entry about a very good and useful collaboration.

The OpenStreetMap project aims to record geographical information in an open and accessible format, so anyone can find their way and create interesting devices and applications.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/

In the UK our governmental operated mapping data is owned and controlled, unlike the USA where data is made available in the Public Domain. So the service in the OSM for the UK is very important. I myself updated much of the mapping information for the town I grew up in, little parts that others hadn’t yet touched on.

So now, I’d like to see an Ubuntu application that is able to use OSM data, plug into GPS hardware and fuse the two into an offline mapping and route finding system. That would make netbooks very useful indeed! I’m betting someone somewhere has already taken a stab at such a program; but I’ve yet to be able to find it.

Let me know if you know.

Update: And boy did you guys not let me down… I’m compiling a list of things that people have suggested to me.

1. The Nokia Maemo project has a Mapper tool which doesn’t yet work on Ubuntu.
2. TangoGPS looks like it does everything, available in the repositories.
3. Merkaator is a simple GPS Path recorder also available in the repositories.
4. The Nav-IT project can do similar things, but looks a bit config fiddly, they have their own repository.
5. If your ok with Java and with German, you might try CacheWolf.
6. For the python programmers, we have PyRoute.

One missing piece I notice is route finding, it must be a difficult problem to solve. so I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a dedicated lib that could do it.

Listening to Obama speak recently, I was struck by the likeness of social status to the ability of an individual to control his own live without having people interfere. It seems he is aiming at reducing some of the problems of the current mis-balance but I can’t be sure if he knows why the middle class is so important.

This is why I think is why the middle class is so attractive:

In the UK we have a more complex system of class, a more traditional class, that has everything to do with breading and nothing to do with much else. Forget that kind of class.

But there is a relation between what you can effectively leverage and your social status, below is a small diagram of my view of this correlation. It shows that a person must own himself and be healthy in order to have any freedom at all. Those with nothing are slaves, children, prisoners and in some countries, wives.

So there is an attractiveness to get everyone hovering between the Lower and Upper Middle classes, where they can effectivly control their own lives. But I don’t count people with highly leveraged housing as middle class, only once you own the majority of your home is it fair to call it yours, until then I’d think you were just working up to it with loans.

I’d also suggest that the top bracket is a very dangerous goal, controlling others and their lives is not really that moral. If you can’t give a share of the profit to all employees, then what are you doing? Taking from one person who did the work, to pay someone else who did nothing. That can’t be right in any sensible system.

If you can’t take sufficient profit from selling a home, then why be in housing? Renters like employers of typical companies are taking liberties from those in our society that have the least amount of control over their lives. Sure my views are about as palatable as Avocado, but I’m not going to stop looking for a fairer society just because the current crop at the top find the current system just peachy.

Here it is:

I’m probbably dead wrong about the correlation, but I’m sure there is something in the freedom of a man in relation to his ownership over his own life in the modern world.

Sometimes I find myself inspired enough to write a bit of poetry, it’s never much good. But I write it so I can get it out of me and hopefully feel better about myself. This piece is something that came to me on my bike ride today, I was going to pick up some chocolate Easter eggs from an Irish foods importing shop 5 miles away.

It’s a story told in third person, about a man who finds himself unexpectedly. I repeat, I don’t know the first thing about literature and failed my GCSE in the subject.

To have These Wings

by Martin Owens

There was a friend of mine,
not seen for many years,
Who was taught a lesson,
That brings out my fears.

He was driving from work,
Late in the evening.
From old London’s Warf,
His heart was beaming.

For he was a clever soul,
Who’s job was to own.
To profit from that owning,
Through returns off a loan.

A man of men,
A man without men.
A man self contrived,
A man in need of no other.

On this night it was to be,
The strange event took place,
To have fallen ill in a way,
To have have had such a taste.

See his car had stopped,
and a silken voice had said:
“I will make of you,
what you think of yourself”

It was the voice of a god,
Sweet as it was forelorned.
It sang a painful song,
And my friend was transformed.

He became a Hawk that night,
Flew from the open car.
Cursed to eat rodents,
And to be by himself.

Now he needs no one,
That much is true.
But now he has no one,
Not even to talk to.

His investments matured,
and his fortunes came in.
But no longer human,
he doesn’t really care.

It takes society to have money,
And people to build things.
Now in a tree on his own,
He has these thoughts and his wings.

Looks like we’re in for another wave of 3D films, I’ve so far watched Coraline and Monsters vs Aliens.

I have to say I’ve enjoyed having the film in 3D, this new polarised light steroscopics is much more natural than the old red and green varity.

So do I think 3D films will take off? I think so, we’ve been waiting for the tech to reach a point when multiple people can watch a movie in 3D from their own homes, and I think there may be TVs on the way with just such tech in them.

If you get a chance to try it out, do so and tell me what you think. I’m waiting for Pixar’s Up in May and the film called ‘9′ out in September (which looks AWESOME with a capital Awe).

I got a first generation Asus Netbook in exchange for some work I did on a cheer-led display. I’ve been playing with various things and using it for some interesting things. Now it was heavily modified, extra SSD and Bluetooth inside soit’s battery is poor (40 mins) compared to my notebook from System76 (3 hours) with it’s 8 cell battery.

Today I will note the most useful things I’ve managed to do with my Asus Netbook running Ubuntu 9.04 (alpha) and some of the things that it can’t do.

• Reading comics in bed using xrandr options to rotate the screen.
• Incidental fact checking, being able to check wikipedia or some other online resource at the pub.
• Checking addresses and phone numbers from emails while en route.
• Making notes and updating my calendar with off the top of head ideas and events.
• Taking down details from business cards, while you were just given it and saving trees.
• Showing off Ubuntu based apps, such as inkscape, openoffice, to people you’ve only just met.
• Showing slideshows to the general public to test your new visual book about FOSS.

Now all of these things were useful in their place, I found that it’s the access of the device that gives it it’s power. Although the size of the Asus limits it somewhat.

Now onto things I couldn’t do:

• Play the Daily Show videos in bed.
• Show off desktop effects to random people.
• Press buttons on most administration panels (vert screen space)
• Press anything on maximised windows (bug in shifting screen)
• Make tea and toast and create world peace.

So the Netbook is a useful device, a bit smaller and a better battery and I could see myself buying a newer one. But it has limitations which programmers should be more aware of. We currently don’t have any automated testing to test gui packages to see if their gui will fit on a screen resolution smaller than 800×600, perhaps we should at least test glade xml files.

I look forward to getting good use out of this one, though it now tends to stay at home when the laptop travels with me for official events.

The Massachusetts LoCo which I lead has been running meetings this year with the idea to increase the visibility of things we want to get done in that month.

Tonight we hold our 3rd meeting this year and as meeting organiser and chair, I have to make sure all the bits are together. This includes getting the agenda together and sending out reminders.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MassachusettsTeam/Meetings/Minutes/2009-03-26

So far I’ve been keeping a track of what everyone wants to do during the month in an action items list:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MassachusettsTeam/ActionItems

This is a simple compiled list of items from the meeting minutes which allows people to check up on things and anything they may have forgotten about.

I’m thinking of putting more things on the action items, more for myself such as the meeting actions, thigns we do every month and so on. that way we’ll keep up to date with those things we’re doing all the time and the stuff that is one off.

Thoughts? I noticed very few locos and other ubuntu groups use the actions part of the meeting template. I wondered if there was a reason for this.

On Monday I created a book which I posted to this blog in draft form, I created each page in inkscape.

Today I want to share some of the tips and tricks I picked up doing this mini project.

So first, Inkscape doesn’t yet support (0.46) the ability to have multiple pages. It’s also not got any functionality to append to a pdf or to collate documents into a pdf file, so your stuck creating single pdf files. But this isn’t as much of a problem as it may at first seem, in fact the inkscape scriptability from a CLI makes it easier.

You’ll also have to be aware that the Cairo export from svg to pdf isn’t perfect, things like shading, bluring and other effects will disapear if not cause outright blemishes. Be sure that any svgs you import have been stripped of fancy blending. I had to do this manually for a few human icons I used.

Select a single size for your document, I created mine as a 640×480 slide format with a standard header and border. This was because I wanted this to be most useful on screens.

Make sure to prefix a padded number to each page filename e.g. 01, 02… because later we need to make sure that all the pages appear in the right order.

Reuse, I reused a ton of graphics over and over, sometimes complex graphics can make things seem too fancy. The man with a white arm is about as basic as you can get while including a direction and a few pose-able ideas such as need, want, have, offer, get, select etc. A friend from the inkscape irc channel did create some more complex figures, but I decided that they increased the busyness of the pages too much.

Create a pallet svg with all your reusable graphics and import it to each new frame. In my version of inkscape there was a bug that prevented copy and paste from working, so I improvised with a pallet file.

Once you’ve got all your svg pages, you’ll want to create pdfs, I used inkscape on the command line to make a pdf from each svg: `inkscape -A file.pdf file.svg`

Now you have a load of pdf files, next I used pdftk to gather all the pdfs together into a single pdf file `pdftk 01-file.pdf 02-file.pdf … output file.pdf`.

I was also creating an archive of each version that people could use, and cleaning up all those single pdfs afterwards.

This is the script I ended up making to allow all my pages to be collated into a single pdf:

Hope this helps others create some useful documents.

It’s interesting when you think about it, the ideas we have about property, where they come from and how they are backed  up in society.

If you go way back to the dawn of mankind, you’ll find that the only things you could own are the things you can effectively protect with your own hands. This puts quite an abrupt limit on how much stuff you could ever possibly own without undue risk.

As societies developed we decided that the community as a whole should protect each others property via law. If it’s legally someone’s property, then everyone else should respect that. Today we have the same basic law that says your property should be yours to do with as you wish without interference; but we have it applying without limit and balance.

Instead of the costs of asset retention increasing exponentially with the acquisition, we have the earning power of assets increasing exponentially and the costs burdened by society as a whole. Even when hoarded assets would damage societies interests and the economy as a whole.

So what could possibly make the mathematics work? Well I’m very big on liberty, I don’t believe society has the right to steal property in a sort of robin hood style arrangement. All you get there is resentful rich and an unscalable taxing problem.

Whatever we do, it must be some changes with the mechanics of how capitalism works. It’s the machinery that really needs the tweaking. If it were me in charge and I felt I could get away with tyranny: I’d tax asset ownership of housing over a single property in a proportional value of the houses by the number of properties, but not it’s earnings over that time (rents and so on).

I’d try and redress the balance of resource acquisition by placing all natural resources into the public commons, people who wish to take from the land or pollute the air would be required to compensate the public, scaling it with the amount of resources left in their natural place. All resources would be counted too, if you wanted to dig open a hill side, then the beauty and environment of the spot would add to it’s value that you wish to destroy.

And finally I’d try and create a system of market share taxes which would effectivly make monoplies uneconomic. If you have more than 10% of any given market over state or wider area, then you’d be liable to pay a scaling tax to the profit of that venture in that market place. God help you if you own 90%, that kind of monster should never happen again in such a system.

Obviously these are just intellectual exercises. I don’t expect very many people to agree with them, especially considering how much they differ from the status-quo.

Today I decided to create a 22 page visual guide which describes what FOSS is and how it works. This is because I’ve found technical people who describe it to be dull and non technical users who get a good explanation to be genuinely interested.

So there seems to be a disconnect between technical people who understand FOSS and non technical users and what kinds of explanations work between them.

Since I’ll be explaining these concepts to many different people, mostly non technical, I need a way to communicate what we mean by Free and Open source Software and some of it’s implications for the community center organisers I’ll be talking to.

I’m attaching both the pdf and an archive of the source svgs all licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-SA. If you see spelling mistakes or think there is something missing or erroneous, tell me or post a fix.

Download PDF here

Download SVGs here

Update: Thanks to all the input so far. I’ve revised it 17 20 times with each person’s input and help. Spelling mistakes have been removed, my own personal dogmas have been sanded down, some new pages and it’s now ready for use.

I tried it out on the local Radio Shack employees, it seems to work. They get the ideas, they understand what it’s about and seem to be able to relate better to people who choose to use Ubuntu. So good signs for this trial.

I’m having a bit of difficulty finding a solution to a problem, maybe you guys can help.

In my User Data Services project, I need to have the ability to search for items which may be files, may or may not be currently available and which come from many different sources. I’m fairly used to Xapian and Lucene full text indexing, and something a kin to the field indexing of lucene would be the right kind of thing.

But python… well I’m not having much luck with anything that integrates into python. Lucene is Java based and the cLucene port doesn’t have a working s python api.

I was also thinking about Ubuntu’s existing full text file searcher, I think there may be more than one. If it’s possible to use that system, or one of the new tagging systems, then so much the better. It’s just a matter of integration and would reduce external dependencies.

In fact the tagging system is fascinating, some sources support tagging and most do not, integrating that is going to be interesting. But I’ll leave that for another time.

Update:

• pylucene is a Java wrapper and as such has heavy dependacies and is unstable for deployment.
• trackerd is the ubuntu indexer and it will be investigated since it’s dbus based and supports tags.
• python-xapain is available and just needs some TLC to convert my existing Perl Xapian knowledge.