DoctorMo's Blog

A while back our LoCo (Ubuntu Massachusetts) needed to order some CDs quickly. We’d just run out of CDs in a rather unfortunate way, we’d confused the server cds with the ubuntu desktop cds and thought we had more than we did.

Come time for an event and we have only 5 cds left in the whole group.

So I quickly get onto shipit and order some more. I haven’t heard anything from them since… until today, when a large canvas bag, the sort you might use to do your laundry in, turned up on my door step. Inside was a heavily broken box with many ubuntu desktop cds.

This is great, now we can distribute lots of CDs to everyone!

Although the manner of their arrival was a little odd. Normally Canonical sends these out through TNT International with about 50 CDs to a box. There were about 200 CDs in a bigger box, some of which had obviously been through the post office shredder. This is obviously a postal problem, the row boat from Europe that they send mail on probably hit some rocks or something.

So if any other groups are awaiting CDs from shipit, perhaps they’re on their way in handy canvas bags.

Last year I found a comic which I really liked called Digger.

It was smart, funny and the stories and tangents were fantastic. The way the story has been woven over time is also very good, you can tell the author is a master story teller.

I really enjoy the art work, it’s all black and white, but the contrast on scenes where they are under ground or in dark places where masterfully done.

Some of the humour reminded me of Terry Pratchett, there is both cynical story and visual humour, with various creatures in the woods asleep under blankets as the protagonist goes by. Things that would be easily missed if you weren’t paying attention.

So after I’d read a fair way into the story I hit ‘The Wall’, this is where the story became pay only viewing. This was quite a frustrating discovery so I put the comic aside while I got on with other things. Recently however I was browsing and found that the website had been redesigned and now I could read the rest of the story!

So I decided to read the whole thing again, and to be clever about it I decided to read it on my asus eepc like it was a book (see photo) for this to work I had to:

1. Use xrandr -o left to rotate the screen.
2. Use grease monkey plugin to add left and right keyboard navigation keys
3. Use stylish plugin to redesign the website so only the comic fit on the screen
4. Use the F11 full screen mode in Firefox

Now that I have played around with how to do this and have found it comfortable enough to read with this orientation, I may be able to read other comics and stories from my bed before sleep, instead of at my computer desk.

I’ve just got back from a particularly engaging meeting with a network of community centers here in Boston. The Timothy Smith Network is a  group to help community centers with technology education.

So firstly, the bad news. Microsoft has quite a few things going on already:

• Free Microsoft software, Windows, Office for these centers.
• Free Online training in Microsoft technologies.
• Funding and grants to Community Centers directly.

But despite the entrenched Microsoft use and the Microsoft philanthropy, there was a great deal of interest in Free and Open Source Software and in Ubuntu. So there is things we can do to benefit these centers and what these centers lack is a few things:

1. Information on what FOSS is, what it means and how to teach it.
2. People who are skilled in the tools who can donate their time to teach the public.
3. Access to the software, downloads, cds, does it work on windows, mac etc?
4. Admin skills, a place where people can go to find out how to run centers on Linux and with other Free Software

I’ll be working with this group in the comming weeks and months to try and see what we can set up. I can personally teach many technical subjects to a degree, and can bring someone up to the level of self inquiry quite easily. But it’s going to require a broader volunteer effort, they have the space, the computers, the people who want to learn. What they don’t have is skilled people with the time to teach some of those skills.

I’m looking for a set of resources which would allow me to guide system-admins in the right direction when it comes to Ubuntu.

See we have a number of systems-admins are community centers, and I want to be able to offer them the resources upon request to learn about managing their centers with Ubuntu.

Sometimes this is just basic stuff like ‘What does a computer look like inside’ or ‘How does networking work’ wikipedia can answer some of these simple things.

But then you get onto more complex issues such as ‘How does PXE booting work’ and ‘What do I need to do to create an image of a machine setup’

If anyone out there in the community knows of an existing resource, then I’d like to hear it. Otherwise we’ll be trying to teach people on the fly as we go.

These are the sites recommended so far:

• http://www.firewall.cx/linux-introduction-intro.php
• http://www.tcpipguide.com/
• http://doc.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/serverguide/C/
• http://tldp.org/HOWTO/HOWTO-INDEX/howtos.html
• http://lartc.org/
• http://www.w3schools.com/
• http://www.debian-administration.org/
• http://en.flossmanuals.net/
• http://howtoforge.com/

Today I’m just going to ramble on a bit about music and what I’ve picked up about how it all works:

Neurologically humans are programmed to recognise patterns, when the pattern is successfully predicted the brain releases hormones that make us happy, which also strengthen the connections in that area of the brain. When it gets it wrong it release cortisol a stress hormone and I bet we don’t feel as good.

We also feel happier about being in social groups, socially conforming produces much higher releases of happy chemicals than going against the grain or being alone.

So what would a pleb like me make of these ideas?

I reckon this means that the music we enjoy will be what ever music we’ve listened to while in the company of people we like and it’ll be dependant on the number of times listened and how similar the music is to other music you like. If it’s a new form of music which is completely different, then a socially positive experience can introduce the patterns and allow you to enjoy that music more (say listening to Beethoven or Mendel while at a Concert with friends).

It’s unlikely the the kind of music we enjoy are related to our intellect or genetics. A person who is in the social circles of rap music will tend not to like classical music, but that’s only because of the large social separation between people who like each kind.

Thoughts?

If you haven’t yet, catch some of these videos that were entered into the Linux Foundation’s competition.

Despite how great some of these videos are, I do have a problem with the way ‘Linux’ the brand is used. This post won’t win me many friends, we’re all very invested in the current Linux brand. But I argue that has to change:

When Gnu was starting out, it was a dedicated project with a wide set of aims, but it’s brand got trampled by the ambiguity of the platform and the lack of understanding about what it actually means for users. So instead when the project was joined into complete systems with the Linux kernel, the result was just called Linux (much to Stallman’s chagrin).

Then as time went on, Linux became the interchangeable name for the generic ‘platform’ we use as an operating system. Even the Tux pengiun was used on hardware boxes and games that supported certain distros.

Now it’s time the Linux brand got trampled to death too. The term is ambiguous and unhelpful when you use it outside of the programming and sys-admin industries. OK so we love having a single banner to fly and Linux is a very successful kernel project. But it’s not good to advocate with a conversation that starts off with a lie, that this system your using is Linux. Because then you’ll be constantly trying to explain why Linux doesn’t work here, but does work there, doesn’t do that, except when it does over there. It’s not a coherent system like the name’s use suggests.

I think we should be more specific and say what we mean:

• Linux – The Kernel project
• FOSS – The Philosophies that underpin the creation of software
• Ubuntu, Fedora – The Operating Systems

We can’t use specific names for the platforms, because there is no such thing. The Linux kernel with the BusyBox tools and Java meddley on a locked down G1 phone is not the same platform as Debian. The fact that you can mix and match makes it very difficult to brand everything the same. I’d use the LSB as a platform name, if they had a good enough brand name that wasn’t so confusing. Or perhaps FDO is useful as a platform name? (f.d.o, freedesktop.org).

So what do I do when I advocate for my LoCo? I promote Ubuntu, I say that it is Ubuntu, a Debian based Operating System just as good as Windows. If they wonder how it’s made, I go into FOSS, if they need help I show them the communities they can join. What I don’t do is say it’s ‘Linux’, why bother? I might just as well call it ‘gnome’.

If your thinking of making a video, I think you should promote FOSS. It’s the social ideas that lead to change and FOSS needs much explaining. Give examples in your distro of choice, in Firefox, in OpenOffice or even OpenLDAP or Apache. If you want to promote a replacement for Windows, then promote your distro of choice and be happy that your marketing will be much more tightly focused and less ambiguous.

I was reading this article on works with ubuntu and I had to take issue with one very small point:

Beyond rarely used instances of Windows and hardware drivers, I was able to think of only three additional closed-source components of my systems.  These are Adobe’s flash plugin, media decoders for formats like mp3 and Microsoft’s fonts.

My problem is how he is lumping MP3 encoding and decoding into the closed-source pile and this is something that frustrates me terribly. Ubuntu users should be much better educated about what the issues with codecs really are. It’s not because they’re all windows dlls (w32codecs) and thus are copyright infringement on someone else’s creative work or violate the DMCA because they break some trade organisation’s encryption scheme.

The mp3 format is supported in Ubuntu by liblame and libmad, liblame is a Free and Open Source library for encoding mp3 audio data, libmad for decoding, licensed under the LGPL and GLPv2 respectively. The reason why they’re not included by default is because some mobsters in Germany and France (Accatel) have dubiously applicable patents, which may or may not apply them. No one will ever check to see if they actually apply, or if there is a way around them because they’re all too scared. Let’s just pretend they don’t exist and perhaps we’ll avoid triple damages in US courts.

Although I notice no ones removed vfat, ntfs or other kernel drivers because of known patents. Although saying that, not that TomTom got sued for these, perhaps they won’t last long.

There is some of the codec stuff that is closed-source, the whole w32codecs should be scraped and we should support ffmpeg’s support of wmv and other formats (which I believe is happening). Closed source is bad technically and it’s bad socially, think about the support costs of having to fix the nvidia driver integration all the time and what better tasks these guys could be putting it to.

Now the crazy situation with libdvdcss requires the DMCA and the EUCD to be killed. No where in my moral book does it allow a government to send a citizen to jail for 10 years for playing his store bought DVD in his store bought computer, just because he’s not paid the DVD Forum cartel. And so, no questions, these laws must go.

So if you want support for codecs in Ubuntu hope for these things:

• Support FOSS implementations (ffmpeg, gnash etc)
• Remove the DMCA, EUCD and similar laws.
• Remove or limit the scope of software patents
• Education that allows us to choose when it’s safe to include the FOSS libs.

I often do derivative works of sketches that I like on deviantArt, the problem is convincing the original artists to allow me to make such a work. Not many artists understand Creative Commons licenses and this is such a shame, even though CC is available on deviantArt submissions. (although not Public Domain, much to my chagrin)

So here is my recent work: It’s a scene from Going Postal by Terry Pratchett , a book which is being mae into a live action film like The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic and Hogfather.

I was invited last night to attend Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall. It’s was great, the Helios was well received and the music is so much better in person.

I’m listening to a Mozart piece when I suddenly hit upon this idea, possibly already been implemented:

How about I create a python wrapper which is able to look out for exceptions, compile the execution path into a unique id and then lookup that id on launchpad. Obviously you would need to account for python libraries as well, the execution path processing has to be clever enough to pick up on what the last execution file was and what package that was a part of, and if the error was an external api error (defined class).

This would have the unique feature of being able to tell the user what the bug was, if it’s been reported yet and what the status of the bug report is. As well as a useful link to the bug report or the form for filling it in.

Perhaps not something that should be on every live python app, but certainly something useful for testing new released and for gathering information for a bug report for the user:

If anyone knows of an existing system like this, let me know, I’d be very interested to implement it for Coisas, since it’s first release will likely have problems.

The problem is this, you have thousands of supported devices, all using shared code. The programmers that maintain the code and build new code do not have access to every supported device and rarely do I think every device is tested.

Instead the process is one of “repair when needed”, you change the inet stack so the ipw modules no longer work on ipv6? someone will report the bug and it can be fixed later. Regression and Cyclic tests can only do so much, and then those seem centered around the soft modules (usb stack, file systems etc).

Is it possible to construct a testing system that allows a quicker regression test for hardware when your a distribution like Debian or Ubuntu? The only possible people with most of the hardware is going to be the diverse community of testers themselves, and even then if the testing procedure for each new kernel version is too hard, it won’t be tested.

I think we could research and develop a system which allows alpha, beta and rc testers of ubuntu to contribute their hardware testing, allowing a visual map of hardware to be constructed with possible regressions and unsupported hardware by weighting of reported incidence. This does require a fairly strict data set when it comes to hardware devices, something more solid than even smolt.

So how would such a system work? Well there is a great deal the computer can test, without ever having to bug the user about it. A basic report about what modules loaded, what hardware is available (and how they are tied up together), then you look at what device nodes are available and if a network device doesn’t have a corresponding inet interface, then it doesn’t work. If a wifi card produces a ethernet interface, then you have a problem.

You can then think about augmenting this report with a more detailed, user interactive report. Which should include almost every class of device.

Once you’ve got your report, it’s a simple matter of sending it and collating the information for developers to mull over. There could be a webpage where you can go to see the status of hardware regressions and other useful information.

How can we possibly look at device support, when we’re not even sure what works and what doesn’t with each new version of the linux kernel?