DoctorMo's Blog

I was looking at etckeeper recently, it looks like a fascinating program that will store configurations in any one of half a dozen repository types. Thus allowing the experienced administrator to easily version control and distribute their system’s configurations.

When I think of configuration files, weather it be in etc or in the users home directory¹, I think about them as initial conditions: You have a logical program your going to run and setting the initial conditions will make it go this way or that way in the logic. The fact that these conditions are saved over from the last execution is irrelevant for this thought exercise.

Now all initial conditions follow the very fixed mathematical rules of all structured data. If I were to put this in Perl parlance, everything’s a hash, array or string. Even seemingly complex things like crontabs will fit this rule once you make take order and format out the back and shoot it.

Following this logic it should be possible to convert any one configuration format into any other², given enough information about the file’s intended format. Once you can describe what the file should look like you can get on with working on explaining what the structure should be.

Then your but a stones throw away from being able to systematically test any initial condition data (configuration files) against known structure validators (say an xsd or dtd) using a clever format parser definition (see what vim does for lots of examples) and confirm that this version of the package’s config will work with the next version.

And then… now here’s where you can get some really fancy happenings: you can use translation languages like xslt to upgrade or downgrade from one version to the next of any given configurations. Making systematic config regressions disappear and allowing programmers to offload configuration management onto a standard system.

I’ll be at UDS and I’ll be happy to discuss or argue with anyone there about the merits of such a system.

¹ All of which should be moving to ~/.config/ XDG directories anyway.
² Except those where form and function are bound, e.g. crontab

Hey guys, yesterday and today I’ve been helping out with a US LoCo project (which I’m forbidden to talk about) but I wanted to share with you how awesome svg is.

If you believed what people say, you’d believe that flash is the only answer for web based flashy graphics, this is a map of the USA and each state, it uses css and javascript to produce an mouse over (although in the project it’ll be changed to an onclick) and it works out the position of the info box from the direction of the line leading to it.

It should be possible to take this and create other maps, similar in nature since all shapes work from IDs. The tools I used for editing and scripting where:

* Inkscape – although inkscape messes up CDATA and inserts far too much garbage. It’s still the defacto standard for editing and creating the svg file. Often I would create copies, edit in inkscape and then copy out the edited parts to make sure I didn’t get garbaged.
* Imagemagik, bash and wget – For creating resized flags from a script which dowloaded the svgs from wikipedia and outputted 64×64 scaled images.
* vim and gedit – I used vim for the main editing and gedit for parts where I needed to copy large amounts of text on one line (vi isn’t good with 400 node paths).

I also took good use of google to fill in any javascript gaps and although this isn’t yet finished for the project it’s still pretty cool.

You’ll remember back a few days ago I made a post about Canonical and all this Ubuntu One trademark nonsense.

Well looks like someone posted my thoughts to the bug report (even though I said that the bug was meaningless and not a real issue at all), It appears that some read into my words that I thought the issue was between some definitive black and whites in the over reaching authority.

That’s not true, more specifically my blog post was arguing for clarification about the definition of the Ubuntu project’s community self declaration (what it thinks of itself), if it’s very own name is not in it’s control it kind of breaks self embodiment and what you end up with is not two separate organisms with mutually beneficial aims, but a single organism with two heads that most of the time want the same things.

BUT, and this is a big but, since the Ubuntu Community does have control of some parts of the trademark it does manage to keep hold of itself authority but not it’s uniqueness. It has been granted certain uses and flexibilities which does make it seem more like two beasts where one has a yoke of the the other, a symbiosis, a very interesting one.

Now that I’ve read Mark’s views on this trademark issue I feel on firmer ground that the Ubuntu community is a part of the Ubuntu Project and of which Canonical is the chief operator and controller. I’m happy to continue to be in the community by the way, I approve of the way the community is organised. So long as other people in the community don’t think that the whole Ubuntu community (including Canonical) is under the control and ratification of the Ubuntu Community Council, some parts of it are outside of it’s control.

You thought I wasn’t going to make it, I thought the same. but now, I have my receipt from the US government and I can finally leave the country. Instead of visiting my family, who I haven’t seen for 3 years, I’m going to UDS… because it’s next week.

I have my flights, via Paris, should be fun.

Now all I have to do if figure out how to get a hotel. Are any of you planet readers also going to UDS Karmic and would also be having hotel rooms with extra beds? I need to save as much money as I can (being unemployed). Anyone with a spare couch, I’m happy to couch serf too if needed.

I’m so excited, I’m going to put on my “Your wrong and I’m right” t-shirt so everyone knows my position in sessions.

No video today folks, I just got back from Vermont late in the day (although a day early) and I have just enough time to post this thought for the day.

Often I find the problem with certain social solutions to problems is one of consideration or scope. A single individual person is not able to grasp the complexity or the idiosyncratic nature of social groups. Solutions usually fall between those more concerned with others (compassionists) and those more concerned with themselves (individualists).

Self embodiment is the understanding of what constitutes your very being, it’s not the way you view yourself (mirror) but is more about understanding what you are made of. Only once you understand yourself can you truly understand other people (so the conjecture goes).

Take for instance the issue of free will. In terms of a scientific view we are pretty much predetermined by the nature of the universe and it’s function; but just because someone is predetermined in a universal context does not mean that there is no free will, after all the part of the universe that predetermines you is, er, well you. The only way it would mean that you had no free will would be if you weren’t a part of the universe or were not existing, but the universe still predetermined your future.

As philosophies go, this one is quite hard to explain, lots of people don’t understand the above and scoff. The current modern world view is one that considers everything as components and separate parts. It’s only now with the turning of minds that modern philosophers are starting think that perhaps there is something to ‘universal constituent’ that makes us more than the sum of our parts.

Take Ubuntu, something I work in a lot. My friend asked me “Why would you want to go to UDS and spend all that money for those *swears*, haven’t you done enough for them?”; To which my only reasonable reply was that “I do things for Ubuntu because I make up it’s community as much as anyone else”¹, I’m a constituent part of it not a separate outsider who constantly has to give and receives nothing in return.

Then, I think towards all of the people in the modern world who no longer consider themselves parts of their cultures, communities, countries. They consider themselves classes by it, but not a part of it. It means they can be lazy and lay easy claim to other people’s successes, but to feel no responsibility to do anything for anyone else inside of it.

Think of how we cheer when our country’s team wins in the Olympics or in the World Cup. When was the last time that most of these people actually gave any time for said country or even felt like they were a part of it? Maybe that’s why we feel good about cheering along in pubs up and down the nation, we finally feel like we’re a part of something, even for a brief time.

And this is where it gets into politics and sociology. I believe very strongly that a single person should not make the decisions for the majority or even for a single other person; because it violates the embody rule: one person does not embody the whole. It’s not a system of individual choices which make up the resulting society, but how each of those components interact. It’s not from the leader’s orders that the subordinate acts, but from the belief and authority in the leader and those orders taken.

That’s the difference, we think of governments as people, but in fact the governments is more like the gaps between people. The mechanics of how each of those people interact and how who they rule interact with their choices.

Please do comment on this entry if your confused, if you found it useful or if you think I’m talking out of my behind. This is a philosophy that I’ve been building for a while now from various different things.

¹ Well, that and I like to have my say and talk to people much brighter than me.

I’m up here in the wilds of Vermont relaxing in front of Groton lake doing a bit of fishing with an Irish friend of mine.

So I won’t report back until Tuesday. I’ll have missed this week’s video so I appologise to all who were looking forward to it.

I’ll post further if I get bored (but it’s so relaxing!)

Before I begin, I must disclaim that I can not speak to any large degree about Ubuntu One since I used to work for Canonical on that very product and don’t want to risk saying anything technical.

There is a lot of hot air going around various blogs today and yesterday about Ubuntu One (Ubunet), some are just general reviews but a whole host of them have picked up on the Trademark issue, so I’ll split this blog entry into two parts:

Canonical and the Ubuntu Trademark

The bug #375345 is a red herring. The fight going on is not productive because it’s not a fight about Ubuntu One at all.

In my view this conflict is about the Ubuntu Community and Canonical and the relationship between them. Ubuntu is supposed to be the community to which Canonical belongs; but it’s also true that the people in Canonical are the creators and shapers of the Ubuntu Community. With the very Trademark used by the Ubuntu Community to define it’s self in the hands of a single member of said group, hence conflict.

It’s about who is who’s daddy. Is the Ubuntu Community an subservient part of Canonical or is Canonical a member of the Ubuntu Community? I can’t see it being both ways, one must be the parent and the other must be the member. Lots of people will be upset if it turns out that the Ubuntu Community is nothing more than a labour division of Canonical Ltd. Although that’s not true, I’m just making a sharp point.

If Canonical is truly a member of the Ubuntu Community then it must give the trademark for Ubuntu to the Ubuntu Community for management. Otherwise the community must face loosing Canonical as a friend and gaining it as a master. those who are unhappy about that will leave the community.

Update: Someone posted my blog entry to the bug report, and Mark Shuttleworth responded. Sometimes it’s worth noting that when I use a black and white analogy, it’s a very specific aspect of the issue and not quite as broad or as loose as readers sometimes read into it.

Canonical in Trade

Each company must have a business. What is Canonical’s business? Is it support services? Is it online services? Is it development? I don’t know, it confuses the hell out of me. I know the main core of Canonical is development, but the main funding drive is for services (except for OEM development funding).

I’ve talked at length before about how you can’t really offer services for excessive prices in order to re-focus money on development. It’s just not going to fly economically, someone will always be able to out compete you even when you make parts of the service closed source.

The more people I talk to about funding, the more I’ve come to the realisation that not one person has the slightest clue how to make a software development company economically viable in the FOSS industry¹ (me included). It’s becoming very apparent that Mark is attempting to translate Red Hat’s service focus business into a proxy fund for their development focused business of Canonical, and in my view it’s not possible to do.

Pick a business, development or services, you can focus on one and dabble in the other but your business focus should always be earning your bread and butter. If you pick development then you need to get to the lab and start researching funding models pronto, because there aren’t any that work yet.

¹And this is really why Adobe, Microsoft and other pure software houses will not join FOSS in any meaningful way.

This is a quick blog post about gravity and the way in which we visualise it in our educational materials, take a look at this:

Typical Visualisation of Gravity

This is what I’ve seen a lot of when I was growing up, it’s also what comes to mind when ever I watch TV shows or have ever had the idea of gravity explained to me in layman’s terms.

But while this does show off the very basic ideas of gravity on a 2D space/sheet, it does lead one to conclude that it would be easy enough to pick up the object and move it somewhere else (e.g. time-travel and teleportation). It also makes us think of other forces as magical forces fields around atoms. Weird.

Instead when I think of things in space I think of them as a part of space:

Object of Space

You’ll have to imagine for a moment that the photo above is more symbolic and that there is nothing inside of the space, it is simply lots of space screwed up into a tiny ball. (bit of a stretch of the imagination required)

So that’s it, objects on space: I don’t believe; objects as space: totally makes sense to me, then your crazy entropy can be just unfolding and expanding space. Crazy! This means though that entropy would increase if the universe was to shrink.

I was reading a very interesting blog post section today called “Relevance to Open Source and Paradigm shifts” by Alan Kay and SteveJ which is about how ideas in society change and how to achieve critical mass.

Central to the idea is that there is a large amount of people who think critically about how every tool can directly effect their current set of problems and another calculation of the number of people who only think externally. They put the figure at around ~80% of people who are “outer motivated instrumental reasoners”

These people, so the theory goes, will move towards what ever the majority of people use, even if they don’t want to. Think about MacDonnalds, even if you don’t like it, people still eat there. Those people are probably instrumental reasoners (although I don’t class it as food, but that’s a different story)…

So to take advantage of these ideas for Ubuntu LoCos and communities it would mean focusing very hard on a very small community or sector and focus all resources on getting that community up to 66% usage in order to get ignition, this is where the ideas will shift and everyone will believe that it’s normal to use Ubuntu (see Lindependence 2008, converting one town at a time).

Now getting 66% of everyone to use Ubuntu is going to be VERY hard indeed, that’s why the suggestion is to focus on small communities and then leverage those by brining in outsiders (in small enough numbers)

I have another convincing strategy: lie, well not quite lie, but basically we as a community should stop harping on about how _little_ of the market share we have, we should not discuss any market shares below 66% and we should shape our marketing in a way that makes us look like we believe Ubuntu is the natural thing that everyone is doing (even if they aren’t yet)

I’ve seen Apple do it with their Mac adverts, there are only about 12% in the US market of desktop users using Apple Computers, but if you were to ask people, there successful advertising campaign and their indifference to their low market position means that the general public’s mind-share is much greater. Everyone wants a Mac, even if they can’t afford it. Not being able to buy it of resenting buying a PC, but their mind-share still counts towards that magic 66% ignition threshold. (although it probably doesn’t help that they’re not really selling ideas, but life styles)

I would appreciate the input from other LoCo groups, what kind of message do you send out when you talk to members of the public about the position of Ubuntu? Do we say that it’s a new thing that everyone should be using, or do we say that it’s a new system that everyone is already using?

Comments most welcome.

I was sent a link to these awesome stickers, they dissect through satire the motivations of school boards in some US states.

The whole idea that you can control people through what they learn is a fascinating social weapon. As if the truth wasn’t difficult enough to approach. We have to create stories, often mostly fictional ones, about almost every aspect of science in order to fit the core ideas into our heads. Little lies that can lead to bigger truths.

What is worse than the lies is the erosion of the scientific principles. The enlightenment was our civilisations way of digging our way out of the primitive creation myths and dogmas and now we seem to be sliding back. I see less people able to cope with philosophy, fewer people who are able to wield rational skilfully and worse, people who no longer believe in their own ability to test any theory.