DoctorMo's Blog

Well I just installed the newly released Firefox 3.5 on Jaunty from a PPA.

I mainly wanted to see if the speed improvements were real and if those speed improvements would affect my svg world map, with all it’s AJAX and animations.

It’s about 20% faster by eye, it manages a few more animation frames but not much more. I’m not sure if the animations are working or if fakeSmile javascript is kicking in, or even getting in the way. If anyone else has firefox 3.5 installed and would like to give it a test using the link above.

Update: Apparently Firefox 3.5 doesn’t have any animation, just faster javascript. Oh well.

At least it still works

From the folks that are brining us a compiled online video program comes an interesting funding model. Adopt a Line of Code.

You get to pick a line of code to adopt and pay $4 per month for looking after it. The cute graphics really made me laugh though, as if code is really that pretty¹. These charitable donations count towards your tax return and of course help to make development possible.

I’m wondering if anyone has had any ideas on Adopt a bug or Adopt a feature. Something to tie users into the programming and code support for Ubuntu would be really useful. although I have heard that lots of people don’t really want to pay for software, which is sad to hear, because software development costs are not zero, even if distribution costs are².

Like my Software Concert idea, it has boasting extras such as tags you can put on your blog or website and it ties the product it’s self into what your buying so your not just buying a token heart felt thanks like you are with typical donation buttons.

I’m interested to hear how successful this project is for Miro and I’m also interested to hear of other unique and interesting funding models for Free and Open Source Software, the more we experiment, the more likely we’ll be able to invent something that will be able to drive FOSS development economically out of the enterprise and student bedroom production houses and into a more professional and well paying development that seeks to serve real end users in homes and small businesses.

¹ Depends on the language of course
² Well, close to zero.

I would have reported today, but I’m burnt out. sorry folks. Hopefully next week will be better.

Since laptops and netbooks are getting so cheap, what should we be doing about our broken laptops?

I’m fixing a laptop now, needs a replacement screen which will cost $100 or so, that’s a lot considering you could get a brand new laptop from Dell for $300. Even when we put Ubuntu on P4 machines to refurbish them, are they as useful as a new machine would be given the low costs?

Is it worth doing at all? Has anyone managed to come up with a way to calculate the benift/cost of keeping with the old and repairing it or throwing it away in favour of something new? Surely in the computer world we’re going to be experiencing this at a much higher rate than in other industries. So what’s to be done?

Should all complex equipment to be sold have to have disassembly instructions? component and materials lists? It wouldn’t be so bad if you could repair basic faults like broken plastic with some Fab lab equipment, but no manufacturer releases models or specifications for even the smallest parts of their designs.

What about more complex parts, screens, main boards? should we be recycling them? should we be forcing manufacturers to pay for recycling or accepting them back to deal with (so called reverse shipment)? Is it possible to disassemble modern electronics into material forms for use in newer parts?

I think we may have lead ourselves down a rickety road of resource misuse. Getting this house back down the stairs will difficult, costly and interesting, if we ever learn of course.

A hydrogen based concept car designed by teams in Oxford and Cranfield universities in the UK that I totally missed the news on last week.

There are some very nice technical features to this car such as 300mpg fuel use, energy recovery on each wheel, it’s light and can go up to 50mph (not that fast considering the top speed is 70mph on the roads) but what is very interesting to me is that the overall design will be open source, or some form of open source I guess. While the designs for the motor and fuel cell components won’t be, the idea that the design can be modified and taken up by anyone anywhere in the world is something worth watching.

I’d be interested in finding out what the licenses are, what kind of format the specifications are in and so on before I rush to judgement. But it’s interesting how the ideas we’re developing in the software world are being experimented on in other fields of endeavour.

Today my day has been consumed by a mathematical problem given to me by a potential employer. I think it’s one of the Evil things that Google has given us, Computer Science exam questions for programming jobs.

You might be able to prove some sort of understanding about problems that people picked up in University, but what about those poor sods like myself that learned programming through hard work? Ah well better brush up on your Factorials, Diophantines, Combinatorics and Permutations Mathematics.

Although I don’t know about other programmers, I’ve very rarely ever had to use anything more advanced than basic calculus and even then it’s mostly for graphical and data storing algorithms. Your basic programmer should be a good engineer first, a good scientist second and a good mathematician third. At least in my experience, so why oh why am I spending so much time on this?

/moan

Some of you may have heard of this project before, a research project I started with some rapid prototyping in python called “User Data Services” now renamed to “Central Services”. The idea is that you should be able to access any kind of data from any kind of data source through well tested APIs over something useful like dbus.

This replaces the need for multiple implementations of the same data access, listing, indexing and meta data storage patterns in every user application and replaces each source with plugins. Since the prototype in python has ghastly memory usage for small collections of objects I want to move to something with better resource management and I’ve been investigating Vala and implementing strong paging and object garbage collecting for this reason.

This overview diagrams the proposed architecture for this service, taking into account what I have learned in the prototype phase. It will need some existing components to work, a very good search indexer, a meta data field manager and lots of useful data access plugins before it can become truely powerful, but I believe most of these parts already exist.

I’ll be looking into this project as time allows as it’s unfunded. Let me know if you think it’s interesting or if you have any comments (or if you think it’s rubbish).

Today I was called out to help a young mother who got a Dell Mini 12 refurbished some months ago, which had come with Ubuntu on it. I was surprised again because there are contacts who are obviously geeky and who have participated in the community to some degree and then there are those out of the blue contacts who need help because they bought a computer directly from the OEM and now it needs someone to give it some attention.

This machine only had one problem, she couldn’t remember the password. The guides on-line that she had tried had told her to press [Esc] and load up the recovery mode. But Dell has stripped that option away, yay Dell. So I reinstalled the computer with 9.04 replacing the Dell crusted 8.04 install and making sure it had skype and all the other user facing goodies that people expect; obviously making sure to back up her 35MB of photos and documents. I backed up and installed from a single 4GB memory stick (800MiB for the installer, 3.3GiB for data) which I now carry around with me everywhere (Very useful device).

We made arrangements to meet at a coffee shop, not that it’s too much of a problem installing Ubuntu on battery power and I can certainly understand the need for public places when meeting some stranger. Fortunately the battery power at 45% on this machine lasted 2 hours, so the whole install and medibuntu + restricted extras completed on battery even with the coffee shop’s 60MiB/s wifi connection.

I do love helping people who have come to Ubuntu, although this refurbished machine was kinda odd since I didn’t think Dell shipped Mini12s with Ubuntu and it did have a ‘Designed for Windows XP’ sticker (but no license sticker). But everything seemed to work out ok, she’ll get in touch if there are problems. We finished up and she headed out.

As I was getting up, someone on the next table raised her voice and asked if I knew anything about Ubuntu. Now i think I’ve entered the twilight zone where everyone in the coffee shop appears to be using Macs but are actually Ubuntu users. Anyway, turns out her computer has a duel boot with Ubuntu 7.04 and windows xp, she wanted to know if I could remove Windows and upgrade Ubuntu. I gave her details of my private support and of the Ubuntu Massachusetts LoCo Tuesday Education and Support sessions that we run for free and hopefully she’ll be in touch to sort out her machine too.

As an aside to my utter surprise at coming across two Ubuntu users at random. I am starting to note a pattern, of the 5 chance encounters that have needed Ubuntu support in the last year: all have all been women. Now either it’s because women are more willing to try something new when offered by Dell, are less invested in Microsoft’s desktop familiarity, are more willing to go out and find help (and thus find me or the LoCo group) or some unforeseen force, but I’m very happy to see the 50% of people who have been typically excluded from technical areas coming to Ubuntu naturally.

Anyone else found Ubuntu users randomly because you were helping someone else with their Ubuntu machine in a coffee shop? Because I think there is progress in the air.

This is a second part to my Who needs Flash post, I’ve continue with prodding to work on some ideas for simple svg maps. A map that is able to find your country or state, but not directions or anything like as complex.

This map shows the world, it’s interesting because it loads maps from a simple apache webserver using XMLHttpRequest and allows you to drill down each section of the map until you find what you want. For the purpos of this demonstration I have only populated a number of maps, I expect that it’d be very complete and useful with an open streetmap backend cleverly processed into the required output and so forth, maybe combined with wikipedia links and other fun stuff. See here for each of the map files and how it was constructed.

I also used FakeSmile in this project, this allows Firefox to display svg animations, even though Firefox 3.5 doesn’t yet support animations in svg files (coming soon), fake smile is a great project, a credit to the authors, I only have one problem with it so far and that’s the infinate loops and uncaught flipping of properties once animations should have finished, this can cause your cpu to spike, so don’t be worried if your computer grinds to a halt.

You’ll also notice that it makes heavy use of cascading style sheets, very useful for hovering and selecting elements based upon multiple inherited classes.

There isn’t any server side code in this demonstration, it’s all done by matching up the element ids to file names stored on the server. The server did need a .htaccess to report all svg files as xml and not svg+xml which firefox balks at.

Also worth noting is the horrible, horrible speed of everything. Hopefully if more demonstrations in svg can be put together, stretching the framework, we’ll see improvements in Firefox and other browsers when it comes to rendering speeds and svg processing speeds.

I think SVG is the better standard and the better framework when compared to Flash, not because of speed or technology, but just because of how integrated it is with everything. I was able to develop this demo using Firebug, I was able to use standard javascript and standard css to style and run everything. If it wasn’t for the terrible neglect that svg has suffered at the hands of Adobe, we’d have replaced Flash already for a large number of things.

Today I’d like to ramble on about Adult Language Learning:

Remember to post links and information if you know of existing projects or programs that are solving these problems.