DoctorMo's Blog

From an editor and the writer and artist of Ubunchu comes a couple of very nice wallpapers. Today I’m going to share with you these:

All svg sources available so get mixing!

Back when I was developing a project called ‘Dohickey’ I had this idea that we could unify a great deal of customer information about hardware and make it so that user facing information was as editable as wikipedia and just as expandable.

I got it to the point where all my hardware had nice names, descriptions, pictures and a set of specifications detailing all the available features. Obviously the project didn’t go anywhere useful for anyone else, mostly due to doing a great deal of development in python and outside of HAL upstream which would have been better placed.

So today I’m going to detail some of the interesting things I had to try and work out or fix while I was doing this project. This is more of a documentation effort so anyone who would like to learn from some of these can try and get some of them into DeviceKit.

Stable Type Identification

Most hardware has the same set of ids used for identifying what a piece of hardware is, vendor id, product id, possibly a revision which usually describes the chipset. For pci you also have sub-vendor id/product id for who ever put the card together.

The first job was to try and stabilise a single field which would become an extendible id, the reasons for this is that multiple devices can be later further identified by their drivers, making more detailed identification. You want to have a field that can make the distinction between a Blackberry Curve and a Blackberry Pearl so your lovely phone management app can display the correct names and picture of the device.

Separation of Device and Hardware

The way most hardware is identified is through the set of device interfaces it presents to the computer’s operating system. Take any of the Intel chipsets (82801H for instance), they all contain the same basic set of chips and being able to identify them all as one single bit of hardware makes things MUCH simpler. Instead of 10 chipset devices, your program can display one chipset with the option to detailing to each separate device.

With pci I managed to do this by figuring out that the first two parts of the pci bus id usually accounted for the physical separation of the hardware, for instance I could be sure that 00:1d.7 and 00:1d.2 were the same pci card or motherboard chipset, but 00:08.0 was something completely different.

Motherboard / Mainboard

Together with the above, I wanted to create a useful was to store information about the motherboard. It’s not a device, it’s a collection of devices and is controlling the rest of the hardware. You can sometimes get useful information from dmidecode but not very often since the thing likes to lie¹. I managed to work out what was onboard and what was not using the pcidecode, take the router pci device and work out from there where everything was. Against 356 hardware profiles this system worked quite well.

Once your motherboard has a nice stable id through some mechanism, it doesn’t really matter if the name is initially , because the idea was to be able to attach to that id a real name and other information.

Firewire Isn’t Nice

I spent a lot of time trying to work out how to identify Firewire devices, all the devices I have (including an Apple iSight) did not have any identifiers as per the spec. Either a problem with the kernel driver or a problem with the devices. I ended up stripping and using the name fields as a fall back.

Monitors and Ram

Some bits of hardware lie right on the edge of visibility. If you want to know what kind of ram you have and how much of it and if you have a free slot, you can have a look at dmidecode and it may tell you those things. There’s also a way to interrogate the ram directly for vendor and product details but hardly any of the motherboard chipsets supported it in the linux kernel.

Monitors was similar, you can get some information by looking at the i2c/ddc info, but not all drivers support it. This is one of the things x11 does to work out what resolution your monitor should be. For instance not having the nvidia driver can kill your ability to know what kind of monitor is being used.

¹ Check out smolt for how bad the data can get when all you do is rip it directly from dmidecode.

There is so much new stuff being brought out right now, everything from Google Wave to some very interesting ubunet ubuntu karmic integrations.

What is interesting is how costly the first iteration of any idea is, it seems that before an idea is really solid or cohesive you need to spend a lot of time just thinking about what your trying to achieve. This includes a lot of pondering, staring into blank spaces and coding stuff that may never be used, over and over again.

Once you’ve got the idea nailed down, seemingly any programmer and her dog can recreate it with a fraction of the effort and even start evolving it using ideas from other spaces. Perhaps it’s similar to how some artists can take other people’s works and redraw them, but would always claim never to be able to draw.

It’s interesting because we may have to try and work out the economics of “first to market” projects, ideas and what essentially boils down to software research. Currently it’s kind of expected that projects that are first to market will be able to recoup their costs from that advantage, selling licenses and such.

But this is FOSS not proprietary closed source, it’s possible but not really very efficient to sell GPL licenses. So exactly how are we going to fund software research and unique projects that may have a high failure rate? Can we expect normal users to invest time and money into these kinds of projects using previously proposed methods for funding features and bug fixes? Would that really work if we knew it was very risky and the users are even less likely to understand what the result is really going to deliver?

Or perhaps it’s more likely that the developers will work for free on new ideas with the hope that one day people will be paying them to keep them active as successful projects. It seems like an enormous investment for volunteers, but they would be best placed to recoup from their experience.

Perhaps it’s best to leave this kind of thing to Universities like other industries do? Get government subsidised labour to do all the ground work and then be ready to jump into the successful projects later on, perhaps this might even get the students jobs later on based on their work.

An alternative thought might be to dismiss any kind of dedicated research and be contented with purely evolutionary work. No need to test new ideas or research user interaction, just follow user demands and what ever else is currently in the market.

I don’t really have any answers, I just figured I’d throw this out there. Maybe all of the above works, I obviously want lots of new cool stuff in Ubuntu.

I was reading an old entry by Ivanka Majic about testing Ubuntu on hey mother now that she got a job with Canonical.

I remember testing Ubuntu on my dear ol’ mum, and a part from other people messing the computer up and my sisters having extreme reluctance to anything other than windows, she was very impressed and decided to spread the word herself to all her friends. The fact that she didn’t have a computer at all before was a great starting point, nothing to unlearn and lots of new stuff to explore.

OK so I wonder if other Canonical staffers and Ubuntu members have tested Ubuntu on their mothers, I’m sure we’ve all done it right?

I was just looking though some BBC news when this lovely video popped up: ‘Obliteration’ risk from download[s].

The main argument seems to be: “If everyone is downloading things, the media industries couldn’t survive and would be ‘obliterated’, wiped out, no longer creating anything.”

Now I may be just be simple, but if the UK was really producing media that consumers wanted, then that demand doesn’t just evaporate with the advent of downloading. The nature of demand is that someone somewhere will make some money making it and supplying it to those people.

The difference is of course that the media would have to be supplied on the terms of the consumer and the creators would loose a lot of control over their creations. Control that they may be leaning on to earn more money than can actually be justified from their works. But at least they’d have jobs though right?

Well we’ll see how long Channel 4’s Count Down is off the air before the thousands of students and night workers who watch the show demand it’s return. To which the media companies can quite rightly start asking for payment. You can’t demand stuff be made for free, and the attitudes of advertising and license funded content seems to be dead set against admiting direct funding for content creation is even possible.

If the music industry was to suffer ‘obliteration’ in the UK, would any of the bands even notice? would anyone who is still actually making music and singing on tours actually care? I doubt the money from Glastonbury would dry up just because people can download the songs, if anything the removal of radio and crap cds might actually make it more interesting.

So my questions to Universal Music chairman Lucian Grainge are: After the obliteration, then what happens? and why should we care when it does? Even if we enter a few years of media darkness I’d stake the outhouse on there being new inventive ways to earn money from every creative industry based on the huge outpouring of demand for the kind of TV, music, film¹ and software that’s we’re all so damn used to, provided to us on the ever so damned useful internet as peer to peer downloads.

Media creation won’t disappear, the rules will change, your business will have to adapt and we’ll all get on with our lives. Because the alternative is that we turn the country into a police state that criminalises sharing and human natures to serve the interests of an outmoded media creation industry.

I won’t ever support such a move.

¹ If the UK actually had a film industry of course.

Is the majority of Free and Open Source development some form of consumer cooperative?

A consumer cooperative is where the people who would buy products or services own or fund the means to service them. So should most scratching itch type FOSS projects be considered a time based consumer cooperative? and is there anything we can learn from historical cooperatives?

Or is the open nature of involvement something different? We don’t restrict who can take advantage of our work, or who can modify and fork the work. So is it perhaps a media cooperative that has different rules from a traditional physical product cooperative?

Perhaps we should be looking at credit unions. I once had someone explain to me that credit unions are like the open source version of banks, owned by the people who hold their money there.

I’m going to be thinking about this some more, has anyone else ever thought about what we do in more traditional definitions?

Hello Folks, time for another instalment of me blabbing on camera:

I had a rather enjoyable bike ride today, three hours of Boston drivers petrified of the guy who knows how to cycle in a city. When I was on my was home I noticed a computer shop I haven’t previously seen.

So as is customary for an Ubuntu Advocate and LoCo member, I went in to say hi and see what kind of situation the shop was in regarding Ubuntu. Sometimes you’ll find shops who are Microsoft certified partners, they think of Ubuntu as “just another Linux that’s too hard” and other times you’d be surprised by the positive and welcoming attitude that being in the Ubuntu community you’ll get in a computer shop.

This place was more on the negative side, not bought and paid, but certainly one track. I had a very interesting discussion and I pressed the availability of the Ubuntu training we run at the South End Technology Center to get anyone interested familiar and experienced and I tried to explain how Ubuntu was really Linux for normal people, not for geeks or technical users, but for the kinds of customers he has.

The counter argument was that no one wants Ubuntu, no one has ever asked for it and they will only stock things that people ask for. It’s not that no one has never heard of it before, it’s just that Windows must be so much better because no one ever seems to want anything different.

So you’d be forgiven for thinking as we do in the Ubuntu Community that one of the biggest challenges is trying to get the word out. Advertising on no budget with no real outside support. Perhaps all his customers have heard of Ubuntu from a friend, but somehow I doubt it. At least one assistant there had at least tried it, although he found it slow running it in a VMWare session under windows Vista, so I gave some advice with running it via wubi or installing it natively.

I left on good terms and I gave them as many details as I could to come down and see what Ubuntu is actually about, the technology, the ease of use and even why it has so many volunteers. Hopefully we can offer all the correct information to these kinds of places so they can really take advantage of the awesome technology that we’re building here, I’d like to see more places asking for CDs and sending people our way to get advanced technical training and community relations.

Hopefully they’ll take me up on my offer.

Hey folks, I would have dearly loved to have gone to this year’s Community Leadership Summit, but my traveling budget got killed by UDS Karmic and it wouldn’t be fair to go jet setting all around the place when I don’t even make enough to cover rent¹.

So instead I’m inviting all you lovely Ubuntu folks to make sure to get yourselves down there, Jono Bacon will be there as will other important people from the Ubuntu community leadership. I think it would be a great opportunity for Ubuntu Local Community (LoCo) organisers and leaders to learn some tricks and tips from the masters of community.

It’s in San Jose California, United States and will be held on the 18th and 19th of July. All people who want to go should register on the registration page to make sure you get to go.

¹ I would have also liked to go to the Grand Canary Islands for the Free Software for rich people summit. But that’s serious layout for such a swanky place in the middle of an ocean.

http://www.imdb.com/video/hulu/vi4271112985/

I almost died laughing at this (video is limited to the USA I believe, sorry) in the episode of The Simpsons called “Mypods and Broomsticks” the Groaning crew take the piss out of Jobs and his over priced, over hyped gear to hysterical limits.

I wouldn’t mind but this episode isn’t new, it was released last year (2008). I gotta keep up with the Simpsons more often.