DoctorMo's Blog

Something I have been enjoying since I got access again to the BBC:

Armstrong and Miller on Youtube

Hey everyone!

I’m pleased to announce that thanks to the hard work of Arturo Silva and Anton Ekblad we have a speedy translation and editing of the new chapter of Ubunchu. This chapter is all about getting new netbooks for the school and why everyone always uses windows… Because you can’t buy anything without windows preinstalled.

Download it Here

French, Spanish and Indonesian editions are on their way too. We have a new translators mailing list that everyone who wants to be involved, should join: Ubunchu Google Group

An odd bit of news from the xorg foundation. During some discussion on their mailing list about missing funds it became apparent that PayPal had simply taken $5k of their money because PayPal thought xorg foundation were some sort of scam.

This has lead to more people boycotting paypal and a general unease about the liberty of financial transactions online.

For me it demonstrates a core corruption in the way our governments tackle law enforcement online. Instead of improving the police and the judiciary so that they can effectively cope with online fraud, copyright infringement and illegal computer entry, the governments are instead creating laws which force service providers to be the police, judge and executioner of punishments.

Everything from this PayPal misappropriation to the infamous three strikes internet connectivity laws currently being discussed in Europe. All of it shows the same disregard for impartiality, fair, open courts with a proper objection process. Instead we can replace courts and police with companies who’s job is providing us goods and services we pay for, so they can’t really be impartial.

Mix in heinously badly written laws like the DMCA who vagaries rank right up there with bible quotes. Who’s job it is to spread around the job of criminalising the general population so that everyone is responsible for watching and reporting on everyone else…

Wait that sounds awfully familiar…

There is no replacement for the judiciary for criminal activity, if the majority of people are tipping up over a law it’s because the law is wrong, not the majority of people. Most of these laws that grant corperate policing powers are so vague that even the mere hint of infringement or suspect activity is dealt with same severity as the worst offenders of real criminal activity. (if real criminals get caught by these schemes at all)

My friend leftyfb over on his blog has highlighted an issue with gnome that I always thought was a genuine oversight. i didn’t think that the gnome developers were seriously and deliberately removing the icons from certain menus. For the past few months, every time I went into the System menu, I thought the missing icons were because some bug that no one could find the time to fix, had crept in.

Apparently not. according to records it was a discussion by developers to remove visual queues and make Ubuntu harder to use for dyslexics like myself. Forcing us to read words which we can very easily misread and not letting us use icons in which a combination of shape and colour can act as reinforcing cues for the noun of these menus.

I know dyslexia isn’t a fun disability like blindness and deafness, but a little consideration would have been nice.

The exact regression aside, Mike points out in his blog another worrying facet that I’ve seen myself all too often in the gnome developer community. A community of disagreeableness. As I was saying yesterday in my blog post about disagreeable filtering: Being nasty and obnoxious is a poor man’s user contribution filter compared to being patient, understanding and using dialectical tools to work out problems so they can achieve as many wishes as is possible.

I don’t expect devels to say they’re good at design when they are only good at systematics. If you’ve worked out some of the science or some basic principles of design, it doesn’t make you a designer. It’s not always parcelled into simple rules and regulations. Sure, sometimes they help, but they’re at best guidelines and a good starting point and you’re not expected to use them as iron clad regulation. Of course this is an obvious warning sign that the coders have taken to design before learning anything about servitude let alone elegance.

I’m not pleased with gnome developer’s attitudes. Yes, sure, users are annoying, but why aren’t you asking them for money in exchange for listening to them? Instead you’re pretending that you’re an open community that welcomes contributions from unskilled users, but in fact want to cut yourself off from all users. A sort of Unenlightened self interest, the bastard brother of Enlightened self interest who is responsible for cutting ties between developers as users and pure users.

This is why I protest that we MUST start being honest about how progress is funded. You only have to listen to the people that control the purse strings, listening to anyone else is charity and is not guaranteed in any way. If we want to have users making a real difference in the community and ultimately getting the software that they want to have, then we MUST make sure those users have a way to pay for such services.

If we want to have users making a real difference in the community and ultimately getting the software that they want to have and not the software that we think they ort to have, then we have to listen to them and be able to ask them to pay for the time of developers.

This is an interesting comment to a previous blog post of mine:

I think there is a huge problem with the routes to contribution. There is a zero-requirement entry to Launchpad and Brainstorm, meaning that the small proportion of useful contributions are swamped by noise.

Ubuntu would benefit from a route to contribution that filtered interested and committed third parties capable of significant contributions. An excellent example of filtered contribution would be the recent article on kernel patching in Linux Format magazine (http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/archives).

In a practical regard I’m very impressed with the shear scale of development that the Linux kernel project manages to organise. It does have a very effective set of mechanisms for filtering contributions that intend to reduce noise and promote useful contribution over general chatter.

But, from my observations and the observations of other people, these filters primarily work through a social principle of being loud, obnoxious, aggressive and arrogant. Not to say that everyone is like that, but the culture certainly promotes those aspects. I don’t like contributing to the kernel project and I wonder why anyone else would bother to either. But that’s where the filtering comes in, you drive away so many people who would like to contribute, that only those who are hell bent on achieving a goal or are contractually obliged to would put up with it.

I remember asking an female kernel hacker (works for a big firm) one time about her experiences. I was rest assured that if it wasn’t for her companies requirement to work with the kernel project, that she would have no desire to contribute normally.

The Ubuntu community is quite different, the CoC means we can’t use unfriendly officious nastiness as a technical filter for poor contributors. We have to be a little better with our social skills, we have to encourage people, educate them and at the same time engage in tough love honesty so contributors know they’re work isn’t up to the standard, but we’d like them to continue to improve on it.

A hard balance to strike.

What are your thoughts?

I had to opportunity yesterday to have a look at the Cambridge MicroCenter software selection. Of course I wasn’t expecting much, if anything. What I found was amusing and confusing at the same time.

Of course they had four full isles of software products and from what I could tell a lot of them were quite old. One side of one of the shelf actually advertised that it contained “Linux” and I went to have a look at what they had.

1x Box of TuxRacer for windows and Linux, unknown age, looked pretty old.
2x Box of Develop with Linux, publish date about 2001.

That’s it, no boxes of Ubuntu, SuSE, RedHat, Madriva or anything else. No other Linux software (although that concept is a little out of date so I wasn’t expecting much). It was kinda sad, like seeing a software graveyard where old software refused to die.

What have you seen at your local computer shop?

I was on the Ubuntu forums yesterday checking out a couple of threads and it struck me that we still haven’t managed to get out of a weird feeling that the amorphous developer community surrounding Ubuntu somehow owes the users who post wishlist threads a free ride.

For instance in one thread there is a general complaint that developers are not doing enough new things for lucid, or not enough testing, or enough stabilisation. When in fact the developers are doing exactly the right amount of development and exactly the right amount of work, based upon what their own needs and feelings are.

Of course this part is hard to understand for users that have been told that Ubuntu is a free lunch. Developers are under no obligation to do anything unless paid to do so. It doesn’t matter how many wishlist threads there are, few developers are ever going these things for ideas and I wonder if it’s actually a cry for help that these users don’t know how to get involved. I’m reminded of this phrase:

“Too many Chefs and not enough Cooks”

Yes FOSS gives you the power to be your own Chef, to say what you like and don’t like, to use what you find useful and to dismiss anything you don’t. But along with that it gives you the responsibility to be your own cook too. You have to work at what you need and it’s only useful to complain when your hoping to strike up a decent and productive discussion.

Perhaps this is why the Opportunistic Developer project is important, to try and convince more Chefs to get down and do some of the grunt work in solving their problems. I just wish there was an Opportunistic Payment project that allows people who can’t contribute time, to at least be able to push development forward with good old fashioned money.

Thoughts?

If you’ve ever been involved with teaching then you’ll know that you teach the small stuff first, little lies, small over simplifications that get the students off in the right direction. Sometimes this is characterised as getting students on the first rung of the ladder of learning.

Then there is the fear that our modern world is too complex, it’s pushing our children to think, process and work out their mental faculties more and more. Some say you can see the result of this in the ever upwardly reassessed median IQ. Others say you can see it in the stress levels, the increase in trivialities and the reduction of curious pursuits.

But what I see is something different. There are and always will be a range of people with a range of mental facilities and abilities, that not everyone understands computers doesn’t mean that everyone is expected to grapple everything. We worry about the lowest common denominator focus of society, but the common don’t.

When you see the world looking a little simple, basic, too well understood, not progressive enough, I recommend looking a little deeper because it’s fractals all the way down. You used to learn how to farm wheat, now you learn how to drive a tractor, one day you’ll learn how to press a tractor robot activation button, but there will always be more to it and deeper understandings to have for those that seek them.

Don’t refrain from making things simple, the simpler they are the more you can zoom in to greater complexities. The simpler the big stuff is the more you can get on with making progress.

Don’t worry about the apparent deficit of mental alacrity in the general population, it’s always been like that, if anything things are getting slightly better though the shaping and presentation of learning to even the unenthusiastic student. Some are saying that we shouldn’t teach children facts and figures, who cares who the third US president was (Tom) as soon we’ll all have mobile computers with permanent access to wikipedia where all our fixed knowledge can be stored.

Is that progress? do facts help us think up new idea, or do ideas and concepts only matter? Do we need new narratives and tales to pass on these concepts to our children?

Your cognations?

I’ve just been looking through Spread Ubuntu, that bastion of advertising media for Ubuntu LoCo teams which allows us to share designs and such.

I noticed something which made me smile, a long time ago I made a poster for the Massachusetts 8.10 party and it was commissioned from Mimloy a Thai artist from deviantArt. She kindly made it and released it under CC-BY-SA for me. So I made modifications and did my editing and produced this. (see left)

So checking art I was glad to see this work by Leogg, a Spanish Ubuntu person who designed/released some great Ubuntu CD covers for 9.10 (1 year later) and some of them clearly show a derivative of the original Ubuntu girl from the above poster. Changed, made better, made to fit, given a body and split into a number of personalities.

Isn’t it great? Score another point for creative commons freedom. Now on an interesting note technically each derivative work should attribute all the people who’ve worked on it so far, but that’s actually hard to do because you may not know everyone who did (I doubt leogg knew Mimloy was the original artist) and it could ruin the artwork to have a million names printed on it each time. I’ve not yet come up with a good answer for how to solve these problems.

Thanks to everyone who has been helping the Ubuntu MA team and Danny Piccirillo, Myself and Michael Dexter of the Linux fund with the Ubuntu @ Anime Boston event. We’ve got most of the money and most of the resources too, so a big thank you goes out to:

• Canonical Ltd for a timely conference pack with t-shrits, pens, caps and 300 Karmic CDs.
• Go Promotional for their printing of flyers.
• Arturo Silva for his Art, Money and general outstanding kindness.
• Everyone who has been very kind to our project and donated or helped with materials.

So to keep everyone up to date this is where we are as of today: We have money to get things made, manga, flyers, posters and a new team banner (lost the old one doh!) We have materials, cds, canonical flyers, this how-to-make Anime in ubuntu flyer and some lovely pens.

What we’re working on producing is: Designs for flyers (which I’ll post as they’re done), we want to get in touch with that new anime project that seeks to produce an anime using FOSS tools, maybe even the Blender project to get some information from those projects made available.

We’ll need to start getting a roster together of people who are going to be able to come to the event, there are 2 spots that come with the booth we’ve gotten and we can buy more. People who are going to Anime Boston anyway and wouldn’t mind manning the table for an hour over the weekend can also apply to us by email. We’d also like to know who’ll be coming so we can spot you and have some time to chat with people from out of state who might already be involved in FOSS/Ubuntu.