It’s time once again to show off some of the great art being made using Ubuntu and the wonderful tools we have available to us:
Also check out the Cartoon TV show made using ubuntu and blender: Pirates vs. Ninjas vs. Robots vs. Cowboys (in Portuguese)
This is my top 10 for August, if you want to see more of the amazing art being done using Ubuntu, check out the full gallery.
I am in support of the census package that Canonical is trying out. We could do with more public access to the data set the package will create, but that’s not really a policy of the package. That’s a Canonical policy thing.
Having a fully public data set would of course prove beyond doubt about the anonymity of the data being saved.
David wrote: Do we [have free will]? We like to think that we do, but a look at the psychological research into the subject of priming leads to some interesting questions with respect to this.
It’s an interesting philosophical question. One that science can’t really answer because of the nature of science as an externalised view on the subject of reality.
We may be completely nailed down to our pre-defined destinies as the supernaturalists would have it. Or we might be completely predictable from a neurological aspect.
Either way, it doesn’t mean we don’t have free will.
The problem is how we think of ourselves and how we think about embodiment. If I am a brain in a body that as a system is predictable, then I am still making my own choices because I _am_ that system.
It only really gets into a lovely problem when you have a soul that sits outside of the universe pulling levers and creating a discrepancy between what the natural reality can predict and the choices we actually make. That discrepancy would be fairly easy to spot too.
All neural science is able to prove is that we have no soul, but it would be unable to get rid of free will without discounting the material that makes up the person as embodying of what that person really is.
Scientists love to have an externalised viewpoint though, so it’s no surprise to me that a lot of scientists (even atheists) subscribe to the supernatural out of body free will argument.
Martin,
I wanted to post this to the planet because we rarely get to think about the kernel in the Ubuntu world, and when we do get kernel related posts they’re usually fairly dry and require some background skill to read.
This is a commentary piece.
Getting the community involved in testing
There is not enough testing of RC kernels. Most people who attended thought the level of testing in Linux was bad.
Testing would be much easier if there was the possibility of safely testing a kernel by selecting installed RC kernels on boot in Ubuntu and letting it run through an automated set of regression tests which could automate a potential report for time and regression and then perhaps reset (if possible). Such a test suite could expand the number of users who would be willing and able to test the kernel without background skill in kernel development.
I feel that not enough time has been spent on coding the boring part (tests) and too much emphasis is put on the exciting features development. Of course the rationale is that users will just test out the bugs. But if the user-base is shifting then users won’t be able to carry the burden of testing for all regressions forever.
Increasing invisibility of the Kernel
The kernel ecosystem is concerned with the lack of visibility and the unattractive nature of working on the Linux Kernel. The pressure is to increase the visibility to end users to make the brand glamorous to work with. The licensing of the kernel doesn’t require any sort of attribution upon the distribution of a product using the Linux kernel, it’s not well known that the Linux kernel (with busybox in toe) runs the majority of embeded consumer devices as well as some of the most popular phones but isn’t well known.
Perhaps another problem with the Linux kernel is that it fails to control it’s brand in such a way as to make it clear that you are not working on Linux _unless_ you are working on the kernel project. This is a failure of the project to correctly market itself as a kernel and not a whole operating system stack which seems to be the current problem. The attempt of the kernel project to hijack the branding of the standard distro space has caused a lot of confusion and head scratching.
Ubuntu is not Linux, in the same way that an Ice cream isn’t a waffle cone.
Playing with Branches, New Version?
Does strict release cycles put new developers off from playing with the Linux kernel code base. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that we should be having a play-with branch set which doesn’t need to be versioned as 2.6.7 or 2.6.9 in such a way that it could potentially lead contributors to believe that they are working on code which is the future of a Linux release. Which is not the intent of a highly experimental space. For a play branch it just needs some educational type of person to manage a playground kernel branch specifically for the weird and wacky as well as perhaps educating new users. Perhaps some educational grants could be put towards paying someone to run such a program.
Getting Patches Into Linux
Security is a fairly hard area of kernel development where scrutiny over patches is very high. If there is a developer that is finding it hard to get patches into the Linux Kernel mainline then it’s advisable for the to separate their changes into manageable chunks. From these chunks it’s possible that some chunks would be acceptable and merged in on their own merits, while other chunks/patches would remain in discussion.
For google to get their wait lock Android patches in, they’ve basically got a small team which is trying very hard to upstream the code. Of course the technical solution chosen isn’t quite good enough yet for the kernel team to accept just yet and the solution does need the costly and extensive discussion for the appropriate way forward to be selected. This of course does create a cost barrier to google and the team that works on this functionality has found that it needs to work in non-work hours in order to both fulfil the requirements of releasing a solid Android release and at the same time attempt this much more idealistic technical feat of getting the right solution unto the mainline kernel.
I don’t have any thoughts on this issue, it seems like everyone is one the same page.
Ever wanted to not have to fill in your team’s calendars in multiple places? Well now you don’t have to!
Just enter your team’s events as usual in the loco directory and subscribe your calendar software to the new per team >ical interface.
I’ve subscribed using google calendars and evolution to make sure it works, now we have the opportunity to clean up wiki’s full of event dates and customised google team calendars.
Also available is a global events ical feed so you can keep up to date on what’s going on as well as a an all teams feed for keeping up to date with everyone’s activities.
There is a bit of a bug in Ubuntu where it doesn’t recognise the ical mime type and open it up in evolution, so remember to copy the url and paste it in when you go to add a new calendar in evolution or google calendar.
Sorry to people at DebConf about Saturday, I fled back to Boston under a cloud of a rotten cold to be in my nice warm and self medicatable home. Still under the weather and such but not as bad as earlier in the week.
DebConf was actually very enjoyable (apart from getting rottenly sick) I learned a great deal and I have lots of ideas. Thanks to everyone who ran DebConf and to Kings College, New York *ahem* I mean Columbia. Good show and all that.
Quick note, those interested in the very start of extracting binary fla files can start here:
Python Scripts – GPLv3 don’t forget.
This is part of the way and yes I’m well aware of using Flash CS5 to convert these binary files into their friendlier XML cousins. But we should be able to rip these apart as well. I think having some xml and binary forms of the same data sources would be most helpful.
I’ve put out a call to artists to get some of these source files. If your reading this much later then perhaps I’ve had an update since which has better scripts or more information.
If you thought DebConf was all about programming and art was all about being a loner huddled over a computer with a stylus in one hand and a cappuccino in the other, then think again! This was a collaborative art session I ran this evening at DebConf using inkscape and my Wacom Intuos 3. Involved in drawing were myself of the Ubuntu community, Ian Molton of Debian from the UK and Paul Liu of the Canonical OEM team from Taiwan. Each person did a a part of the process and we learned together how we each did out part:
A number of people were influenced to try out inkscape and their pressure sensitive input devices. So I deem this collaborative art a success!
We had a showing of Nina Pasley’s fantastically animated “Sita Sings the Blues” here at DebConf last night. It’s great watching Creative Commons on the big screen and it was great to see Nina there and the reception she got for this and her meme shorts.
One question that we asked was what software was used to make all the artworks and as it turns out all the works were not made with Free and Open Source Software. So what is the problem?
Well Sita was made before Nina was aware of the FOSS community and any of the tools available, as so often happens. The workflows that one builds up as an artist is critical to how one thinks about making art and focusing creativity. It’s hardly surprising that an artist would be reluctant to change workflows.
But then there is the other problem of how to make the resources available in the original source files (available under CC-BY-SA) actually available in useful and open standard formats. Converting from swf to svg actually has more code written than to try and convert from fla to svg. Which is interesting.
FLA is the source format to Adobe Flash creator, it’s an OLE2 stream (Microsoft creation) which is often used for Microsoft’s binary office documents and other such files. It’s like a mini basic fat system inside the fla containing all the resources that make up the animation.
There is a tool in Ubuntu called ‘ripole’ but it doesn’t yet extract the contents of the fla sources successfully, libraries pole and libextract seem to do the same trick so perhaps it’s just some glue required. Perhaps the first step to being able to offer artists the transitioning tools to open standards is to extract the resources from fla files, either as an archive module (open it like a zip/tar file) or mount it as a local drive (bit like iso loop mounting). I favour the archive approach as you could extract all your resources and just keep them in a directory or re-tar them up for storage and distribution.
Obviously once this step is over there will be a conversion of the elements to open formats. But that probably is just another case of finding existing tools that convert swf and seeing how similar they are. We may even find some fla resources are actually just xml.
Update: With a python module and a lot of hacking, I’ve managed to decode all of the media in an fla into their component files. This includes the aif audio and the flash animated elements. Email me if your interested in the python script to do this.
This is the kind of bad attitude problem that we try to get away from in the Ubuntu community, why this program was accepted into universe (I presume from debian) I have no idea. This is my attempt to try out a game from the archives:
doctormo@delen~/$ conquest
Can not connect to locahost
doctormo@delen~/$ conquestd
conquestd: Common block ident mismatch.
You must initialize the universe with conqoper.
doctormo@delen~/$ conqoper
Poor cretins such as yourself lack the skills necessary to use this program.
I have only one response to the socially challenged individual who thought that was a good message:
doctormo@delen~/$ sudo apt-get purge conquest-gl conquest-server
Bye!
