DoctorMo's Blog

I got indignant at the popes suggestion that atheists (he really means secularists) are a threat to moral society. Oh sure, he just compared secularism with the German Christian Socialist movement of the 1930s. It’s not like he was trying to suggest that these Nazi people were atheists and therefore immoral… no wait that’s exactly what he was trying to suggest and attempting to rewrite history in order to do it.

Typical mythology that gods bring morals and to lack faith is to lack morals. “Plato voiced it best in Euthyphro – is that which is pious what is beloved by the gods, or is it beloved by the gods because it is pious?”

Here is some secular commandments.

I went to six flags, on the way in they were checking t-shirts. I assume for fun. The lady said my t-shirt was good and that I should see out Scooby-doo as he’d be into that sort of thing.

So as well as going on a whole bunch of rides in this mini-american-but-almost-the-same Alton Towers. I got my picture as promised.

Taken by my wife for free and well it was interesting to be in line with 4 year-olds. But great all the same to do something social instead of thrill seeking.

I also gave them a hug. I mean if a 4 year-old can, I can’t see why I can’t!

If you have trouble with a USB HSDPA modem being stolen away by the usb mass storage device (you get the windows drivers in a disk on the desktop, but not the device in network manager) then try usb_modeswitch. Which is available in lucid but there are updated packages in Odyx’s ppa if those don’t work for you:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:odyx/usb-modeswitch
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install usb-modeswitch

Make sure the device isn’t plugged in, and then try and plug it in. If that doesn’t fix it, try a restart. If that fails then message here and we’ll see what we can do to fix it.

We’re trying to stop the complex guides for enabling various devices. Ubuntu is about computers for people, not only for the courageous command line users. Part of that is turning guides into workable and permanent solutions. If you see a guide that is making you compile things, stop and ask the guide writer if there is a ppa or other solution yet and if not could that be worked on?

Once we have a ppa that works, it’s MUCH easier to get the fix into the next version of Ubuntu than with a guide online. We also have to fix and remove old guides which make Ubuntu out to be very complex.

I just found this relic hiding in the closet, it’s a boxset of Kubuntu 5.04 from 5 years ago. These dvd-box designs were one of my very first contributions to the Ubuntu community. I was playing with making Ubuntu into a product even back then but of course Ubuntu is much better now and I think I’m much more able to understand why this approach doesn’t work.

I’m going to keep it as a memento for 5 years involved in the community.

I’m dyslexic, which means that my brain doesn’t function in a literary kind of way and instead functions in a very systematic way. The erratic nature of language doesn’t fit the total mental model and the lack of being able to spot errors and the frustration with knowing a word is spelt wrong from it’s appearance but not knowing quite why is the worst.

One of the common problems in Ubuntu is that the spellchecker is sub-optimal for all cases where I spell a word wrong. Often I have to copy and paste the word into google, because google does a much better job of correcting my spellings than ispell or firefox.

Annoyingly one of the common mistakes the spellchecker makes is assuming that because I’ve got a couple of extra letters in a word, that what I really mean is to add suffixes. So for instance misspelling alcohol suggested to me ‘alcoholic’ but not ‘alcohol’.

To aid this I wonder if it would be possible to use the full text indexing method of word stemming (removing the ends of a word) to see if it’s possible to get better suggestions. It’s more unlikely that a person has misspelled the suffix than the rest of the word, just as it’s less likely someone has misspelled the start constant of a word (but not vowels they’re treacherous).

I wonder what others methods could be used to improve spelling suggestions? perhaps some sort of web 2.0 social group think new age neural network pattern recognition software? Or we could just send the word to google automatically

Just a reminder for the community that if you’re interested in the Alternative Accommodation for UDS Narwhal, please do get in touch soon as we will be booking all required rooms soon.

That is all.

I have a love/hate relationship with gnome. I use it, I develop for it and at the same time I dislike the way the gnome project produces functional libraires.

Take for example librsvg, an awesome library for turning svg files into pngs for display and for making thumbnails. For some unintelligent reason installing or compiling librsvg requires gtk and thus also requires avahi and hicolor-icon-theme, xrandr and libcups2. Does making a png out of an svg require us to send icons to a rotated screen connected to a networked discovered printer? No? Then why do I need all this stuff?

The problem as I see it is that librsvg should be split out more into it’s none-gtk library parts and it’s pixbuf/gdk parts. Making it a useful library to a wider audience from servers to other desktop systems. Larger audiences mean more attention and more attention means more bug fixes.

The gnome project historically I think didn’t have much of a culture of serving a wider ecosystem and saw gaps and filled those gaps with gnome-only libs. It pains me to say but as a programmer I’m disappointed by the lack of foresight even though I understand resources were always tight. A “do everything with gtk deps” culture produces inflexible libs with rare logical separation between layers and fewer opportunities to share with the wider community because of it.

I’ve always hoped that the FDO culture of sharing APIs and working towards standard consensus would help the culture along and promote a culture of making libs for everyone.

Does anyone know of any alternatives to librsvg that produce good results? imagemagik failed to meet standards as it doesn’t support most of the filter effects, but I don’t know of many others.

just my 2 cents, what are your thoughts?

I got all my packages compiled in the PPA (at last) see yesterday’s post. But now I’ve gone and lost my phone, I’m getting a new one and it’ll of course _not_ be a blackberry.

But for everyone else, you should be able to enjoy the barry project and opensync latest builds in ubuntu maverick, lucid and karmic.

I’ve created a new barry snapshot PPA which should be updated every 2 weeks with the latest barry git revisions and the latest opensync svn. This is to encourage testing and perhaps there is some functionality which you need in the latest versions.

I will warn you that opensync 0.4x isn’t done, isn’t safe and isn’t ready for being trusted with your data. It can duplicate entries, delete them entirely or mangle text on a whim. But it will support calendar, contact and note syncing.

Update: My PPA has been shut down because of an inability for me to test the packages. Please see the barry website for more details on how to get barry working with your Ubuntu installation.

Now that should pull in barry, opensync and your opensync 0.39 plugin. Please report back here if it works. I’ve had the devil of a time packaging all these things, almost a week worth of messing about with the packaging to get everything buildable.

If you get an error such as “E: Broken packages” then hold onto your hat, the packages are still building and taking their damn sweet time to finish. — All Fixed and built, sorry for the wait