DoctorMo's Blog

Welcome reader to another “impossible to prove conjecture Tuesday”. Today I’ll be looking at the grievously problematic notions of modern morality.

The Christian church; that would be the catholic one, not the Orthodox, Church of England or any of the Eastern Churches. They believe that morality comes from God and we learn about his morality through his words which are documented in the Bible. Everything from thou shall not kill (Deuteronomy 5:17) to no buggery (Timothy 1:10). There is a golden rule theme running through the Bible’s moral thinking which is especially evident in the new testament.

But ultimately the important thing about the authority of the Bible and God for Christians is that the morality is fixed. It’s not relative to the times you live or person you happen to be interacting with, nor relative to your position in society or attributes therein. It’s something that applies to everyone and it brings Christians a sense of stability.

But I am not a Christian, to me the Bible is a 1,500 year old unaccountable narrative of man’s accent from chaos and into a more ordered society. So I can not use it as an anchor to say what should be moral and what be immoral. But I can use it as a set of good ideas, thinking which was done long before I was born which I can incorporate.

As the modern world progresses and we unshackle ourselves from old religious dogma, there is a tendency to think that everything is relative, even morality. Somehow morality itself is in doubt if it’s possible to show situations where it would be considered the other way about. The best example is murder in self defence, by accident or deliberate? with a weapon or without? all these complicating factors which would suggest the morality is simply a weakened with complexities.

But, that’s over thinking things. Murder is immoral because you intend to do harm to someone else, murdering yourself isn’t immoral in itself because you’re doing yourself harm (however it can be said that you are harming others, especially if you don’t tell them or don’t have their support). As the buda would say: killing things for a reason doesn’t remove the fundamental wrongful truth, it just provides motivation.

So my conjecture today is: The fundamental property of morality is causing harm to other people. The most basic tool to avoid causing harm is the golden rule philosophy. The best way to deal with causing harm is to find ways to undo or make up for what you’ve done and hope for understanding and forgiveness from others.

What are your thoughts?

Ubuntu based manga originally written in Japanese for ASCII magazine company and released as Creative Commons. Many years ago I set up a project to translate the work into english. since that time the group has translated each edition that’s come out. A few people would transcribe, others would translate and I would edit them into English pages and publish online. Read more about Ubunchu here.

Seotch-san (the author) has just released two new editions in Japanese and I’m busy editing pages, and others are busy transcribing and translating in the google group. We could do with some help doing either translation or transcription of the Japanese intot he google spreadsheets. Information is available here if you can help us.

Also needed are two artworks which go on the Stop pages, to explain to English readers how to read Manga right to left instead of the western left to right. In the last edition I personally did the work taking over from the fabulous ~c-quel who did all the previous editions. You can see the past stop/go pages here.

So if you’d like to be involved in drawing some Manga art for Ubuntu, this is your opportunity. The work needs to be related to the chapter it’ll go into, and either be vector svg or high resolution raster png file format. Please comment below to get involved!

P.S. These are the last two chapters of Ubunchu, after this, I don’t think there will be any more.

I’ve been trying to run an nfs server for home mounts using the rpc username syncing functionality built in. But this system doesn”t work very well in the system I have, new users are created on the fly and folder access gets messed up all the damn time.

Basically the filesystem ownership gets messed up. I have tried searching for all sorts of help, but I can’t find anything about this issue since I can only assume I’m using nfs in a special way not intended.

So since my server usernames and uids match up to the client usernames and uids, I should be able to switch off the rpc and use direct uids and get away with that.

Thoughts? Advice?

I’ve been really wanting to show all you lovely internet based friends the exciting and totally awesome Ubuntu based community center I’m setting up. So I created a video where I show off the login/registration greeter and the rest of the physical space.

Check out the video, it’s only about 4 minutes long: To play this video see the source mpeg or go here for flash player.

Post your comments below.

There is a brand new stable release of the efl (Enlightenment Foundation Libraries) for Oneric, and because I want to play with python-efl, I needed to compile and build an entire PPA full of the newest stable release.

So here we have it, I invite anyone to use this PPA if you’re interested (or have a need) to use efl-1.0 in past Ubuntu releases.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/efl
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python-ecore ... etc


This ppa has taken me all week to build, it’s a lot of work so please do use it if you need up to date efl libraries or a newer cython build and especially if you need python-efl 0.7.3 or better.

I hope to use the code to produce the netbook-launcher effect in the logon screen, but this is very early days and it might be a fools errand. But it will be F’N awesome if successful. Report below if you know anything about programming with efl.

It’s time for impossible to prove conjecture Tuesday! Today I’ll be looking at freedom and price. Those two great pillars of our movement from barbaric propriety and gouging monopolies into a bright future of open sharing and low-low prices.

I read about the Future of Open Source Survey and according to it’s findings most respondents value ‘open source’ and will be deploying it. But more intriguingly this time around instead of valuing ‘open source’ for costs reasons, the value is more firmly placed in Freedom.

This freedom can mean all sorts of things depending on what you do, and unlike what far too many commentators say about access to source code not being important to non-programmers; it isn’t actually about the source code at all.

So what happened to all that low-low price hype? I think that we’re reaching maturity. First FOSS is attractive to anyone who doesn’t quite understand it because of it’s apparent cost benefits. That is, what has already been written is free for anyone to use. Explaining the benefits of Free Software to someone who doesn’t see the problem of proprietary software is impossible.

Once you’re using an open source platform, of course it’s much easier to calculate the benefits of investing in the improvement of the code (hiring/contracting developers) against simply buying a replacement off the shelf product. This is what makes advocating FOSS so interesting, you never know if the person you’re convincing to use Ubuntu will turn around and spend money on helping it grow later.

So why is freedom now important to all these cost conscious businesses? I believe that the successful foss product in any market pretty much sets the commodity cost and any propriety software will have to either beat the cost or improve on features in orders of magnitude better. The problem of course is that a lot of these businesses have gotten a taste of what it’s like when you can take your internal tools and change them to do anything in any way your business requires. This is something that proprietary software vendors find hard and expensive to do well.

So, my conjecture today is: “People will be attracted by the price and with enough time, stay for the Freedom”

Your thoughts?

Sometimes I do some graphics work as a side job. This book cover has taken a while to do (fifteen revisions), but I’ve very pleased with it. Made in Inkscape using Ubuntu 10.10.

Doing this piece I found there are a couple of pieces missing from Inkscape for doing production work, perhaps this is why so many people use Scribus-ng. The normal workflow from what I have seen is to make artwork in Inkscape and then transition to Scribus for the nitty gritty of doing production.

I also did the structural editing of the book contents. That is using LibreOffice to haddle all the titles, paragraphs and types as class styles instead of ad-hock ms-word inline styles. Also dealing with the pagination and a bunch of other production issues. LibreOffice was an ok tool, but a lot of the interfaces are confusing and could do with some more design being brought in on them.

Your thoughts?

Hey guys, you might remember that a few days ago I was asked to build the lucid netbook launcher functionality for maverick; enough people asked me for a natty version that I wanted to make sure you guys got access to the clutter based netbook-launcher too. So here you go!

Of course this repackaging can’t go on forever, the packages I’ve sent to my PPA have no maintainer and sooner or later there is going to be major api failure as gnome3 moves on and ubuntu doesn’t ship the libraries this interface needs.

With that caveat out of the way, you can install the netbook launcher (3D) like this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/netbook-launcher
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install yeold-netbook-launcher

If you would like the 2D version of netbook-launcher, then the best thing to do is to install the netbook-launcher-efl which is shipped in natty (and meverick), true it’s a daft package which sucks in unity by mistake, but it still works and unlike the 3D code, the 2D code is still being developed (if only in small ways) by mterry.

Thoughts, comments and problems, please post below…

I’m please to announce that version 1.0 of the deviantArt stash plugins for Inkscape and Gimp are released.

It’s a Big Deal

This is a BIG deal my friends and I’m very excited because not only do we have this functionality, but we have it FIRST, before ANY proprietary software package. That’s right, the stash API was only announced last week and here I am giving you the keys to brand spanking new functionality right from within your favourite art creation applications!

We can do something with art that no other software can do today… send your artwork (with or without sources) directly to your deviantArt account… then once uploaded it can (at your option) open up the web browser so you can look at the artwork, send your friends a link or publish it further in your main galleries.

Oh and you can submit from the command line using the da-submit command.

Where do I get it!?

You can get the goodness from the source tarball or from my ppa if you’re using Ubuntu 10.04/10.10/11.04 by following these steps:


sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/deviantart-plugins
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gimp-plugin-dastash inkscape-extension-dastash


Please report bugs in launchpad, if you would like to make these plugins available for other platforms, please do let me know. If you know someone who will sponsor these packages into Debian, also get in touch. Because this is the sort of functionality that should be available directly from the software center.

How do I use it?

Simply go into either Inkscape or Gimp…

Open up an XCF gimp file and from the Image menu, select ‘Publish to’ > ‘deviantArt Stash’:

Open up an SVG file and from the Extensions menu, select ‘Publish to’ > ‘deviantArt’:

A small window will appear, fill in the title and maybe a few keywords and press ok… If this is your first time uploading you will get a pop-up asking you to authenticate:

Log in and now wait as your image is saved as a png, and then the png and source files as sent to deivnatArt. Inkscape might give you a warning that the extension returns (saying you weren’t authenticated) you can safely ignore it. You should still get the webpage pop up in your web browser showing your your new devination:

Now you can edit the piece in the browser and publish it to one of your galleries and give it a good CC license too. Don’t forget that the sources are made available by default, so be sure that’s what you want to do.

With Thanks To

A big shout out to Gilles Dubuc and Mike Halpert from deviantArt who made sure that bugs were fixed and I was given help trying to fix some of the problems with OAuth. Thanks LGM for hosting an awesome event that allowed the project to happen.

If you have any questions or thoughts, please add a comment to this blog entry…

OK so yes, this looks a bit weird but hear me out. The netbook-launcher package was the old clutter based user interface for the Intrepid to Lucid netbook editions of Ubuntu, which was supplemented by the netbook-launcher-efl package that used enlightenment for anyone who didn’t have 3D. After Lucid, the code for the non-efl hasn’t been development and now everything from Maverick onwards is Unity only.

The efl package is still available, but that has it’s own problems…

I always liked the netbook-launcher, I always put it on other people’s computers (especially for the elderly who need big icons) because it filled the screen and everything was right there on the desktop. Perfect.

Screenshot of Netbook-launcher working on Maverick

It wasn’t really available in maverick until tonight, when prompted by a friend who is delivering 10 new Ubuntu computers to the local working-class community. The plan had always been to use the netbook interface and the machines won’t run Unity. So here’s where I step in, I downloaded the Lucid code for liblauncher and netbook-launcher and have fixed the gtk bitrot errors and published the results on a new PPA.

I had to change the name of the clutter package because of the hatchet job done on the netbook-launcher package to upgrade people from Lucid to Unity/Maverick. This means that when you try to install netbook-launcher, you get unity instead. That aside packages are available here:

https://launchpad.net/~doctormo/+archive/netbook-launcher/+packages

My friend probably wants to use the efl version which is still in development (by the heroic mterry no less, is there any cool project that guy isn’t involved with?). The problem with the shipped version is that it recommends the old ‘netbook-launcher’ package which pulls in unity. So I’ve built a new version of that without that dependency problem and I’ll try and get mterry to update the package for Oneric.

To use/test this branch try this:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:doctormo/netbook-launcher
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install yeold-netbook-launcher netbook-launcher-efl

I hope this ppa will be useful to a few people and do let me know below if you would like a natty version of the package…