DoctorMo's Blog

So I have all these client computers doing the right thing, I have a long, long list of tweaks needed to turn Ubuntu into a community center operating system. Right now I have a few limitations that I would like to put on users:

• Number of pages able to print per user per printer
• Disk quota, 500MB
• Timed Sessions (1 hour) per user group.

So far I know cups should allow page limitations, but I can’t find it. Disk quotas lack good documentation on how to set them up and timeoutd was the suggestion but it doesn’t appear to work with my testing. Also anything that notifies via notify-osd would be good.

Any suggestions?

I’ve decided to move away from working on and advocating for the Canonical’s Ubuntu release for this cycle. Instead I will be working more with Debian, Ubuntu Studio, Edubuntu and perhaps Xubuntu instead.

But wait Martin, I hear you ask, why would you be working on Ubuntu spins? Well the Ubuntu platform is a fairly strong bases to build good distros, the various distros just need more love. And who doesn’t like Debian with a better installer?

So what am I really quitting? The version of Ubuntu that is focused on customers, the Canonical mainline which most people know as “Ubuntu Desktop Edition”. This version of Ubuntu is no longer an attractive to work on for me.

Basically I’ve run out of patience with the Ubuntu direction as moves away from creative people and more and more towards consumerism. In Oneiric, as far as I can make out, there will be no creative tools installed by default. To me this is an indication that the mainline distro is not in accord with my own wish to promote independent creativity and sharing.

Perhaps we’ve accepted that anyone can install anything and there for there isn’t a need for anything to be installed, perhaps we should remove everything but the installer and package manager? Or maybe we’ve grown beyond an ability to look at the desktop through fresh ideas and imagine the excitement and possibilities offered by the default tools on offer and make the leap that there might be more on offer.

The lack of support for Free Software philosophies, it’s gone from the website and is talked about with affection in decreasing frequency. Possibly in error, but the promotion of open source as interchangeable language isn’t good.

So why will I quit advocating for Ubuntu to normal users? This latest release has been problematic for my users; they’ve been complaining about doing the upgrades themselves and them having a desktop that either doesn’t work or is annoying to use. If Canonical can make 11.10 _much_ better for non-technical users, then I might revisit advocacy.

So there you have it, my general directional change for Oneiric. I’ll reassess what I want to do after this cycle, but I have work to do…

While I was at LGM I got into an interesting discussion about communities and how much they are like biological organisms. When the organism is doing well and all the parts are working on their own little jobs, the rest of the organism doesn’t have to pay much attention. But if something goes wrong then all sorts of attention is paid to the damage/infection.

The conjecture I tested this morning was that “negative posts in a community will attract more comments and longer comments than positive posts” this in essence was a critical look at weather it’s hard work to praise but easy to complain on a unit level. So, apologies to all my test subjects below, I turned a fairly positive post into a fairly negative post to see what would happen.

Conclusion: There was a strong community reaction to the negativity, taking data from a number of older positive posts I’m able to confirm that communities do act like complex organisms focusing on damage.

My post is this: I had a good time at LGM and though I missed UDS in Budapest last week, I have some plans of my own for Oneiric:

• I’m running a community Center for Boston Housing Authority (ubuntu 10.10)
• I’ve got a community greeter login project to allow users to register at login.
• A new deviantArt upload library using their new stash API (OAuth 2.0 draft 10).
• Some new plugins using said library for inkscape, gimp and nautilus.
• Edubuntu wallpaper refinement for the next release.
• More free culture artwork and posters promoting use of creative tools.
• Getting more involved with Inkscape bug fixing (already fixed one bug).
• Worrying about the release of baby 1.0 in October, new father syndrome.

Apologies again for playing with your collective. Thanks for posting comments

Michael Terry and AdaptableGimp

Michael (not our mterry, but the other one) Terry presented a wiki based system for presenting artistic tools in gimp within a workflow structure. This means that all the tools that you need to achieve an action are displayed in order and there are instructions linked from each tool in how to use that tool in that workflow.

The best parts of this FANTASTIC functionality is that as well as downloading instructions from the wiki and an xml list of tools, you can create new Tool Sets within Gimp and they are automatically uploaded to the wiki. This allows all users to collaborate on gimp workflows.

This is the sort of workflow based tool use that I really enjoy seeing. It emphasises the task you want to achieve and makes education as shallow as possible. Imagine a method of embeding the documentation/tutoral right into the UI of your software, this is what this does. checkout their website.

Using PinPoint for Presentations

Pippen talked about using a very light tool to show very awesome presentations. Check out the source code and if you know how to package things then get this packaged so we can use it in Debian.

Features include animated transitions, simple text format you can write by hand, lots of options, comments that appear on the presenters screen, running commands.

Talking about Economics

One of the lighting talks talked about economics. He suggested that incidental development was the way to go. Sighting mozilla, wordpress and other projects as examples of this economic model working.

Hardware is as Important as Software

There was a very interesting talk about Fabrication and Hardware by Jon Phillips. He talked a lot about how China develops open hardware and processes through a methodology which isn’t as restricted. He also suggested that if we don’t get a handle on the hardware situation we will be left with closed and non-modular hardware which is mass-produced but inflexible for innovative product development and distributed production.

Party

Party Time! See you all in Montreal until 3am! Thanks to all the sponsors and all the really interesting people who I could spend some time with.

Using Inkscape to Make Patterns

Susan showed off the inkscape plugins she has made to draw cloth patterns, so you can make clothes by using inkscape and a plotter device (to draw the pattern). It was pretty cool to hear inkscape being used to make physical items.

DeviantArt Demonstration

Two deviantArt people were here talking about how they foster communities, ideas, sharing and how they support the use of open source tools and creative commons licenses.

They have a New API which should allow tools to create plugins to export to deviantArt. It uses OAuth2. The idea is that you can sync updates to your deviantArt files from your programs.

Open ColourSpot, The Problems

In printing there is a system of colour matching called PANTONE, which is an arse of a proprietary colour system. Unfortunately we don’t yet have a good free culture replacement for this. This is the concern of the Open ColorSpot project. ginger ‘both lower case, no seriously, she means it’ coons gave a good talk about the frustrations in trying to lead the project against the industry invested interest.

JonCruz talks about Linux Printing (and how it’s dead)

Basically Jon’s talk talked about how badly the Linux platform supports the professional printing industry. This is a walk through all of the problems and gaps in the functionality we currently have. Much more so than the desktop itself, we suffer not being able to supply good tools for artists and print professionals.

Colour correction is one of those problems, but also things like 6 colour, CMYK handling and other controlled printing methods (Halftones, true black, registration issues etc)

One interesting idea is “Supporting 80% isn’t enough” and Jon is passionate in expressing how just supporting the common users doesn’t get you noticed. The press isn’t interested in apps which do boring every day things and attracting new users and programmers to a project can really be about supporting more edge cases than just always going after the 80%.

Christopher Adams and an Open Font Stack

Chris talked about the availability of free fonts. They announced the rebirth of the Open Font Library who’s goal is to collect together a collection of useful fonts. Some of the most interesting elements to the new font library website is the ability to type directly in the website to text the font. This is a much welcomed improvement over the traditional font website which tends to render a default set of letters as a picture.

The Font page also shows all of the interesting information, everything from it’s free license to which languages it supports and how up to date it is. Included in most uploads are the source files which can be edited and uploaded. An exciting project and I hope we can somehow tie the desktop into this kind of website to allow installation of these fonts easy.

Inkscape Meeting

Jon Cruz explained the project he’s working on to bind together different open source graphics tools with a sort of project management tool. This he says is similar to Adobe Bridge. Other interesting topics were the redesign of the gradient tool, problems with the font list and a bug fix for grow/shink by paint bucket.

Free Network Services

MediaGlobin announced! This talk is all about federated network services. Everything from StatusNet and Gnu FM. Checkout the video to this massive hour and a half talk as there were some great questions and pieces discussed.

Richard Hughes talks about ‘colord’

RedHat has allowed Richard to work on a really cool framework for setting up and managing colour management in freedesktop using dbus. It’s a framework which expresses profiles and devices and provides methods to allow management. This is then plugging into gnome colour manager and the kde colour manager.

The colord is in Fedora 15 already and will probably be in Ubuntu 11.10 later this year. Hopefully Ubuntu/Debian won’t be too far behind this important functionality.

Thanks to JonCruz for allowing me to use his screen correction device to create a screen profile for my laptop to allow me to correct my screen. This should make my art look better and make prints easier to judge colours for. I might have to buy myself a screen calibration tool, but using it showed me how dificult it is to mess about with colour profiles today (i.e. command line, guis a broken etc).

Eric Schrijver and the text only programmers culture

Eric did a very interesting talk about the difficulties in getting programmers to recognise that the command line (while being awesome) is not the only input method that should be scrutinised for key parts of the system. Specifically under criticism was the high use of text only programming languages and text only command building.

These ideas are near to my heart as working on Ground Control showed me very vividly how cruel and unwelcoming traditional programmers can be to innovative graphical expressions of command line functionality. The people who report positive use are the people least able to help with programming, which is a shame as it needs love.

Christopher Webber talks animated advocacy

Chris walked us through some basic 3D animation and more advanced 2D animation using blender, surprisingly to me he showed how easy it would be to bring in inkscape layers and animate them into a nice looking video. He’s interested in using animation to promote free software advocacy, convinced like me that new mediums can express and explain complex ideas and philosophies in new ways that allow new people to really et on board to the whole free software movement.

This is particularly interesting to me as the only animation I’ve managed to do has been using inkscape to generate a hundred frames which are then put together manually in openshot. Not exactly quick or easy to manipulate after the creation.

I’ll be attempting to talk to Chris during LGM more about the prospects of animation to explain Free software principles.

Today there wasn’t a great deal happening at the pre-event for the Libre Graphics group. There was an art thing which I didn’t go to and the local python group which I was late for. Overall it was fun talking and I’m getting ready for a meaty day tomorrow at LGM proper.

Hey there, I’m in Montreal this week for the Libre Graphics meetings. I’ve been here since Saturday and it’s been quite a blast already and the main event isn’t even here yet.

We had an excellent chat about how much the author of software can be said to be responsible or involved in the art expression and how software as tools are different or the same as physical art tools and art education.

There was a nod towards proprietary software being profoundly bad for education as well as a lot of mooting that control over your own art tools was very important from an artistic point of view.

I’d have gotten better notes, but I was completely zonked from work on Friday and 4 hours sleep. Then I had wine and was drunk and deathly sleepy. But I seem to remember there might have been Mexican food and a chat between Janine Melnitz and google maps to find the hidden hotel of the elves.

2 days later I’m almost completely recovered! Let me know below if you’re interested in LibreGraphics and if you’d like me to report on any issues that might be talked about.

I’ve been thinking about what it is that cultivates a negative reaction from people who use your software and who are invested in it’s success. This line of thinking has obviously been brought about by the new Ubuntu Unity interface and the strong reactions to both technical implementation and implementation method.

Firstly I want to separate out the general masses and the competition (no offence Jeff), there are plenty of people on the internet who just love to troll and there are plenty of people in other distro that talk nonsense based on tribal affiliation. Ignore them, I’m talking about negative reactions from people who make up the fixtures and fittings in the community, for Ubuntu, this would be Ubuntu Members (but not MOTU).

I’m sure we’ve all seen comments such as:

I really liked Maverick, but now with this new Unity thing that Mark has dictated will will all be using, I guess I’ll stick around for 11.04 but then move when 11.10 comes out and we have no choice but to use Unity.

The user in the quote is frustrated that development on Unity has seemingly come out of nowhere to crush all the familiarity they used to have and in order to continue to use the latest and greatest Firefox and OpenOffice they’ll be forced to put up with design decisions that will be against their own personal internal aesthetic. They’re not wrong in their concern, but of course this is a risky move that their distribution is attempting; a massive coarse correction which delves deep into the bowls of the ship we’re all sailing in and is tinkering with the engine and reshaping the hull to see if it’ll make the thing go faster.

Much like someone below deck messing about, we can’t see what the hell is going on, all we can see is the speed of the boat. So for a while the ship starts to slow down and we start to wonder if our friendly hacker is down there hitting the engine with a wrench and drilling holes in the hull. Of course the truth is that they’re risking everything on thought out designs will the same goals as most on deck, that part needs trust.

Alternatively we read official messages like:

Unity is a new interface to attract new users to Ubuntu and to attempt to jump the chasm, not everyone will be happy with the design direction; but we can’t hold back developing a user friendly desktop operating system waiting for a consensus that will never arrive.

And this too is true, but again is missing bits of the puzzle. Nothing about this kind of press release calms the fears of users, in fact it may only work with casual users and those that really trust where the ideas are coming from. It’s just as nutty to ask everyone in a committed community to trust you while you ignore the majority of what they say in order to get on with the herculean job before you as it is for users to suggest developers are deliberately planning to remove functionally just to hear the sweet screams of users.

The key is probably trust. The community members can trust the corporate development because we’re all in the same boat and they’re hardly likely to throw us overboard and corporates need to trust their community more, they’re not as design blind as we like to think, sometimes they’re just really bad at describing why they’re having trouble. This is especially true when a community member looks after lots of ubuntu user’s computers. We as developers just need to be better at reading/translating them.

I drew this graph to try and illustrate what it is about the development method that annoys people and provokes them into irrational opposition or productive support for any given project:

What are your thoughts?