DoctorMo's Blog

Hello Community,

I’ve finished writing a new addon for xbmc (the tv media center for Ubuntu) called Librarian. She will take a look at your impressive video library and check for various inconsistencies and potential problems which you might want to look into. This 1.0 release includes the following features:

• List Movie Files not Included in the Database
• List Movies which have incorrect length, i.e. misidentified or corrupt (requires ffmpeg installed)
• Lists TV Shop Episodes separately with both above features
• Tells you which seasons and which episodes of each show you’re missing
• Shows you which TV Show Paths are being ignored completely.

More checking can be added as good ideas come in, I’ve also written an addon module called xbmcdata which wraps sqlite3 the xbmc httpapi to give a consistant inside xbmc and outside testing/scripting interface. This makes addon development _much_ easier. For instance listing movies is now just a case of:

from xbmcdata import Movies

for movie in Movies():
    print "%s (%s)" % (unicode(movie), movie['Year'])

Please download the code here: http://divajutta.com/doctormo/doctormo-xbmc-addons.tar.gz and install in ~/.xbmc/addons/ then test, entry is available under ‘Programs’. Please report issues back to me with full logs from ~/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log included.

Have fun.

Playing with concepts, words and tag lines with the keen Charlene from the Vancouver LoCo team. We’ve come up with this advert targeted specifically for Farmer’s Markets.

The brief asked to use some of the tag lines and terms which have been successful in the past as well as attempting to invoke questions in the reader so they are prompted to ask and become more interested in exactly what all this free and open source stuff is.

We reused some sembrandolibertad.org.ar graphics as well to give it a nice family feel. I wanted to match the similar styles found in earthy crunchy markets.

If this is successful as a target, then I could try using these at other earthy crunchy shops. You know the kind, with herbs, buckets of flour and great cheese.

Update: Updated evil computer to be more friendly, rounded and smiling and link to svg added. Licensed as Creative Commons, Attribution, Share Alike.

Thoughts or ideas? Comment below.

Have you guys seen this? It’s funny and made using Ubuntu, Blender and other art tools:

Si Nini by Johantri

Here’s the problem, you want to use LibreOffice to do a simple registration for a small class, so you open it up and write a small table for the dates you want to record:

You use a simple X to record when someone was present and a simple dash – to record an absence. But the mood strikes you and you want to make it look a little more professional. So you load up the Character Map program and grab a tick character from the symbols available and paste it into all the marked in cells:

OK so your spreadsheet looks nice, but your reviewer wants to know how many students were in each class total. this should be easy enough and you make a new row and add in the cell SUM formulas. But woe! it doesn’t work. Using characters in a spreadsheet doesn’t count because they’re not numbers:

So to fix the issue you use the search and replace to replace all your nice tick symbols with the number ‘1′ and to be consistent, all of the dashes to the number ‘0′. And it works, you have your totals; but this doesn’t look nice! So you decide to use the format cell option to figure it out:

This brings up the number formatting window. Here you can decide what the cell should look like given a certain value. Our values are ‘1′ and ‘0′, anything else is a problem, so we use the cell formatting code: [=1]"✔";[=0]-;[RED]"Error" which shows a tick when the cell is ‘1′, a dash when the cell is ‘0′ and a red coloured Error when the cell is anything else:

Now everything is formatted wonderfully and LibreOffice Calc has saved us from having to decide between an ugly or a useless spreadsheet, we can have both beauty and functionality!

As a bit of extra curricular, I also created one for deciding if someone loves you:

It’s been a while in the pipes, but one of the jobs the Free Software Foundation (FSF) wanted me to do was to design for them a nice logo for their Gnu Free Document License (GFDL).

This License is a very special sort of document license that allows for the majority of the text to be covered by a free culture license (modify, share, etc). But the difference and the reason it’s not a true free culture license is that you must always include a section of text specified by the author which you can not modify.

This text in the case of the Emacs Manual is the introduction and copyright info. Each work is different as to what you can’t modify and if in any doubt, use the Creative Commons share alike license which is a free culture license.

So the design brief was simple, they needed a simple logo which could fit in small formats similar to the creative commons logos. For them I created four drafts to work from, they then selected one to work from:

We didn’t work through many iterations to get to the end result, certainly not as many as the average client. But one of the concepts was chosen to be the new logo.

Job done, thoughts?

Made using Inkscape on Ubuntu 10.10.