DoctorMo's Blog

This week Michael Hall wrote a blog post about his foray into writing a new Dictionary Lens for Unity. It’s a lens that I would find most useful but until it’s packages I used the screenshots as a guide to how it would look.

I thought about how you would use the icon space to illustrate something useful about the words and definitions being shown. I thought that the type of the word is often not understood or remembered when looking up a word and often find myself reading over the abbr. italics. So I thought, how would you go about developing symbols for the concepts of word types?

In a fit of inkscape drafting, I put together a few concepts without colours and an open question to those interested; how would you iconify a concept?

Your comments below…

I’m getting a lot of grief… or rather Ubuntu is getting an awful amount of grief from a normal Ubuntu user who is used to his laptop computer with HDMI automatically switching video and audio from the laptop screen/speakers to the television.

This of course doesn’t work in Ubuntu 11.10 and it hurts when I here things like “It’s not user friendly” and “why doesn’t it work, it should bloody work” and “I plug it in and Ubuntu fails”. This is very frustrating, I don’t want Ubuntu’s motto to be “To get your computer working, restart it into Windows” as that’s just shit. I’ve had to create a script to poll the status and do what it needs to work. I’m debating putting this in a ppa and answering the 40 or so hdmi askubuntu questions.

What’s difficult about Ubuntu advocacy overall is that it’s like fighting a war, a constant and ill equipped war where we have to fight an monstrous company with an army of minions, a horde of cash and worse of all, massive public support. And all the weapons we’re given blow up in our faces because the people behind the lines can’t or won’t test them before shipping them.

*sigh* I’m going to need an extra dose of coolaid at the next advocates anonymous meeting.

May I just say, I have a fantastic time with the UK LoCo this evening attending the interesting Dans LaNoir. This is a restaurant which is completely pitch black, where you’re served by blind waiters and lead in and out.

Part of the appeal of going through this kind of blind experience was seeing if I could cope with not having sight. But part of it was a good old fashioned dare with friends. I found myself using some of the techniques I’d observed two of my blind friends in the US use as well as noticing how much the eyes fake information which you can see when you can’t see, if you see what I mean.

The conversation is also a good laugh. With Alan Pope in the gang it felt like I was invited to eat inside the UK Podcast; where all there is food and the sound of stuff happening with much frivolity.

Many thanks to the UK LoCo leader Alan Bell for making me feel very welcome and for all the gang for being such awesome geeks.