I’m breaking my two week blog holiday early to bring you a super cool genetic wallpaper video:
As I show in the video, once you have a nice svg (manually edited of course) you can use the script to nudge elements in it. Comment here if you think this is cool.
Mark Shuttleworth is so crazily quotable! Also Bow Ties are cool
It’s time once again to show off some of the great art being made using Ubuntu and the wonderful tools we have available to us:
Also check out the Cartoon TV show made using ubuntu and blender: Pirates vs. Ninjas vs. Robots vs. Cowboys (in Portuguese)
This is my top 10 for August, if you want to see more of the amazing art being done using Ubuntu, check out the full gallery.
Sorry to people at DebConf about Saturday, I fled back to Boston under a cloud of a rotten cold to be in my nice warm and self medicatable home. Still under the weather and such but not as bad as earlier in the week.
DebConf was actually very enjoyable (apart from getting rottenly sick) I learned a great deal and I have lots of ideas. Thanks to everyone who ran DebConf and to Kings College, New York *ahem* I mean Columbia. Good show and all that.
Quick note, those interested in the very start of extracting binary fla files can start here:
Python Scripts – GPLv3 don’t forget.
This is part of the way and yes I’m well aware of using Flash CS5 to convert these binary files into their friendlier XML cousins. But we should be able to rip these apart as well. I think having some xml and binary forms of the same data sources would be most helpful.
I’ve put out a call to artists to get some of these source files. If your reading this much later then perhaps I’ve had an update since which has better scripts or more information.
If you thought DebConf was all about programming and art was all about being a loner huddled over a computer with a stylus in one hand and a cappuccino in the other, then think again! This was a collaborative art session I ran this evening at DebConf using inkscape and my Wacom Intuos 3. Involved in drawing were myself of the Ubuntu community, Ian Molton of Debian from the UK and Paul Liu of the Canonical OEM team from Taiwan. Each person did a a part of the process and we learned together how we each did out part:
A number of people were influenced to try out inkscape and their pressure sensitive input devices. So I deem this collaborative art a success!
I wanted to play with brush lines and I was thinking back to a chat I had with my good friend David about Free Software and lack of User attachment to sticking with Free products when their only desire is practicality. This of course can make a very transient user base who will leave at the first sign of trouble.
Of course any time spent with a particular piece of machinery like software will develop an educational and brand familiarity attachment. I want to put those to one side because I believe they are useful over long time periods but not the short term.
Contributors (and if you reading this then your more than likely a contributor) are of course different, they’re invested in time, philosophically and socially and so are much more likely to stick it out and may actually know how to not only work around problems but we hope through training programs like UDW and UW that we can train people to know how to deal with problems in a more sustainable way. Treating bugs as problems for everyone and not just the individual.
Of course what the mainstream pattern looks like is different, they don’t have contributors or contributing developers, everyone is locked into working around problems. The key difference is that because users are customers, they’re invested in the product. They feel like they own it (even when they don’t) and feel like they ort to stick out problems so that they can get their money’s worth. Of course what do you do in both this and the above case when you have a major headache that you don’t know how to work around or even if you manage to work around? You complain like crazy on your blog, to your friends and to anyone that will hear your pain.
Your complaining is a direct reflection of your ties to a particular product, even to it’s defects.
In the most ideal case and one I was trying to make the case for a few days ago, we’d be able to either turn users into contributors or if that’s not possible then into paying customers that pay for real solutions and code patches, not just work-arounds.
The training that’s going on is a great start, but with better training materials in the community we could be making more contributors aware of the ability of solving problems more permanently and thus improve their input into progress (blogs showing you how to work around a problem are not progress in code terms).
Software isn’t perfect and we need to get lots of people with lots of energy (or money) to invest that energy into the community and to the community collaboration that so effectively benefits everyone. And in my mind the best way to get people quickly attached to FOSS and Ubuntu is to get them to invest into it sooner rather than later, then we have time to get people familiar with the brand and educate them.
Your thoughts?
