DoctorMo's Blog

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.

Slogan thanks to meson1007 on deviantArt.

Not much happening here in Boston, it’s all good.

By Tkensum

Ken’ Hess has posted a blog article on ZDNet about how control over your own computer is overrated. This sentiment I feel is an attempt to embarrass people into moving their computing further onto the cloud.

This type of thinking also deeply effects the free and open source culture. Since one of the reasons for using FOSS is ultimate control (and responsibility).

From an individual perspective the goal of personal control is simple: You have this responsibility to provide this service and you do it with this property running this configuration. It’s human nature to want to control directly the service you’re responsible for. The other option is to pass over control to a good friend who you have a good positive relationship with (company or individual is irrelevant).

I think the failure of a speedy transition to “cloud computing” has been a failure in relationship building, but I’m sure that will come along in due time as the industry matures.

From a social perspective, having everyone on the same centralised system can introduce a fragility which can cause some interesting cascading and simple root failures which would be very bad for economy should enough businesses all move to the same few providers.

A lot of the people who would want their services taken care of are already not in a good mood from the 20 years of bullshit from the likes of Microsoft, as providers go we’ve had some fairly nefarious characters in control of everyone’s desktops.

I think it will take a while to turn that around, of course I’m putting my bets on distributed computing using things like the sheva plug or the free software router currently in development, because distributed resources that are properly designed can be much more interesting that centralised service prevision.

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.