Tongue in cheek.
Should Ubuntu announcements seem like a comedy show? As far as HUD goes, I like the idea. I just find the idea of it replacing menus completely to be bonkers mad.
Hello Community, I’ve put together a video to show my existing Ubuntu TV; the one I’ve been using with XBMC for the past year or more.
If you’re using a similar setup, I’d love to know how you manage your content library and do remote access. If you’re interested in my fall-over easy python modules for accessing the XBMC library database you can find the code on launchpad and the librarian code too.
I think Randall might be onto something with the “two word” Ubuntu branding idea.
I really like the idea of test suites, they give me a positive feeling that the code I’m making is probably going to do what it’s supposed to do. Not only that, but I feel far more confident about hacking the code to pieces in a random fit of creative genius if I know I can run a set of unit tests at the end and make sure all my designed APIs still work from the outside.
But why should I feel so good about tests? Isn’t writing the tests just like writing the code? except for the second time?
Well the logic of tests may mean that you have to do all the same kinds of logic, but it’s not really the same logic. You’re telling the computer what you expect to happen, not what happens. Take the analogy given in the title: If you were to carve/sculpt a masterpiece, you could be expected to gain some great notoriety for being a genius artist; alas much like code without tests it’s a one shot deal. As soon as you try and change the work, change it’s material and reproduce it for more customers you suddenly find yourself with lots of work making, remaking, fixing and refixing.
Any hired programmer will recognize the situation. Conversely software with complete testing (of all three kinds) will be much more like a mold, given any language with enough consistent code you could fill the mold many times to arrive at the same quality as before. The tests aren’t the same as the original sculpting, they’re much more like the framework that shows how to reproduce the work with ever tighter testing resulting in ever more accurate reproduction.
This assumes of course you imagine programming cycles as if they were mass production units.
Enough waffle! what do you think?
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.
I’m after a system where by users of my community computer labs can enjoy a new entry in their bookmark bar of items which are of particular interest and use.
Our system we use requires each user to have their own username and password and thus their own firefox profile, so we can’t do what the windows 7 labs would do which is just to add the bookmarks to the Internet Explorer session as the ‘User’ user.
So I had a look at social bookmarking services like delicious, but none of them provide a way to specify bookmarks or tags (which work) in a way that allows bookmarks to be populated.
I also looked for some scripts that perhaps might be able to open the firefox profile bookmarks html and edit it and sync one particular part of it up with a master file. But I haven’t been able to find such a thing.
So I turn to you dear reader; do you know of anything like this? Please comment below.
Aaron Toponce has just written a blog post about online services and how he doesn’t view proprietary online services as a problem. The analogy he uses is that of a Burger joint where the meals and service are excellent and all the recipes are trade secretes.
I wanted to take a moment and explain why a Burger fast-food restaurant is a very poor analogy with proprietary online services. I don’t want to go into whether online services are good or bad, as always that’s an exercise for the reader.
What’s the best way to show a bad analogy? Make it look silly: Imagine if eating where like facebook.
These are just some of the silly results that come out of trying to fit the idea of ‘restaurant’ into the idea of ’software on the Internet’ there could be more.
I think my point here is that proprietary software, including proprietary services are anti-social. Not just rude, when taking into account the network effects. With monopoly mechanics we end up with systems which control us instead of the other way round and the only solution we’ve found as a society to extract ourselves from tar-babies like Facebook and those that came before is a total and aggressive cultural shift from one product to another. A revolution where your job is to convince your friends and family to stop using MySpace.
It’s tiring being a revolutionary for a corporation.
Ultimately I resent being required to use certain products and I resent having to resent my friends and family because they’re using certain high network effect internet-garden-esk services and require me to join them. I shouldn’t need to feel that way and no company should be allowed to insert itself into society in such a way as to make the choice between freedom and friendship an either-or proposition.
Thoughts?
* Ironically recipes can’t be copyrighted, they’re public domain as soon as they’re published. Embellishments and prose can be though, so don’t go copying recipe books with copy and paste.
I think so and so does this developer of one specific game on facebook please add your ‘like’ +1 to the facebook page so this game and the artists and other developers behind it understand that Ubuntu isn’t just being used by one or two people but by an entire community.
And even if you don’t play games. Like it too, since there are plenty of people this facebook page won’t reach, but would love to have games to play.
