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.

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.

1. Food can only be eaten if you’re with 100 of your friends
2. Everyone only dines at a single restaurant for their entire lives
3. You can’t eat at home, because 100 friends wouldn’t fit and they don’t like your cooking anyway
4. The recipes aren’t just trade secretes*, their copyrighted. Attempting to describe the taste to someone else can get you 10 years in jail under the Diners Millennium Copyright Act.
5. There is only a single burger place in every country
6. Because of network effects it operates a total monopoly on what people eat
7. The service is tailored for the lowest common denominator
8. And it poisons every customer because it can effectively leverage it’s size with the FDA.
9. Half of your friends you eat with every day constantly want you to play the burger game and do so by kicking you in the shin under the table.

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.

There are so many people in Ubuntu who do such marvelous work all the time. I’d like to thank every one of you wonderful hard working bunnies.

My special shout out has to go to a tour-de-force in Ubuntu passion, stead fast community support and on going involvement in any and all LoCo teams she’s within ten miles of. Of course I’m talking about Elizabeth Krumbach (pleia2). Thank you pleia2 for your wonderful involvement and may we benifit from your wisdom for many years to come.

Note: I know I’m not terribly good at capturing people yet, but with practice I can get better, if you’d like to be a test model, send me a message and I will sketch away.

First with Gimp:

Then in Inkscape:

Just caught this artwork on deviantArt:

Interesting, isn’t it.

I came across an idea about how machines interact with people while watching some TV. They were joking about Sat-Nav devices and all the silly voices they can make when it occurred to me that Sat-Nav devices are indeed replacing our natural abilities to navigate and know where we are and how to move around in our urban areas. (Most of us have long since lost our ability to know where we are and how to get around in the wild)

This is an example of a device which replaces a natural talent so well, that we find we don’t need our mental functions any more. But of course the one great evil of this is that we no longer know how to operate without them, thus Sat-Nav will always be required by people who use Sat-Nav a lot. (forgetting of course people who couldn’t operate at all until Sat-Nav came into being)

So what’s the alternative to technological replacement? I think one idea is technological reinforcement; the idea that the best technology improves the human operator through it’s use. Take Wikipedia; the fear is that no one will never need to remember anything and we’ll all forget to remember everything. But using Wikipedia seems to do the opposite, reinforcing information and making us more certain about some of the billions of facts we can hold in our heads. (but maybe it hasn’t been around long enough to show it’s effect)

So this got me thinking about what I would like a Sat-Nav device to do, to help me reinforce and hone my skills navigating the streets. Partly it could help by always stating the names of the roads when you’re in a local or frequently visited place. “Turn Left” is an instruction but “Turn Left at Washington Street” is educational and reinforcing if I take that route a lot. The information is certainly being presented at the right time for me to combine it with other sensory information so I can call it back up later. Another idea is to mention the absolute direction, North, South etc so we get a feel for the absolute direction we’re traveling in.

Of course none of this might work, so to test we could see how Sat-Nav devices effect people’s ability to judge medium and long distances. Most devices mention how many yards/meters it is until a junction so it’s already going into our heads and reinforcing something in there, but maybe we can’t process it because we don’t really have a sense of speed (in a car, I do on my bike of course). Maybe the brain just throws all the information away, but I find that hard to believe since brains are really good at learning to understand all sorts of data.

What do you think?