DoctorMo's Blog

Talking some time off from my blog for the summer. See you all in two weeks.

This is the kind of bad attitude problem that we try to get away from in the Ubuntu community, why this program was accepted into universe (I presume from debian) I have no idea. This is my attempt to try out a game from the archives:

doctormo@delen~/$ conquest
Can not connect to locahost
doctormo@delen~/$ conquestd
conquestd: Common block ident mismatch.
You must initialize the universe with conqoper.
doctormo@delen~/$ conqoper
Poor cretins such as yourself lack the skills necessary to use this program.

I have only one response to the socially challenged individual who thought that was a good message:

doctormo@delen~/$ sudo apt-get purge conquest-gl conquest-server

Bye!

I took the bus down to New York and any travelling for me seems to leave be dehydrated and haggard. No matter what kind of transport I just get in a bad mood about it. I think it’s all the bumping, noise and people around me.

Anyway, I’m here now so I can start to relax and enjoy the big apple again.

Here’s to DebConf!

I’ve been thinking about my time and how much I spend on actual project work.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I should not disregard the time I spend struggling or the time I spend relaxing enjoying some entertainment.

This seems to also be a facet of history in general. We hear about important points in history and important people, but are we really any good at knowing what was and wasn’t important? Doesn’t it seem more likely that all sorts of individuals did all sorts of small amazing things which we will never really know about or be able to appreciate.

There is a lot of enjoyment which is disregarded.

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?

Just having some fun.

Seems like the summer is just grinding on, most people have gone very quiet indeed. Bit boring to be honest.

I’ve deactivated my account of facebook, firstly because I just can’t be bothered with it and secondly to see if my friends are really my friends and will email me and if they’re interested watch my identi.ca feed and blog.

Obviously I think very few of them will actually be that bothered, not least because most of them use inferior operating systems that don’t deliver their social systems to the desktop like mine

Anywhoo, email me.

Also works with pictures, now have some fun!

I was watching the amazing tedtalk by Isabel Allende as she described some of the women who dedicate their lives to making the world better and the incredible cultural sexism they faced in their journeys.

Near the end of the talk Isabel talks about the world as it is and how unsatisfyingly bad it is and how much better it could be if we could promote women’s rights and embrace women in jobs.

What’s striking to me is that I’ve noticed the tendency of not just the lack of women in various job roles, but also that any women that do get into those jobs tend to need to act like men in order to advance. I’m not just talking about sexism, but about aggressive social interaction, bullying and inconsideration for the wider implication of action. Their patriarchies are not familiar matriarchies or tribal relations.

There is an interesting thought that we should be investing more in enterprises run by women, especially in the third world where women can really make a difference for their families and society.

Isabel also mentions teaching young men how to understand and embrace their feminine energy. something I assume is code words for social organisation such as the idea that the people we talk to may actually be important enough to care about, empathise with and think about in a less self serving manner. I know it seems hard to think of people as people and not as ways to further one’s personal agenda, but it’s possible to teach I think.

I guess I’d be a feminist if I thought it should be a movement and didn’t just think of it as common sense. Rather than thinking I need to join a social group of people, I think I’m rather more comfortable imagining everyone a feminist and anyone who behaves sexist is simply that: outside the realm of acceptable behaviour.

Thoughts?