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.

See Video Here

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.

Over the years in the Ubuntu community I’ve grown to dislike this particular metaphor. Not just because we cant seem to learn anything useful from it to enable our community to succeed, but also because its a very weird way to look at the problem. The problem is not number of users or products sold per year, but how your ideas are spread through the population by other people.

For example if we were to think of the chasm as just about getting the majority of people to use your product, then we can consider Apple to have failed to cross the chasm in their desktop computer market. But if you change the concept of success to “people think and talk about” my product then apple is wildly successful. Even the legions of windows users aspire to and understand ownership of an Apple computer. Many of these people will have never used a Apple computer in their lives but will actually change
their way of thinking about desktop computers in order to incorporate Macs into that world view.

So what is the role of advertising? Well that depends on how good the advertising is by how much of an effect advertising has on the population. So if you produce a perfect advert, it can only have a certain effect on the people who see it and then you have to run it a lot or hope those that saw the advert will pass on the ideas your trying to communicate. Since adverts are known for being fairly weak forms of idea transmission you would have to run a lot of adverts for a long period of time to basically force the population to adopt a new set of ideas. This is also known as “throwing money at the problem” since you don’t have to do much leg work with your message in order to get it out there.

What is a strong form of idea transmission is word of mouth. This is easy you might think, anyone who uses your product would be naturally inclined to tell their friends about it! Ah, just because a set of ideas find a home doesn’t mean they’ll find a good way of spreading. You will get a set of customers who enjoy using your product, but no one outside of that group will really know about it. This forms them chasm in the metaphor mentioned above. Its created by a reluctance of your users to communicate your ideas
to the people they know.

As an example i present to you RedHat. Way back before Ubuntu, it was very uncool to run a server with linux, only really technical people did so and usually not with the knowledge of their bosses. Then a company comes along and spreads the idea that Linux can be brilliant on the server, they’ve done something to it or cast a spell of invincibility or something. But even if Linux was exactly the same technically, it was now completely different and new in the eyes of many more people.

The technical users started telling their bosses, other professionals, the word got out not because the technology changed, but because the message was sent with a renewed vitality and conviction that it was new, improved, important and could save you a bag of money to boot.

And that particular war drum has been beating ever since.

Then comes Ubuntu many years later. The same thing happens in fact, Ubuntu creates hope and a renewed vitality for spreading the message. “hey did you know you could run Ubuntu on your desktop computer?” it became cool to tell your friends you used Ubuntu, that maybe they should give it a try or let you
give them a try with a helping hand. Ubuntu wasn’t massively better that Mandrake, Mandriva or SuSE, it was just getting out a clearer and more easily spread message.

Spreading the meme over the chasm

What we’ve done is incredible. Many more people run a Free Desktop now than in 2004. But the message got old over the years, the faith and the vitality has waned and public relations issues have made the message of spreading Ubuntu to everyone you know less appealing and seem more risky.

Nothings really changed. Ubuntu is really getting better and better as a technology, but its message, its “meme spreading” capabilities aren’t what they used to be. New products like Ubuntu TV and Ubuntu phones are interesting and renew some of the flagging faith and in a bring back the old religion in seeing a Free and Open Source platform flourish somewhere.

We secularists tend to think of religion and faith as nasty, dirty emotionally charged system and we should focus instead on proving with data that we are the best and only supporting Ubuntu if it really is the best. But that’s not how humans work, we’re far more emotional and biased and working with that is what produces this chasm effect in the market; if you’re before the chasm then the bias is working against you, if you’re over the chasm then the bias is working for you.

We want to take on the world, and it can be done. Ubuntu can be installed on every computer within a mile of
where you live, that there is nothing it cant do without a bit of persistence and faith that Ubuntu can work. Each and every member of the community is a mass of human interaction; chance after chance to spread our ideas and get the message out there that “you may not use Ubuntu, but think of Ubuntu when you think of computer desktops”.

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?

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.