DoctorMo's Blog

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.

The Genetic Wallpapers project is supposed to be able to help any artist create a wallpaper capable of shifting and moving over time to produce interesting and unique results over time.

The Idea

The problem is that artists have all sorts of crazy ideas about what and how the wallpaper should progress and currently the logic for how the wallpaper will mutate is contained within the python code of the main project.

So I had this crazy idea, what if I could move that logic to javascript, a language which far more people know and each logic mechanism would be self contained within the svg wallpaper it’s supposed to effect.

I thought this was such a cool idea I rushed to google to do a search to find out how I could execute self contained javascript from python without a browser (because it’s svg, not html) and it only needs to be able to modify the Document Object Model to move and resize the objects in the image.

The Problem

All of the projects I encountered searching for a solution couldn’t really do the job. Either they were hacks, tied to web browsers, didn’t really work or were mostly converters to make javascript out of python. Which isn’t what we need for this to work. I looked at python-jswebkit, python-spidermonkey and pyv8, none of which could really do the job of running javascript to act on a DOM.

Possible Solution

Instead of trying to use python, I could farm it out to perl. I hear perl has better javascript execution support and best of all, documentation to show you how to do it.

The alternative is to ask the community. But this is quite a highly specialised bit of functionality, very rarely do we need to run one bit of JIT code on another. But any ideas would be very welcome.

Comments and thoughts on the idea and the direction, please to post below.

I’ve been thinking about what it is that cultivates a negative reaction from people who use your software and who are invested in it’s success. This line of thinking has obviously been brought about by the new Ubuntu Unity interface and the strong reactions to both technical implementation and implementation method.

Firstly I want to separate out the general masses and the competition (no offence Jeff), there are plenty of people on the internet who just love to troll and there are plenty of people in other distro that talk nonsense based on tribal affiliation. Ignore them, I’m talking about negative reactions from people who make up the fixtures and fittings in the community, for Ubuntu, this would be Ubuntu Members (but not MOTU).

I’m sure we’ve all seen comments such as:

I really liked Maverick, but now with this new Unity thing that Mark has dictated will will all be using, I guess I’ll stick around for 11.04 but then move when 11.10 comes out and we have no choice but to use Unity.

The user in the quote is frustrated that development on Unity has seemingly come out of nowhere to crush all the familiarity they used to have and in order to continue to use the latest and greatest Firefox and OpenOffice they’ll be forced to put up with design decisions that will be against their own personal internal aesthetic. They’re not wrong in their concern, but of course this is a risky move that their distribution is attempting; a massive coarse correction which delves deep into the bowls of the ship we’re all sailing in and is tinkering with the engine and reshaping the hull to see if it’ll make the thing go faster.

Much like someone below deck messing about, we can’t see what the hell is going on, all we can see is the speed of the boat. So for a while the ship starts to slow down and we start to wonder if our friendly hacker is down there hitting the engine with a wrench and drilling holes in the hull. Of course the truth is that they’re risking everything on thought out designs will the same goals as most on deck, that part needs trust.

Alternatively we read official messages like:

Unity is a new interface to attract new users to Ubuntu and to attempt to jump the chasm, not everyone will be happy with the design direction; but we can’t hold back developing a user friendly desktop operating system waiting for a consensus that will never arrive.

And this too is true, but again is missing bits of the puzzle. Nothing about this kind of press release calms the fears of users, in fact it may only work with casual users and those that really trust where the ideas are coming from. It’s just as nutty to ask everyone in a committed community to trust you while you ignore the majority of what they say in order to get on with the herculean job before you as it is for users to suggest developers are deliberately planning to remove functionally just to hear the sweet screams of users.

The key is probably trust. The community members can trust the corporate development because we’re all in the same boat and they’re hardly likely to throw us overboard and corporates need to trust their community more, they’re not as design blind as we like to think, sometimes they’re just really bad at describing why they’re having trouble. This is especially true when a community member looks after lots of ubuntu user’s computers. We as developers just need to be better at reading/translating them.

I drew this graph to try and illustrate what it is about the development method that annoys people and provokes them into irrational opposition or productive support for any given project:

What are your thoughts?

The blogger Anthony Papillion has penned an article about how Canonical has taken another step against the community. It’s all about how Canonical have shut down the sounder mailing list and irc channels because they’re off topic and wildly out of control.

I have many concerns relating to Canonical and it’s conduct, but this isn’t one of them.

The first point Anthony raises is easy to debunk. The Community Council was the body to shutter the group, not Canonical. This was a community decision to help make sure the community is healthy. You can check what people were involved and if they work for Canonical or not.

Secondly, It would be hard to argue that the people in Canonical and even Mark himself have complete disregard for the community. They spend a lot of money maintaining various parts of the community, with staff and resources and while sometimes the community team does come out with some amusingly one sided posts and ideas, over all they’re here to both help the community grow and improve education within.

Finally, there is this mistaken belief from far too many people that Ubuntu advocates (or even Canonical staff) would be sad if users started to leave Canonical’s distro for other Free Desktops like Debian or Fedora. This is nonsense. We do our best here to provide a pretty cool desktop and the code is on offer for any other desktop too. I’m pretty happy about users finding their way onto other Free Desktops and I’m bemused when upset users try and use their move to Fedora as some kind of stick to lay into Ubuntu.

Please, go to Fedora, go to Debian, have a crack at Gentoo. Just enjoy yourself and be free.

Thoughts?

For today’s video blog I’m tackling the ideas behind Ubuntu the platform and Ubuntu the product, courtesy of Ayatana Mailing List. Nobody doesn’t like good Ayatana! Basically I dig into the problems between a One and Only vision and the more flexible, but harder to do, platform model of design.

With visual aids thanks to Inkscape!

Video Problems: Go directly to the video on blip.tv here and download the source ogv here.

What are your thoughts?

There has been a lot recently about community fighting. It’s been interesting, but also silly in a lot of ways because it’s a great deal about egos, and you know what happens when the immovable ego meets the unstoppable ego.

Thought for the day:

If you have a problem with the embedded video player: click here to play video and here for source avi.

I was somewhat disappointed with the poll and article by Raphaël Hertzog concerning the use of flatr buttons on the debian planet. This was also posted to Planet Ubuntu and although I would dearly like my views shared with Planet Debian, this post can only reach Planet Ubuntu.

The poll is somewhat negative and doesn’t really have a ‘I think this poll is silly’ option.

Those who like reading my blog will be aware that I’m a fan of economic prosperity for people who perform a useful job. This means any job which takes time and is useful to more than just the performer is in justification to be paid somewhat by the beneficiaries.

This doesn’t guarantee any payment of course. Even making Free Software that benefits the entire worlds economy worth billions can see you destitute through bad positioning and sale of your trade. So Flatr, one of the few micro payment systems I’ve seen flourish in the foss world more than just as an experiment is under attack from an anti-payment mentality.

I understand that there would be some fear about someone earning money from the backs of someone else’s work. But having a flatr link directly on your work, even if your work is a blog post about someone else’s work, is precisely the most direct form of invitation to be rewarded for the act of publishing useful information. If you don’t agree then you don’t have to pay the writer. What I wouldn’t want though is a ban on making money, money isn’t a danger it’s misappropriation and misrepresentation that are the usual gremlins.

In this case I find neither. Your thoughts?

I was reading last week the new OpenRespect website by Jono Bacon, where he is attempting to create a set of standard communication self applying rules to how we all can criticise respectfully each other’s opinions.

Today I read an interesting blog post about Did UbuntuJono disrespect fedora. The interesting part is not the article which is based on an error of timing and judgement, but instead the comments which seem to fall into three categories:

• Destructive – Anything to do with Ubuntu or Canonical is obviously Hitler related.
• Counteractive – Anything Ubuntu related is obviously Ghandi related.
• Jef Spaleta – The only person who can be critical and still talk sense it seems.

When you have a vested interest in getting dissenting views silenced..and want to accomplish that as respectfully as possible…the information at openrespect.org is a wonderfully excellent resource…written by someone who needs to do that day in and day out as a “community manager” working for a corporate entity who doesn’t really want people rocking the boat with regard to questioning corporate policy. – Jef read whole comment here

Canonical does seem to have a strong position on not rocking the boat, but we can do a little experiment to see what will happen when I make a list of my current disagreements and how I think the community can resolve them by rocking the boat:

Underinvestment in Plumbing – It’s true that very few companies are investing in the Free Desktop plumbing. Well a little, but it’s not a lot considering how much is being invested elsewhere. There isn’t a lot the community can do, Canonical and Mark are free to invest in whatever they like. But being critical of Canonical’s investment in plumbing and upstream plumbing especially is appropriate since a lot of technical user problems in Ubuntu are directly traceable to this underinvestment.

Weak Technical Board – Mark is the man and where once he was a Benevolent Dictator for Life, the person who could come in and break tied or tired argument; not any more. the position in a number of communities has morphed into plain dictatorship. And that perhaps is because of the weakness of the technical board and the fact that there is no resolution board for user experience and design. What we end up with is a whole bunch of employees who can’t tell Mark he’s wrong and a community who is denied the opportunity. End result is contributor dissatisfaction and a melting meritocracy. My advice is to question vigorously everything that seems to be pre-made decisions and champion community everywhere, refuse to engage in activities such as testing when decisions are dictated.

Antisocial Contributors Agreement – This really does boil down to a cultural problem, Canonical as an Upstream (ayatana etc) do not believe hand on heart in Free and Open Source. Because if they did, there would be no issue with accepting patches from anyone. This is a really big issue that sticks in the craw of many Open Source advocates. My best advice is that upstream should consider all Ayatana projects objectively and fork all code that seems attractive, create new repositories and encourage downstream contributors to contribute to the fork instead. I see no difference between what Sun/Oracle are doing with OpenOffice.org and the Ayatana projects at Canonical, and I see no other remedy at this time.

So, the question is, does my boat rocking constitute disrespect at all? Do I have my facts wrong or is my view out of step? Your comments are welcome:

This post will either go one of two ways, either people will get more irritated or it will shed some light on why seemingly rational people keep on doing seemingly irrational things.

From near as best I can tell, we look like this:

Your agreement may vary, post below (politely) if you do or don’t agree with my graphic.