Audacious Video

You can test this out for yourself with Ubuntu 12.04 (Beta) using the following:

sudo apt-get install gir1.2-gtk-3.0 gir1.2-clutter-1.0 gir1.2-gtkclutter-1.0 gir1.2-gconf-2.0
bzr branch lp:csslavie
cd csslavie
./netbook-launcher.py

Note: default clutter/cogl has a bug which prevents the background’s opacity setting, so you won’t get as cool an effect. But a fixed version of those libraries should be available eventually.

Please comment below what you think.

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?

You use a simple X to record when someone was present and a simple dash – to record an absence. But the mood strikes you and you want to make it look a little more professional. So you load up the Character Map program and grab a tick character from the symbols available and paste it into all the marked in cells:

OK so your spreadsheet looks nice, but your reviewer wants to know how many students were in each class total. this should be easy enough and you make a new row and add in the cell SUM formulas. But woe! it doesn’t work. Using characters in a spreadsheet doesn’t count because they’re not numbers:

So to fix the issue you use the search and replace to replace all your nice tick symbols with the number ‘1′ and to be consistent, all of the dashes to the number ‘0′. And it works, you have your totals; but this doesn’t look nice! So you decide to use the format cell option to figure it out:

This brings up the number formatting window. Here you can decide what the cell should look like given a certain value. Our values are ‘1′ and ‘0′, anything else is a problem, so we use the cell formatting code: [=1]"✔";[=0]-;[RED]"Error" which shows a tick when the cell is ‘1′, a dash when the cell is ‘0′ and a red coloured Error when the cell is anything else:

Now everything is formatted wonderfully and LibreOffice Calc has saved us from having to decide between an ugly or a useless spreadsheet, we can have both beauty and functionality!

As a bit of extra curricular, I also created one for deciding if someone loves you:

Doing this piece I found there are a couple of pieces missing from Inkscape for doing production work, perhaps this is why so many people use Scribus-ng. The normal workflow from what I have seen is to make artwork in Inkscape and then transition to Scribus for the nitty gritty of doing production.

I also did the structural editing of the book contents. That is using LibreOffice to haddle all the titles, paragraphs and types as class styles instead of ad-hock ms-word inline styles. Also dealing with the pagination and a bunch of other production issues. LibreOffice was an ok tool, but a lot of the interfaces are confusing and could do with some more design being brought in on them.

Your thoughts?

We had an excellent chat about how much the author of software can be said to be responsible or involved in the art expression and how software as tools are different or the same as physical art tools and art education.

There was a nod towards proprietary software being profoundly bad for education as well as a lot of mooting that control over your own art tools was very important from an artistic point of view.

I’d have gotten better notes, but I was completely zonked from work on Friday and 4 hours sleep. Then I had wine and was drunk and deathly sleepy. But I seem to remember there might have been Mexican food and a chat between Janine Melnitz and google maps to find the hidden hotel of the elves.

2 days later I’m almost completely recovered! Let me know below if you’re interested in LibreGraphics and if you’d like me to report on any issues that might be talked about.

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?

But, I want to do something special, I’m making a computer lab with a registration screen and other fun stuff. I’ll blog about the designs and code for that in a future blog post. Today I’m going to talk about how I made a gdm greeter in python despite the lack of documentation and the round-about API challenges.

First thing to realise is that GDM 2.30 which shipped with Ubuntu 10.10 has a rich and full service/client API via DBus. This allows me to do what I’m going to do because it allows my program to act just like the shipped simple greeter. Only a single greeter can talk over the DBus API and it’s worth noting that the API isn’t over the normal System or Session Dbus, it’s over a private dbus unix socket to prevent all sorts of security issues with passing passwords around.

I first deactivated the GDM greeter: `mv /usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/gdm-simple-greeter.desktop ~/Desktop/` this will now not allow you to log into Ubuntu!

Next I developed a script which uses python’s DBus lower layers to connect over the private dbus address. The address is given to us via an environment variable ‘GDM_GREETER_DBUS_ADDRESS’ and we just feed that in as it’s randomly generated. Fill in the PASSWORD and USERNAME variables to have GDM handle the communication and log in, this is certainly not a script you should leave installed and I have written a better one with a gui now, just use it as an example.

Finally I developed a .desktop file which will autoload the example script when the login is ready. Copying that into the directory `/usr/share/gdm/autostart/LoginWindow/`.

To restart GDM I used this command as root: `service gdm stop && sleep 1 && service gdm start`

I used a VirtualBox machine which I communicated over via SSH in order to test this out, over and over, hacking away at how this could be done. You can try the same. The log files you should be watching are in `/var/log/gdm/:0-greeter.log` you’ll get all the stderr messages from your login screen in there as well as all the errors.

You can use DBus System connections on org.gnome.DisplayManager.Display to control the display and org.gnome.DisplayManager.UserManager to get lists of users, user information and events for when users are added and removed from the system, same goes for network manager and a bunch of other services running during the login session.

I’ll blog more, and perhaps video when I’m finished. For now, if you’re interested in login screen development for Gnome2 (I don’t know what they’re doing for Gnome3) then this will interest you.

Also check out the Cartoon TV show made using ubuntu and blender: Pirates vs. Ninjas vs. Robots vs. Cowboys (in Portuguese)

This is my top 10 for August, if you want to see more of the amazing art being done using Ubuntu, check out the full gallery.

This image brought to use by FLOSS:

Open and Responsible in the Herd.