I’m breaking my two week blog holiday early to bring you a super cool genetic wallpaper video:
As I show in the video, once you have a nice svg (manually edited of course) you can use the script to nudge elements in it. Comment here if you think this is cool.
This weekend we were attending PiCon once again, a wonderfully smaller SciFi and geeky event in the middle of CT near the MA border. I’d like to thank Jonathan Prigot and Penelopy (Pendulum) for personing our desk with me and proving excellent help and support to all that came seeking out Ubuntu.
Here are some Photos:
We didn’t have enough 10.04 disks so we were pushing to get rid of some 9.10s we had left over. Our LoCo isn’t official any more so I don’t know how easy it will be to get more. But it should be simple enough to sort out for our next event, esp since it’s an LTS.
Reaction was very positive, we had people we saw last time who wanted an upgrade, some people who wanted to try it out and lots of questions. The thing that is always interesting to me is how much more geeks need to be convinced of something before they’ll take the plunge. Interestingly I think this points to the responsibility we have in our authoritative positions as keepers of know-how on Ubuntu how e look to non-geeks who maybe trust what we say implicitly.
I guess that’s why we have Martin Guidelines which state to not over-play features and down-play gaps in functionality.
Recently I’ve found myself having to balance more precariously how I approach local community based activities. Say if I’m going to be teaching Free Software use, then should I be putting to one side my obvious and oblique “Ubuntu is easy” agenda and just go with what is already there?
Even if I know that other people are using events to promote other focuses of interest. If I think the event is worthwhile in it’s own right then I think I ort to be involved and help out where I can.
I know I’ve looked more like an Ubuntu only fan but personally it’s much more about getting the best and quickest Free Desktop in front of as many people as possible, whatever that turns out to be. Making sure that users have tools that work and are respectful of their rights as users under the Free Software definition. That is perhaps my agenda, perhaps trying to spread principles is part of it too?
So long as it’s an event to promote Free and Open Source, I can’t see a reason why I shouldn’t be involved if needed. Weather it’s Debian, Fedora or Firefox.
Thoughts?
Mark Shuttleworth is so crazily quotable! Also Bow Ties are cool
It’s time once again to show off some of the great art being made using Ubuntu and the wonderful tools we have available to us:
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.
Sorry to people at DebConf about Saturday, I fled back to Boston under a cloud of a rotten cold to be in my nice warm and self medicatable home. Still under the weather and such but not as bad as earlier in the week.
DebConf was actually very enjoyable (apart from getting rottenly sick) I learned a great deal and I have lots of ideas. Thanks to everyone who ran DebConf and to Kings College, New York *ahem* I mean Columbia. Good show and all that.
Quick note, those interested in the very start of extracting binary fla files can start here:
Python Scripts – GPLv3 don’t forget.
This is part of the way and yes I’m well aware of using Flash CS5 to convert these binary files into their friendlier XML cousins. But we should be able to rip these apart as well. I think having some xml and binary forms of the same data sources would be most helpful.
I’ve put out a call to artists to get some of these source files. If your reading this much later then perhaps I’ve had an update since which has better scripts or more information.
If you thought DebConf was all about programming and art was all about being a loner huddled over a computer with a stylus in one hand and a cappuccino in the other, then think again! This was a collaborative art session I ran this evening at DebConf using inkscape and my Wacom Intuos 3. Involved in drawing were myself of the Ubuntu community, Ian Molton of Debian from the UK and Paul Liu of the Canonical OEM team from Taiwan. Each person did a a part of the process and we learned together how we each did out part:
A number of people were influenced to try out inkscape and their pressure sensitive input devices. So I deem this collaborative art a success!
We had a showing of Nina Pasley’s fantastically animated “Sita Sings the Blues” here at DebConf last night. It’s great watching Creative Commons on the big screen and it was great to see Nina there and the reception she got for this and her meme shorts.
One question that we asked was what software was used to make all the artworks and as it turns out all the works were not made with Free and Open Source Software. So what is the problem?
Well Sita was made before Nina was aware of the FOSS community and any of the tools available, as so often happens. The workflows that one builds up as an artist is critical to how one thinks about making art and focusing creativity. It’s hardly surprising that an artist would be reluctant to change workflows.
But then there is the other problem of how to make the resources available in the original source files (available under CC-BY-SA) actually available in useful and open standard formats. Converting from swf to svg actually has more code written than to try and convert from fla to svg. Which is interesting.
FLA is the source format to Adobe Flash creator, it’s an OLE2 stream (Microsoft creation) which is often used for Microsoft’s binary office documents and other such files. It’s like a mini basic fat system inside the fla containing all the resources that make up the animation.
There is a tool in Ubuntu called ‘ripole’ but it doesn’t yet extract the contents of the fla sources successfully, libraries pole and libextract seem to do the same trick so perhaps it’s just some glue required. Perhaps the first step to being able to offer artists the transitioning tools to open standards is to extract the resources from fla files, either as an archive module (open it like a zip/tar file) or mount it as a local drive (bit like iso loop mounting). I favour the archive approach as you could extract all your resources and just keep them in a directory or re-tar them up for storage and distribution.
Obviously once this step is over there will be a conversion of the elements to open formats. But that probably is just another case of finding existing tools that convert swf and seeing how similar they are. We may even find some fla resources are actually just xml.
Update: With a python module and a lot of hacking, I’ve managed to decode all of the media in an fla into their component files. This includes the aif audio and the flash animated elements. Email me if your interested in the python script to do this.
