Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 11)

Walmart Rejected

I cannot tell you how much these words warm my heart.
from the CBC

Manila faithful flock to bury Sin

from the BBC, the best news service in the world. I wish the CBC was as smart. (But at least they do have ogg streams now)

Recently, I read two excellent comments on the Ubuntu community and vision, by Michael Banck and Stephan Hermann. This is my quick story about that.

I started using Linux in August of 2003, after I finished Katimavik. I installed Red Hat 8.0 and later put Ximian Desktop on it. While I enjoyed using it, it was only when I installed Ubuntu in October of 2004 that I truly starting feeling part of the Linux community.

Shortly after that, I went to Mataro and the first Ubutu developer conference on my own money. That was sort of crazy, but there was a comment I heard there that really struck me. "You can't tell the difference between the Canonical people and the community". Now that is the kind of people I want to work with.

Anyway, the point of that long beginning was to discuss my latest crazy idea:

Gnome 3 today

The crux of my idea is that all the pieces are in place for one specific section of Gnome 3, and that is the image editing.

What I would like to see is a unified interface for image viewing, managing and editing.

How would this look? Here is how I would imagine it.

1. User opens image. Image is opened in a window somewhat like Eye of Gnome. Across the top are buttons for rotating the image, jumping to the next/previous image in the directoy and also 3 buttons for the "mode". They are labelled: View, Edit and Manage.
2. User clicks Edit, and see the gimp interface launch
3. User clicks Manage and sees an f-spot/gthumb window sidebar.

What is key is that the main image window doesn't change, you are just opening and closing extra windows around it.

The best part about this is that nothing much has to change. Only the 3 specific applications. We can roll this out slowly. Which brings me to my next part...

Now for the total crack

There is no reason why this could not be extended to every kind of document on the desktop. Open in a viewer, and the launch and edit interface.

Later, we can change the menus. There is an excellent mockup on the Gnome desktop-devel list

While I was designed the interfaces for Spud and Mapper (which really needs a better name), I was thinking of the colours for the glow on mouse-over. This lead me to realize that I have no idea what a colour-blind person would see.

Thus, I had the crazy thought about a new applet, that when activated, allowed you to "see" what a colour-blind person would see, by eliminating certain colours.

Is this even possible? If it is, how hard would it be?

While thinking about the Mr. Potato Head game (for which I thought up the name Spud), I also realized that the interface, with a few tweaks could be used for a great deal of things.

The one that most interested me was a RPG mapping program, one of my other vices. So I went ahead and designed an interface for that too. This is also inspired by some graphics from Nicu.

So, if you want to help me with any of these things, please contact me.

For all you poor planet.ubuntu people, this is my last post for today.

Recently, Nicu of planet.openclipart posted some excellent Mr. Potato Head graphics, and asked for GTK/Gnome programmer to make a game for this.

Well, I have gone one further, and designed an interface for this. If you want a quick, easy project, with a clear reward (our undying gratitude), come talk me or Nicu and lets get this game going!

KDE and Large source packages

Everytime I see an update to one of the large KDE packages, I am glad that I don't run Kubuntu or live behind a 56k line.

What strikes me about it is that large source packages are easier for upstream and that there has not been much communication regarding what is good for shipping. Now, that could be completely wrong.

Now, I am not a developer, but honestly, even I can see the bandwidth bill ticking over.

Riddell, are there plans a foot to do something about this?

Thanks

For the past number of weeks, the topic on #ubuntu-motu has included:

-Please don't complain about mono deps for next 2 weeks

-Please don't complain about X for the next 2 weeks

It occurred to me that I don't know if anyone has thanked Daniel Stone (our X guy) or Brandon Hale (our Mono guy) for their absolutely amazing work. Mostly, it has been bitching and bug filing it seems.

Thus, I would like to take a moment to say "Thanks!" to those 2 people (and the rest of the Ubuntu team) for all the great work.

There are a number of applications I would like to see packaged for Breezy:

• Koha - an open source library solution
• Mediawiki - by far the best Wiki engine out there, but unfortunately written in PHP.
• Fedora Directory Server - the GPL'ed Netscape server

Enough serious stuff, there are a number of nice games that would be awesome to package:

• S.C.O.U.R.G.E. - rogue-like game in the fine tradition of NetHack and Moria
• FreeOrion - cool 4x space game. I am hoping for the 0.3 release before Breezy
• Lincity-ng - a graphical update to the old classic Lincity, done by the great people at The Linux Game Tome
• Nexuiz - a GPL'ed first person shooter
• UFO: Alien Invasion - graphical remake of the great classic UFO

The games I am likely to try and package myself, but the server applications are completely beyond me. To my knowledge, no other distro ships either Koha or Mediawiki, so it would be a major coup. Oh, and keep updating Hula, that is a project that is going places.

If you are going to work on any of these, come chat in #ubuntu-motu on Freenode.

Ogg's big mistake

I really like ogg and the guys at the Xiph foundation. They have provided us with free and good codecs for video and audio.

But they also made one big, giant, glaring mistake:

.ogg as a file extension for both video and audio.

Why is this a mistake?

Well, to put it quite simply, it confuses users and computers. Users get confused because they can't tell what is a video and what is a audio. Case in point, I downloaded Jdub's excellent 10x10 speech. If I didn't have video thumbnailing, I wouldn't know that it is a video.

Computer get confused as well. Nautilus attempts to do a sound preview of the file, as it cannot tell the difference between the ogg audio and the ogg video.

Now, it is not too late Xiph! You can define a .ogv extension for video and leave .ogg for audio alone. Please, it is a simple thing to do.