BBC Digital Planet interview Mark Shuttleworth

I found this recent news article on BBC Technology News site entitled “Lift off“, which leads to the main article page entitled “Space tourist promotes open source”.

“…space tourist and open source evangelist Mark Shuttleworth talks about the developing world’s need for technology solutions.”

In my opinion the word “evangelist” should have been substituded to “advocate“. This is more appropriate when discussing promoting the ethos of Open Source Software, as the former conjures up images of, fanatical preaching zealots performing ritualistic acts.

There is also a podcast download available, of the entire BBC technology programme Digital Planet interview with Mark Shuttleworth (sorry – no direct URL as I don’t wanna be stepping on “Auntie’s” toes).

Whilst the interview offers no new news from Canonical or Ubuntu, it is well presented and touches on the importance of Open Source technology within education and developing economies.

Gnome-Screenshot & Beryl Screenshot Plugin

Taking screenshots in the Gnome desktop environment is as simple as pressing [Print Screen] key. If like me you use a Mac Mini USB keyboard (which doesn’t have such a key) you could mess around with keyboard mapping.

Alternatively within Gnome there is a screenshot app called “gnome-screenshot” found in Application > Accessories > Take Screenshot. I’ve placed a copy of this app on the lower panel (the camera icon) and assigned a 10 second delay to the launch properties. This gives me time to prepare for taking screenshots, especially useful for taking a shot of the 3D cube within Beryl.

If you use the XGL/Beryl environment there is a neat screenshot plugin which allows you to take a screenshot of a specific area through the combination of pressing the [Super] key & left clicking your mouse whilst high-lighting the area. You may need to edit the plugin properties within the Beryl Setting Manager to set your desired directory path such as /home/username/Desktop.

Here is an example of the selected area (minus mouse cursor) I choose to take a screenshot of within the Beryl environment.

After releasing the [Super] key and mouse button the screenshot of the area you selected should now be automatically saved in the directory you assigned.

Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

Days before the official release of Edgy Eft, Mark Shuttleworth has recently announced the name of the next development version of the Ubuntu distro family.

“With the final release of Ubuntu 6.10 approaching, and apparently set
to be spot on schedule October 26th, we’re starting to look beyond
it to Ubuntu 7.04, scheduled for release on 19 April 2007.

In the next cycle we’ll expand on the brand new infrastructure that has
landed in Edgy as well as branching out in some exciting new directions.
This combination of courage and restlessness is also found in a young deer
that sets out to explore a world that is new and exciting – seeing the
world through eyes unprejudiced by what has gone before.

In that spirit, the release will be be code named “The Feisty Fawn”.

The main themes for feature development in this release will be
improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end
server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies.
Ubuntu’s Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement
and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for
both users and developers.”

Judging by the specifications of next months development meeting, more emphasis seems to be placed on improving assistive technology & accessibility features such as; braille device support, screen magnification, and speech synthesis.

I have a friend, whom I’ve known for over 20 years (since we were knee high to grasshoppers), who will be very appreciative of such features. Hopefully the developers will get it right and liaise with people affected by sensory deprivation and make significant improvements of accessibility, which are surprisingly still very primitive within Linux & Open Source.

Bubble Bursting Beautified Desktop

A few days ago a friend of a friend was chatting to me about the “new” desktop environment and effects in the forthcoming release of Windows Vista. He was so enthused and excited by what he had seen in the beta release that I sat and listened.

Not wanting to burst his bubble I waited, during which my internal dialouge was impatiently running amock, and slowly a smug grin was gradually creeping across my face Once he’d finished, and with no immediate response from myself I booted up my Ubuntu Dapper installation running XGL & Beryl.

Needless to say he was blown away with what he saw and one could clearly hear his bubble burst, and then some! My silence was broken with the response “It’s all very well an having a beautified desktop, the question is does the underlying operating system have any substance to it?”.

Despite my efforts to explain the ethos, ethics and benefits of using Open Source he wasn’t prepared to deviate from his Microsoft centric life. More fool him and the other millions of hoards prepared to believe the marketing hype spun to line the corporate pockets, just to keep their operating systems up to date.

HAL9000 Desktop

Here’s a series of screenshots I’ve taken in sequence of how I recreated a recursive like effect on the cube faces of my current XGL & Beryl desktop. The process is quite simple;

1. take a screenshot of your desktop with your preferred background image.
2. apply this image to the top & bottom faces of the cube.
3. rotate the cube to desired position, and take another screenshot.
4. goto 2 and repeat.

The original image I started off with is that of the character Dave Bowman inside the central core of the HAL9000 computer, from the sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey”.

Incandescent Illunimate

On Friday night, myself & DZ attended the Hull leg of the Illuminate – Light Night event.

“Hull Art Lab presents Incandescent: a month of events exploring the spectacle of illumination, which includes: artists from the UK and Europe, exhibiting and performing specially commissioned work; a film programme spanning over 100 years of cinema; and a symposium discussing time, light and the visible; the presentation of light as both material and illusion to stimulate our senses and challenge our intellect.” Hull Art Lab

We started off, by visiting the “Day In, Day Out” installation outside Hull Central Library. We arrived slightly too early, and due to the natural light during dusk we wasn’t able to clearly see the projected image on the pavement and decided to return later.

On our way to the main event area, in the distance we could hear a heavy ethnic sounding beat. As we approached we encountered a parade of people & children circling around holding aloft home made lanterns of various designs, lead by a Chinese dragon.

Next we headed off into Queen Victoria Square to see an animation being projected onto the front of Ferens Art Gallery. The animation was of stick people, which wasn’t that impressive . Despite the huge projection I noticed how oblivious other people were of the projection. One image that certainly stood out occurred as a man walked by pushing a child in a pram, to the left of him was a image of a stick figure holding a hand gun and it was pointing towards them! This was soooo surreal, I just wish I had a camera.

From, “Vicky Sq2″ we headed down to the Blue Bell pub to have a quick pint of Sam Smiths Stout ordered from the landlord who DZ has nicknamed “The Red Baron” (INTP humour LOL).

Having had a slight pick-me-up pint, our next leg of our “Light Night” journey took us to The Deep @ the mouth of the river Hull. Half way across the footbridge we stopped and peered over the side to experience the pulsating wind hitting our faces which quite literally was taking our breaths away. In the distance down the side of the river bank saw an artist dressed in a electro-glowing multicoloured suit which was very reminicant of deep sea bioluminescence creature – quite apt considering the location . We wasn’t able to get a close up view of said suit as the concourse was blocked off to public access.

We back tracked and went to see an exhibit underneath Garrison Road bridge, which consisted of a series of green glowing lines on the individual concrete support columns. From a distance they were all at different heights and broken up, however from a certain vantage point all of these lines could be viewed as a continuous line. I had fun trying to find the elusive point, although it was taxing having to crouch down here & there and experiencing the grinding of my knees, ouch!

Not too far away on the concourse of the Tidal Barrier, there was an artist attempting to replicate a rainbow using a light on a tri-pod and sprays of water from a number of household objects. Unfortunately it wasn’t appearing to be a success, and as DZ pointed out she was beginning to get some assistance from nature, in that it started to drizzle with rain.

Finally we back tracked to revisit the “Day In, Day Out” video-installation. By day a specific public spot is recorded, this is then in turn is re-projected during night onto the exact same spot. I’ll be revisiting this installation during the course of the week hopefully to borrow a camera to take some snapshots.

I enjoyed most of the exhibits and the journey, although considering the events title, personally I thought some form of laser show would have been spectacular.

Hull~FLOSS New Look Web Site

I finally went live with the Joomla CMS version of Hull~FLOSS web site www.hullfloss.org.uk.

I’m quite pleased with the look & feel, even if I do say so myself Not all features have been implemented just yet, but at least the basic framework is now in place with appropriate information.