Planet Inkscape

John Bintz: Plugin Wonderful 0.5 Released!

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:00:23 +0000

I just finished up version 0.5 of Plugin Wonderful, the WordPress plugin that makes it easy to add Project Wonderful advertisements to your blog. This version is almost a complete rewrite of the core of the plugin, with a full suite of unit and functional tests added (courtesy MockPress and PHPUnit). I’ve greatly improved compatibility with WordPress MU, and the plugin also takes advantage of the new WordPress 2.8 widgets API.

I want to extend a big thanks to beta tester Don Koch who helped with code and such (and made me realize that everything I had for widgets was wrong and needed rewriting). Go see the site he’s building using ComicPress.

Note: if you find issues with the plugin, file a bug over at GitHub. Comments here get lost too easily.

Jon Phillips: The Green Dam be Damned: Free Party Day Press Hits from using Laoban Soundsystem 1.0

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:37:19 +0000

[ End of the day photo by Shasha Liu ]

I wrote a quick summary of yesterday’s party and chronicled many press hits the event got on the Internet. I’m still not finding many photos which I know were being taken. If you took photos or wrote about yesterday, please do comment on this post or email me.

I also wrote about the Laoban Soundsystem 1.0 July 1st Green Day IDEA2009 on my wiki previously if you’d like to chip in some links or comments. I really want to use the speakers, granted they aren’t the big Laoban 2.0 stack, for more events in Beijing! Also, I really must learn more about this brilliant Ableton live software. I’ve avoided it because its not free software, but now I think I’ve got it running in Wine. And, regardless, I must learn about this software if myself or anyone else wants to make something similar for live audio/video performances in the same caliber, but as Free Software (and better!).

If you want a great analysis and take on the Chinese Green Dam Saga, please read Andrew Lih’s post and the other great ones by Rebecca MacKinnon.

Bryce Harrington: Dumping currently loaded Firefox URLs

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:22:09 +0000

Chris Cheney posed an interesting problem - how to get a listing of currently opened Firefox windows.

You can get this info from sessionstore.js in your firefox profile, but it's a jumble of javascript. I wrote a script ff-pages to display them in a more useful way.

Example usage:

$ ff-pages .mozilla/firefox/*.default/sessionstore.js

Window 0:
    http://shoutcast.net/directory/index.phtml
    http://www.radioparadise.com
    http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/Plots/
    file:///var/www/X/Graphs
Window 1:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/379797
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21315
Window 2:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/360319
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/376092
Window 3:
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21756
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16702
...

Bryce Harrington: Solutions to me-too storms

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:39:33 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about me-too storms, including how they develop and some of the problems they can cause (most notably - delaying the bug's solution).

Since this is a bad problem there's been quite a few ideas proposed.

FIXING the bugs faster would be the best thing of course. That's a whole other topic... but does deserves first mention.

Launchpad already has a solution in the form of the "This bug doesn't affect me (change)" text and link on every bug.

Presumably this is serving as a lightning rod saving us from heaps of me-too comments. And presumably the data is being stored somewhere to help developers identify highly popular bugs, but I don't know how to access that info. I would imagine if developers could filter/sort/view this data it'd give added incentive for people to use that and it would be a more effective tool.

Another issue is that the link just isn't that noticeable. I'll leave it to usability experts to work out how best to improve it, but it definitely needs a re-think so it's a bit more obvious, especially for casual launchpad visitors.

Educating bug reporters is another oft-suggested solution. I think there's some truism about documentation being the worst way to explain how software works, because no one will read it. Actually there's been reams and reams of discussion and documentation about how to write and behave on bug reports, and indeed I think this is really helpful as it can turn bad bug reporters into really good bug reporters. That said, many people are just too busy, or too lazy, or don't even know they don't know how to report bugs.

Hiding comments or otherwise emphasizing/de-emphasizing comments by various criteria has been suggested and I believe is being considered by the launchpad crew. The trick is to do this in a way that doesn't end up actually consuming more time to manage than it saves. I think a lot of useful experimentation could be done on this idea using greasemonkey, as Brian Murray has done.

Splitting bug reports would be pretty cool feature, at least in theory. If we realize that John and Bob have different issues, it'd be slick to be able to push a button and have all of Bob's comments moved to its own bug report. But in practice I suspect this could result in creating more confusion by losing context. In any case, I don't think it'd help with me-too storms since most of the low value comments really aren't worth setting up a separate bug for; better to just have the people file new bugs from scratch.

Locking bug reports, is sometimes suggested by those familiar with similar functionality provided by forums software.

Minimum karma requirements to post onto other people's bugs is an idea I've been kicking around for a while. I've noticed (thanks to Kees Cook's lp_karma_suffix greasemonkey script) a very strong correlation that the worst me-too'ers also tend to have the lowest karma. People with the most helpful comments usually have higher karma.

So why not make use of that by requiring posters to have a certain karma level before being able to comment on someone else's bug report? From what I can tell, it needn't be high; 50 points would be enough to weed out the vast majority of the noise, but still be low enough that anyone with a legitimate interest in helping on bug reports could earn with a fairly minimal amount of work, such as helping on answers.ubuntu.com or going through the full bug process following up on their own bug reports.

Perhaps it could be set up to kick in only after there are already a few commenters, so we don't get in the way of random helpers on bugs that would otherwise be neglected. In a way, this would be akin to the "locking" idea above, but a bit more targeted.

Other thoughts?

Gail Carmichael: Google Scholars' Retreat Tech Talks: Street View

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 10:00:11 +0000

After the eyes-free Android demo, we had a few choices for what topic we wanted to learn about next. I would have loved to learn more about Chrome and especially Android, but I chose Street View because of its relevance to my thesis research topic. There are three main things I took away from this presentation by Luc Vincent.

The first is that the original panoramas being investigated by Google were actually the 'pushbroom' type. These are long strips created by slicing and stitching long video sequences taken with one camera. There were all kinds of problems with generating the panoramas themselves, like weird effects from the multi-perspective model. Trying to get a working system inside the vehicle for the very custom setup also posed many challenges, down to simply powering the Windows and Linux boxes set up in the back of the vans!

Then I learned that, when they experimented with spherical panoramas, they did indeed use the Ladybug camera. This is what the panoramas I'm using in my thesis were made with. However, the slide with that rig was up for about 0.3 seconds before Luc quickly and politely expressed how much it sucked before showing the custom rig with real lenses and cameras that Google put together. No wonder their panoramas increased in quality so much! Even though it doesn't actually help me with my thesis, it does make me feel just a little bit better about all the problems I've been having with the panoramas generated with Ladybug data.

Finally, Luc showed us a new interaction tool used in Street View, called the 'pancake.' The video below shows how awesome this tool is.

This would not be easy to implement - a full 3D model of the scene would be required. Luckily, Google uses laser data in addition to the images captured, which gives the depth information needed. Getting my hands on both the higher quality panoramas and some laser data would have made my thesis much easier, and given me much better results. I heard that some panoramas are going to be released, so maybe someone can pick up where I left off.

Jon Phillips: Laoban 1.0 Retrofitted Grillz July 1 Free Party Day

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:01:03 +0000

Just in time, Matt got some pretty new aluminum fronts cut in time for the big event today.

Now that the Green Dam Youth Escort has been delayed, we have a full on celebraton on our hands in CaoChangDi from now until midnight, on Wed, July 1, 2009.

Gail Carmichael: Google Scholars' Retreat Tech Talks: Introduction

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:08:48 +0000

While this year's Google scholarship winners spent the day at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California for part of the Google Scholars' Retreat, Google treated us to some great tech talks in addition to all that awesome free food.

We were first welcomed by Laszlo Bock, Google's VP of People Operations. The most interesting thing he told us about is the statistics that Google uses to determine everything from which employees are most likely to leave the company to how to keep them there. I can't remember which parts were secret now, so I won't go into details, but the amount of effort put into understanding these sorts of things is both fascinating and impressive.

The next few posts will each summarize one of the tech talks given. If you're interested in a more in-depth post about any of these, leave me a comment and I'll see what I can do!

Gail Carmichael: Google Scholars' Retreat Tech Talks: Eyes Free Android

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:08:30 +0000

The first technical talk of the Google Scholars' Retreat was given by one of Google's blind engineers, T.V. Raman. T.V. showed us the work he's been doing on an eyes-free shell for the Android mobile operating system.

The main example he used to show the thought process in designing the shell was the use case of simply dialing a number. How does a blind person do this accurately on a touch screen? How does he know where the numbers are?

The answer comes from the idea that the numbers don't always have to be in the same place; they only need to always have the same relative position. So if you say that the digit 5 will always be located the first place you put your finger (or thumb), you can then slide your finger around to the relative position of the other digits, laid out as they normally are on a phone. Audio and tactile feedback is given as you slide over the numbers, and the digit is spoken aloud once selected.

The video below shows the dialer in action (skip to about 1:50 if you don't want to see the introduction).

The cool thing is that this is useful for everyone, not just blind people. If you're walking along the street and need to dial your phone, you generally want to continue looking where you're walking. Otherwise, you'll be like the person who apparently walked right into T.V. on the street when not paying attention. He laughs about that, since he's the one who's blind, yet he's the one being walked into! ;)

Gail Carmichael: Google Scholars' Retreat: San Francisco

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:48:09 +0000

I was ever so lucky to make it as a finalist for the Google Anita Borg Canada scholarship again this year. The best part of these awards, really, is the trip you get to take to visit Google and meet all the other inspiring scholarship winners. Last year it was New York City, and this year it was San Francisco!

I was in San Francisco not so long ago for the CRA-W Grad Cohort, but we stayed a little out of town, so I only saw a little bit of the city. I was pretty excited to stay right in the financial district this time and look around some more!

The plane ride in was mostly uneventful, though the connection from Denver to San Francisco was delayed over an hour. This wouldn't have been a problem if (a) we were still inside the airport with free WiFi, rather than on the plane, and (b) if there weren't a bunch of people waiting for me at the airport at the other end! I was so stressed. Either they all waited for me, in which case I felt bad delaying their sight-seeing, or they didn't wait, and I would be somewhat stranded, since I never actually figured out how to get to the hotel for myself (too busy thesis writing!). Luckily for me, they did wait. I want to repay their kindness but don't know how. (In fact, the opposite happened when I left to look around the city - one of the people who waited at the airport actually came down after us and we ended up leaving without her! I'm not sure how it happened, but I was told she had already left. So so so sorry!)

The hotel was right beside Chinatown, so that's where we went first. I loved the architecture! A great mix of traditional and modern.

The girls I was with had planned to check out the cable car museum. I didn't really know what it was all about. In fact, I just assumed that "cable car" referred to something like you'd see at the ski resort. Either that, or just a street car or bus powered by overhead wires (they did have that, too). My mind was pretty blown when I learned that there were literally giant loops of twisted cable going round and round under the streets. The cable cars hook this cable, and slowly clamp on with a vice, at which point the car gets pulled along its track. This replaced horse carts travelling up very steep hills (and sometimes not making it) back in the mid 1800's. Very ingenious design!

Later that evening, Google held a little welcome reception at the hotel. It was very nicely done, and I had a blast meeting a bunch of awesome people, even though I had to leave a bit early, having been awake for 20 hours due to the time change and early flight.

The next day, we took a shuttle to Mountain View to visit Google headquarters.

The day was full of tech talks, a tour, and food food food! At the ice cream social late in the afternoon, I heard that Sergey made an appearance, but somehow I didn't seem to notice. Maybe I was too busy running around taking pictures of dinosaurs and stuff. ;)

Friday night's meal was at a nice Asian grill. Funnily enough, the concept was similar to the place we went to in New York City. You didn't order - they just brought you food platters and you ate what you felt like eating. Not a huge amount of variety was available, but certainly enough for everyone. We could have used some guys at our table, because the ten of us women couldn't eat it all! (I also learned that more than half our table was either married to or dating another computer scientist. For some reason, this made me smile.)

Finally, on Saturday morning, four scholars presented their research. By chance, it was all women who presented (there were guys there for some scholarships). I couldn't help but notice that the many questions asked were also by women (until the very end when a short and quiet question was finally asked by a male voice). Just a coincidence, but a nice change, anyway!

So once again, Google treats us right - thank you!! I hope to post about the technical talks over the coming days. More photos available on Flickr.

Jon Phillips: Fabricatorz Laoban at Free Ai Wei Wei Party Wednesday July 1, 2009 Caochangdi

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 10:41:56 +0000

Spread the word! The Party Day is on tomorrow like no other in CaoChangDi! Get your boycott on.

[Link to the SVG file]

We will bring our Laoban 1.0 Soundsystem with its new shiny grillz tomorrow. To all DJs and musicians out there (especially good ones!), this is an open call to come on out and plug-in to the speakers. We need you to come out and make some sound, art, and have a big ole green day brainstorm. The whole day is free and open! The entire day is to boycott the Chinese Internet.

To all our Internets Massive! To all Twitteronians, Identicators, Free and Open Source, Creative Commons’d out people in Beijing, or those who just want to have fun, please come out tomorrow for the full day or even just part of it. Matt Hope, Jon Phillips (rejon), Robin, Phil Dunn and so many more will most definitely be on hand to mix, make some projects in realtime and collectively boycott the Internet.

Party Day — See You in Caochangdi

WEDNESDAY 2009 1 July 9:00 AM to 11:30 PM, all day beer and chatting.

Blog friends, food friends, all are welcome. There will be gifts.

Phone: 010-8456-4194
Email: xuesheng512@gmail.com

Address: Beijing, Chaoyang District, Airport Service Road, Caochangdi No. 258 FAKE Studios

Breakfast menu: soy milk, gruel, youtiao, dumplings, four types of pickled vegetables, fried eggs, ham, tea eggs, fruit platter

Lunch menu: cinnamon lotus root, village style fungus mushrooms, seafood hot and sour soup, marinated duck, oyster sauce beef, fried fresh vegetables, Yangzhou fried rice, fried noodles, seasonal fruit

Dinner menu: cucumber, fish and egg soup, barbecue chicken, fish steaks, gulao pork, hot and spicy tofu, black peppercorn beefsteak, fried dishes, assorted mushrooms, udon, lotus fried rice, seasonal fruit

Midnight snack menu: cabbage hearts, spicy dried tofu, peanuts, fried broad noodles, gruel, fried bread with dipping sauce, garlicky vegetables, season fruit, four types of pickled vegetables

Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and midnight snack. Coke, Sprite, Fanta, orange juice, plum juice, lemon tea, Tsingtao, all kinds of beverages.

Guests can hang out in the lobby our outside eating and doing whatever they feel like.

Thanks to our great friend Robin Peckham for the realtime translation of the original post by the Wizzler.

UPDATE: Chinese government has delayed the Green Dam! The party goes on though in more of a celebration-mode!

Bryce Harrington: Solutions to "me-too storms"

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:25:27 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about me-too storms, including how they develop and some of the problems they can cause (most notably - delaying the bug's solution).

Since this is a bad problem there's been quite a few ideas proposed.

FIXING the bugs faster would be the best thing of course. That's a whole other topic... but does deserves first mention.

Launchpad already has a solution in the form of the "This bug doesn't affect me (change)" text and link on every bug.

Locking bug reports, is sometimes suggested by those familiar with similar functionality provided by forums software.

Other thoughts?

Bryce Harrington: "Me-too storms" in launchpad

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:53:19 +0000

I deal with a lot of X.org bugs in launchpad, and I often run into an intriguing phenomenon, the so-called "me-too storm".

Essentially, a me-too storm is a bug report which accumulates a large number of confirmation statements from different people, to the point that it actually hinders progress.

Knowing that a bug affects additional people does have some value to it. I particularly appreciate it when someone of a technical bent is able to reproduce a problem, because I can have confidence that they can test out patches or at least provide insightful technical analysis.

However, past maybe half a dozen comments, the value of an additional confirmation drops off to zero. So, comments in a healthy bug report would shift from confirmatory statements towards comparing data, discussing workarounds, identifying test cases, proposing patches, and so on.

Unfortunately, with a me-too storm, the confirmation statements come in at a faster clip, and their quality often drops further. Commonly, the confirmer will not provide log files or other proof that they do indeed have the bug. This is a particular problem with X because often there are different unrelated bugs that have identical symptoms (examples include X freezes, black screens, performance degradation), and so they might have a different bug; by "me-too'ing" their bug instead of creating their own bug report, it means their issue probably won't be investigated, or it can cause massive confusion or even sidetrack the discussion away from the original bug.

The bug suffers from a bad feedback loop at this point. The more comments a bug has, the more "important" it looks to launchpad's search engine, so it gets suggested to anyone with vaguely similar symptoms. New commenters notice that some old commenters provided data already so they don't bother putting it in.

Indeed, after a while the bug report can start accumulating negative comments, that have a value below zero - they actually detract from the discussion. These range from demanding "is it fixed yet?" questions to rude, inflammatory or borderline threatening comments "fix it now or I go back to windows, you insensitive clod!!!1!" These predictably stir up a variety of 0-value follow on comments, "No, it's not fixed yet, please be patient," "yeah +1 for fixing this soon," "did you try rebooting? it helped me," "plz unsub me from this list, to many emailz," "'doze sucks, get a mac," and so on.

Now, no one would argue that "me-too storm" bugs are not important. Obviously with so many people commenting, there must be some real problem that needs dealt with. It could be a real bug, or a class of bugs with similar symptoms, or a usability issue, or even just poorly set expectations...

However, the stormy nature of these high comment bugs tends to work against themselves, for a few reasons. First, as a developer it's just plain time consuming to read through a gazillion comments. Second, these bugs can be hard to summarize and send upstream, particularly if analysis data is coming from different people (with perhaps differing hardware). Third, if you post a proposed solution, you often get feedback from people having unrelated bugs that leads you to make erroneous conclusions about the fix.

The "me-too storm" is a fascinating phenomenon, but since it hinders bug solution it is interesting to consider ways that this could be prevented or mitigated in launchpad. I'll share my own thoughts in a future post. Meanwhile, I'd love to hear other's ideas.

Jon Phillips: Caochangdi RealLife Painting

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 08:32:38 +0000

It collects particles in the air in #caochangdi

The Underground Space in Beijing

Is this a possible #laoban event space?

Bryce Harrington: Ubuntu's xorg-edgers PPA

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 22:22:50 +0000

The xorg-edgers Personal Package Archive (PPA) has been proving itself in battle for Karmic.

PPAs can be thought of as basically a "build service", however they also include dependency info that lets you deploy a set of interdependent packages. This feature is extremely handy for X.org since it is not unusual for a package to require a new mesa, libdrm, or kernel update. PPAs provide a package-system compatible way to let users install a package and all its dependencies in one go.

xorg-edgers was originally set up by Tormod Volden a couple years ago to make it easier for bug reporters to test git snapshots of the -ati and -radeonhd drivers. These drivers were not putting out regular releases, but were very active at committing fixes for problems we reported, so xorg-edgers gave a way to both enable users to easily validate the fixes, and as a way to test-drive a particular snapshot before uploading it to Ubuntu proper.

Several of us noticed how useful this approach was, and assisted Tormod. One key was to turn the procedure of packaging new git snapshots into a script, and document the procedure so others could participate more easily.

Over time, xorg-edgers expanded to include more than just ATI drivers. Today it encompasses the major video drivers, the x-server itself, and all manner of various dependency libraries.

Since xorg-edgers is set up as a team PPA, the overhead of getting access to uploading to it is much lower than to upload X.org bits to Ubuntu main. This has paid off recently as the team gained a new member, Robert 'Sarvatt' Hooker, who has dug into the tough work of sorting out KMS packaging issues with Tormod and myself, and has been using the git snapshot scripts to keep packages up to date.

One thing I really like about how xorg-edgers is set up is that it is strongly community-owned and driven. It gives freedom to experiment beyond what would be suitable in the distro proper, and it engages contributions that might not have been made otherwise. This bleeding edge packaging work can be an exciting challenge, especially when it results in you being the first to see some sexy new feature.

Yet I also see xorg-edgers as strategically important for tackling the types of problems we've run into with X.org in the past. First, it should help us more reliably detect major regressions in upstream versions prior to upload by engaging a larger pool of testers than we've had in the past. Second, since upstream prefers reported bugs to be tested against their recent work, it makes it easier to ensure our upstreamed bugs are maximally relevant to upstream. Third, it gives users with bugs in the current version an alternative to try.

Another reason I strongly support xorg-edgers is to help upstream. Without something like xorg-edgers there is a trade-off between including newly released versions in Ubuntu, which helps upstream by giving them more testers but risks regressions, and sticking with older but proven-stable versions. upstream can simply recommend bug reporters test against xorg-edgers, rather than walk them through all the steps of compiling all the various bits from git (which can sometimes overwhelm non-technical folks!) Ubuntu benefits as well in that the bugs and their fixes are tested in a Ubuntu environment, so when we do update to the new version we can be assured that the reported problem will be fixed.

We've gotten good feedback from upstream about xorg-edgers, such as in a recent blog post by Carl Worth. I know that other Linux distributions are often considered more "developer-oriented" because they carry newer (if unstable) versions of packages, but I hope that techniques such as xorg-edgers provide a better solution to the problem in the eyes of upstreams, that gives a stable Ubuntu base to the majority of users, and testing "overlays" that users can opt-in to as needed for doing testing/development of particular subsystems.

Gail Carmichael: Teaching Computer Science with Augmented Reality

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 22:59:37 +0000

There's this guy named Jack Cough (can't say whether it's his real name). He writes about software on his blog, Jack Cough on Software.

One day, Jack Cough wrote about teaching his young child about functional programming. Jack Cough's post made it to Reddit, where I, and many others, found it, read it, and thoroughly enjoyed it. After that, I (and maybe those many others) completely forgot about it.

Until now.

After watching the video about the augmented reality zombies game, I was thinking to myself, "What kind of cool stuff can I make for my PhD?" I know I really want to work on augmented reality (whether it's for the main dissertation or smaller research projects). I'm also rather interested in the role video games can play in education (either as entertainment designed to teach new skills, or as a motivation for learning computer science). Combining all these things together only seems natural.

It's amazing how little time it took for me to remember Jack's post after I started this wondering. I can definitely imagine an augmented reality game that has kids build Dr. Seuss's Star Belly Sneetch machines using concepts of functional programming (without even knowing it! A head fake as Randy Pausch would say...). More mature analogies could make the concept useful for college students struggling to figure out programming for the first time. Even Siftables - smart, intercommunicative little tiles with LCD screens - might prove ideal for such a project, either in addition to or instead of augmented reality solutions.

Now, I don't want to steal Jack Cough's ideas and build a game completely based on his concept. That's just not fair. But it does give a bit of inspiration to look around and see what others might have done, and to start exploring various ways to teach young children about programming. Stay tuned in case I come up with anything really cool! I might just share it here...

Gail Carmichael: Zombies!

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:58:44 +0000

This zombie shooter game is a little out of the ordinary...

I really like this concept - I feel there is so much potential. A lot of the AR games I've seen come out of university research efforts have felt so incomplete and rough around the edges. (Ok, I'll admit it - they generally just plain didn't seem fun!)

But this one has nice graphics and a concept that actually makes a lot of sense. I mean, flying in a helicopter - what a great way to give the real position of the mobile device meaning in the game! Using it as a spotlight is also pretty smart. Then there's the skittles. Genius.

John Bintz: ComicPress development codebases are now up on GitHub

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:43:13 +0000

I’ve spent the past few days getting all of the development work on ComicPress and ComicPress Manager up on GitHub. This also includes setting up automated documentation generation and regular Zip builds of the contents of the repositories. Check out the project pages and wiki pages, and if you want to help out, drop me an email!

Gail Carmichael: Becoming Viral with The Sims 3

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 21:32:32 +0000

I don't know how I missed this until now, but I just stumbled upon some of the best video game-related writing I have seen online. Written in blog form, Alice and Kev by game design student Robin Burkinshaw is, on the surface, nothing more than a record of what is happening to two characters she created in EA's recently released The Sims 3. But start reading from the beginning, and you'll soon find you can't stop!

The concept is something that was apparently done in previous versions of the game:

This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes. It’s based on the old ‘poverty challenge’ idea from The Sims 2, but it turned out to be a lot more interesting with The Sims 3’s living neighborhood features.

I am totally flabbergasted at the story that unfolds from there. I haven't played the game yet, so I can't say whether it's some kind of coincidence that the characters have evolved the way they have, or if the artificial intelligence is really that realistic. (I'd love to get into the guts of that AI engine.) Of course, most of the credit goes to Robin, who really brings the characters to life with her words and carefully selected game screen shots.

I don't want to give the plot away so far, so you'll have to go read it. But I do want to comment on the concept. Some comments on the blog entries wondered whether this is actually a viral marketing campaign on behalf of EA. Although I doubt that was the intention, this is certainly having a similar effect. I know I sure want the game now!

Beyond that, this is turning out to be a viral marketing campaign for Robin herself. This is exactly the kind of publicity anyone with aspirations in technology usually only dreams about. If there aren't a dozen game design companies, big or small, that are now wondering when Robin graduates, I will be surprised. Kudos!

Gail Carmichael: Learning Drupal

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 12:01:12 +0000

I've been having fun being creative with my Nikon D90 and snapping a bajillion photos (many of which I still have to look at, going all the way back to March Break!). Recently, a new photography club just got started in my area, and I volunteered to make a website. I figured it would be a great opportunity to pick up some new skills, since I'd never really had a reason to put together a dynamic site before.

The site would have to house the usual information - upcoming meetings, news and announcements, club rules, etc - but I thought it would also be fun to have a blog that all members could contribute to, as well as a showcase of winning photos from the quarterly contests we planned to hold. I also wanted to make it possible to (eventually) have the club's executive make updates themselves. Some kind of content management system was clearly needed.

Way back in the days of being President of our undergrad computer science society, we rebuilt our website from scratch. It had been done in Drupal before, but it wasn't really kept up to date or well used. The web guy at the time decided to use Joomla! as it would probably be a little easier to get running and to maintain. No complaints from me - I knew I wouldn't have time to help administer the site's back end, so anything that gave me a nice template and lots of options for content made me happy.

So when it came time to choose the back end for the photography club's website, I was a little sceptical about my husband's suggestion of using Drupal. It seemed that Joomla! really was easier. But he offered to get it going, so I figured - why not?

While Joomla! would have been fine (and maybe even better in some ways?) I can't say I regret the choice.

Finding and installing new themes and modules is dead simple - you literally just upload the files to your server to the appropriate folder. The administrator's menu seems to include everything you need in a relatively easy-to-navigate layout. The Views module is a little confusing at first, but getting what you want (if what you want isn't too complicated) doesn't take long. The Content Construction Kit allowed me to make custom stories - one each for blog posts, news items, and events. This way, I can give registered members access to post only certain kinds of items on the website (typically, just the blog). It also makes it easier for them, because they can't accidentally mess it up! I also love that you can have all your content get put into a single RSS feed.

It's not all unicorns and rainbows, though. One of the most frustrating things is figuring out how to style your views. In fact, I haven't even figured this out at all yet - I'm just using the default styles, but I'm not 100% happy with the way things look. Some of the spacing is weird, for example, and the view items don't even seem to use the same styles as the rest of the site! I don't even want to know how hard it would be to customize the overall theme...

It's hard to compare exactly to Joomla! since I didn't do the actual setup of that, but I definitely do get the impression that Drupal has a much steeper learning curve. However, once you get a handle on the basics, it's pretty obvious that it is really quite powerful. I'd recommend it for anyone with some decent computer knowledge and lots of patience.

Here's the website I made: North Grenville Photography Club.

Inkscape: Prerelease of 0.47 is available

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 15:00:23 +0000

Later than expected we uploaded a prerelease of upcoming Inkscape 0.47. We are working on rescheduling the final release. The prerelease is currently available as source code and a Mac build and binary builds for Ubuntu. Fedora users can also use testing repository to fetch recent builds. Windows binary builds might follow, but you can use nightly builds for now. We encourage you to test and report issues you run into.

Inkscape: Inkscape 0.47 about screen contest results

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:00:20 +0000

We have the winner of the about screen contest! Congratulations to sko whose winning submission has first received 29 votes from the DeviantArt community and then Inkscape developers choose it from three submissions with the most votes. A big thanks go to all participants for showing off what can be done in Inkscape when combined with creativity. In case you have missed them, here are all submissions.

Inkscape: Translation Statistics

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:00:20 +0000

Here are the current translation statistics for Inkscape trunk. We have 13 languages at 80% or better - it's only a half of what we had in the 0.46 release! We should catch up since 0.47 release is nearing. Compared to state at 0.46 release we have 1 new language (hy), 15 languages dropped under 80% (bg, ca, de, en_GB, eo, fi, hu, km, nb, pt_BR, pt, sr@latin, sr, vi and zh_CN) and only 1 language got over 80% (ko). am: 1% ar: 9% az: 3% be: 63% bg: 55% bn: 0% br: 100% ca: 64% ca@valencia: 43% cs: 43% da: 37% de: 57% dz: 42% el: 5% en_AU: 26% en_CA: 3% en_GB: 74% en_US@piglatin: 42% eo: 74% es: 91% es_MX: 6% et: 2% eu: 98% fi: 59% fr: 100% ga: 1% gl: 37% he: 81% hr: 56% hu: 65% hy: 11% id: 2% ja: 39% km: 74% ko: 93% lt: 39% mk: 0% mn: 3% nb: 42% ne: 34% nl: 99% nn: 28% pa: 16% pl: 99% pt: 54% pt_BR: 62% ro: 19% ru: 95% rw: 1% sk: 99% sl: 99% sq: 1% sr: 71% sr@latin: 61% sv: 23% th: 21% tr: 22% uk: 100% vi: 63% zh_CN: 58% zh_TW: 99% Average: 47%

Inkscape Tutorials: Inkscape Video Tutorial Double Feature – Faking 3d Text & Wrapping Text Around a Globe

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 01:34:05 +0000

Introducing a new segment here at the inkscape tutorials blog: the Inkscape Video Tutorial Double Feature. Screening this week, we have:

3D Text Using Interpolation: An example on how to use the interpolation effect to create a faux 3d (yet impressive none-the-less) text effect:

And, Secondly, we have:

Wrap Text Around a Globe:

Another awesome screencast by heathenx:

In this episode I will demonstrate how to wrap text around a three-dimensional globe in Inkscape v.046.

I used a fairly new extension from Gerrit Karius (aka G33K) called Bezier Envelope. If you want to follow along or use the Bezier Envelope for whatever future purpose then be sure to download it here. Thanks Gerrit.

Ryan Lerch: Touchpad Click and Edge Scrolling broken in Fedora 11?

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 05:38:51 +0000

In Fedora 11, default mouse settings (with regards to laptop and notebook touchpads) have been slightly changed. In previous versions of Fedora, tapping the touchpad to “click” and scrolling using the edge of touchpads was enabled by default. In Fedora 11, these options are now disabled by default. To re-enable these options:

1. Open the Mouse Preferences dialog either by choosing System > Preferences > Mouse from the Fedora Main Menu or by running the following command from a terminal:

gnome-mouse-properties

2. In the Mouse Preferences dialog, choose the Touchpad tab, and enable the options you desire.

Mouse Preferences Dialog

Gail Carmichael: Pros, Not Prudes

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:43:50 +0000

My attention was brought another article about male presenters being rather unprofessional at a technology conference. I passed up on writing about the previous Rails CouchDB fiasco since it was pretty well covered already. But the fact that someone has raised the bar even further is rather troubling and warrants a post here.

The article is called Prude or Professional? and really hit the nail on the head for me:

Don't get us wrong, we are not women who can't handle off-color humor, or provocative messages, or even erotic digital art. But each of these has it's place. Paying for a professional conference and being subjected to this kind of content is infuriating.

Jokes amongst my closer friends could definitely be construed as sexist or inappropriate. I remember hanging out in the undergrad lounge with some of the guys (including a faculty member, if I recall correctly), and someone brought up the fact that some person was considering a "Women of Computer Science" calendar. The joke was that I'd be the only one in it (and I think it went on from there - it was a while ago). Though this is a mild example, I'm sure there are many others not so mild. These guys would not talk this way if they didn't know for a fact that I'd be ok with it.

But there is a big difference between joking with friends and infusing a talk given at a conference with very sexual content. Hoss Gifford spoke at Flashbelt about his latest Flash endeavours.

And then, to top it off, a self-made flash movie of an animated woman's face, positioned as if she's having sex with you, who gradually orgasms based on the speed of your mouse movement on the page.

Forget women being uncomfortable with this - any professional person would be!

I'm not sure why it's only the world of technology that seems to be able to get away with this. I imagine you don't see this sort of thing on teachers' P.D. days or at medical research conferences. Is it because tech really is still too much of an 'old boys club'?

I figure if there's as much controversy created as there has been for the CouchDB talk and now this one, they'll eventually learn.

Jon Phillips: Fabricatorz Naked Laoban Soundsystem 2.0 in Guangzhou

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:43:43 +0000

Fabricatorz is getting a lot more love than REJON.org right now. Check out the naked Laoban Soundsystem 2.0 without the grills. Just a little more sponsorship will land this in Beijing. Read more…

Ryan Lerch: Control+Alt+Backspace shortcut does not restart the X server in Fedora 11

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:30:56 +0000

Note: This post documents a change that was introduced in Fedora 11 (F11). Special thanks to who-t for his help on this one

Previously, pressing the key combination Ctrl+Alt+Backspace forced the X.org server (the open source implementation of X11) to instantly restart, returning the user to the login screen. This functionality is useful on unstable systems where the X server frequently hangs, however, if the shortcut is inadvertently invoked, the user will lose anything not saved to disk. In the version of X.org shipped in Fedora 11, the decision was made in upstream to make the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace shortcut disabled by default. To re-enable this option (on the Gnome Desktop):

1. Open the Keyboard Preferences dialog either by choosing System > Preferences > Keyboard from the Fedora Main Menu or by running the following command from a terminal:

gnome-keyboard-properties

2. In the Keyboard Preferences dialog, choose the Layouts tab (labeled 1 in the screenshot below) and press the Layout Options button (labeled 2 in the screenshot below) to bring up the Keyboard Layout Options dialog.

Keyboard Preferences dialog

3. In the Keyboard Layout Options dialog, unfold the tree item “Key sequence to kill the X server” (labeled 3 in the screenshot below), and mark the checkbox “Control + Alt + Backspace” (labeled 4 in the screenshot below)

Keyboard Layout Options dialog

Update: X input hacker, who-t (Peter Hutterer) on the differences between Ubuntu and Fedora on this change:

The Ubuntu “dontzap” command has no effect on Fedora.

There are two parts to zapping: one is the permission in the server (Option DontZap) and one is the trigger (the Terminate_Server XKB symbol). To zap, you have to invoke the trigger and you must be allowed to zap the server.

In Ubuntu, the server by default does not allow zapping, but the trigger is in the default keymaps. Thus, to enable zapping it needs to be enabled in the configuration file (and the server requires a restart).

In Fedora, the server by default allows zapping, but the trigger is not in the default keymaps. Thus, to enable zapping it needs to be enabled in the keymap. This can be done at runtime.

Doing the equivalent to “dontzap -disable” in Fedora explicitly enables an option that’s enabled by default anyway, so it has no effect.

Gail Carmichael: The Creative Side of Computer Science

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 18:56:07 +0000

A lot of people assume that computer scientists are dangerously logical, to the point of not being at all creative. I beg to differ. Among my classmates, I've seen many talented musicians, artists, creative writers, and so on.

Of course, we aren't all that artistic. That's why I take pride in my own creative abilities. I've always been able to write well, winning short story contests as a kid. I am also a little better than the average person at graphics and design. I can't draw or paint, but I have a good eye for layout. That's probably why I'm also really getting into photography (check out my Flickr photostream if you want) and scrapbooking. I used to play saxophone in high school, and am itching to get back into it.

Another misconception is that art and computer science can't mix. This is probably related to the first assumption. But, again, I have to disagree! Because you can connect so many different things to computer science, you can be as creative as you like!

For example, if you love music, you could work on audio processing software, study how to tell if music is pleasing algorithmically, or figure out how to generate good music automatically.

Adore photography? I've always marveled at the level of processing happening right inside today's cameras. Although digital SLRs are generally the standard even for professional photographers, there's always room to improve image quality. Then there's software like Photoshop. There are so many opportunities for not only new and interesting effects, but for automating or helping with common tasks that are still mostly confusing, manual and sometimes tedious.

These are just a couple of examples of the creative side of computing. I didn't even get into the many ways to get creative when it comes to game development, but I'm sure you can imagine a few. The main point is that you don't have to replace your creative brain cells with logical ones to study in this field.

John Bintz: WordPress PHPUnit Mocks is now MockPress

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:41:02 +0000

Since the code I was writing could be used with any PHP unit testing framework, and since “WordPress PHPUnit Mocks” doesn’t roll off the tongue like “MockPress” does, and because no one else is using the name for anything, my project for creating mock functions for simulating WordPress is now named MockPress. I’ve been slowly mocking up more WordPress functions as I need them. The documentation has moved, too.

Jon Cruz: On Conficker and Zombie Education

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 09:59:24 +0000

So, T was talking with me just the other day about Conficker worm, and had a bit of a question. She'd finished listening to Steve Gibson's excellent Security Now podcast on the worm (episode 193), and was wondering about the checking of random domains. The question was basically how that could help infect machines.

The answer is that Conficker is not using those domains for infecting new machines, but rather for the zombie machines that are already infected to go and wait for updates. Other standard means are leveraged to infect new boxes and bring them into the botnet, and to do DOS attacks and such. Once I mentioned "zombie" as a term, she said "Yes, I get that. So you basically have the evil horde wandering to random intersections waiting to answer calls as they pass phone booths". Her question had been trying to figure out what the purpose of that would be, if it were not to infect new machines.

"Simple", I answered. "To get updates". That, of course, begs the question as to what exactly one would need to update a zombie in regards to. Well... using the analogy it turns out that the answer was very simple. Aside from the basic cat-and-mouse aspect of trying to hide from the zombie hunters that T. already knew, a big reason to update your zombies would be... to teach them to turn doorknobs!

In classic zombie movies, the heroes always end up huddled together inside a room/house/cabin/pub where the closed doors cause the feeble minded attackers to fumble uselessly against the panels of the door. Teach them to quickly open such obstacles and suddenly the horde is swarming right in to attack your PC and eat its brains. ♪ ♫

Jon Phillips: Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 from Nathan Willis Press + Open Font Library

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:43:20 +0000

The most complete article I’ve seen recounting LGM2009 comes from Nathan Willis’ great reporting.

Here is the motherload of reviews and notes about LGM2009 from the LGM website:

Alexander Prokoudine (Magic glue between developers):

LGM 09 aftermath,

Cédric Gémy (Création Libre):

lgm-j1,

lgm-j2,

lgm-j3

Jon Phillips (Rejon):

Creating in the Cloud Presentation at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 and the related presentation,

More Reviews and The Ultra Wide Views Exhibition at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

Open Source Publishing:

Reportage : day 2,

lgm top nine,

New work on Fonts at W3C,

interview at the airport,

Nathan Willis:

Libre Graphics Meeting 2009: Visions of the Future,

Open fonts at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

Yuval Levy:

LGM Day 1,

LGM Day 2,

LGM Day 3, Day 4, Follow Up,

Exhibition Video,

LGM 2009: Conclusions

One of the gems Nathan Willis also covered in a separate article, “Open Fonts at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009,” is the LGM2009 discussion around the Open Font Library, the larger Open Font movement, and what is surely to be quite important, web font linking. The basics are that up until this point, fonts on the Internet have been limited to literally 4-6 generic fonts. With the upcoming release of Firefox 3.5, this will change as fonts can be linked like many resources, downloaded and rendered.

Nathan’s article I’m not doing justice right now, so please go read up on his report about the importance of Open Fonts, and the upcoming relaunch of the Open Font Library in sync with the release of Firefox 3.5.

Jon Phillips: Blackcloud Sensor Installation at Kudelabs in Guangzhou

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:23:10 +0000

Kudelabs Office in Guangzhou

Recently I worked with my friend, artist and UC Berkeley Professor, Greg Niemeyer to install one of his Blackcloud sensors at Kudelabs in Guangzhou, China, a great software company cranking out web applications you will be hearing more about in the near future.

Blackcloud is a quite interesting project to create highly sensitive pollution sensors to be distributed around the world with the data collecting at blackcloud.org to make observations and games around the concept of pollution. Each Blackcloud sensor tracks:

… CO2, your VOC’s, your city light, your endless noise, your rising heat, your damp confines in places all around the world. I visualze the Indoor Air in beautiful graphs so you can see when and where you pollute. Maybe I can predict your pollution cycles, too.

From Drop Box

Blackcloud Sensor at Kudelabs office in Guangzhou

The sensors are quite interesting little boxes I thought I might have had a hard time transporting into China. They have little LEDs on the outside which show the previously discussed measurements. The whole box uses power-over-ethernet and of course a net connection to send and receive pollution data.

Here is more info for the tech nerds, Greg wrote:

I built two sensors so far. Both have a two-PCB board design, a ATMega 168 processor, a DCS CO2 sensor, and an array of other parts. The blue version sends data to my server via SMS text messaging, and the red version sends data via TCP/IP. I built the sensors using Eagle PCB design software, and a local PCB manufacturing plant.

I took a bunch of pictures of the installation and Kudelabs at Flickr, which I’m having a terrible time accessing today in the Great Firewalled China.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonphillips/tags/kudelabs

To me its quite curious to collect pollution data in China. It is often rumored that even during the Olympics, pollution measurements in Beijing were done far outside of the city away from the major sources of pollutants. With the lowering prices of sensors and affordable access to the Internet, it is possible for many to do their own fact finding. Now, if only the Chinese Internet could be made more reliable…

NOTE: Kudelabs is a gracious sponsor of the Laoban Soundsystem 2.0 being manufactured in Guangzhou, China, right now! Check out the latest in-progress pictures.

Ryan Lerch: 10 inkscape tutorials

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 05:42:34 +0000

shameless crosspost from inkscapetutorials.wordpress.com =)

With the readership of the inkscape tutorials weblog steadily increasing over the past year, there are many great tutorials deep in the blog archives that newer readers may not have discovered yet. Therefore to celebrate the forthcoming milestone of 1.5 million page views of this site, we have decided to list the top 10 inkscape tutorials that have been featured on the inkscape tutorials blog to date.

Text and Simple Styling

An awesome tutorial from Troy Sobotka detailing how to create a colourful outset text effect.

Creating a Business Card Template and Basic Business Card with Inkscape

Create a business card template using inkscape, and learn how to populate it with a simple business card design.

Shattered, Smashed and Grungy Text in Inkscape

A step by step on creating a smashed and grungy text effect using inkscape..

Create a Lightbulb Icon that follows the tango! guidelines.

This tutorial provides a detailed how-to on creating a lightbulb icon that uses the tango! icon set guidelines.

Create an impressive stick man cartoon character / avatar

A super detailed guide to creating a stick man cartoon character using inkscape.

Draw A Realistic Vector Guitar in Inkscape

In this tutorial, Nick Roberts demonstrates in detail how to illustrate a “Fender Stratocaster” type guitar. The final result is stunning, and the author has detailed the steps superbly with many super useful screen shots.

Creating a Coffee Cup using inkscape

Another detailed and impressive tutorial from the vectortuts website. This tutorial demonstrates how to draw a coffee cup using inkscape.

How to make RPG map elements with inkscape.

This is a great tutorial on creating RPG map symbols using inkscape. The tutorial outlines a workflow for creating a simple jailhouse RPG element.

chrome text effect

From the same author as the “Text and Simple Styling tutorial”, Here is a another that demonstrates how to create chrome text effect using inkscape.

sticker with a folded / dog ear edge

here is a cool tutorial for creating a simple sticker / decal with a folded down edge.

Digg this! | reddit

Inkscape Tutorials: 10 of the Best Inkscape Tutorials

Sun, 31 May 2009 10:17:31 +0000

With the readership of the inkscape tutorials weblog steadily increasing over the past year, there are many great tutorials deep in the blog archives that newer readers may not have discovered yet. Therefore to celebrate the forthcoming milestone of 1.5 million page views of this site, we have decided to list the top 10 inkscape tutorials that have been featured on the inkscape tutorials blog to date.

Ryan Lerch: twitterverse: a diagram

Sun, 31 May 2009 03:19:55 +0000

twitterverse is a neat little diagram that lists and categorises major twitter apps and services.

[twitterverse] via beth’s blog

Ryan Lerch: Diary of an App Store Reviewer

Sun, 31 May 2009 00:52:52 +0000

A cute satirical piece from John Gruber on the farce that is the Apple App Store review process.

[link]