Archive for March, 2007

Posted on March 31, 2007 - by jono

Album, on its way

The Big Red Recording has been going very well, and the songs have turned out great. There is however a delay – I will be releasing the songs at Midnight tonight (5 hours later) for some final refinements. We want to make sure this album is as solid as possible, so stay tuned folks.

Thanks for everyone for your your interest, and we are stunned how many people have been checking the blog and flickr photos as the recording as progressed. You lot have been incredible.

Posted on March 30, 2007 - by jono

And the crazyness begins

Well, here it is, today is the big day. In a few hours at 7pm, after some pizza, the recording begins. Its going to be a busy 24 hours – lots to do.

Oh, and I woke up today with a sore throat, which makes things interesting.

Regular updates will appear on recreantview.org and regular photos of the recording will appear in the Big Red Recording Flickr Set.

Nervous is an understatement. I don’t want to let anyone down. Here goes…

Posted on March 30, 2007 - by jono

Balancing discussion

Recently the subject of mailing list discussion and offensiveness has erupted in the community. This has been triggered by a joke being sent to a list and the fallout that ensued after it. I am not going to comment on the specifics of that incident, but instead look at what I consider a critical issue here – the balance between political correctness and abusive discussion.

The Ubuntu community is a tremendously open, freeform community with a rich and diverse range of people, discussions and opinions. This diversity is our strength – we harness it to express our opinions, validate them and challenge them. To encourage frank and open discussion, we always need our discussion to be exactly that – frank and open. Two enemies to frank and open discussion are extreme political correctness and abusive discussion and are at entire opposite ends of the discussion spectrum.

On the far right side we have clearly offensive, abusive discussion. This kind of content would offend anyone, whether you fall into the specifically abused demographic or not. Such chatter is not only against the Code Of Conduct but against anyone’s better judgement and is clearly unacceptable – its just not good. On the far left side we have political correctness, and its own battalion of fears that are involved. In this scenario people are afraid to say anything as it could offend someone. The problem with being too-PC is that discussion can be stifled and inhibited. So, on the left we have too careful and on the right we have too bad.

I believe we need balance here. Not only should we be conscious to not post derogatory or discriminatory content, but we should also understand and expect that some things will be offensive in different degrees, and this is part of and parcel of any community, be it on a mailing list, on a bus or in a pub. We cannot eradicate the world of the words we find uncomfortable or offensive, but we should also not accept words that are intended to abuse and discriminate.

Much of this is about context. There are always going to be some things you would say in front of some people and not others, and there is a time and a place for pretty much everything. Public discussion areas such as mailing lists have their own etiquette and norms, and it is common to be more restrained and polite as you are pushing your words out to a wider audience. I think this is fair and reasoned, and we should always remember that we are speaking in a public forum, with a diverse audience, and ensure that our words are suitable for that audience and context.

It concerns me that some of the opinions cited about these issues have fallen into one of the left or right camps – either “those words were horrific and terrible” or “get a sense of humour and chill out”. Neither is right here. We need balance and understanding to defend against abuse but to protect diversity.

Posted on March 29, 2007 - by jono

Song titles

I am pleased to announce the titles of the seven songs to appear on The Big Red Recording:

• Untouched Face
• What Is Me?
• Unfolded Notes
• Laying Broken Bones
• Death Lane
• Under a Blackened Sun
• Blood Red Day

All lyrics are now finalised and complete, although there will no doubt be small changes when they are recorded, usually based around rhythm. I am pretty pleased with the lyrics – they are evocative in many different ways.

My acoustic and electric guitars are now re-strung, and I will be sorting out the studio tonight ready for the big day tomorrow. This is going to be interesting…

Posted on March 28, 2007 - by jono

Organic interface design for GNOME

Interface design is a complex business. There are a great many schools of thought about how to build an effective interface, and ultimately no-one is 100% correct. Lots of theory, lots of academia, lots of opinion, but little hard evidence about what design constructs actually work best for general human-computer interaction.

Recently I kicked off a segment on everyone’s-favorite-un-PC-ramblefest, LUGRadio, in which I expressed concerns that the GNOME project is not deciding on a direction for a next-gen incarnation of the environment, and KDE4 is primed to swoop in and eat its lunch. I am pleased to see the segment kicked off some discussion, and the issue has been raised in the minds of some core GNOME contributors.

While at GUADEC 2006 I sat on the patio of our wooden shack with Mirco Muller at about 3am and we spent quite some time discussing concepts about what a next-gen GNOME could look like. For a while I had been mulling over different concepts and ideas about how GNOME should work, and trying to distill them into core interactions for a desktop. In my mind, before you even think about mocking up a a user interface design, you need to define the modes of interaction; they are like deciding which tools and ingredients you are going to need to bake a cake. If you don’t decide on the tools and ingredients, you cannot effectively move onto the design stage and then the implementation.

The problem with current desktops is that they are largely artificial. We have created modes of interaction that the user has to learn to understand the computer, instead of the computer trying to understand the user. We have to learn where things live, how to move things around, which things can be clicked on and which can’t, how sensitivity and insensitivity works and other false economies. Fundamentally we the users have to fit in with what the computer wants us to do.

The next-gen GNOME needs to change this. It really, really does. What I want to see is an organic environment; one that is designed around human interactions, tasks and concepts that we find natural, intuitive and repeatable. Do you ever have those experiences where you think “it would make sense if it worked this way, I wonder if it does” and to your surprise it does? We need to fill our desktop with these experiences. To do this, we need to understand what interactions and concepts are natural to us as humans, and work on these concepts in GNOME.

So, with time not my friend right now, here is a rough list of some organic concepts that I think we need to bear in mind in our thinking:

• Pile Theory – nope, nothing to do with a nasty dose of the bum grapes, but the idea that we all naturally collect and stack things together into piles. I think this is a fundamental concept in a desktop – collections of things. Think of archives, directories, photo sets, collections of songs, related videos – they are groups of things that we need to access both as a group and as the individual items in that group. You can see this theory in action, look at many people’s desktops and the groups of icons of related bits and pieces – we need to make it easy to great this piles. Imagine a 3D interface to this piles where a bunch of items pile on top of each other and you can explode the pile or fit it together and re-organise it in different ways.
• A Physical Environment – I want to pick up documents that I am editing, spin them round and scribble notes on them, I want them to look like they are shredded when I delete them, I want to stick related things together like lego – I want a physicality to the things that happen on my desktop. A great first step with this was when Compiz put virtual desktops on a cube – it made the concept of multiple desktops more tangible. We need to apply this kind of physicality to all aspects of the desktop.
• Contextual Tools – something I have banged on about with Jokosher. You should only ever see tool options appear when it makes sense and when you can actually use those tools – insensitive greyed out tool options are nothing more than a distraction and a waste of space. In Jokosher, when you make a selection, the tools that can be used on that selection appear, we need to apply this concept to the entire desktop. This makes the desktop feel more organic in itself as the tools will only ever appear applicable to your context. It also makes the desktop far less cluttered and gets away from the nightmare of modal tools. We particularly want to get away from the hundreds of toolbar options available that clutter our applications. For all people have heralded the Ribbon as a great idea in Microsoft Office, I am pretty convinced that it may over-egg the pudding and confuse people with so many functional options available. We fundamentally need our desktop to be contextual – more on this later.
• Two Handed Interaction – some of the work with multiple mouse pointers makes this possible. For some applications this makes perfect sense. Think of a 3D modeller such as Blender – the most natural modelling process is sculpting using your hands, and this requires two hands. Think about putting things in other things – it makes sense to hold the container open to put the things in it (like when you put items in a carrier bag). Naturally there is a hardware implication for this which will delay its adoption.
• Real Contextual Working – a while back I wrote up my thoughts for a project desktop. We need our applications to be aware of what the user wants to do and ensure they are organic enough to evolve into a form that is condusive to that task.

With the growth in 3D technology, we have the opportunity to make all of this happen. This is just a collection of rough notes, but at GUADEC I hope to flesh some of these ideas out with other people. We need to break down the barriers to interaction, but also be brave enough to stand up and set a direction, which was the point of the segment. If I had my own way, I would love to blow off a week and spend all week designing a bunch of mock-ups. I have a fairly clear idea in my head how this kind of stuff would work, inspired from various interfaces and concepts, but I just don’t have the time to mock it up.

Posted on March 27, 2007 - by jono

Update on TBBR

Quick update on The Big Red Recording.

Pretty much all the songs are complete, and I am feverishly writing lyrics. I have written lyrics for three of the songs, and the fourth is on-going. One of the songs may be an instrumental – it sounds pretty cool without lyrics. I have also written all of the drums and bass for the songs, and I spent some time at the weekend with Emelye getting the Cello sorted. She wrote down her notation for her parts, and it is sounding incredible.

In the meantime, there is all the other stuff around the recording to sort out. I have taken my Jackson Randy Rhoads in to be re-strung, and I will be re-stringing my acoustic tonight. Emelye has changed her cello strings, and I will be decking my gear (in the words of the mighty Manowar) over the next few days, tweaking everything ready for the big day. Emelye has also arranged for her husband and her friend Toni to come over and cook us breakfast and lunch on Saturday. On Thursday evening I will be going out and buying a huge pack of Red Bull as well as getting the studio in shape. Busy days.

Its going to be tough. Really tough. 24 hours locked in a room recording is not only going to be exhausting, but physically and mentally challenging. The most challenging parts I suspect are going to be the singing (I have four songs to sing and three to growl, Emelye is also singing on a number of the songs), the drumming (physically demanding) and the cello (Emelye hammers that cello, so there is always the risk of intense finger agony). Combine physically demanding playing with tiredness and it’s a tall order. The plan is to work really hard and fast in the early hours to get the core guitars sorted, and then when we hit the tough time between 4am – 9am, it should be things like bass guitars which are being recorded. By the time the second wind comes at around midday, it will be cello and vocals time. Well, this is the broad plan…never done anything like this before…

We should hopefully be posting regular photos and updates to my blog and flickr. More later.

And and there is still time donate, tight-wads.

Posted on March 26, 2007 - by jono

psubuntu

Now I am about to become a Playstation 3 owner, things like psubuntu perk my interest. Am I the only person who thought it was Ubuntu for power supplies?

Oh, and no, I won’t be running Linux on my PS3. I already have Linux running on pretty much everything in my house, and I bought the PS3 for games.

Posted on March 25, 2007 - by jono

This is living

I just ordered a Playstation 3. Oh yes, the fun is coming. I got this deal.

Posted on March 23, 2007 - by jono

The Big Red Recording draws closer

On Feb 26th I announced the Big Red Recording; an audacious goal to record a full album myself in 24 hours with Cello provided by my pal Emelye. On that day I had no music, no lyrics and no idea if any of this was possible. Now I have seven songs and over £1000 in donations thanks to many of you. Stunning folks. Simply stunning, thanks so much.

In the less than 30 days since that announcement I have spent much of the time when not at work and travelling locked in my studio writing songs. I now have seven songs, and I am pretty happy with the results so far – they are a rich collection of musical textures, from sensitive and emotive to intense and aggressive. My plan here was to try and write an album that triggers so many senses and emotions, and I am quite happy with my work so far.

It is intensely difficult writing seven songs in a defined period of time – music and creativity just doesn’t work that way. The reason is that you don’t write all your good stuff in one go – there is a lot of dud material you have to work through to pull out the gems, so you need to factor in enough time for the dud material to get to the quality. The solution is to spend every living moment working on the music so you feel like you get this right level of polish. Writing seven songs in a month is tough enough, but I didn’t want to just write seven songs, but to write seven real songs with heart, feeling and hooks.

So, not long until the big day on the 30th March, and I need your money. Lets get that grand total higher. There are lots of you out there who should be donating but haven’t, so don’t be slack bastards, wrench open that wallet and give some money to a good cause. You know its the right thing to do.

GO AND DONATE RIGHT NOW LIKE THE HERO YOU ARE

Posted on March 22, 2007 - by jono

Making us win: Integrating open content

One of the most notable changes in Feisty that I have been looking forward to is the updated Rhythmbox with its Jamendo and Magantune support:

With this support you can browse, listen to, download and purchase albums right from within Rhythmbox. It is still very new and a touch buggy, and has a few quirks (when you download albums from Jamendo it loads a torrent instead of adding the album to your library), but it is a great start.

This is the kind of thing I have been banging on about for a while. Sometimes we, the free software community, can get a little pre-occupied with the immediate landscape, and we often focus too much on Linux, free software ethics and open standards. These are essential, but there is a whole world of open content such as Jamendo, Magnatune, Open Clip Art, OpenStreetmap, Wikipedia, Freesound and much more at our fingertips. With such a rich tapestry of open content and a licensing infrastructure (Creative Commons as a great example) that makes it so simple to license and distribute such content, we have a huge opportunity to not only provide a free software Operating System, but to also hot rod it with oodles of free content.

But, this is where we typically fall down. One thing the free software community often sucks at is integration. We are great at building individual chunks of software, but are typically rather ropey at hooking these chunks together in useful and meaningful ways. Of course, this is a sweeping generalisation, and there are indeed exceptions, but I am always keen to see real integration. In my mind the general rule should be:

If you have to access, browse and/or download open content via a web browser, your integration sucks.

The kind of integration I am talking about in Rhythmbox is what I want to see. A media player is your hub for digital content, be it from music players, CDs, online stores, radio or elsewhere, and this is where access to open content should live. We implemented exactly the same approach to this problem in Jokosher with our Freesound Plugin. With it you can browse Freesound content right from within Jokosher, audition it and just drag it into your project. This is real integration.

There are hundreds of opportunities for such content, and both the GNOME and KDE projects need to ensure that they have a strategy for making content available easily for their applications and for their application developers. We should not expect application developers to have to re-invent the wheel everytime they want to include this kind of support in their programs. I would love to see the GTK and Qt projects working on widgets, and the desktops working on pre-rolled support for these services. Adding this support should be trivial.

The desktop is right at the center of a wealth of incredible content, and the free software ethos has spread out and diversified enough to encourage people to these incredible open content archives, so lets make use of them. In my mind, a Linux distribution that does not include native, integrated access to this content is simply missing a trick.