Planet Inkscape
Gail Carmichael: CCCG: How to Give a Talk the Right Way
A quick side note before I begin. Imagine my surprise when Martin Demaine, Erik's dad, told me at the conference banquet that he had read my previous day's blog post that included a mention of him. When asked where he'd found it, he said "the Internet" quite matter-of-factly. Of course ;). I suppose he had a blog watch on his or Erik's name? In any case, he told me he thought I wrote well, which was probably more flattering than he knew. If you're reading this now, Martin... hi! You guys are great!
Ok, back to the presentations. I first have to give a hat tip to my own academic supervisor, Jit Bose. He started his talk with a story. In this story, Jit explained how he didn't really want to give the talk (these things are stressful!), but hadn't heard from his other co-authors, so did what any mature adult would do: go on vacation for three weeks and ignore email. Alas, when Jit returned, the other author who would be at the conference was surprised to learn that Jit, like himself, thought the other would be giving the talk. So Jit told us he'd come up with a compromise. He'd do the odd slides and Stefan (the present co-author) would do the even slides. Stefan pops up in the audience, pretending to be completely surprised (and very convincingly, too!). He finally gives in and helps out with the talk. The slides were formal looking at first, but as they advance, funny scriblings and beer-related changes are made to the formal problem definitions. These guys pulled off the humour thing perfectly and did a good job of switching speakers to keep things interesting.
The other tag-team that worked out remarkably well consisted of Erik Demaine (yup, him again!) and his girlfriend Vi Hart, who is apparently not a computer scientist, but a math hobbyist (how cool is that?). I think Erik did most of the talking, but Vi was able to interject throughout the talk, at times often enough to read every second item from a list. By the fact that my favorite talks had two speakers, you should be able to surmise that I strongly believe in this technique for presenting (assuming speakers have prepared enough to pull it off properly). Another trick to learn from Erik and Vi is the generous use of photos and minimal amount of text on their slides. Nobody wants to read on the screen exactly what somebody is saying (I could do that from home!). In the same vein, nobody wants to read a lot of text that's different from what a speaker is saying because, in the end, it's impossible to pay attention to either. Finally, the dynamic duo were able to make use of something that's not always easy to incorporate: props. Their talk was on balloon twisting, so, of course, they brought balloons to twist!
These two talks skillfully incorporated several seldom-used but highly effective presentation techniques to make their talks the most memorable. Of course, none of these will help you if you happen to speak unclearly or unenthusiastically in front of audiences. But once you've overcome the basics of public speaking, consider trying to incorporate these ideas into your next presentation! Your audience will thank you.
Jos Hirth: A Simple AS3 Texture Font for Easier Debugging
- 3 alignments and their origins
If you're writing a game with ActionScript3 you've basically two options: either use the scene graph or handle it yourself. I.e. extend Sprite, create some Bitmap, attach it to your Sprite, and blit onto its BitmapData via copyPixels.
Skipping the scene graph is certainly more fun. If you wrote some games in other languages, you'll quickly feel at home. Apart from that external main loop it's basically the same deal. Additionally, if your game requires full redraws either way (i.e. dirty rectangles won't help), using copyPixels is the fastest option.
However, if you take a look at BitmapData's documentation you might be in for a big surprise — there is no drawString function. How can you draw some text on top of your entities for quick debugging now?
Andy Fitzsimon: Andy moves to Hong Kong
It looks like HK will be my home for the next 1-2 years. Drop me a line if you live in the area!
a few people have asked me why I’ve left Singapore. To be honest, I had no reason.
Singapore is a beautiful city. In business it punches higher than its weight and for my lifestyle, I loved everything about it; The climate, my friend and the region.
My girlfriend Brenda has followed her career to HK and I’m here to support that. We both tried to make it work in Singers and after 6 months we’ve realised the best opportunities were further north. A hard pill to swallow when you’re so comfortable with such a lovely area.
But living in Hong Kong changes the perspective a little. The proximity to mainland china presents insight into what i saw growing 2 years ago, a furiously scalable resource pool, something I should be paying attention to. Plus, the tech and design communities here seem more grass-roots and enterprising (most design magazines I read growing up featured HK artists) it’ll be exiting to be a part of that culture.
This is an exciting move, thanks for letting me share the news. I’ll keep you posted.
Gail Carmichael: CCCG: Spending Time With Smart People Is Fun
I took the bus from Ottawa to Montreal yesterday, and then we walked uphill for about 30 minutes to the residences we would be staying in. Luckily, it didn't rain, but it was uncomfortably hot compared to home. The rooms turned out to be decent, though basic.
There was a reception in the evening in the better-than-Mike's Place. Because this edition of CCCG marks the 20th Anniversary and the return to McGill University, registration is free. So we got printed proceedings and a bunch of free food. Not bad! I chatted with a bunch of Carleton people I haven't seen in a while as well as some new folks. One of the most interesting was Erik Demaine's dad. Erik's a bit of a celebrity academic in my books. His dad was saying that he hasn't lived in the same place for more than five years or so (I can't remember exactly). He was pretty surprised to learn that the only time I moved in my life, I moved just down the road.
After the reception, we went to Brutopia, a brew pub I thought I had been to before (turned out I was confused). I tried to impress everyone with the beer knowledge I'd learned from Andrew, but eventually I got confused and had to back track on that.
There was a pretty good variety in talks today (Wedesday), both in subject and quality. The highlight of the day was the invited speaker Ron Graham. Not only did he work closely with Erdős and come up with the Graham Scan for convex hulls, but apparently he juggles!
I think that'll have to be it for now, given that we haven't had dinner yet and need to pick a place. All I can say is that hanging out with smart people is actually really fun!
Jon Phillips: Latest Bio
When I taught at San Francisco Art Institute, I taught a class basically on Artist as Artwork, meaning one needs to work on him or herself regularly.
I updated my bio to reflect Jon 4.0 changes.
I need to spend some more time in the shop to work out the kinks before I really jump into any other big adventures like Creative Commons is the summary of my last few days
Gail Carmichael: Recent Reports on Telemedicine
A recent study "assessed whether telemedicine (real-time, two-way audio and video, and digital imaging and communications in medicine [DICOM] interpretation) or telephone was superior for decision making in acute telemedicine consultations". The results sound pretty positive (emphasis added by me):
The authors of this trial report that stroke telemedicine consultations result in more accurate decision making compared with telephone consultations and can serve as a model for the effectiveness of telemedicine in other medical specialties. The more appropriate decisions, high rates of thrombolysis use, improved data collection, low rate of intracerebral haemorrhage, low technical complications, and favourable time requirements all support the efficacy of telemedicine for making treatment decisions, and might enable more practitioners to use this medium in daily stroke care.Check out Video: Emergency Room Stroke Exam with a Webcam from Wired for more.
Gail Carmichael: Creature Evolution Fourteen Years Ago
Karl Sims,a graduate from MIT who studied computer graphics and life sciences, used Darwinian evolution to come up with the block creatures in the video, along with their behaviors. As Karl says on his site about the project:
A population of several hundred creatures is created within a supercomputer, and each creature is tested for their ability to perform a given task, such the ability to swim in a simulated water environment. Those that are most successful survive, and their virtual genes containing coded instructions for their growth, are copied, combined, and mutated to make offspring for a new population. The new creatures are again tested, and some may be improvements on their parents. As this cycle of variation and selection continues, creatures with more and more successful behaviors can emerge. The last challenge shown in the video involves two creatures battling it out over a green block. Whichever is closest to the block at the end of the simulation is declared the winner. Some of the strategies for winning are actually pretty impressive, including what looks like actual hand-to-hand combat. Remember, this was done in 1994, when the beta for Windows 95 was released and Netscape was just founded.
You can read more about the technical aspects of this evolution system in Karl's paper here.
Gail Carmichael: Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry
I have never been to an academic conference before. It's a shame that I missed this one when it was held at Carleton last year, but it was held the week of my wedding, so I suppose I can be forgiven. I hope to learn some new things about computational geometry, of course, but almost as importantly, I want to observe the presentation skills of the speakers. It should also be interesting to see who I talk to about what, and what kind of contacts I'm able to make.
Jos Hirth: Separation of Content and Presentation - One Step Ahead
If you didn't ignore the web for the past few years, you've probably heard it a million times by now: separate your content and presentation, use CSS for presentation, and say yes to semantic markup. There is no doubt that it's the right thing to do, given the sheer amount of benefits.
In a nutshell: it makes your life easier by lumping those pieces together which belong next to each other. It's somewhat akin to the proximity usability rule. It also keeps the noise down; if you want to change parts of the presentation there are no content bits in the way and vice versa. There is also a lot less overhead since those style sheets can be cached on the client side. In extreme cases it can save as much as 200kb of utterly pointless bloat. Additionally, proper CSS usage also paves the way for the ultimate killer feature: interchangeable presentation.
John Bintz: ComicPress Manager 1.0: An adventure in WordPress complete!
Just a note for all you comic artists and WordPress + ComicPress folks: I just finished the first stable version of ComicPress Manager, version 1.0. It was quite and adventure trying to wrestle out a high-class plugin from the sometimes-awkward WordPress API and the quite-awkward syntax & behaviors of PHP (how about glob(), on some systems, returning FALSE if there’s no files in the directory? That one bit me good…). But it’s done (for now) and you can check out all the plugin goodness on the WP Extend site. Yeah!
Jon Phillips: Fix Your MTRR on Gentoo with Thinkpad x61 Intel x3100
I’ve noticed for ages that my thinkpad x61 with 4 gigs of ram has been sluggish on the desktop with redraws. Now that I have a bit more time, I looked into this, oh, and because I’ve been shamed into getting all the funky compiz-fusion graphics looking hot on my desktop by Freddie B and Mr. Adams.
After some gentoo forum spelunking into the issue across distros, I found out that at least with Intel 965 (x3100) and kernel 2.6.25-26, there are some major issues with mtrr not being set properly.
I took the plunge at trying to understand the issue and wrote a basic script to fix-up my mtrr settings from the commandline:
#!/bin/bash # # fixmtrr # # fixes /proc/mtrr # based upon termites script from gentoo forums # disable pre-existing ones and order does matter! echo "disable=0" >| /proc/mtrr echo "disable=1" >| /proc/mtrr echo "disable=3" >| /proc/mtrr echo "disable=4" >| /proc/mtrr echo "disable=5" >| /proc/mtrr echo "disable=2" >| /proc/mtrr # Now create the right ones... # These are powers of two, they get progressively smaller # so we can get right up to the system device page below. echo "base=0x00000000 size=0x80000000 type=write-back" >| /proc/mtrr echo "base=0x80000000 size=0x40000000 type=write-back" >| /proc/mtrr echo "base=0xC0000000 size=0x10000000 type=write-back" >| /proc/mtrr # Video Card: # 0x10000000 was the value for size trying for echo "base=0xE0000000 size=0x10000000 type=write-combining" >| /proc/mtrr # High memory area echo "base=0x100000000 size=0x40000000 type=write-back" >| /proc/mtrrThis helped to set my mtrr up right so that X can find the dynamic shared memory to do all the fun compiz effects and more. If there is a better fix for the above, I’d love to hear about it! More than just bling bling, my overall computer is much much better. I can’t believe I put up with this!
Then, I started running powertop to test out my system, and noticed that there are many features that can be set after a computer is setup, so I created an init script to set all this at boot:
!/sbin/runscript # # This starts the thinkpad post-boot settings # TITLE="Thinkpad Specific Options" LINKPOWER=/sys/class/scsi_host/host0/link_power_management_policy FIXMTRR=/usr/local/bin/fixmtrr WRITEBACK=/proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs checkconfig() { if [ ! -e $LINKPOWER ] && [ ! -e $FIXMTRR ] && [ ! -e $WRITEBACK ] ; then eerror "You cannot set $TITLE. Check settings." return 1 fi } start() { checkconfig || return 1 ebegin "Starting $TITLE" $FIXMTRR echo min_power > $LINKPOWER echo 1500 > $WRITEBACK } stop() { checkconfig || return 1 ebegin "Stopping $TITLE" echo 500 > $WRITEBACK }Make sure to put the fixmtrr script in /usr/local/bin or change the path to fixmtrr in your script. Then, set thinkpad script to run at boot before xdm kicks in:
rc-update add thinkpad bootThese are pretty basic scripts, but I wanted to dump them out for other users of this system. Its beyond just Gentoo-based distros, and will take a while to get into main kernel especially for slow distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, etc
I had to put that one in there for those who try to convert or chide me off Gentoo.
Gail Carmichael: Things You Need to Succeed
Time and time again I hear students complain about the electives they have to take as part of their Bachelor's degree. The arts classes drag down my GPA, they say. I just want to learn about computers, they lament. But sometimes these electives provide the only opportunity to break away from the logic and conciseness of computer science, and thereby the only chance to develop these essential skills Lifehack talks about.
Take number two on the list, for example: writing.
Writing well offers many of the same advantages that speaking well offers: good writers are better at selling products, ideas, and themselves than poor writers.In addition to these points, consider the documentation you need to produce for your code, the specifications you will write, the proposals you may need to put forward, and even the emails you need to send to your boss and co-workers. Even in technical fields, being able to express yourself with the written word is very important.
How many essays did you have to write for a compilers class, or a course on algorithms? Exactly. While a few professors do take the opportunity to assign papers or other written projects to their undergraduate students, they often don't give much help in terms of how to write well. Practising this skill in arts classes that require multiple essays will help students improve it.
Another important skill listed is networking. There are definitely students that recognize this as being a useful skill, and take opportunities to meet others in the field whenever they can. The many that don't would do well to attend social events undergraduate societies organize. This includes both those events aimed at just students and those that include faculty as well. Career workshops often include relevant people from the industry and are as worth attending as job fairs. Because many events do already exist, perhaps a little more advertising and coaching from professors would help get more students to attend.
I'm a bit on the fence with number five, critical thinking:
We are exposed to hundreds, if not thousands, of times more information on a daily basis than our great-grandparents were. Being able to evaluate that information, sort the potentially valuable from the trivial, analyze its relevance and meaning, and relate it to other information is crucial – and woefully under-taught.In matters of logic, computer scientists can certainly evaluate and sift away the trivial bits rather well. But I have observed that many students apply black and white logic to matters more complex. I remember taking a Canadian Studies class in my first year where the main theme was "critical nationalism." I was taught what it truly meant to think critically in matters outside of math and science. I'm sure many arts classes could do the same, again suggesting that these electives are rather valuable.
Luckily, there are a few skills in this list that computer experts tend to excel at. For example, math and research. I'm sure most undergrads could use some help in learning research techniques from the perspective of academia, but anytime we run into a problem we seem to be able to find the answer using the Internet, friends and colleagues, or controlled testing and trial and error. I shouldn't even have to comment on math, which is pretty much at the core of computer science. ;)
So why not think about this list at a deeper level, and see how you might be able to brush up on a few of your weaker areas? For example, if public speaking isn't your thing, join Toastmasters. If you find yourself working too long and too hard, join a sport or club to up your relaxation. However you choose to improve yourself, you will surely up your ability to succeed.
Kees Cook: dbus session access from remote
In order to turn off the music playing on my desktop (in audacious) from my laptop in another room, I must figure out the DBUS session, and set it up before using the audacious session management control (like “--play-pause“).
$ ssh MACHINE "set -x export DISPLAY=:0.0 PID=\$(pidof audacious) if [ -z \"\$PID\" ]; then rhythmbox-client –pause else export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=\\ \$(cat /proc/\$PID/environ | xargs -0 -n1 \\ | grep ^DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS= | cut -d= -f2-) audacious –play-pause fi”
Jon Phillips: Free Software, Free Culture Trajectories, and Free Culture Conference
@mlinksva just put out a great slide show, albeit the over-use of bullet points ;), that is an overview of CC as well as a general look at the historical trajectories of Free Software and how Free Culture Movement is approximately 10 years behind. This is a great beginning at the more intimate look at where WE are heading collectively, because of course, Free Software and Free Culture’s paths are intermingled. It would be quite interesting actually to write a book about these paths with major highlights and where WE are heading.
Yes, I know there are many books analyzing Free Software and then some coming out like David Bollier’s Viral Spiral that looks at Commons production overall including rise of Creative Commons, but actually one looking at the larger scope of Free Culture would be quite interesting.
Check out the slides and throw em up if you have any comments:
Free Software/Free Culture Collaboration view presentation (tags: wiki opencontent opensource freesoftware)BTW, I wonder if we should collectively be working on a more finite conference about the Free Culture Movement for next year. This would be one targeted towards production of content, assessing failed projects, live events, and no eunuchs to assist in cultural production. The idea is that this conference would directly fit into the trajectory of Free Software. This conference would be in the optimal location globally for most people to attend for the least amount of expenditure, such as Amsterdam, Vancouver, Singapore, or a better optimized location. I think we can learn from Wikimania in Cairo and conferences in Sapporo as absurd for more than the usual suspects on the conference circuit (of which I am a part).
Free Culture Conference (”Get your FreeCon”) would be a meeting of specific projects to hash out interrelationships and collective trajectories for the coming year. We have had great success with the Libre Graphics Meeting which is not about people hand waving and armchair philosophizing about every single person’s movement, but specific projects coming together to their roadmap, challenges for interoperability, and real hacking on projects more than just declarations.
What would it take to put on a proper Free Culture Conference and who would need to be present. I would say:
Free Software Foundation
Creative Commons
Wikimedia Properties
Gnome Foundation
Open Courseware Consortium
Internet Archive
And the list keeps going on…please add to, as this is just off the head…the number of companies that would be interested in this intermixing would be quite high IMO. I’m particularly interested in this being a place for companies interested in Open Hardware and Specifications to intermingle (aka, Openmoko, VIA, Intel)
The idea is that this is a place where project roadmaps are compared, integrations resolved (like Wikipedia BY-SA compatibility), and real hacking would take place. Also, this conference would be 2-3 days max and marked with conversions of projects to more liberalized licensing as affirmations each day to pump up participants [0]. The goal of the event would be to produce actual statements showing resolutions with implementation to back them up, and to announce the next 5-10 free culture priorities for the year.
Is anyone interested in this?
[0] I’ve called this Freedom Day before, but it needs a better name without the negative associations with Freedom in many asian countries - aka, freedom means free as in destroy the government, which this is NOT. Rather, the idea of Freedom Day would be for projects to announce using free licenses and/or moving from more restrictive licenses to more free licenses. What would a better name for this annual day be? What about SHARING DAY, or Global Day of Sharing
Jos Hirth: AS3 FPS Counter
- FPSCounter.as in action
The last time I looked for something like this I was only able to find horrible implementations. They somewhat worked for the most part, but boy where they ugly. All of them. Well, to tell the truth I gave up pretty quickly. I decided to use a simple 18 lines long version which utilized trace for the output.
And that was fine. However, as I experimented around with Kostas Michalopoulos's Flash mod player I found out that the Debug Standalone Flash Player can be much slower if the bottleneck is on the code-side. It was over 10 times slower. That was a bit of a surprise, given that this kind of thing is free in Java. Of course I wanted to know now how fast my game can actually run in it's current state.
Bryce Harrington: Commentary on mpt's Free Software Usability article
mpt wrote on Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it. A good read, but a few comments:
On incentivizing usability, he suggests stronger incentives in the form of design awards and a bounty system. I suspect neither would be adequate. I'd suggest identifying a handful of "good" designers who have voluntarily made successful enhancements to some program, and interview them for what motivated them. I'll bet it was something other than the lure of fame or money! Whatever it was, seek to maximize THAT.
On inviting design input, I sort of tend to agree that in general people often don't realize they CAN contribute to open source projects, until someone invites them. However, the approach I'd suggest for fixing this is a bit different. This is an approach I've used extensively on Inkscape and other projects:
Watch for a user offering extensive criticism or suggestions for improving the UI that are well thought out and expressed. Often these guys can be recognized as the one complaining that no one is listening to him. ;-) Next, teach them how to make the changes to the program directly.
mpt would point out that "designers ain't coders", however really these changes tend to be pretty easy. Sometimes, if the program uses Glade or other XML formats for defining the UI, the work doesn't require any programming experience - and usually doesn't require even recompiling the program.
Even in cases where the UI changes need to be coded, the code tends to be fairly easy work as far as coding goes, often achievable by just copying and adjusting other similar code.
You don't need to be fluent in a foreign language to get around in a foreign country - often just knowing a few dozen typical words in the language (thank you, hello, please, toilet, how much, etc.) can suffice. Similarly, a UI designer doesn't need to know all the ins and outs of coding; just knowing the syntax for making buttons, adding menu items, and swapping out icon images can get you a LONG way towards your goals.
Further, an approach we've used quite effectively in Inkscape for people that even the above is too hard, is to encourage them to work up their ideas or proposal as a mockup, using Glade, Gimp, or even Inkscape. This gives something that other users can peer-review. A lot of issues can be worked out this way, before any coder comes near it.
On workflows and workloads, care needs to be taken to avoid proposed solutions that require the core developers to do something beyond what they're already doing. The reason is simple: They're too busy, and your proposed workflow will just bottleneck on them. Often they're still working on "it doesn't work", rather than "it doesn't work as well as it could." It's better if you can construct the bulk of your workflow to operate autonomously from any core developer involvement, or put off required involvement to as late in the process as possible.
In general, it occurs to me that many of mpt's ideas could be achieved by creating a team ala freedesktop.org, which works at a level above and outside particular open source projects. Such a group would focus on creating tutorials and specifications, creating shareable code to solve specific classes of issues, and so on.
Kees Cook: (late to the) history meme
My history isn’t entirely interesting, but does seem to show the single-mindedness of my terminals:
$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head
73 cd
68 vi
39 ls
24 bzr
18 exit
18 cat
13 u-build
13 sudo
13 am
10 echo
Random details:
- I use a lot of terminals, and have only just recently gotten into the habit of using Ctrl-D to close them — as seen above, I use exit.
- am is a script that takes apt-cache madison "$@" and shows only the most recent version from each release.
- u-build is a script that prepares and performs a build in my sbuild/schroot/lvm environments.
- echo snuck onto this list because I was verifying some x86 machine code, and kept typo-ing it as I ran “variations” of (the correct command line) echo -ne '\x33\xdb\x68\x70\x77\x6e\x0a\x8b\xcc\x8d\x43\x04\x43\x8b\xd0\xcd\x80\xeb\xfa' | ndisasm -u -
- It seems I’m in need of the same thing helix noted from Greg KH’s terminal-tied-to-Twitter: an alias for cd "$@" && ls instead of constantly typing cd followed by ls.
Jos Hirth: Firefox's "Clear Private Data" Shortcut is Really Annoying (and how to fix it)
I just trashed my history again. Same accident as last time. Was it my fault? Well, herein lies the problem. I pressed a specific key sequence which triggered the delete. However, it's very similar to a key sequence I'm using a dozen times a day. The only difference is the order of one down and one release key event.
But let me explain it a bit first. If you hold the Control key you can jump from one word to the next with the left and right cursor keys. If you also hold Shift you can quickly highlight a couple of words. I often highlight parts of the URL like this in the address bar. Then I press Delete and then I either add something new or press Return right away.
The problem is that I can trigger Firefox's Clear Private Data dialog with Control+Shift+Delete (i.e. if I don't release Control or Shift quickly enough). If I now press Return right away, which isn't all that unusual if you've done it a million times before, it will delete my history (among other things) instantaneously.
Jon Phillips: More on the Jon Phillips 4.0 Launch
I just announced over on the CC site my job change. I will still be on the books with Creative Commons, but will not be a full time staff member any longer. While I have been a human interface for Creative Commons to people, businesses and organizations, particularly in the technology space, my role will change to be Business Development and Community Liaison.
I have been working for Creative Commons for the past 3 years. In that time, I’ve fully devoted myself because I wanted to “scratch an itch,” as its called in open source development circles. Over the last few months I have felt that I sufficiently scratched the itch. Through my contributions to Inkscape and Open Clip Art Library I met the best boss and coolest person in the world, Mike Linksvayer. I wanted to make CC easier for the free and open source world by creating a library to make CC licensing easy: Now we have liblicense and LicenseChooser.js. I wanted to see the expansion of an international public domain dedication that worked globally, as Open Clip Art Library wanted: Now we have CC Zero Waiver and soon a Universal Public Domain dedication.
Of course, along the way, there have been other projects which I’m massively happy I contributed to, such as brewing the ingredients for CC Salons, working on media sharing web engine ccHost, and then efforts to provide simple solutions to help people, businesses and organizations to use CC licensing: Case Studies, http://creativecommons.org/projects/metrics”>Metrics and Documentation project.
After August 2nd, the world will continue to be in great hands with new and ongoing staff members that are supporting the efforts of Creative Commons around the clock. The international community of CC Jurisdiction Projects has an amazing line-up of individuals globally that are handling relationships amazingly. And, I’m still on the books to keep facilitating when possible.
If you are curious what I am immediately working on, then you kind readers of my blog might realize that I’ve been spending a lot of time on the upcoming art exhibition, Cantocore, an international contemporary art project between San Francisco and Guangzhou, China August 30 - September 6th near the Guangzhou Triennial. I am also planning a large art show in San Francisco for Overlap, which is Overlapping Networks of Experimental Media and Culture with Free Tools, Releases, News and Events” at the Gray Area Gallery starting Sept 13, 2008 through Sept 27, 2008. There is much work associated with the above projects which will require most of my time. This includes websites, projects for the shows, wrangling of participants, producing books, and more.
Cantocore ping pong space in Guangzhou
Beyond these immediate plans, I am of course entertaining various consulting projects, speaking engangements, writing for various magazines, trying to finish my book CVS (maybe should be renamed SVN ;), and then set-up my own solo art show somewhere in the next year before I turn 30 next May 28! If you would like to talk about these projects, are interested in working together with me on them, and/or hiring me for various gigs, contact me!
Cantocore Container
Lu and I will be primarily living in Guangzhou this August, then I will be in Beijing this fall. Of course, I’m traveling much around the globe. I’m particularly interested in working with more projects and companies in China and Asia.
Regardless, I’m more than ever committed to Creative Commons as an idea and set of practical tools. I am super committed as well to building up the projects I’ve been working on for some time with new vigor and knowledge gained from experience over the last few years in working with people, companies, and organizations.
Here is more as well from the post on the CC site:
Photo by-sa Freddy B. Used with permission from Photographer.
I’m in Sapporo for the CC Legal Day, Commons Research Mini-conference which the Metrics Project is but part, and to
further promote the CC Case Studies project. As Greg outlined so clearly last week and I presented at the launch of CC Singapore a few days ago,
this project is doing quite well with 112 submissions from around the world assisted by
a great system for supporting this community project, and even better brilliant people adding case studies daily!
Also, you kind readers might have noticed that we have launched and/or refreshed several projects over the last few weeks to prepare for a coming change. As of August, my role with Creative Commons will change from managing community and business development to being liaison in ongoing similar affairs. This also means that I will be spending most of my time on projects outside of Creative Commons — most still involve using Creative Commons licensing and technology.
I’m not leaving the culture of free and open, nor Creative Commons, both of which I have been involved with for some time. Rather, I will be, as of August 2nd, devoting most of my energy to projects I’ve been delaying or couldn’t do as effectively since I have been living and breathing Creative Commons. My job and peers at Creative Commons are amazing and working for CC, in my capacity at least which I can speak to, is a dream job. If anything, I will be pushing Creative Commons even more by action, projects, and facilitation in another capacity.
Thus, if you want to find out more about what I will be doing, you know where to find me. And, if I’ve been working with you, your business, your community, and/or organization, jon@creativecommons.org still works (and will so). I am continuing work on a couple of projects that have not launched in relationship to Open Library/PDWiki project. I also am on-demand still for speaking at events and conferences globally - particularly in Asia since I will be spending most time in China from August - December 2008. I’m still on the books and will facilitate any discussions to the appropriate people. I’m more excited that ever to keep growing the commons!
Ted Gould: Location, Location, Location
It's said that in real estate the most important thing is the location, and that's also true when thinking of screen real estate. How big something is and where it's located is tied closely to how useful it is.
The point is accentuated when it comes to the corners of the screen. These four precious areas are very easy to mouse to, making them very quick for oft used items. In the current Ubuntu default desktop we've chosen to give the upper right hand corner to bringing up the logout/power dialog. While this is a good use, I think we can do better.
One of the problems with that solution is that we're using a whole corner for basically only one function. While it's an important function (turns out the center of the Earth isn't oil) it would be nice if we could put more functionality into that location.
The functionality that we're looking at putting into that corner is managing your IM status. Almost every user I see today is using some form of messaging client. If we look to optimize the interactions with instant messaging we're likely to see productivity gains for large numbers of users.
The other piece of functionality that we'd like to put on the same menu is fast user switching. This is a very handy function, but it is directly related to logging in and logging out. In many ways it is similar to "Pause session."
All in all, the better use we can make of our corners, the more efficient we make our users. If we have users that are 100 times more productive, even if we only have 5% of users, we can rule the world!
This update may or may not make users 100 times more productive, it hasn't been tested so it might, we just don't know. Remember, numbers never lie.