miércoles, 10 de abril de 2013

Your own Ubuntu / GNOME custom emblems

I love emblems. To me, they were a killer feature. Something that, when I started giving Ubuntu a try, led me to stick to it. Also something that made me prefer GNOME over KDE back in the day.

An often neglected features, the gnome environment was never a fan of motivating the user to use or even be aware of the feature. Things only got worse as Desktop Environments "evolved"s;. The GTK 3 generation - Unity, GNOME 3.0, Mint, etc, basically removed the feature of emblems. In reality, Nautilus still supports emblems as a tool for software to use them automatically (For example, Dropbox uses them so you can see if a file is updated, being updated or in conflict), but users cannot customize them anymore unless they mess with the command line or use third party tools. I recommend emblemize

Emblemize is great, but sometimes you might want to make your own custom emblems. Some icons that might be missing in the list of system icons. This command line tutorial should show how to add an icon that can be used as emblem and how to put it to a folder/file.

I suspect that this feature is nautilus-only. Nautilus forks probably have it too.

What I want to do

My home folder currently looks like this:

As you can see, almost everything has a descriptive icon with an emblem if needed. But the priv folder does not. The reason is that I am yet to find a good icon for it in Emblemize's list. I would like a lock icon.

How to do it

First of all, you need an icon to use as your emblem. You want a image format that supports transparency (png, SVG, gif), and an icon that has transparency. Optimally, the object in the image must touch the image's borders, else the emblem will look a bit small. I used google to find a "Tango lock icon". (Tango is the visual style most of the default icon themes in GNOME-based desktops are based on).Found a nice image, let us call it custom-emblem-lock.png. You can always make your icons yourself (I use inkscape), but generally google searches with the words Tango and icon give good results.

In order to add a custom emblem, we need two things:

We need to add the icon to the system. There are two methods, one involves editing the icon theme, but has the weakness that whenever you change your icon theme you might lose the emblem. The other is to add the icon to /usr/share/pixmaps. We will need the terminal for the second step, so we might as well use it for the first step. Open a terminal.

  • In the terminal, type this:
  • sudo cp /home/yourname/whatever/custom-emblem-lock.png /usr/share/pixmaps/

    Just make sure to replace "/home/yourname/whatever/custom-emblem-lock.png" with the complete path to the image icon. To make things simple, just save the image icon to your home folder. Then the complete path is just "/home/username/filename.png".

  • Open nautilus/your favorite file manager and head to /usr/share/pixmaps to verify that your icon is there.

If the extension of your icon image is png, it should now appear in Emblemize's window. But it might be hard to find it. I sometimes have to use files with different extensions. When you cannot find the image in Emblemize after placing it in /usr/share/pixmaps, you will need to continue to the next paragraph:

Now a bit of a harder part. The data that determines which file/folder has an emblem or not is saved in something called the metadata. We will use the gvfs-set-attribute command to set it manually, because Emblemize doesn't support you to input arbitrary strings as the name of the emblem (I wish it did). Go back to your terminal.

gvfs-set-attribute -t stringv "/home/vx/priv" metadata::emblems "custom-emblem-lock"

Of course, you should replace "/home/vx/priv" with the complete path to the file/folder you want to emblemize and "custom-emblem-lock" to the name of the image you moved to pixmaps. Note how this command does not include the file extension of the image. I put "custom-emblem-lock" instead of "custom-emblem-lock.png".

After running your command, nothing will happen. You need to refresh the nautilus window for the new emblem to show up.

I hope this was useful.

I fantasize of a program that allows you to create your own list of custom emblems, and then allows you to set them with just a popup menu in Nautilus.

It is difficult not to get overboard and enjoy emblems. This is a sample of my dev folder (Where I place all my programming projects).

I had to use this trick for three of these files. The folder that triggered this all was the xyedev foder, the one in which I develop (or used to develop) my free software game: Xye. I really wanted to see Xye's icon in it.

viernes, 29 de marzo de 2013

On RMS' support of sexism at conferences

Yesterday, Richard Stallman wrote something that I do not like at all in his political notes:

A man got fired for making jokes in Pycon that alluded to sex.

Making jokes referring sex, as such, is not wrong. Making a joke about "fork" or "dongle", as such, is not wrong. To criticize these things is prudery.

I don't know precisely what those people said; there might be more information in Richards' blog post, which I cannot access. Perhaps their words deserved criticism for some other reason I have not seen.

In the absence of that, they are the ones who were wronged. Pycon should not have criticized them for this (not even privately), they should not have apologized, and they certainly didn't deserve to be fired.

This appears to be an attempt to reimpose oppressive 1950s prudery. Richards and her supporters deserve to meet firm resistance. However, I would not have called for her to be fired for this, and sending her threats of violence was inexcusable.

Oh boy.

I have been following this debacle closely, really avoiding to make a blog post condemning the horrible sexism and misogyny in the Python community. Probably because I am a coward. But also because I am not really part of that community at all, and I doubt anyone would care. However, this post by RMS is a breaking point. It worries me because I call myself a supporter of Free Software. I even released free software code and a terrible game that no one plays at all. I promote Free Software operating systems and programming tools. This is why I cannot stand seeing someone in such a high position of influence in the Free Software world to do this.

Where do I begin?...

Conferences and codes of conduct

Fun thing about programming languages and tech conferences: They cannot really afford to deny entry to 50% of the potential population that could be interested in the topic. It is important to make sure that no one is uncomfortable at the conference. And it is also nice for the environment to be professional and have no sexual harassment. I think this is a good thing for everyone... men and women. It really pains me that it looks like the main reaction (similar to the main reaction when similar incidents happen in other communities that are mostly composed of 'geeks') is ... OPPOSITION TO OUR RIGHT TO MAKE JOKES!. People behave with such a sad and ridiculous entitlement about this. Do you mean, do you you REALLY mean that it is important for your comfort at a tech conference to withhold your right to make sexist jokes and innuendo and other things? Is it really that important? Is this really the sort of issue that requires your FREE SPEECH ACTIVIST tone?

I don't think so.

I wonder if part of the reason for Stallman's reaction is not being well-informed about the case. PyCon had an easily accessible code of conduct. It was against the code of conduct to make sexist jokes at that conference. And this has nothing to do with a conspiracy by Richards and her supporters to ruin conferences. This code of conduct existed well before the incident. Maybe the free speech activists should have reacted to it when it was first revealed, and not when a woman used the code of conduct to ask the conference organizers to do something - she was feeling uncomfortable because of the dongle and forking jokes (One of the guys has admitted that at least the dongle jokes were sexual in nature).

I am going to speculate, maybe the reason Richards and perhaps some other attendees to the conference decided to attend the conference was that the Code of conduct contained clear guidelines about these issues. I don't think there is anything wrong in expecting other attendees to follow the Code of conduct. I actually think that when the code of conduct is this well established, then those guys who really think their right to make sexist jokes is very important should avoid going to that conference. I think that for the most part this is true. The two guys who were making the jokes recognized that it was not good behavior and apologized.

In addition, Richards did not ask for anyone to get fired.

Prudery

Contrary to how Stallman feels about this, those of us who would like there not to be sexist jokes at conferences are not killjoys. If anything, we would like conferences to be enjoyable for everyone. That is a bit of an issue though, because if we allow guys to freely make the conference an uncomfortable place for, for example, women, we would be failing our main objective. The entitled dudes with the jock mentality would be enjoying the conference, but ... no one else would.

Then Stallman talks about "oppressive prudery"... I really don't think this is a free speech issue. I think that guys are still pretty much able to make their own blogs where they can make compilations of all dongle jokes they can find. Of course, it could get you fired, specially if you do something like make the blog post in the your company's official blog. Or if you are found making the sexist jokes at a conference. A conference that explicitly bans those jokes. A conference that you are attending in representation of your employer.

In these regards, Free Speech is not really a right not to be criticized. I think that as entitled as people are to make sexist jokes, other people are also entitled to criticize that action. Publicly, even.

This brings the side issue of "public shaming". Stallman did not mention it, so I will be brief about this. If you do things in public, you should consider the possibility to be called out in public about them. If these jokes are really a source of shame for you - To the point you would consider getting called out on them "Public shaming" then I have a good solution for you: Do not perform shameful acts in public. A frankly ridiculous defense is that the jokes were "private" jokes. No, the guys were standing in a conference room surrounded by people. So no.

Those who really deserve firm resistance

It challenges my suspension of disbelief to read Stallman saying that Adria Richards and her supporters "deserve" firm resistance. Altogether ignoring the outburst of awful sexism and misogyny in the community after the event.

  • Sexism: If you are confused or undecided about whether or not the reaction included a whole bunch of sexism. Detecting sexism is easy, it takes the guise of a double standard. Look up to those reactions that make a pretty big deal about a father of three getting fired and actively ignore the probable repercussions Richard's life is going to have for getting fired herself.
  • Misogyny: Much worse and obvious than the sexism, but for some reason there are people that deny it even when it is flaunting. If a person's main reaction to a woman complaining is to call her a B word. If the reaction includes projecting negative views about other women on her or if the reaction includes the words rape or ugly in any form or any other form of violence. That is how a misogynist comment looks like.

The thing is that after the ridiculous explosion of sexism and misogyny anyone would worry about Richards herself. Or spend anytime criticizing her actions. Whereas there is clearly a much bigger issue at hand. While Richards may be a threat to your freedom to make dongle jokes; The sexism and the misogyny are a threat to women in the Python community and as such a threat to the community itself. How do you intend there to be any progress. To make more techs to join. And to make the conventions seem safe and comfortable. When these people seem to have the louder voices? Asking people to oppose firmly to Richards after this incident is a serious mistake. There are certainly much greater threats to the community that were made evident after the incident.

Side notes

If you really think that making a public tweet was a big sin, you are probably unaware of reality. Asking nicely is not a reliable solution.

Plenty of commenters have fallen victim to the fallacy of the middle. Yadda yadda yadda, "making sexist jokes in the wrong place and in a conference that explicitly forbids it is wrong an unprofessional BUT it is also wrong to tweet pictures of it " yadda. I strongly disagree. Richards acted within the code of conduct. PyCon later updated the code of conduct to forbid public shaming, which is a frankly terrible move.

To sum up

I find Richard Stallman to be disturbingly wrong in this topic. A bad sign that the free software movement is hostile to the idea of making conferences a safe and comfortable place to everyone. As a free software fan, I feel forced to state strong disagreement.

Richard Stallman is in Bolivia right now and I was going to attend one of his conferences next Monday. I decided not to do it. Just a quite meaningless action and I really doubt there will be an empty seat or that anyone will actually care, but still.

Unfortunately, this is not a first time either. In June last year he showed concern against the notion that maybe guys shouldn't make sex propositions during conferences. Oh well.

sábado, 23 de marzo de 2013

RSS readers and self-congratulation

RSS were a great idea. An open standard based off XML so that web sites can easily share latest updates.

What they did great was allow you or a program or other web site to quickly list the updates and provide links/summaries/copy pastes of them.

Less trivial was the management of many multiple RSS feeds a user may have in order to keep track of her favorite web sites. When you have many feeds, you wonder which you have already read. When websites provide only the 10 or so latest updates in their RSS feeds, there is also the risk of missing some updates if updates are not done regularly/automatically. The RSS software client was born.

A small problem with the RSS clients is that users are consistently less and less likely to use the same computer device all the time. Devices now come in all sizes , shapes and purposes. Each with the ability to browse the web. A less common issue is that some people actually use multiple different operating systems in the same device, which unfortunately tend to work the same as if they were different devices.

The 2000s were a fun time for everyone. And when I was testing my first Red Hat and Ubuntu versions alternating with windows and cyber cafe computers, I eventually gave up on the RSS Bandits, the Lifereas and the Kaggregators. I learned about a great little service called Bloglines. It did everything those RSS readers did, but it was a website. Think about it. I could use it in any computer/OS that had a web connection, it was practical.

History is full of disappointment though. The RSS reading business is apparently difficult to profit from. A web service whose main utility is to direct users to updates in other sites? Bloglines eventually broke, was sold to a company whose main objective was apparently to completely ruin it with awful interface changes. I had to be directed to google reader. And for a couple of months it was great. Actually even better than bloglines because you could create your own RSS feed with things you would share from other feeds (and add comments even). Too bad google decided to kill this too. By first ruining it with awful interface changes of its own, and crippling google reader by replacing the sharing feature with google+ trash. This was a great way to scare away users, which then allowed them to announce that they are shutting it down because of lack of users...

Life goes on, and there are google reader alternatives. It seems most people are jumping ship to feedly, which means that feedly is next in the line to be ruined absurdly by a sale, or company decision.

You all might be wondering what Linux.com has to say about this... Goodbye Google Reader, Linux Has Its Own RSS Aggregators... I got a bit of a problem with this. I think Linux evangelism is great. But not when it provides non-solutions to people. The kind of people that are going to miss google reader most likely have already heard of local software RSS clients and they did not find them to be a complete solution to the RSS aggregation problem. A google reader alternative has to be online or be at least barely on-line based, using a server's database to keep track of whatever you already read. I just think that this sort of forced evangelism ultimately does not really help improve the image of Linux or open source.

sábado, 16 de marzo de 2013

There are alternatives to google reader - Still bad news

I wrote this as a response to : http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2013/03/16/opml/

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Let us ignore the minor issue that the alternatives are not very good and that self-hosting is not a realistic solution for two thirds of the internet users…

The issue is google’s choice. Ever since google reader was feature-crippled a couple of years ago. It seemed that goog want us to move to their walled garden with no anonymity of g+. At this time it seems that they are getting rid of RSS precisely because it is an open standard. Since that date there were other anti-RSS moves from big G, like the removal of ad sense for feeds. The objective with these shut downs does not seem to be to cut costs. There are currently services at google that have less impressive usage numbers than google reader.

While the effect on the people that do not want to lose RSS feeds will be minor – we will move on to an alternative – . This will still motivate more people to give them up for walled gardens, because when they hear “just use an alternative”, they also consider twitter, facebook and G+ an alternative. The real issue is the signal google is sending. That they do not care about open standards and that they are not above getting rid of them.

Is feedburner next?