Mark Shuttleworth’s recent post on the new gaudy desktop prettiness of Ubuntu has received a good deal of interest and discussion (more than 130 comments and counting). Pretty much all of that discussion was summed up in one of those comments: # Murray Cumming Says: October 25th, 2006 at 7:31 pm The bikeshed is brown. [...]
Native speakers can rarely explain the grammatical rules of their own language. In the same way, those who are most ‘fluent’ in the rituals, customs and traditions of a particular culture generally lack the detachment necessary to explain the ‘grammar’ of these practices in an intelligible manner. This is why we have anthropologists. – Kate [...]
Some time ago, Anne Galloway posted an excerpt from a talk by designer and HCI theorist Brenda Laurel on her concept of culture work which caught my interest. Laurel’s main concern is design which focuses on the bottomline, the way that most of the products we buy are designing with buying and consumption in mind, [...]
So with the release of the new version of Ubuntu, 6.10 (6 for 2006, 10 for October) I decided that rather than merely upgrading my system from 6.06 to 6.10, I would wipe clean my hard disk, wipe all my desktop settings and try to start afresh to see how long it would take me [...]
It didn’t take long for my specification on community governance best practices to be superseded by an avalanche of community and governance-related topics that are already approved for the upcoming Ubuntu Summit. Clearly, it is something the governing bodies have been meaning to put on the agenda for some time. And basically, it looks like [...]
After some deliberation, I decided to blow all of my remaining grant money plus a little extra to buy a ticket to the Ubuntu Developers’ Summit at the Google HQ in early November. This is quite a big step, since I only just came back from three weeks of fieldwork in Ireland, England and Scotland [...]
I’ve bought or were given several pins during my tour of the British Isles. I got the KDE pin at the aKademy, and it sums up the atmosphere at the conference quite well: Even the man sitting at the counter in the hostel got free Kubuntu CDs to showcase KDE, that passion and outgoing interest [...]
One of the frustrations with being on the road doing my fieldwork is that I can’t be on-line often enough to keep a solid presence in the Ubuntu community or even on my blog. The birthday consumption of my bottle of Danish herb snaps on my last night at the aKademy resulted in seven KDE [...]