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Feb 25
For the past few years those folks over at Ubuntu have been running their “Free Culture Showcase” competition – with the winning submissions being used to fill some of the free space on the Ubuntu CDs and ISO images. This is a great way to showcase Creative Commons works, and clarify to people that there’s more to “Free” than software.
Personally I think that SVG files are perfect for this type of competition because, unlike most media files, SVG files are their own source code. In other words the recipient of an SVG file hasn’t just got a finished product – they’ve got a file that they can dissect, examine, modify and translate without any loss of quality. That’s why I think Ubuntu (and other Linux distributions) should come with more SVG-based desktop images.
We thought we’d have a try at submitting a Greys comic to the competition this time round – and this is the result. Like all of the rest of our strips, it was created entirely using Inkscape on a couple of 5-year-old PCs running Ubuntu, so as it’s a submission for the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase, created using Ubuntu machines, the subject matter seemed fairly obvious. There’s no requirement for the Free Culture Showcase submissions to be Ubuntu-themed – indeed it might actually be detrimental to our chances of winning, if part of the aim of the competition is to show that “Free” doesn’t have to mean “Geeky”. But we had a Ubuntu joke on our list of ideas, so it seemed like as good an excuse as any other to draw it.
With this iteration of the competition they removed the “Photo/Image” category so as not to overlap with a similar competition that is taking place to find desktop images. Clearly our comic isn’t really suited to being a desktop image, so after a little pleading and cajoling they’ve now added a category for “Other Media Submissions”. There are a few rules and requirements that cover the competition as a whole, and some specifically for the “Other Media” section. Let’s see how we do with meeting these requirements:
- • The submission must be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike or Creative Commons Attribution license
- Our comics are usually licensed as CC-by-nc-sa, so it was no great stretch for us to switch this strip to a CC-by-sa license. You might have noticed one less icon in the bottom right of the border
- • The submission must be submitted by the author of the work
- Yep, that’s definitely us
- • Each submission cannot be larger than 0.5MB in size
- We’ve spent a lot of time tweaking and trimming this comic in order to get it small enough, but without compromising the design or style too much. If you really want the gory details, I posted this message to the Inkscape forum which covers a lot of it. Suffice to say that judicious use of clones rather than copies allowed us to reduce the file size from well over a megabyte to less than 0.5MB. We could go even smaller still by saving as an svgz file, but see below for why we decided not to do that
- • The submission must be available in a format playable by Ubuntu 10.04 out of the box
- SVG files are represented as preview icons in Nautilus (see below) and can be viewed in Eye Of Gnome and Firefox. They can also be loaded into The GIMP, but that’s being removed from Lucid Lynx by default
- • Please embed the License/Author information into the file using the file metadata
- SVG files allow for arbitrary metadata to be embedded, and Inkscape makes it easy to put the most common details in via the Document Metadata menu entry. Because of this all of our comics have had embedded metadata since day 1, and this one is no different
- • You must provide a link to the submission file
- Usually we provide links to the svgz versions of our strips at the bottom of each page (as we have at the bottom of this one), but for the purposes of this competition we’re supplying an svg file, rather than an svgz file, for the reasons described below. If you just want a copy of the file, or are looking for Easter Eggs, please download the svgz file from the link at the end of this post, as it eats up less bandwidth – but if you really want to get the exact svg file that we’re submitting to the competition you can find it here
Okay, let’s clear up all that confusion about file sizes and svgz. The SVG spec allows for compressing an SVG file using GZip, and naming the resultant file with an “svgz” extension. This leads to significantly smaller file sizes, and would have let us get below the 0.5MB limit with ease. But there’s a catch: although Eye Of Gnome displays svgz files fine, Nautilus doesn’t show preview images for them and Firefox won’t load them except via a web server which sends the correct header information to specify that they’re gzipped.
What this means, in practice, is that although svgz files are viewable in a stock Ubuntu installation, they don’t do a lot to entice the user to open them in the first place. This screenshot, taken on an alpha-2 release of Ubuntu 10.04, shows the same image as an svg file on the left, and svgz on the right. Which would you be more tempted to open?
It looks like this is a regression in Ubuntu, as it worked in the past, as described in this bug report. From our perspective, the fact that this regression currently exists in Ubuntu, and that Firefox won’t open an svgz file from disk, means that an uncompressed SVG image is our format of choice for this competition.
Now that I’ve bored you senseless with all that exposition about the specific choices made for the benefit of this competition, here’s a light-hearted “And finally…” to go away with. As the comic strip documentary image above clearly shows, The Greys are now using Ubuntu… but it seems that they weren’t the first sci-fi standard to make the switch, having been beaten to it by Dr Who.
Click here to download the SVG source for this comic
↓ Transcript
G1: Since Jeff Goldblum managed to infect our computers with a virus, we've decided to switch them to Linux
G2: Linux? Well, that should keep our systems secure and stable. Which distribution did you pick?
G1: We went for Ubuntu
G2: Any particular reason for choosing that one?
[Scene shows the Greys' UFO lifting off, leaving a Ubuntu logo behind as a crop circle]
G1: Something about it just seemed familiar…
[A Ubuntu logo and slogan is shown, modified to read "Linux for sentient beings"]
G2: Linux? Well, that should keep our systems secure and stable. Which distribution did you pick?
G1: We went for Ubuntu
G2: Any particular reason for choosing that one?
[Scene shows the Greys' UFO lifting off, leaving a Ubuntu logo behind as a crop circle]
G1: Something about it just seemed familiar…
[A Ubuntu logo and slogan is shown, modified to read "Linux for sentient beings"]
3Comment
Mar 07
It appears that our original “Ubuntufied Flying Object” comic has been translated into Spanish.
We’re more than happy to have our comics translated – but it’s a shame that the translator only did half a job. We make the SVG files for our comics available so that anyone can translate them properly – by replacing the text in the comic directly, rather than just adding a separate translation that then has to be read together with the original images.
So we’ve taken that translation and put the text directly into the comic – feel free to share this with your Spanish-speaking friends:
Click here to download the SVG source for this comic
Mar 04
Our most recent comic strip, Ubuntufied Flying Object, was also our submission to the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase. We decided to go with a Ubuntu-themed comic, with a bonus punchline of “Linux for human sentient beings”, based on the wordmark and tagline that Ubuntu has used for the past six years.
Of course Murphy’s law has struck. After all this time using the same logo and styling, it seems that Ubuntu 10.04 will be the first release to use a new design. The “circle of friends” motif remains, so the main joke of our strip still works, but the tagline is gone – making our secondary punchline redundant.
Now I don’t know how strictly these new branding guidelines will be enforced on the CD’s content – particularly as the Free Culture Showcase deals with third-party contributions in an “Examples” folder – but we don’t want to take ourselves out of the running from the start. So we’ve produced another version of this strip, foregoing the secondary punchline, and changing the colours in the first panel to better reflect the new style.
Although we still prefer the original strip, if you really want to download the re-themed strip you can find it here.
Dec 27
I watched the last episode of Defying Gravity last night. It was an excellent series – the best sci-fi I’ve seen in a long time. For a start the “sci” was largely believable, while the “fi” was a lot more than just shooting aliens with lasers.
If you haven’t seen it, it’s set in the near future, and is based within our own solar system. No warp drives. No extra-solar alien planets populated by space-faring races. No teleport devices – in fact no shore leave at all, unless you count 20 minutes or so in a refrigerated space suit on Venus. What it did have was strong characters, made all the stronger by gradually unfolding back-stories, excellent sets which looked like they could have come straight out of the NASA design book, and an ongoing plot which, though slow at times, did have the effect of drawing you in if you were prepared to stick with it.
An ongoing plot, however, pretty much guaranteed that ratings would progress mostly downwards, rather than up (it’s a disincentive for people to tune in halfway through). It didn’t start strongly enough to overcome that, so only made it as far as one series. For that reason, even though I thoroughly enjoyed it, I wouldn’t recommend anyone to watch it unless you quite like the idea of being left with only a fraction of the story completed.
Alas, it’s an all too familiar tale: Programme gets commissioned; Writers plan for a multi-season storyline; programme gets cancelled part-way through the plot, which rarely gets resolved (unless the producers manage to wrangle the money for a film or comic book out of someone). If you’ve stumbled across this page because you did watch Defying Gravity, then you might like to follow this link to find the resolution to a few of the dangling plot lines.
So farewell DG, you were too good for the TV of our time. Oh, and could you TV execs please stop commissioning series if you’re not going to show any commitment to the integrity of the story. At the very least, try to find another way to deal with this issue, other than just leaving your viewers in limbo. Again.
Nov 25
Congratulations to the Inkscape developers on releasing version 0.47. In case you’re new at this site, Inkscape is an Open Source (and free of charge) vector graphics program, in a similar vein to Adobe Illustrator. It saves in the SVG file format – an open standard which is supported by various applications, including native support in most web browsers (except Internet Explorer).
It’s the program we use to create The Greys, and we make the original Inkscape SVG file of each of our comics available to download, usually embedding extra jokes or references as Easter Eggs. The new version adds extra features that will make it quicker and easier for us to work on The Greys, and is well worth checking out if you’re looking for a vector graphics program on a budget.
Nov 16
Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, has been out for a couple of weeks now, so I upgraded my main desktop machine over the weekend. Well, I say upgraded, but what I actually mean is “went through the upgrade procedure, found that the machine wouldn’t boot anymore, so ended up doing an in-place reinstall instead.”
In fairness, this is the first time in 5 years that I’ve had to do a full reinstall on this machine – I’ve done upgrades on it every six months since Warty Warthog and up to now it’s been fine. It’s also worth noting that a reinstall of a Linux system (assuming you know what you’re doing) isn’t like using the typical “rescue” CD that comes with a Windows machine – all my personal data and settings were left in place, so I was back up and running within an hour. Still, not a great start to the new OS.
Having upgraded to Karmic I quickly installed Inkscape and fired it up. The version that is in the 9.10 repositories is 0.47pre4 (at the time of writing). The full 0.47 release is due any day now, so I’m glad they decided to go with this version rather than making Ubuntu users wait another six months for the new features in 0.47. Because of this upgrade, however, any new SVG files posted on this site will be from a 0.47 version of Inkscape. If you do decide to go looking for the Easter Eggs we hide in our comics, please bear that in mind.