His specific order means he is banned from acting, or encouraging others to act, in a way that “causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to any person in Derby as defined by the Inner Ring Road” (via Asbo bans 35-year-old man from begging and boozing in city centre.)

For once some I feel like some justice has been done. I think I speak for everyone when I say I’m a little sick of being asked for cigarettes/money and getting nothing but abuse when I dare to say no. I look forward to a day when I can walk into town, perhaps smoking, and not get sworn at for wanting to keep what is mine.

Me morphing into my brother Sam.

Just a quick post to show what can be made in around 10 minutes with a nifty little java morphing application called Javamorph and of course my favourite image editor gimp.

The Javamorph project can be found at Google Code or if you’re lucky enough to use Ubuntu it’s in your repositories so you can just apt-get it. I think it’s in the Debian Squeeze repos too.

The project homepage is worth checking out for a brief overview of how the program works and a link to a very informative pdf that explains all.

My very quick and dirty example shows me turning into my youngest brother and back again. Sorry Sam.

As you can hopefully see from the image below all you basically need to do is match up the mesh points with certain areas of each face, eyes, hair, nose etc.  Once you’ve done this javamorph will do the rest of the work.

What javamorph creates is a series of images (jpegs) stored in the output folder after you have run a ‘morph’. These images show the progression from one state to another. To make that into a single animation file (in this case an animated gif) you need Gimp and importantly it’s extra package/plugin gimp-gap. So if you’ve not got these the quickest remedy is:

sudo apt-get install gimp gimp-gap

While you’re adding this great program you might also want to take the time to install gimp-data-extras to add some more brushes, palettes and gradients to your collection. You never can have enough.

So, once you’ve made your morph fire up gimp and head straight to the file menu where there is a handy entry titled Open as layers. With this you can import all your individual images as layers on the image in one command – just highlight all your images with your mouse or ctrl + a.

As you can see we now have as many layers as we do images. Why you might ask? Well because this is how the gimp animation package works – each layer is effectively a a frame in our animation. Obviously at this point you could tinker with the images to your hearts content, perhaps changing the colours or adding in some funky fades and gradients to spice things up a bit. This is just a quick and dirty tutorial though so I’ll leave the creativity to you!

So.. back to the gimp. My morph was made up of 20 images so I have that many layers. However, this animated gif will be used on a loop. That means that (if left as it is now) I’d get a nice fade to one face then suddenly straight back to the original. I don’t like that so I import the same pictures again (still using open as layers) and rearrange their order in the layers list so that one fades seamlessly to the other. Not sure that there is a quick way to do this so be prepared to be clicking the move up and move down buttons a good few times.

When you’re happy with it – you’re ready to save. Before making the gif it’s not a bad idea to save it as an xcf first. The last thing you want to have to do is arrange all those layers again! So once you’ve done that click Save as this time and change the .xcf to .gif. Once you’ve done this the export wizard will fire up. Initially it will suggest flattening the image but you don’t want that so select Save as Animation. The next popup allows you to tweak the speed between frames. The best bet really is to leave it at the default 100 initially, see what the saved gif looks like. From that you’ve a far better idea of whether to speed it up or slow it down.

Well done – you just made your first javamorph!

This was all accomplished in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha4 (technically now that’s 10.04 RC .) To achieve the same in Windows you’d need gimp-win.

Inspired (if that’s really the right word) by all this new Ubuntu artwork I decided to have a little go at creating a new wallpaper. As I said in my last post I like brown, it’s smooth, sexy and natural. So, after a little tinkering with an old photo of my Bonsai tree – ‘Gemmell’ – I created this.

It’s now the default wallpaper on my desktop: could it be yours?

If anyone does like it I’ll upload the (somewhat mammoth sized) gimp xcf file so anyone can play with the colours or whatever they wish.

Currently the chatter surrounding Ubuntu is obviously focused on its next upcoming release 10.04 Lucid Lynx. However, most blog posts and news articles are all talking about the new artwork rather than any technological advances. Discussion (as ever with Ubuntu users and critics alike) seems to focus almost solely on colour. Yes that’s right. I said colour. This release will bring about quite a few changes in not only the colour scheme of the default desktop, it’s wallpaper and themes but also the ubuntu website, online shop, documentation cd covers (just mockups currently) and more besides. Which is nice. But how important is it?

The key word that so many people seem to miss here is default. It’s what the desktop arrives on your computer looking like after a fresh install or while trying out the livecd. I would happily agree that first impressions do mean a lot. Having a slick polished-looking desktop is seldom a bad thing. However, it really is the easiest thing to change whether you’ve never used Ubuntu or Linux before or you are a hoary old hedgehog like me.

What gets my goat is the extent to which the debate surrounding this tiny aspect of the OS takes such focus. The default theme released with Ubuntu has become more polished with each release but it never looked bad. As much as so many bemoan the brown, it made Ubuntu as successful as it has been. No other popular distro used quite such a distinctive and memorable scheme – most default to blues or greens and look entirely unexceptional. The proposed new colours, aubergine being amongst them (fantastic colour, shame about the taste) will hopefully still remain fairly unique to Ubuntu but time will tell.

If I were to point you in the direction of omgubuntu.co.uk and their recent post about the new wallpaper (thanks for the link mesanna!) you need only scroll down the page a few hundred lines to see all the same old arguements coming out about OS aesthetics (obviously being linked to anything even remotely OSX related as often as possible – grr macs..) Why is it impossible to create a nice looking system without being accused of stealing elements of its design from commercial alternatives? Sometimes there genuinely are only a few ways of accomplishing a particular UI successfully and once the best way has been tried and tested enough it is adopted. This is not theft. This is common sense.

Anyway.. what I’m slowly getting round to saying is that yes, re-style your site’s look, give the documentation a face-lift even create more themes and wallpapers. But don’t expect to be able to create a set of themes and wallpapers that will capture the hearts and minds of everyone. It can’t be done.

In my opinion, rather than spending all this time on the look of the thing just make is as obvious as is humanly possible that you can change how everything looks. Perhaps a notification bubble at boot with the words “You can change how I look! Click here to choose a style and find out more”. Shouldn’t be hard right? I’m thinking of adding a filter in firefox for the words “ubuntu + brown + ugly” I’m that tired of reading about this. Proof can be found again by looking at the post linked above and skimming through the comments. I will leave you with one comment which made me laugh, not because it’s right or bold or clever but because it is so fantastically idiotic.

are you serious? What the hell is wrong with ubuntu. I mean, I had a little sympathy for the whole brown thing, but honestly, you should have known everyone hates brown. Ask any girl with brown eyes and they go “eww! they look like poop!”

So, to further expand on your theory, do girls with blue eyes hate Fedora? Green eyes can’t stand openSUSE? Is this something limited only to the female of the species? Thank you Zach for sharing and bringing a smile back to my face!

Playing with the size and orientation of my mug is now a lot easier. Wish I could alter said mug with this too

I for one am fairly keen on the new in post image editor, I think WP has been needing this for some time and I’m very glad we now have one! It is a little basic, allowing you to crop, rotate or flip your image as well as change it’s size. While true, this does cover the basics I would still like to have seen a few slightly more interesting features.

Whilst on the subject of images I also really like the fact that your posts can now have images assigned to them. This has been possible through plugins for some time but never built in. I like the fact that I can add some extra colour to a post now, having chosen while making the theme where the posts image will go, not sat there tinkering for half an hour with css in the post editor.

From the development blog:

Custom post types have been upgraded with better API support so you can juggle more types than just post, page, and attachment. (More of this planned for 3.0.)

I really like the sound of this, utterly custom content types could open up a swathe of opportunity for creativity and allow wordpress to be the muscle behind even more types of website – not just your average blog.

This release brings with it far too many new changes for me to simply list here. Suffice to say you seem to be able to do more with WordPress every release and 2.9 brings more great features than I’ve seen added in a while. I’m looking forward to seeing how I can push their new template tags, hooks and filters to create some of the most interesting themes yet.  Now with the ability to create custom themes bundled with plugins, surely the sky is just not a high enough limit!