The Big Red CD and Tab
Well, its been just under a week since the [Big Red Recording was released](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/?p=935) and I am pretty pleased with the response to it. Thanks to so many of you who have said such kind words about it. Its not perfect, but it gives a decent indication of what can be accomplished with 24-hours, with no sleep and a lot of Red Bull. 🙂
Now, there are two other things I would like to achieve now it is recorded:
* Produce a CD, sell it and make more money for Comic Relief
* Get the tunes transcribed so others can play, perform and create derived versions
So, lets look at each one and what is involved – I am positive that *every* reader of my blog can help in achieving these goals. Read on people…
## Produce a CD
I would like to produce a professionally reproduced shrink-wrapped CD complete with liner notes that can be sold for a reasonable amount of money, and in which all the profits can go to Comic Relief. With this we have the possibility of making another £10,000 or so for Comic Relief which would be a huge achievement. 🙂
To do this I am looking for a sponsor to cover the production of the CDs. This is going to cost around £500 – £1000 to get 500 CDs produced. I am looking for such a generous sponsor (who would of course be credited in the liner notes) to cover this cost. If you can help with this, please [contact me](mailto:jono AT jonobacon DOT org) and we can discuss it further. 🙂
In addition to this I am looking for help from creative minds and artists to create the liner notes art, album cover and other artistic elements for the package. I will lay out the liner notes, but I am…erm…artistically challenged, so I could do with some help to create a cool, moody, interesting looking theme for the album. If you think you can help with this, please [contact me](mailto:jono AT jonobacon DOT org).
## Transcribe the songs
I am really keen to see all of the music transcribed so people can play it on the guitar, bass, drums and other instruments. I would particularly like to see the songs transcribed into guitar and bass tablature. I don’t have time to do this, so it would be great if a team of volunteers could work on this, maybe using some of the incredible Open Source tabbing programs to create the final transcription. We could then make these transcriptions available so others can play the songs themselves. 🙂
This basically involves a team of people listening to the songs, figuring out how to play them and writing the tab. I could then look over the tab and fix up any specific inaccuracies – it mainly needs someone to spend the time documenting the songs. So, if you can help, please [get in touch](mailto:jono AT jonobacon DOT org). 🙂
**Lets make it happen**
If we work together, we have an opportunity to make even more money for charity and produce some transcriptions so others can share, play and create their own derivatives of the music. Lets see whats possible, and do get in touch if you can help. 🙂
Off to Brazil
Next week I fly to Brazil to [FISL 8.0](https://fisl.softwarelivre.org/8.0/www/?q=en). I am looking forward to visiting such a wonderful country, and I am keen to meet up with plenty of people in addition to [Sulamita](https://sulamita.linuxchix.org.br/) being my guide there. So, as usual, if you fancy meeting up – [get in touch with me](mailto:jono AT ubuntu DOT com). 🙂
FISL looks stunning, and I can’t wait to be a part of it. 🙂
Tired, but done
Well, after a 24-hour marathon recording session, it is time to show what we came up with. The songs are a little late as I got to a point after being awake for about 40 hours where I was collapsing in my studio with tiredness, so I needed to grab some sleep before I uploaded them. Here they are:
* Unfolded Notes – [Ogg](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-unfoldednotes.ogg) [MP3](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-unfoldednotes.mp3) [Lyrics](https://www.recreantview.org/blog/?page_id=113)
* Blood Red Day – [Ogg](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-bloodredday.ogg) [MP3](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-bloodredday.mp3) [Lyrics](https://www.recreantview.org/blog/?page_id=116)
* Untouched Face – [Ogg](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-untouchedface.ogg) [MP3](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-untouchedface.mp3) [Lyrics](https://www.recreantview.org/blog/?page_id=112)
* Death Race -[Ogg](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-deathrace.ogg) [MP3](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-deathrace.mp3) [Lyrics](https://www.recreantview.org/blog/?page_id=110)
* Laying Broken Bones – [Ogg](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-layingbrokenbones.ogg) [MP3](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-layingbrokenbones.mp3) [Lyrics](https://www.recreantview.org/blog/?page_id=114)
* Under a Blackened Sun – [Ogg](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-underablackenedsun.ogg) [MP3](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-underablackenedsun.mp3) [Lyrics](https://www.recreantview.org/blog/?page_id=115)
* What Is Me – [Ogg](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-whatisme.ogg) [MP3](https://www.recreantview.org/songs/jonobacon-whatisme.mp3) [Lyrics](https://www.recreantview.org/blog/?page_id=111)
A month ago these songs never existed, and two days ago they were not recorded. I am pretty pleased with them, naturally there are always things a musician wants to fix, but I am broadly happy with how they came out. 🙂
Thanks so much to Emelye for her contributions to the album, to her husband for cooking us breakfast, her pal Toni for cooking for us and providing some amusement in the afternoon, and to everyone who has supported us in this rather wacky effort. 🙂
Album, on its way
The Big Red Recording has been going very well, and the songs have turned out great. There is however a delay – I will be releasing the songs at Midnight tonight (5 hours later) for some final refinements. We want to make sure this album is as solid as possible, so stay tuned folks. 🙂
Thanks for everyone for your your interest, and we are stunned how many people have been checking the blog and flickr photos as the recording as progressed. You lot have been incredible. 🙂
And the crazyness begins
Well, here it is, today is the big day. In a few hours at 7pm, after some pizza, the recording begins. Its going to be a busy 24 hours – lots to do.
Oh, and I woke up today with a sore throat, which makes things interesting. 😛
Regular updates will appear on [recreantview.org](https://www.recreantview.org/) and regular photos of the recording will appear in the [Big Red Recording Flickr Set](https://www.flickr.com/photos/jonobacon/sets/72157600036354202/).
Nervous is an understatement. I don’t want to let anyone down. Here goes…
Balancing discussion
Recently the subject of mailing list discussion and offensiveness has erupted in the community. This has been triggered by a joke being sent to a list and the fallout that ensued after it. I am not going to comment on the specifics of that incident, but instead look at what I consider a critical issue here – the balance between political correctness and abusive discussion.
The Ubuntu community is a tremendously open, freeform community with a rich and diverse range of people, discussions and opinions. This diversity is our strength – we harness it to express our opinions, validate them and challenge them. To encourage frank and open discussion, we always need our discussion to be exactly that – frank and open. Two enemies to frank and open discussion are extreme *political correctness* and *abusive discussion* and are at entire opposite ends of the discussion spectrum.
On the far right side we have clearly offensive, abusive discussion. This kind of content would offend anyone, whether you fall into the specifically abused demographic or not. Such chatter is not only against the Code Of Conduct but against anyone’s better judgement and is clearly unacceptable – its just not good. On the far left side we have political correctness, and its own battalion of fears that are involved. In this scenario people are afraid to say anything as it could offend *someone*. The problem with being too-PC is that discussion can be stifled and inhibited. So, on the left we have *too careful* and on the right we have *too bad*.
I believe we need balance here. Not only should we be conscious to not post derogatory or discriminatory content, but we should also understand and expect that some things will be offensive in different degrees, and this is part of and parcel of any community, be it on a mailing list, on a bus or in a pub. We cannot eradicate the world of the words we find uncomfortable or offensive, but we should also not accept words that are intended to abuse and discriminate.
Much of this is about context. There are always going to be some things you would say in front of some people and not others, and there is a time and a place for pretty much everything. Public discussion areas such as mailing lists have their own etiquette and norms, and it is common to be more restrained and polite as you are pushing your words out to a wider audience. I think this is fair and reasoned, and we should always remember that we are speaking in a public forum, with a diverse audience, and ensure that our words are suitable for that audience and context.
It concerns me that some of the opinions cited about these issues have fallen into one of the left or right camps – either “those words were horrific and terrible” or “get a sense of humour and chill out”. Neither is right here. We need *balance* and understanding to defend against abuse but to protect diversity.
Song titles
I am pleased to announce the titles of the seven songs to appear on The Big Red Recording:
* Untouched Face
* What Is Me?
* Unfolded Notes
* Laying Broken Bones
* Death Lane
* Under a Blackened Sun
* Blood Red Day
All lyrics are now finalised and complete, although there will no doubt be small changes when they are recorded, usually based around rhythm. I am pretty pleased with the lyrics – they are evocative in many different ways.
My acoustic and electric guitars are now re-strung, and I will be sorting out the studio tonight ready for the big day tomorrow. This is going to be interesting… 🙂
Organic interface design for GNOME
Interface design is a complex business. There are a great many schools of thought about how to build an effective interface, and ultimately no-one is 100% correct. Lots of theory, lots of academia, lots of opinion, but little hard evidence about what design constructs actually work best for general human-computer interaction.
Recently I kicked off a segment on everyone’s-favorite-un-PC-ramblefest, LUGRadio, in which I expressed concerns that the GNOME project is not deciding on a direction for a next-gen incarnation of the environment, and KDE4 is primed to swoop in and eat its lunch. I am pleased to see the segment kicked off some discussion, and the issue has been raised in the minds of some core GNOME contributors.
While at GUADEC 2006 I sat on the patio of our wooden shack with Mirco Muller at about 3am and we spent quite some time discussing concepts about what a next-gen GNOME could look like. For a while I had been mulling over different concepts and ideas about how GNOME should work, and trying to distill them into core interactions for a desktop. In my mind, before you even think about mocking up a a user interface design, you need to define the modes of interaction; they are like deciding which tools and ingredients you are going to need to bake a cake. If you don’t decide on the tools and ingredients, you cannot effectively move onto the design stage and then the implementation.
The problem with current desktops is that they are largely artificial. We have created modes of interaction that the user has to learn to understand the computer, instead of the computer trying to understand the user. We have to learn where things live, how to move things around, which things can be clicked on and which can’t, how sensitivity and insensitivity works and other false economies. Fundamentally *we* the *users* have to fit in with what the computer wants us to do.
The next-gen GNOME needs to change this. It really, *really* does. What I want to see is an *organic* environment; one that is designed around human interactions, tasks and concepts that we find natural, intuitive and repeatable. Do you ever have those experiences where you think “it would make sense if it worked this way, I wonder if it does” and to your surprise it does? We need to fill our desktop with these experiences. To do this, we need to understand what interactions and concepts are natural to us as humans, and work on these concepts in GNOME.
So, with time not my friend right now, here is a rough list of some organic concepts that I think we need to bear in mind in our thinking:
* **Pile Theory** – nope, nothing to do with a nasty dose of the *bum grapes*, but the idea that we all naturally collect and stack things together into piles. I think this is a fundamental concept in a desktop – collections of things. Think of archives, directories, photo sets, collections of songs, related videos – they are groups of things that we need to access both as a group and as the individual items in that group. You can see this theory in action, look at many people’s desktops and the groups of icons of related bits and pieces – we need to make it easy to great this piles. Imagine a 3D interface to this piles where a bunch of items pile on top of each other and you can explode the pile or fit it together and re-organise it in different ways.
* **A Physical Environment** – I want to pick up documents that I am editing, spin them round and scribble notes on them, I want them to look like they are shredded when I delete them, I want to stick related things together like lego – I want a physicality to the things that happen on my desktop. A great first step with this was when Compiz put virtual desktops on a cube – it made the concept of multiple desktops more tangible. We need to apply this kind of physicality to all aspects of the desktop.
* **Contextual Tools** – something I have banged on about with Jokosher. You should only ever see tool options appear when it makes sense and when you can actually use those tools – insensitive greyed out tool options are nothing more than a distraction and a waste of space. In Jokosher, when you make a selection, the tools that can be used on that selection appear, we need to apply this concept to the entire desktop. This makes the desktop feel more organic in itself as the tools will only ever appear applicable to your context. It also makes the desktop far less cluttered and gets away from the nightmare of modal tools. We particularly want to get away from the hundreds of toolbar options available that clutter our applications. For all people have heralded the Ribbon as a great idea in Microsoft Office, I am pretty convinced that it may over-egg the pudding and confuse people with so many functional options available. We *fundamentally* need our desktop to be contextual – more on this later.
* **Two Handed Interaction** – some of the work with multiple mouse pointers makes this possible. For some applications this makes perfect sense. Think of a 3D modeller such as Blender – the most natural modelling process is sculpting using your hands, and this requires two hands. Think about putting things in other things – it makes sense to hold the container open to put the things in it (like when you put items in a carrier bag). Naturally there is a hardware implication for this which will delay its adoption.
* **Real Contextual Working** – a while back I wrote up my thoughts for a [project desktop](https://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/04/remixing_how_we_use_the_open_s.html). We need our applications to be aware of what the user *wants to do* and ensure they are organic enough to evolve into a form that is condusive to that task.
With the growth in 3D technology, we have the opportunity to make all of this happen. This is just a collection of rough notes, but at GUADEC I hope to flesh some of these ideas out with other people. We need to break down the barriers to interaction, but also be brave enough to stand up and set a direction, which was the point of the segment. If I had my own way, I would love to blow off a week and spend all week designing a bunch of mock-ups. I have a fairly clear idea in my head how this kind of stuff would work, inspired from various interfaces and concepts, but I just don’t have the time to mock it up.
Update on TBBR
Quick update on [The Big Red Recording](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/?p=907).
Pretty much all the songs are complete, and I am feverishly writing lyrics. I have written lyrics for three of the songs, and the fourth is on-going. One of the songs may be an instrumental – it sounds pretty cool without lyrics. I have also written all of the drums and bass for the songs, and I spent some time at the weekend with Emelye getting the Cello sorted. She wrote down her notation for her parts, and it is sounding incredible.
In the meantime, there is all the other stuff around the recording to sort out. I have taken my Jackson Randy Rhoads in to be re-strung, and I will be re-stringing my acoustic tonight. Emelye has changed her cello strings, and I will be *decking my gear* (in the words of the mighty Manowar) over the next few days, tweaking everything ready for the big day. Emelye has also arranged for her husband and her friend Toni to come over and cook us breakfast and lunch on Saturday. On Thursday evening I will be going out and buying a huge pack of Red Bull as well as getting the studio in shape. Busy days. 🙂
Its going to be tough. Really tough. 24 hours locked in a room recording is not only going to be exhausting, but physically and mentally challenging. The most challenging parts I suspect are going to be the singing (I have four songs to sing and three to growl, Emelye is also singing on a number of the songs), the drumming (physically demanding) and the cello (Emelye hammers that cello, so there is always the risk of intense finger agony). Combine physically demanding playing with tiredness and it’s a tall order. The plan is to work really hard and fast in the early hours to get the core guitars sorted, and then when we hit the tough time between 4am – 9am, it should be things like bass guitars which are being recorded. By the time the second wind comes at around midday, it will be cello and vocals time. Well, this is the broad plan…never done anything like this before…
We should hopefully be posting regular photos and updates to my blog and flickr. More later.
And and [there is still time donate](https://www.myrednoseday.com/personalPage.aspx?registrationID=216454), tight-wads. 🙂
psubuntu
Now I am [about to become a Playstation 3 owner](https://archivedblog.jonobacon.com/?p=927), things like [psubuntu](https://psubuntu.com/) perk my interest. Am I the only person who thought it was Ubuntu for power supplies? 😛
Oh, and no, I won’t be running Linux on my PS3. I already have Linux running on pretty much everything in my house, and I bought the PS3 for games. 🙂