Doodles & Useless Tutorials: A Personal Weblog

UBUNTU’S ORANGE!!

Orange!!

I can not believe how many people think Ubuntu’s brown, Ubuntu is not brown! It’s ORANGE!

Go ahead, if you’re running Ubuntu right now, open Nautilus and compare the title-bar color to the different shades of orange to the left.

Different shades of orange do look brown, I’ll give you that, but, more lighter shades of orange are used in Ubuntu than the darker ones. Here are a few examples.

Nautilus at any given time will have more orange than any other color, excluding white and gray.

The Ubuntu logo. Here we have two shades of orange, and one dark shade of a reddish-orange. Some would say that there is a shade of yellow in there, well, it’s more of a very light orange, or yellowish-orange, but it’s still orange.

Normally used for updates, also orange. For critical updates it’s a red arrow pointing down, with an exclamation point on it.

A few Ubuntu icons. The folder there is orange, the SD card or floppy there is orange, same as the CD label.

And here are a few shades of brown…

So yeah, Ubuntu, definitely not brown.

I hope you all’ve learned a valuable lesson, which is: orange is different than brown, and Ubuntu is orange.

Some wallpapers included in Ubuntu are brown, but, the wallpapers don’t make the distribution.

Thank you.

Now, we’ve all probably read this before: http://magazine.redhat.com/2008/05/29/interview-joel-cohen-writer-and-associate-producer-of-the-simpsons/#more-907

Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Macintosh operating systems have software built-in necessary for tracking and reporting usage statistics. This lets them easily see how much market share they have. And what people are doing on their computers, what software they’re using, what music they’re playing, what files they’re downloading, copying, moving, sharing, editing, etc., that’s why it’s evil, and a bad thing to include in software all together. But it helps them count their market share.

Thankfully GNU/Linux doesn’t include such software. But, we also can’t see what kind of market share GNU/Linux holds. To the statistics, it’s like GNU/Linux doesn’t even exist. We have to find/guess what the market share is.

So, I want to share with everyone, a way to tell when GNU/Linux has entered the mainstream. It’s called “The Simpsons Test.”

We’ve all probably seen the episode of The Simpsons “The Burns and the Bees” by now — where Montgomery Burns (Mr. Burns) attends the Billionaire’s Retreat with Ted Turner, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, etc., where he tells a story about when he won a professional basketball team in a poker game, and the new arena he plans to have Springfield build for the team threatens to interfere with Lisa’s new bee sanctuary. And due to the Bees, his arena is ruined; making him 400 million dollars short of one billion dollars, so Ted Turner, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, etc., kick him out of the Billionaire’s Retreat and into the Millionaires Cabin.

Here’s how it works: The Simpsons used Ted Turner, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban, etc., and Bill Gates (a few times) as examples of billionaires.

So… Right when The Simpsons use Mark Shuttleworth — who was the second self-funded space tourist. Shuttleworth founded Canonical Ltd. and as of 2009, provides leadership for the Ubuntu operating system — as an example of a billionaire — although I don’t know if he’s a billionaire anymore, just a billionaire in South Africa, or even close to worth a billion dollars in net worth — or an example of, say “Really rich guys who for some reason travel to space” or something like that.

Or a general mention to GNU/Linux as a “fanboy”, “nerd”, “hard to use” or other kind of operating system. THAT’S, when we’ll know GNU/Linux has made it to the mainstream.

After all, Apple was truely “mainstream” when The Simpsons made fun of them in the episode “Mypods and Boomsticks” though Apple already had a very reasonable market share before the episode thinks to their iPods, iPhones, iMacs, Final Cut Pro, the Macintosh operating system (to a lesser extent,) and other products. But, like I wrote “Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Macintosh operating systems have software built-in necessary for tracking and reporting usage statistics.” and “GNU/Linux doesn’t include such software.”

For those of you whom use GNU/Linux, you might know of a little program called Cinelerra. Cinelerra is Free Software, licensed under the GNU General Public License. Some of you may have seen this video on YouTube…


If not, you should watch it, and then continue reading on.

I’ve contacted the YouTube user that uploaded this video. I wanted to know how — in detail — how he made the effect he did. No response.

Here is the video I’ll be working with…

With the knowledge to make the same effect, one could master it, and use it for other — more powerful — visual effects. Some of which are effects like a Lightsaber, gun shots, bullet holes, fire balls, lasers, etc..

At this point we don’t know how to accomplish such an effect. So I played around with Cinelerra-CV* for a long time, and finally found out how.

*CV stands for Community Version.

So here is my tutorial on how to get the same effect, in a similar way. Note, in order to achieve an effect like a Lightsaber, you’ll need a computer better than something intended as a personal computer. The processor would likely have to be a 64 bit Quad-Core 3.0GHz. The computer would also likely have to have 4 gigabytes of memory, a 512MB video card that is supported by the Linux kernel, like newer ATI / nVidia cards, and of course a sound card built-on or other. But for this test a common netbook could even achieve this effect.

Let’s start…

First you’ll open Cinelerra, or Cinelerra-CV, of course.

Secondly you’ll open your video, of course, make sure it’s a supported format; Cinelerra-CV likes MOVs, some MPEGs, some FLVs, and others. Open your video as “Replace current project.”

Thirdly you’ll apply the “Motion” video effect, and the settings shown in the image below. Change them for your own video, of course.


The “Save coords to /tmp” is very important. Try to match these settings as close as possible.

You should see something like this…

Let the video run once with the effect, than disable it.



Fourthly you’re going to open another file, an image for this tutorial’s sake, make sure you open the file as to “Append in new tracks.”

And you’re going to apply the “Motion” video effect, and the settings shown in the image below. Tweaks might be necessary.


The “Load coords from /tmp” is very important. Try to match these settings as close as possible.

You should see something like this…

Move the appended file to wherever you want on the video, lining it up for the effect you’re trying to achieve. And you’re good to go son.

Though here is another video with the same effect:

The candle was unlit.

[EDIT] I see that all but one of the videos above got removed from YouTube, luckily I hosted all the files I needed to reproduce and re-upload.

The Files I Used:

The Original MOV file: GEDC1272.MOV

The circle gradient used for light: gunshotgradient.png

And the finished video’s un-rendered project file: lamplight.xml

Download my original MOV file, gunshotgradient.png and my XML project file, into your filesystem which is the highest level you can go and called “/”, you’ll need root privileges. The files need to be in the filesystem because the location is the same on ever default GNU/Linux distribution, if you place them in your home folder the XML won’t work correctly.

Open the XML project file in Cinelerra and my tracks will be there, with the effects I applied to achieve the desired effect.

Where you can download Cinelerra and Cinelerra-CV:

Official: http://www.heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php
(bugier than the Community Version)

Community Version: http://cvs.cinelerra.org/
(used in this tutorial)