nicu - a window to my sucky life

Winter wallpapers

2012-01-23T14:05:00.000+02:00

Some more freely licensed wallpaper sized photos (wide), this time with a winter theme, use as you want:

SOPA for non-Americans

2012-01-19T12:27:00.000+02:00

Yesterday was the strike day against SOPA and PIPA and I tried to do my part: blacked-out my blogs, put related content on various places, shared link, informing. Many people seemed to understand the issue, but not everybody. Below is an excerpt from a comment (translation is mine) by someone in Romania, a person with IT and FOSS background, this make the quote even more relevant (I saw similar reaction on other tech sites):

I don't understand... SOPA is an American law, right? passed by their shitty Congress, right? how it affect me? how will affect Europe an American law? we aren't Americans so we don't have to obey their laws... what's the deal with this shit? Google and others can move their servers in Asia or Europe and... done... as Obama failed with Google and HP which moved to Ireland for lower taxes...[...]
Back to the initial question... SOPA is an American law, it will affect them.... not me... I am not American... and I don't ever want to be... European countries don't need to obey American laws... as they, in fact do... they don't obey... If the big companies want to keep up any site with piracy of any kind... they only have to host it in Russia :))... SOPA filters will be made in USA, not in our country...
You will say our routes pass there... so what? it takes 30 seconds to change some server routes on your workstation... and 1-2 hours for them to propagate... If USA want to do that, they can do it...

Some points from my reply:

US corporations won't move, they will stay and obey the law and even if they move servers elsewhere, they still have to obey the law, since they want to make business in the US
the case about moving in Ireland is different: it was for taxes, not to produce illegal things
SOPA filters will fork in such way that an European website may get blocked for people in USA
the American government has control over the root DNS filters and there the blocking will happen, the world would have to switch to an alternate DNS system
once it happens, other countries will follow with their own censorship laws, European countries are eager to do it, as demonstrated with TPB
"free Dmitry": you may get arrested even if you do something legal in your country.

For such reasons the Romanian Fedora community participated in the campaign with a notice about the Fedora's stance against censorship (not a full blackout as with my personal blogs, since neither the international project went for a total blackout). From my part, I would have preferred Fedora to go to a full blackout, like Mozilla, Wikipedia or openSUSE, I am disappointed by Red Hat having a stance so weak, it was not even mentioned on their own opensource.com and I am unhappy with Fedora stuck in bureaucracy and not being able to produce in due time an official statement I can link to in the news item.

Hopefully I will make your day better with shining examples from TheOatmeal, Playboy and FightingInternet.

Strike Agains SOPA & PIPA

2012-01-18T08:27:00.002+02:00

Fedora and SOPA

2012-01-13T10:07:00.000+02:00

USA Congress is going to debate and, as the current signs say, approve SOPA and Internet censorship on January 24. Trying to prevent this, a number of online entities are planning an awareness campaign on January 18, ranging from entire blackout of websites (to show the public the expected effects of the law) to mere informational banners and interstitials.

Would Fedora join them? I have little faith it will happen, but we are going to be affected, the project is USA based and was affected in the past (look at multimedia support, audio and video codecs as an example), the main sponsor is also an USA corporation. As a community Fedora is relying user-generated content, and SOPA will block user-generated content, imagine a Fedora with no wiki, no planet blog aggregator, no web archived mailing lists, not even Bugzilla or Koji. Would that be of any use for you? (and don't imagine the project won't be affected, it won't move servers outside USA, it won't change sponsors, it will obey the USA law).

How about other FOSS projects, we are all pretty much in the same boat?

From my party, my own blogs will turn black on January 18.

RHL9

2012-01-03T09:47:00.000+02:00

Back from the holidays for the New Year, one of the first thing I did was to check g+ and learn about what happened in my absence. Among many things about the SOPA atrocity, I found this funny piece titled 10 Reasons to Switch to Linux in 2012, is funny because it gets every one of the 10 points wrong (if I am bored enough, I may write a follow-up showing how and why), but this is not about I want to write now.Scrolling down the article, at about the middle, there is a Best Prices on LINUX/UNIX box in the right sidebar. What is it about? Red Hat Linux 9, Red Hat Linux 8, things discontinued 7-8 years ago (I am too lazy to count).And the site is real, even if so poorly maintained and updated, it has product pages and user reviews. It felt like browsing the web of 10 years ago, both in terms of products and predictions. Let me check again: yes, is 2012.

Getting contributors

2011-12-29T13:58:00.000+02:00

A slow day near the New Year break, calm and silent. Then I get a private message on IRC from a total stranger: he wants to know if is possible to join the Fedora design team. I start by making clear I am not part of the team currently (he supposedly saw may name on the contributors list) and then say is an open community, anyone can join, and point to the instructions on the wiki.

The guy insists in learning the name of the "maintainer", I direct him to the mailing list and #fedora-design, insist on my turn about using normal, open, channels, not people who can be busy or away for the holidays but still tell him the name of the team leader, is public information after all. He want a "chance to join", I repeat joining is open for everyone and point to the mailing list again.

Passing briefly the part about which software is used, my alarm signal is triggered by the next one "in this field coding is not need ?". I answer calmly and now, half an hour into the talk, is my time to ask "what are your skills? what do you know to do? why do you want to be part of the project?" and learn he is a college student with the hobby of doing graphic design.

Then comes the icing of the cake, his following question "after contribution , money will be got or not?" Now is crystal clear my interlocutor knows nothing about Free Software, open source, community, Fedora, Linux and such. Is the time for me to point to our homepage and tell directly we are a volunteer project (duh! we have poor wording on the front page, a poor English speaker is confused).

As a last item, he is stunned to learn I do not work for Fedora and Fedora is not a corporation hiring people. I have the feeling I won't hear from him any more and he won't post to the list. Should I call this over a half an hour wasted time or should I call it a learning experience? Anyway, my current confidence in new contributors is quite low at this minute.

Thunderbird adventures

2011-12-29T12:01:00.000+02:00

I use Thunderbird as my mail client, keeping it up to date to the latest version, Tb 9, thanks to Remi's repo, all on a Fedora 14 desktop. It may use a bit more resources than I like (my desktop is an old computer, with limited RAM amount), but overall I get by.

Not so much the other day, when I was sent a scanned image to crop and adjust it and I just tried to do that. Naive me! An email with an 7.2 MB attached JPEG rendered the mail client unusable and the entire desktop almost unusable: a memory consumption increase from 89.0 MB (Thunderbird "normal" usage) to 373.5 MB (trying to open that particular message) it may not look like such a killer but somehow that was the effect:

In the end I managed to download the attachment and learned the problem: it was a 7.2 MB big image, but the resolution was 9924 x 14039 (don't ask, whoever scanned the image, scanned a full A4 for a small, university diploma sized image, and made it at a huge DPI, so the result can be printed big size. I said "don't ask"). No wonder it was a killer to try and decompress it in RAM.

Now the next challenge, edit the image: crop, rotate, remove cracks and scratches, delete a stamp, improve colors and so. I bet you guessed already: GIMP can't open it, at least my GIMP 2.7.1 (the newest available for Fedora 14) tried with no result until I killed it after over 10 minutes of waiting (yeah, I know, don't preach me the benefits, working with large size images is one of the real benefits of Photoshop).

Fortunately, it was possible to open the image for viewing and Shotwell has a crop function included. Once the important part of the image was cropped all was well, GIMP did the job, another success was checked.

European winner for Wiki Loves Monuments

2011-12-09T10:09:00.001+02:00

After every country, including us, nominated their national winners, it was the time for the big European final, with 17 participating countries. And now we also have the European winners. Here's the first place:

Is a picture from Romania, illustrating the ruins of the Chiajna monastery near Bucharest and the funny part is, in my opinion, it barely made our top, it was 10th place from 10 finalists... there is truth in "last but no least". Why? Where it is a good, beautiful and powerful picture, those ruins are well known among the photographers from Bucharest... at least my personal reaction was "yet another picture of Chiajna? at least this one is good" (for over I year I plan a photo session on my own there, still looking for the "right" model, as I want something more glamour/goth).

Personally I am even more happy since the winner, Mihai Petre is kind of my friend (if you wonder, this didn't affect my notes in the national contest and I was not involved in any way with the European notes) and he is a very cool person. Here's a bonus: I have a picture of him I made this summer at a metal festival, can you identify him?

We rock. Literally.

Chrome vs. Firefox

2011-12-05T12:49:00.001+02:00

Compared with other services, I usually found the stats given by StatCounter having bigger values for Firefox (have no idea about their, or others, methodologies), this is why I don't take the exact numbers as absolute but was looking at the trends. The latest report, which made the rounds in the tech press is showing how worldwide Chrome slightly overtook Firefox (with half a percent) and both of them added are way above Internet Explorer (10 percents). This pretty much mirrors my anecdotal evidence of seeing IE mostly on the computers of the most clueless users, Firefox on those installed by a knowledgeable friend or admin and Chrome used more and more by simple-to-average users and even techies.Is funny how the stats change when looking at my country, Romania, here the places of Internet Explored are switched: Firefox is the top-dog on a slow but sure decline and Chrome just overtaking Internet Explorer for the second place. Of course, the sum of Firefox and Chrome is crushing IE. Not bad.As for myself, I still use Firefox as my main browser for the simple reason I can't stand the UI of Chrome. I am worried about Mozilla's idiotic policy to blindly copy the Chrome UI (is a different browser, it should look and feel different, otherwise why use it? I use it for some reasons, and Gecko is not the only), but continue to use Firefox, deploy only Firefox and support (as in user support) only Firefox.

Open letter to the Romanian Ministry for Culture and Patrimony

2011-11-25T16:24:00.001+02:00

A group of organisations and interested persons from Romania are addressing an open letter to the Romanian Ministry for Culture and Patrimony about the Romanian cultural patrimony on the Internet, which can be published at Europeana.eu, where our country was to submit 789,000 works until 2015 and currently has managed to publish less than 36,000. We ask about the status of this project and propose the use of the images contributed in the recent Romanian Wikipedia photography contest. The full text can be read on the ProLinux website or in printable format (along with the signatures list) from the APTI blog.

Upgrade strategy

2011-11-08T11:59:00.001+02:00

Later today Fedora 16 will be officially released, I am using F14 which is becoming quite long in the tooth, so now is probably a good time to evaluate my upgrade path.

Back in May after some testing I deemed F15 unsuitable for desktop/workstation usage and made the decision to skip a release. It was a first for me, the single one Fedora release I ever skipped, since RHL 9, when I moved to use Linux as my primary desktop. What's the status now, one release later? I acknowledge not doing any testing, had to fight with F14 day by day to get some work done, but I read enough so from what I can see: GNOME Shell is still the same, Xfce is still the same, KDE is still the same. Nothing new, nothing better. So I see ahead another skippable release, which is not that bad considering F14 still has a workable paradigm and is not self-expiring shareware, the applications are the problem and they are what matters most.

So after judging I came with the following strategy: skip F16 also, keep using F14 one more month until its EOL in December and then continue to use it unsupported a couple of months more until F17 Beta. Postpone any decision until then and with the bits released download and evaluate. What can happen by then:

Xfce has a release in January, it may become good enough. Considering the current status and the TODO, the expectations aren't high;
GNOME may become sane and usable again. Highly unlikely;
I may lose faith and accept defeat, give up on the Linux desktop, go to W7. It would be sad after so many year;
I may get into BDSM and start using something like Openbox, saying goodbye to any possible productivity;
get some kind of strange revelation and give KDE a try.

Freeloading

2011-11-07T14:40:00.000+02:00

I do release a lot of content, from drawings and clipart to photography and to videos and learned about many people using them, this always brings a smile on my face. But it can be otherwise :) Today I got a question about some of my clipart being used on some website, but with a twist: I am asked if credit is needed, as in such case the site owner has to adjust the layout to fit it, needing to think about that. My answer was dry "Since those clipart images are released into Public Domain, crediting is not compulsory, that's the license. Is up to you." opposed to an usual "the images are released into the Public Domain, you can use them in any way you want. credit is not required but is appreciated". Indeed, I released the stuff freely, no restriction can be imposed afterwards. But I can contemplate the laziness and freeloading. And smile.

More autumn wallpapers

2011-11-01T09:25:00.001+02:00

I already did a post with some Free autumn wallpapers which I unexpectedly caught back in Milano, but as the last week-end I stumbled upon some more beautiful autumn leaves here in Bucharest, so I couldn't stop myself from taking pics and prepare them as wide-screen wallpapers. Enjoy, they are Free.

...and the winners are...

2011-10-31T09:50:00.000+02:00

The Wikipedia photography contest has ended, the jury made its duty and now we are ready to announce the results (this blog is the first to break the news). So who won?

The first place: Union Square of Timișoara

The second place: "Sfânta Treime" church in Sibiu

Third place: the ruins in Bociulesti

Mentions
Old city panorama:

Mavros-Cantacuzino manor:
Alba Iulia citadel gate:
Caraiman cross:
Densuș church:
Alba Iulia citadel:
Chiajna monastery:

All the 10 images above go to the European final contest, good luck friends!

Welcome to the Revolution, baby!

2011-10-28T17:40:00.000+03:00

The article is in French, so not that easy to understand by everyone, but some group, called "Union des Photographers Professionnels" are opposing the Wiki Loves Monuments photography contest. Why such a stupid thing? Below is a translation of the relevant paragraphs by strainu:

"Presented as a philanthropic operation, this initiative looks more like a commercial action. Indeed, the participation is conditioned by the acceptance of a CC license allowing the commercial reuse of the pictures.
Private or public entities can therefore use this pictures legally as postcards, posters, books or as illustrations in the press.
The professional photographers living from the copyrights are worried by this initiative [...]"

Newsflash! That is the point, Freedom is about empowering people and changing the system, it obsoletes some structures and creates some others instead. We are not any more in the old world, when a photographer, of an artist in general, was like a god, now people have tools and access to distribution channels and participate directly in the creation of the culture, without money barriers and monopolies. I am glad to pe part of this.

The dice, the manga and the anime

2011-10-25T18:14:00.000+03:00

I am not sure: the world is small after all or the little things we do really change it, even if a tiny bit. Either of those should be true.

Last week-end I was (with my camera, of course) at Nijikon, the anime convention taking place every October in Bucharest: there was cosplay, manga, anime, plush toys, really many things. And while wandering around searching for some photographer's prey, I noticed a wheel of fortune improvised at a manga booth:

Something there looked familiar, but I wasn't sure about it and had no way to verify it on the spot. In the evening, I was really tired arriving home, and forgot to check, so the next day couldn't ask the guys about it the second day, I checked only after the event ended:

Yup, the dice image is part of my Free clipart collection - one of my first drawings with Inkscape, made many years ago, so it looks quite weak, but still they found it useful.

Thise clipart images somehow managed to leave home, make a trip to California and return home by the way of the manga. Yes, the world is small.

For cosplay pics, I am sure my readers know where to look :p

Judging for WMLRO

2011-10-20T15:12:00.000+03:00

I believe in transparency and think an open community has to be transparent, so I am going for full-disclosure on the inner workings of the judging process for the Romanian Wiki Loves Monuments contest.

So after September, when the contest ended, the first thing we did was to merge the submissions made to Flickr into the ones already at Wikimedia Commons and count them.

The team is small, 2 organizers, 3 jury members, one person shared by both teams, so 4 people in total, the number of submissions had to be made manageable. For this we had each member of the jury go trough all submissions and make an initial selection, as his proposal. Each of us proposed around 100 images.

Then the image lists were merged, sorted, and the duplicates removed, resulting in a final selection of 284 images, those were marked in a special Wikimedia Commons category, have a look at it, is supposed to contain the best images.

The harder part is the next one: all 284 pictures will be reviewed by each member of the jury and each will receive a rating on 3 categories: technical, originality and usefulness, the final note will be the average of all 3 notes, and this will be the winning order.

For this we needed an application, preferably web-based and since I am way to lazy to code a web app for a single use, I went to the darkside and used a proprietary solution: Google Docs. It has 2 godsends: one is the ability to be collaboratively edited at the same time by multiple users, and the other is a formula, "=IMAGE(URL, view)".

So how does my app look? Is a spreadsheet, first column is the image thumbnail, made with "=IMAGE(URL, view)", the second is the URL of the image page, to be easily consulted at full size, then a series of columns for noting follow, the last one is a general purpose comments column. Each jury member has 3 columns for notes (technical, originality, usefulness) and an automatic total, a pondered sum of his notes (technical * 30% + originality * 50% + usefulness * 20%), then the sums are averaged. Quite simple. And you can see a read-only copy of this spreadsheet, reuse the model if you have any use for it.

Now there is a little over a week, until the end of the next week, while the jurors have the time to give their notes and then they will meet face to face for any eventual arbitration and final review.

October RLUG meeting

2011-10-14T14:54:00.001+03:00

Yesterday happened the October RLUG meet in Bucharest, this time I withhold from delivering a presentation, since lately I was focused mostly on the Wikipedia contest, with very little time for anything else, I presented about it last month, will do it again next month, don't want to bore too many people. But I still did my "media" job.

So we have a small photo gallery from the event and video recordings for the presentations: OpenPGP key signing party (such a party may follow) and Linux install fest review (past week-end ROSEdu kept a successful Ubuntu install party).

Autumn wallpapers

2011-10-11T15:27:00.000+03:00

Not sure how much opportunity for photography I'll get this autumn, so when in Milano I stumbled upon a couple of parks with nice light and autumn colors, I took a few pictures which are now wallpaper sized and released freely for use:

Meaty matters

2011-10-11T09:47:00.000+03:00

I am slightly disappointed for Never not making the code name for F17, this way I cannot put in practice a traditionally bad joking cartoon with a story along the lines of "hey dude, you are still using F14 on your desktop? that's ancient, is almost the age of... W7", "well, i want an usable desktop", "are you a caveman? mobile phone interface are now all the rage, you must upgrade! when will you upgrade?", "never", "hahaha, you stupid! 'never' is the code name for F17","i knew that, and F17 may have at least an Xfce *i* can use".

But is not that bad, the Beefy Miracle sets a precedent, we will surely try again and maybe, just maybe, legal will be OK with it and won't block Bacon again and it will make for F18. And for those keeping release parties for F16 (we will most likely skip it again in Bucharest), having a hot dog for everyone is basically a must.

Late to the voting but still in time

2011-10-10T10:43:00.001+03:00

After FUDCon I got caught by a lot of work, realizing very little about the world around, so somehow I missed the announcement for the F17 codename vote. And, with disappointment, I should acknowledge beefy miracle it was not my first option, as I expected (and I waited for... years), I felt into temptation by never (with "beefy miracle" as a close and single second), it enables for so many bad jokes... "when **** will ****? in F17, never!!!"

From Milano: the big photo dump

2011-10-04T14:57:00.002+03:00

I was asked repeatedly about my photos from the Milano FUDCon, when and where will be posted and I always replied a big photo dump is coming in the next days, after I get home. And that time is now, I am posting, as I did with the other previous FUDCons, a big dump with many photos, barely sorted and unedited: I don't have that much free time and I was not making art there. Bigger versions may be available upon request, but you can use them freely, as in CC-BY-SA, anyway.When time will be available, hopefully this week, I am going to dump a bunch of my "travel" photos, with what I saw from the city. Probably it will be linked only from the photography blog.

The problem of too many

2011-10-04T09:40:00.001+03:00

After the submission period for Wiki Loves Monuments ended with around 5800 pictures from Romanian contributors, it was decided to leave the uploader working, so the people wanting to continue posting pictures with monuments have this shortcut handy. But something happened, the form was not edited enough (don't look at me, I am not an admin) and it continued to leave some categories on the pictures' metadata and even after the contest formally ended, we continued to see the uploads increasing, the following couple of days and they climbed to over 6000.
While this is cool and dandy for Wikipedia, for the Romanian culture and for the project gathering continued contributors, is not that good for the contest itself, we had a number of pictures to deal with somehow.... not manually, since the tools are not that great. Being away for FUDCon, I missed the opportunity to signal the problem in due time, my colleague was away too, so quite a few pictures piled-up.
But never is too late, yesterday a bot started working, cleaning the categories for some 270+ pics (yes, that awesome are our contributors), we are back to 5767 pictures for the contest, to which there may be some uploads from Flickr to be sync-ed and about 152 pics from the organizers to be removed. So we are looking at well over 6000 pictures as a result of this campaign, with around 5700 of them eligible for the contest.

My FUDCon finale

2011-10-02T23:47:00.000+03:00

After FUDCon ended, I wandered a bit in the Milano city center and one of the things I did was to meet this happy group offering free hugs (surely i received some). Told them I have friends at home doing such things (didn't tell I am kind of their "official" photographer)... maybe we, FOSS communities, should do it too? It would put a more human light.

Thoughts on WLMRO

2011-10-02T13:48:00.002+03:00

Still at FUDCon and still not having digested completely the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign numbers, here are are some fresh feelings about it:

Should I be sad due to my friends who promised to participate and didn't or the friends who didn't even considerate participating? No, this was not the point, you can't force someone to volunteer and community work is not for everyone.

Should I be sad due to local companies not interested is sponsoring the contest? No, this was not the point to buy contributions, but to make people understand how fun can be to participate. Surely, I wish we could have better rewards, but we are not marketeers and the economy is slow.

Should I be sad my country placed on the 10th position from 18 participant European countries, behind some smaller ones? No, it was not such type of contest, in fact it was well expected, knowing how little spread is the community work around here. And we also placed in front of many other countries.

Should I be sad about the guy who tried to put a personal vendetta against the campaign and me personally, throwing mud at every possible step? No, there are loons everywhere and there is the saying "let the dogs bark, the caravan is moving forward", the noise was ignored.

Should I be happy we gathered 5800 free pictures with monuments from my country in an one single month? Yes, definitely, this in one degree of magnitude over my (pessimistic, I admit) expectations, we showed is possible.

Should I be proud about the accomplishment? I am not sure, on one hand, I have to acknowledge we could have been done a much better job, on the other we basically were only two people doing the organizational work and it was our first project of such magnitude.

Should I think about doing it, or something similar, again? Why not?

The baby and the beer

2011-10-02T11:53:00.001+03:00

People never learn not to dare me, because I don't need much pushing intro doing nasty things or simply trolling, so is this funny picture. And my model didn't even needed directions, like the "baby, make love with the beer" cliché: Problem? :D I'm just doing my hackfest!

Beefy stuff that matters

2011-10-02T11:45:00.001+03:00

Also on the beginning of the last FUDCon day there was a "Fedora trivia" were a few Beefy Miracle T-shirts were awarded. Lucky winners...

Milano: FUDCon/Hackfest

2011-10-02T11:20:00.003+03:00

The last day of the FUDCon is for hackfests, so we started with hackfest planning for the day:

I, for one, started with hacking a muffin:

Someone gave me the idea, I could do it but most likely won't: do a photoshooting hackfest on the building roof... any victim volunteering?

FUDPub Milano

2011-10-02T01:58:00.001+03:00

A tradition for every FUDCon is the FUDPub, and for the Milano FUDCon it just happened this night at an Italian pizzeria. Unfortunately is late and I am very tired, so for now one picture should suffice, good night, see you tomorrow :)

FUDCon group photos

2011-10-01T16:42:00.002+03:00

You know I am evil (and nasty, and a perv and much more), no naturally I want to steal the thunder from the official Milano FUDCon photographers and come first with a group photo. In fact with two, since I am twice as evil (I am evil and my evil twin is evil too). But I will give them a favor, my pics are quite non-standard, from some more extreme angles, so is a place for each of us under the sun.

Thank You for WLMRO

2011-10-01T13:47:00.000+03:00

At FUDCon, I am taking my breath after delivering an Inkscape session/workshop/demo/presentation (the picture below is taken by Adrian, my friend) and using this time to say something to a bunch of awesome people.

What I have to say is a big and warm thank you! to the awesome contributors to the Romanian Wiki Loves Monuments campaign, which closed last night (we are now going to the next stage, centralizing pictures, passing them to the jury and awarding a few prizes). My highest dreams were not even close to it, but the total we reached is around 5800 pictures (more precise numbers after we clean and add the last items from the Flcikr queue). I am barely find my words, so I will shut-up for the moment and return to the conference:

FUDCon started

2011-10-01T11:22:00.000+03:00

So, finally, the Milano FUDCon started:

The first thing was, as expected, Jarred's foreword and opening:

And then the BarCamp talks pitch, still on-going:

Now I have to run and pitch my own session, see you later!

...few minutes later (couldn't post, the Wi-Fi was down for a while), now the talks are pitched, waiting for people to vote on them:

The Lady and the Tramp

2011-10-01T01:11:00.001+03:00

Since someone dared me to post this night this picture worthy of a Disney movie, taken at the FUDCon warm-up party, I had to do it, I leave on you to guess who is the Lady and who is the Tramp. Good night everyone!

FUDCon Milano, Day 1

2011-10-01T01:02:00.001+03:00

Today was the first day of probably the shortest FUDCon ever, with some of the Fedora contributors gathered here in Milano going in the evening near the city center for a warm-up party:I didn't stay long, since I had to be near a computer with internet access and some silence, having to end the photography contest (more on that probably later tomorrow, for now will say only this: aroudt 5700 pics!)

The last day

2011-09-30T09:05:00.001+03:00

Today is the first day of the Milano FUDCon and early in the morning I am waiting for the breakfast so I can go to the conference place, but as early as is, I had to share something and to make a last request: today is also the last day of the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign and our contributors were busy at night furiously uploading pictures so we passed the 5000 mark (actually we are above 5300 as I write this), way above my expectations (I didn't dare to vocalize any 5K hopes). And the request? Is more of a reminder, is the last day, if you have any pics left, now is the time to upload them, the contest will close at the end of the day (you can, of course, continue to contribute after, some people asked about that, only it will be off the contest).
Thank you!

The last, straight, line

2011-09-28T13:28:00.000+03:00

Tomorrow I will be travelling to FUDCon Milano (yay FUDCon, here I come!), away from home, from my computer, from my pictures and probably away from an reliable internet connection, so I uploaded my last batch of photos, 10 pictures from the Village Museum in Sibiu, and put everything on auto-pilot, we are in the last straight line of the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign, with only two days left and about 45000 pictures uploaded so far (the 4.5k mark is going to be passed probably in the next couple of hours). Will continue with a few conclusion near the end of the week from Milano and going to the next step (centralisation, jury, statistics) starting early next week.

Now excuse me, there are some last minute things to take care of.

Wiki took Bucharest

2011-09-26T10:22:00.001+03:00

As planned, we had yesterday (Sunday) a photo walk in Bucharest to gather together some contributors to the Wiki Loves Monuments photography campaign and also take a few pictures for the contest

The starting point was at Eroilor subway station, some came, some couldn't (funny story: the couple who in the previous day did their own 10km photo walk had hurting legs and couldn't):

We were seven people and since we exceeded the six people threshold, "plan B" was activated: we split in two sub-teams, each following a different route, planed as about 2 hours long, and then joined back together in the city center. I let the team take pictures of monuments (is a contest, after all), resuming myself to "making of" pics, below are the adventures of my team:

As you can see, each had his/her own tools: from mobile phone and compact cameras to DSLRs:

And each of us freely took the pictures he/she wanted:

In the end we meet the other team in front of Caru' cu Bere and those who wanted continued somewhere in the Old City with some talk, beer and pizza (not pictured, I don't want people to hate me that much):

Expect the pictures to hit Wikimedia Commons any time soon (some already did, probably). And BTW, we are close to 3800, is the last week, the time to contribute the last pics you have lingering, don't be lazy!

...and if you have pictures from your own photo walk, please share them, ours was fun!

2.5k and one more week to go. Wiki rulz!

2011-09-22T09:28:00.000+03:00

One more week passed and another milestone was reached in the Romanian Wikipedia photography contest: we passed 2500 pictures! This was a spectacular growth after 500+ at the end of the first week and ~1200 at the end of the second week. Thank you everybody!Now anyone wanna bet about the amount of images we will receive in the next (last) week? Another surprise or some slowing down? Guess Romania's final position among the 18 countries participating?But better stop betting and guessing, put your hands on your camera, go out, search some monuments, take pics with them and send them to Wikipedia, you know you want to do that!Also, if you live in Bucharest, you can join us for a photo walk on Sunday, we can take some photos, know each other better, maybe have a beer or so... fun time anyway. And if you don't live in Bucharest, you can organize your own photo walk in your city, it can be equally fun, grab some people and go out, in the big room with the clue ceiling.

Jury duty

2011-09-15T10:02:00.002+03:00

Time to share two unrelated stories about my participation in the Wikipedia photography contest:

The other day was talking with someone I know for about a couple of weeks, when she asked "are you in the jury for the Wikipedia contest?" me: "yes! do you participate?" and her "yes". What to do? "cool! but be aware I won't play favorites :D " and out of curiosity had to ask "how did you learn about it? it was from my facebook wall posts?" and she "no, I heard a week ago from a friend". Kinda bummer "but I kept talking about Wikipedia stuff"... for a "yeah, but didn't understood is about this". The conclusion is positive: people talk about it, people hear about it from unexpected source, there is hope for sustained level of contributions in the remaining weeks (hmmm.... maybe even sustained growth?).

Also the other day I meet a photographer friend for a photo action in the city with a larger group (bummer, it was the perfect opportunity to wear the WLM T-shirt, but it didn't arrived yet, any time soon), so having free time for half an hour I did took a few monument pictures and was showing them to this friend (she will contribute some stuff to Wikipedia in the following week, has the photos ready, needs the time - again, hope for sustained level) and she asked "but aren't you in the jury?". So I had to explain her, and will do it here again: yes, I am in the jury and would not be fair for me to enter the contest, so I won't. But at the same time, I cannot stand and skip contributing to Wikipedia, I do it all the time, contest or not. So I take my photos, submit them, add them to the total number, but they will be outside the competition.

PS: 2 weeks passed, 1186 photos received in the Romanian contest. still 2 weeks to go.

One thousand pictures

2011-09-13T13:46:00.002+03:00

If a picture is worth 1000 words, then what is worth 1000 pictures? Not sure, but 1000 pictures is the milestone we just reached in the Romanian Wikipedia photography contest and this is before reaching the half of the contest duration. Not bad, I say. Better than I expected. Let them coming!

A first week of WLM

2011-09-09T16:42:00.000+03:00

So many notable things happened during the first week of the Wiki Loves Monuments photography contest, I talked about some of them yesterday at the RLUG meet (there is a video recording of it available), first of them, in this week we passed the 500 pictures milestone, in 7 days reached 516 uploads (422 of them uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and 94 to Flickr). With this amount, Romania is somewhere close with Sweden for the 11-12 place in the pan-European competition. While it may seems modest compared with other countries (like Switzerland for example), it exceeds all my expectations (maybe I was too pessimistic?).

Another thing to notice is the contest banner on Wikipedia, it started running a few days ago, so the exposure is increasing with a huge amount:

Not last, regarding exposure, today we just closed a media partnership with a large (near to 1.5M unique monthly visitors) video sharing site who is advertising our competition (yeah, technically this happened in the second week, but is worth noting).

Hunting for WLM

2011-09-06T10:00:00.001+03:00

A good approach for taking pictures for the Wiki Loves Monuments Wikipedia photography contest is to have "monument hunting sessions" and this is what I tried to organize for the last week-end: get a few photographers out in the city, with a list of monuments in hand (paper, electronic device, their brains, whatever), have a walk on the streets, have fun, take photos, and then from home upload the photos to Wikipedia. Don't say it isn't fun!My plan was to assemble a team of 2-3 photographers (with me not taking photos, I am organizer and a judge, I won't enter the contest) but it was too short, found only Razvan available, so we did the photo walk together and in the end I took a few pictures too, unsure if and how to use them - after that, speaking with more people we decided to have a special category for photos submitted by organizers, so in the next days I will uplaod content too, but outside the contest.What I decided NOT to do myself is to transform the contest in a nationalistic one: there is a top of contributions by country, where Romania is currently 10th of 16, this is decent, IMO, I won't push for climbing on 9th, I won't spread the fear of being replaced by 11th, that's not the reason to contribute (even if it may be an effective motivator).

First day of Wiki Love Monuments

2011-09-02T09:42:00.000+03:00

With all my honesty, the first day of Wiki Loves Monuments, the free photography contest for Wikipedia, exceeded my expectations: we received 56 images on Wikimedia Commons and 19 images on the Flickr group, this is a total of 75 images. Was I too pessimistic again? Well, I start to believe we will beat my most optimistic expectations. We'll see :)Now, after yesterday I published a video tutorial for uploading photos for the contest to Wikimedia Commons, is time to make the next step and show a video to the other way to contribute, by adding the photos to the Flickr group (starting with new images and having accounts on both systems, I find uploading to Commons easier ...and it will make the work easier for us, wikipedians, but... contribute in what way to find yourself easier):
Încărcare pe grupul Flickr(if not working from here, the video is up on YouTube and WikiMedia)

Wiki Loves Monuments in full force

2011-09-01T11:27:00.004+03:00

Today it started, the free photography contest for Wikipedia is up and running in full force, the news is spread also in the mainstream media, a central newspaper and a news television

Trying to make everybody's contributions easier, I made a small video showing the upload process with the wizard on Wikimedia Commons:

(if not working from here, the video is up on YouTube and WikiMedia)

Still, everything is far from perfect, I worked a bit on the video, adding annotations and sound, but the video editor, Kdenlive, refused to work, due to a nasty bug in Fedora/Rpmfusion, so I had to go with a crude and ugly version.

Seaside wallpapers

2011-08-30T17:23:00.000+03:00

For the last few days I was away, at a photography workshop (some posts are up on my other blog, some will come later), a trip that slowed my progress with the Wikipedia photography contest, but I am back and working.

So a trip to the sea side, of course I took a lot of pictures and from some (which are safe for work) I had to make some wallpapers, all freely licensed:

And not only beaches, but also sunrise on the beach (enough with the sunsets OK?):

The way back home was also a good opportunity:

Enjoy!

PS: maybe one day will make some NSFW wallpapers from the same set of photos, but those won't appear here.

Wiki Loves Monuments in 3, 2, 1...

2011-08-30T13:24:00.000+03:00

One day remaining until the official start of the Wiki Loves Monuments free photography contest for Wikipedia, which will happen during September in 16 European countries. In the last week I was away and busy (the work will start showing at some point on my photography blog) so didn't promote it as I should, but I am back and kicking. Wanna join?

Wallpapers in the sunset

2011-08-23T11:14:00.000+03:00

No, nothing is setting (yet), it just happened for me to get with my camera in front of some beautiful sunsets and take pictures. Of course I had to continue my series of wallpapers, all under the same free license. Enjoy.

Wanna laugh? Facebook malware

2011-08-19T17:57:00.000+03:00

It happened to me twice today. I had a facebook chat like this with someone I know from real life:

hi
hi
Wanna laugh? :)
sure!

at which point I received a tinyurl address, leading to a malware delivery site.
my reaction was:

ops! that was a virus, good thing i dodged it
There are no viruses there

A bit later, another person I know from real life:

hi
hi

Pre-emptively I tried to check in front of me is a real person:

how are you?

It continued:

ok. wanna laugh? :)
no, thanks

But I received again a tinyurl encoded address to which I didn't reply further.

Seeing this primitive dialogue, I suspect there is a malware with some chat boot embedded or a low-wage worker in the 3-rd world.

Anyway, the malware addresses will lead you to a fake personalized YouTube page like this, trying to make you run an .exe:

See the problems:

the numeric URL is the first thing to give it away as malware, unfortunately some browsers, like Chrome, will hide the URL bar by default, leaving the user more vulnerable (Furefox is expected to blindly copy this feature too, making even more naive users vulnerable)
the target has knowledge of my real name, making me more inclined to trust the source;
the "video" is a link to an .exe file, something able to trick unsuspecting Windows users;
the first couple of comments are fom real facebook contacts, making you be even less suspecting;
the status bar shows the download as being an .exe, Firefox removed the status bar at all before FF4 and restored it after the users outcry, it shows it was a wise decision.

What can I say? this is a pretty sophisticated attack, combining AI (bots), social engineering, competent crafted design and advanced use of facebook APIs. Be careful!

PS: of course nothing bad happened to me, I spotted the URL instantly, noticed the .exe and don't run Windows anyway.

Free photography contest for Wikipedia

2011-08-18T11:15:00.001+03:00

Part of a pan-European contest happening (so far) in 17 countries, in September we will organize in Romania Wiki Loves Monuments. We have rules and prizes, we have a jury and we have the first press release.

What is is about? People are invited to take pictures of monuments in Romania (there is a list with those out of copyright) and upload them on Wikimedia Commons under a Free licende (CC-BY-SA) during September 2011. 10 will be selected, 3 prizes and 7 mentions will be awarded and the 10 winners will also go to the European contest, for a new round, with its different prizes.

Why are we doing this? To enrich Wikipedia with pictures from our country, to teach photographers about sharing, to increase awareness about Wikipedia and Free culture and so on. Like it? Help us by spreading the work and, more important, submitting your photos.

Sorry, no CDs

2011-08-11T11:23:00.002+03:00

I got asked if I can provide some Fedora CDs for an upcoming install fest (happening in October). My answer was a straight one: sorry, I don't have any due to GNOME 3, I am not willing to spread that thing so I got no CD. Maybe if I go to FUDCon and find there some Xfce disks available, I will bring some, but in limited quantity, since I will have little space available in my bags.

Then I was asked if I can point to someone else who may have such CDs and my answer was straight again: I don't know any active Fedora ambassador still based in Romania (my friends moved). So no luck, I guess they will have to use self-recorded disks or USB drives.

(and no, I was not lured elsewhere)

Update: Just after I pressed "publish" I received an IM from an old contributor, wich was silent for the last couple of years and re-started after the last FLOSSCamp:

he: i installed fedora 15 on my laptop and can't understand what's about this interface
me: gnome 3?
he: i think so...
he: but i didn't think is that bad:|
me: i was protesting against it from the beginning and refused to upgrade
me: try Xfce
he: can't install gnome 2 ?
me: in fedora 15? not
me: someone tried a port but is still work in progress
he: meh, i think i will install fedora 14 and call it a day:)) is way too much...
me: that's what I did
he: ok... we'll talk after I get a working system

Wallpapers from... heaven?

2011-08-10T14:33:00.000+03:00

"You were in heaven" a friend told me after seeing some landscape pictures I took at FLOSSCamp 2011. "It could have been" I sourly smiled but also I thought seriously, selected a few and prepared them as wide-screen wallpapers, to be made freely available (CC-BY-SA). Enjoy.

More on the supremacy

2011-08-09T15:10:00.000+03:00

Some may jump for joy, shouting "good riddance!" but... the rumors about me joining the orange side are... uhm, greatly exaggerated :D it was harmless fun with old friends from the Ubuntu community at FLOSSCamp

But speaking about pictures, communities, friends, FLOSSCamp and poking fun, I have to continue with another pic about Ubuntu's supremacy:

Distro wars?

2011-08-08T15:27:00.000+03:00

This picture, which I took at this year's FLOSSCamp may be a reasonable explanation for some distro's supremacy, methinks:

FLOSSCamp 2011

2011-08-08T15:25:00.000+03:00

"Where the Irinas are, why didn't you bring them?" was a question I was repeatedly asked at FLOSSCamp, the 5th edition of the Romanian Free and Open Source Software annual gathering. I could only smile and reply "they aren't mine, they were with Ceata, which is pretty much dissolved by now".

Long story short, past week-end people from various communities meet at this social event, near Bran and Șimon in Romania, in the middle of some beautiful scenery (I may have some wallpapers at a later time).

It was some wonderful company, seeing again many old friends from all corners of the country:

And we had some unexpected funny company: the dog, the cow and the cat, inhabitants of the mountain (I didn't manage to capture a pic of the deers or the lizards and butterfly are kind of cliche).

The food was great (and unrelated with the above-mentioned animals):

And the camp fire warm (in all senses):

Myself, I didn't manage to recapture the magic of last year, but still got an interesting sunrise:

one over another, it was a big mix of various projects, with people from GSL, RLUG/Prolinux, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, FreeBSD, Mozilla, GNOME, Wikipedia and other projects which escape my memory for the moment (sorry guys and girls):

All like a big, happy family:

And for all those who didn't attend: we missed you :(

Clipart spotting: 2D Photography

2011-07-18T15:15:00.000+03:00

Not sure how many of my readers remember how excited I was half a year ago when I spotted on YoutTube one of my clipart images being used by the Marina (very few probably know she did it again and again and she even blogged about it - awesome!). Today is one of those days again: a friend of mine wanted to make my day brighter by showing a funny photography-related Rube Goldberg machine and watching it I spotted something familiar: go to the 3:21 minute and notice a little cardboard rocket moving... it is my Public Domain rocket clipart, part of my free clipart collection, an image for which I even wrote an Inkscape tutorial.

Not sure about the total number of views, but only on YouTube the video has over 430.000 views so far, so I guess I made the world a tiny bit better. Then why do I feel so crappy?

What's your t-shirt?

2011-07-14T12:36:00.000+03:00

So Paul launched a new meme about T-shirts... today my mind won't set on work (in the evening I should have a hot photo session) and I can't resist, must join the fray:

For those who remember, the T-shirt is bought at in Brussels at this year's FOSDEM (sorry, I don't wear the wig too, is way to hot in Bucharest these days).

Now... what's your T-shirt? Quote from Paul:

"Upload a photo of you wearing your t-shirt, let's see what type of t-shirts people wear...link in my comments or do your own blog post :) hmmm wonder how many comments i'll get from my Fedora buddies ;) "

Genuine People Personalities

2011-07-14T10:37:00.000+03:00

Seeing Nushio's cumstomized terminals I just had to come with my own:

Quite predictable, right? Well... here is my offer: if at least 10 more people show their terminal customization, I will post one more. And that one is going to be NSFW :D problem?

Master of email?

2011-07-14T09:44:00.000+03:00

With so much messages received (and notice, my Inbox in 0 unread!), I guess I am the master of email.

The Freedom To Hug

2011-07-11T14:51:00.000+03:00

We geeks are all used to various freedoms: to use the software, to study its working, to make derivatives, to share it... still, there are other freedoms, like the freedom to hug :) But most of the times we are too much of a geek for it (I remember how back in November I tried to persuade the team to a hugs event for Ceata's 2 years anniversary with lack of success).
Last week-end I joined a bunch of kids for such an event (free hugs in the Herastrau Park of Bucharest) and noticed the much fun they had... methinks geeks should do it more often.

On Google+

2011-07-05T10:33:00.001+03:00

Like any "normal" geek, I am on Google+ from as soon I could grab an invitation. And as a "normal" geek, I brag about it, try to lure people into the network and give invites left and right, as much as I can. You know... maybe, just maybe, people will move away from facebook.

But here I don't want to show my e-penis size, measured in the days of being a Google+ user, neither do I want to use it to attract new users (but if someone want to add me in his/her circles... feel free), right now I want to ponder a bit about the viability of this new social network.

A social network is by definition "social software", so what determine its success or failure is the ability to get people laid, as JWZ rightfully said once. Take this in a metaphorical sense, is not necessarily about people having sex, but about improving one's life.

Point in case: currently my biggest circles on Google + are "FOSS" and "Fedora", all made by other geeks, practically the same I have as contacts on identi.ca, the same hanging on the freenode channels I hang too, some of them the same I had as contacts in Diaspora when I tried to use that (long story short, Diaspora seems dead in the water, the precise reason: I think nobody ever got laid from using it).

So what's the added value? I am a photographer, to stay in touch with my photography contacts, which most likely won't move any time soon, I have to continue using my facebook account. And if I am already there... most of my FOSS and Fedora contacts are there too...

Sure, Google + is in early stages and available as invite-only, there is hope once the gates will be opened, more people will join and make the network useful. Time will tell.

PS: I don't expect Gwibber in Fedora 14 to be able to post status updates to g+, so I have to keep posting the same thing in multiple places.

Life with GIMP 2.7

2011-06-28T09:49:00.001+03:00

Trying to repair the ugly "Could not find compatible GRE between version 5.0 and 5.0." error after a Firefox 5 upgrade I did the mistake to run a full "yum update" which (so I deserve for having many repos enabled) brought me with GIMP 2.7.1, which I consciously downgraded from many months ago (2.7.2 is not available for F14). I have work to do: edit photos, not install/uninstall and downgrade apps again, so here are the first things I did trying to make GIMP 2.7 bearable:

change the "Export..." from Ctrl+Shift+E to Ctrl+S: I edit JPEGs and want to save JPEGs, not create from scratch to need XCFs (2.7 allow you to "Save" only in XCF, everything else is supposed to be exported);
changed the shortcut for "Fit Image to Window" from Ctrl+Shift+J back to Ctrl+Shift+E (as it used to be in 2.6): with image surgery you need to zoom a lot, and do that only one handed, the other hand holds the mouse;
disabled the confirmatin for closing unsaved images, since it is triggered even when the image was saved as JPEG, my desired target - hope won't lose data due to it.

Now back to work, will try to use it as it for the rest of the day and see how I can adjust to the new brushed, which dynamically change size (very annoying when you need precise size for image surgery) and force you to play with the brush scale on a tiny slider.
Wish me luck and wait for some hot pics on my photography blog later today (hopefully, if GIMP cooperates).

Update: in the end I created a set of custom fuzzy round brushes at various sizes: 3, 5, 9, 15, 19, 25 and use those, the slider is not usable to adjust the size. Hmmm... the GIMP developers are going to great lengths to remove useful functionality left and right, like they are aiming for inclusion into GNOME... newsflash for them: ain't gonna happen, these GNOME is not aimed at such advanced users like those able to edit pictures.

Summer wallpapers

2011-06-21T10:04:00.000+03:00

Since I am not currently member in any artwork/design team, but I sense some people are playing with wallpapers and some people may enjoy pretty pixels, I think I'll share a few wallpaper-sized images (and not having a group to submit them to, the blog is just good for that). Enjoy and feel free to use them.

note: wide-screen sized, freely licensed as in CC-BY-SA

Confusing websites or confused users?

2011-06-08T12:53:00.001+03:00

There are a few people following me as a photographer on social networks, many of those people which I didn't meet yet in real life, some I will never meet. And from time to time I get question, like this one:

Person: Hi Nicu could you indicate a Photoshop free to download ?
Me: you can't get legally a free Photoshop download, it is a proprietary software developed by the Adobe corporation, which don't allow for free use. this is the reason I personally don't use Photoshop bit a Free alternative. GIMP, which can be downloaded at no cost from its makers website: http://gimp.org/
Me: oh, a better download link is probably http://www.gimp.org/windows/
Person: how i could donwload , this site its so crazy

I realized the main GIMP website may be a bit unfriendly for an end user, since the downloads page is all about installing on Linux from packages, this is why I returned with the Windows link, but how the user is unable to use that page, with a big Installer link, is beyond me, so I stayed silent, making such an user install and run GIMP would result for more annoyances for me in the long run.

However, I don't understand how the same people are able to find their way on scammers websites, which sell GIMP and other apps as their own, and download from such messes (this particular user didn't try a scam site, but I am sure would not have declared that "crazy").

YouTube and CC: a baby step in the right direction

2011-06-03T23:05:00.000+03:00

I wanted this feature forever, since I started uploaded stuff on YouTube, the ability to license them under CreativeCommons terms and today it was at last added. Have I already relicnesed my videos? Not yet... why? for the same reason I call it a "baby step", only CC-BY can be used, CC-BY-SA is not available. Still, I have hope for it, looking at the comments on the announcement, most people ask for two things: mass re-license and CC-BY-SA, pretty much what I expect too before taking this step. I asked for the feature too, I invite my readers to do the same.

Elections

2011-06-03T12:20:00.001+03:00

Almost unnoticed, the voting for the Board and FESCo started and I voted, but I am a bit of disappointed: very few Board candidates have public answers and no one shows enough balls, even the one who tried is very weak and ambiguous (so I didn't give him full endorsement). I ended giving the most candidates zero points (too bad I can't give negative points) and a few points to a couple.

Politics sucks.

Better Wikimedia Commons uploads

2011-05-25T13:49:00.000+03:00

Having some more pics to upload to Wikimedia Commons, but not many enough to use a dedicated tool, I went today to the web interface and was blown away by the simplified upload wizard, is very nice to use and also allows for multiple uploads. Good work, guys! Yeah, there is still something lacking: a geotagging tool (well, there was no link to the manual instructions page, so my laziness won and I skipped this step), but I liked it enough to share a screencast with the world:

No party for you. Tradition cancelled.

2011-05-24T10:30:00.001+03:00

As heart-breaking as it is to cancel a years old tradition (we started the tradition of gathering the community for a face-to face meeting in the very release day with Fedora 8 and continued it release after release, no matter what), this time there will be no Fedora 15 release party in Bucharest.

While there may be a couple of good to have features and a number of controversial ones, which some will love and some will hate, there is the abomination overshadowing everything. so overal there is nothing to celebrate. By the contrary.

As there must be a news item on the local community website, there will be one, a short Twitter-like status update mentioning the release availability and linking to the >spins website (when it will be ready), not the main download page, so people will get something usable.

Fedora at Agora's Open Source / Free Software conference

2011-05-20T17:25:00.000+03:00

I asked if, as disgruntled as I am, I still go and talk about Fedora at a local FOSS conference and the feedback convinced me to go. As the local Fedora community is extremely weak these days, I wasn't able to summon a team (we were on hostile grounds, with Microsoft as the main sponsor of the event), so I joined Ceata.

I delivered my talk (slides available), which was about the local Fedora community, maybe a bit more optimistic than it should have been and, as I couldn't resist other way, a small sting at the conference's main sponsor (not included in the slides).

Overall, it was a nice experience: strengthening the team (Ceata), fun time, making contacts and delivering a message. A good day.

PS: I recorded on video my presentation, but being dumb enough I lost it... have no idea on which hard drive was saved :(

The kite is flying high and free

2011-05-10T11:06:00.000+03:00

Is about a year since we launched Fii Liber, a magazine about freedom in arts and technology. For this we gathered as much of the contributors were available (unfortunately some missed) and a couple of contributors-to-be:

Since the project uses a kite as its logo, we got hold of a couple of kites, rainbow colored, to be as close to the logo as possible and got them fly. It was a fortunate window of good weather and a small blue sky, in an otherwise rainy and gloomy day, just enough for us to make a stand and have some fun.

Then we continued inside with some pizza, beer, pie and cake, Also, all the contributors present received a diploma from Alina, our project leader (and Alina got hers too from Tibi, Ceata's leader).

Doesn't this sound like a fun project to be part of it? If you care about Free software, Free arts and freedom in general, why won't you join us?

PS: yeah, there was also a downside, despite my efforts to de-emphasize that, the team noticed my anniversary being on the same day so made a big fuss of it, letting it somehow eclipse the main event. Thank you guys and girls!

Color choosers

2011-05-06T15:30:00.000+03:00

I am a long time fan of Agave, but if Agave is the vi of the color pickers... there has to be an Emacs of it. And it is gpick, which as opposed to the lean Agave, provides a lot of additional functionality. Needed, unneeded functionality? I guess this is about the users, some will like one, some will like the other.

But gpicker is available in no Fedora repository so far and many won't bother with a manual build (then what would be the purpose of the distro?), so is not that easy for a Fedora user to play with it. Or it is? A former Fedora contributor, now in SUSE land, provided a F14 package (in a handy repo), so the curios has access to the toy (the SUSE build system seems useful after all).

Stop to the installing woes

2011-05-04T10:58:00.000+03:00

A couple of weeks ago at a city photo walk with friends, I saw this "Windows install" add on a street trash can, found it funny enough for a photo, but was lazy enough to kneel in the dirt for a proper shoot.

I was decided not to post such a crappy picture until I saw yesterday a funnier ad which made a good set with the can above, this one is from the tram station near my home and the interesting line says "Installing Windows (XP, Vista, 7), Linux and Mac + Drivers - 9€". Duh! the crafty kid in the neighbors is doing Linux too :D This means for a mere equivalent of 9€ (that is 35 RON) I can escape all my installing woes?

I do not feel trollish enough to call the number and ask for a Gentoo install... or ask for a desktop on a PC with totally unsupported hardware >:) Hint someone bored enough?

PS: now I shrug for not kneeling in front of the trash can, a better pic could have been used for a demotivational poster in my collection, one about Windows being just the right OS to be installed on a trash can... and maybe GNOME 3 being so bad and not deserving even that :D

Branding is useless?

2011-04-23T00:56:00.000+03:00

According to Zonker, branding for a Linux distro is of little use since a FOSS user is fully aware of what he's using, so my natural question come: then why do we cover our laptops with stickers? why do hang on our backpacks as many pins as we can? why do we wear printed T-shirts? We surely know what we are running.

Speaking about Fedora

2011-04-19T15:41:00.000+03:00

When I got the invitation to talk about Fedora at a local FOSS conference, which kind of speech I am supposed to deliver?

honest: it used to be a great distro, but some idiots are running it down the drain;
half-hearted: ignore the present and talk about how it was 0.5-1 years ago;
coward: use the pretense of a busy schedule decline participation,
small scale: focus entirely on the local community (Romanian) and our struggle to survive and not say a word about the international project.

Best of both worlds?

2011-04-14T11:01:00.001+03:00

From time to time I help a bit a NGO (won't enter into details now, there may be some common projects to talk about later, some older were covered on my photography blog, is a foundation helping mothers that had children die), this time they bought a couple of netbooks, for some activist to get some work done, Considering the budget and the requirements I put my FOSS in the closet and recommended some Acers with Windows 7 Starter, they are going to be used by some basic users (think "girl scouts but at a mature age") who won't learn a new interface or new software, they need something they feel comfortable with and I won't school them.

The computers came to me to make them useful (remove tons of pre-installed crap, add some useful things, switch the defaults to Firefox and VLC and so on), and, much to my surprise, when lifting the screen I saw this cute sticker with the green android popping from the edge and saying "dual loads. best of both worlds!"

Only after I started Windows, completed the install and, probably in the process, agreed to the MS EULA, when everything was done it gave me a dialog asking if I want to set up Android. As busy as I want, and as hurried (I had to give the computers forward in a couple of hours) I took a couple of minutes to see what this android is about (but only a couple of minutes, not enough for a review):

One thing to notice: the arrow in the top-left corner say something like "Go back to Windows". And the sticker is true: the boot is fast, not instant. Since it was not my computer, and I didn't want to leave my Google account data in it, the computer was not able to do much anyway.

So back to Windows, hide all Android traces (it would completely confuse the users), finish the setup and pass the netbooks forward.

Now, honestly, my best hope is the they will use at least GIMP instead of a pirated Photoshop (small image editing is one of the target use), on this I put my foot down, when asked to teach some graphic editing, my reply was: I teach only Free Software, Photoshop I don't use and don't know.

No torrents needed

2011-04-12T16:36:00.000+03:00

him: hi... i bother you again:)
him: you think you can send me the app which you are using for vector graphics, the one from your tutorials :)
him: i can't use torrents to get it
me: no need for file transfers or torrents... is free software, you can get it directly from http://inkscape.org/
me: take care to download the windows version
him: thanks:)
me: my pleasure

Needing help with data recovery

2011-04-11T11:31:00.000+03:00

Me in big trouble:

kernel: [ 9406.243037] usb 2-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9406.364420] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=05e3, idProduct=0715
kernel: [ 9406.364425] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=4, SerialNumber=2
kernel: [ 9406.364428] usb 2-1: Product: USB Storage
kernel: [ 9406.364431] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Generic 
kernel: [ 9406.364433] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 000000009412
kernel: [ 9406.365409] scsi11 : usb-storage 2-1:1.0
kernel: [ 9407.372992] scsi 11:0:0:0: Direct-Access     Generic  STORAGE DEVICE   9412 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
kernel: [ 9407.375394] sd 11:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
kernel: [ 9438.118031] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9448.336036] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9464.555023] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9464.774027] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9474.992028] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9475.108909] sd 11:0:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
kernel: [ 9475.108939] sd 11:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
kernel: [ 9475.108953] sd 11:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
kernel: [ 9475.108961] sd 11:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
kernel: [ 9475.108966] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] READ CAPACITY failed
kernel: [ 9475.108970] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
kernel: [ 9475.108974] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense not available.
kernel: [ 9475.108982] sd 11:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
kernel: [ 9475.108988] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
kernel: [ 9475.108994] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
kernel: [ 9475.109179] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

Lost about 700 photos, the result of a full day of shooting in 3 locations. So far tried TestDisk/PhotoRec with no success, since they can't see there is a card. The camera offers to format the card, but I don't dare to do that (and try a recover after) with no backup first. I am quite upset about this, since a lot of people are waiting for the photos, only for a few there is a partial replacement (well... at least it was not a commercial endeavour)

My lawn, my preciousss...

2011-04-07T14:38:00.001+03:00

Sanity

2011-04-07T10:49:00.000+03:00

When I am flooded with what some people supposedly are, I have to keep my sanity:

Beef?

2011-04-05T14:03:00.000+03:00

I don't have strong feelings for beefy things and I am sure the joke will be old half a year from now, still I selected "Beefy Miracle". Why? Because it enables a link to "Bacon" for F17.

...mmm, bacon! that's more like it :D

A bus story: of Windows and user interfaces

2011-04-05T10:22:00.000+03:00

This morning going to work the traffic was a killer, fortunately waiting in the bus in the middle of the traffic jam, I got the opportunity to relax a bit overhearing the conversation of two guys, apparently Windows sysadmins at something like public administration institutions.

They did catch my attention while talking about security and the primary threat being the internal users, which, as every sysadmin know, are stupid, they do stupid thing, including writing passwords on post-it notes they stick on the computer display. Then they went about user stupidity and how they set their users to classic grey user interface they learned and knew, then moved to Office, where in Office 2007 the suite is better, but the ribbon interface is bad, hated both by them and their users, unable to find the functions they knew, with Office 2003 having a better interface but they being forced to use 2007, because that's they have license for. And then they moved back to Windows: not one of them even tried to deploy Vista, which is awful, with Windows 7 correcting some of the drawbacks. Then it came the absolute pearl of the conversation: "If you want a stable computer, use XP, that is tried and tested" (they know XP is going out of support soon?), after which they moved away from the IT topic.

If you wonder, no, I couldn't put my half-ambassador hat and tell them: "Hi, I am Nicu, let me introduce you to the beefy side, we are inventing an even worse interface."

The story of a poster or the making of Fii Liber Land

2011-03-30T09:50:00.003+03:00

The task was forgotten, sitting untouched for months, when I was reminded about it (and perhaps assigned in the tracker): make a poster design for the Fii Liber project, to be put at Ceata's headquarters.

I got the "Fii Liber Land" concept right away in my head, but it was too complicated (so I thought) and I was not in the mood for drawing it, so postponed it for a while, over a week, during which I kept working on demotivational posters (more on that in a couple of weeks, the project is not ready to be announced), while trying to simplify the idea and do something easy, which I would be able to do in the blink of an eye and no effort.

Time passed and I was unable to come with a simplified form, so build my courage and went for the whole shebang: I could get away with the simple kite (the Fii Liber logo) on a blue sky and the clouds from the current website header along with a text like "Fii Liber. Noi suntem liberi! Tu?" ("Bee Free. We are free! You?") but that was less than optimal: the kite and the clouds do not match in their visual style (I made the kite logo on my usual style but when it came to the clouds I was "busy" and skipped the task) and... I wanted to make a point and I am not the person to step back from a controversy.

Fii Liber is queued for an infrastructure upgrade, will be migrated to Drupal 7, and with this it will receive a new theme, which I find boring, corporate-like and bad for our "normal users" audience (obviously, some people in the team disagree, so they want the change). The poster is supposed to show the friendly and informal image I envision for the project.

But I talked already too much, time for some pretty pictures! Here is the poster design I came with:

As you can see, it represents a happy land with hallmarks of life, technology and culture (as Ceata is an organisation promoting Free arts and technology) with a kite (the logo) flying freely over it. Of course, there are some stereotypes included, like Dracula's castle, a Modavian painted church or the Endless Column (do I need to also talk about sheep?)

Now the work is not done :) From my point of view it may be, but since the design is Free and a group has different visions, modifications may happen: the Ceata logo, which is not loved any more may get axed (in what I see as a mistake for growing the identity) and some text may get added at the bottom, where I intentionally didn't allow the space for.

As said, done, time to go forward, staying a bit more in the poster land... a bit of work is planned today on the demotivational side :)

First thing to do after a Firefox 4 install

2011-03-24T11:34:00.000+02:00

go to View -> Toolbars
uncheck "Tabs on Top"
Profit!

Now Firefox is once again consistent with the rest of my desktop.

Proud to be European or Fx4 5M

2011-03-23T10:24:00.000+02:00

5 million downloads in less than 24 hours and the adoption rate does not show any sign of slowing down, I guess it was a much awaited release. While we were asleep, NA closed the gap, from ~50% to ~75% but as usual they are trailing behind, let's count again at 10M which I guess it will be about tomorrow.

From my part, I exercised my BOFH powers and deployed it since yesterday at my [small business] workplace, but .ro is weak so far, less than, for example, 1/10 compared with .de (at ~1/4 of population size).

Firefox 4 taking over the world

2011-03-22T18:11:00.001+02:00

Recorded a few minutes ago from http://glow.mozilla.org/, by now the counter is already at 849.233

Demotivational Posters with GIMP

2011-03-21T16:16:00.000+02:00

Having a lot of unplanned free time time on my hands and bing in exceptionally good spirits and getting my hands of a few useful pictures, I decided it is the time (wow! almost a year passed!) to write yet another graphic tutorial, this time about creating a demotivational poster with GIMP.Something like this:

2011-03-17T11:20:00.002+02:00

When uploading to Wikimedia Commons a few photos taken in the last weekend in Târgoviște, it was the perfect opportunity to remember how difficult is to pay attention when filling all the metadata and notice how plenty of apps on my GNOME desktop are able to upload to various proprietary services like flickr, Picasaweb or facebook, but none I know of will make it easy to upload to Wikimedia. Or there is one and I didn't do my searching homework well? Or it is deliberately so to keep the spam under control?

Update: as suggested in the comments, I tried commonist, a Scala/webstart app, which is not bad at all, not as desktop integrated as a real app would be, not as easy to launch and missing a few features, but it does 90% of the needed job... is probably the best option.

PS: yes, at the first look seeing the splash I wondered if I caught a virus or trojan...

Update: after using the tool for another upload, I think I have to adjust my rating: it does 75% of the job :)

The Thunderdome - A GNOME Wars Comic

2011-03-15T13:22:00.000+02:00

Watching the FOSS blogosphere, is pretty much like news television before some elections: two sides throwing mud at each other, trying to win you on their side, but in the end, no matter who wins, you still be screwed. Really, as in politics the lesser of two evils is still evil, in GNOME the lesser of two retards is still retard.

And as in politics the people reaction is not to vote, also in software it can be not to upgrade. Honestly, I don't care what will happen in the Ubuntu camp, but I am pessimistic about the Fedora camp: even if the users revolt for, pulling a number completely out of my ass, only half of the regular downloads, the poisonous people won't get fired, they will talk their employer into the excuse as a normal trend of people moving to mobile device and will make it even worse.

RLUG meet, March 2011

2011-03-11T14:46:00.001+02:00

Yesterday we had the March edition of the monthly LUG meet, held again in a room at the Polithnica University of Bucharest, with help from our friends at ROSEdu.

This time it was short, we had only 3 talks, each of them being "lightning" (mine was the longest, at around 12 minutes), so for the next time we need you as a speaker too. The event ended with some traditional pizzas and beers.

The talks covered:

QR codes with Free software in Linux, by Nicu Buculei
Linux From Scratch 6.8 by Ovidiu Constantin
Scapy, python packet generating tool by Alex Juncu

The GNOME wars

2011-03-11T09:28:00.000+02:00

There is so much noise on the web these days about the big flame: GNOME with the Shell versus Canonical with Unity, I find very amusing the naivety of many people not understanding its roots.

In fact is very simple: the Linux world is going to war, a war between Red Hat and Canonical and GNOME just happened to be the first big visible battle on this war... expect more like this to come while Canonical feels the need to grow and at some point start making some money and Red Hat feels its dominant position challenged more and more.

Who will win? Is still too early to tell.

F16 name proposal: Lock Up Your Daughter

2011-03-09T15:21:00.000+02:00

The submissions are open for the Fedora 16 name proposals and there are cute drawings on Planet supporting some of them, so as immature as I am, I couldn't stop myself plugging my tablet and quickly drawing something (nothing fancy, just a quick scribble) for what I think is the best possible code name for F16:

I can already hear "huh?" from people not understanding this, so used the tablet a little more, scribbled some additional text and here is a full graphic:

The voices in my head are still "huh?", so I guess is the time for more words: after the huge fiasco Fedora 15 is going to be, we very likely will go downhill, towards extinction and the only way to survive will be to get the hackers back in power. If that will happen, expect them to take no prisoners.

Now only to find a link between "lovelock" and "lock up your daughter" and the proposal can be officially submitted...

Breaking News: Fedora 15 Beta leaked! Now with desktop icons!

2011-03-08T14:11:00.001+02:00

The Alpha release of Fedora 15 is expected to hit the news on a few hours (the torrents are already up if you think it is a reason to hurry), which makes this leak even more sensational, as the Beta release is scheduled in about one month from now.

It was leaked from trusted sources the biggest feature that will hit the code in the meantime, based on user feedback, and the info is certain, it is proved by the screenshot below, taken from actually running code: icons will be returning to the GNOME 3.0 desktop.

The info is even juicier, not any icons will be provided but the default install of the Desktop (GNOME) Live CD will come with the set of icons which are more useful for any desktop user, shortcuts for downloading and installing proper desktops, like KDE, Xfce and LXDE and also for wiping the Linux partitions.

Unfortunately a large-scale user survey revealed most new potential users will choose the last option (returning to Windows), after the suicidal moves that happened inside the GNOME desktop with the migration from the 2.x to 3.x branch, this is why this option is the last in the list, with the hope a few will still remain as Linux users in general and Fedora users in particular.

An unconfirmed last-minute rumor tells until final the list may be completed until final release in May this year with another option, for downloading and installing Ubuntu with Unity, but it comes from a less trustworthy source, so keep it so far only as a rumor.

[p]review: Fedora 15 + GNOME 3.0, a skippable release

2011-03-03T16:34:00.000+02:00

So now that the Alpha release for Fedora 15 has been declared gold, all the features are in, only polish and bug fixing are to be applied until final, is the time for previews are reviews, it was also the time for me to look at the new default desktop and understand what is coming. The executive summary of my review is: from a desktop point of view, this is a release to skip, and I am not talking about the Alpha, but about F15 altogether.

As you can see from the first look, the desktop is very bare, one single panel at the top, no icons, no files, no applets, no widgets, no nothing. And the panel and its widgets are dark, Windows and OS X style.

What I tested here is a very fresh version: GNOME 2.91.6 from Fedora 15 Alpha RC2:

Playing with the Desktop Live image, our default download there is very little to do other than getting a feel of the desktop, practically there is no app to use, which is a shame and a disservice to fedora... the ISO is 567MB for i686, respectively 568MB for x86_64, with plenty of room left available for a few useful goodies, that would make it an useful tool.

As with the apps is very little to talk about (at least we have in a beta of Firefox 4), let's move back to the desktop feel: for me not having a second panel with an open windows list so no quick application switch is possible turns into a huge productivity killer. No icons on the desktop means a big paradigm switch and very slow access to my files and to the general file system and no applets on the panel means little usefulness of my desktop - for example what good is Gnote now if I don't have access to my notes with 2 click any more?

And our friends from the Desktop Team succeeded to make it feel "Fedora" as little as they could, I am not talking now about the striped background that was ~~pushed~~ kindly asked for, I talk about a non-blue icon set in the file manager, not-blue window titles an widgets (funny, see how the scroll bar is still blue in Firefox but not in Nautilus?), the dark theme... all those break a tradition since before Fedora was Fedora, a decision made behind closed doors by a very small group of people.

I didn't need more than 5 minutes to understand this is not for me, the developers made GNOME 3.0 worse from my usability point of view than Xfce and even than LXDE, so the next step was to try the backup option, the classic panel was supposed to be available as a fallback option and providing a "classic" style of work. Unfortunately, the settings are now re-organized in an awkward control panel where is no option to switch modes.

Unable to find a switch, the first idea was to reboot, degrade the video settings, so hardware acceleration isn't available and the panel kicks in automatically. This was an opportunity to learn I can't reboot my PC, only shut it down or suspend... hello! this is a desktop, not a portable! And also learned I don't have handy access (where the panel applets are gone?) to safely umount the USB stick where I saved my screenshots.

So reboot and degrade the video mode.

And surprise! As I expected, the panel is not the classic feel promised to people complaining about a paradigm shift, but is a half-assed effort to provide... something. It is half shell and half panel.

There is a window list, there are some applets, you can put launchers on the panel, the desktop is empty, with no files or launchers, the colors are an uneven mix of light and dark, the window widgets are completely different... at least you can use Gnote and switch apps.

So not even the "classic" mode is not good for me, time to end the review, an opportunity to notice neither here I have easy access to safely umount the USB stick where I saved the screenshots, there are some applets available, but only very few.

Conclusions:

for me, GNOME Shell as it will be available in Fedora 15 is not an option, my advice is if you can live with KDE, Xfce or LXDE instead, use one of those, they are better desktops. If not, do like me: stay with GNOME 2.32, it is a so better desktop compared with those other options;
if you hope the Shell problems will be fixed in the couple of months until final, have a touch of reality: this is Alpha, is feature complete, only small bugfixes will get in forward, the problems outlined above are intentional decisions made from a flawed design, they won't be fixed this release cycle
my faith with GNOME in Fedora is very low, the designers and developers refuse to listen, labelling all the non-enthusiastic feedback as "stop energy". Unity, the GNOME fork driven by Canonical does not look better either, so I can't think about a positive outcome, even if a massive user backslash will happen, the people in charge are so arrogant, they will not acknowledge their mistakes.

Romanian Fedora community at crossroads

2011-02-18T14:32:00.000+02:00

By the official numbers there are 9 Fedora Ambassadors for Romania, this sounds like a healthy number but: some of them I know nothing about, from some didn't hear in more than a year, some are busy with life, some working exclusively on derivative distros, some left the country and some left the country with a paid job on a competing distro... Also, I am not an Ambassador, so not included in the list above. Yet.

We had our little Romanian Fedora community in Bucharest: two ambassadors (one contributing code and packaging, another focusing mostly on our own infrastructure) and me, having a hand in many things. We are joined at times by an Ambassador from a far-away city (he works mostly in localization) and another Ambassador from Bucharest disappointed enough by Fedora to become a CentOS refugee and contributor. Not big, but I can say we are friends and were able to to some things: organize release parties, represent Fedora at event and conferences, work with other organizations, maintain a website with news and user support (forum)... in a word be visible. All this while having a lot of fun.

What's our status now? Well... one of us left the country to work on a competing commercial distro, one will leave the country in a few days and will get probably swamped with work at a new job, one as I said before, moved completely to CentOS and the other was promoted and is also swamped with work. Soon the community in Bucharest will be left only on my shoulders, me who I also am quite disgruntled and wondering what to do for the future, with Fedora being less and less the distro and the community we all knew, loved and contributed to.

I am looking forward and those are the options I see:

do nothing, continue by inertia and leave the things to evolve naturally. If there will be a genuine need, people will come and help "make it", if not, let it die by natural death, it was not needed;
reborn, find somehow the needed energy (I am really empty by now) to raise awareness and recruit new contributors, inject new enthusiasm, make friends, get exciting things happen;
give-up, acknowledge "they" destroyed Fedora, acknowledge my friends already left or are far away, I can't "make it happen" and go away, where the life will lead on.

So, not trying to be overly dramatic, what should I do? Why? I am sure other people from the community passed trough similar times and may be helpful to learn about their experience.

PS: this is not and invitation for other community distros to try to "recruit" me

A better home for our LUG videos

2011-02-18T12:32:00.000+02:00

After enough troubles with video hosting services we decided to take our destiny in our own hands: we have the infrastructure, don't have to be held hostages.

So I imported (manually...) the archive in the new site, videos from December 2009 until today, a total of 51 recordings, summing 11.3 GB, all available freely in free formats (Ogg Theora) in the Media category of the ProLinux website (or under the video tag, if you fancy that).

Now it the time to assume my deserved blame: 3 months are missing from the archive - May 2010 when due to life happenings I simply forgot about editing and uploading the videos (sources are available, will do it at a later time), August 2010 when I misses the monthly meeting (was at a Metal festival, out of the city and unable to record) and November 2010, when again due to life happenings, I didn't record the meeting, even if I attended. Sorry.

And for the future I will take more care with encoding, not relying on external services will try not to strain our resources too much, compress more aggressively and save storage space and bandwidth for everyone. Of course after the Firefox 4 release (it that will ever happen :p ... it was delayed so much...) will investigate moving to WebM for video delivery.

Enjoy the viewing! (of course, all the content is in Romanian)

Feeds and aggregation

2011-02-16T15:51:00.001+02:00

I wonder if the invention of a ~~censored~~edited version of Planet Fedora is an invitation for the rest of us to open the content gates for everything on the "normal" planet.

Hmmm... should I start by posting a few Fedora-related photos (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) and then see where it goes? My fingers are itching so bad...

PS: I have no intention to apply to the new aggregator (it seems you have to apply and be approved)

Video woes / February RLUG meet

2011-02-16T10:00:00.001+02:00

I know people wait for me uploading the videos from the February RLUG meet and I am delaying more than usual but is not my fault!, all the blame is on crappy video hosting services, especially blip.tv.

When you upload video presentations from your Linux User Group you obviously want them in a Free format and playable out-of-the-box on a Linux box, so Flash-only is not a solution, YouTube is not a solution until they will have guaranteed WebM delivery (I upload there HD videos, they are still Flash-only)... the best solution seems to be blip.tv, but it fails the expectations very often.

I complained it in the past when the frustration was big enough, then it worked for a while and now again it does not work: quickly after the meet last Thursday I started editing and uploading and by Friday everything was up... but queued for Flash conversion, without what playback is almost impossible. In the past when the conversion failed, it failed after a few hours, this time they are stuck: waiting in the queue and nothing happening.

I did wait, one, two, three, four days... until it was enough and wrote a ticket to the support system, asking about the status (remember, the conversion was, and still is, queued, not failed, not successful, not anything). Of course my ticked was closed as solved with the following resolution:

Hey Nicu,

We're huge fans of free software and OGG in particular. We're very much looking forward to the day when a majority of Web video is encoded using free tools like OGG.

That said, unfortunately, blip doesn't offer any active support for .ogg or .ogv conversion to Flash. It works sometimes, but not always. We use ffmpeg and ffmpeg2ogg for conversion to an intermediary format, and from there to Flash. Unfortunately it's hit or miss.

Until we have a reliable OGG/OGV transcoding solution (and we're working on it) you're probably better off uploading MOV, WMV or FLV files as your "primary" format. You can still upload OGG/OGV files as an "alternate" format so that people using GNU/Linux can watch in that format if they choose.

blip.tv

Thanks for nothing! Sweet talk and no action - they didn't even look at the files, they are still "queued", it was a standard answer (and is true the Theora tools sucked always, that's why the format pretty much failed).

But enough with apologies, I have to deliver something, surely people are waiting... what can I do is to link directly to the OGG sources on blip.tv, people will be able to see them with a competent browser and blip.tv won't receive full page views and ads display... sorry, they let me with no choice.

So the February RLUG meet was again hosted by ROSEdu in the Universitatea Politehnica Bucuresti and we had a number of talks:

Fotografie Remote cu Entangle by Nicu Buculei (lightning talk)
Distractie cu MeMaker by Nicu Buculei (lightning talk)
Linux pe un Tablet PC by Radu Zoran (lightning talk)
Tune in .. on Linux ! by Cornel-Florentin Dimitriu

And, of course, there is a photo gallery from the event, hosted as usual on our Fedora local website.

Since I was lazy enough not to prepare formal slides, under the excuse my presentation were live demos, showing applications in use, I feel I needed to deliver more, so as they were short enough (remember, lightning talks), I also uploaded them on YouTube: Entangle, MeMaker.

I have no idea what to do with my videos next month, suggestion welcomed.

Mischief: how it's made

2011-02-15T10:06:00.000+02:00

Now that Nihed published his own FOSDEM 2011 photos is a perfect opportunity for me to steal one of them and use it as a "making of" poster for my own stuff, how mischief is dealt and then shared.

ph34r teh 3v1l gr1n!
Thanks Nihed!

Bye Nokia, it was a fun journey

2011-02-11T11:51:00.000+02:00

My current phone is a Nokia, my previous phone was a Nokia, in fact all my mobile phones so far were Nokias. My next phone will not be a Windows Phone. I think is the time to say goodbye, Nokia is not any more the company I trusted and willing to make business with.

There is a good part here, now I am pretty sure my next phone will be Linux powered and way more open. Thank you Nokia for driving me to Android, which most likely will be the OS of my future phone. And thank you Nokia for helping me to stop crave for a MeeGo device.

After FOSDEM 2011

2011-02-08T11:42:00.000+02:00

I need revenge! Biertie stole my thunder and taking advantage of my rest after the travel back home he posted first the group photo from the FOSDEM finale. I must take revenge on him... maybe searching one embarrassing picture of him from the event? Let's try:

Or should I take revenge on the rest of the world, with a "behind the scene" picture from the event? Let's try that too, this was the world behind the desk of out booth:

But anyway, it ended, so we departed in (crocodile?) tears:

If you want more pictures showing the FOSDEM 2011 story, I have this full gallery with unedited photos (too many for my time, trying now to put on some with food and the city).

Keysigning madness

2011-02-06T16:49:00.002+02:00

This is keysigning madness: everyone signs with everyone: