The benefit of range voting

I have to witness that I find the range voting beneficial for me when voting for the Fedora 10 release name. Why? Because I find hard to make my mind and choose only one option (we have 9 options and each can receive a score ranging from 0 to 9).

But what are my options?

I like Terror, it is silly and over the top, but it is my kind of silly, it reminds me of Werewolf and I can't stop thinking about how we can jokingly prepare the release: "on October 2008 the Fedora Project will release the Terror upon the world". And I can imagine calling the Fedora project leader "the Lord of Terror" instead of "fearless leader".

And I also think I can find a couple of self-serving options, to me both Cambridge and Saltpetre have a "steampunky" ring so I guess I can link them somehow with the Gears F10 theme proposal.

Fedora 10 themes - round 1

The first round for proposing theme concepts for Fedora 10 has ended. Before commenting, please keep in mind that the purpose of this round was to gather concepts, unfinished sketches, so do not expect polished images, use your imagination to extrapolate where they can be driven (with your feedback). This is partly why I use such small thumbnails, to make the reader follow the links, read more and see more.

The list is ordered chronologically, I have an entry here and I don't want to play favorites here (I can and did use other posts to root for it). The thumbnails are selected by me, so take them with a grain of salt (and do follow the links) and the description are quotes from their respective wiki pages (not all have a proper description, too bad for the submitters):

Gears

"In the naming contest for Fedora 9, Batisphere (see Wikipedia ) was a popular name, second to the final choice, Sulphur. From this "old but cool technology" concept, came the idea to feature the technology aspect of Fedora (technology advancement is one of the primary goals of our distro) by using a steampunk aspect. And as steampunk is represented by steam engines and clockworks, a Gears theme seems fit."

Blue Fire



Binary

"Everything in the computer breaks down into binary 1 and 0 symbols. Whether it is art, code or text, the very atomic building blocks are always the same. Yet their arrangement forms structures of greater beauty that the sum of their parts. The theme attempts to present (on a microscopic level) the formation of something large and complex from components that are very simple."



Dice

"This theme plays with an idea that the ten (ten points) is the first *border* (decimal exponent == 1) to higher numbers up until the infinity, dice like a symbol of the variability."



Neon

"After some IRC discussion, we three decided to co-op this theme idea, and will all submit our own stuff and mortal combat it out later"



Wing Anatomy

"Wings perfectly symbolize stability, balance and freedom. The anatomy of the wing focuses on the well formed shape of the wing. A wing is curved in an optimal aerodynamic shape; it is light, but yet strong. The feathers are organized in a most effective way: vibrant, messaging to reach for infinity."



Eden

"The bits I thought were most important to the theme were the roots extending below the ground, and the flowers appearing on the branches of the tree. If you want to get all deep and meaningful, I guess the roots could represent the solid base that Fedora is building on: the concepts of free software and open community; the flowering branches represent Fedora's rapid growth and all the new ideas that we're bringing into the world all the time :)"



InvinXble

"I've created the "invinXble" theme thinkin about this is the 10 version of this distribution. I've thinked to the difficulties founded on the road, but the project doesn't quit, and, if sometime it may be falled it raised up strongest than before. Fedora had to fight to reach this point, so we can say Fedora it's Invincible, or better invinXble. I play with the name, yes. :D"



Solar

"My creative path was: 1) start thinkin to the "Perfect System" meaning a good, right working OS. 2) I think to find something in nature representing some Over-good working System 3) Idea! I said... The Solar System blinks in my mind. Solar System... and then the step was so short... - SOLAR, simbolizing the centre of the universe, the engine of our galaxy, the light in big shadows."



Libera Programaro

"A futuristic / sci-fi theme. The idea here is, literally, computing "with no strings attached"....or, translated into Esperanto: Libera Programaro."



Simmetrical Freedom

"he concept is the perfection that simmetry can offer with the freedom power of the possibilities of forms and states that it can take and reborn inside the same thing."



Spectrum

"Envisioning Fedora (blue) as part of a continuous spectrum. It is influenced by a variety of users of different backgrounds and ideas working together. They leave their mark on Fedora, and vice versa, affecting and complementing each other in an ongoing cycle."



Now you can help us decide what will make to Round 2 and how the images will evolve, to not hesitate and talk to us (the mailing list is the preferred medium and the best place you will be heard by the right people). Do not be afraid to say even that all the current proposals sucks, we already heard that, plenty of times, you won't shock us (and we won't completely ignore you if you say that).

FLOSSCamp 2008 - Romania

At the initiative of the Grupul pentru software liber (the Group for Free Software) there is an event organized in Romania for the first time this year: FLOSS Camp, on 29-30-31 August at Păltiniş, with the ideea to "take out of their houses all the people wanting to discuss or to exchange ideas and opinions about Free software".

So I guess everyone is invited - it is an offline event, there won't be Internet access and most likely not even electric power, but a couple of days away from our computers should be good, healthy and refreshing.

If nothing really brutal happens, I plan to attend and will share impressions about it (good thing it is not the same week end as FUDCon, for which I still have to make a decision for myself).

When to say to someone: you suck?

Living in the Eastern Europe I wasn't brainwashed into Political Correctness but still have a scale of moral values (which may be different from those in, say USA or Australia) so I have a mental blockage of saying to someone directly "you suck" or "your work suck", even if there are times when I really fell a need to do so.

Example: someone comes to the Fedora Art list, introduces himself and shows some graphics which are supposed to be a proof about his experience in the field. But the graphics are so bad, that there is no chance that person will be able to ever produce something useful. Usually you ignore the message or give a polite, but cold, reply, hopping he will understand (as anyone else, I had my share of those and sometime I think I understood the message, butprobably not always).

So a question I ask myself over and over is: is not more honest (and maybe the better thing to do) to say to that person directly "your work is not good enough"? That way he will not have false hopes, will not work in vain and maybe will have a chance to explore another area, where he may be good enough (but them, you will not be considered a "friendly community").

Of course, the same question may be asked outside the tiny niche of Linux graphics and I bet everyone wanted at least once to have heard a blunt "you suck" right from the start.

Note: this is not about literally saying "you suck", but about not necessarily trying to say nice things at all costs.

Do NOT send me your CV - or About open communities

One of the administrative tasks I try to follow is keeping a bit sane the Art group membership requests queue in FAS (a job that hopefully will become a lot easier): I send a mail to the applicants inviting them to the mailing list and showing the open tasks queue, which is rarely followed. But this is boring and I already talked about it in the past, now to the meaty part...

Yesterday was a full day, probably the day with the most requests received in one day so far (interesting, the bulk of requests came from the Middle East) and, the interesting part, after one of welcome messages I received, on my private address, a CV.

This in not how one should introduce himself to an open community (like Fedora in general and the Art Team in particular are), you join the mailing list, say "Hi" and maybe a few words about you. And in the Art Team case, a link to some website hosting a few graphics made by you do not hurt.

We are not that formal to require a CV, we are a community of (I believe) friendly people. And, in any case, if you want to send a CV, do not send it to me, I am a notorious asshole (or so are some people trying to google-bomb my blog).

Since I received the CV, obviously I did a quick read and sent some observations back: in our case (Fedora Art) in interesting the experience with graphics FOSS applications (GIMP, Inkscape, Blender), so if you send your CV, it should better have a mention about them. And not be in .doc format.

My Fedora Weekly Webcomic: The Incident

I won't comment about "the incident" at this time, there are lots of labels, flames and reactions about it. But I can draw some inspiration from it.

Steampunk photography - a GIMP tutorial

The other day I asked for a steam engine in Bucharest to which I can take a photo and I received the best next thing: a Free photo which I can use, thank you Kevin! So I don't have to go with the plan B (which involved shooting myself a toy train and adding fog/steam myself with GIMP). Now I can proceed to writing a GIMP tutorial about turning a regular photo intro "steampunk photography" effectively photos that would fit my Gears theme proposal for Fedora 10. (note: those photos are intended as additional graphics, not as a default wallpaper, I am not a big fan of photographic wallpapers as default and I can see no way of adding some blue to it, to make it look like Fedora).

Those familiar with my graphic tutorials probably know that I use to address the beginners, showing some techniques as simple as possible (and only pre-built filters), followed by some pointers about advanced usage and also letting it open, with a lot of optional steps and alternative ways, so I will try to do the same this time.

For beginners

So what's more appropriate for a steampunk photo than a steam engine? Nothing... so I got a steam engine photo (thanks again Kevin!) and opened it into GIMP and applied all the basic operations (crop to take out the unneeded parts and focus to the subject, adjusted the colors resized to decrease the file size and sharpened to compensate for the resize) and got it decent looking:

The I applied the Old Photo filter (Filters > Decor > Old Photo), where I decreased the border size a bit (for my image size the default value was a bit too large). After reading the next steps, decide if you want to let Defocus on (I let it on, as it is the default):



And instantly we have an old looking photo:



We can leave it as it, looking old (150 year old?). But what I want is a steampunk image, like we are living in an alternate reality without electronics, and the photo was just taken yesterday with steampunk technology. So I made it more vivid by adjusting the color curves:




And the defocus option in applying the filter was a nice touch in making the photo look old, but I want to experiment with taking it into the opposite direction and apply a heavy sharpen:



For a result I find interesting:



Now going over the top, add a few coffee stains (Filters > Decor > Coffee Stain) to the photo (accident happens with old photos). The stains are drawn randomly, so try a few times until you get something you like:



And the final result, which we obtained only with pre-built effects:



Beyond the basics

Sure, applying the sepia effect automatically was easy, but with manual control we can get something much better (I think), so let's redo that step manually, like pros.

Back to the initial (color) photo. Turn it into black and white (a quick way is to desaturate it - Colors > Desaturate, but you can also use convert to grayscale and then back to RGB).



The result is as expected, black and white:



Now select a light brown as foreground (painting) color, add a new layer, fill it with that light brown. Optionally rename the layer "sepia" to help you identify it.



Add a Layer Mask to the brown layer and leave it white (full opacity):



Now go to the background (photo) layer, select everything, go back to the sepia layer, select its mask and paste (paste into the mask, not into the image layer). Anchor the selection.



The result will look funny, but do not get scared:



Just change the layer mode from "Normal" to "Color":



And you will have a good looking sepia image (now we can merge the layers):



If we want a border we can add it using the Fuzzy Border filter (Filters > Decor > Fuzzy Border), just take care to select a good color for it (use the color picker and take a sample from the picture) and a good size:



And the result is something like this:



If you want to defocus add a little Gaussian Blur or if you want to go the opposite way just sharpen it:



And also you can play with the Color Curves:



What's next?

I think it would be interesting to experiment with Steampunk Portraits, that is, changing people photos to show like from a steampunk universe, but those are (at leas for me) more difficult: I need props - clothing, accessories, facial hair, etc.

Mixed stuff: fonts, photos, games, anniversaries

When is a good time to use the "Impact" font? How about... never!

Last week a friend of mine put on sale some stuff on an auction website (kind of local ebay, this is his the main activity of his small business) and when creating the page he had to choose a few style elements, the font being one of them.
He selected the Impact font, thinking that such a name probably stands for a font that will catch attention from the readers. But being a Linux user, without the Microsoft Core Fonts installed (Impact is part of MS Core Fonts), he didn't saw how the font really looks, all he saw was a harmless san-serif fall-back option. And made it red, no less.

Only after I showed him a screenshot of the site in action he understood and changed it to something sane. Look below at a sample "lorem ipsum" text to see how unreadable it was:

With this still fresh in my mind, one can understand my probably exaggerated reaction when I saw Impact used on a Fedora related proof of concept website and complained about it.

From here I can draw a couple of conclusions:

• Who named the font Impact had an effective idea, even the fonts is hard to read beyond very short labels (probably it can be used on buttons), a lor of users fall for its name
• It is not a good idea to use such "fancy" on websites intended for a large audience, even less when your audience is mostly Linux users: there is a huge chance they will not have the font installed and don't see the page as intended. Stay with the basics, they are nice enough

Upskirt

This is an interesting reason to use the bus to go from work to home (Bucharest, the 300 bus line):



The photo is not that great, being made with my 2.5 years old phone (I didn't had the guts to reach my backpack and take out the SLR with really big lenses), but think it was taken wile standing and with the phone at the height where you are normally using it for writing text (and imagine what could I do with just a bit of effort).

Walking guy

A couple of days ago I posted a small animation (made with Inkscape and GIMP) of a little guy walking. I am not completely happy with the result (and I still have a lot of other graphics to do for that project), I added the other walk directions:



Birthday

Tomorrow, 12 July, is an important birthday. I am really sorry I will not give any gift. I didn't forgot. And I have god ideas, good enough (I think) to top last year's gift. It is only a delivery problem.

PS: It is not my fault if someone has not updated the feed address and carry posts that are not announcements in the Romanian language and has to endure what is perceived as offtopic crap :p

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Total World Domination ... I guess...

I am not sure, I should be optimistic or pessimistic about that? How about you?

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Are you Fedora?

Some of us are Fedora and this is a good thing. Some other people are not Fedora, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
The important thing is that the video kicks ass and I am trying for some time to get hold of a camera and a few local contributors to make a local video about that.

In unrelated news, even I am not much into micro-blogging myself, it seems that all the cool kids are doing it, so I have to join the bandwagon.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Elections

Much to my shame (one should not talk about elections if he didn't bother to vote), I didn't vote for the Fedora board. Why? I think any of them would do a good job on the board and do not know them enough to say if one or another would do a better or worse job.
Also, I am not close enough to anyone to vote him only on a friendship basis (probably that would be equally worse from a democratic point of view).
However, voters, candidates, winners: congratulations to all!

Romnian Fedora team at Cluj - an illustrated history

As announced, a group of Romanian Fedora contributors went Saturday at an event organized in Cluj-Napoca by Grupul pentru Software Liber. Now it is the time for a [heavy] illustrated report of the event (even more photos [*] can be found in our photo gallery):

So, we leaved Bucharest Friday, with the night train:

Where for now "we" is as this: me, Nicu, (if you read this, you should have a pointer about who I am), Adrian and Andrei are Fedora Ambassadors and the other Andrei is a junior member of the team (and being underage, we had to take care of him, Adrian received something like 20 minutes of instructions on the phone from his mother).


We were awaited early in the morning at the train station by Jani and Adi (both are Ubuntu contributors), and having a lot of time until the event's start, they took us for a walk in the city:


After that, we went to Adi's house, meet Alex) (he came from Timisoara), who work on Fedora but also on Firefox and OpenOffice.org, took the materials and headed to the event's place:


Namely, to the Babes - Bolyai University, which is a beautiful place (from every point of view):


There we prepared the room and waited for the audience to come:


I started the presentation with a talk about the Fedora community, but instead of half an hour, as planned, I got carried away by the speech, talked for a full hour and messed-up the entire schedule (bad idea guys to move my speech at the beginning):


Then Alex talked about Narro, his wonderful web-based translation tool, and about using it to translate OpenOffice.org and Fedora


Then Adrian gave a general presentation of the new features in Fedora 9, but he had to rush the presentation, because of me, who talked to much in my previous segment:


But probably my greatest victim was Andrei, who intended to talk a bit about Java in Fedora (sharing the same presentation with Adrian), but effectively had to resume it to a couple of phrases (bad, Nicu, bad!). But he helped us a lot and took a large number of photos (not yet online)


Then Alex took the stage again and talked about Firefox 3, release, features and translation


And during all those speeches, aour junior apprentice was helpful and good at cheering


After the presentation, we got to a Firefox 3 release party: friendly people, beer and interesting personal talks.


After the party, all of us Fedora guys (all five, including Alex), took another walk in the city (mainly at the Botanical Garden)


But we have not limited to admire some beautiful places, the city has plenty of other beautiful things to see:


And that was almost all, we returned with another night train.

In the end, many thanks to Adi and Jani, you were fabulous hosts!


Note: I made even more photos, but in the gallery are available only photos somewhat related to FOSS, photos with other subjects (like beautiful girls from Cluj streets) may be found on my other sites.

We are going to Cluj

We are going to Cluj-Napoca this Saturday! Grupul pentru software liber (the Group for Free Software) organized an event, held at the Babes - Bolyai University and we, the Romanian Fedora team are going to talk (in front of what I expect to be an Ubuntu predominant audience, so keep your fingers crossed for us to return alive).

a poster for the event,
greatly influenced by Mo's work

What we will to there? the plan is like this: Adrian to talk about Fedora 9 with Andrei adding a few words about Java, Alexandru will talk about localization with Narro (introducing OpenOffice.org) and Firefox, me to talk about the Fedora community (as viewed thru the eyes of an Art Team contributor) and the other Andrei to cheerlead.

homemade promo stuff for the event

As you can see from the photo above, I have a new toy, but more about that later, probably next week, for now is enough to say it stole a lot of my time, so I barely prepared a a set of slides for my presentation (according to the schedule, I have about 20 minutes for it anyway).

But back to the topic, after the event we will go to drink at the Firefox Release Party, so it must de fun!

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Webcomics War

The regular readers of Planet Fedora probably noticed a new (and very cool) webcomic K3RNEL from Mexico. Some competition for this webcomic.

Of course nodoby is going to war, I know they have a mighty army, so will just claim the two webcomics have completely different styles, formats, stories, graphics and both can live happily together.

Make fun not war!

Id cards, beards, framing BUT also university degrees, congratulations

I could rant about a "John Doe" life: over a year of not having a valid ID card, living an almost underground life, mostly normal but with only a few minor annoyances (like having the bank accounts blocked, being unable to travel outside of the country or, if that matters, being unable to vote - it doesn't matter, we can't escape the communist mafia).

I could write, for those who know me closely and may jump to some wrong conclusions, about my beard: even if it is not visible, I still have a beard inside, nothing changed, I am the same.

Instead my choice was to write about photo framing, this may be useful for a wider audience.

So I took the plunge, temporarily shaved my beard and renewed my ID card (it expired over one year ago and I have not cared enough to replace it). I used the opportunity of the local elections around here, when the people at the office in charge work overtime, so I had my card ready in two days, instead of the usual wait (at least a week, I believe).

The lady at the office, bored by the perspective of working overtime, took the following photo:

With the red arrows I emphasized the bad framing: 40% of the photo is occupied by my body, which is useless, nobody is interested in my shirt (or the hair on my chest for that matter). The purpose of such a photo is to show the face, so use zoom and crop (they had a 6 MP Olympus camera, a SP-500 UZ I believe, which should be perfectly apt for the task), here is (gimped) how such a photo should look:

---

In unrelated news, do you know Adrian Joian, a Fedora Ambassador and my colleague from the Romanian Fedora community?


Today he had the last exam for his university degree and finished with a perfect 10.
Congratulations, Adrian!

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Fedora Weekly News

After a few weeks of pause, Fedora Weekly News is back in full force, giving each week an interesting read.
While I may have lied a bit about the nudity part, the rest is true, and true is that it could use some more contributors, so join the team!

Zombies? Bring it on...

Can I resist playing the running meme on Planet Fedora? Of course not, and of course I temporarily changed my hackergotchi to fit it.

You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:

1. One weapon
2. One song blasting on the speakers
3. One famous person to fight along side you.

---

1. Emerald Sword - see next item for additional info
2. Emerald Sword - while I could go for many other (and maybe better) choices from a Rhapsody of Fire compilation, I will go with Emerald Sword to give the needed background info for the previous item
3. Aerie - the wise choice would be a cleric with the Turn Undead ability, but I have a soft spot for elvish companions, so Aerie is.

How to make a screencast

I told you already that today I am in a screencasts creation frenzy, so here is one more, a screencast about creating screencasts with Istanbul (this one inspired by a talk on the Fedora marketing list):

Echo tips: screencast - Creating icons

It seems like my initiative to get people intro producing tips, howtos and tutorials about creating Echo icons was not that bad after all, Martin wrote a couple of very useful pieces.

Being in a screencasts frenzy today and until I got to write something original, here is a little screencast I made based on Martin's excellent tutorial about Creating Echo Icons with On the Table Perspective (all the creative credit goes to Martin, I just recorded his steps):

Note: forgive me Martin, I misspelled your name in the screencast and I am too lazy to record it again only to properly de-capitalize one letter :p

Everybody: what are you waiting for? Move your lazy asses and start drawing Echo icons, is not hard at all!

How to get your blog on Planet Fedora - screencast

As some people are confused about the "technical difficulties" of having their blog added (or re-added) to Planet Fedora, here is a small screencast about how to do it. So can you still honestly say the barrier is to high?

The screencast is made with OGG Theora so it should work out-of-the-box in Fedora (or any Linux distro), but if there is anyone "technically challenged" that much so it is too hard, I uploaded the clip also to YouTube: