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.

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.

Pink - or how (not) to sell computers

I started to crave for a recently released ultraportable notebook (a certain model), thinking seriously about buying one. What's the problem? The local sale strategy.
I won't complain about the global strategy (even if there is enough room to complain: only a Windows version is available, to be followed only after a couple of months by the Linux counterpart, which will be underpowered - less RAM an poorer battery).

My complaint is about local sales: all the stores offer only the pink version (rumours say black and white are supposed to be available in a couple of weeks). Like they want to get rid of the unwanted stock. Stupid move, who want to be seen in public using a pink laptop? They should have manufactured less units in this color.

And a second complaint: almost all sellers are giving a crappy 1GB MP3 player as "gift" with the purchase. Except one seller (which does not have any in stock), which has a lower price. Hoe lower exactly? With the MP3 player's price, so the "gift" is another way to get rid of an undesired product (you know, like I was a kid, under the communist regime and when you wanted to buy food were forced to also buy some undesired crap and help the store to report exceeding "the plan").

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!

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:

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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!

Tuca

There is and on-going meme on the Romaian "blogosphere" and I am going with it: Marius Tuca is an onanist. That is very clear from his recent article.

For my English readers: the guy is a well known Romanian journalist (written press and TV) who recently published a piece where he calls the Romanian bloggers "onanists", here is my translation of a quote from the above-mentioned article: "...Romanian bloggers are nothing else than worms who got to the surface without having something to say, ready to flood the space with banalities and originalities known and told by everyone, in a common masturbation..."

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In unrelated news, I keep counting down:

Keyboard languages, language communities and national communities

I hate the the Keyboard Indicator applet on my Fedora/GNOME desktop.

My (physical) keyboard, as virtually all keyboards sold in my country (Romania), has an US layout. And I, as a large majority of people around, write without diacritics (ă, â, î, ş, ţ). Except in the cased when I really need diacritics or the euro symbol (€). So I have to change the keyboard configuration, and for my own use the "programmers" version of the Romanian layout (the default Romanian layout in Fedora) is the best: it is identical with the US layout, so the print on my keys remains usable and I get diacritics with AltGr+a for ă, AltGr+s for ş, AltGr+e for € and so on. Which is nice. But I still hate the applet.

As shown in the screenshot above, the applet display a text, "Rou" in my case, instead of flag icons. While I know the argument why the flags were replaced with text a long time ago and it make sense (flags are symbols for countries, which represent political entities, not languages and their use may get you into nasty nationalistic conflicts), I sincerely don't care. I want pretty pictures, my desktop to look nice, with icons on the panel, not with boring text. So the best option for me is to stay with one single layout and not use the applet at all.

I used to argue for the flags, as I believe we should grow up and get past those artificial issues, here is an example: using a Hungarian flag at a public event in Romania in 1990 was absolutely inflammatory, today we grew up as a community and people do not react seeing those flags displayed. But some happenings in the Fedora land made me see the issue from the other perspective and have a first hand understanding of why country-based communities are not such a good idea, so I have now something to put in balance.

I worked recently on a small graphic for the Fedora community of Moldova and I tried to find some way of collaboration with our Fedora Romanian community. I ended by not finding any solid bridge, as they have almost all the valuable content in Russian, but it was an invaluable opportunity for me to contemplate this strange animal: a tri-lingual website, with a short English introduction, a lot of Russian content and some Romanian content.

I wonder what is the purpose of such a website? People searching the web for Fedora content in Russian will land in a Russian website, people searching for Romanian content will land on a Romanian site. If they will open a forum, what's the point for an user to join that forum instead of going to a larger Russian or Romanian forum? This is, IMO, the best example for the futility of a country-based community.

But I still hate the keyboard applet and would prefer it to have flags

PS: And here is a pretty picture for the knowledgeable ones:

Stepping on a geek's copyright OR what could have been the beginning of a beautiful friendship

I stepped up recently to help Dragos Manac with his Linux column in the Catavencu magazine (the print edition). Not for the money (it's a sum so low, I would be ashamed to tell and I can get better payment from other places) but for the greater good, for Linux, for glory and stuff like this.

This seems kind of fun job, I am used to write stuff (even if I usually write in English, a return to Romanian prose is refreshing), I have plenty of ideas in the queue and a lot of things deserve promotion. Being a mainstream magazine, is not hard, you have to touch light topics without entering into details.

All good until today, then the first piece was published. Attributed to someone else. And with someone else's website URL next to it. Sorry guys, but this is too much. I have to react.

I can accept it was an editor's mistake, without rushing to the "p" word. I may accept Dragos sent the correct text with the correct signature to the editor. But, frankly, I don't care. I don't care if it was a honest mistake, laziness, malevolence or something else. I want moral reparation.

Now here is the full text of the article, I have not signed anything with anybody, have received no payment (but have not asked for), have not waived my copyright, so sue me if you dare:

Of course, before going out in the blog with it I escalated to the proper channels: first to Dragos (an answer like "it's too late, nothing can be done now, the next number will have an article with the right credit" is not good enough), then to the magazine (no reply so far).

So disappointing when you put god faith in a thing and people don't give a rat's ass. If I publish content as GPL, CC-BY-SA and even PD that does not means I don't care about it. By the opposite.

Update: one week later, the next edition of the magazine published an errata. I am OK with them now (but only with them).

All your mails are belong to Y!

I am a heavy email user, but my mail exchanges are usually either in geek circles, the business area or both, so my usual data is not a good sample. But recently I was involved in a project (website) which deals with a completely different demographic group: women watching specific TV shows (soap operas, talk shows) or reading specific press and who happen to have access to a computer, either at work or at home, but don't understand, and don't want to understand the technology. Pretty much the mainstream public.

Not much to my surprise, I saw the statistics with hard numbers about how the Yahoo mail reigns supreme on this group: over 90% (in my sample it was ~92%) of those people use Yahoo as an email provider (those are personal email addresses), any other provider is just statistical noise. Some of those people give an IM address as their contact address (sometime in addition of email, sometime instead of) and those are always Yahoo! Messenger addresses.

I checked my findings with a friend of mine, he also work with mainstream, non-geek audience (he run an online store, but not sell technology products, only contact lenses) and he has similar numbers but from both men and women.

The conclusion from this is that on the home/personal area, Yahoo Mail is almost a monopoly on the Romanian email and IM market.

Talking about this with my friend, the discussion got inevitably to the topic of Microsoft's intention of buying Yahoo. While my friend,a fervent Debian user, is delighted by this perspective, he hates Yahoo with a passion after a lot of problems with email delivery to his Yahoo using customers (he says something like: I want Yahoo to die, even if Microsoft is the one that kills them), I am scared as hell by the idea of being forced in a Microsoft email and IM realm too (I am also not an Yahoo fan, but I use some of their services but no Microsoft service).

More interoperability

My first reaction seeing the page in the screenshot below was to get scared. But I am unsure what the second reaction should be: to pity the fools from a certain FOSS project hurrying to give a lot of personal data to the beast in exchange to a small gift (which is "subject to availability" anyway) or to applaud them for emptying the beast's pockets?
In any case, I appreciate the irony of the gift being a bracelet.

Hero by accident

This is how an obscure blogger, writing on an obscure blog can get the most know Romanian blogger by accident (pun intended).

Long story short: afternoon, Sunday December 16, a Bucharest covered in snow. A Romanian ministry drives his car, returning from a party, loses control of his car, hit another car and a pedestrian (supposedly on the pedestrian crossing ans supposedly hit only lightly).
A newspaper get a clue, but is not able to verify the story: the ministry denies everything, the police denies it, the ambulance service does not confirm any victim, in what seems to be the perfect cover-up, so no story get in the press.

And here goes the real accident: a young girl passes by, see the cars crashed, makes some photos with her mobile phone, learn about the ministry's involvement, takes more photos and get home and blog about them (link in Romanian language).

The newspaper learn about her blog post, use it as a confirmation for the story and the truth start to be revealed and new witnesses get courage to talk : first the ministry acknowledge he was in the city, then he acknowledge he was involved in a car incident but without any victim, then the police acknowledge a car incident without victims happened, then 30 hours later (!!!) the ministry get to the police to tell his story, then the ambulance service acknowledge it was called at the accident, then the police acknowledge they got an emergency (112) call, then they acknowledge a victim.

Today, 3 days after the incident, it is on the first page on all traditional media. And all this because of a pesky blogger with a camera on the mobile phone.

When religion is schools is too much?

Forced religion in public schools is an old pet peeve of mine, but sometime it is just too much, and I have to join other Romanian bloggers and protest: this is too much. The linked article is written in Romanian, but it contain explicit pictures (scroll down a bit).

This is supposed to be a "religion laboratory", a special class room where some students spend a large part of their time. And this is in a public school, paid from my money.

Creative Commons licenses and the Romanian web

Lately I started to publish my tutorials in the Romanian language too, in addition to the original English version and I observed an annoying thing: people take the content and re-publish it on their own sites (which is fine, this is why I use CC-BY-SA) but they tend to not follow the license: do not attribute the source, do not link back and do not share alike, even more, in those conditions they hot link images back from my site (this give me the unexpected advantage of easily tracking them).

I contacted those people, outlined the license and politely requested credit and share alike. Usually they reply nicely and comply, even if I have to further explain what are the requirements of the license.

My conclusion is that the Romanian public is generally not informed properly about licenses and Creative Commons, so an information campaign is needed to raise awareness, so here is a short introduction about the main Creative Commons licenses, written on a Romanian language blog.

To further this effort, I guess I could try to translate the full text of the licenses in the Romanian language, but I don't think this is the best thing as (1) is not wise to have an engineer translating legal stuff and (2) a localized version of the license (as CC has for various regions) will need input about the local law from a local lawyer.

Microsoft Office Open XML and ISO fast-track adoption

So ISO will vote on September 2 for or against the Microsoft Office Open XML file format as a standard. What I expect the result of this vote to be? I think the quote bellow (followed by my own English translation) from the unofficial position of the president of the Romanian committee is telling:

Motivele mele pt. a favoriza OOXML sunt de natura practica si "ideologica", nu tehnica:

1. Sigur ca OOXML e un standard atipic. Cum zic si IBM-ii (in critica lor), nu e "aspirational". Dar are un scop "nobil", pe care-l salut: "decripteaza" binarul (mai multor generatii de) documente Office. Fiind eu in bransa patrimoniului, o sa ma intelegeti ca sunt sensibil la prezervarea documentelor "legacy" (si migrarea este - pina la noi ordine - metoda cea mai convenabila de prezervare). Dar "transparentizarea" formatului intern al tonelor de fisiere Office nu e utila doar "comunitatii arhivistilor". Ma gindesc si la programatorii multor aplicatii care vor sa consume documente Office: standardul asta le usureaza viata.

2. Obiectiile de detaliu ale IBM imi par (pe cit le pricep) notabile, dar imi vine greu sa cred ca un comitet tehnic ECMA (cu Apple, Novell etc., adica cu tehnicieni adevarati) sa le fi trecut usor cu vederea, daca sunt asa de serioase. In plus, mi se pare ca - cel putin o parte - sunt lamurite de raspunsurile ECMA. Si mai multe sunt lamurite de raspunsurile MS. In plus, vad ca MS e gata sa ajusteze in unele locuri unde obiectiile IBM au nimerit. Nimic neobisnuit in procesul de evolutie a unui standard.

And now my English translation:

My reasons to favor OOXML are practical and "ideological", not technical:

1. Of course OOXML is an atypical standard. As IBM says (in its critique), it is not an "aspirational" standard. But it has a "noble" goal and I salute it: it "decrypt" the binary of (several generations of) Office documents. As I work in the patrimony branch, you should understand my sensibility for legacy documents preserving (and migration is - until new orders - the most convenient preservation). But the "transparentization" of the internal format of tons of existing Office documents is useful not only for the "archiver community". I think also at the programmers of various applications wanting to consume Office documents: this standard will make their lives easier.

2. The detail objections from IBM seems (as fair as I can understand) notable, but I find hard to believe an ECMA technical committee ECMA (with Apple, Novell etc., so real technicians) could overlook them if they are so serious. Additionally, I believe - at least in part - those are clarified by the ECMA replies. And more are clarified by the replies from MS. Additionally, I see MS is ready to adjust in some places where IBM's objections have hit. Nothing unusual in the evolutionary process of a standard.

So what I can say more? With such blinded apologists who need paid supporters?

Copyleft icons

This morning I played a bit with the Copyleft symbol, by making some shiny variations. If I have those, I think I'll share them with the world along with their SVG sources, you never know when someone needs such things:

And this self-ironic Copyleft Commie flag:

Religion and orthodox icons in Romanian schools

After the fall of the Communist regime the Romanian society was invaded by religion, among other thing the schools were filled with icons and children forced to take religion classes (almost exclusively Christian Orthodoxy).
Fast forward these days (sorry, link in Romanian): a school teacher complains about displaying religious symbols in schools, considering it a form of discrimination, the National Council Against Discrimination agree and ban those symbols, a civic association make a challenge, the Appeal Court stay with the original decision and now the Education and Culture Ministry announce they will attack the decision to the High Court of Justice.

From the reactions of people around, I see a lot of Christians defending the religion in schools, which is what I expect, knowing the demographics, as illustrated in this map (from Wikimedia Commons):

Yeah, Romania is absolutely the worst in Europe.

I have my theory about how those the facts illustrated in this map explain a lot about the current state of the country: via the general stupidity of the people, the lack of culture, wrong moral values and so on - all of them are the cause of the bad things in economy, politics and society.

GIMP rain animation tutorial, "patrulaterul maro" buttons

GIMP rain animation tutorial

After a number of Inkscape tutorials, it was the time for me to make a GIMP one, this one about creating a fake a rain animation effect, like this:

It is quite big, with many large images, so I put it on a static page from my tutorials website, if you are interested, read it in its original location.



"Patrulaterul maro" Buttons

As I am in the mood of showing some creative products, here are a few political buttons I made for my own use, but I share them with my Romanian readers who may find them useful.

The brown quadrilateral

Only a few months after acceptance in the EU, the communist restoration is flourishing here in Romania, it culminated yesterday with a coup d'état performed by the communist mafia.

The brown quadrilateral if formed by communists, political police from the communist era (securitate), mafia, and corruption.

The only sane thing one can do is to leave this shitty country for good, and never look back.


Me? In another life I would have cared about those things, but for now I just lack the energy...

Censored?

I don't know if this is just a technical glitch[*] or straight censure, but one of the Planet aggregators carrying my blog selectively skip content (I talk about this post).
If I am censored, please either a) drop me from aggregation or b) stop censoring.

Thank you.


[*] - I doubt very much the glitch, as a lot of other aggregators (some run by me) are just fine

Update: Further investigation and cooperation of the admin show a technical problem. Too bad I write once in a while an article for my Romanian readers and then something happens and is not delivered in the channel. There must be a moral to this story...

OLPC and Romania

The Romanian Parliament debate the OLPC program and the current tendency is to reject it. I find suggestive this quote from one of the most vocal opponents (source: HotNews.ro, translation mine):

"On the IT market, beside this manufacturer (OLPC), there are two worldwide companies, Intel and AMD, who produce more powerful mini-laptops"

I know the saying "Never attribute to malevolence what you can explain by simple stupidity", but Varujan Pambuccian, the author of this quote, is a former computer programmer, with an impressive background in IT&C.