Clipart Browser

This is my screenshot of Greg's Clipart Browser, made as a Google SoC project:

It show a bunch of SVG files from my hard drive, not the OCAL collection, but all those images are part of OCAL.

Traducere OpenOffice.org

Contray to my habit, this post is in Romanian language as it is addressed to Romanian readers, the subject being translation of OOo

Un grup de traducatori coordonat de Dan Damian, localizat la Politehnica din Timisoara si avind deja experienta traducerii GNOME (care e aproape 100% completa) se va apuca de interfata OpenOffice.org, avind ca punct de pornire proaspata versiune Beta2.

Pentru inceput, simbata 3 septembrie incepind cu ora 11 va avea loc un maraton de traducere in sala 107 a Politehnicii din Timisoara. Din cite am inteles, se poate lucra si remote, deci poate participa oricine, nu numai timisorenii.

Resurse suplimentare:
Dan spune ca informatii suplimentare se gasesc pe wiki.
Lista de mail romaneasca pentru dezvoltare OOo este dev@ro.openoffice.org.

naked comix

As I can't comment to Gerald's post without registering to tribe.net, will reply here:

Excelent link Gerald, thank you!

This one is the same concept with the French KiSS game I talked about recently.

As a side note, it would be useful if I had it back a few weeks when we had that huge flame on what is suitable for OCAL.

This is not a logo, move away citizen

I find really dumb the idea to have a project named Fedora and don't allow the usage of a fedora as a logo for the project.

Unrelated, I made a page containind some hats (yes, all of them are fedoras).

Note: As you can see, those does not resemble in shape or color the trademarked Shadownam logo:

OCAL 5K Continued

Considering the OCAL 5K initiative I talked about yesterday, I figured out is time to put my clipart where my mouth is: contribute some images.

But the time is short, my inspiration dry and wasn't able to find something simple yet attractive to make me work on it. After some thinking I got an idea: publish the elements form some older and unpublished works:

• from the Potato Guy I took the hats, smokes, mouths, one year and one tie


• from the game map I took the individual elements (which I intended anyway to submit sooner or later) and one yet unpublished separate graphic


• the Snowman was already published, but I intended for quite some time to take apart a couple of elements: the hat and the broom

The net result? 53 newly submitted images towards the 5k goal.

OCAL 5K

As we are a few hundred items away from 5,000, I'll join the initiative started by Ted (also using his logo) and encourage people to submit images

French KiSS

No, is not what do you think, is a practical use of the Clip Art concept in a Paper Dolls game, very similar with the Potato Guy, only in Anime style. (sometime it may also involve [soft] porn)

Of course, there are viewers for a lof of plaftorms, including Linux:

(I know this screenshot is ugly, from GNOME 1.x era)

24 hours later

grep -c "pr0n" /var/log/httpd/access_log.nicu
49

Substracting 3 hits from my own machine, the result is 46, and this is 24 hours after posting the mesage.

I expected better results from a post featuring a [Click here for pr0n] link.

pr0n

The submission system at Open Clip Art Library is abused from time to time will various inappropriate content: game screenshots, porn, desktop screenshots and other images. This had generated a couple of threads on our list on what to do with porn and what kind of nude images should be accepted and not.

I am sure every graphician has tried to draw such images but have not published them for various reasons: may be the low quality, the shame to acknowledge this in public, the source of inspiration or whatever else.

As I am human and graphician wannabe, of course I tried too, playing with the calligraphic lines on top of some pictures:
[Click here for pr0n]

I think from a moral or artistic point of view, these images are perfectly suitable for OCAL, but the originality is the problem: the original images are some random pictures from the internet, I don't have any rights on them (here is the place for another discuss, what "derivative" works means and where is the line).

Weather

As I see on some aggregators, people are showing pictures of their thermometers or screenshots of the weather applet.
Like a monkey, I can't resist and copy them:

And a whole week was just like that!

Dvorak against Creative Commons

A recent article by John C. Dvorak criticize the Creative Commons licenses.

His attack on Creative Commons Public Domain is the perfect example why he is completely off-track here:

When you see its licenses the wording will say something like "Creative Commons License: Public domain." This means that the item is not covered by copyright but is in the public domain. So what's Creative Commons got to do with it? Public domain is public domain. It's not something granted by Creative Commons. Yet you see this over and over as if it were!

We, at the Open Clip Art Library are using the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication for a perfect reason: it gives an explicit definition on what Public Domain is and the consequences of releasing with this license, here is just one paragraph:

Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.

You will find a lot of materials published on the Internet claimed as Public Domain but with various restrictions imposed, like "no commercial use" or "give credit". This is not Public Domain.
And there is the role of Creative Commons: they precisely define what Public Domain is, what a free-to-copy-but-no-for-commercial-use or a free-to-copy-but-give-credit license is.

Another use of Creative Commons system is that your license is machine-readable and this allowed our metadata format and also the existence of various search engines based on the license.

SeaMonkey logo design

SeaMonkey (the former Mozilla Suite) is looking for a new graphic desing/logo.

The funniest proposal I saw so far is this (posted by someone named yamal):



PS: If you don't get the joke, here is a hint.

OOoAuthors

As the front page says: "OOoAuthors is the development site for OpenOffice.org documentation".

It received a new graphic style, influenced greatly by Wikipedia. The main purpose was to get a front page which is not English centric and give equal weight to all languages supported.



The graphics are made from my drawings, but this is not surprising, as the previous ones were also mine.

Inside the site, the Romanian section contain a lot of user guides translated by ghrt (I assumed mostly the reviewer role in this activity). When finished, all tis translated documentation will be available for end users on the Romanian Native Language Project.
My activity as an author here is very limited: a couple of drawing tutorials in the English section, and a few edits.

Potato revived

Do you remember my earlier Potato Head generator?

Today I found one of my friends, which is a CS student used images from it to make a Hangman game for one exam (Web Programming). I was almost thrilled by this.



As you can easily see (from the bad dithering of a gif version or the layout of the page), she is a newbie, but the really bat thing is the page does not work on Mozilla, because on specific JavaScript she used. She got a 10 for this, but if I was the professor, I would not give even a 5.



When I complained the page does not works, the reply was candid "Try it in another browser, I tested it in Internet Explorer and Opera".

Sorry, dtinad, no cake for you today! You still have to learn what all this Word Wide Web is about, and program to the standards, not to a specific monopolist browser.
And be assured I will not link from my blog to such a broken page.


Also today and also about the Potato Head, Alan reminded me about GCompris.

Thanks Alan, I remember them, they were one of the first users of my images published on the Open Clip Art Library.

But I should witness I am a kind of zealot, if it is not a GNOME program probably I will not use it, so is not a very attractive target for me.

Happy, happy, joy, joy!

It appears we won:

"After years of struggle, the European Parliament finally rejected the
software patent directive with 648 of 680 votes: A strong signal
against patents on software logic, a sign of lost faith in the
European Union and a clear request for the European Patent Office
(EPO) to change its policy: the EPO must stop issuing software patents
today."

Goat

Holly Crap! My eyes! It burns!

Be warned and do NOT click on it.

Update: the image is not anymore there

Alan and the Gnome CD Player

I guess Alan's feelings for Gnome CD Player are really strong: in half of one single post he manage to use the Gnome CD Player words no less than 20 times!

Alan, you are wrong saying "Evince is the PDF Viewer for Gnome", it is a document viewer for multiple document formats, which happens to be the default viewer for PDFs in Gnome. Its intention as a general purpose reader is (IMO) demonstrated by the recent efforts to make it read also PowerPoint files.

A great release is coming

I had a look in the incoming section of OCAL and expect the following release (the next week probably we will start to talk about it) to be a great one: we have as usual a large number of images from a lot of people but also some big and wonderful sets by Gerald like: diner menu collection, sailing illustrations and r15 of general.
On top of that the total number of the images will be increased by my cards collections (encouraged by Benji I uploaded all four decks).
If we make sure the two icon sets not validated last month will be included, this release will be huge.

PS: Of course, the incoming section contains some bad things, one example being woman_joao_01.jpg, which looks to me like a caveman style piece of art, but I know that image will not pass validation.

Cards::Conclusion

Following an advice on blog comments from Karl, changed the figures from serif to sans serif to match the font.

The package landed on OCAL (for now in incoming) - note to self: to be careful at the end of the month for the correct package (02) to be included in the release.

Also made a page on my website for the cards.

Conclusion?
It was an interesting experience to develop the set on the blog, with people giving feedback at every step. Benji tried something similar with the Tribal font, but I guess my cards had more "eye candy" and as a consequence the feedback was greater.

Alternate faces

Public question: this style is worth pursuing and using it instead of what I made yesterday?



Update: All four faces (the feedback was positive). Color variations will be used to generate each specific card.


Update: My blog became aggregated also by Planet linux360. I hope their readers will not be very annoyed by my graphic-heavy posts from the last days.

Faces

I am sure not everybody will like those faces (I am not very happy myself) but the cards will be hopefully part of the next release of the Open Clip Art Library, with a full Public Domain license, so anybody will be free to improve them.

I am a coward

Indeed, a coward I am: i got the idea that drawing the faces for the playing cards deck will be the hard part, so I do anything to delay it. The last thing was to do some backs:

Steps to the full Deck

So the boring part is done:


Next step: the hard part: drawing the faces and at least one back side. I have now just a vague idea on how to do them, something modern and original.
Note: I'm fully aware that the faces are the "salt and pepper" of the deck, the most important part of it.

After that, a future step will be to choose a final template, these are the candidates so far:


Of course I can to all of them but this may be just bloat: 216 images instead of 54. Hard decision to make: quantity or quality?

Playing Cards

I'm thinking about creating a complete playing cards set for the Open Clip Art Library and here are two samples:

What I really need is a sincere opinion: are those samples worthy? (quality wise) is such a set needed? (considering there is at least another one set with a free enough license).
The task may become boring at some point (54 figures!) and definitely will have some hard parts (cards with figures) so I'm not sure if is wise to engage in this task.

create.freedesktop.org

The infrastructure for the project is up and running:

• Website: a quick copy of the Planet OCAL with logos and feeds removed (more polishing needed)


• Mailing list, but only with my "frist prost" so far


• The default Wiki

To Do:

• clear the scope and maybe decide a policy;


• spread the word and get people from intersted projects (Inkscape, GIMP, Scribus, etc.) to join;


• create a particular look and feel for the site (new logo, favicon, style sheet);


• more? join the mailing list and propose