Bummed

I am bummed: a lot of people (according to my logs) clicked and visited my Jump out of GIMP tutorial but I failed to determine them to follow with they own creations. I suspect the example was not compelling enough, so here is another one, a better one I hope.

I guess this will ease my job: I have in mind at least a couple more lessons, each of them posing serious troubles, but in the absence of some follow-ups I think I may drop them. This what I had in mind:

• A GIMP lesson for touching-up photos and correcting portraits. I have a perfect picture picture, some good ideas about how to process it but I have interdiction to post it on the 'net


• A face drawing lesson in Inkscape. I have raw materials, I have experience in doing this but it takes a lot of motivation and patience

I think I will contemplate a couple of days about making more tutorials.

Note: (for those in the know) Today is Marti and nothing is better than a good old headache :D

UNIX

What is UNIX? The answer is simple: a car parts (piese auto in Romanian) seller, here is the proof:

Sorry for the picture quality, it was taken with a camera phone, in a dark, moving bus with blurry windows and the subject was a moving car.

Voodoo Stuff

I am glad to see Diana's talk about Voodoo, seeing her goals clearly stated was something much awaited.

As grumpy as probably everyone should know me already I was just scared hearing the word Voodoo, it contradicts the O in FLOSS, where the processes are expected to be Open and the V word make you think at the opposite.

I agree with her about Flying High being one of the strongest candidates, but it is right now a kind of spaghetti, it evolved in at least 3 different directions, from cartoonish to minimalistic and to technical drawing, I would be curious to know which is the one liked by Diana.

References:

• one


• another one


• yet another one

And as the talk is cheap, better back it with some work, here is a 468x60 web banner based on one of the Flying High evolutions:

GIMP trick: make your subject pop out of a photo

I found an easy and nice Photoshop trick, so easy that anyone can do it with a bit of patience, it was hard to resist and not adapt it for the GIMP.
I made a detailed description of the process with screenshots for every step.
Here is a teaser:

See my page for the full presentation.

As the week-end is coming, see this as a challenge to produce your own works, put on the blogs and amaze people with your GIMP wizardry :p
And maybe post in the comments some links to your work.

Many thanks to my friends for motivating me to write this.

nVidia binary driver and FC6

Monday morning, I get to the office, start my computer and see a X.org startup error caused by the nVidia driver (I updated the kernel ad video driver Friday, but being lazy and confident in Fedora had not rebooted after that). Monday morning is a busy time, so I reverted to nv and postponed the investigation a few hours.

Now I found the problem, it is explained is on the front page of livna along with the solution:

The new 1.0-97xx series from nVidia drops support for any card with a chipset below NV30, such as all GeForce2 and GeForce4 cards. However don't worry! Livna has forked the original xorg-x11-drv-nvidia and kmod-nvidia packages to create ones named xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx and kmod-nvidia-96xx. These will be kept at the 96xx series of drivers and the original driver will be updated to the 97xx series. If you are using one of the cards named above, you can install 96xx like this:

yum remove kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia
yum install kmod-nvidia-96xx xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx

Arghhh! The "beauty" of closed source drivers...

Looking forward to Nouveau.

Open Art Communities with Romanians

This is a follow-up to my previous post about the dumbfucks at OpenArt.ro.

Here is a list of really Open true Communities of Romanian artists:

• http://eyes-on-you.deviantart.com/


• http://club-romania.deviantart.com/


• http://rowatch.deviantart.com/


• http://ro-nature.deviantart.com/


• http://bucuresti.deviantart.com/


• http://bucharest.deviantart.com/


• http://transilvania.deviantart.com/


• http://cluj.deviantart.com/


• http://brasov.deviantart.com/


• http://timisoara.deviantart.com/


• http://huneazii.deviantart.com/


• http://muntenia.deviantart.com/


• http://ploiesti.deviantart.com/


• http://constanta.deviantart.com/


• http://brailacity.deviantart.com/


• http://iasi.deviantart.com/


• http://botosani.deviantart.com/

Sure thing, the large majority of people on deviantART are photographers, because this is the most accessible type of art, but there are a lot of other artists.

Conclusion:

• if you are an Romanian artist, there are a lot of better and more open communities, think where you want to be


• if you are a dumbfuck at OpenArt.ro look and learn what a community is and what is the meaning of Open

A funny project for someone with too much time on his hands would be to buy a domain like OpenOpenArt.ro or ReallyOpenArt.ro, drop a ccHost install on it with a Romanian translation and have an instant Open Community free for all Romanians to join.

Maybe I am to harsh with that obscure web design company making a poor site probably for some minor local prize or for a quick buck from some non-profit.

Update: as this is is of interest mostly for the Romanian readers, I did a Romanian translation.

Ampelfrau and Ampelmaennchen

We received at the Open ClipArt Library yet another request to remove the "famous" Ampelfrau and Ampelmaennchen images, this time citing trademark infringement. The message appear to come from their creator, thomas.fuchs@ampelmann.de, is quite strong and sound like this:

Dear Mr. Gates,

on your website "openclipart.org" you offer two cliparts
called "Ampelmaennchen" and "Ampelfrau" as a
license-free download. We are the owners of the
registered trademarks "Ampelmännchen" and
"Ampelfrau". So we challenge you to remove the two
symbols from your page within the next two weeks.

Best regards

Thomas Fuchs

Note: Matthew Gates has made the images in SVG format and submitted them.

My belief is that is stupid to protect with trademark and restrict usage of road traffic signs created with public money. Info on Wikipedia here and here.

I see there is a movement on OCAL to remove them, so I saved a copy:



Now good luck in removing them from all the mirrors, version control systems, packages, applications, distributions etc.

PS: I wonder if "Ampelfrau" and "Ampelmaennchen" would be ever registered as trademarks in my non-german speaking country.

Open Art? Not so "Open" maybe not so "Art" and definitely no "Community"

Open Art?

I stumbled across this site, called "Open Art - the Community of Young Professional Artists" (rel="nofollow" in the hyperlink in a hope to NOT improve their search engine ratings)

• Open: can you call open a so-called community where members have to submit a CV, participate in an interview before acceptance, and have to be a student or graduated of an Art university?


• Art: nowhere on the site is defined that Art means - painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, video, music? In my conception, "Professional" is not related to what university have you graduated, but to what you do for a living.


• Community: no comments, no feed-back, no favorites, no open subscription - enough of a community! More, a "Open" one!

Here is the time for a disclaimer: I did not encountered the site by chance, I know a person working on it (I used to know), so people may consider me biased. I hope this will not be considered a personal vendetta.

Back to that site, it also suck from a technical point of view:

• Static HTML! How dumb is that for a "Community" site? Whitout feeds and syndication is next to useless


• Terms and Conditions section is a .DOC file! Yes, can you believe this?


• validator.w3.org. Should I say more? I wonder about this one, I know the makers of the site used to price validation

Personal. Offensive.

This is a message intended only for a few people around me, so DO NOT LOOK AT IT if you do not know me in person, you may be offended.


Sorry for spam

Having some free time and nothing better to do (and no mood for doing something better) I went to my blog and added labels to each post, way back to its creation, about 3.5 years ago. The result? A completely broken RSS feed.
So sorry, my apology to all Planet sites aggregating my blog, it was not intended.

Update: Planet linux360 took my spam perfectly (ignored it), Planet Open CLipArt so-so (only a couple of misplaced posts) and Fedora People was the worst, all posts in the feed misplaced. Guuess were are the most readers :p

Update: there is a follow-up to this story

Update: as this is is of interest mostly for the Romanian readers, I did a Romanian translation.

Localization

There is a talk on the Romanian OpenOffice.org mailing list about the lack of speed on our project, the few people working on it and their lack of enthusiasm.

My take on this is: I will contribute (and have contributed in the past) to the UI translation (in a very small amount) but I will never use it for myself. Yeah, pretty strong this never.

I got a reply from Secărică deploring this attitude as being unconstructive. He is forcing himself to use his own translations (as bad as they are) in order to detect bugs and fix them.

I guess we are all different people, I can not stand an interface saying "soarece" instead of "mouse" or "brouser" instead of "browser" (as proposed on the diacritice localization list).

PS: to add insult to injury, right now I blog about this localization issue in English too :p

Dracula's Castle - kind of

Now as everybody is talking about Dracula's Castle being up for sale, maybe is time for me to post a picture from my last trip there:

Bran (Dracula's) Castle

Yeah, the picure quality suck, it was made years ago with a crappy camera. Probably the new owner will not demolish it, so I can take a better picute any time.

Or maybe I should get motivated enough and get to the real Dracula's castle and take some photos there (not anytime soon).

Satanic Fedora

I am fully aware this break a lot of guidelines and I do NOT think even for a second to propose it as a concept for Fedora themes.
I guess it is good to use next time when someone call our themes "dark, satanic, gothic, death metal and futuristic" as a comparison so I can reply: "Look, this is dark, satanic, gothic, death metal".

Source available on my Fedora Wallpapers page (do not try to render it with Firefox 2.0).

Note: Abusive use of blur really pushes the edges of Inkscape develpment branch, a very serious hit on performance.

Inkscape "About" screen

Is there something wrong with me if I do not find any of the proposals for the Inkscape 0.45 "About" screen good enough? A lot of people say "amazing", "awesome", "nice" or "cool". (yes, that was a rhetoric question, I know there is something wrong with me).

BTW, about the new year, happy thoughts and all the associated bullshit, here is my stance (update: unrelated to Inkscape):

Fedora Art leadership, XMAS vacany

Fedora Art leadership

So we started the much needed talk about leadership and decisions making. I hope the project will get stronger after it and we will rock even harder.

XMAS vacancy (personal)

As almost everyone else, I will be on a short vacancy for a few days.
I expect this to be my worst Christmas. And this saying should have some weight considering the second worst is the one when I decided I hate Christmas.

OpenOffice.org icons - Galaxy

Sun just unveiled a new icon design for OpenOffice.org, named Galaxy.

As always, I have a strong opinion about it but at the second toght would not say much about it now. Only that they use too many details at the smallest size (16x16px) and the result is a little blurry.

SVG rendering in Gran Paradiso

With the newly released Alpha 3 of the development version for Firefox 3 (Gran Paradiso) I tried the SVG rendering to compare it with the current Firefox (well, current as provided by Fedora, but I do not expect major differences in FF 2.0, it has Gecko 1.8.1).

As a sample, I used my remix of Mairin's design for the Flying High round 2 theme.

This picture is worth 1000 words:

click to enlarge

It looks almost identical (at a quick look I can't see any difference) with Inkscape's rendering.

Mugshot

Now that anyone can signup to Mugshot I created an account for myself ans started playing with it. The first impression it that it lack tons of things, but more on this later.
For now I want only to advertize the group I made for Fedora Art contributors, please join so we can see if we can interact like a community.

Hypocrisy

I expect today to be a good day to observe the hypocrisy in the surrounding world.

Note: this post is only for people who know me in person.

Update, a day later: Yup, I was correct, a lot of hypocrites showed...

Fedora themes, OOo translation, life and beards.

Fedora themes - Round 1

Today is December 4, the end of Round 1 for submitting theme proposals. There are some more or less formal proposals, like Borealis, Dreams, Flying High, Planet, Tangram, each with its ups and downs. I expect a productive discussion on our mailing list in the next days.

Bad me, I was unworthy again and have not contributed a theme concept, only useless comments.

UPDATE: the deadline was extended until December 6

Translating OpenOffice.org in Romanian

It started with a big boom but the process was stalled for about one year. Now we have a leadership change: ghrt, from translating the User Manual fame, is taking charge of the UI translation. We will see how this will improve the work, I hope for the better.

Life?

A rhetoric question: if I lost about 15% of my weight, it was part of me, living tissue and is no more. It is correct to say a part of me died?

Beard

This is how my two months old beard is looking. Is somewhat funny how people look at me in shock, like I am some kind of circus freak, I had even requests for touching my beard.

GUIs

I could not stand anymore Azureus from Fedora Extras: it stop the transfers out of the blue, some times does not close cleanly, is a nightmare. So a replacement was in order.
I tested bittorrent-gui, also from Extras. It sucks feature-wise, for example you can't limit the download speed.
After a little digging in pirut i found a little gem: the Transmission BitTorrent GUI:

Transmission - nice and easy

Speaking about interfaces, I can't go over Beryl.
I had problems with Compiz and AIGLX on my Nvidia card, even using the nice instructions provided by Chitlesh. Enter Beryl. I would not talk now about how buggy and slow is, but about the awful user interface for its configurator:


It would be a good candidate for the GUI hall of shame

Yeah, I am very negative today, a normal state when nothing around you works.

Blackout

The blackout was almot complete, even the website and the mail server were down for a little over two days (both .ro and .com).
Now the server is back and I slowly get up to speed. Probably next week I will get back to 100%.
So if anyone wonder where I am (I don't think anyone cares), I'm still alive.

Terrorists

Here is a screenshot from the Hacking Democracy documentary, I guess it shows without any doubt its makers are nothing else than a bunch of terrorists, they use BearShare, an evil p2p application and only terrorists use such software.

Painting aircrafts, blog search, free fonts, evolution

Painting aircrafts with Inkscape

I work as sysadmin in a small aviation company, so my job usually involve very little graphic creation, I have to do it mainly in my spare time. But these days I had a good opportunity: had to simulate painting an aircraft as a preview for one of our customers, so I followed tigert's steps and did it with Inkscape:

Just for kicks, here is the outline view:

Unfortunately, I don't have enough rights over the initial photo, or else I would add more polish to it (blur filters and stuff) and submit it an a screenshot/showcase for Inkscape.

Also, for a long time I did very little graphics on my own, so being somewhat "forced" to do this was a kind of unexpected.

Blog searches

Is not good for web searches of your blog to have your name corresponding with an English word, in my case Newborn Intensive Care Unit, but I still tried is, here is the result of a Google search for "nicu blog":

Is not that bad: my blog is not the first result, but is in the middle of the first page. I guess I am not yet that evil to start fighting newborns :p

Free fonts

We got the idea a long time ago on the Open Clip Art Library mailing list: the contributions seems to be very high, people are unexpectedly wanting to contribute free content. So we can try to expand to other areas, like fonts. As a consequence, we founded the Open Font Library project, but as we all had our hands full working on various other projects, put it in "sleep" mode, waiting for the right time to push it.
And it seems the right time is now.

The project is gaining traction: new contributors arrived, traffic on the mailing list is booming, the website backend was migrated to ccHost, people are uploading fonts.
Of course, new contributors are invited to come.

Evolution

No, this is not about that Evolution, is about my personal evolution.

Playing Cards

I made those playing cards decks some time ago motivated by the Bellot set from GNOME Games being licensed as LGPL, so not free enough for the Open Clip Art Library (where the requirement is for release as Public Domain).
There are four variants: ornamental, white, bordered" and simple. Feedback on my blog and OpenClipart.org mailing list indicated ornamental as the nicer one.
So I submited them right away in the Open Clip Art Library and after some months, encouraged by Alan submitted the ornamental variant to GNOME Games (they made 2.14).

Coming no present day and to the actual news, it seems those cards are making a way in KDE 4, with the white variant considered a favorite.

Nice to have my cards set in both GNOME and KDE :p

Cu o floare nu se face primavara

Calla Lilly

This is not about software or Open Source, if you are not interested in my ranting, please skip this post.

Not sure how, I got a couple of white Calla Lilly on my garden.

They bloomed for the first time in the middle June when it has hot, sunny and I was happy. The flowers withered after a few weeks of the torrid summer about at the same time with my good spirit.

After a couple of months they bloomed again. It was a bad time: I was depressed, whitout any drop of vital energy. They bloomed and withered without any consequence.

Now, in this dark, cold and rainy October, in an exercise of supreme futility another bud appeared. I highly doubt it will get to bloom, the leaves are in the process of becoming yellow and brown, air temperature approaches negative values in the morning.

Winter is coming, I wonder it will survive and live another year with this hostile climate.


Note: pictures taken back in June.

Raster to Vector conversion

So Rejon is trying to kick me out of my current apathy by making me write more on my blog... Well, it does not work but at least I hope this is an informative post.

We, at the Open Clip Art Library, received a donation from worldlabel.com, it consist of a number of clipart images, unfortunately in raster (JPEG) format.

The policy of our library is to accept only images in vector format (preferably SVG), so we have to do some conversion. At first, Gerald came with the idea to manually trace the images, basically redrawing them and maybe use the opportunity to improve them. I was supporting more an automatic trace, as a chance to get beginners involved.

At this point Ryan came with a nice tutorial about converting from raster to vector using both Inkscape and The Gimp. I think the process can be greatly simplified by using only Inkscape and select the right parameters for trace, so I did my own simplified tutorial.

Shortly: for new people wanting to contribute to Open Clip Art Library, we have a very simple task: raster images wanting to be converted to vector, and two nice tutorials describing the process.

Note: for people in the Fedora Art project, this is the ccHost in use, which I think would be useful for us.