Inkscape + Eee: at last!

One of my main troubles using the Eee was Inkscape not playing nice with the screen size: having the status bar with a lot of useful tools out of the screen is a real pain.
The good news is that the recently landed in Rawhide build from the 0.47 development branch does not have this problem any more.

And for more happiness, the package is now a lot smaller, so it may stand a chance of being included on the media!

The road to 10000 or CC0 only over my cold, dead body

After a few days ago I was so excited about the drive to 10K images at the Open Clip Art Library I figured is the time to put my work where my mouth is, and planned a large contribution when I got disturbed by a talk about moveing away from the Public Domain dedication and towards a Creative Commons travesty, a move I am highly opposing to.

I was very close to to what I do when I am very unhappy about something: go ballistic, burn the crops and poison the wells. And nuke and the bridges. I think I have extensive experience in the area and can be pretty effective doing it. But having a busy day I didn't got time for that, instead I had the time to think more, cool down and come with a second strategy: consolidate my position as the second largest contributor by counting the number of uploads to have a bigger soapbox when/if the proverbial matter will hit the fan.

And as I rarely take the middle ground, my first contribution in this drive to 10K was a batch of 44 new images (new as images never published to OCAL so far, I still have a bunch to import from the old website so a lot of aces are in my sleeve).

PS: the illustration for this post was prepared with an experimental Inkscape devel build for F10, generously provided in addition to the Rawhide package by our mighty packager.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Dual Screen

Some of the features may not make the freeze and be kicked from the list, but even so it is going to be the longest list of features in Fedora's history.

If you want a more realistic story, replace the feature list with the GNOME preference menu in Rawhide. Who is still laughing now?

Openclipart.org: aiming for 10K images

After a couple of relatively highly popular successes (map elements and pac-man, remember?), in the last year I was pretty much inactive at openclipart.org, as what I had on the TODO was boring and frustrating: re-upload images from the old site on the current one, with an awful interface and important core features missing.

But now a couple of things are aligned and the Open Clip Art Library deserves a share of the spotlight:

First, the number of images uploaded at this very moment is 9,323, very close to a round 10,000 (yeah, we still have some thousands not yet imported from the old site, but only those are easily reachable).

Second, the project was launched in March 2004, so this month will mark its 5 years anniversary.

Putting those two next to each other, the conclusion is very tempting: a joined effort to hit the 10,000 images milestone until the end of March 2009. I'm in, how about you?

With the current upload rate, it may take 2 or 3 more months to reach the 10,000 target, so an effort, not a big one, is needed. We can do it, but only with contributor's help. When I will get some time I will upload at least 10-20 images on my own, most likely more.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Fanservice - The Gratuitous Panty Shot

Any long running series has to have from time to time some filler episodes, which obviously will not make their fans happy so the producers use cheap (but effective) tricks to get the audience content and the easiest trick is a good old fanservice, with a gratuitous panty shot (potentially NSFW) being the most popular choice.

The same with me, a couple of weeks ago I was in a good creative mood, had some free time and a [what I think it was] good idea, so I made such a filler episode to have in reserve which proved useful this week when I had a tough week, with low morale and productivity (this happens if you spent the previous week-end with very little sleep due to a marathon of about 90 episodes to get up to date with an anime show), so here is me trying the fanservice trick on my readers (good thing I don't have many fans, otherwise probably I would get a lot of people upset). But at least, I don't use that kind of panty shot...

Note 1: I can think about the possibilities to extend the characters, like in an OS-tan, covering a lot of distros. Some ideas could be: a guy with old panties, unchanged and unwashed for about a couple of years, a guy who forgot to use any panty because the feature does not seems that important to him or a guy wearing iron underwear (chastity belt?). Do you have any ideas?

Note 2: After panty shots, the second most known type of fanservice in use is jiggling boobs... Oh, my eyes! Think of the characters of my comic... I must find a way to erase that image from my head...

Fedora Weekly News: Troll Killing

Not sure where to link, since the announcement and invitation to patent defense, FOSS-style is practically everywhere in slightly different forms, but it was an unmissable story for my webcomic.

Note: I know the ending is cheesy, but the initial version in my head was even cheesier :p

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: The Perfect Wallpaper

Another week, another opportunity for me to make display of my lack of originality, coming with a theme from Mo and the story from the comments on some blog post. The anecdotal evidence from the comments there somewhat fit my own anecdotal evidence about some loyal Ubuntu users finding the Fedora artwork better.

An, and those who think I am a weenie for not bringing the joke deeper in the brown matter, I defy you: take my SVGs and try your own :D

PS: sorry to disappoint those of you who expected a Valentine's Day joke, I had an idea but it was too offensive for both brow and blue, so I took the easy way out...

Screencasting with mencoder

I didn't made many screencasts, but the most usual complaint I hear is about the lack of a soundtrack, people request a spoken explanation for the actions happening on screen or at least some music. Now way I will include a spoken audio track, but since I know about acceptable music with a clear license, I can do that.

So for a recent screencast I tried to silence the critics by adding a music track, which by consequence forced me to add a "credits" screen, to satisfy the license requirements (CC-BY-SA), resulting in a somewhat complicated editing operation, something deserving to be documented and shared. Keep in mind that my target was to upload the file to YouTube, so a number of compromises were considered acceptable.

Now tot he tools: PiTiVi is crap and I don't say it lightly, not only it lacks the features I needed (and will document in the following paragraphs), but the only thing it seems able to do is crash as soon as I hit the "Redner project" button, so my only option was to use the arcane but efficient Mencoder, cutting some corners, like using DivX as a video codec, mp3 as audio coded and AVI as a container. If someone can come with an alternate recipe, keeping the formats Free, I will use that in the future, if the solution involves a GTK GUI, most likely I exclusively use that...

So back to the screencast. I recorded it with gtk-RecordMyDesktop, even if Istanbul has a better user interface, its recording is worse: it uses an predefined low quality setting, resulting in a bad looking video and high CPU usage during recording. With RecordMyDesktop set at 100% quality level, you get a smooth recording and a very crisp looking video, nice to have for an original.

So the first step is to transcode the image to MPEG4 (DivX) and at the same time reduce the resolution to 800x500, people will not see it at 1680x1050 (my full screen size) on YouTube and the file size is too large anyway (note: no additional parameters for video encoding, since it will be transcoded to Flash at a worse quality anyway):
mencoder screencast.ogv -oac copy -ovc lavc -vf scale=800:500 -o screencast.avi

My video was too long, 18 minutes, much over the 10 minutes limit allowed by YouTube, so my trick was to speed it up (3 times). Being lazy, I just increased the frame rate, didn't care too much about the file size, as I will upload it just one single time:
mencoder screencast.avi -oac copy -ovc copy -speed 3 -o screencast-fast.avi

For the credits screen I prepared a PNG with Inkscape and multiplied it as many times as the number of frames I needed - 10 seconds at 45 fps = 450 copies (10 seconds is a bit too much, and the 45 fps is the results of the lazy speed-up in the previous step):
seq -w 1 450| while read i; do cp frame.png "frame_0$i.png"; done

Then convert all those PNGs in a video with the same codec and frame rate as my screencast:
mencoder "mf://*.png" -ovc lavc -mf fps=45 -o ending.avi

The next step is to merge the two videos and the image is ready:
mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy screencast-fast.avi ending.avi -o screencast-end.avi

I needed properly licensed music, so I used a track from the Denied by Reign album by Severed Fifth, namely War, which has about the same time duration as my video part. In the same step with adding the music, I transcoded it from Ogg Vorbis to mp3 (as required by the AVI container):
mencoder screencast-end.avi -o screencast-final.avi -ovc copy -oac mp3lame -audiofile severedfifth-deniedbyreign-war.ogg

And that is all, upload to YouTube and enjoy.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Togas

I should start by acknowledging two sins with this edition, first, I stole the idea from Max, the marketing gang and a neoclassical painter and, second, I am like one week late. But I had to use it somehow and at least abstained myself to take the joke in the direction of "my eyes! too many USB dongles in sight with those togas..." So, how blue are your bed sheets?

The great IP of Pantone

The other day when talking about Pantone's refusal to work wit FOSS software I was quite Spartan (pun intended) and my post generated some confusion: there is no need to reverse engineer the Pantone® Matching System®, the core of their "Intellectual Property" is basically a spreadsheet: 3 columns representing color values in Re, Green and Blue and a fourth with the color name, something like this:

You use those values to be sure the printed colors look like you intended and usually pass the info to the printing shop: the color here is PMS-xxx and the color there is PMS-yyy, so you are sure they match the sample (a physical color swatch) you showed to your customer.

The spreadsheet above is all an software application needs but can be used only under some draconian restrictions (and big $$$).

Fun fact about olive trees

Talking with Martin over #fedora-art about F11 graphics I felt like researching how an Olive Tree is supposed to look like, I never saw one and we may use such visuals in the release graphics. This was an opportunity to learn (from Wikipedia) that there are several 3-4000 years old (yeah, thousands!) such trees in the world and they still continue to produce fruits (in some cases used to make oil). I find this piece of trivia amazing and, honestly, hard to comprehend how a living thing can be so old. This puts some things in perspective.

My Ass in Pantone Colors

Please be aware that I have consulted with executives at the company and unfortunately, we do not know of a way in which we can work together. "Open source software" is not a venue in which Pantone, Inc. will permit its intellectual property to be licensed, referenced and/or disseminated.

Enjoy reading more about this. Now I'm busy going to paint my ass in nicely matched Pantone® colors.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: PC Speaker

Last week I was wondering about cracking yet another joke with Spartans, but I really wasn't sure about it: I had a premise - all the characters growing beards as they think they are Spartans, the development - someone from outside tell they are ugly and should get a razor, but was unsure about the punchline, either some of then don't need razors since being girls their beards are fake or an emo from another distro has a razor but don't want to lend, being busy with it. Weak either way, my mind stopped at "get a razor".

But I was saved from this lameness: last wee-end the planet was taken by storm by PC Speakers, so I knew I have to talk about that, even if a few days after. But I am still haunted by mi indecision: I also have here two alternate endings, one is in the webcomic and the other one was with the laptop owner thinking he is cursed for not having a PC speaker on his laptop and the other guy wondering if that really is a curse or a blessing.

Portraiture photography

Since I moved my photography blogging elsewhere I mostly stopped from spamming various aggregators with my photos but this weekend it was a nice experience.

The few that know me close enough are aware that I am following a photography course and blog a lot about it. In addition to theory classes, we have also practice and this week-end we did portraiture photography, my fist opportunity to work with studio lights, place them where I feel like and pretend I am not just a n00b. We were photographers but also models, shooting and being shoot.

I find interesting the contrast of the photo where I am the model and the one where I am the photographer: evil versus good, night versus day, Hell versus Heaven...

On the left one can see my dark usual self, dark, bearded, offensive and not usual (covered in smoke, let's pretend it's coming straight from Hell) and on the right the exact opposite, a picture of a blonde colleague (a blue eyed blonde is a must for high key portraits).

There is some GIMPing in the photos above, but it is kept at a minimal level. Time allowing, I will play more later. Also the smapping will be kept at a minumium :p

Video tutorial: the sign

After the other day the secred sign was revealed to the world, I don't want to see people making mistakes and having their file system checked, so I decided to follow up with a small video tutorial. The image quality is poor, as this seems to be all can do the webcam on my Eee, but I believe the message is not hard to understand:

Video in Ogg Theora, 3.7MB

If for some weird reason you have something against Ogg Theora, I made available a version using the evil Flash format.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: The Secret Sign

Today's subject is a bit delayed, the last week I was busy with werewolves and Spartans, but I have to tell a story about secret societies. It is unrelated to the to recent talks on Planet Fedora, the source is a cool photo from Mo's FUDCon coverage.

Now in the following days I have a decision to make for the next issue: come with a fresh subject or continue to beat the poor horse some more and bore my audience with yet another bad joke involving Spartans.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: How to Kill a Werewolf

With everybody excited and happy about new names and past conferences, maybe it the time for me to talk about deaths, about how to kill a werewolf. Of course, pretty much in my own style...

...now I should take my leave, back to reviving my own dead, my main internet server that effectively died on me this morning, with smoke and all the goodies.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic Special: HA-OOH!!!

I was in doubt if I can sit on this idea until the regular publishing day (Thursday) or to issue a "special edition" while the topic is still hot. Well, the decision was eased by the publishing of other comics, so I was afraid someone else may "stole" my exact joke:

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Baloney

I didn't draw a webcomic since last year so is natural to come in full force with a subject anchored in actuality and this obviously is the vote for the Fedora 11 release name. And do not take the webcomic as a recommendation on what to vote, the "sausage" was not my first vote (also not the last), it is for me the perfect opportunity for [bad] jokes. So don't look at me, go and vote, you surely don't want to be responsible if a bad name wins.

Unfortunately, there is another event this week, the Boston FUDCon, and I can't cover both: one issue each week, one topic covered. But I got an idea about a guy digging a whole in the ground with the intention to reach the other side Earth in the hope to find a FUDCon related joke subject.

PS: Today I am pimping one more vote, go and help our friend to shape the revival of the K3RNEL webcomic.

PPS: for anyone speaking another language in addition to English, it should be evident how hard I made for myself the job to translate this issue (I maintain a Romanian translation). For those who don't, here is a hint: I translated/adapted "baloney" with something like "cabbage... with sausages". Damn translations!

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: The Morning After

Yet again a webcomic edition posted automatically in my absence by my nasty twin. I hope he won't manage to show once more he is also my stupid twin, messing the post and forcing me to do an errata.

As for the cartoon itself (note, it is also part of the set I teased my readers a couple of months ago), at one time I had the idea to add a frame with the Mac guy but abandoned it not because of its lack politically correctness but because of redundancy, repeating one of the "forget about" clauses. Well, a few days ago, with the comic ready and waiting the publishing, I got the idea of a Microsoft frame, "forget about the party, we are immensely boring..." but abandoned it to keep the strip Linux-only (brown versus blue - this sounds like a good spin-off).

Competition is good. Good for webcomics too.

I am glad Lubomir found and published at last his webcomic, I searched for it too but didn't find the reference, all I was remembering was that the URL should be in a log from a IRC channel during the Brno FUDCon...

Back then I believed he will get serious about it and planned a proper reply, in a webcomic which was supposed to be something like that:

• first frame: a bearded, pony tailed guy sits on the toilet doing his daily news reading on a laptop;
• second frame: in shock, he notices another webcomic using the same graphics and start shouting about theft;
• third frame: and he is suddenly struck by the common sense, that he intended by using a free license and by making available all the building blocks. Everyone is happy.

Too bad I missed the opportunity to make this, it seems like the competition is tough (anyone remember K3rnel?)

Anyway, the guy reading the news on the toiled haunted me a long time and I was tempted to reuse it in relation with another publication in the Fedora universe but I abstained from that too, since there was a big change to get misunderstood and send a wrong, unintended, message.

Sorry for the mess - the real Christmas Webcomic

I suck. Sorry for the mess, I have not paid real attention to the preview when scheduling the last issue of the webcomic and posted the Romanian version in the wrong place... (the original is always in English and Romanian translation is made later).

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Santa's Hat

I teased a couple of months ago about some nasty webcomics and I got inquiries about them, now (and the next week) is time to deliver and disappoint :D Both in the Christmas and anti-Christmas spirit...

As all the comics poking fun at our brown friends, I expect this one to also generate some hate reactions, so fire away and hate me in the comments... just don't expect me to reply quickly, the post was brought to you by scheduled delivery, at the time of the reading I should be offline, "enjoying" the holidays. Ho, ho, ho!

Christmas Lights in Bucharest

After a public challenge and a miserable failure I had to try again and I think the photos are just a bit better and the place was better organized (being so close tot he Christmas).

Overall I am still unhappy with the photo session and I still think the city officials did a shitty job, but Saturday night on location a big glass (400ml) of boiled wine temporarily changed by view about the world and life.

But let's try some learning from here: taking night photos (or just with not enough light) your camera will use a large ISO value, so it don't need a very large exposure time (you can't afford a long exposure if you shoot moving targets and/or your camera isn't fixed on a tripod).

The downside of a large ISO value is the addition of a lot of unwanted noise and you will surely want to post-process a bit and try some corrections. A good tool for the job is GREYCstoration, a GIMP plug-in (yum install -y GREYCstoration). I should have used it in all the photos, but being computation intensive it take a lot of time on 12 MP photos, so I applied the treatment only to some.

PS: I still feel pity for the poor reindeers, they looked really unhappy.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Future Boot

This is one of those weeks, with too many ideas but only one to implement: over the week-end I was leaning to use at last an old idea for my webcomic, something with a D&D theme but Monday looking and the mail I saw the evolution of the talk about boot speed an I knew it has to be the topic, so during the day I developed it completely into my head. Tuesday another subject hit my ZOMG Stickers!!!!11 was also perfect but a bit to late, I was already committed, so I freed some time and made this issue, with a regret of not using the stickers. Wednesday I got excited of the topic of black T-shirts (it seems like in 2009 our T-shirts will be black at last) but with the comic already drawn, I resisted. Today the megathread is going into new areas, with new possibilities, but I am holding strong to my initial idea.

And don't blame me for incorrect use of quantum mechanics terms, I am not an expert in the field and nobody answered to my (obscure) call for help, but if you don't know what Scroedinger thing is, go and have a quick read at Wikipedia on your route the office where you resign your geek card.