Shame on you OSDL

OSDL has published the results of their Linux desktop survey.

As you can see from this Evince screenshot, the published PDF was made using Microsoft Word, probably on Microsoft Windows undinf the Microsoft DOC format.
Shame on you OSDL! Have you heard the phrease "eat your own doog food"? So much for the Desktop Linux from them.

PS: at least they could have hired some competent workers able to obfuscate the massive use of Microsoft products at the Linux development headquarters.

Update: It was pointed to me the PDF metadata contain more info - the document was made on OS X, but this is not much better.

Update to update:If you ask, the document was made inside OSDL, not by external contractor.

Another update: Do you remember how much fun we have when learning about a Microsoft employee using Firefox?

OCAL in impasse?

Open Source games sucks. People argue this is because Open Source people are mostly developers, not artists and because artists are not very much into free sharing of their work.

I think the Open Clip Art Library proves this wrong: we showed is possible to get in less than two years over 10.000 images from several hundreds of people, producing something which is included in many FOSS and commercial projects. But we were not able to get enough developers doing a half-decent CMS for the website.

The upcoming release look like a bad milestone: over 10% of the submitted SVG files were damaged by the upload scripts. A bug reported a few days ago prevent uploading of zip archives (this stopped Gerald from submitting his set of 1400 images). All of this happens after we skipped a release because of security problems on our website. And we still don't have a plan on implementing features promised over than one year ago.

I wonder how many contributors or possible contributors were lost because of our broken website and what is our real potential, double, triple, more?

I have not made many new images from the last release (something around 80 files) but because of the brokenness, don't feel very motivated to create more or even submit them. Yes, I am a bit disappointed for the moment.

Me from Middle Earth

Numenorean


To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

Ass, erm... donkey

I guess I just let myself carried by a joke made by Joshua Wulf:

Demand OpenDocument: Tell Microsoft You Want It

An online petition for Microsoft to support OpenDocument was launched today by the OpenDocument Fellowship. Microsoft has stated that the company will support the OpenDocument format in MS Office if there is customer demand. This petition will demonstrate that customer demand already exists.

The OpenDocument Fellowship, a volunteer organisation with members around the world, calls on everyone who uses MS Office, or who has an interest in open standards, to sign the petition at http://opendocumentfellowship.org/petition.

The petition, available in several languages, states:
"I request that Microsoft fully support the OASIS (Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) OpenDocument Format for Office Applications in its MS Office product. This should include the ability to read, edit and write OpenDocument files reliably, according to the format specification."

OpenDocument (short for OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications) is:

• An open, XML-based file format.


• An open standard from the OASIS standards group.


• The default file format for OpenOffice.org 2.0, KOffice 1.4, StarOffice 8, IBM Workplace and other applications.


• The required office format for internal archives of the US State of Massachusetts.


• A format that fulfills the European Union's criteria on open standards.

"OpenDocument is important because it keeps your data accessible and promotes competition," said Jason Faulkner, press contact for OpenDocument Fellowship. "People want their information to be free, and competition is good for customers. OpenDocument brings open architecture to your data in the same way that the IBM PC brought open architecture to computer hardware. The competition encouraged by that has seen ever-improved performance and decreasing prices of computer hardware."

OpenDocument is designed not just to handle all office type files but also to integrate with the Internet. Users whose data is stored in OpenDocument format will never again face the problem of not being able to access data because the application that created it is no longer supported.

Open standards already enable users of different computer systems (both hardware and software) to access the Internet and communicate with each other. ODF enables users of different computer systems and software to freely exchange and use files. Vote for ODF!

For more information, see the Fellowship's website, http://opendocumentfellowship.org

LOAD - Photo

MyLINUX has published on their website a picture from LOAD with me giving the presentation about OpenOffice.org 2.0

LOAD

Linux Open Alternative Days is a business oriented conference and I was invited to keep a presentation on OpenOffice.org. Obviously, the subject was the classic "What is new in OOo 2.o" with a touch on the Romanian Native Language Project.

My slides are in Romanian language and available here.

And a picture of the conference room:

What can I say more? I was a nasty boy, and interrupted two respectable people from their presentations:

• Victor Spigelman - IBM WW Linux and Infrastructure Sales Executive was saying that the city of Munich decided to migrate to Linux despite the price reduction made by Microsoft because of religion, in his vision the migration was dictated by a religious attitude toward Linux - I pointed out the reason was because of long-term costs


• Claudiu Borsan, Novell SEE, Country Manager Romania was saying that Linux is not necessary free, and it cost money (he was talking in Romanian but used the English word free), and did it twice, so I had to interrupt him and point that Linux is Free but not necessarily gratis

Also, it was a pleasure to know Andrei Pascal from ITtraining and Mircea Buzlea from MyLINUX

Borked Colours

Have a look of this:

It seems the Photoshop-fu is weak in the person who made it, he managed to alter my cake and transform the chocolate is some disgusting chemicals:

Also the blue colour of "Office.org" is bad: it should be the same as the horizontal bar (R6, G52, B140).

In my experience this is caused by colour setting in Photoshop: next time use GIMP, dude!

Tango Project

I am trying to understand what is this Tango Desktop Project, beside the claim of "exists to create a consistent user experience for free and Open Source software with graphical user interfaces".
The Icon Theme Guidelines look like a fork of the GNOME HIG but using instead a very bright look for icons, it reminds me of KDE.
Beside the talk about all Open Source GUI applications, of GNOME, KDE and Mozilla, the people behind it are exclusively GNOME people from Novell.
Maybe I am mistaken, but it looks to me pretty much as a HIG fork, as adopting it by GNOME would obsolete its own guidelines.

Stuck in Corel land

I need some OpenOffice.org business cards, as I will keep next week a presentation at a Linux conference. So designed a nice one in Inkscape and experimented with some export options.

The next step was to search for a print shop to make them.

Print Shop 1, a little pricey, varying from .25 to .50 RON (about 0.07 - 0.14 EUR) each, depending on the amount of colour used. It was like this:
- What file formats do you accept?
- Any Corel up to version 12
- Anything else? EPS? PDF?
- We don't work with EPS, PDF yes, if you do the entire A4 paper, but we will not be able to edit it or adjust colours.
- OK, I will not need adjustments, but you will accept bitmaps?
- Sure, but we will not be able to edit it or adjust colours.
- Fair enough, what dpi?
- Anything more than 72 dpi
- OK, will do 600 dpi

Print Shop 2, a seriously cheaper one: .18 EUR
- What file formats do you accept?
- Corel
- Anything else? EPS? PDF?
- No, only Corel
- F*ck you very much

I don't have much time to search for other options, so I guess will go with Print Shop 1.

Another step will be do design a t-shirt (with OCAL to wear at the same conference) and to find a shop where to print it. I expect it to be more trouble some, as I want to use a non rectangular shape and maybe some gradients (at a second thought, maybe without gradients). I suspect here PNG is the only option.

All this experience reminded me of another one, about one year ago, when I had to do a brochure for my job. Then the print guy (our company is a regular customer of him) was a little more enlightened: he used both Illustrator and Corel (with a preference for Corel) and, as a big surprise for me, was a OpenOffice.org user, preferring it to MSO because "it work better with tables". But from our discuss I learned he never heard of PNG before. SVG, W3C? Obviously, he knew even less about those. (Is possible to know less than nothing about something?)

Politics

Take this with a grain of salt, as the test is taylored for people in US:

You are a Social Liberal (73% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (26% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

Open Source games

So if both Alan and Bryce talk about Open Source/Linux games, can I stop myself trowing two cents on the debate?

In my opinion, the main problem is the barrier to entry. It is too high.
And the second problem is the desire to make games comparable with the latest commercial production. And too many 3D shooters.

What I would like to have in Linux is a tool comparable with RPG Maker 2000 with a free license. This would allow easy creation of fun and simple games and if the game creation tool is free is also possible the games will be free (a lot of games made with RPG Maker 2000 are freeware).

From a few minutes of looking at RM2K my conclusion is that it represent a wonderful tool. I have one single complaint: the controls are very dumb, in the style of game consoles, this is wrong, a PC game should be controlled like a PC game, with mouse and keyboard not with cursor keys and A, S, D. Also, the menus system and all dialogs are very dumb, console style, implemented.

Inkscape in the press: MyLINUX

This morning in my way to the office noticed a new edition of the MyLINUX magazine featuring Inkscape on the front cover (they contacted us some weeks ago requesting screenshots):

  

What to say about it? The article is full of praises from an enthusiastic author, mostly for the keyboard shortcuts and the integrated documentation.
Of course, it contains a lot of sample images, including my old RPG map example.

Resemblance

Vote ending

I expected a larger number of replies, but the result (after over 24 hours), with a score of 5:1 is:

As you may suspect now, an invitation to an Inkscape "Bug Party" will follow shorty.

Damn rain!

This morning, on the way to work I had the sensation I'm trapped inside an old platform game:

Basically I had to jump from stone to stone, avoinding to drop in the water. The main difference: no sharks in the water :D

The ending was also a surprise: right in the front of the building entry, a big puddle, impossible to cross:
 
Well, life as usual in Bucharest when it rain...

Vote

Let's do a quick vote, what do you like more:
1.
2.

3. none of the above, both of them suck!

What is wrong with games by 'bedroom programmers'?

Citing from this bullshit article:

There are uncomfortable similarities between the OSS development process and the situation that arose in the computer games industry in the early 1980s, where legions of 'bedroom programmers' produced video console games of such poor quality that, despite selling in tens of thousands, they nearly destroyed the industry.

and:

The games industry learned a valuable lesson from this experience and is now arguably the most highly trained and disciplined software development community in the world. This professionalism in software development is cited as a major contributory factor to the explosive growth that the computer games industry has enjoyed over the last 10 years.

Indeed, this is why the large majority of games produced today are the crap series made by Electronic Arts, dreaming of the golden age of games made by those 'bedroom programmers', when it was fun to play original and innovative games.

Clip Art vs. Clipart and OCAL

Let see what are the results of searching the newly released Google Blog Search for the Open Clip Art Library.

• My first try was to search for "clipart". We don't get a direct link anywhere in the first 100 results. The best mention is Greg's blog in "Relatd Blogs" and F12EdCom linking to us on page 5;


• The second attempt was to search for "openclipart" to see if we are indexed at all. The result is as expected: our website is on "Related Blogs" (is our website really a blog?) and a lot of blogs talking about us. Nitpick: the Planet is not listed in the results;


• One more try: search for "clip art" - our site listed on 'Related Blogs' and some (not enough, IMO) results with pages talking about us;


• The last try: OCAL - Benji's blog on 'Related Blogs' and a lot of pages from insiders in the results. This is expected, as the acronym OCAL is only for "internal" use.

Conclusion? Our site is represented fairly good on clip art but not good on clipart, and this should be because our title is Open Clip Art Library and not Open ClipArt Library, but I will expect much end-users to search for "clipart" instead of "clip art".

Granny Linux

Bryce talk about Granny Linux listing as requirements:

First, the interface should be extremely stripped down. Granny Linux users are the polar opposite of the traditional Linux user - choice is bad. They probably only use about 4-6 applications, so there should be no other options beyond those, plus a button to turn off the computer, and a magnifying glass button. Firefox, one or two apps from Open Office, and a couple games. That's it.

Well, judging after the screenshots (I had not used it), Symphony OS look like fitting the bill.

Venus

So, if Rejon revealed it, I guess I'll have to put the picture here:

Too bad Adobe does not use the Venus picture anymore, this devaluate my joke a lot :(

Rap songs are NOT Clip Art

Amazing what people submit instead of clipart: desktop screenshots, photos, game screenshots, porn and so on. I guess the most offtopic so far is rap song lyrics.
To top that, the text is in Dutch and saved as Microsoft Word .doc.
Can something get more offtopic than this?

Translation marathon - OpenOffice.org

We just started the translation of OOo UI under the coordination of Dan Damian and a team experienced in the translation of GNOME.
As a first step we had Saturday 3 September a translation marathon at the "Politehnica" University in Timisoara. At the event participated 5 people on site and another 4 remote.
We succeeded in translating in one single day (11 to 20 hour) around 3300 strings, which represent in Dan's estimation about 15% of the entire UI. Additional statistics are available (in Romanian language).

The translation will continue with individual work but probably also with other future marathons, with coordination provided on the wiki and our project mailing list

I address warm thank you for all the participants and I'm looking forward for great accomplishments.

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.