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.