MemoriSolitaire

I just got a nice holidays present: learned about MemoriSolitaire, "a solitaire card game where you use your memory to gain advantage", which is the first known use of my playing cards.

Free fonts

The latest Fedora Reloaded Podcast features an interview with Andy Fitzsimon, well known for his work on Inkscape and OCAL.
Andy is working on a Free font (probably to be released under LGPL) for the Fedora Project. The font is intended to be used on documentation, posters, flyers etc.

At the end an the interview, the Libre Graphics Meeting is mentioned - Andy will give there a demonstration on using Inkscape and GIMP.

go4it

go4it is a magazine with very little content: advertising for gadgets and pictures of babes holding those gadgets.

Today it was the first time for me reading this magazine (if we can call "reading" my two minutes look at it) and I don't like it:

• no real content, only advertising for expensive gadgets with a lot of hype (better search yourself online);


• the babes wear to many clothes for my taste (better search yourself online).

Then why blog about it? This number have something interesting, and I do not talk about the girl, the famous (for Romanians) Abramburica (she is so-so, nice body, common face, bad actress). The real event: they have a comparison of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2003.

Their conclusion: the best tool is the one you are used with, OOo has a formidable price but is slow and resource hungry (true).
And the second conclusion: it does not matter much, because soon we all will be using Writely.

It looks like they did their job, the article list the address of our Native-Lang Project and mention the work on localization as an advantage.

Can I be allowed to hope for a future edition with a centerfold of a better babe clothed in OOo CDs? Anyway, I will not buy it, but receiving it for free, will browse for a couple of minutes.

Xmas poll

I promised a follow-up, so here is it.

So i made a few greeting cards, just in time for this year's Xmas. But the hard part is now to find myself which one i like better (or put in other words, which one suck less).

1. 


2. 


3. 


4. 


5. 

Feedback?

Counting users

Bryce talks about the classic subject of Importance of Cross Platform OSS Applications, i will not argue for or against, just make one small nitpick:

our measurements showed more Windows-based Inkscape users than Linux ones

We all know the measurement method of counting SourceForge downloads is flawed: Inkscape is included in all major Linux distros and any sane user will prefer to use the native packages provided by his distro instead of Autopackage or static RPMs.

So yes, i agree probably there are more Inkscape users on Windows than on Linux, but the ratio is not the one illustrated by sf.net downloads. We, as any other OSS project, just don't have a reliable way to count the users - see the 100 M downloads of Firefox or 50 M downloads of OpenOffice.org.

Xmas is coming

Yup, Xmas is coming and it looks like Open Clip Art Library will skip yet another release.

But I'm bored and what to do? Of course, some Xmas themed Pin-ups!

The first one was made a couple of days ago:

The second, made today, is more polished and have a size just right for our calendar contest:


And I have at least a couple of different ideas, watch this space :p

Inkscape Calendar

We have a sort of competition hosted at deviantART: the purpose is to get a calendar with images made with Inkscape.
Come and join the contest, is not that hard to win, as a year have 12 months so we will need 12 "winners".

Unfortunately, the time available is short, as we want to promote the calendar as a gift for the upcoming holidays, so the ending date is Monday 12.

R.I.P. - MyLINUX magazine

My picture just got published in a magazine - MyLINUX, so I purchased this morning one to show it to my mom :p

I had a surprise opening it: an announcement saying the magazine will be published in the future only in PDF format on the CD-ROM of their other magazines (MyComputer, PCGames and CDForum). So practically, the magazine is dead.

I wonder if it was bad karma for them to publish my picture in the magazine or a Linux magazine is not a viable business in Romania.

On a more serious note, I think I have some ideas on why the magazine failed after only 7 editions:

• the company making it is not big, probably is hard to push that many magazines


• the paper based media is dying being replaced by online venues and this is more visible on IT magazines


• maybe I am well informed and in touch with the Linux world, but this particular magazine failed to offer to me significant value


• in a country where a copy of Windows costs very little above the price of a blank CD (at the corner of the street, of course), desktop Linux is a niche product for end-users

note: It looks like my blog posts are pretty negative lately, maybe I should write about more optimistic things, like the incredibly cool idea of a SVG game