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.
Sun just unveiled a new icon design for OpenOffice.org, named Galaxy.
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:
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.
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 - 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.
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:
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.
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 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:
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.
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.
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.
Rahul about the new FC6 theme:
It is claimed to be dark, satanic, gothic, death metal and futuristic ;-)
I, for one, welcome our new death metal futuristic goth stanic overlords! Dark is good.
But take this opinin with a grain of salt, from someone who used to use solid black backgrounds when no "nice enough" picture was available.
Most wanted
People seems amazed by the similarities between me and this guy, featured on the most wanted list of our Romanian police (18 years for murder - he surely is a dangerous guy). At least I have long hair and am a few years younger.
Drinks
I could not resist and copy other people, just like the monkey I am:
| How to make a Nicu Buculei |
| Ingredients: 5 parts pride 3 parts humour 3 parts leadership |
| Method: Layer ingredientes in a shot glass. Top it off with a sprinkle of fitness and enjoy! |
This is teamwork!And the team absolutely rocks.
Mairin came with the metaphor and a first implementation, Mola with the 3D rendering and Diana with the finishing, other people with feed-back, testing and comments, for a completely stunning result.
There is a plan in renewing GNOME Games: in the 2.18 cycle add a new game and remove an old, uninteresting one. For this, a survey is taking place in order to get an idea about what people like or don't like.
One of the games with few supporters is Gnobots, which honestly is ugly and does not fit well in a modern desktop, but I have some ideas for improving it - unfortunately only graphics, no code, I hope it will not die:
No, not me, this is about the Open Clip Art Library.
A question about OCAL being "dead or alive" started a long talk about merging OCAL back into Inkscape if this is the way to keep the project alive.
It seems the consensus was (and I fully agree) a complete merge is not the best option.
The positive outcome is that a few people commited to increase their contribution to the project and the activity has increased.
However, the area where most help is needed and we are still uncovered is about php programming, to add SVG support to ccHost, according with our plan of action.
We launched the Romanian version of the Get Legal - Get OpenOffice.org campaign. Feel free to link to those pages and/or put buttons on your pages:
So OpenDocument was adopted as an international standard: ISO/IEC 26300.
Open the champagne, bring the beer or whatever you like, is the time to party!
Inkscape is really cool for creating diagrams like this:
With a little experience, is easy to fake a 3D look with Inkscape:
This seems logical, as today is the traditional day for painting eggs for easter, but not so logical considering i am definitely an atheist.
My only excuse: i will enjoy this upcoming 3 days week-end and the traditional festive meals (but still feeling a little dirty for exposing those religious symbols).
I wonder how appropriate is to use themes for the games in GNOME to "promote" a distro. I was told by someone to send such themes upstream.
Now, if i would be the upstream maintainer, i would feel the need to be distro-impartial and reject such contributions, this is why i am reluctant to propose those upstream.
But i, as a theme creator, i am not sure creating such themes in the first place is a god idea, still weighting it. Opinions?
Anyway, just for fun, i did such a theme:
Quoting Netcraft about the new launched Open Source Domain Parking Service:
The project's goals are to increase the market share for open source software and generate revenue from advertising on the parked domains, which will be used to fund "political and promotional efforts" on behalf of open source software.
So Caolan asked for a pink (OMG PONIES) Gnome wallpaper.
A Fedora one is good enough? (I quickly adapted a blue one from my collection).
I was surprised seeing a Google search will return my Fedora wallpapers page as the third result in about one million entries.
Here is a Bluecurve palette for use in Inkscape and Gimp.
You can sign it too!
The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Cliches was a very long but entertaining read. I definitely prefer PC games over consoled, where those cliches does not fully apply, but can appreciate it as insightful.
Mărţişor is an over commercialised Romanian tradition celebrating the beginning of the spring on 1 March.
At every big intersection, we have these says sellers on the streets offering some kitsch products and a lot of people wanting to buy some as cheap and as impersonal as possible. That is because every man is expected to offer one to each of the females around him: coworkers, family, neighbors etc.
Usually, as a socially inapt geek, I ignore this tradition, but this year made an exception, created a very symbolic virtual Martisor, which I share here, for other fellows to use as they like.
Accelerated X is a hot topic these days and Free Software Magazine has an article about it.
Surprisingly enough, I would not talk about the accelerated X, but about this particular article: it contains some diagrams in which I recognized a couple of images from my Public Domain clipart collection (also part of Open Clip Art Library).
Those are not something I am proud of, the images were made back when I was learning my way into Inkscape(or probably Sodipodi at the time) but is nice to see them used.
The protest was started by the kids in a Romanian school, feed-up with the bad translation of the programs on Cartoon Network. Yes, we don't want the shows doubled in Romanian, we like the original, in English, with a Romanian subtitle for those who does not know enough English.
Someone just discovered the StarWars game easter egg in OpenOffice.org Calc so la lot of noise started:
- the developers does not take the project seriously;
- this is not professional;
- we can't trust OOo;
- my employees wile play instead of work;
- this is a blocker for adoption in schools;
- etc.
Bugs opened in IssueZilla only to be closed by developers in a few minutes, endless threads on the mailing list - in a few words: hell on earth.
So if having easter eggs is so bad, how one can explain the dominance of Microsoft Office, with the famous flight simulator in Excel?
Well, I have a simple solution for those people: download the source code, comment the easter eggs code, build a binary, rename it BoringOffice.org and advertise it as "the same OpenOffice.org but with all the fun taken out".
SeaMonkey released the first stable version. At a first look it looks better than the combination of Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5, both are based on the same Gecko generation, so SVG support, tab reordering, global inbox, or whatever you need, but SeaMonkey is faster.
Sure, I can see also some downsides: SeaMonkey does not have pretty pictures, the icon theme is the same old one, remembering of Netscape 4.x days.
It appears the SeaMonkey developers follow a lesson from Firefox branding: they don't want to release the source for the logo graphic, to keep it under control.
I have bad news: such a logo is easy to recreate, here is a very quick job, with a lot of room for further improvements:
Just found this picture, it is about 7 years old. Can you guess who I am? I bet you can't!
Consider the betting game open :)
Admire the new default theme in Gnobots (from GNOME Games):
An intriguing inquiry today at Open Clip Art Library: someone from a gaming company is searching for some of a few of our authors for a business proposal.
Of course, I don't have their contact data, end even if I had it, don't think is appropriate to give it to strangers.
So if Dan Gerhards, The Structor or AJ Ashton are reading this: have a look at the mailing list someone is wanting to give you money.
About the same time someone else is looking for Franccesco Rollandin, this time i don't know if money are involved. Francesco is easy to find, he used to post on the mailing list.
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