When religion is schools is too much?

Forced religion in public schools is an old pet peeve of mine, but sometime it is just too much, and I have to join other Romanian bloggers and protest: this is too much. The linked article is written in Romanian, but it contain explicit pictures (scroll down a bit).

This is supposed to be a "religion laboratory", a special class room where some students spend a large part of their time. And this is in a public school, paid from my money.

Lycanthropy

Werewolves are kick ass mythical creatures.
I still believe vampires are cooler (maybe we will have on as an option for F9), but werewolves are good enough.

It is a tram, it is a tank?

I saw it some days ago but only today I had my phone handy and was in a close distance (but being in movement, I had only a single shot opportunity, the result is acceptable).
Well, it is a tram painted in the army green, complete with the army symbol. WTF?


It is a tram, it is a tank?
(on the streets of Bucharest)
I guess it is some weird marketing campaign, but it had no visible advertising on it.

Creative Commons licenses and the Romanian web

Lately I started to publish my tutorials in the Romanian language too, in addition to the original English version and I observed an annoying thing: people take the content and re-publish it on their own sites (which is fine, this is why I use CC-BY-SA) but they tend to not follow the license: do not attribute the source, do not link back and do not share alike, even more, in those conditions they hot link images back from my site (this give me the unexpected advantage of easily tracking them).

I contacted those people, outlined the license and politely requested credit and share alike. Usually they reply nicely and comply, even if I have to further explain what are the requirements of the license.

My conclusion is that the Romanian public is generally not informed properly about licenses and Creative Commons, so an information campaign is needed to raise awareness, so here is a short introduction about the main Creative Commons licenses, written on a Romanian language blog.

To further this effort, I guess I could try to translate the full text of the licenses in the Romanian language, but I don't think this is the best thing as (1) is not wise to have an engineer translating legal stuff and (2) a localized version of the license (as CC has for various regions) will need input about the local law from a local lawyer.

The IT Crowd and Linux

Quote from an interview with Graham Linehan, creator of The IT Crowd (emphasis mine):

I always try and come up with ideas that have what I call 'penetration'; they involve computers in some way, but in such a way that everybody will know what I'm talking about. So I'd write something about Facebook, which people are very aware of now, but not My Space, which was more of a culty thing. I'd write about the German cannibal because it made the news, but I hardly ever do gags about geeky things like Linux because to hasn't penetrated into the mainstream.

More Fedora userbars

In an earlier post I showed a Fedora signature bar (userbar) for forums and almost forgot about it, until a recent comment on another post reminded me about the topic, userbars are appropriate not only users, but also contributors (developers, ambassadors):

F8 "Infinity" web banners and buttons

I like simple things and I like the texture from the "Infinity" background so I did a few very simple preliminary web graphics with an "Infinity" feel, they will probably serve as a base for some better graphics to come:

• plain and simple banner:
  


• with the "Infinite Boundaries" initial concept from "Infinity":
  


• with the traditional "infinity+freedom+voice" message:
  


• buttons:
  

AMD/ATI

My PC at home is in a serious need for a major upgrade for quite some time and after hearing the good AMD news about Linux drivers, when the time will come I will almost certainly break my tradition of using Nvidia cards and go for an AMD/ATI card along with (here the tradition will remain unchanged) an AMD CPU.
This may even change my position about laptops.