Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Elections

Much to my shame (one should not talk about elections if he didn't bother to vote), I didn't vote for the Fedora board. Why? I think any of them would do a good job on the board and do not know them enough to say if one or another would do a better or worse job.
Also, I am not close enough to anyone to vote him only on a friendship basis (probably that would be equally worse from a democratic point of view).
However, voters, candidates, winners: congratulations to all!

May I take this photo?

Saturday, in our trip to Cluj, after the presentation and the party ended we still had a few hours to spend, so we went to the Botanical Garden.

Close-up to a cactus

As the entrance, we had to pay a small tax, 4 RON (a little over 1 EUR) but to be allowed to take photos, an additional tax of 20 RON (or five times the entrance ticket) was needed. Figuring there is no way the tax is worth the amount of pictures we can take, we went tu put our cameras (4 of us had cameras) in the backpack.
Then the cashier noticed and told us the price has to be paid only if you take commercial photos and we do not have to pay for personal photos, so we went ahead (guessing the lady is not familiar with "Intellectual Property").

a Japanese garden

After passing beyond the gate I raised the question (but nobody in the group played along): it is non-commercial use if I will put the photos on my blog, where I also display AdSense? And an additional question: are those photos compatible with my CC-BY-SA license or should I re-license my blog as CC-BY-NC-SA? (I am not going to do that, NC means "non-Free").

is Nicu shooting Alex taking a close-up of a strawberry
or is he shooting the girls sitting on the bench?

Romnian Fedora team at Cluj - an illustrated history

As announced, a group of Romanian Fedora contributors went Saturday at an event organized in Cluj-Napoca by Grupul pentru Software Liber. Now it is the time for a [heavy] illustrated report of the event (even more photos [*] can be found in our photo gallery):

So, we leaved Bucharest Friday, with the night train:

Where for now "we" is as this: me, Nicu, (if you read this, you should have a pointer about who I am), Adrian and Andrei are Fedora Ambassadors and the other Andrei is a junior member of the team (and being underage, we had to take care of him, Adrian received something like 20 minutes of instructions on the phone from his mother).


We were awaited early in the morning at the train station by Jani and Adi (both are Ubuntu contributors), and having a lot of time until the event's start, they took us for a walk in the city:


After that, we went to Adi's house, meet Alex) (he came from Timisoara), who work on Fedora but also on Firefox and OpenOffice.org, took the materials and headed to the event's place:


Namely, to the Babes - Bolyai University, which is a beautiful place (from every point of view):


There we prepared the room and waited for the audience to come:


I started the presentation with a talk about the Fedora community, but instead of half an hour, as planned, I got carried away by the speech, talked for a full hour and messed-up the entire schedule (bad idea guys to move my speech at the beginning):


Then Alex talked about Narro, his wonderful web-based translation tool, and about using it to translate OpenOffice.org and Fedora


Then Adrian gave a general presentation of the new features in Fedora 9, but he had to rush the presentation, because of me, who talked to much in my previous segment:


But probably my greatest victim was Andrei, who intended to talk a bit about Java in Fedora (sharing the same presentation with Adrian), but effectively had to resume it to a couple of phrases (bad, Nicu, bad!). But he helped us a lot and took a large number of photos (not yet online)


Then Alex took the stage again and talked about Firefox 3, release, features and translation


And during all those speeches, aour junior apprentice was helpful and good at cheering


After the presentation, we got to a Firefox 3 release party: friendly people, beer and interesting personal talks.


After the party, all of us Fedora guys (all five, including Alex), took another walk in the city (mainly at the Botanical Garden)


But we have not limited to admire some beautiful places, the city has plenty of other beautiful things to see:


And that was almost all, we returned with another night train.

In the end, many thanks to Adi and Jani, you were fabulous hosts!


Note: I made even more photos, but in the gallery are available only photos somewhat related to FOSS, photos with other subjects (like beautiful girls from Cluj streets) may be found on my other sites.

We are going to Cluj

We are going to Cluj-Napoca this Saturday! Grupul pentru software liber (the Group for Free Software) organized an event, held at the Babes - Bolyai University and we, the Romanian Fedora team are going to talk (in front of what I expect to be an Ubuntu predominant audience, so keep your fingers crossed for us to return alive).

a poster for the event,
greatly influenced by Mo's work

What we will to there? the plan is like this: Adrian to talk about Fedora 9 with Andrei adding a few words about Java, Alexandru will talk about localization with Narro (introducing OpenOffice.org) and Firefox, me to talk about the Fedora community (as viewed thru the eyes of an Art Team contributor) and the other Andrei to cheerlead.

homemade promo stuff for the event

As you can see from the photo above, I have a new toy, but more about that later, probably next week, for now is enough to say it stole a lot of my time, so I barely prepared a a set of slides for my presentation (according to the schedule, I have about 20 minutes for it anyway).

But back to the topic, after the event we will go to drink at the Firefox Release Party, so it must de fun!

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Webcomics War

The regular readers of Planet Fedora probably noticed a new (and very cool) webcomic K3RNEL from Mexico. Some competition for this webcomic.

Of course nodoby is going to war, I know they have a mighty army, so will just claim the two webcomics have completely different styles, formats, stories, graphics and both can live happily together.

Make fun not war!

Id cards, beards, framing BUT also university degrees, congratulations

I could rant about a "John Doe" life: over a year of not having a valid ID card, living an almost underground life, mostly normal but with only a few minor annoyances (like having the bank accounts blocked, being unable to travel outside of the country or, if that matters, being unable to vote - it doesn't matter, we can't escape the communist mafia).

I could write, for those who know me closely and may jump to some wrong conclusions, about my beard: even if it is not visible, I still have a beard inside, nothing changed, I am the same.

Instead my choice was to write about photo framing, this may be useful for a wider audience.

So I took the plunge, temporarily shaved my beard and renewed my ID card (it expired over one year ago and I have not cared enough to replace it). I used the opportunity of the local elections around here, when the people at the office in charge work overtime, so I had my card ready in two days, instead of the usual wait (at least a week, I believe).

The lady at the office, bored by the perspective of working overtime, took the following photo:

With the red arrows I emphasized the bad framing: 40% of the photo is occupied by my body, which is useless, nobody is interested in my shirt (or the hair on my chest for that matter). The purpose of such a photo is to show the face, so use zoom and crop (they had a 6 MP Olympus camera, a SP-500 UZ I believe, which should be perfectly apt for the task), here is (gimped) how such a photo should look:

---

In unrelated news, do you know Adrian Joian, a Fedora Ambassador and my colleague from the Romanian Fedora community?


Today he had the last exam for his university degree and finished with a perfect 10.
Congratulations, Adrian!

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Fedora Weekly News

After a few weeks of pause, Fedora Weekly News is back in full force, giving each week an interesting read.
While I may have lied a bit about the nudity part, the rest is true, and true is that it could use some more contributors, so join the team!

Zombies? Bring it on...

Can I resist playing the running meme on Planet Fedora? Of course not, and of course I temporarily changed my hackergotchi to fit it.

You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:

1. One weapon
2. One song blasting on the speakers
3. One famous person to fight along side you.

---

1. Emerald Sword - see next item for additional info
2. Emerald Sword - while I could go for many other (and maybe better) choices from a Rhapsody of Fire compilation, I will go with Emerald Sword to give the needed background info for the previous item
3. Aerie - the wise choice would be a cleric with the Turn Undead ability, but I have a soft spot for elvish companions, so Aerie is.

How to make a screencast

I told you already that today I am in a screencasts creation frenzy, so here is one more, a screencast about creating screencasts with Istanbul (this one inspired by a talk on the Fedora marketing list):

Echo tips: screencast - Creating icons

It seems like my initiative to get people intro producing tips, howtos and tutorials about creating Echo icons was not that bad after all, Martin wrote a couple of very useful pieces.

Being in a screencasts frenzy today and until I got to write something original, here is a little screencast I made based on Martin's excellent tutorial about Creating Echo Icons with On the Table Perspective (all the creative credit goes to Martin, I just recorded his steps):

Note: forgive me Martin, I misspelled your name in the screencast and I am too lazy to record it again only to properly de-capitalize one letter :p

Everybody: what are you waiting for? Move your lazy asses and start drawing Echo icons, is not hard at all!

How to get your blog on Planet Fedora - screencast

As some people are confused about the "technical difficulties" of having their blog added (or re-added) to Planet Fedora, here is a small screencast about how to do it. So can you still honestly say the barrier is to high?

The screencast is made with OGG Theora so it should work out-of-the-box in Fedora (or any Linux distro), but if there is anyone "technically challenged" that much so it is too hard, I uploaded the clip also to YouTube: