Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Popcorn

My initial plan for this week was to come with a Star Wars themed sequel, but in the end they dropped the part about a princess Leia and without the opportunity to draw some bikini and not get flamed for it, my enthusiasm decreased.

A second option was to talk about one stage of the recent flame war (around the mixer), but that would be an unfunny personal attack, which my easily be seen as personal payback, so scrapped that too.

Then an obvious (and predictable) topic was the recent release of a competing distro and our own preview release. Even if the angle was new, I felt I am somewhat repeating myself and put it on hold trying something else.

I found the fourth subject attractive: a "fedora-flu" pandemic, which is expected to get global in less than one month an geeks wearing breathing masks to keep it under control.

Still unsure I asked for feedback on #fedora-ro and the general opinion was the pandemic premise is good but it lack a good punch so better go back to the third option. I listened, implemented the graphics and here is Popcorn. Don't bother to flame me about how we are all supposed to be friends, hold hands and sing Kum-Ba-Yah.

Fedora, Vader, Stormtroopers, geeks, geekettes

Hurry, so I can take the first post from Tatica... remember my star wars themed comic? It was inspired by actual facts which at the time were supposed to happen. And they happened, thanks to the cool guys and girls from the Fedora Venezuela community.

photo from tatica's flickr account

Eh, isn't this an uber-cool community?

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Unbreakable Prophecy

While I pompously call this the "Fedora Weekly Wecomic" , my comic is fan-made content, I am in no way a Fedora representative, not even an Ambassador (even if some guys are trying to persuade me into enrolling), so even if sometimes I may appear to pick on some corporations, this is just my personal voice, not a statement from Fedora or any of its sponsors.

Open Source activity in Romania

There is this interesting Open Source Activity Map made collaboratively by Red Hat and Georgia Tech so I had to check the status of my country, which is a very yellowish orange, very close to the bottom yellow:

At the first look I find hard to believe the "community" score is lower than "government", (or for that matter, anything in this country being worse than the government), but looking at the raw data I can understand why, we have things like 0.0000622 Linux users per capita and also can understand why the "e;industry"e; score is so good (things like the cellular network).

We have a lot of things to do, according to the environmental map, we could be closer tot he middle of the pack and the community should be much better (score 33 instead of 55).

However, thins are moving in the community part, so I will use the opportunity to congratulate the guys from the local openSUSE community for getting into legality by getting approval for the trademark usage but also tease them: we (fedora) didn't had to wait for a full month for a similar process, it was solved in a matter of minutes :D (well, it took like 3 days, but that was because we moved slow to print a piece of paper, sign it, scan and send back).

One thing I hate about Firefox 3.1 (3.5)

After I jumped at Rawhide for daily use, I live with the new Firefox (3.1 Beta 3, to be renamed 3.5), which overall is a better browser but I have a huge annoyance: closing the last tab will close the browser entirely (I think I can figure the rationale behind the new behaviour, even if I don't like it).

After a normal working session (with 3-15 tabs), I close them one by one, when I have no need for them any more, until I get to a single one. Then I start something entirely different, by typing a new URL in the address bar or going to a saved bookmark... but not want to send the old URL as referrer for a lot of reasons. In this case I used to close the last tab and start with an empty one and clean history, but it does not work any more.

My current workaround was to set the home page to "about:blank", add the Home icon tot he toolbar and train myself in using that Home icon (don't remember when I have used it the last time). This is some impact on my workflow.

Update: thanks to an anonymous comment, teh solution is to set browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab to false in about:config.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Level up!

This week I am playing (an one time try) with a slightly different format (otherwise the story would not fit) and a slightly different character design (chibi). This was also the comic with the most research work behind: several days spent with ZSNES and various ROMs, I needed it tu be accurate :D

PS: the amount of testing was limited only by my own lameness, I was not able to beat and get past of the Evil Wall in FF4 and Hiryuusou in FF5... the work on FF6 is still in early stages.

A messy desktop?

The past day when blogging about the new Leonidas backgrounds, Martin apologised for his messy desktop, which made me think: if that's messy, then how I should call my desktop?

PS: and this is after I did some cleaning the past week, when wiped F10 and installed F11 Beta.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Zeus

If you tried the Fedora 11 Beta or played with Rawhide, surely noticed a landscape image with a "Greek" theme: a temple of Zeus, mountains, sky, birds... You may liked or hated it, is already unimportant, the theme will be replaced before the upcoming development freeze (so any time now) with something completely different, about a lion.

The change is happening for a number of reasons developed after the inclusion, among which are NOT the reactions about the use of temples and "worshipping paganism", so I give today a taste of Zeus goodness (fear his thunders if you are unbelievers):

I can has mascot? - take 2

As I said before, I am a n00b at creating lolcats, so frustrating things happens, like you put online your first lolcat ever and a couple of hours later you get a better idea for the caption, as how the text should have been in the first place.

Decent people would suck it up, learn from the mistake and next time try to do it better. But I am no decent people, I get frustrated, take yesterday's lolcat, recaption it and post again.

Too bad my cat (an all black little guy with an evil look and disturbed personality) is uncooperative, so a weekly lolcat from me is unfortunately out of question.

I can has mascot?

With many thanks to Diego for the source image and to Max and Paul for the story, I present you the first know Fedora lolcat (and is my first lolcat too, made with GIMP and Inkscape):

One step closer to eLiberatica

We are one step closer to Fedora's presence at the eLiberatica conference: thanks to Max I just received a box with Fedora 10 Live CD, so we have the first thing to give to our visitors. We are still planning for more bang, join if you want to help.

Fedora Weekly Webomic: Ctrl + Alt + Backspace

If the other day I ran special edition for the Beta release did someone believe that was all from me for this week? Not so fast! I am here on the schedule with an predictable piece about the huge "Ctrl + Alt + Backspace" dispute:

Fedora Webcomic Special: The Beta Nazi

I guess that a Beta release deserves a special edition don't you think so? Even if it is overloaded with TV references and internet memes... now maybe I can get "hooche mama" out of my head :D (believe or not, it was a tough decision to go with it or "yo yo mama" as the final line)