Another one for the team

If the first one was about mere strawberries, the second dedication for the Fedora Design Team members absent from the Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 is more elaborate: Belgian gaufres, with strawberries, chocolate and whipped cream. And this time we definitely eat them for the team:

LGM 2010, Last Day

The last day of any conference is lighter on content, so that was also the case with Libre Graphics Meeting, but it still had a couple of presentations (albeit, they were not very technical):

And a panel discussion:

And plenties of "thank you" for everybody: participants, speakers, sponsors, crew, etc. (now is my turn to say thanks to Femke and the rest of the team):

And we had a last lunch with the leftover from the previous days (real food, here I come!)

And the conference ended formally with a planning session for the next year:

But of course we said goodbyes, took photos, daid goodbies, shaked hands, said goodbyes, sometime hugged, said goodbyes:

and said goodbyes again for maybe the million time:

And if that was not enough, got in the city for the evening with a new round of goodbyes:

Learning to shoot

The final lunch of LGM 2010, trying to eat the same green stuff that make my stomach so unhappy and letting Martin play with my camera and learn some tricks.
Of course he is using me as a model and my battle suit T-shirt as a subject:

LGM 2010, Day 3

The third day of LGM was a tough one, I wasn't able to write about it at the end of the day (still, I managed well, some of us not only overslept, but AFAIK they are still sleeping now), so here I am, on the conference room, listening to Rejon' presentation and doing my blogging...

The day started with quite a cultural shock for me, didn't expected to see such a bazaar on the streets of the Western Europe:

But back at the conference... the highlight of the day for me was the opportunity to listen to presentation from I people who I respect for a long time and learned a lot from, Jimmac talked (unfortunately a bit too general) about creating icons with Inkscape:

Alexandre Prokoudine presented a free solution for digital photography;

And AndyFitz making the audience enthusiastic with his Inkscape world domination talk:

It was also the day for the traditional group photo, where everyone was invited (it was a bit rainy outside, but we didn't really care):

Late in the night we went to the movies: the Blender team gave us a preview of their upcoming animation film, Sintel and the audience was charmed (I will deny any rumour about someone sneaking a pocket camera, recording [pirating?] everything [while the developers looked the other way and putting their fingers in the ears to not hear anything about pirating] and planning to release it on the net)

And of course, we partied late in the night with the Blender/Project Durian people, why else would be so hammered in the morning?

Anime

Sorry for spamming the planets and the universe, but I have to set the record straight, it was a slight exaggeration (the order of magnitude may be right) from Pierros about me checking the "japanimation" store for a 1535th, the bad part about that my new preferred place in Brussels (better than Delirium!) is that I don't have enough space in my backpack (and probably not enough $$$ on my card) to get everything I like from there :p

Now blame Pierros for making me post the following photo on Planets, I had to show the score abut his post: Nicu: 5, Martin: 1, Pierros 0. ...Anime figures, what else?

PS: Pierros has none only because he's picky with the shows :p

LGM 2010, Day 2

Is 01:49 in the morning and I am tired, still, tomorrow is going to be a full day so I don't know how much time available will get I'm going with a late-night post. As I don't plan to compete on blogging verbosity with Pierros and Martin started blogging too, i will resume myself at dumping a bunch of photos and leaving the audience to fill the 1000 words for each.

The day ended with Rejon's birthday party, where, amongst other things, I had the opportunity for a chat with such great people like Garrett, AndyFitz or Jimmac, from who I learned a lot along the time. We left the party late, after the subway stopped running, and had to do a walk in the city from the conference location to the Fedora's Brussels secret lair... so here I am, half asleep and rushing a blog post...

Real Ubuntu bashing

Some people are unhappy with the supposed "Ubuntu bashing" happening on my comic but let me tell about some real Ubuntu bashing (I can't show right now, since the video is quite large - 20 minutes/420 MB in the h.264 format made by my camera, the netbook can convert it to Ogg Theora in ~4 hours and then have to upload it from a conference place): during the Fedora Design presentation the other day we never said words like "Ubuntu", "other distros", "competition" or such, were talking straight about what and how are we doing. Still, after the talk many people in the audience were enthusiastic: "thet's how the design for a distro should be done" ...the second part in their minds, "not like Ubuntu' was never said by me or Martin.

PS: yes, I will say now those words - when attending the 10.04 release party unhappy, I saw the people there unhappy with the design decisions and the way they are made - Cathedral style, behind closed doors.

One for the team

Waking-up in the second day of LGM 2010 was really hard, we arrived late and missed a good part of the first presentation of the day, "Diffusion Curves in Inkscape".

However, on the positive side, today seems to be a nice, warm and sunny day in Brussels and in the place next to the conference location we stumbled upon a colorful bazaar where I had the opportunity to take a photos with tasty strawberries for those members of the Fedora DEsign Team who are not here with us (we have some big strawberry fans in the team).

LGM 2010, Day 1

So the previous episode ended with LGM just starting... here's what happened later for the point of view of our small gang: Pierros made himself useful by drawing info notes:

I joked he's doing t to impress the girls, but he was setted on work, repairing wireless router and such, until he became almost a member of the staff, complete with the uniform.

It should be mentioned the official lunch, good to bring together the people and make them talk easier.

Finally, late in the afternoon it came our time to bring Fedora in the spotlight - too see how insightful we where, check the slides - the talk was delivered by Martin while Pierros was doing photos and me and I hope e weren't entirely bad (hopefully, you will se it next week, after I get to edit the video).
And of course I was crazy enough to edit the slides 10 minutes before the presentation to ad a silly picture. We are all crazy.

After the conference day ended, it was natural for us to grab some fries:

And then end the night as it is supposed to be, with hard beers at Delirium.

Let'see what new adventures will be brought ahead us...

PS: don't blame me for the incoherence, grammar or bad stile... try you first to write a professional after that much beer and at this hour in the night :

The Sign... 'nuff said

...still something to say: too late for F13, but maybe useful for F14 One Page Release Notes

LGM, day 0.5

Continuing the story from where I left, we finally meet Pierros and inevitably went for the Delirium experience where we got Martin Delirium devirginated.

Then, after a night of profound sleep (not sure about the others, they choose softer beers but I gradually went from 8% to 9% anf 10.5%) we reached in the morning the LGM location, De Pianofabriek

Here Pierros got almost out of control with making customised buttons (more on that later, I hope):

And then the conference began:

Now I'm off to work, have to do some small tweaks to the Fedora presentation that will be delivered later today, around 17:00.

Warming up for LGM or Boys will ever be boys

So I meet Martin and we had some time to spend in Brussels, first we went site sighting and, of course, eating a lot of Belgian chocolate:

Then we find some kind of paradise: a "japanimation" store! the perfect opportunity to go wild...

And bought some cool stuff...

Now we are at the hotel, playing with dols updating the blogs and waiting for Pierros, hopefully the day will end with some manly stuff like drinking beers and such...

Tomorrow however, is a brave new day... we will swing in full force with the Libre Graphics Meeting.

F13 - the largest party ever

Still in a hurry, won't talk much, leave to Adrian the opportunity for a better story, just wanted to say the traditional beer party in Bucharest for the Fedora 13 release was the biggest and better yet.

not sure if people came because we grew as a community or just wanted to see first hand my naughty photography, but the reality is they came and in a record number (didn't count, but I estimate at over 20 participants).

In Brusells for LGM

Just landed in Brussel for Libre Graphics Meting, where I hope the Fedora Design Team will have a nice presence, and still busy afer thhe late night party yesterday for the F13 release (more on that later).

For the moment I got to a turistic info place with a free hotspot, checking the news while waiting (in the rain) for the other guys to arrive - Martin should be there in about one hour.

...now gotta go!

Hyperspace comic tutorial

This time I feel like doing a crazy and useless tutorial, based on the last episode of my webcomic and using a combination of Inkscape and GIMP I will create a space ship jumping into hyperspace (uswd in the last panel of the comic).

The ship
The first step is to make a panel for the comic. Following the style of my comic, I use for that a rectangle with rounded corners colored in a light blue gradient.

So let's do the ship! For the geeky feel I want to make it look like the Millennium Falcon,
so I start with a circle, made with the ellipses tool while keeping the Ctrl key pressed

And a second, slightly smaller, circle

Select both of them (with the Shift key) and using the Align and Distribute dialog align them at the center of the bigger circle.

With both of them still selected, substract the small circle from the big one to get a ring.

Duplicate the ring (Edit > Duplicate.

And resize the copy (keeping the Ctrl key pressed to preserve the aspect ratio) to make it smaller.