Release names: it's supposed to be fun

I see people campaigning hard on Planet Fedora against having release names, it heated now since the vote on this matter is closing in a few days. Time to bring balance in the force: why do we need release names?

Because is supposed to be fun!

Of course, there are many other arguments for it, ranging from identity to putting a warmer face on the project for the external actors (potential contributors?) to involving our community, but all those are trumped by the most important argument, this is a community, not a corporation, were we should be friends and have fun time together, not wear suits, be silent and serious and work like robots. No, no, no, is a place where we want people to come in their free time and feel good.

Some will pick on the F17 having a silly name as "Beefy Miracle"... guess what? This particular code name was voted by the community exactly for its silliness, don't be grumpy. Some others will pick on it for a perceived religious offence. Guess what? Anything on this world will find someone unhappy with it, don't be an extremist. Next time it may be your turn to propose a name. Some others will complain about the waste of resources for selecting the names. Guess what? I'm sure the benefits overweight the resource used and I guess all this campaign wastes a comparable amount of resources.

So I voted in favor of keeping the release names as I believe having them is a benefit.

PS: for every "Beefy Miracle" there is also a "Zod" or a "Werewolf".

On strike

So we bent over. And not only bent, also provided the lube and pretended we liked it. I have no intention of joining this play dirty, so I am stepping back for a while, will stop contributing to the Design Team for the rest of the development cycle for Fedora 15, after that we'll see what happens. Have fun.

What I am doing next? On Fedora land will focus mainly for a while on the local community where the things may get to an important crossroad in the next couple of months and there are a lot more FOSS communities in need of contributions. On the artsy things, will probably focus on photography, where I am saving money for another lens, which will probably complete my set for a while. And I have things in my personal life more important than those petty wars, politics and power-grab attempts.

Meet me at the upcoming FOSDEM for a more in depth talk about those things.

Nijikon 2010

I know a number of people will snub at me for posting and pushing this, but I also have a lot of friends in the community that will enjoy it (some will even be jealous) so while I don't really care about the former, I am a friend for my friends. So here is a short reviews in photos of the Nijikon anime convention that happened the last week-end in Bucharest:

It was my first time at an anime convention and also the first serious use of my new lens, that many of you will probably meet at various events in the future.

PS: the event had some connection with freedom: many free hugs here offered there (still, not sure if they were free as in freedom or as in free beer, I kept myself away).

Dead man's switch

A dead man's switch is, in Wikipedia's words, "is a switch that is automatically operated in case the human operator becomes incapacitated" and beside being a simple but cool project to work on, it may prove useful if you for example got threatened - your friends may notice you disappeared from the face of the internet, but will not be sure what is it about and won't know which actions to take.

So here is how I coded my own using some very simple Bash and php scripts (precise details are left out to diminish the possibility of an attack): there is a cron job running at a predefined interval, every N days. IT checks for an existence of a file, if the file exists, it is deleted and I am sent a reminder to update my status. If the file does not exists, then it assumes I was incapacitated and unable to update my status in the last N days, so it releases the payload, publishing some important content on the web.

The reminder directs me to a web page where the viewer is asked for a secret password, if the correct password is entered the status is updated, the check file restored. Every operation there is logged.

For security reasons, the software does not run on any of my computers or, if that matters, on any computer in my country, so it can't be reached by any person who has physical contact with me.

The code is trivial and sloppy, with sensitive info inside, so it is not worth or sane to publish the sources, but I am sure any of my readers can reimplement it in a matter of minutes, a couple of hours at most, reading the design specifications above.

Note: if you wonder, I did not got threatened by anyone in the FLOSS world or software world nor I feel in any immediate danger, is mostly a geeky exercise.

Sad panda, happy panda

This wek-end, when shooting cars & stuff (there was a drift competition in the parking lot of a mall) I stumbled upon those toys and decided I must have a piece too, as Pandas are kind of a sacred animal in Fedora-land, so they are sitting now right next to my computer.

PS: no plastic toy was hurt during this shooting, all the possible perceived sadness is due to GIMP alterations.

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:

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).

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.

Even more fantasy Inkscape work

After the time spent last week-end (the May Day week-end) inkscapping fantasy drawings proved a relative succes, it seemed like a good idea to spend this week-end (my sad birthday week-end) inkscapping more of the same: a winged fairy.

This time I went back to my usual, less realistic, more cartoon style, not only because I was down and busy with a commercial gig (also drawing fantasy stuff) but because this way I feel more at home (quick poll, answer in the replies: which style do you like better?).

Note: in the preview I added the mosaic to keep the prudes silent and my ass covered from authorities, click on it and you may get blind...

Using the cards

For a couple of days I am pondering about publishing this follow-up: on one hand I know some friends from the community would like it, on the other I think some other would think this is useless bragging. But in the end I did a sanity check with an external opinion. Remember those business cards I made for myself last week? I already started using them like this and they are requested like hot cakes:

However, the cards are asked before seeing the design, so probably having a drawing with a sad bearded guy with a sword is not the recipe for success, the size is.

Eye photography

Saddened to learn how negative feedback and unpleasant members of the community drove tatica out of planet with her photography project, I am stubborn enough to continue posting photography stuff. I have a few friends in the community who will be totally jealous for my latest experience.

Last weekend, working on a half-commercial project (got no money, waived no ownership) for a friend who has a small online store selling cosmetic contact lenses I had the opportunity to learn how close (in a literal sense) is the phrase "I can see the world in your eyes" used by guys to impress girls (ops! I said "guys" and "girls"!)

My friend is trying an interesting experiment: usually the websites selling cosmetic contact lenses use really bad (in GIF format, WTF) and heavily photoshopped) images, so a buyer can't set his/her expectations right, does not know what will get. So he is putting a bet on honesty, showing the unaltered truth.

Beyond the artistic and technical part, we are debating the legalese: I am a huge adept of sharing and Free licenses and he has an opposite point of view, coming from and industry where nobody has any shame in stealing and reusing the photos. So in the end probably the photos will get to the public only at small resolution and bearing watermarks, something making me uncomfortable.

729/65535

Is Friday afternoon, and I don't feel like working, not even writing the Design beat for FWN, where I think I will wait a couple more dayd to gather more content, so while thinking at the opportunities of taking photos in the next week-end at Bucharest Days I can continue my X/65535 mock project (I know we don't mind) with a second take, playing with a funny guy gift I received a couple of days ago (I blackened his shirt and draw a beard with a marker) and a small bottle of Ouzo brought by a co-worker who returned from a vacancy in Greece.

A new tentative personal photo galley

For quite a while I was searching for a self-hosted solution for my photo gallery, willing to move away from Flickr (which I still think is the best gallery from a technical point of view, too bad about its other downsides). Well, the Yahoo guys just gave me the final impulse for the switch by deleting my flickr account (don't know why, I received no warning about that, my suspicion in linked to a photo where I was criticising their recent deal with Microsoft).

I tried but really do not like the layout of other image hosting services like Picasaweb of SmugMug, I find them bad, ugly and too expensive but since I already have my own hosting solution with plenty of disk space and bandwidth and also don't care about the social network side of those services, a self-hosted gallery seems the optimal choice. The problem is, none of the existing solutions makes me happy.

After trying a number of existing solutions (I am too lazy and too busy to write my own), I am inclined to give phpGraphy a try:

As I said above, it is far from perfect, there are a number of pros and contras, making me to install a test instance, play with it, think more and ask for feedback (pretty please...)

My pros:

• no database. It can work with an MySQL backend, but by default it works with flat files, which is a plus in my book, I want something light, small and easy
• as said above, light, small and easy
• RSS feed for last uploads
• ability to upload images with scp and automatic thumbnail generation
• user comments and ratings
• ability to display EXIF info
• clean layout by default

My contras:

• no captcha and no OpenID login for comments: it seems like I have either to leave the comments open for everybody or require authentication to my site, both bad
• no comment notifications by email: these two are almost show-stoppers (I would hate to block comments)
• no ability to adjust the licensing info for each image and album
• old-style album-based format instead of the photostream I got used to
• no tags/keywords/labels and no navigation based on tags/keywords/labels, only album based navigation
• no search

There are also smaller complains, like the inability to easily offer HTML code for embedding in web pages and the lack of geotagging, but those are not vital.

So please have a look at my test gallery (populated only with very few images) and maybe give me some opinions (I am looking for a self-hosted FLOSS solution). Thanks.

Own stupidity = data loss

I have little space available on my hard drive, so I bought an external (USB) drive for photo storage, a little slow but it does its job: I download photos from my camera, review them, delete those defective, select a few to resize and publish on web and once in awhile copy the photos to the external drive and delete them from my desktop, to make room for more downloads from the camera (yes, I know I am stupid for not having a backup, but until now I escaped the consequences of that).

Well, it seems my process is prone to human error and that just happened: the huge majority of the photos taken this year in May are gone (thousands of photos). Most likely I got confused in the directory structure and delete some folders before making the much needed copy first.

Alex suggested PhotoRec (packaged in fedora as part of testdisk) and despite my skepticism I gave it a try (the PC had nothing better to do overnight anyway) and, as expected, it recovered almost nothing (images in the Firefox cache from a couple of years ago are useless): if you have ~30GB of free space, download photos, delete them, download another, delete and so on, the task is impossible (but the tool is powerful).

I could pay Yahoo some money for access to a small selection of heavily resized images, but that would be good only as a preview, so here are a few highlights of what I lost (again, from a pool of thousands):


In a somewhat similar situation other people had a more energetic approach and started writing photo management software but I show the national spirit, get totally bummed and observe: "life is NOT a pony farm".

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: Fanservice - The Gratuitous Panty Shot

Any long running series has to have from time to time some filler episodes, which obviously will not make their fans happy so the producers use cheap (but effective) tricks to get the audience content and the easiest trick is a good old fanservice, with a gratuitous panty shot (potentially NSFW) being the most popular choice.

The same with me, a couple of weeks ago I was in a good creative mood, had some free time and a [what I think it was] good idea, so I made such a filler episode to have in reserve which proved useful this week when I had a tough week, with low morale and productivity (this happens if you spent the previous week-end with very little sleep due to a marathon of about 90 episodes to get up to date with an anime show), so here is me trying the fanservice trick on my readers (good thing I don't have many fans, otherwise probably I would get a lot of people upset). But at least, I don't use that kind of panty shot...

Note 1: I can think about the possibilities to extend the characters, like in an OS-tan, covering a lot of distros. Some ideas could be: a guy with old panties, unchanged and unwashed for about a couple of years, a guy who forgot to use any panty because the feature does not seems that important to him or a guy wearing iron underwear (chastity belt?). Do you have any ideas?

Note 2: After panty shots, the second most known type of fanservice in use is jiggling boobs... Oh, my eyes! Think of the characters of my comic... I must find a way to erase that image from my head...

Miserable Failure or Rain and the City Lights

After I challenged everyone to shoot the city lights, it was natural to eagerly await the week-end and do my own photos, something I planned to to the last Saturday. But that day, despite an acceptable temperature, a cold wind was blowing and a cold rain was falling down... a weather to not leave your dog out, the photographer even less so.

Seeing the weather forecast about a rainy Sunday too and the rain slowing down a bit around the noon, I decided to go out and try my best. Bad decision, with the night falling the rain intensified, it became colder and colder and after a few failed shots I thought my camera does not deserve the punishment and went home. It is not like that was the last day on Earth.

Sunday the weather was a bit better but not good enough to get me out...

No cake for nasty boys

It took a long time to deliberate and decide if I should post those photos here or not, they are somewhat worse than porn: more addictive, instantly triggering a body reaction (mouth watering, hunger), politically incorrect for diabetics and just cruel for those trying to preserve their body shape. But in the end I decided I am a nasty boy and went ahead, sugar coated in a cultural game idea.

When uploading the photos to the gallery I realised I don't know the English name for any of those cakes and I think it would be an interesting experiment to learn their name in English and any other languages, I believe some of them are quite straightforward and available in a lot of countries.

At this point I should acknowledge that I know the Romanian name only for some of them (savarină, amandină, mascotă, ecler) and that the majority of those names seems to have French origins.

PS: I hope I have not ruined the day for that many of you with those photos... Or being nasty I am happy about that?