Partial solar eclipse

Taken with a crappy old camera and filtered with the magnetic surface of a two floppy disks.

no CRAP

CRAP, an acronym standing for Content, Restriction, Annulment and Protection should be used instead of DRM.
I don't want this kind of CRAP around me.

Cliches

The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Cliches was a very long but entertaining read. I definitely prefer PC games over consoled, where those cliches does not fully apply, but can appreciate it as insightful.

Martisor

Mărţişor is an over commercialised Romanian tradition celebrating the beginning of the spring on 1 March.
At every big intersection, we have these says sellers on the streets offering some kitsch products and a lot of people wanting to buy some as cheap and as impersonal as possible. That is because every man is expected to offer one to each of the females around him: coworkers, family, neighbors etc.
Usually, as a socially inapt geek, I ignore this tradition, but this year made an exception, created a very symbolic virtual Martisor, which I share here, for other fellows to use as they like.

AIGLX, XGL and me

Accelerated X is a hot topic these days and Free Software Magazine has an article about it.
Surprisingly enough, I would not talk about the accelerated X, but about this particular article: it contains some diagrams in which I recognized a couple of images from my Public Domain clipart collection (also part of Open Clip Art Library).
Those are not something I am proud of, the images were made back when I was learning my way into Inkscape(or probably Sodipodi at the time) but is nice to see them used.

Save Tweety / Salvati-l pe Tweety

The protest was started by the kids in a Romanian school, feed-up with the bad translation of the programs on Cartoon Network. Yes, we don't want the shows doubled in Romanian, we like the original, in English, with a Romanian subtitle for those who does not know enough English.

• the original Salvati-l pe Tweety website, made by the kids
• the petition, signed already by a lot of people

BoringOffice.org

Someone just discovered the StarWars game easter egg in OpenOffice.org Calc so la lot of noise started:
- the developers does not take the project seriously;
- this is not professional;
- we can't trust OOo;
- my employees wile play instead of work;
- this is a blocker for adoption in schools;
- etc.

Bugs opened in IssueZilla only to be closed by developers in a few minutes, endless threads on the mailing list - in a few words: hell on earth.

So if having easter eggs is so bad, how one can explain the dominance of Microsoft Office, with the famous flight simulator in Excel?

Well, I have a simple solution for those people: download the source code, comment the easter eggs code, build a binary, rename it BoringOffice.org and advertise it as "the same OpenOffice.org but with all the fun taken out".

Sea Monkey 1.0

SeaMonkey released the first stable version. At a first look it looks better than the combination of Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5, both are based on the same Gecko generation, so SVG support, tab reordering, global inbox, or whatever you need, but SeaMonkey is faster.
Sure, I can see also some downsides: SeaMonkey does not have pretty pictures, the icon theme is the same old one, remembering of Netscape 4.x days.

It appears the SeaMonkey developers follow a lesson from Firefox branding: they don't want to release the source for the logo graphic, to keep it under control.
I have bad news: such a logo is easy to recreate, here is a very quick job, with a lot of room for further improvements:

Of course, the source is available as SVG

oldies

Just found this picture, it is about 7 years old. Can you guess who I am? I bet you can't!
Consider the betting game open :)

Commando
Originally uploaded by nicubunu.


Disclaimers:

• Yup, the military service there is still mandatory in my country


• Those are real AKM rifles


• The picture is not taken in Siberia nor in a real war

Gnobots

Admire the new default theme in Gnobots (from GNOME Games):

Unfortunately, i was completely unaware by the GNOME release schedule, so two additional themes (a Sci-Fi one and a Horror another) did not make the feature freeze (by a few hours). However, expect to see them in a future version of Gnobots, when the game will be fully scalable and support SVG graphics (this is what i was told). Until then, take a peek:

Business and OCAL

An intriguing inquiry today at Open Clip Art Library: someone from a gaming company is searching for some of a few of our authors for a business proposal.
Of course, I don't have their contact data, end even if I had it, don't think is appropriate to give it to strangers.
So if Dan Gerhards, The Structor or AJ Ashton are reading this: have a look at the mailing list someone is wanting to give you money.

About the same time someone else is looking for Franccesco Rollandin, this time i don't know if money are involved. Francesco is easy to find, he used to post on the mailing list.

MemoriSolitaire

I just got a nice holidays present: learned about MemoriSolitaire, "a solitaire card game where you use your memory to gain advantage", which is the first known use of my playing cards.

Free fonts

The latest Fedora Reloaded Podcast features an interview with Andy Fitzsimon, well known for his work on Inkscape and OCAL.
Andy is working on a Free font (probably to be released under LGPL) for the Fedora Project. The font is intended to be used on documentation, posters, flyers etc.

At the end an the interview, the Libre Graphics Meeting is mentioned - Andy will give there a demonstration on using Inkscape and GIMP.

go4it

go4it is a magazine with very little content: advertising for gadgets and pictures of babes holding those gadgets.

Today it was the first time for me reading this magazine (if we can call "reading" my two minutes look at it) and I don't like it:

• no real content, only advertising for expensive gadgets with a lot of hype (better search yourself online);


• the babes wear to many clothes for my taste (better search yourself online).

Then why blog about it? This number have something interesting, and I do not talk about the girl, the famous (for Romanians) Abramburica (she is so-so, nice body, common face, bad actress). The real event: they have a comparison of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2003.

Their conclusion: the best tool is the one you are used with, OOo has a formidable price but is slow and resource hungry (true).
And the second conclusion: it does not matter much, because soon we all will be using Writely.

It looks like they did their job, the article list the address of our Native-Lang Project and mention the work on localization as an advantage.

Can I be allowed to hope for a future edition with a centerfold of a better babe clothed in OOo CDs? Anyway, I will not buy it, but receiving it for free, will browse for a couple of minutes.

Xmas poll

I promised a follow-up, so here is it.

So i made a few greeting cards, just in time for this year's Xmas. But the hard part is now to find myself which one i like better (or put in other words, which one suck less).

1. 


2. 


3. 


4. 


5. 

Feedback?

Counting users

Bryce talks about the classic subject of Importance of Cross Platform OSS Applications, i will not argue for or against, just make one small nitpick:

our measurements showed more Windows-based Inkscape users than Linux ones

We all know the measurement method of counting SourceForge downloads is flawed: Inkscape is included in all major Linux distros and any sane user will prefer to use the native packages provided by his distro instead of Autopackage or static RPMs.

So yes, i agree probably there are more Inkscape users on Windows than on Linux, but the ratio is not the one illustrated by sf.net downloads. We, as any other OSS project, just don't have a reliable way to count the users - see the 100 M downloads of Firefox or 50 M downloads of OpenOffice.org.

Xmas is coming

Yup, Xmas is coming and it looks like Open Clip Art Library will skip yet another release.

But I'm bored and what to do? Of course, some Xmas themed Pin-ups!

The first one was made a couple of days ago:

The second, made today, is more polished and have a size just right for our calendar contest:


And I have at least a couple of different ideas, watch this space :p

Inkscape Calendar

We have a sort of competition hosted at deviantART: the purpose is to get a calendar with images made with Inkscape.
Come and join the contest, is not that hard to win, as a year have 12 months so we will need 12 "winners".

Unfortunately, the time available is short, as we want to promote the calendar as a gift for the upcoming holidays, so the ending date is Monday 12.

R.I.P. - MyLINUX magazine

My picture just got published in a magazine - MyLINUX, so I purchased this morning one to show it to my mom :p

I had a surprise opening it: an announcement saying the magazine will be published in the future only in PDF format on the CD-ROM of their other magazines (MyComputer, PCGames and CDForum). So practically, the magazine is dead.

I wonder if it was bad karma for them to publish my picture in the magazine or a Linux magazine is not a viable business in Romania.

On a more serious note, I think I have some ideas on why the magazine failed after only 7 editions:

• the company making it is not big, probably is hard to push that many magazines


• the paper based media is dying being replaced by online venues and this is more visible on IT magazines


• maybe I am well informed and in touch with the Linux world, but this particular magazine failed to offer to me significant value


• in a country where a copy of Windows costs very little above the price of a blank CD (at the corner of the street, of course), desktop Linux is a niche product for end-users

note: It looks like my blog posts are pretty negative lately, maybe I should write about more optimistic things, like the incredibly cool idea of a SVG game

Shame on you OSDL

OSDL has published the results of their Linux desktop survey.

As you can see from this Evince screenshot, the published PDF was made using Microsoft Word, probably on Microsoft Windows undinf the Microsoft DOC format.
Shame on you OSDL! Have you heard the phrease "eat your own doog food"? So much for the Desktop Linux from them.

PS: at least they could have hired some competent workers able to obfuscate the massive use of Microsoft products at the Linux development headquarters.

Update: It was pointed to me the PDF metadata contain more info - the document was made on OS X, but this is not much better.

Update to update:If you ask, the document was made inside OSDL, not by external contractor.

Another update: Do you remember how much fun we have when learning about a Microsoft employee using Firefox?

OCAL in impasse?

Open Source games sucks. People argue this is because Open Source people are mostly developers, not artists and because artists are not very much into free sharing of their work.

I think the Open Clip Art Library proves this wrong: we showed is possible to get in less than two years over 10.000 images from several hundreds of people, producing something which is included in many FOSS and commercial projects. But we were not able to get enough developers doing a half-decent CMS for the website.

The upcoming release look like a bad milestone: over 10% of the submitted SVG files were damaged by the upload scripts. A bug reported a few days ago prevent uploading of zip archives (this stopped Gerald from submitting his set of 1400 images). All of this happens after we skipped a release because of security problems on our website. And we still don't have a plan on implementing features promised over than one year ago.

I wonder how many contributors or possible contributors were lost because of our broken website and what is our real potential, double, triple, more?

I have not made many new images from the last release (something around 80 files) but because of the brokenness, don't feel very motivated to create more or even submit them. Yes, I am a bit disappointed for the moment.

Me from Middle Earth

Numenorean


To which race of Middle Earth do you belong?
brought to you by Quizilla

Ass, erm... donkey

I guess I just let myself carried by a joke made by Joshua Wulf:

Demand OpenDocument: Tell Microsoft You Want It

An online petition for Microsoft to support OpenDocument was launched today by the OpenDocument Fellowship. Microsoft has stated that the company will support the OpenDocument format in MS Office if there is customer demand. This petition will demonstrate that customer demand already exists.

The OpenDocument Fellowship, a volunteer organisation with members around the world, calls on everyone who uses MS Office, or who has an interest in open standards, to sign the petition at http://opendocumentfellowship.org/petition.

The petition, available in several languages, states:
"I request that Microsoft fully support the OASIS (Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) OpenDocument Format for Office Applications in its MS Office product. This should include the ability to read, edit and write OpenDocument files reliably, according to the format specification."

OpenDocument (short for OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications) is:

• An open, XML-based file format.


• An open standard from the OASIS standards group.


• The default file format for OpenOffice.org 2.0, KOffice 1.4, StarOffice 8, IBM Workplace and other applications.


• The required office format for internal archives of the US State of Massachusetts.


• A format that fulfills the European Union's criteria on open standards.

"OpenDocument is important because it keeps your data accessible and promotes competition," said Jason Faulkner, press contact for OpenDocument Fellowship. "People want their information to be free, and competition is good for customers. OpenDocument brings open architecture to your data in the same way that the IBM PC brought open architecture to computer hardware. The competition encouraged by that has seen ever-improved performance and decreasing prices of computer hardware."

OpenDocument is designed not just to handle all office type files but also to integrate with the Internet. Users whose data is stored in OpenDocument format will never again face the problem of not being able to access data because the application that created it is no longer supported.

Open standards already enable users of different computer systems (both hardware and software) to access the Internet and communicate with each other. ODF enables users of different computer systems and software to freely exchange and use files. Vote for ODF!

For more information, see the Fellowship's website, http://opendocumentfellowship.org

LOAD - Photo

MyLINUX has published on their website a picture from LOAD with me giving the presentation about OpenOffice.org 2.0