Playing Cards

I made those playing cards decks some time ago motivated by the Bellot set from GNOME Games being licensed as LGPL, so not free enough for the Open Clip Art Library (where the requirement is for release as Public Domain).
There are four variants: ornamental, white, bordered" and simple. Feedback on my blog and OpenClipart.org mailing list indicated ornamental as the nicer one.
So I submited them right away in the Open Clip Art Library and after some months, encouraged by Alan submitted the ornamental variant to GNOME Games (they made 2.14).

Coming no present day and to the actual news, it seems those cards are making a way in KDE 4, with the white variant considered a favorite.

Nice to have my cards set in both GNOME and KDE :p

Cu o floare nu se face primavara

Calla Lilly

This is not about software or Open Source, if you are not interested in my ranting, please skip this post.

Not sure how, I got a couple of white Calla Lilly on my garden.

They bloomed for the first time in the middle June when it has hot, sunny and I was happy. The flowers withered after a few weeks of the torrid summer about at the same time with my good spirit.

After a couple of months they bloomed again. It was a bad time: I was depressed, whitout any drop of vital energy. They bloomed and withered without any consequence.

Now, in this dark, cold and rainy October, in an exercise of supreme futility another bud appeared. I highly doubt it will get to bloom, the leaves are in the process of becoming yellow and brown, air temperature approaches negative values in the morning.

Winter is coming, I wonder it will survive and live another year with this hostile climate.


Note: pictures taken back in June.

Raster to Vector conversion

So Rejon is trying to kick me out of my current apathy by making me write more on my blog... Well, it does not work but at least I hope this is an informative post.

We, at the Open Clip Art Library, received a donation from worldlabel.com, it consist of a number of clipart images, unfortunately in raster (JPEG) format.

The policy of our library is to accept only images in vector format (preferably SVG), so we have to do some conversion. At first, Gerald came with the idea to manually trace the images, basically redrawing them and maybe use the opportunity to improve them. I was supporting more an automatic trace, as a chance to get beginners involved.

At this point Ryan came with a nice tutorial about converting from raster to vector using both Inkscape and The Gimp. I think the process can be greatly simplified by using only Inkscape and select the right parameters for trace, so I did my own simplified tutorial.

Shortly: for new people wanting to contribute to Open Clip Art Library, we have a very simple task: raster images wanting to be converted to vector, and two nice tutorials describing the process.

Note: for people in the Fedora Art project, this is the ccHost in use, which I think would be useful for us.

Dark overlords, most wanted and drinks

Rahul about the new FC6 theme:

It is claimed to be dark, satanic, gothic, death metal and futuristic ;-)

I, for one, welcome our new death metal futuristic goth stanic overlords! Dark is good.
But take this opinin with a grain of salt, from someone who used to use solid black backgrounds when no "nice enough" picture was available.

Most wanted



People seems amazed by the similarities between me and this guy, featured on the most wanted list of our Romanian police (18 years for murder - he surely is a dangerous guy). At least I have long hair and am a few years younger.

Drinks

I could not resist and copy other people, just like the monkey I am:

How to make a Nicu Buculei

Ingredients: 5 parts pride 3 parts humour 3 parts leadership

Method: Layer ingredientes in a shot glass. Top it off with a sprinkle of fitness and enjoy!

Username:

Personality cocktail
From Go-Quiz.com

The trick: try all the possible combination of your name or nickname, even the case matters. For me, it seems the deafult is representative enough (less the fitness part).

Powered by Fedora buttons

Now obeying the Logo Usage Guidelines:

Teamwork

This is teamwork!And the team absolutely rocks.
Mairin came with the metaphor and a first implementation, Mola with the 3D rendering and Diana with the finishing, other people with feed-back, testing and comments, for a completely stunning result.

My main concern is this: with the bar raised to such a high level, we will have a hard (but fun) time raising it again for FC7.

GNOME Games survey

There is a plan in renewing GNOME Games: in the 2.18 cycle add a new game and remove an old, uninteresting one. For this, a survey is taking place in order to get an idea about what people like or don't like.

One of the games with few supporters is Gnobots, which honestly is ugly and does not fit well in a modern desktop, but I have some ideas for improving it - unfortunately only graphics, no code, I hope it will not die:

note: I believe this is my first post after I got aggregated on Planet Fedora, so Hello everybody! I know I posted very little lately, but this is for good reason: better say nothing than sound like an emo.

Alive and kicking

No, not me, this is about the Open Clip Art Library.

A question about OCAL being "dead or alive" started a long talk about merging OCAL back into Inkscape if this is the way to keep the project alive.
It seems the consensus was (and I fully agree) a complete merge is not the best option.

The positive outcome is that a few people commited to increase their contribution to the project and the activity has increased.
However, the area where most help is needed and we are still uncovered is about php programming, to add SVG support to ccHost, according with our plan of action.

Get Legal - Get OpenOffice.org

We launched the Romanian version of the Get Legal - Get OpenOffice.org campaign. Feel free to link to those pages and/or put buttons on your pages:

OpenDocument - ISO 26300

So OpenDocument was adopted as an international standard: ISO/IEC 26300.
Open the champagne, bring the beer or whatever you like, is the time to party!

Diagraming with Inkscape

Inkscape is really cool for creating diagrams like this:

Full size SVG source available on my Fedora artwork page.

More wallpapers

With a little experience, is easy to fake a 3D look with Inkscape:

I got carryed away with this, and created a bunch of SVG wallpapers based on it, see below a couple, more are available (along with the SVG sources) on my Fedora wallpapers page:

Easter eggs

Lately i got in a frenzy of drawing game marbles with Inkscape so i couldn't stop drawing some easter eggs, which are pretty much a special case of those marbles (just shapes as an ovoid).
This seems logical, as today is the traditional day for painting eggs for easter, but not so logical considering i am definitely an atheist.
My only excuse: i will enjoy this upcoming 3 days week-end and the traditional festive meals (but still feeling a little dirty for exposing those religious symbols).

Branding in desktop games

I wonder how appropriate is to use themes for the games in GNOME to "promote" a distro. I was told by someone to send such themes upstream.
Now, if i would be the upstream maintainer, i would feel the need to be distro-impartial and reject such contributions, this is why i am reluctant to propose those upstream.
But i, as a theme creator, i am not sure creating such themes in the first place is a god idea, still weighting it. Opinions?

Anyway, just for fun, i did such a theme:

This Same GNOME theme is available for download.

Open Source Parking

Quoting Netcraft about the new launched Open Source Domain Parking Service:

The project's goals are to increase the market share for open source software and generate revenue from advertising on the parked domains, which will be used to fund "political and promotional efforts" on behalf of open source software.

I'm glad one of the ads used on those parked domains is my OpenOffice.org button:

Follow-up: more wallpapers

A follow-up to my previous wallpapers post - more on the same theme:

OMG PONIES

So Caolan asked for a pink (OMG PONIES) Gnome wallpaper.
A Fedora one is good enough? (I quickly adapted a blue one from my collection).

Update: And a Gnome one:

Searching for Fedora on Google

I was surprised seeing a Google search will return my Fedora wallpapers page as the third result in about one million entries.

The first two entries are from the same website, so I am only a step away from world domination on this topic.

Bluecurve Palette

Here is a Bluecurve palette for use in Inkscape and Gimp.

It may be useful when creating Bluecurve icons.

Power in numbers

I previously talked about this: Microsoft has stated that the company will support the OpenDocument format in MS Office if there is customer demand. So the OpenDocument Fellowship started a petition to show this demand is real. This just reached a significant milestone: over 10.000 signatures, representing over 277.000 computers.

You can sign it too!

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.