Censored?

I don't know if this is just a technical glitch[*] or straight censure, but one of the Planet aggregators carrying my blog selectively skip content (I talk about this post).
If I am censored, please either a) drop me from aggregation or b) stop censoring.

Thank you.


[*] - I doubt very much the glitch, as a lot of other aggregators (some run by me) are just fine

Update: Further investigation and cooperation of the admin show a technical problem. Too bad I write once in a while an article for my Romanian readers and then something happens and is not delivered in the channel. There must be a moral to this story...

OLPC and Romania

The Romanian Parliament debate the OLPC program and the current tendency is to reject it. I find suggestive this quote from one of the most vocal opponents (source: HotNews.ro, translation mine):

"On the IT market, beside this manufacturer (OLPC), there are two worldwide companies, Intel and AMD, who produce more powerful mini-laptops"

I know the saying "Never attribute to malevolence what you can explain by simple stupidity", but Varujan Pambuccian, the author of this quote, is a former computer programmer, with an impressive background in IT&C.

Professional Webdesign

In the last few days I thought a lot about webdesign companies and their practices (probably this was ignited by the talk about Simplissimo and their attempt at an alternative approach).

The thing that bother me mainly is how those firms do their own website: usually a flashturbation extravaganza with very little meaningful content (sometime not at all). This is apparently a paradox, as the own website has to be the most effective selling tool for a website maker.

I'll focus on one almost random example, my old "friends" at INOVATIKA.COM, which are far from an isolated case, the majority is about the same. The websites they do for customers are not entirely bad (read me well, I didn't say good or even half-good, I said precisely "not entirely bad", I saw worse, but more about this later), but their own website is so bad, I can't understand how a customer in his right mind would buy a website.

Let's cut to the chase, here is how the website look most of the time:

And when displaying content:



I could keep a long dissertation about how, why and where the site sucks, but I am not in the business of giving such advices for a commercial entity, one which is supposed to have first class experts (or so they claim in a comment on my blog).

Well, I used a little rhetorics above, surely I have my own theory: the usual customer does not know the basics of design, marketing or usability and they mistake bling and shiny for quality. They see the site which look complex and assume the creators know their turf. What a potential customer does not know it that the Flash website is usually not made by the same person/team (depending on the company size) as the HTML site he will get.

Another theory, specific to my example (INOVATIKA) can be drawn by looking at their Portofolio page, it not seems like those sites were purchased by customers discovering their website. So then what is the purpose of the website? Self increasing the ego? Dick contest with the competition?

I hope the people at INOVATIKA will not consider my use of this example (fair use I would say) as an insult, I said I saw worse from their competition. For example someone I know purchased some months ago (unbelievable, in the year 2006) for a 4 digits sum a website made with Dreamweaver, with a table based layout witch fail HTML validation (and that is a supposedly respected and widely know firm). Unfortunately at the time I was asked just for an advice, not having a decision (to reject on technical grounds) and not being listened, so they got away saying "W3C standards are optional, not required" and "Nobody in Romania use W3C validation" (now I'll defend INOVATIKA, at least they use validation to a certain degree).

There is more to say about webdesign, maybe other time I'll talk about a friend of mine (this time a real friend) who do websites for 50$ (by customizing free templates downloaded from the 'net) and does not have a website for himself.

Or maybe about huge corporations who do websites on big budget for government agencies, but here I just started gathering data.

Footnote: Sure, one can point his finger at my personal websites, which are not state of the art, but the thing is, I don't sell anything on them, I can afford even to insult my Internet Explorer using readers or to serve them intentionally a crippled version of the site. I think I am not a complete idiot in the field thinking at my work in a few community, commercial and educational websites, but I will not take it personally if someone affirm the contrary.

Update: now I have a Romanian translation of this in my articles page (in Romanian).

Linux Personas

Winning Against Linux is a site where Microsoft identifies Linux users as personas, along with the ways to convert us to using their products and even the money they think can get. Awesome!

I modified in the screenshot just one small detail, for increased realism: the user photo.

PS: so they fight if they feel the need need to win, the conclusion is that we have just one more step.

Notebook stickers

I saw on Planete Beranger a collection of notebook stickers for various Linux distros. The Fedora one needed some minor tweaks, so here is a remade version (complete with SVG source, part of my artwork page):

Yeah, I know it uses the logo and the wordmark, and the use of those by the community is taboo, but what else can I do?

Update: I know it is not good for print, but couldn't stop the urge to add blur, so I made an additional fancy version.

Update: and a monochrome one for as cheap as possible printing.

On dogfooding and application usage

This is beyond my comprehension: when you post a screenshot about how to contribute to Fedora and post the screenshot on Fedora wiki which is the best to use? Mac OS X of course! To show the world how Fedora is a first class Desktop. At least the person who did the screenshot is sincere.

Please spare me the use the best tool for the job argument, for $DEITY sake, is a basic screenshot of a web browser uploading a file to a website.

I am very straightforward, my application usage, as reported by Mugshot is like this:

Martisoare, martisoare

If I have regular readers of my blog, probably they already know my opinion about Mărţişor, but If Planet linux360 is talking about the subject, I'll add my voice in a visual way:

Yeah, good and sincere way to show your affection to your SO...

Red Hat Magazine - The Open Palette

The Open Palette

Red Hat Magazine started a series of of tutorials on how to create art with Free and Open Source creative tools. The first in the series, authored by me with help from Mairin is titled How to use Inkscape’s new blur filter and is a celebration (albeit a little late) of the 0.45 release of Inkscape.

go and read the article

I used my own research on orbs, a little inspiration from Ryan's tip about 3D text combined with other minor elements (trace, inset/outset. boolean operations) and excessive use of blur.

The same technique can be extended, even to create something like this:



More tutorials

The column in Red Hat Magazine will continue (probably monthly) with other interesting subjects (we already have a list of ideas), but the tutorials posted on my own site and blog are put on-hold for the time being, due to the lack of reaction to my previous call for help.

Service Announcement: Hackergotchi Service

After the hit received by the Fedora Art project, we are thinking about ways to revive from its own ashes. The current idea is to organize it as loosely coupled sub-teams working on different areas.
So here is my take:

The Hackergotchi Service

In the past I worked on my own to polish a few hackergotchi images and send to the Planet Fedora admin, but this is an easy task, perfectly suited for beginners.
I created a page in the wiki where any Fedora contributor can request a hackergotchi and receive help from an Art Team member. Consider yourself already invited to use it.

note: I am sure Fedora Art people will be open and answer requests not only from Fedora contributors and not only for Planet Fedora.

Flames

I lost my words. It was expected, probably everybody saw it coming from a long time ago.

Due to unrelated reasons I am too unmotivated to fight, so no flamewar from me today.

Office stuff; Tutorials

Microsoft Office 2007

I see a lot of complacency inside the OpenOffice.org team regarding the new look and feel of Microsoft Office 2007. The general tendency is to disregard is as something user will reject, wanting something more familiar and choose OOo as the "safe" choice. Is hard to argue for or against without facts, so I used the opportunity of an MSO 2007 deploy to observe the users (my own Guinea Pigs) and draw my own opinion based on this.

Premise: I had recently to upgrade some of my desktop users with both hardware and software, going from Windows 98 + Microsoft Office 2000 to Windows XP + Microsoft Office 2007. Of course I tried to push OpenOffice.org, but the reply I got from the decision maker was something along the lines: "I saw OpenOffice and it is a fart" and he went for MSO 2007 Professional, top of the line, full-price (why he thinks that is a long separate talk, we can discuss with another opportunity).

Users: My users are, I think, a very good sample, they use various incarnations of Office for a long time, at least 7-10 years but at a very basic level, mostly Word and Excel for simple things (no charts, mail merge, templates or such "advanced" stuff). They may use PowerPoint only to see a .pps joke received in the mail and nobody ever used Access (note: Outlook is forbidden in my network).

Reaction At the first look, they reacted exactly as expected, ranging from "can't you make look like the old one?" to "I can't do anything with it, I have to re-learn everything I knew".
The very next day, their opinion changed dramatically, to "wow! this new Office has a lot of new functions, I never saw those in the old one" and to "I said is hard to use but in fact is much easier".

Conclusion: I see two possible conclusions from this:

• Microsoft is up to something here and they have a really better, more usable interface
• we are completely brainwashed by Microsoft and without comment will accept anything they throw at us.

Of course I did my own testing of the interface in the 5 minutes or so spent learning how to change a couple of defaults (.doc instead of .docx as file format for compatibility with the rest of the users and with the rest of the world and A4 as paper size for compatibility with the printers) but I keep from expressing my opinion as I, as a long-time member of the OpenOffice.org community am far of being unbiased and also far from being a regular user.

What OpenOffice.org people do about this? For now nothing, I saw a core developer saying "we can easily implement this Ribbon interface if we want" and this is all.

Tutorials

Easy to notice, another week passed and no tutorial on my blog, probably you saw it coming (not only because I was busy with deploying MS Office and observing the users). And I am not sure I want to continue without help from my readers, I really need raw materials and motivation.

To not spam the aggregators, I will add in the comments how the readers can help me with this.

No tutorial this week

Bummer of the week

grep -c inova access_log.nicu
0
grep -c inova access_log.nicu.1
350
grep -c inova access_log.nicu.2
34
grep -c inova access_log.nicu.3
594
grep -c inova access_log.nicu.4
0

So as a consequence, I didn't have any incentive to write any tutorial this week, being defeated by my miserable failure. Which is unfortunate, the new Inkscape release is worth celebrating with a tutorial.

Here is a list of tutorial ideas I had in mind at various points in time:

• Drawing faces with Inkscape if you can't draw: using Beziers or the calligraphic tool (there are two distinct ways) you can draw over a photo and do something called a manual trace, resembling the original portrait of the subject. Is not state of the art or some high art, but is good enough if you cant' draw


• Drawing orbs with Inkscape: this is simple and easy, but Is what I feel a good way to introduce people to the brand new Blur filter in Inkscape. I have not abandoned completely this idea, this tutorial may appear at another time in another place


• Touching-up photos with GIMP: with the omnipresent digital cameras, all of us are taking bad photos, so retouching them is an absolute need, but also imperfections of the subject can be corrected (this is called airbrushing): remove blemishes and wrinkles, make the teeth and eyes white, the skin softer and so on. Another problem with the picture I wanted to use in this tutorial is the interdiction to use the photo: "you can do anything with it but don't put it on the 'net" - the thumbnail here should be fair use, but I can't think of a workaround for the full size image.

Some meat

To make this post not so useless, here is some meat: a few 3D effects on the Fedora logo made in Inkscape with a combination of the 3D text tutorial by Ryan and my own research into orbs:




SVG sources are available on my Fedora Artwork page.

Jigsaw Puzzle Tutorial

This tutorial brought to you by the number seven and the color blue

This is the second in a series of tutorials, I intend to continue it even if I get tons of "ur GIMP skillz are teh suck" as comments in reply.
The article was ready for publishing yesterday but I published it today (Friday) to have it as close as possible by the "7". (7 days, weeks, months, years, something like that).

Jigsaw Puzzle Tutorial

Made mostly with GIMP with some introductory Inkscape and a bit of Clipart.

The tutorial is very graphic intensive, with screenshots for every little step.

Language

A guy I know complained recently in a private (messenger) talk about what he perceive as abusive use of the "suck" and "bullshit" words on my blog. Well my friend, this is the reality, the way I see my surrounding world and is very hard to change that (pictured is my 4 months old beard, as a proof I know what I say).

Bill Gates in Romania and more tutorials to come

A new tutorial under way

I said the other day that I am bummed by a less-than-expected reaction to my previous GIMP tutorial, but it seems I can't stop making more. At least as long as I still have raw materials (I have fresh pictures only for a couple more tutorials).

I have a new one underway (previewed here) about how to make jigsaw puzzle pieces from a photo. The work is more than half done: the image is ready, screenshots are taken, I have only to polish the screenshots, write the text, make the html and put it on the server. It will be another heavy tutorial (20 screenshots), so I have to put the pictures again is an external storage (picassaweb), as my current hosting can't deal with it (note to self: I really should change my hosting solution soon). I hope to have the tutorial online by Friday, just in time for the week-end.

Bill Gates in Romania

This usually should be a non-event, but is sickening to see all the press (newspapers, radio, TV) praising "the first visit in Romania of the richest man in the world", just like a few years ago at the first visit of the Pope.

The authorities react at about the same level: they finally removed the Christmas/New Year lights from the city center only to replace them with Windows Vista lighting logos. Yeah, the national sport around here seems to be kissing a$$.

He will open a support center, will celebrate 10 years of Microsoft presence in Romania and will launch MS Vista, MS Office 2007 and MS Exchange Server 2007.

I have no penguin costume and I am not aware of any flashmob organized for this opportunity, so the best thing I can think of doing was to update an old drawing of mine with the Vista logo and put it on my blog in celebration:

Bummed

I am bummed: a lot of people (according to my logs) clicked and visited my Jump out of GIMP tutorial but I failed to determine them to follow with they own creations. I suspect the example was not compelling enough, so here is another one, a better one I hope.

I guess this will ease my job: I have in mind at least a couple more lessons, each of them posing serious troubles, but in the absence of some follow-ups I think I may drop them. This what I had in mind:

• A GIMP lesson for touching-up photos and correcting portraits. I have a perfect picture picture, some good ideas about how to process it but I have interdiction to post it on the 'net


• A face drawing lesson in Inkscape. I have raw materials, I have experience in doing this but it takes a lot of motivation and patience

I think I will contemplate a couple of days about making more tutorials.

Note: (for those in the know) Today is Marti and nothing is better than a good old headache :D

UNIX

What is UNIX? The answer is simple: a car parts (piese auto in Romanian) seller, here is the proof:

Sorry for the picture quality, it was taken with a camera phone, in a dark, moving bus with blurry windows and the subject was a moving car.

Voodoo Stuff

I am glad to see Diana's talk about Voodoo, seeing her goals clearly stated was something much awaited.

As grumpy as probably everyone should know me already I was just scared hearing the word Voodoo, it contradicts the O in FLOSS, where the processes are expected to be Open and the V word make you think at the opposite.

I agree with her about Flying High being one of the strongest candidates, but it is right now a kind of spaghetti, it evolved in at least 3 different directions, from cartoonish to minimalistic and to technical drawing, I would be curious to know which is the one liked by Diana.

References:

• one


• another one


• yet another one

And as the talk is cheap, better back it with some work, here is a 468x60 web banner based on one of the Flying High evolutions:

GIMP trick: make your subject pop out of a photo

I found an easy and nice Photoshop trick, so easy that anyone can do it with a bit of patience, it was hard to resist and not adapt it for the GIMP.
I made a detailed description of the process with screenshots for every step.
Here is a teaser:

See my page for the full presentation.

As the week-end is coming, see this as a challenge to produce your own works, put on the blogs and amaze people with your GIMP wizardry :p
And maybe post in the comments some links to your work.

Many thanks to my friends for motivating me to write this.

nVidia binary driver and FC6

Monday morning, I get to the office, start my computer and see a X.org startup error caused by the nVidia driver (I updated the kernel ad video driver Friday, but being lazy and confident in Fedora had not rebooted after that). Monday morning is a busy time, so I reverted to nv and postponed the investigation a few hours.

Now I found the problem, it is explained is on the front page of livna along with the solution:

The new 1.0-97xx series from nVidia drops support for any card with a chipset below NV30, such as all GeForce2 and GeForce4 cards. However don't worry! Livna has forked the original xorg-x11-drv-nvidia and kmod-nvidia packages to create ones named xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx and kmod-nvidia-96xx. These will be kept at the 96xx series of drivers and the original driver will be updated to the 97xx series. If you are using one of the cards named above, you can install 96xx like this:

yum remove kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia
yum install kmod-nvidia-96xx xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-96xx

Arghhh! The "beauty" of closed source drivers...

Looking forward to Nouveau.

Open Art Communities with Romanians

This is a follow-up to my previous post about the dumbfucks at OpenArt.ro.

Here is a list of really Open true Communities of Romanian artists:

• http://eyes-on-you.deviantart.com/


• http://club-romania.deviantart.com/


• http://rowatch.deviantart.com/


• http://ro-nature.deviantart.com/


• http://bucuresti.deviantart.com/


• http://bucharest.deviantart.com/


• http://transilvania.deviantart.com/


• http://cluj.deviantart.com/


• http://brasov.deviantart.com/


• http://timisoara.deviantart.com/


• http://huneazii.deviantart.com/


• http://muntenia.deviantart.com/


• http://ploiesti.deviantart.com/


• http://constanta.deviantart.com/


• http://brailacity.deviantart.com/


• http://iasi.deviantart.com/


• http://botosani.deviantart.com/

Sure thing, the large majority of people on deviantART are photographers, because this is the most accessible type of art, but there are a lot of other artists.

Conclusion:

• if you are an Romanian artist, there are a lot of better and more open communities, think where you want to be


• if you are a dumbfuck at OpenArt.ro look and learn what a community is and what is the meaning of Open

A funny project for someone with too much time on his hands would be to buy a domain like OpenOpenArt.ro or ReallyOpenArt.ro, drop a ccHost install on it with a Romanian translation and have an instant Open Community free for all Romanians to join.

Maybe I am to harsh with that obscure web design company making a poor site probably for some minor local prize or for a quick buck from some non-profit.

Update: as this is is of interest mostly for the Romanian readers, I did a Romanian translation.

Ampelfrau and Ampelmaennchen

We received at the Open ClipArt Library yet another request to remove the "famous" Ampelfrau and Ampelmaennchen images, this time citing trademark infringement. The message appear to come from their creator, thomas.fuchs@ampelmann.de, is quite strong and sound like this:

Dear Mr. Gates,

on your website "openclipart.org" you offer two cliparts
called "Ampelmaennchen" and "Ampelfrau" as a
license-free download. We are the owners of the
registered trademarks "Ampelmännchen" and
"Ampelfrau". So we challenge you to remove the two
symbols from your page within the next two weeks.

Best regards

Thomas Fuchs

Note: Matthew Gates has made the images in SVG format and submitted them.

My belief is that is stupid to protect with trademark and restrict usage of road traffic signs created with public money. Info on Wikipedia here and here.

I see there is a movement on OCAL to remove them, so I saved a copy:



Now good luck in removing them from all the mirrors, version control systems, packages, applications, distributions etc.

PS: I wonder if "Ampelfrau" and "Ampelmaennchen" would be ever registered as trademarks in my non-german speaking country.

Open Art? Not so "Open" maybe not so "Art" and definitely no "Community"

Open Art?

I stumbled across this site, called "Open Art - the Community of Young Professional Artists" (rel="nofollow" in the hyperlink in a hope to NOT improve their search engine ratings)

• Open: can you call open a so-called community where members have to submit a CV, participate in an interview before acceptance, and have to be a student or graduated of an Art university?


• Art: nowhere on the site is defined that Art means - painting, photography, sculpture, drawing, video, music? In my conception, "Professional" is not related to what university have you graduated, but to what you do for a living.


• Community: no comments, no feed-back, no favorites, no open subscription - enough of a community! More, a "Open" one!

Here is the time for a disclaimer: I did not encountered the site by chance, I know a person working on it (I used to know), so people may consider me biased. I hope this will not be considered a personal vendetta.

Back to that site, it also suck from a technical point of view:

• Static HTML! How dumb is that for a "Community" site? Whitout feeds and syndication is next to useless


• Terms and Conditions section is a .DOC file! Yes, can you believe this?


• validator.w3.org. Should I say more? I wonder about this one, I know the makers of the site used to price validation

Personal. Offensive.

This is a message intended only for a few people around me, so DO NOT LOOK AT IT if you do not know me in person, you may be offended.


Sorry for spam

Having some free time and nothing better to do (and no mood for doing something better) I went to my blog and added labels to each post, way back to its creation, about 3.5 years ago. The result? A completely broken RSS feed.
So sorry, my apology to all Planet sites aggregating my blog, it was not intended.

Update: Planet linux360 took my spam perfectly (ignored it), Planet Open CLipArt so-so (only a couple of misplaced posts) and Fedora People was the worst, all posts in the feed misplaced. Guuess were are the most readers :p

Update: there is a follow-up to this story

Update: as this is is of interest mostly for the Romanian readers, I did a Romanian translation.

Localization

There is a talk on the Romanian OpenOffice.org mailing list about the lack of speed on our project, the few people working on it and their lack of enthusiasm.

My take on this is: I will contribute (and have contributed in the past) to the UI translation (in a very small amount) but I will never use it for myself. Yeah, pretty strong this never.

I got a reply from Secărică deploring this attitude as being unconstructive. He is forcing himself to use his own translations (as bad as they are) in order to detect bugs and fix them.

I guess we are all different people, I can not stand an interface saying "soarece" instead of "mouse" or "brouser" instead of "browser" (as proposed on the diacritice localization list).

PS: to add insult to injury, right now I blog about this localization issue in English too :p

Dracula's Castle - kind of

Now as everybody is talking about Dracula's Castle being up for sale, maybe is time for me to post a picture from my last trip there:

Bran (Dracula's) Castle

Yeah, the picure quality suck, it was made years ago with a crappy camera. Probably the new owner will not demolish it, so I can take a better picute any time.

Or maybe I should get motivated enough and get to the real Dracula's castle and take some photos there (not anytime soon).

Satanic Fedora

I am fully aware this break a lot of guidelines and I do NOT think even for a second to propose it as a concept for Fedora themes.
I guess it is good to use next time when someone call our themes "dark, satanic, gothic, death metal and futuristic" as a comparison so I can reply: "Look, this is dark, satanic, gothic, death metal".

Source available on my Fedora Wallpapers page (do not try to render it with Firefox 2.0).

Note: Abusive use of blur really pushes the edges of Inkscape develpment branch, a very serious hit on performance.