Spread ODF - web buttons

Red Hat Magazine has an article about ODF: the inevitable format and a follow-up to it with shareable artwork to spread the word. Those who know me should expect I can't resist such temptation and had to come with some derivative graphics, a few buttons in various (standard) sizes:

•  88x31:
• 110x32:
• 120x60:
• 125x50:
• 180x60:

One question arise: to which page those web buttons are better suited to link? So far, they link to their SVG sources, which you are invited to freely play with.

Update: I got a request, so here are some smaller sizes:

•  36x13:
•  80x15:

Mascots and Fedora. Do we need one? Do we want one?

Back in the release cycle for Fedora 7 we had an initiative: create an open process where anyone can play and see if we can come with a Mascot for Fedora.
It generated a lot of long talks on mailing lists with strong supporters and opponents of the idea but also a number of contributions (about which I planned to blog but never came to it until now, shame on me!).
Here is a collage with various graphics we got:

But it seemed it was not hugely popular inside the Art Team, contributions slowed, the initiative got on hibernation or maybe even died.

I don't want to declare it dead or, by contrary, forcedly revive it, I just think is worthy to mention it, as we have a recent topic on the mailing list about its status.
So if you want it alive, start contributing, if not, the silence will take care of its [lack of] future.

Reflecting images on surfaces with Inkscape and GIMP

In the comments to my post from yesterday about creating shiny buttons with Inkscape I got asked about "simple howto about how to create planes with reflections of existing objects". Does someone think I can resist?


I wrote a simple howto about this effect for both Inkscape and GIMP . And for those who like it this way, there is also a Romanian translation .

The useless guide to drawing shiny web buttons with Inkscape

I understand the uselessness of writing yet another tutorial about creating shiny web buttons with Inkscape, but I think I found a niche: I don't know about such tutorials in my native language, Romanian.
So instead of translating an existing one, I was hit by the "not invented here" syndrome and wrote a Romanian Inkscape tutorial about creating web buttons.

With the article already written, it was obvious I have to pollute the 'net with it and make an English translation of it (usually I do the other way, write in English and maybe translate into Romanian later).

Progress: Authoring SVG websites with Inkscape

About a month ago I wrote about this experiment: create a website in SVG using Inkscape exclusively, put it on the web, link to it, and wait and see if and how search engines (and Google primarily) will index it.
I could present some results earlier, but one stupid mistake made me do have such a delay.

My stupid mistake

To serve a site completely as SVG you have to put a SVG file (index.svg in my case) as DirectoryIndex in the Apache config. Without access to httpd.conf, I used .htaccess for the job, which is just fine.
Not so fine is my stupidity: a few day after the site went online I needed a .htaccess file in another subdomain of my site, so I used the one from the SVG subdomain as a template. But by doing file management with drag and drop using Nautilus over SSH, I moved the file instead of copying it, and I had the directory exposed for a few days without an index file. Just enough for Googlebot, which already was all over it due to tons of links, to index the directory content.

Conclusion

I got to the conclusion just after one week, but waited a full month trying to repair the mistake described above. The conclusion is: no major search engine will index a website made entirely with SVG, will not follow links inside SVG and will not index the text.

My logs show a very large number of visits from spiders: Googlebot, Yahoo Slurp, MSN Bot, even from the Baidu bot, but all those will do is to ask for the website root ("/") and maybe for robots.txt, so the links are not followed. (my robots.txt is empty on purpose, the goal of the experiment was to see what search engines do on their own).

I put inside the SVG pages some unique strings, to query the search engines on them later. Of course the queries return nothing, my pages are not indexed and full-text search can't be performed.

Google Webmaster Tools say "Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Jun 19, 2007", the day when I didn't have .htaccess and index.svg was not served as DirectoryIndex.

Thanks

My little project created a lot of interest from my readers, I got a lot of links to my experiment and as a consequence a lot of visits from various bots. Thank you all!
But no thanks to the search engines, which are not able to index pages made with SVG, a W3C standard. Shame on you!

Fedora 8 themes - Round 1

Later today, 11 July, is the end date of the Round 1 in the 3 round process to create a new theme for the next release, Fedora 8.

The focus in the first round was to gather ideas, concepts, metaphors, which would be refined in the next two rounds. Here is what we got so far:

• Infinity by Máirín Duffy, a collection of photos around the slogan "Fedora: Infinite Boundaries"
  
• Abstract by Ben Arnold, an abstract style
  
  
• Moon by Mola Pahnadayan
  
• Feng Shui by John Baer with the goal to craft Fedora 8 artwork which is harmonious with the goals and objectives of the final product.
  
• Floating Cubes by Martin Sourada, based on some kind of projection of N dimensional cubes on plane.
  
• Thunder by Mola Pahnadayan
  

Note: those proposals should not be judged by the degree of polishing but by the idea.

My two cents

I am not the final decision maker and not one participating in the "contest" (is really is not a contest, more a collaborative work) so I will take the freedom and comment on those proposals.

• Infinity is an interesting concept, one on which I think I will try myself some modifications. But it is a mix of different concepts and those will have to be moved from photos to vectors and maybe abstracted a lot.
• Abstract, an abstract theme is something we are talking about as the opposite direction to take after F7. Many are inclined for such an abstract style, whatever metaphor we will chose.
• Moon show Mola's well known skill, is a very polished (maybe too polished for Round 1) and beautiful image, but I find it to close to the F7 Flying High. I think two consecutive releases should not have so similar graphics, but we can revisit the concept later.
• Feng Shui a very minimalistic take. I have to make my mind if I prefer the default theme to be so minimalistic or if I prefer a theme like this to be offered as a default alternative.
• Floating Cubes is a math thing, appealing to our inner geeks, but I fail to see a metaphor in it. Maybe it should take a minimalistic approach and join with Abstract and/or Feng Shui?
• Thunder - another beautiful and polished work from Mola. A very strong and powerful concept I can identify with. But sadly, I find it too looking too much like F7.

Update: Round 2 will end on 1 August and is dedicated to visual refinement of the images. The way to vote for your favorite is with your time and effort, by providing constructive feedback, preferably with illustrated examples.

Inkscape shiny arrow - redundant

So people are complaining about the existence of too many redundant Inkscape tutorials for simple things.
As an author of such basic tutorials I obviously disagree (how about many more redundant Illustrator or Photoshop tutorials?) and I join Ryan in his move and I present:

Inkscape shiny arrow

When I write on by blog the blurb for an Inkscape tutorial I usually present the process by showing the start image, the end image and an arrow like this:

So how I do those arrows?

• with the Bézier tool draw a rough arrow
• edit the nodes and make the lines slightly curved
• fill with a bright color, like this light green
• change the fill in a gradient
• increase the width of the stroke
• use the same gradient for the stroke as with the fill but with inversed start and end points
• add a slight Blur shadow
• optionally, add a glossy area (white to transparent gradient)

Spread the meme!

I can't draw but I want to draw people faces (with Inkscape)

As probably my loyal readers are used to, I write tutorials at a very low level, suitable for beginners. In the same note, today I'll talk about how to draw people faces (or hackergotchis) with Inkscape even if you don't know how to draw.
Something like this:

The basics: import a photo in Inkscape and using the calligraphic tool draw on top of it and then fill with colors and add highlights and shadows.
Sound interesting? Read more.

At some point I had the idea to make it a screencast, but the video would be long and in need for some editing. PiTiVi is far from usable and Avidemux2 can't work with Ogg, so I'm back to HTML, which is good, a HTML page is better indexed in search engines compared with a video :p

This tutorial has also a Romanian translation.

Copyleft icons

This morning I played a bit with the Copyleft symbol, by making some shiny variations. If I have those, I think I'll share them with the world along with their SVG sources, you never know when someone needs such things:

And this self-ironic Copyleft Commie flag:

Religion and orthodox icons in Romanian schools

After the fall of the Communist regime the Romanian society was invaded by religion, among other thing the schools were filled with icons and children forced to take religion classes (almost exclusively Christian Orthodoxy).
Fast forward these days (sorry, link in Romanian): a school teacher complains about displaying religious symbols in schools, considering it a form of discrimination, the National Council Against Discrimination agree and ban those symbols, a civic association make a challenge, the Appeal Court stay with the original decision and now the Education and Culture Ministry announce they will attack the decision to the High Court of Justice.

From the reactions of people around, I see a lot of Christians defending the religion in schools, which is what I expect, knowing the demographics, as illustrated in this map (from Wikimedia Commons):

Yeah, Romania is absolutely the worst in Europe.

I have my theory about how those the facts illustrated in this map explain a lot about the current state of the country: via the general stupidity of the people, the lack of culture, wrong moral values and so on - all of them are the cause of the bad things in economy, politics and society.

HTML layout and fonts

A lot of web designers want an impossible thing: their pages to look exactly the same, to the last pixel, to every user, no matter which platform or browser is he using. In many cases they try to circumvent this by using ugly hacks and Flash.
The fonts are one of the biggest cause and the lack of their availability is huge. I just started to address this on all my websites using the Liberation fonts pack.

It is very simple and obvious: you don't have any guarantee about a certain font is installed on your target system, but you may get a guarantee of having a metric equivalent of it, and Liberation is exactly this: the metric equivalents of the Microsoft fonts, so you set one font as the primary one and its metric equivalent as the fall-back option.

As Linux is my primary target, this is what I do in CSS:

font-family: "Liberation Sans", Arial, sans-serif;

Of course, is possible to do it the opposite way:

font-family: Arial, "Liberation Sans", sans-serif;

YouTube, screencasts and Ogg Theora

According to YouTube Help Center:

What video file formats can I upload?

YouTube accepts video files from most digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones in the .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG file formats.

So how about Ogg Theora?
In a moment of craziness I recorded a very short and excessively lame clip with Istanbul and uploaded it to se what it happens, the end result was unexpected: it worked.


For those reading my post via various Planets where the Flash object is not included and wanting a proof,a here is a direct link but you will not find anything interesting at its end. I think I will start doing more screencasts (if my underpowered desktop will let me record long clips).

Authoring SVG websites with Inkscape

This really is an interesting idea: create websites using Inkscape exclusively and publish them on the web in SVG. In theory it should be fine, SVG is a W3C standard so it should be supported by browsers (and I personally don't care about browsers not supporting W3C standards - cough, IE, cough), Gecko 1.9 and Firefox 3.0 are coming with better SVG support, Inkscape in nice (But not perfect) for authoring websites.
So far the main blocker I see is the way Google and other search engines index SVG files, the reports are mixed, some say they are indexed full-text, other say they they are indexed as images, some say they are not indexed at all.
My own experience show the SVG files from my personal SVG clipart collection don't have assigned any value for PageRank despite being online for a few years already and barely show in search results.

So I did a very small (3 pages) and simple website 100% with SVG and I link it from a couple of blogs waiting for crawlers to index it. After a few weeks will try various queries in search engines and see what shows up.

If you have additional ideas or knowledge please share in the comments.

google searches: .com and .ro and my blog

A google.com (NOT .ro) search on either "tuica" or "ţuică" (the same but with Romanian diacritics) will return my humorous blog post about Fedora 7 Moonshine on the second position of the first page with results, right after the Wikipedia definition of the word (I can't really expect to beat Wikipedia) and in front of an Uncyclopedia article on the matter.
Neat stuff!

On the opposite face of the coin, a search for either "tuica" or "ţuică" on google.ro and my blog is nowhere to be seen (where nowhere is "not in the first 30 or 40 pages with results). Google will detect your geo-location and for users from Romania will default the searches to google.ro.
This is not good for my Romanian readers, but it is a direct consequence of my conscious decision to blog almost exclusively in English, you can't have all.

Flying High - variation

For those linking the Flying High metaphor but being not that happy with the bight colors and the aggressive branding, I recommend the darker variation posted by Kelly on the Art List, this is what I am using for the moment:

(I promise, the full size version
look better than this thumbnail)

Fedora Tuica

Fedora 7 Moonshine translated in Romanian is Fedora Tuica (with diacritics Fedora Ţuică). It allow users to make their own mix at home and brew an own home-made derivative, with its own personal flavor, including liveCDs or liveUSB.

In a celebration of the Moonshine, here are schematics of an improvised installation for making tuica, just like my grand mother uses to use ages ago:

There are a fey quick similarities comparing Fedora and Moonshine (tuica):

• using any of them will make you happy
• both are addictive and may render you dependant
• being home made, Tuica is free, Fedora the same
• you can share them with your friends
• both are strong

A bit more info about the Romanian Tuica:

• the original and traditional receipt is to made them from plums
• an appreciated variety is the one made from pears
• the flavor is poorer, but the fruits are everywhere, so many people make it using cherry plums
• mulberry is a very sweet fruit, so people make tuica using mulberries, when they have them
• a cheap receipt it to use the remaining of the pressed grapes after wine making

Bible Fight - cool Flash game

This cool Flash game,, seen on Planet linux360, thanks to Starlog.

It bring me a bit of nostalgia about a time around 10 years ago when I used to enjoy a little Mortal Kombat match, but I am a little too old for that now and my fingers are not fast enough.


BTW, are there such fighting games released as GPL and available for Linux? (bonus point: funny, cartoonish look, maybe SVG graphics, kind of Monkey Bubble style)

What is a name?

I voted for Siegfired



Background info and credits for the photo at wikipedia