Constantine

This is already public knowledge: the code name for Fedora 12 is going to be Constantine. If you voted for it thinking about the Keanu's movie, I have some bad news for you: the F12 theme will not be based on that, it will not gonna happen.

My first reaction is to go straight to the source: Constantine the Great, the famous Roman emperor, which was "first" for some things, had some "features" and also provided some "freedom". And for me that Constantine equals Byzantine culture, best represented by Byzantine mosaics, something like:

see more; photos by Gauis Caecilius
published under a CC-BY-ND license

The real trick is to take out the religious implications (which are bad) and leave in the cultural references (which are good). And I think there is potential in a visual conflict in a contrast of old mosaic style and modern imagery (4 F's?), everything with a shade of blue.

FUDCon day 2

The second day of FUDCon was dedicated to the BarCamp:

Some of us were more energetic, some a bit less:


I attended a few talks, which were more or less formal and more or less interesting:



And, of course, as at any respectable BarCamp, people also gathered spontaneously to do their stuff:


Myself, I didn't got much stuff done, I mostly cheered-up Mo for her getting stuff done.

When arriving at the hotel we had a big surprise: there was a large party with a lot of (mostly) nice looking high school German girls dressed up in fashionable outfitts, but I will talk more about this in a later post:

Panda story or getting stuff done

First it should be mentioned no human is responsible for all those thing, it was the panda who got drunk early in the morning ans started impersonating Mo, so it wasn't her and I was not involved in any way.

panda getting drunk

So the first move of the drunk panda, Mo impersonator, was to inkscape a FUDCon poster (he also invented the verb "to inkscape"):

the poster

To have the madness complete, Hello Kitty joined the party:

Hello Kitty popping in

And the next move was a making-of video of the poster creation (complete with title and credit screen and catchy soundtrack):

the video

You know a panda has fingers? Of course he has, so he can get carried away and show them in reply to wise-ass comments (so be warned):

panda fingers

Of course all this was possible with the valuable contribution of a lot of nice chevaliers, ready to jump at any moment and help a panda in distress:

panda helpers

Disclaimer: this post was fuelled only by cranberry juice provided by the hotel's breakfast service.

FUDCon day 1 + FUDPub

I am moody at times, like yesterday, when I was tired a bit, frustrated a bit, so got pretty demotivated and took a smaller than usual amount of photos (and maybe not that great). But they are still quite a few.

This morning I am somewhat more optimistic: not enough for a big blog post with a story wrapped around the photos, but enough for a large photo dump. So here was the first FUDCon day seen trough my lenses (again, there are more on my photostream:

The FUDCon day ended with a big group photo but it continued late into the night with FUDPub, the social event consisting of beers, fancy drinks and free pizzas (BTW, does anyone liked the seafood pizza? it was like everybody was running away from it):

FUDCon BarCamp

Next on FUDCon's agenda is the BarCamp day, those are the people who enlisted yesterday to keep talks:

We are Fedora!

The photo didn't came the best (is rotated a bit), as I didn't have a real tripod with me, but it captures the spirit of our community ant this is all that matter - happy Fedora contributors at the Berlin FUDCon in 2009.

If you want to play a bit with it in GIMP, print a poster or whatever (I tried to put it online ASAP, at least a FUDCon logo could be added) a large version is available (CC-BY-SA).

Fun time waiting for FUDCon

FUDCon started already, but while listening to speeches and taking some more photos, I still have to talk a bit about yesterday.

After a morning at LinuxTag I joined Mo, Spot, Jesse and Ionut for a sushi lunch

If you know Mo at all, you don't me to tell we stopped and bought a big basket of (very yummy) strawberries


Jesse went for some business and the rest of us got to visit the Berlin Zoo (with seeing pandas as a primary objective and frogs as a secondary one, you must know already who is a panda appreciator and who is a frogs fan). Conclusion: the zoo is amazing.


Then we got for a while back to "serious" Linux stuff, attending the LinuxNacht, which ended sooner than expected, remaining without drinks and food. So I got out with a few Ambassadors to take care of the problems. We had some beers and interesting talks about various stuff, from hiring idiots to Michael Jackson (fun fact: at about 2:00 AM, we had a TV crew asking Cristoph about the "king of pop").


Much to my disappointment, even if we were in the right place, it was too dark to use my camera properly and take revenge for yesterday's hooker incident.