The Lady and the Tramp

Since someone dared me to post this night this picture worthy of a Disney movie, taken at the FUDCon warm-up party, I had to do it, I leave on you to guess who is the Lady and who is the Tramp. Good night everyone!

FUDCon Milano, Day 1

Today was the first day of probably the shortest FUDCon ever, with some of the Fedora contributors gathered here in Milano going in the evening near the city center for a warm-up party:

I didn't stay long, since I had to be near a computer with internet access and some silence, having to end the photography contest (more on that probably later tomorrow, for now will say only this: aroudt 5700 pics!)

The last day

Today is the first day of the Milano FUDCon and early in the morning I am waiting for the breakfast so I can go to the conference place, but as early as is, I had to share something and to make a last request: today is also the last day of the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign and our contributors were busy at night furiously uploading pictures so we passed the 5000 mark (actually we are above 5300 as I write this), way above my expectations (I didn't dare to vocalize any 5K hopes). And the request? Is more of a reminder, is the last day, if you have any pics left, now is the time to upload them, the contest will close at the end of the day (you can, of course, continue to contribute after, some people asked about that, only it will be off the contest).
Thank you!

The last, straight, line

Tomorrow I will be travelling to FUDCon Milano (yay FUDCon, here I come!), away from home, from my computer, from my pictures and probably away from an reliable internet connection, so I uploaded my last batch of photos, 10 pictures from the Village Museum in Sibiu, and put everything on auto-pilot, we are in the last straight line of the Wiki Loves Monuments campaign, with only two days left and about 45000 pictures uploaded so far (the 4.5k mark is going to be passed probably in the next couple of hours). Will continue with a few conclusion near the end of the week from Milano and going to the next step (centralisation, jury, statistics) starting early next week.

Now excuse me, there are some last minute things to take care of.

Wiki took Bucharest

As planned, we had yesterday (Sunday) a photo walk in Bucharest to gather together some contributors to the Wiki Loves Monuments photography campaign and also take a few pictures for the contest

The starting point was at Eroilor subway station, some came, some couldn't (funny story: the couple who in the previous day did their own 10km photo walk had hurting legs and couldn't):

We were seven people and since we exceeded the six people threshold, "plan B" was activated: we split in two sub-teams, each following a different route, planed as about 2 hours long, and then joined back together in the city center. I let the team take pictures of monuments (is a contest, after all), resuming myself to "making of" pics, below are the adventures of my team:

As you can see, each had his/her own tools: from mobile phone and compact cameras to DSLRs:

And each of us freely took the pictures he/she wanted:

In the end we meet the other team in front of Caru' cu Bere and those who wanted continued somewhere in the Old City with some talk, beer and pizza (not pictured, I don't want people to hate me that much):

Expect the pictures to hit Wikimedia Commons any time soon (some already did, probably). And BTW, we are close to 3800, is the last week, the time to contribute the last pics you have lingering, don't be lazy!

...and if you have pictures from your own photo walk, please share them, ours was fun!

2.5k and one more week to go. Wiki rulz!

One more week passed and another milestone was reached in the Romanian Wikipedia photography contest: we passed 2500 pictures! This was a spectacular growth after 500+ at the end of the first week and ~1200 at the end of the second week. Thank you everybody!

Now anyone wanna bet about the amount of images we will receive in the next (last) week? Another surprise or some slowing down? Guess Romania's final position among the 18 countries participating? But better stop betting and guessing, put your hands on your camera, go out, search some monuments, take pics with them and send them to Wikipedia, you know you want to do that! Also, if you live in Bucharest, you can join us for a photo walk on Sunday, we can take some photos, know each other better, maybe have a beer or so... fun time anyway. And if you don't live in Bucharest, you can organize your own photo walk in your city, it can be equally fun, grab some people and go out, in the big room with the clue ceiling.

Jury duty

Time to share two unrelated stories about my participation in the Wikipedia photography contest:

The other day was talking with someone I know for about a couple of weeks, when she asked "are you in the jury for the Wikipedia contest?" me: "yes! do you participate?" and her "yes". What to do? "cool! but be aware I won't play favorites :D " and out of curiosity had to ask "how did you learn about it? it was from my facebook wall posts?" and she "no, I heard a week ago from a friend". Kinda bummer "but I kept talking about Wikipedia stuff"... for a "yeah, but didn't understood is about this". The conclusion is positive: people talk about it, people hear about it from unexpected source, there is hope for sustained level of contributions in the remaining weeks (hmmm.... maybe even sustained growth?).

Also the other day I meet a photographer friend for a photo action in the city with a larger group (bummer, it was the perfect opportunity to wear the WLM T-shirt, but it didn't arrived yet, any time soon), so having free time for half an hour I did took a few monument pictures and was showing them to this friend (she will contribute some stuff to Wikipedia in the following week, has the photos ready, needs the time - again, hope for sustained level) and she asked "but aren't you in the jury?". So I had to explain her, and will do it here again: yes, I am in the jury and would not be fair for me to enter the contest, so I won't. But at the same time, I cannot stand and skip contributing to Wikipedia, I do it all the time, contest or not. So I take my photos, submit them, add them to the total number, but they will be outside the competition.

PS: 2 weeks passed, 1186 photos received in the Romanian contest. still 2 weeks to go.

One thousand pictures

If a picture is worth 1000 words, then what is worth 1000 pictures? Not sure, but 1000 pictures is the milestone we just reached in the Romanian Wikipedia photography contest and this is before reaching the half of the contest duration. Not bad, I say. Better than I expected. Let them coming!

A first week of WLM

So many notable things happened during the first week of the Wiki Loves Monuments photography contest, I talked about some of them yesterday at the RLUG meet (there is a video recording of it available), first of them, in this week we passed the 500 pictures milestone, in 7 days reached 516 uploads (422 of them uploaded to Wikimedia Commons and 94 to Flickr). With this amount, Romania is somewhere close with Sweden for the 11-12 place in the pan-European competition. While it may seems modest compared with other countries (like Switzerland for example), it exceeds all my expectations (maybe I was too pessimistic?).

Another thing to notice is the contest banner on Wikipedia, it started running a few days ago, so the exposure is increasing with a huge amount:

Not last, regarding exposure, today we just closed a media partnership with a large (near to 1.5M unique monthly visitors) video sharing site who is advertising our competition (yeah, technically this happened in the second week, but is worth noting).

Hunting for WLM

A good approach for taking pictures for the Wiki Loves Monuments Wikipedia photography contest is to have "monument hunting sessions" and this is what I tried to organize for the last week-end: get a few photographers out in the city, with a list of monuments in hand (paper, electronic device, their brains, whatever), have a walk on the streets, have fun, take photos, and then from home upload the photos to Wikipedia. Don't say it isn't fun!

My plan was to assemble a team of 2-3 photographers (with me not taking photos, I am organizer and a judge, I won't enter the contest) but it was too short, found only Razvan available, so we did the photo walk together and in the end I took a few pictures too, unsure if and how to use them - after that, speaking with more people we decided to have a special category for photos submitted by organizers, so in the next days I will uplaod content too, but outside the contest. What I decided NOT to do myself is to transform the contest in a nationalistic one: there is a top of contributions by country, where Romania is currently 10th of 16, this is decent, IMO, I won't push for climbing on 9th, I won't spread the fear of being replaced by 11th, that's not the reason to contribute (even if it may be an effective motivator).

First day of Wiki Love Monuments

With all my honesty, the first day of Wiki Loves Monuments, the free photography contest for Wikipedia, exceeded my expectations: we received 56 images on Wikimedia Commons and 19 images on the Flickr group, this is a total of 75 images. Was I too pessimistic again? Well, I start to believe we will beat my most optimistic expectations. We'll see :)

Now, after yesterday I published a video tutorial for uploading photos for the contest to Wikimedia Commons, is time to make the next step and show a video to the other way to contribute, by adding the photos to the Flickr group (starting with new images and having accounts on both systems, I find uploading to Commons easier ...and it will make the work easier for us, wikipedians, but... contribute in what way to find yourself easier):
Încărcare pe grupul Flickr (if not working from here, the video is up on YouTube and WikiMedia)

Wiki Loves Monuments in full force

Today it started, the free photography contest for Wikipedia is up and running in full force, the news is spread also in the mainstream media, a central newspaper and a news television

Trying to make everybody's contributions easier, I made a small video showing the upload process with the wizard on Wikimedia Commons:

(if not working from here, the video is up on YouTube and WikiMedia)

Still, everything is far from perfect, I worked a bit on the video, adding annotations and sound, but the video editor, Kdenlive, refused to work, due to a nasty bug in Fedora/Rpmfusion, so I had to go with a crude and ugly version.

Seaside wallpapers

For the last few days I was away, at a photography workshop (some posts are up on my other blog, some will come later), a trip that slowed my progress with the Wikipedia photography contest, but I am back and working.

So a trip to the sea side, of course I took a lot of pictures and from some (which are safe for work) I had to make some wallpapers, all freely licensed:

And not only beaches, but also sunrise on the beach (enough with the sunsets OK?):


The way back home was also a good opportunity:



Enjoy!

PS: maybe one day will make some NSFW wallpapers from the same set of photos, but those won't appear here.

Wiki Loves Monuments in 3, 2, 1...

One day remaining until the official start of the Wiki Loves Monuments free photography contest for Wikipedia, which will happen during September in 16 European countries. In the last week I was away and busy (the work will start showing at some point on my photography blog) so didn't promote it as I should, but I am back and kicking. Wanna join?

Wallpapers in the sunset

No, nothing is setting (yet), it just happened for me to get with my camera in front of some beautiful sunsets and take pictures. Of course I had to continue my series of wallpapers, all under the same free license. Enjoy.

Wanna laugh? Facebook malware

It happened to me twice today. I had a facebook chat like this with someone I know from real life:

hi
hi
Wanna laugh? :)
sure!

at which point I received a tinyurl address, leading to a malware delivery site.
my reaction was:

ops! that was a virus, good thing i dodged it
There are no viruses there

A bit later, another person I know from real life:

hi
hi

Pre-emptively I tried to check in front of me is a real person:

how are you?

It continued:

ok. wanna laugh? :)
no, thanks

But I received again a tinyurl encoded address to which I didn't reply further.

Seeing this primitive dialogue, I suspect there is a malware with some chat boot embedded or a low-wage worker in the 3-rd world.

Anyway, the malware addresses will lead you to a fake personalized YouTube page like this, trying to make you run an .exe:


See the problems:

• the numeric URL is the first thing to give it away as malware, unfortunately some browsers, like Chrome, will hide the URL bar by default, leaving the user more vulnerable (Furefox is expected to blindly copy this feature too, making even more naive users vulnerable)
• the target has knowledge of my real name, making me more inclined to trust the source;
• the "video" is a link to an .exe file, something able to trick unsuspecting Windows users;
• the first couple of comments are fom real facebook contacts, making you be even less suspecting;
• the status bar shows the download as being an .exe, Firefox removed the status bar at all before FF4 and restored it after the users outcry, it shows it was a wise decision.

What can I say? this is a pretty sophisticated attack, combining AI (bots), social engineering, competent crafted design and advanced use of facebook APIs. Be careful!

PS: of course nothing bad happened to me, I spotted the URL instantly, noticed the .exe and don't run Windows anyway.

Free photography contest for Wikipedia

Part of a pan-European contest happening (so far) in 17 countries, in September we will organize in Romania Wiki Loves Monuments. We have rules and prizes, we have a jury and we have the first press release.

What is is about? People are invited to take pictures of monuments in Romania (there is a list with those out of copyright) and upload them on Wikimedia Commons under a Free licende (CC-BY-SA) during September 2011. 10 will be selected, 3 prizes and 7 mentions will be awarded and the 10 winners will also go to the European contest, for a new round, with its different prizes.

Why are we doing this? To enrich Wikipedia with pictures from our country, to teach photographers about sharing, to increase awareness about Wikipedia and Free culture and so on. Like it? Help us by spreading the work and, more important, submitting your photos.

Sorry, no CDs

I got asked if I can provide some Fedora CDs for an upcoming install fest (happening in October). My answer was a straight one: sorry, I don't have any due to GNOME 3, I am not willing to spread that thing so I got no CD. Maybe if I go to FUDCon and find there some Xfce disks available, I will bring some, but in limited quantity, since I will have little space available in my bags.

Then I was asked if I can point to someone else who may have such CDs and my answer was straight again: I don't know any active Fedora ambassador still based in Romania (my friends moved). So no luck, I guess they will have to use self-recorded disks or USB drives.

(and no, I was not lured elsewhere)

Update: Just after I pressed "publish" I received an IM from an old contributor, wich was silent for the last couple of years and re-started after the last FLOSSCamp:

he: i installed fedora 15 on my laptop and can't understand what's about this interface
me: gnome 3?
he: i think so...
he: but i didn't think is that bad:|
me: i was protesting against it from the beginning and refused to upgrade
me: try Xfce
he: can't install gnome 2 ?
me: in fedora 15? not
me: someone tried a port but is still work in progress
he: meh, i think i will install fedora 14 and call it a day:)) is way too much...
me: that's what I did
he: ok... we'll talk after I get a working system

Wallpapers from... heaven?

"You were in heaven" a friend told me after seeing some landscape pictures I took at FLOSSCamp 2011. "It could have been" I sourly smiled but also I thought seriously, selected a few and prepared them as wide-screen wallpapers, to be made freely available (CC-BY-SA). Enjoy.

More on the supremacy

Some may jump for joy, shouting "good riddance!" but... the rumors about me joining the orange side are... uhm, greatly exaggerated :D it was harmless fun with old friends from the Ubuntu community at FLOSSCamp

But speaking about pictures, communities, friends, FLOSSCamp and poking fun, I have to continue with another pic about Ubuntu's supremacy: