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.

Save Tweety / Salvati-l pe Tweety

The protest was started by the kids in a Romanian school, feed-up with the bad translation of the programs on Cartoon Network. Yes, we don't want the shows doubled in Romanian, we like the original, in English, with a Romanian subtitle for those who does not know enough English.

• the original Salvati-l pe Tweety website, made by the kids
• the petition, signed already by a lot of people

BoringOffice.org

Someone just discovered the StarWars game easter egg in OpenOffice.org Calc so la lot of noise started:
- the developers does not take the project seriously;
- this is not professional;
- we can't trust OOo;
- my employees wile play instead of work;
- this is a blocker for adoption in schools;
- etc.

Bugs opened in IssueZilla only to be closed by developers in a few minutes, endless threads on the mailing list - in a few words: hell on earth.

So if having easter eggs is so bad, how one can explain the dominance of Microsoft Office, with the famous flight simulator in Excel?

Well, I have a simple solution for those people: download the source code, comment the easter eggs code, build a binary, rename it BoringOffice.org and advertise it as "the same OpenOffice.org but with all the fun taken out".

Sea Monkey 1.0

SeaMonkey released the first stable version. At a first look it looks better than the combination of Firefox 1.5 and Thunderbird 1.5, both are based on the same Gecko generation, so SVG support, tab reordering, global inbox, or whatever you need, but SeaMonkey is faster.
Sure, I can see also some downsides: SeaMonkey does not have pretty pictures, the icon theme is the same old one, remembering of Netscape 4.x days.

It appears the SeaMonkey developers follow a lesson from Firefox branding: they don't want to release the source for the logo graphic, to keep it under control.
I have bad news: such a logo is easy to recreate, here is a very quick job, with a lot of room for further improvements:

Of course, the source is available as SVG

oldies

Just found this picture, it is about 7 years old. Can you guess who I am? I bet you can't!
Consider the betting game open :)

Commando
Originally uploaded by nicubunu.


Disclaimers:

• Yup, the military service there is still mandatory in my country


• Those are real AKM rifles


• The picture is not taken in Siberia nor in a real war

Gnobots

Admire the new default theme in Gnobots (from GNOME Games):

Unfortunately, i was completely unaware by the GNOME release schedule, so two additional themes (a Sci-Fi one and a Horror another) did not make the feature freeze (by a few hours). However, expect to see them in a future version of Gnobots, when the game will be fully scalable and support SVG graphics (this is what i was told). Until then, take a peek:

Business and OCAL

An intriguing inquiry today at Open Clip Art Library: someone from a gaming company is searching for some of a few of our authors for a business proposal.
Of course, I don't have their contact data, end even if I had it, don't think is appropriate to give it to strangers.
So if Dan Gerhards, The Structor or AJ Ashton are reading this: have a look at the mailing list someone is wanting to give you money.

About the same time someone else is looking for Franccesco Rollandin, this time i don't know if money are involved. Francesco is easy to find, he used to post on the mailing list.