GIMP rain animation tutorial, "patrulaterul maro" buttons

GIMP rain animation tutorial

After a number of Inkscape tutorials, it was the time for me to make a GIMP one, this one about creating a fake a rain animation effect, like this:

It is quite big, with many large images, so I put it on a static page from my tutorials website, if you are interested, read it in its original location.



"Patrulaterul maro" Buttons

As I am in the mood of showing some creative products, here are a few political buttons I made for my own use, but I share them with my Romanian readers who may find them useful.

Tips: using brushes with Inkscape

In another follow-up to Máirín's tutorial about Grungy Brushes, I showed an alternate way to create those using Inkscape only. But is kind of weird to create brushes with Inkscape only to use them with GIMP so I wrote a few tricks about using brushes with Inkscape.

The article is a bit heavy in images, with a few large screenshots, so I will not post it directly in my blog to waste people's bandwidth, but instead in a static page. Go read it if you are interested.

More "Grungy Brushes"

If you have not already read Máirín's nice tutorial about Grungy Brushes, published recently on the Red Hat Magazine, go and read it now before continue reading this. I skip here a lot of steps and present only part of the workflow.

I will explore a more simplified (and probably not that good looking) way to do it, using only vector graphics for path generation.

• Fire Inkscape, of course, this is the tool we will use



• Draw a rectangle, al large as you want. I made it red only for visual feedback in the next step.
  
  



• Switch to the calligraphic tool and draw randomly until you cover the rectangle but leave a lot of gaps, we will use only the gaps. Make sure you have one single path, otherwise select the paths and do a union (Path > Union).
  
  



• Select the the chaotic path and the rectangle and perform a difference (Path > Difference). After that break it (Path > Break Apart).
  
  



• Optionally, if the blobs are too big make them smaller using inset (Path > Inset) and if they are too complex simplify (Path > Simplify).
  
  



• Now, just as Máirín did, use the Align and Distribute dialog to move them around.
  
  



• And go wild with a lot of crazy shapes:
  
  



• As shown in the tutorial, export as PNG, import into GIMP, flatten image, convert to grayscale and save as brush (.gbr).

I think at another possible approach which would not use a rectangle and difference, but the bucket fill from the Inkscape development branch, but for now I will limit to tips and tricks about the stable version.

If you didn't read the tutorial before, I hope I got you interested, so go read it now!

Sinclair Spectrum Nostalgia

My celebration of the 25-th anniversary of the Sinclair Spectrum is to highlight some games or applications that influenced me in some way.

• Rygar - because it was my first and you will have a soft spot for your first forever. Well, it was not the first computer game I ever played, but it was the first I really liked and the first I won. Later I grew bored by the genre and stopped playing this kind of games, I revisited it years after in a improved version (MAME), but it have not captured the old feeling.
  
  


• Elite was in those years my backup game, something I played when I wanted to play something but didn't have something interesting to play (note: later, in the PC era the backup game became Heroes of Might and Magic II-IV). Sure, I tried later the PC version and some clones, but it was too little, too late.
  
  


• The Dizzy series I liked so much that I tried to do my own clone, directly in Z80 assembly language. I started by drawing a complete set of tiles for graphics (with pen on graph paper, no less!), creating a game map of about 20 rooms composed from those tiles, an engine to display the game world and move the main character in this world (complete with keyboard input and sprite animation) and display of text messages using a custom font. Then I got to the hard part: implementing the game logic, so I put the game on hold to get some ideas and life took me away from it.
  
  


• Art Studio was a graphics software, not a game, and it defined my way of drawing for many years. Later, in the Windows 95 era I kept using MS Paint and missing its version from Windows 3.x because it resembled better some "features" from Art Studio.
  

Oh, and BTW, in that era my "computer monitor" was a black and white 14" TV.

Fedora Visual Identity

In the last few days I uploaded a number of screenshots to http://wiki.lug.ro/, mostly in the desktop area: graphics, office, multimedia, games. A lot of work is still to be done, but this process made me to have a clearer picture about the visual identity of Fedora.

I use a configuration pretty close to the default: for windows the Clearlooks theme and for icons Bluecurve/Echo/Mist, which in result is something very close to the upstream GNOME default. This in opposition to Ubuntu screenshots, which clearly stand apart by their look (which I don't like, but this is not the point). When a reader see a screenshot made with Ubuntu, he can recognize on the spot: Ubuntu, GNOME, Linux. In the case of a screenshot made with Fedora what else can be recognized except GNOME? Not much else.

I guess this is part of the explanation why almost half (number pulled straight out of my ass) of the Linux screenshots found on the web are brown.

This is true at leas for me: having a more personal look of Fedora by default would motivate me more in publishing screenshots in such places as Wikipedia, is addition to my blog or my tutorials.

What a more personal look could be? It may be something little, like a specific shade of blue, a small change to the window decorations, a small tweak to the icon theme.

The brown quadrilateral

Only a few months after acceptance in the EU, the communist restoration is flourishing here in Romania, it culminated yesterday with a coup d'état performed by the communist mafia.

The brown quadrilateral if formed by communists, political police from the communist era (securitate), mafia, and corruption.

The only sane thing one can do is to leave this shitty country for good, and never look back.


Me? In another life I would have cared about those things, but for now I just lack the energy...

Spread Open Media

Quote:

Spread Open Media (SOM) is a project in the same line as Spread Firefox, but combined with a powerful community like Mozillazine. SOM will promote Open Media formats like Xiph's (Vorbis, FLAC, Speex, Theora and XSPF) and others like SVG and ODF.

We, at the Open Clip Art Library, together with Xiph.org are hosting a contest for creating a logo and maybe a mascot for Spread Open Media. All submissions should be in SVG format and released as Public Domain, so they cam become part of the Open Clip Art Library. The contest started on 10 April 2007 and will end on 05 May 2007. Using those contributions as a base, a lot of materials like banners, buttons, badges, icons, fliers, t-shirts will be created.

Read more about the rules and start contributing your graphics!

Communication channels

Channels

For this rant to be understood in its entire value, I should notice I do not work in a FOSS company and not even in a company where IT is the main focus.

Last week I was at work doing something at my desk when the phone ring: "Someone named XXXX from the city YYYY is asking for you". Unknown name, but I take the line, maybe is something business related and not spam. "Hi, I am XXXX from city YYYY and I have a question about OpenOffice". My first reaction was "from where do you have this number?". The answer: he got my name from the OpenOffice.org website, found my work email address, then my employer website and phone number.

Then he asked something about using regular expressions in Calc filters, but I was to shocked by his gesture to call me at work (is clear from the website we work in an unrelated area) so I could not answer at the moment (and I needed a look in the help anyway). My reply was along the "I can't tell you right now, but let's talk on the mailing list, even if I don't know the answer, maybe somebody else can and if not, you may ask on the English list". And he: "but I don't know enough English" (but he knew enough to find my employer website (which is entirely English), and my work phone number there.

Of course, he never came to the list to properly ask the question, which was not hard to answer.

The moral of this story is: use the proper communication channels, otherwise you may not get the desired answer (hehe, this may apply also to me sometimes...)

Articles page

On a related note, about the communication clarity, I did a cleanup of my articles page, it was a straight translation from my blog, with bad and bloated html and css. I now communicate clearer and my money are at the same place with my mouth.

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).