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

Inkscape folded sticker

Ryan's tutorial about creating stickers with folded edge in Inkscape is very addictive, so I couldn't stop myself playing with it, here is what I did:

Nice work, Ryan!

When I saw the sticker for the first time (before the tutorial was published) I had an idea, but being too lazy and too focused on other things for the moment will not follow it: how about a little web page to create such customized stickers? Like a form to enter your text, select the sticker color, click a button and your sticker is ready!

I see two ways to do it:

• have two PNG images, one with the body of the sticker and another with the "dog ear", use a library like gd and combine these two PNGs with another one, generated on the fly, containing the text (also made with gd and php)


• work with vectors, replace the text inside the SVG and use a command line utility to convert from SVG to PNG. Unfortunately, imagemagik is not up to the task (it does not support advanced SVG features) and Inkscape is probably not available on your web host (and I don't think Inkscape will work without X)

cc Swag

I received a note calling me to the post office to pick a package. What that could it be? Suprise, surprise: it was a package with swag from CreativeCommons, nice!

Thanks Rejon!

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...