Romnian Fedora team at Cluj - an illustrated history

As announced, a group of Romanian Fedora contributors went Saturday at an event organized in Cluj-Napoca by Grupul pentru Software Liber. Now it is the time for a [heavy] illustrated report of the event (even more photos [*] can be found in our photo gallery):

So, we leaved Bucharest Friday, with the night train:

Where for now "we" is as this: me, Nicu, (if you read this, you should have a pointer about who I am), Adrian and Andrei are Fedora Ambassadors and the other Andrei is a junior member of the team (and being underage, we had to take care of him, Adrian received something like 20 minutes of instructions on the phone from his mother).


We were awaited early in the morning at the train station by Jani and Adi (both are Ubuntu contributors), and having a lot of time until the event's start, they took us for a walk in the city:


After that, we went to Adi's house, meet Alex) (he came from Timisoara), who work on Fedora but also on Firefox and OpenOffice.org, took the materials and headed to the event's place:


Namely, to the Babes - Bolyai University, which is a beautiful place (from every point of view):


There we prepared the room and waited for the audience to come:


I started the presentation with a talk about the Fedora community, but instead of half an hour, as planned, I got carried away by the speech, talked for a full hour and messed-up the entire schedule (bad idea guys to move my speech at the beginning):


Then Alex talked about Narro, his wonderful web-based translation tool, and about using it to translate OpenOffice.org and Fedora


Then Adrian gave a general presentation of the new features in Fedora 9, but he had to rush the presentation, because of me, who talked to much in my previous segment:


But probably my greatest victim was Andrei, who intended to talk a bit about Java in Fedora (sharing the same presentation with Adrian), but effectively had to resume it to a couple of phrases (bad, Nicu, bad!). But he helped us a lot and took a large number of photos (not yet online)


Then Alex took the stage again and talked about Firefox 3, release, features and translation


And during all those speeches, aour junior apprentice was helpful and good at cheering


After the presentation, we got to a Firefox 3 release party: friendly people, beer and interesting personal talks.


After the party, all of us Fedora guys (all five, including Alex), took another walk in the city (mainly at the Botanical Garden)


But we have not limited to admire some beautiful places, the city has plenty of other beautiful things to see:


And that was almost all, we returned with another night train.

In the end, many thanks to Adi and Jani, you were fabulous hosts!


Note: I made even more photos, but in the gallery are available only photos somewhat related to FOSS, photos with other subjects (like beautiful girls from Cluj streets) may be found on my other sites.

We are going to Cluj

We are going to Cluj-Napoca this Saturday! Grupul pentru software liber (the Group for Free Software) organized an event, held at the Babes - Bolyai University and we, the Romanian Fedora team are going to talk (in front of what I expect to be an Ubuntu predominant audience, so keep your fingers crossed for us to return alive).

a poster for the event,
greatly influenced by Mo's work

What we will to there? the plan is like this: Adrian to talk about Fedora 9 with Andrei adding a few words about Java, Alexandru will talk about localization with Narro (introducing OpenOffice.org) and Firefox, me to talk about the Fedora community (as viewed thru the eyes of an Art Team contributor) and the other Andrei to cheerlead.

homemade promo stuff for the event

As you can see from the photo above, I have a new toy, but more about that later, probably next week, for now is enough to say it stole a lot of my time, so I barely prepared a a set of slides for my presentation (according to the schedule, I have about 20 minutes for it anyway).

But back to the topic, after the event we will go to drink at the Firefox Release Party, so it must de fun!

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Webcomics War

The regular readers of Planet Fedora probably noticed a new (and very cool) webcomic K3RNEL from Mexico. Some competition for this webcomic.

Of course nodoby is going to war, I know they have a mighty army, so will just claim the two webcomics have completely different styles, formats, stories, graphics and both can live happily together.

Make fun not war!

Id cards, beards, framing BUT also university degrees, congratulations

I could rant about a "John Doe" life: over a year of not having a valid ID card, living an almost underground life, mostly normal but with only a few minor annoyances (like having the bank accounts blocked, being unable to travel outside of the country or, if that matters, being unable to vote - it doesn't matter, we can't escape the communist mafia).

I could write, for those who know me closely and may jump to some wrong conclusions, about my beard: even if it is not visible, I still have a beard inside, nothing changed, I am the same.

Instead my choice was to write about photo framing, this may be useful for a wider audience.

So I took the plunge, temporarily shaved my beard and renewed my ID card (it expired over one year ago and I have not cared enough to replace it). I used the opportunity of the local elections around here, when the people at the office in charge work overtime, so I had my card ready in two days, instead of the usual wait (at least a week, I believe).

The lady at the office, bored by the perspective of working overtime, took the following photo:

With the red arrows I emphasized the bad framing: 40% of the photo is occupied by my body, which is useless, nobody is interested in my shirt (or the hair on my chest for that matter). The purpose of such a photo is to show the face, so use zoom and crop (they had a 6 MP Olympus camera, a SP-500 UZ I believe, which should be perfectly apt for the task), here is (gimped) how such a photo should look:

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In unrelated news, do you know Adrian Joian, a Fedora Ambassador and my colleague from the Romanian Fedora community?


Today he had the last exam for his university degree and finished with a perfect 10.
Congratulations, Adrian!

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Fedora Weekly News

After a few weeks of pause, Fedora Weekly News is back in full force, giving each week an interesting read.
While I may have lied a bit about the nudity part, the rest is true, and true is that it could use some more contributors, so join the team!

Zombies? Bring it on...

Can I resist playing the running meme on Planet Fedora? Of course not, and of course I temporarily changed my hackergotchi to fit it.

You are in a mall when zombies attack. You have:

1. One weapon
2. One song blasting on the speakers
3. One famous person to fight along side you.

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1. Emerald Sword - see next item for additional info
2. Emerald Sword - while I could go for many other (and maybe better) choices from a Rhapsody of Fire compilation, I will go with Emerald Sword to give the needed background info for the previous item
3. Aerie - the wise choice would be a cleric with the Turn Undead ability, but I have a soft spot for elvish companions, so Aerie is.

How to make a screencast

I told you already that today I am in a screencasts creation frenzy, so here is one more, a screencast about creating screencasts with Istanbul (this one inspired by a talk on the Fedora marketing list):

Echo tips: screencast - Creating icons

It seems like my initiative to get people intro producing tips, howtos and tutorials about creating Echo icons was not that bad after all, Martin wrote a couple of very useful pieces.

Being in a screencasts frenzy today and until I got to write something original, here is a little screencast I made based on Martin's excellent tutorial about Creating Echo Icons with On the Table Perspective (all the creative credit goes to Martin, I just recorded his steps):

Note: forgive me Martin, I misspelled your name in the screencast and I am too lazy to record it again only to properly de-capitalize one letter :p

Everybody: what are you waiting for? Move your lazy asses and start drawing Echo icons, is not hard at all!

How to get your blog on Planet Fedora - screencast

As some people are confused about the "technical difficulties" of having their blog added (or re-added) to Planet Fedora, here is a small screencast about how to do it. So can you still honestly say the barrier is to high?

The screencast is made with OGG Theora so it should work out-of-the-box in Fedora (or any Linux distro), but if there is anyone "technically challenged" that much so it is too hard, I uploaded the clip also to YouTube:

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: How to break a world record

Everybody likes to set a clever publicity stunt when doing a release and for FF3 which will be (or for some of us already is) a major the Fedora guys are planning to break a Guinness World Record:

For me this is a kind of moral dilemma: I want to help a bit spreading FF3, but I don't want to lie, all my machines running FF3 will receive it either as an yum update or as an FF3 automatic update (from RC to final), depending on the OS, therefore not counted by their system. What do you do, pledge or not?

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: A release name

Who doesn't enjoy taking sides in a megatheread?

PS: If you think I am not funny enough, just hit me with ideas in comments.

A meme enabled Planet

There are a lot of cool things about the new and simplified procedure to get added on Planet Fedora but what's the coolest one?

It is not that we avoid a human bottleneck, like Seth may gets abducted by aliens, brainwashed and decide to play a Jeff Waugh on us, we know and trust Seth.

It is not that Planet Fedora gets more open, empowering its contributors even more, lowering the barrier to entry and showing, once again, what an open community should be.

And it is not that this will filter out some people who got aggregated by chance, without being really Fedora contributors.

The coolest thing is that Planet Fedora just got meme enabled.

Do you remember a few years ago when all the rage on various Planet aggregators was to use South Park characters as hackergotchis (made with an online Flash tool)? Some planets still use them...

Of course the South Park meme is old, but we can be kittens, astronauts, ninjas, rock stars, robots or whatever else is the meme of the week just by changing one line in a .planet file. So start your memes...

Note: it would be cool if we had a tool to create characters, like a skinable web application or skins for a potato game (to bad KTuberling is KDE and not in the default desktop).

For those who do not want to play memes, just have a plain hackergotchi, just make your image fit visually the layout of Planet Fedora, that means an icon of about 96x96 pixels, we have currently a few which are a bit too large making the aggregator look kind of buggy. And do not forget we are running a service for those who can't do their own hackergotchi, do not hesitate to ask.

Echo icons. Tips: guides and grids.

A bit of history

There are two years since the first mockup (no picture, the particular wiki page is dead) for what was going to become the Echo icon theme (at the time it was just "Bluecurve and Beyond") appeared. It was a rough preview (~20 icons) made by Diana.
Honestly, the icons sucked a lot - bloated SVG made with Illustrator, no standard size, no guidelines and so... but a lot of us, bored by the already old Bluecurve and not convinced by Tango, got excited and put some hope in it.

Now

After a while, without a maintainer, with poor infrastructure (a wiki page), no guidelines and poor SVGs and few active contributors, the development slowed down.
Then Luya and Martin stepped in, took over the maintenance, worked hard on guidelines, a new hosting infrastructure and a number of cool looking icons which are used in various places around Fedora.
The plan is ambitious: to get the icon theme in a state so it can be considered as a default for Fedora 10. The plan is hard but not unattainable. In needs more contributors. It needs you.

Tips

Icon development is not my filed of expertise, I have contributed to Echo only a few remixes in the early days, but I like to learn. So here is my idea: show some basic tips to encourage others to put they own tips, generate a healthy exchange of information, learn from each other and encourage new blood.

One of the hard part about the Echo icon theme is that it uses an axonometric (not that is not isometeric) view for the large view, and the creation of such icons have a level of difficulty. So you need to use a kind of helper - the old way was to import a SVG showing a grid, draw on top of it and then delete it (the source is available in the guidelines page):

Now Inkscape 0.46 comes with improved features: angled guides and axonometric grids, making your life (and icon creation) easier.

Drag and drop from the top ruler a grid line, double click on it, rotate with 24.5 degrees:


Drag another grid and rotate it with -16.25 degrees (at least, those are the values I measured):


Now use these two guides to help you drawing the nice perspective (press "|" to toggle their visibility on/off):


While the guides are only a visual reference, a grid can be more effective: it is more dense and also allow snapping to its nodes. Its visibility can be toggled on/off using "#".
So use File -> Document Properties, go to the Grids tab and create a new Axonometric grid with a 16.25 degrees X angle, 24.5 degrees Y angle and whatever value you like/need for Y spacing:

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Webcomic 2.0

As disappointing as it may be, my countdown has ended and it was related to my webcomic... sorry if you had greater expectations :D

Anything that's put on the web is measurable and the measurements for my Fedora webcomic showed unsatisfactory results, so I had two options either to drop it or make it better. Being excessively stubborn, dropping was not an option so the only way remaining was trying to improve, and as I can't improve the humor (as it defines me as a person) I worked on the graphics. So here is today's edition:

Along with the new graphics, I came with a new process, based on a clipart style, with pre-defined images which can be quickly assembles in a comic strip. I also introduced a new website for the webcomic, showing the latest issues (extracted from my blog) but also a number of goodies: the Romanian translation but, probably more important, what I like to call the cast of characters, a page containing a number of characters I imagined I could use, with full source available as SVG and a short description (this can be improved) and also a lot of images which can and will be used: items, emotions, strip templates (all with the corresponding sources), so anyone can create his own webcomic.

Here is a teaser:

Narro for beginners - screencast

As the title says, it is a screencast, which is narrated in Romanian, so it may not be that useful for my English readers, but if you find it useful, just ask for a transcript and one can easily do a voice over in another language.

At the recent Romanian Fedora release party one of the speaker was Alexandru, who talked about his web-based translation tool, Narro and how it can be used to translate Fedora and other FOSS applications.
Those reading my blog probably know that I like Narro, so as promised at the release party, I did a screencast for beginners (OGG Theora video):

At my suggestion, Alexandru added today Inkscape to the various programs which are included in translation, so there may be hope for having this application translated into Romanian, just watch the screencast and get contributing to the translation (Fedora, Inkscape, GIMP, Firefox, OpenOffice.org, whatever you like).

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In other news, something is really close, with only one day remaining:

Lame blog post

This is the perfect example of a lame blog post: I was super busy today all day long, without the time to write a proper post (I had two subjects in my mind, one involving a screencast for translators and another a couple of tips for icon creation) but at the same time I wanted to test Seth's changes at Planet Fedora (more about coolness potential in it in a future post) and I had to update the countdown, as it is close to finish, so sorry for the noise.