Romanian censored sites (warning: about porn but SFW)

Recently Romania started to block access to some websites, deemed to have pornographic content and, in the Romanian style, the decision to block each site is not made by a judge, but by a government bureaucrat. The first batch contains 40 websites and only websites hosted in Romania (the law does not apply for sites hosted abroad).

And also in the typical Romanian style, the list of blocked sites quickly surfaced on the web.

photo by Bogdan Manolea, published under CC-BY 2.0
At a quick scan on the domain names, almost all the websites seems to be porn but here is a notable exception: 220.ro is a crappy and dubious local YouTube clone with user generated content which contains some amount nudity (not sure about porn, since I use the site very rarely).

I leave open for the debate if the porn sites should be blocked or not (note: this is "adult" not "kiddie") and what is porn.

PS: the blocking is implemented at the DNS level, so affected are those using the DNS server provided by their local ISP.

Miserable Failure or Rain and the City Lights

After I challenged everyone to shoot the city lights, it was natural to eagerly await the week-end and do my own photos, something I planned to to the last Saturday. But that day, despite an acceptable temperature, a cold wind was blowing and a cold rain was falling down... a weather to not leave your dog out, the photographer even less so.

Seeing the weather forecast about a rainy Sunday too and the rain slowing down a bit around the noon, I decided to go out and try my best. Bad decision, with the night falling the rain intensified, it became colder and colder and after a few failed shots I thought my camera does not deserve the punishment and went home. It is not like that was the last day on Earth.

Sunday the weather was a bit better but not good enough to get me out...

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Snakes on a Hat

The first and obvious idea was to talk about the elections, but I have used the vote theme for a couple of times already and I don't want to be very repetitive (except with bashing Ubuntu, that never gets old). So I jumped to the next topic: snaaakeessss! When the comic wad ready, I realised I had the opportunity for another topic: the PackageKit/D-Bus breakage, but it was too late. No worry, I am confident I will have similar opportunities with whatever packages, those things happens...

December lights photo challenge

I know Christmas is twice evil being an over-commercialization of a religious manifestation and I know the New Year is a fake event with a randomly set date, but beyond that December is a time when a large number of cities around the world change their faces, being decorated in various creative ways. So I think we have the opportunity for a community-wide kind of game: grab your cameras, get out, take photos from your city and share them for all of us to enjoy.

It seems like I succeeded in persuading a few people to join the game, both Mo and Michael showed their interest, so don't be shy and join us, the "game" is not limited to the member of the Art Team.

To break the ice, here is a poor photo I made last week-end in the Bucharest city center (Piața Universității) - this week-end I plan to do some more and better, actually using a tripod, a larger area, other places...

Solving problems, one step at a time (photos)

Storing the photos online is only a part of my problem, storing them offline is the other: in a few months my collection grew enough to fill the hard drive, my current one is not that big (is quite old) and I find very hard to delete photos (I could probably delete about half of them).

this is what I whish to put online
So obviously I had to buy a new hard drive, I went with an external one (USB), WD My Book Essential, 500GB (I figured this should be enough for a couple of years), the price is not bad and the device is nice.

The next step was a somewhat controversial decision: the file system choice. I could have left it fat32 as the factory default, the drive will be used mostly for photos but I may have some files over 4GB, like a DVD iso. Another option was to format it as ext3, it will be used most of the time in Linux, but I surely will need it also on other computers with another OS. So I swallowed my pride and went with NTFS. My Fedora desktop seemps happy with this choice.


That was the first step, the second step, choosing an online storage solution (flickr replacement), is still open. But since people showed interest about it, here is my progress, evaluating a few suggestions:

SmugSmug has a lot of features, but it does not look good for me, here are some of my concerns:

• I hate the uploader: I have to choose Windows or OS X, select Windows and get a clumsy Java applet;
• the HTML code to embed the photos in other websites is served as Flash and is not usable for me with Flash 10 + Firefox + Fedora;
• there is no possibility to license your photos under a Creative Commons license, all you can do is to manually add a text in the description field;
• I don't like their policy of not having both free and paid accounts, everything is paid. To test you have the option of a 14 days long demo;
• the structure is the same old and boring, based on albums. There is no gallery other than flickr where you can have one photo as part of more than one album? Like both in "FOSS" and "beer"?

The Atomique layout looks clean, but hoestly, I was scared to read in the installation instructions "Atomique is still in its very early stages. It is advised to be cautious and not use the software in a working environment"l and scared even more to read on the front page "I didn’t really find the time so far to continue my work on Atomique and I probably won’t be able to in the near future": it does not look to me like something where you can invest thousands of photos.

I also received a hint about the possibility to craft something like I want on top of Drupal: I am sure this is possible, I saw wonderful things done on top of Drupal, but such a task is much beyond my skills as a programmer (there are years since I did programming seriously) and much beyond the time I can invest in this project.

There is still Gallery2, I have an instance of it working for some months, but I don't like it and don't feel compelled to switch to it: Gallery seems to follow the "more is more" philosophy, resulting in something hard to navigate or administer. Also in the category "tried and not liked" I can mention Zenphoto, which I tested for a short while back this summer, nice, but lacking important features and the awful and feature-lacking Coppermine which we run at the Romanian Fedora community.

I am still searching, the time for step two has not come yet.

No longer a Pro or Searching for a Gallery

For a few months I enjoyed a "Pro" flickr account from a donation (thanks Gianluca), it was useful to host some photos from FUDCon, a time when I got accustomed with the website and started to use it more and more. But like any good thing in life, it ended recently. The price is affordable, so I could renew it, but with the recent news I don't even thing about that: there is no way in hell I will give money to a company that wants to sell to Microsoft or to a company which is a target for acquisition by Microsoft. That just won't happen.

So here I am, looking for a gallery software to run on my own domain, on my own website (with supposedly "unlimited" storage and "unlimited" bandwidth), unhappy with everything I tried so far, from Gallery2 which I find to complex to Zenphoto which I find to basic, asking for input and advice.

I won't move my photos to my Picasaweb account, I find its interface terrible and the limitation of an unpaid account are even more restrictive and I won't go to any obscure flickr clone, I have waiting for upload thousands of photos.

Analyzing myself, I think I understand my rejection for any gallery I saw: it looks like everything is "album" based, as opposed to flickr's "photostream" approach, where you have a river of photos with the ability to include it in as many sets as you like them and have the navigation based on sets and tags. And I like on flickr the ability to license the images as you like (for now I have everything as CC-BY-SA, but I see me making some stuff proprietary and some PD, depending on the content and its use).

So this is what I want: a clean interface, RSS feeds for everything, licensing, comments and a photostream approach. Ideas?

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Name Brainstorming

This process is running twice a year and it just started for F11, we'' see the measure of our creativity. And Bob isn't our uncle...

No cake for nasty boys

It took a long time to deliberate and decide if I should post those photos here or not, they are somewhat worse than porn: more addictive, instantly triggering a body reaction (mouth watering, hunger), politically incorrect for diabetics and just cruel for those trying to preserve their body shape. But in the end I decided I am a nasty boy and went ahead, sugar coated in a cultural game idea.

When uploading the photos to the gallery I realised I don't know the English name for any of those cakes and I think it would be an interesting experiment to learn their name in English and any other languages, I believe some of them are quite straightforward and available in a lot of countries.

At this point I should acknowledge that I know the Romanian name only for some of them (savarină, amandină, mascotă, ecler) and that the majority of those names seems to have French origins.

PS: I hope I have not ruined the day for that many of you with those photos... Or being nasty I am happy about that?

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Perfect 10

The tubes were filled, the release day came and was enjoyed, what is remaining? Install the thing and play with it (if you didn't to this id advance, at the PR, Beta or Alpha). And drool a low awaiting for the install to finish...

Photos from the F10 release party

As announced, instead of staying online, digging stories and replying to mislead comments, a few Romanian fedorans and a few friends meet yesterday for what we called a "release party". And, as expected, the nasty photographer was with us, drinking all the beer...

More photos are available in our photo gallery.

Romanian F10 party

25 November 2008, the Fedora 10 launch, a group of Romanian Fedora contributors will meet for a beer at La Berbecu, starting with 18:30. If you are in Bucharest and care about Fedora or just Linux or FOSS in general, come and join us!

More details on the forum

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: On The Tubes

The final preparations are in place, everybody is gearing for the release, so the webcomic can't stay behind. Now back to filling those tubes...

Photoblog

More than once after a photo shooting session I had the impulse to blog about how it went, the ups and downs, to echo my happiness or frustration. And usually I restrained myself from doing so, as I felt it will be useless noise in the various places places where it is aggregated - not a good thing to restrain yourself.

Of course I could use tags to filter the topics, but I don't want to be that restrictive and let from time to time some offtopic posts, so after some deliberation I decided to start a new blog, dedicated to photography (don't hurry up there, you won't find any upskirt photo), this way I can have a cleaner layout, a simpler navigation and a better URL.

With the launch of the new blog I did an important amount of preparation work: using scheduled post with a date in the past I populated the blog with photos from all those months since I have my current camera.

Of course I will still post photos here, but only when I think the subject is worthy. And, of course, the content on the new blog is also Free.

Choo choo!

Don't blame me for the large "screenshot", Mo made me to install and run this :p

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Final Freeze

As I told in an earlier post, I have ready the Christmas edition for the webcomic, which is somewhat a bad thing, since I may get new ideas in the meantime and so happened a few days ago. But is a spectacular turn of events, the secondary idea was voided, F8 will not be killed on that day, I can't make a webcomic about the guy finding a dead Fedora under his Christmas tree, I am back at something that will annoy our Ubuntu friends :p

Keep Internet Explorer?

I never saw such a button on a website in the modern age (after the "e;Browser Wars") so I wonder who and why... get serious, "KEEP INTERNET EXPLORER"... someone still the worst browser on the face of the earth? What's this, a manifestation of the Stockholm syndrome?

Easy to understand why I obfuscated the URL, I don't want to drive any traffic to such a website, but it is in Romanian and the text say "This site is optimized for Internet Explorer. Vor visitors using Firefox, we recommend at least the version 2.0.0.16"

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Democracy and Dictature

Obviously the premise of today's cartoon is drawn from state politics and events, but that is not more than a pretext for telling a story about FOSS communities.

My main issue with the joke is its difficulty to translate, losing the cool "-trix" suffix (terminatrix, dominatrix) - I know why I hate translations...

I learned a new word: Bokeh

While almost our entire community is celebrating Obama's victory, overshadowing the F10 Preview Release (anyone wonders why so few diggs for the announcement?) I decided to do my own offtopic post about the latest word I learned: Bokeh.

Stumbling over it in a comment to one of my photos, I did what I usually do when I see an unknown word: try a "define:" Google search (well, I do that when I am not going straight to Wikipedia). And Google did what it usually do: offered a list of description, including one from Wikipedia:

Bokeh (derived from Japanese boke ぼけ, a noun form of bokeru ぼける, "become blurred or fuzzy") is a photographic term referring to the appearance of out-of-focus areas in an image produced by a camera lens using a shallow depth of field.[1] Different lens bokeh produces different aesthetic qualities in out-of-focus backgrounds, which are often used to reduce distractions and emphasize the primary subject.

This technique is most used on portraits and macro photography and as like a lot to do portraits and macro photography I used it a lot, but without knowing its proper name. Bokeh. Mmmmm...

Counting down to Fedora 10

Now with the F10 Preview Release in the wild, is the time to start counting down the days until final (you may noticed already the counter is running on fp.o).

This time we had a new contributor, Paolo Lenoni, creating the banner based on the Solar desktop theme, welcome Paolo!

And I think everybody got my message, there is a nifty code you can use to embed the counter in your own blog or website, go and copy/paste it.