Viva la Revolucion

Shamelessly stolen from Kital:

Second part this week-end in Brussels. I promise way more pics >:)

Bad Jokes

Over the week-end I will probably be out taking photos, I won't follow the FUDCon happenings so I guess I can do some warm-up throwing a few bad jokes:

PS: actually I had in mind one more, with a punch line around "call me Caroline", but thought that would be too niche, with only very few figuring it.

Nicu's Webcomics: Cookies

'Nuff said.

PS: even if reusing some elements, this is not part of my old Fedora comics series, neither is it in any way endorsed by the Design/Art Team, is a personal project.

"Give back" badge

Since I have a bit of free time I am doing all kinds of Free graphic projects and it was no big effort to provide an option: a round version for the "give back our distro" badge, something for everyone's taste, I guess.

Now you have something to wear/show at FUDCon, FOSDEM and such.

The Moods Project

Moods is my latest free graphic project and in a long while the first not linked to openclipart.or of Fedora Design (from the first i am on extended leave and from the second on temporary strike). What is this project? Is best described with a quote from its own page:

This project started after I noticed myself saying a lot "pics or it didn't happen" so the idea was obvious: make a drawing, based on my free clipart images, to illustrate this classic line and then just pass a link to it. Obviously, as everything I do, it had to be Free and shared with the world. The next logical step was to develop it by adding additional mood images, which is a never-ending work, fuelled by own mood but also by the feedback received and the usage level, so use the images and it will be an incentive for me to add more.

Of course, it is made with Inkscape and SVG sources are really easy to get hold of if you know where to look (or know my working style). And sorry, but CreativeCommons made me reinvent the wheel with the license.

Fedora: from bleeding edge to bleeding contributors

At the end of this week will take place the biggest event of the year for Fedora, the North American FUDCon, a place for great expectations with events, talks, discussions and such, is the place from where you expect a "strategy" to come but where in reality we'll see a lot of bating around the bush with the main issue: we are going the wrong way and we are losing contributors - some reduce their work drastically, some step back quietly, some say goodbye with a tear in their eye, some wave their hands from the Debian side, some go away in flames, some are shown the door - all they have some thing in common: they don't contribute any more.

As many other problems, this is a design problem, and I am not talking here about graphic design or interaction design, I talk about a higher level design, one that is perhaps the Board's competence: is the definition of the Fedora purpose and is implemented with policies, peer pressure, the power of example and so on. The problem is: Fedora used to be a distro aimed at advanced users, the ones that are likely, and we want, to contribute back and now is changing into a distro aimed at the Girl Scouts of America. A huge identity crisis, we are tying to become the second Ubuntu and this is not good.

I used to be in Fedora's target audience, now:

• as an User I don't have the apps (or the app versions) I need for my day to day work, being pushed towards 3-rd party repos and I get bad defaults - this is a big problem, the purpose of a distro is to offer a collection of packages and default options. Also, the way forward is departing from my needs: I use my computer to do stuff, not to watch stuff, if I needed a phone UI, I have used a phone, not a PC.
• as a Contributor the itch to scratch is vanishing - I do not care about the Girl Scouts, so there is no incentive for me to contribute to a distro targeted at them, I want to contribute to a distro that makes my life better, is targeted at me and solves my problems.
• as an Ambassador I am embarrassed: Fedora 14 was the lowest so far from this point of view, if I talked about the new features bragging for the single end-user talking point "JPEG pictures are loading faster", I would have been laughed out of the room. So I gathered people for beers, with no talks about features.

That much for "freedom, friends, features, first"...

Do not get me wrong, I am not arguing for making Fedora hard to use or to make it hostile for Girl Scouts (heck! in the local community I am usually considered the public figure for our equivalent of Girl Scouts, so the complaints above coming from me should mean something), I argue for returning Fedora to the target it used to have maybe a couple of years ago, when it was a much better place to contribute. So, please, give our distro back!

I am sure many would like to frame this as a "Red Hat versus Community" problem, which is not the case: Red Had is big enough of a company to not have a consistent policy towards Fedora, leaving enough place to maneuver for interest groups (up to middle management) to play their politics and power games, with people naturally siding with the next-cubicle guy because they have to live together, with people who value their job security and like their workplace and there are also people who do not like the situation but fear to talk in public (and not only a few of them) as there are people who talk in public but not very loud. So loud can be someone like me, who has nothing to lose - I believe we are not yet as low as our green friends who kick out from the community voices out of the "party line".

Wikipedia - 10 years

Last Saturday a group of people from the local community meet in Bucharest to celebrate 10 years of Wikipedia.

PS: sorry for the briefness of the message but... sometime you have to be brief...

Let It Snow! - video: Inkscape demonstration at the monthly RLUG meet

What did I do that I have my upload limit increased to over the 15 minutes, unlike the other mortals? Don't know but surely enjoy it, I was limited before and not linking it. Then the second question: how can I ensure my videos are available ASAP for delivery in the WebM format? (I upload in Ogg Theora, Kdenlive in F14 still does not have WebM export, I need Theora also for blip.tv and don't want to transcode once more with my pity CPU).

But enough blabbering, yesterday at the monthly RLUG meet I continued demoing Inkscape drawing from December (people asked for it, I couldn't refuse) with making a snowflake (yup, I know we are all feed-up with the winter and looking forward to the spring but... it was requested). As you already suspect, the video recording is up on YouTube, unfortunately not yet in WebM, and also is free format on blip.tv, together with the other RLUG recordings (the other two videos from yesterday are still processing).

Of course, there are also some photos, but they are just usual, nothing extraordinary. And sorry... I have no formal slide, since you can't do one for such a presentation. Maybe, just maybe I would put myself to work one day and do a tutorial one day, but don't take this as a promise.

GIMP and the falling sky

After an article about the development status and delay of the GIMP 2.8 release, many news sources talk about the app's doom and uncertain future. According to the article, "the only big chunk of work left to do for 2.8 is the optional single-window mode, for which the final design spec is also missing at the time", which is pretty much in line with the talks on the development mailing list. The bad thing is, there is no new release estimate either.

Now here are my two cents: last summer I tried for some months the development branch and this is what I have to say, the biggest and most anticipated feature, the single window mode is expected as the holy grail by those wanting a Photoshop clone on Linux, but are simple users, with no interest in contributing back (many times, they are not even users, making it as an excuse to stay with Photoshop). Trying it, I found it cute (it has an "Inkscape feeling", good for consistency) but not something I want to use, it wastes screen estate and makes harder to work with multiple documents at the same time. This coupled with a number of smaller annoyances made me return to the 2.6 branch with the upgrade from Fedora 13 to Fedora 14 and want to look again at it only after the release.

On the positive things, the news generated interest in donations, I bet the team would have liked coders more, but they will use what they get. There is some cash at hand (thousands of dollars, according to the mailing list) and people trying to figure a best use (bounties, hardware devices). So the sky is still up there, somewhere.

On strike

So we bent over. And not only bent, also provided the lube and pretended we liked it. I have no intention of joining this play dirty, so I am stepping back for a while, will stop contributing to the Design Team for the rest of the development cycle for Fedora 15, after that we'll see what happens. Have fun.

What I am doing next? On Fedora land will focus mainly for a while on the local community where the things may get to an important crossroad in the next couple of months and there are a lot more FOSS communities in need of contributions. On the artsy things, will probably focus on photography, where I am saving money for another lens, which will probably complete my set for a while. And I have things in my personal life more important than those petty wars, politics and power-grab attempts.

Meet me at the upcoming FOSDEM for a more in depth talk about those things.

eog versus Shotwell

I do a lot of photography, having a huge collection of pictures and such, but I see no use for photo managers, like F-Spot or Shotwell (I admit of liking Darktable a lot, but its editing capabilities, not for management and still preferring GIMP for said editing). My "photo management" needs are covered by the following:

• Nautilus file manager with thumbnail view for images (still trying to adapt myself with the browser view after the departure from spatial view)
• a few self-made ImageMagick scripts for quick batch processing of large amounts of photos (simple operations like resize or watermarking)
• a fast and powerful image viewer, which until recently used to be Eye of GNOME (eog) (that's the meat of this post)
• GIMP for all editing needs, even if they are as small as cropping, sharpening or color adjustment
• when the photos are taken in raw format (not often) the GIMP UFRaw plugin for import

So... one of the many desktop regressions introduced in the Fedora 14 desktop is affecting the basic image viewer, eog, which became almost unusable: the colors are wrong (see the photo above) and the image loading times are unbearable slow. So I decided to try Shotwell, the new default image viewer in Fedora, which I use only as an image viewer, not as a photo manager, it has correct color reproduction, is fast but lacks many essential features and has horrendous user interface.
Let me sum up the main points (ups and downs) for each of those apps:

Eye of GNOME/eog

• small, simple, GNOMEy, used to be fast
• many formats supported
• wrong color reproduction (compared with GIMP, Firefox, Shotwell on the same system)
• slow loading times
• good user interface
• provides easy access to vital features, like file size, resolution, EXIF data
• no editing functionality is a non-issue, there are better tools for the job
• good keyboard shortcuts
• for GNOME 3 redesigned by a clueless wannabe designer that will break all the good UI things

Shotwell

• apendage of a photo manager, but still small and relatively simple
• supports only JPEG and PNG, needing another viewer for image formats as SVG or GIF
• good colors
• fast
• horrendous user interface, no toolbar, no drag&drop, no file open in the menu
• lacking important features: no EXIF display, no image info (file size, resolution)
• limited editing, that may satisfy a very beginner
• lacking important keyboard shortcuts
• the new default in Fedora but not ready yet IMO

With this said, I am looking forward, with very moderate optimism, to the situation in Fedora 15, where so far everything in nebulous and the upcoming GNOME 3 may make me a temporary refugee in the Xfce camp.

A book for Xmas

In the middle of the preparations for a sad Christmas a courier rang at the door: "I have a package for Mr. Buculei"... me, in my mind: "WTF? I didn't ordered anything... Oh, it must be the book!"

A few weeks ago a couple of my friends who are writing a FOSS book together (don't ask, they will talk about it when they will feel ready for that) asked me for a review of their proposal, I did it and the publisher offered as compensation a book of my choosing from the InformIT offer. As many of their books, about Microsoft and Adobe products, are uninteresting, my choice was for the single photography book not mentioning Photoshop.

The book is beginner-oriented but at the time I had a friend making the first steps into photography who I am sure would have loved it, so the plan was to give it to her. Now I will start by reading it myself, any book must have something useful to learn.

So... thank you my friends, thank you publisher.

Ask me about Ubuntu. Not. Or how I disappointed yet another user.

I will acknowledge from the start I know very little about Ubuntu specifics and have a lot many other more important things to do before learning, so when someone I remotely know came and asked a problem by answer was "not sure I can help, shoot".

I was able to diagnose the issue: Pidgin unable to login to Yahoo Messenger because Ubuntu 9.04 is older than Yahoo's latest authentication change, tried to come with a solution, package update, which the user wasn't able to implement (neither sudo apt-get update from terminal, nor from the GUI), I have no idea why... probably because it was a Live USB created from a CD? (it is a temporary solution, while the damaged hard drive of that Windows PC is replaced... not gonna happen very soon, students don't have much money) I don't know... I am familiar with live persistence only on Fedora live media (and recommend only Fedora to those asking me).

The massive download needed for an Ubuntu from this year was not a solution either, so in the end she concluded a pirated Windows XP with no updates or security patches is the better choice. When she will have a hard drive.

How do I feel about this? These days I don't feel anything. How should I feel?

Second class citizens

Yesterday Fedora Design Team weekly IRC meeting had on its agenda a sketching session about what will become the default wallpaper in Fedora 15, it was supposed to be a new experiment for the team.

Then the bomb dropped: Mo forwarded a "special request" (from the sound of it looks non-negotiable) from the Red Hat Desktop Team: in Fedora 15 the wallpaper in the default spin, the Desktop Live CD, which is under discretionary control of the RHDT, to be the default upstream GNOME 3 wallpaper. The reason: F15 is supposed to be the first distro featuring GNOME 3 and wanting to increase visibility of that feature, it looks to me as a desperate move to pimp GNOME 3 (in the light of Ubuntu ignoring it and going for the competing Unity) and a much awaited dismissal of our team. Also, an insult to the other Fedora spin and a break of the consistency of the user experience. Some people inside Fedora think GNOME branding is more important than the Fedora branding, and they have control of our default image.

To be fair, the proposed wallpaper is made by jimmac, for who's work I have great admiration, and look professionally done, even if a bit bland: a set of vertical blue stripes.

The reactions inside the team ranged (see the log) from outright opposition, to doubts and to surrender to the greater powers. Some brainstorming happened towards a graphic concept that may be an alternative on the default spin and the default on the the [second-class] others.

In the end "we" avoided to draw a conclusion, letting it in suspension, for people to get used to the idea, which later may be showed easily down their throats.

Happy holidays. And bend over.

RLUG meet, December 2010

Yesterday we had the last LUG meet for this year, and the last in this current location (from next month we need another place, still looking for it). One above another, it was a good one.

I presented, as planned, a lightning talk about creating presentations with Sozi, an Inkscape extension. Then, as the schedule seemed light enough, I continued with some Inkscape demo drawing. Then Petre shared his experience with signatures and cryptography on Linux, Doru continued with a talk about databases and Matei closed with a presentation about a Fully Automated Install (FAI) on Debian.

I should mention there are photos from the event, many of them brought with the contribution of an unexpected helper, thanks a lot!

Clipart spotting: HotForWords

I do watch constantly a single one YouTube channel, HotForWords where the "teacher" Marina Orlova has weekly lessons about the origins and meanings of various English words, made in a funny style, with a very cute Russian accent and sometime with a sexy blond wig. The show has millions of viewers, is really popular.

Today I was effectively floored seeing in the latest video one of my clipart images, a pencil (used there to illustrate the term "-graphy", "write") appearing suddenly on the screen (around minute 1:19). I have no idea it was taken directly from my clipart collection or from OCAL, but this does not matter, my day is already a lot better see how my Inkscape made, Public Domain released, clipart is used in my favorite show and going to be seen by millions. In an episode about the origins of the word "porn", no less. I feel like I made a difference.

Update: minutes after I published this, here is a folow-up on Marina'a blog. Thanks a lot.

Creative Commons retiring the Public Domain dedication

I strongly believe in not re-inventing the wheel, not only in the technical parts but also in licensing, this is why I use and promote Creative Commons licenses (despite their flaws) and this is why I supported using the Creative Commons definition of Public Domain for projects like the Open Clip Art Library. And it worked well for a while.Until Creative Commons was unhappy with the Public Domain dedication, probably not branded enough for their taste and for their need for attention, and "invented" a replacement, CC0, which was received not as warmly as they hoped.

Now we are at a new milestone: Creative Commons is retiring their Public Domain definition, they leave many of us, users of their licenses, in the dust, with only two options: embrace their new CC0 license or use a scary Public Domain Mark, plastered with "not recommended" disclaimers. Take the poison of your choice! That much for trust and continued services... I had better expectation from a community project.

Now projects like OCAL are at a crossroad, having to decide a way forward. People like me are also in trouble: I used the PD dedication quite a lot to share many resources, now I have to update some of my websites and not sure how... I can see two ways:

• write my own dedication, as much as I hate re-inventing the wheel and writing one
• use a more restrictive license, that will harm my users and the usefulness of the shared items

. There is one thing that is guaranteed I won't do: migrate to CC0... on top of the objections I had before, now I feel Creative Commons betrayed me. And for betrayal, there is no forgiveness.

Quality journalism

At the end of the last week the FOSS news exploded with titles about Fedora and Wayland, in many cases going as aggressive as "Fedora to ditch X.org for Wayland" and "May bring Wayland Fedora 15", all of them based on an insightful post made by ajax, the X.org maintainer in Fedora, but most of the time letting out relevant details as "eventually", "not usable default", "something you can play with" or "don't have a timeframe".

The result was a flood of posts, comments, dents, twitts and so, many of them based only on partial titles and raving about how awesome Wayland is going to be, now that Red Hat will put resources behind it (that's really jumping to a conclusion!). Net effect: the community moved focus from singling out Canonical for they anti-community perceived Wayland announcement from a couple of weeks ago. That's good relations with the press! And that's spinning!

Of course, there was a number of news sources with good headlines and good content as there were also sane reactions but somehow most of the time only the bad ones were filtered to the channels I read. I think I should probably read less "social news" or at least filter better my sources.

I am not a designer

Last week for Ceata's anniversary I had to deliver a couple of presentations and when they were ready I did a sanity-check with a friend from the community. The feedback received was like that (she should know I won't get upset even with reactions like "it totally sucks"):

tatica: downloading
nicubunu: the slides are quite simple, i am counting on my personal charm :D :D :D
tatica: hahahah that's enough
[...]
nicubunu: they are short and easy, i will have 10 minutes for each
[...]
tatica: I like it
tatica: but you need to add more style to it u_U
tatica: you're a designer....
nicubunu: nah... that's enough. i won't work more on them
nicubunu: and i am not a designer.... i only do graphics and photography
nicubunu: and i hate the designers that ruined the experience of me using many apps
tatica: hahahahahahahhaha
nicubunu: :)
tatica: then add some "graphics" and "phptographs"
tatica: people like to see draws... no letters
tatica: you know it better than me :P
tatica: you....
tatica: SYSADMIN!
nicubunu: i tried to add a picture in every slide
nicubunu: but won't bother with fancy backgrounds or so
tatica: lol

I have to acknowledge, the slides were bare, which I don't have a problem with (I hate slides shouting "Martetroid") and... I had my own things to care about than prettify a presentation. Considering that, probably neither the "personal charm" part didn't work, but that is at least recorded on video, so easier to judge. But I digress, the executive summary here is me not considering myself a designer.

Vodafone stormed by Androids

For quite a while the TV channels are bombarded with commercials (good thing I only watch very little TV) for various phones which have touted as ultimate feature the Android operating system but today I saw something that made me smile: received from Vodafone a quite spammy-but-not-realy-spam presentation (I am the official contact inside our company, they are a big communications provider for us) about they introducing the Samsung Galaxy TAB in the offer.

Usually I read such mails directly with the "Delete" key, but this time being an Android device I was curious enough to read it, wanted to see the price and put in perspective with the epected wave of Chinese devices (that would probably be the time to evaluate a purchase for me).

And reading the presentation (PDF not PPT!!!) I saw something that made my day a little better: on the page outlining the advantages over iPad they have (translation mine): "Open development environment allowing for more freedom for user application usage". Yay!

Icons uploaded

After a well deserved delay, I uploaded, complete with SVG sources, the Public Domain Event icon set made for WorldLabel.com to the Open Clip Art Library and also to my own clipart collection, download them from any of those sources, they are equally Free.

At least this circle is closed.

...and we celebrated Ceata

It happened yesterday: Ceata celebrated its second anniversary holding an event at the The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, so here is a short report: we had a few presentations - general introduction about who is Ceata and what we want (Tibi), a definition about Linux (me), an introduction to OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice (Răzvan), a few words about CreativeCommons licenses (me again), all of those linked together by our wonderful host (Irina) and supported technically by Andrei. It ended with a short Free movie from the Blender Foundation.

We managed to gather a number of students in the audience, with some of them completely unfamiliar with the world of Free and Open Source Software:

It, of course, ended with socialisation, beers and good time at a nearby pub:

As a honest evaluation, I don't call the event a success, we didn't have the audience which I setted for myself as a threshold for calling it so, but won't call it a failure either, we had a presence in a new place, an event organized by a new contributor, nothing really bad happened...let say it was OK and conforming with my expectations.

Let me try to end this in a funny way, showing how two of our colleagues (Irina and Eugen) saw the party after in a drawing (myself, I still can't draw):

...and we partied for F14

As planned (and according with a long standing tradition by now) we celebrated the release of Fedora 14 right on the release day, contributors from the local community and friends from other communities, we were about 15 people and had a few hours of fun time, good talks and cold beers. Of course, we planned some improvements to the website and also used the opportunity for a last check for Ceata's anniversary that will happen later today.

What can I say more? Oh, yes... it was a good opportunity for me to use the new lens and I hope I made a few people regret they didn't attend.

PS: no, I didn't start wearing glasses (yet), I was just fooling around.

Fedora 14 Release Party in Bucharest

This is pretty much a tradition in our (Romanian) community: at the moment of a new Fedora release we are partying. This time we'll meet (again) at Curtea Berarilor in the old city of Bucharest, Tuesday 2 November 2010, starting hour 19:00. You know you want to be there.

Ceata two years anniversay in ASE

For the two years anniversary Ceata is planning something bold: an event with presetnations about free technologies and free arts at the The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, a bastion of closed source and proprietary technologies (they are pretty much in Microsoft's pockets). I guess we are kind of crazy, but were is the fun if you don't aim for high goals and tough challenges?

Come with us, I hope it will be fun, we will have a few presentations (I will bore the audience with a general introduction about Linux and a general introduction about Creative Commons licenses which will complete a program with Tibi talking about Ceata, Razvan about OpenOffice.org and Doru about AplixERP) but also one or two short films from the Blender Foundation and some beer after.

The full program of the event (and the ways you can help) is available on the wiki. Join us on Wednesday, 3 November 2010 in the 2013 hall, Virgil Madgearu building, The Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies.