FOSDEM 2011 day 2

The second day of FOSDEM started, our awesome ambassadors are in positions doing their job, I am trying to sort and send some photos and plan for more posts covering the event... some of them will really, really disappoint people but... theey will make other people happy.

Survival guide for FOSDEM

To survive in Belgium you basically need two things: the first one is fries:

and the other one is trapist beer:

...oh wait, I think I got the order wrong! But important is that many survived...

The Girls of Fedora

Mwahahaha! I hope my centerfold-sounding evil title attracted many eyes, so I can point from a big soap box to the anti-girl scouts roaming around at FOSDEM in Brussels:

Sudden Death?

I have only two comments about this picture taken at the FAD yesterday, before FOSDEM started:

• for those who don't speak Frech, "mort subite" means "sudden death"
• i was assured by a trusty voice it won't be sudden, but long and painful :)

To the FOSDEM 2011

I should start by acknowledging I prepared myself for FOSDEM, to fit the new Fedora target audience, as I should also acknowled at the time I was not (yet) intoxicated in any way.

Traditionally, any FOSDEM start for Fedora in the same place, the "A La Mort Subite" pub, doing the same thing, a FAD:

The FAD was telling, is interesting to see all the ambassadors acknowledging they are not happy with the current Fedora state, is good to se ideas and possible solutions. Things may happen.

Also a traditional thing to do is a dinner together before the, also traditional, beer event:

Of course the beer event is, as every year, of epic proportions:

And of course we had the best of time:

Today morning FOSDEM started officially:

But not before our team has set a nice booth:

Stay tuned for more stories and photos... brief during the event since is busy around here, but more in detail during the next week.

Nicu at FOSDEM 2011

I am looking forward to the upcoming FOSDEM conference at the end of this week, there will be present a large Fedora group, mostly Ambassadors (including my Greek roommates) but also a large Romanian group, mostly from ROSEdu, so plenty of people to hang with.

What I will be doing here? A lot of photography, of course... and as I am still crazy about my new wide lens, most of them will be bad, using that lens in the most inappropriate situations and screwing opportunities. I will also available talk with those interested about the bad state and direction of Fedora and the things that make me, and everyone else I know, unhappy about it. If anyone will want to find me, I will probably roam around the Fedora booth, but not serving at the booth, as I am not a full Ambassador, nor someone that will talk now only in superlatives about the distro.

                   
What I won't do there? >No activities involving the Fedora Design Team, still, I may be available for general graphics stuff (however, no more bribery) and, if needed, may be available for some design tasks for "the revolution".

PS: I heard some rumours about people wondering about me during the Tempe FUDCon, if anyone is curious, I was home over that week-end taking photos (they should be able to know how to reach my other blog for them).

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.