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.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Distro Names

I think someone is preparing a release these days, so a welcome webcomic from me (you can file it in the "mine is bigger" collection)...

Quotes of the day

A couple of quotes that really made my day:

"some days it feels like I am more likely to get a pink pony with wings, though"

"it's hard to have one arm extended out to you reaching out an olive branch and the other arm of the same creature brandishing a chainsaw and waving it in your face at the same time"

Go girl, go!

Now I have to those visuals in my head and I am looking for a way to reuse them (too late in the release cycle for this week's webcomic)...

Two months in advance

It happened to have my webcomic ready for a certain week only a few minutes before the publishing time, but usually I make it one or two days in advance.

Not so this time: the other day in the morning I was in the bus, going to work and without nasty activity to do (you know, the kind of nasty things I am infamous for), I was planning my activities (that is what I do when I don't have anything nasty to do). So I was struck by two webcomic ideas, one for Christmas and anther for the New Year (well, those ideas are somewhat nasty, but not that kind of nasty).

After a day of internal debate, leave it as ideas in my head or draw them, I decided to put them down and have one worry less in the holiday season (and along with them I also made next week's issue).

Not the tough part: I have to sit two month on those drawings and do not show them to anybody... can I resist? Hopefully so, but I can't resist to tease: the images are online, in the usual place but not linked, here is a sample:

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Remix

This week I try an experiment with the wecomic: replace the (must hated by some readers) handfont with a new font, Rufscript, a font made by Hiran, from our community and already packaged for Fedora.

I am not sure (and I could use some feedback) if the readability is improved, but this new font is more compact, I can put more text in one strip (again, this is not necessarily a good thing).

Another implication of the font change is the move from a Public Domain font to a GPLv3+font exception one, but this should not be a problem, both are Free.

People shoot people

Earlier today, talking with Kushal in #fedora-art about photography he said a phrase which rang a bell in my head "I shoot people" and made me to try a few T-shirt designs on that theme (follow the links for the SVG sources and a large view):

Now, as always, I am undecided, can't say which is my one choice, the "I shoot people" design (in two variants) or the "cameras don't shoot people, people shoot people" design. Opinions? Until now the feedback I received for the first design is 50-50.

I made the sources available so anyone cam make his own, with his own modifications (for example I plan to add my website URL or my own), at whatever price or quality he want. But for the lazy ones, I put together a small shop at Cafepress (I won't use that for myself, is not an option due to its shipping prices).

Denied By Reign

Jono Bacon announced the Denied By Reign, the first Severed Fifth release under a Creative Commons license. Free metal, I had do download it and keep the torrent seeding, even if there are few downloaders (it seems like I wont' get to a 1 or 1.5 share ratio anytime soon).

About the music, while it is not exactly my genre of metal, it is metal and is not bad, but the most important: it is freely licensed, so I have something to use as a soundtrack for my future screencasts (unless the releases from NIN, where the NC clause is a deal breaker) ... now it PiTiVi would be useful enough for joining the audio and video tracks and for adding the credit screen required by the license (Attribution).

Tons of photos

I got a really good scare from gThumb: take the SD card out of my camera, put it in the computer, open gThumb and import the photos, with the option to delete the card after import. When the import is done, look at the imported directory and notice it had 1024 photos. Naively think about is as an very odd coincidence to see such a "round" number and start the work: a first view of the photoset, to get an idea about what can be published on the web.

And then PANIC! The set ends too early, before some of the most important photos... where did they go? Deleted? PANIC! Rush to the memory card, put it in the PC and what a relief: there are the photos, undeleted, about 165 of them. Stupid gThumb!

As one can easy understand, last weekend, between a food festival with fat and ugly waitresses and a car (tuning) exhibition with Barbie shaped booth babes, I effectively took a ton of photos (a selection available in my flickr account for those interested).

Speaking of Yahoo, for a large number of reasons I feel uncomfortable about putting my photos in its basket, would feel a lot more comfortable with a main gallery, with tons of photos (a lot of them unposted yet), on my capable hosting solution and only a few highlights on flickr, for the social network part. The problem is that I still like flickr's interface the best and I am not happy with any alternative I tried (gallery2 is too complex, zenphoto is too basic and so on). In fact I have a lot of ideas about how the "perfect" gallery is supposed to work, and nothing is close.

But I digress... apparently all ended well, with the photos not really lost, but the weekend's conclusion, learned the hard way, was: never leave the home without your business cards, or at least carry a pen... You learn this when you are asked by the best looking (according with my personal scale) model at the car exhibition and the only thing you are capable to to is to babble something about a search on flickr... Compared to this, the organizer of the food festival proposing to pay for some photos from you is nothing :p (note: this one fell off too, until I realised I had no cards on me, he was called with some urgent business elsewhere).

Well, nothing lost, nothing gained, is not like I expected anything before those events, just to take some photos.

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: A Pony for Me

A flamerwar about why Fedora sucks and what should be done to stop that is a recurring event and usually the subject is multimedia support.
Well, as the problem with multimedia is smaller and smaller (do you saw the new capabilities built into PackageKit?), the latest flamewar (still ongoing) is about "Long Term Support" and I believe it is a kind of record, my fingers are tired of deleting unread threads...

Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Dogfooding

Its' been a while from my last webcomic containing the "U" word, I have to correct this...

Man, I am sloppy that sometime I really feel embarrassed...

The HackergotchiService queue is one task I claim to keep under control, but something happened and I stopped receiving notification changed for that page from the wiki (maybe I deleted by mistake a notification or just forgot to follow the link to re-enable). So today when someone pinged me on IRC about an long-time open request I noticed 4 open requests and one where the requester (Larry) tired of waiting just went forward and did the job himself. Sorry! I really feel ashamed by my sloppiness...

In somewhat related news here is a screenshot of the new GIMP 2.6, installed from a F10 package lifted from Koji (thanks Nils!), running on my EeePC. Neat.... one more reason to jump soon to Rawhide on the desktop too.

Damn city...

This morning when I get out of the house to go at work I encountered a beautiful sunrise: dark clouds with a golden bottom edge, from the warm light coming from below, and a glowing blue background. Amazing colors!

The light was perfect, my camera was close, but I didn't have a clear sight to the horizon: too many houses, trees, pillars and wires. Damn city! wanted a picture of the sunrise, not of the sity skyline...

I could have taken a detour, trying to find a good spot, but that would mean a large detour and getting very late at work (I am late anyway, is hard to wake up so early in the morning).

Now don't get me wrong, I am a city boy, I despise the city but will not like to live outside it, I am just frustrated: the opportunity hits you in the face and you miss it again.

I can draw an optimistic or pessimistic conclusion from that, here is the pessimistic one: in a couple of weeks the sunrise should happen when I am near the Herastrau Park, but I am sure the combination (weather, clouds, light) will not be that good.

Fedora Weekly Webcmic: The bribe

Freeze dates are freeze dates and we are supposed to respect them, but also features are features and is natural for us to crave for them... So which crave-worthy application was released recently? GIMP 2.6, of course, I crave for it too!

Inkscape howto: Drawing the webcomic titles

So the time for the so called "surprise" is now: a basic tutorial about how I do and how I should do the cartoon titles for my Fedora Weekly Webcomic (the tutorial is structured in two parts).

I had it in mind for a ling time and used it as a backup option in the case I have to give a public talk about FLOSS graphics and I don't have anything better to talk about. Time passed, I have not used it and no other talk is planned any time soon so probably it is a good idea to put it out now. Which may be useful from another point of view: there are rumours about some possible "competing" webcomics based on my building blocks, so leveling the playing field more should be good for everyone.

This is the end result (again, presented in two ways, both with an identical result) of the tutorial:

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Fedora Weekly Webcomic: The Way of the Ninja

The other day I said I will not do a webcomic special for Fedora's birthday and just move this week issue one day in advance and today will go with a surprise instead.

Well, I changed my mind and have to postpone the surprise one more day: being not very happy with the joke and having a [I think] better one, I decided to have today the regular webcomic: this time funnier (IMO), anchored in reality, more elaborated (two new characters) and more violent (so if you can stand some blood in a webcomic, stop reading RIGHT NOW). Of course, nothing is perfect, the downside it that this new one is also "more niche", so it may need background info, otherwise generating only a blank stare. But enough...