Fedora Webcomic, F13 Special: Hyperspace

Does anyone around here remember I promised months ago the conclusion of a 3-part comic around Fedora? Remember Goddard, the first part? Or The Red Shirt, the second part? Now , minutes away from the official release, we'll jump into hyperspace and conclude the story.

Honestly, the real surprise is not on this blog, where I try to keep the prudes under control, but on my un-aggregated photography blog I can go wild and challenge everything. And hate groups can try to googlebomb me as much as they want, more traffic is a plus.

Beer for F13

This is a tradition already, so the Romanian Fedora community will gather toghether, with some friends and everyone who feels like it, contributors, users "competitors", to celebrate the Fedora 13 release. We will meet at Curtea Berarilor, in the Bucharest old city, tommorow 25 May 2010 starting with 19:30 (more details on our site)

Fedora at Libre Graphics Meeting

This year the Fedora Design Team will have a strong presence at the Libre Graphics Meeting in Brussels, including a presentation about our team and designing with Free tools in an Open community, scheduled on Thursday 27 May 2010 from 17:30 to 18:00. Come to see the awesome presentation (me humble? never!) and meet those ass-kicking guys:

Martin, true hacker and awesome guy, who learn quantum physics, design, code and package for Fedora and also learn Japanese.


The energetic Pierros, charismatic Fedora Ambassador and a new and valuable acquisition of the Design Team.


And lastly, Nicu, the troll that everyone loves to hate (me humble? never!) and one of the old farts in the team.

WE will be there for the entire conference, so even if you can't attend the presentation, come at any time to meet us, talk about stuff and maybe get some design work done. And, most important, drink some fine Belgian beers.

Model releases and Free licenses

Even if at a slow pace, the ongoing debate about needing model releases for using photos of people in Fedora while still preserving our Freedom foundation is advancing and even if I try to play knowledgeable there, the cold reality is I have my own dilemmas.

Here's one: I have signed forms for a recent photo session (with nudity, when getting enough time will post some in an appropriate place) allowing me full use ("any legal purpose" for me and "those acting with my permission"). At the first sight, this looks pretty much like me having the right to put them out under a Free license, say CC-BY-SA. Still, a bit later, in the model rights section, a few restrictions kick in: I can't use the photos in a malicious way to harm the model and I can't use them in a pornographic way or in pornographic montages (the photos are nude, not pornographic, but with photomanip, the sky is the limit). So now it looks like I can't use a Free license for the photos, the restrictions are incompatible.

This thing about photos, freedom and rights is really hard, I am not sure about the best way to make everyone happy and still be Free.

We are Free. You?

It was in development for quite a while, and this is the second concept, but today we (Ceata) launched at last "Fii liber" ("Be Free"): a website promoting Free Arts and Free Technologies, as a collection of articles aimed at "normal" (read: mid-level) computer users and written exclusively in Romanian, we start with pieces about Emacs, programming, boot.fedoraproject.org and photography. And, of course, an editorial.

Most of the editorial team (well, everybody except me) is young and enthusiastic, even if not very experienced with writing (that last one is true for me too), so don't be very harsh on us for our possible mistakes, we want to grow. Be Free together with us!

Surveyed

I find myself a a little bit of a lab rat after filing Diana's Fedora Research Survey, but surely I felt a lot more of a lab rat when previous to this I offered for an extensive interview on the same topic, when I answered so many questions, telling so many things about my involvement in the project.. more than probably told to myself.

So come and be yourself a bit of a lab rat too:

Even more fantasy Inkscape work

After the time spent last week-end (the May Day week-end) inkscapping fantasy drawings proved a relative succes, it seemed like a good idea to spend this week-end (my sad birthday week-end) inkscapping more of the same: a winged fairy.

This time I went back to my usual, less realistic, more cartoon style, not only because I was down and busy with a commercial gig (also drawing fantasy stuff) but because this way I feel more at home (quick poll, answer in the replies: which style do you like better?).

Note: in the preview I added the mosaic to keep the prudes silent and my ass covered from authorities, click on it and you may get blind...

More Inkscape work

I liked the result of the intensive Inkscape session the other day, so was motivated enough to play today with another picture. Not as provocative (duh! I managed to escape unflamed!) but I think the result isn't that bad either:

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This time I got help with the final polishing from Mo, Tatica and Gnokii.

Inkscape work

May Day is supposed to be a holiday, when you sit down and do nothing or, at most, following the Romanian tradition, eat grilled mititei and drink beer. Still, I felt like working today and created my most complex work in Inkscape so far: a detailed portrait, something unusual compared with my usual simplistic and sketchy style.

Also unusual was me doing such work on the small display of the netbook, as opposed to the big, fat LCD attached to the desktop I consider the only possible tool for any serious work.

The image is based on some photography I took a few weeks ago, so thanks to the model for being beautiful and cooperative and also thanks to Tatica for helping me with a few advices in the polishing stage.

10.04

Not having something better to do, I let myself talked by rpetre into attending the Ubuntu 10.04 release party organized by ROSEdu in Bucharest (can you imagine how sad I am if my chief option is worse than attending an Ubuntu release party?)

I stated my lack of excitement about the F13 features, but from the presentations, Lucid Lynx does not fare better by any means, here are a few "features" that stuck in my mind: a new (and fugly, IMO) desktop theme, the ability to post to twitter right from the desktop (Gwibber?) and the ability to buy proprietary music from Ubuntu One.

At least the guys were fun and we ended the event with a few beers (and shame to me for attending the event completely unprepared, without a proper T-shirt on me).

Update: after consulting with the server master it was decided we can host the photos in our Fedora gallery. Enjoy political incorrectness :D (and blame Ubuntu for that :D :D )

Spring panorama

Under the pretense of preparing a lightning talk about panoramic photography in Linux with Hugin for the next RLUG meet, the other day I spent an early evening in the Japanese Garden of Herastrau Park in Bucharest taking photos (not only) for panoramas. So if you like the topic, I may have an interesting presentation about it.

click to enlarge

F13

I may act most of the time as a fanboy but, believe or not, I am deep inside a balanced guy (am I?) so a cold shower from time to time probably does not hurt, I guess I can share bluntly my first impressions after living a bit with Fedora 13 (beta/devel).

One of the main reason I use Fedora is the 3-rd Foundation, the features, so if in the past I used to jump with my main desktop to a new release around Beta, this time I felt unmotivated, not only because I was busy with the life, but also because for the first time in all the Fedora history the features list didn't have anything to bring butterflies in my stomach.

Ultimately, I built the energy and installed it a couple of days ago I accumulated enough energy and installed it. It was a big disappointment, from the look (I don't like the new icon theme and I hate the new cursor theme) to the need to re-learn old habits (never though it will be so hard to use again a file manager in browser mode).

Beyond the superficial look and feel, which can be easily changed, I encountered loss of functionality which keeps me from getting work done, one example is gThumb, removed as the default but still easily installable, does not have any more the feature I used the most: export as a Web Album. I guess I will need to use some script for it. Similarly, Gwibber, not a default any more but still installable, lot the ability do watch any RSS feed, something I was relying on and became useless to me, with this reduced functionality I can stay very well with the default, and much lighter, pino.

Initially my plan was to write this in a different tone, highlighting one thing that I really like, but after 24 hours of intense use, weren't able to find such thing so let my crankiness out. But I will live with it, I don't have any plan for going back to 12, instead will move the netbook to F13 too in a few days. I am self-destructive like that :p

Outlawed

It was a hectic week this week, so I am behind with everything, including news. So only today I noticed the last edition of the Linux Outlaw podcast mentioning my piece about Fedora rebranding as "the one and only good April Fool’s joke we found". I understand the hyperbole, but thank you guys, I appreciate and I am happy to make someone smile. At least for the jokes to be remembered, if else...

NASA mission styled badges with Inkscape

Yet another benefit of having your content ready in advance, but it has its own downside too: with the beta delayed again and again I had to sit on this piece a couple weeks more than expected.

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NASA mission styled badges with Inkscape

This time I have to start by giving credit where credit is due, since all the "NASA mission badges" concept, including the STS-98 reference, is shamelessly stolen from Zoltan (I hope I didn't gave away any of its ongoing projects).

So if I celebrated the Fedora 13 Alpha release with an Inkscape rocket drawing tutorial, I have to do something for Beta too (Beta is supposed to be bigger than Alpha) and after stealing the idea, making a Fedora themed badge in the NASA mission style seemed an obvious choice. Sure, you are not forced to use the same theme but use the instructions creatively. For me, I am aiming for something like this:


The badge

So a badge is usually round, let's start by drawing a circle (keep the Ctrl key pressed to preserve the aspect ratio):


Make sure it has no stroke and apply any fill color you like (going with the Fedora theme I used Fedora's dark blue):


Now we need a circled text, we will need a guide for that, so create another smaller circle (leave it in a contrasting color so is easy to work with each element):


Select the two circles and using the Align and Distribute dialog center them vertically and horizontally relative to the biggest object (the first circle):

Fedora Webcomic, F13 Beta Special: The Red Shirt

Those that followed my riddle know I had prepared in advance a comic for Fedora 13 Beta release, so later today is the Beta day and is the time for a webcomic special.
There are ups and downs of having the content prepared in advance, the good part about it is that at times when your geek activity is unpredictable (duh! niche not covered in the study) you have at least something to put out. On the other hand, if the content was made too much on advance, it may become obsolete, and let me know what happened here: I am pretty sure someone from the Ubuntu camp decyphered my riddle and that was all the reason of their rebranding from brown to orange, to escape my joke. Well, it looks like I still had the last word with the ability to alter the final punchline!

Do not forget the third part, "is about jumping to light-speed"! Is up and with an URL ready to be guessed.

My geek card

I ask quite often my friends/colleagues to return their geek card when they fail at basic geeky things (like not knowing basic things about Trek or D&D) and I also strongly believe in putting your money where you mouth, so I decided to eat crow publicly:

notes:
1. do not write, asking what the video is about
2. thinking deeply, I suspect I may didn't failed at being a true geek, but reinforced my übergeekiness.

Videos: RLUG meet, April 2010

My CPU is still hot from editing and uploading videos, the few photos are up too, my media editing for the April RLUG meet is done:

• Editare colaborativa real-time in intranet with dserban
• Comunitati si unelte pentru localizarea in limba romana with nicu
• Povestiri din transee - Partitionare cu forta with rpetre

The geek in spring

The spring around us is the matting season and it effects everyone, including the geeks, like my friend, who I'm not sure if he is desperate enough (he sounds so) or naive enough (he's young, still a student) that the best idea he was able to come with was a T-shirt announcing his availability:

I think I know enough to understand how it could work (for example as a joke among the friends) and when asked if I would wear it my answer was "probably if the shirt quality is good and if the print quality is good", still I found it an interesting "design" exercise to take the project seriously and try to help being it as good as it could, like using a monospaced font, terminal colors and keeping the 31337 as low as possible, so the message has a better change to be understood by the target audience.

This made me put some order in my mind and decide to write down a related piece about how the sex life is affecting a geek's ability to hack, maybe he will read it and get the clue :p

• first, a geek will operate at full capacity (that's 100%) only when he gave-up sex, then there is nothing to distract him and he can concentrate on what's important, he won't waste the time on marginal things. This is maximum and constant productivity;
• when in a stable relationship the geek will be able to operate at near the full capacity, again time lost, no distraction. The capacity is not used fully since the relation will drain some amount of his interest, but close, as a geek can't have a stable relationship when he can't do what he likes;
• on the opposite, the lowest point is happening when the geek is actively searching for sex, he can't focus, won't be able to pursue the tasks, is unreliable. The code will be buggy, the documentation lacking, even the bugzilla tickets may get filled wrongly. Hopefully, this stage does not happen for a long time and end in one of the above-mentioned states;
• there are also a couple of intermediary states where the geek will act unpredictably and inconstantly, the first one is when recently dumped. Then he will have moments of working above full capacity (>100%) to keep his mind busy alternating with moments of depression, when he is unable to do anything. The average is completely unpredictable;
• the second case of unpredictability and inconstancy is happening during a new found flame, he will alternate from times at above full capacity when he is overconfident and feeling able to move mountains with times when he is unable to do anything, dropping the focus from geeky stuff to useless things.

Exercise: identify a geek around you, evaluate his work level and based on the items above try to determine his relationship status. Don't publish the results anywhere, nobody wants to read depressing stats, but if you feel like it, you can make for yourself a "fr33f0r53><" T-shirt, the source is Free.

Enough snow, sakura time...

The other day, when Martin posted the April snow photo I got a bit depressed, this was the heaviest and longest winter I remember and I feel like going postal even only at hearing the word "snow", enough is enough. Now it sakura time, the cherry blossom are ready to explode in a couple of days, so if you are like me will go out and go crazy with flowers, bees, green fields and such.

Apricot blossom and the bee

Field of flowers

Blue Forget-me-not
Of course, this is also the start of the little skirts season, but the Planets must behave before getting such goodies...

Inkscape workshop

Yesterday was a full day for me, with the type of work I hate the most: on field, setting surveillance cameras, DVR-s, proprietary drivers, badly designed proprietary software, Windows laptops and such so didn't have the time to enjoy April Fools nor to go emo-style about my friends letting me alone in the cold with DFD.

But there was a positive part of the day, in the evening I had planned an Inkscape workshop with Ceata, to which I barely managed to arrive after the field task, so it was not completely wasted.

One of our friends who is a fire fighter by day and Linux user by night needed to learn how to make some signs and symbols for his day job, asked my for advice and tips so I proposed the workshop. We gathered 5 people with 3 laptops, no mice and one tablet (when I realised I forgot the USB mouse at home, I took with me the tabled which is gathering dust at the office). Lesson learned: no matter how good are you with the trackpad, when doing graphics you need a mouse.

We had the time for two signs, "no smoke" and "electricity hazard", as we had to go into many basic things, like drawing a circle or a star, using Ctrl key to preserve aspect ratio, changing colors and so on. My signs came like this (for source, open the URL and change the extension to .svg):

We also recorded on video as much as we could (the battery in my camera lasted for about 1 hour and 20 minutes) from which I made available a 5 minutes long segment to probe the interest (not sure is worth the effort for the full 1.7GB raw footage - editing and transcoding may take at least half a day and hosting + uploading would be tricky).

Magenta is the new blue - Rebranding Fedora

As the recent Ubuntu rebranding made a lot of headlines and spread the distro's popularity even more, we decided to follow in their steps once again, trying to consolidate Fedora's image as the New Ubuntu in our recently discovered quest for users and market share.

In order to make the rebranding happen, it was necessary a huge flamewar inside the Design Team, with two large camps: one, lead by Máirín, argued for strawberry-pink, trying to reach the female users and developers, a huge potential pool not tapped yet by any other competing distro, and another, championed by Nicu argued for pitch-black with a tint of phosphoric green, appealing to old-fashioned hacker wannabes, as the core of Fedora.

The dispute was settled with a middle ground by a panel of usability experts from outside of the FLOSS world, to have a view from the target we are trying to expand into. The result is magenta, as the new color we are going to, something in-between ping and black, trying to make everyone content. So instead of the old dark blue we will be using a dark magenta, with the hex-code #731473 and instead of the old blue we will use a light magenta, with the hex-code #d801d8

The workdmark will retain the same shape, the small case "fedora" text in the same Bryant 2 font face, just colored in the light magenta color(#d801d8)


Together with a change of colors, a message change is mandatory and magenta is usually associated trough the history of art with religion and royalty. Controversy is good for increasing the public awareness, but controversy from religion may be a bit too unhealthy for an international project so we chose the royalty angle, positioning now Fedora as "The King of Linux".

The new positioning must be reflected in the logo treatment, so we managed to finally receive blessing from our main corporate sponsor Red Hat and include a piece of headwear in the logo in the form of a crown (still, not techincally a hat or a fedora). But to keep the distinction from RHEL, this logo version is going to be used exclusively in non-profit projects. For the other cases, there is a version of the logo with a background textured with medieval French lilies.


The complete logo is the combination of the light magenta wordmark and the textured formal logo:


This change is effective immediately, packages propagating the change are already built in Koji and will reach all the users of the development versions of Fedora at the next push. After the packages get delivered into the channels, the logo and logo usage guidelines will be updated to reflect the change.

Manifest pentru un proiect deschis eRomania / Manifesto for an open eRomanaia project

Manifest pentru un proiect deschis eRomania

Un grup de iniţiativă pentru susţinerea a şapte principii în realizarea unei eRomânii deschise:
1. Accesul deschis la întreg conţinutul creat în cadrul proiectului, disponibil pe Internet
2. Publicarea într-un format deschis a tuturor datelor publice obţinute în cadrul unei activităţi finanţate cu bani publici
3. Reutilizarea conţinutului deja disponibil pe Internet. (inclusiv cel pus de instituţii publice)
4. Utilizarea formatelor şi standardelelor deschise în cadrul proiectului eRomania
5. Publicarea tuturor programelor de calculator dezvoltate din bani publici pe un site specializat şi sub licenţe deschise
6. Respectarea standardelor de accesibilitate
7. Realizarea unor proiecte necesare pentru domeniul public, nu concurarea cu sectorul privat

Cititi mai multe si semnati

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Manifesto for an open eRomanaia project

An initiative group for supporting seven principles for an open eRomania:
1. Open access to the entire content created inside the project, available on the Internet
2. Publising in an open format all the public data obtained in activities financed with public money
3. Reuse of the content already existing on the Internet (including the content created by the public institutions)
4. Use of open formats and open standards inside the eRomania project
5. Publising all the computer programs created with public money on a specialised website and under free licenses
6. Compliance with the accessibility standards
7. Implementing orjects needed for the public domain, not competing with the private sector

Red more and sign

Making of: Document Freedom Day photos

The tools are far from perfect, so my struggle to put out a "making of" video and encourage people to spread the friendly photos for Document Freedom Day encountered a lot of setbacks, so in the end I had to put out two versions, one in Flash for the larger audience and another one in Ogg Theora (keeping my money in the same place with my mouth) for those who care about Freedom and have the bandwidth:

Since I was busy with the photo camera, most of the video was recorded by Adrian, for whom it was the first time doing something like this. Thanks Adrian!


PS: YouTube FAIL, Blip.tv FAIL, ffpmeg2theora FAIL, OggConvert FAIL.

Document Freedom Day / Ziua Eliberarii Documentelor

For the 2010 edition of the Document Freedom Day, a group of 10 enthusiasts, a flag, a camera and a photographer got lose on the streets of Bucharest in a nice, sunny, spring day taking a bunch of photos in front of a number of buildings of the Public Administration with a simple message: Nu va putem citi documentele! / We can't read your documents!".

Today, on the Document Freedom Day / Ziua Eliberarii Documentelor, if you like our idea, be invited to goo to the page, choose one or more photos that you like and spread them in any way and any media you see fit (the photos are freely licensed as CC-BY-SA).

Breath, think, wait, DFD

This morning when going to work I meet this neighbour (we meet once in a few months, today he was on foot, probably his wife seized the car) who works as a programmer in the police. He politely asked, for conversation sake, about my doings, which was all I needed and got fired and telling about a cool action for Document Freedom Day that will happen tomorrow.

Much to my surprise (the police, as the rest of the public administration in Romania is totally owned by Microsoft from a software use point of view), he easily understood the problem but, this time not much to my surprise, for him open document specs is RTF and OOXML is "that XML thing in the new Microsoft Office" (that's speaking of MS Office 2007 in 2010).

Speaking of documents formats, we go to PDFs (about he was not aware the specs are public) and his current intention to write a library for creating PDF files. Used with the FLOSS way of thinking my reaction was: why write a library when there are tons of them available under a Free license? and gave a few examples (OK, I don't know and don't want to know about libraries for .NET, that he is using - remember, total Microserfs). The reaction was a classic one from the Windows world: the free apps have limited functionality, you have to pay for more features. Duh!

OK, I am in the right mood for celebrating the DFD!