Better Wikimedia Commons uploads

Having some more pics to upload to Wikimedia Commons, but not many enough to use a dedicated tool, I went today to the web interface and was blown away by the simplified upload wizard, is very nice to use and also allows for multiple uploads. Good work, guys! Yeah, there is still something lacking: a geotagging tool (well, there was no link to the manual instructions page, so my laziness won and I skipped this step), but I liked it enough to share a screencast with the world:

No party for you. Tradition cancelled.

As heart-breaking as it is to cancel a years old tradition (we started the tradition of gathering the community for a face-to face meeting in the very release day with Fedora 8 and continued it release after release, no matter what), this time there will be no Fedora 15 release party in Bucharest.

While there may be a couple of good to have features and a number of controversial ones, which some will love and some will hate, there is the abomination overshadowing everything. so overal there is nothing to celebrate. By the contrary.

As there must be a news item on the local community website, there will be one, a short Twitter-like status update mentioning the release availability and linking to the >spins website (when it will be ready), not the main download page, so people will get something usable.

Fedora at Agora's Open Source / Free Software conference

I asked if, as disgruntled as I am, I still go and talk about Fedora at a local FOSS conference and the feedback convinced me to go. As the local Fedora community is extremely weak these days, I wasn't able to summon a team (we were on hostile grounds, with Microsoft as the main sponsor of the event), so I joined Ceata.

I delivered my talk (slides available), which was about the local Fedora community, maybe a bit more optimistic than it should have been and, as I couldn't resist other way, a small sting at the conference's main sponsor (not included in the slides).

Overall, it was a nice experience: strengthening the team (Ceata), fun time, making contacts and delivering a message. A good day.


PS: I recorded on video my presentation, but being dumb enough I lost it... have no idea on which hard drive was saved :(

The kite is flying high and free

Is about a year since we launched Fii Liber, a magazine about freedom in arts and technology. For this we gathered as much of the contributors were available (unfortunately some missed) and a couple of contributors-to-be:

Since the project uses a kite as its logo, we got hold of a couple of kites, rainbow colored, to be as close to the logo as possible and got them fly. It was a fortunate window of good weather and a small blue sky, in an otherwise rainy and gloomy day, just enough for us to make a stand and have some fun.

Then we continued inside with some pizza, beer, pie and cake, Also, all the contributors present received a diploma from Alina, our project leader (and Alina got hers too from Tibi, Ceata's leader).

Doesn't this sound like a fun project to be part of it? If you care about Free software, Free arts and freedom in general, why won't you join us?


PS: yeah, there was also a downside, despite my efforts to de-emphasize that, the team noticed my anniversary being on the same day so made a big fuss of it, letting it somehow eclipse the main event. Thank you guys and girls!

Color choosers

I am a long time fan of Agave, but if Agave is the vi of the color pickers... there has to be an Emacs of it. And it is gpick, which as opposed to the lean Agave, provides a lot of additional functionality. Needed, unneeded functionality? I guess this is about the users, some will like one, some will like the other.

But gpicker is available in no Fedora repository so far and many won't bother with a manual build (then what would be the purpose of the distro?), so is not that easy for a Fedora user to play with it. Or it is? A former Fedora contributor, now in SUSE land, provided a F14 package (in a handy repo), so the curios has access to the toy (the SUSE build system seems useful after all).

Stop to the installing woes

A couple of weeks ago at a city photo walk with friends, I saw this "Windows install" add on a street trash can, found it funny enough for a photo, but was lazy enough to kneel in the dirt for a proper shoot.

I was decided not to post such a crappy picture until I saw yesterday a funnier ad which made a good set with the can above, this one is from the tram station near my home and the interesting line says "Installing Windows (XP, Vista, 7), Linux and Mac + Drivers - 9€". Duh! the crafty kid in the neighbors is doing Linux too :D This means for a mere equivalent of 9€ (that is 35 RON) I can escape all my installing woes?

I do not feel trollish enough to call the number and ask for a Gentoo install... or ask for a desktop on a PC with totally unsupported hardware >:) Hint someone bored enough?

PS: now I shrug for not kneeling in front of the trash can, a better pic could have been used for a demotivational poster in my collection, one about Windows being just the right OS to be installed on a trash can... and maybe GNOME 3 being so bad and not deserving even that :D

Branding is useless?

According to Zonker, branding for a Linux distro is of little use since a FOSS user is fully aware of what he's using, so my natural question come: then why do we cover our laptops with stickers? why do hang on our backpacks as many pins as we can? why do we wear printed T-shirts? We surely know what we are running.

Speaking about Fedora

When I got the invitation to talk about Fedora at a local FOSS conference, which kind of speech I am supposed to deliver?

• honest: it used to be a great distro, but some idiots are running it down the drain;
• half-hearted: ignore the present and talk about how it was 0.5-1 years ago;
• coward: use the pretense of a busy schedule decline participation,
• small scale: focus entirely on the local community (Romanian) and our struggle to survive and not say a word about the international project.

Best of both worlds?

From time to time I help a bit a NGO (won't enter into details now, there may be some common projects to talk about later, some older were covered on my photography blog, is a foundation helping mothers that had children die), this time they bought a couple of netbooks, for some activist to get some work done, Considering the budget and the requirements I put my FOSS in the closet and recommended some Acers with Windows 7 Starter, they are going to be used by some basic users (think "girl scouts but at a mature age") who won't learn a new interface or new software, they need something they feel comfortable with and I won't school them.

The computers came to me to make them useful (remove tons of pre-installed crap, add some useful things, switch the defaults to Firefox and VLC and so on), and, much to my surprise, when lifting the screen I saw this cute sticker with the green android popping from the edge and saying "dual loads. best of both worlds!"

Only after I started Windows, completed the install and, probably in the process, agreed to the MS EULA, when everything was done it gave me a dialog asking if I want to set up Android. As busy as I want, and as hurried (I had to give the computers forward in a couple of hours) I took a couple of minutes to see what this android is about (but only a couple of minutes, not enough for a review):

One thing to notice: the arrow in the top-left corner say something like "Go back to Windows". And the sticker is true: the boot is fast, not instant. Since it was not my computer, and I didn't want to leave my Google account data in it, the computer was not able to do much anyway.

So back to Windows, hide all Android traces (it would completely confuse the users), finish the setup and pass the netbooks forward.

Now, honestly, my best hope is the they will use at least GIMP instead of a pirated Photoshop (small image editing is one of the target use), on this I put my foot down, when asked to teach some graphic editing, my reply was: I teach only Free Software, Photoshop I don't use and don't know.

No torrents needed

him: hi... i bother you again:)
him: you think you can send me the app which you are using for vector graphics, the one from your tutorials :)
him: i can't use torrents to get it
me: no need for file transfers or torrents... is free software, you can get it directly from http://inkscape.org/
me: take care to download the windows version
him: thanks:)
me: my pleasure

Needing help with data recovery

Me in big trouble:

kernel: [ 9406.243037] usb 2-1: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9406.364420] usb 2-1: New USB device found, idVendor=05e3, idProduct=0715
kernel: [ 9406.364425] usb 2-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=3, Product=4, SerialNumber=2
kernel: [ 9406.364428] usb 2-1: Product: USB Storage
kernel: [ 9406.364431] usb 2-1: Manufacturer: Generic
kernel: [ 9406.364433] usb 2-1: SerialNumber: 000000009412
kernel: [ 9406.365409] scsi11 : usb-storage 2-1:1.0
kernel: [ 9407.372992] scsi 11:0:0:0: Direct-Access Generic STORAGE DEVICE 9412 PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
kernel: [ 9407.375394] sd 11:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg2 type 0
kernel: [ 9438.118031] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9448.336036] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9464.555023] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9464.774027] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9474.992028] usb 2-1: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
kernel: [ 9475.108909] sd 11:0:0:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery
kernel: [ 9475.108939] sd 11:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
kernel: [ 9475.108953] sd 11:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
kernel: [ 9475.108961] sd 11:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
kernel: [ 9475.108966] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] READ CAPACITY failed
kernel: [ 9475.108970] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=DID_NO_CONNECT driverbyte=DRIVER_OK
kernel: [ 9475.108974] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense not available.
kernel: [ 9475.108982] sd 11:0:0:0: rejecting I/O to offline device
kernel: [ 9475.108988] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] Write Protect is off
kernel: [ 9475.108994] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] Assuming drive cache: write through
kernel: [ 9475.109179] sd 11:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

Lost about 700 photos, the result of a full day of shooting in 3 locations. So far tried TestDisk/PhotoRec with no success, since they can't see there is a card. The camera offers to format the card, but I don't dare to do that (and try a recover after) with no backup first. I am quite upset about this, since a lot of people are waiting for the photos, only for a few there is a partial replacement (well... at least it was not a commercial endeavour)

My lawn, my preciousss...

Sanity

When I am flooded with what some people supposedly are, I have to keep my sanity:

Beef?

I don't have strong feelings for beefy things and I am sure the joke will be old half a year from now, still I selected "Beefy Miracle". Why? Because it enables a link to "Bacon" for F17.

...mmm, bacon! that's more like it :D

A bus story: of Windows and user interfaces

This morning going to work the traffic was a killer, fortunately waiting in the bus in the middle of the traffic jam, I got the opportunity to relax a bit overhearing the conversation of two guys, apparently Windows sysadmins at something like public administration institutions.

They did catch my attention while talking about security and the primary threat being the internal users, which, as every sysadmin know, are stupid, they do stupid thing, including writing passwords on post-it notes they stick on the computer display. Then they went about user stupidity and how they set their users to classic grey user interface they learned and knew, then moved to Office, where in Office 2007 the suite is better, but the ribbon interface is bad, hated both by them and their users, unable to find the functions they knew, with Office 2003 having a better interface but they being forced to use 2007, because that's they have license for. And then they moved back to Windows: not one of them even tried to deploy Vista, which is awful, with Windows 7 correcting some of the drawbacks. Then it came the absolute pearl of the conversation: "If you want a stable computer, use XP, that is tried and tested" (they know XP is going out of support soon?), after which they moved away from the IT topic.

If you wonder, no, I couldn't put my half-ambassador hat and tell them: "Hi, I am Nicu, let me introduce you to the beefy side, we are inventing an even worse interface."

The story of a poster or the making of Fii Liber Land

The task was forgotten, sitting untouched for months, when I was reminded about it (and perhaps assigned in the tracker): make a poster design for the Fii Liber project, to be put at Ceata's headquarters.

I got the "Fii Liber Land" concept right away in my head, but it was too complicated (so I thought) and I was not in the mood for drawing it, so postponed it for a while, over a week, during which I kept working on demotivational posters (more on that in a couple of weeks, the project is not ready to be announced), while trying to simplify the idea and do something easy, which I would be able to do in the blink of an eye and no effort.

Time passed and I was unable to come with a simplified form, so build my courage and went for the whole shebang: I could get away with the simple kite (the Fii Liber logo) on a blue sky and the clouds from the current website header along with a text like "Fii Liber. Noi suntem liberi! Tu?" ("Bee Free. We are free! You?") but that was less than optimal: the kite and the clouds do not match in their visual style (I made the kite logo on my usual style but when it came to the clouds I was "busy" and skipped the task) and... I wanted to make a point and I am not the person to step back from a controversy.

Fii Liber is queued for an infrastructure upgrade, will be migrated to Drupal 7, and with this it will receive a new theme, which I find boring, corporate-like and bad for our "normal users" audience (obviously, some people in the team disagree, so they want the change). The poster is supposed to show the friendly and informal image I envision for the project.

But I talked already too much, time for some pretty pictures! Here is the poster design I came with:

As you can see, it represents a happy land with hallmarks of life, technology and culture (as Ceata is an organisation promoting Free arts and technology) with a kite (the logo) flying freely over it. Of course, there are some stereotypes included, like Dracula's castle, a Modavian painted church or the Endless Column (do I need to also talk about sheep?)

Now the work is not done :) From my point of view it may be, but since the design is Free and a group has different visions, modifications may happen: the Ceata logo, which is not loved any more may get axed (in what I see as a mistake for growing the identity) and some text may get added at the bottom, where I intentionally didn't allow the space for.

As said, done, time to go forward, staying a bit more in the poster land... a bit of work is planned today on the demotivational side :)

First thing to do after a Firefox 4 install

1. go to View -> Toolbars
2. uncheck "Tabs on Top"
3. Profit!

Now Firefox is once again consistent with the rest of my desktop.

Proud to be European or Fx4 5M

5 million downloads in less than 24 hours and the adoption rate does not show any sign of slowing down, I guess it was a much awaited release. While we were asleep, NA closed the gap, from ~50% to ~75% but as usual they are trailing behind, let's count again at 10M which I guess it will be about tomorrow.

From my part, I exercised my BOFH powers and deployed it since yesterday at my [small business] workplace, but .ro is weak so far, less than, for example, 1/10 compared with .de (at ~1/4 of population size).

Firefox 4 taking over the world

Recorded a few minutes ago from http://glow.mozilla.org/, by now the counter is already at 849.233

Demotivational Posters with GIMP

Having a lot of unplanned free time time on my hands and bing in exceptionally good spirits and getting my hands of a few useful pictures, I decided it is the time (wow! almost a year passed!) to write yet another graphic tutorial, this time about creating a demotivational poster with GIMP.Something like this:

When uploading to Wikimedia Commons a few photos taken in the last weekend in Târgoviște, it was the perfect opportunity to remember how difficult is to pay attention when filling all the metadata and notice how plenty of apps on my GNOME desktop are able to upload to various proprietary services like flickr, Picasaweb or facebook, but none I know of will make it easy to upload to Wikimedia. Or there is one and I didn't do my searching homework well? Or it is deliberately so to keep the spam under control?

Update: as suggested in the comments, I tried commonist, a Scala/webstart app, which is not bad at all, not as desktop integrated as a real app would be, not as easy to launch and missing a few features, but it does 90% of the needed job... is probably the best option.

PS: yes, at the first look seeing the splash I wondered if I caught a virus or trojan...

Update: after using the tool for another upload, I think I have to adjust my rating: it does 75% of the job :)

The Thunderdome - A GNOME Wars Comic

Watching the FOSS blogosphere, is pretty much like news television before some elections: two sides throwing mud at each other, trying to win you on their side, but in the end, no matter who wins, you still be screwed. Really, as in politics the lesser of two evils is still evil, in GNOME the lesser of two retards is still retard.

And as in politics the people reaction is not to vote, also in software it can be not to upgrade. Honestly, I don't care what will happen in the Ubuntu camp, but I am pessimistic about the Fedora camp: even if the users revolt for, pulling a number completely out of my ass, only half of the regular downloads, the poisonous people won't get fired, they will talk their employer into the excuse as a normal trend of people moving to mobile device and will make it even worse.

RLUG meet, March 2011

Yesterday we had the March edition of the monthly LUG meet, held again in a room at the Polithnica University of Bucharest, with help from our friends at ROSEdu.

This time it was short, we had only 3 talks, each of them being "lightning" (mine was the longest, at around 12 minutes), so for the next time we need you as a speaker too. The event ended with some traditional pizzas and beers.

The talks covered:

• QR codes with Free software in Linux, by Nicu Buculei
• Linux From Scratch 6.8 by Ovidiu Constantin
• Scapy, python packet generating tool by Alex Juncu

The GNOME wars

There is so much noise on the web these days about the big flame: GNOME with the Shell versus Canonical with Unity, I find very amusing the naivety of many people not understanding its roots.

In fact is very simple: the Linux world is going to war, a war between Red Hat and Canonical and GNOME just happened to be the first big visible battle on this war... expect more like this to come while Canonical feels the need to grow and at some point start making some money and Red Hat feels its dominant position challenged more and more.

Who will win? Is still too early to tell.

F16 name proposal: Lock Up Your Daughter

The submissions are open for the Fedora 16 name proposals and there are cute drawings on Planet supporting some of them, so as immature as I am, I couldn't stop myself plugging my tablet and quickly drawing something (nothing fancy, just a quick scribble) for what I think is the best possible code name for F16:

I can already hear "huh?" from people not understanding this, so used the tablet a little more, scribbled some additional text and here is a full graphic:

The voices in my head are still "huh?", so I guess is the time for more words: after the huge fiasco Fedora 15 is going to be, we very likely will go downhill, towards extinction and the only way to survive will be to get the hackers back in power. If that will happen, expect them to take no prisoners.

Now only to find a link between "lovelock" and "lock up your daughter" and the proposal can be officially submitted...