About ACTA

I am not sure how it happened, but while I was away, somehow the Romanian society got interested in ACTA and the topic became hot and trendy, trendy enough to rally all hipsters in a try to "save the Internet". Which is not a bad thing, the Internet is in big need for more freedom and protection. You see the topic on the news, magazines and TV, people talk about it... so yesterday evening a magazine organized a debate at a fancy cafés "ACTA and the Internet. The end or the beginning of an era?"

It was a high-level debate, having as guests a jurist, Bogdan Manolea, a philosopher, Constantin Vică and a jazzman, Mihai Iordache. The moderator, the magazine's editor-in-chief, Mircea Vasilescu, unable to find an ACTA supporter for a balanced debate, had to play the "devil advocate" and try to heat the discussion, otherwise everybody, speakers and audience, would have slammed ACTA. Tot that slamming ACTA is undeserved :) There were a bit over 50 people in the audience, some press, video recording, so I expect it to get echoed. The topic moved from ACTA to copyright in general and freedom on the Interned, with some nuances: the musician having some interests in copyright revenues, the lawyer having sympathy for (not-software) patents in some cases and the philosopher being the most radical, and probably closer to my own point of view. It was mostly about artists, but at the end it touched a bit the pharmaceutics industry, which everyone agreed is a bigger evil, deserving a separate talk.

FOSDEM 2012 photo dump

After a couple weeks on the road I had my hands full, but I am recovering and cleaning the queue, so now is the time to to what I usually do after every FOSS event I attend: dump a lot of photos, unedited, in a simple web gallery, so anyone can use them freely (CC-BY-SA). The photos from FOSDEM 2012 are up.
This thime the Fedora group booth was weak and the group... heterogeneous, barely acting as a group, so for the big finale we didn't even get a group picture, the best finale I can offer is this sunset from the last conference day (as you expect, many of the geeks there didn't noticed it).

On why GNOME got to suck so badly

Below are a few snaps from a FOSDEM presentation by GNOME's Allan and Seif about "how to trick a developer to being a designer":

So no wonder GNOME got to suck so badly and more and more people fondly remember the "good old days" when software used to be made by engineers and get your job done.

Contributor communities @FOSDEM

Right now I am sitting in the room 1301 of the H building of the ULB at FOSDEM 2012 and watching the Working with contributor communities round table, which is moderated by Cristoph, which tries to be as impartial as possible:

On behalf of Fedora (other represented distros are, from left to right, Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, Mageia and Gentoo I believe) we have Joerg speaking:

LGM @FOSDEM 2012

Yesterday evening, after the first day of FOSDEM, there was the dinner of the Libre Graphics people, talking about the upcoming conference in May in Vienna but not only, mostly having fun and catching-up:

FOSDEM fanservice

I got a couple of personal requests, so I cannot disappoint my fans, fulfilling their inquiries now. One was for a picture of the official FOSDEM T-shirt design for this year (this is a tradition for the conference, to come every year with a completely new design):

The other one was for a photo of the Debian booth, which happens to be this year one of the busiest, being fillet with a lot of merchandise, mostly nice T-shirts. Too bad I don't see the Debian wine any more...

And being a nasty person, I will complete the circle with a picture of the wasteland at our own Fedora booth:

FOSDEM 2012

After many adventures in snow and very cold weather (an about 5 hours delayed flight) I managed to finally reach a frozen Brussels yesterday late in the evening:

Due to the unexpected delay, I missed the FAD and the traditional Drug Opera dinner, but at least got to the even more traditional (and important?) beer event at Delirium Cafe, making the first contact with the Fedora gang and many others: Today morning everybody goes to ULB for the FOSDEM conference: The Fedora team is, of course, here, preparing the booth. You can find us in the new K building, along with many other projects, like FSF, Mozilla, CentOS, Debian, openSUSE, Mageia, to mention a few: And the conference started, time for me to stop blogging and go meeting people, roam around, do things:

Winter wallpapers

Some more freely licensed wallpaper sized photos (wide), this time with a winter theme, use as you want:

SOPA for non-Americans

Yesterday was the strike day against SOPA and PIPA and I tried to do my part: blacked-out my blogs, put related content on various places, shared link, informing. Many people seemed to understand the issue, but not everybody. Below is an excerpt from a comment (translation is mine) by someone in Romania, a person with IT and FOSS background, this make the quote even more relevant (I saw similar reaction on other tech sites):

I don't understand... SOPA is an American law, right? passed by their shitty Congress, right? how it affect me? how will affect Europe an American law? we aren't Americans so we don't have to obey their laws... what's the deal with this shit? Google and others can move their servers in Asia or Europe and... done... as Obama failed with Google and HP which moved to Ireland for lower taxes...[...]
Back to the initial question... SOPA is an American law, it will affect them.... not me... I am not American... and I don't ever want to be... European countries don't need to obey American laws... as they, in fact do... they don't obey... If the big companies want to keep up any site with piracy of any kind... they only have to host it in Russia :))... SOPA filters will be made in USA, not in our country...
You will say our routes pass there... so what? it takes 30 seconds to change some server routes on your workstation... and 1-2 hours for them to propagate... If USA want to do that, they can do it...

Some points from my reply:

• US corporations won't move, they will stay and obey the law and even if they move servers elsewhere, they still have to obey the law, since they want to make business in the US
• the case about moving in Ireland is different: it was for taxes, not to produce illegal things
• SOPA filters will fork in such way that an European website may get blocked for people in USA
• the American government has control over the root DNS filters and there the blocking will happen, the world would have to switch to an alternate DNS system
• once it happens, other countries will follow with their own censorship laws, European countries are eager to do it, as demonstrated with TPB
• "free Dmitry": you may get arrested even if you do something legal in your country.

For such reasons the Romanian Fedora community participated in the campaign with a notice about the Fedora's stance against censorship (not a full blackout as with my personal blogs, since neither the international project went for a total blackout). From my part, I would have preferred Fedora to go to a full blackout, like Mozilla, Wikipedia or openSUSE, I am disappointed by Red Hat having a stance so weak, it was not even mentioned on their own opensource.com and I am unhappy with Fedora stuck in bureaucracy and not being able to produce in due time an official statement I can link to in the news item.

Hopefully I will make your day better with shining examples from TheOatmeal, Playboy and FightingInternet.

Strike Agains SOPA & PIPA

Fedora and SOPA

USA Congress is going to debate and, as the current signs say, approve SOPA and Internet censorship on January 24. Trying to prevent this, a number of online entities are planning an awareness campaign on January 18, ranging from entire blackout of websites (to show the public the expected effects of the law) to mere informational banners and interstitials.

Would Fedora join them? I have little faith it will happen, but we are going to be affected, the project is USA based and was affected in the past (look at multimedia support, audio and video codecs as an example), the main sponsor is also an USA corporation. As a community Fedora is relying user-generated content, and SOPA will block user-generated content, imagine a Fedora with no wiki, no planet blog aggregator, no web archived mailing lists, not even Bugzilla or Koji. Would that be of any use for you? (and don't imagine the project won't be affected, it won't move servers outside USA, it won't change sponsors, it will obey the USA law).

How about other FOSS projects, we are all pretty much in the same boat?

From my party, my own blogs will turn black on January 18.

RHL9

Back from the holidays for the New Year, one of the first thing I did was to check g+ and learn about what happened in my absence. Among many things about the SOPA atrocity, I found this funny piece titled 10 Reasons to Switch to Linux in 2012, is funny because it gets every one of the 10 points wrong (if I am bored enough, I may write a follow-up showing how and why), but this is not about I want to write now.

Scrolling down the article, at about the middle, there is a Best Prices on LINUX/UNIX box in the right sidebar. What is it about? Red Hat Linux 9, Red Hat Linux 8, things discontinued 7-8 years ago (I am too lazy to count). And the site is real, even if so poorly maintained and updated, it has product pages and user reviews. It felt like browsing the web of 10 years ago, both in terms of products and predictions. Let me check again: yes, is 2012.

Getting contributors

A slow day near the New Year break, calm and silent. Then I get a private message on IRC from a total stranger: he wants to know if is possible to join the Fedora design team. I start by making clear I am not part of the team currently (he supposedly saw may name on the contributors list) and then say is an open community, anyone can join, and point to the instructions on the wiki.

The guy insists in learning the name of the "maintainer", I direct him to the mailing list and #fedora-design, insist on my turn about using normal, open, channels, not people who can be busy or away for the holidays but still tell him the name of the team leader, is public information after all. He want a "chance to join", I repeat joining is open for everyone and point to the mailing list again.

Passing briefly the part about which software is used, my alarm signal is triggered by the next one "in this field coding is not need ?". I answer calmly and now, half an hour into the talk, is my time to ask "what are your skills? what do you know to do? why do you want to be part of the project?" and learn he is a college student with the hobby of doing graphic design.

Then comes the icing of the cake, his following question "after contribution , money will be got or not?" Now is crystal clear my interlocutor knows nothing about Free Software, open source, community, Fedora, Linux and such. Is the time for me to point to our homepage and tell directly we are a volunteer project (duh! we have poor wording on the front page, a poor English speaker is confused).

As a last item, he is stunned to learn I do not work for Fedora and Fedora is not a corporation hiring people. I have the feeling I won't hear from him any more and he won't post to the list. Should I call this over a half an hour wasted time or should I call it a learning experience? Anyway, my current confidence in new contributors is quite low at this minute.

Thunderbird adventures

I use Thunderbird as my mail client, keeping it up to date to the latest version, Tb 9, thanks to Remi's repo, all on a Fedora 14 desktop. It may use a bit more resources than I like (my desktop is an old computer, with limited RAM amount), but overall I get by.

Not so much the other day, when I was sent a scanned image to crop and adjust it and I just tried to do that. Naive me! An email with an 7.2 MB attached JPEG rendered the mail client unusable and the entire desktop almost unusable: a memory consumption increase from 89.0 MB (Thunderbird "normal" usage) to 373.5 MB (trying to open that particular message) it may not look like such a killer but somehow that was the effect:

In the end I managed to download the attachment and learned the problem: it was a 7.2 MB big image, but the resolution was 9924 x 14039 (don't ask, whoever scanned the image, scanned a full A4 for a small, university diploma sized image, and made it at a huge DPI, so the result can be printed big size. I said "don't ask"). No wonder it was a killer to try and decompress it in RAM.

Now the next challenge, edit the image: crop, rotate, remove cracks and scratches, delete a stamp, improve colors and so. I bet you guessed already: GIMP can't open it, at least my GIMP 2.7.1 (the newest available for Fedora 14) tried with no result until I killed it after over 10 minutes of waiting (yeah, I know, don't preach me the benefits, working with large size images is one of the real benefits of Photoshop).

Fortunately, it was possible to open the image for viewing and Shotwell has a crop function included. Once the important part of the image was cropped all was well, GIMP did the job, another success was checked.

European winner for Wiki Loves Monuments

After every country, including us, nominated their national winners, it was the time for the big European final, with 17 participating countries. And now we also have the European winners. Here's the first place:

Is a picture from Romania, illustrating the ruins of the Chiajna monastery near Bucharest and the funny part is, in my opinion, it barely made our top, it was 10th place from 10 finalists... there is truth in "last but no least". Why? Where it is a good, beautiful and powerful picture, those ruins are well known among the photographers from Bucharest... at least my personal reaction was "yet another picture of Chiajna? at least this one is good" (for over I year I plan a photo session on my own there, still looking for the "right" model, as I want something more glamour/goth).

Personally I am even more happy since the winner, Mihai Petre is kind of my friend (if you wonder, this didn't affect my notes in the national contest and I was not involved in any way with the European notes) and he is a very cool person. Here's a bonus: I have a picture of him I made this summer at a metal festival, can you identify him?

We rock. Literally.

Chrome vs. Firefox

Compared with other services, I usually found the stats given by StatCounter having bigger values for Firefox (have no idea about their, or others, methodologies), this is why I don't take the exact numbers as absolute but was looking at the trends. The latest report, which made the rounds in the tech press is showing how worldwide Chrome slightly overtook Firefox (with half a percent) and both of them added are way above Internet Explorer (10 percents). This pretty much mirrors my anecdotal evidence of seeing IE mostly on the computers of the most clueless users, Firefox on those installed by a knowledgeable friend or admin and Chrome used more and more by simple-to-average users and even techies.

Is funny how the stats change when looking at my country, Romania, here the places of Internet Explored are switched: Firefox is the top-dog on a slow but sure decline and Chrome just overtaking Internet Explorer for the second place. Of course, the sum of Firefox and Chrome is crushing IE. Not bad. As for myself, I still use Firefox as my main browser for the simple reason I can't stand the UI of Chrome. I am worried about Mozilla's idiotic policy to blindly copy the Chrome UI (is a different browser, it should look and feel different, otherwise why use it? I use it for some reasons, and Gecko is not the only), but continue to use Firefox, deploy only Firefox and support (as in user support) only Firefox.

Open letter to the Romanian Ministry for Culture and Patrimony

A group of organisations and interested persons from Romania are addressing an open letter to the Romanian Ministry for Culture and Patrimony about the Romanian cultural patrimony on the Internet, which can be published at Europeana.eu, where our country was to submit 789,000 works until 2015 and currently has managed to publish less than 36,000. We ask about the status of this project and propose the use of the images contributed in the recent Romanian Wikipedia photography contest. The full text can be read on the ProLinux website or in printable format (along with the signatures list) from the APTI blog.

Upgrade strategy

Later today Fedora 16 will be officially released, I am using F14 which is becoming quite long in the tooth, so now is probably a good time to evaluate my upgrade path.

Back in May after some testing I deemed F15 unsuitable for desktop/workstation usage and made the decision to skip a release. It was a first for me, the single one Fedora release I ever skipped, since RHL 9, when I moved to use Linux as my primary desktop. What's the status now, one release later? I acknowledge not doing any testing, had to fight with F14 day by day to get some work done, but I read enough so from what I can see: GNOME Shell is still the same, Xfce is still the same, KDE is still the same. Nothing new, nothing better. So I see ahead another skippable release, which is not that bad considering F14 still has a workable paradigm and is not self-expiring shareware, the applications are the problem and they are what matters most.

So after judging I came with the following strategy: skip F16 also, keep using F14 one more month until its EOL in December and then continue to use it unsupported a couple of months more until F17 Beta. Postpone any decision until then and with the bits released download and evaluate. What can happen by then:

• Xfce has a release in January, it may become good enough. Considering the current status and the TODO, the expectations aren't high;
• GNOME may become sane and usable again. Highly unlikely;
• I may lose faith and accept defeat, give up on the Linux desktop, go to W7. It would be sad after so many year;
• I may get into BDSM and start using something like Openbox, saying goodbye to any possible productivity;
• get some kind of strange revelation and give KDE a try.

Freeloading

I do release a lot of content, from drawings and clipart to photography and to videos and learned about many people using them, this always brings a smile on my face. But it can be otherwise :) Today I got a question about some of my clipart being used on some website, but with a twist: I am asked if credit is needed, as in such case the site owner has to adjust the layout to fit it, needing to think about that. My answer was dry "Since those clipart images are released into Public Domain, crediting is not compulsory, that's the license. Is up to you." opposed to an usual "the images are released into the Public Domain, you can use them in any way you want. credit is not required but is appreciated". Indeed, I released the stuff freely, no restriction can be imposed afterwards. But I can contemplate the laziness and freeloading. And smile.

More autumn wallpapers

I already did a post with some Free autumn wallpapers which I unexpectedly caught back in Milano, but as the last week-end I stumbled upon some more beautiful autumn leaves here in Bucharest, so I couldn't stop myself from taking pics and prepare them as wide-screen wallpapers. Enjoy, they are Free.

...and the winners are...

The Wikipedia photography contest has ended, the jury made its duty and now we are ready to announce the results (this blog is the first to break the news). So who won?

The first place: Union Square of Timișoara

The second place: "Sfânta Treime" church in Sibiu

Third place: the ruins in Bociulesti

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Mentions
Old city panorama:

Mavros-Cantacuzino manor:
Alba Iulia citadel gate:
Caraiman cross:
Densuș church:
Alba Iulia citadel:
Chiajna monastery:

All the 10 images above go to the European final contest, good luck friends!