MP4 and Wikipedia

Last week when I read about the request for comments on Wikimedia supporting MP4 video I wasn't at my computer, so I couldn't vote and later forgot about it. My position here is simple: supporting proprietary and encumbered formats can only harm the open web, so Wikipedia and all the other Wikimedia websites endorsing it would be a huge blow for the openness and community, so I strongly oppose. However, I acknowledge a lot of the existing devices produce content in such formats, so I guess a reasonable compromise would be allowing such uploads but then transcode the videos in open formats and serve those for viewing.

Today I was reminded about the issue by a message on some Wikimedia mailing list by a message worded in such way, I can easily label as "pro MP4 spam". It was a good incentive for me to finally answer the RFC/vote.

Still, I am disturbed to see a "product manager" at Wikimedia Foundation campaigning for MP4, especially when the public opinion is strong against it (at this moment it records 251 votes for no support, votes for contributing only, no view and only 132 for full support, so more than 2:1).

On Red Hat and CentOS joining forces

Red Hat and CentOS joining forces is a really smart move and it potentially is a win-win scenario for all parties involved: Red Hat, CentOS, community, end-users, FOSS. I won't enter into details, since a lot of people are talking about this already.

However, what baffles me is how little people understand the reasoning. So many comments frame it in the old context: a lot of projects need a no-cost Linux solution, and if they can't use a Red Hat derivative, they will use a Debian flavour and later when money will get involved, they will buy support from Canonical instead of Red Hat. Yes, this is a solid reason, but is the old reason. What we see now is something else.

The real reason for Red Hat embracing CentOS now is written plainly everywhere, from the press release "Red Hat is once again extending its leadership in open source innovation by helping to establish a platform well-suited to the needs of open source developers that integrate technologies in and around the operating system" to the FAQ "Red Hat is taking an active role in the CentOS Project to accelerate the development and broaden the reach of projects such as OpenStack by expanding our base."

These days Red Hat is selling not only the established Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but quoting from the same press release, things like "OpenStack, RDO, Gluster, OpenShift Origin, and oVirt" solutions. Compared with Linux, those technologies have so far less traction but comparable potential. Having CentOS as a strong player and supporting all those technologies will make them more popular and increase the chances for a later sale of more than RHEL.

Everything mentioned above is Free Software, so it can be a win-win for all of us. Of course, there are dangers (GNOME 3, I'm looking at you!) but there are safeguars: if the srpms will be easier to get, projects like Scientific Linux will have the life easier too.

Night wallpapers

For the New Year night I chased some fireworks pictures, but in the wrong place (had to stay near home) so the result was not spectacular (I didn't have high expectations for the fire show in the nearby park). But having the gear with me and noticing the park at night, which do looks different, I turned on them for more pics, which were then posted in the usual places. Receiving a specific request on some social network for high resolution, I follow with a blog post with wallpaper sized versions:

Anaglyph

Disclaimer: to properly read the following article, you need to have a pair of red-cyan 3D glasses, otherwise the images won't display as intended. The cheapest one should do it, perhaps even home made. Lacking such glasses, you can generate your own 3D images for different types of glasses.

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon an old article about how James Cameron is/was remaking Titanic in 3D and somewhere in the technical explanation it was mentioned you can do 2D to 3D conversion with Free Software tools, namely the G'MIC plugin for GIMP.

In the late '90ies I received a computer magazine which came with a pair of paper 3D glasses and a CD containing the usual software demos AND a few 3D pictures, it was my first contact with anaglyphs. I still have the glasses, but I use them maybe once every few years, when I remember to search some such images.

Along the time I learned how to properly make such images: two cameras, filters, combine the two images in one. Way too much effort for me. It looks like way too much effort even for some commercial filmmakers...

When I saw the Titanic article, I said to myself 'what the heck, let give G'MIC a try'. AFAIK it is not available in any official Fedora repo, but you can download a binary from the upstream, drop it in the proper folder and go with it. It will survive even a distro update/reinstall. Not a big fan of the 'application inside another application' approach of G'MIC, nor of its duplication of existing GIMP features, that's why didn't have it already installed, but playing is fun.

I don't have the time and patience to learn how to fine-tune the parameters (with hand crafted depth maps you should be able to reach high quality results), nor do I plan to return to anaglyphs any time soon, so I used pretty much the automatic settings. Below are a few pictures I think came decently with no fiddling and automatic settings:

Mist wallpapers

When I took pictures of the overwhelming mist, it became obvious such minimalist image have a great potential for effective wallpapers: they are simple and won't stand on your way. So here are some for anyone want to use them. Enjoy and don't let their mod depress you :)

Programatica

At first, I received the invitation for the Programatica - Open Source conference for the Fedora community, but since I don't have much to say on this matter, I passed it (I am a Linux desktop user these days and Fedora does not shine there). When the invitation arrived at ProLinux and was difficult to find a speaker, I offered myself for the task.

The conference was mixed, it had 3 tracks: open source projects, open source communities and celebration of 20 years of internet in Romania. The first part, the projects, was about an Arduino clone from Intel (and a Linux distro to match), a Microsoft Azure sales pitch from a local distributor and a F-Droid for FirefoxOS from Ceata. The communities included Ceata (again), "Informatica la castel" summer school, ROSEdu, ProLinux and YATE, which is not quite a community. The last track brought panels and talks with some of the internet pioneers in the country.

My talk was a short one and quite generic (slides here): in an age when so much money are invested in Linux and Open Source and so much money are drawn from them, there is still a need for the community? We believe so.

Get 'em while they are young

A relaxed post as for a lazy Sunday afternoon: the little one is "hacking" graphics with Inkscape on a Fedora Linux laptop.

In case the VIDEO tag does not work for you, here's a YouTube version.

Romanian winners for Wiki Loves Monuments 2013

After the jury did its work, we announced the winners for the national Wiki Loves Monuments contest in Romania. The top 10 images will go in the international contest, along with winning images from the other 52 participating countries. Best of luck there!

Autumn wallpapers

It's the season for autumn themed wallpaper backgrounds to bring their warm colors to a desktop nearby, so here are a few of my recent pictures which may fit the bill (freely licensed as CC-BY-SA, of course):

And a bonus one for the braves to laugh in the face of a vertigo-inducting image:

Hackathon

I may not be thrilled advertising Facebook, but they do were the sponsor of a big hackathon organized by ROSEdu last week-end at Politehnica University in Bucharest. For about 24 hours 15 teams of 2 to 4 hackers coded on various projects for fun, glory, learning and prizes. They were assisted by a bunch of ROSEdu volunteers and some Facebook engineers from London and Dublin. The goal was for each team to have at the end of the coding day a piece of software ready to ship.

Unfortunately, not everything was perfect: after many successful events, this time the weakest link was the University, which kind of screwed a big multinational sponsor, an enthusiastic NGO and a lot of volunteers when the power went off for several hours. Of course, the internet connection was down too, so the organizers had to sent the teams to work from home for this interval. And this was not all: the University rented some rooms on Saturday for some exams at the Fiscal Administration, so due to that the hackathon had to be cut 2 hours. The teams were diverse: most of them were university students, but there was a team with all its members being high schoolers and there was an all-girls team. Hackers were running an assortment of systems: Linux, Windows, OS X. In my empirical observation (I didn't count), Linux was a plurality and as distros I noticed Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Gentoo. Projects targeted Android, iOS, the web or a combinations of those and were developed with a lot of mixed technologies, I saw Java, PHP, Node.js, ObjectiveC, Ruby and more. The power was still down at the finale, so instead of presentations on the big screen for everyone to see, the jury had to move to each table and watch presentation made on laptop batteries and mobile data connections. Less than ideal, but in the end they managed to get the job done. I followed the jury and learned more about every project: some were warm-fuzzy feel-good about recycling, some may seem useful for students newly arrived in the big city and trying to figure its transportation system and other really creepy from a privacy point of view, but all of them had or "planned" to have some "notify your friends" or "see shit your friends do" features to palate the sponsor.
PS: incidentally, the winning team was the one who asked at some point the roaming photographer for some ideas on their interface design :)

On Linux Install Fest 2013

Today was that time of the year again when ROSEdu organized the traditional Linux Install Fest. I managed to be there only a couple of hours, enough to get a grasp of the event and do a few things.
Being a Sunday, there were no electrician available at the university, so the light was less than perfect. Not a problem for the hackers but a challenge for the photographer.
The event surpassed in size the previous year, with an increase from 118 to to 139 participants (preliminary data). Also, compared with the previous year, the Fedora presence increased: thanks to Iosif who sent me a package just in time, I had enough Fedora 19 DVDs to cover the event and some handy stickers. Gabriel also joined, armed with a bunch of Fedora 18 DVDs and more swag he saved from a past event this winter. And actually there were some people installing Fedora! Looking at the numbers some changes are noticeable: after the last years most of the installs were Ubuntu, closely followed by Debian, this year the situation is dramatically different: no Debian install registered, the most installs are MINT with Ubuntu in a distant second place.
There are some possible explanations:

• the Ubuntu install discs arrived 1 hour late, so early in the morning the girl at the registration desk had to reply to Unbuntu inquiries: "don't you want Mint instead? it comes in both 32 and 64 bit versions";
• the computers in the university lab moved from Ubuntu to Mint to get away from Unity;
• Mint was available on USB sticks, which AFAIK were for the students to keep, while the other distros were available on optical media (also for the students to keep).

From my point of view, there is also noticeable the Fedora increase: from zero to 8 students this year. Worth mentioning, almost all of them happened early in the morning (in the first hour).

Enjoy below a few more pictures from the install fest:

Ready for carving?

Today I felt like drawing some clipart images, now is the time to share

PS: this post may not display correctly on bad browsers

Nostalgia

Yesterday evening I was at the university for a meeting when I noticed in a window a HC 85 computer, which was in the 80'ies a Romanian clone of the popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum (at the time, it was state of the art for the local IT industry along with the PDP-11 clones). For me, it was nostalgia: one of its brothers was the first computer I ever put my hands on (as a high school student), it was the first computer I programmed on, it was the first computer I dreamed making games for (in assembly language, no less).

Linux Install Fest in Politehnica

This Sunday, October 13, ROSEdu will organize in Universitatea Politehnica Bucharest its yearly Linux Install Fest, the biggest event of such type I am aware of in the country (last year there were 118 participants). Its main purpose is to help first year CS university students putting a Linux install on their systems, but LIF is open to everyone. So if you have troubles with your Linux install, no matter if your machine is a laptop or a desktop, Politehnica is the place to be this Sunday.

Myself, I will try to get there for at least a couple of hours, even if I know from the experience the interest on Fedora and Fedora-based systems is low around there.