Planet Nicu

The expression "back in the trenches" is usually used as a metaphor for going back to work on something... this time I use it literally, just like the digging ditches:

Returning from FOSDEM (more posting about FOSDEM is in the queue), where the weather in Brussels was not bad at all, I found Bucharest waiting me with a big surprise, when arriving home the snow was so big, it was impossible for me to open the gate, I had to take it out from its joints:

My house is positioned in such a way that it provide shelter against Crivăț, the mighty wind from the Nort-East (from Russia, Siberia, from where most of the nasties come), so during a snowstorm like that, the blizzard will blow the snow from the open areas and pile it where its sheltered (like in front of my house):

The snow had formed a crest with the peak at about 80cm exactly in front of the door and where I have to dig trails, I used a ruler to measure it:

My dog was the happiest to see me back, she was alone for those few days (with a big reserve of food) but she didn't like at all to be isolated by snow like that. I was a liberator!

Now in Bucharest is -5°C and snowing slowly...

So my soul is sold for a couple of beers, I have no shame. And because people waited so long. this one is bigger, has more panels and more people.

Now back to the planning for today's beers...

I am in a hurry, preparing a surprise, struggling with bad connectivity, so won't talk a lot abut the photos from the FOSDEM -1 day (didn't made even a good selection before publishing). but it was good: first I joined the gang for a good talk about ambassadors (and of course some beer)

Then we got somewhere to eat and had some nice crêpes (and some of us had some beers)

After which we moved to the traditional beer event

Where obviously everybody had plenty of beer:

If you follow my photography blog, you already know that, I am a perv and if there are any panties in the visual reach, I will shot them, or at least try to... So the last week-end, I was surrounded not only by beautiful cleavages but also by panties... here are some:



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As a "respectable" photographer I naturally enjoy seeing a beautiful cleavage, be it on street or at a fashion show, so the past week-end at Expo Mariaj I couldn't stop admiring the abundance and a famous Seinfeld quote came to mind "... And by the way...they're real, and they're spectacular." Can't vouch for the "real" party, as unfortunately I didn't get the opportunity to touch them, but "spectacular" indeed they were.



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I learned about the Public Domain Manifesto from Bogdan's blog and as soon as I read it I found it awesome and signed.

As skeptical as I am about such a document being ever officially accepted (there are so many interests and such powerful lobbyists...) I couldn't stop promoting it further. The Open Clip Art Library is an excellent use case for PD, the manifesto is all about we are doing there. I' also trying to talk one of the ambassadors (I am not one of them) into signing it on behalf of our Romanian Fedora community.

Here is the preamble of the manifesto:

"Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a Public Domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights. The Public Domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The Public Domain is the place we quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture."(James Boyle, The Public Domain, p.40f, 2008)

Its general principles:

1. The Public Domain is the rule, copyright protection is the exception.
2. Copyright protection should last only as long as necessary to achieve a reasonable compromise between protecting and rewarding the author for his intellectual labour and safeguarding the public interest in the dissemination of culture and knowledge.
3. What is in the Public Domain must remain in the Public Domain.
4. The lawful user of a digital copy of a Public Domain work should be free to (re-)use, copy and modify such work.
5. Contracts or technical protection measures that restrict access to and re-use of Public Domain works must not be enforced.

And general recommendations:

1. The term of copyright protection should be reduced.
2. Any change to the scope of copyright protection (including any new definition of protectable subject-matter or expansion of exclusive rights) needs to take into account the effects on the Public Domain.
3. When material is deemed to fall in the structural Public Domain in its country of origin, the material should be recognized as part of the structural Public Domain in all other countries of the world.
4. Any false or misleading attempt to misappropriate Public Domain material must be legally punished.
5. No other intellectual property right must be used to reconstitute exclusivity over Public Domain material.
6. There must be a practical and effective path to make available 'orphan works' and published works that are no longer commercially available (such as out-of-print works) for re-use by society.
7. Cultural heritage institutions should take upon themselves a special role in the effective labeling and preserving of Public Domain works.
8. There must be no legal obstacles that prevent the voluntary sharing of works or the dedication of works to the Public Domain.
9. Personal non-commercial uses of protected works must generally be made possible, for which alternative modes of remuneration for the author must be explored.

If I read this photo correctly, her eyes say she was fully aware what shot I was trying to take, but her smile say she has no problem with that! Thank you very much :D Want to see a video with her singing?



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Before selecting the photos into relevant categories and adding witty comments, I will follow the teaser with a short video:



Again, I am sorry for the music... that was happening on the floor. And I, once again, lost my last hope into humanity, seeing how those beautiful women are happy with that crappy music...

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I am sitting on a ton of photos from the past weekend at the Expo Mariaj fair in Bucharest and I am swamped with work and having very little time to allocate to photo sorting and publishing. To make the wait more interesting, here is a sneak preview, the very first thing I photographed on the grounds. Isn't great? And she was here before make-up and such...



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The price of popularity: your blog gives up with 'bandwidth exceeded' (yeah, cheap shared hosting). This just happened to our colleague who apparently became too popular, not sure if because of her slow but continuously growing photography project, the exploding (in the Spanish speaking community) series of GIMP video tutorials or due to a couple of incredibly well received articles about a crappy and cheap smartphone.

Well, the useful content can still be reached: photos on flicker, videos on blip.tv: is this an argument for using proprietary sharing platforms or just for a better hosting? If you know who I am talking about, you must know already hot to get to the content.

Nevermind, popularity is good. Or bad. Or good.

In what I presume to be this season's last winter photoshot I noticed how big and beautiful snowflakes were falling on my camera, it was cold enough they didn't melt. As you can't take photos of something sitting on the body of your camera, I chased a few, and tried to shot them from my hand.

The photo is not perfect, as I held the snowflake in the left hand, the camera with the lenses extended to the max in the right hand, in freezing cold and snow over the ankles:

Do you know the snowflakes are supposed to be unique, not two identical ones? Each one will have its own imperfections and be distinct. You know, just like people, only the snowflakes are so many more and so ephemeral...

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Snowbound in the park I found this image lovely:



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Winter strikes back just when I though all is over: a lot of snow and so cold that even the stones are breaking (this morning the thermometer was showing -16°C, supposedly over night it was even colder). So I planned to take advantage of the winter while is still possible, with a week-end photoshot, no matter the cold.

Saturday it was a beautiful snow, with large and slow snowflakes and lacking the possibility to for a photoshot in a traditional countryside, I though the Village Museum from Herastrau Park is the best next replacement, the closest fake. Unfortunately, the Museum was close, dunno if it is closed all winter long or I was just unlucky, so all I could take was a few shots from across the lake:

There are also a few other park decorations with a rustic feel:

And of course, the ducks (I think they are heroes for bathing in that water):

And there were also some very happy (and fat) small birds:

I found impressive the real winter tree decorations:

And found funny this statue (is Venus? Diana? not sure, but this statue is in the park for as long as I remember), effectively swimming in snow, it made me think about how old farts (like me) are saying: in my time, to do X we had to walk Y miles uphill in the snow

When going home, under the Arcul de Triumf I saw those poor soldiers in festive uniforms, over the week-end was the Union Day, so they had to be part of some ceremonies:


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Nokia N900 looks like the most awesome phone you can buy from a FLOSS point of view, but I wasn't impressed so far from what I read about it, the phone is priced way over my price range and is too big for my pockets (I don't need full keyboards and so). However, after reading a blog post about running GIMP on the N900, my views changed a bit, now I would like such a device (it would not be far fetched to say I crave for one), but the price is still to big. Make the price 2/3 and I'll get one (make it half the price, and the money got out of my pocket a couple of hour ago :D)

Speaking of phones, my current one is a Nokia from the S40 line and is almost 4 years old, it barely hold ans is in need for a replacement. Replacement with what? Not sure, but I wish with something running Linux... I thought about something with Android, there are some entry-level devices which can become affordable if you hunt for a good deal/supplier, but except Nexus One all the Android devices are tied with old versions of the operating system, you can't install the latest upstream software, and that's uncool and not geeky. Nexus One is not available and in the same price range with N900. And it can't run GIMP anyway :D

I see everyone's talking about YouTube experimenting with serving video with HTML5 and the justified outcry for not using Ogg Theora, which is a shame. Supposedly the video quality is bad, but since they keep away Firefox, Ephiphany (with WebKit) and Seamonkey, I can't look there. Not much missing.

Almost at the same time, Vimeo is doing the same thing: HTML5 but not Ogg Theora, but I don't really care, I think I can count the times I used Vimeo on my fingers. Probably without taking my shoes off.

In the meantime, I still struggle with blip.tv, which I use for sharing videos from the RLUG meet, they are the opposite, some Ogg Theora support but not HTML5. I complained the other day about conversion failures, tried to provide .flv versions manually, but it didn't work. And the reply from support was shameful enough (I noted I used the site specifically for Ogg Theora) that is deserves to be shown in public:

"We're big fans of open source and Ogg, however it can sometimes be difficult for us to transcode to Flash. You may want to try uploading a Quicktime or Windows Media version as your Source/Master with your Ogg Theora version as a secondary format."

...thanks for nothing!

As in Friday evening here, I will end in a funny note: do you know who was the main victim of my work on video editing and transcoding? My dog! Having to stay late at computer to supervise the CPU intensive activity and long timed operation, I had to leave the computer very late, after the pet food store closed so my dog had to eat cat food for a couple of days :D
Meowwww....

After Cristoph commented on the yesterday's post about my likes and dislikes with LXDE I learned a lot of my complaints are going to be solved in the upcoming version of PCManFM, that's nice to hear and it looks like it will be worth spending a day with it again with Fedora 13.

I imagine some people think my complaints are minor, just cosmetic stuff: well, they may be, but this is the thing making you more or less productive. If you learn the content of a file from its desktop thumbnail, then you can open it right away, not waste time trying to discover its content. The same about placement of files or launchers on the desktop or panel: you are a lot more productive when you know where to click and don't have to hunt. An ideal desktop is supposed to not stand in the way, it should make you easier to work with your applications and get the work done (bad news for the desktop developers: people are using the desktop for the applications, not for its desktop environment), one that for example allows to witch two open windows with one click of the mouse, not 3 clicks and 2 animations (oh, I am still traumatized by the GNOME Shell experience).

But enough with the ranting, after a day with LXDE, it was the time for a day with another alternative desktop, Xfce. My day was quite busy, full of video transcoding and publishing but I still managed to do it with a somewhat unfamiliar desktop.

The install i just as simple:

yum groupinstall xfce-desktop

It weighted about 14MB, small enough (again, I already had a full GTK+ stack from my GNOME install), but after that I found and installed from the repository a number of other useful applications and plugins, for a better experience.

Things to like:

• ages ago I briefly used CDE, not enough to grow fond of it, but is not to customize Xfce to look like something you are used to
• mature, having a lot of applications, plugins and settings but still fast enough
• no-nonsense, a familiar environment
• built-it "Open In Terminal" for the current directory, I need plugins for this with GNOME

The dislikes:

• the same lack of integrated gvfs, making hard the work with remote file systems, but a bit of googling reveals a new version of Thunar is out and has the feature, so just like LXDE is a desktop to revisit for Fedora 13
• it also suffers in customizing the panels, to put a launcher exactly where you want, you have to fiddle a lot with spacers
• not only not showing the content in the file thumbnails on screen, but also very ugly, opaque, background for icon captions

The review is quite frugal as my day was busy, but as a conclusion: would I use it instead of GNOME 2.x? No. Would I use it instead of GNOME Shell? I am tempted to.

After a couple of days with the CPU hot from editing and transcoding, I managed to put online the videos from the RLUG meets in December and January. With advice from tatica I used blip.tv for publishing and everything is nice available as a RSS feed: RLUG videos.

There are good reasons to use blip.tv for publishing FLOSS videos:

• they accept and serve Ogg Theora files (not using HTML5, but nobody is perfect)
• they allow everyone to download the original video (Theora or whatever)
• using the 'Download' button you can view the Theora video directly in your browser
• the content is published also as an RSS feed (with direct links to the files)
• they know about Creative Commons licenses and let you use them
• there is not a 10 minutes limit, like on YouTube
• being able to watch the Theora original, the video quality is unbeatable

Still, I found a couple of problems:

• you can upload either with a desktop client (written in Java) or with FTP, but both of them have a file limit of 1GB (YouTube is 2GB currently)
• every time I uploaded a large Theora file (3 times so far, ~25, ~45 and ~50 minutes) it took too long, timed out and failed (no problem with videos up to 10 minutes long). With an unpaid account, you have only one conversion attempt allowed.

Go and watch the videos (they are all in Romanian language) and if you don't have the bandwidth, maybe skip for the time being the 2 out of 10 with large size, hope my support ticket will get a better reply than "buy a pro account, it will work with that".

The LXDE project noticed its Romanian translation is pretty much dead in the water and considered dropping it along with a few other unmaintained translation, in a clean-up effort. rsandu ignited the alarm and in an effort spearheaded by ajoian and alexxed, all the strings got translated in less than 2 days, now there is still needed a validation from alexxed and upstream submission. It was awesome to see so many people lending a hand, including a couple of people at their first translation contribution (trizen, you kick ass!).

All this community effort was impressive and motivated me to an experiment: spend an entire day day with LXDE and evaluate what I like and dislike about it, evaluate how I could deal with it as the primary desktop. Is not my first experience with it, I toyed with LXDE in the past, but usually after 10 minutes I went back to the comfort of a desktop I am used to, but beyond the community enthusiasm, it was a long reaching study, if something goes wrong in the GNOME land, is useful for me to know what the alternatives are.

Installing is fast and easy, just:

yum groupinstall lxde-desktop

For me it was a 5 MB download (all the GTK+ dependencies were already in place) and after that everything was good to go.

What I like about it:

• the desktop is small and fast. Really fast
• it includes a few basic applications, which are also small and fast: image viewer, text editor and so on
• with a bit of customization, it was not hard to bring it to a familiar 2-panels layout
• it has in place all the known paradigms: panels, buttons, menus. It is not distrupting

Of course, there were a number of things I didn't like:

• is painful to use a file manager without gvfs, I need to transfer files over ssh/scp on a daily basis
• customizing the LXDE panels is hard and limited
• the size of fonts and icons is ugly and hard to adjust
• no drag & drop adding shotcuts to the panel
• icons on the desktop are always auto-arranged, they move all the time and you can't place them where you want
• no integrated screen capture with the PrintScreen, you have to use external applications

I can see me using LXDE as my main desktop? Maybe on one of those underpowered ARM tablets and smartbooks... but if the computer does have the power to run my apps (I would NOT pay money for a computer unable to run GIMP and Inkscape), then it should be pretty much able to run also a normal GNOME desktop.

From an usability and customizability point of view I find it much behind a normal GNOME 2.X setup, but compared with GNOME Shell (as previewed in Fedora 12) it would be less of a productivity drop and a lot less annoying. However, in the case worst nightmares come true, LXDE may not be the best exist choice. Will spend another day sometime with Xfce and report the findings.

Prezentare de la Intilnirea RLUG din Ianuarie 2010: Notiuni de design, palete de culori cu Agave - p

A week ago when the weather was warm and nice and I thought the winter is gone for good I noticed in my garden some snowdrops (ghiocei) preparing to blossom and, as cliché as it is, I wanted to take a photo, as the message is strong, they are the first flowers of the year, the triumph of live over death, spring over winter.

With a full time work, at 7:30 in the morning when I leave home is not enough light and at 19-19:30 in the evening when I get back, it it already pitch black for a couple of hours already... yeah, that's one of the ugliest parts of the winter, so my only chance was to wait for the week-end, hoping also for a ray of light, to make the photos more lively.

Fast forward to Saturday: the sky was cloudy, dark and depressing, not the atmosphere I wanted to illustrate the triumph of spring... so postponed one more day. Sunday morning, no luck either: the same dark, heavy clouds, the same depressing atmosphere. However, the ground was covered with some icy dust, a lame snow attempt, so I got the camera out for some photos, even if the story was different than the plan in my head. It still was a good story, about the winter who does not give-up easily:

Much to my surprise, today (Monday) morning when I opened the door was hit with a huge surprise: everything was white, a full winter is back. Of course my snowdrop flowers were covered fully in snow and of course it was too early in the morning, to dark to take a contrasting photos about how winter has won one more battle.

Now waiting for the next week-end, wondering which surprise will bring, what story will be told, what photos to be taken...

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We had yesterday the first edition for this year of the RLUG meet (Întâlnirea RLUG) and I pretty much failed as a photographer: expecting to take only a few shots (they look pretty much the same as one meeting to another) I skipped checking the battery level in my camera, so with the last charge being last year (for the New Year's Eve photoshot)it was obviously depleted, so my only option was to resort to the video camera, which is not suited for the task for a few crappy shots.

For the video part, just like the last time I recorded all the presentations, but as we are still debating (and not agreeing) about who will do the editing (nobody stepped up for a boring task), which app will be used (the options for Linux video editing are not stellar), what will be shown (some are happy with unedited video, others want aggressive editing) or where to post (even here we are not sure), I went forward and published only a video of my own presentation (in Romanian, about color theory, palettes and Agave). The video is not great, exposure is bad, but this happen when you are the performer and cameraman at the same time and editing was made with Kdenlive, the tool I settled on after testing all the options from repositories usable with Fedora.

I oppose censorship as strong as I can, I consider it to be evil and I enjoy a lot post on various Planets about the personal live of the people behind the code, however seeing something like this is embarrassing... making you think maybe RMS was not entirely wrong.

note: the button above links to microsoft.com

Today I needed a drawing of a nerd, so fired MyPaint (currently my favorite app for such things), plugged in the tabled and did it. Just a bit of polishing with GIMP after the fact and here is my n...

I often see Romanians priding of our country because the women are beautiful here. I really don't see why I would pride with that, if Geta from Floor 3 is gorgeous, that does not make me better, smarter of more handsome. Even if I somehow get to bang her, that does not make me better, smarter of more handsome. Maybe just lucky for that particular time and space.

I am also highly unsure about this claim, about the Romanian women being that beautiful... I saw a lot of them being ugly or average. Maybe the percentage of above-average ones is a bit over some other countries, but (and I speak now from a photographer perspective) the percentage of top-of-the line, breath-taking, knocking-you-off, stunning beauties is not something I find impressive.

However, I just stumbled on a site with an top 15 of countries with the hottest women and Romania is listed among those. I'm not sure if I should dismiss this for listing Andreea Răducan as the country's highlight or for including USA and UK in the top. I just note one of the criteria for inclusion in the top "the girls are said to love American men" (American men, is not you but your money.

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I noticed today a cool Free Art project: OpenGameArt.org is a large collection of freely licensed resources (graphics, 3D models and audio) for game development, both original creation and contribution from existing FLOSS games. It looks like fun to me:

I guess I should look if I have some stuff suitable for it...

In addition to the photos from the New Year's Eve parties and fireworks I also recorded vidos. Unfortunately blip.tv failed with the conversion so the entire show is available in a ~970MB .OGV (Ogg Theora) and the only thing I can offer is a low-quality cut version (09:50 minutes long) on YouTube.



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I pretty much like Kushal's new idea for a best photo of the year meme, but even after a long process of deciding which one I like the best, the result is that it (or even the top 5, maybe also the top 10, judging by any objective factor, like number of views, comments, positive feedback) is not suitable for aggregation on Planet (it would bring me again a spike in traffic, comments, pagerank, adsense money). So instead of that, I could probably post some sakura blossom (that is really a special time of the year) or maybe some fruity madness (a photomanip of that is still my desktop background).

Wasn't aware Blue Moon actually is a rare astronomical phenomenon, learned about it on the evening of 31 December on the news, just before going out to shot the fireworks. But as I didn't care for most of their music, I noticed the moon (fortunately, the rain didn't last long) and tried to "capture" it... still not happy with what I got using my lens (zoomed at 300mm), handheld and manual exposure. And totally missed the partial eclipse which happened the same night. So I wonder if someone else in the community got a better shot.

A short lived tradition (it was the second iteration), but is still a tradition, it was again the time of the year to shoot New Year's Eve concerts and fireworks. Unlike the last year, when my choice was to boycott a communist mayor ans stay in Piața Revoluției, this year I headed to the main event, in Piața Constituției.

However, I still passed trough Piața Revoluției, with a party organised by Pro TV and MTV, which was flooded with people wearing blue and red fedoras (I covered more about this elsewhere).

One thing to appreciate is those people know hot to make a show, even if they co bad in the opposite direction with manele:

After spending about half an hour there, I moved to Piața Constituției:

There it was a varied audience:

Listening to music

And having tons of fun

I appreciated the "evil" side

And rocked a bit

And then participated in the countdown

And enjoyed the show, with lasers

And fireworks

And lasers

And fireworks

And fire

And lasers again

And fireworks

Into the huge spectacle

All the time I was as busy as I could: in the right hand holding (and shooting with) the dSLR, and with the left hand recording video:

One over another, it was a positive experience.

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This time I tried again to spend the New Year's Eve on the street with my cameras, where I took a few photos and recorded a few videos (still not ready to be posted, a big video upload is ongoing, they will probably be published only on my photoblog, to keep the noise down). While my main target was the large party in the Constitution Square, I passed by Revolution Square, where they had a smaller party organised by Pro TV/MTV.

I don't know what Google image search the organisers did, but they ended finding fedoras, in both red and blue, to the event looked like secretly sponsored by a Red Hat and Fedora joint:

The square was effectively flooded by people wearing those freely distributed hats:

However, apparently the red fedoras were in a somewhat larger number:

And some people were wearing both type of hats, just like in the real life:

In the middle of the crowd I couldn't plan the photos, so I had to do snapshots, trying to capture as much as possible and select later, so happened with this couple, where I can't decide which photo I like better: in the second one their hats are clearly visible and the image is framed well, but in the first one you can see the joy, the faces, the relation:

There is one photo I like the most from the set, it shows how the aurolacs are those with the blue hats (read it as you like, FEdora is for huffers, huffers use Fedora, Fedora will get you high...)

PS: unfortunately, I didn't get hold of any of those hats...

Beyond being totally creepy (oh, those empty eyes!) as a statue and beyond the need for some kids to get a life, I kind of admire the dedication of building this unusual snowman, the snowcarnation of Michael "the king of pop". Maybe I should take a detour to take another photo a few days later, it wad warm and rainy, he should look disfigured and even creepier.



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Playing the Pan flute is pretty much a highlight of the local folklore (you know, titans like Zamfir) so when you encounter a Christmas concert in the park, even if the singer is pretty much a kid, what she's playing is not bad at all (there is also a video with her solo play of O, brad frumos/O Tannenbaum).



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Holidays starting in 3, 2, 1... you don't want me blowing kisses, so a helpful Santa helper will help:

KTHXBAI

Yesterday, 22 December 2009 it was the 20 years anniversary of what we like to call the "revolution", the fall of the communist dictatorship in Romania, which was violent: over 1000 people died, some fighting for freedom, some on duty, some by accident and some due to stupidity.

The celebration was lame and uneventful, proving once again we are ready to easily trade the freedom for a bit or promised "tranquillity": a solemn session on the parliament where nobody was interested (they have those every year), some documentaries and talk shows on TV and that was about all.

Passing trough the city center, I noticed something that fired my interest: in the passage below Piața Universității (the square where many people died - tanks, guns - it much worse than Tienanmen) they had a photo gallery, open for all the people walking: photos from the last days of the dictatorship, from the revolution days and from the aftermath.

On one hand, I was jealous as a photographer, those are times when you can capture the reality and even a snapshot can become "gold" from an artistic point of view. On the other hand, people died and you don't want people to die only to have subjects for your photos.



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I had the laugh of the day (of the week?) when bmbogdan showed me this:

I found it very funny and ironic when you take your current avatar/hackergotchi, delete the Fedora logo from his T-shirt, submit the SVG as Public Domain to the Open Clip Art Library for everyone to use it freely and it ends as an illustration to an article about photo managers in Ubuntu. That's sharing! Lets all hold hands and sing "Kumbaya".

Note: the guy has NOT a happy face, maybe because of the GIMP removal? (he definitely looks like a pro)

You surely know Santa, that big, fat, old bearded guy, who is useless by himself, he can't do stuff without his helpers. So I present you, close and personal, the Santa's helpers:


Well, were you nice boys or will get this wear some coal again?

Note: I pretty much messed-up this photoshot, it was so clod, my fingers almost frozen so I didn't concentrated well enough for the best exposure... too bad, the girls deserved better.

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With this snow all over us and no handy access to some beautiful landscape out of the city, I decided for a week-end walk in the park, trying to capture the moment:

The park where I used to shot candids all summer long, even my favorite bridge, everything was empty and desolated

Very few chicks around, and not of that kind:

Still, some people were having fun:

I also visited the cathedral which impressed me in the autumn colors, but obviously it was changed:

In the place where squirrels used to play (they probably hibernate by now) there was a different fauna, somebody got a pony:

And transportation was assured by their full-grown versions:

Of course there was animation, with reindeers and elves (unfortunately, not my favourite type of elf):

...and I stand corrected, there were some chicks:

When the night come, the colorful lights were fired:

Even the fake reindeers:

And a mighty Christmas tree:

Well, is cold enough, a close-up with the tree and I can go home:


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The Christmas lights are lame this year, but is cold and the snow abundant, so a combination of the two is interesting:



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A couple of days ago Bucharest was assaulted by the first real snow of this winter and it was beautiful, like in fairy tales, with large and thick snowflakes and a bit of wind to animate them. Frustrating to be trapped in the city, at work and not free of a field for beautiful, expressive shooting of the season. Now is freezing cold...



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Back in the hot and sunny winter days I used to walk around the parks and take photos of people skating (roller skating, that's is). Now in cold winter days, what I am supposed to to? Right! Walk around the parks and take photos of people skating (ice skating, of course). And this is not hard to to, since there are quite a few skating places in the city.



Nice enough, right? But now the question is, what you like better, summer or winter?

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This week-end happened a very ambitious project: the first edition of Blug*OS*Con, București Linux users group Open Source Conference, which proved to be some very large to fill by such a new project.

Obviously, I participated on behalf of the local Fedora community with a short presentation about Fedora in general and Fedora 12 in particular, which was somewhat rushed, as I find very hard to covert this topic in only 15 minutes (I have a raw video of my presentation, trying to upload it somewhere). With the people from SbLUG missing I was invited to also cover a track about graphics, but ultimately the schedule slipped with delays and it was skipped, so I got home earlier.

It was probably not the best idea to keep the conference is such a large room, if you don't gather many people, better keep it in a smaller space. And I am not sure the booths in the hall were a good idea either, they had very little content and traffic. Of course, the bad weather didn't help, cold and snow keeping people in their house in such a unwelcoming Sunday.

Of course I used the opportunity to take as many photos as I could (some are nice) but I also played with video recording, making a very amateurish videocast covering the first half of the event.

As this is the plan to create a monthly tradition with Întălnirile RLUG (RLUG meets) we had yesterday the December edition and it was, in my opinion, de best so far (well, being the second edition, that wasn't hard...)

We had a long track with Lucian talking about openSUSE, then after a break, a session of lightning talks (5 minutes long): Ovidiu sharing his experience about deploying Linux (Ubuntu) to non-technical users in his company, Adrian talking about improving Apache security with various modules, dserban presenting about Reverse VNC, cmatei speaking about kexec and me demoing some nifty graphic tablet uses in Fedora. At the end, rpetre informed us about a better way to buy O'Reilly books.

Of course I took a lot of photos:

Taking advantage of my new toy I also recorded the presentation as video, but for the moment we are sitting on the raw footage and debating what to do (I argue about putting it online as-is/roughly edited, everybody else is opting for heavily edited, cut and polished versions), which tools to use (that's hard) and who to do the job. Well, I have no shame and don't care about damaging my public image, so a video with my talk is already up.

Playing with my new video camera toy, I try to transcode all the clips from h.264/AAC .MOV to Theora using ffmpeg2theora with its default settings, however I find the size of the resulting file unpredictable: my first clip was filmed inside and was very short, so after the transcode the file size shrinked from ~24MB to 3MB. Excited by this, I tried the same transcoding with a large clip, filmed outside but much to my disappointment, the result was an expansion from ~421MB to ~570MB. Finally, a video of the fish tank shrinked from ~118MB to ~62MB. I can't see any pattern here, what I am supposed to to when uploading the next clip to something like YouTube? (I want the shortest upload time)

I complained a few days ago about our incompetent city mayor and the late firing-up of the city lights for Christmas, the city center is a major disappointment: for the first time they are using exactly the same lights as the last year, only fewer (some were probably broken).

Something new and positive wad the Cismigiu Park, in addition to the skating area they have a big tree, a fair and lights:


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Suddenly, it seems the Kiseleff Parc became fashionable this year (I guess is close to the city mayor's house or something like that) so a big Christmas Fair is held here for the first time. And it was a first time for me, when I went into shooting mode with my new pocket video camera (is my first, so forget the amateurish style, it was a learning experience).



Of course I also used the DSLR, taking a fer snapshots:



Not that is a Romanian Christmas: plenty of food (pork), plenty of drinks (wine and țuică), lot of people.

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I was disappointed by the city lights for the holidays this year: is the first time when they reuse the lights for the previous years and they are fewer (naturally, since they are fragile and some broke), but after Sin posted a set of noisy photos (huge ISO, handheld camera), here are a few of my last weekend:

I found compelling the image quality/camera price when I saw Mo recent awesome 5 Fun things in Fedora 12 video and considering some opportunities to record useful stuff in the near future, is spite of the lackluster editing FLOSS tools, I bought one too. Yay! me haz a new toy! (a Kodak Zi8 Pocket Video Camera)

Well, the firmware in the camera was quite old (1.03, versus the current 1.06), so I proceeded to a firmware upgrade. Here is the story:

First, go to the manufacturer's website. It will identify the operating system (sort of, Unix, instead of Linux) and lie about not having any update for you:

If the site lies to me, then I can lie to it too, so I pretend I am using Windows XP. Suddenly, a download is available, grab it:

The download is an .exe, but you don't need to use Wine, Nautilus is clever about that, detects a ZIP self-extractor and open it with File Roller. Copy the files on the memory card:

Then read the steps intended for Windows:

Put the card containing the firmware update files back in the camera and fire it up. When asked, confirm the update:

Now all is well, the device is up to date with the internal software:

Delete the files form the card, they are not needed any more and go on with your life, it was another happy day far from Windows. Find something interesting to film... more than you just goofing around with your new tow.

Note: for those reading this post about internal Romanian politics in a FLOSS aggregator, please forgive me and skip it. I write such type of stuff less then once in a year (hopefully) and is not worth a special feed.

Am refuzat sa ma duc la vot in primul tur al alegerilor prezidentiale de anul asta, convins fiind ca orice candidat as vota, voi regreta mai tirziu. De asemenea, am incercat sa ignor pe cit am putut fenomenul mediatic generat de alegeri (ei bine, mergind pe strada sau asteptind RATB-ul nu m-am putut abtine sa nu studiez din punct de vedere tehnic, al fotografului, imaginile de pe afise, dar cam asta a fost tot).

Si cu toate astea am ajuns sa fiu agasat (mai comuti din cind in cind televizorul pe un canal se stiri pentru ca acolo e afisata ora exacta si e mai rapid decit un Alt+Tab dintr-un joc care se incarca cam greu) de campania furibunda impotriva unuia dintre candidati, campanie care ii are de multe ori campioni pe niste indivizi pe care nu numai ca nu dau doi bani, dar ii consider nocivi. Si vazind atita disperare din partea mafiotilor si comunistilor pentru a il schimba, mi-am zis ca omul ala s-ar putea sa faca ceva bine daca ii deranjeaza atit de mult. Cred ca in turul doi ma duc la vot, pentru a alege raul cel mai mic.

Am mai auzit din partea unor oameni obisnuiti argumentul pentru care voteaza intr-un anume fel: vor mai putine scandaluri si mai multa liniste. Eu cred ca e de preferam prea mult scandal fata de prea multa liniste: arata ca exista libertate, iar libertatea mi se pare esentiala. Imi amintesc foarte cauza pentru care am trecut prin ce am trecut in anii '90 si pentru care sintem acum la coada lumii civilizate, in 1990 am ales (nu eu, ca nu aveam drept de vot) pe cineva al carui slogan era "un presedinte pentru linistea noastra".

Update: citat dintr-un spam primit de la candidatul comunist (prin intermediul unei firme americane):

Dupa cum afirma si Presedintele nostru de Onoare, domnul Ion Iliescu, imi doresc ca acest mandat sa fie unul al linistii, al impacarii tuturor oamenilor din tara noastra, a adevaratului consens care sa-i uneasca pe Romani in normalitate.

1990 este all over again! Scary.

Failing to shoot the Christmas city lights, I had the opportunity to stumble upon another interesting thing: people in the street, protesting about the possible communist restoration in the upcoming presidential elections, against the censorship and manipulation in mass-media and fighting for freedom and future. Unfortunately I wasn't prepared at all, had with me only the camera with normal (not fast) lenses, on-camera (not external) flash, no tripod, nothing. But bad photos are better than no photos...



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Knowing the old tradition of having the Christmas lights to be started in the city for the December 1st, I planned a shooting expedition in that evening, with the tripod, cable release and everything, but after freezing in the morning at the military parade, I didn't feel like it, and postponed for a later day. Next day I felt bad about losing an opportunity, so after work did a short walk in the city with only the camera, no additional gear: surprise! the lights were still off, thanks to our incompetent city mayor, so my original decision wasn't that bad.

At least the failure was not epic: I found a boulevard with some lights (not the city center, just a more civilised district with probably a better mayor) and, and this will be cubject of another post, people in the street protesting about the possible communist restoration in the upcoming presidential elections.



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What a bummer! After a couple of sunny weeks the morning of the national day, with its traditional military parade, was cloudy and misty. Bad for photography, bad for the photographer, so the photos are not much better than last year, in yet another cold, cloudy and misty winter morning. Click to enlarge.



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Much to my disappointment, among for the naming criteria for Fedora 13, we did NOT have "it must not be a ruler or religious figure" so a lot of obscure kings or emperors were advanced, but a queen is much better than that, more so when we are talking about a queen of the fairies. So my vote for the F13 codename was Gloriana.

Have you voted yet? If not, then go now and obey your queen!

From the "posted elsewhere" category, with a full HOWTO of the process on my other blog. Enjoy.



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A lot of people in the community are blogging about food making, Mo has a dedicated blog for that, but she's a slacker and don't keep it updated, tatica is a wimp, she tag the tasty stuff out of Planet, Charlie do awesome stuff but only on special occasions and so on. I guess is the time for me to join and since the winter is less than one week away, this is a season recipe: boiled wine (this is how we call it in Romania, you may call it mulled wine), something what will make a cold winter day pass easier. But I don't guarantee your programming skills will remain the same...

The pretty picture must say it all:

More in-depth:

1. First you need wine, preferably red. Obviously, the better the wine is, the final product will be. But don't overspend, we will add a lot of spices as the original purpose of this recipe was to make bad wine drinkable. The half-full empty mug in the picture is for illustrative purposes, use at least a full mug;
2. It must be sweetened, with either sugar or honey. I think honey is tastier. The quantity depends on your taste and how sweet the wine is;
3. Add cinnamon, preferably whole but if all you have is powder, that is good too. The cinnamon is the most important spice, you can make the recipe with only wine, sugar and cinnamon and it is still good;
4. An awesome touch is to add a quince fruit, sliced. It add some flavor to the drink, but most important, the taste of the fruit will be awesome. If you don't have quinces, apples will also work instead, they are related fruits (for exaple if you put quinces instead of apples in a pie, it will be equally good);
5. More spices, for better flavor: add a few clovers. I didn't have some in the house, but a few pieces of dried orange peel are also good;
6. Make the drink richer by adding some (more than in the photo above) raisins and walnuts;
7. Put everything in a kettle and let it over fire until it boils;
8. Stop the fire, let everything sit for a couple of minutes for the flavors to mix, but not longer so it is still hot and pour the result, wine and fruits, in a mug (ceramic, to keep the drink warm or glass like here to see the awesome colors);
9. Enjoy it while still hot.

Even if this is pretty much a non-event for us, Fedora users who can make use of the development builds since before F11 (half a year ago), it is still a milestone and the developers deserve congratulation for releasing at last the new and feature packed Inkscape 0.47 (could you endure the wait?).

I for one can't endure such waiting, so I am glad I use Fedora and be on the bleeding edge.

Yesterday due to some problems with the hosting provider, our local Fedora website went down completely. With a new hosting provided by RLUG/ProLinux and after some good late night hours spent by rpetre and ajoian, the website is up again and working better than ever.

Thanks guys, you absolutely rock!

Collage with autumn's beautiful colors

Playing with MyPaint and the Wacom tablet - my first "digital paint"

When Mo was enthusiastic about tablet improvements in Fedora 12, this made me dust-off my own device, but only a few days later when Kaio pointed to the small and awesome MyPaint I got hooked, liking a lot how it feels like real drawing/painting.

And my first drawing with it, my first digital painting ever, is something I think is not entirely bad:


Speaking about graphic applications, I found somewhat funny (and somewhat sad) to see how Ubuntu is again following Fedora's footsteps, this time by removing GIMP, with a similar line of reasoning ("we" wanted to free space on the Desktop Spin for more apps and ended with a 650MB .iso and 50MB is unused space). At least they got Slashdot headlines with this move and somewhat compensated our own negative PackageKit headlines (wait a bit to see the headlines when they will follow with the PackageKit thing too).

PS: thumbs-up for doing at last (post-release) the right thing with PackageKit in F12.

I know there is a famous quote saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity and one day after the release the news about PackageKit allowing unprivileged users to install packages without root permission made a larger number of [negative] comments than the release announcement itself on such sites as LWN or Slashdot, which I am not convinced is a good thing for publicity.

But surely I am glad I got to keep my public presentations about F12 in advance last week, so I didn't get laughed-out of the presentation for such a "feature", for which I wouldn't know how or care to defend.

Now I promise, my next post will be on a more positive note about the release!

Among the large number of new features in Fedora 12 there is Thusnelda, the new and improved version of the Theora encoder, which is supposed to bring either better-looking videos or smaller files at the same quality.

As the Theora videos I create are mostly screencasts made with gtk-RecordMyDesktop (image quality from Istanbul is unacceptably low), I have no idea how I can take advantage of any of those optimizations (probably one of them is active by default, without any control from me).

But what I can tell, is a decrease in quality: screencasts recorded now are jumpy, the image freezes for a bit, then jump forward, skipping some important frames. No ideea if this is caused by the aplication, libtheora, X.org, video drivers or something else.

Ideas?

Fedora 12, Beer, Today, 18:30, La Berbecu, Bucharest, reservation for "Adrian"... 'nuff said

Even if the release counter still says "Fedora 12 Constantine arriving in 2 days" (one day and a couple of hours by now), we already launched F12 in Romania, taking advantage by the invitations to speak at a couple of local events.

Now the photos are up in the gallery: those from the RLUG meet are a few and more serious, I was speaking and ave played more conservatively with my camera:

Then it was more relaxed to the Firefox anniversary, where the audience was formed mostly by students and we had Mozilla sponsored pizzas, beers and cake:

The slides are available for download in PDF.

It started today when Kushal told us in #fedora-art about his brand new Wacom tabled and how he want to learn to use it. Obviously, his first drawing was a simple house, drawn in the most traditional kindergarden style. Fun!

Not being able to resist, I cleaned the dust on my old tablet, plugged it in, and drawn my own naive house:

Then, we took the challenge to tatica, who was also on the channel, so she made one too - they should put they drawings online any time now...

Now here is the thing: we know Fedora 12 rocks on tablets, so we have a meme for harmless Friday fun, all of you in the community having a tablet, plug it in, start GIMP and draw a kindergarden style house and post it (at least Mo and Kaio are tablet owners, so I count os some follow-ups).

A couple of weeks ago I made noise about our series about Linux/FLOSS airing on the national television, but to much disappointment it was unintentional false news. Today I received apologies (which in turn I return to my mislead readers) and a confirmation: it will be diffused this week, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 17:00, in fact they will have two segments about us.

Too bad the date and time is totally inconvenient for me, struggling between day job and a Fedora 12 presentation. After the first failure I am ashamed to ask people to record the show again...

I know the parties are supposed to take place after the event, but this time we got the opportunity to talk about Fedora in general and the goodies in Fedora 12 in particular at a couple of events taking place a few days in advance of the general availability, but the distro is "gold", we are close enough, so will go for it, together with Adrian.

First, Thursday 12 November 2009 at 19:00 we are invited to keep a short (less than 30 minutes) presentation at the first RLUG meeting (this is supposed to become a tradition and I am glad we are one of the openers). Here the audience will be comprised of a highly experienced crowd, so I look forward to a challenging experience.

Then Saturday 14 November 2009 at 14:00, together with friends from the local openSUSE community, who also have a launch, we are guests at a larger Firefox 5 years anniversary, event sponsored by Mozilla. Here we will also have a short presentation and will take advantage of Alex's presence, who is a key contributors in both Fedora and Mozilla local communities.

Is still early for this, so this is not decided yet, but we may also have a beer meeting in the very release day (we geeks are immune to the AH1-N1 hysteria which conquered the city :D). More details about that to be announced at a later date.

A year ago I had a beautiful experience in a warm sunny weekend with the opportunity to take some great shots of bees and chrysanthemums in my garden. This year my garden is in a much worse shape (I totally suck as a gardener) but still a nice couple of days, some flowers and a few bees... and this look like the start of a tradition.



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I didn't turn Ubuntu overnight, I am the same blue zealot at the core, but I find nothing short of amazing those earthly warm tones of the autumn[*].

[*] I know some people not happy with their distro being brown and prefer Fedora only for its color (yeah, really!), but this is wrong, there are not "good" or "bad" colors, its about how are you using them, you can make bland or beautiful images with any color.

Quinces are one of the specific fruits of the autumn, even if their taste is not the best, they have a distinct and wonderful flavor. Maybe one of those days I will find the time to illustrate a recipe for preparing boiled (mulled) wine with quince... stay tuned.



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Remember my old friends and models, the squirrels from the Herastrau Park? I meet them again this week-end, when shooting the beautiful autumn



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Last week I was bummed about a lost opportunity for autumn photography, failed due to bad weather, being convinced it was the last opportunity for this year. Well, contrary to the weather forecast, the last week-end was nothing short of amazing: warm and sunny, exceeding my expectations, so I had to get out and do my stuff. Gladly.




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The running joke in our local community is that not officially being an Ambassador but doing a lot of Ambassador work I should become one, but I refuse to apply for the title - I guess this makes me a half-Ambassador :p Still, the meme is not limited to that, working also for users, so I can join in:

name: Nicu Buculei
nick: nicubunu
IRC channels: #fedora-art, #fedora-design, #fedora-ro
location: Bucharest, Romania



And trying to add to the meme, the most awesome thing I learned today about our community: one of the members of our local (Romanian) community as a day job as a violin player in the Bucharest Philharmonic. How cool is that? I love this diversity and looking forward at chatting and drinking beers.

This morning when going to work I somehow noticed (I usually don't look for such things) this small poster glued on the wall of a building close to my office (less than 50 meters away):

Noting out of the extraordinary, some small firm advertising for pet services, but what drew my attention was the drawing in the top-right corner with a dog head. It was looking familiar, as it is one of my drawings published at the Open Clip Art Library and it made my day!

I made it years ago, exercising original drawing made with the mouse, so the result is not great, but I submitted it to the library anyway, as I do with all my drawings which are not made for a specific project. And I found awesome how a little graphic contributed to an international project found its way back to a few meters away of me. Either the world is very small or what we are doing is really useful for the people.

Now to be honest, I can't say for sure if the image is taken from openclipart.org, from my own website, where the images are also available, or from one of the many other websites redistributing, grace to the PD dedication, the openclipart.org content. But this is irrelevant, the goal was achieved.

PS: is not wise to base your company logo on Public Domain clipart, but for very small companies this is not a real problem, they don't have real branding.