Planet Nicu

This car si so jam packed, to the full capacity that you wonder how it manages to resist. And good look with having more than two "passengers" looking in the same direction at any given time.


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In the land of the bubbly bubbles, there are a lot of soap bubbles floating in the air.


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A photographer life can be hard, he is a pro, must behave and don't do like the bozos (cocalari):

And he will receive his compensation, in the form of pretty eyes and beautiful smile:

But know what? Life is not always bad, when he go to the other end he will receive again the bonus of the eyes and the smile.


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Lot of reflecting surfaces all around, you have to have a self shoot like this, photographer at work.


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Still busy trying to get on top of the photos from 4tuning, but I feel like keeping the interest up with another preview that I'm sure will make plenty of guys coming back for updates:


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For a couple of days I am pondering about publishing this follow-up: on one hand I know some friends from the community would like it, on the other I think some other would think this is useless bragging. But in the end I did a sanity check with an external opinion. Remember those business cards I made for myself last week? I already started using them like this and they are requested like hot cakes:

However, the cards are asked before seeing the design, so probably having a drawing with a sad bearded guy with a sword is not the recipe for success, the size is.

I am swamped with photos from the just closed 4tuning auto show, have about 3.5 tons of photos to sort and process, so far I was able just to put out a small catalog and to start blogging with, from what I saw so far, the photo I like the most from the event:

Stay tuned (pun intended!), more to come...

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No, I wasn't that pissed and I am after nobody, just used the opportunity with the photo above to show my new toys tatica style. Thanks to a lot of wonderful people in the community and especially Rex who pointed the solution, my video editing problem is solved, I had to update the kdenlive package from rmpfusion updates testing (long story short, the problem was known, the patch was coming, just a bit delayed). Is late today so the videos will have to wait for the next week, but in the meantime people can get themselves busy with photos from the RLUG presentations.

Now that I am not pissed anymore, let me tell a story with Microsoft, which I found cute:

So far our LUG meetings were hosted by a company who was king enough to offer us a nice room in very affordable conditions (however, starting next month we will probably move in a more central and easily reachable location) and in the middle of our meeting we had a surprise visit from 3 people: the company manager and a couple of guests, a former manager in a major phone company and, the icing on the cake, the former general manager of Microsoft Romania and Microsoft South East Europe (also I believe the founder of Microsoft Romania) - they had a business meeting and then came to see the geeks, probably like at the Zoo :D

I found funny how the ex-Microsoftie found hard to understand how we are not managers in a boring business talk, but enthusiast people having great time together. I also found funny the question about our opinion on Windows 7 (rpetre's answer was spot on "for a Windows is OK") and the sales pitch for the Google Apps clone from Microsoft. In the end, all was good, we even got a round of beers "on the house" (from CG&GC, not from MS).

They are two of my new friends, the black and the silver (there is one more black, for "bullet time action) and I was deeply pissed, I think it shows:


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I am pissed. So pissed that my language will probably stronger than usual. I have work to do but I can't.

Yesterday was the March RLUG meet where I recorded videos of all presentations and I was supposed to start today editing, uploading and sharing them. Unfortunately, Kdenlive, the tool I settled on after extensive research refuse to cooperate: is broken when placing clips on the tracks. It must be the massive yum update I performed a couple of days ago after a long time of laziness: I see in the logs updates for mlt, kdelibs-common and qt, it should be one of them. I can do a yum downgrade for mlt and kdelibs-common, but that's even worse: "kdenlive: error while loading shared libraries: libmlt.so.2: cannot open shared object file".

I don't know what conclusion to draw from here:

• stop doing any updates
• stop using KDE apps
• stop hoping Linux can ever be used for video editing

I don't have the time (nor the patience) for drawing insightful conclusion or for debugging the problem, I have plenty of work to do today, including selecting, editing and publishing some photos from the same event (and forget about the funny story about when the Microsoft guys crashed our meeting).

For the short term, there are a couple of possible solutions for me:

• put the videos on keep and forget about them for a while (I hope my next week will be even busier with some photography stuff), maybe another update will fix the things and I can continue with the work
• turn back to the only trused and reliable video editor available for Fedora, mencoder (PiTiVi is useless, Kino can't do HD, Avidemux is a tool for a different job, Kdenlive just let me down and I don't think we have something else in an usable repository) and do only some rough work before uploading - just splitting and merging, no titles, no effects, no nothing.

I was close from not publishing this angry rant, as in the context of the large discussion about updates in Fedora it can be misread as an endorsement of the Board's vision, which is not, I like a lot feature upgrades and staying on the bleeding edge, I just want those updates to be less broken. If the Board's vision becomes reality, I will probably see myself forced to use Rawhide more and more, endure even bigger pains and in the long term become even more frustrated.

After you gathered some photos it the time to make something useful with them, like drawing some illustrations - this one is made with Inkscape using as a reference one of the pieces from the photoshot.

I know I could spend some more time on this, improve the shading, add a few highlights and better texture in the hair, maybe enhance the cleavage... but enough for today.

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I have to witness I liked the idea of a delicate girl wearing big, bulky, rough boots, I think it has the potential for a good story, with tension and visual impact.

Unfortunately, the boots were not the best for the shoot, so the first step in dealing with them was to fire-up GIMP and erase those strident red/yellow labels, a supposed bad girl will not show such labels.

Then the overall color of the brown leather was not matching well the rest of the clothes (those are mountain boots, not war boots...) so I changed their color a bit, going from brown to black. At this step I cleaned them a bit - not much, such thing is better done before taking the photos.

After this work I think the result is better compared with the starting point, still there is room for further improvement.


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No matter how I pose and what I pretend, I know well and won't try to deny what not I am: a sexy photographer. But what I can do is acknowledge and show you some: no matter how small their cameras are and how often used, by simply using them they are "photographer" and as for the "sexy" part... you tell who is sexier, the model or the photographer (hint: they take turns, so...)


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Many places I go I meet people telling how much they liked graphic tutorials and how much they learned about using GIMP and Inkscape following theb, and this makes me feel bad, as I am quite busy lately with a lot of things (video and photography ate a lot of my time) and rarely manage to write something new. But here is a perfect opportunity, Fedora 13 entered Alpha and had a code name (Goddard) and so far a visual theme based on rocketry, so it seems a tutorial titled "Drawing a rocket with Inkscape is not rocket science" would be just fit.

The target here is to produce something like this, not extremely realistic but easily recognizable as a rocket and the most important, fun (hopefully) and easy to create by someone who is using Inkscape for the first time.

So start Inkscape and draw a rectangle, which must be more tall than wide (we are drawing a rocket!) and have straight, not rounded corners.

Then select it and convert to path, we will do node editing.

Now go in node editor and select the two top nodes. The following operation can be done (as far as I know) only from keyboard: press Ctrl + Alt + > to enlarge the segment, the result should be a trapezium with the big side up.

With the same two top nodes selected, add a new node in the middle of their segment.

Select the new node (only it) and move it up (keep the Ctrl key pressed to limit the movement to vertical only).

Select back the two nodes that were the top corners of the rectangle and make them symmetric, for a shape starting to look like a bullet/rocket.

To finish the bullet shape of the rocket body we need to make the bottom edge rounded: select the two bottom corners, add a new node in the middle, select it, move a bit up and made it symmetric, now we have a bullet, an aerodynamic shape.

A rocket needs some "wings", so we will create another rectangle, this time much smaller.

Select the rectangle and click on it once, this will put in in rotate/skew mode so we need to skew it a bit my dragging on the arrow on one of its edges.

Move it in position, next to the rocket body.

Again, in rotate/skew mode, rotate it a bit by dragging one of the arrows at the corners, until we like the alignment. Note: no worry if the alignment is not perfect, lower it under the body and when filled with color this won't be noticeable.

Select the wing and duplicate it.

Flip the new (duplicate) wing horizontally and move it to the other side of the rocket body (keep Ctrl pressed to limit the movement to horizontal).

The wing facing us is another thin rectangle, with the same height as the other wings (technically, we should have two rectangles, one for each edge, but for now use one for simplicity). To center the new wing to the rocket body, select it and the body, then use the Align and Distribute dialog to align them horizontally relative to the biggest item (the body).

Now you know what is needed for a funny rocket? A window, so the astronauts inside can look at the space. Start by drawing a circle, which will be the windows frame (I think I am boring repeating this, but keep Ctrl pressed, so what you draw is a round circle not an ellipse).

Select the circle and the rocket body and align vertically to the center of the body.

Another smaller circle will be the real window.

Select the two circles and align them horizontally and vertically.

Now color the items, using either the color palette at the bottom, the Fill and Stroke button in the toolbar or any of the other possible ways (there are quite a few). A rocket is usually silverish, so use shades of gray.

If you want the rocket less realistic but screaming "Fedora", make those grays a bit bluish or go the extra mile and straightly use the Fedora colors (light and dark blue).

Back to our rocket, let's make it fly. Take the Bezier tool (pen) and draw freely a few spikes, they will be the flame.

Color the flame red or a redish orange and lower it under the rocket body.

The core of the flame is supposed to be warmer, so let's draw a new set of smaller spikes in yellow.

Optionally, if we want the rocket cruising, not just taking-off, select everything and rotate a bit.

A bit of beautification never hurt, so let's make the rocket a bit more realistic (if you can call that "realistic") and less cartoon. Remove the strokes (for example using the Fill and Stroke dialog) and use silver gradients for all metallic surfaces, do this by using the Gradient tool, dragging and editing colors.

Fill everything with gradients, including the flames and the window.

Select the inner (yellow) flame and using the Fill and Stroke dialog Blur it a bit for a more realistic (and prettier) look.

Blur also the outer (red/orange) flame. And that's about all.

Now our rocket can take-of and fly proudly. Go to the stars and beyond them!

Very few followed my riddle and to my knowledge nobody guessed the answer, but the time has come for the first part of the trilogy, today the day for the Fedora 13 Alpha release.

It was not hard at all, the riddle was "the first one is titled just like a name" and its answer "Goddard", as in the rocket scientist and the F13 codename. The next one, "is about trekish cannon-fodder" is slightly harder, but still trivial for any respectable geek.

Now gotta run, I have a localised announcement to write...

I think creating and printing a set of photographer business cards is supposed to make me take this photography thing more seriously, even if the cards are as little serious as possible (aren't the card supposed to represent yourself correctly? I hope they do).


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When I was hit by the need of some business cards and considered the Fedora contributor ones are not fit for the tasks and the ones from my day job are even worse, I decided I need to make some. Fired Inkscape up and got playing with it.
The inspiration came easy: after I saw rejon using his avatar/head icon/hackergotchi on business cards and people recognizing him from that, I knew I have to use one of my avatars too. Not sure what to choose, I conducted a small survey on #fedora-art, but ended not following the advice, most people considered my choice looking too sad, but I feel it is representative. Sorry guys, it was a close call though.

If the narrow depth of field allows (it doesn't :D), one could notice there is nothing "design" related in the area of competency, but I started with "graphics. The words have been carefully selected, as I don't feel comfortable calling me a designer: observing what is happening in FLOSS it make me think more and more about a designer touch being some king of opposite Midas touch, the things turn to crap instead of gold.

It may be that I am an engineer at heart (I worked as an engineer for almost the entire time I remember), but I find myself preferring software applications designed by engineers[*], not by professional designers: I liked Pidgin better before it started become "designed", Thunderbird 3 makes me uncomfortable, I am glad we Linux users were spared by the "keyhole" abomination in Firefox (however, the mockups for FF4 are really scary) and don't get me started on GNOME Shell...

[*] sure, I can provide plenty of examples of horrible design made by engineers, but that's beside the point.

This is new and awesome: the new interface for the Open Clip Art Library is at least what we waited for all those 6 years since the project was founded. Not the images can be browsed visually (can you imagine an image gallery lacking such feature? OCAL was it...)

The site is powered now by Aiki Framework, a "a new and flexible PHP+MYSQL platform that allows designers and programmers to easily create and work with content management systems from the web" (quote from the press release).

Actually, I think is not very accurate to call it "OCAL 2.0", I think it should more like "3.0", the 1.0 version was the mess put together by us at first that compromised freedesktop.org a few years ago (that happens if you force artist types code :D), then 2.0 was ccHost, that was not really intended for images but for music and now we have a third version which is something usable... hmmmm, I can think about a big software company in Redmond which is famous for having its products usable only starting with the third version, it must be just a coincidence :D

Now I think I should upload some more clipart...

I think is the time to take a pause from echoing the last photoshot, otherwise people will start labelling me as "obsessed" or something, so let's take a look at the spring which is trying to settle (it won't be easy, the forecast says "light snow" for tonight)


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I am known to fall into extremes at times, like a week ago when a photoshot came less than perfect (read: "messed up") due to the lack of a power outlet where I could plug the lights. Frustrated enough, I took care of the problem by buying some power cords: a raw cable, 30 meters long and a 10 meters roll, for a total of 40 meters... that should be enough, I thought.
Now I wonder if the decision was the best: instead of the 30m cable, a 20m one could have been long enough, but considerably easier to carry around (is heavy!)... but the bigger the better, I have more autonomy this way. As for the weight... that's between me and my back :p

Anyway, it was not a problem... the large majority of the problems you encounter can be solved by throwing money at them and as long as you afford that, they are not really problems. Problems are those you can't afford the price or the ones which can't be solved with money, there are some of those too...

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Is arrogant to pretend you enhance the model, but after shooting you have to enhance the photos a bit, even if you just smooth the skin, sharpen the eyes and mouth and adjust the colors. Being quite a FLOSS zealot, I do that with GIMP:


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My video camera is a toy, its battery lasts only a short while, so it wasn't possible to record the entire photo session and as a result the "making of" covers only a small part of it and not necessarily the best moments. Also, the camera was all by itself, on a small tripod, without anybody controlling it.


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Light photomanip on a portrait made at a recent photoshot... when shooting I intentionally uncovered her ear in anticipation of this.

Mastering the wind is fun, but when you are shooting inside there is no much wind, except what you can create artificially. And if you lack electricity on the shooting place, so no fan is usable (supposing you had the means to carry a fan) the best solution is to have someone make the wind using a reflector, just as I did.

Of course this type of wind is not to be used for upskirting (unless the model does want that), but to make the hair more dynamic, more beautiful and sexier.



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It looks like everybody is rocking the planet except me, wonderer with pink ponies and disco balls and mchua with happy people, ponies and disco balls again. Is time for me to join the fray, rocking as hard as I can (with a bit of help from my little cartoonish friends):

As Fedora lacks a warm an fuzzy mascot (and every time something like that was tried it was received with a very strong and vocal opposition), I had to use for this photo session the same old Tux penguin. So there is no way I can turn this photo series into some distro-related wallpapers or posters.

It is worth noting the model is a CS student who understand and likes the principles of Free software and Free culture but still uses Windows on her laptop, so the message is almost true :D

Speaking about distro-specific fanmade artwork, I found very amusing an Ubuntu call for artists with a note like "Important: If you use Adobe Creative Suite be sure to save your art in a CS3-compatible format." ...I think I should download Ubuntu and give it a try to see what is about this CS3-thingy, it seems like some cool stuff available only for Ubuntu users (yum search CS3 returns nothing).

Who said gaming in Linux is hard? You just need a stuffed Tux and a playful model. Is that simple.


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Prepare to be crushed... she is mighty and does not seem happy.



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As anticipated here is the fruit of the photo session over the week-end with Irina. Lacking a better name, I titled it after the colors she was wearing, "Black versus White".

She was really nice, the location was OK, it lacked only a power source, so without the ability to use my gear fully, the light was less than perfect and the photos suffered. I suck.

So the place didn't have power, but it had really big windows... still the day was cloudy, the light was not enough so I used a portable flash with my biggest portable softbox during the entire White set (it was the first).

Later, when shooting the Black set the sun appeared so part of this set has less portable flash and better light. Next time I must use some proper lights, not just uselessly carry them with me.

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Mărțișor is a holiday for women, when they expect gifts, flowers and so, but this time I will do the other way, giving a present for men. Nicely packed and waiting:

Ant then happy and full of joy:

This is part of a large series which will follow in the next days.

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In addition to taking photos at the Marțișor Fair at the Peasant Museum (Muzeul Țăranului Român, MTR) I also dis a short, crappy, video:

...have a bit a patience, a better Marțișor will come later today :D

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People are probably used with my bombastic titles, but this time there is a truth into it: Adina sings in a band called Heaven and she is also the manager, so she must also have some brains too.
The photo is made at her birthday, so try to count the roses if you want to learn her age (or not, since is not polite to reveal a lady's age)



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Even if I think Mărțișor if a shitty useless and overcommercialized tradition, every year I go shooting, as the opportunity is too good to pass. This year the Peasant Museum held again a big fair, but the weather today was really uncooperative: clouds, rain, cold. Still, people were on duty.



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Last Saturday I took a pause from shooting hotties and tried to please my lenses with some geeky stuff at a convention called "The Gathering: Origins", which was supposed to be about "board games, guns and airsoft equipment, action figures, darts, fussball, SF and more". I can't say it was a disappointment, it was exactly how I expected it: lame.

First, the cosplay is key. And I can't call cosplay a "Japanese" girl dresses in something looking like a bathrobe stolen from her mother and a Lara Croft dressed for winter won't cut it.

Or how about the hot nurse? Not sure what her purpose was there (I believe a booth with some guys fixing PCs), but she was so bored and tired, not wanting to pose any more.

Of course there were some girls willing to pose and hoth enough to worth that, but without the costumes, where's the fun?


Worth noting were a few tables with people playing Warhammer

And maybe a few figurines (but not that great: the same old Batman, the same old Star Wars, the same old Lara...)


All in all, I don't regret leaving the fashion show for it, I returned to that the next day for more bling.

The part I really liked was a good reprise of juggling with fire:

There were a few people doing it and knowing what they were doing:


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I got those photos from my friend Adrian, who hunted me while I was hunting. Thanks!

For various reasons I moved most of my photography blogging in a separate place (easily discoverable), but as the evil troll I am, I couldn't resist doing what I like the best: tormenting my friends from the community. I know that posting this I would make a guy photographer cry for not having such an opportunity, a designer girl run away scared by the image of the white stuff and a lot of other people (statistically, geek guys are a large majority around here) jealous learning I befriended with all those models.

Now let me tell a story about how the community helped me with this photo set: I met at the show my friend Adrian and when the girls asked for my contact to get the photos, the stupid me didn't have any business card on him, so Adrian gave me a few of his Fedora Ambassador cards and I wrote my email address on the back. The icing on the cake: one of the girls even asked what is that Fedora thing on the face of the cards... I was not bold enough to try to talk her into FLOSS :(

Was the wait long enough? Were you able to endure it? The photos from the Ghidul Miresei weddings fair are up... in the following days I will probably follow with a few higlights.


I know there really are a lot of photos, but the girls asked for many pictures so being lazy I dumped the entire selection on the web (and still not as many as they wanted, forgive me girls!).

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Still waiting for the photos? Here's a little backstage video:



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One nasty, another one not so much... that the excitement is supposed to be built... the big photodump is coming



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Beware, huge bridal photoshot incoming, including a lot of candids and playful poses, here's a teaser (technically, this was NOT a candid, since she was aware of my doings):



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The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is the annual working conference for free software graphics application users and developers. The fifth edition takes place 27-30 May 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. Teams from GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, Open Font Library and many other graphics projects gather to improve their software and discuss new ideas for interoperability and shared standards.

LGM2010 has launched a fundraising campaign called 10by10by10 to raise $10,000 USD from grants, $10K from corporations and $10K from the community. The funds raised from granting organizations, public, and corporate partners will allow participants who have no other means of sponsoring their travel to Brussels to attend the event.

Please contribute to the community campaign at: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926

All donations are tax deductible for US taxpayers. For larger donations from corporations and individuals, you can contact us directly at lgm AT gnome DOT org

---

Note: I have proposed a talk there titled Desiging with Free tools in an Open Community: experiences from the Fedora Design Team

I am in a hurry, working on some cool (for myself!) stuff which I will probably write about in a couple of days, so I will reproduce the announcement verbatim:

The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is the annual working conference for free software graphics application users and developers. The fifth edition takes place 27-30 May 2010 in Brussels, Belgium. Teams from GIMP, Inkscape, Blender, Krita, Scribus, Hugin, Open Font Library and many other graphics projects gather to improve their software and discuss new ideas for interoperability and shared standards.

LGM2010 has launched a fundraising campaign called 10by10by10 to raise $10,000 USD from grants, $10K from corporations and $10K from the community. The funds raised from granting organizations, public, and corporate partners will allow participants who have no other means of sponsoring their travel to Brussels to attend the event.

Please contribute to the community campaign at: http://pledgie.com/campaigns/8926

All donations are tax deductible for US taxpayers. For larger donations from corporations and individuals, you can contact us directly at lgm AT gnome DOT org

This year we may have a healthy Fedora presence at the event... I should look into details and see if I can call that a FAD.

I, for one, feel an itching seeing Inkscape 0.48 in "chill" - this means just before "freeze" and on the way to "release" and start thinking about a jump to Rawhide as soon as it's version will be upgraded but on the other hand I see people in a different situation: big company with "RHEL4 on thousands of workstations" crying about being stuck with (self built) 0.46 and preparing a migration to RHEL5 now, in the spring of 2010, and crying their old building script won't work with 0.47 (EPEL has 0.44 for RHEL4 and 0.46 for RHEL5).

Definitely, I couldn't live with a desktop/workstation like that: no rush for the latest version, not getting hit by early bugs, no fun (even if I, for example, never used for real anything in the "Filters" menu introduced in 0.47).

You have an old addiction and somehow manage to get cured of it but then you cave to peer pressure and regress once... Then the addiction is all over again, you try to abstain as hard as you can and only draw a trilogy of "special editions" to go along with milestones in a nearby event/release/happening.

After drawing them, the normal thing to you is to upload them in the target web space, waiting the right time for publishing and have use the minimal effort when publishing. But all the fun is sharing them, so you are itching for sharing them with the world, having to wait a couple of weeks for the first, one month and a half for the second and beginning of May for the finale is a pain.

So I devised a riddle for those really interested in the topic: the files are in the usual place, with very obvious names. If you can guess the names, you can see the files. Here are the hints for guessing the names:

• the first one is titled just like a name
• the second one is about trekish cannon-fodder
• the third one is about jumping to light-speed

I hope I didn't destroy the surprise, ruin the punch lines or give away too much of the stories with this riddle. And still thinking (suggestions welcome) for a prize to the first one solving the riddle.

I think MrTom's testimony about why he's not abandoning Firefox is interesting so I should provide my own take on that: I think the alternatives are inferior.

- Chrome/Chromium: (forget for the moment about the part where I won't use Chrome because it has the sources closed, there is his Free brother Chromium) I won't use it because its weird user interface. Give me an app following the GNOME HiG, something that will fit my desktop, a browser with a normal titlebar and tab label below the URL bar and then we may talk. I stopped using themes in the Mozilla Suite ages ago and never looked back.

- Epiphany: is nice to have but it is quite low on features. Probably I could live with that, but the pain of moving my current data from Firefox is just too big. However, I have it always installed and use it from time to time.

- Seamonkey: that's a reliable browser I always keep handy as a secondary option, having fond memories of the old times when I kept using the suite and resisted to move to Firefox. After its development was re-started and synced with Firefox, it has become more usable but is still visibly one or two steps behind.

- I also tried Kazehakase, which looks interesting but seems to have the same downsides as Epiphany.

However... what I see from the design mockups for Firefox 4 make me think harder.

The February edition of the RLUG meets was a bit unusual: the formal part started late and the guys with the projector got stuck in traffic, the main presentation was extra long, in the end we didn't have time for the lightning talks, which were postponed for the next edition.

So our guest was Eddy Petrișor, with a talk about OpenStreetMap, which I captured on video, but having forgot the charger at home, I was able to record only about an hour and 31 minutes (I believe it was at least 15 minutes more). Then for a sane upload and watch, I split the video in 3 parts and put it on blip.tv, which failed me again converting to FLV, so only the Ogg Theora version is available (not that this is a bad thing), so you can watch (in Romanian):

• OpenStreetMap: part 1 of 3
• OpenStreetMap: part 2 of 3
• OpenStreetMap: part 3 of 3

The plan for the next edition (March) so far is to be again unusual, only with lightning talks (8 of them or more) so come to see a more varied programme. Also, register for a talk, we need that too.

Just before selecting a candidate for F13 Alpha (we were supposed to do this yesterday), those are the concepts submitted for Fedora 13 artwork, enjoy:

As you can easily see, the inspiration source was the code name Goddard, going the way to rocketry, deep space, exploration. I expect we will go with one of Mo's rocket trails and also like Mola's cartoonish style, which I could see used for additional graphics (banners).

A few weeks ago (almost one month ago!) I though I blew my last chance to get a good (but cliché) photo with snowdrops and snow but many things happened since then: snow and freezing cold, huge snow and so on. However, last week-end it looked like the spring finally triumphed and I got my snowdrops cliché:

It was warm and sunny and the little resilient managed to find their way out:

My joy was premature, this morning the winter was in full swing again, the place of my little snowdrops went from that to that (today's photo are a bit rushed, I was already late for work):

And the little guys are fighting and still holding:

Who will win in the end? Place your bets...

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Seeing the St. Michael cathedral in Brussels, it was the first time when I had the opportunity to visit a Gothic cathedral and, the raging atheist I am, I was impressed by it: the architecture, the majesty, the stained glass.





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It is said a picture is worth 1000 words, then a video must also worth more than a few pictures (not as much as the sum of all its frames, but I digress) so probably the best illustration of people having fun around FOSDEM is using video. Technically I could have embedded the .OGVs using the VIDEO tag, but I am not sure blip.tv guys like that (embedding the flash version will carry advertising, theora not) so I am just linking. Follow the links and select "Source - Ogg Theora/vorbis (.ogv)" from the dropdown.

First, there is the FOSDEM Beer Event taking place at Delirium Café. A lot of Fedora people appear here, since they were around me (and a lot of us were there) and the place was quite crowded, making hard to move around (but still not yet at its peak). My highlights: Hercule Stout, the "only" Belgian stout, Delirium Nocturnum, the dark version of Delirium Tremens and a cherry beer for which name I am not sure of.

Then a short clip from the Mozilla bowling which followed the dinner. Unfortunately the footage from Laser Tag were too dark and unusable and I turned off the camera quickly, so I pretty sure this was not the cause my team (blue) got its collective ass kicked so badly.

Sunday evening a part of the Fedora gang returned at Delirium for more beers, fun time and playing with our cameras. If you manage to freeze this video at the right time you can get a very compromising picture of the Dutch and the Greek... I guess it's the time for me to run and hide :D

Maybe I should have started the list of video link with the traditional FOSDEM dance, but it was the last uploaded and I am lazy. Watch the moves and try to repeat them. And don't break anything around you!

If that's their wish, is fine to remove those live footage from a weddings fair in Bucharest, however I think I should also delete all the photos with artists under contract with RBA Dragon, if RBA Dragon does not wants his artist advertised, known and with better chance to find contracts in the future, who am I to do something against that? The country is full of such other artists...



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Trying to document my trip in Brussels at FOSDEM, some photos with food and drinks are in order.

One of the things Brussels is know for is its beer and bars, like Delirium Cafe, a place keeping the world record for having available 2004 types of beer in January 2004:

Very nice to be there with some friends

Of course, the beer is good and strong:

Another Belgian speciality is seafood, but I didn't had any of this, just looked and shot:

But I had crêpes, still no gaufres:

And fries are everywhere:

Still, you can also eat more common, less traditional stuff:

I don't know, profiteroles are traditional or generic?




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Now that I can see beyond the snow is time to follow the Day -1 with more photos showing what happened during the event.

Travelling with a sponsorship from Mozilla (thank you guys a lot!) and being a rabid Fedora fanboy I shared my time between the Mozilla room and the Fedora booth:


And hanged with people from both communities:


Also, had the opportunity to take part in a planning for the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting, where it looks like the Fedora Design Team will have a good presence:

It was impressive how many people have attended, many presentations had the rooms jam-packed, with more people in the audience than seats available:

Being there with two groups, one night I partied with the Mozilla people (food, drinks, bowling and laser tag):


And the other with my Fedora friends (food, drinks, jokes, photography)


I don't know from which project they were, but some people seems they had partier even harder than us:

It was not all fun, jokes and trying to impress girls:

I even managed to get some work done (if you can call that work):

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.