Planet Open Clip Art Library

We Are Such Geeks

2008-05-12T08:26:51+00:00

I previously wrote about how lame I am (BTW - I didn't get the job... ), but today, I include my wife in the geekery.

If you've read my blog assiduously, all three of you, you know we enjoy BBC America and some of its sci-fi and comedy offerings. Anyhoo, we were watching "That Mitchell and Webb Look" (it's no "Little Britain", but it'll do) and they were doing a sketch where two Nazi SS officers were discussing whether or not they were "the baddies."

They're on the Russian front, and as an aside in the conversation, one of them says: "If there's anything we've learned in the last thousand miles of retreat, it's that Soviet agriculture is in dire need of mechanization." My wife and I busted up.

We are such geeks.

Tuca

2008-05-12T07:52:00+00:00

There is and on-going meme on the Romaian "blogosphere" and I am going with it: Marius Tuca is an onanist. That is very clear from his recent article.

For my English readers: the guy is a well known Romanian journalist (written press and TV) who recently published a piece where he calls the Romanian bloggers "onanists", here is my translation of a quote from the above-mentioned article: "...Romanian bloggers are nothing else than worms who got to the surface without having something to say, ready to flood the space with banalities and originalities known and told by everyone, in a common masturbation..."

In unrelated news, I keep counting down:

Job Scam: The Case Company (UK) LTD

2008-05-09T19:18:43+00:00

Just got a new job scam. They're very vague and don't give any details, but they're showing big red flags and you just should not reply to find out more. Here's the text:

Subject: Representative Needed
From: "The Case Company (UK) Ltd" <info@case.co.uk>
To: undisclosed-recipients

We are one of the fastest growing company here in UK.Due to increase in
customers we are seeking for representative in CANADA & U.S.A. Interested
persons should email the Information Below to this email
address(thecasecom@sify.com) 1.NAME 2,ADDRESS 3, COUNTRY, 4
PHONE NUMBER 5, AGE.
Regards
Mrs.Butler Julie.
----------------------------------------------------------------
This message was sent using http://webmail.coqui.net

Okay, red flags...

Sent via coqui.net, a free web mail service in Puerto Rico, and that's backed up by the underlying mail headers. That pretty much shows that the info@case.co.uk "from" address was forged.
Rather than ask you to reply to them at case.co.uk, they ask you to reply to an address at sify.com, a Yahoo-like portal in India with free webmail accounts.
If they were really in the UK, their English might be a little better.

Don't reply to these people, and if you have, ignore further communications from them. I don't know what their scam is, but I can tell you right now, they're showing all the signs of a scam.

Best of luck to you all.

Photos of people

2008-05-09T13:22:00+00:00

Is not hard to imagine cool stuff we can do with photos of people, see gregdek's idea about hackergotchi stickers, the old call for photos by Mo to promote spins, or a couple of ideas from me (Anaconda slides or fp.o front page banners), you know, things which could "emphasize the human nature of Fedora and the people behind the project" (he, he).

But we have a big blocker: lack of such photos... photos of Fedora contributors and enthusiasts which we allow us to use their photos (the approval part is very important).

So here is an idea: next week Fedora 9 release parties will gather all around the world a lot of right people in the right mood, so get your cameras, get approval from the subjects and let the photos flood. I am sure we can find crafty way to put them to good use.

Even if you are feed-up with my countdown, I still continue:

I find amusing how people think I may be going to marry, shave my beard or get a better job... not gonna happen, keep trying :p

links for 2008-05-09

2008-05-09T00:49:15+00:00

BBC NEWS | Technology | TorrentSpy ordered to pay $110m

This is bullshit. What year is this?

(tags: copyright, 2008, bittorrent, pirates, sharing)

ryanlerch

2008-05-08T22:46:52+00:00

Even though I have only been an active member of the fedora community for about a month now, something happened about an hour ago just to reinforce how awesome the community is. I was reading the fedora-art mailing list this morning, and was pleased to read a short and sweet message from Jon Roberts that contained encouraging words about the art-team’s echo icons project. So thanks Jon!

I would also like to jump on the encouragement bandwagon and give a shout out to the fedora-docs team and thank them for the awesome Desktop User Guide, which has been a valuable source of information for myself in making the switch to Linux and Fedora.

Are You Listening?

2008-05-08T20:36:18+00:00

Very quick thought.

I handle some valuable real estate on an intranet portal for my current contract. And I regularly deal with stakeholders from around the company who want brief announcements posted there.

Today, I got one where their suggested headline was "We hear you!"

My response to them was: "Our style guidelines prohibit exclamation points in headlines. Besides, how can you hear them if you're shouting at them?"

Weekly Fedora Webcomic: Robots

2008-05-08T12:54:00+00:00

Powering robots since 2005. 'Nuff said. Now bow to your robotic overlords.

If you noticed the date for this comic, yes, it was made in April and the next issue is also made in April (that one was made for the release week and I had to delay it) but, I promise, after that there is a surprise waiting...

Last week experimented with translations for the webcomic, without success which drives me to one of those two conclusions: either is to complicated to use PO files and translating directly from Inkscape is simple enough, or I have to grow the webcomic and improve its quality to become translation worthy, so back to simple SVG this week.

I didn't forgot about the mysterious countdown, here is the current count:

F10 Gears: Using some feedback

2008-05-07T09:36:00+00:00

Before going to the meat of this post, here is a new instance of my mysterious countdown (the bets are still open):

After my last piece about colouring the Gears in an old paper style I got some interesting feedback (not sure if that was because what I did was good and stimulated people or because it was bad and prompted for corrections). Anyway, let's play a bit with the feedback:

Jude reminds me of the sculpting tool, one of the awesome features introduced in Inkscape 0.46, which I could have used instead of node simplification. It should be used in roughenmode:

To get something like this:

Greg is not happy with the amount of blur I used to soften the contours, and recommend either a different color for to just blur the edges:

For something like this:

Ryan points me to an alternate way to greate the paper-like texture, using the feTurbulence filter.
So I duplicated the background and got the the Filters dialog:

Here I applied a Turbulence effect:

Then color Matrix in Saturate mode to make it black and white:

And some Gaussian Blur to blend it into the image:

And here is the result, take the steps (original or alternate) you find useful for your own case:

Hillary Unspun

2008-05-07T06:49:22+00:00

Here are the raw numbers from today's primaries. With 99% of precincts reporting, Hillary's 51% to 49% win is a rounding error. Out of one and a quarter million votes, she leads by less than 23,000 votes for an actual tally of 50.49% to 49.51% Right now, with maybe 10-12k votes to be counted, her lead is not 2%, but less than one.

In the popular vote count, if things hold, Obama will add over 230,000 votes to his lead. And in the delegate count, it's looking like he'll net 12 more delegates than Hillary. He could do a bit better or a bit worse, but there's not a huge margin by which these numbers can change.

Hillary's camp will spin it 8 ways from Sunday, and try to claim it was really a major win and validation that she's the candidate who can win the general election, but she's undone and unspun tonight. +12 for the delegate lead and +230,000 for the popular vote lead... for Obama.

Yippee-cai-yeah, Hillary.

Sebastian Dröge joins Collabora Multimedia

2008-05-06T11:56:33+00:00

Thought I should let the world now we have a new employee at Collabora Multimedia. I think most of you know him already as Sebastian Dröge is one of the biggest patch reviews and bug fixers in the GStreamer community already. While Sebastian will be helping out with some of our internal projects we also plan on letting Sebastian continue his great community work. In fact the first assignment we have given him is simply to try to help out with some hard bugs thats been troubling Jokosher for a long time. So a big welcome to Collabora Sebastian, and an especially big thanks for starting your new job by taking GStreamer once again out of the top 10 bugzilla list

Countdown to what?

2008-05-06T08:41:00+00:00

I was so carried away with the idea of the Fedora 9 release countdown that I couldn't stop myself from creating a counter for a "personal" project (the counter is plain and boring: static images, without any scripting or autoupdate):

Now, obviously, the bets are open for what I am counting down to...

Why should I "fight" for desktop linux? or Has Red Hat betrayed me?

2008-05-05T09:38:00+00:00

Sorry for the delay, this happens when the feedback is happening elsewhere , clashing with May Day and a weekend. (note: I expected a bit of controversy after the Desktop piece in my webcomic and was wondering about the silence).
As usual, Radu is strong and direct, he says "let's be honest: this is what a fanboy does when he doesn't want to admit the betrayal" (linking to the already famous official position from the Red Hat Desktop Team) but he also ask a question which I think deserves an answer:

"By the way, can you explain why should you fight for "Linux on the desktop", when Red Hat Inc. has stopped doing it?"

And the answer is simple as that: Because *I want* to run Linux on *my* desktop.

And, from what I know, there is a large number of other Fedora contributors who think the same, they want to run Fedora on their desktops and they want a first class experience doing so.
Of course, there is also a large number of Fedora contributors who are content (some are even happy) with running Windows, OS X or that other Linux distro on their desktop (even I know some) and that is their option.

Here is a short Q&A session expanding on the short answer above:

I am disappointed by the Red Hat's position about the desktop?
Sure. I use so-called "traditional desktop". I see the pluses and the minuses of Fedora in this role and understand the need of a large amount of work needed to improve it. And the need of a strong player (and $$$) behind this work.

I feel betrayed by Red Hat in this matter?
The (probably unexpected) answer is: No. You feel betrayed when you have expectations from some entity and see those expectations vanishing in the air. Well, at least in the last 5 years, Red Hat never talked about a frontal assault on the traditional desktop and all the official declarations were against it.

Do I think Red Hat is wrong with that position?
Yes. I think it is short sighted and in a few years will come back and bite them in the ass. But I also think I understand their reasons and can't provide a better solution (and isn't my business of finding one).

Should I care what happens with Red Hat?
To some degree: Yes. I am a Fedora user and a Fedora contributor, Fedora and RHEL are different distros, with different goals and audience. But Red Hat and Fedora are in a symbiotic relation, they will fail or succeed together. And I invested work, time, resources and emotions into Fedora.

I may be completely wrong in my analysis, but I think it is all about bang for the buck, spending your money in an efficient manner. And currently the best return of your investments in the Linux world seems to be on the server side.

Years ago when Red Hat choose to focus on RHEL and changed the old RHL into the Fedora "community", it was a huge outcry, betrayal accusations and flamewars on the entire Linux world. But so far it proved as the correct decision: it created a healthy company growth with a viable business model, which allowed them to expand and hire a lot of great hackers (and not only hackers) to work on various areas, including the desktop.

Desktop is hard, it is a money pit: Corel tried and failed, Linspire tried and failed, Xandros tried and failed, Novell is trying and does not look like succeeding, Ubuntu is still working as a charity and does not appear (so far, but it will come) to try and sustain itself.

Now Red Hat looks like is using the same strategy and focus on JBoss. Money invested there are expected to produce a healthy revenue stream which would allow them to hire even more hackers to work on wonderful things, including the desktop. And we have to take that and be happy with it, even if we wished to see Lunix commercials on TV or so.

Now to the "short sighted" part. While the move to the RHEL/Fedora combo may have proved as a success in terms of revenue, at the same time it acted as one of the primary factors contributing at the creation and success of its primary competition in the Linux world (despite all the collaboration in development, nice talks and Kumbaya singing, the distros are in competition).

And these days, not pushing the desktop is strengthening the competition. Desktop Linux is happening and it is happening elsewhere. And it is important for the server world because it builds mindshare. The desktop users of today are the decision makers of tomorrow - they will decide what to deploy in their corporations, and that most likely will be the server version of the distro they know from their desktop.

From my external point of view (which I acknowledged may be completely wrong) I can see an additional reason: corporate culture. Red Hat, as a corporation, seems to understand the server world well (as shown by the feedback from their customers) but not understand so well the consumer desktop (looking at some RH desktop initiatives: OLPC is a failure, going to Windows, RHGD has silently died, GNOME Online Desktop is a few RPMs in F9, but nothing in the Feature List, Mugshot is in the same boat as GOD). Usually is a god thing to stay with what you know and do it as best as you can, and Red Hat may be doing just that.

The Real Carbon Offset

2008-05-03T17:12:45+00:00

For anyone trying to offset your carbon footprint: Get a shovel, dig a hole, and bury yourself. I’ll take volunteers to do this first and I will document the whole process from start to near finish.

Photos from Guangzhou China Town Demolitions and Linux Photo Sharing Question

2008-05-03T06:17:39+00:00

AhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHhhhhhh! Our time in Guangzhou is nearing an end for this spell. I have not adequately covered what Lu and I have been up to. Here are some immediate photos taken of Guangzhou which illustrate the dynamism of where we live right now.

Photos below by Lu Fang under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

We discovered this village a couple of blocks from our house was being destroyed to make way for new housing and skyscrapers which you’ll see at the end of this.

Also, a few of my colleagues will be happy to note that a W hotel and Ritz-Carlton are being built on these grounds — ironies abound. The other day as well, helped my wife’s parents plant some plants. They wanted me to help dig out this huge *rock* in the ground. That rock happened to be a big multi-colored chunk of rubble from the village that lays under where we live — some kind of rock!

I need to get into photo dumping online. What is the linux workflow that others use to get photos from camera, to desktop, to flickr, Internet Archive, etc? I just took a hard look at just uploading all my photos to Internet Archive, but the interfaces are not there for photo fun nor conversion to other formats, and the biggest part is lack of active community. Any thoughts?

Obama 2008 Has Already Won Discussion with Chinese Granpda Agong

2008-05-03T06:01:50+00:00

Lu’s grandpa, Agong, who is 97 years young, asked me why the American elections take so long. This is a daily occurrence here in Guangzhou, especially in the south of china, as many are convinced that some form of democracy or rule by the people is coming. It is just a matter of time. This is one of the unwritten rules of China: the farther you get from the capital, the more people speak their minds. You could also say the further people get away from Beijing, the more lawlessness, but that is another story altogether (I would also say the other unwritten rule is that as long as you phrase anything in terms of business, you are better off with the government. So instead of addressing problems with GFW in terms of censorship of free speech, address it in terms of increased transactions costs and bad business — in what business is getting 70% of your order ever okay?)

Anyway, I didn’t have a great answer to Agong this time, and conceded that this battle between Obama and Clinton has gone on way too long. Look at the intrade charts! Come on!

2008 US Presidential Elections

Source: Dynamic, compound prediction market charts from InTrade

2008 US Presidential Election Winner - Individual

And, while yes, I agree that Obama is elitist, my daily read of the commercially focused American media is compared against the intrade charts.

SO, at the end of the day I told Agong, “Obama has already won the democratic nominee and the presidential race is a lot closer.” Of course, something abominable could happen to derail this prediction market, but it is super crucial to get Hillary out of the race now and focus all conceptual and ideological nukes onto McCain. Geez, does McCain represent you? Obama! Obama! Temporary Dictator is the best of the worst as I’ve previously pushed At least there is some feeling that the common persons efforts are connected to the presidential selection compared to selection of the temporary dictator in China. So with that being said, that is the most nationalism you are going to see out of me, quite unlike the red-guard-like red nationalism inside of China directed at CNN and French-connected Carrefour.

links for 2008-05-03

2008-05-03T00:54:14+00:00

信息时报 - 2008年4月26日 - AT4:酷玩集中营版 - 装置艺术：非花样，实验中的形式

Cool, Lu got some press about her artwork in Chinese news publication

(tags: art china network lufang deerfang 2008 guangzhou online print press hit presshit)

OCWC Conference in Dalian 2008 and Beijing

2008-05-02T08:56:28+00:00

Jose speaking about Knowledge Hub at the Open Ed conference in Dalian, China, Photo by Tom Caswell

I just arrived back home in Guangzhou, China from the OpenCourseWare Conference in Dalian, China last weekend and met many great people (but don’t have the tolerance to write out the contents of my thoughts ;), had many fruitful discussions, and rocked out a good slide deck for ccLearn (and you!). Check out my presentation (or any of my presentations and here), “OER XinXai (NOW!)“:

OER XinXai (NOW)! Dalian OCWC Conference 2008 - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: OER XinXai (NOW)! Dalian OCWC Conference 2008

The most fruitful part of the conference for me was interacting with Philip Schmidt, Victor from Hewlett Foundation, Chunyan Wang from CC Mainland China, and Stewart Cheifet from Internet Archive. Also, hearing about sustain-o-bility in all its forms as a major consideration for projects, and mentions of CC+, made me quite happy. It also served as a nice place to test out my Mandarin skills for the good or worse of things. Hopefully at the next conference there will be more time for discussion during the conference days.

I jumped up on stage to give a final call for participation to the ccLearn and OER regional meeting at iSummit July 29 - August 1 in order to increase participation by principals in the region. Let’s hope it worked!

After this conference, I directly headed to Beijing where I worked with CC Mainland China team on accelerating business development and assessing great projects which would be great to integrate Creative Commons licensing. If you have an organization in China or any jurisdiction and want to help in this process, check out the page CC Web Integration.

The next stop for me is to head to celebrate Lu’s 27th birthday on May 4th, then onto Japan to meet up Joi, Catharina, Fumi and more (ken!). Then back to Guangzhou, Beijing, then back to Guangzhou, then back in San Francisco May 21 through at least end of July as homebase. Cheers!

links for 2008-05-02

2008-05-02T00:42:52+00:00

olafur eliasson show pictures of light artwork

Cool sculptures and show from sfmoma

(tags: art newmedia sfmoma moma contemporary kanyewest)
Science Commons » The Health Commons

John Wilbanks is brilliant and the work Science Commons is doing here is totally amazing and a force to keep tabs on!

(tags: johnwilbanks friend personal sciencecommons presentation)

ryanlerch

2008-05-02T00:16:06+00:00

Okies, here is the v.2 of the fedora 9 banner that i originally posted yesterday…

And here is v.1 from yesterday for comparison:

Despite what I said yesterday, i am pretty happy with both designs, so i will post the sources up on the fedora wiki

Workspace Everywhere

2008-05-02T00:10:17+00:00

So, this afternoon, when I got home from work, I was faced with a tough choice: go check my e-mail... or poop.

Both were insistent urges. And since I do use a MacBook Pro as a "desktop replacement" machine, the thought did cross my mind to bring the laptop into the bathroom and check my e-mail while I pooped. But the thought of balancing a laptop on my bare thighs while I answered nature's call seemed fraught with peril.

And then it hit me... a wall-mounted, fold-down ironing board at just the right height... toilet desk. Right? Right? I see a lot of you frowning out there, especially my wife, but it makes sense. In our overworked, overscheduled lives, why sacrifice precious minutes of productivity just to poop?

Yup. Better than calling it a toilet desk, we could call it a potty desk. I have looked on Google and aside from some gags where someone suggested putting a toilet at your desk, I couldn't find anyone pitching a toilet desk or potty desk. It's brilliant. All I need is funding... and a domain. Nooooo! Someone already has pottydesk.com. Well, let's go to the site... nothing but a parked page full of ads. A squatter is sitting on pottydesk.com. Damn. Toiletdesk.com is taken too. Pottytable.com and pottyoffice.com are available.

I'm telling you, it's the bathroom of the future.

Sun’s new video codec

2008-05-01T17:07:39+00:00

So Sun Microsystems video codec effort is now public. Actually its been public since the 11th of April, but I missed it until today. I think it is an interesting effort and wish them good luck. That said I noticed from the comments that people where wondering why they where not instead pushing Theora or Dirac forward instead of making their own codec. Well the answer to that question is implicitly given in Rob Glidden’s blog post, Sun wanted something which they felt was 100% sure to not be under any current patents and thus they started with the sure to be patent free H261 codec (due to its age).

Of course that is similar to the approach the BBC took with Dirac, but instead of using an codec implementation they used old text books and research papers as their baseline.

That said neither the OMS video codec or Dirac can be 100% sure that there will never be any patent lawsuits, to many bogus patents for that. So all they can do is what they have been doing, which is to ensure that their prior art story is so strong that if a case ever is brought they should be able relatively easily defeat it.

And while I would of course love even more people contributing to improving out existing codecs like Theora and Dirac and think that getting new codecs launched which has used different strategies for ensuring their royalty free status is only a good thing as it gives us more angles of attack. And once one of these codecs reaches critical mass in terms of consumer adoption I think it can actually open the door to the others as it will reduce the current ’stigma’ around royalty free codecs.

In the meantime we just need to continue improving our tools as I feel that is the next step we need to take to help push free codecs forward. My goal is that we will get Pitivi and Jokosher to a stage where we have them running on all three major platforms and thus the threshold for getting your marketing department etc., to publish their audio clips and videos with free codecs is greatly reduced. The two Summer of Code students we have working on Pitivi and the renewed Jokosher effort should help push us forward.
I am also hoping that the codec support provided in HTML5 through Firefox will open some doors. While Apple and Microsoft are still trying to sabotage it there is still hope that the market share of Firefox is large enough to make a difference and force the issue.

Weekly Fedora Webcomics: the Desktop

2008-05-01T13:14:00+00:00

Do you remember the Fedora stickers kit I talked a about a few days ago? Here is an usage suggestion:

And in related news, my webcomic goes international! With baby steps, of course.

The first attempt was made by myself, I translated by hand the SVG (this is the advantage of having access to the source) and created a webcomic section on the Romanian Fedora community website.

On a strange coincidence, about at the same time lkundrak asked me for PO files, for proper translation, which make me to think of a proper solution. Then all I had to do was to remember I read a while ago about a piece by Andy about translating SVG, search for it and:

Create the English PO from the source SVG:

xml2po -a -o the_desktop.en-US.po the_desktop.svg

Create the Romanian PO from the source SVG:

xml2po -a -o the_desktop.ro-RO.po the_desktop.svg

Edit the translation (with gtranslator), save, create the Romanian SVG, export as PNG (with Inkscape) and publish it:

xml2po -a -p the_desktop.ro-RO.po the_desktop.svg > the_desktop.ro.svg

Now to get an infrastructure, to publish the source and the PO a few days in advance, to coordinate with translators, that is an effort. And I am not sure there is demand for it (and I lack the experience and time to set it up).

Note: making the SVG play nice with POs and translation required me to use some flowed text, a SVG feature not supported by Firefox 3 or EOG, so there are downsides.

ryanlerch

2008-05-01T00:18:45+00:00

Here is a quick banner that i threw together in Inkscape + the GIMP for the upcoming Fedora 9 release. I dont think this is the one that ill submit officially to fedora-art, but i wanted to throw it up so people can see it.

I’m not fully happy with the positioning of the text that appears at the end, but ill fix that up later…
Shoot me a message if you are on the fedora-art team and want the source files (.xcf, .svg and all the frames in .png)

F10 Gears: Colouring the Gears - Gears on Old Paper

2008-04-30T11:46:00+00:00

After last week I took the initial gears and made them from solid gold, not is time to talk about the completely different approach, old writing on old paper, where we will work on the strokes.

So, back to the black and white gears:

If we set the stroke color and unset the fill color will get something like this, with overlapping contours, he will have to get rid of:

So select the gear (gears if we have more) suffering due to this unwanted overlap and convert the stroke to path:

The go to another gear which covers it, duplicate, select the duplicate and the former stroke and do a difference operation:

Repeat with all the gearc covering it until we get to something like this:

Then convert all the remaining strokes to paths.

Now we want the drawing to look rough. But it has a large number of nodes, it will take quite a while to edit them manually for the desired rough look, so, as usual, I will cheat and use an automatic simplify operation (shown at an increased zoom level):

Repeat for all your gears and get something like:

Now define a multistop gradient for the paper - light grown/yellow for old paper or dark blues if we want to go with blueprint (I have not decided yet about the way to go).

A multistop gradient is needed for ink too (not shown), and it has to have fitting colors but good contrast with the paper (like browns for old paper and light blue for blueprints). Apply the gradients:

Then add some texture to the paper: draw a random blob with the freehand tool, will it in a color similar with the background (but slightly darker or lighter), unset the stroke, simplify if needed and blur a lot:

Add some more until you are happy with the texture:

The images is still too sharp for an old drawing on old paper, so we will have to soften the focus. Select all the gears, duplicate, make the duplicate darker (black), apply some blur and decrease the opacity:

And this is all for now:

I still want to tweak this design further, I am researching for an additional effect which I am not sure how to achieve (yet): I want to make the paper look like it was folded (probably a combination of random shapes and blur).

Hillary Clinton: The Party's Over

2008-04-30T02:52:15+00:00

As I've watched the nomination battle wage on, one thing has become clear to me. The Democrats are burning their own house to the ground and Hillary is holding the match.

Her politics of negativity and venom, her fearmongering, her scheming and attacking are doing one thing... pissing people off. And it's not just Obama supporters. It's Hillary's supporters. She's working to make them hate Obama like people in the 50s hated the commies. Recent polls show that her supporters are so rabid, large numbers of them say they'll defect or stay home if she doesn't win.

See, Obama's tried to stay positive, tried not to beat her up on really obvious and easy targets, tried not to bring fear and anger into the race, but instead concentrated on hope and possibility. And because of that, if Hillary takes the nomination, Obama will have an easier time picking up her standard like a good soldier and rallying his loyalists to her side.

But if she loses, I don't think she can undo all the damage she's done. Her attitude has been that she'd rather take the party down with her than carry on a respectable, honorable, campaign. And if it becomes her time to rally the troops, to mend the fences and rebuild the bridges... I don't think she can.

And that makes me wonder if we can afford not to have her as the nominee, because if her campaign collapses it could be like a Jonestown massacre.

If anyone deserves this nomination -- for running a clean campaign, for talking to our heads and hearts instead of our fears, for not taking the easy low blows even when they were taken against him -- Obama does. I just fear that Hillary's politics of anger, hate, violence, and fear are going to win.

And if they do, I don't know what I'll do. I can't take 4 more years of Republicans spending our economy into the shitter. But I cannot take 4 years of Hillary's anger, pettiness, and "do anything to win" attitude. I used to support Obama because I thought Hillary would prove too much of a bogeyman to the Republicans and help them turn out the vote like never before. Now I support him because he's shown honor, dignity, and respect, and Hillary is just covered in the filth she spews, the muck she rakes, and the mud she slings.

If she carries this on until August, the party will be burned down, and she'll be standing in the ashes, holding the match.

Hillary Clinton doesn't care about America. Hillary Clinton cares about Hillary Clinton. And you can quote me on that... please.

Job Scam: Dating Euro Union

2008-04-29T15:07:04+00:00

The angle on this one is different than ones I've seen before. They want to pay you for proofreading services. And the rates they're offering are actually a little lower than a random check of per-word pricing from a couple of random proofreading services I looked up. But there's our first big flag. There are LOTS of people out there offering this service and would be glad to offer a volume discount.

Here's the mail:

From: "Mr. Swenson" <teeq@acryglas.com>
Hello!

We offer a part time job on your computer.

Job Description:
We will provide you with the texts for our employees with the important information and you will correct the texts as an english speaking person and send them back to us.
Salary:
We don't have a fixed salary for this vacancy. We will pay you $7.00 for every 1Kb of the corrected text. You will get paid at the END of each month. Every month your salary will be different as it depends on your activity.

Example: If you correct about 5Kb of texts per day you will get over $1000.00 at the end of the month.

Requirements:
-Location: USA
-Age: 20+
-Home computer, e-mail address and Microsoft Word
-Responsibility

To apply for job please send us the following information to:
dating.uniongroup@gmail.com

__________

FULL NAME: HOME ADDRESS:
CITY, STATE, ZIP CODE:
Phone number (home or cell, but SHOULD BE available any day time):
E-MAIL:
AGE:
OCCUPATION:
EDUCATION:
AVAILABLE HOUR TO WORK WITH US:

----------

As soon as we revise your aplication we will contact you within 24 hours.
If you have any additional questions, feel free to ask.
Awaiting for your application.

With respect Dating Euro Union

Now here are the red flags...

The "from" address is not only different than the one they ask you to reply to, but comes from a domain (acryglas.com) that has absolutely nothing to do with the business they're claiming to be (Dating Euro Union).
There are any number of companies offering this service so they could get a one-stop solution with one bill and no employees to manage. Even if they save a small amount on the rate this way, any real business can run the numbers and see this wouldn't be cost-effective.
This came in to an e-mail address that hasn't been actively used since the 90's meaning that they got it off a purchased spam list. If they're purchasing lists of e-mail addresses and spamming this out, that makes them suspect.
I'm sorry, but copy editing and proofreading require skill, talent, and education. You're not qualified for it merely because you're a native English speaker. A good editor is worth a ton of money.

Most likely, the scam is that they'll ask for your bank account and bank routing numbers so they can wire transfer or direct deposit your monthly salary. Next thing you know, they've used the information to forge a wire transfer out of your account and you're cleaned out.

As inviting as it seems, this has all the hallmarks of a criminal scam. Do not reply to it, do not give these people your personal information, and do not give them any banking information.

Best of luck to you all.

Seven

2008-04-29T06:39:00+00:00

After the latest issue of my webcomic, where I touched the Ubuntu release subject, I received a healthy amount of feed-back (I said you then, a bit of controversy is good) and the piece I thins stands out the best is this blog reply from Cypress:

Well, Cypress, I give you a 7 (seven) for the effort and for finding a good looking stock photo.

At a second thought, the "rpm hell" joke is so ooooold and the "old tractor" metaphor is wrong (a much better metaphor/joke on Fedora would be as a to new, unproven technology) that it make me think I was too generous with a 7, but I already said "seven" and "seven" is.

This Is How Lame I Am - Part II

2008-04-29T02:32:50+00:00

So I've got a new "keep my sanity while I wait to hear if I got the job" song that's calming me down better than "Don't Stop Believin'" And not only that, I found I can embed a sample of it it in my blog courtesy of imeem. If you click the song name in the player, you can go to imeem and listen to the whole thing.

Now, the thing is that lots of people think "Gonna Fly Now" is the most inspirational music from "Rocky," but it's not. It's just happy music. The inspirational piece of music is called "Going the Distance". This is when Rocky's up against it, when Rocky's fighting his demons, fighting his doubt, fighting against everyone who tells him he can't do it. This is the darkness of self-doubt that Rocky conquers to beat Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago.

"Don't Stop Believin'" has a good chorus, but it's essentially a power ballad. When you need something about slogging through, earning every hard-won step toward your goal, and making it to the end... "Going The Distance" is your music.

I am soooo lame.

This Is How Lame I Am

2008-04-28T15:29:12+00:00

I had an interview for a perm job (as opposed to the contracting I'm doing now) about a week and a half ago. The hiring manager wanted to meet with a lot of candidates, so they just finished the interviews late last week and a decision is going to come down most likely today.

It's a cool job. Has a lot of potential for growth and doing neat stuff in the process, plus the money should be pretty good. I think I got myself a little too over-excited about it.

Just a few minutes ago, after checking my personal e-mail for the umpteenth time this morning, I just needed to hear Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'", so I went to Amazon and paid $0.99 to download an MP3 of it to my work PC and I'm listening to it as I type this. Actually just started it for a second time.

This is how lame I am.

Thanks to the Fedora Project, LGM Goal Met

2008-04-28T07:04:07+00:00

I wanted to send a big thank you out to The Fedora Project, Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg for their support of the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Poland, May 8 - 11!

Dave Neary wrote a good overview of the state of the massively successful fundraiser we put together with Pledgie.com (try it out if you want to raise money for your cause!).

It is still not too late to donate money (you can use paypal with the previous link which will help get more developers to the event. Cheers to all who gave too and linked to the various posts thus truly shedding light onto the huge community of free and open source graphics users and developers out there in the world

Job Scam: MBC Company

2008-04-27T02:51:57+00:00

Just got a job scam, though I'm a bit stumped as to what the catch is. According to this, they send you packages that you then forward on. They pay your mailing costs and $50 on top of it for the service... per package. I'm figuring there's something illegal in the packages and they're using you to muddy the trail back to them so if the cops intercept a package, they're having to track it back through multiple blind drops. But that's only supposition.

Here's the e-mail:

MBC Company

Our company "MBC Co." offers a part-time work giving you an opportunity to earn extra money for your family budget!!!

Here is some information about us: "MBC Co." co-operates with business partners in more than 180 countries in Europe, North and South America, Middle East and Asia. Our company was founded 3 years ago. By now "MBC Co." has achieved the reputation of reliable and secure company. Our fields of activity are various. We find firms and people and arrange a contract between them. We appear as a guarantee between a firm and an employee.

At present we are opening a new mail delivery service and seeking for personell. Yet this is only a part-time work, however we are intending to develop this service and in case if you are interested, we are ready to permanent co-operating.

The essense of your work is following:
Our client sends you a letter (or an envelope). You take it to the nearest DHL or PonyExpress office and send it to our client. If the letter is shipped with regular mail it takes months to deliver it to the reciever, which is unacceptable due to our client's business level. That is why we are helping our clients to have their mail delivered in any place on the Earth as soon as possible.

This is a well-paid job. The wage for each letter is approximately 50$. The more letters you recieve - the more money you earn.
If you wish to gare interested in our offer or have any questions about the "MBC Co.":
Please complete in block letters and be attentively the following form:
Full name:
Adress:
City:
State:
Zip:
Phone:
E-mail:
Please send your information to e-mail: Support.MbcCo@gmail.com

Please, write your data correctly! If it is required we'll call you. You will receive further instructions.

Thanks for your attention, post-service MBC Company.

FAQ:

1. Who do I recieve the package from? - You recieve it from our clients, who are not able to send it with express mail abroad.
2. You are not allowed to open any files or envelopes.
3. How much do I get paid? - You are paid 50$ for each package. You recieve the package, we give you the money for the redelivery. You give us the tracking number of DHL or Pony Express.
4. The best variant is to send the package the day you recieved it.
5. The DHL or PonyExpress delivery doesn't cost more than 100$. as you recieve the package, you send us an e-mail. We send a money transfer to your account in 2 days.
6. Can I send the package with some other mail? - No, DHL or PonyExpress only.
7. What about taxes? - Don't worry, you don't have to pay any taxes.
8. How many packages a month can be sent? - We can send up to ten packages a day, if this is allright with you. The amount of money depends on the amount of packages.
9. Your work is not hard, you don't have to invest anything. We are paying you for the service.
10. All operations of our company are legal which is confirmed by a number of international legal statements.
11. Who is responsible in case if client is not satisfied with the service? - Our company
www.worldmbc.net

Now, this has all the hallmarks of a scam:

High pay for unskilled labor
The web site they send you to was registered on March 20th (barely over a month old) and it was registered out of Russia.
The sender's "from" address is at a completely unrelated domain and you're supposed to reply to an address at a free e-mail service.

Besides the possibility that they're having you help move contraband, the part about them sending a money transfer to your account in two days has me suspicious. It may be that the packages are full of newspaper and ping-pong balls. The trick will be getting you to provide your bank account information so they can send you a wire transfer to cover shipping costs. Then they use it to forge a wire transfer from your account instead of to it.

Anyway, I'm sorry I can't give as many details on the scam behind this that I do on other scams, but this is raising all the red flags and the odds of it being on the level are next to nil. Don't reply to this, don't give them any personal information.

Best of luck to you all.

Farwell Edgy

2008-04-26T02:39:41+00:00

Edgy is now officially at end-of-life.

Looking back through my build logs, I can see that my desktop spent 55 hours, 14 minutes, and 3 seconds on 406 builds related to edgy-security updates I was involved in publishing. These times obviously don’t include patch hunting/development, failed builds, testing, stuff done on my laptop or the porting machines, etc. Comparing to my prior post on this topic, here are the standings for other releases:

dapper: 44:48:24
feisty: 58:49:04
gutsy: 37:06:08
hardy: 86:25:58

Hmm… I think my hardy numbers include devel builds times… I’ll have to sort that out. :)

Thank you Edgy! I will remember you for your wonderful default -fstack-protector.

Fedora stickers kit

2008-04-25T13:04:00+00:00

As for the Werewolf Romanian release party we produced locally a bunch of stickers I toyed with the idea to produce something similar but still different for Sulphur (most likely we will hold an event on 18 May).

My solution was to come with a "kit", an A6 adhesive paper with as many as possible Fedora graphics crammed on it (stickers suited for various things from USB sticks to laptops or buttons):

[PNG] [SVG]

The big advantage, as I see it, is that an ambassador (or any other Fedora enthusiast) can print them cheaply on A4 adhesive paper, cut it in 4 quarters and give them away in a "do yourself" style, where the receiver is supposed to cut itself the individual pieces:

[PNG] [SVG]

We have not printed anything yet, used the slippage of the release date as the perfect excuse to delay the work :p - so tings may change until 13/18 May.

Fedora 9 looking good

2008-04-24T14:31:00+00:00

I upgraded my laptop to the latest Fedora Core 9 test release last night due to having some issues with a broken keyring database. And I have to say it is a very nice experience so far. The major thing I think a lot more people than me has been waiting for is having the GNOME keyring database connected to your gdm login. So now more first login in then providing they keyring manager your password before it logs you onto the wireless or email servers.

Another small bug now fixed is that when you boot with for instance a SD card in the machine it pops up on the desktop right away. in FC8 I had to take it out and put it in again once the desktop was running to get it automounted.

The system monitor is also become very nice, while this is a GNOME improvement more than something Fedora specific it is still something I appreciated when I took at look at it. There are also some improved icons, especially the new SD card icon looks really sweet.

Various bits of polish added to NetworkManager also like a Connection Information item. The power manager has also improved, and it now asked me if I wanted to change my lid down action when connected with mains power to avoid system risking overheating.

Firefox 3 is of course another nice improvement of this release. And it seems Fedora integrated the OpenOffice GStreamer patches created by Novell as I was able to put an Ogg video into a presentation and have it work now.

I also liked the fact that when I had to type in my SSH password in a terminal window the gnome-keyring popped up a dialogue asking if I wanted it to remember this password, very sweet indeed.

Only thing I am not to fond of is the new GDM log in, it feels slow and cumbersome as I first have to pick my name from the list before it ’slowly’ brings up the password field.

Weekly Fedora Webcomics: 8.04

2008-04-24T13:48:00+00:00

I was labelled as having a grudge, probably I will be called flamebaiter or troll, but I think a little controversy is healthy from time to time, so I won't censor myself and leave this cartoon online.
If my intention was to do cheap trolling, I would have used the word hardon somewhere in the dialogs, but I assumed the IQ of my readers is high enough so I don't have to go for obvious jokes.

PS: considering the feedback about unreadable text received after the previous issues, I kept the handfont font (for freedom) but I moved to ALL CAPS, hope it is readable enough (and updated the old webcomics too).

PPS: source is available in SVG, as always (open source webcomics).

More SoC Pitivi hacking

2008-04-24T12:07:45+00:00

So it turns out we got 2 Summer of Code projects working on improving the Pitivi non-linear video editor. Sarath Lakshman will be hacking on Pitivi this summer as part of the Fedora Summer of Code. This is in addition to the work that Brandon Lewis will be doing. So hopefully by the end of summer Pitivi will be useful for a lot more people.

KDE 4

2008-04-24T06:53:00+00:00

I tried KDE 4 back at the Fedora 9 Beta, I tried it again at the F9 preview release and will try it again at the final release (I plan to have it on a bootable USB pen drive, along with a GNOME one at the event we will hold locally for the release). But every time I end my test run quickly, after a few minutes.

I understand that KDE fans and users should be happy with it, the KDE SIG guys did a wonderful job, it looks polished and close to the default KDE look and feel (long gone are the controversial, good or bad, days of Bluecurve, RHL 8 and unified look and feel).

But longer I try KDE, the more displeased I get and more committed to GNOME. It looks alien to me, it feels alien to me. Yes, the desktop looks shiny, but all my shortcuts, reflexes and habits are useless here. I could train myself (probably in at least a few weeks of pain) and heavily customize to get something familiar but is much easier to stay with my current choices. Which does not means KDE 4 is a bad desktop, it just isn't the best desktop for me.

Pan-o-rama Planets

2008-04-23T22:59:00+00:00

Sorry planet people. I didn't think last night when I posted the pan-o-rama in my blog entry. It's now appropriately thumbnailed.

Job Scam: Grandy's EPack Corporation

2008-04-23T18:43:31+00:00

Just got the following job offer for a "Financial Representative" position. Of course, it's a check cashing scam.

For those of you who haven't heard about the check cashing job scams going around the internet, they work like this: A company pretends to hire you as a "financial representative" to cash checks from their clients in your country, because they don't have a presence in your country. They send you checks, you cash them, take a piece of the money, and then wire the rest through Western Union.

Here's the problem... the checks are only good enough to pass first inspection. Most banks will cash checks for their customers under a certain amount without checking to see if they're good. Then a few days or a week later, once they've gone through the clearinghouse and come back as no good, the bank demands their money back. You've already sent it via Western Union, but since you're the one who cashed the check, you're on the hook for the money. Good luck getting your "employer" to even answer your e-mails after that, much less return the money.

Here's the e-mail I got:

from: Ophelia Ortega <xfidnsqcvacf@bowkerandassoc.com>
date: Wed, Apr 23, 2008 at 11:26 AM
subject: For: columns [editor's note: the address it was sent to was "columns" @ one of my domains]

Grandy's Epack Corporation is announcing about a job opening in the company. The software developer now having their clients in different globe spots located needs Financial Representatives to help handle money flow and save both time and efforts of their clients. No upfront paying, you will never be asked for a dime out of your pocket. You get paid instantly in amount of 5% out every transaction operation.

Benefits listed:
-Steady income in amount of 3500 $ minimum on a monthly basis.
-5-6 hours a week! That's all you have to spent on doing this job. You can easily combine this job with your another one.

Requirements:
-Basic idea in Accounting
-Regular internet Access
-Ability to accept payments using your BANK ACCOUNT
-Ability to resend money VIA WESTERN UNION

If feel qualified ,please, attach the following info to start up with:
- Fist Name:
- Last Name:
- Age:
- Sex:
- State, City, Zip:
- Phone number( home and cell):
- Valid email address:

Please, contact us for the first time via this email address: epackpersonnel@gmail.com , in the subject field put: "Interested". Use only mentioned email address, otherwise we'll fail to receive your response.

Here are your big red flags:

Why is her e-mail address a string of gobbledygook at an odor control company in the U.S. instead of with the company she's recruiting for?
The English is terrible. Bad grammar isn't a crime, but seems to be an affliction common to these criminals.
"accept payments using your BANK ACCOUNT" and "resend money VIA WESTERN UNION"... Yup, run away. Run away fast. (p.s. I didn't put theose words in all-caps. They did. It's as if they were trying to point out their red flags for me.)
who is going to pay a complete stranger over $100 an hour for *legal* work that requires next to no skill and next to no effort? Come on.

This came to an e-mail address I haven't used in years an never associated with my job search, so that was a flag too, but only for me. You may have gotten your copy at your primary address. Still, toss this away, don't reply, and understand that there's nothing you can really do about it except warn others not to fall for it.

Best of luck to you all.

F10 Gears: Colouring the Gears - Golden Gears

2008-04-23T09:10:00+00:00

Last week I talked about drawing gears with Inkscape (for a Fedora 10 theme proposal, but not only), now it's the time for a promised follow-up: let' put some color on the gears.

I want to make the gears golden (or bronze, there is not much difference in the process) to express the value and at the same time match the intended steampunk style. The start is exactly where I left the image, black outlines on a transparent background:

The first step is to define the color, and metallic is not a color, the metallic look of a surface is given by light reflection, so we will use a multistop gradient (a gradient with more than two colors). For gold it should contain a succession of lighter and darker shades of yellow, maybe also a bit of orange, for bronze also yellows with a shade of green (copper oxidation is green), for steel it should contains greys, the chrome is also greys but more reflective (more contrast, from almost black to almost white), silver is less reflective grey and so on.
Here is my gold:

Then take one wheel and apply the gradient to it:

For a 3D look add a drop shadow (duplicate, make it black, move a few pixels down and right, move it under the wheel, add a bit of blur and maybe decrease the opacity):

The gear does not say on air, we'll put on a background, and I used the same golden gradient for the sake of simplicity, you can use a different one, maybe darker:

Add some more gears (all your golden gears). Note the usefulness of the drop shadow, without it it would be hard to set apart the gear from the background, now they are distinct objects:

To make the image more vivid (and because so looks the pocket watch I'm using as a reference, I add some steel gears. Start this by defining the gradient (multistop, greys, with a shade of blue):

And apply the gradient to some wheels:

Here is one trick to get some of the wheels richer, not that plain and boring: add a groove - two smaller circles, aligned to the center of the gear, filled with the same grey gradient, the larger in an opposite direction, the smaller in the same direction as the rest of the wheel:

Put the steel gears in the device (just take care to not couple steel gears with gold gears: steel with steel and gold with gold):

Now for some axles: small circles, made from gold, steel, ruby or sapphire (if you remember my attempt to cheat and put more blue). Do not forget the drop shadow and consider a white highlight:

Place the axles in the center of the gears and we are set:

But I often have a tendency to go overboard and will do now the same: add some screws holding the device. They are easy to do: create a steel circle, substract a rectangle to create the groove, add a darker steel rectangle, the bottom of the groove, rotate the screw to a random angle (we don't want all the screws to have parallel grooves, that would be repeating and boring), fix the gradient and add a drop shadow. Maybe a hole: a larger circle colored with the same gradient as the background but with an opposed orientation. (I increased the zoom level in this step for a clearer illustration)

Distribute the screws evenly (or randomly it you feel like too) and it's done:

Now wait for another follow-up, probably next week, when I will try to color is an old drawing on old paper or blueprint style.

Beach Wedding

2008-04-23T07:29:00+00:00

Bryce had his wedding a couple of weekends ago out on the Oregon Coast. Beautiful weather and beaches made for a wonderful time. Now he didn't blog about it, so that makes me believe that we should choose a random entry and everyone give him a congrats there (I gave him over a week to do it on his own, that's like a billion-gazillon-years Internet time). Nobody tell him I organized this.

I took this pan-o-rama on the beach. It isn't perfect, but I do think it turned out pretty good for being hand held with a point-and-shoot camera.

Get Pim off Iron Chef

2008-04-23T03:50:15+00:00

So, they've had this woman, Pim (or is it Pym?) as a judge on Iron Chef America recently, billing her as a food blogger. She speaks with an accent and I'd say her English is pretty good except for the fact that she seems to know only one adjective.

It's the Iron Chef drinking game... every time Pim describes something as "lovely," you drink. By the end of the first chef's courses, we're blotto.

Get her a thesaurus or get her off Iron Chef!

And what about Robert Irvine's meltdown? First JAG on "The Next Food Network Star" (which I didn't get called for despite my kick ass audition video), then this. They need to avoid ex-military for a while.

OTOH, it gives us a chance for more Michael Symon. Him, Mario, and Alton are the holy trinity of "Food Network stars I'd like to have as poker buddies." Yes, no Guy Fieri (his machismo seems too contrived), no Bobby Flay (his doesn't), no Emeril (my kid's asleep -- keep it down, guy), no Dave Lieberman (my secret nickname for him is Buffy), no Rachel Ray (shudder), no Giada (I just don't need the porn voice-over soundtrack with every bite), but Paula Deen would be allowed to sit in for Anthony Bourdain when he went out for a smoke.