Planet Open Clip Art Library

Greg Bulmash: Are Consumers Stupid?

2008-05-20T16:55:00+00:00

This weekend, I had to fill up my car with gas. As it was on my way to some other errands, I went to Arco because they generally have the best prices. But I was amazed by how much. Over the course of about 2.5 miles on a main highway, I saw a Shell and a 76 station each charging $3.95 and 9/10 per gallon for regular unleaded. A Tesoro station was a bit better at $3.91 and 9/10. But the Arco was at $3.67 and 9/10.

Despite that, there were cars filling up at Shell, 76, and Tesoro. If you have a truck with a 20 gallon tank, you're wasting over $5 per fill-up by going to Shell or 76. If you fill up once a week, you're wasting $260 a year. Is Shell's plain old 87 octane regular so much better than Arco's that it's worth $260 a year? If you're already hurting from high gas prices, is there a reason why you're needlessly paying an extra $20+ a month?

I'm not saying everyone should go to Arco. I'm just wondering how multiple gas stations can charge 7.6% more for gasoline than a station just down the street and have customers at the pumps.

Nicu Buculei: Lame blog post

2008-05-20T15:14:00+00:00

This is the perfect example of a lame blog post: I was super busy today all day long, without the time to write a proper post (I had two subjects in my mind, one involving a screencast for translators and another a couple of tips for icon creation) but at the same time I wanted to test Seth's changes at Planet Fedora (more about coolness potential in it in a future post) and I had to update the countdown, as it is close to finish, so sorry for the noise.

Jon Phillips: Twitter Updates for 2008-05-19

2008-05-20T04:59:59+00:00

@kiruba i hope you wrote that after you got out of taxi #
@joi hahahahahahahaha #
While the allowed mourning is amazingly open in china, this forced mourning is horrendous. If anything gov’t should push for more business #
Nothing like totally disrupting business all throughout china when funds are needed in this disaster, which is also economic! #
Lu and I just went in and around a few places, and malls, shops, are nearly deserted, movie theaters shut down for next three day, etc!!! #
@isaac that only works if the government installs it for you…didn’t you know!!!! #
skype, how about renaming it trype #

Andy Fitzsimon: send me your GNOME screenshots

2008-05-20T02:31:30+00:00

I’m currently collecting as many desktop screenshots as I can for my talk at GUADEC this July.

If you have any novel ones (new or old) that you’d like to give me permision to share, please email them to andyfitz at gmail.com. Attribution will of course be given.

For those able to attend this guadec, I’ll probably be staying here feel free to contact me if you are up for a group booking.

Nicu Buculei: Fedora 9 - Romanian Release Party

2008-05-19T08:37:00+00:00

The subject says all: Sunday 18 May we had a small Release Party for Fedora 9 in Bucharest. First I will scare you with a few ugly photos made with my phone (resized from GIMP so they are not that ugly):

As you can see, we had an live USB creation station, free stuff (install DVDs, stickers) and even some beer after the event.

But fear not, there are better photos coming, the first batch from Adrian is hosted on our official gallery (more form him later tonight):

Expect this space to get updated with more links as I'll find the photos taken by other people.

Update: some meaty photos from wolfy, showing not only people but also snippests from the presentations:

Of course the party was not trouble-free: of course we had problems with the internet pipe, of course everybody who brought the laptop forgot to check the installation of the livecd-tools package and of course everybody expected it to be on the install DVD (is not), but in the end everything got solved. And it was fun.

And BTW, here is the obligatory (aren't you tired of it already?):

Jon Phillips: Twitter Updates for 2008-05-18

2008-05-19T04:59:59+00:00

garage killing mystery sticks, I push mayonnaise colored benz like its miracle whips…crackin on some fun projects #
getting massively jazzed on dennou coil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennou_Coil Diving into experimental media projects now #
on my new assistants resume said: versed in bypassing GFW…instant hire! #
@tvol: GFW = great fire wall (the big ass internet filtering of china….great firewall 2.0) #
syncing all personal info and more, catching up on really old email, contemplating sustaining old projects #

Jon Phillips: Audio Junkies: Overlap Salon 01 Max/MSP/Jitter Wednesday May 21 2008 - San Francisco

2008-05-18T09:02:38+00:00

I think this new ongoing Overlap Salon that we are putting on through Overlap.org is going to be nice and fun. If you are into cutting edge music, audio performance, and the technologies related with these, I urge you to come out to this new regular event. Christopher posted more on Overlap.org about this:

This first Overlap Salon event brings together users of Cycling 74′s legendary “build-it-yourself” software universe Max/MSP/Jitter. Cool Max/MSP/Jitter nerds will be able to meet, exchange knowledge, advice, and software patches. Max/MSP/Jitter patches covered in the Salon will also be shared on Overlap.org following the event. All participants are required to bring your their own laptop, beer (if u want) and thinking cap. WIFI provided.

I will bring beer. I wonder if we have any more free beer at Creative Commons actually Anyone interested in coming to this and/or presenting? Let us/me know! If I talk about anything, it will be the anti-max/msp/jitter called PD which I used to hack on back in the UCSD-aze. Also, if you show up, maybe I will talk more about why Lil Wayne is so brilliant and use my Eeepc as an awesome DJ’ing platform.

Jon Phillips: ccHost 4.5 Out and Liblicense 0.7 Too!

2008-05-18T08:54:12+00:00

Mike blogged about the ccHost 4.5 release for all you to update your sites to for stability right before the massively updated 5.0 arrives on the scene. If you have forgotten, ccHost is the engine behind Open Clip Art Library and Open Font Library (which both need developers). More info below:

Two new releases of ccHost today, the remix-oriented media hosting software that drives ccMixter:

4.5, the final release from the 4.x tree. 4.0 was released March 6 last year.

5.0beta is the code that has been running on ccMixter for several months (5.0alpha was available in February.) The missing piece needed to make 5.0 final is updated administrator documentation.

The software is licensed under the GPL and downloadable from sourceforge or our source repository.

Also, Asheesh packaged up liblicense 0.7 which is useful for all wanting to add licensing to your application. I want to get liblicense into a couple of applications like Eye of Gnome and something else fun. Any ideas open source developers? There are resources to help work on this at Creative Commons if you are interested in something fun:

I just released liblicense 0.7.0 on SourceForge. It fixes the Python bindings. They’ve been broken since the 0.6 release, it seems. Some functionality in them probably worked between 0.6 and 0.7, but (read on for more)…

LL_LICENSE and other constants were “extern const char” arrays before. Now they’re just lousy old #defines. This way, even though the strings might appear more than once in memory, it’s very simple for the IO modules like exempi.so to refer to those constants.

Before, due to dynamic linker loading order issues, if liblicense.so were added to a process’s memory memory map at runtime, if liblicense then tried to dlopen() its modules, the modules wouldn’t be able to find those constants. What a drag! That broke the Python bindings’ ability to use the modules.

Now, I guess that’s still true, but the modules don’t need actual symbols from liblicense anymore.

I noticed this issue in the process of creating and testing RPMs for Fedora. I had to bump the SONAME because this removes symbols from the library.

You can grab it on SourceForge, and perhaps soon in Fedora Rawhide.

Jon Phillips: Yes, Use CC to Free Your Stuff IANAL

2008-05-18T08:43:19+00:00

Yes, I do get paid by Creative Commons, but I’m speaking in a personal capacity in response to the post on i, quaid about using CC licenses.

My answer is yes, using CC is better than using nothing where anyone would have to ask you for permission to use your work which is locked by default in many jurisdictions, including U-S-of-A. And, if you want to contribute to the solution you and others seek, use something like CC Attribution or the CC Public Domain dedication. New things like CC Zero coming down the pipe are good to with a system in place to encourage social solutions per community (called “social norms”) rather than legal solutions, like the NC, SA, ND conditions, which I have been super excited about for some time and pushing hard, because that is what we have been doing with Open Clip Art Library for ages by using PD and encouraging attribution.

I shouldn’t tell you what to use, but I do personally think that the NC condition is a gateway into the free universe. Without it, you will get a situation where less people will use more free licenses. And, in my experience as well, individuals are the ones using the NC condition more than businesses, which often times select the CC Attribution or the CC Public Domain dedication for all content submitted to their site, like Digg.com (look at the bottom of the page). Please do conjecture about why this is, as I’m curious to why others might think this is the case.

With that being said, IANAL

Jon Phillips: Flame of Shame Pictures 2 on DeerFang.org

2008-05-18T04:40:23+00:00

Lu has a good post about the Olympic flame of love following up from my last post, which you can also purchase as a commemorative item. Here are a couple of photos. Follow to her page for more:

This is an interesting phenomena, which Lu and I will skip by heading to San Francisco next may 21…heads up people!

Greg Bulmash: Will Gay Marriage Be A Factor In The Presidential Race?

2008-05-17T23:16:30+00:00

In a post on CNN, Jack Cafferty asked if gay marriage will be a wedge issue in the 2008 election like it was in 2004.

All the top answers seemed to focus on the fact that this time around there are bigger fish to fry and that's what would stop it from being an issue. Me, I believe it won't be an issue because they made a big thing of it to get votes and then did squat. If the Republicans bring it up in 2008, it's just a reminder of a broken campaign promise (one of many).

Christopher Schmidt: Cool Processing Stuff

2008-05-17T19:30:17+00:00

Notes about Processing, from processing.org, and other related things. "Drawing images is not about telling which pixels to turn on or off, it's about telling to draw lines." In addition to processing being pretty, you can draw the entire map into any unit you want. Drew a bunch of lines out in ...

Greg Bulmash: Ann Coulter = Manure?

2008-05-17T02:09:35+00:00

So I was doing some research on the prices of different kinds of animal poop for an upcoming Rough Equivalents article. Ended up in the home and garden section of Amazon.com, pricing manure-based fertilizers.

Amazon, being ever helpful, decided to show me products related to manure, and the first product... a book by Ann Coulter! Apparently some users have used "manure" as a tag for categorizing her books. You can see Amazon's list of items tagged with "manure".

Wonder how long it will take Amazon to notice.

Jon Phillips: links for 2008-05-17

2008-05-17T00:37:06+00:00

中国开源软件（OSS）推进联盟 - 2008 Linux Developer Symposium - China–Speakor

Crap, leaving for sf for couple of months on may 21, and then my friends are coming to guangzhou for kind of fake open source conference the days right after leave!

(tags: opensource china guangzhou conference 2008)

Christopher Schmidt: Geohacking This Evening

2008-05-16T17:00:06+00:00

Tonight, starting around 7:30, there is a plan to descend on The Dubliner, in Noe Valley, San Francisco, for beer and hackery. If the plan changes, I'll update twitter. If you want to join us, please: Comment here Email me (crschmidt@crschmidt.net) or Text or call me (603.264.2294)

Nicu Buculei: Fedora Weekly Webcomic: Smell the Sulphur

2008-05-15T13:05:00+00:00

One more webcomic created in April (the last one, cross my heart), but this time I have an excuse: it was made for the release week the release got delayed, so my webcomic too (but next week...)

With my effort to translate it into Romanian I inflicted the translation pain of having to translate untranslatable expressions and play-on-words, which reminded me why I hate translations.

And 8-1=7:

Andy Fitzsimon: What an LGM. I mean wow!

2008-05-15T06:56:03+00:00

It will be weeks before I can actually take in all of the developments, conversations, challenges and potential each participating project had benefited from.

I’ll have to categorize the areas of massive development:

It was like a wedding of api’s, libraries, programs and users: All parts of the open source creative chain met together and the fusion was immediate and real.

Colour: management in our files, our applications and throughout our desktop.
Typography: management, libraries, designing, accessibility and the authors.
Geometry: Rendering api, computational libraries, new methods and in our apps
Publishing: the best workflow, the toolchains, the standards and the content.
Image: composting frameworks, open formats, editing articulation ..more
Insight & Implementation: research, usability, interaction design & planning

I’ll try to pull apart these categories to cover each projects benefits of the meeting. Like I said, its a lot to take in… I couldn’t be more happy.

So, Thank you!

Thank you to everyone who made the most of their time during LGM.
You were teaching, learning, coding and planning. As a collective, our understanding grew into other new worlds and our code will benefit.

Thank you to everyone who made LGM happen. You were sponsors, helping out during the day, and making introductions between projects.

Even the people who couldn’t make it to Poland, your efforts made LGM possible and look at the benefits. So thank you, again and again.

I’ve always known open source is the best way to develop software (and ideas) and LGM is such a real demonstration of the fact.

I should probably get preachy and mention that the most expensive proprietary company SLA’s will never get you this kind of synergy between your engineers and the api’s they use. But there’s plenty of time for that later.

Stay tuned for more news soon. I’m off to have some chilli crab!

Andy Fitzsimon: Fedora 9 is out !

2008-05-15T03:40:16+00:00

Check out my favourite open source desktop environment:

Its been a pleasure using Rawhide this time around.. still glad to be back and stable

Christopher Schmidt: Wherecamp, here I come!

2008-05-14T14:00:05+00:00

I'm off to Wherecamp tomorrow. I'll be in town and have no plans yet as of Friday, and I'll be at wherecamp all weekend, planning to spend the night hacking at the Googleplex. Who's going to be there? Anyone interested in meeting up on Friday, or doing any hacking ahead of ...

Nicu Buculei: Translating Fedora into Romanian with Narro

2008-05-14T08:42:00+00:00

You may remember when I talked is some older posts about how awesome Alexandru Szasz is, now here is the latest cool thing he is up to and which I think deserve recognition: he just added Fedora in his web-based translation tool, Narro, for translation into Romanian:

Just for kicks, I translated about 100 Fedora strings and it was a snap (well, I have already used the tool, translating for Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org). There is an initiative to get the Romanian community involved in this and maybe (just maybe, it is early to say) get something ass-kicking for F10 (not that hard, the translation is currently at 39% from about 15000 stings).

In a somewhat related matter, I dis a "fedora translation" search on Google and got amused by the sponsored link shown at the top of the page (the one on yellow background). I guess that's so-called "friendly competition"...

And jumping to an unrelated matter (is it really unrelated?) that's today's counter:

Ryan Lerch: ryanlerch

2008-05-14T02:03:31+00:00

Comment me if you have more links…

Jon Phillips: links for 2008-05-14

2008-05-14T00:52:34+00:00

Mozilla Stealth Data Project Could Be Just What The Internet Needs

Yes, this is great! What would be really great is for this precious data to be channeled into a non-profit or other .org and allow for other browsers, projects channel this type of anonymized data into a common place for accurate web forecasting/reporting

(tags: data firefox interesting internet mozilla News project software web metrics techcrunch statistics analytics)

Ryan Lerch: ryanlerch

2008-05-13T20:25:46+00:00

Yes, it it true… Fedora 9 has been released. I am downloading via bittorrent as we speak.

digg fedora 9 here!!!

Jon Phillips: I missed the flame of shame in Guangzhou

2008-05-13T09:17:10+00:00

Last week I took cc biz trip to Tokyo and missed the flame of shame outside our place in Guangzhou…totally bummed! Lu shot tons of HD footage of it and many photos of the endless security here…crazy!

Nicu Buculei: Just a few more hours...

2008-05-13T07:16:00+00:00

I am not a fan of their music, but when when I learned about the second album released by NIN under a CreativeCommons license, I fired up by BitTorrent client to download and see what's about it.
But starting the client activated the seeding for my previous uploads, with an interesting surprise:

Guys, stop downloading the pre-release ISOs, those are ooold... the real deal is going to get live in a few hours, just wait a bit. Or, if you can't stand the heat, use a leaked torrent, they are all over the place, but make sure to verify the SHA1SUM before installing... (me taunts my buddy who refuses to use a leaked torrent and tries to find an unprotected FTP and continues seeding the previews, they will get yum update'd tot he final version).

Oh, and I didn't forgot (yet):

Ryan Lerch: ryanlerch

2008-05-13T00:36:18+00:00

If you live in Australia and don’t want to waste 4gB of your precious download limit on downloading fedora 9, I will happily burn a DVD for you! (i will be only downloading the i386 - Install DVD, so that is all i am able to burn for you…)

Here’s how:

Shoot me an email at ryanlerch at gmail dot com to get my mailing address.
Then, send me a stamped, self addressed envelope with a blank DVD in it.
I’ll burn the DVD for you, and pop it back in the post.
if you feel like it, do the same for someone else.

Hope i can help people out!

Greg Bulmash: 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.

Nicu Buculei: 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:

Greg Bulmash: 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.

Nicu Buculei: 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

Jon Phillips: 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)

Ryan Lerch: 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.

Greg Bulmash: 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?"

Nicu Buculei: 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:

Nicu Buculei: 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:

Greg Bulmash: 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.

Christian Schaller: 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

Nicu Buculei: 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...

Nicu Buculei: 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.

Jon Phillips: 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.

Jon Phillips: 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?

Jon Phillips: 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.

Jon Phillips: 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)

Jon Phillips: 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!

Jon Phillips: 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)

Ryan Lerch: 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

Greg Bulmash: 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.

Christian Schaller: 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.

Nicu Buculei: 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.

Ryan Lerch: 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)

Nicu Buculei: 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).

Greg Bulmash: 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.

Greg Bulmash: 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.

Nicu Buculei: 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.