February 09, 2010

Nicu Buculei

Some FOSDEM 2010 photos

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

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

And hanged with people from both communities:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 09, 2010 02:24 PM

Nicu Buculei

Back in the trenches

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

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

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

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

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

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

February 09, 2010 07:43 AM

February 07, 2010

Máirín Duffy

Inkscape Class Day 7

Friday morning, I taught the seventh session of an 8-session (40 minutes per session) course on Inkscape at a Boston-area middle school. (For more general details about the class check out my blog post on day 1.)

Friday’s Class

Well, this Inkscape course is quickly wrapping up. One more class after this past one on Friday. The students’ work was due at the end of this class and they all did great work in prepping their designs for the printer. I handed out a sheet with the export instructions (available for download below.)

We weren’t exactly sure the best approach to gather up the files at first; Ken had set up a shared drive on the network for the students to save their work to, but on some of the Macs, Inkscape’s export bitmap dialog could not see the shared drive (and some could!) What we ended up doing:

Have the students export their work out to the desktop – 300 dpi, PNG format.
I asked them to use either their band name or their own name in the file so I could tell them apart.
Then, ask them open up the appropriate network drive folder and drag both the exported file and original SVG into it from the desktop.
I then connected to the shared drive, inspected all the files to make sure they had exported correctly (they had! If they hadn’t, I would have gone back to the students whose files had issues and tried to help them re-export them.)
I then copied the files from the network drive onto a USB key.
Immediately after I got back to the office, I went through the files carefully, adding the requested T-shirt size from the students’ filled-out T-shirt size sign-up sheet from day 5 of class. My naming scheme was the following format:

01-studentfirstname-bandname-sizeS.png
I then uploaded the files to a URL, both as individual files and bundled in a zip file for Walter’s convenience – then I emailed Walter the URLs.
John called Walter from EmbroidMe Chelmsford up to make sure he had gotten the email (he hadn’t yet, so great thinking on John’s part) and Walter set out setting up the T-shirts that morning.

A few things we learned from this process I think you could take away in teaching a similar class to make it run more smoothly:

Make sure you pass that T-shirt size signup sheet around early on, and keep bringing it back to class until every student has filled it out. Students are absent sometimes, especially in the winter cold season, and you want to make sure you’ve got each student’s size.
We had one student absent this past Friday. We’ll get his file on the last day of class and get his T-shirt to him after the class is over. That being said, you may want to have the students save out to a shared drive throughout the class (we weren’t doing that, we were having them use their individual accounts) and in the days of class past the halfway mark of the entire course, ask the students if they are going to be there for every day, and if not would they like us to go ahead and print their files if they’re not there or to wait.
Make it easier for your printer and put the students’ T-shirt sizes in the file name.
Make sure you get the students’ SVGs as well as PNGs! Rendering PNGs from SVGs with a lot of blurs can take a long time! I was really surprised by this. The Whisp logo took the longest – a good 15-20 minutes to render! If you have the students’ SVG files as well and run out of time during class, it enables you to do the rendering on your own post-class to make sure the printer will get the files on time. It’s also good to have the SVGs in case you or the printer notice any issues with the PNG that might have been missed during class.
Bundling the files into one compressed file makes it easier for them to download than individual files.
If you’re on a tight deadline, don’t rely on email only – give your printer a call!

Many students were finished with time to spare, so they had the rest of the period to explore Inkscape on their own. They came up with some very cool sketches using the techniques they learned throughout the class:

You can see the full set of photos John took of the students’ work in the Flickr album for session 7. On Tuesday, if all goes well (fingers crossed!) we’ll hand out the T-shirts and do some fun exercises with Inkscape, so look forward to those photos.

Follow Along on Your Own

Here’s the lesson sheet we used for class on Friday:

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 7

As always, the OpenOffice.org source files and the outlines for the entire course are at the course page on my website – but please note that’s a rough outline; as we progress through the class I’m coming up with the more-solid lesson plans based on how far the students get each session. By the end of the course I hope to have the course page organized much better.

By the way, if you’d like to follow all the blog posts about this class at one URL without getting the rest of my feed, I’ve set up a category in WordPress specifically for these posts:

http://mairin.wordpress.com/category/inkscape-class/

Enjoy! And please do let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions

This course is sponsored by

Filed under: Inkscape Class

February 07, 2010 04:34 PM

February 06, 2010

Nicu Buculei

Fedora Webcomic, FOSDEM Special: The Lame Sellout

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

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

February 06, 2010 12:35 PM

Nicu Buculei

FOSDEM -1: FAD and beer

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

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

After which we moved to the traditional beer event

Where obviously everybody had plenty of beer:

February 06, 2010 11:32 AM

February 03, 2010

Henrik Heigl

MKTG FAD 2010 – thoughts about photoshooting

It is about a month from now (plus minus a fews days) so I had some thoughts about the photoshooting stuff we want to do at the days during the Marketing FAD 2010 and maybe here are some ideas we can use as a base for some sort of themes.

1.) 30 photos in 30 minutes

We have several photographers at the scene. Maybe we spread out and take a look around. Make 30 photos in 30 minutes and put them together. Everyone have different experiences, differnet thoughts, etc.

2.) trash the color

with gimp or digikam we could change the color, but if we shoot in black and white from the beginning on.

3.) using wrong technique

why use teleobjectives outdoors and wide-lens for portraits? Maybe flip that around.

4.) take a pet

use any pet (dog, cat, hamster, pony, etc.) for a photoshoot. Don’t harm him/her, but try to focus on the pet.

5.) play the game

There is a game called “tabu” (in german, I know it exists also all over the world)around where people have to explain a word, but not to use some distinct word. E.g. if it is “fedora” you mabye cannot use “Linux, Distribution, freedom, friends, features, first, hat, Red Hat”. THEN the game gets interresting.
Try this with your camera.

P.S.: I also made a small MKTG FAD Banner for my blog … hope you like it, feel free to use…

February 03, 2010 03:15 PM

Máirín Duffy

Unpackaged Font of the Week: Gillius ADF

Gillius ADF is a sans-serif typeface, heavily inspired by the famous Gill Sans MT typeface by Eric Gill – who designed Gill Sans inspired by the Johnston typeface designed for the London Underground which Gill had worked on as an apprentice.

The Arkandis Digital Foundry created the Gillius ADF font under the GPL with font exception. There is an alternative version available too (that also needs packaging ) called Gillus ADF No. 2. Each font has regular and condensed variants, each with bold, italic, and bold italic versions. The coverage is not bad for extended Latin characters:

Gillius ADF is a nice, clean font that should serve you well both in regular body text in documents as well as for headings and logo treatments. It’s a versatile and very readable font, just like the Gill Sans typeface that inspired it. One thing you might want to be aware of when working with Gillius ADF – just as cultural context anyway – in the same way that Helvetica is used heavily in the United States, especially on municipal and transit system signage, Gill Sans is used heavily in the UK and recalls ‘mid-century’ type usage in the UK. Gillius ADF, since it refers so closely to Gill Sans, might carry a bit of a UK connotation to it.

(Btw, I purposely picked a word with a lowercase ‘g’ in it for my little type sample because I really like the ‘g’ in Gillius Sans. )

Gillus ADF is licensed under the GPL with Font Exception.

Fedora Font Wishlist Entry:https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ADF_Gillius_fonts
Upstream Homepage: http://arkandis.tuxfamily.org/openfonts.html

So, you want to package Gillius ADF?

Zomg! You’re sweet! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Joining_the_Fonts_SIG

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fonts_packaging

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fonts.

Last Week’s Font

Last week’s font was League Gothic by The League of Moveable Type. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?

Filed under: Unpackaged Font of the Week

February 03, 2010 01:34 PM

Nicu Buculei

The Public Domain Manifesto

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

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

Here is the preamble of the manifesto:

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

Its general principles:

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

And general recommendations:

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

February 03, 2010 09:39 AM

Máirín Duffy

See you at RPI!

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or more affectionately known as RPI, is my alma mater. It was pretty clear to me early on that it was the right school for me. Behold, the RPI campus computing center (Voorhees Computing Center):

That’s right, it’s inside of a church – they take computing seriously at RPI – obviously a great place to recruit current and future free & open source hackers!

I’ll be at the RPI Spring 2010 Career Fair in Troy, NY with my colleague John (who also started the Inkscape class project) – we’ll be representing Red Hat as two past RPI students. If you are an RPI student and are interested in a career at Red Hat, please stop by our booth at the Armory between 12 – 5 pm tomorrow – say hi and see what opportunities we might have for you!

By the way, I’ll be back on campus this Friday, February 5th to give a talk about Fedora, from 4-5 PM in JEC 3117. More details are at the Rensselaer Center for Open Source website. I’ll have plenty of Fedora swag, so if you’re in the capital region and are interested please stop by and say hi if you can!

Filed under: Uncategorized

February 03, 2010 03:32 AM

February 02, 2010

Máirín Duffy

Inkscape Class Day 6

Yesterday morning, I taught the sixth session of an 8-session (40 minutes per session) course on Inkscape at a Boston-area middle school. (For more general details about the class check out my blog post on day 1.)

Yesterday’s Class

Yesterday’s class, like last Thursday’s class, was primarily a working class. After this class we have only two sessions left, and the students’ artwork is due at the end of next session, so we’ve been giving them as much time as possible during class to work on their designs.

When I passed out the shirt size signup sheet last week, one of the students was absent, so I got his size and sent Walter at EmbroidMe Chelmsford a quick email listing of all the T-shirt sizes we’d need so he would be ready to have the shirts printed when we send the designs on Friday.

I gave some quick instructions on working with the align & distribute tool in Inkscape – since we are getting close to the end of class, I thought going over alignments would be helpful for the students in making final preparations for their artwork to be handed off. One of the scenarios I used to explain align & distribute was making a template for a CD design, and how to use the tool to center the hole in the center of the CD to the circle shape for the actual disc.

Some things that came up while the students worked on their designs.

One student wanted to space some shapes surrounding a center circle at even intervals. I struggled a bit to explain how to do this – we tried using the ‘Remove overlaps’ section of the align & distribute tool, but it turns out that ‘remove overlaps’ behaves really strangely when you’re working with circular shapes. I would expect it to either calculate the spacing between the two objects based on the frame around the circular object, or between the outer edge of the shape at the point where the two shapes are closest together. Instead, it calculates based on the right-most point of the left circle, and the left-most point of the right circle, which results in the tool taking somewhat un-intuitive actions. I ended up instructing her to go around the center circle, clicking two of the outside objects at a time, and using the right-align, bottom-align, left-align, and top-align buttons all around the center circle to get things lined up. A bit more tedious, but at least it seemed to work more predictably than using ‘Remove overlaps.’ You can see her design in the photo above, in case this issue is hard to visualize.

Another student wanted a sword to run through a snake such that one part of the snake was above the sword, and the other was under the sword. We made a copy of the snake using Ctrl + D and a copy of the sword using Ctrl + D, then we used Path > Intersect to get two pieces of the sword from where the snake intersected with it. We used Path > Break Apart to seperate the two sword pieces, and deleted the sword piece that covered the snake in the area where she wanted the snake to run over the sword.

One of the students made some really cool textures using a radial gradient with a lot of different points. However, he faced the challenge of part of his band name not being readable because the background coloration was so vivid behind the letters. I showed him how to make a copy of the text, give it a thick stroke in either white or black, then place it behind the original text so that there was a white outline behind the text to help make it readable. I also showed him how to blur the outline to give it more of a glow effect.

You can see the full set of photos John took of the students work in the Flickr album for session 6. You might start to notice a ‘blood’ theme here I think maybe all the vampires from Twilight have had a bit of influence on our youth

I mentioned in earlier posts that the students were very quiet – during these working sessions they’re definitely a bit more social now, talking to each other and helping each other out. I’m really happy to see that happening.

Follow Along on Your Own

Here’s the lesson sheet we used for class yesterday:

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 6

As always, the OpenOffice.org source files and the outlines for the entire course are at the course page on my website – but please note that’s a rough outline; as we progress through the class I’m coming up with the more-solid lesson plans based on how far the students get each session. By the end of the course I hope to have the course page organized much better.

By the way, if you’d like to follow all the blog posts about this class at one URL without getting the rest of my feed, I’ve set up a category in WordPress specifically for these posts:

http://mairin.wordpress.com/category/inkscape-class/

Enjoy! And please do let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions

This course is sponsored by

Filed under: Inkscape Class

February 02, 2010 03:16 PM

February 01, 2010

Maria "tatica" Leandro

Chapas Fedora / Fedora Badges

Solo jugando con algunos diseños de chapas que susmit estaba necesitando / Just playing arround with some designs for some badges that susmit was requesting

Fuente Azul SVG / Blue SVG source
Fuente Blanca SVG / White SVG source

February 01, 2010 03:59 PM

January 31, 2010

Máirín Duffy

Inkscape Class Day 5

This past Thursday morning, I taught the fifth session of an 8-session (40 minutes per session) course on Inkscape at a Boston-area middle school. (For more general details about the class check out my blog post on day 1.)

Thursday’s Class

Thursday’s class was primarily a working class.

First, we passed around a sheet for the students to write out their name, band name, and T-shirt size so EmbroidMe Chelmsford can have the correct size T-shirts ready to go. Then we passed out sheets with a calendar / schedule for the rest of the class. We’re halfway through the course – there are 4 sessions left – so the students’ due date for their design is the end of the second-to-last class on February 5th.

Then, I set out a sheet with some suggested band names that any student who was still stuck on a name could pick from. One idea for using this sheet in your own class could be to cut the band names into little squares and have students pick them out of a hat early on in the course. The students seemed to have settled on either using a band name of their choice (one student is doing the logo for a band he is actually in!) or doing ‘band’ logo using their name.

Last week, I sent Walter at EmbroidMe Chelmsford a demo design created in Inkscape for us to test out how well Inkscape-produced files work with his printing process. Some of the effects such as path clipping and blur did not come out right when he tried the SVG, so we decided to work with 300 dpi PNG exports. The shirt came out great, and I wore it to class as an example for the students, showing them the original file and finished T-shirt side-by-side. I then quickly showed the students how to set their canvas size to 13″ x 15″ so they could see the boundaries of where their designs would print on the T-shirt. One important thing I tried to remind them of is that the shirts will be heather grey, and there is no white ink, so any areas that are white in their file will turn out heather grey / no ink. You can see this in the snowcap of the Inkscape logo mountain in the test t-shirt, as I’m pointing out in the photo below:

The only instruction besides that was a quick run-through on linear and radial gradients. I did not have a sheet prepared for that, but I have prepared one here for your usage. Originally, I had prepared a sheet on importing Open Clip Art graphics, but as Eve and I were talking on the car ride into class we decided that it’d be better to go over gradients – getting the students working with Open Clip Art too early we feared might encourage them to lean too heavily on found art rather than hone their still-developing skills in creating their own artwork. I’ll use that material for the last day of class.

After the explanation on gradients, we encouraged the students to raise their hands as soon as they got stuck on something. By far, the most common issue that has gotten students stuck is the alpha setting in the fill dialog somehow getting turned all the way down, so when they start drawing with the calligraphy pen or shape tools, they can’t see their artwork at all. It’s the ‘alpha’ slider, not the ‘opacity’ slider (the latter they seem very comfortable with.) I’m pretty sure the stuck students were not setting the alpha in that dialog deliberately, so I am not sure how it keeps getting turned down.

Some other issues that came up:

A couple of students over the course of the class have gotten ‘lost’ on the canvas. We’ve instructed them to hit ‘5′ on the keyboard to get brought ‘back to center’ to find their artwork again.
A couple of students have gotten confused when a shape didn’t have nodes – I’ve had to remind them to convert the shape to a path first.
One student today had a really nice illustration of a snake that she made with the calligraphy tool, but she did it in separate strokes and was not sure how to link them together. I showed her how to hold down Shift, select the pieces she wanted to unify, then go to Path > Union to make them one shape. It was a little hard for her to ‘collect all the pieces’ but once she got them all selected she was back on track.

I don’t think these are necessarily flaws in Inkscape, just humps that beginners to the program should learn how to resolve!

I forgot to take photos of the students’ work again – I will try harder for class 6 tomorrow!

Follow Along on Your Own

We have a lot of materials this week for folks following at home.

Here’s the lesson sheet we used for class on Thursday:

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 5

Here’s the other materials we handed out:

T-Shirt Size Signup Sheet

Band Name Suggestions Sheet

Class Calendar with Deadlines

Here’s the sample design for the Inkscape T-shirt, both in SVG and the 300-dpi PNG Walter used to print the shirt out (the same shirt you see in this post’s photo!)

Sample T-Shirt Design SVG

Sample T-Shirt Design 300-DPI PNG

As always, the OpenOffice.org source files and the outlines for the entire course are at the course page on my website – but please note that’s a rough outline; as we progress through the class I’m coming up with the more-solid lesson plans based on how far the students get each session. By the end of the course I hope to have the course page organized much better.

By the way, if you’d like to follow all the blog posts about this class at one URL without getting the rest of my feed, I’ve set up a category in WordPress specifically for these posts:

http://mairin.wordpress.com/category/inkscape-class/

Enjoy! And please do let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions

This course is sponsored by

Filed under: Inkscape Class

January 31, 2010 11:35 PM

January 29, 2010

Nicu Buculei

Success to much?

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

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

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

January 29, 2010 09:18 AM

January 27, 2010

Máirín Duffy

Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: League Gothic

League Gothic is a sans-serif Gothic typeface, originally designed by American typeface designer Morris Fuller Benton in 1903. The League of Moveable Type has made this typeface available as a font under the the Open Font License as it was designed pre-Steamboat Willie and is under the public domain. Morris Fuller Benton designed over fifty typefaces, including well-known (to designers at least) ones such as Franklin Gothic, ATF Bodoni, Century Schoolbook, News Gothic, and Parisian.

How can you use League Gothic? It’s a very bold and strong font, easily readable from far away. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the Marvel Comics logo, so naturally I used it to create a tightly-spaced Batman (DC Comics) related type specimen. In all caps, the font has a very tall feeling because the legs of the letters are very tall – the x-height seems to be much taller in proportion to the full letter height than in other typefaces. The League of Moveable Type page for League Gothic has a nice type specimen for the font – it’s a clear and readable typeface for info graphics, but also could make for a nice, epic-feeling logo.

League Gothic has coverage of some accented characters in Latin Supplemental, but Latin Extended A and B are not covered:

League Gothic is licensed under the Open Font License.

Fedora Font Wishlist Entry:http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/TLOMT_League_Gothic_fonts
Upstream Homepage: http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/fonts/7-league-gothic

So, you want to package League Gothic?

Way to go – you’re rad! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Joining_the_Fonts_SIG

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fonts_packaging

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fonts.

Last Week’s Font

Last week’s font was Tuffy Infants 2 by Thatcher Ulrich. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week

January 27, 2010 12:50 PM

January 25, 2010

Nicu Buculei

GIMP on N900

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

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

January 25, 2010 11:10 AM

January 24, 2010

Máirín Duffy

Inkscape Class Day 4

This past Thursday morning, I taught the fourth session of an 8-session (40 minutes per session) course on Inkscape at a Boston-area middle school. (For more general details about the class check out my blog post on day 1.)

Thursday’s Class

Thursday’s class was the first class the students really got a big chunk of time to start working on their project. With only 20 minutes or so under their belt, working on their rock band logo assignment, they’ve already come up with some pretty impressive designs!

Music Artist Logo Review

We started class off by walking through example logo designs from music artists of various genres – I pointed out some of the features about each logo and asked the students to think about how they contributed to the message the logo put across. I also pointed out that they should think about the kind of message they want their logo to send, and brainstorm ways they could change up the design of the logo to follow that message. For example, I contrasted the curves, hearts, stars, and bright colors of Katy Perry’s logo to the sharp angles of Metallica’s logo and asked them to think about each band’s music and how the design fit with the music.

We went over logos Eve and I pulled together from the following bands:

Adam Ezra Group
Atmosphere
Black Flag
Boys Like Girls
Britney Spears
Bullet for My Valentine
Cobra Starship
Katy Perry
Lady Gaga
Metallica
Muse
My Chemical Romance
Nirvana
Norah Jones
Pink
Prince
The Coup
The Killers

I would happily post the logo slideshow we put together, but these logos are all property of other folks and I’m not sure if it’s kosher for me to redistribute them. But you’d probably want to customize the logos you use to your own students’ taste anyway. A few of the groups listed there students in the class explicitly told me they liked the first day when I asked them their favorite groups. I also asked John for some suggestions via his daughter’s taste as to what kids in this age group are listening to today, because I am definitely behind on the times on music these days.

I was happy to find some of the students weren’t familiar with some of the artists, like the Adam Ezra group and Norah Jones, because it gave them an opportunity to try to figure out what type of music the artist played based on the logo design, and then I was able to tell them what genre the music really was.

I had the idea to arrange for a playlist of a sample of each band’s music – I put one together using a playlist in totem and Amazon’s music preview links. Turns out those preview links expire after 20 minutes or so, so when I went to play the playlist later on, it didn’t work! Oh, well. If you teach this class to your own students, consider picking up some sample music to play for the students as part of a “What genre is this group based on its logo” guessing game. I think it could be a fun way to get the students to think critically about what message the different attributes of the logo designs support.

Color Palettes

We talked a little bit about how color palettes can be an inspiration and help convey a message in a logo. I brought in two color palette books that I left out on the center table of the computer lab for the students to use during class if they wanted (none of them ended up using them.) The books are:

Colorist: A Practical Handbook for Personal and Professional Use by Shigenobu Kobayashi
Color Index by Jim Krause

I also referred them to ColourLovers.com which is a great site for inspirational color palettes.

More Material on the Text Tool

I had just a little bit more material on working with the text tool – kerning, line spacing, letter spacing… and we had to just skip pretty much all of it. Why? For some reason, the Inkscape keyboard shortcuts for kerning and letter spacing do not work on a Mac. Does anybody know why this is? On my Fedora machine, for example, I simply use Alt+ to adjust letter spacing. We tried every key combo we could think of on the Mac to try to get it to work – command+>, alt+command+>, ctrl+alt+>, etc. etc. Any ideas from the Mac Inkscape users out there?

Anyhow, I kind of cheated and had the students convert text to paths and move letters manually with the arrow keys on the keyboard to get the same effects that the type tool should have offered. We also put text on paths…. although I have to say, have text run along the inside of a circular path vs the outside of the path is still really confusing. Path > Reverse doesn’t work when the text is already on the path, you have to take the text off the path first. Maybe worth filing a bug?

Logo Assignment

Finally the students got to work on their logo assignment. I read over the guidelines on the assignment sheet and let them go. Strangely, four classes now and the students are still very quiet! As you can see from the photos though, their results were impressive – they are very serious and focused on their work:

Some of the students struggled to come up with a band name. Eve and I offered a few suggestions to help them get unstuck and start playing with Inkscape:

If you have the style of the band in mind and just can’t come up with the perfect name, design a logo using your own first or last name, and when you think of a good band name you can replace it.
Use an online band name generator.
Work on an illustration to accompany the band’s name as part of a logo, and maybe a name will come to mind as you work on the illustration.

That being said, I think I should have maybe had a set of index cards with pre-picked fake band names and genre specifications for stumped students to pick through. It might still be useful for session 5. If I have time I may try to put these together…

Follow Along on Your Own

For those of you following along at home, here’s the lesson plan and exercise sheets we used for the class today:

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 4

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 4 Logo Assignment

How To Download & Install Inkscape

Today we handed out this sheet – although I should have put this together and handed it out on the first day. It’s instructions for the students to download and install Inkscape on their home computers. It includes instructions for Windows and the various OS X versions. There were already students who had Inkscape installed at home when I handed this out – but I think it helps to have instructions and an explanation of what the software is for parents who might worry otherwise:

As always, the OpenOffice.org source files and the outlines for the entire course are at the course page on my website – but please note that’s a rough outline; as we progress through the class I’m coming up with the more-solid lesson plans based on how far the students get each session. By the end of the course I hope to have the course page organized much better.

By the way, if you’d like to follow all the blog posts about this class at one URL without getting the rest of my feed, I’ve set up a category in WordPress specifically for these posts:

http://mairin.wordpress.com/category/inkscape-class/

Enjoy! And please do let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions

This course is sponsored by

Posted in Inkscape Class

January 24, 2010 06:01 AM

January 23, 2010

Henrik Heigl

apple vs. fedora lineup

I just found a nice picture from my friend volker he took at the applestore opening in Frankfurt.

The nice thing about that was, that I thought “hey, you know that colors in a lineup” and so I crawled around some “old” pictures:

So, we can say – again – freedom, friends, features, FIRST! After we teach the Suse guys how the ambassador program works, maybe we can teach the apple staff how to look great and have (more) fun at work …

January 23, 2010 07:11 PM

January 22, 2010

Nicu Buculei

Video sharing, HTML5, Theora, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv...

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

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

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

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

...thanks for nothing!

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

January 22, 2010 03:39 PM

Nicu Buculei

One day with Xfce

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

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

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

The install i just as simple:

yum groupinstall xfce-desktop

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

Things to like:

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

The dislikes:

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

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

January 22, 2010 08:20 AM

Ian Weller

“Get with the program”

John Gruber on Vimeo’s new HTML5 player:

“Nice. And, just like YouTube’s, it only works with Safari and Chrome because they’re using H.264. Firefox supports the HTML5 video element, but only for Ogg Theora video. Get with the program, Mozilla.”

Mr. Gruber, I subscribe to your blog in my feed reader because I enjoy feeling like a rational human being. I am still a recovering Apple zealot, and it’s interesting to see how much my views have changed over the last five years.

Some of my friends know that I started with Linux simply because it was free and accessible to me, but I stuck around because of the philosophy behind it—most notably, the concept of free software, and the concept of what is “bad” software because you can’t change it or legally use it.

When I hear comments such as Mr. Gruber’s—”get with the program, Mozilla”—I wonder if people really understand the patent issues that surround the HTML5 open video debate. (Read more on the debate from Ars Technica’s Ryan Paul.) Long story short, H.264 is patent encumbered, Ogg Theora isn’t (as far as anybody can tell). Full stop.

Unfortunately here in the United States, we still permit software patents. Also unfortunate is that somebody is charging for patent licenses to the H.264 codec.

There’s a reason Mozilla is staying away from H.264, and it’s not just about the monetary cost of a license. Mozilla has taken on the responsibility of providing a free-software solution for browsing the web, which often directly conflicts with anything that requires a separate license. Even if Mozilla did want to pay for the patent license, even redistributing Firefox with the H.264 codec would taint the very freedom that it touts.

So, Mr. Gruber, et al.: Get with the program. Understand what Mozilla and its hundreds of contributors want to do. Help put an end to software patents. Or, help to make Theora better, making it more useful to YouTube and Vimeo. It takes a community to have real action, not just the beck and call of the few and powerful.

January 22, 2010 06:42 AM

January 21, 2010

Henrik Heigl

Fedora Weekly News – FWN 209

Der RSS Feed bei Radiotux ist im Blogeintrag zur aktuellen Sendung unter http://blog.radiotux.de/2010/01/21/fedora-weekly-news-fwn-209/ zu finden.

Die FWN werden bei der wöchentlich ausgestrahlten Sendung von Radiotux (siehe http://www.radiotux.de) Donnerstags gesendet und sind auch über den dortigen RSS Feed abrufbar.
Die Originalvorlage der FWN ist wie immer unter https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/LatestIssue zu finden.

Bei Fragen, Anregungen, Meinungen, Kritik einfach eine Mail an mich.

Audio-Datei herunterladen (2010-01-21.Radiotux.Fedora_Weekly_News_209.mp3)

January 21, 2010 08:00 PM

Nicu Buculei

A ton of Linux/FLOSS videos

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

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

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

Still, I found a couple of problems:

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

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

January 21, 2010 03:38 PM

Nicu Buculei

One day with LXDE

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

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

Installing is fast and easy, just:

yum groupinstall lxde-desktop

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

What I like about it:

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

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

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

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

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

January 21, 2010 08:54 AM

Máirín Duffy

Inkscape Class Day 3

Yesterday I taught the third session of an 8-session (40 minutes per session) course on Inkscape at a Boston-area middle school. (For more general details about the class check out my blog post on day 1.)

Yesterday’s Class

Yesterday’s class was jam-packed with information, and it proved to be too much material to allow the students enough time to really play around with and try out the techniques in the lesson!

We covered:

Using the pen tool to create Bezier curves
The different types of nodes
Working with node handles
Converting nodes between types
Adding & Removing nodes
Scaling and rotating nodes
The pencil tool
Simplifying Paths
The tweak tool
The fill tool
Converting type to paths

The general approach I wanted to take was to show how to manipulate the nodes on a path in an advanced way, then show additional ways to create paths and form paths (pencil, tweak, fill, type) and show that the node manipulation skills could be applied to any path created using any of those techniques or the shapes from lesson 2.

I think it was a little too ambitious for only 40 minutes of classtime, though – I’m feeling the crunch of having only 8 sessions. If I could have an extra session and if I could go back and edit the lesson plan, I would focus solely on node types and manipulation and give the students plenty of exercises and time to play around with them on their own. As Eve said after class, working with nodes and the pen tool is a bit of a mental leap as well as a technically difficult thing to do – they need a full session. After splitting that out into its own session, I would then split the rest of the content in the class into a separate session, and proceed with the material for lesson 4 as if it was lesson 5.

That being said, class went okay. I think the students picked up on everything – I checked monitors after each section and it seemed the few who were not yet caught up were quickly caught up to speed with Eve’s help. One of the students even had an elaborate design of a bird going in between the quick exercises.

One thing John, Eve, Ken and I discussed after the class is that 3 classes in and the students seem very quiet and focused. I’m hoping for more collaboration between the students in session 4 – I’ve planned to take up no more than 10 minutes going over a little bit more on working with type in Inkscape, then giving them the rest of the class period to work on their band logos.

Class was so jam-packed for this third session that I didn’t get an opportunity to whip out the camera. I’ll be sure to do so in tomorrow morning’s session 4!

By the way, I received permission from Walter to post his notes on T-shirt printing technologies and his specifications for the project – I updated the Inkscape Class Day 2 post with the link.

Follow Along on Your Own

For those of you following along at home, here’s the lesson plan and exercise sheets we used for the class today:

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 3

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 3 Exercises

As always, the OpenOffice.org source files and the outlines for the entire course are at the course page on my website – but please note that’s a rough outline; as we progress through the class I’m coming up with the more-solid lesson plans based on how far the students get each session. By the end of the course I hope to have the course page organized much better.

By the way, if you’d like to follow all the blog posts about this class at one URL without getting the rest of my feed, I’ve set up a category in WordPress specifically for these posts:

http://mairin.wordpress.com/category/inkscape-class/

Enjoy! And please do let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions!

This course is sponsored by

Posted in Inkscape Class

January 21, 2010 05:35 AM

January 19, 2010

Henrik Heigl

Fedora Marketing FAD 2010 – prework update

so, I updated some things at the wiki. Especially https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Marketing_FAD_2010#Questions seem to be a place where I will write some things down, so I do not forget to ask the guys from Red Hat Office …

January 19, 2010 08:41 PM

January 17, 2010

Máirín Duffy

How to set up the Canon Pixma MX860 with Fedora

So for Christmas I bought myself Unclutter Your Life in One Week by Erin Doland of unclutterer.com. One of the things she suggests in the book is to create a personal digital library of documents, scanning in (most of) the papers you’ve got lying around and shredding and recycling the paper copies. Actually, I think it’s a pretty awesome idea – I had a neatly-bundled, chronologically-ordered stack of SprintPCS phone bills from 1999. I’m now on my 3rd phone carrier since Sprint – so why was I letting that useless junk take up my space?

One complication Erin’s advice introduces is that scanning a couple filing cabinets’ worth of papers you do want to keep some record of with a typical flatbed scanner is time-consuming and not exactly fun. Erin suggests using an ADF (Auto-Document Feeder) scanner like the Fujitsu ScanSnap – problem is, for $1100+ I’d be substantially towards my way at buying another car. Does the ScanSnap work in Linux? No idea.

Then I started to notice that many $200 and under multi-function inkjet printers had ADFs built-in. I have a non-color laser jet which is really great, but I can’t print in color or print photos or do crafts or any of that sort of thing. Also, it is not a network printer, wired or wireless, so it is in my living room so the USB cable is reachable. The Canon MX860 seemed a good answer to all of this, and searching around on the internet seemed to indicate a basic level of Linux compatibility, so I decided to give it a shot.

When I got my MX860, I plugged its power cord in and turned it on. Nothing. I went through the menu, saw it has a wireless access point called BJNPSETUP, and tried to connect to it – nothing. I was a little afraid that I needed a Windows or Mac to run a setup program just to tell the printer my access point’s name and key.

Now I don’t own a single Windows or Mac machine. I have an old Mac G3, the smooth, forgiving curves of which cradle my feet under my desk at work (I think it was last booted in 2006.) I didn’t want to have to bring the MX860 (a behemoth compared to my laser printer) into work just to do the initial setup The instructions that come with the MX860 are non-existent for Linux, but I think it’s equal-opportunity suckage because the instructions that come for Windows and Mac are really terrible.

No worries, though. You don’t need a Mac or Windows to complete initial setup of the MX860. But you will need an ethernet cable:

Canon MX860 Initial Setup

Connect your MX860 directly to your wireless access point via an ethernet cable. If the MX860’s front ‘Canon’ logo is facing you, the ethernet jack is in the rear on the right side – there’s a white pull tab in it.
Turn the MX860 on. Once it boots up:
- hit the ‘Menu’ button
- navigate 3 icons over using the right arrow button to the ‘Settings’ icon and hit the ‘OK’ button
- now navigate 2 icons ove rusing the right arrow button to the ‘Device Settings’ icon and hit ‘OK’
- Navigate four items down to select ‘LAN Settings’ and hit ‘OK’
- Select the first item in the next menu, ‘Change WLAN/LAN’, and hit ‘OK’
- Turn on the wired ethernet by selecting the second button ‘Wired LAN Acive’ on the screen.
Turn the MX860 off and back on again. You might not need to, but it’s a reliable way to get the MX860 to pick up an IP address.
Now that the MX860 is back on, you need to get the IP address:
- hit the ‘Menu’ button
- select the ‘Settings’ icon and hit the ‘OK’ button
- select the ‘Device Settings’ icon and hit ‘OK’
- select ‘LAN Settings’ and hit ‘OK’
- select ‘LAN Settings List’ and hit ‘OK’. The IP address of the MX860 should be listed there – write it down.
Go to the IP address in your browser’s URL bar. You’ll see a ‘Network Configuration’ UI as shown below:
Click the ‘Advanced’ button in the lower right of the screen. Go to the ‘Wireless LAN Setting’ button on the left navbar and fill out the details of your wireless network:
If you have a MAC address filter on your access point, make sure you add the MX860’s (WIRELESS, not wired) mac addy to your mac filter. I was halfway there – but by accident copied down the wired MAC instead of the wireless MAC and had a very confusing 10-15 minutes following that.
Go back through the LAN settings menu as detailed above, and turn the wireless LAN on.
Turn the MX860 off, then back on. Check your access point’s DHCP clients list – you should see it there.

Okay now your MX860 is on your wireless network.

Setting up a 32-bit client

Now you’ve got the MX860 on the wireless network, but what good is that if you can’t connect to it from your Fedora laptop or desktop? The Canon drivers are 32-bit only, so getting them to work on a 32-bit machine is obviously a lot cleaner and nicer than on a 64-bit machine.

On your Fedora machine, download the Canon linux drivers from Canon EU – download the RPM version labeled ‘Printer Driver for Linux (rpm)’.
Install the drivers. You’ll get a tar.gz, so in a terminal in the directory you downloaded it to, run tar -zxvf cnijfilter-mx860series-3.10-1-i386-rpm.tar.gz. Then, cd into the cnijfilter* directory, and run the install.sh script inside by running ./install.sh.
The MX860 has a USB cable. Plug that USB cable into your Fedora machine. The drivers will automatically be detected (you’ll see a pop-up message telling you as much.)
In a terminal, run the following command as root to verify your Fedora computer can see the printer over wireless: /usr/lib/cups/backend/cnijnet
Go to your Fedora computer’s CUPS setup by visiting http://localhost:631 in a browser and adding the MX860. It should already be in all the menus:
Plug out the USB cable. You should be ready to print wirelessly.

Setting up a 64-bit client

So as previously mentioned, the Canon drivers are 32-bit only. The license posted on Canon Australia seems to claim they are GPL – well, I tried to build them for x86_64 using source download which handily included the spec and SRPM, but, unfortunately the sources include a binary library with no included source so it’s not possible to build the driver for x86_64. (I’ve been meaning to write Canon a note about that….)

So, you have a couple of options if your machine is x86_64:

Connect to the printer via USB. Yeh, it defeats the point of wireless. But it works. Here’s the Canon MX860 PPD file, extracted from the drivers, if you care to set it up this way.
Make your x86_64 machine multilib and install the x86 drivers on it.

Since I only use the MX860 for scanning with my x86_64 machine, I simply use a USB key plugged into the MX860 to save the scans to, then I transfer them to my x86_64 machine by plugging the USB key into it.

Conclusion

Anyway I hope this guide has been helpful. If anyone has better ideas on getting the drivers to work on x86_64 or convincing Canon to fix their source I’d love to hear them.

January 17, 2010 04:22 PM

January 15, 2010

Nicu Buculei

RLUG meet, January 2010

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

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

January 15, 2010 10:25 AM

January 13, 2010

Máirín Duffy

Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Tuffy Infants 2

Tuffy Infants 2 is a font derived from the Tuffy fonts created by Thatcher Ulrich. The Tuffy fonts are a really cool example of how folks around the world can work together to create new things under open licenses. Thatcher, who is from New York released his first Tuffy under the public domain in 2004. Jowaco, from York in the UK, created both Tuffy Infants 2 and Tuffy 5 as derivatives of Thatcher’s original Tuffy fonts.

That being said, Tuffy Infants 2 is a sans-serif font. Note I’m not an expert on classifying fonts, but I believe it is a humanist sans-serif font like last week’s font, Junction. Looking at the loop in the lowercase k, the finial in the lowercase ‘a’, ‘m’, and ‘d’ – among other parts of the letterforms – there seems to be variation in line with a humanist-style font.

Tuffy Infants 2 is nice, clean yet organic – and it also has a very fun feel from the merry curves of its letterforms. Jowaco suggests it would be used well for teachers creating type for their students.

Tuffy Infants 2 has no license – it is under the public domain.

Fedora Font Wishlist Entry:https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tuffy_Infants_fonts
Upstream Homepage: http://forum.high-logic.com/viewtopic.php?t=1138

So, you want to package Tuffy Infants 2?

Beautiful! You’re super fly! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Joining_the_Fonts_SIG

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fonts_packaging

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-fonts-list.

Last Week’s Font

Last week’s font was Junction by Caroline Hadilaksono. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week

January 13, 2010 12:11 PM

January 12, 2010

Máirín Duffy

Inkscape Class Day 2

Early this morning I taught the second session of an 8-session (40 minutes per session) course on Inkscape at a Boston-area middle school. (For more general details about the class check out my blog post on day 1.)

Today’s Class

Today’s class was split up into two major sections.

T-Shirt Technologies and Specifications

First, Walter Miska from EmbroidMe Chelmsford went over different T-Shirt printing technologies and gave the students the specifications for their T-shirts that he has so generously volunteered to produce at the end of the class. Here’s a list of the T-shirt printing technologies he covered (and he showed off samples of each, I wish I thought to take photos!):

Screen printing
Screen printed transfer
Sublimation
Transfers
Direct-to-Garment

Walter produced a great worksheet running down the details of these – he has given me the okay to publish his worksheet here (and on the course website) under a Creative Commons Attribution license. You’ll find it in the files list below.

The students’ designs will be printed on light ash grey t-shirts. The maximum print area is 13″ wide and 15″ long. Walter’s going to use the relatively new direct-to-garment technology to produce the shirts. It turns out it’s safest to work with PNG files so we will be exporting the students’ work to 300 dpi PNG files to deliver to Walter.

I’m going to take down each students’ size next class and get them to Walter. I’m also going to send him a sample design tonight created in Inkscape that he is going to do a test print of just to make sure there aren’t any hiccups with SVGs created in Inkscape.

Shapes, Paths, & Pen

The theme for today’s lesson was shapes, paths, and pen. We started out with basic shapes and talked about the shape-specific toolbars for each – we drew squares, rectangles, circles, and spirals, then modified the squares to be rounded, modified the circles to look like Pac-Man, and changed the spirals so they were tighter and looser.

Then we dove into star & polygon-based shapes. We went from triangle, 5-point stars, and pentagons, right into rounded and randomized stars and complicated rosettes. Here’s one students’ work – it’s a rosette that’s been slightly randomized for a cool organic feel:

Next we talked about the differences between shapes and paths, we converted our shapes into paths, and then played around using the path operations – union, intersection, exclusion, difference, and division. One quick exercise I had the students do was to create a bunch of circles in the shape of a cloud, then use union to make one unified cloud shape:

Finally, we did a very quick and simple intro to the pen tool. We didn’t use bezier curves at all, we just did simple click-click-click straight-lined paths and straight unclosed paths as well. To practice basic pen usage I asked the students to create paths for the letters of their name using the pen tool:

These students are QUICK. I jam-packed the lesson for today since the students moved so quickly through the first session, but thought we wouldn’t make it all the way through for sure since Walter was coming to talk to today. We got through the entire lesson, however, with a few minutes to spare. Actually, I was amazed that within the first couple minutes of the lesson, one of the students had already gotten several pages into the lesson packet and even completed the first exercise on the exercise sheet!

Thanks to your suggestions in the comments to my post from the first day of class, I thought to bring my camera and I took some quick (and regrettably blurry) shots of the students work from the lesson exercises, so please check them out if you’re curious. I wish I had taken shots of the example shirts Walter had brought as well. I’ll try to get better about taking pictures as class progresses.

Follow Along on Your Own

For those of you following along at home, here’s the lesson plan and exercise sheets we used for the class today:

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 2

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 2 Exercises

T-Shirt Project Specifications

These were written by Walter Miska of EmbroidMe Chelmsford. They review the different types of T-Shirt printing and also go over the specifications for the students’ design.

As always, the OpenOffice.org source files and the outlines for the entire course are at the course page on my website – but please note that’s a rough outline; as we progress through the class I’m coming up with the more-solid lesson plans based on how far the students get each session. By the end of the course I hope to have the course page organized much better.

By the way, if you’d like to follow all the blog posts about this class at one URL without getting the rest of my feed, I’ve set up a category in WordPress specifically for these posts:

http://mairin.wordpress.com/category/inkscape-class/

Enjoy! And please do let me know in the comments if you have any questions or suggestions! Your comments last week definitely helped me out this week

This course is sponsored by

Posted in Inkscape Class

January 12, 2010 02:42 PM

January 10, 2010

Máirín Duffy

Car Smash

Woke up this morning to find our car smashed up. The person who did it allegedly fled. We’re in contact with the police and we’re very hopeful it’ll all work out. You can virtually rubberneck here if you’re interested.

I’m just way worried right now, because I need that car on Tuesday morning to make the next Inkscape class session and I don’t think it’s safe to drive, and I’m not sure how that could be righted in time. I’m trying to work that out now.

Posted in Suck Tagged: crap, Suck

January 10, 2010 06:24 PM

January 08, 2010

Nicu Buculei

Believe me, I hate censorship

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

note: the button above links to microsoft.com

January 08, 2010 03:57 PM

Máirín Duffy

Inkscape Class Day 1

Early this morning I taught the first session of an 8-session (40 minutes per session) course on Inkscape at a Boston-area middle school. The course is part of Red Hat’s community outreach program. My fellow Red Hatter John had come up with the idea for the program at a school meeting and made it happen, I created the curriculum with the help of the Fedora Design team, and my fellow RH designer Eve and I have volunteered our time to run the course. Red Hat has also donated some Wacom Bamboo Pen + Touch tablets to the school to use during the course. This program is something we’ve been working on making happen since last October so I’m very excited to have kicked things off today.

The Plan

There’s a theme that spans the entire course, involving a rock band:

Blanchard Records, Inc. is a young record label and they’ve just signed a deal with a hot new band. They think this is going to be their big break, so they want to make a big splash – and it’s time to release a new album and kick off a worldwide tour.

There’s just one small problem. The band doesn’t even have a logo yet!

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a logo for this new band, along with the artwork for the new album, a design for their worldwide concert tour poster, and their tour T-shirt.

You’ll learn how to do this using the free graphics program Inkscape, in a 8-session course. At the end of the course you’ll even get your own tour shirt, designed by you, to wear! Sign up today!”

That’s right, one very cool part of this course is that each of the students will produce a design that Walter, the owner of EmbroidMe Chelmsford has very generously agreed to print on T-shirts that the students can keep after the course.

Class Makeup and Organization

I was blown away by how quickly the students picked up on Inkscape. The class is 10 students, all whom are 7th graders. The teachers arranging the course had students ‘apply’ to the class by writing an essay about why they thought they were a good fit for the class – and the students’ motivation was really apparent from how well the class went. The class had originally been planned to be 10 sessions long, but because of various scheduling issues is 8 sessions long. I was really quite worried about this because already there’s a ton of material I have planned, and to condense that even further – well I was worried it would be too much material. After today, however, I’m pretty confident these students can handle what I throw at them very quickly.

The school has fairly new Mac desktops, so we used Inkscape 4.7 on OS X (yes, I know, but baby steps ). The Wacom Bamboo pen AND touch worked perfectly in Inkscape (after some hiccups… you must have X11 2.4 installed for it to work – we learned earlier this week during a test run that 2.3 doesn’t work.)

We had a very good student to teacher ratio as Ken noted (Ken is one of the teachers at the school who has been helping us a lot to make this happen.) Today we had 9 students (1 was absent), and 4 teachers (myself, Ken, Eve, and John.)

Today’s Class

Today’s session theme was ‘Inkscape bootcamp’. We ran through the Inkscape bootcamp lesson plan I came up with in a little over 20 minutes. I’d give a quick demonstration of an Inkscape technique up on the projector, then I asked the students to try it themselves and I was able to watch their screens from where I was standing to make sure they were able to get through the exercise. Sometimes one or two of the students would run into trouble, and Eve and I would go over to their workstation and help them out quickly one-on-one. For more involved issues Eve helped out the student and I’d move forward in the lesson so the other students weren’t waiting too long. This seemed to go well for today.

We were left with about 15 minutes at the end of the lesson where I handed out an exercise sheet for the students to run through if they wanted to in order to practice the techniques we had just covered. But I left the time open for them, making it clear the exercises were just a suggestion. Tatica advised me from her experience teaching Inkscape courses that it’s important early on to give the students a chance to play around and discover on their own, and let them ask questions based on where they end up. So we did just that, and by the end of class time the students didn’t want to leave – I think that’s probably a good sign things are going well so far. Some of the works the students ended up with blew me away. Several of the students started playing with opacity and blur and came up with cool effects (one student came up with a circular design that would have easily made a nice disc design for a rock band album ) and compositions.

We laid out the lesson sheets before class next to the students’ keyboard, and one of the students actually had it read at the beginning of class such that he was always a few steps ahead of the class’ progression and he was already exploring the calligraphy tool effects (for example, making wiggly lines using the wiggle control) by the end of the 40 minutes. It was really cool to see.

Follow Along on Your Own

I’m going to try to make a blog post per session to keep you updated on how the class is going, and hopefully to also be a resource to other folks who might be interested in teaching a similar class. I’d like to document any issues we run into and the solutions we come up with as well as the successes we stumble upon to that end.

That being said, here’s the lesson plan and exercise sheets we used for the class today:

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 1

Introduction to Inkscape Lesson 1 Exercises

If you’re following along at home and have any questions about the lesson or exercise go ahead and ask away in the comments!

This course is sponsored by

Posted in Inkscape Class

January 08, 2010 03:26 PM

January 07, 2010

Máirín Duffy

Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Junction

Junction is a humanist sans-serif typeface developed by Caroline Hadilaksono. The font actually reminds me a lot of Myriad which is very popular humanist sans-serif typeface – but Junction has some unique personality traits to it. Check out that uppercase ‘D’ in my type sample above – it kind of looks like a tongue sticking out at you! It’s a spicy font

Typography terminology is a bit intimidating, but I’ve been reading up a bit on the history of type and its terminology to help make this series of posts more useful. I’m about halfway through Ellen Lupton’s excellent typography book Thinking With Type and the first section of the book details the history of type from calligraphy to metal blocks to fonts on a computer. Really fascinating stuff and a very enjoyable read.

That being said, I wanted to point out that Junction is a humanist sans-serif typeface. Humanist refers to the calligraphic-like way the strokes of letters are ended and how the line widths are not one consistent width but vary depending on where in the letter they are (unlike Helvetica or Futura, where the line widths are very consistent and don’t vary at all.) Humanist typefaces I think are called ‘humanist’ because they reference / are influenced by how the human hand produces lettermarks. Sans-serif refers to the fact that the type does not have serifs, or little ‘ink wells’ at the end of each stroke (in contrast to a font like Times New Roman which does.) I believe since serifs can be difficult to render cleanly on a pixel-grid in the sizes typically used for body text, sans-serif fonts tend to be easier to read on pixel-based displays.

So, you can use Junction to give an organic feel to your text while at the same time allowing it to display crisply & cleanly on a computer screen.

Junction is licensed under the Open Font License.

Fedora Font Wishlist Entry:http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/TLOMT_Junction_fonts
Upstream Homepage: http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/fonts/1-junction

So, you want to package Junction?

Legend. You’re kickin’! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Joining_the_Fonts_SIG

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fonts_packaging

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fonts.

Last Week’s Font

Last week’s font was Blackout by Tyler Finck. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?

On the future of these posts

I’ve taken a couple weeks’ break for the holidays and I’ve decided that once a month I’ll feature a cool unpackaged piece of FLOSS software rather than a font. So each month will have 3-4 font highlights and 1 software highlight. Thanks to everyone who responded to my call for feedback!

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week

January 07, 2010 02:45 PM

January 06, 2010

Henrik Heigl

neue c’t Security CD mit F12

english guys: This is an article about the german magazine called “c’t”. There was a Security-CD inside wich is based on fedora12. More info at http://www.heise.de/ct .

Ich habe eben die neue c’t in die Hand gedrückt bekommen und mich mal wieder über die Heft-CD gefreut und mir angeschaut was das ist. Der Nachfolger von Knopicillin heisst nun Desinfect. Ok. Dann als ich mir den Artikel dazu durchgelesen habe las ich dann, das es auf Fedora12 basiert. Wow.

CD gleich mal eingelegt, gestartet und voila, es geht schonmal alles.

Dann einfach auf auf “Desinfect starten” geklickt und alles ging. Man kann über den Networkmanager natürlich die entsprechenden Netzwerkeinstellungen anpassen, aber in meinem Fall lief alles durch. Im Web gibt es genauso wie im Heft noch viel mehr Infos. Auch bin ich mal gespannt wie sich diese Version der Security CD entwickelt auch vor dem Hintergrund, das man von Knoppix als Basis auf Fedora gewechselt ist. Gerade was die Unterstützung neuerer Hardware angeht wird man denke ich einige Verbesserungen merken (Fedora Zyklus 0,5 Jahre vs. Knoppix – Debian “Kern” – ca. 2-3 Jahre …). Es ist bei solchen Projekten ja auch immer ein bischen eine politische Entscheidung und man weiss nie ob das in den nächsten Ausgaben noch so ist, aber ich finde das es recht rund und gelungen aussieht. Ob man als Desktopumgebung Gnome lässt oder doch lxde wird man auch sehen ebenso ob man nicht noch einige nette Tools mit dazupackt. Hab das ganze auf einem alten Rechner, zwei neuen Notebooks und unter VMWare getestet. Nice!

Werde die CD jetzt mal also ISO Image auf einen bootbaren USB Stick zu bringen versuchen …

January 06, 2010 03:50 PM

Nicu Buculei

OpenGameArt.org

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

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

January 06, 2010 08:45 AM

January 05, 2010

Nicu Buculei

Passing the meme: Best photo of 2009 (no photo)

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

January 05, 2010 12:36 PM

Nicu Buculei

Blue Moon

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

January 05, 2010 09:19 AM

January 04, 2010

Nicu Buculei

Hats for the New Year - Red and Blue Fedoras

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

January 04, 2010 10:16 AM

December 25, 2009

Maria "tatica" Leandro

095/365: Tengo nieve!!! / I have snow!!!

===== Español =====
Este es un especial de navidad… CONSEGUI NIEVE!!! MUAHAHAHAHA esta es una prueba de que cuando se quiere, se puede. La perseverancia es lo que nos hace realmente lograr las cosas… así que siempre persigan lo que quieren en esta vida, que si lo buscan con cariño, lo obtendrán. Feliz Navidad a todos y gracias por seguir mis bobadas

Gimp: cortar.

===== English =====
This is a Christmas special … I HAVE SNOW! Muahahahaha this is proof that when you want, you can. Perseverance is what makes us get things… so always pursue what you want in this life, that if we seek it with love, you will get it. Merry Christmas to all and thanks for following my silly

Gimp: cut

December 25, 2009 01:03 AM

December 24, 2009

Nicu Buculei

Fun with weather

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

KTHXBAI

December 24, 2009 01:49 PM

December 23, 2009

Michael Beckwith

Synfig Studio now available in Fedora Repos

As per a Fedora Design mailing list post, Fedora now has the Synfig Studio program available in the repos for Fedora 11-12.

For those of you who don’t know what Synfig is:

Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based open-source 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources. While there are many other programs currently on the market to aid with the efficient production of 2D animation, we are currently unaware of any other software that can do what our software can.

–Synfig homepage

Synfig has supported releases for all major operating systems.

If you are anxious and interested in getting started with Synfig, you can check out tutorials available at: Synfig Wiki Tutorials or check out a gallery at Synfig Gallery

December 23, 2009 02:29 AM

December 22, 2009

Nicu Buculei

Oh, the irony! Take better care of your avatar...

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

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

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

December 22, 2009 08:07 AM

December 21, 2009

Máirín Duffy

Zomg EtherPad

So my friend Corey told me about how Google recently bought a company called AppJet who makes this sweet online shared notepad called EtherPad. Google went ahead and released EtherPad under an Apache 2.0 license. Sweet; thanks Google!

I could see Gobby hooking into EtherPad – could you?
Enjoy some screenshots – and I apologize for being so short with this post; I am a busy bee today finishing things up before I leave for the holidays tomorrow.

Main Document Window

Document Versions Timeline

You can play forward through versions…. so sweet…. I so wish MediaWiki had this!

Import/Export Options

Would be super sweet if you could import a MediaWiki page then export it back out from where you got it. Or at least export in MediaWiki format.

Document Revision History

What do you think? Could this app be useful for Fedora?

Posted in Uncategorized

December 21, 2009 06:44 PM

Maria "tatica" Leandro

Constantine: Fedora 12 en dua y siliconia

aqui les dejo unas fotos del set de instalacion que realicé a dua (acer aspire one 10″ d-150) y a siliconia (compaq presario cq50-101la) para instalarles a ambas Fedora 12 – Constantine.

Dua: Instalacion de Fedora 12 - Constantine

Siliconia: Instalacion de Fedora 12 - Constantine

December 21, 2009 04:41 PM

December 20, 2009

Ian Weller

What I want for my 18th birthday

~~Somebody to implement a “mw status” command in mw so I don’t have to think about it~~
Somebody to fix this dastardly python-mwlib bug once and for all
Somebody to try and reproduce this lordsawar bug
(oh, and a pony :) )

Edit: I did the first one myself :)

December 20, 2009 05:07 PM

December 18, 2009

Maria "tatica" Leandro

092/365: FAmSCo está aquí / FAmSCo is here

===== Español =====
Señoras, Señores y Fedorian@s… Hoy salieron los resultados de FAmSCo y pues he quedado seleccionada para formar parte de este comité que, entre sus principales funciones, está velar que los embajadores y usuarios fedora de todo el mundo esten felices.

Una nueva puerta se abre para los Latinoamericanos en este comité donde podemos hacer el intento de conseguir cosas asombrosas y así, apoyar a los que como nosotros, tuvieron un inicio bastante dificil como comunidad.

Hoy somos una comunidad en pleno crecimiento, con piedras en el camino como todo en la vida; pero hemos demostrado que pese a cualquier dificultad, el tener metas bien planteadas hace la diferencia.

Felicitaciones a todos los que participaron, ser parte de FAmSCo o no serlo, no cambia el hecho de que todos trabajamos por una meta en común… hacer de Fedora la mejor distro y comunidad. Gracias a todos los que votaron.

Pd: si… hoy ando en vestido y tacones… y que?

Gimp: cortar.

===== English =====
Ladies, Gentlemen and Fedorians… Today FAmSCo results came out and I have been chosen to be part of this committee that has as main functions, ensure that the ambassadors and fedora users around the world are happy.

A new door opens for Latin Americans on this committee where we can make the attempt to achieve amazing goals and also support those who like us, had a difficult start as a community.

Today we are a growing community, with stones in the road like everything in life, but we have shown that despite any difficulties and have clear goals, makes a difference.

Congratulations to all involved, be part of FAmSCo or not, does not change the fact that we all work towards a common goal… make Fedora the best distro and community. Thanks to everyone who voted.

Pd: Yes… Today I’m wearing a dress and heels… so that?

Gimp: cut

December 18, 2009 09:15 PM

Maria "tatica" Leandro

Mosaico de Polaroids con Gimp

Tutorial sencillo para convertir una simple foto en un mosaico de fotos polaroid

Enlace directo => http://blip.tv/file/2989631

December 18, 2009 02:41 PM

Maria "tatica" Leandro

Mundo #Unplug: #3 Feliz Navidad

===== Personajes =====
todos u_U ubiquense ustedes mismos

18-12-2009

unplug.org.ve
tatica.org

Usa Software Libre!!
Inkscape – Fedora 12

Mas cartoons en MUNDO UNPLUG (Click aqui pues u_U )

December 18, 2009 01:35 PM

December 17, 2009

Máirín Duffy

Unpackaged Open Font of the Week: Blackout

Blackout is a decorative typeface that uses filled-in sans-serif lettering with a little bit of a grungy feel. Tyler Finck developed the font for his homepage / portfolio which is also a great example treatment of the typeface. It’s a bold and attention-grabbing typeface but it also has some attitude, so you could use it on posters to get people’s attention from far away, or you could also use it in limited doses around any kind of composition for a little bit of spice.

Blackout and is licensed under the Open Font License.

Fedora Font Wishlist Entry:http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/TLOMT_Blackout_fonts
Upstream Homepage: http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/fonts/5-blackout

So, you want to package Blackout?

Schweeeeet! You’re rad! You’ll want to follow the first steps here next to the ‘if you intend to do some packaging’ header:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Joining_the_Fonts_SIG

Our fonts packaging policy, which the above refers to, is documented here:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Category:Fonts_packaging

And if you have any questions throughout the process, don’t hesitate to ask on the Fedora Fonts SIG mailing list:

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fonts.

Last Week’s Font

Last week’s font was Selfism by Jan Sonntag. Nobody has picked up the font package request yet! Would you like to?

And on that note:

Now people. Let’s be frank here. This is week #11 of the Unpackaged Font of the Week blog posts. It’s been over a month since these fonts I’ve been highlighting to you have gotten some packaging love. So talk to me:

Am I posting these too often? Should I go bi-weekly? Monthly?
Do you want to help and don’t know how to package? Or is the font-packaging process too complicated?
Do you just not care about fonts and would rather see packaging needs highlighted for some other type of thing? (I recently discovered there’s a lot of great audio apps that we don’t have packaged yet!)

Please let me know, because I need to decide if I should keep doing this. My goal here is twofold: I want folks to see what awesome openly-licensed stuff is out there to use, but I also want to show folks very specific, well-defined, and not too-overwhelming ways they can jump in and help further free & open source projects – packaging content for use in a distro is a great way to do that.

When you package fonts and help me out, I see the love, but when I don’t see stuff getting packaged, I feel sad!

One idea I had was maybe to do fonts on week 1, do a wishlisted audio package on week 2 (omg do I want pure data packaged), do maybe something interesting off of the general package wishlist on week 3, and wishlist games on week 4, then rotate. That’s just one idea I had though. I want to hear what you think I should do!

Posted in Unpackaged Font of the Week

December 17, 2009 02:57 AM

December 16, 2009

Charlie Brej

Plymouth theming guide (part 4)

This the final part of the theming guide. As I mentioned in the last post, you already know everything you need to write your themes. In this post I will show a couple themes I wrote to explore the system and some fancy high level aspects of the scripting language. You don’t need to know these, they are just a cute method to solve a problem that others may find useful.

Themes

To install these themes, extract them to /usr/share/plymouth/themes and run the appropriate plymouth-set-default-theme line.

Vizta

A very simple theme matching what the Vista theme does. It has just 30 lines of custom code.

Could not use HTML 5 or Flash for playback. You can download the file as MPEG4/H.264 or Ogg Theora file.

</object></video>

source

Dandelion

This theme has the target of stressing the system. A couple months ago it was running at about 3 fps, now my machine hits 30 fps and spends some time idle.

Could not use HTML 5 or Flash for playback. You can download the file as MPEG4/H.264 or Ogg Theora file.

</object></video>

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Inheritance

When I first proposed doing a scripting system Ray said “If you do this, I guess I’d recommend you keep it very simple”. I agreed, so what I aimed to do was to implement all the features with the minimum space. The solution I came up was to kill several birds with one stone. The stone being an inheritance system.

The important operation for inheritance is the single bar (“|“), inherit operator. Think of it as a very lazy OR function. As an example take the statement:

A = B | C;

This creates a new object (A) which is an inheritance of B and C. A now gains all the properties of B and, as a fall-back, C. There are three ways of using inheritance objects.

Direct

Consider the following statement:

A = "Seven" | 7;
B = String(A).CharAt(2);
C = 80 + A;

So A is an inheritance of the string “Seven” and the number 7. This means when in situations where a string is preferred, it will act as a string, and when the a number is preferred, it will act as a number. The value in B will be the third character in the string (“v”), and the value in C will be the number 87.

This kind of inheritance is used to allow native C objects (images, sprites etc.) to be able to be used as hashes to find appropriate functions to call. An object is created which inherits from the native object and the object template hash (which holds all the functions). The constructor function is also connected to the template using an inheritance. Thus you can treat it as a function, or as a hash of functions and it will adopt the appropriate behaviour.

text_image = Image.Text("string"); # Treat Image as a hash
png_image = Image("filename.png"); # Treat Image as a function

Hashed

Hashes are the main containers in the system. When an object inherits from two hashes, accessing the inner elements will trigger a crawl through all hashes for that element.

A.a = "a";
A.b = "b";   # A: a="a", b="b"
B.b = "B";
B.c = "C";   # B: b="B", c="c"
C = A | B;   # C: a="a", b="b", c="c"

When accessing the elements within C, the system looks within A, then B (also within any object they inherit from). Thus, elements within B can be overridden by A. This is very much like the __proto__ in Mozilla JavaScript.

Functional

Just like hashes, when functions are inherited, the system goes through them in the inheritance sequence, executing each one and moving onto the next if it has failed.

Fib = fun (v) {if (v <= 2) return 1; else fail;}
    | fun (v) {if (FibCache[v]) return FibCache[v]; else fail;}
    | fun (v) {return FibCache[v] = Fib(v-1) + Fib(v-2);};

If you have ever programmed the ML languages, you will already be somewhat familiar with this. In those, you can put constants in the function variable decelerations and functions which do not match these to the passed parameters, fail. Here, at any point in the function, you can choose to fail. The system then tries to execute the next function in the inheritance.

December 16, 2009 11:22 AM

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