Software Free

Some of us are Fedora and this is a good thing. Some other people are not Fedora, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.
The important thing is that the video kicks ass and I am trying for some time to get hold of a camera and a few local contributors to make a local video about that.

In unrelated news, even I am not much into micro-blogging myself, it seems that all the cool kids are doing it, so I have to join the bandwagon.

Much to my shame (one should not talk about elections if he didn't bother to vote), I didn't vote for the Fedora board. Why? I think any of them would do a good job on the board and do not know them enough to say if one or another would do a better or worse job.
Also, I am not close enough to anyone to vote him only on a friendship basis (probably that would be equally worse from a democratic point of view).
However, voters, candidates, winners: congratulations to all!

The regular readers of Planet Fedora probably noticed a new (and very cool) webcomic K3RNEL from Mexico. Some competition for this webcomic.

Of course nodoby is going to war, I know they have a mighty army, so will just claim the two webcomics have completely different styles, formats, stories, graphics and both can live happily together.

Make fun not war!

After a few weeks of pause, Fedora Weekly News is back in full force, giving each week an interesting read.
While I may have lied a bit about the nudity part, the rest is true, and true is that it could use some more contributors, so join the team!

It seems like my initiative to get people intro producing tips, howtos and tutorials about creating Echo icons was not that bad after all, Martin wrote a couple of very useful pieces.

Being in a screencasts frenzy today and until I got to write something original, here is a little screencast I made based on Martin's excellent tutorial about Creating Echo Icons with On the Table Perspective (all the creative credit goes to Martin, I just recorded his steps):

Everybody likes to set a clever publicity stunt when doing a release and for FF3 which will be (or for some of us already is) a major the Fedora guys are planning to break a Guinness World Record:

For me this is a kind of moral dilemma: I want to help a bit spreading FF3, but I don't want to lie, all my machines running FF3 will receive it either as an yum update or as an FF3 automatic update (from RC to final), depending on the OS, therefore not counted by their system. What do you do, pledge or not?

Who doesn't enjoy taking sides in a megatheread?

PS: If you think I am not funny enough, just hit me with ideas in comments.

A bit of history

There are two years since the first mockup (no picture, the particular wiki page is dead) for what was going to become the Echo icon theme (at the time it was just "Bluecurve and Beyond") appeared. It was a rough preview (~20 icons) made by Diana.
Honestly, the icons sucked a lot - bloated SVG made with Illustrator, no standard size, no guidelines and so... but a lot of us, bored by the already old Bluecurve and not convinced by Tango, got excited and put some hope in it.

Now

After a while, without a maintainer, with poor infrastructure (a wiki page), no guidelines and poor SVGs and few active contributors, the development slowed down.

As disappointing as it may be, my countdown has ended and it was related to my webcomic... sorry if you had greater expectations :D

Anything that's put on the web is measurable and the measurements for my Fedora webcomic showed unsatisfactory results, so I had two options either to drop it or make it better. Being excessively stubborn, dropping was not an option so the only way remaining was trying to improve, and as I can't improve the humor (as it defines me as a person) I worked on the graphics. So here is today's edition:

As the title says, it is a screencast, which is narrated in Romanian, so it may not be that useful for my English readers, but if you find it useful, just ask for a transcript and one can easily do a voice over in another language.

At the recent Romanian Fedora release party one of the speaker was Alexandru, who talked about his web-based translation tool, Narro and how it can be used to translate Fedora and other FOSS applications.
Those reading my blog probably know that I like Narro, so as promised at the release party, I did a screencast for beginners (OGG Theora video):

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

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

And 8-1=7:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To get something like this: