Free Software Linux

No, I wasn't that pissed and I am after nobody, just used the opportunity with the photo above to show my new toys tatica style. Thanks to a lot of wonderful people in the community and especially Rex who pointed the solution, my video editing problem is solved, I had to update the kdenlive package from rmpfusion updates testing (long story short, the problem was known, the patch was coming, just a bit delayed).

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

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

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

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

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

When I was hit by the need of some business cards and considered the Fedora contributor ones are not fit for the tasks and the ones from my day job are even worse, I decided I need to make some. Fired Inkscape up and got playing with it.

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

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

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

If you've ever watched a road bike race like the Tour de France, you know the peloton is the big group of riders that cluster together during the race to reduce drag. It's a great example of collaboration in action. But let's face it: the people in the middle of the peloton may go faster than they would otherwise, but they don't win the race.

When it comes to creating and innovating, most companies (and employees) are in the peloton. They are doing enough to survive, but they are stuck in the pack. And if they stay in the pack too long, they lose.

• Business

In a time when many tradeshows are experiencing lower then normal attendance the 8th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 8x) had record attendance this past weekend in Los Angeles. I was there exhibiting and conducting a community training day for Zenoss and was very impressed by not only the quality of the program but the enthusiasm of the attendees.

Here are some of the highlights:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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