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It possible to attend two FUDCons at once? It seems I managed to do this in an indirect way and without even knowing: while I was in Berlin for the European FUDCon, the guys at LATAM FUDCon were near a place called "Nicu's Bar & Restaurante".


photo stolen from tatica's photostream

There is a rule for photographers: take a lot of photos but then make a strict selection and show the world only a very few, the best from a photo session, those that are truly great. This way people will think you are a great photographer, they won't ever know you had "poor" or "mediocre" photos. Hell, they should not know even about your "good" ones, only about the "great".

I often break this and post a bit too much of my photos, but today I'll mark the triumph of the quantity over quality, posting a gallery with all the photos I made in Berlin at FUDCon (over 1300), I had people asking for them so I provide. Even if this cost me a bit of reputation as a photographer :D

Much to my amusement, for the return from FUDCon I got the plane seat numbered 13:


And somewhat I can say I was unlucky about that, Ionuț got the window seat, so I couldn't stare at the cloud formations all the way. But this was not that bad, I got to stay next to a pretty girl with hazel hair and big, green eyes (sorry, no photos for you :D)

Then I got back to the shitty city of Bucharest: dog-days, traffic jams, construction works in the middle of the roads and so on (still there is a small positive impact over the way the streets are looking due to the excessive heat, but again, no photos for you :D)


On a positive note, my dog was very happy to see me again, she was alone in the backyard with a pile of food and a reserve of water for about 5 days:


And then the 13 kicked-in: a phone call and I learned about the first job I have after returning to the office: setup a Vista computer, buy MS Office for it and shit like that. Way to go... At least I can give a try to the Fedora Live CD on the machine (an HP TouchSmart). After 5 minutes (don't have much time to play with it), the touch screen and wireless do not work OOTB, the webcam does.


Probably to celebrate my return, my co-workers decided to have for lunch a traditional Romanian meal: mici with mustard, French fries, salad and, of course, (hopefully my boss does not read this :D) beer.

At the end of the third (and last)day of FUDCon I joined the Italian guys for a little walk in the city. Unprepared for this, we wandered chaotically for a while and then returned to the hotel


From the hotel we went for the dinner in a beautiful place called Hackescher Markt were we had some good beers and meals and enjoyed the performance of some street artists


Also we had the opportunity to learn a few tricks about picking-up girls from Lennart (somehow I doubt those would work on someone who is not a waitress or have a similar job where has to play nice expecting a tip)

The third (and last) day of the Berlin FUDCon was dedicated to a hackfest, with everyone working on whatever they liked:


There was also a presentation of the Electronic Lab spin by Chitlesh:


The atmosphere was pretty relaxed:


And the people attending where not that many, with some already leaving before the day started and some other leaving at various moments of the day:


Some were creating "patches" for the group photo:


I managed to take a photo of the third girl present at the event, so the ratio was about 1 woman in 50 men, yeah, this sounds pretty much like Fedora (and don't blame me again for this):


For a little while we had a nice sun and warm weather outside, so a few guys moved in the park next to our building:


Of course I couldn't miss the opportunity to take a few flower macros (come on guys, with such beauty near us, why are we staying in the inside?):


And also play with the lights and reflections:


A bit of disappointment was people not using their freedom to write names, thoughts, locations on the big board prepared for that (I did my part, how about you?):


Oh, the time is passing, not much remaining until I have to board the plane so I'll end this for now (a bit more to come later about how we spent the evening) with a photo of the deserted hall. FUDCon ended.

I teased before about some fun adventures after the second FUDCon day, so it's the time to deliver my promise: in the front of the hotel there it was a large crowd from which were standing out a lot of nice looking girls dressed like for a fancy event. No way that would be related to FUDCon or LinuxTag, they were attending some kind of reception and we had to mix with them on the route to our rooms:


Learning it was a high school party, so part of them were potentially underage was not the real stopper, but the bad light and my shyness (being shy is my main flaw as a photographer, where the rule for taking photos of people is like: go as close to them as so feel comfortable and then take two more steps closer). So I didn't feel like lighting my flash and shooting left and right, but with the help of my long lens and most importantly with some support from Franceso, with whom I stroke a deal to ask the girls to pose with him, I managed to grab a few:


Then I went with a group of people to the eastern part of the city for a dinner, and learnet a lesson: don't go to eat to a place called Habana, the advice is even stronger if you are hungry:


No matter how nice the waitress is, or how fruitier the fancy drinks are


It does not matter if the food is good or bad, no matter the free shots at the end as an excuse, no matter they don't charge for the appetizers they forgot to bring to the table for over an hour, if it takes that long to get the food (I think it was about two hours), then it does not matter anymore.


Oh, and forgot about the waitresses, hookers, high school girls and stuff, we decided what was the sexiest thing at this conference: our mighty leader. The sunglasses are definitely the final touch:

This is already public knowledge: the code name for Fedora 12 is going to be Constantine. If you voted for it thinking about the Keanu's movie, I have some bad news for you: the F12 theme will not be based on that, it will not gonna happen.

My first reaction is to go straight to the source: Constantine the Great, the famous Roman emperor, which was "first" for some things, had some "features" and also provided some "freedom". And for me that Constantine equals Byzantine culture, best represented by Byzantine mosaics, something like:

see more; photos by Gauis Caecilius
published under a CC-BY-ND license

The real trick is to take out the religious implications (which are bad) and leave in the cultural references (which are good). And I think there is potential in a visual conflict in a contrast of old mosaic style and modern imagery (4 F's?), everything with a shade of blue.

The second day of FUDCon was dedicated to the BarCamp:


Some of us were more energetic, some a bit less:


I attended a few talks, which were more or less formal and more or less interesting:



And, of course, as at any respectable BarCamp, people also gathered spontaneously to do their stuff:


Myself, I didn't got much stuff done, I mostly cheered-up Mo for her getting stuff done.

When arriving at the hotel we had a big surprise: there was a large party with a lot of (mostly) nice looking high school German girls dressed up in fashionable outfitts, but I will talk more about this in a later post:

First it should be mentioned no human is responsible for all those thing, it was the panda who got drunk early in the morning ans started impersonating Mo, so it wasn't her and I was not involved in any way.

panda getting drunk

So the first move of the drunk panda, Mo impersonator, was to inkscape a FUDCon poster (he also invented the verb "to inkscape"):

the poster

To have the madness complete, Hello Kitty joined the party:

Hello Kitty popping in

And the next move was a making-of video of the poster creation (complete with title and credit screen and catchy soundtrack):

the video

You know a panda has fingers? Of course he has, so he can get carried away and show them in reply to wise-ass comments (so be warned):

panda fingers

Of course all this was possible with the valuable contribution of a lot of nice chevaliers, ready to jump at any moment and help a panda in distress:

panda helpers

Disclaimer: this post was fuelled only by cranberry juice provided by the hotel's breakfast service.

I am moody at times, like yesterday, when I was tired a bit, frustrated a bit, so got pretty demotivated and took a smaller than usual amount of photos (and maybe not that great). But they are still quite a few.

This morning I am somewhat more optimistic: not enough for a big blog post with a story wrapped around the photos, but enough for a large photo dump. So here was the first FUDCon day seen trough my lenses (again, there are more on my photostream:



The FUDCon day ended with a big group photo but it continued late into the night with FUDPub, the social event consisting of beers, fancy drinks and free pizzas (BTW, does anyone liked the seafood pizza? it was like everybody was running away from it):

Next on FUDCon's agenda is the BarCamp day, those are the people who enlisted yesterday to keep talks:

The photo didn't came the best (is rotated a bit), as I didn't have a real tripod with me, but it captures the spirit of our community ant this is all that matter - happy Fedora contributors at the Berlin FUDCon in 2009.


If you want to play a bit with it in GIMP, print a poster or whatever (I tried to put it online ASAP, at least a FUDCon logo could be added) a large version is available (CC-BY-SA).

FUDCon started already, but while listening to speeches and taking some more photos, I still have to talk a bit about yesterday.

After a morning at LinuxTag I joined Mo, Spot, Jesse and Ionut for a sushi lunch


If you know Mo at all, you don't me to tell we stopped and bought a big basket of (very yummy) strawberries


Jesse went for some business and the rest of us got to visit the Berlin Zoo (with seeing pandas as a primary objective and frogs as a secondary one, you must know already who is a panda appreciator and who is a frogs fan). Conclusion: the zoo is amazing.


Then we got for a while back to "serious" Linux stuff, attending the LinuxNacht, which ended sooner than expected, remaining without drinks and food. So I got out with a few Ambassadors to take care of the problems. We had some beers and interesting talks about various stuff, from hiring idiots to Michael Jackson (fun fact: at about 2:00 AM, we had a TV crew asking Cristoph about the "king of pop").


Much to my disappointment, even if we were in the right place, it was too dark to use my camera properly and take revenge for yesterday's hooker incident.

It may needed to remind that the photos posted on my blog are only a thin surface, I do a lot more, from which a selection is available online, but since my photostream is quite volatile the flickr pool is a safer place for archiving (it looks like I am the only putting there photos from this FUDCon, guys and girl, do not forget about it!)

Speaking about the LinuxTag, the first thing to mention should be our ambassadors, who are doing a great work but also seem to have a good time while doing it


Then I have to acknowledge I am not impressed by LinuxTag, in the little time spent here didn't saw something striking, it seems a bit boring. But there are a loot of FOSS projects represented there


Yesterday was also the day for LinuxNacht, a social event around LinuxTag, for which I was lucky to receive a discount voucher (thanks!). It was really dark in there, so the photos are not that great


The next post will probably be about the fun time from yesterday: sushi, zoo and late night beers, stay tuned.

Still one more day until FUDCon, here are a few photos from a rainy morning while going to the LinuxTag place:


A first impression of our booth:


And how we are getting things done, both the serious and the cute way:

We (me and Ionuț) arrived in Berlin for FUDCon yesterday evening, at about 18:00 (the plane has a small delay)


We decided to walk to the hotel, since it is not far away from the airport, about 30 minutes


And the decision proved to be a good one, near a huge park we had the awesome opportunity to admire the local fauna/wild life, there were a lot of bunnies


At the hotel we meet Mo, Spot and Jesse and got together for a nice Indian dinner


I also tried some local beer and liked it:


As a funny anecdote, on the route to the restaurant we meet a different kind of local fauna, a few working girls and almost got into a fight with then, they were angry about Mo taking photos in the area but somehow didn't have any problems with me doing the same thing - this must be yet another side effect of me having a much bigger camera

I have blogged in the past about my dislike for Yahoo, a dislike which from time to time grow to real hate, like right now about the inability to log intro Y!M with Pidgin.

In Romania Instant Messenger (or shortly "mess") is practically all Yahoo, no no matter how geek you are, you have to be on Yahoo Messenger to be able to communicate with the people around you. Which is doable, as Pidgin, while far from perfect, is acceptable as a client. Well... until now, when Yahoo is performing an upgrade to their servers and enforcing a new authentication method, with the direct result of locking-out everything else beside Y!M 9, so no Pidgin and not even Y!M 8.

You can see geeks gathering where they can (IRC, mailing lists, even Jabber) and talking about the futility of a revolution and impossible ways to move the entire country out from the Yahoo Messenger network.

At least it is not all black, the next version of Pidgin, 2.6.0, still under development and with an expected release in a few weeks is supposed to work again, so the Romanian geeks can take a little vacancy from chatting online with their girlfriends and do some useful stuff, like writiing code or drinking beer, right?


PS: after a round of feedback I decided to leave out from this post some explicit imagery about my feelings.

Update: thanks to a tip from Rahul, it seems gyachi still work (but what horrible interface it has...)

Reunite la o întâlnire patronată de Biblioteca Regală a Olandei și OpenDoc Society, firme de software, administrații de stat și organizații non-guvernamentale din întreaga lume au decis să întreprindă ceva practic pentru creșterea interoperabilității documentelor de birou, în software-ul pe care îl produc sau utilizează.

Iată știrea aici.

Semnificativ mi se pare și faptul că s-au descoperit și corectat în timp real erori privind interoperabilitatea documentelor.

Ca de obicei, România lipsește de pe „hartă”...

Surely you are familiar with those "I am going to [whatever FOSS event]" buttons we geeks are putting on our blogs when we want to show-off, but I decided 1) those buttons are boring and 2) personalization is key (even search engines are doing it), so this is not a button:

This may be a new low for postings on my blog, but I rarely get my cat Zorro in a good posture for photography and here I think his yawning can be easily confused with a manifestation of his essence of evil, so I had to turn it into a lame lolcat.

Quick follow-up to my post about the Fedora 11 release party in Bucharest: as expected, our friends gathered in a few other cities and had their own event. Not many people, but I think is a good poin to grow on.


Sibiu

Arad

Cluj-Napoca

Targu Mures

A facelift was much needed as we used a quite standard Drupal theme not looking very "Fedora" for the Romanian Fedora community website and we at least found some time for it. Many thanks to our Brazilian friends for sharing their theme (Jayme, your rock!), a bit of effort from Adrian and Alex to customize it and we are sexier than ever! (and the content is better too)

The next step would ideally be making a fitting theme for our (SMF powered) forum... I don't think we have an easy way here.

A couple of hours after the official launch we used the opportunity and gathered together for some beers and interesting talks about Fedora, Linux, FOSS and more: some Fedora contributors and friends from Ceata, openSUSE and Mozilla (...especially Mozilla, ask the SUSE guy about that :D )


more photos on our gallery
Next in line, Saturday in Cluj-Napoca, Sibiu, Arad and Targu-Mures.

This is not a rugosa rose, it is a dog rose, but is the closest thing to a rugosa I was able to find in my photos:

Earlier today I did my duty as a conscious member of the community and voted (in the Fedora elections, not past week-end, in the Euro-elections, where all the alternatives sucks and we didn't have at least a Pirate Party in Romania), But after my ballot was submitted, I realized I put to little weight on Rugosa, which, as a type of rose gives good opportunity for theming. So I shamelessly raise he awareness for it here, trying to repair my mistake (you are not able to change a vote once submitted).

We hoped to have a cool event for the Fedora 11 release in Bucharest organized at the Politehnica University with the help of our friends from Ceata, but the release was delayed, the university exams session started, no way to get the students now (and for ourselves the schedule is bad, a few of us had vacancies that ended). Maybe in November for F12 we will do something larger... But we still have good news, with events announced all around the country, this is what I know so far:

• in Bucharest we will gather this evening from 19:30 at "la Berbecu", which became kind of a tradition;
• in Cluj-Napoca Saturday is the day for a formal presentation followed by a beer party;
• beer party in Sibiu, Saturday evening;
• also a beerfest in Arad, Saturday.
• UPDATE: another party is planned for Saturday in Targu Mures

Also worth mentioning is a new experiment which will provide, in addition to the traditional mirrors, a large local seed for Fedora 11 images over BitTorrent, available right from the official release time.

Having a number of photos taken with hand held camera in not the best light I had to use a high ISO value, with the downside of getting a lot of noise in the image (a noisy photo is better than no photo). In such situation I retorted to GREYCstoration, probably the best GIMP plug-in for this kind of job (Fedora users can get it with yum install -y GREYCstoration).

Looking at the large number of available parameters I don't know what are good for, I realised I probably do a poor job at noise removal I looked at the project website, searching for some user-friendly documentation, but there I learned it is superseded by G'MIC, a drop-in replacement with a huge amount of additional features (this one is not yet packaged for Fedora, but the easiest way to install it is by downloading a binary in the gimp plugins directory from your home).

Deep inside the options you can find exactly the same options from GREYCstoration in a better layout, something that will wok on smaller displays.

Now I am unsure what to think about G'MIC: it has a lot of filters, many new and interesting but also many duplicates of filters already existing in GIMP (Unsharp Mask, Cartoon, etc.). Yes, is a good thing to have more filter, but is a good thing to have an application inside your application? Is a good thing to have the filters hidden so deep? Is a good thing to have two filters doing the same thing and don't know which is doing it better?

Recent, IBM a publicat un mic studiu-ghid practic privind adoptarea sistemului de operare GNU/Linux la nivel de masă, mai ales în firme.

Puteți descărca studiul aici (fișier PDF).

Concluzia este că, folosind o politică de migrare atentă și selectivă, o organizație poate beneficia relativ ușor de avantajele aduse de GNU/Linux - performanță, stabilitate, imunitate la viruși, cost scăzut sau chiar nul - fără a crea o „ruptură” semnificativă în activitatea zilnică.

Cheia pare a fi migrarea cu prioritate a utilizatorilor cu cerințe IT scăzute - cei care folosesc, în primul rând, e-mail, web, suită Office - lăsând la urmă utilizatorii avansați, proiectanții, graficienii, arhitecții... Din fericire, prima categorie reprezintă peste 80-90% dintre angajații unei organizații tipice.