The Final Zone project

Courtesy of my Dad, this is my first writing from Apple iPhone.

I am still around. I have being busy with Graphic Design assignment. The session is almost over and I will get time to focus on Fedora Artwork. Je suis la. J'ai été très occupe avec les travaux d'art graphique. La session est presque fini et j'aurai l'occasion de me concentrer sur Fedora Artwork.

As it becomes a routine, I have replaced Moonshine (Fedora 7) by Loup Garou (Wereworf in French) that is Fedora 8 after backing up all the essential data such as email, specs and artwork for echo-icon-theme and the incoming Fedora 9. All system was succesfully detected. One particular feature I have noticed on Fedora 8 is the long awaited ability to install package from either CD and DVD. That is a major welcome addition for people who still have a narrowband connection. See the image showing InstallMedia as access point from optical drive or possibly USB. ---- J'ai remplacé Moonshine (Fedora 7) par Loup Garou (Werework) qu'est Fedora 8 après avoir archivé les données essentielles comme les courriels, fichier SPEC et les travaux d'art pour echo-icon-theme et Fedora 9. Le système a effectivement détecté tous les composantes. Un point particulier de Fedora 8 est l'habileté d'installer un paquetage à partir d'un disque compact or un DVD. Ceci est une excellente ad...

Writing a blog from a XO B4 replacing the B2 who got electrical issue. I never expected to write with an Arabic keyboard and the layout position started from right when using Write activity. It will weird for someone used for latin style of writing but it is fun. Browsing is much faster now.

Third week of Illustration class. I don't like the software much although I am learning new skills that can be transferable on Inkscape. Version 0.45 lacks blending mode and is available on development version. I noticed Adobe Illustrator allows grouping the layers so it is easier to organize them without so much effort. I wish Inkscape can perfectly import ai files from CS2 (it only has Illustrator 8 format). Currently, I save these exercises in ai and svg (File->Save as Web in Illustrator CS2) so I can work on Inkscape. What does it relate to the project? Expect improvement on echo-icon-theme which is planned for Fedora 9 and future artwork.

OLPC is the PC you can’t ever criticize .

48x48 input-device 48x48 utilities-terminal Available draft icons . Utilities-terminal has shadow added while input-device is new. They will soon be published on the trunk of hosted.fedoraproject.org/hosted/echo-icon-theme/

In reply of Warren Togami's Live Journal , Koji icon was already done several ago but got ignored. It is still on the Design Service wiki page . It symbolize a rice covered with koji-kin using japanese style painting. Shoud you want to get an alternative, let me know.

It was my first even conference on Virtual FUDCon which greatly saved time and money. In summary, echo-icon-theme will not be ready for Fedora 8 given the time constrains. Its guideline needs a rewrite started by Martin Sourada. The icons are now residing on echo-icon-theme repository which facilitates the access for contributors looking to add/update the icons. It also means the wiki page for EchoDevelopment will no longer upload icons and will serve as reference. The mouse cursors are not in the repository yet but will be available shortly. Mairin, Fedora Artwork team leader, suggested to use Tango guideline for icons smaller or equal than 24x24 while keeping the isometric view for 32x32 and above. Demitri Glezos thanked the team for the use of icons on his Transifex project . The set of icons is roughly 40 percent complete and users of other desktop environment like KDE are encouraged to test them and provide ticket to track issues. Be in mind the echo-icon-theme division tea...

Missing LinuxWorld San Francisco this year and next because of Graphics Design classes. Seen how the staffs did made me wish to be there. :\

I am back to school to further enhance my art skills I have rediscovered with Fedora Art team. Keeping an open mind, I found the whole class much easier than expected. It is also challenging because it is the very first time I attended in English world school, the majority of school was done in French until now. Fortunately, the schedule is flexible enough to get a spare time to work on other projects. Watching Martin Sourada's effort to create a Clearlook replacement and the initial development of sound project, it looks like Fedora Art team is getting active. With a short time for Fedora 8, revamping the art will be more challenging.

I will not go in Linux World San Francisco 2007 this year because of Summer class in Graphic Design Foundation. I will manage to get contact via IRC. I owe a review for adesklets . The stop gap I faced is the use of perl command which I am unfamiliar. I may consider to stop packaging it if there is another packagers willing to take over. Working on mirror.fedoraproject.org, it will take longer as the goal is to make it W3C compliant. I will publish the template soon.

Is there anyone who know a good application for Internet Cafe in Fedora world? Y a-t-il une application d'Internet Cafe pour le monde de Fedora?

It was time to say goodbye to Zod after backing up all my home data. Its soul is still in a DVD so I can retrieve it with Virtual Manager on Moonshine. The installer has a very good artwork. I feel like the layout could be improved. I have not gotten the opportunity to do it but I will prepare it for Fedora 8. One thing I wish to see on the installer is the size of package. Other than that, the installation was uneventful. The new desktop itself is very impressive with its fast-user-switch. It is now possible to switch session while keeping activities from the original. The icons on the upper panel still uses Bluecurve. It should be normally replaced with the default theme which is Mist. I have seen some users complaining about the absence of Echo icon theme, rest assured it is available on the repository. There were new icons added since then, it should be available soon. The blog was written with the LiveCD version that also provides the ability to easily resize Logical Volume Manage...

20:10 Pacific Time, a French channel TV5 reported about OLPC XO with Red Hat France. I am glad to see that project has a very good international covering.

For the first I can now see other XO machines through mesh networking with the recent Sugar build 426. John J5 reported the XO he used is in Cambridge while I am located in Vancouver, Canada. It is hard to believe the OLPC XO can contact other XO from a very far distance, at the same time it is utterly impressive. The activities (equivalent to applications ) got some change. Writer (slim Abiword) now uses tables, it will be possible to share that activities. The camera activities is now fullscreen mode. There is a journal activities that report the action of the user. The Sugar is have some way to go with some broken activites like Tam Tam and the inability to close them.

I came back from Montreal where Linux Graphics Meeting occured. Too tired after a long journey back to Vancouver, I did not feel to give summary. For now, ZZZ.

Better late than never. This was my first time in Libre Graphics Meeting where I met Máirín Duffy in the first day of conference and Andy Fitzsimon on the third and final day. The whole experience was great for the following reasons: Exchange of ideas among developers and users. Presentations in two languages: English and French Meeting new people. For this 2007 of Libre Graphics Meeting, here is the summary for each applications: Blender 3D : the next version 2.44 will come with full support of 64bit architectures. It is the transition for the incoming 2.5 release at the end of 2007. Also display is the first open-source movie Elephant Dreams. Inkscape : the main attraction given the fact it has the most presentation. The ability to provide a photorealistic art was one of impressive features. Scribus : Announcement of 1.3.4 that provide new features like improved text layout. One of example of the use of Scribus is Le Tigre , a French ad-free newspaper. Gimp : preview release of G...

I arrived in Montreal last Wednesday night. Looking for the right place for the LGM conference turned out to be complicated because of the lack of information from the website. After getting the right information, I brought the OLPC XO-2 machine to the Polytechnique computer retailer in order to fix the keyboard issues. It was an opportunity to take picture of the disassembled XO-2 machine which was surprisely easy to remount confirming its educational purpose. After finding the room where LGM will occur, I contacted Mairin, Red Hat employee, who recently arrived. For the information, LGM is using Fedora Core 6 for the presentation. Je suis arrivé à Montreal mercredi soir. Chercher le bon endroit pour le LGM s'est averé compliqué en raison du manque d'information du site. Apres en avoir obtenu, j'ai amené le portable OLPC XO-2 pour fixed le problème du clavier. C'était aussi l'occasion de voir la machine demontée et d'en prendre les photos. La facilité d'ass...

Read this blog MS Office 2007 versus Open Office 2.2 shootout . The test was already flawed from the beginning for the following reasons: The author did not upload the original file which is probably a Excel 97 xsl file as a reference Instead, two different formats were used: one from OpenOffice 2.0 beta sxw which is a compressed file and other a xml file from Microsoft Office 2003 . Since two different formats were used, the test is automatically void of meaning because of the lack of the original file. Renaming the xml file to xsl like the author, I verified if it can be read with OpenOffice 2.2. It does not because the data is interpreted as xml which will exceed the limit of row in Calc application. Office Excel 2003 will render like a spreadsheet due to proprietary XML parser. However, Excel 2003 cannot read sxc nor OpendDocument Spreadsheet unless SUN's Open Document Format plugin is used. The test is unrealistic in real world business because of the size (273 Mib of spread...