Monthly Archives: March 2009

Document Freedom Day

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“Document Freedom Day” is an event, promoted by the Free Software Foundation, whose aim is to spread free documents formats and the Free Software culture. Last Wednesday I attended the Italian DFD 2009 in Opera (near to Milan, where in 2008 was organized “Liberamente“).

Me and Gianluca Varisco proposed a talk about the core values of the Fedora project, whose aim is to spread the meaning of the 4 foundations in general, and Fedora’s policies around codecs and firmwares in particular – thus covering a wider subject matter, not only documents.

Fedora gadgets

Fedora gadgets

However, I couldn’t stay there all the time because it was a workday. I came during my lunch break and brought an OLPC (the byte-code one), some Fedora stickers and gadgets with me. Stefano Frontori, my colleague at byte-code, accompanied me and he was the official photographer (you will find some photos attached to this post). He’s a very good photographer but he has only one defect: he’s a Canonist (yep, this is a neologism “A person who uses a Canon” :) )

Fedora attenders

Fedora attenders

The initial plan was to do a two-people speech, but unfortunately Gianluca was unable to attend, due to last-minute-problems. I want to thank him: he took care all boring pre-event tasks: put together an abstract, contact the event owners and so on. There weren’t many people, but some interested students (better than 100 bored and inattentive people). I had only 30 minutes for my speech so I tried to do it in a more interactive way, people could interrupt me, ask questions and so on. At the end there was an important question about Fedora hardware support, about the community, and Fedora/Ubuntu comparison.

Me and my talk

Me and my talk

I want also to point out the spirit of the FSF, in this case FSF Italy. Where the hell were they? FSF choose the most ugly day to organize this event (it was a workday, how can you expect a wide audience?), and didn’t send any FSF person.

Fedora ambassadors

Fedora ambassadors

Last but not least, many thanks to every voluntary people who organized this event. Special thanks to Alexjian Carraturo who allowed Fedora presence to this event.

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My first HDR photos experiments

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This afternoon I was bored in my room so I decided to start to learn how to create high dynamic range photos.

What is high dynamic range photos?

“The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.” (from wikipedia)

More theory informations here and here.

The main task is to take (at least three) equals pictures (better if raw, but it works also with jpeg) with only different exposure levels ( usually +3 EV, 0 EV and -3 EV, but you can choose your own settings) and combine it with particular software.

I started to use qtpfsgui that help you to align photos, combine with various techniques and obtain your HDR result. To be sure today I used it like monkey user: I got all default settings. After alignment I adjusted Tonemapping and I chose only mantiuk algorithm by trying to change saturation.

Here my results:

Puppets in England

Puppies in England /1

Puppies in England /1

Puppies in England /2

Puppies in England /2

Puppies in England /3

Puppies in England /3

Puppies in England /4

Puppies in England /4

Puppies in England /5

Puppies in England /5

My old street

My old street /1

My old street /1

My old street /2

My old street /2

My old street /3

My old street /3

My old street /4

My old street /4

My old street /5

My old street /5

Not so bad but not yet good :)

Stay tuned!

Moving Fedora-it on rails

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I’m 2 month late to write this post, but on the other hand, I adjusted my thought with last three months experience and give you a better perspective.

When I think about Fedora-IT community origin, I start smiling. I remember clearly when on #fedora-it IRC channel were only two (me and Matteo), and two Fedora Ambassador (Francesco & Francesco). Today we are officially a community. We are about 10/15 people on IRC and 5/7 active Fedora Ambassadors. This is nothing respect to French and German communities but for now is enough.

Since 2009 I have been decided to enhance the community by add short regular activities:

  • We have to do at least one meeting for month (no matter who is the owner or who ask for it, it’s important to keep in touch regularly, have brainstorming, discussions and involving all interested people.
  • We have few localized pages on fedora wiki to keep and track internal informations:
    1. Event page with a list of Italian events where we my participate (for example LinuxDay, Document Freedom Day, Software Freedom Day ,etc). This page has multiple goals: track every event may be interesting for us, give to Ambassador people the possibility to choose which event they want to attend,  Today this page is incomplete but next year we will have a really valuable event list.
    2. Inventory page collects gadget location and owner, this page exist because gadget are distributed all around Italy. This list give you the possibility to know what is available and who ask to.
    3. Meeting page with transcript and summary meeting.

I think we are on the right way.Stay tuned!

Action – Reaction

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After I noticed about this annoying bug on Xorg that break your keyboard layout (if you are not using US one), and considering some of people with laptop like mine (Dell D630) confirmed it, I decided to save my laptop…so:


[lfoppiano@sboing ~]$ uptime
21:52:13 up 8 days, 3:54, 7 users, load average: 1.14, 1.02, 1.05

Right now I’m surviving :)

It’s really a mess

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Disclaimer: this is a rant.
Disclaimer²: Although I included fedora mailing list guidelines, this message is not only for fedora people (most of them should read).

Premise: Bad quoting is one of the reason I skip messages.

I’m paladin of “good quoting” (and, if I’m bothering you I don’t care :) ), and I’m getting sick reading long threaded discussion where email is continuously raped by “I need to reply fast” or “this si more simple” stupid philosophy.

Please…..Please read and apply these few rules. I assure the world will be better, the entropy will increase less. But please, read it.

The most important rule you must apply is this:

Make sure we can tell what you are replying to. Place each part of your reply after the text it addresses (i.e., NO Top-Posting, please see “Wikipedia – Top Posting” and links therein for more on this). Most mail readers automatically put a ‘>’ character in front of each replied-to line. It gives a conversational flow to the text, and people know what you’re replying to. Trim irrelevant material. It makes it easier to read your reply and helps the reader to stay on subject.

You may change the world…remember ;-)