nixternal

After reading Jorge’s blog post titled Amazing open source image resizing technology, I decided to download and install the new plugin into Gimp and give it a try. The outcome, not to shabby, but not even close to great at the same time. Take a look at the before and after images below:

Before

After

The things that stick out graphically after using the liquid plugin is the set of weights in the background, one is considerably smaller than the other. The other thing is look at the collar the dog is wearing, looks like he chewed it up. Yet, the dogs head looks fine visually. Another downside, a 1600×1200 jpg file before using the plugin, is 484k in size. After using the liquid plugin and knocking it down to 1024×768, the size almost doubled to 836k.

Still pretty cool, and I am sure after further tweaking and playing around it will get better. One thing to note, is that I haven’t played with all of the available settings when using the plugin either. The main reason for this plugin from the previous videos I had seen, was say you want to keep the width at 1600, but wanted to shrink the height to 768, this plugin would allow you to do it without skewing the image to bad. Which that impressed me, however the increase in size was a little bad. I want to see some cool panoramic images of the ocean, or mountains, or rolling hills and see what the outcome is.

UBUNTU!

Only two Linux distributions participated in our Battle of the Distros competition. The two competitors were Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu Linux. Representatives from both distributions had an opportunity to give a fifteen minute presentation on why their distribution is best. While both distributions had its advantages, the audience chose Ubuntu Linux as the overall best distribution.

Earlier this year the University of Illinois at Chicago’s ACM group put on a very nice “Open Source in the Business” conference. The conference, called Flourish, went off without a hitch and had plenty of people show up. Last I heard roughly 200 people showed up, which isn’t bad at all, considering they held it on Easter weekend, yes the one Easter weekend where all religions who celebrate it had it at the same time. Not to bad.

Ubuntu vs. Red Hat. It was a great opportunity to show off Ubuntu as well as Red Hat (Fedora) as two amazing operating systems. Tom “spot” Callaway from Red Hat give his part about Red Hat and did an amazing job. He showed off some coolness with Fedora that made me actually like the way Gnome looked. What started out as a competition really turned into a pretty cool little talk between the two distros. Ubuntu Chicago gave their talk, after a five minute episode of “Ubuntu doesn’t like this LCD.” Tom fired up Fedora and right away it was up an rocking on the LCD. OUCH! So, to prove our point, we simply asked, “Who here is using Ubuntu or one of its projects?” Pretty much everyone raised their hand. And out of all of them people who raised their hand, I can comfortably say Xubuntu was the majority. Xfce and Xubuntu are pretty big here in Chicago among the developers it seems. Our other point was a funny really. We googled “Ubuntu sucks” and “Red Hat Sucks”, and Google showed that Red Hat had roughly 400,000 more hits for the search topic Thanks to Tom of course and to the Ubuntu Chicago guys who kicked arse. Truthfully, Tom was outnumbered, but I feel that overall his presentation(s) were excellent, and Tom if you just happen to read this, Ubuntu Chicago would love to call it a tie and share the award with you. Even though we offer the battle as a tie, don’t think we won’t rub it in every chance we get when you are around

Also, who took pictures of Tom and I in a deep, loving, embrace? It was a show of Linux force If you have those pictures, because I seen the flash bulbs (so 1970s) going off, send them my way or link me to them please. You can view pictures as well as the talks via Google Video by visiting the Flourish Media page.

Sorry for the double post, but low and behold this just came across Akregator.

With the recent news of several Linux vendors entering into partnership agreements with Microsoft (Novell, Linspire, Xandros), there has been much debate recently about two factions of Linux forming. Saying that Linux is going to be torn in two, makes for good press and lively debates, but this is certainly nothing new for Linux. There are far more material splits today in the Linux world, such as Debian vs RPM, KDE vs GNOME, Distro A vs Distro B, and so on. These divisions are quite material, and dilute significant energy and efforts across competing standards. However, we accept this as the price we pay for freedom of choice.

Note the There are for more material splits today in the Linux world, such as Debian vs RPM, KDE vs GNOME, Distro A vs Distro B, and so on. THOSE ARE CHOICES, NOT SPLITS!.

You have made your bed, lie in it. Don’t sit here and try to make excuses now and try and point the finger at other distributions. You talk about this Moral High Ground that some distributions are standing upon and then claim that some of these same distributions also link to tools that allow illegal installation of codecs and drivers. Bah humbug! I am willing to bet you are speaking of Automatix, in which not many developers I know like it, use it, advocate it, support it, and the list goes on. I know that Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat don’t link to it at all, and if there was a moral high ground, these 3 are standing proudly on top of it.

Quit defending you decision, or trying to, and then spewing opinions and not facts about the situation. You said you are fine with us disagreeing with your deal, yet you defend it every chance you get.

NOTE 1: I do understand there is a demand for the proprietary codecs and drivers, however I don’t feel we should sign a deal with the devil in order to provide them. And what does signing a deal with Microsoft have to do with proprietary codecs and drivers? Microsoft doesn’t create any of these items that are in demand.

NOTE 2: GPLv3 to be released in 24 hours!

That’s right, Ubuntu Chicago invaded this weekends Barcamp Chicago event in style.

From left to right: Francisco (aka OmniColos), Freddie (Admiral_Chicago), Eddie (posingaspopular), Rich (nixternal), and Jim (j1mc).

Or for the image above, in terms of operating systems, from left to right you have: Ubuntu (tablet pc), Kubuntu, Kubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu! And the install fest, I seen plenty of Ubuntu and Kubuntu booting up on peoples laptops.

Plenty of excellent talks, cool people, good pizza, great beer, and a patio that was about to collapse! There should be some great video posted this week as well as more images, so I will keep you informed.

Also, great news. The University of Illinois Chicago are planning a bigger Flourish Conference for 2008. This past conference had Chris DiBona, Peter Brown, and other great speakers, and for 2008, there are 2 people they are really interested in getting, Mark Shuttleworth, and/or Jono Bacon. We would love to have Peter Brown from the FSF back again, but I also mentioned that Mako Hill is a killer free software speaker and they are interested as well. The UIC ACM will have a definite date set this week, so more information will be made available.

Thanks to everyone I hung out with yesterday and met yesterday. Thanks for the beer and food, and for the good times! Here is to Barcamp Chicago 2008!

Aaron Seigo, of KDE fame, was recently filmed while down in Brazil for FISL 8.0. It is a quick 5 minutes, but in those 5 minutes I heard him speak about the differences in proprietary and open source software that I haven’t heard many people hit on. I will say this, he is correct and it is sad. I have never thought about it the way he put it, which was great. I can attest to what he is saying as well. When I helped run a tech company in Chicago years ago, we had used accounting software such as Quickbooks and Peachtree. Well after the years of upgrading our software, we went back to look at previous years accounting information to try and create some custom reports for potential investors. We were shocked that these latest version couldn’t open, or better yet, wouldn’t open the old databases. If I remember correctly, either Peachtree or Quickbooks stated we could purchase another application in order to convert the old data to the new format.

On another note, my father was talking about a database his company uses to provide potential customers a quote on specialized equipment. It is an old Access database, from the 90s. I guess his company just received new laptops with Office 2007 and none of his salesman can access, let alone create, any proposals. So now, they have to downgrade. And to play fairly, they have to get a bunch of new Office 2000 (or 97 can’t remember) licenses for these new machines. So their new upgrade costed them double than what they projected. This is insane.

Anyways, Aaron did a great job bringing it to light and said it very eloquently. Great job Aaron!

I highly agree and support both Jono Bacon and Melissa Draper with their recent posts concerning discrimination in the community.

I left a comment on Melissa’s blog today and I very much mean everything I said. I had my eyes closed, I will admit it at the blatent discrimination that has gone in the community. I know the one form I constantly see is the use of the terms noob and newb which references a beginner at anything as a newbie. I myself find that a little disrespective and it reminds me of the days a lot of us use to tell others to RTFM.

As a community we need to rise against this, we don’t need separation, we need equality. The greater the standards and the greater the collaboration between everyone will only result in better application, and most importantly, a greater way of life in the Open Source community. We can all come together to say Microsoft this, DRM that, yet some of us tend to voice ignorance and disrespect to our own members. Age, race, religion, sex, or amount of knowledge, we are all one in this community. If you can’t live with it, I suggest you either 1) grow up, or 2) get on with life and leave the open source community, there is no room for you here!