Graphics Planet

Akkana Peck: Fontasia v 0.3

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:31:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I posted about fontasia, my new font-chooser app. It's gone through a couple of revisions since then, and Mikael Magnusson contributed several excellent improvements, like being able to render each font in the font list.

I'd been holding off on posting 0.3, hoping to have time to do something about the font buttons -- they really need to be smaller, so there's space for more categories. But between a new job and several other commitments, I haven't had time to implement that. And the fancy font list is so cool it really ought to be shared.

So here it is: fontasia 0.3.

Aditya Bhatt: Aix en Provence : My first KDE sprint

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:09:35 +0000

I returned home two days ago from the 2010 KDE Imaging sprint. It was awesome because:

It was fun to “meet the people behind the email addresses”,
I learned some new stuff from seeing how the others code,
I’d never been outside of India before.

I arrived in Marseille sometime before noon, after a journey of more than 24 hours, barely catching about 3 hours of sleep (I still don’t get how people can sleep in an airplane). At the airport I met fellow digiKam contributor and SoK student Kunal, and managed to catch a bus to Aix en Provence, which is approximately a 20-minute ride from the airport. Aix is Gilles Caulier’s home city, and, I must say, a beautiful one.

The Aix City Center Fountain

Most of us arrived a day earlier, and in the evening, Gilles invited us to a digiKam talk that he was to give in a local LUG meeting. In the same place where we would code the next day. It was fun chatting with the LUG folk (some of them knew English).

I had to crash on bed soon that night, I was sort of starved of sleep.

The next day, I woke up early and walked around the hotel’s neighborhood, taking pictures of whatever caught my eye. There was this really nice cathedral there, just a five-minute walk from the hotel:

Cathedral (Photo courtesy of Marcel)

Gabriel arrived that morning, and then we proceeded to the Maison des Associations Tavan, which is the hall where we would work. We just called it “Tavan”.

During the coding, Marcel showed me his new revamped implementation of the face interface in digiKam, and we discussed with Gilles some of the possible reasons behind several crashy bugs in the face scan process. Marcel had committed the face thumbnailer delegate he’d been working on since a while, and I and Gilles played around with it for a bit.

We had a fair amount of false positives in the face detection, and while this accuracy can be improved in libface, there will always be some false positives, so we needed a “reject button” overlay on each face thumbnail to be able to dismiss these.

We had a good laugh when certain unthinkable things got detected as faces

I set to work on that, with help from Marcel. I wasn’t able to finish it due to some bugs in my code, but it looks like Marcel has fixed it now.

Michael had brought a really nice device that he had assembled and programmed himself :

Michael's device has a GPS receiver and, if I remember correctly, an Atmega 256 microcontroller. It shows the GPS coordinates on a display on the lid of the box.

Meanwhile, we discussed the feasibility of having arbitrary (as in polygonal/freeform closed curve) region tagging in digiKam, which seems an enticing idea. Some other future improvements such as having truly multithreaded batch tasks (like fingerprinting), and having a unified task manager for controlling these were discussed.

Martin's special Czech beer and Andreas' hard-as-rock bread.

Gabriel and Michael worked on the polishing stuff in the reverse geocoding project, and Martin continued working on the image versioning. This was the first time I saw Gabriel’s project in action. Kunal continued with QtScript integration, and we discussed interesting use-cases of this very useful and enabling project. So I guess Hot New Stuff ™ is coming to digiKam soon! So we’ve all been working on our projects post-GSoC too Andreas Huggel was there for Exiv2 work, and Laurent Espitalier for database interop with other applications.

I’m looking forward to working for a long time with the digiKam team. And hopefully I’ll be able to attend the next sprint too.

The entire team.

True Volumetric for Blender: Let your neurons grow connections

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:46:05 +0000

Yesterday nigth I have finally make some progress getting the EditMeshDerivedMesh in the Unlimited Clay modifier, it will be the key to sculpt over the EditMesh to get the dynamic subdivission and also have automatically access to every mesh editing tool current and that may appear in the future, this approach is much more flexible than write a custom structure just for unlimited clay because that way feature scaling is achieved. A custom structure may provide a bit more speed but at the cost of flexibility and that is a tradeoff I will never like to do.

Is all must a law, when you face a problem , you will need only time and let your brain get used to the issue, read, re-read, think of it, no matter if you don’t have a single clue, it will make new connections between your neurons and suddenly, a day, you sit down in front of your PC and the solution will start to flow, no mater if the problem is easy or complex, just don’t get panic if you don’t see the solution at first, trust that it will eventually get to you.

A quick advice for dev beginners

Cheers Farsthary

Máirín Duffy: fedoraproject.org redesign update

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 04:32:45 +0000

So it’s been a while, a month really, since I’ve given you an update on the Fedora website redesign. Well, in the past month Fedora design ninja Jef van Schendel and I have been cranking out mockups and Sijis Aviles has been doing an awesome job making the mockups a reality and getting things into staging and building things out. So we’ve got quite a few things to go over here.

Too professional?

One piece of feedback we heard from several of you about the last mockup for the front page of fedoraproject.org looked a little too professional. “This looks like it’s trying to sell me something,” one of my colleagues told me about it recently, “this doesn’t primarily say community or freedom to me at all first glance.”

Well, crap. Freedom & friends are two main values of Fedora. If folks don’t get a feeling about community and freedom from looking at our website, we’ve got issues. How did this happen?

Well, when designing the first mockup and even when iterating through the header designs, I was reviewing many application websites for general formatting & conventions for some inspiration and to make sure that our website didn’t violate any conventions that would confuse users. If our website follows patterns users have experience with at other software-related websites that involve downloads, then they’ll probably be able to have a smoother experience since they’ll have to expend less active brain power on figuring out what the website is for and what they are meant to be doing with it. It was through this quick & unscientific survey that I figured out wording for the navbar items – I chose words I saw that were the most frequently used – “Download,” “Help,” etc.

I think this influence probably ended up giving a bit too commercial of a flavor to the resulting mockup. Whoopsie!

How to fix it?

Well, let’s take a quick peek at the “too commercial” mockup:

“How to fix this, how to fix this?” I stewed. First I tried to figure out, what might have given it the commercial flavor? I asked a couple of the folks who felt it was commercial, and they just couldn’t put their finger on it. So I poured over it and figured out a few things:

While there are people on the page, the product itself stands out much more loudly than anything else.
The color palette is mostly grey, and the main background color is white. Very conservative.
There isn’t a single header on the page referring to community – the words “community,” “forum,” “people” are just not in the large and prominent headers on the page.

“All right, this is fixable,” I thought to myself, looking at the list of mistakes. Not many people featured prominently on the page? Add some. The color palette is conservative and grey? Make it more colorful! No prominent community-centric keywords? Add them! Not too hard, right? So here’s what we did:

The main navbar is now a bright Fedora blue, buh-bye grey!
The screenshot is backed by a colorful illustration rather than a plain dark grey gradient.
One of the first things I see on the page is the photo of Tatica and Pedrito – the darkness of their clothing contrasts with the much lighter & brighter colors around them, I think making them stand out right away.
The headers for the page are backed by a pale blue, and the media quotes under the banner are backed by a pale yellow. More color!
“Community” has been added to the navbar and falls towards the center of the screen, much more prominent than the word was in the previous mockup.

The reveal

So this is the course-correction to attempt to mistakes of the previous mockup, hopefully making for a mockup that better reflects Fedora’s values of freedom & community. The initial feedback we’ve gotten on it has been positive; what do you think, does it work?

But wait, there’s more!

Once Sijis, Jef, and I finally settled on this mockup being something we could live with, Jef and I went ahead and started fleshing out more of the screens needed. Jef took on the “Community” page (which will be roughly equivalent to today’s join.fedoraproject.org). I fleshed out the features page and also filled our recently-updated download pages into the new template. Let’s take a look!

Features Mockup

For each of the five major feature areas (Collaboration, Entertainment & Media, Creativity, Office/Productivity, and Desktop Basics,) I wanted to highlight a major feature of the desktop or a killer app in that category. You know, there are cool features in Fedora that a lot of long-time Fedora users aren’t even aware of. Let’s let them shine, right?

This mockup fleshes a couple of the six sections out. One piece of feedback I’ve gotten so far is that the text is just too long, “too long, didn’t read.” So it’ll definitely need to be tightened up a bit more.

One thing I think would be really sexy is to add a “download now!” button for folks already running Fedora. The kickass new Fedora PackageDB web application has this feature, so maybe it’s possible! Anyway, the mockup:

Download Pages Mockup

This mockup really isn’t anything remarkable; it’s just the recently-updated http://get.fedoraproject.org design in the new template. The mockup below is for the first page. There’s also other download mockups and they show the detailed options view and the download splash in the new template as well.

Community Page Mockup

Jef did a kick-ass job on this mockup, and he worked very closely with Sijis and me as he iterated on the design, posting revisions in IRC and discussing them with us real-time, then making changes based on our discussion and posting another iteration (so on and so forth.) He also picked the right color for it – magenta is the Fedora “friends” color. The green on the features page will probably have to be changed to “features orange” and the orange on the downloads page to “First green.” One cool component to this design is the idea of a watermark-style Flickr group/tag gallery behind the much larger, masked photo of Fedora community members. Jef also integrated the Fedora microblog feed, and made our current join graphics look a whole lot nicer!

Other mentionable items

fedoraproject.org redesign in staging

Sijis set up a staging environment for the redesign at http://stg.fedoraproject.org. Right now it has the base template with HTML & CSS Sijis and I worked on, but none of the new design meat I’ve showcased above… we’re working on it! (If you’re interested in helping… pop into #fedora-websites on irc.freenode.net and let’s talk!) So watch our staging environment; as we check in content it’ll appear within an hour or so of checkin.

Download splash system

Another cool development Sijis made was a functioning download splash system! This was a feature we had to drop in the http://get.fedoraproject.org redesign for Fedora 13 because there wasn’t enough time to implement. Sijis figured out a way to do it with Javascript, making it a much lighter and impactful feature – way to go! While there’s still some issues to be worked out as I understand from IRC today, you can try it out now by clicking on a download link at http://get.fedoraproject.org.

Embedded fonts!

We’ve got free and open souce fonts Comfortaa and Cantarell embedded in the page, so you’ll note all the mockups use Cantarell as the base font – and the feedback we’ve gotten on the use of Cantarell thus far, by the way, has been overwhelmingly positive.

And yet even more…

But it will have to wait for another blog post. We’ve got some really amazing updates on the fedoracommunity.org project, including some super-slick jQuery-based javascript from new Fedora design team member Marc Stewart!

Where the action is at

If you want to jump in on this project or just learn more about it:

Our project page on the wiki is a great place to start.
Pull up a virtual chair in #fedora-websites on irc.freenode.org and poke me (mizmo), Sijis (sijis), or Jef (Schendje) and chat us up!

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Design Team, Websites

Blender 3D Architect: Detailed guide and tutorial for SmallLuxGPU and Blender

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:59:37 +0000

The use of GPU power is one easiest ways to speed up the rendering for any type of project related with 3d visualization. Today we have a lot of tools that help use to use all those cores on our shiny graphics card, and work in real time generating realist images. For Blender 2.50 we [...] Related posts:

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Allan Brito: Detalhes sobre render com GPU no SmallLuxGPU e Blender

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 02:25:11 +0000

A renderização de cenas 3d e vídeo são alguns dos processos que mais consomem recursos do computador na área de computação gráfica. Existem várias maneiras de otimizar esse tipo de tarefa, mas sempre é importante contar com hardware de boa qualidade para conseguir bons resultados e principalmente tempos mais curtos de render. Uma das soluções [...]

tube animation film project: Mushroomer Documentation Published

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:09:14 +0000

Thanks for all the positive feedback we’re had on the demo video! Due to the interest shown I’ve started a documentation wiki and written a substantial amount of info about the less-than-obvious features that are included. Its more of a technical reference so everyone working on our project knows how to use the generator than a straightforward tutorial. If anyone is interested in writing/screencasting a tutorial I’d be happy to offer help when I can! We’ve also released an example blend file with a simple setup.

Documentation Wiki

Example Blend File – updated for release 3

In addition another RNA update broke the script just hours after we released it, so I’ve published an update here! [UPDATED:release 3] Note its still a script which needs loading in the text editor rather than an add-on. [UPDATE] Release 3 compatible with 31744 – bug fixes and better UI clarity.

Meet the GIMP: State of the Art

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:30:33 +0000

There is a nice article about photography and Open Source over at the blog of worldlabel.com. It covers a lot of programs and I think Nathan Willis missed nothing.

Other news: I am just starting to produce the next episode, the first from Berlin.

Jon Phillips: An Introduction to StatusNet Video

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 17:01:16 +0000

Thanks to @rejon pals @mray and @hypermodern for putting together the new html5-based “Introduction to StatusNet Video.”

Please head over to StatusNet’s main page to see the video.

Máirín Duffy: Sweet Caroline

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 04:38:51 +0000

Caroline’s Identity Crisis

Remember Caroline Casual-User? After speaking with some of you after the last blog post, I think I may have misrepresented her in terms of Fedora’s target user. (The LUNIX joke was really bad, serving only to confound.) Hopefully folks from the Fedora Board who were involved in the creation of the target user base definition could also clarify what their original intention was in case I’m not understanding the intent or not communicating it as effectively as I could again. In either case, I would like to explore who Caroline is, and who she isn’t, in the hopes of at least bringing a bit more awareness that we’re probably not all talking about the same woman, if not to go so far as make it fairly clear who she actually is .

Caroline’s Origins

First, let’s look at the target user of the the default Fedora desktop:

This type of consumer is someone we think can immediately benefit from the usefulness and elegance of free software. This type of consumer is also someone who can be persuaded to participate or contribute to Fedora. Consumers who don’t fit this minimum profile, though, might very well be pleased with what we provide. We tend to favor consumers who are interested in taking a step toward collaboration. [...]

Voluntary Linux consumer

Computer-friendly

Likely collaborator

General productivity user

A slightly-different version of this statement from a mailing list announcement has also been widely-quoted, so let’s take a look at that too:

We found four defining characteristics that we believe best describe the Fedora distribution’s target audience: Someone who

is voluntarily switching to Linux,

is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer,

is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something’s wrong with Fedora, and

wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either using desktop applications or a Web browser.

Okay. So we’ve reviewed the source material and it’s fresh in our heads. Now let’s walk through what I believe are some misconceptions about Caroline based on comments to my last blog post, and read them while referencing this source material.

Myths about Caroline

Caroline doesn’t care about technology

Caroline is supposed to be a “computer-friendly” person who is “voluntarily switching to Linux.” It may well be a flawed assumption, but I’m not sure folks who aren’t interested in technology even really understand what Linux is, nevermind would voluntarily switch to using it or describe themselves as computer-friendly.

Caroline isn’t willing to give back.

The Board’s definition and communications about it were pretty careful to point out this isn’t the case. Actually, one of the four key attributes of the target user is “likely collaborator.” The the user base definition says, “We tend to favor consumers who are interested in taking a step toward collaboration.”

“We found four defining characteristics that we believe best describe the Fedora distribution’s target audience,” states the the mailing list announcement, “Someone who [..] is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something’s wrong with Fedora.”

As Deb pointed out, “Today’s Carolines could become tomorrow’s Connies.”

Caroline only asks for mp3 and Flash support.

Well. I think do Caroline probably cares a lot more about her music collection and being able to be Rick-rolled and watch the latest Autotune the News rather than mp3 and flash technology specifically. (Although from my own guesses about Caroline, she may well be the type to write her own songs and share them or post video tutorials and video blogs – she doesn’t strike me as a straight-out consumer.) The Board-written, detailed description of her computer usage does include “locating and viewing/playing media.”

That being said, yes, Caroline has an issue if she can’t listen to her 50 gigs of music albums or see the new Snoop Dogg cameo in Katy Perry’s latest music video. The problem isn’t insurmountable, and Caroline is comfortable with computers and interested in technology, so I think she will probably find a (admittedly PITA) work-around to do these things before technologies like webm make this silliness unnecessary.

So just who is Caroline? Let’s play a game!

I think it might be helpful if we think through specific examples of places we may or may not be likely to find Caroline. So, are you ready to play……

Is Caroline someone you could easily meet……

While attending LinuxCon?
In between sessions in the hallway at GUADEC or Akademy?
While eating lunch at FOSDEM?
Waiting in line to pick up your badge at USENIX LISA conference?
Sitting next to you at your local LUG meeting?

GUADEC 2006, my own photo

I think that the folks above are most likely to be in Pamela’s camp, and in some cases Connie or Nancy’s camp. Linux is a big enough part of these folks’ lives that they’ve taken the trouble to pay or find funding for a flight and lodging, they’ve taken time away from their family and perhaps even vacation time from work in order to spend at least a day if not a whole week at a conference revolving around it. (Or in the case of LUG attendees, an evening away from home missing dinner with the family once a month or weekly.) I just don’t think it is possible for these folks to be Carolines.

Is Caroline someone you could easily meet……

Standing in line behind you at your local farmers’ market?
At the Otakon anime conference?
At the community center studio art class you take on the weekends?
Shopping at the Sunday church flea market?
At a Blue Hills Hiking Group meetup?
At your local pub?
Sitting next in the row behind you at the movie theater waiting for the latest movie blockbuster to start?

“Farmer’s Market” by Emily Prachthauser. Used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.

Isn’t it kind of a crap shoot? I know folks I would consider to be Carolines who each individually might go to one or two of these types of events, but I think I would be very lucky to have the chance to meet a Caroline just by going to any of these events. Unfortunately, I think maybe a lot of you came away from my last blog post thinking I meant to say that a Caroline could easily be picked out at any of these types of events.

Is Caroline someone you could easily meet……

At the SXSW conference?
Hanging around at PAX?
Sitting next to you at a TED technology talk?
Attending an ACM CHI conference?
Building cool things at a MakerFaire?
Chilling out at a hackfest at RailsConf?
Through her awesome Vimeo channel, where she posts weekly Gimp tutorials?
Browing the aisles of your local electronics store?
Working as a technology coordinator at a local school?

“pre-panel get together” by Ed Schipul, taken at SXSW’08. Used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.

Outcome likely, yes, IMHO. These are folks who are comfortable with computers, clearly love technology, but whose lives do not center around Fedora and/or Linux. (Instead, their lives and/or passions center around MakerBots or RepRaps, Adobe products (or Gimp!), Playstations or Nintendos, technology-related research, user interface design, blogging, building awesome web applications, maintaining computers for their students, etc. etc. ….) These are not folks who would identify themselves as Linux contributors, but whom are probably a far cry from needing instruction in how to use a computer mouse or what an MP3 is, and whom are very likely to value the freedoms using free software affords them. (They may already use free software!)

If you’ll humor me the effort, keep these folks in mind and then re-read Caroline’s yellow speech bubble at the top of this blog post. Maybe it makes more sense what I was trying to do… if you replace the “coffeeshops and parties” with Makerbots, Playstations, or building kick-ass web applications.

Who is getting left out?

So, at least in this blog post, we’re probably not talking about your grandparents’ friend Etna who stands behind you in line at your local supermarket, has three cats, and always confuses you with your younger sibling. We’re likely not talking about elementary school age children in a third-world country who struggle just to find clean water to drink. We’re probably not talking about the person who drives the subway car or bus that helps get you to work in the morning, or the woman who owns and operates your favorite neighborhood restaurant.

These folks are probably not Carolines. They’ll need a different persona. Whether or not we’re meant to or should consider targeting them, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

What do you think?

Filed under: Fedora

Blender 3D Architect: SketchUp 8 available to download

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 02:37:54 +0000

The workflow of an architectural visualization project often involves the use of several types of files, coming from softwares like AutoCAD and SketchUp. In the past months I `m starting to receive more and more projects created with SketchUp. Since SketchUp is an easy tool to create volumetric models, most architects or small companies without [...] Related posts:

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Barak Itkin: Update - Multicolored text is now supported in GIMP

noreply@blogger.com (LightningIsMyName) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:36:00 +0000

Thanks to Michael Natterer (mitch) who had some time to do some cleaning to my patch, and integrate his patch to allow true rendering of color for text (instead of rendering an alpha mask) GIMP now supports multicolored text :D

Go test it from the latest source and report bugs if you find some ;-)

tube animation film project: while the cat is away…

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 19:14:14 +0000

So Bassam’s been away in Bulgaria for a couple of weeks and Henri and I mostly had the studio to ourselves. I’ve been working on a mushroom generator for a couple of timelapses – not that tube will be filled with glowing mushrooms, more that we wanted something half way between the ivy generator and a fully fledged particle system. Henri modeled some funky mushrooms and together we spun together a quick demo video just to show off some of the effects that are possible, and to exercise our fetish for indirect lighting and luminous pink.

Mushroom Generator Blender 2.5 from Henri Hebeisen and Josh Wedlake on Vimeo.

The script is still heavily in development but if you like alpha stuff and you’re happy to do your own debugging, then feel free to download and run.

Download – UPDATE Fixed for r31726 and up

Essentially you need to model a couple of mushrooms (just a generic term – you can model flowers or trees or robotic arms) with some shapes for their animation which will be blended sequentially, some shapes for random variation, some shapes in which they bend up the y axis, a painted vertex group for shrinkwrapping the base of the mushroom, all scaling and rotation applied and the origin at the base of the mesh.

above: creating the shapes for auto animation

above: adding manual animation to a mushroom

You also need a target mesh which has nice topo (ideally no elongated tris or nasty convex quads), optionally painted vertex groups named OBmymushroomname… and MAmymushroommaterial… to control the distribution of your various materials and different object types, optionally a limit vertex group (ie only faces within this will receive mushrooms), and a lot of patience. Select the mushrooms then make the target active and tab into edit mode, select the start face(s) then hit spacebar>Mushroomer (remembered to run the script first).

above: mission control, godspeed

Adjust the settings and hit go. I suggest you run blender from the terminal so you can watch for progress and any hangups. You might well want to abort if it starts slowing right down from too many mushrooms.

above: when its done

Development on this script has been a bit of a nightmare. Currently it is not possible to create multiple linked objects and have different shape key and material animation blocks on them without having to duplicate the mesh and/or material blocks (thus unnecessarily eating up huge amount of memory and removing the possibility to edit the mesh for one mushroom and have all of the update). This is in the blender bug tracker as #23546 and #23547. If they get fixed you can uncomment the deep data path keyframe adding and enable all the code for migrating actions to object level. Another limitation which slowed development is that it is currently not possible to merge two actions into one. This is necessary if you are moving mesh level and material level animation data back to object level. Essentially you need to combine two actions into one. Not only is this not possible, but its also not possible to copy an fcurve in its entirity, but rather python has to iterate through very slowly copying every handle one by one, and even this is susceptible to some bugs (not yet reported). This is because the collection of fcurves is read only even though each fcurve itself if read/write. I was also held up by bug #23532 which prevented me from doing the action block combining in the NLA editor, and for a short while by bug #23548 which caused blender to crash when creating new fcurves. Finally the script can’t currently support animation data on the mushrooms’ materials due to bugs #23593 and #23594 – I’ve chosen to block this feature rather than risk an inescapable hang and data loss – uncomment those lines at your own risk! Fingers crossed the devs will iron these out sooner or later and the mushroom generator will be running faster, with lower memory requirements, smaller file sizes and more stability!

Its also been a sad day today as we waved goodbye to Henri who is on his way back to France as I write. Its been great fun working together for the last 2 months. Luckily we’ll only be a stones throw apart when we’re back at our separate homes in Toulouse and London. If all goes well we’ll be at the Blender conference this October as well. Rest assured, the world hasn’t seen the end of the glowing mushrooms saga – I’m hope we’ll have another chance to work together soon!

Allan Brito: Google SketchUp 8 disponível para download

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 16:23:02 +0000

O SketchUp é uma das ferramentas de modelagem 3d mais importantes no que diz respeito a união de qualidade na modelagem, e também facilidade de uso. Sempre que conheço alguma pessoa com grande dificuldade em trabalhar com softwares 3d, recomendo que a mesma tente primeiro criar objetos no SketchUp para depois passar para softwares mais [...]

Bastien Nocera: New sharing UI update

noreply@blogger.com (hadess) — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:22:51 +0000

Even though the current status is best gathered from bugzilla, I'll post a few teaser screenshots to whet your appetite.

Sending to Twitter/Twitpic

Sending to Flickr

The interface will see a "folks" based sending item called "Contacts" at the top of the sidebar, and we should see some more services and devices appear as well, as libsocialweb gains support for them, and old nautilus-sendto plugins are ported.

More when those pesky upstream bugs are fixed.

Allan Brito: Blender usando nós para editar animação e dados

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:33:29 +0000

Os softwares que trabalham com modelagem 3d e animação acabam precisando gerenciar projetos com grande quantidade de dados, e complexos esquemas de duplicação e outros elementos. Com o tempo, esses projetos acabam ficando difíceis de organizar e atualizar. Isso é bem simples de perceber quando temos grande número de modificadores aplicados no mesmo objeto, junto [...]

Máirín Duffy: A story about updates and people

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 04:35:30 +0000

A bit of discussion about update policy in Fedora has been brewing lately and I’ve been reading and thinking (and stewing and moaning and wringing my hands) about the discussion a lot. I noticed a few archetypes in the positions taken throughout the discussions:

Caroline Casual-User

Why should we care about what Caroline has to say? Well first of all, she isn’t involved directly in any of these discussions, so she has the least voice in all of this and to some point might not even be able to follow the discussion (“What’s a koji? What’s a FESCo? Who you callin’ YUM?”)

We should also care about Caroline if we want our userbase to continue to grow, and if we want to better fulfill our mission which is in part “to spread free/libre code and content.” I don’t think you can really spread anything without reaching beyond where it already is. Caroline has just as much right as the rest of us to enjoy software freedom, and she may even help spread it to more new users than we could reach alone if we can only capture her interest and inspire her.

Pamela Packager

Why should we care about what Pamela has to say? She’s pitching in here. She’s devoted a great chunk of her time (in many cases, personal & volunteer time) to help out, and she cares very deeply about the mission and soul of the project. The technology excites her, a lot more than it does Caroline, and she can help push more innovation and expand our capabilities if given the chance. If we lose all of our Pamelas, we lose our capacity to get keep things humming along.

Connie Community

Why should we care about what Connie has to say? She’s a community gardener. She’s making sure we’re open and transparent and enable new contributors to enter the project and she notifies us of issues as they happen, helping us course-correct. She helps recruit new contributors and make sure the environment for contributors is a fun and welcoming one.

Nancy Ninja

Why should we care about what Nancy has to say? She may have been around Fedora for a very long time, from it’s pre-beginnings through all its growing pains up until now. She feels very close to it, and has for a long time, and is afraid of change and that the project is shifting to cater only to a user base that doesn’t include her and feel unwelcome. She doesn’t want to lose the OS she’s relied on all these years.

Where you stand depends on where you sit

This is something my colleague Adam Young told me this morning. It kind of resonates for me here – “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” I think at some level in the various discussions about Fedora updates, Caroline, Pamela, Connie, and Nancy are making assumptions and taking away completely interpretations of the same idea, and communication is breaking down, because they come from such different positions. Computing I think is really the world of the abstract, and because so many things like, ‘packages,’ ‘updates,’ ‘repositories’, ‘environments’, don’t really have real-world objects bound to them, folks end up using the same words to describe completely different things a lot.

Pamela wants updates to be constant throughout a release, no holds barred – she wants the latest Gimp and she wants it yesterday. Caroline just wants her computer to work – “please don’t change a thing – it worked yesterday – if it breaks before my presentation I’m screwed!” Can both their needs be met? I think so! But it’s easy to completely miss where interests and needs can both be met when the language is so easily interpreted to mean the problem is untenable. Let me give you an example of how I think both Pamela’s and Caroline’s needs could be met here:

Here, if Caroline runs stable (as she should be with a default install of Fedora), she might notice an update to the core system once a month or so, maybe occasional additional security or critical bugfix updates now and then. Not two hours’ worth of updates on a fresh F13 that took 15 minutes to install a month after release…. ahem. Pamela wants her newest Gimp and she wants it now – well, she’s got options. She can hook her system up to testing, and if the Gimp she so craves is not there, she can enable rawhide real quick to grab it, or look for a koper that’s got the latest and greatest Gimp – maybe a pre-release development version.

“Well, wait a minute!” you cry. “Once-a-month updates???” No, not exactly. Let’s zoom in a bit on that stable package graph, okay?

Why should update policies for the kernel, dbus, firefox, inkscape, xorg-x11-server, and cowsay be the same? Does that make sense? If an update breaks my graphics, I can’t use anything. If an update breaks cowsay, well… my clever MOTD is a little less clever but it shouldn’t break other apps. So why not bundle critical stuff that’ll really hurt our users in a huge way – the basics like networking, graphical display, hardware support, i18n input methods, sound – and put much more stringent guidelines on them than apps like figlet, xbiff, or xbill? If an application is relatively self-contained and can really only break itself – is it so necessary to be as strict about updates to it within a stable release?

I thought this game was the bee’s knees when I was a junior in high school. Take that, The Man!

Then we have a base platform that’s a bit more stable, letting Caroline live without fear, all without stifling gotta-have-the-latest-apps hunger of folks like Pamela. Hmmm. Stable base platform. That might make life easier for 3rd party developers such as Boxee, Amazon, and Adobe to provide support for Fedora, no?

Bonus

If we had a concept of a base platform treated separately from applications…. for Caroline I think PackageKit would go from this:

To this:

About this blog post

I’m a designer, I’m not an engineer. I may be missing something insanely basic and be sitting in the midst of y’all, Dr. Evil-like with a big puff of Cappucino foam on my nose here.

That’s okay!

Maybe I should have posted this to a mailing list. Well, I hate mailing lists, and I wanted this to be visual. If anything I hope you walk away from this post thinking that maybe sketching out some diagrams or working through some (basic, not fancy-pants) personas might help solve the problem in a more productive way than the flamewars that inevitably break out whenever you try to do something productive on mailing lists. (I wish we had something like this today, so bad.)

Actually even more importantly than that, I want you to walk away with the idea that this is a solvable problem and doesn’t have to disintegrate into bad feelings and flames. Even better, start sketching out your own ideas and possible solutions, feeling free to mark up my little sketches if desired. The Inkscape sources for my diagrams is available. If you’ve got an idea you can describe to me that is indeed awesome and might help solve some of this mess, I’d be happy to help you put together some graphics to help communicate your idea more effectively.

So what do you think? I’m going to try to keep my bar for the comments on this one really high, so I’m going to be really strict in moderating. You’ve been warned

(Cartoon graphics courtesy of Nicu Buculei, public domain from the Open Clip Art Library.

Filed under: Fedora

Pascal de Brujn: Darktable 0.6 Released!

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 21:27:27 +0000

After 5 month’s of hard work, we finally got around to releasing Darktable version 0.6. The new version has boatloads of new features. For example we added a lot of new image processing plugins. Other notable features are Picasaweb export and we can now storage password (like your Picasaweb login) in GNOME Keyring or KWallet (as any decent application should). Beside the new bells and whistles a lot of crashes have been fixed in the last month. Hats off to Johannes, Henrik, Tobias and the other contributers.

That said, my personal contributions to the latest release are mainly related to the basecurves… The basecurves allow us to have decent default output of camera RAW files. With proper basecurves Darktable’s output is roughly similar to the camera JPEG output. We now have basecurves for Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Olympus, Panasonic and Leica. We have a basecurve for Kodak as well, though that didn’t make it into the 0.6 release.

With the new 0.6 release I also took the oppertunity to cleanup my PPAs. I now have two seperate PPAs exclusively for Darktable. For “stable” releases add this PPA to your sources:

https://launchpad.net/~pmjdebruijn/+archive/darktable-release

Or if you’re feeling adventurous, and don’t mind the occasional problem, you can use our regular development snapshots:

https://launchpad.net/~pmjdebruijn/+archive/darktable-unstable

We’re now working toward a 0.6.1 release with amongst other things some user interface improvements.

Rawstudio project: New Cameras and Colour Profiles

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:31:48 +0000

We’ve just added colour profiles for a bunch of new cameras in Rawstudio:

Canon EOS 60D (Colour profile, ordinary RAW mode supported, please send in sRAW/mRAW files)
Panasonic DMC-FZ40/45 (Colour profile, loads in 4:3 mode, please send other aspect ratios)
Sony A500 (Fully supported)
Sony A550 (Fully supported)
Sony STL-A33 (Fully supported)
Sony STL-A55V (Fully supported)
Panasonic DMC-FZ100 (Colour profile, loads in 4:3 mode, please send other aspect ratios)
Panasonic DMC-LX5 (Colour profile, please send in raw samples in all aspect ratios)
Pentax 645D (Only colour profile, we need a few RAW samples for load support)
Sony A290 (Only colour profile, we need a few RAW samples for load support)

As you can see we still need your Raw samples for complete support. Especially Panasonic is a nuisance, since the raw files are different for each aspect ratio.

You can upload to our FTP server, or use this web upload form to send us your images.

Allan Brito: AutoCAD para Mac Os X e iOS confirmados

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 16:10:32 +0000

Os profissionais da área de design e construção que acabam decidindo por migrar dos ambientes Windows para o Mac, sempre encontram na alteração das suas principais ferramentas de design e desenho uma dificuldade. O AutoCAD é uma das ferramentas mais usadas na área de desenho técnico assistido por computador, e mesmo já existindo opções mais [...]

Allan Brito: Efeitos com partículas no Phoenix FD e 3dsmax

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:07:37 +0000

O mercado de computação gráfica destinado aos efeitos especiais com fogo e fluidos é dominado por várias empresas especializadas nesse segmento, podemos listar vários softwares que trabalham em conjunto com o 3dsmax para gerar esses tipos de efeitos. Entre os nomes estão o FumeFX, Thinking Particles, Krakatoa e vários outros. Agora o Chaos Group acaba [...]

Morevna Project: Remake – Version 0.2

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 10:12:58 +0000

I am proud to announce new version of “Remake” – unified build system for animation projects. It’s purpose to automatically track changes in your project files and update rendered footage.

Download remake-0.2.tar.gz

What’s new:

Support for the Blender 2.5x.
New “-t” option to run multiple jobs in parallel when rendering footage.
New “snapshot” feature – you can save the current rendering as video file to track your “work in progress” changes. This feature is especially useful when your project is under version control. See manual page for more information.

Barak Itkin: Some thoughts on hunting bugs (Software in General)

noreply@blogger.com (LightningIsMyName) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:37:00 +0000

I don't tend to complain too much, but it was annoying as hell to track down this bug, so I though I'll share some of the joy with you =) This post is mainly for software users (not GIMP-specific) as it should give you an insight on how to track the exact cause of a bug, and so make better reports and make it easier for the developers to fix the bug =)

Developers may also enjoy this post - thinking about this bug and how I tracked it, it is in fact a very funny bug :D

Here is the original report:

Since 2.6.7 or 2.6.8 I am having a persistent crash with GIMP:
When CTRL-left clicking on a layer mask to toggle it, about 30% of the times my GIMP segfaults and badly crashes.

Helpful ain't it? A bug which can't be reproduced in any deterministic way is a nightmare to track down :P I can't blame the reporter (especially now that I know the cause, it was very annoying to find) since it's not his fault that this is how the bug appeared.

Several days later, someone shows up on IRC complaining that GIMP crashes when he alt-click's a layer. The first thought I had is "yay! sounds similar - maybe he knows why". He provided steps which always cause a crash for him. When I tried them it didn't reproduce the bug for me...

So he said he'll clear his gimp configuration directory and restore files one by one until he finds the one which causes it. After some time he returns back to us, saying the sessionrc file is the cause for the bug and he sent the file. I tried his steps and indeed, I managed to reproduce the bug.

"So now you know the cause, that's what you wanted!". Usually, I would have agreed on the last sentence, but not in this case - this a general file, with many settings, which doesn't contain anything which even seems related.
So using the same technique as above, I removed the settings one by one until I found the one which causes the crash. The one which caused the bug was a setting in the user interface which determines which tab is open. That doesn't even make sense, or as mitch said "What?!!" :P Which tab in the user interface is open should not make a program crash...

Now, to the last step of tracking down the exact cause - trying, trying, trying... For 40 minutes I tried with the user interface using the instructions the guy on IRC has given - each time trying to add/remove steps to see which ones affect the bug.
The result, was that if a certain tab is hidden (the layers tab) and you restore it later, then if you click at some place directly after restoring it, it would cause GIMP to crash. Certainly one of the strangest bugs I ever saw...

So what do we learn from this? The 4 "golden rules" of hunting bugs:

Make it Deterministic: There is usually no such thing as a random bug - Almost every bug has a series of steps that will always reproduce it. Finding this series of steps is essential in order to continue the debugging process. This may take lots of time, so it's recommended to try reproducing it in an organized way, maybe even writing down what doesn't help reproducing it.
Make it small: When you found the series of steps, you should try to eliminate as many of them as possible to keep reproducing the bug using a minimal amount of operations. If any files are related, try to isolate only the ones that affect the bug. Less steps mean less things to check.
Make sure it's essential: With the remaining steps, try to replace them by others - if a step can be replaced by other steps which are not related, then it's probably not the direct cause of the bug.
Finally - Make no Assumptions: Bugs don't have to make sense :D Even the most weirdest things can be related. Don't say "This can't be the cause" without actually checking. Bugs should make sense eventually, but the logic behind them is not always obvious at first.

Following the 4 steps above should help you find the exact cause of the bug you are reporting/hunting. It will make your reports very very effective, and you will save lots of time to the developers, so they can work on the important stuff ;-)

For those who want to take a look at the specific bug - here it is: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627328

Federico Mena-Quintero: Mon 2010/Aug/30

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 19:36:00 +0000

Rooting the file chooser

Christian Hammond has been working on a very cool branch of GtkFileChooser to let you define roots for the file dialog. Normally, this is what my file chooser looks like — it lets me browse anything on my file system:

In the following screenshot, the file chooser has been rooted to show only my $HOME. Note that no volumes or shortcuts that are outsideof my $HOME show up in the shortcuts pane.

The API makes it easy.
```
GSList *roots;

roots = g_slist_append (NULL, "file:///home/federico");
gtk_file_chooser_set_root_uris (chooser, roots);
```
And in the following example, the filechooser has been constrained to my $HOME and to /tmp:

This is basically the infrastructure we need to support proper lockdown in the file chooser. At some point it may be interesting for sysadmins to say, "don't let users wander in the filesystem, but constrain them to their home directory, the corporate shares and their USB stick".

This is bug 609886 - multiroot support for GtkFileChooser.

The patches are not quite ready yet (in particular, passing a GSList of strings is not very nice for language bindings, I think), but it should be easy to fix for production. Any volunteers?

True Volumetric for Blender: I’m back from hollyday

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 17:46:00 +0000

Hi all

Just a quick post because today I’m trying very hard to update myself from a full offline month ! my email inbox is nearly to explode
I have make some progress to unlimited Clay as a modifier, I have replicated (in a non relesable form yet) the previous funtionality but now as a modifier, and als this takes advantages of all the sculpt goodies. Soon I will post more on this.
It was really hard to be offline for so long and this month turn a year.
Is ok to be on track again
Cheers Farsthary

Adam Celarek: A new curve widget for Krita

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:48:44 +0000

I’m coding right now on a new curve widget. Here are some screen-shots of the still unfinished work:

There are no icons yet, but enkithan promised to create some, thanks . It’s currently not yet possible to extract the curves as data and i still have to port the current krita curve (some kind of function curve made by Dmitry Kazakov) to this new widget and integrate it in Krita.

I was told, that Dmitry has created an extendible api. If i can reuse that, it would be possible to replace all widgets at once, which in turn would mean, that the new curve could appear in Krita 2.3. Unfortunately i broke my ankle last week, while climbing in Croatia, and i have to undergo a surgery next Thursday or Friday, so maybe i won’t be able to code in the next week.

Andreas Nilsson: Friends of the Tree website mockup

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:34:28 +0000

Every week during the Thunderbird Status Meeting we reward a contributor who have been doing great work on the app recently. A Friend of the Tree.
They get a honorable mention during the call and a sweet t-shirt in the mail, but I feel that’s not enough.
We should put them in the Hall of Fame in 1 mile high LED letters, seen from miles away and stories should be told about them for generations to come. After all, they made a great contribution that will benefit millions of users, all during their spare time!
I’ve put together a mockup of a site that could be fed with a simple rss feed and want some feedback.

svg source

Is it too cute or too little cute? Is it a good idea to begin with? Are there other ways we could highlight our contributors?

Thorsten Wilms: Inkscape Tiled Clones

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:20:16 +0000

Inkscape has this dialog hidden in Edit -> Clone -> Create Tiled Clones…:

It has been brought up on the Inkscape-devel list and I decided to have a closer look.

Inkscape defaults to shifting the clones by 100% width of the selected object for columns and 100% height for rows. So the parameters on the Shift page are actually about the deviation from that, but the interface doesn’t make that clear at all.

Shift and Scale only take %, but should allow absolute values with a unit of the user’s choice.

Rows, columns wouldn’t make sense for radial arrangements that should also be possible.

Width, height: it could be made clearer that this option will fill the specified area and in what directions (original defines top left).

Use saved size and position of the tile checkbox: what is the use case for this option?
The tool-tip shows that this needs a lot of explanation: “Pretend that the size and position of the tile are the same as the last time you tiled it (if any), instead of using the current size”.

The Exponent parameter on the Shift and Scale pages depends on the tool-tip to explain that it defines whether rows will be spaced evenly (1), converge (1).

Trace page: Well, non of my tests produced anything sensible or useful.

The Symmetry page only contains a pop-up list (what GTK+ erroneously calls a combo box) full of mysterious items:

These are the 17 wallpaper groups, all possible tilings with translational symmetry. I don’t think knowledge of these should be expected. At the very least, the term wallpaper groups should be mentioned. Even once you know what this is about, the descriptions might not help you much with recalling the patterns or with predicting the outcome based on the selected object.

The Wikipedia article includes diagrams, but I didn’t find them to help much. A page of Inkscape: Guide to a Vector Drawing Program is much better. There are 11 groups based on rectangles (2 of them can be parallelograms), 1 on right-angled rectangles (rectangles cut apart diagonally) and 5 on hexagon subdivisions.

Here’s an attempt at creating the most simple schematics, leaving out points of rotation and mirror axes to just depict orientation. The place taken by the selected object is darkened:

These could be added to the descriptions given now.

Filed under: Conception, Planet Ubuntu, User Experience

Allan Brito: Tutorial de animação com Maya usando nCloth

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:00:16 +0000

Como parte da reciclagem que sempre promovo no meu material de aula, sempre que começo uma nova turma, estou reformulando o que já tinha pronto sobre o Maya. Esse semestre tive a oportunidade de começar a ensinar a parte de dinâmica do Maya, e preciso atualizar o material do Maya 8.5 para o 2010 ou [...]

Lukas Tvrdy: Week 32,33,34: Sheep, fixing and cleaning Krita

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 09:47:19 +0000

Let’s review what I was working on in Krita lately. On Monday, week 32 I pinged David Revoy on #krita IRC channel, digital painter,with question what bugs him in Krita the most lately. He wrote nice report for us, but he started with 3 things.

First, he was missing global curve for the pressure mapping. Every dynamic parameter can be controlled by pressure from tablet and with custom curve for it. But the global curve is also useful and we did not have that one. I implemented it, you can tweak it in Settings->Configure Krita->Tablet settings, which shows just one big curve widget for you. On the related note, Adam Celarek is working on new curve widget as the current one is optimal for image processing but not much e.g. for painting.

Next David’s request was option for setting the color of the canvas border. He is using GNOME and some dark theme. Our gray color was too much for him. First enkithan suggested some GTK theme for Qt to him. But the canvas border is not theme-able. I’m not sure if it should be, probably not.So I added new option in Settings->Configure Krita->Display -> Canvas Border.

When you do speed painting as David, you need to be fast . One of the tasks that is slow is to pick color. And to make it fast, we made the painting tool to be able to pick colors.You just press CTRL and you pick color. Precision was missing, you were not able to see what color you are picking when the tools are in brush outline mode. I fixed it by showing the Color picker tool icon. Next problem was our strategy to pick color. Before the color was picked when you pressed the mouse button. If you moved, the color was not changed. I did not like that behavior, so I changed it. Now when you pick color, you click and you can move and you see in color selectors the color you are selecting. When I was on it, I checked also our color picker tool and fixed the behavior there too. Color picker is little more stronger then the freehand tool,e.g. it can do averaging of the area you are picking.

Holiday week 33 followed, I had holiday week,I was taking care of some sheep in Greece and enjoying the sea.

No code, just sheep

Next week was devoted to cleaning. We have same brush engines that overlap with features. So I started to merge them. I started with Soft brush. It is brush engine I wrote for my thesis. It’s main feature is that you can setup softness/hardness by curve, so it is more powerful then just one linear value. Also soft brush has density feature which is usable e.g. for chalk simulation and you can control softness with pressure. I merged it with Pixel Brush.

I ported the code as circle mask generator based on curve and wrote a new rectangular one. The rectangular mask generator was not present in the old one, so it is new feature I also added support for the spikes. Then I fixed the way we compute the preview — this is also nice, now you can have live preview of the brush mask inherited from Pixel Brush gui. It was not there before! It’s cool as you can see how the change of the curve reacts to the resulting mask without the need of some stroke testing.

Then I ported the density feature. Now you can have density also with old (default) Pixel Brush masks.I plan to add the density feature also to brush masks.

Soft brush had also “jitter movement” feature. As you paint, the position of the dab is jittered as you would have shaking hands. I implemented it as sensor and I renamed it to “Scattering” and added possibility to jitter in two axes (X, Y), which are rotated according the drawing angle. It will be useful when we will map the Photoshop brushes to Krita – Photoshop has similar feature with less options. It is merged, so now you can spray in Pixel brush. But only one dab per scatter event. Spray brush has a new competitor.

Other feature was the softness controlled by pressure. Now it is dynamic also for Pixel Brush. Both fading/curve softness can be controlled by sensor. It was little tricky for soft brush, I wanted to improve it so I changed the way I compute it now: You setup the curve and the softness is changed by moving the points of the curve on it’s y-coordinate according the pressure. All points are transformed expect the first and the last one. If there are only two points, one artificial point is added to the center of the curve and translated up&down according the pressure (or sensor value).

The merge has many benefits for the users. Now you can spray the soft brush masks with spray! Or you can use soft brush mask for hairy brush bristles! Cool!

Then I co-operated with Sven Langkamp regarding the fix of the deserialization of the gimp brush presets. The brush was not selected in the UI when you loaded the preset, but it painted. It had bugs like wrong outline etc. Reported by David Revoy, fixed by Krita team!

Other brush engine, called Pixel Pencil, was not written by me. But the code was so similar to Pixel brush, that I decided to merge it. I created one new sensor called Sharpness and it is responsible to give Pixel Pencil behavior. All it does is converting the sub-pixel positions into pixel positions – the masks are more sharp. Then it does thresholding of the alpha values of the mask. If the brush mask pixel is lower then threshold, it is replaced by transparent pixel, otherwise it is replaced by opaque pixel. No anti-aliasing — Pencil effect. Merged!

My first brush engine, the derivation of the Hairy Brush (actually Hairy Brush is derivation of the Chalk but that is different story) called Chalk is merged too as it does everything as Soft brush, which is now merged in Pixel Brush. Only the Fade effect was missing. I implemented it as a new sensor. It will be also useful when the Photoshop brushes will be mapped to Krita more. It was missing for that work too. Extra points also for work on abr brushes I will prepare the factory preset so that the chalk is easily found.

I spotted some bugs with deserialization of the brush masks. E.g. deserialization of the rectangular mask type did not worked – nobody tested the preset with that type of the mask probably. It might be less used. I did mistake too when implementing the merge and I fixed the deserialization of the mask types (so far default mask type and soft brush mask type – Gimp brush mask type might come handy in the feature).

Next week I will continue to work on Krita. I suppose to prepare Action Plan v3 thanks to the donation from Silvio, big Krita supporter. Basically I will fix bugs from bugzilla and from reports from the Krita artists (enkithan, Animtim, deevad, …). The aim of the last part of my sponsored work is stability effort. It will take one month and maybe some more. Cheers!

Adrian Likins: Balloon launch

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:19:48 +0000

I've been working with a team from Tech Shop RDU to put together a helium balloon as part of the Hackerspaces in Space contest.

Basic idea, build a balloon with a camera and gps, and try to get pictures of the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space. And I think we did.

We actually made two launches, the first included my camera (Canon sd850, running CHDK firmware, and a script to take a pic every 15 seconds and log some basic data). We thought we lost it after the gps transmitting via a ham radio data connectio stopped transmitting, but someone found it in Wendell, NC and called us.

The team also made a second launch that day. We thought the first one was long gone, so put together a second launch from spare parts. I had to leave early so didn't get to help out with the second launch though. Mk II was a simpler setup, with just a Spot gps tracker and a nikon point and shoot camera with a built in intervalometer. It looks like it was able to fly a little higher, probably due to the reduced weight (first capsule was about 3.5lbs, I think the second one was closer to 2).

I think the current estimate for the second balloon launch is somewhere in the 80,000 ft range. It is definately high enough to see the curvature of the earth and the thinning and the black of space in the photos.

We had a lot of people show up to watch the first launch.

We even maanaged to get a fair amount of press coverage, including a segment on the local news ,WRAL

Photos provided by lintqueen, and clubjuggler, and Ncnearspace

Thorsten Wilms: Full Circle Magazine Logo 4

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:11:06 +0000

The Full Circle Magazine (Issue #40) is out, with a new logo:

Ronnie Tucker (editor) liked the middle variant of the last set posted, but considered it too plain. While I don’t agree, I preferred to offer this final solution instead of him going with something entirely different

Filed under: Logos, Planet Ubuntu, Ubuntu

Durian Project: Nearly finished!

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 11:39:42 +0000

Dolf spent the last two weeks here on a wonderful film credits, based on David’s concept art, which added another few minutes to the film! Pablo and Soenke keep trying to make shots even more awesome, but that also has to stop soon now. The next week we can still do last re-renders, spend time on a final color grade session, and then at sept 7 deliver the final files to the film lab. The final Dolby master then has been scheduled on the 9th, with the first film print – for the premiere on NFF – ready tuesday 14th.

Film stats:

- Film itself: 12:24
- Credits: 2:24

Total length: 14 minutes 48 seconds, or 888 seconds!

Who could have imagined! We started with a target of of “6-8 minutes” you know. And even after the finals screening, Colin and Beorn managed to add 4 seconds to the film!

Next on the todo: get the DVD mastering started up, we already have a menu loop for it, a quad-split-screen version with storyboard-layout-opengl-final and will add a number of fun deleted scenes! Ali has the documentary finished (60 minutes). Oh, and we didn’t forget the tutorials, our loyal team members are working from home on it now.

-Ton-

(BTW: I’ve updated the About pages with proper history info and added the missing artist’s mugshots, this in preparation of press releases and for magazines etc.)

(BTW2: the date for the actual online release has to be pinned down still. Aim is to do this within a week after the premiere. Also depends on how fast we can get the DVDs done. News on this will follow)

Rawstudio project: Curve adjusted saturation addition

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 10:57:47 +0000

When originally implementing the saturation adjustment in Rawstudio, we did it pretty simple. We do the transformation in HSV-space, so it is pretty easy to adjust saturation here. Up until now we simply multiplied the saturation value of the pixel with the selected saturation.

If we look at it visually, here is an unadjusted image:

We apply some saturation, and here is the result:

When switching between two images, you will probably notice that some areas are becoming fully saturated, while other parts of the image are hardly affected. So we started out by looking for a new algorithm, that would not give these artefacts. Let’s look at a graph displaying input (x-axis) and output (y-axis):

Blue: Unadjusted saturation.
Red: Old saturation adjustment.
Black: New saturation adjustment.

The blue line is unadjusted saturation. If we raise the saturation value, the red line shows what happens if you use the old algorithm, with a saturation value of 1.4. Raising saturation more will simply make the line steeper. What we see is that values are quite easily saturated. In this example, all input values higher than 0.7 are fully saturated.

The new algorithm applies saturation much gentler and avoids saturating areas that already have a high saturation value. If we look at the image above with the new algorithm applied, it looks like this:

Hopefully you will agree that this is a much more optimal result – the reds are not completely burnt out, while the same amount of saturation is applied to the rest of the image. In my experience the new algorithm is also much better at handling skin-tones, which had a tendency to easily burn out. But try it out yourself, and post your feedback below.

Thorsten Wilms: Keysigning Party Aftermath

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 09:36:39 +0000

I have been at FrOSCon and participated in the keysigning party. About 60 people evaluating each others IDs was … interesting.

My prior exposure to this whole PGP/GPG key business had been just the minimum required for a Launchpad/BZR account and signing the Code of Conduct.

Now the task at hand is signing all the keys where I’m reasonably sure about the ID of the owner and mailing the signatures to them. While there’s no way around going through not just every key, but every uid (a name and email address associated with the key) interactively, everything else about this calls for automation.

The command line tool caff has been recommended and it seems to be the only game in town. It’s in the signing-party Debian/Ubuntu package. No GUI and no out-of-the-box solution in Ubuntu. One could conclude that building a web of trust is not essential

The easiest way to allow caff to send out emails seems to be to set up ssmtp. Installing it caused the removal of the exim packages. Well, there was no way I would deal with the more than 1000 lines long configuration file for exim. Getting ssmtp to work with my account did cost me a few attempts, but wasn’t too hard. It’s a little sad to have a configured account in Evolution and having to use something entirely separated for sending mails from the command line or via scripts, though.

No matter what I do, caff always tells me it can’t import the keys I want to process. It asks if i want to continue anyway and defaults to aborting. Only after trying a lot of things, I decided to choose continue and it looks like the script can do its job nonetheless!?

Meanwhile, I imported and signed the keys via gpg directly, instead. Signing on a per-uid level is really cumbersome and could be much faster with a GUI.

caff assumes the keys are not signed, unless run with a flag to not sign keys. Using that, I did a test run with a single key. Since I couldn’t think of another way to check if the email had the right content and got through, I did send another one via Evolution to ask the recipient.

No answer, yet. This morning, I decided to pick another single key. I’m not aware of any relevant changes on my system, but now caff claims that it can’t find a signed uid for any of the keys. The gpgsigs tool tells me there are signed uids for all keys in my list, so the signatures most definitively did not disappear. Any idea what might be going on?

My inbox shows that several participants got caff to work.

I could help with the interaction/interface design, if somebody decides to write a graphical tool or to extend one of the existing key managers. I wonder if and how this should be integrated with whatever is the default email application of a distribution, though.

Filed under: Planet Ubuntu, Thoughts, Ubuntu

Máirín Duffy: Amen, brother

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 01:51:53 +0000

A great blog post that Jon Masters made today pretty much sums up my frustrations with Fedora. I was really happy to see it! Jon basically lays out four things he’d like to see Fedora do:

Slow the updates – they bring too much instability to what is supposed to be a stable release.
Set a mandate – either ask the users or set it yourself, but take a stand. “Fedora can’t be all things to all people, that isn’t working,” OMG yes, preach it!
Establish cross-functional workgroups.
Set specific goals. “Have a strong process (stronger than now – before anything is allowed to be built and shipped out the door), with an overall vision that those ideas fit into.”

I wanted to point out some of the efforts the Fedora Board (current and over the years) has made thus far to rectify the situation (which, by the way, I think is a natural symptom of growing as a project and not too much cause for alarm given that we right it soon.):

The Fedora target user base was put together by the last Fedora Board. In short it’s a user who is a voluntary Linux consumer, computer-friendly, a likely collaborator, and a general productivity user.
We have Fedora’s foundations, which are the core values of the Fedora community – freedom, features, friends, first.
We have a mission statement, “The Fedora Project’s mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community.”
The current Fedora Board has been discussing Fedora’s vision (or lack thereof) and is in the process of drafting a vision statement for the project. You can see some of the drafting and discussion on this thread of the advisory-board mailing list.

“Panda on Crib” by Jan Alvin Dimla on Flickr, used under a CC-BY-SA 2.0 license.

Here’s how I see these interacting:

The mission statement sets out what we are doing. We’re focused on free and open source software and content. While running a panda nursery or developing new and exciting flavors of ice cream might have some positive value to society, those are out-of-scope for our project (damn! )
The target user base sets out who we are doing it for. Sometimes it can be hard or even impossible to please two groups of people at once, for example, how can you please both New York Rangers and New York Islanders hockey fans at the same game? The target user base defines the team we’ll be rooting for when conflict arises and a decision needs to be made (the Rangers, of course!)
The four foundations set out how we do it (from a values perspective.) There’s a lot of different ways you can get to the same end goal. For example, I could raise money by holding a bake sale with cookies and cakes, or I could raise money by selling tickets to the circus. If my organization is like Weight Watchers, I’ll probably opt out of using decadent baked goods since it conflicts with my organization’s core values towards healthy eating and healthy weight. I might sell tickets to the circus instead. If my organization works to protect animals, though, supporting a circus might be a questionable way to represent my organization’s values, and a bake sale might be a better choice.
The vision statement will set out why we do it and where we want to be. While driving around in a car without a destination or purpose in mind can be fun, it’s not necessarily going to be very productive. This isn’t to say that open exploration or innovation is a problem – not at all – but there are ways of doing that without being a total flake, I think. I think arguing that this kind of free meandering about will eventually lead to a great user experience does a great disservice to the time, effort, and discipline that is in reality required to achieve that.

So, what you may ask, and what I ask myself all the time, is – are these fancy documents really going to be of any use? I think Fedora has grown up enough that they really are necessary. It’s not a close-knit group of folks in North Carolina putting a Linux distro together. I think small, tight teams don’t need fancy documents because they work so closely together, they share a common culture and can work big-picture concerns out. When you’ve got a large global project with several thousands (if not more) contributors across the world working on it, it’s a bit harder to get everyone on the same page and resolve misdirections before they go too far. Thinking walking your dog vs. herding a hundred cats. Although I think maybe Smooge can speak more authoritatively on how Red Hat Linux was put together vs. how we put Fedora together today.

No, I don’t think finally having a vision statement as the final puzzle piece in place is going to magically fix everything. I think there’s a lot of work that is going to need to happen to put all of these things into working use. I think the documents and more importantly the ideas behind them are going to have to be socialized into the culture of Fedora to really be successful. That is why it is so important to get involved in the discussions around them if you are part of Fedora. So please, do Hit up the Fedora advisory-board mailing list to start, and maybe drop by a public Fedora Board meeting.

Filed under: Fedora

Yuval Levy: FreeBSD 8.1 Intel Ethernet Driver

Sat, 28 Aug 2010 01:26:24 +0000

I've updated a few FreeBSD servers in the last days. They all went smooth with one exception: a pretty recent, state of the art small business custom server based on Intel's S3420GPLC motherboard and an LGA1156 Xeon CPU.

Máirín Duffy: Autotest Logo

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 22:11:45 +0000

My colleague Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues thought it would be nice for Autotest to have a fancy logo. He came up with a great concept – a robotic arm pulling Tux upwards:

He asked me for a bit of help in spicing it up. I came up with a couple of sketches using MyPaint in Fedora:

We both agreed the original concept was strongest. So here it is, hopefully all done up real purdy-like:

What I did was to import the original MyPaint sketch as a flat PNG in Inkscape, save it on a layer, then I locked that layer. I created a new layer, and very carefully used the calligraphy tool with my tablet to trace a clean outline of the penguin. I went back in another couple of passes and thickened the external parts of the outline, and segments of the outline I wanted to pop out more (like his right leg.) Then I created another layer for the robotic arm and did the same. Finally, I created yet another layer, for the fills, moved it to the bottom of the layers stack (deleting the original sketch layer), and using Inkscape’s fill tool to fill in a base color for each area to be colored. Finally, I did another pass over all the fills, adding gradients as necessary to make them pop a bit more.

Previously I would sketch ideas out on paper and scan them in, importing the scans into Inkscape. Since I’ve discovered MyPaint, my process in doing quick designs like this has gone entirely digital. It just has that right feel I couldn’t get in Inkscape for sketching.

I hope Lucas likes the final result. These and more related Autotest logo files are available in my Fedora People space, including the Inkscape source.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Barak Itkin: GIMP can now export PDF's!

noreply@blogger.com (LightningIsMyName) — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 21:34:00 +0000

Hello!

After some work, I'm proud to say that GIMP can now export PDF's using my new cairo-based pdf export plugin!
Go check it out - it's in the main source repository in the master branch :D

Comments and feedback are more than welcome - you have until 2.8 to affect how this plugin will work and which features it will have. Currently, it has:

Support for multiple pages using multiple images using File->Create->Multiple-Paged PDF...
Support for exporting text as text!!
Support for resolutions

And it has the following optimizaiton options:

Replace rectangles of a single color with a vector shape. This can dramatically decrease the file size (think of all the single-colored background layers that are now saved as vector instead as bitmap)
Remove the alpha channel of layers where it's unused, to decrease the file size
Discard layers which are not visible or are100% transparent
Can either apply layer masks (to decrease the file size) or keep them (better quality pdf, bigger file size)

Happy Gimping!

Edit: Updated the post with details on the plugin

Máirín Duffy: Fedora Board Meeting 27 August 2010

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:54:56 +0000

The meeting today was a public meeting on IRC (#fedora-board-meeting on freenode) and lasted 1 hous. We continued to follow the new meeting format we introduced during the last IRC. The next meeting will be at the same time next Friday, and will be held over the phone.

By the way, I missed last week’s phone meeting, so I didn’t blog it (I was getting fitted for my wedding dress. ) The minutes from that meeting are available, so check ‘em out if you are curious.

Log Links

Introduction

inode0 thanked spot and others for their tireless work on the Sun RPC-licensed code relicensing, and many attending chimed in with their words of thanks.
mizmo mentioned sgallagher’s proposal to advisory-board-list. jsmith said we’ll discuss it further when we have a draft vision statement.

Question 1: Decentralized Technical Direction?

Are we disperse and unfocused on technical direction?

skvidal: “Fedora doesn’t have any one group/person who oversees technical direction or sets goals. Do you think that means we end up being disperse and less focused?”

Matt Domsch disagreed with the initial assertion – “that is FESCo’s (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee) role,” he said, and Spot agreed.

Jared agreed as well, “I may have a naive understanding, but I personally think FESCo should take that the lead in the technical direction and decision making role.” Jared continued, “One of the things that I’d like to discuss with FESCo is whether or not *they* think they have that role.”

With no authority to direct developer resources, are we doomed to unfocused development?

Following up, Seth asked, “FESCo has no authority or any developer resources to direct. So they can sing and dance all they want, but without any capacity to DO anything. If that’s the case, then is Fedora as an organization doomed to unfocused development?”

“Last time I looked, the only one here who can direct other people’s work on a day-to-day basis is Spot,” Matt pointed out.

Spot offered, “I’m not necessarily against figuring out if there is a way to put some of Red Hat’s devel resources at FESCo’s disposal.”

Jared stated that he was “open to proposals on how you think we can get more traction within FESCo.”

Continuing with another follow-up, Seth noted, “Spot sadly cannot direct the Desktop Team folks, as far as I know, to focus goals for Fedora, or to defocus things which are non-goals. It seems without that, we’re at the whim of whatever someone happens to be working on. and whether or not it can qualify as a ‘feature.’”

Matt responded, “Spot can’t direct me either, but clearly having a manager isn’t a prerequisite to being a contributor who gets things done.”

“I see most work/change being driven by individual developers, groups/sigs, etc. that’s where the fun happens,” Rex responded.

“But if you work on renovating ‘foo’,” Seth replied, “and foo is something everyone uses – you can deeply impact the distro.”

Spot replied, “I don’t think it is impossible for FESCo to have some say in where paid Fedora development happens, whether it is desktop or not.”

“As a board, we set the overall vision for Fedora,” Jared said. “But we depend *very heavily* on individuals to do the heavy lifting. FESCo should take a role in making the technical decisions regarding features, major changes, etc. In general, that means that we are sometimes dispersed and not working in unison.”

Matt added, “FESCo does get to approve major changes, or NAK them if they so choose.”

Can FESco stop commits?

“So, in short,” Seth said, “If there is an organization or sig who can direct developers and they have influence over important pkgs, then they win, defacto. It can’t stop their committing, not without a fistfight. I mean, FESCo couldn’t stop the KDE commits. It still can’t. If someone has commit access to a package, FESCo can’t stop them.”

Colin replied, “It should be able to, at least if there’s rough consensus they’re screwing things up, especially if it’s part of core.”

Rex added, “FESCo (or whoever) can impose sanctions, if required, for those not playing nice.”

“Well, yes,” was Matt’s reply, “but if push comes to shove, FESCo could restrict someone’s commit access if they were making commits that directly conflicted with FESCo’s direction. FESCo could also have rel-eng untag builds.”

Caillon responded, “I do think a FESCo-like thing should eventually be able to help direct, but if we want to be able to do that, we need to make Fedora more about coding and less about packaging. I think also we need to decide to ship a product that everyone can get behind, not just poop out something every 6 months because its time.” A couple of folks noted that “poop” was probably not the best choice of words, despite an earlier remark regarding burritos.

Jared tried to clarify Seth’s concern: “Are you arguing that FESCo should be able to override them? Or that FESCo is powerless? I’m not sure I follow your train of thought.”

“Exactly,” Seth replied. “Either FESCo has to have authority, or they are powerless. Those are the two choices.”

“Are you willing to write a proposal for the Board to consider that picks one of those two sides and runs with it?” asked Jared.

Seth answered, “I don’t think a proposal is possible without buy-in from various management inside Red Hat to enforce FESCo guidelines internally.”

“Well, we need to do that,” said Colin.

“I didn’t think there are sides to pick (really?),” said Rex, “it should be obvious that FESCo has the power to enforce the policies/rules it makes.”

Seth replied to Rex, “It is not obvious to me at all, and I was onFESCo for long enough to see that.”

“Ok, let’s make it happen then,” replied Rex. “What’s in the way?”

Caillon noted that the question had overrun the 8-minute limit, and Jared encouraged Seth to continue the conversation on the advisory-board mailing list. Jared concluded the discussion with, “It’s clear there are a lot of mixed feelings about FESCo in general, and we’d like to try to come to a resolution of some sort.”

Question 2: Funding and organizationof Fedora Activity Days

inode0: “Speaking of resources, as Red Hat Community Architecture funds are more and more spent to support development through FADs (Fedora Activity Days) does it make sense to have some group make those decisions? Perhaps FESCo for some of those funds?”

Matt asked, “Let FESCo spend the CommArch money and plan FADs to further its goals, so it doesn’t feel as powerless?”

Jared pointed out that FADs are primarily organized through FAMSCo, and inode0 asked, “Is the right way?”

“Some FADs have been organized around development topics,” Matt said. “It could be organized any group that wants a FAD, and within the budget constraints.”

“This isn’t just about turning them down or funding them,” said inode0, “it is also about encouraging them where they are beneficial.”

Matt suggested, “FESCo can propose FADs to further its goals.”

“FESCo could maybe just take a more active role in doing that,” inode0 agreed, “regardless of the funding source.” Mizmo and Jared also agreed.

Question 3: FESCo and Enforcement

notting: “With regards to FESCo becoming more of an enforcing body… Historically, there’s been a reluctance to … suggest … to contributors that their energies are better focused elsewhere. If the Board would like FESCo to be a more enforcing body, does that mean they are OK with taking a stronger stance in this area?”

“Gee, we’re really grateful that you’ve electrified the toilet seat,” joked Spot, “but maybe that’s not what we need right now.”

“Yes,” Matt responded, “Otherwise, what does setting direction mean?”

Colin said, “I don’t see how it’s any different from rough consensus of a project’s maintainers not allowing bad code in.”

“I think we agree that if FESCo is going to make technical decisions, it needs to be able to say no,” said Jared. “We might disagree about the exact details, but in general, the answer to your question is yes.”

Mizmo agreed, “From a user experience perspective I think its more important to say no then yes.”

FESCo and the Board working Together

“To add onto that,” asked mmcgrath, “does the Board think FESCo should be making “should” decisions as well as the “can” decisions they’re making now? FESCo seems to be a policy and approval body right now, it doesn’t seem to be focused on what Fedora should be. It’s just making engineering decisions. so Fedora’s been engineered, not designed. Does the board think they should be pushing FESCo to step in more into the design of what Fedora should be?”

“Hmm,” said Colin, “I wouldn’t say ‘design,’ but ‘technical direction,’ probably.”

“And I wouldn’t use the word ‘pushed,’ either,” Jared added. “I don’t think it’s as much about ‘pushing’ as it is ‘working together.’ I think FESCo should work together with the Board to make sure they share the same vision for Fedora, and then work together to realize that vision.” He continued, “Right now, the Board is working on their vision statement. When done, we expect to consult with FESCo to get things lined up behind said vision.”

Mizmo agreed, “I kinda think the Board and FESCo should design fedora together as a product with the Board setting the vision and FESCo determining how to best make it happen technically. Having the vision will help define the major problems – what’s a problem in the context of one vision might be a positive in another.”

“I would agree with “technical direction” as being a responsibility of FESCo,” said Spot. He noted he would love to see FESCo and the Board say “these are some big problems that we’re going to rally the community to solve.”

Matt added, “We’ve already started to do just that… There’s a back-and-forth on what the Board really means by the stable updates policy, for example.”

Should & Must & No

“‘Should’ and ‘must’ are two dangerous words to say to a volunteer,” said inode0. “Be careful using them in their direction.”

“Careful, I agree,” chimed in Matt. “But we shouldn’t be scared to use them too.”

Jared asked, “What would the RFCs look like without “shall” and “must” and “should”? We obviously need to be considerate (and even compassionate?), but we must also draw some boundaries.”

Jon responded, “I sort of think that they have to be used. And, as mizmo so eloequently put it, the word “no”.”

“I think 37signals says something like ‘say no to a feature request the first three times, consider yes the 4th time.’” Mizmo added.

Jared added, “Or, at a minimum, ask “Why?” until you get to the root of the problem, like a famous car manufacturer used to do.”

Question 4: Target User

skvidal: “What’s our target again? I was looking for it in the wiki and I couldn’t find it.”

“There’s a wiki page, but i can’t find it either!” said Mizmo.

skvidal replied, “Maybe it shouldn’t be QUITE so hard to find?”

Mizmo provided a link to it: http://lwn.net/Articles/358865/, still unable to find it on the wiki. Nirik was able to find it on the wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User_base. A summary of the target user for Fedora is as follows:

We found four defining characteristics that we believe best describe the Fedora distribution’s target audience, someone who:

is voluntarily switching to Linux

is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer

is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something’s wrong with Fedora

wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either using desktop applications or a Web browser.

skvidal said, “So we’ve precluded servers from the target. That’s fine, I just wanted to confirm it.”

“Primarily due to the lifecycle that doesn’t tend to match server deployments,” said Matt.

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Board

MenTaLguY: Maru Plays Star Wars

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 20:44:31 +0000

“Maru” is a popular pseudonymous Japanese musician on the video sharing site Nico Nico Douga. While Nico Nico requires registration to view videos (and is generally difficult for non-Japanese-speakers to navigate), some of her videos have been mirrored on YouTube.

Watching via YouTube, you’ll miss out on the clouds of user comments floating by (one of the Japanese site’s unique features is the way user comments scroll over the video in realtime), but her performances speak for themselves. This lady rocks the Electone (an advanced console synthesizer).

This morning, I’d like to share with you her performance of selected themes from Star Wars:

(Star Wars(Electone)スターウォーズ(ファンファーレ付き)エレクトーン,maru氏 – sm1895469)

Also, just because she could, she did another version where she swapped major and minor keys. It’s not as epic, but it’s worth it to hear what the Imperial March sounds like in a major key:

(StarWars.Electone(MajorKey⇔MinorKey)スターウォーズエレクトーン – sm2037274)

Update: Here’s another video of Maru playing music from Pirates of the Carribean, this time wearing her iconic dinosaur suit. It isn’t as technically impressive as her Star Wars videos (she’s playing from sheet music, a prepared arrangement), but it’s still neat:

(Pirates of the Caribbean(Electone)パイレーツ・オブ・カリビアンエレクトーン演奏 – sm3341314)

Máirín Duffy: Linux Install Fests at RPI

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:18:41 +0000

Luis Ibanez contacted me last week about obtaining Fedora media for a Linux installfest at my alma mater, RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.) Linux installfests such as this one are actually a great opportunity to expose more college students to Linux. You see, at RPI (since I was a freshman, actually ), there is a laptop program that requires all undergraduate students to have a laptop of at least a certain spec and also offers laptops at a great price for purchase through the school. Today and this coming Sunday are the student laptop distribution days.

How better to convince students to install more goodies on their new laptops by staking out a location near where the laptops are being distributed and helping them install a dual-boot with Linux, a Linux VM, or even a complete replacement of Windows?

So that is exactly what the RPI Center for Open Source, RPI ACM/LUG, and Open Source Software course students are doing today and Sunday. You can see the goodies I sent for the cause below. Since the RPI laptops are 64-bit, we made sure there would be 64-bit media available, but it’s also good to have 32-bit media available in case folks show up with netbooks, and live USB as well in case folks show up with netbooks that have no optical drive. I wish I could be there for the fun! If you’re an RPI student reading this and are interested, it looks like it’s going on in Lally 102.

Are there colleges near you with laptop programs? If so, you should consider helping to run a similar program there! It’s a nice way to volunteer and help spread Linux and might only take a few hours of your time.

Filed under: Education, RPI

Morevna Project: Stickman Template Update

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:24:23 +0000

Morevna Project is proudly presents an update of Stickman Template. Stickman Template is used for character animation. It tends to simplify setup when you want to make animation in cutout technique or something more complex.

Changes:

Now stickman’s parts are automatically stretched depending on the bone length.
Additional scale and rotation controls for head.

Enjoy!

Download Stickman Template

Esteban Tovagliari: 0.6.3 news

ramenhdr@gmail.com (est) — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 23:17:57 +0000

Altough I didn’t post anything on the blog for the last weeks,
I kept working on Ramen with the idea of doing a new release after the
first week of September.

The most important change in this new version is a new memory manager.
It’s not a user visible change, but I think it’s fundamental for the
future of the app. With 0.6.2, after some hours of serious use with
high resolution images, memory fragmentation made the program unuseable.

Other changes include:

- Sergey wrote two new useful nodes: color replace, and color grade.
- Fractal noise generator node.
- Displace and turbulent displace nodes.
- The old color match node is back, and improved.
- The WLS filter and Adjustment Mask nodes are also back as OFX plugins.
- Bug fixes and other minor improments.

Akkana Peck: Painless Panorama Stitching with Hugin

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 22:11:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago in my Fotoxx article I discussed using Fotoxx to create panoramas.

But for panoramas bigger than a couple of images, you're much better off using the Linux panorama app: Hugin.

Hugin is very impressive, and much too capable to be summarized in a single short article, so I'm planning three. This week's article is a basic introduction: Painless Panorama Stitching with Hugin.

Allan Brito: Tutoriais sobre animação e efeitos com Softimage ICE

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 01:58:52 +0000

Uma ferramenta que aparentemente seria esquecida no meio do vasto leque de softwares mantidos pela Autodesk é o Softimage, que depois de ser adquirido pela empresa levou vários usuários ao desespero. Ainda lembro-me de encontrar mensagens em fóruns especializados em que pessoas colocavam em cheque os esforços para se especializar na ferramenta, pois temiam que [...]

Blender Project: wiki.blender.org errors solved

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:00:00 +0000

The wiki docs site was giving problems for 4 days... lots of thanks to Luca Bonavita & Nathan...

Durian Project: Sintel selected for Siggraph Asia festival

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 10:25:52 +0000

With a pre-screening copy we are already submitting to festivals, the first approval now is in, for Siggraph! Here’s a snippet of their email:

We are very pleased to inform you that your submission “Sintel” has been accepted to Animation Theater of the SIGGRAPH Asia 2010 Computer Animation Festival.

Our International jury, a diverse group of leading animation experts, selected your piece from among the hundreds of entries for the festival due to its high quality, interest, and impact on the SIGGRAPH Asia Community. Congratulations!

Siggraph Asia will be in Seoul, South Korea, from 14-18 december. I probably will have to go then!

-Ton-

(Added Asian styled Sintel mockup from David !)

tube animation film project: Autumn Internships at Bit Films

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:38:11 +0000

Calling all students (18+), recent graduates, and professionals wanting to ply their 3D skills in free software:

Applications are open to join Bassam’s team this fall, hosted by the very cool Bit Films Animation Incubator Program at Hampshire College, Massachusetts.

Helmed by Chris Perry, formerly of Pixar and Rhythm & Hues, the program draws together a number of interesting projects and a lot of talent, so although the internships are unpaid, it promises to be a very stimulating and fruitful space. For applicants to Tube, there is a possibility that housing can be offered.

The official internship period runs from September 20 to December 17, 2010. Applications are due (via email) no later than Monday September 13, 2010 at 5pm (EDT)). We understand that this is short lead time for those in need of making visa and travel arrangements. Because the project is ongoing, the internship period is flexible; if in doubt, apply!

Although it may not provide as immersive an experience, we are open to considering applicants not able to join us locally, but interested to join the already semi-distributed team for a remote internship using our web-based project management software, SVN, and IRC.

Full announcement and FAQ here. Still have questions? Leave a comment, or email me, fateh [ at ] freefac [ dot ] org.

tube animation film project: some quick concepts…

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 19:22:30 +0000

Been meaning to post these for ages… from 4 or 5 weeks ago…

I’ve been modeling the train on and off when I’ve not been pythoning – don’t want to give too much away now, just to say that the model is going to be very high poly. Most of the details are now complete but I still have all the big panels to go. I’ve built a low(ish) poly base mesh which all of the details will be deformed to (using shrinkwrapped 2D lattices). All of the side panels are modular so we can swap around the order for variations etc. Thoughts gladly received.

Durian Project: Market scene, extras credit

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:09:45 +0000

Hi all!

Here’s the names of artists we’ve used character models and/or animations from, for the market scene.
Philip Aigner

Andre Souza
Inken Meyer
Denny Lindberg
Stefan Löffler
Roger Wickes
Pascal Gabus
Daisuke Matsumoto
Daniel Alarcon

Thanks,

-Ton-

Durian Project: Get Blender graphics on 35mm film

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 09:24:11 +0000

We’ve delivered 2 minutes of dpx files, straight from Blender sequencer, to the film lab Cineco here in Amsterdam. The first digital projection in their grading room looked brilliant! (Gigantic new Barco projector). It’s now being moved to the Arri Laser to make 35 mm film, anamorphic 2.35:1 aspect. In a few days we’ll get a screening. Exciting!

Thanks to Blender’s linear workflow now, we should be able to give them perfect linear DPX files, for them to convert to wonderful film colors. However, it’s never as simple as it seems!

Here’s how we did it now:

- Files rendered in 2048 wide, 872 pixels high. This matches the standard for film, so no scaling is needed.
- DPX files (3 x 16 bits color) saved as linear – default in Blender with linear workflow enabled – but with a gamma 2.2 applied (code not committed yet). That is the thing that confuses me most… but according the Arri operator at Cineco it is “the standard”. Their LUT conversion (lookup table) assumes this to go to film color.
- At first we made the mistake to test DPX files saved from 3×8 bits sources, but these are not linear! So DPX ended up in the color space of the 3×8 bits graphics.

I also had to fix the header in DPX files to not denote a gamma anymore, for some reason that gamma value doesn’t denote what the data is, but what the files should be corrected for in displays (confusing!).

People with DPX and film pipeline experience are welcome to feedback here. A dpx file and the corresponding jpg can be downloaded below.

http://download.blender.org/durian/2975.jpg
http://download.blender.org/durian/2975.dpx

(BTW: the graphic looks a bit dark, but was in the screening room totally brilliant! Dark tones survive much better in projection than on screens. Do we have to make a special graded version for LCD and TVs)?

-Ton-

Jakub Steiner: Revisiting Android

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 23:04:13 +0000

Here it goes again.

Samsung Galaxy S. Really awesome piece of hardware

My Palm Pre pretty much disintegrated. What a shame that such an awesome mobile OS runs on such a lousy piece of hardware.

Like many others I have gotten a Galaxy S. While Android is pretty decent on it, I really wish WebOS had devices like this to run on.

Allan Brito: 60 dicas para acelerar a renderização

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:20:38 +0000

A velocidade com que determinado software pode gerar imagens renderizadas é fator fundamental para a finalização de qualquer projeto, principalmente quando o objetivo do mesmo é a criação de uma animação. Mas, uma coisa que poucos artistas acabam percebendo é que a velocidade do render é determinada pelo conjunto de ferramentas disponíveis e diversos comportamentos [...]

Virgilio Vasconcelos: Blender 2.5 FAQ

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 13:26:28 +0000

Where did that shortcut go in Blender 2.5? If you often find yourself asking something like this, you should bookmark the FAQ written by developer Aligorith.

[read the full article]

Rawstudio project: Even faster load and export times in Rawstudio

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:37:24 +0000

Faster initial display time

We have now implemented an improvement, that will give even faster response time from clicking an icon until the image is displayed on screen.

For the initial image to be displayed on the screen, we have previously implemented a “Quick” mode in relevant filters. The short story is, that for the initial display of the image, we run the decoded image through the filter chain in quick mode, which currently has faster de-mosaic, faster rotation, faster resize, de-noising, sharpen & lens correction disabled.

The new change is that de-mosaic now outputs the image in half size. Previously we’ve run the full-size image through crop, rotation and as input to the resize filter. This reduces the memory usage for the initial preview, and makes these filters run four times faster. Furthermore raw formats that relies on raw decoding for thumbnails (like Panasonic) will also be faster.

Quicker “Quick Export” and “Export to Gimp”

We’ve reduced the processing and memory required to do an Export. Since these operations always run on the currently open image, we can re-use the information we have already processed for displaying the image. So now “Quick Export” should actually be quick! :)

With some help from a user, we also nailed a bug in these functions, where colours were incorrect when using the functions above.

Automated build system

Anders Kvist has fixed the dreaded automatic build system (again), so now there should be fresh builds available for all Ubuntu platforms. Go to the launchpad page to get it.

tube animation film project: Texturing and adding dirtyness

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 15:33:05 +0000

Version française en dessous.

hi,

For the last few week, I’ve mainly done some modeling trying to add as much detail as I could so we can use the models in the various close-up shots we have on the tracks. I had to model various little objects to “populate” the scene. I also started the first texturing tests for all our various models. Until now, we’ve mainly modeled objects but we only have a few textures and materials because we were waiting to see how blender internal is going to evolve with project Durian. We were especially expecting to use the ‘material refactor’ which would allow us to have better shading. Unfortunately, with Brecht’s departure and all the other work on 2.5, the project seems to be stopped for the moment…

In this post, I’ll try to explain how I textured the concrete support of the tracks using material nodes.

The basic idea for this model is to have old and damaged concrete blocks, covered in oil. I started sculpting some cracks, details and broken parts. Here is the model before starting texturing :

The next step was creating two basic materials, one for the damaged parts and one for the regular concrete. i tried to use procedural textures as much as possible to avoid resolution problems. Then I painted a texture to tell blender which part of the model receives each material. Finally I mix everything in the node editor :

So far my concrete block looks like this :

It’s not bad but it’s not really realist. The next step consists of adding all the oil splatters. As I have two different materials, it’s easier to add these splatters using nodes. I’ve used an overlay mix to composite my generic oil map over my base material. By using the ‘mapping’ node, I could use the same map several times and play with scaling and rotation values to add variation.

Here is the final node setup for the concrete material :

And voila! this is a quick method for adding dirt to a material without having to paint a texture in gimp!

French version :

Ces dernières semaines, j’ai principalement fait du modeling pour le projet en essayant de détailler un maximum pour pouvoir utiliser les modèles dans les nombreux plans où l’action se situe sur les rails du métro. Il m’a fallu modéliser pas mal de petits objets divers pour ‘peupler’ la scène. Mais j’ai surtout commencé à faire les premiers tests de textures pour les différents modèles. En effet jusqu’ici nous avons surtout des objets modélisés mais très peu de textures ou de matériaux car nous attendions de voir comment le moteur de rendu de blender allait évoluer avec le projet Durian et notamment nous attendions de voir si nous pourrions utiliser le fameux “material refactor” qui nous permettrait d’avoir un shading bien plus réaliste que ce que nous avons actuellement dans blender. Malheureusement, avec le départ de Bretch et la sortie de la 2.5, le projet semble être remis aux calendes grecques…

Dans ce post je vais détailler comment j’ai texturé la base des rails en utilisant et en abusant des nodes !

L’ idée pour ce modèle est d’avoir du vieux béton abimé et couvert d’huile. J’ai donc commencé par sculpter les détails, par ajouter des craquelures et par ‘casser’ un peu le modèle. Voici à quoi il ressemble avant de commencer le texturing :

La première étape a été de créer deux matériaux assez basiques, un pour les parties abimées et un autre pour les parties en meilleur état. J’ai essayé d’utiliser au maximum des textures procédurales, histoire de ne pas avoir de problèmes de résolution. Ensuite j’ai peint une texture pour déterminer quelle partie du modèle recevra quel matériau. Et enfin grâce aux nodes j’ai mixé le tout.

Et voici à quoi ressemble mon bloc de béton à cet instant :

C’est pas mal, mais pas franchement réaliste. L’étape suivante consiste donc à ajouter de nombreuses taches d’huiles qui vont salir un peu tout ça. comme j’utilise deux matériaux différents, le plus simple est de rajouter ces taches d’huiles via les nodes. J’ai donc utilisé une map générique avec des taches d’huile que j’ai superposées à mon matériau de base. En utilisant le nœud “mapping”, on peut utiliser la même map plusieurs fois en changeant sa rotation ou son échelle…De cette façon on ne voit pas la map se répéter et le résultat est bien plus réaliste :

Et voila le setup nodal final, vous pouvez voir dans la zone légèrement sur-éclairée toutes les couches nécessaires pour ajouter les taches d’huiles :

Et voila, grâce à cette méthode, on peut très facilement salir ou vieillir un objet sans avoir a passer par Gimp!

Happy blending !

Boudewijn Rempt: Cool gear

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 09:05:00 +0000

Yesterday I got myself some new toys.

It's weird, though, because all my life I have been content with fingers, small bamboo sticks (the sort you use for sateh) and odds and ends like pins or needles. And now I've spent some money on these, admittedly, very nice tools.

The first thing I'm going to do is fix the details on the face of this young lady who is about to become a mother in the next, say, twenty minutes.

Although, not today, since tomorrow is Krita bug day, and I am standing by on #krita, ready to help anyone who wants to get the latest Krita running on their hardware. (You can't really test Krita in a vm, I'm afraid, since much of the issues are with graphics cards or with the use of tablets.)

Kubuntian and I have, independently, tried to make the OpenSUSE build service build Krita packages from trunk, but Krita is a bit more complex than the average application, so we haven't succeeded in taming OBS yet. It's more complex than getting Krita to compile on your system, so don't be discouraged.

Aditya Bhatt: Sweet

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 05:52:35 +0000

This landed in my mailbox today:

Hi Aditya Bhatt,

We have processed the evaluation for your project named Face Recognition in digiKam with KDE.

Congratulations, from our data it seems that you have successfully passed the Final Evaluations. Please contact your mentor to discuss the results of your evaluation and to plan your goals and development plan for the rest of the program

Greetings,
The Google Open Source Programs Team

This has been the one awesome year, from getting selected for GSoC to working with KDE and digiKam, getting paid to work on what I like to do, finally passing the final evaluations, going to a sprint in France next week, and also getting some/all exams waived in the beginning of next month. Awesome

Looking forward to working more with digiKam, I have a lot of things I want to implement…

Federico Mena-Quintero: Fri 2010/Aug/20

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:57:00 +0000

Which document is open in a window?

Yesterday I mentioned a patch for Evince to add an "Open Containing Folder" command. In the bug that tracks the patch, Milan Bouchet-Valat asked about having an X window property that apps could set to let the environment know the URI that is being shown in a window.

This sounds pretty useful. I told the Zeitgeist hackers about this, and Michal Hruby told me about exactly the same proposal, which had some discussion in the wm-spec-list.

The basic idea is to add a _NET_WM_CURRENT_URI property to windows, whose value is a string with the URI of the document being viewed. From the application programmer's viewpoint, this would be something like gtk_window_set_current_uri (window, string). You would call that function when you load a document.

Gnome-shell and window managers could use this information to do several things — offer the "show in file manager" command themselves, provide information to Zeitgeist about the documents that are open at any one time, etc.

The discussion has an interesting mail from Luboš Luňák. It seems that KDE has already been considering something similar.

Extending the idea a bit further, gnome-shell has mockups to show a list of tabs that are open in your web browser. If you make that window property be a list of URIs (for all the open documents) instead of a single URI, then the window manager can list the open web pages easily. You would need a human-readable list of document titles (and possibly favicons and other nasties), but details, details...

I think we would also need some sort of message that the window manager can send to windows, like "focus this document" for when you select your tabbed web page in gnome-shell's lists. This message should be the only command that we add to communicate from the window manager to apps; in theory you should be able to do everything else from the app itself, once you have focused the documents — close the document, move it, etc.; there is no need to complicate the window manager with that knowledge.
For my Mexican friends — correlación entre municipios PANistas y violencia.
Tarantino, decoded.

Bastien Nocera: libfprint project updates

noreply@blogger.com (hadess) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:03:52 +0000

As mentioned in my previous post, Bugzilla and translations project setup were still pending.

They're now all setup.

Durian Project: Film Credits, version 2

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:25:10 +0000

Based on all feedback sent to the shop at blender.org address, the credit list has been updated. Please visit the page to check if this has been correctly handled. The list for people who bought the DVD after sept 15 last year will be posted here mid september.

I also need everyone’s help to get the credit for modelers corrected. We are not going to add nicknames in the film credit, only real ones. Below is the complete list of people we’ve used props from, mostly modeled during the modeling sprint. I’ve asked the blendswap.com maintainer to help as well
Post remarks about this below, or mail me (ton at blender org).

Pablo Lizardo
Jarred de Beer
Thomas Kole
Robert Udvardy
Eugène Fritz
Gustav Göransson
Emil Krantz
Julio Iglesias
Daniel Salazar
Guillermo Chan
Kevin Hays
Andrew Wall
Dmitry Kalinin
voxelbunny
Shawn Zilbert
3dommi75
Brendan Gallagher
Maren März
Stian Grindvoll
Joseph C. Lee
Matjaž Lamut
Manuel Quiñones
Sean Olson
Alastair Low
spacetug
Owen Egan

(those in gray are nicknames missing real names)

-Ton-

Allan Brito: Tutorial 3dsmax: Animando multidões com Thinking Particles

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 02:37:35 +0000

Entre as tarefas relacionadas com a computação gráfica 3d, podemos dizer que a mais trabalhosa e exigente em termos de paciência e atenção aos detalhes é a animação de personagens. A quantidade de pequenos detalhes e configurações que precisam ser ajustadas para criar personagens animados, é fator de desistência para muitos dos animadores iniciantes. Se [...]

Federico Mena-Quintero: Thu 2010/Aug/19

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:56:00 +0000

"Open Containing Folder" for Evince

Remember the lack of bidirectional navigation in our document windows? The problem is that you can go down in the folder hierarchy with the file system until you open a file, but you cannot go up from the document app to visit the file system again.

I just made a little patch for Evince to add an "Open Containing Folder" command, similar to the one that Firefox has in its Downloads window.

This patch is is at bgo#627443.

Unfortunately, Nautilus currently seems to have a bug. If you launch "nautilus file:///blah/blah/foo.pdf", Nautilus complains that "foo.pdf is not a folder". I'm sure this worked at some point before — you could make Nautilus open a window showing a folder *with* a certain file already selected.

In the meantime, my patch for Evince just causes Nautilus to open a folder window. It would be nice if it could also select the file in that window.

Update 2010/Aug/20: My patchset is against the master branch. I've redone it for 2.28 and 2.30 as well, for if you are running older versions of Evince. You can do "git clone git://gitorious.org/evince/evince-document-centric.git" and look at these branches: unmessify-my-pdfs (master), unmessify-my-pdfs-2-28, unmessify-my-pdfs-2-30.

Bastien Nocera: Fingerprint readers: new substitute maintainer

noreply@blogger.com (hadess) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:35:26 +0000

Another week, another hardware enablement project. I'm now the official substitute maintainer for libfprint, the fingerprint reader library, and we just had a new release!

If you have a newer Thinkpad, with the UPEK Eikon II reader, grab the latest version, and don't forget to apply this patch to the control-center, or the enrolling UI will look bizarre.

All those bug fixes and new versions coming to a Fedora update shortly.

Máirín Duffy: Free Interaction Design for your FLOSS Project

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:31:13 +0000

Matt Jadud made a blog post yesterday offering up free interaction design for free & open source projects.

Wait, wait. Let me repeat that and make it a little bigger, because in the brevity of that sentence you might have missed it’s sheer awesomeness:

Matt Jadud is offering up free interaction design for free & open source projects.

This is a great opportunity.

Matt is a computer science professor at Allegheny College, and he’s teaching an interaction design course this coming semester (which starts next Thursday!) Matt is an alumni of the Teaching Open Source POSSE program (POSSE standards for “Professors’ Open Source Summer Experience”) and a writer for opensource.com, and he is passionate about getting students involved in free & open source software and improving the connections between FLOSS and academia. So when you read his blog post, where he’s offering up the students of his Fall 2010 interaction design class to help FLOSS projects, you can be assured he means business.

So here’s what Matt is asking of you:

You need to be a developer or manager directly involved with the project you’re submitting for interaction design help. While I am sure we all have our pet bugs in Firefox or Nautilus, if you’re not directly involved in these projects, you’ll not be able to provide Matt’s students the upstream contacts and guidance they need for their work to be effective.
You need to be open to UI changes, and not of the mindset your UI is already perfect. Matt is looking for folks who want the help, and who are willing to consider the data and the suggestions for improvement his students will be providing.
You have to commit to respond to students in a timely manner. These students will be working within a 14-week schedule. If you take 2 weeks to get back to a student, you’ll really impact their ability to get their work done.

This is not so much to ask given what Matt is offering here:

Your project will be part of a list Matt will provide to his students to choose from. If a student ends up working on your project, they will have picked it from other projects and likely be genuinely interested in working on it. (And motivated too, to get a good grade )
The students will work within your existing community infrastructure. Already have a mailing list, IRC channel, etc.? Matt’s students will engage with you in these places the same as any other contributor.
You will receive a usability evaluation and/or mockups and suggestions for improving your interface from an interaction designer in-training! What you choose to do with that data is up to you, but please consider it seriously!

Now, I know there are tons of you out there who are ready for interaction design help and are definitely willing to work with designers, because I hear from you all the time! There’s not enough interaction designers in the FLOSS community, and I believe programs like Matt’s that engage up-and-coming designers in the FLOSS community early on will help build up our interaction designer population. They provide a wonderful mutual benefit – the design students get to work on real-life projects, not just throw-away designs that are abandoned forever at the end of the semester – and the developers involved get the design help they desire but have such a hard time finding because of the dearth of designers. Help provide these students a great experience in interacting with our community, and maybe they’ll stick around!

Note that you won’t become a surrogate professor here – Matt will be teaching and leading these students throughout the process – if you have any concerns or questions throughout the process, if something isn’t working and you’d like it addressed, just get in touch with Matt.

So what are you waiting for? Don’t be shy! Pop on over to Matt’s blog and sign up!

Filed under: Interaction Design

Michael Muré: Trick list

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:48:05 +0000

Here is a list of trick, technic, tips, that I learned during my Summer of Code. It’s published here as it is, and my or may not interrest you.

Memory allocation with Glib:

memory allocation for objects:

- g_new (struct_type, number)

- g_renew (struct_type, old_allocation, number)

- g_unref_object (object)

simple allocation:

- g_malloc (byte_number)

- g_realloc (old_allocation, byte_number)

- g_free (allocation)

Allocation with g_malloc are expensive, use gslice instead if the memory needed is length fixed.

Hacking Gimp

gobject and glib debug

Run Gimp with –g-fatal-warnings

GTK event debug

When GTK send an event (key press, mouse clic, ..), Gimp grabs the event manager. If you set a breackpoint in an event handler, this manager isn’t given back to GTK when the debugger freeze Gimp. Result, you cannot use your keyboard or mouse anymore. Not especially handy. Solution is to compile you own GTK with –enable-debug=yes, compile Gimp with this GTK, and run Gimp with –gtk-no-grabs.

autogen.sh

Compilation options are available with ./configure –help

compilation without optimisation

CFLAGS=-O0 ./autogen.sh –prefix=….

quick install of binaries only

cd app/ && sudo make install-binPROGRAMS

Gobject

gobject is evil.

if you have a warning relative to glib or gobject, try make install

something wrong ? Try make install

Babl

Babl is a library used to abstract different pixel formal and color space (RVB, CMJN, …)

setup a format

babl_type (“float”)

babl_type (“u8″)

babl_format_n (babl_type (“float”), nombre_element)

Look in the doc http://www.gegl.org/babl/#Vocabulary to see format available. A small precision:

- R’: gamma adjusted

- Ra: pre-multiplied alpha

<http://www.gimp.org/docs/plugin_in/appendix-alpha.html>

convert buffer with a Babl fish

babl_process (babl_fish, buffer_source, buffer_destination, nombre_d’element)

Gegl

create a buffer

GeglBuffer *bfr = gegl_buffer_new (gegl_rectangle, babl_format)

buffer leak

In gegl/buffer/gegl_buffer.c, uncomment #define GEGL_BUFFER_DEBUG_ALLOCATION. When closing Gimp, you will have an allocation trace. You can convert adress in the binary in position in the source code with addr2line -e app/.libs/gimp-2.7 adress.

Git

push in a remote branch

git push origin soc-2010-cage

keep branch up-to-date

git fetch origin && git rebase origin

Michael Muré: Official end

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:30:48 +0000

That’s it, Summer of Code is over, at least officially.

I finally updated this blog less than I expected. I have to say that after 2 month banging my head to the code, motivation is less than before. So, here is the news:

As announced in my last entry, I worked on a process to invert the computing of the transformation (ie know from where come pixels instead of where they go), to have a good image quality and avoiding aliasing. Here is how it works:

we set on the image a cage-sized grid
we apply the deformation to the grid
we split each grid case to two triangle
for each pixel inside these triangle, we compute the source coordinates
finally, we have for each pixel of the final, the coordinate from where to fetch color (sampling)

My first approach for iterating in a triangle was first, re-order it (find the top-high vertice, then left and right vertices), and then iterate it with straight equation. That’s not a great idea. There is a lot of special case, it’s complex and inefficient. Finally, a friend suggested me to proceed recursively, by splitting the triangle in 4, until it include only one pixel. Then, interpolation is done with a barycentric system. Tadaaa, it works every time, and that’s even efficient ! Thanks Théophile (yes, you now have contributed in free software with more than a libcaca patch =) ).

In fact, it’s so efficient that i will probably replace the “forward” method which is currently used for interactive preview (which is also quite ugly).

These is how the tool core looks like. Each circle is a Gegl operation.

Cage_coef_calc compute, for each pixel that need to be transformed, the coefficient series that the transform algorithm need.
Cage_transform compute and inverse the transformation
Render_mapping render the final image.

This architecture allow, with Gegl, easy reussing of this operation. In that case, my tool’s code can be easily reused and adapted to create an iWarp like tool.

To stay in the present, here is the state of things. My tool is in majority done. I mean that the core works well, and it’s usable for a classic utilisation. There is still some teething problem to correct (for instance, it doesn’t works on mask), love to give to UI, and it will be ready for code review and inclusion in master branch of Gimp. At least I hope =)

Here is some deform example:

It ain’t over, but it never was so close to be.

Blender 3D Architect: YafaRay with Irradiance Cache

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 03:22:21 +0000

One of the features that I miss the most on Blender 2.5x series is the possibility to use advanced rendering features from YafaRay and LuxRender. The scripts that will allow us to export scenes for those renderers are still in development, and will probably be done by the end of the year. For the YafaRay [...] Related posts:

YafaRay projects for SoC 2010 The approved projects for the Google Summer of Code 2010...
Tips to create better renderings with YafaRay As an architectural visualization artist and also a teacher, I...
How to improve interior design renderings with YafaRay and Blender 3D? An external view of a Project is very simple to...

Allan Brito: YafaRay usando Irradiance Cache

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 02:30:48 +0000

Na atualização do Blender para a versão 2.50 e a consequente alteração da API dos scripts, uma gama enorme de ferramentas para modelagem e conversão de arquivos para outros formatos foi perdida. Mas, os desenvolvedores estão correndo para atualizar e criar novamente todo esse material de apoio, que ainda sofrerá pequenos problemas até o lançamento [...]

Akkana Peck: Fontasia: View and categorize your fonts

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:20:00 +0000

We were talking about fonts again on IRC, and how there really isn't any decent font viewer on Linux that lets you group fonts into categories.

Any time you need to choose a font -- perhaps you know you need one that's fixed-width, script, cartoony, western-themed -- you have to go through your entire font list, clicking one by one on hundreds of fonts and saving the relevant ones somehow so you can compare them later. If you have a lot of fonts installed, it can take an hour or more to choose the right font for a project.

There's a program called fontypython that does some font categorization, but it's hard to use: it doesn't operate on your installed fonts, only on fonts you copy into a special directory. I never quite understood that; I want to categorize the fonts I can actually use on my system.

I've been wanting to write a font categorizer for a long time, but I always trip up on finding documentation on getting Python to render fonts. But this time, when I googled, I found jan bodnar's ZetCode Pango tutorial, which gave me all I needed and I was off and running.

Fontasia is initially a font viewer. It shows all your fonts in a list on the left, with a preview on the right. But it also lets you add categories: just type the category name in the box and click Add category and a button for that category will appear, with the current font added to it. A font can be in multiple categories.

Once you've categorized your fonts, a menu at the top of the window lets you show just the fonts in a particular category. So if you're working on a project that needs a Western-style font, show that category and you'll see only relevant fonts.

You can also show only the fonts you've categorized -- that way you can exclude fonts you never use -- I don't speak Tamil or Urdu so I don't really need to see those fonts when I'm choosing a font. Or you can show only the uncategorized fonts: this is useful when you add some new fonts to your system and need to go through them and categorize them.

I'm excited about fontasia. It's only a few days old and already used it several times for real-world font selection problems.

If you want to try it, it's here: Fontasia: View and categorize fonts.

Máirín Duffy: fedoracommunity.org website design progressing

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 17:53:10 +0000

So a while back I talked a bit about the fedoracommunity.org website project that the Fedora Websites team has been working on, including the vision behind it and the work that had been done on it up to that point.

We received some really great feedback from you on this project, including a really nice suggestion from Felix Kaechele to organize the areas of the world according to Fedora ambassador regions rather than continent groupings. This actually provided a bonus – you’ll see the design has been slightly changed so there is now an area above the individual country/region site listings to provide information & links on ambassador region-wide resources, something that wouldn’t have made as much logical sense outside of the scheme Felix suggested.

Some other feedback we’ve gotten thus far was Remy Decausemaker and Tommy He’s suggestion to make the map highlight to the region currently-being viewed and perhaps serve as rollover navigation. If you are a javascript pro and want to try your hand at this, please let me know and I’d be happy to get you started (otherwise I’ll put this awesome idea on the backburner while I devote a lot more time to the www.fedoraproject.org redesign project. If I have time I will try to figure it out since it seems like it would be a fun project!)

Anyway, based on your feedback we’ve made some changes to the design, and I put together Sijis’ template design with the HTML content I generated for each region so we now have a set of static HTML/CSS mockups:

Let me know what you think of our progress so far, and please do let me know if we are missing any regional sites or if there are any typos/mistakes in these pages. You can drop your feedback off in the comments section on this blog, or hop on the thread on Fedora’s websites list.

Filed under: Fedora, Websites

Rawstudio project: New Quick Export/Batch Filename Options

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:19:03 +0000

A week ago we added a few “simple” changes, that may help you a lot in keeping your final photos organised. In the following I will show how you can use these new features.

Let’s look at how the preferences dialogue is looking:

You select a directory to output to, and a filename template, the defaults are using the filename for the camera as a base, and adding a counter for each export. Pretty basic, and good enough if you prefer your images in one directory. The rest are the output file settings, which I will not go deeper into here.

In the following I will shortly explain the new filename template features and how you can use them.

Directories

A new feature is that is actually a quite big change is that you can now use subdirectories. The major change is that if the output directory does not already exist, Rawstudio will now always attempt to create them. This means that you can have Rawstudio create the folder structure for you based on metadata.

An important modifier is “%p” that will insert the original path of the processed image. This means that if you use “%p/%f_%2c”, your image will be placed in the same folder as the original image. You may note that the directory you choose in the selector, will not be used for anything.

You can of course do variations, so “%p/converted/%f_%2c” will create a subdirectory called “converted” inside the folder with your raw images and place your converted images there.

Extended Metadata

We have also added a few more data from Metadata, or to be more precise, we allow you to customise the date field a lot more. Here are all the options:

A simple example for this is “%DY/%DM/%f_%2c”, which will create a folder with year and month (Eg. “2010/April/IMG_0987_01.jpg”). The folder will be based on the date from your camera, so if that is correct, you are good to go!

A slightly more advanced filename template for this could be “%DM %DY/%DD %Dd, %t (%f_%2c)”. This will create folders for each month (Eg. “July 2010″ where it will place images with file names based on the dates, like “Monday 21, 12:45:01 (IMG_7325_01)”. This may be a little over the top, and slightly impractical, but you can of course adjust this to your personal preference.

We might add more things from metadata, like ISO, shutter speed, etc. If you’d like to see that or other things, please leave a comment below, so we can prioritise that! :)

The screenshots above are based on the “Quick Export” settings, but it also applies to Batch Export, where the exact same templates can be used.

Máirín Duffy: Fedora 14 Artwork Progressing!

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:27:55 +0000

So about a month ago I blogged a preview of the Fedora 14 theme, which was designed fo Fedora 14 Alpha. Based on your feedback (mostly that the initial wallpaper was too dark), Kyle Baker came up with a modified version of the wallpaper that is much lighter in color:

Kyle B

Since then, Federico Cáceres, a new member to the Fedora Design team, has put together some iterations on Kyle’s latest iteration:

Federico A

Federico B

Federico C

You can also find them on the Fedora project wiki’s F14 Artwork page.

Time is running short for us to iterate this wallpaper for Fedora 14 Beta! Want to try your hand? All of the sources are available, and it’s a great excuse to try out Blender if you haven’t gotten a chance to yet. Not up for working on the design, but have some feedback you’d like to share? Join the conversation on the design-team mailing list, or drop your feedback in the wiki or in this blog post’s comments.

Filed under: Fedora Design Team

Pentalis: Krita phong filter GUI linked, thoughts on Impasto Effect

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 19:30:35 +0000

Hello everybody, this is my last blog post as part of the Google Summer of Code 2010, and I’m here to tell you as briefly as possible, what happened to getting the Impasto effect in Krita.

Short story: didn’t happen.

Long story:

Turns out that creating new height-enabled color spaces for Krita wasn’t as easy as I thought. It began as an horribly mysterious thing that took me really long to grasp from end to end; not the concept of color spaces themselves (that’s crystal clear in my head), but the code that implements them in Krita.

Color spaces are plugins to color engines which are plugins too. Everything here is heavily optimized for speed and full of templates everywhere. So, there’s no way to create a single height-enabled colorspace for testing, because every tool is made to interact with each other. Either one makes a complete set of fully working height-enabled colorspaces, or nothing. Certainly creating such beautiful thing would take more than one week, possibly more than one month, so I didn’t do that.

But then arose the emergency plan!.

It consisted of adding, to a normal image, a hidden greyscale layer working as an heightmap, and a hidden phongbumpmap filter layer doing the magic on top. That was much simpler to do and I was about to make it happen. Until I decided it was going to be a rushed effort, that it was going to generate code MADE to be replaced, and that it wasn’t an easy hack anyway. I often make simple hacks to test things, or to upload working copies while I polish them further. But this approach had several shortcomings. For example it required painting operations to write to 2 devices at the same time.

So, I created a paintop that wrote to 2 layers at the same time to test this feature. It wrote to the normal layer and a secondary layer. It achieved the desired effect but it broke undo, pressing ctrl + Z only undid the painting in 1 layer.

And then came the problem of compositing the bumpmap to the image. What’s the most correct way to composite the bumpmap to the image to achieve a good impasto effect?, and what kind of heightfield should brush engines generate to make it look GOOD?.

Certainly all this testing gave me more questions than answers. And thorough my life I’ve learned that rushing toward a goal without a clear vision is nothing wise to do. At worst I’d get nothing done, at best a patched-together design. So I decided to accept that the impasto effect wasn’t going to be done within the timeframe of this GSoC and will instead design it with time, patience and calm.

Then I switched my focus to completely link the GUI of my filter just to call it “beta complete” right before the hard pencils down deadline!.

I made an ugly heightmap such that if it looks pretty I can blame it all on the filter. Here, enjoy the images and goodbye!.

Allan Brito: Sonorização automática de animações 3D

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:00:15 +0000

A criação de uma animação 3d passa por diversos estágios, sendo que um dos mais importantes e que não tem relação direta com a produção visual é a sonorização. Uma animação por mais bem produzida que seja, fica sem vida com a ausência de efeitos sonoros que possam contextualizar as ações, ou até mesmo enfatizar [...]

Máirín Duffy: Mini-Education Summit LinuxCon Boston 2010

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 15:22:01 +0000

I spent most of last week at LinuxCon helping Spot at the Fedora booth. However, the day before the main conference, Sebastian Dziallas organized a Education Mini-Summit to take place in conjunction with LinuxCon.

I gave a talk on the Inkscape class Red Hat has done plus some other related initiatives, including one we are planning for next fall with the Free Software Foundation. The slides are available here.

There were so many great talks. Here’s an overview of the ones I attended (my apologies for having no details on Caroline Meek’s talk on “Computers in US Schools: Realities and Challenges and how Open Source can help” – I had to leave before her talk for the FSF Women’s Caucus dinner in Cambridge.)

“Can Open Source Save The World…?” Bryant Patten, NCOSE

Bryant split his talk into three sections: the bad news, the good news, and the better news.

The Bad News

Here’s an overview of the points Bryant made in this section:

Waiting for Superman, Two Million Minutes: A Global Examination, The Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner, What the internet is doing to our brains: the Shallows by Nicholas Carr are books and films that discuss some of the problems facing education today.
There’s a perennial pull in education between content and skills. Bryant said we should be talking about content AND skills, and his slide had a full-screen ‘&& ! ||’. This kind of argument can cause issues in discussions about improving education, though.
For the last 10 years or so, schools don’t want to teach tech – they just want to have it seamlessly integrated across subjects. Bryant disagrees with this position, though. He believes we need to teach technology too. One of the excuses he hears against it is that “kids know it better than we do, we don’t need to teach it!” Bryant counters, however, that kids know how to entertain themselves with the computer – their actual knowledge of technology is wide but very shallow.
Within what fields are these students’ future jobs likely to be in? 18,000: number of jobs available for physicists in 2016. 91,000: number of jobs for chemists in 2016. 4,006,000: number of jobs for technologists in 2016
Finally, the last bad piece of news is that there is still an attitude about free and open source software in schools: “It can’t be good it’s free.” “We can’t teach it – it’s not industry standard.” One other current misconception is that free & open source software is the same thing as web 2.0. No, Google Docs is not free software, even though it’s free as in beer. That it costs no money isn’t the most important point.
I believe it was Algot, a K12 educator with 36 years of experience, in the audience who brought up the point that in k12, you’re not given the opportunity to retry if you fail. “We tell kids to scratch their itch as long as they get 70-75% or over on their test. If they don’t, they stop caring, or they care like crazy and turn themselves into dunces because they can’t afford failure again so they just turn off. The kids are left behind because they stop engaging.”

The Good News

The free & open source software available today is the good news.
Digital Equity – you can give it to kids, they can have it in both their homes if their parents are split, there is no monetary barrier to access.
Teachers get more choice in what apps they choose to use.
He mentioned theingots.org – a normative testing standard for technology.

The Better News

NETS – the National Educational Technology Standard for students: the next generation. The guidelines have been loosened such that FLOSS is now eligible to compete – it no longer mandates Microsoft-specific technologies.
project FOSS4ward – students and FOSS teams, submitting documentation, testing, creating tutorials, template and clipart creation for free software.
Emerging maker culture in the US – Maker Bot, for example. A lot of opportunities for students to learn and create.

Ruth Suehle wrote up a great recap of Bryant’s talk on opensource.com: Bryant Patten on open source education (LinuxCon session recap).

“Open source improving education around the world” Ruth Suehle, Red Hat, Inc.

Ruth reviewed a number of projects and initiatives involving open educational materials and FLOSS:

OER commons – makes it easy for teachers to license, share, and categorize educational resources so they can find them and use them.
Common Core state standards initiative – a non-federal gov’t initiative to build open standards for schools
Curriki, a wiki providing quality free educational content.
IT@Schools – a project that is bringing FLOSS to 3 million Indian students.

I’ve kept my summary of Ruth’s talk short just because many of these projects are covered in great detail at OpenSource.com’s Education channel – so please pop on over there to read more if these pique your interest!

Being Present – a Beginners Guide to FLOSS Outreach in Education Karlie Robinson, Webpath Technologies

Karlie has been very involved in both the Fedora project and the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and its usage of OLPCs in computer science courses. She outlined how she began her involvement – it started when her company, On-Disk.com was asked by Greg DeKonigsberg to produce Fedora 10 SD cards for use with the OLPC laptops. Afterwards she attended what she classified as a random meeting on RIT’s campus, where she connected some students and professors with the OLPC project and which culminated in Professor Jacobs using OLPCs in a computer science class in which students developed math software for 4th grade students using OLPC as a platform. Karlie talked about how she is not a technical contributor, rather she served as a ‘router’ to connect people and projects together to help make things happen. She emphasized how impactful it is to simply show up, to be available, make connections, and share your knowledge.

Karlie also talked about some other initiatives happening at RIT involving open source. Currently they are working on improving video chat on OLPCs in the hopes of providing enough fidelity for sign language video chat, with the help of funding from the National Institute for the Deaf. The project is leading to better video drivers and software for the OLPC. Typically for college computer science students, their buddy working on a project with them or in the same class is right down the hall, and they can chat in-person and help each other out and work on things. In FLOSS, the help you need is in an IRC room, not a dorm room down the hall, and working within that social space takes a bit of adjustment. For example, Karlie gave the example of a student struggling to find an answer to a question he had on the software he was working on. He told Karlie he couldn’t find the answer. “Who did you ask? ” asked Karlie. “Oh, it was late” the student replied. Karlie responded, “It’s never late!Ppeople all over the world come online all the time who can help you.” She’s had to explain to the students that time doesn’t exist in the FLOSS world and if a chat room is silent, it’s time to hit the mailing list – just don’t give up. She relating teaching community interaction to teaching a foreign language. These students know python and C and java, but they don’t know who to ask for help. This is in a world where proprietary software developers are trained to not ask anybody else – loose lips sink ships. And what’s considered cheating and plaigarizing vs. collaboration? FLOSS challenges some of these computer science instructional notions. Karlie suggested that with FLOSS, if you write something from scratch you should get an F. Karlie also mentioned how the FLOSS world has made computer science instruction easier, and she related an example of a professor from Seneca College who told her “It’s much easier to grade a class based on git and wiki commits. You can see who did the work and who didn’t, and how well they managed their time.”

Finally, Karlie said that open source isn’t code. It’s a method, it’s a culture.

The State of Open Data in Education Colin Zwiebel and Andrew Pethan, Olin College

Colin and Andy started off by introducing themselves. They are both currently Olin College students. Colin started with Linux at age 11 – he found his way to FLOSS. Andy built a computer when was younger. He recently took a year off from Olin to start a software business in education. He didn’t know a lot about business, though, and he learned a lot about it and education. Colin worked at a non-profit this summer in New York City that focuses on public transportation and open source technology. Andy worked at IBM this summer on Lotus.

Colin and Andy then painted their idea of data utopia, where everyone’s app makes their data usable by other apps and easy to share. They’d like to see much smarter software, and more learning based on data findings. There are some practical concerns – What can you do with that data? Who do I allow to use that data? What is the license of that data? But they think the community around building standards and interoperation is important.

Colin gave the example of how New York City recently released a public domain transportation dataset in an open format. What are people doing with this boring timetable data, he asked? He then gave some examples of applications that make novel usage of that data. One is called “Exit Strategy NYC”, which, if you tell it where you are trying to go, will tell you not only which way you need to head out of the station to best get where you’re going, but even which train car to get into for the most efficient trip.

They both went on to talk about how poor the data on education is today, and what kinds of things might be possible if schools had some standard open format and tools with which to report up that data. Today schools rely on proprietary software that locks up their data and makes it hard for them to share data as well as migrate to better tools. Andy and Colin mentioned some initiatives that might help achieve this goal:

National Education Data Model (NEDM) – just releasedthis year, it’s a standardized way / db schema to describe everything, from students / blood type to bus routes to neighborhood demographics. They couldn’t find any reference implementations of it. It’s XML-based so you can transform it and submit it for federal reporting you need to do, good incentive for schools to use it.
Schools Interoperability Framework – It’s been around for about 10 years and hasn’t been implemented in any product so far. There’s a project (Open ZIS) to develop a zone integration server to work with SIF, where you should be able to hook something else in as a teacher, to do interesting analysis, help you track grades differently, or other innovative things. A single teacher could just access the students in their class, and outside of the school the data could be anonymized.
Common Cartridge – a common way for publishers to create something that will plug into a CMS. It’s gained buy-in from Blackboard, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and is supported by apps such as Moodle.
School of One, NYC Dept of Education – a pilot program of a data-driven education model, one kid per computer. It involved structured content to switch instruction based on the best individual learning model – for example, teaching a math concept for a visual learner vs. a math concept for aural learner, etc. They tried to correlate performance with the order in which it was learned, the style in which it was presented in. Aggregate data can’t provide that kind of insight.

What kinds of innovative things could come from schools sharing their data? Colin gave one example, “What if a teacher tweeted each topic she was about to cover during a typical school day, and that was correlated with student attendance. You could see based on attendance and teacher tweets what topics a student missed when they were gone, and try to correlate the absences with to questions missed on an exam.”

Schools are trying to buy packages and services from companies, but Colin and Andy think that’s the wrong model. If the data is provided, then more free applications could surface to allow schools to do more with the data they already collect

Ruth Suehle wrote up a fantastic article on Colin and Andy’s talk on opensource.com: The importance of open data in education.

The Open Source Way: Leveraging Communities Sebastian Dziallas, Fedora Project & Sugar Labs

Sebastian first got involved in open source two years ago as a high school student in a computer club. He was looking for a way to improve his high school’s computer system. He started looking at Linux and poked around, and was very lucky things worked out how they did. He did an internship at 11th grade at a computer magazine, and a person he met there was a former leader of Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. This person challenged Sebastian to get involved in open source. Sebastian started approaching open source by looking at educational initiatives, as he was a high school student. The wiki pages he found on the topic were outdated, so he started poking around on the related mailing lists and also did not see much stuff going on. He decided that he wanted to create an education spin of a Linux distro and chose Fedora. From the start though, people were discussing technical issues such as if it should be CD- or DVD-sized. Sebastian really didn’t care, he just wanted to get started and have a spin at all. Greg DeKonigsberg emailed him off-list and they started talking…. that helped Sebastian a lot, and eventually Greg pinged him in IRC and asked him if he wanted an XO. He really liked OLPC but didn’t know how to get involved because they were so far away – he is just in HS. Greg asked him if he wanted an XO, and Sebastian said of course, and this really jump started his involvement.

One of Sebastian’s first projects was developing the Fedora 10 SDcards for OLPC. Through this project, he got to know Walter Bender and Mel Chua and found his way through OLPC and Sugarlabs. He ended up creating Sugar on a Stick – a Sugar desktop environment (as seen on the OLPCs) that can be booted off a USB key so you don’t need OLPC hardware to use Sugar. There is now a 1st grade teacher in Boston who is using Sugar on a Stick in her classroom. Although Sebastian was in Germany, he was called into their classroom three times. Her students have provided bug reports and have learned about how open source projects work. One bug report they made was on the maze activity, which resulted in a fix. The team working on Sugar on a Stick now includes Sebastian along with Peter Robinson and Mel Chua.

Sugar on a Stick, as a project, is an example of both how things can go right and how they can go wrong. First Sebastian showed us the ‘Blueberry’ release’s release cycle. It involved the orchestration of three main upstream components:

Fedora / core OS
Sugar core / Sugar Labs
OLPC activities / third-party developers

Combining these three upstreams to build Sugar on a Stick worked well for the first release, but it didn’t work so well for the second release. As Sebastian was about to jump on a plane for FUDcon Toronto last December, he still had to do composes for final image as there were still bugs occurring. The team had a schedule, but they couldn’t stick to their freeze. The problem was that they had the idea to include some nice ebooks, but at the last minute it turned out that there were licensing issues with the books – they had an ND clause in their Creative Commons license. The ND clause is against Fedora licensing guidelines, so they had to recompose the spin at last minute to remove the content.

After learning from the issues in the Blueberry release cycle, the Sugar on a Stick team changed up how release engineering happened for the latest Mirabelle release. Sugar on a Stick is now an official Fedora spin. Practically this means the Sugar on a Stick folks don’t have to take care of builds anymore – from becoming a Fedora spin, they get automatic nightly builds. All they have to do now is to make sure the OLPC activities and the Sugar core are packaged for Fedora, and they get pretty much everything else automatically.

Sebastian then talked a little bit about how he’s worked on enabling people to contribute. The new Sugar on a Stick webpage links to a contributors’ portal to help show how folks can help. The Sugar on a Stick team continues to try to make it easier for folks to get involved in their community. One vital thing you need to do to build community is to communicate. If you don’t talk about what you are doing, people won’t know what you’re doing, so they won’t know how to help. Sebastian mentioned a group development theory by Bruce Tuckman – it involves four phases:

forming
storming
norming
performing

Sebastian closed off his talk by suggesting when you’re trying to develop a new project and community, it’s important to look for related projects. It’s okay to fork, but try not to waste resources.

Using OpenHatch to find student projects and mentors Asheesh Laroia, OpenHatch

Asheesh got through his talk admirably well considered he faced some pretty rough hardware failure and ended up having to give his talk using a borrowed laptop. That being said, he introduced the group to OpenHatch, a project he started with a couple of friends and now runs on his own. The website is meant to help match up FLOSS projects with potential contributors – and the assumption of the site is that the potential contributors searching for projects to work on are ‘self-starters’ who want to help out. OpenHatch itself is open source and is written in Django. Asheesh works on the site half-time and has some start-up funding.

Asheesh introduced some aspects of the site that would be of particular interest to an educator looking for projects their students could get involved with:

OpenHatch has an inventory of bugs & tasks to work on, and you can filter this list to show ‘bite-sized’ projects. He compared this category of bug to GNOME Love bugs, which are typically marked as bugs that are good for a newcomer to work on. The bug browsing interface of OpenHatch is powerful and will let you search across all bugs that are ‘bite-sized’ or view only the ‘bite-sized’ bugs of a particular project of interest.
OpenHatch has a mentorship system. There are some caveats to it, however. There is no delineation between skills and projects in mentoring system, so you can mentor in both a particular project (e.g., GNOME Shell) and/or a particular skill (e.g., python).
There is a location-based system where you can search for projects that have people near you. This could be of particular use to educators who might be interested in having a developer come and visit the classroom for some in-person mentorship. You can also go to a location on the map and check out what projects your neighbors are working on. One caveat here is that if a developer decides not to put in where they live, they are placed on an inaccessible island in the Atlantic. The map is a CPU-hog though!

We had a discussion about how contributions to FLOSS projects don’t just consist of code, and during the session I actually submitted the Fedora Design team’s ticket system to OpenHatch, and Asheesh said he would use our bug tags as design-related tags in OpenHatch. (Examples of our design-related tags include html/css, icon request, hackergotchi request, logo, interaction design, usability.)

Asheesh pointed out that in general, when you need help, or want something – say so! He said, “So Sebastian told us about how we should communicate, communicate, communicate. I like to say, “communicate – it can’t make things any worse!”Asheesh’s overall position is that the FLOSS community as a whole needs to do more outreach.

Here’s Asheesh’s summary for teachers on using OpenHatch:

You can search projects for students to work on by language.
You can also search for people nearby, maybe have them come in and talk to your students.
If you are worried about submitting to a project and seeing no movement on your proposals, or a mentor dropping off the face of the earth -
find a local person…. call them on the phone, meet them in person.
Create a project page, say you want to help, and we’ll figure out what you want to work on together.

Some ideas for features suggested by the audience:

Jeff suggested integration with trip-it to coordinate which folks were going to which conference so you’d know who you could meet at a conference.
Colin suggested adding a feature to add ‘in-person’ as a mentorship possibility.
Colin also suggested a way to broadcast my hackathons on OpenHatch. Asheesh noted that only way to do that now is to go to people’s people pages and contact them via email.

Asheesh’s grand world-domination scheme is to get professors all over the world to sign on to teach open source classes to find mentors to help structure the class for a semester – and then have students at colleges across the world working on a project during the same semester.

What’s next for OpenHatch? They have a summer of code stduent who is working on training missions, which you can preview and test out at http://openhatch.org/missions – these are interactive tutorials on using free software to teach you. For example, you’re on a mission, you’re an agent for mr good to gain the trust of mr. bad, and you learn how to use git along the way.

Open1to1.org (Linux and FOSS in the classroom) David Trask, Open1to1.org

David is a school teacher from Maine. He has taught every grade level; he’s taught special ed, high school, social studies, freshmen US history, coached football…. now he is teaching computers and he is the IT guy at a large school. In the beginning, he was working at the school until 11 pm trying to get things working; it was a windows shop and he was more of a fireman. He started position in 1999, and by 2001, the school was totally Linux. Now that Maine has a Macbook laptop program, it’s a Linux & Apple school system. MLTI – the Maine Learning Technology Initiative – went with an Apple-based solution, requiring ibooks and macbooks be used in the schools. People have learned a lot through the project; even though it’s an Apple solution it’s still an open solution: their primary word processor is OpenOffice.org, Firefox is the standard browser, and Gimp is the standard for imaging.

He started out with a Windows 2000 server, and was a Windows guy. With the Windows 2000 resource kit, he had to enter in 300 users one-by-one because it wouldn’t import the users, and the system crashed completely and totally. It was a ‘reformat and start over’ situation. David had been using free Cisco floppy-based Linux router distro as his first foray into Linux. He started asking people on that project’s mailing list if it would be possibleto replace win2k server with a Linux-based domain controller; the list-goers pointed him at esmith with is now smeserver: you click a checkbox and it’s a domain controller. It’s still around today. After this experience, David went to his principal and told him: “We can do Linux, our users won’t know about it…” So they sat down and drew out the pros and cons of going back to the Windows solution. The Windows cons ended up being a very long list, while the Linux pros we really long. So the principal ended up supporting David in trying to do Linux. The very first year of his school’s Linux usage, people noticed he wasn’t on the intercom anymore telling people they had to log off NT4 to reboot the server weekly (due to a famous memory leakin NT4.)

David’s staff and students are now used to things changing every year – they don’t know what to expect first day of school. A good illustration of this is when he finally pulled every Windows machine out of every classroom. All the machines were Linux except that they had a single Windows machine in every room for the teacher. David spent a lot of time creating a special Windows image just for the teachers, but the kids were doing just fine with Linux. He decided to pxe boot the teacher’s Dell optiplexes to be Linux thin clients that August. There was a kindergarten teacher, a 33-year veteran, who had the machine on right after the refresh to Linux, who was using OpenOffice.org…. The principal had been worried about the teachers not acclimating to Linux, and here this teacher was up and running all on her own. The teacher knew what to do, although she was upset about about the lack of U.S. holiday clipart.

Then the funding model for deploying laptops changed. The Maine government had originally paid for them, and nothing came out of each school’s budget directly. In their high school program, the funding formula is to you spend $242 per secondary student on technology. If you’re a poor community, most of money that comes from state subsidy. If you’re a wealthy community, you have to pay the $242 out-of-pocket. Sometimes the money was used to pay for things like the technology coordinators’ salaries. The state came up with a new rule – they would take the cost of the laptops out of that money. If you’re a poor school, that’s a good deal – they don’t lose any money since it’s all state-subsidized anyway. If you’re a wealthy school, though, you lose a lot of money. If you were using it to fund your tech coordinator, suddenly you’ve got an extra expense. School budgets get started in November and typically pass in January in Maine. The state made this decision in March, so schools were scrambling. It resulted in the wealthy school communities becoming the ‘have-nots.’

This situation is what led to the Open 1 to 1 project. Netbooks are becoming popular and very inexpensive to do 99.9% needed to do in education. Openoffice.org, web surfing, etc. Open 1 to 1 is not just for netbooks, but they are the platform of choice because of their low cost. Macbooks had been a yearly fee, $249 x 4 years. These netbooks are $289 once – no recurring fees. So how does David get Open 1 to 1 on 1,100 machines? He needed a total solution, not just a netbook image, but a way to get it on the machine in the first place. He got it down to two clicks by using and modifying an existing USB creator.

Something a lot of people seem to forget is that kids are not concerned about the operating system on devices they purchase at Best Buy – they don’t know and they don’t care. What they do care about is if they can take pictures on it and if they can listen to music. It takes kids two seconds to get on the internet…. before you know it they are learning it.

This project is across all grade levels…. Bryant has 24 dell 2100s used by a 1st grade teacher with the Open 1 to 1 image. He went with open 1 to 1 because it is so easy to customize. You can simply drag a new application like scratch on to it, save it, and it creates a new image… so you can basically add on to or modify the stock image for your own purposes very easily.

David ended his talk with a live demonstration of Open 1 to 1. You can learn more about this project at Open1to1.org.

Lunch

We had some lively discussions at lunch just down the street from the conference site.

Our Swag

A great idea, but unfortunately we weren’t actually provided with whiteboards in the room.

Conclusion

I hope this overview of the LinuxCon Education Mini-Summit has been useful for you! If you’d like to get involved and continue the conversation, you can visit the Teaching Open Source project. Many of the folks who presented are on the Teaching Open Source Mailing List. There is also a Teaching Open Source blog planet and an irc channel at #teachingopensource on irc.freenode.net.

Update: And if you'd like to catch up on the sessions during the main LinuxCon Conference, Alison Chaiken (whom I had the pleasure of meeting face-to-face at the conference) has put together a great set of notes on the sessions she attended, licensed CC-BY-SA!

Filed under: Education, Inkscape Class

Andreas Nilsson: Two cool Linux addons for Thunderbird

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 12:57:34 +0000

Came across two nice addons of late that makes Thunderbird love your Linux system recently.

The first one is the Evolution Mirror extension that makes the appointments and tasks you create in Lightning show up in the GNOME clock applet.

The second is libnotify-mozilla by Ruben Verweij that allows Thunderbird to make use of Ubuntu’s Indicator Applet.

Durian Project: Sintel official premiere

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 11:09:43 +0000

Just had it confirmed from the Festival committee:

Official premiere Sintel: Monday 27 september, 19:30h, in Rembrandt theatre, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

This screening is part of the normal festival, for which tickets have to be reserved or purchased via the theatre or via the festival itself.

Netherlands Film Festival website. (program will only be available sept 9)

The DVD production has also started (slowly!), we plan to have this ready for print at the festival. I’m uncertain if we can have the DVDs available then already though… we’ll do our best!

In order to prevent crappy bootlegs to be posted, we’ll release the film a few days after the premiere as well, with sufficient mirrors for everyone to enjoy with us this milestone in Blender history!

-Ton-

Bastien Nocera: Geek hardware, for a change

noreply@blogger.com (hadess) — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 10:43:05 +0000

Wireless router

Urgh. After having been fighting with my ISP about connectivity problems, they announced that the problem I was plagued with (a bug in a Motorola UBR on their network) was fixed. I was still getting dropped connections though. Turns out the software on the provided D-Link DIR-615 is DIRe (see what I did there).

Here comes DD-WRT. I followed the instructions from this forum post (just the “How do I install DD-WRT?” part), with a firmware grabbed from the DD-WRT website itself.

After the initial setup, I also switched off 802.11B support, as the last device I have to require this is a Nintendo DS that doesn't even do WPA.

New phone

I got a new phone on Friday, and managed to steer clear of iTunes for now. First off, I exported all the contacts from my old Sony Ericsson phone using obexftp:

obexftp -v -b 00:11:22:33:44:55 -U synch -S -g telecom/pb.vcf

This will give you a pb.vcf file with all your contacts.

With the new device still missing a micro-SIM, I fixed a bunch of nautilus-ideviceinfo bugs. With the micro-SIM inserted, I activated the phone with Free Software. After setting up a minimal network, I sent my pb.vcf file to the new phone via e-mail, and reinserted all the contacts.

Still plenty more integration to be done, though a visit to jailbreakme.com will make this easier.

Blender Project: Blender Conference: call for proposals

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 15:31:00 +0000

We still can use some more talks, training, demos, case studies and so on... please submit before...

True Volumetric for Blender: DIY solar projects (high temperature heat + electricity)

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 12:49:43 +0000

Hi all,

A last update about solar stuffs for people who have shown interest a few months ago about these technologies, here are DIY projects:

(warning! these projects have nothing to do with me aside passion, and are not for commercial use according to the blueprint authors)

a free handbook about solar energy (theory and technology)

solar concentrators designs (detailed blueprints), robust and proven:

500W-scale stirling engine (for temperatures above 550°C)

for parts you can now find firms on the internet that do machine custom parts based on blueprints (some even provide the CAD software that for)

By the way, Farsthary’s PSU is broken, this is why he can’t tinker as much as before…

Regards

Lapinou

Alexandre Prokoudine: Scratching your itches

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:03:26 +0000

Initially the re-lab project was going to work on reverse-engineering of Microsoft Publisher file format for the Scribus team. The thing is that the files generator/inspector (that is, me) is on Linux and doesn’t feel justified to install Windows and use it. And MSP knowingly doesn’t run under WINE reliably (I haven’t managed to run [...]

Hylke Bons: SparkleShare 0.2 Alpha 2 for Linux

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:31:49 +0000

I’m happy to announce the second Alpha release for SparkleShare. Please be aware that this is a development release and therefore should not be used in production environments. Although it’s much better than the previous version, it’s still known to snatch some kittens occasionally. Here’s a list of reported bugs that have been resolved (but many more have been fixed).

Get it here.

The README file has some instruction on how to build and install SparkleShare. If you don’t have a git repository yourself, you can create one on Gitorious or GitHub for free and upload your public key there (these are public repositories, so careful with what you put on there)

If you have questions, feel free to drop by in #sparkleshare on irc.gnome.org.

Bug reports can now go under the ‘sparkleshare‘ component in GNOME Bugzilla.

Tomasz Meger: 2nd part of the project – testing at the function level (part 2)

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:18:35 +0000

Thanks to my mentor I have a list of functions that Hugin is using. It allows me to focus on the most important part of the project – writing the tests. And here is the list if someone needs it:
CheckParams
DisposeAlignInfo
distSquared
erect_albersequalareaconic
erect_mercator
erect_pano
erect_rect
erect_sinusoidal
erect_sphere_tp
erect_stereographic
erect_transmercator
execute_stack_new
GetFullPath
getROI
horiz
inv_radial
mercator_erect
merge
myfree
operator&lt
pano_erect
panoProjectionFeaturesQuery
panoProjectionFormatCount
pano_sphere_tp
ParseScript
persp_rect
persp_sphere
PrintError
PT_setErrorFcn
PT_setInfoDlgFcn
PT_setProgressFcn
queryFOVLimits
radial
rect_erect
rect_sphere_tp
resize
rotate_erect
RunLMOptimizer
SetAdjustDefaults
SetCoordDefaults
SetCorrectDefaults
SetCorrectionRadius
SetGlobalPtr
SetImageDefaults
SetInvMakeParams
SetMakeParams
SetMatrix
SetOptDefaults
SetStitchDefaults
sinusoidal_erect
sphere_tp_erect
sphere_tp_pano
sphere_tp_rect
stereographic_erect
StringtoFullPath
transmercator_erect
vert
WriteResults

I also resigned from using Boost Test Library simply because ctest is already handling the most of BTL tasks (it also needs to install Boost library etc.). Not every element (function) from the list above is needed to be tested, but much of them is very important. So we concentrated on two essencial areas: math/projection and optimization. A list of tested functions (they are already added into svn and integrated with cmake/ctest):

- Optimizer related functions:
* CheckParams
* distSquared
* RunLMOptimizer (this is the main function)

- Math/projection related functions:
* transmercator_erect
* erect_transmercator
* stereographic_erect
* erect_stereographic
* sinusoidal_erect
* erect_sinusoidal
* rect_erect
* erect_rect
* pano_erect
* erect_pano
* mercator_erect
* erect_mercator
* sphere_tp_erect
* erect_sphere_tp
* sphere_tp_pano
* pano_sphere_tp
* sphere_tp_rect
* rect_sphere_tp

Morevna Project: Call to Community: Shot 54 Overpaint

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 05:56:13 +0000

OK, looks like it’s time to try the new strategy of attracting contributors to the project.

Our previous strategy was based on the assumption that contributors will work directly with the production tree and maintain their working copies using git. Now I should admit that it was quite naive for me to expect this strategy to be the main one for collaboration. At least at this time.

New strategy is the strategy of “calls” – small, extremely specific tasks where multiple people can put their efforts together without deploying full toolchain, described in the Contributor’s Guide. I hope this strategy will bring community closer to the project, let us have more fun and make the Morevna Project more “crowd-sourced”.

This is the first call from the series I plan to make and it’s about drawing.

I have six keyframes drawn for shot 54 of the demo (see storyboard). I’m not quite satisfied with them. I wonder if someone get interested to participate and help me to fix with overpaint (mention in the credits guaranteed).

Here’s rendered draft of the shot:

Download OGV (0,7 Mb)

Here are the keyframes I need overpaint for:

On the images below I have marked the issues I would like to have fixed:

[1] – hand
[2] – cloth: t-shirt
[3] – cloth: jacket
[4] – face
[5] – cloth: wrinkles at the elbow
[6] – hand
[7] – fist
[8],[9],[10] – cloth: jacket
[11] – hands
[12] – cloth: jacket

Though, other corrections are welcome. ^_^

Images of Ivan for the reference:

Steven Garrity: How the Venue Shapes Music

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 00:09:00 +0000

In David Byrne’s talk at the TED Conference, “How architecture helped music evolve”, he takes a walk though the history of venues and their accompanying influence on musical styles. Apparently birds adapt their music to the venue too.

tube animation film project: Going to TOSMI, Sofia Bulgaria

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 21:40:03 +0000

Hi folks,

Tube will be on slight slowdown the next couple of weeks, as the local team goes on various hiatus(es? ii? hmmm) . I’ll be in Sofia Bulgaria, teaching with some standup talented Blenderheads at TOSMI (Training in Open Source Multimedia Instruments – in a word: Blender) sponsered/ ran by interspace.

Becky is taking a week break from drawing- right now we’re four shots short of our summer goal of finishing a draft of the new animatic- and visiting friends in NYC. Fateh, Josh and Henri are vacationing in Boston, Block Island, and NYC for a few days, then back to the studio.

I’ll be still working on Tube part time, via IRC , email and Helga. Expect some rigging goodies soon!

Máirín Duffy: Fedora Board Meeting 13 August 2010

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 19:50:42 +0000

The meeting today was a public meeting on IRC (#fedora-board-meeting on freenode) and lasted 1.5 hours. It was the first time we tried out a new format. The next meeting will be at the same time next Friday, and will be held over the phone.

Log Links

Introduction

Matt Domsch is on a plane and won be able to join us.
We’ll start today’s meeting with general questions and answers from the community.
Our new meeting protocol is documented here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board_public_IRC_meetings
In general, “?” means you’d like to ask a question, “!” mean you’d like to comment on the current question, and “eof” means you’re done talking.
We typically do 40 minutes of Q&A and leave 20 minutes for other board business.
No more than 8 minutes per question so at least 5 questions can be reached.
Board members can speak without moderation, in the interest of not being too slow.

Question 1: Schedule

jjmcd: “In view of our recent slip, is the Board as passionate as poelcat about learning how to keep a schedule?”

Jared responded that he is very sensitive to it and doesn’t like seeing it slip. Jon said he doesn’t like to see it slip either, but the reality is that things come up. Jared said he doesn’t want us to ship something simply because we reached a date on the calendar – there’s got to be some human judgment on the right balance between the two. He feels our Go/No-go meetings give that the right balance.

Smooge said that he’s inured to slippage, as the installer has often faced last-minute OMG realizations. Máirín agreed and noted that the installer folks work very hard but without a working installer there’s no distro, so that team is far less able to make mistakes than other package maintainers are. Jared also pointed out the installer has to adjust to many other changes in the distro frequently, and Rex pointed out anaconda is almost always highlighted for blockers, and schedules are captive to those being fixed. In this situation the anaconda folks have gone out of their way to help get things in shape. Jon suggested that FESCO look at considering anaconda freeze earlier.

Question 2: Vision

mizmo: “I was wondering if we can work on a vision statement for Fedora, because I think a lot of conflict in our project stems from not having a clear vision.”

Jared answered, “Absolutely… It’s one of the things I’d personally like to work on over the next month or two. I certainly have my own vision of what I think Fedora is and should be, but I want to work with all the key stakeholders (the board, steering committees, etc.) to make sure we’re all working in concert with each other.” Smooge also noted, “I wanted to say that it has been on my mind. I have been reading various books and wondering about the various ‘vision/mission statements.’”

Jared also said, “In general though, I think we’re probably closer to agreement on “vision statement/strategy” and less in agreement on “tactics”", but mizmo disagreed, “There’s definitely a consumer camp and a for-techies camp that do not always see eye-to-eye.” Jared responded, “Sure… but I’ll be honest, I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game. I’m gonna be honest — I’m not treating anything (well, OK… maybe anything except the four freedoms) as sacred things that can’t be revisited/discussed.”

Jon responded as well, “The real goal is somewhere in the middle of that…. the previous boards have come up with something. Not saying that we shouldn’t revisit it, but this has been done.” Mizmo responded, “That’s target audience though, vision is what you do with it. The techie camp sees Fedora as a bucket of parts, the consumer camp a polished desktop experience. Techie camp sees more emphasis on development tools, etc.” Jon said, “It has to be a bucket of parts that can be put together ” Mizmo replied, “but do you call it a bucket of parts?” Jon replied, “Yes and no. The default configuration should be a put together bucket.” Mizmo continued, disagreeing with the suggestion, “Or have a bucket of parts and call that a standard / ABI / SDK? Language is really important and we’re lazy with ours. Fedora is a community, a desktop, a bucket of parts – it’s too confusing.” Rex agreed, “I would agree terminology needs to be improved.”

inode0 brought up a point, “Since Fedora is a community, this sort of thing might be worked on by the community rather than the board to begin with.” Mmcgrath answered, “The community has no facility to make decisions.” inode0 also suggested, “another review of how the wikipedia people do this sort of thing.” Jared asked if inode0 could write a summary to advisory-board list on how Wikipedia does things, and inode0 agreed to see that someone does, mentioning that rbergeron understands their process better. Robyn spoke up and said she would be happy to summarize it. Jared also encouraged anyone else to bring up these sorts of things on the list. Jon also noted he’d like to see more things discussed on advisory-board list in general. Caillon also pointed out there was a study posted on the list a while ago that helps outline the wikipedia stuff.

Mizmo noted the Fedora website redesign has been very difficult without a defined vision.

Question 3: Code maturity for inclusion

EvilBob: What is the board’s opinion on using something like systemd that as I understand it is still being coded this close to a release? Shouldn’t core code be a bit more mature before inclusion? systemd is but an example. I know this is mainly a FESCo thing but surely the board has an opinion.

Jared replied, “that’s more of a FESCo decision.” Spot agreed that FESCo is free to make that call. Jon also agreed, and said that one of the four foundations is “first.” Stickster pointed out, “I saw that jsmith posted something to the devel list saying he would like to see FESCo taking a more active role in tracking/managing technical development in Fedora.” Mizmo lamented, “Since we dont have a vision who knows if fesco’s policy on the matter meets it :-/.”

Jared concluded with, “In general though, my attitude is that sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Let’s just be careful about how we break the eggs.” Chris Tyler pointed out, “separating ‘first’ and ‘on fire’ can be a challenge,” and Rex also said, “and to balance who many eggs we’re willing to break to get there.”

EvilBob responded, “In this case if it blows up in “our” face it will reflect on the board. That being the case the board should have an opinion IMO rather than passing the buck.” Jared responded, “Sure… all decisions reflect on Fedora as a whole, and on the governance in particular…” and continued to say, “Please understand — I’m not playing ‘pass the buck,’ The buck stops here.That being said, they’re the ones tasked with making the judgment calls on technical features, and whether they’re ready or not for inclusion.” Rex agreed, “the buck stops here obviously, so it’s in all of our interests that core tech pieces do not fail. So, in that regard, if we, as the board, see fesco flying down to fail-ville, it’s our job to step in to help right the ship.” Jared also pointed out to EvilBob, “The Board can obviously go back to FESCo and overrule them, etc.”

Stickster queried further, “Can you elaborate on how you envision that expanded role for FESCo? What’s an example or two of roles/actions you think FESCo could take up for technical management?” Jared answered, “One of the hard things FESCo has to do is say “yay” or “nay” on the new features. A couple of things I would like to see include: 1) Making things more clear as to what constitutes a features being “100%” ready or “90%” ready; it’s not always clear what that means. 2) The other thing I would suggest (not really relevant to this discussion) is to make it clear which types of things should go through the “features” process, and which types of things can just be added as package updates (or new packages).”

Nirik pointed out, “I would just like to note that FESCo holds all it’s meetings in public on tuesday afternoons. Feel free to bring concerns up there or in a ticket to fesco. If there are widespread fears about systemd, please provide TECHNICAL feedback to help fesco decide about it.” Smooge also pointed out, “I think that to be innovative we are going to need to have a VERY high bar for thinking something is going to be FAILville. FESCO is an open body and not a cabal,” and mizmo responded, “but that’s not a great position to have if say having a usable consumer desktop is important.”

Question 4: Meeting protocol

rbergeron asked, “We are asking a lot of questions in this public meeting – not all of them will be answered or agreed on as far as concensus in an 8-minute period. Is it possible for us to keep track of these questions and make sure they are answered somewhere – or at least given a timeline for actions to be taken – so as to not have an hour of opinionating? “

Jared answered, “In general, discussion should happen on the advisory-board list. I prefer to use board meeting time for answering questions and making the tough decisions. I’m sure others who have much more experience on the board than I do may see things differently. Yes, there will always be discussion in the board meetings, and that’s healthy… but not everybody can attend the board meetings in real time.”

Mizmo said, “I dont think IRC is a great place to make heavy decisions – not in this format. There should be an agenda if its to make decisions.” Jared agreed.

Robyn asked, “Can we perhaps follow up the meeting with what the consensus answer is to questions asked?” Jared answered, “One of the things I’m looking at is a better tool for keeping track of the questions asked and the answers presented, so that I don’t have to keep answering the same questions all the time ”

Stickster poined out, “This forum was conceived as a way to make sure community members know Board members are listening to their ad-hoc concerns. It’s always easier to capture an action from that when the question leads directly to a decision point, like “How do we collect data to figure out if ___ is a problem?” or “What should we do to make $PROCESS work better?”" Mizmo asked in follow-up, “How does the agenda for board meetings that are not Q&A get determined? These Q&A sessions should have an affect on that agenda,” noting that she is a new board member and really has no idea.” Rex answered, “Ask jsmith to add it to the agenda, is usually all it takes. doesn’t necessarily have to be a board member asking either,” Jared responded, “Yes, the agenda comes from items brought up in the advisory board list, as well as other things brought to my attention.” Stickster said, “at was part of how I set the agenda in the FPL role — also input on the advisory-board, and specific situations that come up elsewhere in the Project where it seemed the Board was needed or could be useful.”

Jared said, “If you have items you’d like on the agenda, please let me know — I accept patches ” Mizmo asked, “Is there a wiki page where the running agenda is stored? It’s hard to submit a patch without the code ” Jared explained, “I usually build it from Trac tickets with the “meeting” keyword. Board members can obviously create tickets with that keyword to get them on the agenda.”

Mizmo said, “It seems like robyn’s indicating a lack of followup, or maybe a worry about a lack of followup.” Robyn said, “I am just saying – if there is something to be answered, can we call out the clear answer – if there is something to be followed up on, can we please define it, and get a timeline, or at least have someone responsible in the meeting for kicking off that followup on the advisory board list. Just for these public IRC q&a’s – It’s one hour, and we have a lot of community members, and I’d like to see that time well-used, questions answered.” Jared replied, “I’ve started investigating tools that will help with that” and noted he hopes to hae a better answer in the future.

Stickster brought up these blog meeting summaries and suggested they could be a guide in producing whatever’s necessary to track items brought up, and mizmo offered to file and reference trac tickets when posting the summaries. Jon mentioned the trac tickets are private, and if referenced folks cant view them. Jared concluded, “Again, I don’t think we need to answer the technical decision of “how” in this meeting.”

Question 5: Fedora Board Composition

inode0 asked, “I see several negative effects of Red Hat retaining structural control over the composition of the Fedora Board. What benefit does the Fedora Project get from this arrangement? Would anyone on the Board be in favor of transitioning the rest of the appointed seats to elected seats over the next few releases?”

Jared responded, “In general, it’s all up for discussion. Red Hat obviously puts a lot of resources into Fedora, and wants to see that its resources are used wisely. That being said, I’m open to discussion.”

Rex, Spot, and Jon asked which negative effects inode0 was referring to. Inode listed three effects:

prominent community members declined to run for the board and this was one reason given (Spot asked, “really? aside from kkofler, i didn’t hear that from anyone.”)
It reinforces the view (right or wrong) both inside and outside the Fedora family that Red Hat exerts a lot of control over the project
It confuses at least me in understanding the relationship between Red Hat and Fedora (are we upstream with Red Hat as an important participator, or is the community participating in an internal Red Hat project)

Rex asked, “I forget, how many appointed seats are there at the moment?” Caillon answered, “4 appointed, 5 elected.” Spot pointed out, “I think RHT has done an admirable job with the last several round of appointments, and I also think it is a nice way to reflect Red Hat’s investment and involvement in Fedora.” Jared said, “I’ll be honest here — Red Hat pays my salary, but I still feel like an outsider looking in.” Smooge said, “#1 I think that it does not have a large effect because because those same people either don’t run for FESCO or think its too political.”

DiscordianUK pointed out, “I think for example CentOS regards Fedora as upstream.” Rex pointed out, “I would consider the project leader and board chair position appointment to be “enough”, but that’s just me.” Smooge pointed out, “For #2, making it 100% elected would not change the view that Red Hat does not exert lots of influence on the project because well it pays for pretty much everything.” Colin also said, “large amount of “influence” i’d agree with, and it’s hard to avoid when the company invests as much as it does in terms of people and money; as far as “control”, let me assure you there’s no evil master plan.” Jared and Caillon also pointed out the number of deelopers employed and infrastructure provided. Caillon said, “I think that #2 is still okay, because with all elected seats, it is possible (and honestly, not beyond the realm of possibility) to get a board full of Red Hat employees. with appointments, that is unlikely to happen.”

Brunowolff said, “I think that being able to fork Fedora is more important than the board membership. I have been seeing improvement along those lines throughout Fedora’s history. That says to me that Red Hat is guaranteeing their future behavior.”

inode0 followed up with two points:

there are respected and very valued contributors who aren’t running because they don’t feel the board can ever really change from one view to another because of this structural constraint
there is really no evidence that the composition of the board would look much different whether it was entirely appointed by the FPL or entirely elected – so this is I think more about perception in the short term

Ke4qqq wondered, “I wonder if some of those problems couldn’t be mitigated with term limits.” Jared asked for clarification on which problems h meant. Ke4qqq replied, ” specifically inode0′s original #1 – but also his second #1.”

Inode0 pointed out, “Removing the structural control of the composition of the board would empower the community to *actually* reform the board if it felt that was needed.” Smooge replied, “that would require an elective that is interested in voting or forced voting. Basically too many people DON’T vote to make a difference.” Rex responded, “it obviously goes both ways. voting apathy perception about not making a difference.”

Jared said, “I can’t speak for the rest of the board, but I’m certainly open to suggestions on how we can make Fedora stronger.” inode0 suggested making the Board elected. Rex said, “I’d like to at least consider the idea proposed, about reducing the number of appointed seats… sometime over the next few months.” Jared concluded, “OK… in the interest of time, let’s move the discussion to the list.”

Update: Smooge did so, and the discussion has now started on the advisory-board mailing list.

Topic: Updates

As everyone is probably aware, we had our Go/No-Go meeting and the Alpha release candidate did not pass the release criteria. The schedule has been pushed back a week. I see that there’s active discussion on the lists about how to improve the process, and as long as we’re learning from our slips, we’re making progress.

Topic: Other Board Business

In last week’s board meeting, I asked each of the board members to go through the list of board tickets in our private Trac instance and see what tickets can be closed. There are a number of items that are in limbo. I didn’t see much action on that front this week, so I’m going to make an extra effort this week to close as many as possible. I especially need the input of people who have been on the board for a while, as you’re probably more in-touch with some of these issues than I am.

Mizmo pointed out a Board discussion about revealing sensitive private issues discussed by the Board once they are no longer sensitive/private, as Jared explained “That we open up private matters after some embargo time, with the possible exception of personnel matters, so as not to embarrass said people. We’ll need to work through the details on the list, but in general, I think we’re all in favor of more transparency. In short, there are times the Board discusses private matters (usually things that would damage relationships if discussed openly — personnel matters, fiduciary matters, etc.) We certainly want to be very careful about those things, but in general, there are items that can be revealed publicly at a later time. mizmo graciously accepted the task of helping us to keep track of said items, and I thank her for that.”

Meeting Format

Stickster asked, “Do the Board members agree the change in the way the meeting was run was helpful? Or did it cause obstacles for you?”

Mizmo answered, “It was much easier to take notes this time – last time it took over an hour to unravel the spaghetti. I’m all caught up at this point.” Jared said, “I personally thought the change of IRC protocol helped eliminate confusion, but it did lengthen out the conversations.” Chris Tyler said, ” I think it was a good improvement.” Rex chimed in, “I liked the format, thought it a fruitful balance of discussion vs organized productivity.”

Jared pointed out, “We may need to schedule more time to properly address more questions (or convince people to ask more questions on the advisory-board list).” Mizmo replied, “Asking questions to a mailing list though, there’s no guarantee of a response. So i can see why people wouldn’t.” Jared said, “I think we’ve been pretty good at responding to questions on the advisory-board list.” Mizmo responded, “Well I’m just saying in general, I don’t think the list has been socialized that way, even if it does perform. Fedora lists in general do not. The list doesnt have a description, nor does it say it’s a place you can ask questions https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/advisory-board – I actually wasnt even subscribed to it as a community member until a year or so ago, i didn’t know what it was. I thought it was board members only. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Board#Contact doesn’t say it’s a place to ask questions, it says its a place for the board to discuss.”

Jared suggested using the list to discuss how to make the list more visible as a place to ask questions. Rex said, “Mizmo’s concerns are valid, having a better description of the list in mailman and on wiki would be definite improvement.” Jared took an action item to get a better description of the advisory-board list, and blog about it.

Filed under: Fedora, Fedora Board

Roman Joost: If acquisition comes in the way

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 00:48:22 +0000

I’ve witnessed a very strange error today.

The problem

I had a custom content-type which was partly indexed. When viewing the content type, parts of the edit form showed raw HTML code instead of widgets:

What was going on?

The solution

I hunted around for a while but checked the contents of the index. Strangely, it had a whole page indexed. After investigating further: it’s another object in the portal with the same id as the attribute on the content-type. The error happens only, if the attribute is missing on the content-type and an object in the hirarchy above has the name id.

So – if you encounter a problem like this, check if the portal_catalog may grab a different object for indexing with the same name of your attribute.

Akkana Peck: Fotoxx: the Greatest Little Linux Photo Editor You've Never Heard Of

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 22:44:00 +0000

Dave stumbled on a neat little photo editor while tricking out his old Vaio (P3/650 MHz, 192M RAM) and looking for lightweight apps. It's called Fotoxx and it's quite impressive: easy to use and packed with useful features.

So I wrote about it in this week's Linux Planet article: Fotoxx, the Greatest Little Linux Photo Editor You've Never Heard Of.

At first, I was most impressed by the Warp tool -- much easier to use than GIMP's IWarp, though it's rather slow and not quite as flexible as IWarp. But once I got to writing the article, I was blown away by two additional features: it has an automatic panorama stitcher and an HDR tool. GIMP doesn't have either of these features, at all.

Now, panorama stitching used to be a big deal, but it isn't so much any more now that Hugin has gotten much easier to use. (My article in two weeks will be about Hugin.) Fotoxx isn't quite that flexible: it can only stitch two images at a time, and can't handle images with a lot of overlap. (But Hugin has some limitations too.)

But HDR -- wow! I've been meaning to learn more about making HDR images in GIMP -- although it has no HDR tool, there are plug-ins to make it a bit easier to assemble one, just like my Pandora plug-in makes it a little easier to assemble panoramas. But now I don't need to -- fotoxx handles it automatically.

I won't be switching from GIMP any time soon for regular photo editing, of course -- GIMP is still much more flexible. But fotoxx is definitely worth a look, and I'll be keeping it installed to make HDR images, if nothing else.

Kees Cook: CryptProtect broken

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:31:20 +0000

Dan Rosenberg pointed me to a paper from the 2010 WOOT conference that mentions my work to implement the CryptProtect function in Wine. Their research is awesome, and it was fun to compare my attempts at identifying the blob structure to what they discovered. Looks like I got the structure pretty well, but that was easy; they totally broke the encryption itself. Now those native blobs can be decrypted, opening the door to full NTFS interoperability, offline forensics of Windows encrypted files, etc. (For designers of future symmetric encryption methods: please don’t store the keys (in any form) on disk with the cipher text…)

What I found most alarming about this is a comparison to eCryptfs, and how it is implemented with the user’s login passphrase. In both cases, a hash of the passphrase is used to perform additional work that results in keying the final encryption. In eCryptfs, this hash is calculated to unlock the main key that is used for eCryptfs and is then thrown away (it can always be regenerated when the user logs in). If the user changes their passphrase, they must decrypt and re-encrypt the eCryptfs key (this is done automatically by PAM). Under Windows, to deal with potential user login passphrase changes, they instead decided to store all prior (SHA1) hashes of the user’s passphrases, even lacking a salt. So all the clear-text user login passphrases are recoverable with a standard rainbow table, in parallel. O_o

Durian Project: Get Your Very Own Nathan!

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 11:33:12 +0000

Hello! Nathan here.

Since my job on Project Durian is over, I am now seeking work. Specifically I am looking for freelance, consulting, and teaching work. So if anyone has money they would like to throw at me in exchange for me doing stuff, please get in touch with me at nathanvegdahl@gmail.com

I currently live in Seattle, WA. I am happy to work remotely, and I am more than happy to travel.

My primary skills are rigging and animation, but I am skilled in most other aspects of 3d production as well. And although my professional experience thus far has been in film production, I am interested in branching out to other applications of my talents, especially visualization work.

I have a new demo reel for 2010, but unfortunately I cannot make it publicly available at this time because it contains work from as-of-yet unreleased productions. But I am happy to provide it upon request.

Here is my old rigging/animation reel from 2008:

Nathan_Vegdahl_reel.mp4

Thanks!

–Nathan Vegdahl

Mukund Sivaraman: August 11

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:59:27 +0000

For use with Raster, I searched for an image file format similar to PPM that stores 32-bit floating point values. There's PFM, but that has no support for alpha transparency. I request comments from raster graphics software developers on a new PRM format (this file is a temporary draft, and the text is poorly written). The main features of this format are:

It supports alpha transparency.
It supports storage in the local endianness of the platform (so that local images can be processed efficiently).
It supports tile based storage, where the tile size is currently fixed at 256×256 pixels. Tiles can be located in constant time, and even mmap()'d.
It is extensible to support other data formats. Currently, only RGBA 32-bit float formats are specified, but others can be added.

Barak Itkin: That's it! No more exams!

noreply@blogger.com (LightningIsMyName) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:49:00 +0000

Finally, I finished all the big university exams :D
This means I can now start to work on GIMP much much more time. As I said in my previous post, We need some feedback from the GIMP community =)

These two months until the next semester will also give me some more time to put into music and photography - two things whwich I haven't dedicated enough time to lately...

Ruben Vermeersch: F-Spot 0.7.2 Released!

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:33:59 +0000

I’ve just pushed F-Spot 0.7.2 out into the world, four weeks after the F-Spot 0.7.1 release. This was a very busy cycle (in part due to GUADEC), but despite all that we’ve continued our path of fixing loads of bugs (closed over 50 of them) and making it generally much more solid.

No big earth-shattering user-visible new features in this release: the focus has mostly been on fixing breakage and solidifying what we have. All of this to make sure that F-Spot 0.8.0 (the next release, in 4 weeks from now) will be stable and supportable over a long period of time. This will allow us to make big and radical changes during the 0.9 cycle, which starts together with the 0.8.0 release and will last for 6 months. More on that in a future post.

Get your hacking shoes on.

You can now build, develop and debug F-Spot in Monodevelop

From a developer point of view, there was a very big change though: F-Spot can now be completely built using the Monodevelop IDE. You still have to do the initial ./autogen.sh; make; make install to make sure all the native code is built, but afterwards everything can be done in Monodevelop.

We want to make it super trivial to dive in, similar to how things work in the Banshee Awesome Factory (Gabriel Burt gave a great talk about this at GUADEC 2010, check it out once the recording is online!). This is an ongoing process.

Getting the code
You can get all of this goodness through GNOME FTP, the OpenSUSE build service or the F-Spot team PPA (packages will be up shortly). More info can be found in the full release announcement.

Allan Brito: Sculptris é comprado pela Pixologic

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 02:55:43 +0000

Já faz alguns dias que divulguei aqui no blog o lançamento de uma ferramenta destinada a trabalhar com escultura digital chamada de Sculptris, fruto do experimento de um desenvolvedor da Suécia chamado Tomas Petterson. A ferramenta oferecida diversos recursos avançados para escultura digital e inclusive estava levando usuários que adquirem licenças comerciais do ZBrush e [...]

Bastien Nocera: Old skool GNOME

noreply@blogger.com (hadess) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 01:02:47 +0000

Some of us were discussing olden UIs during this year's GUADEC, including the original Totem UI. Searching through my old files, I found some interesting screenshots.

That includes an early version of Soundbox, the predecessor to Rhythmbox (it was later renamed to Rhythmbox as the name Soundbox was already used by some piece of software).

CDDB-enabled, incredible

Also of interest, abc, the audio-CD burner equivalent of sound-juicer, a bonobo-ised version of Rhythmbox, early versions of Vanity (my Cheese-before-Cheese webcam tool), and instructions on how to flash my netBook (click the link, you'll be surprised).

And a screenshot of Totem circa June 2002 (the first public release was in July 2002).

Totem with the original interface designed by task-pooper man

Adam Celarek: Krita GSoC: Colour selectors once more

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 00:14:53 +0000

My last blog was long ago. I know, this is bad, i should blog every week, but well i didn’t really had interesting news.

I was doing very much small changes, tweaks, bug fixes, layouting code and much more. The last bigger addition was the minimal shade selector, I will talk about it in a few lines.

But first here is a small summary, of what i was doing since the last blog post: I’ve connect the colour selectors to the resource manager, made the settings save to kritarc, added a tab in krita preferences (thanks Boud for the new registry, that was needed for that), added a colour history, moved the settings button to a more space efficient place, implemented drag and drop for colours, shortcuts for quick access and an api for setting a colour. The last point was actually much more difficult, than it sounds, because of the way, the selectors work with colour spaces. The selector has to search for the colour, that generates the user visible colour by using the colour spaces. Here is an attempt to explain it graphically.

Lets turn to a slightly more interesting thing, the minimal shade selector. Probably some pictures are better than 1000 words

It’s the bottom part with the gradients / patches.

Here is the configuration dialog.

And the combo box for selecting the gradients.

You can select one of the predefined gradients or configure one in the highlighted area.

That’s it for now..

Next Tuesday I’m going on a motorcycle trip to Constanta, which certainly will take a few days. So in that time I will be offline. Hopefully the weather will be ok

Aditya Bhatt: [digiKam GSoC] Face Tags progress

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:12:35 +0000

The GSoC deadline is coming soon, so here’s what I’ve done so far:

Face detection is now almost fully integrated into digiKam, you can scan photographs in all of your albums by clicking the “Scan for faces” button in the new People Sidebar on the left.

Scanning your albums for people

The scanner uses the same progress dialog as the already-existing image fingerprint generator for the fuzzy searches uses. It has resume support, of course.

You can configure your detection and recognition accuracy :

Tune speed, accuracy, etc.

The new People Sidebar has a rescan button and a filtered tag tree view that only shows tags below the “People” tag. So yes, we’re using normal digiKam tags to organize people, and not some separate marking.

By default, images with detected faces go into the “Unknown” tag. Once you tag all people in the an image, the “Unknown” tag is unassigned for it.

In a recent change, People Tagging now supports grouping people into categories. You could, for example, make a new sub tag of “People” named “Family”, and drag-move all family members names to it. Later, whenever a family member is tagged, the tag below “Family” will be assigned to him/her, instead of creating a new tag below the “People” tag. No, you can’t have two people with the same name (as of now).

People Sidebar

Clicking on a person name in the tag tree will show you all photos that have that person in them. We also have a normal tag sidebar on the right (not shown here), using which you can select any two or more persons to see photos with all of these in them. Of course, this is standard tag behavior.

And here’s the region tagging in the image preview:

Face region tagging

Most of the region tagging widget’s code is lifted straight from the nepomuk-peopletag widget and the rectangle-region tagging class is now exported by libkface. It isn’t awesome, has a few glitches, but it works. Will be improved later.

Dismiss a face (or non-face ) by clicking on the red cross, and approve a name by pressing the tick mark, upon which the tag is immediately applied. If a face is not detected (happens), you can add your own face region tag.

The iconview-based tagging is to be done later this week . There were some deep changes required in digiKam model-view code which my co-mentor Marcel is working on. Once these changes are done, it should be easy to have faces as icons in the iconview, with a text entry widget below each face thumbnail, etc. The face recognition code is already there in the FaceIface interface I’ve written in digiKam, but will be used only with the iconview.

I probably could have done things faster, but real life gets in the way. My new semester started half a month ago, so my work pace isn’t exactly what I’d like. I’ll blog about work as soon as I finish the recognition.

Also, we’re releasing digiKam 2.0 on Christmas, this December. The current release is 1.3.0. The plan is to release 1.4.0 and probably 1.5.0 as bugfix/incremental releases. There will be a 2.0 beta about a month before it’s release. 2.0 will have all the 3 huge GSoC projects merged in. So that gives me a lot of time to fix things, improve/change the recognition algorithm, etc.

Anyway,

I’m going to :

Gilles is organizing the event in his home city, Aix en Provence, near the famous city of Marseille in France, so kudos to him.

I’ll be discussing parts of my project like usability issues, fixing my crappy GUI code, and will do some bugfixes. And finishing off possibly unfinished parts of my project.

Looking forward to meeting with the great team, and a big thank-you to Claudia and the e.V for sponsoring everything!