Graphics Planet

Thorsten Wilms: Ubuntu Brainstorm Help 2

Sun, 11 May 2008 19:37:51 +0000

Sketches for a series of icons to illustrate the main aspects of the Ubuntu Brainstorm site: Post, Vote, Discuss, See, Participate.

Part 1
Nicola’s selection

Scribus Project: Mailing list moved to scribus.info

Sun, 11 May 2008 15:58:05 +0000

Scribus Users mailing list was moved to lists.scribus.info.

lucille 開発日記: Weekly progress: ~11, May 2008

Sun, 11 May 2008 14:16:42 +0000

I’d like to report this week’s progress of syoyo’s activilty - E-mail discussion with renderer writers in worldwide(almost everyday). - Read few SIGGRAPH 2008 papers - Played with Pure language Pure is a functional language with LLVM backend. I like it’s syntax and interoperavility of C language. - rsl2llvm RenderMan Shading Language to LLVM compiler prototype project started. rsl2llvm is written in Python. - [...]

lucille 開発日記: OoO 第二回参加ありがとうございました.

Sun, 11 May 2008 13:51:25 +0000

OoO 第二回に参加いただいた皆様、ありがとうございました。次回は 6 or 7 月を予定しています. その頃にはそろそろ - 今年の EG/SG 論文実装とか, - ○○言語でレンダラ - レンダラコンサルのアウトソース先が本格的にできてくる頃になりそうだと感じています.

Peach Open Movie: The release!

Sun, 11 May 2008 13:08:24 +0000

The dvd gold masters were sent in time to the printer, with as aim the may 15 release. Of course the day after we sent the discs some errors were detected… like stereo sound in the ntsc movie, where 5.1 was more appropriate! New gold masters were sent, but it means that the printer needs extra days too. That means the discs get delivered here now on tuesday May 20th (confirmed date by printer). We then will ship all of them the same day.

The online release of the film will then happen 10 days later, May 30 or 31.
We’re already lining up great mirror websites, sufficient for everyone to watch or download the film the same day!

Really curious to learn your reactions… :)

-Ton-

(BTW: May 17 or 18 is Blender 2.46 release. We’re going to get a good website traffic test!)

Cyrille Berger: Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 : Day 3

noreply@blogger.com (Cyrille Berger) — Sun, 11 May 2008 12:32:41 +0000

For the third day of Libre Graphics Meeting 2008, there were two presentations from people coming from KDE: Emanuele about colors, and Gilles about Digikam.

This picture was taken near the conference center, when we tried to go to a Japanese garden.

That day started by a presentation about the distribution fonts along with HTML page, which triggered a discussion about fonts licensing, and license in general, where some people became very aggressive over the subject, that's why I think license and politics really needs to be moved out of free software, people are nice unless licenses are discussed. Then Peter Sikking discussed how to change the Gimp UI to improve its usability, there are some nice ideas on how to minimize the space lost by dockers, toolbars and toolboxes. Then Andy Fitzsimon made a demonstration of the new stuff in Inkscape like path effect where you can apply a shape to a path.

Then the afternoon started by a talk by Emanuele about the mathematics behind the new colors mixer in Krita (where "blue" + "yellow" gives "green" and not "purple"), while I have followed what he has been doing since I more or less maintain PigmentCMS (the Color Manipulation System in KOffice), it was quite nice to see the reason behind his design decision, and how the whole things work. Then it was the turn of Gilles presentation on Digikam, the two new features he presented that I found most interressing was the light table to be able to compare side by side two pictures in order to compare them, and I also found interesting the integration of geolocalisation.

Then Liam Quin from W3C made a talk to start a proposal about copy/paste of text between Free Software applications, and exchange formating information. Then there was a presentation about node editing using Blender to do photographic retouch. I had to miss the talk about InGimp because my head was starting to explode, it's infortunate since it's an interesting project about collecting information on how an user work with the Gimp.

Boudewijn Rempt: KDE4 spotted!

Sun, 11 May 2008 11:30:17 +0000

Almost everyone at LGM is using Gnome -- there are few KDE desktops to be seen. And no KDE4 desktops at all. Until now: Dave Coffin of DCRaw fame uses KDE4! And XV -- ages since I last saw that.

Dave's presentation was another very satisfying, very technical and deep presentation. This year had quite a good mix of presentations at different levels.

Alexandre Prokoudine: LGM. Take one

Sun, 11 May 2008 07:17:21 +0000

It’s last day here in Wroclaw at LGM. We slowly are wrapping up, and Andy works as a walking shameless plug for eeePC

This conference is unbelievably fun and useful. Can you imagine Dave Coffin, Udi Fuchs, 3×Anders of Rawstudio and Gilles Caulier in just one room? Easily! You just should have been at Libre Graphics Meeting 2008

More details to follow.

By the way, we now have a dedicated Flickr group.

Boudewijn Rempt: Colour

Sun, 11 May 2008 07:00:24 +0000

Colour is a big topic at the Libre Graphics Meeting. Today, Kai-Uwe Behrmann will speak about his Oyranos project. Yesterday, it was Emanuele Tamponi's turn. Emanuele presented his work on the Kubelka-Munk colorspace. His presentation went very well, even though some of the less mathematical-inclined people left at the third slide with formulas. I was glad to see, however, that there are a number of rather more in-depth presentations at this LGM.

Showing off the mixing algorithm in Krita

Emanuele discussed the research in the field of pigment representation and his totally new roundtrip conversion method for going from RGB to a realistic pigment colour representation and back with a high degree of realism and fidelity. There are also way more applications for his work than just the colour mixer in Krita.

Emanuele discussing the finer points of colour theory with SVG guru Chris Lilley

Just like last year, it's a really great conference. It's mostly meeting up and talking and getting to know each other, but there's also real, hard work being done. Gilles Caullier from Digikam fame presented the current and future Digikam and has started all kinds of cooperation with other photo handling applications.

By the way, this is my hotel room:

But Wroclaw is a city with many beautiful spots. We had a nice walk with the Scribus people last night, ending up at a restaurant next to this arch: (which Alexandre Prokoudine was nice enough to photograph for me):

Yesterday we took a walk with Udi Fuchs from UFRaw, his girlfriend and a random collection of other hackers to the Japanese Gardens, which unfortunately was closed, but I managed to make this picture of the Centennial Building, built when Wroclaw was still Breslau:

MenTaLguY: Adobe Does Not Suck

Sat, 10 May 2008 20:49:05 +0000

(This is a follow-on to my post The Adobe Flash Player Deadlock)

I’ve been very pleased to see that, after my original post on March 9, many of my criticisms have been addressed, and I’ve learned that some were simply founded on poor communication. Let’s run through some of them.

Criticism: There is no way for the general public to report flash player bugs.

Originally, your options for reporting bugs were posting comments on a certain blog, or filling out the Adobe feature request form at http://www.adobe.com/go/wish. The blog wasn’t particularly encouraging since few of the issues raised there got addressed or even received a positive response (I’m also not linking to the blog because towards the end the exchanges between frustrated Linux users and a beleaguered Adobe project manager make both sides look needlessly bad).

I had also not been aware of the wishlist form as an accepted avenue for reporting bugs, but the current version of the page makes that a little more clear and easier to find in a search on Adobe’s site. However, the wishlist form still isn’t very ideal. Rather than a black hole to send “wishes” into, I’d really been hoping for a public bug tracker where you can actually see the fate of your problem report. Even Sun, in their most obnoxious days, had such a thing for Java.

Thankfully, as of April 8, Adobe finally has a public bug tracker for flash: http://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer.

This criticism is now completely addressed.

(Many thanks to Marnen for filling me in on this point.)

Criticism: Adobe is not devoting sufficient resources to the Linux Flash player for it to remain viable.

I had based this criticism on Adobe’s public statements and history so far. After an initially promising release of Flash 9 (Linux Flash had previously languished buggily at verison 7 for an extended time), subsequent Flash 9 releases were increasingly infrequent and full of new regressions. Adobe was supposedly going to make a big push for Linux with the release of AIR, but when Adobe actually released AIR 1.0 in February, they omitted support for the Linux platform since (according to the AIR FAQ at the time) they had to “wait on the core Flash Player’s support for Linux to be finalized.” All these things together painted a very ominious picture for the future of Flash on Linux.

On March 30, however, Adobe released an alpha version of AIR for Linux, showing that they were making a serious effort to support the platform. I suspect that the reason for the falloff in Flash 9 support is the result of Adobe reallocating programming resources to Flash 10/AIR, although it would be nice if Adobe publicly announced their plans the same way that they did for 64-bit Photoshop, so people wouldn’t be left to conclude that, absent released software, they didn’t have any serious plans at all.

This criticism is probably unfounded to the extent that Adobe is doing the best they reasonably can as long as they are not accepting outside help by opening development of their own player (which itself would require a significant initial investment of resources that Adobe may not have).

However…

Criticism: There is no finalized release of the Flash player for Linux which is stable enough to use for development work.

It’s still the case that the latest Flash Player 9 takes out my browser multiple times an hour if I use it heavily (FlashBlock has helped mitigate this issue for casual use). Since Linux is my preferred development platform, there’s no way I could see myself developing for it until this changes.

(A few people have asked me why I think Adobe has to be altrustic and expend resources supporting Linux. They don’t, of course. But then I don’t have to be altrustic and bend over backwards to develop for an RIA platform that doesn’t have good support for the development platform I normally use either. Remember that the original post was about why I personally didn’t want to develop for Adobe’s platform.)

For now this criticism remains unaddressed, although with the alpha release of AIR for Linux I have hope that it might be addressed this year.

Criticism: Adobe is putting up roadblocks for open source Flash player implementations.

Even when Adobe finally published specifications for the flash format, they carried restrictions which prevented using them to implement your own flash player. Interviews with Adobe employees in the past had also indicated that Adobe was concerned about retaining control of its platform. Worse, in March they had announced their intent to make DRM part of the flash platform, introducing an additional obstacle for Open Source players.

However, just this month (May), Adobe launched the Open Screen Project and removed the restrictions on the use of their specifications. Some have called this a PR stunt, since the way it worked out Adobe hadn’t relaxed the restrictions on the specifications until all the information published in them had been reverse-engineered by the developer community anyway. However, I think calling it a PR stunt misses an important point—the Open Screen Project is specifically a signal that Adobe is no longer directly hostile to alternate Flash Player implementations.

This criticism is largely addressed; DRM remains an issue on the horizion, but Adobe’s public stance against non-Adobe players has clearly changed.

Criticism: Adobe doesn’t consider broad platform support for Flash to be important.

Historically, aside from Flash Lite (which is fairly different to the regular Flash platform), Adobe’s official support for Flash has mostly extended to PPC OS X and x86-32 OS X and Windows. There’s been the rather flaky and inconsistent support for x86-32 Linux (and the zombie-like revival of some version of the PPC Flash 7 plugin for the Wii), but that’s about it. The thing is, until you are able to support a certain number of platforms, the incremental cost of supporting each additional platform is extremely high. There’s essentially a knee in the graph, and Adobe is still quite far from reaching it.

As Sun discovered with Java, truly broad platform support is really only possible with an open source implementation of the platform. The community-developed zero-assembler Hotspot has enabled the JVM to be brought to a wide variety of new platforms which didn’t have Sun Java before with extremely little initial effort, and soon may start leveraging LLVM for cross-platform JIT performance. Flash will not be able to catch up in terms of platform support until at least one solid open source implementation of the Flash platform is available. On the evidence of the Open Screen Project, and their previous open-sourcing of the Tamarin runtime, I think Adobe finally realizes this.

I think this criticism was unfounded. Their release of Tamarin in November ought to have been a clue to me that they were waking up about this.

MenTaLguY: Blogging Again

Sat, 10 May 2008 17:18:28 +0000

Job stress had really gotten to me the past couple months, to the point where I really didn’t have the time or energy to blog. Now that I’ve made some needed changes, I’ve got quite a lot of ideas piled up to blog about. I will try to pace myself and do it in small chunks, to avoid a yeggesplosion.

Cyrille Berger: Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 : Day 2

noreply@blogger.com (Cyrille Berger) — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:59:29 +0000

Yesterday was the second day of the meeting, Emanuele has finally arrived and made his final preparation for its talk which is going to happen later today. I aslo finally met Gilles Caullier of Digikam.

We all meet in that nice building of the Technological University of Wroclaw:

Yesterday starded with a talk from Boudewijn about the reason that drive him to work on Krita, so it was mostly an overview of what has been happening in the Academic and Commercial world around digital simulation of painting. Then Pablo did a demo of what you can do with Hugin, panorama and also image calibration to feed the lensfun database, which is cool project whose intention is to allow to easily find the distortion correction parameters for lenses, instead of spending time playing with the parameters.

In the afternoon, we had an interesting talk on how "coders" and "designers" interact, and the problem and solution you can use to make both worlds work together. Then there was a demo of Scribus. And the day finished with an OpenICC meeting to discuss what has been done, what needs to be done, and what we are currently doing at OpenICC, to bring more color management on the linux desktop.

Boudewijn Rempt: Is it already the third day

Sat, 10 May 2008 07:00:22 +0000

Of the Libre Graphics Meeting? It seems it is... Emanuele has arrived, as has Gilles Caullier -- doubling the KDE attendance compared to last year. Next year we really must, must, must, must! bring the ksvg2 people, the karbon people -- everyone interested in graphics and free software should be here. The KDE e.V. should start saving up, because it's likely that next year's venue will be Singapore.

My impressions of Poland... The language really threw me off. I've never been in a country where I couldn't understand more than one or two words, and only today I managed "goodbye" in Polish -- and I still couldn't spell it. The train journey from Berlin to Wroclaw was awesome! So much countryside! Beer is fair to great, food is somewhat difficult. But last night we went to a very expensive, high-class restaurant and had a really great dinner -- for about 20 Euro's. Wonderful mushrooms, fresh vegetables, not too salty. I am sorely tempted to go there again before I leave Wroclaw. Wroclaw is a very interesting city with a lot of very beautiful spots. I've recharged my camera batteries, so I might be able to post some pictures when I find my usb cable.

Our hotel, the Hotel Polonia is a once in a lifetime experience. We probably shouldn't have gone there. The entrance looks more like a sex shop than a hotel. The decor is authentic fifties. The rooms are dusty, musty and run-down. The lights tend to be broken, the beds are extremely uncomfortable. And I suspect that On the plus side, there's theater stage in the breakfast room, and breakfast is pretty good. And there's a 24h shop and a taxi stop nearby.

I've given my presentation: it was a bit more generic than last year: the topic was natural media simulation, the field and the future. For most people in the attendance it was a first introduction to the field, and I'm not sure I didn't overwhelm then. But I got very favorable reactions.

Pippin's talk about Gegl was not only deliciously technical and accompanied by frenzied recompiling, but also too long: I had to skip the end to attend Chris Lilley's SVG talk. We had a great OpenICC bof. As with the previous LGM there's a healthy mix of coders, designers and artists, and the artists are giving presentations, too, which is great!

Cyrille Berger: Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 : Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Cyrille Berger) — Fri, 09 May 2008 17:14:33 +0000

I arrived in Poland two days ago for the Libre Graphics Meeting 2008. It's an interesting conference where developers and users of graphics applications open source application meet and discuss.

The afternoon before the start of the conference, I had some time to do a little tour of the city:

The first talk on the first day was about Hugin, the panorama creation tool. Then there was one about Phatch, it's a batch processing tools which is very similar to Workflow, except that Phatch is dedicated to image manipulation, and was released.

Then the afternoon started by a talk by some Bruxelles designers who use open source software to do their job. Then there was a presentation about Font and Free Software: the tool to create fonts and how the best way to propagate your work.

Then there was the yearly gegl presentation which was much more technical than previous years, and concentrating on some internal of gegl, it's quiet interesting to see how different and similar are the core of Krita and gegl (the future core of the Gimp). Then I went to a presentation on the upcoming SVG 1.2, and new cool features like movies as background of a text.

Thorsten Wilms: Popup Scrollbar Concept Demo

Fri, 09 May 2008 08:27:44 +0000

It has been a while since I came up with the original concept which proved to be hard to get across. But now there’s a Python-GTK demo, a GTK feature request and a narrated video

Ogg Theora from archive.org

Thanks to drew Roberts for helping me with ponunciation, it would be worse without him

Yuval Levy: When the dust settles

Fri, 09 May 2008 04:37:31 +0000

It's a few week before the official coding starts. The students are bonding nicely with the community. Ideas are flowing, and some patches too. I can't wait to see what they will do when they are officially on Google's payroll and assigned to work full time on hugin. While Pablo and Alexandre P. are at LGM, time to introduce properly this year's team that will participate in the Google Summer of Code. There is a lot to be written, and more may come over the next few months as the summer unfolds. For now, here is an overview of the six projects we're working on, of the people, and of exciting things to come.

Akkana Peck: Feeding Fledgelings

Fri, 09 May 2008 04:30:23 +0000

After I wrote about the mockingbird fledgelings the other day, someone asked me how long the parents keep feeding them. I checked past blog entries -- that year they fledged on June 25, were still being fed on July 10 and were still EEPing but no longer being fed on July 20. A little over two weeks.

Two of this year's chicks, who fledged four days ago, can fly pretty well now for short bursts, but they tire very quickly and can't stay up for a long flight.

Just now, at sunset, Oak (I'm naming them for to the trees they ended up in when they fledged) flew from the oak over to the back porch roof and spent ten or fifteen minutes begging from there, in nice view of my office window. He was EEPing louder than the other chicks, and both parents were feeding him as fast as they could find bugs. Oak is as big as a towhee, and fat and fluffy, with a spotted breast and a short stubby tail less than two inches long. He still has some of that scrowly wide yellow bill that says "Feed me, mama!"

At one point a parent showed up with a pyracantha berry, but Oak was already being fed. The parent tried a little squawk, maybe to see if Cedar wanted anything, but almost dropped the berry in the process. So with an air of "oh, what the heck!" it swallowed the berry.

Then Cedar started crying from the chinquapin (or whatever the weird tree in the backyard is) and drew the parents' attention away from Oak. After another few minutes of fruitless eeping Oak decided to get some of that action and joined Cedar. Then they both flew down to the lawn, where for the first time I could see both at the same time. Cedar is a lot slimmer than Oak, but with a longer tail, maybe half the length of an adult's.

Oak was in the wildflower bed, actively hunting for food and occasionally finding something to swallow, though I don't have a lot of confidence that they were insects rather than dirt clods. Cedar wasn't hunting for food very actively, but took a few desultory pecks at the pavement and once picked up and swallowed something (a piece of a leaf, I think). Every now and then one parent would glide in from the front yard, and whichever chick noticed it first and eeped would get fed.

I haven't seen Holly today. I thought I heard some eeping from the direction of the holly in the front yard, but never definitely located the third chick.

The evening wore on, though, and the chicks have found trees to roost in for the night and have finally stopped eeping. Mom is taking a well-deserved break while Dad sings the family a lullaby.

Jon Phillips: links for 2008-05-09

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:49:15 +0000

BBC NEWS | Technology | TorrentSpy ordered to pay $110m

This is bullshit. What year is this?

(tags: copyright, 2008, bittorrent, pirates, sharing)

Máirín Duffy

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:31:54 +0000

SVG Source

Rodney Dawes: Olympics and China Tours

Thu, 08 May 2008 18:52:17 +0000

If you were planning on going to the Summer Olympics in Beijing this year, but have not yet purchased your tickets, then be glad you waited. Turn your trip to see the Olympics into a tour of China, and save money with the whole package. Go to http://skyhoppertravel.com/china2008/ to book your tickets for a 9 day or more tore of china, including the Beijing Olympics, starting at $1499.00 departing from LAX.

lucille 開発日記: rsl2llvm, RSL to LLVM IR compiler

Thu, 08 May 2008 16:07:28 +0000

After some discussion with renderer writers in the world(All is done in English, indeed!), I’ve decied to launch a prototype RSL(RenderMan Shading Language) to LLVM compiler project, rsl2llvm. rsl2llvm is the prototype project to quickly find what will be the problem when we use LLVM as a shader VM and translate RSL to LLVM IR. For quickly investigate [...]

Máirín Duffy: Fedora Stickers

Wed, 07 May 2008 00:34:04 +0000

Inkscape source is here (~~temporarily; I have very little hosting space o_O~~ thanks skvidal!)

Now that I have more space, also enjoy the Scribus source for above sticker sheet (with proper Fedora colors) as well as this design for a sheet to be included with Fedora 9 presskit:

(PDF behind the link)

What do u think?

Alexandre Prokoudine: Printing food

Tue, 06 May 2008 19:11:46 +0000

What is it? Cooking classes?

Nooo! This is actually a Print Party by Open Source Publishing that is ongoing right now in a Wroclaw pub, just two days before Libre Graphics Meeting 2008. If you are around, don’t miss out tomorrow’s type design workshop.

Meet the GIMP: Episode 044: Splitting myself!

info@meetthegimp.org — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:56:53 +0000

Video again available - new version.

There were problems playing the video on Apple iTunes and iPods. Perhaps the update to 8.04 made more damage….
This week I am absolutely late with the show. I recorded on the weekend and had to find out later, that I had messed up the sound.

As an emergency fill in I made this. It’s a project I wanted to do for a long time - and did now without anny planning and preparation. I even forgot to take a tripod for the video camera with me. But the lab provided a clamp for Erlenmeyer flasks. Worked great.

I got the idea from Allan J. Ager and Simon Taylor from the Tips from the Top Floor Forum.

You can download the four finally used files and a shrinked xcf file as an archive. The full resolution output is here.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Share This Video again available - new version. There were problems playing the video on Apple iTunes and iPods. Perhaps the update to 8.04 made more damage.... This week I am absolutely late with the show. I recorded on the weekend and had to find out later, that I had messed up the sound. As an emergency fill in I made this. It's a project I wanted to do for a long time - and did now without anny planning and preparation. I even forgot to take a tripod for the video camera with me. But the lab provided a clamp for Erlenmeyer flasks. Worked great. :-) I got the idea from Allan J. Ager and Simon Taylor from the Tips from the Top Floor Forum. You can download the four finally used files and a shrinked xcf file as an archive. The full resolution output is here. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.Share This

lucille 開発日記: Playing with Pure

Mon, 05 May 2008 08:07:27 +0000

http://pure-lang.sourceforge.net/ コンパイルが通ったのでちょっと遊んでみました. Pure 言語とはなんぞや Pure とは、和○○○○主演のドラマで,,, と信頼関係のコントのネタに出てきそうですが、そうではなくて、項書換え(term rewriting)ベースの関数型言語です。 Pure 言語の開発者は、同じような特徴の言語として、 Q 言語をすでに開発していますが、 Pure 言語はそれの後継を目論んでいるようです. Pure 言語が Q 言語と異なるところは、先進的な言語的特徴を取り入れているところと、 LLVM バックエンドの採用で高速に実行できるところです. (どんだけ高速に実行できるのかは不明) また LLVM バックエンドを採用していることで、 C 言語との親和性も高いです. とりあえず使ってみる pure 言語は、かなり C 言語に似ています. コメントは C/C++ と同じ //, /* ~ */ になっています. また、式の終わりには ; が必要です. PURELIB の環境変数が通っていないと、式を評価してくれなかったり、サンプルが動かないので注意です. $ pure > square x = x * x; > square 5; 5 * 5 $ export PURELIB=/path/to/pure/lib $ pure > square x = x * x; > square 5; 25 system.pure 標準モジュールを使うことで、標準 C 関数を使うことができます. > using system; > [...]

Rodney Dawes: Lost Ones

Mon, 05 May 2008 01:13:04 +0000

You might win some, but you really lost one
You just lost one. It's so silly how come
When it's all done, did you really gain from
What you done done. It's so silly how come
You just lost one..
You just Lost One

Akkana Peck: Chicks everywhere

Sun, 04 May 2008 20:24:00 +0000

It's definitely spring now! The air is filled with the cheeping of baby birds demanding feeding.

I thought we didn't have a nesting mockingbird pair this year, because there's been almost no singing. I've heard chicks cheeping from the yard across the street, but nothing in our yard.

Until today, that is. This morning, there's a mocker chick in the holly tree in the front yard and another one in the red oak in the back yard, both making noisy demands to be fed. The parents are having a hard time, between hunting and flying back and forth between the two chicks.

The chicks are staying too high up for any good photos, but they're easy to see in binoculars. They're a bit bigger than house sparrows, but still very baby-like, with short tails, fluffy spotted downy chests and big wide yellow bills. They can flutter from branch to branch pretty well, but aren't comfortable going farther than that, especially on this windy morning. I wonder if the wind explains how the two fledgelings ended up in trees so far apart?

(Update a couple of days later: turns out there are actually three chicks. One of them is confident enough to fly in the open and perch on power lines; the other two haven't moved from their respective trees.)

I'm hearing lots of California towhee pings, too (they make a noise like a submarine sonar ping) and there's a towhee pair foraging more actively than usual in the garden, so I'm pretty sure there are some towhee chicks somewhere nearby, getting ready to fledge.

After watching the fledgelings in the yard for a while, I decided to take a peek at some Peregrine falcon webcams. The IndyStar falcon-cam is easy -- two views to choose from, and it pops up a window with an image that refreshes every 30 seconds. Works everywhere. The San Jose falcon-cam is a lot trickier, since their page is loaded with elaborate "pop up the Microsoft Windows Media Player plug-in, and if you don't have that, you're out of luck" code. But Sarah and I and some folks in #linuxchix worked it out a few months ago before there was much to see: it's actually a Realplayer stream, which realplay itself can't play but vlc sometimes can: vlc rtsp://bird-mirror.ucsc.edu/birdie-sj.sdp

It doesn't work every time -- I have to try it five or six times before I get anything. I'm told that this is a common problem -- RTSP streams are notorious for having problems with NAT, so if you're anywhere behind a firewall, keep cheeping with vlc and eventually the server will feed you some falcon images.

lucille 開発日記: MCUDA: An Efficient Implementation of CUDA Kernels on Multi-cores

Sun, 04 May 2008 14:02:57 +0000

MCUDA: An Efficient Implementation of CUDA Kernels on Multi-cores John Stratton, Sam Stone, Wen-mei Hwu http://www.gigascale.org/pubs/1278.html 最近お気に入りの gigascale.org から CUDA を CPU でも動くようにフレームワークを作ってみたよ、 CPU でも効率的にコードが動くことがわかったよ、という論文。効率は、チューンされた CPU コードを 1 とすると、 MCUDA でコードした同等のプログラムは 1/2 であったとのこと。このパフォーマンスのロスは、データの局所化のセットアップなどの余計な処理が原因のようです。 CUDA は G80 にべったりな仕様ですが、まあ言語自体は複雑ではないので CPU にマップするのはさほど難しくないでしょう。ただし論文が言うように、最適化の方向性は CPU と GPU ではすこし変わってきますね. でもそこはコンパイラで吸収できるでしょう。ただ、CUDA の実行モデル自体がプロセッサでの実行に適しているわけで、 CUDA にうまくマッピングできるプログラムなら、まあべつに MCUDA を使わなくても CPU でも効率に実行できるわけです. とはいえ、同じコードで CPU でも GPU でも動くというのはプログラムを書く方にとってはうれしいですね。それにどうせ (GP)GPU はなくなるんですから、MCUDA があれば GPU がなくなっても CPU にそのままスイッチできるという利点があります. – うーん、でも CUDA 化しやすいプログラムなんて、実世界から見れば 1 [...]

Máirín Duffy: Colonel Tigh for President

Sat, 03 May 2008 17:26:35 +0000

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

Cylons for McCain, Meg Muckenhoupt, the Boston Phoenix.

Jon Phillips: The Real Carbon Offset

Sat, 03 May 2008 17:12:45 +0000

For anyone trying to offset your carbon footprint: Get a shovel, dig a hole, and bury yourself. I’ll take volunteers to do this first and I will document the whole process from start to near finish.

Hubert Figuière: demosaic and pixbuf

Sat, 03 May 2008 15:58:43 +0000

I just committed some code in libopenraw that allow displaying digital camera RAW files in eog (or anything else using GdkPixbuf). The colors and the gamut are still off, that's because I only perform the demosaic.

Just to be clear, I haven't changed a single line of code in eog. It is the stock version from openSUSE 10.3.

lucille 開発日記: OoO 第二回開催通知

Sat, 03 May 2008 15:26:57 +0000

OoO グループの方には既に通知済みですが、オフラインレンダラ野郎のためのオフライン勉強会、通称 OoO の第二回を、以下のように開催します. 日時: 5 / 10 (土) 13:00 - 19:00 場所 : 恵比寿ガーデンプレイス SGI 株式会社様(31F) 集合: 13:00 B1F ホール(マックの隣) http://www.sgi.co.jp/company_info/map1.html お時間のある方はご参加ください. 「えっ！アレがアレするって!?」というオフラインレンダラ界隈の動向が聞けたりするやもよ. 詳細はこちらへ. http://groups.google.com/group/oooo_renderist/ web/ooo%20%E7%AC%AC%E4%BA%8C%E5%9B%9E%E9%96%8B%E5%82%AC%E9%80%9A%E7%9F%A5

lucille 開発日記: Black-Scholes option calculation in MUDA

Sat, 03 May 2008 14:58:49 +0000

MUDA で Black-Scholes オプションプライシングの計算をやってみました. http://lucille.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/lucille/angelina/haskellmuda/examples/BlackScholes/ 参考にしたのは CUDA の SDK から. static always_inline vec cndMUDA(vec d) { vec A1 = 0.31938153f; vec A2 = -0.356563782f; vec A3 = 1.781477937f; vec A4 = [...]

Jon Phillips: Photos from Guangzhou China Town Demolitions and Linux Photo Sharing Question

Sat, 03 May 2008 06:17:39 +0000

AhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHhhhhhh! Our time in Guangzhou is nearing an end for this spell. I have not adequately covered what Lu and I have been up to. Here are some immediate photos taken of Guangzhou which illustrate the dynamism of where we live right now.

Photos below by Lu Fang under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

We discovered this village a couple of blocks from our house was being destroyed to make way for new housing and skyscrapers which you’ll see at the end of this.

Also, a few of my colleagues will be happy to note that a W hotel and Ritz-Carlton are being built on these grounds — ironies abound. The other day as well, helped my wife’s parents plant some plants. They wanted me to help dig out this huge *rock* in the ground. That rock happened to be a big multi-colored chunk of rubble from the village that lays under where we live — some kind of rock!

I need to get into photo dumping online. What is the linux workflow that others use to get photos from camera, to desktop, to flickr, Internet Archive, etc? I just took a hard look at just uploading all my photos to Internet Archive, but the interfaces are not there for photo fun nor conversion to other formats, and the biggest part is lack of active community. Any thoughts?

Jon Phillips: Obama 2008 Has Already Won Discussion with Chinese Granpda Agong

Sat, 03 May 2008 06:01:50 +0000

Lu’s grandpa, Agong, who is 97 years young, asked me why the American elections take so long. This is a daily occurrence here in Guangzhou, especially in the south of china, as many are convinced that some form of democracy or rule by the people is coming. It is just a matter of time. This is one of the unwritten rules of China: the farther you get from the capital, the more people speak their minds. You could also say the further people get away from Beijing, the more lawlessness, but that is another story altogether (I would also say the other unwritten rule is that as long as you phrase anything in terms of business, you are better off with the government. So instead of addressing problems with GFW in terms of censorship of free speech, address it in terms of increased transactions costs and bad business — in what business is getting 70% of your order ever okay?)

Anyway, I didn’t have a great answer to Agong this time, and conceded that this battle between Obama and Clinton has gone on way too long. Look at the intrade charts! Come on!

2008 US Presidential Elections

Source: Dynamic, compound prediction market charts from InTrade

2008 US Presidential Election Winner - Individual

And, while yes, I agree that Obama is elitist, my daily read of the commercially focused American media is compared against the intrade charts.

SO, at the end of the day I told Agong, “Obama has already won the democratic nominee and the presidential race is a lot closer.” Of course, something abominable could happen to derail this prediction market, but it is super crucial to get Hillary out of the race now and focus all conceptual and ideological nukes onto McCain. Geez, does McCain represent you? Obama! Obama! Temporary Dictator is the best of the worst as I’ve previously pushed At least there is some feeling that the common persons efforts are connected to the presidential selection compared to selection of the temporary dictator in China. So with that being said, that is the most nationalism you are going to see out of me, quite unlike the red-guard-like red nationalism inside of China directed at CNN and French-connected Carrefour.

Jon Phillips: links for 2008-05-03

Sat, 03 May 2008 00:54:14 +0000

信息时报 - 2008年4月26日 - AT4:酷玩集中营版 - 装置艺术：非花样，实验中的形式

Cool, Lu got some press about her artwork in Chinese news publication

(tags: art china network lufang deerfang 2008 guangzhou online print press hit presshit)

Akkana Peck: Two font mysteries solved

Fri, 02 May 2008 22:58:00 +0000

This has been a good week for fonts: two longstanding mysteries solved.

The first concerns the bitstream vera sans mono I've been using as a terminal font in apps like rxvt and xterm. I'd been specifying it in ~/.Xdefaults like this:
XTerm*font: -bitstream-bitstream vera sans mono-bold-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso10646-1

The mystery is that I'd noticed that in xterm, the font looked slightly different -- slightly uglier -- than in rxvt (both apps use the same X class name of XTerm). It was hard to put my finger on what was different -- the shape of all the letters looked the same, but it just seemed a little more ragged, and a little less compact, in xterm. I figured it was just a minor difference in their drawing code, or something.

Well, I was fiddling with fonts (trying to get the new-to-me "Inconsolata" font working) and I noticed that iso10646 bit. I didn't know what 10646 was, but shouldn't it be 8859-1 or 8859-15, the codes for the Latin-1 alphabet? After finishing up my Inconsolata experiments, when I set the font back to Vera I changed the line to XTerm*font: -bitstream-bitstream vera sans mono-bold-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-15 and moved on to other things.

Until the next morning, when I booted up to a surprise: my main terminal window no longer fit on the screen. It seems it had reverted to the other (uglier) version of Vera Sans Mono, which is also very slightly taller, so instead of being a couple of lines shorter than the screen height, it was a couple of lines too tall to fit.

I checked .Xdefaults -- yes, it was still Vera. What was going on? I finally remembered the one thing I had changed: the language setting on the font, from 10646-1 to 8858-15. I changed it back: sure enough, now the font was pretty again and the terminal was short enough to fit.

I fired up xfontsel and did some experimenting. It turned out the difference between the two almost-identical Vera sans mono bold roman fonts is a field xfontsel calls "spc". It can be either 'c' or 'm'. The 'c' version is the pretty, compact font; the 'm' is the uglier, taller one. For some reason, specifying 10646-1 makes "spc" default to 'c', while 8859-15 makes it default to 'm'. But specifying 'c' in the font specifier gets the good version regardless of which language is specified.

So this would work: XTerm*font: -bitstream-bitstream vera sans mono-bold-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-c-*-*-*

But then I read up on 10646-1 and it turns out to mean "the whole unicode character set". That sounds like a good idea, so I kept it in my font specifier after all: XTerm*font: -bitstream-bitstream vera sans mono-bold-r-normal-*-12-*-*-*-c-*-iso10646-1

(For the moment I still didn't know what spc, c or n meant; read on if you're curious.)

The second insight concerned a longstanding mystery of Dave's. He has been complaining for quite a while about the way Ubuntu's modern pango-based apps all refuse to see bitmapped fonts. (It bothered me too, but less so, because the terminal and editor apps I use can see X fonts.)

Dave has an Ubuntu install on one machine that he's been upgrading release after release, which does see his bitmapped fonts. But any fresh Ubuntu installation fails to see the fonts. What was the difference?

We knew about the trick of going into /etc/fonts/conf.d, removing the symbolic link 70-yes-bitmaps.conf and replacing it with a link to /etc/fonts/conf.avail/70-yes-bitmaps.conf ... But doing that doesn't actually change anything, and bitmap fonts still don't show up.

The secret turned out to be that you need to run fc-cache -fv after changing the font/conf.d links. This apparently never happens on its own -- not on a reboot, not on installing or uninstalling font packages. Somehow it had happened once on Dave's good install, and that's why it worked there but nowhere else.

I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to find out about fc-cache -- there's no man fontconfig, and the /etc/fonts/conf.avail/README offers no clue, just misleadingly says "Fontconfig scans this directory". man fc-cache mentions /usr/share/doc/fontconfig/fontconfig-user.html, which doesn't exist; it turns out on Ubuntu it's actually /usr/share/doc/fontconfig-config/fontconfig-user.html. But wait, that's just an html-ized manual page for fonts-conf, so actually you could just run man fonts-conf ... your guess is as good as mine why the fc-cache man page sends you on a hunt for html files instead.

man fonts-conf is good reading -- it even solves the mystery of that spc parameter. It stands for spacing and can be proportional, dual-width, monospace or charcell. Aha! And there's lots more useful-looking information in that manual page as well.

Rodney Dawes

Fri, 02 May 2008 19:15:47 +0000

This page intentionally left blank.

Garrett LeSage: 이 모든 것이 읽어 봅니다. (I scommessa non è possibile, senza un aiuto!)

Fri, 02 May 2008 18:19:46 +0000

Ich finde es lustig, dass die Leute sich beschweren über andere Sprachen als Englisch auf Planet GNOME… und dass sie tun es in englischer Sprache. Threfore, ich bin dieses Posting nicht auf Englisch, aber einige Google Übersetzt Deutsch.

Pour le mélange encore plus, je pourrais ainsi poste dans d’autres langues. Ce paragraphe est en français.

كما احب العربية ، على الرغم من انني لا يستطيع القراءة او الكتابة ، الا من خلال صور سحريه للترجمة. ومن جميل عندما تبحث اللغة المكتوبة بها على الرغم من ذلك انه سيكون من العار ان لا تدرجهه

自UTF-8存在，我们可以张贴的东西在网路上以多种语文，我可能会以及不会离开了中国。

…または除外日本語、のいずれかです。

Надеюсь этого блога не будет катастрофы в браузере.

Αν σας λέει, “Λοιπόν, δεν μπορώ να διαβάσω όλα αυτά!” Αυτό είναι εντάξει. Αν μπορείτε να διαβάσετε ένα ή περισσότερα, τότε αυτό είναι μεγάλη. Για τα υπόλοιπα, ίσως να λέει, “Αυτός είναι ο Έλληνας που μου!”

Si está ofendido por esta falta de Inglés correo, entonces me siento.

Echter, als je echt wil weten wat ik heb geschreven, kunt u gebruik maken van Google Translate.

क्या एक अच्छा दिन है . मैं आपको डाक से भविष्य में फिर से अंग्रेजी में है .

Peach Open Movie: DVD authoring last bits

Fri, 02 May 2008 17:41:50 +0000

We’re doing the last bits on the dvd set… encoding and authoring a video DVD and collecting and testing all files for the DVD-ROM is just a bit too much work to be really fun… especially for people suffering post-BBB fatigue! :)

Even after about 6-8 manweeks of work on this DVD we could easily add another four or so. Nevertheless, we should now finish! Here’s a quick shortlist of what you can expect, at least:

(more…)

Boudewijn Rempt: And suddenly

Fri, 02 May 2008 17:00:15 +0000

My eldest daughter Naomi started getting interested in drawing and sketching, nicking my paper, buying her own pencils, and becoming quite definitely, better than I have ever been, in about six months:

I'm pretty proud of her work!

Jon Phillips: OCWC Conference in Dalian 2008 and Beijing

Fri, 02 May 2008 08:56:28 +0000

Jose speaking about Knowledge Hub at the Open Ed conference in Dalian, China, Photo by Tom Caswell

I just arrived back home in Guangzhou, China from the OpenCourseWare Conference in Dalian, China last weekend and met many great people (but don’t have the tolerance to write out the contents of my thoughts ;), had many fruitful discussions, and rocked out a good slide deck for ccLearn (and you!). Check out my presentation (or any of my presentations and here), “OER XinXai (NOW!)“:

OER XinXai (NOW)! Dalian OCWC Conference 2008 - Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: OER XinXai (NOW)! Dalian OCWC Conference 2008

The most fruitful part of the conference for me was interacting with Philip Schmidt, Victor from Hewlett Foundation, Chunyan Wang from CC Mainland China, and Stewart Cheifet from Internet Archive. Also, hearing about sustain-o-bility in all its forms as a major consideration for projects, and mentions of CC+, made me quite happy. It also served as a nice place to test out my Mandarin skills for the good or worse of things. Hopefully at the next conference there will be more time for discussion during the conference days.

I jumped up on stage to give a final call for participation to the ccLearn and OER regional meeting at iSummit July 29 - August 1 in order to increase participation by principals in the region. Let’s hope it worked!

After this conference, I directly headed to Beijing where I worked with CC Mainland China team on accelerating business development and assessing great projects which would be great to integrate Creative Commons licensing. If you have an organization in China or any jurisdiction and want to help in this process, check out the page CC Web Integration.

The next stop for me is to head to celebrate Lu’s 27th birthday on May 4th, then onto Japan to meet up Joi, Catharina, Fumi and more (ken!). Then back to Guangzhou, Beijing, then back to Guangzhou, then back in San Francisco May 21 through at least end of July as homebase. Cheers!

Yuval Levy: First May Installer

Fri, 02 May 2008 06:30:07 +0000

This is the first hugin installer in May, and probably not the last one. Fahim Mannan, one of the students that joins us for this year’s Google Summer of Code, is leading the way into the Community Bonding Period. He has helped fix some bugs that warranted for a new snapshot. The other students are [...]

Jon Phillips: links for 2008-05-02

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:42:52 +0000

olafur eliasson show pictures of light artwork

Cool sculptures and show from sfmoma

(tags: art newmedia sfmoma moma contemporary kanyewest)
Science Commons » The Health Commons

John Wilbanks is brilliant and the work Science Commons is doing here is totally amazing and a force to keep tabs on!

(tags: johnwilbanks friend personal sciencecommons presentation)

Hylke Bons: Extending Discovery

Thu, 01 May 2008 23:33:53 +0000

I’m planning to make Discovery a full blown theme to be included with Ubuntu 8.10. For the next release several teams will create different themes. I thought it would be fun to lead such a team. Finishing Discovery icon theme will be the most work i think. Apart from that it needs a nice wallpaper (I’m [...]

Thorsten Wilms: Ubuntu Brainstorm Help

Thu, 01 May 2008 14:32:48 +0000

Nicolas asked for artwork for a Ubuntu Brainstorm help page.

Rough sketches to collect ideas:

Jakub Steiner: Twitm

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:57:27 +0000

I enjoy Twitter a lot. There’s many, many clients for the service. I’ve grown to like Alert Thingy (yes, that’s the actual title) which actually integrates with Friendfeed too.

But I felt a bit ashamed using Adobe AIR. Inspired by garrett’s stylesheet tweets, I created a Prism app bundle that makes Twitter main web-interface nice and compact. It wouldn’t be complete without an icon.

I couldn’t figure out how to nicely integrate the multi resolution icon into the bundle though. While the mac and windows icons can be multi-res, for Linux we get grandpa XPM. I have no idea why the spec defines to use XPM. Such an ancient format incapable of using alpha transparency needs to die. It’s not like gecko would have trouble rendering PNG. Also sad to see my whining hasn’t been fruitful yet. Especially when there’s a library available!

As for how to use this thing — for now you need to copy the individual sizes to ~/.icons/hicolor/. Once you let Prism generate your .desktop file, edit the link to the icon to just say Icon=twitm. That way you get all the sizes nicely thresholded on the panel/menu/desktop.

Maybe using the mobile site would have been safer, but I prefer the javascript character counter, so I went with styling the main site. As soon as the site layout changes, expect brokage :/

New! Download Twitm 0.4

lucille 開発日記: The Pure Programming Language

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:04:11 +0000

The Pure Programming Language http://pure-lang.sourceforge.net/ Pure is a functional programming language based on term rewriting. It has a modern syntax featuring curried function applications, lexical closures and equational definitions with pattern matching, and thus is somewhat similar to languages of the Haskell and ML variety. But Pure is also a very dynamic and reflective language, and is [...]

Rodney Dawes: Removed

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:14:47 +0000

Akkana Peck: How often does updatedb really need to run?

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 04:48:00 +0000

Since updating to Hardy, I've been getting mail from Anacron:

/etc/cron.weekly/slocate:
slocate: fatal error: load_file: Could not open file: /etc/updatedb.conf: No such file or directory

That's the script that updates the database for locate, Linux's fast find system. I figured I must have screwed something up when I moved that slocate cron script from cron.daily to cron.weekly (because I hate having my machine slow to a crawl as soon as I boot it in the morning, and it doesn't bother me if the database doesn't necessarily have files added in the last day or two).

But after talking to some other folks and googling for Ubuntu bugs, I discovered I wasn't the only one getting that mail, and there was already a bug covering it. Comparing my setup with another Hardy user's, I found that the file slocate was failing to find, /etc/updatedb.conf, belongs to a different package, mlocate. If mlocate is installed, then slocate's cron script works; otherwise, it doesn't. Sounds like slocate should have a dependency that pulls in mlocate, no?

But wait, what do these two packages do? Let's try a little aptitude search locate:

p   dlocate                         - fast alternative to dpkg -L and dpkg -S   
p   kio-locate                      - kio-slave for the locate command          
i   locate                          - maintain and query an index of a directory
p   mlocate                         - quickly find files on the filesystem based
i   slocate                         - Secure replacement of findutil's locate

Okay, forget the first two, but we have locate, mlocate, and slocate. How do they relate?

Worse, if I install mlocate (so slocate will work) and then look in my cron directories, it turns out I now have, count 'em, five different cron scripts that run updatedb. They are:

In cron.daily:

locate: 72 lines! but a lot of that is comments and pruning, and a lot of fiddling to figure out what version of the kernel is running to see whether it can pass any advanced flags when it tries to renice the process. In the end it calls updatedb.findutils (note no full path, though it uses a full path when it checks for it earlier in the script).

slocate: A much simpler but unfortunately buggy 20 lines. It checks for /etc/updatedb.conf, runs it if it exists, fiddles with ionice, checks again for /etc/updatedb.conf, and based on whether it finds it, runs either /usr/bin/slocate -u or /usr/bin/slocate -u -f proc. The latter path is what was failing and sending root mail every time the script was run.

mlocate: an even slimmer 12 line script, which checks for /usr/bin/updatedb.mlocate and, if it exists, fiddles ionice then runs /usr/bin/updatedb.mlocate.

In cron.weekly:

Two virtually identical scripts called find.notslocate and find.notslocate.dpkg-new, which differ only in dpkg-new having more elaborate ionice options. They both run updatedb. And which updatedb would that be? Probably /usr/bin/updatedb, which links to /etc/alternatives/updatedb, which probably links to either updatedb.mlocate or updatedb.slocate, whichever you've installed most recently. But in either case, it's hard to see why you'd need this script running weekly if you're already running both flavors of updatedb from other scripts cron.daily. And having two copies of the script is just plain wrong (and there was already a bug filed on it). (As long as you're poking around in cron.daily and cron.weekly, check and see if you have any more of these extra dpkg-new or dpkg-old scripts -- they might be slowing down your machine for no reason.)

Further research reveals that mlocate is a new(ish) package intended to replace slocate. (There was a long discussion of that on ubuntu-devel, leading to the replacement of slocate with mlocate very late in the Hardy development cycle. There was also lots of discussion of "tracker", apparently a GUI fast find tool that can only search in the user's home directory.)

What is this mlocate? The m stands for "merge": the advantage of mlocate is that it can merge new results into its existing database instead of replacing the whole thing every time. Sounds good, right? However, the down side is that mlocate apparently can't to purge its database of old files that no longer exist, and these files will clutter up your locate results. Running locate -e will keep them from being printed -- but there seems to be no way to set this permanently, via an environment variable or .locaterc file, nor to tell updatedb.mlocate to clean up its database. So you'll need to alias locate to locate -e if you want sensible behavior. Or go back to slocate. Sigh.

Cleaning up

The important thing is to get rid of most of those spurious updatedb cron scripts. You might choose to run updatedb daily, weekly, or only when you choose to run it; but you probably don't want five different scripts running two different versions of updatedb at different times. The packages obviously aren't cleaning up after themselves, so let's do a little manual cleanup.

That find.slocate script looks suspicious. In fact, if you run dpkg -S find.notslocate, you find out that it doesn't belong to any package -- not only should the .dpkg-old version not be there, neither should the other one! So out they go.

As for slocate and mlocate, it's important to know that the two packages can coexist: installing mlocate doesn't remove slocate or vice versa. A clean Hardy install should have only mlocate; upgrades from Gutsy are more likely to have a broken slocate.

Having both packages probably isn't what you want. So pick one, and remove or disable the other. If mlocate is what you want, apt-get purge slocate and just make sure that /etc/cron.*/slocate disappears. If you decide you want slocate, it's a little trickier since the slocate package is broken; but you can fix it by creating an empty /etc/updatedb.conf so updatedb.slocate won't fail.

Cyrille Berger: OpenGTL 0.9.2 and linear RGB color space

noreply@blogger.com (Cyrille Berger) — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:51:20 +0000

I finally made a new release of OpenGTL, with a nearly full support of the CTL (Color Transformation Language) syntax. While large part of the standard library is still unavailable, it has all the features currently needed for Krita's color spaces.

This allows to bring color management to color spaces that didn't have that, and most specifically our RGB HDR (High-Dynamic Range) color spaces. It is especially interesting, because we need to have both a linear color space (for most high dynamic range operations, and if you want to do gamma correct scaling) and a non linear (a sRGB color space, which is used for color conversion, mostly with the painterly framework). So we were in need to be able to have profiles on top of those color spaces, and that is exactly what CTL is giving to us.

Back to gamma correct scaling, some times ago someone mentioned to me this link, scaling with non-linear color space gives a wrong result. Before we started using CTL based RGB color space, our HDR color space were an hybrid of sRGB (non-linear) and scRGB (linear) (don't try to understand how we got there, I don't either), and curiously, the scaling was wrong half of the time (don't try to understand it was possible, I don't either), but now, using the linear RGB color space, we can have gamma correct scaling:

Meet the GIMP: Episode 043: Brand New and Stone Age

info@meetthegimp.org — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 16:00:01 +0000

Brand new tech- nology meets stuff from the Stone Age, ehm… the 70’s.

Rawstudio’s 1.0 release sits on the lab bench for a test run. I am impressed by the workflow and the overall appear- ance. The output in the video has some noise in it, but that was my fault.

I had my camera set up to store a RAW and a JPEG image and have put both files and the camera profile into the companion file to this episode. Now you can try to get a better image out of the RAW file than the processor of a Nikon D200.

In a lot of discussions and tutorials you read the term “lith” or “lith film”. One is running in the meetthegimp.org photogroup at 23.hq. I found an old box with real lith film and take you back some decades while describing how I have worked with these sheets of plastic.

Then I try to rebuild one of the effects that were done with lith film in GIMP. I just emulate the effect, but I am working on a process to really simulate the process done with film. You can find the file to this part of the podcast also in the companion file.

How did you like the concept of these two last shows? Not one monolithic block but several shorter segments? I want to offer a mix of different topics in each episode, covering different levels of experience and different interests. I have put up a poll for you to vote on the side bar. If you want to give me more input than just a click, write to info@meetthegimp.org or post a comment here in the blog.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.

Share This Brand new tech- nology meets stuff from the Stone Age, ehm... the 70's. Rawstudio's 1.0 release sits on the lab bench for a test run. I am impressed by the workflow and the overall appear- ance. The output in the video has some noise in it, but that was my fault. I had my camera set up to store a RAW and a JPEG image and have put both files and the camera profile into the companion file to this episode. Now you can try to get a better image out of the RAW file than the processor of a Nikon D200. In a lot of discussions and tutorials you read the term "lith" or "lith film". One is running in the meetthegimp.org photogroup at 23.hq. I found an old box with real lith film and take you back some decades while describing how I have worked with these sheets of plastic. Then I try to rebuild one of the effects that were done with lith film in GIMP. I just emulate the effect, but I am working on a process to really simulate the process done with film. You can find the file to this part of the podcast also in the companion file. How did you like the concept of these two last shows? Not one monolithic block but several shorter segments? I want to offer a mix of different topics in each episode, covering different levels of experience and different interests. I have put up a poll for you to vote on the side bar. If you want to give me more input than just a click, write to info@meetthegimp.org or post a comment here in the blog. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany License.Share This

Boudewijn Rempt: Rijksmuseum Twente

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:00:13 +0000

It's weird, but even though I work together every day with people who live in Enschede, and though I've been told six or seven years ago that the Rijksmuseum Twente is well-worth a visit, I had never been to Enschede before. We had intended today to go to Rotterdam, to the Bojmans van Beuningen museum for the Dutch Primitives exhibition, but went the other way instead, to the Rijksmuseum Twente. At last.

It was well worth a visit: the neoclassicist exhibition with paintings from the Bruges school was rather nice and we bought the catalog. The collection of early Dutch painting is a bit uneven: it contains rather a lot of second or third rate work, but also a few absolute must-have-seen pieces. None of us has ever managed to get interested in modern, abstract art. Too often, a particular piece of modern art only looks good because all the other things surrounding it are even worse junk. The Pjotr Mueller statues were somewhat interesting, though.

The Rijks Twente is a nice place, rather quiet, too: we were three out of maybe ten visitors. Still I don't think museums should forbid visitors to photograph the pieces (if done without flash), that's a bit old-fashioned. And to share one pin card reader among the main desk, museum shop and restaurant is a bit quaint, to say the least. But well worth a repeat visit: they have a history of out-of-the-way exhibitions, especially about unpopular periods in the history of art. And that's something I'm very much interested in.

lucille 開発日記: Manga illustrates job career

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:54:14 +0000

(from 投資世代) The Adventures of Johnny Bunko http://www.amazon.com/Adventures-Johnny-Bunko-Career-Guide/ dp/1594482918 This book seems the first career guide written with Manga. Manga is now “invading” many fields including business field I really feel that (Japanese-style) Manga is changing cultures in worldwide. [Ja] マンガで書かれた(あちらでは)初のキャリアガイド本だそうな. ってか trailer の「ぱかっ」とか「どよーん」とか笑った。日本人じゃないノンネイティブにわかるのだろうか。かといって無理矢理英語にすると、例えば「ゴゴゴゴ」は「Rmmmb」となんともスゴ味のない擬音になるわけで、そう考えると日本語のままのほうがいいのかも.

Dave Neary: OpenOffice.org - a candidate for a 501(c)6?

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:48:03 +0000

Following up from my previous post, there has been some interesting discussion in the comments and elsewhere. One issue in particular came throughh in a couple of comments.

Ted Ts’o is gushing in his praise of the Eclipse project:

Look at Eclipse; it was released by IBM in November, 2001. Within 2 years, it had something like 80 companies participating in the code development, and in less than 2.5 years, a non-profit organization was founded where IBM didn’t even have a majority of seats on the board.

And Michael Meeks brings up the subject of OpenOffice.org governance (which he has written about frequently in the past - by the way, Michael, I can’t find an easy way to link to individual journal entries of yours):

Faced with serious, persistant maladministration and injustice in the ‘communities’ Sun controls - what can you do?

Indeed, Sun has a ways to go make sure that projects they free have a non-negligible contribution from people outside their organisation, and OpenOffice.org is probably the most compelling case for an independent non-profit that they have right now. You have all the elements - significant industry buy-in to the project, multiple companies investing time, financial and human resources in building on the project.

In the comments I argue that OpenOffice.org should consider setting up a 501(c)6 (a trade association) as Eclipse did, to ensure both community and industry participation in the project:

OOo as a project is really too big to be easily accessible to a volunteer community, but the project has succeeded in gaining industry support - an initial board would doubtless include IBM, Sun and Novell as major members, but might also include CollabNet, the French ministry for the interior, maybe NeoOffice and StarXpert?

In any case, the structure of a trade organisation, which aims more to have an ecosystem than a wide-open community, seems more appropriate for a project like OOo. It provides all of the things which Michael Meeks has been calling for - an independant governing body which owns trademarks and copyright, and is answerable to companies and communities in proportion to their contributions.

I also think that it’s important to separate governance in the sense of marketing, infrastructure and industry relations from technical governance. In the case of the Eclipse Foundation, it’s important to note that IBM is still by far the greatest single contributor of code:

And while it’s absolutely correct to laud praise on IBM for Eclipse, it’s worth noting that even now, 7 years after the project has been freed and 5 years after the creation of the Eclipse Foundation, 75% of the committers work for IBM, and an even higher percentage of the check-ins come from IBM employees. So yes, the project has succeeded in establishing an independent governing body, but code talks, and IBM still talks loudest.

Aside from that, I want to reply in particular to something that Ted said in his comment:

Community governance is hard? I’m going to have to call bullshit on that. It really isn’t hard. What’s hard is letting go of control, which Sun has proven to have an extremely hard time doing.

I agree - letting go of control is hard. And I’ve seen many companies struggle with it - Xara, Wengo, Sun, to name a few, and other companies skirt the issue by unashamedly keeping control - Trolltech, MySQL, Alfresco, JBoss, SugarCRM come to mind. It’s a question of expectations. When a company says “sure, we’re happy to work with you, on our terms”, you know where you stand.

But starting a project on Sourceforge, putting 4 years worth of code on there, telling your team of (proprietary) software developers “now you commit there”, and then expecting that Poof! like magic little Code Gnomes start appearing from out of nowhere to make your project better is unrealistic. It really is the difference between “organic” (grown from scratch, by developers for developers) and “non-organic” (code is liberated en masse) projects. If you have absolutely no governance guidelines whatsoever, who’s the maintainer? The manager who manage[ds] the development team in your lab? How well does that work?

Hubert Figuière: exempi 2.0.1

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:19:01 +0000

Just released a bug fix version of exempi. Version 2.0.1 address issues with error handling and some building issues on non-Linux systems.

This is likely to be the last 2.0.x release. 2.1.0 is on its way.

Steven Garrity: Overheard at Canadian Tire, a one-act play

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:16:00 +0000

Setting: Waiting in line at the cash at a Canadian Tire hardware store.

Man (to woman): “Wanna go to WalMart?”

Woman shrugs.

Man picks up laser-pointer from display, shines light in woman’s eyes.

Man: “Cool light.”

Dave Neary: Upgrading to Ubuntu Hardy: a typical dist-upgrade, so far

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:29:16 +0000

I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 from 7.10 today - I set the upgrade going when I went away for lunch, half hoping that it would be done when I got back. So here’s my experiences so far.

The upgrade stopped with a question screen after about 15 minutes. The installer wanted to know if I wanted to replace one config file which I have never touched with the distribution’s version.
After that, the install blocked a further 9 times, one time for an OpenVPN password, when I would have much rathered it carry on without starting the VPN, and eight further times for config files. I had only changed one of these files since my previous upgrade, and would have liked that file to be kept without a question being asked.
After rebooting, my screen was filled with error messages from crashing applet, many of whom have not been installed on my panel since I upgraded from 7.04 (because they didn’t work with 7.10).
Apport was nice enough to offer that I create bugs for each one, which I tried to do, but apparently there was a problem with Firefox after the upgrade due to a release I’d previously installed separately, so that didn’t work until I restarted Firefox, at which point it worked swimmingly. Some bugs reported in Launchpad, but I really lost track of where I was at.
Upgrading Gossip lost old account information. Apparently the DTD for accounts.xml changed, and the new version of Gossip can no longer parse the old accounts file. Bug reported.
The Xrandr applet works again, after being broken in 7.10. Nice.
Dasher still crashes when changing language or dictionary, or when importing training text. Hitting F1 in Dasher does nothing. The Dasher manual installed doesn’t correspond to the Dasher user interface. Bugs reported.
Suspend/resume gave me a black screen the first time. I know stuff is happening when I open the lid; the wifi indicator shows that I have network, the hard drive light is flickering, but I have no screen. I’m hoping it’s a one-off, and that it’ll work now.

All in all, not what I’d come to expect from Ubuntu, although not an unfamiliar experience for me over the years. Perhaps a straight install would work better than a second dist-upgrade on a system that has actually been lived in. I haven’t tried everything yet, obviously, and I’m looking forward to seeing if there are any improvements in the support of my webcam’s driver - although I’m not holding out much hope.

Dave Neary: Trademarks

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:55:27 +0000

Funny, this post has been in my drafts for months… in relation to my earlier post, and since a trademark issue is at the heart of much of the recent OpenSolaris controversy, the time felt right to finish & publish it.

Many moons ago, there was a discussion on the FLOSS foundations mailing list about trademarks for the Nth time, after Simon Phipps proposed having a BOF on the subject at OSCON.

My initial reaction was “I hope that people find something new to talk about”, I’ve been involved in many conversations on the application of trademark law to free software projects, and typically, the range of reactions is:

Defending trademarks is important, and the (US) law requires aggressive defense (the Mozilla or Wikipedia position).
Defending trademarks is important, and we can draft guidelines which allow some community uses of the trademark, but we have to disallow a wide range of things to avoid opening a loophole for malicious use (the GNOME position - the degree to which we’ve succeeded is debatable - or the Perl Foundation).
Defending our community is important, but that doesn’t require a trademark (the Postgres position, or Chris Messina’s community mark idea)

There are lots of data points between all of these (Linux, Open Source, Eclipse, Java, …) which go from the “we didn’t register the mark, and we regret it” which perhaps apply to Linux and Open Source, to “our trademark is a certification mark” for Java. I would say the most common reaction is “we have to register the trademarks! But we have no idea why, or what that means for the project.”

(more…)

lucille 開発日記: Vol. 7

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 14:58:13 +0000

(from wikipedia) Prof. H による渾身の Vol. 7 が出版されていたので早速購入しました。ぬおおぉーーーー、巻を重ねるごとに面白さが指数関数的に上昇している件について〜〜〜〜！いやー、日本人でほんとよかった… 「FKYK」「ルマンド」「闇鍋しよう」「東京湾13号埋立地」「アル中」しかしあれだね、「I am legend」といったらやっぱこっちを想像するよね. 最初、おお、アノ Prof. H の「レジェンド」がなんとハリウッドで映画化されるのか！？って思いましたもん.

Dave Neary: Sun: Trying to do the right thing

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:15:29 +0000

I’ve been annoyed by some of the Sun-bashing that has been going on over the past few months and years. I’ve written in the past about my belief that Sun are trying to do the right thing, and my appreciation for the investment that they’ve put into projects I care about. And yet no matter what they do, it seems like there are nay-sayers working to undermine Sun’s community-building efforts at every turn.

Here’s a few examples of Sun-bashing that I’ve seen recently:

No projects primarily sponsored by Sun get accepted to the Google Summer of Code (unless you count MySQL). Rumour has it that Sun were told not to bother applying. Of course the Summer of Code is Google’s baby, and as such they decide who gets to participate and who doesn’t. They don’t even have to explain themselves.
Linux Foundation employees repeatedly criticising OpenSolaris and Sun. I suppose that this is to be expected from a group that is representing its members, and sees the OpenSolaris kernel as direct competition to the Linux kernel, but it’s just as disappointing to me as when I see KDE or GNOME hackers ripping into each other
Press articles in Slashdot [2] [3] and elsewhere consistently spinning things as “Sun’s free software efforts aren’t sincere” interspersed with “Sun is ruining <insert project here>”.

I feel like a lot of this rhetoric is self-fulfilling prophecy. If you say often enough “Sun is a bad community player”, then Sun’s projects will seem unattractive to prospective volunteers.

All of this completely ignores the many great free software people who are working for Sun - to name just a few, Glynn Foster, Simon Phipps, Dalibor Topic, Ian Murdoch, Rich Burridge. These people are extremely clueful about free software and community interests. And the message which we have seen consistently from Jonathan Schwarz over the past couple of years reinforces that there is a commitment to free, community developed software, and there are many capable people working towards that commitment within Sun.

So why the difficulties? Many of them, I think, are project specific, and stem from this fundamental fact:

Community governance is hard.

(more…)