Fading Memories

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!

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.

It's Easter! I've completely lost my voice through a horrible cold that couldn't have come at a more inopportune time -- but I managed to serve the Easter service. We had a good Lent, I managed to lay off the wine, oil and animal products except for one piece of cheese a day (after I noticed I started getting rather dizzy), lost about one-ninth of my weight -- and although I didn't manage to read the entire gospel according to St. Mark in Greek, I did get back into coding -- weirdly enough. And now I've got three weeks of holidays for coding, visiting museums and Wroclaw, for the Libre Graphics Meeting.

Anyway: Christos Anesti! Christos Voskrese! Christus is opgestaan! Christ has Risen!

This year KDE tried another system for alotting slots to subprojects: some subprojects were allowed to predetermine their list of preferred projects and then got a certain number of slots guaranteed. It didn't quite work out, and I'm not totally happy with the way we executed this idea. The problem is, KDE, with 47 slots and 300 applications is just too big to handle. The mentors cannot read so many proposals, and the Google web interface doesn't scale to 300 applications either.

Anyway, I'm really excited by these KOffice projects, even though there's just one Krita project:

• Kexi Web Forms by Lorenzo Villani, mentored by Jaroslaw Staniek
• Converting the old KPresenter format KPR to ODF by Carlos Manuel Licea Vázquez, mentored by Casper Boemann
• Sumi-e brush engine for Krita by Lukáš Tvrdý, mentored by Boudewijn Rempt
• Calligraphy support in Karbon by Fela Winkelmolen, mentored by Jan Hambrecht
• Notes and Presenter View Support for KPresenter by Fredy Yanardi, mentored by Thorsten Zachmann
• Improve ISO OpenDocument support by Pierre Ducroquet, mentored by Sebastian Sauer
• Improve KWord MS Word filter by Benjamin Richard Cail, mentored by Boudewijn Rempt

I think this is a nice mixture between new features and work on improving the core of KOffice

But... There's another, very cool project that will benefit KOffice a lot, though it isn't even among the KDE projects: KDE Control Panel for Color Management.

Krita already had filter plugins: filters take pixels as input and produce possibly different pixels as output. Filters in Krita can be used destructively: to change a layer or a mask directly. They can also be used dynamically: either in adjustment layers that filter the result of the layers under the adjustment layer in the layer stack, or as filter masks, that filter the contents of a single layer. Or you can paint with them, and in the future you can associated filter parameters with the pressure, rotation and other types of input from your input device. I'm working on that...

But now, requested by Matthew Woehlke, there's another type of plugin: generators. Generators take parameters but not pixels as input, and create pixels as output. That's ideal for things like Apophysis-like plugins. Right now you can only use these generators in Krita on paint devices, as fill types (similar to solid colors or patterns) with the fill tool or as dynamic layers. Painting should be possible, too, but that needs some work. And it would be nice to use this kind of noise in a transparency mask or in a filter mask: that's already possible, but not in a dynamic way.

There's just one snag: I'm not a mathematician, so I depend on other people to write nice generator plugins! Matthew has promised to do something Apophysis-like, but we need lots more: flames, clouds, checkers, waves, marbling -- for someone with the right kind of knowledge or no compunction about copying code from other free software, the possibilities are endless!

Through Mark Rosenfelder's Zompist website, which I've been reading since my conlang days, I came across Eric Janszen's article The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash. Well worth a read -- and now I am pretty certain that, no, there won't be a stop to burning food is fuel, no matter how many scarce food becomes. No way anyone can fight the might of $20.000.000.000.000...

Which reminds me of another article I've read but lost the URL of that explained how the corn lobby in the USA was ultimately responsible for the Volstead act (because corn was too bulky to move, it was converted into something smaller and more valuable, namely Bourbon, which caused massive alcoholism, which caused the anti-alcohol campaigns because factories needed sober people to work the machines, etc.), and later the corn-syrup-in-everything phenomenon. I really should have saved that URL.

Of course, if the corn that used to be converted into corn syrup now gets converted into fuel, maybe ubiquitous obesity will be a thing of the past very soon... But so many other foodstuffs get caught up in the food-for-fuel bubble, too.

Is generally reckoned to be a Good Thing. Not-Invented-Here and solipsistic DIY frowned upon. The danger, of course, is when the shoulders one stands on come with feet of clay. If, for example, someone in the 16th century mis-interpreted a 12th century book and the mis-interpretation becomes the foundation of generations of shoulders, fun ensues.

So, just like the kilt isn't Scottish, witches weren't burned by their millions by the Church of Rome and Columbus wasn't the first man to realize the earth was a globe, the middle ages turned out to be clean and not feudal at all.

Now for a historian who manages to undo the artificial separation between the history of the Christian West and the Christian East.