Fading Memories

This article by an anonymous person tells you why -- near the bottom: And now a word from our corporate sponsors

Let the stuffed shirts and corporate bigwigs make money from the Free code. Let the pundits question what it will take for Linux to succeed on the Desktop. There is massive innovation in Linux userspace, driven by the same geeky joy that, in another era and in other fields is called "intellectual curiosity." That's what I see as the main force behind the Open Source movement; not corporate possibilities, as the LinuxWorld convention pretends, but brutal candor, mischievous smartness, self-mocking over-eagerness. The corporate successes of Linux are just the results of an overflow of energy, the excesses being mopped up. The hacker ethic is driving the corporations. We don't need them, but they need us.

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Gah! I never had proper maths at school, and I dare say that if someone had tried to teach me maths at the tender age of eleven or twelve, I'd probably have bucked like race horse that's harnessed in front of a brewery sledge. But the fact that my maths teacher walked out of the class when I was in the second form, to never return, didn't help either. Not that I ever thought I had missed something essential.

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When we came back from a visit to the Prinsenhof in Delft, I made a resolution that I would learn about the art of still-life. I want to be able to paint a lemon like Willem Heda...

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By Eric Flint

Talk about a timely release -- just when I was down and out with a spot of pneumonia, Eric Flint releases the sequel to 1632 in Baen's Free Library. I rather liked the people in 1632, even though I didn't like Eric Flint's preaching that republicanism is the panacea for all evil, so I downloaded the html version, and began reading.

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Aagje Luijtsen (collected by Perry Moree)

Kikkertje Lief (dear froglet) was the favourite pet-name of Aagje Luijtsen for her husband, Harmanus Kikkert, first mate on a VOC ship in the 18th century. Perry Moree found her letters to her husband in an archive in Great Britain. The letters had been captured with the ship Kikkert was sailing on by the British, and the British had the custom of archiving all papers found on such a ship.

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Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler is widely regarded as the best writer of hard-boiled thrillers, and probably rightly so. I don't care much about the genre, so I don't own many Chandlers. Pick-up on Noon Street contains four stories from The Simple Art of Murder, and most of them were interesting enough to finish them, especially when read with a writer's eye.

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From December 2002 to December 2003 I kept a booklog. I started the booklog both because I tend to forget that I've already read something, and to learn Zope. I did learn Zope, and I did keep the log pretty meticulously.

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I've spent the better part of this week rather feverishly (literally, I'm afraid) hacking on Krita, trying to bring it up to KPaint-level feature-wise, at least, and all that seems to happen is that my TODO list is growing.

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The Gimp nowadays comes with a small set of rather nifty brushes -- the so-called pipe brushes, recognizable from the file-extension .gih. The fileformat for these brushes is actually really horrible, a mix between text and binary. The first line contains the brush name, the second the number of brushes the brush contains, a space, and a bit of text detailing the way the brush ought to be used.

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I am reading Oliver Twist to our children, once chapter a night. They really like it, recognize it as the real ginger, strong stuff. Naomi told me she particular likes the long descriptions of people and places -- as if you were watching a movie, as she says. And they also like Cruikshanks' illustrations -- we had a lot of fun spotting the bible story on the painting in Ms. Bedwin's parlour. It's the Good Samaritan, of course

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I just completed the first stab at pressure sensititivity support... It's still slow, and not completely correct in all places, but you can make beautiful galaxies with it and gorgeous blobs that look like you've been painting with a brush and thick india-ink.

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I'd almost forgotten how easy Python is, how comfortable it is not to have to recompile, how nice it is not to have to type all kinds of superfluous interpunction... Java is better than C++ in this regard, but still... Compared to Python.

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It turns out to be remarkably easy to buy an earthenware pan (supposed to be the perfect vessel for stewing hare in cream among other things). Specialized shops touting their wide-ranging assortment deny categorically that such things exist; you cannot put earthenwire on the fire. (A bit like specialized arts materials shops denying the existence of bristol board.)

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I've finally discovered how to do a decent brush in Krita. Turns out that the most time-intensive bit was the redrawing of the picture. This happened a lot in the in-betweening code, that painted a line between the previous and the current mouse position if Krita couldn't keep up with the mouse.

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Since I stopped doing the really regular updates for Fading Memories the booklog, I've read the occasional book or two. The habit is kind of ingrained, and so's the habit to make a short note of those books. Here are the notes -- I might have forgotten some books, but well, those were apparently instantly forgettable.

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I am finally being developing the feeling that I am starting to begin achieving the first step towards a modicum of confidence in my ability to achieve a moderate competence in C++. That's to say, last night I spent a few hours hacking the KisToolBrush class for Krita. I want to achieve what nearly all paint applications manage to achieve: to draw a beautiful, antialiased line that accurately follows the mouse or stylus and is painted in the right colour, gradient or pattern using the correct brush. And I don't seem able to figure out how to do that.

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The Prinsenhof in Delft is a very nice museum which had, when we visited them, a wonderful collection of still life paintings. As always, and no doubt as intended by the painters, I was very impressed by the lemons...

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Dutch primary schools nowadays aren't terribly adequate when it comes to teaching their pupils that painting and drawing can be a whole lot of fun; neither do they teach them even the most basic of techniques. Naomi once came home with a reasonably competently executed sketch of a horse. It turned out that she was giving step-by-step, connect the dot instructions that would invariably lead to the exact same cartoon-like sketch no matter who executes it. Harumpf.

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Thanks to some tips from Michael Dunn, I've finally managed to get Kura working on OS X. Actually, it wasn't so much a matter of getting Kura to work, as it was a matter of untangling various previous attempts at getting PyQt and sip to work.

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It's tacky I know, and I am very much running behind the herd -- so far behind, in fact, that the herd has already jumped the cliff -- to write on this topic in the winter of 2003. But I don't care all that much. I still feel the need... I am going to compare using OS X with using Linux+KDE

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I like to sketch a bit, paint a bit, mess about with pen and ink, pencils, everything but chalk and charcoal is fair game. And in the grand Dutch tradition of interpreting and showing daily life, as discussed by Svetlana Alpers in The Art of Describing, I'm not afraid to turn my pen to other things than those that exist in my imagination.

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A little more than year ago I started Fading Memories, which was a booklog intended to help me remembering what books I had already read, and occasionally what movies I had already seen.

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