2004-09-30
Our friends from Uzbekistan, asylum-seekers in the Netherlands have received the final decision. They are to be evicted from the Netherlands. Despite being husband and wife, they are to be separated. She, a muslim married to a Christian is to be sent back to Uzbekistan. He is to be sent to Israel. After many years in the Netherlands.
2004-09-29
S.D. Tower
I really wanted to like this book, no, I wanted to love it. It's that _rara avis_ a single-volume fantasy book, set in a world of its own, not a bastardized Ye Olde or Ye Nowadaisy England. The world building is of a high order, better than mine. There are hints of China, but also of India, and many, many details that are quite unique, such as the names of plants and animals, many aspects of culture (such as the particular kind of ancestor worship) and religion.
2004-09-28
I re-re-re-re-reading Strong Poison, one of the best, most rounded Dorothy L. Sayers novels (Nine Tailors is good, but this one has a dramatic quality over and above that prime example of the puzzle detective novel). And reading a little more closely than usual, I suddenly found the Dowager Duchess' remark on page 24 significant:
... I have been reading one her books, really quite good and so well-written, and I didn't guess the murderer till page 200, rather clever, because I usually do it about page 15.
And true enough, about page 15 (13 in this edition), we get the scene where Philip Boyes is actually administered the poison. Quite clever. I wish I had a first edition: perhaps in that edition, the fatal dinner is first described on page 13.
2004-09-27
Marc van Oostendorp
Not so long ago I hacked languages instead of painting applications, and I cannot, in fact, promise that I'll never hack languages again. And not programming languages, but human languages. I've invented quite a few languages for my invented world, the setting of two novels that I'm trying to sell. I've had the languages bug since I first discovered that our school grammar of French wasn't all that well laid out and could be improved upon. Later I learned about Tolkien, about Roland Tweehuysen (but not Mark Okrand -- I never was a trekkie). I joined a club of people interested in designed imaginary countries, world and languages.
After the last altercation, I felt a little disinclined to blog, after all a 'planet' doesn't offer the creature comforts Usenet offers for the practicing of the noble art of flaming. Plus, and perhaps more importantly, I have been busy. Work has been picking up and I'm doing a quite interesting job connecting medical information systems using agents. I've celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday with appropriate rituals, like the eating of rich viands and the releasing of Krita.
2004-09-17
Obviously, neither Aaron nor Matt have gotten my point. The point being this: I was a Kopete user, and from one moment to another, I could not sent messages anymore.
If you change basic things like keybindings in an application do not change them for users who are already using your application. At the very least warn them upon startup in a nice message box:
"Dear user, you have been using our application for a while. Obviously, you are happy with it, otherwise you wouldn't have launched it again. Still, we have determined that your by now ingrained habits are not consistent with those of the rest of the world, so we want you to relearn. Or you could go and change our preferred defaults back to what you are used to by clicking --here--."
So, to summarize:
Personally, I don't give a fig for what the rest of the world is used to (i.e, "other IM clients except for ICQ". I used Gaim before Kopete, and I distinctly remember having Gaim set to be consistent with the rest of my environment), and I don't give a fig for technical problems with having two KXMLGUIClients either , and I don't give a fig about IRC either (because the difference between IRC and IM is that with IM the messages can be a lot longer than with IRC).
I care about not being disrupted by the software I use. I care about being able to let my fingers learn the moves and about being able to trust my fingers.
2004-09-16
Aaron Seigo is raving about a recent change in Kopete that was also backported. Instead of ctrl-enter, now plain enter sends a message. I noticed... One morning, after the usual apt-get update I noticed that suddenly I couldn't send messages anymore. Damn. It took a while and some googling to realize that I hadn't stumbled into a bug, and some more googling to find out how to fix it(1). An hour later I had found the configuration option to get the old defaults back.
2004-09-15
I think a little re-organizing of blog entries has, despite careful keeping the creating dates intact, given Planet KDE the idea that I have suddenly started blogging faster than my shadow. Nothing is further from the truth... It's funny that I cannot find evidence of reordering in my rss feed -- and funnier still that there is a longish entry that doesn't get picked up. Oh well, I have to do something with my blogging software anyway, because it's cracking a bit.
To fit in with KOffice, one needs to do as KOffice does. Since Krita should be bona-fide KOffice citizen, that means Krita needs to fit in. Now, what's the first thing you see when you start a KOffice app? Right, it's the three-tabbed file window. Create, Open, Recent. And what do you see when you click create? Right, a host of templates. So today I created templates and made that dialog work. More or less -- but first a screenshot, and then I'll talk about the less.
Nice icons, innit? I like them, and I created them with Karbon. I wish Rob Buis would keep working on Karbon, because it's got all the potential and a lot of the features of an Inkscape, but as it is, it's still buggy (don't select the 'pattern fill' button, and don't use it on a powerpc). Anyway, these are bona-fide svg icons...
And then I ran into problems. Image editors differ from presentation apps or word processors that you cannot catch everything a user wants to do in a template. There's an infinite range of sizes, and besides, there are background colours, transparency issues and colour models. So I would need to add a page to the template dialog where the user can create a document from parameters. Haven't figured that one out...
The other, even bigger, problem is that apparently templates should not be the same as ordinary files. Krita crashes when I want to create something from a template.
Still, the icons are nice...
2004-09-14
Okay, so I have been working on Krita with some little concentration. That doesn't mean that I don't read myself to sleep with a book. It just means that I forget to blog about my reading on Fading Memories. Which is rather a pity, since logging notes about books read so I could refresh my memory was rather the raison d'etre of Fading Memories. But what with Krita, blosxom's quite unsatisfactory search function (don't know why I still keep that plugin around, it doesn't do anything useful), blosxom's rather unsatisfactory habit of showing everything in a subcategory and all subcategories blow that and the incidence of blogspamming, I didn't get around to it. However, in the expectation of the possibility that I might find better blogging software, here's a long list of short book notes...
is no security at all. I knew that, but still had a vague hope that my anti-blogspamming device would last a little longer. But the filthy dregs have found a way to pollute my servers again, and I have had to remove all talkback functionality until I've found something that allows moderated talkbacks for blosxom. Sorry folks, I really enjoyed all your remarks and notes... And I'll restore all of them when I've found out how to do that. I'm open for all suggestions, up to and including migrating to another blog application, provided the app works with plain text files.
All suggestions to boud@valdyas.org, since you can no longer put your comments here...
2004-09-13
Lindemans used to be a good brewery, specialized in lambic, gueuze, faro and other lambic-derived beers. Lambic is a spontaneously fermented beer with a pleasant sour taste, and the gueuze is a mixture from old, ripe lambic and young lambic. Or at least, so it should be. But despite claims on their website about producing a real gueuze to counter the modern trend of light and sweetened gueuze-type beers, the Lindemans gueuze is sweetened with an artificial sweetener. Such a waste of a lambic. It isn't as if there's enough of it. Now the Lindemans gueuze tastes like some light soda with a dash of vinegar and a little alcohol. And it leaves a horrible aftertaste, a bland bitter film all over the tongue.
2004-09-12
As I'd hoped for. I had taken two days off to work on selections, three days in all including the Saturday I'd reserved for Krita anyway. But Friday I hit a snag with the basic pixel-mangling code. Krita is quite old already, five years, and at least four different design philosophies have gone into the core, maybe even five or six. This means that it's not always all that apparent how to mess with pixels and pixel elements.
This Needs to be Cleaned Up, but ideas are still ripening on that account. It's also a bit much to refactor in nice, small steps. Anyway, that was Friday. Cut now works, and Copy too. And you can cut from Krita and paste into Kolourpaint, but you still cannot paste in Krita without meeting the good doctor. It's progress of a kind: cut, copy & paste used to work perfectly, but, and here's the snag, only with rectangular selections.
Then Saturday I had to jump into the breach and work on a bug in the combination of MySQL, FreeBSD and java for work, so that was a wasted day from the Krita point of view, although quite necessary, of course, and nothing to beef about. Sunday was going to be a non-hacking day anyway, with Church in the morning, followed by a panichida for the victims of Beslan, a visit to my father-in-law because of his eighty-second birthday. And then eating out, because our rather unpleasant neighbors were throwing a street-party. I'm not going to party with people who sent us semi-anonymous (signed with house-number, not names) letters threatening unspecified acts of revenge or who don't check their children when they are insulting ours. So we went to a quite decent eatery in Zwolle, Michelangelo's, where they had gave us good food and excellent wine. A mellowing experience.
And when I came home, faith in humanity was completely restored by finding that Daniel Molkentin has prepared nightly tarballs of Krita and has offered to do a special preview release September 24. Not even the silly discussion on Linux Weekly News has managed to break me from my feeling of complacency.
2004-09-09
Good progress today... I discovered yesterday that I had about ten more holidays left than I thought the day before yesterday, so I took two days off to hack on Krita. (Pity I didn't know earlier, or I'd had been able to go to either aKademy or to the monastery in Hemelum -- both equally attractive propositions.)
2004-09-05
My father is visiting us for the twin's birthday, and today we agreed to meet after Church at the 'Zevende Hemel', a nice little place with a good terrace at the Grote Kerkhof in Deventer. Not knowing that there was going to be real, live music. Jeroen Sweers Boogie Woogie Band played really, really good boogie woogie, ragtime, blues and a little jazz. Unbelievably dexterous piano playing, great drumming, and a bass player that just exuded fun. It was a great occasion. Little children in the public were bouncing up and down, the aged proprietor of of second-hand bookshop Lomonosov was dancing the boogie with a contemporary. At one point in time to small girls sidled up to the stage, and started to drum with sticks on the stage. I'm off ordering their CD's...