2004-10-31
So I decided to resize my home disk to make place for one or two experiments with distribution, and my first experiment was with Ubuntu. It's got a very good, if text-based, installer that installs my wifi card without problems. The default Gnome desktop does look slick. No KDE better than 3.2.3, though, so that side of my requirements isn't met. But I decided to explore Gnome at its best a bit... And there are plenty of niggles that make me sure that they have a long way to go.
2004-10-29
I feel a bit like a waif... I'm not sure I am going to like the next SuSE all that much. Yes, I'm a hobbyist. No, I'm a professional who uses his Linux laptop seven days a week, more hours a day than the ophthalmologist recommends to earn his daily bread, keep in touch with friends all over the world and to play an occasional harmless game of install-the-cool-app-from-source. So... Given that I'm a holistic person who does work-related stuff in his free time, and vice-versa, who regards his work as his hobby and his hobby as his work, am I among the target audience of SuSE?
Should I be? Do I want to be? It's a lifestyle thing, I guess. Maybe I shouldn't care. Brand loyalty is a thing of the past, after all.
Is being had by me. An unpleasant cold, a completely unrealistic deadline at work and the need to do some serious studying conspire against working on Krita. But that's no news. The big problem this time is that I blithely assumed I would be able to take Kivio's docker implementation and use that KOffice-wide.
2004-10-28
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
I have been taught that Columbus discovered that the earth was round and not flat; and that he has been put to torture by the inquisition. That was not true; it was a nineteenth century invention. Apart from authors with a clearly allegorical intention, such as Lactantius, no educated person in Europe ever gave a hint of thinking that the earth was flat.
2004-10-26
I still buy every new Terry Pratchett as soon as it is published. Only... With this one, I hadn't noticed until someone mentioned it on the rec.arts.sf.composition newsgroup. I must be losing my grip -- or Terry Pratchett is losing his grip on me. That's a possibility, too.
2004-10-25
As this picture shows, lamb cutlets are in great demand in our family:
Grilled or quickly fried like a steak with a good sauce with mint and garlic and cream, for instance. Or a caper sauce. However, in the restaurant Le Caveau de L'Isle, (36 Rue de L'Ile St Louis), they do lamb cutlets that are a lot better than mine.
Not all their food is all that great, it's very much a 'drape-the-sprigs-of-chives-over-the-meat-sign-your-name-with-brown-sauce-we're-poshish' type of restaurant, and they serve the same gratin with all dishes. And everything is lukewarm -- but that seems traditional. But their lamb cutlets were fragrant, tender and tasty in a way that I don't seem to be able to emulate. Probably their cook is a better man than I am, but equally probably they have access to better meat than I can get from the local Turkish butcher.
But their cheese selection was poor; in the very same street there is a shop which has about a dozen different, great goat cheeses, and they served camembert, gorgonzola and two other bland cheeses. Ah well... That's something I can point at with pride: whatever may go wrong, I always have a good selection of cheese to tempt my guests with.
Season of mists and mellow coughs. In autumn, the passing of time seems more like a Javanese mudslide than the pleasant, leisurely rush of a timer's sand. It's a busy time. Business tends to pick up, so I'm really forced to contemplate working evenings for my day job, too. Exams rear their ugly head, even as the topic of those exams is really interesting. I didn't know there was so much fine, ripe stuff to be read in Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. But work and study means that work on Krita has to suffer. I wish I could afford to take a week off from work to do some connected work.
2004-10-21
A developer, a hacker, is a craftsman. A craftsman of the engineering persuasion, but a craftsman nonetheless. And a craftsman values their tools. To the point where one can become passionate about tools. Which is one reason I'm so glad to work for Tryllian Solutions -- they allow their developers to choose their own tools to produce the code with. When I arrived at Tryllian, I got the choice between a Linux or a Windows 2000 desktop machine, or a laptop with either OS. And if I wanted to put SuSE on that laptop, no problem. And no nonsense about company-wide standardization on one IDE.
Last weekend, we've been to Paris. For the children and Irina it was the first time in their life, while I'm an old hand, having been in Paris in 1991 or thereabouts with a school trip. We had a reason for the trip; friends of ours got married in the crypt of our bishopric's cathedral in the Rue Daru:
Of course, being in Paris means, especially if you're nine years old, seeing the Eiffel Tower and all the other landmarks, including the throng of Chinese tourists in front of the Mona Lisa. (More Chinese than Japanese, curiously enough. When I was last in Paris, that was definitely the other way around.)
Any way, I'm back to hacking Krita now, with fixing the crop tool and the selection handling being the top priority for now. Michael Thaler has saved the honour of Krita by keeping us in the intro to the cvs digest with his cool shearing code. This week, my hopes are for Cyrille Berger's work on ksjembed scripting for Krita...