Fading Memories

This dissertation (which you can download from the author's website) is the single most important advance in digital art since the first paint application by Shoup. In contrast with earlier academic work, like Curtis and Salesin on water colour painting, or Cockshott on oil paint simulation or any of the other research papers published and collected in volumes like Non-Photorealistic Rendering (Gooch and Gooch), Bill Baxter has not just investigated his topic and written some text, but he has created a real, usable, interactive application that has been tested by actual artists. The other researchers have never reached that stage -- well, maybe we should count Raph Levien's Wet Dream, which is derived from Curtis et al.

Read more ...

But it's time to clear away some junk from around my desk and bookshelves, so here's one of the statistics killing summaries of books read and things done.

As for Krita, we're still busy picking up the bits after merging Casper Boemann's new tile code. I had sworn not to do a heart transplant before releasing Krita to the public -- Krita already has had four cores before now -- but we needed to get something a little more flexible in place. But now we have to get everything working again, and debug the new stuff. That's taking a bit of effort and it means that we lost a some of our momentum, which worries me. I really want to get a first release out before April, only six months after my initial estimate.

By the way, I'm reading Bill Baxter's dissertation, and for all you usability freaks and geeks, I've got this screenie of the best possible of all possible paint applications. Nothing else needs to apply, every other pixel pushing application is inferior to this:

(And yes, the palette slides out) For the best effect, you really need to watch the videos provided at:

• Impasto
• Dab
• Viscous paint

Pity it's not free software; Bill Baxter intends to commercialize it. For now, it's not available to us mere mortals. When I've done reading the dissertation, I'll report in detail. I've also started reading up on OpenGL and shaders and so on; those are what Baxter uses to achieve interactive speeds. I've also come across Tom van laerhoven's website, a Belgian KDE user who is interested in liquids and has done a paper on water colour simulation. Maybe I should ask him for some pointers when I'm done with the Wet & Sticky implementation.

Books I've got on the stack and which I'm not going to do a full notice of because they're going to go back onto the shelves:

• Nest of Vipers, by Tod Claymore. A convoluted murder mystery with precious little plot; a pot-boiler detective in the pre-war English vein, but written in the 1948. Not available except from second-hand books.
• Deurwaarders Delirium, by Havank. One of the more inebriated novels by Havank, the celebrated Dutch author of detective novels. This one is almost unreadable -- it reads as if Havank decided on a new plot with every glass of wine, and he must have downed many when writing the book. Still, there's some memorable descriptive prose, particularly at the beginning of the book. Near the end it becomes a Phillips Oppenheim clone, but without the charm.
• The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis. One of my favourites, I recently retold this in condensed form to my daughters, and thought I had to re-read it because I had forgotten several points. It's a Divinia Commedia-like story of a young man who travels from Hell to Purgatory (which I understand is not part of the Orthodox conception of the after-life, being a purely western thing -- the Orthodox base their ideas on what happens directly after death on the visions of one Byzantine monk whose name has escaped me for the moment) and who meets various saints (who were sinners) and sinners (who prefer to stay sinners). The danger with this book is that it's convincing enough that it's hard to keep in mind that it's fiction, not a report from a fact-finding mission.
• Klein Typicon, by Father Arch Priest Martin Erlings. Both the choir leader of our church choir and my wife tried to dissuade me from buying this book. It's an incomplete, error-ridden introduction to the order of services in the Orthodox Church. In some places Father Martin drops into anecdote, and those anecdotes (for instance about the Beatitudes not being read in the Greek Churches) tend to be inaccurate, too. Still -- it's the only work in Dutch that offers anything approaching an introduction to this intricate subject. It's all very well to tell me that if I want to master it, I should sing with the choir for ten years, but I cannot sing, so that won't happen...
• Winter on the Plain of the Ghosts, by Eillen Kernaghan. I really wanted to like this book... It's more-or-less self-published by an author who didn't manage to interest publishers in the book, despite having a track record of decent-selling mid-listers. But you know what? The publishers may have been right. Despite being set in Mohenjo-Djaro, the people bear Sanskrit names, but often ones not proper to their own gender. The story is a bit flat, the writing feels flabby -- but the opening is priceless. The old narrator, having decided to put down the story of his life, has laid in a good store of clay... Makes a change from a ream of paper.
• Honderd jaar wonen in Nederland 1900-2000. This is a catalogue to an exhibition we never visited, but it was remaindered and was very cheap at De Slegte. It's a fascinating collection of essays and pictures on housing and furnishing in the Netherlands in the twentieth century. Neither too scholarly, nor too light-weight, with good photographs and reproductions.
• Een Gegeven Dag, Robert Hans van Gulik. This book deserves a thorough study. It's a weird novel, the odd-one out in van Gulik's oevre. It's not about Judge Dee, for starters. It's written in first person present tense. The narrator is a deeply traumatised man who -- utterly surprising -- decides to the right thing in the end, and who is far more clever than the readers. It's a complete, deep novel and a cheap thriller in one. And a classic puzzle novel, but one in which the pieces of the puzzle are given at odd moments, too early, too late. Deeply interesting. Not as easy as the Judge Dee novels, not at all.

So... Back to the Wet & Sticky paint model, colour management, selections, DICOM images and liturgical theology.

Timothy Wilson-Smith

I haven't seen many paintings by Caravaggio in museums; but then, I haven't been around much, I tend to go to the same places again and again, like the Frans Hals museum in Haarlem or the Stedelijk Museum in Zwolle, seeing the same paintings again and again.

Still, Caravaggio repays study, as much nowadays, as for his Dutch pupils, in the seventeenth century. He was the master of light; but as this catalogue makes clear, he was a dark master of light, a man who would be diagnosed with a mental disorder nowadays and not be allowed near anything stronger than water colours on a piece of wet paper.

This Phaidon Golden Library edition was quite cheap; and the reproductions are a bit grainy. The accompanying text isn't all that great, either. But it's a very useful introduction all the same.

(I just remember that I've bought and used a lot of other art books in the past year, too, varying from a book on Flemish paintings in the United states to a book on the process of converting a drawing into a painting (in French, no less), and a book on art in the National Museum in Washington; I should do a notice on them, if only for my bookkeeping, but I probably won't.)

We went to a great exhibition of still life paintings by Pieter Claesz in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. This exhibition will travel first to Zürich and then to Washington. Pieter Claesz is -- in my opinion -- the greatest master of the genre, even better than Heda.

I seldom buy the catalogue of the exhibition, but this book, published by Waanders, like Het Nederlandse Stilleven, and Waanders always prints excellent reproductions; there are many art books, like the Phaidon book on Caravaggio, that are much worse, with indistinct, lifeless, flat reproductions.

But Waanders' books are excellent; and the text is scholarly and thorough, too. I tend to skip the text in art books, but I sometimes got engrossed enough to skip the paintings. And then I started thumbing back, and forth.

If you like painting -- a liking for still life is not required, there's one very excellent painting of cat killing an eel -- and if you're near Haarlem, Zürich of Washington, then this exhibition is one to go to. And the book one to buy.

We had a lot of fun; the kids like this kind of thing, too, and surprised an elderly gentleman by exclaiming that they'd recognized a particular knife in a series of paintings over and over again. They discovered the reflection of the painter in a tin jar, the difference between a berkemeier and a roemer, decided that the painter in his later period began to deliver sloppy work -- and so on. Full marks for observation, those kids.

Next time we're going to Haarlem, we'll take Danitia, one of our kids' close friends and pay a long visit to the artist's materials shop, buying stuff. We have what I'd almost call a regular club; Saturday afternoon, and Sundays after Church the four girls sit down with me and we experiment with stuff, paint, ink, charcoal -- everything is fair game. They don't get any art lessons at school anymore, so it's up to the parents to make sure they know oil from gouache, ink from charcoal, wax from clay. And it gives me an excuse to buy cool stuff, and to take a bunch of kids to a museum.

Malcolm Tundle Cockshott

I got a PDF copy of the microfiched version of this 1991 dissertation from the website of Bill Baxter, where you can also find his own dissertation. This is one of the first works on making painting on the computer something approaching real painting, with real viscous, thick paint.

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We were in need of a new printer. Our HP Deskjet 500 was still in relatively fine fettle, considering its decade and a half of service, but the output isn't good enough for today's agents and editors.

So we went and bought a new printer. A real laser printer -- if you'd asked me ten years ago that in 2005 I'd own a laser printer I'd have ridiculed you with all the sarcasm that I could muster. But now we have on of the little (yes, they're small, nowadays) beasts.

And it's boring... Really, utterly boring. A Brother HL-5150D, and it just works. Copy the ppd file from the CD, feed it to cups, tell cups everyone in the house is allowed to print, and there we are. Everything works. No challenge at all, it's not fair. I'd counted on an interesting Friday evening messing with drivers, googling, testing and then proudly presenting the slain animal to my wife, like my forebears presented their hunk of dinosaur to their wives. But no scope for my hunterly instincts, no, with thanks to Peggy Seeger, mighty restored hunter. It just works.

Except for printing pdf's with two pages to the sheet from KGhostview. Maybe I can salvage my honor! Here's luck, let's crack some skulls and give a toast!

Rod Phillips

Buy this book (in English...)

A cheapo find in the local bookshop, Praamstra, at only 6,50 euros for a hard-back. Most books about wine are quite pretentious (like the old Het Book van den Wijn) and seldom deal exhaustively with history. This book is true to its title: a short history of wine.

As such, it's quite a success. Possibly the English has lost something in translation as the prose is not uniformly rivetting, but it is serviceable enough even in pedestrian Dutch. The author know what he's writing about: a professor in the history of alcohol in Canada.

Anyway, despite (or perhaps because of) it's being a bit dry for it's subject, it made me long for a glassful of the best, the reddest wine I could get when I was reading it. A good glass of something Italian, that's the ticket...

J.W.F. Werumeus Buning

I may very well be the last Dutchman to actually enjoy Werumeus Buning's literary output, but it's still not easy to find his books in the second-hand bookshops. This little paperback Irina found for me in Haarlem. It's a combination of some poems I already had in his collected works, and a very sentimental, but also funny and pleasant little novelette which I read with a lot of pleasure.

The illustrations are by J.F. Doeve, who also illustrated other books by Werumeus Buning, and who is eminently collectible. That'll account for the rarity of a new find... Werumeus Buning is these days best know for his recipe books and his writing about wine, if people at all know about him...

Herman Teule en Anton Wessels (editors)

This book is 438-page collection of small papers about the history of Christian churches in countries controlled by the Islam, and about the present-day situation. Seeing that my Patriarch resides in Constantinople, Istanbul for those buying a plane ticket, and that he still isn't allowed to re-open his theological university on Halki Island, this topic is pretty interesting to me.

Read more ...

Giovannino Guareschi

My parents had three Don Camillo books -- a little surprising, because they were both from a rather anti-papist Dutch Reformed church family, even if they were both Church-leavers, and the Don Camillo books are very Roman-Catholic -- and as a teenager I devoured them.

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Tool palettes have always been a problem with Krita. Or rather, with Qt and KDE. There's simply no good widget that offers the following features:

• Can dock to the inside border of a widget.
• Can dock to each other.
• Can shade to the height of the title bar.
• Can contain tabs that can be dragged to other dockers, or into thin air where they magically form the first tab of a new docker.
• Have an extensible array of widgets that can be added to the right-top corner.
• Don't stutter when dragged from a docked position to a floating position (QDockWindow quickly moves to application (0,0)).
• Has window decorations taken from the current theme, but smaller.
• And, most importantly, don't take focus from the main window when floating so all shortcuts in the main window still work.

For a while, Krita has used Kivio's sliding dockers. Quite clever little things that slide back into the window border when the mouse leaves them. But they posed some unpleasant usability issues and hard-to-solve bugs, so for the moment, I've gone back to QDockWindow-based dockers. In Qt 4, the stuttering appears to have been solved, at least, even if the other problems persist. But I've added a shade button, so even people with small screens (say 1600x1200...) can use Krita without having two columns of dockers.

The future will learn whether we'll keep this arrangement... Krita already has had many attempts at solving the problem of where to keep tool options and palettes -- take a look at the screenshots at our screenshot page. But I don't want to spend too much time at an issue that is in fact a library problem and has little to do with making a paint app.

Anyway, here's a piccy of Krita with most dockers shaded:

And here's the download of the cvs binary snapshot with this feature:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/krita-cvs-current.tar.bz2

Michael Thaler has completed a port of the oilify filter from the digikam plugins to Krita and Chris Clayton has pointed out a bug I had always intended to fix but had forgotten with the filters that have a preview. So that's enough for a new snapshot, I thought, and here it is. Please, if you manage to run this snapshot mail me and if you didn't succeed, mail me too. I need to have some idea about how well these snapshots work.

krita-cvs-current.tar.bz2

Or rather, the lady. A friend of ours, a Dutch composer, is going to give a series of lectures on the interaction between music and physics (the scientific discipline, I mean). She had carefully ripped 31 tracks from CD's, extracted the bits she wanted to use in her demonstration, and then lost everything.

Enter the audiocd io slave, audacity & k3b. In an hour and a half -- and it would have been less had not my laptop overheated after an hour -- we did the work that had taken her more than a day. Audacity is really stable and really fast nowadays. And while k3b initially crashed when I copied the tracks to an audiocd project, on a subsequent attempt it was on its best behaviour.

And everything was easy as pie... Once I had taken a few initial hurdles. First, audacity wouldn't run on SuSE because of some conflict with the installed GTK lib. Then, audacity being wxWidgets, and not a bona-fide KDE application, I couldn't easily use the audiocd:/ ioslave to load the files directly from CD into audacity. The "do you really want to junk everything you've done" dialogs must miss some window hint, because they never surface above the other audacity dialogs. And lastly, audiocd:/ telling me over and over again that the cd I was ripping was damaged a bit got old really soon, especially when it meant I couldn't do anything with the files on the desktop when that messagebox was playing hide-and-seek with my other windows.

But still, niggles aside, these three great applications did save the day.

Today's Krita binary snapshot contains Michael Thaler's new raindrop filter plugin -- a really cool effect ported from the digikamplugins.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/krita-cvs-current.tar.bz2

By the way -- it seems as if the KMainWindow::setIcon(QPixmap) is quite new, since Tom Chance is using 3.3.1, which gives the error:

Starting Krita ...
./.bin/krita: symbol lookup error: ./lib/libkofficecore.so.2: undefined 
symbol: _ZN11KMainWindow7setIconERK7QPixmap

And I see that this method is going to be removed in KDE 4.0 anyway. But since I'm typing this on my way home, I cannot investigate further. I'm going to do some work on making the dockers switchable between sliding and QDockWindows.

Oh, and Kevin tells me that the $KDEHOME/.env trick should be: $KDEHOME/env and that it should work from KDE 3.3.0 -- I'm going to test that tomorrow.

There were some problems with the tarball of Krita I put up yesterday evening, most notably a total lack of all the necessary KOffice libs. Silly me, I tried to correct another problem and created a broken tarball. This one does work for me, I tested it... Note that you really need to restart all of KDE to use the new version of Krita -- and SuSE users may need to put the same line in their .bashrc as users from other distributions.

Oh, and Tom Chance mailed me with an error that indicates that Krita really needs KDE 3.3.2 at least -- the startup script doesn't check for that. If you have an earlier version of KDE, you will see an error like:

Starting Krita ...
./.bin/krita: symbol lookup error: ./lib/libkofficecore.so.2: undefined 
symbol: _ZN11KMainWindow7setIconERK7QPixmap

Not having an old version of KDE, there's not much that I can do about it, I'm afraid.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/krita-cvs-current.tar.bz2

I'm not really elated, because the hacks are dirty and the installation hassles can be significant, but I do have a binary version of Krita that may be runnable for other people. I've tested it with SuSE 9.1 and Ubuntu, and in both cases I didn't have any trouble. Your mileage will vary... And of course, because it's today's CVS snapshot, the version of Krita I've packaged shows some big holes where we're working on. CMYK is broken for now; colour profiles is half-done and may lead to crashes. You cannot clear a selection. Some tools don't do anything. Autogradients are being worked on. Most tools don't mind selections, and besides, if you move a layer, it's selection stays in situ. Work, but in progress, and that's a good thing.

Okay, these are the installation instructions. Read them.

This binary release of Krita can be installed anywhere you want. It has been tested with SuSE 9.1 and Ubuntu Hoary and did work on those distributions.

For Ubuntu (and probably most other distributions):

add the line

export KDEDIRS=/path/to/krita-cvs:$KDEDIRS

to your .bashrc. If you use tcsh, adapt accordingly.

Restart KDE, cd to /path/to/krita-cvs and type ./krita

For SuSE 9.1

SuSE has changed a lot to the startkde script, and one of the changes is that they unset KDEDIRS. Find the line

unset KDEDIRS

in /opt/kde3/bin/startkde and add AFTER that line:

KDEDIRS=/path/to/krita-cvs:/opt/kde3

Restart KDE, cd to /path/to/krita-cvs and type ./krita

Untested, but supposedly universal and a lot cleaner, if you use at least KDE 3.3.3

Add a file called .env to $KDEHOME containing the line:

export KDEDIRS=/path/to/krita/:$KDEDIRS

However, I don't have 3.3.3 yet, so I cannot confirm that.

If you have a better way for making a binary distribution of a KParts based KDE application that can be used without installing into the standard KDE location, tell me. Please!

If you want to help me with maintaining binary packages from source snapshots, please mail me and earn my undying gratitude.

If these instructions are not clear enough, please mail me with suggestions.

And now for the big secret: the place where you can download Krita:

This is not Slashdottable! Don't be a cad, don't post this link to Slashdot! I need some bandwidth for myself for the rest of the month:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt/krita-cvs-current.tar.bz2

Whenever I think there's something neat completed or nearly completed, I'll post an update on Fading Memories.

I've spent a bit of time recently to finally create a binary snapshot of Krita. The source tarballs Daniel Molkentin makes (or made -- they're disabled for now) weren't trouble-free. A lot of people, including me, couldn't get them to compile.

So I decided to take a leaf out Clarence Dang's book and create binary package using autopackage's apbuild. However, the resulting packages makes Ubuntu hang hard and doesn't work at all on my wife's SuSE 9.1 laptop. And I had to do nasty things to the startup script, like restarting kdeinit, to get it to work on my own laptop. So I'm back to the drawing board... If anyone has a few good tips, I remain obed. yours, boud@valdyas.org

Strewn over my desk and floor was the result of a few weeks of feeling none-too-fit. So, I'm going to jot a note about all of 'em in a big entry, because otherwise I'll never find my corkscrew.

Psmith is always a pleasure to meet, and in this book, part two of the complete novel Mike, we meet him for the first time.

A very early book, where Wodehouse apparently still wasn't sure whether he was writing humor or straight novels. It's fun, but one of the most date Wodehouses.

The book with the immortal scene where Wooster, masquerading as Fink-Nottle teaches aunt-pecked Haddock a hunting song using the port decanter a a baton.

One of my favorites -- a Valley Fields book.

A new addition to my collection -- a collection of golf stories from the time when the clubs still had names.

Not part of a series, but a nice country-house romp from the middle period, made better by the appearance of Augustus Robb, who is everything a personal man shouldn't be, including impertinent and a reformed house breaker.

No, definitely not... And no respect for a convalescent youngster either.

Jeeves on a holiday, which leaves Bertie nicely in the soup,

I've never been able to read this one end-to-end. If there's such a thing as a boring Wodehouse novel, then this is it.

A classic collection of shorts -- with the great tale of the hats that have gone through the fourth dimension, and the wooing of Mordred.

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Ten Lords A-Leaping is perhaps the best of the three Ruth Dudley Edwards books I've read. A strong plot, a sometimes merciless, but fair, dissection of the characters and motivations of the two sides in the fight for the banning of fox hunting and great descriptions of such institutions as the House of Lords and the English countryside.

As always, I have some problems squaring my lefty tendencies with the stance chosen by Ruth Dudley Edwards. I do think that there are better ways of fox control than having caravans of cars follow cavalry charges that follow a nightmare of dogs that follow one little fox. And I do think, too, that it's not always necessary to mess with other people's occupations, no matter how distasteful. It's like adultery; it's not something I do, but I don't concern myself with other people's proclivities -- not even when adultery almost always means someone gets hurt. Likewise, if people want to hunt, let them hunt. And if they hunt an edible animal, so much the better, since a nice game pie with deer, pheasant, mincemeat, saffron, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, onions and eggs is definitely a Good Thing.

Anyway, her book, first published in 1995, now has been made into a fantasy by the British government, so I wasn't even sure where to file my note of it...