Fading Memories

I fear I may be lacking in a quality that I don't know exactly how to describe, depravity, or at least, acquaintancy with depravity, perhaps. Irina has celebrated her birthday today -- and a nice day was had by all, more of that anon -- but in preparation for the grand day, our daughters needed to buy some birthday presents.

In our family it is customary to subsidize the buying of presents by children to a certain extent: they don't have to dip into their pocket money to any great extent on these occasions. So I pressed a tenner into Naomi's hands when Irina wasn't looking, and they resolved to mount an expedition to town the Tuesday after that.

And that Tuesday night, when I came home, Naomi told me they had to curtail their spending after all. Why? Well, this is why...

They assembled in front of a certain shop to divide their loot, and a freak gust of wind tore the tenner from Naomi's hands and deposited it in front of a young man.

Who promptly picked it up, pocketed it, grinned at my daughters, and made tracks.

So, here I'm left with this existential question: how can anyone who presumably lays claim to membership of the human race nobble ten quid from three prepubescent girls? And laugh while doing so? I know, in the abstract, that there are people who do worse than that, but, well, that doesn't mean that this isn't so far beyond the pale that I cannot grasp even the first principles of it...

Fortunately, the kids weren't any too wrought up, and a nice Chaplin tonight (accompanied by four kinds of pasties) did much to restore domestic tranquility. Note to self: The Circus by Chaplin is very funny, but the ending is sad, and the movie adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby is even more brutal than the book, and not suitable for a young audience, or even for an adult audience that doesn't like lovingly depicted cruelty. And that is maybe why I don't understand that blasted thief who stole my my daughters' tenner either.

And especially in its last incarnation on the logout screen of the KDE 3.4 beta version I installed today. It brings a smile on my lips every time I shut my laptop down. No, I won't include screenshots -- just wait, install and see for yourself. A treat for all true konquistadors, among whom I can count not just myself, but also my wife and kids.

As for the people who vociferate their ill-considered opinion that Konqui should go, because he's not 'professional enough', I say unto them: Bah! Humbug! I somehow don't believe that they have any professional standing themselves. I imagine them as spotty high school pupils, students maybe, but certainly not members of the decision making or influencing elite that does so much good work for the world economy.

In fact, I can only too readily imagine the kind of school-corridor conversation that will lead the weak-willed poor souls to an abiding hatred of everything vermiform:

(Smith) Hey, Jones! You still got that namby-pamby baby dragon thing on your computer? That's for babies, man!

(Jones, blushing) Eh, what?

Smith, slaps Jones on shoulder, walks towards the tuck shop.

(Jones, with perfect esprit the escalier, shouting after Smith) It's miles better than those monkey footprints of -- dash it! He cannot hear me anymore. And he's got all the pretty naked people, he does, too. Mutter, mumble. I'm going to write a strong letter to the editor of the Dot.

But as for me, in shart contradistinction to Jones, who will no doubt become a grouch, maybe even a civil servant, I'm getting to like Konqui better with every new appearance.

Aaron Seigo gives, in an interesting blog entry, two very interesting quotes "The handles of a craftsman's tools bespeak an absolute simplicity, the plainest forms affording the greatest range of possibilities for the user's hand. and That which is overdesigned, too highly specific, anticipates outcome; the anticipation of outcomes guarantees, if not failure, the absence of grace.. Reading that made me pause to think.

First an aside: he also instances three people who have trouble organizing their information on their macs -- I don't think that this has much to do with either remark from All Tomorrow's Parties. Nobody has much experience with organizing a small library-worth of information, unless they are trained librarians (are librarians craftsmen?). This is something completely new -- and I guess that google-like interfaces on our own data, combined with some intelligent way of working with and organizing bookmarks are currently our best bet to allow people to handle all that information.

But back to the craftsmen:

A craftsman is someone who has learned his tools, simple tools that can be used in surprising ways. A painter can do a myriad of things with a brush, and when that brush has finally been so worn out it has completely lost its bristles, he can do at least half a myriad things with them. The usual way of allowing a myriad things to be done on a computer is to give the craftsman a myriad tools. All the modalities (if that's the right word) or possibilities of a simple tool are made explicit and discrete, instead of left to the craftsman's inventiveness in using and abusing a single thing.

Not that it's simple to learn to use that single thing: nobody who sits down with a brush, some paint and a canvas can use the brushes. It takes years of learning (much like vi...), and even then paint has all kinds of surprising properties and brushes have a way with them that's often best described as recalcitrant. But all that adds to their usefulness as a tool; all that means that the result is surprising.

Which neatly hooks in with the second quote I quoted from Aaron's quote of a book I have never read... The anticipation of the result that stifles the result itself because it strait-jackets the process (nasty word, process, but I don't have better one at the moment, maybe flow?). You can see the same thing happening when people want to sketch a particular thing, a scene or an illustration and pertinently want it to end up like they imagined the result in their mind before sitting down and letting the paint do its work.

In paint apps, all that layer tom-foolery, all those myriad bezier tools, all those potato-stamp paintbrushes (even when a little randomness is thrown in), in Painter, in the Gimp, in Krita and in Photoshop, all those filters, they all are designed with a certain final effect in mind, not with the process of creating an image in mind. So there's my little contribution to the quest for more useful computers: if you make a tool, don't think just of the results that tool makes possible, but of the work, the flow the serendipity using the tool should enable. And that doesn't hold just for paint applications. I think.

Practical examples? Don't have any, I'm just typing away waiting for KDevelop to compile before I can continue on Krita.

A lesson learned: don't work on three or four things at the same time. It means that if one of those things turns out to be a little too hard, you cannot commit the rest. Which, in this case, meant that Sven has had to do a lot of work to get previews working in Krita again, after the autolayers merge. (The infamous merge which makes Krita behave the same as Photoshop when moving layers, at the cost of some performance and a lot of breakage.).

Another lesson: don't use apt-get to keep your main development system up to date when there's a KDE release around the corner. First I couldn't use the keyboard at all. That appears a known bug, something to do with kdm. Now I just cannot use alt and del in KDE anymore; the other keys work fine... No solution, yet, so I'm downgrading to the SuSE release version while I'm typing this on my old powerbook.

Not that I would have had much time for hacking anyway. Friday we did a little city trip to The Hague with the kids and a friend. We paid a visit to the Convent of Saint John the Baptist, where a good friend of ours lives.

Then we had lunch at one of the best Chinese restaurants in the Netherlands -- not haute cuisine best, but good Chinese food of the kind Chinese ex-pats prefer to eat themselves best. Indeed, there were three Chinese couples lunching, one Cypriot couple and a Dutch old gentleman when we were there. We had Peking duck in thousand-year sauce, squid with seasonal vegetables, beef with sour vegetables and bean-curd puffs with pork mince. Delicious... The friend who had joined us had never eaten in a proper restaurant before, but she enjoyed every bite. The restaurant is Sing Kee, (Wagenstraat 63).

Afterwards we went to the Mauritshuis, a rather small museum that houses some very famous paintings. Currently the most famous one is without any doubt Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, because of the book (nice) and the moving picture (boring). But that painting was a bit disappointing. There's a much better painting by an unknown artist of a servant girl on the same floor a few rooms further along the route... But there are also some rather good Rembrandt paintings (among them Suzanna in bath which is simply astonishing, and also surprisingly small) and a Holbein the Younger and some Rogier van der Weijden paintings that I had never thought I'd ever see for real. We spent a long time discussing the taking-down-from-the-cross by van der Weijden -- and then we noticed a small group of people had stopped listening to us with some interest. Not many kids can determine a bunch of saints with any pretense to accuracy.

Again, this was the first time that friend of our daughters had ever visited a museum, had ever seen a real painting that hadn't been produced in our house or at school -- it was even the first time she had visited a town the size of the Hague. She rather liked it, comparing it favourably to Deventer. Her reaction to the notion of going inside a building as grand as the Mauritshuis was a little comical, being "Cool! Vet-gaaf! Gaan we daar echt in!

Anyway, the next day everyone was inspired to paint, and I started on a portrait of our three daughters, so didn't spend any time on Krita, and in the evening we watched My Fair Lady, with Audrey Hepburn. What a disappointment! Or rather, what a culture shock! Much must have changed in the fast forty-two years... I remember the movie as one where the male love interest, i.e., professor Higgins, turns around completely and acquires some manners. But in the end, when he demands his slippers from Eliza with his hat over his face it's clear that he's bought the girl who has declared her throughout the movie to be a good girl, not a whore, and that she has let herself be bought because the prospect of marriage with impecunious Freddie (query to self: is there any movie or book in which a Freddie, Reggie or Algy ever marries the first female love interest?) is too daunting. I guess we don't see the female sex quite so much as a chattel to be acquired or disposed of as the makers of this move. I've had the same experience with books, for instance those by Havank. Apparently, forty years ago women were very much seen as an object, which is incomprehensible nowadays. (Although Wodehouse (in , e.g., Uneasy Money, already had a very real and independent woman who is very much not an object.)

And today I spend most of the afternoon trying to rebuild a working SuSE 9.2 + KDE system. I guess I'm going to slap this powerbook shut and take a peek at progress right now...

I would not want to say a word against the KDE application development framework, no, certainly not... And if Krita's development has stagnated for a week or two, it's entirely because I am too dim to grasp certain aspects completely. Especially the plugin/xml gui framework. Probably not because the framework is overdeveloped, underdocumented and designed for a quite different kind of application.

Consider the situation: Krita loads most of its functionality in the form of plugins. A lot of plugins, about thirty at the moment of writing, with more to come. Some of these plugins can be accessed from the GUI, with either a menu entry or a toolbar button.

A clear case for KParts and KXMLClient -- and so it would be, if loading all those plugins every time a new view is created wasn't so darn expensive. Besides, I want to manage the plugins. Be able to add comboboxes with all the filters and toolboxes with all the paint operations to dialogs and windows; and I don't want to instantiate more objects than necessary.

But if I use the default KParts framework, every time a view is created, it looks as if all the plugins are searched, opened, loaded, created and added to the gui.

If I don't use the default KParts framework, but load the plugins myself and keep a factory class in a pointer list, then when I create the plugins for a certain view, they are not added to the gui.

Now this problem isn't unique. I have nosed around a bit, and it looks that at least Kate and Digikam have solved this problem, both by wildly divergent means, and I'm quite sure they are not the only KDE application that have hacked a plugin management layer around KParts.

Krita being a KOffice application complicates matters a lot, because a KOffice application is a complicated subclass of KXMLClient -- and that appears to mean that adding dynamic menu entries is hard, too.

So now I'm faced with a hard decision: go back to the old code and tweak it to have al least the paint ops loaded as plugins, or try to slug it out, copy perhaps some code from Kate -- I'm a bit desperate at the moment, because what I really want to do is create a new interface for Krita, one where there is a really small toolbox with the basic tools, and a QToolBox widget (like in Qt Designer) that holds all the nice stuff, such as brushes, fill types and filters for the filter tool. But to do that properly, I need to have the plugins working.

Or... Maybe if I just store the pointers to the plugins in my registry singletons for filters, color models, paint ops and all the rest... Must be worth a try.

I achieved little on the Krita front today. I should have prepared my tax return, but I spend about eight hours hacking on Krita. I'm trying to arrive at a slightly sane situation with regards to plugins and modules, but that's a lot of work.

As with any paint application, the core of Krita is just a tile manager: an image is divided into small blocks of pixels, and the hardest code is to cobble the tiles together in one image. Anyway, that part was recently redone. Around the tile manager is a display routine -- and that's the core. The rest is done with plugins.

KDE has made working with plugins really easy, but you need to have some consistent idea of how to work with plugins. We had a different way of loading filters, UI plugins, color strategies, paint operations and other resources. Making everything consistent is taking a long time...

Anyway, feeling a little dispirited by the lack of progress I was making I shut down my laptop and grabbed my brushes and started finishing an old painting I had never finished, The Contented Bureaucrat, inspired by a photograph of a civil servant in India. I learned enough from Baxter and Cockshott (see previous entries) that I felt confident I could tackle the mounds of paper:

At the same time, Rebecca was discovering that she has indeed a talent for rendering with pen and ink: