2005-03-28
It's definitely not the first time I've been in release crunch mode. When you're nearing your copper jubilee as a software developer you'll have gone through that particular subdivision of hell a few times. About a dozen times, at least. I remember vividly my first experience of release crunch -- that project started in release crunch mode.
2005-03-26
Dan Berger was kind enough to help me debug running the binary cvs snapshot of Krita on Fedora Core. In the end, I had to install Fedora on a spare partition (having four install CD's is so retro -- one expects a net install from a live cd nowadays), and recompile Krita using gcc 3.4, but it worked.
So, for the Fedora users:
(Fedora, by the way, has a quite pretty installer and I like the default look & feel of their version of KDE; nice, sharp fonts, too. And it was a breeze to get a development system up and running for KOffice.)
And now on with Krita. We've got two weeks until the KOffice freeze takes effect and there is much frantic hacking going on.
2005-03-20
I've put up a new binary snapshot of the current cvs version of Krita. This version may:
All of which means that I'm rather bad at packaging software, so if anyone wants to help me out with making binary packages of Krita, please, please, contact me and earn my undying gratitude.
The old installation instructions at Krita, ready to run (almost).
The new binary is at: krita-current-cvs.tgz. Xs4all has dropped it traffic limits so feel free to download as much as you want and tell me whether it works on your system. I 've compiled with KDE 3.4 and gcc 3.3.4.
This snapshot contains the following new features:
And probably some things I've forgotten.
Manif, I gather, is current spoken French for demonstration -- if that's the right word in English. I was in Brussels for my theology course (note to self: finish that summary of Schmemann's discourse on Liturgy and another summary of Bobrinskoy on the trinity real soon new), and when I walked back to the South Station from the Rue Joseph Claes I was surprised by two long rows of armoured police vehicles parked in a derelict building lot.
2005-03-17
Cool as the greycstoration thing may be -- and it is very cool and the code offers lots of possibilities for even cooler things -- I'm not going to put up a new binary snapshot tonight. I'm still putting together back my installation after the !@#$% hard-disk crashed Sunday night, and I hadn't gotten round to installing apbuild again and it's getting kind of late in my timezone now... But it's checked in into cvs and everything.
A few days ago, Victor Stinner published a the CImg library (by David Tschumperlé) to mess with images. Most notably, CImg can restore noisy images to something resembling a clean picture. Apart from that, it can create missing parts of an image with astounding success.
Yesterday evening mr. (or mrs. or ms.) Morreale mailed me asking whether I had seen the plugin. I had, but couldn't get it to work with the Gimp. My correspondent, an archaeologist, wanted to use the algorithm to restore old images of objects that no longer exist. My interest was piqued and I started porting Stinner's plugin to Krita to see it working.
And tonight, apart from cleanup like progress bars and gui repainting while working, and maybe a little hour class cursor, I'm done. It just works... Look at the before and after of the grainy picture I used yesterday to show off our color management support:
Before:
After:
And I also fixed image export (temporary fix, Krita still discards all your image annotations, like Exif data and color profiles on export -- will work on that tomorrow night) and undo for filters. I'll try to make a new snapshot tonight, but I won't promise...
2005-03-16
Newsforge had a nice article today introducing colour management and coincidentally I had some time today to work on import/export in Krita (restoring the server didn't take so much time as I had thought, and I had taken a whole day off for that job) and in the process of doing that, I made it possible to load profiles embedded into images in Krita and fixed a display bug. Compare these to screenshots of the same image but with a different display profile:
Also note the label "CIE RGB" in the statusbar: that's the embedded profile in the image.
You can download the image with the embedded profile, too, to check what other applications make of it. Saving profiles doesn't work yet, I'll add that tomorrow night, probably.
Oh, and Michael Thaler has been having fun with the geometric tools. Now KOffice has even more internal consistency: both Karbon and Krita can draw your stars for you! But only Krita can do so with gimp-type brushes.
As soon as image export works again, I'll start making available regular binaries again.
2005-03-15
I truly, intensely, hate hardware. Hardware breaks, is expensive and doesn't cooperate. The two Dell Inspiron laptops we bought February last year have had the following wrong with them within the warranty period:
And then, Sunday night, two bloody weeks out of warranty, the hard disk of my laptop breaks again. Nothing doing with Dell, no replacements, so I had to buy a new one. Paradigit (an excellent shop, at least in Deventer, where we buy our supplies and parts regularly) had a replacement drive of the right type, so Irina went and bought one, and I spent the night building it in. I'm no hero with those fiddly little screws that are always tightened way too hard in the factory, but I finally succeeded.
Only to discover while moving my music collection from the server that's bringing you this blog page that calcifer's hard drive is failing too. I hate hardware.
