Fading Memories

I was cleaning away stuff that spambayes had classified as spam -- and while deleting my trash mail, I saw a message with the subject "ontology" going the way of all bits... In case that was actually something about my previous entry, please, dear correspondent, I didn't mean it personally, it's these 500+ spam messages a day that have made my fingers more trigger happy than is good for me. Could I bother you to resend? Please?

I simply cannot parse sentences with that word in it. I know -- from observing the AI types at work -- that it more or less means making a list of words that divvy up a chunk of reality so a program can fake being intelligent through pattern-matching. And the dictionary defines it as "the branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being." Which, actually, thank you very much, doesn't help me much.

But what does it mean in a text translated from the Greek written in Paris of the seventies? That is, what the thingummybob is the meaning of "ontological ethos of the communion?"? The weirdest thing is, if I just scratch out all instances of the word in this book (The Freedom of Morality, Christos Yannaras), all sentences seem to make perfect sense, and I cannot conceive of a way they will have any more meaning than with their auctorial scattering of "ontological".

Same with the adjective "existential" in the same book or "real" and "true" in Schmemann's "Introduction to Liturgical Theology." If these were hack writers I'd suspect them of trying to up the wordcount a bit...

Krita is done! At least, the very first public release of Krita. Almost feature complete -- I had hoped to get the CMYK plugin done, but didn't make it in the end -- and pretty stable. I hope.

Bart even managed to salvage the convolver code -- it turns out I had made a couple of stupid coding mistakes, not even real mistakes in the algorithm.

Of course, coding never stops. David Faure has branched the KOffice svn repository (typed cvs here, fingers can't get used to that new-fangled svn nonsense. Harrumph.), and I'm going to re-enable everything that was disabled from compilation for the 1.4 release.

There's a lot to do: colorspace independence for all basic painter and filter functions. A better gui with hooks to enable things that are not useful with particular colorspaces. Draggable tabs for the dockers. And a host of other features -- from a bird's eye-view panning and zooming docker to a color variations dialog. Digikam integration is a big issue, too. After all, it'd be a complete waste of effort to duplicate all the hard work of Gilles and Renji.

And in the meantime a nasty cold has reduced my brains to gooey mush...

Another chapter of the delayed travelogue... Boring, I know, but then, nobody has to read it... Still, some pretty good snaps.

Krita's current convolution code has a bug that I cannot seem to be able to eradicate -- partly because I don't understand convolution all that well, and partly because the code isn't so terribly clear. So what does the intrepid hacker do when faced with a bit of code with a problem?

Right, he starts rewriting. Unfortunately, owing to the fact that I don't understand convolution all that well, the new code doesn't quite work either. Behold the result of a gaussian blur:

If I had set out to achieve this very cool effect, I wouldn't have been able to do it...

I started typing a comment to previous, but then decided that it was too long to bury in a blog comment. By the way, the reason Kurt couldn't comment directly is blog spam. I just couldn't keep up with the comment spams, and blosxom doesn't offer a spamfilter.

Anyway, that's just an aside -- what I meant was, if people start writing a usability report on the current version of Krita with lots of good ideas on how to improve, say, the toolbar, won't they be disappointed to learn that we were going to implement a new toolbox anyway?

On a deeper level, the reason it's hard to involve usability experts in an early stage is that much development in those stages is exploratory, not coding to reach an already conceived-of state, but just futzing around, adding a bit of code here & there. Getting a feel for the problem domain, even. I mean, for a long time the only book on computer graphics I had when coding for Krita was Java2D Graphics by Jonathan Knudsen, because my company had a copy on its shelves. I knew nothing about graphics, and I'm still not an expert.

And Krita had other problems: three different views of what an image editor should be intermingled, with layer upon layer of architectural and accidental residue.

Just getting most things to work within the existing framework took me and the rest of Krita hackers about a year and a half. Take a look at my first baby steps, in January 2004...

Most things work now, many things have been re-done, in some cases for the sixth time in as many years, and finally we've got an application that the original authors and the subsequent maintainers might recognize as something that comes close to what they had intended KImageShop, Krayon, Kandinsky or Krita to be. My own idea of what a paint app should be is quite different, but these are baby steps and I'm learning all the way.

Anyway, just before Kurt published his comment, I'd registered Krita with OpenUsability. Let's wait and see if there are people willing to be consulted about questions like "what should happen when a user applies a rotation to a layer that has a selection active" or "what is better -- having a button on-screen to execute and commit a crop command, or execute and commit the crop on changing to another tool". I do hope so, because not every problem can be solved by doing what the leading commercial application does.

in the KOffice 1.4 release schedules that is marked red. The coding work needs to be done; the translators have another week to clean up the mess the coders inevitably left in their wake.

In the past few weeks an incredible amount of work has been done by the Krita developers. I've been on holiday for two weeks -- I did plan this holiday around the KOffice release schedule, but I thought KOffice would be done by the end of March at its latest -- so I didn't do as much damage as I'd have done otherwise.

Especially Casper, Adrian, Bart and Sven have really cleaned up the TODO list. Of course, a number of planned or tentatively implemented features have been scrapped, but even so, this version of Krita is more powerful and stable than the one in the last beta. Code that was commented out because incomplete has been uncommented and completed, lots of crashes fixed -- I'm really quite happy with the version of Krita that's going to go out into the big, bad world.

(Let me share one tip already with you: if you find that Krita's palette windows take too much space (for instance because you've got a small monitor), then make add the following line to the [GENERAL] your .kritarc file:

dockerStyle=0

This will give you sliding docker windows like in Kivio automatically.)

For the future, we want to finally add 16-bit channels, painterly features like the Wet & Sticky model I've been porting and I've also toyed with the idea of asking the OpenUsability people for a review of Krita's UI -- the problem here is that we have some very clear ideas on what we want to change almost immediately after the release and that may impact the usefulness of a review.

The Krita hackathon will be in a month or two, and I'm still working on an abstract for the User conference part of Akademy -- but I'm also still not sure that I'll be able to go. I hadn't realized that I simply must be back on Thursday, because that's my twin's birthday.

Update: I completely missed David Faure's mail about us coders having another week to fix bugs, too -- not just the translators. I promise I'll be extra careful with strings!

We decided to take our summer holidays a little early, this year. (Or rather, we took the decision last year). I thought we'd have KOffice 1.4 out of the door by April 1, and that this would be a safe time to book a holiday I guessed I would need by then. I did need the holiday, but it was clear my timing was quite a bit off.

I'd already warned the Krita developers that I'd slowly drop out of things during the first half of the Holy Week leading up to Easter. Orthodox Easter, of course... And when I came home from work Wednesday April 27 I didn't even have time to check my mail one last time.

I was already too late to have dinner before Church because we had a reception in honor of a defecting colleague at my work. Seeing that the new CEO seems to be changing the company from a maker of software to a provider of warm bodies with coding skills, my ex-colleague decided that instead of allowing the boss to skim off the profits of letting his body to the highest bidder, he'd better sell himself as dear as possible.

(And frankly, if this goes any further than I'm not sure I will look askance at incoming offers of regular employment... I'm an experienced Java, Python and C++ coder with all relevant extra skills (operating systems, shell, batch, xml -- whatever you want, I've probably dabbled with it. Dicom and Snobol, even.) I'm also a fairly decent project leader who's done requirements analysis, architecture, design and documentation on the side. The one thing I bar is being sent out to do two months of boring work for someone who pays by the hour. I deliver things, not hours of work.)

You know what? If I go on writing everything I want to write, this'll fill a complete page on Planet KDE on on the other aggregation pages that syndicate Fading Memories, and that wouldn't be polite. I'll use the old-fashioned expedient of making a static web-page of the rest, and linking to it. So, if you are interested in the account of the first few days of two weeks in Greece (full of human interest, acute observation of delightful details and what not), with more to come, hop over to http://www.valdyas.org/~boud/athens2005.html. I'll expand it over time, as I find time. Or not...