Fading Memories

It's happened before that a coding mistake produced a very attractive side-effect, but this one is nice enough that I'd wish I could add a plugin to krita to do specifically this. But we're in string freeze now. Running the raindrops filter as an adjustmentlayer shows a bug in our filter API: filters are supports to read from a source paint device and write to a destination paint device, where source and destination are allowed to be the same object. But that needn't be true, and here we see the effect of a filter that does expect them to be different paint devices:

Adriaan, Aaron and Cornelis have all tried to reassure application developers that it's not a problem if KDE 4 will get delayed until somewhere in 2007, since KDE 3.5 is so great and stable and gives us everything we need to create great applications. And since my name was dropped, I'll have to chip in, of course.

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It needs polishing, and it's a bit slow, but on the other hand, it's a first: Krita's got working adjustment layers. This image shows a 16 bit L*a*b* image with a desaturating adjustment layer on top:

Now we got the layer groups implemented, this was fairly easy. Performance improvements will mainly have to come from caching un-dirty bits of projection.

Nathan Willis has written a very good article on Krita for linux.com, Exploring natural media graphics with Krita, where he describes where I personally want to take Krita in the future.

Of course, Krita is and will remain a competent image manipulation application, with cmyk, lab, adjustment layers and all that jazz, but my core interest is indeed natural media. Which makes me very happy that Bart Coppens has managed to make wet paint usable:

Everything works, except that we should disable parts of the user interface that are not relevant to wet work when the layer is wet and that drying is still a problem. In this image you can also see Gábor and Casper's jointly produced layer preview tooltips.

In other news, the freeze went by, but hacking is still frantic. First beta's are notoriously supposed to be unusable, but I do hope people will download the sources, packages and kliks and test KOffice 1.5 beta 1 really thoroughly. Especially OpenDocument interchangeability is of paramount importance, but there are other big improvements that could do with some serious user testing, like all of Krita, really, and big chunks of KWord, KSpread and KChart, and KPlato. We've been busy.

I didn't witness much of the freeze, actually, because I was laid up with acute food poisoning (again...) and I'm still not quite well. Actually, I'm going down about now.

Once I was a scholar, and learned Classical Tibetan, among other languages. Now our teacher was a very fine scholar and gave us a bit of poetry by the famous sixth Dalai Lama to translate, when we'd had about a year of Classical Tibetan.

In four wel-formed lines, this poem expressed the essential dichotomy between his day and his night life, between his exalted and his debased personality. (And, this being Buddhism, there's an argument to be made for connecting the two back to front: where exaltedness exceeds it becomes depravity and where depravity exceeds, it becomes exaltedness. Or something like that, I'm no longer as deeply into Buddhism as I once was.)

And somehow, inexplicably, I have been thinking of this poem all week long, when I was working on getting Krita ready for the freeze at night, and learning how to work with Java Studio Creator (new! hot! Visual Basic 3.0 for Web Applications! Only more complex, with Java and not as stable!) It's strange how man's mind works...

But back to Tsangyang Gyatso. An accurate translation is not suitable for a public web page, especially the last line would sound like a spammer's favourite subject line:

po ta la ru bzhugs dus
rig 'dzin tshangs dbyangs rgya mtsho
lha sa zhol du sdod dus
'chal po dvangs bzang dbang po

Even someone who doesn't know any Tibetan should recognize the first word (three syllables) of the first line, and the first word (two syllables) of the second line.

A loose translation in English:

In the Potala Palace
I am Rigdzin Tsangyang Gyatso
But in downton Lhasa,
I'm Dangzang Wangpo.

Now, where did I put my Dutch translation? It must be somewhere on the hard disk of my first laptop, or maybe on an old floppy... I've forgotten what Rigdzin Tsangyang Gyatso means. Something laudable, I'm sure.

But the old font I used when writing Tibetan in Word 2 is still available. The encoding is fantasy, and I made the font with CorelDraw.

But with an equal amount o flinguistics, sociology and art. Hm. This is the first quiz where I had "agree completely" at the majority of questions. I mean -- everything is so fascinating. I once read a couple of studies on television soaps -- fascinating, even though the soaps themselves are pretty boring. But here's my score:

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The next ice age in KOffice hacking will commence January 12th. That's awfully soon, so we're working like mad trying to get the features in so we can debug them at our leisure during the beta period. Er, no, scratch that. We're ready for it! Freeze, here we come!

In any case, Adrian Page committed a very nice refinement for Krita: the image is no longer show in the top-left corner, but in the center of your window. Together with this, the scaling steps and controls have been sanitized. In the same screenshot, you can see Gábor Lehel's new layerbox. This one is much more robust than the previous one. The old layerbox often became a little deranged when there were more layers in an image than it could show in one go. Of course, the new layerbox support drag & drop and the grouping of layers in folders. That was the cue for me to start implementing adjustment layers. It'll be a race against the clock to get them in before the feature freeze, but I made the first commit today.

In the meantime, Bart Coppens has extended the colourpicker so it can pick the average colour in an area of pixels around the cursor, instead of just the pixel where you clicked, Cyrille Berger has created a png, tiff and jpeg import/export filter, and extended the scripting in Python and Ruby module. Casper Boemann has been working on the palette mechanics and has done most of the work to make the implementation of nested layers possible.

Back to KDevelop now!

Two weeks and one week late, respectively. And at least one will go back to Dell immediately. At least one has been returned to us with a broken dvd player and a broken keyboard.

We're checking the other one as I type...

Update

The other one is working fine. But there's only one expression for Dell, and I'm not going to use that expression in public.

Another update

No, both laptops have returned broken. And it's bloody impossible to get to speak to someone at Dell except ordinary technical support, and they are dragging Irina through the entire "are you sure it isn't your own fault", "run the recovery cd" (nice, both laptops don't have a working cd drive anymore), "no windows? We only support Windows" sequence. And then, of course, they'll notice the machines are out of warranty, I'm waiting for that.

Oh, and Dell technical support cannot handle two broken machines at a time; they can handle only one service tag per call. Damn Dell.