Fading Memories

There are such wonderful new opportunities these days, up for grabs for any self-respecting intelligence agency eager to get on in the world. For instance, the public transport companies in the Netherlands have decided that paper tickets are so past tense -- chip cards are where it is. And unless you pay extra, your chipcard will be personalized and you need to swipe it at the begin and at the end of every journey. And those details will be recorded. And kept, into the ages of ages.

Which we, happy customers, won't mind at all. Dutch Rail knows its customers, said their boss recently, and he just knows we won't mind. And of course we will be delighted if this information is used for commercial purposes -- and we don't like it, we'll just be glad to pay a little more. And, of course, we're fiercely patriotic enough to really love it when all this lovely data is commandeered by the Dutch intelligence agency, the AIVD. It's for our safety and protection! We must unite to safeguard our democracy.

And do we believe the more expensive cards are really anonymous? Do we believe we won't be suspect if we want one of those? Of course! We believe! All hail the wisdom of our government. They know what's good for us, and we cannot but bow our heads in admiration for them.

Read: Bits Of Freedom Niewsbrief, 29 maart 2006.

And don't think you will escape by driving a car: your itinerary will be registered. It is your car, it's you who is driving it. And just like your car won't be stolen by terrorists and criminals, so whatever happens is your fault, your OV Card won't be stolen. And you are your mobile phone. Do not deny it. Be happy, and obey.

Today is a big day for KOffice -- Laurent and David have starting porting trunk to Qt4/KDE4. That's great new -- and a lot of work has already been done. Cyrille has start coordinating the 1.6 effort -- a feature release for Krita, Kexi and KChart. I'm bugfixing already for the successor to the first release candidate for KOffice 1.5. Had a nice chat with Thorsten about tools for flake. Lots of activity, very bracing.

On the other hand, koffice.org is down so we cannot release 1.5 rc1 even though everything is ready!

Yesterday, Rob, Casper, Thorsten, Peter and I discussed the architecture and the design of our new shared KOffice-wide graphical object library. When taking a short breather, strolling through the snow we decided to provisionally call this library flake -- after the complex shaped that were filling the night sky.

The goals of this library are to have in all KOffice application that can use graphical objects like clip-art, stencils, borders, animations, embedded movies and whatever:

• Common object handling in all libraries: the same user interface for creation, selection, moving, resizing, snapping to rulers and guides etc.
• A simple object hierarchy with a common manipulatable base object class and subclasses for svg objects, lines, movies, embedded documents and text objects. Svg objects and lines should always have the option of an associated text object.
• Color management (may be hard to achieve with Arthur)
• Connectors and snapping
• Excellent printing
• The possibility of adding high-level behavior to objects (click on an object and move to another page in Kivio.
• Copy and paste and drag and drop in and between applications
• Saveable in OASIS
• Inspector widgets
• Undo and redo (of course)
• The objects render themselves to a QPainter
• Oh, and while we're at it, let's try to get a common ruler implementation, shall we?

What we don't want to do is:

• KOffice independent. Initially it will be, because we're developing on Qt4, but it's no hard requirement, unless people from outside KOffice start helping and hacking, perhaps.
• No canvas. This is no canvas library: every application will have a canvas optimized for the kind of things it needs to do (although Karbon14 and Kivio will merge their canvas and use the same thing.)
• Creation of complex svg itself: use Karbon14 or Inkscape for that
• Save in KOffice's old file format

Of course, we immediately started hacking, and we can already put a red square with a black border on screen and manipulate it! Our first bit of Qt4 code. Impressive isn't it?

I may be missing the Libre Graphics Meeting (but Cyrille is going to hold up the Krita banner), but we've got our own little KOffice Graphics Meeting here in Deventer this weekend. Peter Simonssen (Kivio), Thorsten Zachmann (KPresenter), Casper Boemann (Krita) and Rob Buis (Karbon14) are here to discuss how we're going to handle graphical objects in KOffice 2.0.

Rob is right now typing up a list of items from our initial dinner discussion Common handling of complex graphical objects, connectors, color management, fine-grained application integration (objects, not documents!) and shared canvas have been discussed tonight. And tomorrow we're going to do some real discussion, design and perhaps even API stubbing.

Thorsten and Casper have arrived -- at least, Thorsten has just arrived, but Casper and I have been hacking all day on Krita already

Rob has joined us.

Peter has arrived from Sweden -- time for dinner and initial exploratory discussions, interleaved with preparing the KOffice 1.5 beta 2 release. Tomorrow we'll do the dot story... Everything is prepared except the kliks, but Kurt Pfeiffle is busy bribing Isaac to prepare the debs...

I recently got my hands on the source code for a painting application written from 1991 to 1993 by a EPITA students in France -- Olivier Brand, Olivier Raoul, Olivier Lahaye, Olivier Coquet, Frederic Losacco, Frederic Gaubert, Bertrand le Vern en Cedric Marsot. Their painting application -- a school project -- is called Rainbow and is a treasure trove of advanced ideas.

Apart from the custom real-time dithering X server that's included somewhere, the version of the code Olivier Lahaye managed to retrieve for me from an ageing MIPS machine can paint using on-the-fly computed textures, deform an image by distorting a grid and lot, lots more. A very cool magic wand implementation.

More advanced code is somewhere on a possibly broken Amiga harddisk. Or not, but Olivier Lahaye is trying to hunt it out for me. This includes a SIOX-like algorithm for foreground selection and an intelligent fill routine that was able to texture an image of a green car in the countryside. Select the car, select fill: presto: a wooden car with all the shadows intact. Painting with just intensity. Paint with color, but not intensity.

To put this into context: in August 1995 Kimball and Mattis started on the Gimp. XPaint seems to have started in 1991, one year after Rainbow. Try to imagine what the libre graphics world would have looked like if an application with the capabilities of Rainbow would have been released under an open source license in 1993!

KOffice and its translations preparatory to tagging KOffice 1.5 b2, I'm already looking forward with anticipation to next weekend. That's when Rob Buis (Karbon), Peter Simonssen (Kivio), Thorsten Zachmann (KPresenter) and Casper Boemann (Krita) are coming to Deventer to start working on what should become a common foundation for the handling of graphical objects for KOffice. The KDE e.V. has agreed to sponsor these hackers' travel costs, and I'll sponsor their food, drink & connectivity.