2006-09-27
There's a tremendous effort being expended in the free software world to create great raster image applications. And that means that there are also a lot of free or open source libraries that could be used as the basis for an image editor application. Still, most applications use their own core. Krita has pigment for color management and kritaimage for pixel manipulation.
2006-09-25
Today I got the official award notification mail from Albert Astals Cid. Seems like it's not just honor I'm getting -- very generously Staikos Computing Services has sponsored two high-end Linux mobile telephones, one of which I'm getting.
The incredible Laurent Montel, who did the lion's share of porting KDE to Qt4, also gets one of these phones. Tink tells me it's a Motorola Rokr E2. Very cool! Apparently it doubles as an mp3-player. You should have heard the agonized squeals from my three very jealous teenage daughters!
Alexander Neundorf, who contributed so much to the success of replacing autotools with cmake has gotten a video iPod sponsored by Ricoh. I'm not sure what would have made my kids more jealous...
Linux New Media -- publishers of Linux Magazine, which is miles better than Linux Format (not a difficult feat) and which I read with more pleasure than Linux Journal nowadays, is giving all award winners a yearly subscription to one of their magazines. Yay for Linux New Media!
2006-09-24
Today's my birthday -- and, unsuited to my age as the sentiment is, I'm impressed by the bounty I've bagged. Episode 9 in Ken Don Rosa's epic history of Uncle Scrooge. A flask of very, very nice peppermint bath foam. A box of delicious Belgian pralines. A very, very cool Danish design wrist-watch. A dvd of the 1917 Dutch moving picture "Het Geheim van Delft" (I love ancient moving pictures, I'm a complete Douglas Fairbanks aficionado) and a dvd of Eisenstein's Potemkin, a movie I've always wanted to watch.
And to cap it all, tonight Thomas Zander phoned from Dublin to tell me Krita has bagged the Best Application Akademy Award! Whee! Yippee! Hurray! No way anyone is going to believe the width, height, brightness and general enormousness of the grin I'm wearing right now.
Hey, Bart, Cyrille, Casper, Adrian, Michael, Gabor, Sven, Sander (only Krita team member actually in Dublin), Emanuele, Ronan, thanks! Krita has a great team! And all our incidental contributors, bug reporters, testers, users -- everyone who has helped making Krita a better use for processor cycles around the world, thanks!
Virtual Guinness for everyone! To Krita 1.6! And again: to Krita 2.0.
2006-09-17
At least once a year, I type rm -rf bla * instead of rm -rf bla*... Today was this year's occasion. And before I knew what happened, the blog directory had vanished. I do have a recent backup, of course, but I cannot find it. Probably because I found a really good off-site place for it that I subsequently have forgotten. Just like a squirrel forgets his nut-cache. In any case, I found a slightly less recent backup -- we're back in May now.
The untimely demise of calcifer II, the server that was bringing you my blog entries, and the quick replacement of it by calcifer III sent me reminiscing about computers past and present.
2006-09-08
On of the little frustrations of developing for KDE4 is changing to the kde4 user (I know that’s not necessary, that it is possible to work on KDE4 from your regular user account, but I’m lazy and this is the way I got it setup). And to change to my kde4 user I type sux - kde4, which, well, sucks.
Fortunately I have at my disposal all the foo-magic of Bash! One quick alias later, KDE4 no longer sux, but rocks!
alias rocks="sux - kde4"
It’s simple, silly and cosmetic, but once more all is well with the world, the snail is on the wing, the lark on the thorn and every time a daisy sneezes a little god is born.
Oh, and I’m nearly through with refactoring Pigment to make it possible to add composition operation dynamically to colorspaces for extra flexibility.