2006-11-30
I've been watching from the corner of my eye the life videocast from the Church of St. George today. The Patriarch of Constantinople and the Pope celebrated the Holy Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. I was hoping for a miraculous restoration of full communion -- for the Patriarch to beckon the pope with the chalice, or something like that.
2006-11-29
I've just been helping a friend of ours to get up to speed with her new Macbook Pro (latest model, very nice!). She's a theoretical physicist and a composer and needed a word processing application. Besides, there were were a couple of things about her new mac she was unsure of. Sitting next to her was as educational for as I hope it was for her. Lessons learnt:
2006-11-14
Derek Kite's blog about gender mentions Leonoard Sax. I feel I have to chip in with a a warning: Sax's book "Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know About the Emerging Science of Sex Differences." has been widely exposed as pseudoscience of the worst kind.
Sax is anecdotal, overinterprets his sources and more. He has a political agenda: he is the premier proponent of single sex education. The "science of sex differences" is mostly on the same intellectual level as "Men are from Mars, Women from Venus".
Don't read Sax (at least not seriously): read Language Log instead!
2006-11-13
I've been sitting on my hands for the whole day, ever since I read Ongoing this morning... By now I've read the blogs and seen the webcast -- and I still simply must chime in:
Hurray!
Sun is just doing everything right: the right licenses, the right language (notice the GNU/Linux on the announcement graphic? The licenses are the right licenses -- being a Java drone suddenly starts feeling right.
Of course, a move like this is going to have a lot of influence. What will happen to Mono? Even, what will happen to DotNet itself? How will Jambi fit? Will we perl KOffice into a pure Java application? May we go as far as expecting imminent peace in the Middle East?
Someone who isn't worrying is Mark Wielaard, the GNU Classpath maintainer. He's loving this: read his blog.
Krita's scaled used to be, at least in my memory, a lot better than it's now. The change came when we went from scaling code that was channel-depth dependent and scaling-specific to channel-depth independent generic transform code. Today I put the old code back and special cased it for 8 bit rgb, cmyk and grayscale code. Let's see if it makes any difference. The image was scaled from 1200 pixels width to 400 using the default settings. Just open the dialog, set the width and press enter. That's what I always do anyways.
The generic code:
Michael Thaler's quality optimized code:
Gimp:
And now blown up to 800 percent:
The generic code:
Michael Thaler's quality optimized code:
Gimp:
The Gimp may still be a little better than Michael's code, which gives results that are just a little fuzzier, but the quality difference between the generic Krita code and Michael's code show that my memory hadn't betrayed me.
2006-11-11
Karbon in trunk has gained an amazing new shape (and because it's a Flake shape every other KOffice application can or will be able to use it, too.) Starting out with a simple star, Jan Hambrecht has created these wonderful objects:
(I defiantly scaled the image with Krita, but I must admit that we've got a regression here. At one point in time, our scaling was really good.
2006-11-10
We're having another flake weekend at my place: Thorsten, Thomas and Sander are already here, we're waiting for Jan Hambrechts, the tireless Karbon hacker from Berlin. Sorry Ellen for abducting a Berlin KDE hacker to the Netherlands!
Tomorrow we're going to do some interaction design, decide on a common UI vision (hopefully) and do a lot of high-bandwidth code design. I want to get as much of this done, and not so much actual coding.
"I have nothing to hide" - or the Sainsbury's Lesson. It explains why Irina and I canceled our library cards when the library started keeping track of not just which of their books we had at home, but also of the books we ever borrowed.
2006-11-06
As Terry Pratchett likes to have his characters say (Pterry being as fond of his own jokes as the next man and liking to repeat them often), a metaphor is a lie. Which makes it surprising, given the propensity of software engineers to shout "Not True!" at the drop of a hat, that metaphors are so often used in our software: everywhere from basic concepts to icons.
We're going to have a KOffice crash interaction design meeting next weekend at my place, and in preparation I'm reading up on my Cooper. One thing that has always surprised me is the use of metaphors in software. Cooper agrees: in chapter 20 of About Face 2.0 he talks about metaphors, idoms and affordances, preferring the latter two over the first. The big problem with metaphors is not that they don't fit the way humans think, we do think in metaphors, but that they don't scale and become stale so very fast. For example: