Fading Memories

Moving is done, job-hunting is done, conferences are done -- I can start hacking again. And here's where I hack nowadays:

When you read this, your provider has already received the DNS update for valdyas.org. We not only moved house, but also ip address. We're now living in the town centre of Deventer -- look at the lovely waag, which is just a minute walking from here:

This is what the living room looked like when we bought the house:

And this is before we moved in:

By now we've not only got internet again, but most of books are out of the boxes, too:

And this is what our old living room looked like before

and after the movers took most of the stuff:

Anyway, KOffice is compiling again!

Emanuele Tamponi (Thrain) has managed to implement Kubelka-Monk color mixing for Krita's mixer palette. This means, simply put, that mixing works like in real life. It uses the reflectancy of pigments to reliably mix color on the computer and get the results you've been taught in primary school.

This is really unique. There is no other software available that does this. Corel Painter doesn't do this. Photoshop doesn't do this. There are some academic experiments that do this -- but it's impossible to get the code or the binaries for that.

Hip hip for Emanuele!

(Pics will follow when I've either compiled Krita (I broke my tree) or have finished moving house, whichever comes first.)

So, after a foray into Javascript and into PHP I'm back, for a bit, coding Java. A stupid little web application with maybe four data objects and a webservice interface. And I am not liking it. We're using Appfuse (nice community, helpful maintainer -- no quibbles with that) to generate all the boilerplate for us. Generating boilerplate code was a cardinal sin already in 1993 when Visual C++ would clutter your application with its reams of generated MFC boilerplate, and it's still a Bad Thing.

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Next week we're moving house. So valdyas.org will in all probability be down for a week (or more, depending on how fast our ADSL connection is moved), and I will not only be incommunicado, but I also won't be working on Krita.

Which is a pity, because after reading Dan Sawyer's July Linux Journal article on Deep Images, I feel extremely motivated. It's a pity the article isn't available on-line, except for subscribers, but it's very enthusiastic and positive. Indeed, the first word that came to my mind was "panegyric"...

People said it couldn't be done, but I've made my connection at Heathrow! Of course, my connecting plane is late now.

I hadn't time to blog about it yesterday -- much too busy attending the extremely interesting BOF track -- but, hey! Emanuele Tamponi has checked in his very first version of the color mixing palette. Using Tunde Cockshott's Wet & Sticky code as a guideline, he made sure that when you mix blue with yellow you get, indeed, green. Likewise red and blue gives purple!

I'm on my way home now, in Glasgow's airport. Yes, it still smells of fire in places. The security checks took much less time than I'd thought, though, so I could conceivable have attended the first track of today's BoF sessions and still been in time. And wifi at aKademy might be patchy, but it is free. Here, I'm paying 4 or 5 pound per hour.

Looking bad, I'm so glad I went. I finally met with Bart Coppens and Emanuele Tamponi in person. I had a lot of fun, learned that we did the right thing in our use of Interview in the Krita layerbox and how to handle gdb in Emacs. Great stuff, great people -- many new faces, which I think is great, too.

My bag is back! I've got my bag back! Not that I didn't look spruce and suave and everything I should have looked at the Lord Provost reception in the town hall tonight -- being clad from toe to crown, from outer crust to inner underwear in Burton's best -- but I'm glad to have my pocket knife, my good shoes and everything back.

Today was the e.V. meeting, an exercise in unavoidable tediousness. And when there's finally something rivetting happening, I can't blog about it, because it's e.V. stuff!

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I learned in response to our Krita donation drive on the Dot, people have donated more than 700 euros already! We're getting really close to the point where we want to be -- two small tablets with the assorted tools. You can still donate:

We need this hardware not just because it's cool: it's simply impossible for us to support all the features that artists need without being able to test them and verify them -- so at least two Krita developers need an Intuos with the right tools!

Still no luggage -- I went out to Burton's yesterday and bought new shirts, trouser, jacket, underwear, socks and shoes. Also proper shampoo. So I'm once again the spruce and natty hacker that I always strive to be.

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