Fading Memories

To read Chinese. Not very well, and only traditional characters (the simplified characters of the PRC were far beneath our dignity in Leyden, at least, when I was a student there). But that's two decades ago, and not much of the ancient skill still lingers.

Which is a pity, since I found four Chinese painting manuals for 50 cents each, dating from the seventies. It's all research for Krita! This one is, judging from the contents, especially about drawing women:

Of course, I still have got all my old dictionaries... But Chinese dictionaries are quite a pain to use. One has to know which "radical" -- the identifying part of the charachter -- the character belongs to. Then you have to count the remaining strokes, and that's generally enough to find the character in the dictionary.

For instance, I seem to remember that the first character of the title belongs to the "man" radical -- that's the two strokes to the left. The other three strokes are also a radical, namely the "earth" radical, but it's the "man" radical that's this character's radical. If I remember correctly, because it got less strokes than the other radical.

Look at this handout that still was in my New Practical Chinese-English Dictionary:

So.. We turn to page 39, where the "man" radical starts, and start looking for the characters with three extra strokes. That's on page 42/43. There we find:

We are in luck! The second meaning of the compound "shinu" means "painting portraying beautiful women". Yes, this book is about what I thought it was about!

Of course, when I studied Chinese you needed an extra board in your computer with all Chinese characters baked into ROM in order to be able to type Chinese. Internet was not for students, especially not for those language types.

These days, it should be easy to create a Chinese dictionary application that lets you draw the character using a stylus or your finger or even the mouse and then checks strokes and stroke order and comes up with the right character. However, I haven't found such an application -- most dictionary want you to find the characters using the Pinyin romanization. Which I don't know if I don't know the character...

Not that I am going to do that. I'm trying to optimize painting in Krita right now, and my compile has just finished.

I'm not sure how I arrived at the website of the Times Literary Supplement and found a review of a book based on Henriette Lucie Dillon La Tour Du Pin Gouvernet's memoirs, "Journal D'une Femme de Cinquante Ans". But is fascinating reading, these memoirs of a lady who was a maid-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette and who lives through revolutions, wars, exile and everything.

And I was so glad when I found the e-text! It was only released on March 15th... I haven't read a lot of French lately, but the nineteeth century French Lucie Dillon writes is really easy to read, probably because the French I was taught at school was already fifty years out of date back in the eighties.

But now for the sad part: it's only part 1! The fun bits, where she lives in America as an exile, making her own butter, and where she returns to Europe to hob-nob with Napoleon are missing! Please, Mireille Harmelin and Eric Vautier, I want to read on!

My book on Python and Qt programming -- which has always been plagued by availability problems and a publisher who managed to fail to get it into Amazon -- is finally obsolete: Mark Summerfield's Rapid GUI Programming with Python and Qt has just been published by Prentice Hall. I haven't read it, but I'm quite confident that it'll be an excellent book.

I know I am person with wide-ranging interests, but how the deuce did Amazon infer that just because I like to read the Church Fathers, I'd also be interested in signal processing? And... Am I interested in signal processing? Image manipulation is special case of signal processing, of course, but I tend to leave that sort of detail to Cyrille Berger and Michael Thaler...

Bjarne Stroustrup

Buy this book.

Since October 2003 I have learned to appreciate the C++ programming language. In fact, the better I get acquainted with C++, the more I like it. So, after having read Practical C++ by Ouailline, C++ in a Nutshell by Lischmer, Accelerated C++ by Koenig and Moo and a few others, and after having touched half a million lines of C++, I thought it time to go to the master for instruction.

Which is why I bought a second hand copy of The Design and Evolution of C++, and later also The C++ Programming Language. Even though it's an old book, dating back to 1994 (stone age, practically, no mention of Java or Python in this book), TDaEoC++ was exactly right for me. I like reading the combination of a historical treatment and a discussion per "feature" or "problem area" much more than a language specification or a tutorial-style book. I feel I've got a much better understanding of why things are the way they are in C++.

Of course, it's also an advantage that Stroustrup is a clear and entertaining author: not too dry, but not trying to be overly funny either. If I wanted to niggle I'd say that Stroustrup is a little too defensive, although that's understandable given the flak that C++ has been getting since its inception.

Dan Margulis

Buy this book.

Larry Marso wrote to the KImageShop mailing list in January 2006 about this book (two chapters are freely available). It deals with the LAB colorspace and the ways LAB makes it easy to completely mess up, I mean, fix, your photographs. Larry wrote us because just then we had added a 16 bit/channel LAB color colorspace to Krita, more because we needed it as an intermediary than because we knew what people would actually do with it.

Now, about a year later, I decided it was time to get the whole text and see whether Krita can Do This, too, already. I haven't started with that yet, for two reasons: first, I was in hospital, second: the demo files that come with the book are not in nice application-independent TIFF (or OpenRaster...), but in PSD, PSD > version 6, to be exact. I have to hope that Cyrille Berger hurries up with his libpsd (which he's developing together with the Scribus people).

Until that's done, I'll just have to content myself with reading the book. There's no doubt that there is a lot of interesting and good information in it. I really want to give Margulis' recipes a try with Krita, and improve Krita where necessary. But at the same time -- oh my gosh! Margulis is a crashing bore. He's self-important, self-congratulatory, wordy -- in short, nearly unreadable. Still, I'll probably wrestle my way through most of it.

Patricia Bray

Buy this book

I had to go to hospital for a small operation (that nonetheless entailed my first night in a hospital), so I had to have some light reading. This book looked like the most likely satisfying on the fantasy and science fiction shelves of the local bookshop. I had never heard of the author, which is a plus for me, and the world building seemed quite nice, even if a little derivative, with strong echoes of late Byzantium and a map that looked a bit like the Black Sea. And despite being the first of a series, it didn't seem the usual hackneyed first part of a polylogy, but a rounded story.

Turns out that it was good choice: there are interesting people in the book, shades of moral good and bad, the world building is as interesting as it seemed at first blush, the intrigue is complex, but not too complex for my nose-stuffed-up-with-sponges-and-bandaged self. Only near the end it seemed as if Patricia Bray got into trouble: she has set up her various plotlines so that there simply isn't good or bad anymore and it becomes difficult to emphathize with any of the protagonists. But that's quite realistic, too, and the depictions of imperial politics, while not quite as convincing as, say, Psellus (who really was in the thick of it), are convincing.

Another strong point: the main protagonist's condition remained a mystery to me for as long as it remained a mystery to himself, despite carefully crafted hints. To me that shows that this is a well-crafted story. I'm looking forward to the second story about Josan -- even though the preview at the back seems to hint that he won't survive the first twenty pages.

In Krita 2.0, we will be using OpenGL much more than we already do in Krita 1.5, so I need to learn. When ordering the two basic books, OpenGL Programming Guide and OpenGL Shading Language. But Amazon then gave me Open Source Game Development Qt Games for KDE, PDAs, and Windows as a related choice.

I was a bit surprised: a whole book on coding games for KDE? But, well, it had an introductory chapter on OpenGL, and I thought that might help me ease into the topic.

It turns out this book is a really excellent, well-written concise and clear introduction to coding for KDE. Not just for coding games, but the whole thing. The ideal beginners introduction for people who are interested in coding for KDE. Of course, it doesn't deal with CMake yet, although there is quite decent coverage of Qt4. And the OpenGL chapter is just what I needed, too.

Buy this book, is my advice!

I am reading An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek. Additional Notes by Hennry Swete. The Grand Rapids seminary (mildly famous in the Netherlands because they revere our Kuyper, while we have almost forgotten about Abraham de Geweldige) have scanned the 1914 edition of this massive book, tagged it using something called "theological xml markup" and prepared a public domain pdf. With all the Greek, Hebrew and everything intact. It's really a great read, and I wish I had a similar book about the Hebrew old testament and another one on the New Testament, with a final volume on the apocrypha.

Read more ...

Neil Gaiman

Buy this book at Amazon

Oh dear... Someone has been reading Frazer's Golden Bough again, And where Wrede and Stevermer's The Grand Tour is fun with dark edges, American Gods is weirdness with leaden edges.

It's the kind of book you open, and then suddenly find that you've read sixty, maybe a hundred pages without the text leaving much of an impression. Fluent wordwooze, was my impression. And then it starts to get seriously weird and complicated.

Not to mention philosophical, but you need to bring a lot more than rehashed nineteenth century scholarly superstitions to faze me (fortunately the book has a happy ending, even if the bit just before the ending is just as unsatisfying as the ending to Cryptonomicon.) But I'm not impressed by a comparison between a television and an altar. That's been done before, on Dutch television, too, or so I am told, not having one of the machines myself.

But in the end, a well-constructed story with some very interesting people in it -- it's just that I wish that these books would have an ending that was as good as the middle.