Fading Memories

Getting weirded out because some people claimed to have "cracked" the Hyves Desktop application Arend, Girish, Roop and had managed to release just before the holidays began. And not only that, they put the cracked version of Bittorrent and Usenet. As if there was anything to crack... And we're still trying to convince the Powers that Be that making the whole thing GPL would be a Good Thing, since it would be a nice demonstration of Hyves' public website API, as well as a morally good thing. Plus, we wouldn't have to provice binaries for all varieties of Linux, which is quite hard, really.

Becoming quite seriously worried about the outlook for 2009. Well, that goes without saying... But we're directly influenced by the current problems, since we bought a new house in 2007 and still haven't managed to sell the old one in 2009.

Watching more than the usual number of movies -- we got a great little combined second-hand bookshop/new dvd shop next door -- from Peter Sellers to The Hogfather, from Bright Young Things to Tous les matins du monde (we discovered that we actually rather like watching movies that are French spoken).

Upgrading to OpenSUSE 11.1, and discovering that the new bootloader configuration screen is really6 incomprehensible and that the installer gave the same grub problems on Irina's computer as on mine. And I'm wondering why X11 sometimes thinks it's necessary to grab 100% of one core...

Roleplaying... Lots of it. And I still need to do the write-up for the last really long session.

Which I never get to, because mainly I've been hacking on krita. Two weeks of nearly daily commits. We've got previews of the brush presets now:

And improvements in performance when painting, fixes to saving and loading. Which fixes have brought their own regressions, despite Krita having a very extensive set of unit tests.

There's been real progress in Krita over the past month or so, but it's so long since we started on the 2.0 road that I sometimes feel nothing has happened. Until I need to take a look at the old codebase and discover that almost everything has changed. What I should do, I guess, is make a nice long document listing all improvements (and also all regressions, although there aren't that many), in time for our 2.0 release.

And finally, I've been toying with making a simple sketching app on top of the Krita libraries -- it's a nice little project, but given that most of my time is spent on Krita, not going very fast. And it gives me a good insight where Krita's dependency on KOffice, KDE and Qt is indispensable, and where it actually is. Dispensable, I mean. (For the hosting, Gitorious and tuxfamily.org seem very ok, although there's still a lot of roll-your-own with tuxfamily).

I thought it'd be a tolerably good idea to celebrate boxing day with installing OpenSUSE 11.1. After all, given that this laptop is a Thinkpad X61t with built-in tablet, installing a new version of any distribution tends to be interesting.

And indeed, I ran into two glitches: at first, OpenSUSE 11.1 refused to install my chosen grub configuration. Putting grub on the mbr fixed that, but it was quite a bit of a bother since my laptop didn't boot except from the external cd drive. But it was also my own fault for accidentally pressing the wrong key in the dialog that asked me whether I wanted to revisit my grub options or install anyway.

The tablet was a bit harder to get working, although the fix is simple and detailed in this bug report -- simply use ttyS4 instead of ttyS0, which used to be the right port to use for a tablet pc. And you know what? The touch screen of this laptop works, too, now! Only I have to use a nail, not my fingers. I think it's time to send Danny Kukawka cookies :-).

Now everything is fine, and rotating the screen with krandrtray very, very nearly works perfectly: only the wacom input devices aren't told about the rotation yet.

If I get that configured correctly, I'll be totally happy. Sound works, wireless network works (but it's still more convenient to use ifup instead of network manager, but the 11.0 bug where I'd have to restart the wireless network after booting to get it working is fixed. KDE looks great and feel very stable and I'm already recompiling KOffice.

Next: give it a try on the kids' laptops.

Update:

Of course, don't forget to manually change the device names from Mouse[x] to stylus and eraser in your xorg.conf: otherwise Krita won't work. And the following script, copied & bug-fixed from Thinkwiki makes the rotation work just fine:

  #!/bin/sh

output="(normal left inverted right)" #LVDS
 # if [ "$XROT_OUTPUT" ]
 # then     
 #         output=$XROT_OUTPUT;
 # fi
devices="stylus cursor eraser"

geomnbr=0
xrandr=normal
wacom=normal
if [ "$1" == "-" ] || [ "$1" == "+" ] || ! [ "$1" ];
then    
        operator="$1";
        [ "$1" ] || operator='+';
        case `xrandr --verbose | grep "$output" | sed "s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* [^ ]* ([^(]*) \([a-z]*\).*/\1/"` in
                normal)         geom=0;;
                left)          geom=1;;
                inverted)       geom=2;;
                right)          geom=3;;
        esac
        let geom=${geom}${operator}1+4
        let geom=${geom}%4      
else    
        geom="$1"
fi
case $geom in
        1)      wacom=2; xrandr=left ;;
        2)      wacom=3; xrandr=inverted ;;
        3)      wacom=1; xrandr=right ;;
        *)      wacom=0; xrandr=normal ;;
esac

echo "xrandr to $xrandr, xsetwacom to $wacom" >&2

if xrandr -o "$xrandr"; then
        for d in $devices
        do      
                xsetwacom set "$d" Rotate "$wacom"
        done
fi

if [ "`xsetwacom get stylus Mode`" == '1' ]; then
        for d in $devices
        do      
                xsetwacom set $d CoreEvent "off"
                xsetwacom set $d Mode "off"
        done
        { sleep 1;
        for d in $devices
        do      
                xsetwacom set $d Mode "on"
                xsetwacom set $d CoreEvent "on"
        done; } &
fi

My changes are to actually use the $d from the $devices and to add the eraser...

It used to be that there was only Sourceforge and DIY hosting for free software projects. Sourceforge was easy to setup, but incredibly slow. Nowadays it's still incredibly slow, and their download pages are stuffed with advertisements like a Christmas turkey. And DIY hosting is a chore, what with maintaining all the necessities and niceties for an open source project: forum, wiki, source revision system, bugtracker, blog aggregator, news pages, tutorials, downloads.

Nowadays there are more and more options available: Savannah, Berlios, Github, Gitorious, Google Code...

But, for a little, Qt-only experimental project of my own, is there one that has all the necessities:

• Project hosted under it's own domain name, like mycoolproject.org
• wiki
• forum
• bugtracker (bugzilla or mantis, not trac!)
• static html
• blog aggregator
• doesn't need to be free, but shouldn't cost more than about ten euros a month

Or does this list (especially requirement #1) mean I have to go the DIY route after all? Answers on a postcard please, since I haven't been able to find one that suits me in all respects. Right now I'm leaning towards google code + gitorious, but that doesn't give me my domain name.

But here it is, and shows a nice picture of the app we've been building together. At the same time Nine's Hyves blog about the photouploader was replaced by a more official, but slightly less accurate blog by one of the Hyves founders. It gets downloaded quite a lot, which adds to the general feeling of having done a good job that this Gang of Four share.

Meanwhile, we are learning about this cross-platform binary release business. Apparently our linux version, which has always been perfectly anti-aliased on our machines, suddenly shed its anti-aliased font rendering on Thomas Zander's computer. And the sound, which works on Ubuntu, doesn't work on OpenSUSE. There's only one real solution, I'm afraid: making it GPL and getting our users to compile it for themselves :-).

And today? I'm giving Qt 4.5 a try and taking a look at the Qt Creator source code. It's pretty interesting to see the code of a big Qt application that's not part of Qt or KDE, and it makes me think of platforms. I mean, an application like Krita is built on a stack of platforms: Qt, KDE and KOffice. What advantages and disadvantages does that stack give us? But that's a topic for another, longer entry.

So, today we not only have Canarias, the second beta of KDE 4.2 (which is seriously cool), and the release of OpenSUSE 11.1 (which is seriously cool), but at Hyves, Arend (ex-Krdc hacker) and me (krita hacker...) released the first version of the Hyves Desktop!

It's "only" a beta, and right now only Gold Members of Hyves can download it, but they are free to pass installers onto their friends and their friends unto their friends unto the nth generation.

But we did it! In only about four months we, that is Arend, me, Girish and Roop (of KOffice ODF fame) managed to hammer out a chat application with built-in photo uploader and blog/photo/news viewer. And it runs on Windows, OSX and Linux (though you probably won't have sound on OpenSUSE -- blame the gstreamer backend of phonon)

I'm a bit dizzy (also because of the celebratory beer) and excited and all that. This has been a cool ride. And now for a nice holiday and then for the final release -- which will be usable and useful for just about half the population of the Netherlands.

And I even managed very nearly at least one commit to KOffice this week, even though those were small commits :-)

View from our bedroom window:

And the roof terrace:

Oh the shame! It so happens that I have only two running versions of Krita: 1.6, to compare trunk with, and trunk. Now, as I said earlier, I happen to be working on loading and saving, and I suddenly thought that it would be way cool to be able to test loading Krita images saved from older versions.

But I don't have those versions, and I don't have images saved with those versions either... So: todays plea for help is "anyone who has Krita images, preferably with more than one layer, saved with Krita version 1.4 and 1.5, please, please contact me -- then I can test whether Krita trunk can still load old images."