Fading Memories

I might make it to Fosdem, too... This year it doesn't, for once, coincide with Irina's birthday, so I'm going to try to pop down to Brussels tomorrow morning, and pop back to Deventer in the evening. It should give me a couple of hours of quality hacking time, at least. So...

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).

Whee! In a few hours, we (that's me and two colleagues from Hyves will be going to München, to be at the Developer Days!

This weekend a Polish delicatessen shop opened for business in Deventer. Right in the nick of time! It means I can get the delicious Tyskie beer that so impressed me in Wroclaw. Just when I was feeling sad for getting a thimbleful of rather depressing beer at the local lunch places (together with food that wasn't any better than the worst food I had at the pizza-ish place at the Grunwaldski street in Wroclaw). And they have Zywiec, too. Pity Spiz doesn't export their great cloudy pilsner -- but I will probably go back to Wroclaw just for that.

I got home yesterday from the LGM in Wroclaw after the longest train journey I've ever made. From spending a couple of hours waiting for my train to depart on Peron 3 in Wroclaw Glowny I certainly got the impression that the railways are used in Poland much like they used to be used in the Netherlands in the seventies: plenty of night trains, trains going everywhere. I mean -- it used to be possible to take a direct train from Deventer to Copenhagen, Moscow or even Wernigerode... The sleeper train I took came from Krakow, split, joined up with another train coming from Odessa and went on to Berlin Gesundbrunnen, where I changed to a train coming from Stettin. I felt like a real traveller, and I was dirty like a real traveller!

The last LGM day, Sunday, felt quite weird. There were two really, really important talks in the morning, but attendance was way down. The first, by Kai-Uwe Behrmann had the Oyranos Color Management System as its topic. Oyranos is just about the only project that gives the free desktop a chance of having a built-in CMS. Pluggable color management engines, coupled with a desktop-wide configuration module (a Google Summer of Code project mentored by John Cruz) may finally put us on par with Windows and OS X. Also presented during Kai-Uwe's talk was the Color Correction near X11 project, another Summer of Code project, by Tomas Carnecky.

I have already blogged a bit about Dave Coffin's dcraw talk. Raw image manipulation was certainly, together with type design, one of the big topics this conference. There are at least four attempts ongoing to make it easier to use dcraw from an application and to make it possible to interfere in various stages during the conversion process. Some applications, like Anders, Anders and Anders' Rawstudio only use dcraw for decryption, others, like Krita, simply call dcraw and scoop in the result from stdout. But dcraw is a most impressive application.

The Rawstudio team: Anders, Anders and Anders

This guy is Kaveh Bazargan. He runs a totally free-software based publishing business in Kerala, India. (The only thing he hasn't been able to replace completely is Photoshop, but he's going to try Krita and Gimp for that.) And he recorded the talks in the big auditorium. There was someone else also doing recordings, but Kaveh's results are at http://www.river-valley.tv/conferences/lgm2008/. He must have been one of the most energetic persons I met this conference -- always excepting Gilles Caullier who leaves you feeling like you were struck by lightning after five minutes of conversation. I'm sure my French improved a lot just from listening to Gilles!

I still think Hotel Polonia is making a bloomer, renovating their premises. They should carefully restore everything and make it a themed hotel. Relive the fifties! The breakfast room girl should then be given a raise: she is so authentically surly. The breakfast was pretty good, though. And there was a theatre stage in the breakfast room!

The corridors must have been great, with marble, inlaid wood floors, flowery carpets...

The entrance to Hotel Polonia.

On Monday, we had a day off, and Cyrille, Emanuele and me went out to take a look at Wroclaw. During the afternoon, Piotr Szymański took us for a tour of the town. He and his friends have architecture and local history as a hobby and they could give us lots of background information above and beyond what we could find in the Guide Michelin Cyrille had brought.

Piotr pointing the Ostrow Tumski (though he should be hacking on Okular!)

Its history makes Wroclaw very interesting, with buildings in German, Austrian, Czech and Polish traditions. Of course, with the expulsion of almost all Germans after the second world war from Silesia, and the immigration of Poles from those parts of Poland that became part of the Soviet Union, the current inhabitants are in the weird position that the monuments that make their city unique are mostly not the monuments built by their forefathers. But no matter the background of the buildings, many monuments are being lovingly restored and there are many unique buildings, often the sole surviving repesentatives of architectural styles and movements in all of Europe. Wroclaw is a really impressive city.

A German building from ca. 1920.

The Ostrow Tumski, the oldest part, is most genuinely Polish, and when we visited the Cathedral, Piotr managed to get us into the normally closed part, the Bishop's private chapel and the seminarist's chapel. This cathedral made a really big impression on us. When we left the bells started ringing for Mass. I felt sorely tempted to go to Mass, and Emanuele felt the same. We took leave of Piotr, agreed to meet Cyrille in an hour and ran back to the Church. Then Joao from the Gimp team joined us. Hearing a Roman Catholic mass in Polish was a weird experience: if I did understand something, it was because some words resemble the Church Slavonic we occasionally use in our own church. It was a great experience, and when a two-year old boy made a bee-line for the altar, I felt completely at home. It's a pity, though that the Orthodox Church was closed, but when I came home, we found out why: the Bishop of Poland celebrated the tenth anniversary of his election and all of Orthodox Poland had gone to Warsaw.

We finished eating at the Akropolis restaurant, where we had also lunched that day, with Chris Lilley. The Akropolis restaurant at the flower marked was perhaps the best restaurant I've eaten in Wroclaw, and I wanted to taste the dish Cyrille and Emanuele had had for lunch, and they wanted to taste the squid I had had for lunch, so we came back for dinner, with Joao.

And now it's time to get back to hacking!

Almost everyone at LGM is using Gnome -- there are few KDE desktops to be seen. And no KDE4 desktops at all. Until now: Dave Coffin of DCRaw fame uses KDE4! And XV -- ages since I last saw that.

Dave's presentation was another very satisfying, very technical and deep presentation. This year had quite a good mix of presentations at different levels.

Colour is a big topic at the Libre Graphics Meeting. Today, Kai-Uwe Behrmann will speak about his Oyranos project. Yesterday, it was Emanuele Tamponi's turn. Emanuele presented his work on the Kubelka-Munk colorspace. His presentation went very well, even though some of the less mathematical-inclined people left at the third slide with formulas. I was glad to see, however, that there are a number of rather more in-depth presentations at this LGM.

Showing off the mixing algorithm in Krita

Emanuele discussed the research in the field of pigment representation and his totally new roundtrip conversion method for going from RGB to a realistic pigment colour representation and back with a high degree of realism and fidelity. There are also way more applications for his work than just the colour mixer in Krita.

Emanuele discussing the finer points of colour theory with SVG guru Chris Lilley

Just like last year, it's a really great conference. It's mostly meeting up and talking and getting to know each other, but there's also real, hard work being done. Gilles Caullier from Digikam fame presented the current and future Digikam and has started all kinds of cooperation with other photo handling applications.

By the way, this is my hotel room:

But Wroclaw is a city with many beautiful spots. We had a nice walk with the Scribus people last night, ending up at a restaurant next to this arch: (which Alexandre Prokoudine was nice enough to photograph for me):

Yesterday we took a walk with Udi Fuchs from UFRaw, his girlfriend and a random collection of other hackers to the Japanese Gardens, which unfortunately was closed, but I managed to make this picture of the Centennial Building, built when Wroclaw was still Breslau:

Of the Libre Graphics Meeting? It seems it is... Emanuele has arrived, as has Gilles Caullier -- doubling the KDE attendance compared to last year. Next year we really must, must, must, must! bring the ksvg2 people, the karbon people -- everyone interested in graphics and free software should be here. The KDE e.V. should start saving up, because it's likely that next year's venue will be Singapore.

My impressions of Poland... The language really threw me off. I've never been in a country where I couldn't understand more than one or two words, and only today I managed "goodbye" in Polish -- and I still couldn't spell it. The train journey from Berlin to Wroclaw was awesome! So much countryside! Beer is fair to great, food is somewhat difficult. But last night we went to a very expensive, high-class restaurant and had a really great dinner -- for about 20 Euro's. Wonderful mushrooms, fresh vegetables, not too salty. I am sorely tempted to go there again before I leave Wroclaw. Wroclaw is a very interesting city with a lot of very beautiful spots. I've recharged my camera batteries, so I might be able to post some pictures when I find my usb cable.

Our hotel, the Hotel Polonia is a once in a lifetime experience. We probably shouldn't have gone there. The entrance looks more like a sex shop than a hotel. The decor is authentic fifties. The rooms are dusty, musty and run-down. The lights tend to be broken, the beds are extremely uncomfortable. And I suspect that On the plus side, there's theater stage in the breakfast room, and breakfast is pretty good. And there's a 24h shop and a taxi stop nearby.

I've given my presentation: it was a bit more generic than last year: the topic was natural media simulation, the field and the future. For most people in the attendance it was a first introduction to the field, and I'm not sure I didn't overwhelm then. But I got very favorable reactions.

Pippin's talk about Gegl was not only deliciously technical and accompanied by frenzied recompiling, but also too long: I had to skip the end to attend Chris Lilley's SVG talk. We had a great OpenICC bof. As with the previous LGM there's a healthy mix of coders, designers and artists, and the artists are giving presentations, too, which is great!

The Libre Graphics Meeting organization has started a donation drive: the money collected is meant to make fund the travel and accommodation cost of as many developers of free graphics software as possible.

The KDE e.V. sponsors the KOffice developers who go to the LGM 2008 in Wroclaw. But we really want to meet as many people as possible from as many different projects as possible. Free graphics software is developing at an astonishing rate, and one of the reasons for this is the existince of this great conference.

Please consider helping the organizers to make this year's conference a big success:

Libre Graphics Meeting, here I come! Yesterday I bought my tickets. About €170,- -- from Deventer to Wroclaw by train and back. Not bad: the airplane would have been almost €60,-- more, and I've even got a sleeper train back. I'll be arriving Wednesday night very late and leaving in the middle of the night of Monday on Tuesday, so I've got a day to see the town, too.

The LGM is the conference for anyone interested in free graphics software, users and developers -- and we need a much bigger KDE repesentation. After all, we've got Digikam, the best photo management app, Krita, Karbon, Kolourpaint -- and much more.