Older blog entries for Acapnotic (starting at number 31)

It's been a good couple days for hacking. Seth is definately my hero this week, as he found the cause of two show-stopping bugs in my GIMP plug-ins, one of which had me at the end of my wits. Now color previews work in antialias and Adaptive Contrast Enhancement, so I released a new version of antialias to celebrate. A new version of ACE will follow soon, but I want to get a few more things done there first.

I also whipped up a patch for raph's <cite>Wet Dream</cite>, to enable it as a GIMP plug-in. It does have a bug which prevents it from writing the image back to the GIMP, which is a big block for usability, but it should be a very quick fix once someone recognizies the symptoms
(gimp_drawable_merge_shadow complains that "assertion `gimage->shadow != NULL' failed.").

Overall, I'm happy with the work done there, considering it's one afternoon's hack. It's enough to make sure that anyone who wants to see Wet Dream as a plug-in will have a real base to work on. The patch was nothing complicated, to be sure, but I think I've finally reached a comfortable stage with GTK+ now... An important step in beating the "but that's too hard to program" mind-game.

I just read Bill Joy's article (and ping is right, Virgina Postrel's response does a good job of highlighting the holes), but there's one of his basic values which I do not understand: What's up with his affinity for the "human species"?

Don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are humans. And they're incredibly beautiful creations, too. But does that give them a permanent or exclusive right to existance on this plane? I'm not so sure about that.

Things die. I feel humans will too, sooner or later. I do, however, hold out a hope that the spark of life which flourished on this planet will not be extinguished by our leave. But if something else comes along which is sophisticated and evolved enough to take our place... Why shouldn't it?

I guess if I were robbed of the chance to see what my progeny and I would live to accomplish, I'd probably be unhappy about it, because I don't think of myself as a force of evil. But given the choice between being survived by my own creations, or nuclear irradation, I'd choose robot takeover any day of the week.

Blerg. Spent two hours last night chasing bugs through "How did this code ever work" mode, and then discovered that the reason why I hadn't seen any bugs go away in the past two hours was because when I switched makefiles, I was now building the executable "gimp_ace" instead of "gimp-ace", and "gimp-ace" was the one I was testing.

I knew having a hyphenated executable name would get me into trouble one of these days.

On the up side, you can expect to see a shiny new preview thingamabob in gimp adaptive contrast enhancement before much longer.

Update: Hit a snag in getting that preview to work right. Sent out a distress call... and now I wait and hope for someone to deliver me a clue. In the meantime, I guess it's a good time to mow the lawn.

The world is gaining on us. Or we're starting to get to the world, I can't tell which. There's an article today, on the front page of the "Living" section of the newspaper, which contains the following:

This system works because of a well-defined standard for electronic mail messages. All e-mail software, if it has any hope of working properly, needs to stick to this standard for handling incoming messages and sending outgoing messages.

If only the same kind of standard existed for electronic calendars.

Then we'd be able to easily exchange appointments [...]

Unfortunately, we're stuck with a system in which [...] these programs refuse to talk with one another.

That was John Moran, of the LA Times - Washington Post Service. I wonder if he's looked at Helix's Evolution preview yet.

Saw this on freshmeat today:

LiveJournal Client is a Perl/Tk program to edit diary entries on LiveJournal.com.

And on Saturday, I heard this guy on Whad'Ya Know, who must have been at least 0.7 centuries old, who spent around 4 hours a day working on his diary (on paper, not LiveJournal), which included everything he did. Including his time spent on the can.

I knew there was a reason I left Ohio.

I also think that Adrian has stumbled onto a powerfull untapped psychological force.

Hmm. Less time with Advogato lately. In fact, some of the links to your diaries have even reverted from their "recently-visited" color.

Posting this with M15 and the Aphrodite chrome. It's getting there... And M15 certainly makes the Advogato colors look better at 8 bpp than they do in Netscape 4's color cube. But it's spending far too much time in swap for me to use full-time.

Julian: Read the NASA press release again. They did not learn anything about dark matter. All they did was find (indirectly) some more of the "normal" matter that they thought must be around here someplace. Not that finding 5% of the matter in the universe is something to be scoffed at, but it's far from finding the 90% allegedly claimed by dark matter.

recidivist: To post, you must be certified. But seeing as how you provide no references about your involvement in the free software community, people have nothing to base a certification of you on, unless they already know you by name or reputation.

Of course, if you are planning on contributing to the certification discussion, you are probably already familiar with that. See also dria's ponderings on the state of the discussion. I will be delighted to read her thoughts, or anyone else's, on the subject of trust metrics -- after they've done their homework.

Today's props go to Dennis McMahan for making the spreadsheet that made master gnumeric hacker jody say "whoever created this is either a sick bastard or a genius."

...and no one told me ILOVEYOU.

Hmm. With the arrival of Max we may have to whip up an alternate storyline to cover for Advogato...

Finished Fermat's Enigma. Most of the book I knew, from class discussions, the Nova special, etc. But there were many interesting historical tidbits along the way. Here's one I wasn't aware of:

In the years after the war Turing had been under surveillance from British Intelligence, who were aware that we has a practicing homosexual. They were concerned that the man who knew more about Britain's security codes than anyone else was vulnerable to blackmail and decided to monitor his every move. Turing had largely come to terms with being constantly shadowed, but in 1952 he was arrested for violation of British homosexuality statutes. This humiliation made life intolerable for Turing [...]

The inquest, on 10 June 1954, established that it was suicide.

Started The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (Samuel C. Florman, 1976). While reading the preface, realization struck: "I am an engineer." That was important to hear because "I am" statements are rather hard to come by in the midst of identity crises. Although upon further examination, that may be more precisely stated as "I have long held the assumption that I am an engineer," as I don't know if I can qualatatively demonstrate my engineer-being.

and perhaps it's just because my last sleep cycle was from 6 AM - 12 AM, but this one is going in the cookie file:

"I'm often convinced that my brain has a mind of its own and some sort of long-standing grudge against me."
-- Deb Richardson, 4/24/2000

Much tidying of Adaptive Contrast Enhancement. Most notably, the PDB interface actually works, so I can tell people who want to add goofy things to the code to go away and write scripts instead. Thought that made it worthwhile putting out a new release (v0.5.1)...

Updated README and NEWS and the like. Updated registry.gimp.org. Uploaded to SourceForge. Updated page on SourceForge. Changed old page to point to SourceForge. Am I forgetting anything?

Also added the libgimp manual to Plug-ins@SourceForge. GIMP 1.2pre is out now, you know (1.1.20). This means that it's getting to be time for me to actually overhaul "Writing a GIMP Plug-In".

Blerg. Eat kitty.

<hr>

Had a dream the other night that I was on a shuttle to the moon with my friends from middle school. The pilot was some new woman, and those of us in the passenger compartment kept sliding up and down, bumping our heads on the ceiling and then feet hitting the floor. Eventually I fell out of the passenger compartment, and went to the people at the desk in order to get back in. They told me that they were sorry but the flight was full, and that they could get me a pass for the next one.

"No," I told them, "you don't understand. I don't need a pass for the next flight, I was on that one. I fell out. I just want to get back on."

They didn't grok.

"So I'm on Earth, and the shuttle is out there?" I asked, gesturing vaugely at the sky. They nodded. "Ok, whatever," I said, and walked off.

The airport on the moon has many vendors along its corridors, most of whom sell books. There are also security stations that make things disappear. Perhaps an art gallery as well, but the focus was definately on the books.

Better get back before it's time to leave...

</me casts a wary eye over Deb's "balanced lifestyle" plans>

This could be dangerous. If she manages to pull this off... the others might start getting ideas. If the secret gets out that someone can go from IRC twenty hours a day to eating good food and doing things they love for the sake of having fun... Well, who knows what might happen? If the terminally-terminal-dependant start leading "balanced lives", what will be my excuse for remaining here in the recesses of my cave?

Fortunately, like many of the terminal-dependant folks, I'm the intelligent type, and I've known (intellectually) that this was possible for a long time. And since knowledge and action are largely, if not completely, disparate things in my universe, this latest bit of information may not be capable of provoking any action at all. In which case I can safely continue not having fun, and neither cracking a book nor putting pen to a page any more than once a month or so.

Long live security!