Older blog entries for Acapnotic (starting at number 35)

Whee. Adaptive Contrast Enhancement release finally happened. And I put up new example pictures too.

Yikes. Once more, Hans Reiser demonstrates he has all the social skills of an eggplant. In a message to Alan Cox titled "Re: New Linux 2.5 - 2.6 TODO (Alan Cox suggests delaying reiserfs integration)" he writes:

This is just a RedHat bureaucratic excuse to delay reiserfs. [...] The fact is, Chris Mason kicked your asses performance wise and now you want to employ some journaling standardization process to stall your competitors that you can't program as well as.

Why don't you help us with ReiserFS instead of standing in the way of people trying to program?

Aya. Naturally, Alan Cox told him to stop treating the linux-kernel list like slashdot. But the best response I've read so far is Chris Mason's:

[...] In other words, quit saying that I did a better job than ext3. We had different goals, and it will be a long time I before understand things as well as Stephen does.

Why don't you help us with ReiserFS instead of standing in the way of people trying to program?

You're right hans, at least once a week, alan comes over to my house and breaks one of my fingers. I've just been afraid all this time to talk about it.

This is not the first time that Chris has served as the Voice of Reason on the ReiserFS list. I hope we neven find out what would happen to the project without him.

As for my own doings... Well, I know I should have had that new release of adaptive contrast enhancement out by now, but the weather really has been terribly nice. In fact, it didn't even rain on the annual Rose Festival parade here, which is a serious breach in tradition. But there were a few rainy days, so when it does come out, it will be debianizable. Now anyone want to contribute an rpm spec file to gimp-plugin-template?

Preliminary investigations of mitch's gimp-plugin-template today, which resulted in some light dancing with autoconf. But more importantly, there are (unofficial) i386 Debian packages of GIMP 1.1.23 at http://yakk.ucc.asn.au/gimp/ (for aussies) and

deb http://download.sourceforge.net/gimp-plug-ins/ ./

for the right-side-up half of the world.

Many thanks to yakk for doing this while gimp's regular debian maintainer is swamped by his academic life.

I've experienced a dramatic drop in hacking time lately, with even times of the computer being off during waking hours. I blame the weather, you can blame Passions... though I've also had recent cause to be more attentive to my physical well-being.

The latest improvements to gimp-ace really deserved to be released before I get drawn away, though, so I'll have to get it together and kick out a new version soon...

Extracirricular activities include readings on massage and pressure points, Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain, and recognizing that when it's been a year since you were last outside barefoot, you really take notice of those pebbles in the road.

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.

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