Advogato blog for bernhard

1 Mar 2001

Thu, 1 Mar 2001 21:36:36 GMT

Released the new version of Sketch today.

In other Sketch news, the people behind LinuxGraphic.org, who also wrote French Sketch documentation, interviewed me and the interview has now been published online and in Linux Magazine France. Currently there seem to be only French versions of the interview available. Let's see whether an English versions will be available, too. That shouldn't even be difficult because the interview was conducted in English.

28 Feb 2001

Wed, 28 Feb 2001 21:39:29 GMT

I haven't found the time to update the diary in the last few months, mostly because there's just a lot to do at work and I moved from Hamburg to Osnabrück.

Work for Intevation remains interesting. Among other things, I've worked on GPA recently.

Sketch

I haven't found much time for Sketch either, but at last things are moving again. A new release of Sketch is imminent. I definitely want it out of the door before I leave for the Python conference on Saturday.

18 Oct 2000

Wed, 18 Oct 2000 23:25:21 GMT

I've got a new job. I'm now working for Intevation, a very small but growing free software company. I'm actually their first real employee. It also means that the other Bernhard is now my boss :-).

I've already been working on my first project for the last few weeks. It's a web-based mapping application called MapIt!.

Unfortunately, this project also means that I don't have as much time for Sketch or the Vectorgraphics-Foundry as I would like at the moment.

HHLUG

The second day of the HHLUG install party on Sunday (September 10th) was very much like the first (see my previous entry), although we did more installations. One problem with the location was that we hadn't access to a phone line, neither analog nor ISDN, so we couldn't check whether the new linux users would be able to connect to the internet. Well, that's something to do better next time.

Oldenburger Linuxtag

Together with the other Bernhard I went to the Oldenburger Linuxtag this weekend. We had two and a half posters. One was about the FreeGIS Project and the other was about software patents and the petition against software patents in Europe (If you haven't signed it yet, please do so now). Both attracted quite a few people. Many signed the petition, especially after Georg Greve (of Brave GNU World fame) mentioned it in his talk.

The "half" poster was a smaller Sketch poster that managed to attract some visitors too and I got to demonstrate Sketch or answer questions few times.

The whole event was bigger than I had expected. The exhibition space was bigger than at last year's Bremer Linuxtag, and I think there were more visitors, but Alan Cox did draw quite a crowd last year with his keynote.

One of the most prominent attendents was Wichert Akkerman, who allegedly played moonbuggy the whole weekend. I can confirm that he did play moonbuggy and all the time I saw what he was doing at his computer he played moonbuggy, so that rumor must be true. :-)

Films and Books

Saw X-Men, Being John Malkovich and Titan A.E. recently. X-Men was entertaining but not really something you have to have seen. At least I saw the original version and not some localized German one.

Being John Malkovich OTOH, is hilarious. I saw it in English too, although it had German subtitles. I find subtitles irritating. Most of the time, I've got a reflex (sort of) to read them even when I understand the soundtrack quite well. If you read the subtitles you don't have time to actually watch the movie because your eyes are fixed on the text and can't take in the visuals of the scenes themselves. Luckily, this time I somehow managed to somehow block them out completely after a few minutes.

Titan A.E. was an interesting mix of hand-drawn animation and computer graphics. AFAICT, there wasn't an English version shown here in Hamburg, so I saw a German translation.

Saw Iain M. Banks' new Culture novel Look to Windward in a bookshop a couple of weeks ago. 36DM are a bit steep for a paperback, if you ask me. I think I'll wait until I find it cheaper elsewhere or on the internet. OTOH, I found his The Business for 21DM on Monday morning in Oldenburg before I took the train back to Hamburg.

Another book I've bought (and read) recently is the paperback of The Fifth Elephant which is already available here in Germany in some bookstores even though it's not available in the UK until early November. Heh.

9 Sep 2000

Sat, 9 Sep 2000 22:49:27 GMT

LinuxFund

Someone from LinuxFund.Org read my diary entry from July where I mentioned that their agreement limits grants to US residents. I never got around to ask them about this and now I don't have to do that anymore because he contacted me about it and said that they're going to change that. Cool. (This should have been in my last diary entry).

HHLUG Installparty

Today the Hamburg Linux User Group had an install party in Altona at the HEW Kundenzentrum (A Customer Center or something in English :-) of Hamburg's electricity company). We didn't have much room, only enough for a few demo machines and a handful of actual installations, but we attracted quite a few people who wanted to learn about linux or ask questions. The HEW people were apparently very pleased with the outcome and offered to let us have the next install party (probably in January 2001) in the main customer center in the city center where we'd have much more room (At least that's what I heard afterwards at the dinner).

The event will be going on tomorrow (Sunday 10th) from 12:00 till 18:00, so if anybody in Hamburg is interested in meeting fellow Linuxers this might be a good opportunity. The Kundenzentrum is in the Große Bergstraße. I wanted to put a hyperlink to the relevant page of the HEW web site here but those pages can't be navigated without Java Script and with JS enabled Netscape kept crashing on me, so be careful if you follow that link.

31 Aug 2000

Thu, 31 Aug 2000 21:02:18 GMT

Dancer, I don't think it's all that surprising that there are many teens in the free software community.

I bought my first computer in 1985 when I was 15, an Amstrad CPC464 (roughly comparable to the C64 and it was actually called Schneider CPC464 here in Germany). One thing I liked about those computers was that they were simple enough so that you could understand how they worked and how the pieces fit together.

With a Windows PC this is practically impossible, given the Windows policy that the users are stupid, don't know what they do and that it's good to hide information from them. Add to that that even Microsoft doesn't seem to know how everything works in their own operating systems.

Linux and the other free software OSes are much more complex than those 8bit home computers, but with their modular nature it's still possible to understand how things work in principle and the availability of the sources means that you can delve into the details as deeply as you like. They also don't hide any information that might be interesting to a user. That's a very intriguing thing for an inquisitive newbie. If I were a teenager today, I'd probably be involved with free software in some way too.

Sketch

I've begun to implement a meta-data facility to make it possible to attach arbitrary data to an object. This is effectively a dictionary. This feature poses some interesting design problems:

How is the data saved and loaded?

This is easy to solve by restricting the keys to strings and the values to a subset of builtin python types. It's possible and not even difficult to extend that to class instances if they implement a certain interface.

I could use pickle, but that would make the file format Python specific.
What happens when you duplicate or copy/cut and paste an object?

The easiest solution is not to copy the data at all. The duplicated or pasted object will have no meta data at all. This is obviously bad, since the user would rightly expect that cut and paste preserves at least some of the data.

The next solution is to make a shallow copy of the dictionary. This can lead to subtle bugs because objects can end up sharing mutable meta-data. Always making a deep copy is not useful either because there might be cases where that sharing is desired.

So perhaps the method that attaches a piece of meta-data to an object should have a third parameter in addition to the key and value, that describes what should happen with the data. That parameter would simply be a callable object that is called with the value and returns the value that is to be used in the copied graphics object.

This solution would be very flexible but it also makes saving and restoring the data harder.

In other Sketch news, I've received Italian translations for 0.6.x.

Sketch is also mentioned in the current issue of c't in the SVG section of the article on internet multimedia standards.

Movies and Books

I've seen several movies lately, including Lola Rennt, Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit films A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave.

I've also read quite a bit and finished Neal Stephenson's Zodiac (recommended by the other bernhard) and Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman which I've been meaning to read for a long time now.

15 Aug 2000

Tue, 15 Aug 2000 17:46:09 GMT

Today's my 31st birthday! I feel old. Most hackers here on Advogato or in the GNOME crowd are apparantly in their early twenties or even in their teens.

Sketch

As planned, I've released Sketch 0.6.8 on Saturday. The lack of outraged bugreports seems to indicate that it wasn't such as fiasco as 0.6.6. :-).

What I forgot to mention is my last diary entry: Sketch will be in SuSE Linux 7.0. It's also in Debian 2.2 which was released today (What a birthday present! :-) ), but that's not really news, because it had been in unstable since early 1999, which makes Debian the first Linux distribution to adopt Sketch.

HHLUG

On Sunday, I went to the monthly meeting of the Hamburg Linux User Group. There'll be an install party on 9th September.

11 Aug 2000

Fri, 11 Aug 2000 20:13:11 GMT

Long time no diary. It seems my diary is turning into a mensary. I don't know if that's a real world, but a log that's updated about once a month could probably be called something like that.

Sketch

I've created a new Sketch mailing list at SourceForge because the old mailing list which was run by Olof Kylander at Frozenriver was down. In fact all frozenriver servers seem to be down. Nobody seems to know what happened to Olof and Karin and Frozenriver. I heard some rumours from a Gimp developer, but no real information.

Fortunately the transition went quite smoothly. As luck would have it I had a quite recent list of subscribers of he old list, so I didn't have to start from scratch again.

On the development side, the next stable version will be released tomorrow, hopefully. It would be mostly a bugfix release with only a few minor new features if it weren't for a slightly improved SVG export filter (it handles some gradients now) and especially the new PDF export filter. Thanks to ReportLab, I was able to implement it with just about 300 lines of application specific code.

I've also started hacking on a PDF import filter for Sketch. It already works to some degree on the PDF files generated by reportlab, but its overall desing is still in its early stages and it will take some more iterations before I feel I can let it loose on the public by checking it into CVS.

Reading

I've been rereading parts of Goethe's <it>Faust</it> in recent weeks. I read it for the first time after I had seen the Gründgens Film in a cinema in Göttingen in IIRC, 1990 or 1991.

I'm not sure whether it's good or bad that we didn't read <it>Faust</it> in school. I mean, I would probably have liked it much more than <it>Iphigenie</it>, but OTOH, having to read something takes away some of the fun of reading.

Anyway, <it>Faust I</it> is probably the most often quoted piece of German literature. Some cool quotes:

Mephistopheles:
Der Geist der Medizin ist leicht zu fassen;
Ihr durchstudiert die groß, und kleine Welt,
Um es am Ende gehn zu lassen,
Wie's Gott gefällt.

Mephistopheles:
Die Mädels sind doch sehr interessiert,
ob einer fromm und schlicht nach altem Brauch;
Sie denken: duckt er da, folgt er uns eben auch.

The Coin Puzzle

To make it a little more difficult, try not only to find which coin is different, but also whether its heavier or lighter than the others. All with at most three weighings.

It's possible. I've written a Python program that demonstrates the algorithm (or at least one possible algorithm, there might be more). Here's a gzipped base64 encoded version (to avoid spoilers):
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5 Jul 2000

Wed, 5 Jul 2000 00:20:21 GMT

LinuxTag 2000

Went to the LinuxTag in Stuttgart this weekend. This was the first big Linux event I attended and it was a lot of fun and I got to meet quite a few people I only new through the Internet.

One of them was Bernhard Reiter from Intevation and FFII who gave a talk about free GIS software. I knew him as a Sketch user and he thinks Sketch would be a good basis for a free viewer of geographical data. Let's see how that'll work out.

I also talked with Simon Budig about possible cooperations between Sketch and GIMP. The reorganizations planned for GIMP 2.0 may provide a good opportunity to functionality that's useful for both projects, such as the color selectors or gradient editor, into libraries that both programs can use.

After the official end of the show on Sunday I had a conversation with Michael Meeks and a few of the other GNOMErs who were still there about Sketch, libart, the GNOME canvas, Bonobo and other things. Somehow I feel that I'll have to look into bonoboizing Sketch as soon as I find the time.

RMS gave a keynote on Saturday. He didn't say very much that I hadn't already read somewhere but it was still very interesting and entertaining because I hadn't seen him before.

After RMS' talk the show was over for the day and the stairs back down to the show floor were blocked by security guys, so I couldn't get back in to get to the party that the other Bernhard had told me would be going on. Fortunately, there was a side entrance that was still open and they didn't have any controls there, so I could sneak in even though I wasn't an exhibitor (is that the right word here?). The party was fun with free beer, free Würstchen (although I was too late for those :-( ) and live music.

Sketch

I've released a new development version of Sketch on June 24th. It has one feature that I haven't seen anywhere else before. You can not only have multiple views for one document but also multiple editors. The difference is that if only create new views they share the set of selected objects, if you create new editors they manage their own selections. I have no idea yet how useful having multiple editors really is and the current implementation has some limitations when it comes to editing bezier curves, so I may take this feature out again before 0.8.

The translation of the French user documentation is underway now and I've seen the first translated sections. It looks good so far.

LinuxFund

LinuxFund.Org (the Tux credit card guys, not to be confused with linuxfund.com) started the beta-test for developer grants. I registered an account and a few hours later was informed that I was one of the first five to do that. Wow.

I want to apply for grants to help with Sketch's development, but when you want to submit a project you have to accept their "Grant Submission Agreement" which seems to state that grants are only available to U.S. residents. This is perhaps understandable in the current stage, but I sure hope that this restriction will be lifted in the future. After all, in their FAQ they state that they want to "be a multinational foundation with fund raising and development grant activity all over the world". I'll have to ask them about this.

23 May 2000

Tue, 23 May 2000 20:31:41 GMT

No entry in more than two weeks, so this summarizes what's happened in that time.

Kirschblüten Feuerwerk

Friday evening was the annual (?) Kirschblüten Feuerwerk (Cherryblossom Fireworks) here in Hamburg. It's sponsored by a Japanese trade organization (or something like that) and takes place above the Außenalster (Outer Alster), a lake in the heart of the city.

The fireworks were really beautiful. The only thing that literally stood in the way of properly enjoying this were all those trees and bushes that line the Alster. The best place to watch this is probably on the water.

It was way better than the "Millennium Fireworks" but that's mainly because back then the smoke from all the private fireworks that had been going on since around 11pm had gathered into a cloud right above the Alster and blocked the view.

Hacking

Not as much as I would have liked, but I got some work done on Sketch to reactivate the localization code in the development branch and I started with the fill dialog.

When I started the 0.7.x development series, I wanted to have a new set of dialogs that would allow the user to make better use of Sketch's style capabilities, but at the moment I think it would be best to copy more or less what's available in 0.6.x and add really new interfaces later. Completing the port to GTK is more important than a completely new style interface and I'm not sure just what that new interface should look like.

Wrote a CipherSaber in Python.

Advogato

God, what are your future plans for dna.c?

7 May 2000

Sun, 7 May 2000 23:13:26 GMT

Sketch

Friday night I Released yet another stable version, 0.6.7, because of the file loading bug. The bug is grave enough for this, even though it's only a one line fix.

ILOVEYOU

Many articles on this email virus/worm correctly state that in principle it would also work on Linux, if the mail clients would let the users execute attached scripts too easily. However, then they go on to say that at most it could destroy that user's files but wouldn't harm the rest of the system.

But the user's data is very likely the most precious data on that system! Well, that's the case for me at least and probably many other people. Imagine the virus would delete the TeX-files for the thesis you have to turn in tomorrow or the source tree for your latest but yet unpublished program! This kind of data is hard and maybe impossible to recreate unless you have recent backups (which everybody hopefully has) while restoring the operating system from CDs/Internet only takes a few hours.

What can protect open source system from mail and macro viruses is that open source programmers probably won't make insecure settings the default and put suitable warning messages into the program.

Microsoft defends itself saying that the customers want programmable applications. Scriptable applications are all well and good, I'm using the perhaps most flexible and scriptable mail program existing for Unix myself, but that's no excuse for making the default configuration so insecure. I'm sure gnus will never automatically execute an elisp script just because it's attached to a mail and I happen to select it, unless I explicitly configure it that way, in which case I get what I deserve.

I haven't seen the virus myself, but from what I read, the name of the VBS file ended in .txt.vbs. This is a clever trick, because apparently many mail programs on Windows don't display the file extensions so that the file name the users saw looked just like a normal txt file. These are usually opened in Notepad, so double clicking on it doesn't seem to be a security risk. Hiding information from the user can be a dangerous thing.