Advogato blog for pippin

GEGL Logo

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:08:17 GMT

Four slightly overlapping horizontally distributed white circles with horizontal and; or vertical cuts tangenting a partial smaller center circle. The cuts makes the circles form upper case letters from the alphabet, each circle is set off from the others and the background by the dropshadow it is causing.

GEGL 0.0.16

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:08:17 GMT

GEGL is already in use by GNOME Scan and the development version of GIMP uses GEGL for some color correction tools. Main highlights of this release is installation of headers that will enable out-of-tree development of plug-ins as well as improvements to the build system to make it work on OSX.

Tarballs of GEGL and babl at the usual place. Packages for Ubuntu and SU SE are already available.

Full announcement..

Mental Context Spills

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:08:17 GMT

I've recently started having context spills between different projects, mainly rendering APIs. Refering to cairo as clutter in #cairo. Writing cairo_chant_class instead of gegl_chant_class in #gegl and even typing out commands like: $ cairo push fdo openvg. in my shell.

To ease confusion here is a list of possible ways of combining these projects, some which already are possible others might make sense.

OpenVG within cairo
GEGL within Clutter
cairo within GEGL
cairo within Clutter
GEGL (output) within cairo (drawing)?
(visual representation of) Clutter (Actors) within GEGL (graphs) (within Clutter, with OpenVG within cairo within Clutter on top)?

babl and GEGL going LGPLv3+

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:08:17 GMT

The next versions of babl and GEGL will be released under LGPLv3+, the changes already apply to the sources in the repository.

QuadEntry in Clutter

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:08:17 GMT

QuadEntry is an input method for cursor keys or four-way pads based on interactive navigation of a quadtree.

For normal text entry you need three presses, for instance entering an 'a' is achieved by pressing the keys up, left, up. This would take you to the upper quadrant, then to the left quadrant of the upper quadrant and finally select the upper pad of that quadrant.

I originally came up with the concept for QuadEntry when I was playing experimenting with and exercising cairo back in 2004. I've resurrected the QuadEntry when I started digging into Clutter, which is one of the nifty projects coming out of OpenedHand, my new employer. Since being able to use the QuadEntry as a virtual keyboard for clutter depends on a more capable event handling and filtering system in Clutter I'll let the actual publishing of the sources wait until it builds without some hacky changes to Clutter itself.

At mobilecamp in Lodon I met the CEO of tikilabs which is a company based on a similar input method concept.

Sources of lost in time liberated

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:08:17 GMT

Moments lost in time, like tears in the rain. was first exhibited in november 2005 the collection of four interactive video installations was first exhibited at Galleri Barbara Hansen in Oslo. The exhibit consisted of four works, now by then, deja-vu, ghost mirror and recursive subdivision. Now by then was also shown at the shown SIGGRAPH art gallery in 2006.

When I pondered whether it would be possible to finance some of the equipment and materials needed for the original exhibition I also desired the code and underlying code logic to be reusable by myself and others in other projects. The result was a discount scheme based sales model, where licenses that I hope increase the chances of myself seeing new and interesting derivative work that I will both have the ability to study and elaborate on.

For an Digitale Spor an outdoor art track in Bergen January 2006 various digital art works were desired. I was contact about the possibility of having works from lost in time be part of the exhibition. The Media Centre at Bergen University College chose to option of paying to liberate the sources under GPL which had the largest discount of the full price (90% discount). You can now download the source and compile, play, experiment and perhaps tinker with the code creating new interesting things.

The installations are written using gggl as the graph based processing engine. At the moment GEGL does not perform well enough to drive the installations in real time, I do however at some point plan to port now by then to be a plug-in for GEGL that exercises and pushes the envelope for the caching infrastructure further.

buu and suspend

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:08:17 GMT

Earlier this week I did a fresh reinstall of Ubuntu Edgy Eft on my lenovo T60 to see if some suspend issues I had had with the dist-upgraded one would go away - those issues only did go away after pursuing information on ThinkWiki, that told me to set POST_VIDEO= in /etc/default/acpi-support (the real issue is in the ATI driver.).

Another intervention on top of the default install that I need is a way to use my mobile phone as a modem with my flatrate GPRS/3G subscription. Since NetWork manager doesn't support this yet, I made a small shell script buu which maintains my uplink when running in a terminal.

BubbleView

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:08:17 GMT

I've been experimenting with a data set visualization concept that acts like a visualisation of a bubble-sort. At the moment my plans and ideas for this thing far exceed the fragile proof of concept prototype I've got.

The simulation engine still needs a lot of performance and stability improvements, and then more interesting possibilities can be explored.

Based on my early experiments with this concepts it seems like it can evolve into useful interfaces for selecting items, exploring data sets with different sorting constraints applied. Interaction methods directed at making CBIR exploration of databases efficient as well as a combined filemanager/media viewer.

GIF screencapture.

Spring has arrived

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:08:17 GMT

The ice on Mjøsa has melted and spring is rapidly proceeding.

I'm starting to think that I should create a new and better gallery for my images, my recent adventures in the land of web 2.0 has left me with some ideas for how to create a minimalistic system that has only static content on the server which is processed on the client for slideshows, tag based searching and more.

DHTML Pong

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 23:08:17 GMT

Press image below to launch a — XHTML+CSS+js standards compliant, cross browser supported without hacks — implementation of clasiscal digital gamer tennis. Avoid moving your mouse at all after loading to have two "ai's" competing each other.

I've been brushing up my js-fu the last couple of weeks due to extra responsiblities at work that have distracted me from hacking on the usual projects. This has led to a pong game and a popup-index and tagcloud for the static content web 2.0 blog renderer at codecave.org.