JBIG2 in Ghostscript

Checked in the first integration of jbig2dec with Ghostscript last night. It took a while to get everything working; the stream implementation in Ghostscript is a bit tricky to work with. The code doesn't yet handle shared 'global' decoder contexts between page images, but all the (single page) pdf files I've seen don't use this feature, so it actually works for wild files. That's very encouraging.

One of the things we've talked about is cleaning up the stream library in Ghostscript. There's sort of a long term project to improve modularization in general, and this is a good place to start (aside from Fitz which will separate the graphics library). It was first suggested by raph about a year ago, and tor brought it up (independently?) recently. Practically speaking, it seems like something the core developers are never going to get around to. So if anyone's looking for a nice refactoring problem, please do take a look.

Edinburgh, city of the future

Been back in the UK for a couple of weeks now. We went to Edinburgh for a couple of days just after I got over jetlag. S had a meeting to go to and I tagged along. We went out in the evenings, and stayed over an extra day to wander around. Beautiful weather for it too: we got a little snow on friday, just enough to be fun (if you weren't trying to leave town) and then a warm sunny day on saturday.

Seemed quite a nice town and we had a great time. The really wild thing is the geography. The castle and the old town are up on a ridge, with what are effectively cliffs dividing different parts of the down. The really wonky thing is that a couple of the major streets are elevated, though the way the buildings are fronted it looks perfectly normal. We were just walking along and would look down a sidestreet to suddenly realize we were four stories up! And there were all these crazy-steep staired passages leading from one level to another. We even found a little lane that ran along the roofs of a row of buildings.

I think that makes for a really cool arrangement. Riding the DLR around Canary Wharf in London I've often remarked that this is how a 21st century city should be, with tracks winding between the buildings several storeys up. Now I see...Edinburgh has been a city of the future for a hundred years.

How not to run an irc network

Last week I got a repeat cold message, Do you know Yopi? from someone on freenode irc. In retrospect, it sounded like they were just looking for someone, but there was a language barrier, and the first time they didn't really respond when I tried to work out what they wanted. So when I got the same message again from a different nick a week later, I worried it might be spam and went to the oper channel to report it in case there was a pattern.

The openprojects staff had always been in my experience interested in helpful in such situations. However, when I went to report the issue, I found #freenode to be a moderated channel. One is expected to msg random people with 'staff' in their hostmask before being granted voice (not an easy thing for novice users with 60 people in the channel) just to ask a question. This struck me as both offensive and ridiculous, but I didn't worry much about it. The network has generally been quite stable, and has let us use our channels in peace.

Yesterday, the freenode admin staff closed down the #vorbis channel. As in we were all booted off without discussion, and joins are disabled. lilo thankfully took the time to explain after the fact so I'm no longer angry, just sad and annoyed.

#vorbis was a very small channel. Most everyone moved to irc.xiph.org in the huff over lilo's canvassing for donations. We mostly had a handful of lurkers, but Michael Smith and I both maintained a presense there. We continued our usual exchange of pleasantries and occasionally used it for technical discussions, in addition to helping visitors when we could. I actually preferred it to the official #vorbis because, while the signal was much lower, the signal-to-noise ratio was much higher, and because I never appreciated the reason for the move in the first place. A pointer to the new channel was forcibly installed at the time of the move and the ownerships changed, but the channel had more or less become what it was obvious to me it would be from the time of the move: a small topical channel on another network from the primary activity of the project.

Lilo's explanation was that he was doing it in retaliation for political games with Emmett Plant. This is so wrong-headed I barely know where to start. It's also surprising given the pretty good advice he's written in the past of irc management. Maybe it shouldn't be; this feels very much like what everyone was complaining about when he was asking for donations on the network, which never bothered me.

Certainly Emmett can rub people the wrong way, but I think the problem lies elsewhere. Lilo clearly views the #vorbis channel as pawn in an argument and nothing to do with the people actually using it. Freenode has a strange policy about channel moves. Lilo has said several times that #vorbis was granted an exemption, by which I guess he means allowing the remainder of the channel to remain after the rest of it has left in a huff. Maybe what's happened to #vorbis is was is meant by 'freezing' the channel. This is just stupid. The policy is heavy handed at best, and seems designed to prevent amicible changeovers. People and channels come and go, and it shouldn't be anything to the network staff. Furthermore, it's impossible from the outside to choose a side in succession disputes. There's just too little information or time for discussion.

Anyone can start their own irc server. The advantages of a shared network like freenode are, as with sourceforge, in the collection of like-minded people who can more easily find each other and in support of small projects for whom the infrastructure is expensive. Not given the space they need, people move elsewhere and the commons is diminished. This is not the way to run a friendly network service. Perhaps they're hurt about all the people who left the network. The end result of this is that I've left too, finally moving to #vorbis on irc.xiph.org.