Check out my sculpture website: www.boudewijnrempt.nl.
2011-11-25
2011-11-19
In the past two years I've travelled a lot, on average about a week a month. I usually take about six books with me if I'm away for a week, but I also started reading books on my laptop, just to have more variety. But my laptop is heavy and not comfortable for reading in a hotel bed. Then I realized that it might be a smart thing to buy a dedicated e-reader. I'm a reader, and I've got about ten thousand books, but I'm not a bibliophile, I don't care about first editions, for instance.
But which one? Kindle was out of the question, since I don't want Amazon to be able to track or even delete my reading habits. I also am quite sure that I will carry around a lot of books, so I wanted to have an SD card slot. And if the device is hackable, that's a plus.
I got the Sony PRS T1 reader on the day it was released:
I've got it for a month now, there are about 500 books on the device, I've spend quite a few hours with it and I've learned what this kind of device is good for, and what it isn't suitable for. In short, it's great if you want to read a novel from cover to cover, and it's atrocious if you're actually someone who uses books.
An advantage or disadvantage is that nobody can see what you are reading: no more peeking around you on the plain or train to see what people are reading, no more smiles of understanding between two Terry Pratchett lovers. On the other hand, since nobody sees what you are reading, no longer sharp remarks about being a poser who is just trying to impress if you accidentally happen to be reading Donne. Or sad looks about your lack of taste if you happen to be reading 1634 by Eric Flint.
Technically, my Sony PRS T1 is pretty ok. There are some bugs, especially in the touch screen which is prone to getting confused and will then turn dozens of pages in a quick succession, but nothing too serious.
The screen is good, though a the white is bit too gray, and it's too small. They tell you that your e-reader will have the same size as a paperback, but that's only true if you count the bezel and buttons. There's much less text on the screen than there's on a page of a real book.
I like the fact that this device has real buttons to go to the next and previous page -- I find that easier ot use than the screen gestures. The touch screen keyboard is pretty good, very usable.
The back is rubberized for good grip, and I wish the front was as well, but it's shiny plastic. Not so good. The whole device feels a bit cheap, which is actually a good thing, because it means I don't feel forced to be too careful with it, even though it cost 150 euros. I pop it in my coat pocket or backpack, carry it everywhere.
Battery life is wonderful, and for reading long stretched of text it's great that I can change the fontsize. When I read in bed without my glasses, I can make it small, when I'm using my glasses it needs to be bigger. But the choice of fonts is pretty limited.
It's pretty easy to add new books from Linux, I don't even use Calibre for that, I just copy them to the right location on the device. And project gutenberg is stuffed with the kind of thing I like to read.
The thing is, this e-reader is nearly good enough. It's tantalizing. Already ten years ago I was dreaming of a device close to this one. But an e-reader made for serious users of books.
It should have a bigger screen, at least A5, but color isn't necessary.
it should come out of the box reasonably well-formatted copies of all the classics, from the Odyssee to the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, from Jane Austen to Kalidasa, from Mengzi to Layla and Majnun, both in the original language and in an English translation, and a way to show both in parallel.
The text should be searchable, but there should also be some serious smartnesss in that search facility: I want to be able to select a passage and nearly immediately get a list of places from which that passage can be a quote and where that passage is quoted. Wikipedia integration is great, but selecting a name should give me a list of all works where that name occurs. A chapter quote should link to that book, as well as books about those books.
There should be a serendipity feature, where browsing through the list of available books is replaced by "give me something that suits my mood" or "give me fiction about Tipu Sultan".
More and better fonts. I want to have Bodoni for my French books, Bembo for my books in Italian and Caslon for my books in English. I got a copy of Mengzi on my Sony, but there's no Chinese font!
It should be much easier to have a set of books open at the same time -- instead of having just one open and the reset remember their current page. Opening a new book doesn't mean closing the other one!
Text to speech -- especially in the dictionary, especially important for English, which does pose some challenges for a foreign reader.
/books | permanent link |
2011-11-14
Of course, I'd also wanted to blog on the second day of the Calligra sprint, but we were way too busy... In the morning we had the usual plenary meeting. Among other topics, we discussed an extension to the 2.4 release schedule. In view of the current state of the Quality Dashboard, we decided to have at least one more beta release, which probably will move the release into 2012. At the same time, our release manager Cyrille Berger, who couldn't join us, had come to the same conclusion.
Then SKF gave a remote presentation to everyone present on how they use Calligra Words in their application. They are developing a modelling and calculation application and using Calligra Words as the report writing component. The main application creates tables, images and plots which inserted in a document in the embedded Words component. The engineer then addes the explaining text. Those generated items are tagged using RDF, which means that if the input data changes, it become trivial to update just those items while the text the user has created remains intact. We got a remote, life demo of their application, event. It's immensely encouraging for everyone in the community to see Calligra being used in real life!
Then Nokia presented every attendee who didn't have a Harmattan device yet with one; an N9 or N950! This once again showed everyone how far along we have come, since it contains the Documents application with is built on the Calligra core office engine.
Despite giving many people new toys to play with, the commits never stopped coming in, and also from a coding perspective, the weekend was very succesful.
An extremely nice dinner in , which the seven Indians acknowledged present acknowledged tasted very authentic rounded off the day, or would have, had we not congregated in the lobby of the Radisson Seaside hotel for some more hacking. And playing with the new devices.
On Sunday, I spent most of my time in a separate room with Pierre, Pierre, Boemann, Thorsten and Leinir, taking a step back to look at the purpose and problems of a text editing component with a goal of identifying where there are conceptual problems in the current design in Calligra's text component. And then there was a group photo (by Dmitry).
Lunch (the lunches provided by Nokia were awesome!) We also got a presentation by Nokia's Abishek on Sunday showing us how well Calligra does as the core engine for Harmattan Office -- and what could be improved still. It's amazing that in some areas, like showing embedded charts in spreadsheets, we're better than Micrsoft's mobile office on Windows Phone.
Many thanks to Nokia for hosting the sprint in their office building, providing us with lunch and dinner, and to Nokia and KO for sponsoring travel and accomodation!
/kde | permanent link |
2011-11-11
Pierre Stirnweiss, Dimitrios Tanis and I arrived together this afternoon in the Nokia office in Helsinki. By coincidence, we're actually using the same room that we occupied when we first discussed putting Calligra (back then, still KOffice) inside Nokia phones! Kind of historic ground!
The usual suspects are here, but also many new faces, like Smit Patel and Brijesh Patel, who hack on Words and Dimitrios Tanis who is doing documentation and is now turning into a Kexi hacker!
We've come a long way since then... We have created at least three different applications based on the Calligra engine. It started with FreOffice, a QWidget-based office application for the FreMantle release of Maemo. The code for this application lives right inside the Calligra source repository. Then came Harmattan Office, which will also be released under GPL. Harmattan Office uses QGraphicsView and MeegoTouch. Having Harmattan Office installed by default on the N9 means that Calligra suddenly has hundreds of thousands of users, since the N9 turns out to be an extremely popular device. And then Nokia sponsored Shantanu to create Calligra Active, a Qt Quick-based document viewer based on Calligra that's part of Plasma Active.
But now it's time to go full-tilt for the 2.4 release of the Desktop applications! There's plenty of cool stuff going on, from discussions about the difference between pre-, post- and ambilactarianism, to new comboboxes for the style dockers, to attempts to get Thorsten to commit his line endings. (We're in freeze, but those arrows are smooth...) The room is already full, more people have to arrive, it's noisy, everyone is active -- this is going to be a great weekend!
Thanks go to Nokia and KO GmbH for sponsoring travel, accommodation and dinner!
/kde | permanent link |
2011-11-07
This was one busy weekend! We had the Krita bug day, of course. But that wasn't the only thing happening: finally the printed comics were delivered! Consquently, Animtim took the train to Deventer and spent the weekend drawing dedications in the pre-ordered comics.
Meanwhile, Irina was busy preparing the list of addresses and printing the address tickers. Then it was time to start stuffing the jiffy bags:
Sort the jiffy bags
And stack them
With a huge stack as result:
Now all that is needed is to get the stamps and send them off, and everyone who pre-ordered a comic-book + dvd pack will get to see the result
If in the coming week or two you do not receive your order, or your order is not correct, please mail me! It's the first time we've done something like this...
And if you haven't ordered your copy, there are still a few left, so don't hesitate, and go to the Krita website and press the order button!
/kde | permanent link |
2011-10-08
Krita uses OpenGTL, a very, very cool techology. We use it for filters and for colormodel definitions (mainly for floating point colorspaces). OpenGTL uses LLVM internally to compile from its domain specific language to fast native code, on the fly. Ultra-cool stuff, in short.
But recently, I've had two bug reports that worry me a lot, and I do not know how to handle them:
It looks like there's problem having an application that links to llvm running on a system that uses the radeon driver. I'm not sure, llvm being black magic to me... I also don't know who to approach in the gallium/radeon/llvm communities about this issue, and neither are the reporters. But if this is true, Krita has a big problem, and so have other applications that make use of the cool possibilities of llvm.
If you have any suggestions, please mail me directly!
2011-10-06
While we're in the middle of the beta period for Krita 2.4 (which promises to be completely amazing, of course!), I got an email from Julian from Packt Publishing, asking me to fill in a questionnaire for the judges of the 2011 Packt Open Source Awards. Nice, thorough questions.
Krita is a finalist in the multimedia category... It's already great that we got this far: a year ago, Krita never got further than a write-in option whenever there was a vote going on! But we want to win as well!
So please go to packt's website, register and vote!
2011-08-22
No, I didn't queue for the exo-pc. More on exo-pc's and tablets in an earlier post. But I am very glad I came to the desktop summit. Had a great time with lots of people, met many people from the Calligra project, including Summer of Code and Season of KDE students Siddharth, Shreya and Aakriti, and even had some hacking time. We even went to an Indian restaurant with Shreya and Shaantanu.
And I gave two presentations. The first was together with Thorsten Zachmann from Nokia. You can download the slides here.
The Calligra Suite of applications has been going places. First came FreOffice, the open source first mobile office suite, later renamed to Calligra Mobile when it was ported to the WeTab and MeeGo. Calligra Mobile is based on QWidget technology.
Then came Calligra Active, part of the Plasma Active project. The development of Calligra Active was sponsored by Nokia. Calligra Active is written using QML.
And Nokia, together with the Calligra community and KO GmbH, developed the successor of Calligra Mobile: Harmattan Office. At the Desktop Summit, Thorsten Zachmann revealed Harmattan Office for the first time. We would have shown it in a life demo had the beamer been compatible with the video out port on the N950. Harmattan Office not only uses Calligra, but also Poppler and will be made available under a GPL license when it ships.
Calligra really has been going places and one of the topics of my presentation was to show how a company-community collaboration can be a success. All in all, Nokia has been involved in the Calligra development for several years now, spanning two generations of mobile office applications.
They spend time (and money) to integrate in the community. They joined sprints, sponsored sprints. All the development on the calligra engine was done directly upstream, in first the KDE subversion and then afterwards the KDE git repository.
At first, bugs were registered in the maemo bugzilla, but all those bugs were pretty soon moved to the KDE bugzilla, and that's where we work with them.
Nokia hired testers to test Calligra. Not just their own gui frontend, but also the backend. They assembled a huge repository of test documents -- and all those are in the open.
Nokia made a lot of effort to grow the community, for instance by sponsoring more than a dozen students to do an internship inside Nokia working, in public, on new features for FreOffice.
It cost effort and was something everyone had to get used to, but as much as possible, everyone used the same communication channels, notably the public irc channels, except for things more tied up with internal process, like the daily scrum meetings. If I would change one thing, I would propose to also do this in the open irc channel.
Like any community member, Nokia scratched their itch. They mostly needed a viewer application, so they were interested in loading office document files, both OpenDocument and Microsoft Office, as well as PDF. And they were interested in rendering fidelity. That's where they put their effort, and not in the desktop gui which they didn't need.
What Nokia also did was develop their gui on top of the calligra engine in-house, so it would be a surprise when they released their new systems -- and then FreOffice was released under GPLv2+. The community had a choice to accept this code-dump or not, and we accepted it. The same will happen with Harmattan Office.
All in all, I consider that the cooperation between Calligra and Nokia has been an example of doing everything right. And the result is impressive: in many, if not most ways, Harmattan Office is more capable of loading and rendering complex office documents than any other mobile office suite.
Then -- after the break, provided by LibreOffice's Michael Meeks, it was my turn again, this time to talk about Krita!
I perhaps over-prepared my Calligra Everywhere presentation -- and underprepared my Krita presentation. In the background, I had gwenview running with a slideshow of all the great art people have created with Krita, and in the foreground I told my story...
Mostly about where Krita came from -- a Photoshop/GIMP clone -- where it went (everywhere, but without focus -- to where we want to take it now -- a really good digital painting application.
I also touched lightly on why Krita seems to be flourishing right now. I don't claim to have all the answers, but some of the things in the mix are these:
And don't forget -- the pre-order for Animtim's Comics with Krita DVD is still open!
| permanent link |
2011-08-18
Intel was nice enough to hand out exo-pc tablets to people at the Desktop Summit. I didn't queue up for one, since I already got a brace -- and seen as geek toys, they're not even that desirable. The wetab I took to the MeeGo conference was a geek magnet, but those days are over for this hardware.
But remarks I've heard around suggest to me that people are mistaken about the purpose of these machines, and even about the purpose of the tablet UX it's running. Not all tablets actually are created for the same purpose, but from what I've seen, no tablet is actually made to be a productivity tool.
For instance, the iPad is designed to bleed you of dollars or euros, a few a day, maybe ten or twelve euros a week. It's a boring device where the big draw is the app store. Every app is a bit boring by itself, and after playing around a bit, you tend to want something new. Say... Another app, or a bit of media like an eBook or music file. Or a comic. So you go to the app store and spend a little money, not enough money to think about. Less than a beer in a cafe (unless you're in Helsinki)... It's a very good device for that purpose. The way it seduces you is by being very nice to hold and inviting to play with, but boring enough that you need something new for it regularly. And when you've got a few dozen apps, it becomes very unattractive to move to another platform and lose your "investment" -- because they do add up, those nickels and dimes.
The WeTab is sort of the same, but instead of bleeding you, it's intended to bleed advertisers. The huge scrolling pinboard is intended to be sold square by square to content/advertisement providers who can place a little app that can continuously show information you might find useful along with advertisements. You're seduced by the information to take in the ads. The applications on the WeTab are secondary, in my experience.
Intel's tablet UX has, basically, as its purpose to get you to buy a tablet with an Intel CPU. To that purpose, they have created an interface that shows the average user what they probably want to see: a quick look at their music collection, video collection, the noise their social network is making and a bunch of favourite webpages. For that, the concept is perfect, even if reminiscent of the plasma netbook interface with its columns in some ways. The version of their UX on the exo-pc's is pretty old, there are newer images on the MeeGo website. I think that the Intel tablet UX is actually quite good and quite useful for the kind of user it's intended for.
But the exo-pc is a developer device, meant to make it easy for people to test their new multi-touch enabled MeeGo application. And the tablet UX is not meant for developers... People complaining that the terminal doesn't have a virtual keyboard are really missing the point. The terminal is useful if you attach a usb keyboard so you can execute a few commands to install your app. For that, I think it's really good enough. All rise to the challenge of multi-touch apps on Linux!
2011-07-29
And I'm coming to Berlin for the Desktop Summit, with lots of colleagues and friends from KO GmbH and from the Calligra community.
And I have been given the opportunity to give two presentations. On Sunday morning (as usual...).
First, I will speak about Calligra Everywhere. Without wanting to put in spoilers, I can say that there are two parts to this presentation.
The Calligra suite of applications has been expanding in the past year in several direction: there are now more applications than ever part of the project, Calligra applications are available on more platforms, both desktop and mobile than ever, Calligra has joined the Active project, Calligra functionality is used in more applications and finally, some of our applications are being used more and more. So what I want to do in the first place is to review these developments, and make clear why they were possible, both technically and socially.
In the second place, the Calligra community has benefited from a long relationship with Nokia. Together with Nokia's Thorsten Zachmann we will discuss not just what this has resulted in for Calligra and Nokia, but also the lessons we can learn from the collaboration of several commercial partners with the volunteer project that Calligra still emphatically is.
Next it's Michael Meeks's turn, who will speak about LibreOffice. It's a bit like Fosdem all over -- where KO colleague Jos van den Oever first presented WebOdf, then Michael talked about LibreOffice, and I finally gave my presentation on Calligra's technical underpinnings. This time, I won't put quite so much C++ in my slides!
So... When Michael is done, it's my turn again. This time I will talk about Krita -- in the first place not about Krita the application, not a list of features we created since last year's aKademy presentation, but rather about Krita the project.
Krita is now more than ten years old, and it has started coming into its own only this year. What I hope you will be interested is in are answers to the questions "Why did it take so long?", "What went wrong?", "What went right?". I'll use the evolution of the application as a guide to discuss what it takes to create a large application with a diverse team that actually makes artists have fun.
/kde | permanent link |