Fading Memories

Well, I've more or less switched over to KDE CVS now. Things are working, mostly, but there are one or two really weird glitches. First and foremost, in any dialog box with a default button, if you move the focus from the default button, pressing enter will not activate the button that now has focus, but the default button still. Space and only space will activate the focus button. And since my fingers are hard-wired for arrowing to the button I want, then press enter (a decade old remnant from my Windows days), I never, ever get the action I intended. It's very, very frustrating. And then there's Konqueror which pops up an completely disabled toolbar when opening a website -- and then makes it disappear again. Sometimes. I don't know what the toolbar is for, it's got some video-recorder-like buttons on it, but it is very insistent. And Kopete's chat window doesn't want to be resized anymore, it opens very wide, and I cannot get it to become any smaller. KMail tends to crash on resume: and it crashes when creating a new folder -- bug that first reappeared in 3.2.3, and which developers assure me doesn't exist anymore. Oh, and KOrganizer doesn't restore my active calendar on resume by session management, and KWord doesn't load the document I was working on in the same situation. And all of a sudden khtml renders every apostrophe with spaces around them, even if they aren't in my html...

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In my last about this subject I said I'd discovered a few more paint apps for Windows. These were:

• Ambient Design: Art Rage
• Right(Hemisphere :Deep Paint
• Nature Painter: Nature Painter Digital Canvas
• Eusoftware: Wizardbrush

Add to that: e-Paint and the experimental and academic Chinese Painting on Phantom by Jeng-Sheng Yeh, Pei-Ken Chang and Ting-Yu Lien. Furthermore, there's Gsumi, which does a nice liquid ink stroke, and Wet, which run on Linux.

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Acer, a fairly popular manufacturer of none-too cheap laptops is a very bad firm to do business with. Their hardware sucks; their warranty sucks; their knowledge of consumer law sucks, their helpline sucks and the idiots they employ suck, too. My advice: do not buy Acer. Ever.

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This book -- the first a moderately long series -- is really, really weird. It's the last gasp of a long-dead genre, the swashbuckling, China-men ridden adventure story of which Oppenheim was the last great representative. This book was first published in 1975, and apart from some token nods towards modern times (the cousin of the hero is leaning towards emancipation, that is, taking a boyfriend without intention of marriage), it's as if you're reading something written a hundred years ago...

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What with one thing and another, I haven't been able to spend as much time on my poor little garden as I should have. But in compensation we're having a really old-fashioned Dutch summer, with rain and sunshine following each other in quick succession. And that means that all the greens are growing really well.

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While I've still not figured out how to make RSS feeds for different subjects, I do have spent some time finding out that Blosxom provides a little plugin, foreshortened, which can be used to present only the first line of a blog posting to rss. I hacked this to produce only the first paragraph, but that's all that will show up on aggregator sites like Planet KDE from now on. The full story is, of course, still available on Fading Memories itself, but I won't make you all scroll through three screenfulls of garden wibbling anymore. I haven't figured out how to make the appearance of the em-brackened three dots dependent on there actually being more to read, so you'll have to try your luck when clicking on the link to the story itself. But I'm a verbose kind of person, who seldom keeps himself to a mere paragraph. Look: there are the dots. (If you're reading this on Planet KDE, that is. Or bloglite. Or in Akgregator.)

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I should have gone for a quad-processor machine with a really, really, really fast raid cabinet... On my almost-new laptop -- a Dell Inspiron 5150 I have blogged about before, compiling all of KDE, excluding KOffice, takes a whole day. That's not something to do daily, and I haven't even checked whether this morning's CVS actually works. Still, I now know that this laptop has a pretty good fan, it's managed to keep the processor running fast and hard from ten o'clock in the morning until right now...

But in the end -- this version of KDE runs much, much faster and snappier than 3.2.3 from SuSE's apt repositories. The difference in responsiveness, especially in Konqueror is unbelievable.

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I had forgotten for some time to empty the digital camera, and when I did (new pics of salad and beetroot coming up!), I discovered this quite decent picture of the IJssel bridge by Zutphen.

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Which is why I am extremely grateful to Mozilla Firefox for releasing version 0.9:

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Fading Memories was a book log, originally. But I haven't read -- really read, from cover to cover, or at least the majority of chapters -- a book for a few weeks now. Dostojevsky is gathering dust in the study, Sophrony has somehow lost its way and now sits next to Java 2D Graphics and Accelerated C++, De Zilveren Hazewind did grab me, but then I put it aside and forgot to pick up again. De Drie Musketiers is bed-time reading, and the travel journal of Huc and Gabet was fun, but in small doses. And that fifth book in the Belisarius series, by Drake and Flint, Tide of Victory was fun to read, and I actually finished it, but that was because it didn't demand much from my mind.

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The hot trend at the moment appears to be Planet. I have been reading Planet Classpath for quite a long time, and now we have Planet KDE, too. Nice initiative, but the consequences are a bit daunting, at least for me and my poor webserver.

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Clarence Dang has just made Krita capable of drawing not just lines, but ellipses and squares in any brush! In other news, I have somehow messed up the ksnapshotwidget.ui.h file, and now my screenshot plugin is broken... Anyway, enjoy the spectacle provided by Krita's new features:

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It used to be a regular occurrence, the absence of Father Theodore of our Parish. And often a priest from another parish, sometimes even from another country, would step into the breach and celebrate the Holy Liturgy with us in Deventer. Today, for the first time since quite long, Father Theodore was in Russia again, and we had a guest priest.

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Being Dutch, I voted for the European Parliament yesterday. I thought it rather important to go and vote: the EP can only become a strong and democratic institution if it receives a strong mandate from the voters. And the way to signal that is to go and vote. Fortunately, more than 40% of the Dutch made the effort: up 10%.

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I've finally discovered why image resizing didn't work when scaling: I believe that when scaling the background layer the projection layer is scaled automatically. Scaling it on its own makes it much too small, hence the blacked-out backgrounds I was having. And I hacked the old KOffice scan plugin and KSnapshot together into a Krita plugin, so I can make snaps of Krita, downscale them -- and presto, Krita is usable for maintaining its own website...

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Unless you count the few times I've putty'ed to calcifer from my father's computer when I was visiting him, I haven't used a modern Windows computer at all. My tax computer is Windows, true, but it's Windows 95. My first laptop still runs Window 3.11 -- and while both Naomi and Rebecca have windows partitions on their laptops, neither is really aware of that fact -- I'll wipe them one of these days, giving them extra room for their /home.

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While I'm bravely forging with Krita, I'm very well aware that mine is not the only game in town, and that it's often a good idea to check out what other people are doing. An interesting conclusion is that natural-media type paint apps must be easy to do, since there are several cheap options that are really good. So: here's an overview of what I've found floating about on the net. Most of it is Windows stuff; all of it trialware. Here's my very cursory survey:

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My laptop was broken -- the spacebarhad a nasty tendency to stop registering presses if I used the right-hand side of the thing. So I phoned Dell on Friday, and on Tuesday (it being Whitsun weekend) they came to collect it.

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