Fading Memories

I like refactoring. It gives a person the warm, fuzzy feeling he's accomplished something, without actually having had to do some hard creative thinking. And it can lead to nice results -- if most of the work remains under the covers. I've just spent three days refactoring Krita's painting code. We used to have a big class, KisPainter, which had a different method for each kind of painting: brush, pencil, airbrush, erasing and some very cool things Cyrille Berger is doing, with painting with filters (something that, as far as I know, is only done by Photogenics. But KisPainter was getting too big for XEmacs to comfortably fontify, and that's always a warning sign. So I started refactoring...

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Michael Pyne was kind enough to say that I rock re: Krita, but nothing is further from the truth... Adrian Page (gradient. tablet, line handling, bug fixes), Bart Coppens (fill, text), Cyrille Berger (filters, convolve, duplicate), Sven Langkamp (hsv color wheel, UI fixes) and Patrick Julien (core design) have done most of the rocking. I've just been messing a bit with selections and code cleanups. By comparison a mere desultory wriggling of the posterior parts. And we're all working on the work laid down by John Califf, Matthias Elter, Michael Koch, Andrew Richards, Carsten Pfeiffer and Toshitaka Fujioka.

Without the rest of the gang I would probably still be wondering how to go about painting a nice curvy line...

Krita has really making progress over the past few weeks. We now have: selections, Gimp gradient loading, a gradient tool, a hsv color wheel, a fill tool that fills with colour or Gimp patterns, a text tool, a number of filters (sharped, blur, convolve, colour filters) and a baseclass that makes writing new filters really easy. The rulers can be shown or hidden according to your taste and inclination. Tools have got shortcuts. The handling of tablets and the painting of lines has been really improved. Drag and drop. Lots and lots of bug & crash fixes. Code cleanups. Work is being done on a really good image scaling algorithm.

I think we can cherish a measure of hope for Krita's inclusion in the next KOffice release. Here's a screenshot:

I finally found an edition of Cryptonomicon that was actually luggable. I'll be waiting a few years for Quicksilver and other, more recent Stephenson books to come out in a similarly handy format. I really hate the big trade paperback format. But I'll probably buy more Stephenson books, something I wasn't so sure about after finishing Diamond Age. But when I found Cryptonomicon I knew I had to give it a chance, if only because of the unanimous recommendation of my colleagues at Tryllian.

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It was quite hard to understand everything on the webcast of the freedesktop.org's representative at aKademy -- Daniel Stone -- but the impression I came away with was not favorable. The idea I got was that Freedesktop.org is led by people who don't know all that much about KDE, but pretend to set the standard for free desktop environments anyway. And if KDE people don't work to their agenda, then that's a pity, but it's their own fault if there aren't, for instance, Qt bindings to d-bus. As it appeared, those exist, but Daniel Stone didn't even know that. I'd expect people who want to set standards, to do that mainly based on existing, deployed, Free software, instead of developing alternatives to existing software. And I expect them to be equally aware of everything out there.

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Today I watched Ian Geiser's presentation on KSJEmbed thanks to the webcast from aKademy -- it was a very interesting presentation and made me want to start coding scripting support for Krita immediately, but it didn't solve my quandary: which engine to use.

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I won't be at aKademy either -- like Rich Moore and Anne-Marie Mahfouf and quite a few other KDE developers. Even though it's only five hours by train and a return ticket is only E100,-, so I've got even less of an excuse than most. Didn't have any holidays left, for one thing, and I generally only start to really want to go to these things when the excitement is building up and it's to late to register. Maybe next year... But that's what I've been saying about Fosdem and EuroPython for years. We'll see.

I recently came across an old article by Benjamin Meyer titled A Tribute to KDE. In it (no, dash it, it's in something else I read today which I cannot find now), he notes the dearth of advanced applications using KDE. And even two years later, that is still quite true. Of course, we now have Scribus, which comes close to being not only usable, but the Free Software standard in its category, but there still isn't a Qt-based vector app that's even close to Sodipodi, nor a Qt-based raster image app that's breathing in the Gimp's neck. And while KOffice is getting better, Gnumeric is more highly regarded by them that think they need a spreadsheet, and while KMail is a great e-mail client, people flock to Evolution, of all things horrible. So, why is this? (And where has planetkde gone?)

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In spring, I found four wrinkly little left-over potatoes in the cellar and decided to plant them anyway.

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Despite the best efforts of the Romans -- and creditable efforts, that have produced creditable results, notable a good Dornsfelder '02 and a Spätburgunder, Germany is a beer country. Not that the 30.000 breweries produce a lot of variety. It's pilsener, weisse or schwartzbier, and that's it. (Or maybe they do produce a lot of variety, but in that case they collectively fail to a) get it into the supermarkets or the Getränkehallen, and b) advertise it. I've seen six different telly ads for beer, and it was all for lager-type stuff.

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We've indulged in an absolute orgy of movie-going last week. Achieving more than the yearly average of cinema visits in a single week. Saturday, we went to Zwolle to see the last performance of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. And Wednesday, we went to the Uitkijk in Amsterdam to see one of the last performances of Girl with a Pearl Earring. I'm sure I've seen enough talkies for a long time now.

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The Dutch newspaper Trouw had already reviewed this book before we went on holiday to Thuringia, which used to by GDR. They were enthusiastic, so when we saw the book in a shop window in Steinbach Hallenberg, we resolved to buy the book. (Turns out it was cheaper in the bookshop, that it is at Amazon.de.)

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