Fading Memories

Thanks to our latest donor, Silvio Grosso, we're at four thousand euros now on Pledgie: Help raise Krita to the next level -- which together with the donations people have made into my bank account directly, means that, even after Paypal has taken its cut, Lukas will be able to work on Krita for another month in the summer!

Here's a screenshot of Krita showing off a feature Silvio asked for that we never really highlighted before: using flake shapes, it's easy to add vector arrows to screenshots, to point out important items. In this case, the default color setting for a new image, which is what I'm working on currently:

Deep-felt thanks go to the more than 160 people who cared enough about Krita that they made this donation drive such an unbelievable success! It is a big vote of confidence and I am determined that we'll prove ourselves worth of it.

The Krita fund raising campaign went live on Monday. Tuesday night, Jos Poortvliet published his interview with me and Lukáš. Today it's Thursday night, and not only have we very nearly reached the campaign goals, we're now at €2,343.00, but I've also bursted out of my Paypal account! So from now on, new donations will go to Cyrille Berger's paypal account, until I've unblocked mine. Our ace webmaster, Kubuntiac has been telling me he warned me this had happened to others, but I simply hadn't expected so many people -- 89 already -- to care enough about Krita that they wanted to help us!

A great, big thank you! to you all!

I can only say that I'm totally floored and apart from the paypal issue, and, deo volente, it's now certain that Lukáš will be able to start doing what you all have decided is so very much worth doing: Make Krita fast!

As I promised, we're having weekly updates on what has happened in Krita on Krita.org, and last week's update has just been published: Week 48: Relative Quiet.

But don't let the title scare you from clicking on the link! It was still a way cool week for us! Quiet for Krita still means lots of development.

After two years and various attempts, Krita finally has a website of its own. And a really nice one, too. Thanks to Krita forum user Kubuntiac who did all the hard work and heavy lifting! Take a sneak peek at krita2d.org -- soon we'll point krita.org to the new location!

It's well integrated within the wider world of KDE websites: we have our forums at forums.kde.org, our tutorials go to userbase, developer information will go to techbase and the developer wiki. We've got a nice showcase with the most impressive images from the forum gallery. Also, the historical screenshots are back, rescued from the old koffice.org website.

I promise -- faithfully! -- that I'll try to make it a tradition to write a weekly "Last Week in Krita" entry for the frontpage. It always surprises me how much we get done in a week. More than seventy commits by seven people is not to be sneezed at! For now, there's some nice and uplifting content for you to read!

And... Watch krita.org for something really exciting later this week!

I'm sometimes tired of hard and software, too... When my Vista laptop boots and refuses to connect to my wifi network -- the little wifi light is on, but no network, or when after coming back from suspending it won't recognize my password (the same that I can login with when freshly booted), or because the fingerprint reader isn't supported. Or when the screen goes black for three seconds before it asks me for the admin password. And when the Photoshop CS3 demo complains it cannot install until I close firefox, I get tired. I despair when OSX gives me an update and suddenly the whole machine won't boot anymore and I have to reinstall Leopard. Or when a friend upgraded to Snow Leopard and discovered he cannot play wma files anymore after the update. I have to admit that OSX's kernel panic screen is nice and multilingual, but I wish I didn't have to see it every month or so. And what's with the vertical green and blue lines the screen on my top-of-the-line Macbook Pro 17" shows? It's not pretty. And when KDE's plasma's task manager keeps crashing or moving all the tabs to the right-hand side, instead of left aligning them, I sigh. Like I did when I find out I have to reboot my N900 every week otherwise the memory gets filled up by the microblogging service that Mauku runs.

Basically, no hardware and no software ever works correctly. All software and hardware sucks, and most of it sucks equally bad. I make an exception for vim, of course, but the only reason other software seems to be less sucky is because I haven't discovered what makes it suck yet. Well, back to doing something about it and getting Krita under 40 known bugs now.

(And now the Photoshop CS3 demo complains it wants at least a Pentium4, Celeron, Core Duo or Core2 processor, on a Core2 laptop...)

On two laptops, prior to running the unittests again. Last time I tried them -- four hours ago -- I had zero failures. And yesterday, Krita's bug count in bugzilla had dropped below 40; today it's 42 again. And that includes a couple of nasty crashers, where we might have a choice between leak and crash, or worse: between disabling a feature and crashing. And there are some important issues among the non-crashers, too, issues that really should be solved.

But we've been fixing bugs like mad, mostly me and Sven Langkamp, since Lukas is working on his thesis (which is about brush engines for Krita, yay!) and Cyrille is finishing up his phd. There are a couple of bus that we really need Cyrille for, even.

The bug fixing has been very rewarding, even though our ace beta testers, Enkithan, M4v, Gaizka and Bugsbane have been doing their darnest to keep the bug count at over 42. And there's more cool stuff: Kubuntiac (on the forum, who is Bugsbane in bugzilla) has been working on Krita's website, and when we've migrated the content from the old website over, we're ready to flick the switch and krita will have it's own website, with lots of content, links to techbase and to userbase.

(Note: we have disabled the following plugins for 2.1: glsl filters, painting with the wave filter, kross-based scripting, together cooperative painting, panorama stitching, the chinese paintbrush (not sumi-e, that's in), an experimental brush engine, the graphicsmagick import/export plugin (photoshop, gimp, gif etc.) if you have GraphicsMagick newer than 1.2 and the perspective transformation tool.)

And have you all seen Enkithan's wonderful Dungeon girl illustration, all done in Krita? That's why I'm spending twenty leisure hours a week on Krita!

Tomorrow Cyrille will tag the first release candidate of KOffice 2.1...

I haven't managed to install a development enviroment yet -- that's part laziness, part caution: I'm not going to install scratchbox on my laptop directly, I'll use a vm for that. And after installing scratchbox in Karmic, Karmic won't start anymore. Need to investigate more -- that's the laziness.

Two observations: the lock switch on the side is soooo nice -- much better than pressing two keys in exactly the right succession on my old E71. And the N900 gets slow when six to eight apps are running, and -- dash it! -- I want them running because they are all so convenient. And a third observation: swiping from outside the screen onto the xterm will select the url to open or copy if there's one on the line(s) you swipe over.

And here's a picture to show the camera in near-perfect conditions: a bright October day in Amsterdam, around 14:00:

(Click to get the full untouched image; the small image has been scaled in two steps with unsharp mask in between, same as I do with my Fuji camera.)

And it took only a day and a half -- I went to the Maemo Summit and got one of the N900 loaners. And I'm not sure what I'll do when I have to give it back in six months. It's great... Let's compare it impartially to the E71 and N810 I used before:

• It's got a better keyboard than either
• It's thicker than the E71 but smaller than the N810
• The webbrowser of the E71 crashes on maemo.org, the N810 or N900 browsers don't, but they are a bit slow.
• The email client has a bit of a problem with large inboxes, but the E71 email client doesn't want to connect at all to some of my email accounts.
• Plenty of free memory
• Plenty of free software, compared to nearly none for the E71
• Open for any kind of hacking -- can even play ogg! -- which impressed Rebecca no end.
• Worst thing: the battery goes flat after only eight hours of continuously running ssh to my home server, the media player, the (great> mauku identi.ca client, email checking, browsing and gaming -- and it can run only about six to seven apps at the same time before the music starts stuttering when when I connect it as a mass storage device to mhy laptop. Shame!

Er, well... I just love this device. Doing without in in half a year will be a bit wrench. And it even runs KOffice, or rather FreOffice, the KOffice-based office document viewer KO GmbH and Nokia have worked on. And even the current GTK-based software is super smooth and usable. The integration of various services is great:

I lent my E71 to Naomi, and she immediately discovered that it can actually use our home wifi network. And Irina got my N810.

It's a pity I was too tired (I've just been ill, and not completely recovered) to be around at the Maemo Summit for more than a day and a halef. In fact, I was so tired I kept making stupid mistakes, like not recognizing some people I should have known in In de Wildeman at the first, informal party (where there was the excellent Jopen Stout on the tap). I attended an hour on Friday, and most of Saturday, but on Sunday I stayed at home.

Nokia did us extremely well indeed: lunch was uniformly satisfactory, there was always some fresh fruit or candy to nibble on, as well as coffee to correct any mishap caused by any of the parties thrown in the evenings (which I did not attend, on account of being too tired, more's the pity).

There was plenty of space for relaxed hacking in the very cool, very hip Westergasfabriek. The combination of awesome industrial architecture, kindergarten, soccer fields and a park made for a unique surroundings. This is Inge Wallin, by the way, hacking away on loading EMF files for KOffice:

Many of the presentations were really interesting, though there were some duds as well, and the keynote by Ton Roosendaal from the Blender Foundation was inspirational. Starting with the content and then adapting the application to make it possible to create that content seems like a good strategy for Krita, too.

I missed the most interesting (after Ton's) presentation, though: Suresh Chande presenting the KOffice-based viewer application, actually using the KPresenter port on the N900 to give his presentation. How cool is that? And he had an interesting bit of news, too: Nokia have contracted KO GmbH to create KOffice filters for MS Office 2007 files -- which are somewhat similar to the formats defined in OOXML. And the coolness doesn't end there, I'm told. KOffice 2.1 is going to rock because of all the bug fixes.

Last night we went out for dinner to Padi at the Haarlemmerdijk 50. We had some amazing food... Vegetarian and extra chicken dishes no problem. And really, living near Java House in Deventer, where they cook like royalty, I like to think I have acquired some discrimination in Indonesion food, and Padi cooks extremely well. All the eleven or twelve dishes were just right, balanced to a nicety with no skimping on the peteh beans or trassi, and there was enough of everything. And it was not just us: all evening people were arriving (and leaving because it was full), and just when we were ready to leave, another group of Maemo-summit goers were wondering whether to enter, a course of action we could whole-heartedly recommend!

And for added atraction, there's a a big, fat restaurant cat:

(All pictures with the N900 -- it has a higher resolution than my first digital camera, but for low-light conditions, it's not ideal...)

Van Gansewinkel came to collect the restaurant garbage this morning, with a whopping big lorry. And the driver hit the street lamp that's suspended from our wall:

And this is after the friendly man from the town council had removed the lamp:

And that facade had been completely renovated about two years ago...

I was asked the other day whether Krita 2.1 would be an official suitable-for-the-user release. And you know what? That's actually a very good question. For most of KOffice the answer is easy: no, it is still a developers release, by developers, for developers and any adventurous user uses it at their own peril.

But for Krita, it's harder to decide. Krita 2.1 still has some feature regressions compared to 1.6 (like no image overview docker, some missing filters, among other things I have discussed before).

And the performance of Krita is still quite bad, and we've done next to nothing about that for 2.1. I test with a 300dpi A4 image and if I play with layers I can almost make coffee while waiting for the image to be redrawn.

But the stability has improved a lot! We've been cleaning away bugs with vim and a hard brush and now there is only one release blocker bug, six crash bugs (only one of which I can reproduce, dash it) and less than forty normal bugs left. Polish is still lacking to some extent, mainly in the area of progress bars, but even there we are making progress.

And subjectively, stability feels pretty good, even while developing. So... It's not ready for inclusion in the mainstream. But it's a good replacement for Krita 1.6, if you are not using many of the filters from the krita-plugins package that haven't yet been ported. So, if anyone wants to give it a try (especially if they are miniature painters who are satisfied with a 1024x768 canvas), we can use some real-life testing now!

I'm allowed to gloat... We had a perfect chunk of roast beef today. Recipe? Take some lean beef, top-side, I think. Sprinkle with crushed juniper berries, salt and pepper. Put dripping (schmaltz) on top. Cover completely with schwarzwalder schinken -- cured, raw ham, not bacon, in thin slices. Put with half-boiled potatoes in an oven dish. Cover with greased paper. Cook 15 minutes for every metric pound at 220 degrees centigrade. We had 1.5 kg, so we removed the paper at 30 minutes and took the dish out of the oven at 45 minutes. Enjoy!

No pictures, but Irina will post pictures of the white cat trying to get in through our kitchen window. She was quite mad because of the appetizing smell... The cat, not Irina.

I first became aware of MyPaint quite some time ago, when the author appeared on the Krita mailing list. Since then, I've been following this application quite closely, updating and building nearly daily. Although it resembles Art Rage, MyPaint isn't a little toy application, and I'm very impressed with it.

It really does allow sketching as if you were working on paper When I was trying out the charcoal brushes, I suddenly noticed myself trying to smudge the lines with my thumb. Well, despite having a touchscreen on my laptop, that didn't work!

MyPaint has the following impressive features, among others:

• Support for OpenRaster -- which makes it easy to work with MyPaint and Krita in one workflow. (If you use Krita 2.x, preferably Krita trunk.)
• 16-bit layers for smoother painting
• really impressive brush engine. I think it would be easy enough to make a plugin for krita that re-uses this brush engine and make krita work with all MyPaint brushes, but whether it would perform well enough is an open question.
• Smooth, smooth, smooth! And performs really well.
• And most importantly: an almost natural feel when painting.
• A very active development community with lots of interesting stuff happening.

One disadvantage for me is that it really is designed for the situation where you have a tablet in front of you and a keyboard aside, under your secondary hand. This means that if I use my X61t in tablet mode, I cannot easily access the brush palette or the colors. This is a design feature, though, and one of the places where MyPaint differs most from Art Rage. (The other is that Art Rage is not only closed-source software, but also not as good an artists' tool by a long chalk.).

Blog with a screenshot:

I love interoperability:

Another long blog post on krita without a single screenshot...

The Krita hackers had an irc discussion some time ago on where Krita was headed. With Gimp gaining high-end features that were previously our province (like group layers and an increasingly attractive and polished user interface), and MyPaint becoming a really nice and comfortable paint application (material for another blog!), Krita's relevance might be thought to have been in jeopardy. And, given that we've spent the past three years porting Krita, catching up with the base platforms (Qt, KDE, KOffice-libs) and adding lots and lots of experimental features, it could be argued that we might have lost focus.

So, we first needed to answer some soul-searching questions, like, "what's the biggest problems we face", "is it useful or detrimental to be based on KOffice", "what use-cases do we want to implement", "what's better, one big app that can do all, or smaller, focused apps" and even: "Is there still a reason for Krita to exists, given that Gimp is getting more and more polished and has layer groups, and that MyPaint is getting layers and has a dream of a brush engine?"

And there are some seemingly contradictory interests too: developers want to experiment with image manipulation technologies, users want a tool that allows them to make cool art with the minimum of distraction. The interests of photographers, comic book authors, illustration painters and amateur sketchers (that's me...) are not the same. A tablet pc has only one key: the escape key. An Intuos user has a keyboard and wants a lot of shortcuts. And so. The full discussion is on the mailing list.

Note that all this time, we carried on fixing bugs and improving Krita's stability! Because, in the end, it's clear that currently stability is the biggest issue everyone has who tries to work with Krita 2.1. And after stability, performance. We recognize that in our plan: see below.

But first the vision as it appeared from our discussions:

Vision

This is what we are thinking now; we are planning a Krita sprint in February and will probably be using some of that time to refine our ideas.

• Integrated: no endless switching between two apps, but switching between modes of Krita, so no data loss because two apps don't completely understand each other, not two color selectors or layer modes that have subtly different meaning. So, if you want to manipulate the colors of a layer, switch to the image manipulation mode, and if you want to sketch, switch to the sketching mode. I envision a slider-like widget to do this, not a complex thing like Eclipse, just two or three well-defined gui compositions, ranging from complex to spare.
• Usable: easy things easy, like getting started with a digital pencil sketch, the rest possible and accessible. We need UI guidelines for things like filter dialogs, tool option panes and brush engine panes. Some things are hard problems, like multiple views, resource management and so on. Our line tool, our assistants really make a diffence for users.
• Powerful: because we build on the KOffice foundations of pigment and flake (which partly derive from krita, by the way), Krita has got color management, rich text, vector layers and everything. If, in addition to Krita you install more KOffice plugins, an application like Karbon or even, if your tastes lie that way, KChart, you will get more power that nevertheless doesn't get in your way.
• Surprising: Krita offers an unparalleled platform for developer experimentation. Things like Cyrille's magnetic painting guides or Lukas' deform paintop are not only unique, but just plain fun, to write and to use. But we need to control the experiments. Right now, we have a lot of half-baked experiments in our code, like Emanuelle's color mixer. That never got the maintenance it deserved, and I really need to pick it up. We should start working in a way that only the finished, polished feature lands in a release. And we should release often, so there's no more than two-three months between finishing a feature and releasing it.
• Accessible: krita2d.org is moribund, the people promising to help with Drupal have all disappeared. krita.org points the koffice.org website, which is rather embryonal. I know that I cannot handle Drupal or wordpress, but what else is there? We need a faq, a gallery, tutorials. Maybe I'll start with just plain html again... Lukas Tvrdy has set up a number of krita-specific forums on forums.kde.org that are proving to be popular. So you don't need to be an irc-addict to contact us!
• Hackable: we started with scripting, extended scripting through kross, broke that (will fix it!) and there's now shiva and its ilk: we want krita to be hackable, even for artists. Procedural layers, filters and brushes, we want make krita hackable beyond traditional scripting in python or scheme, but also beyond the traditional plugins Krita supports (tools, brush engines, filters, generators, file formats, assistants, colorspaces or other extension): if someone wants to add a new layer type that comprises a real node-based system, that's possible too. But easy user extensibility is our first priority.

Roadmap

A tentative roadmap, where I hope that 2.4 will be released before 2010 is a distant memory:

• 2.1: stability
• 2.2: out-and-out performance
• 2.3: use-case one: bliss out the comic book author whose usecase Enkithan has written down for us.
• 2.4: use-case two: make something like David Revoy's workflow possible in one, integrated application. (Why are all the good artists French?).

And then on and on!

Yesterday, Irina, Jos van den Oever and I went to the Software Freedom Day in Amsterdam. I think there were about fifty to sixty attendants, and a nicely balanced schedule of talks in two tracks. Very interesting was the presentation about Soleus: community driven virtual private servers. We did enjoy ourselves a lot, but since it has been ages since Irina and I have been in Amsterdam without the kids, we left around four o' clock to go on a book buying spree the like of which we haven't committed for over four years. And then we rounded off with an excellent Indonesian dinner for two.

And our kids are wonderful: when we came home they had done all the dishwashing for us:-)

My beloved X61 tablet is still going strong, and I still carry it with me wherever I go. I got the tablet calibrated now, for stylus and finger usage and together with MyPaint (I need to blog about mypaint!) or Krita it's just perfect.

But KOffice is getting bigger and bigger, there are more and more unittests and the poor thing now takes about two hours to compile everything and another hour to run the tests, which is not productive if you try to fix stuff in the libraries, which I've been doing a lot. Krita alone has 102 unittestsi (out of 213 for all of KOffice), not counting the two tests that try to run all filters. And while 1024x768 is still the resolution I am making Krita for, I can only use KDeveloper or Qt Creator if they run in full-screen mode.

So I got a new one. A Thinkpad, of course. A really fast W500 with a high resolution screen. Lovely! Same form factor as my previous Z60M. Weirdly enough, on the X61t OpenSUSE rules: everything works perfectly, but it failed on the W500 with bad screen fonts, no network, no suspend, while Kubuntu, which didn't work on the X61t, works perfectly on the W500. There's this thing bugging me: with the great build quality, why does Lenovo put such crappy backlights in their laptops? There's no way to tilt the screen so all of it is readable. And it's way too dim for my nearly forty-year-old eyes.

But it compiles like a dream!

And got myself a new telephone. When I was in Berlin for the KOffice Sprint, I get totally fed up with sms'ing with only a numerical keyboard. So I went to the shop and got myself something with a real keyboard: a Nokia E71.

My previous phone was actually the Motorola phone I received got the 2006 aKademy Award for Best Application. I clocked up about three hours of call time and about sixty sms messages since then -- I'm not a great phone user. But look what this phone can do:

Logging in with ssh on my home server!

Of course, no matter what you do, unless you get one given to you (and my daughters are now fighing over the Motorola phone), when you get a phone, you will feel ripped off. Did I get the best data plan? Shouldn't I have waited for another type of phone with just as good a keyboard, but full VGA resolution? Or maybe even got something that doesn't run S60?

Right now, I think this phone has great hardware, great design (with two minus points: the rubbery bits covering usb and micro-sd slot are tacky, and the screen resolution should be better.) and software that could be improved a lot.

Because I cannot figure out what button to click in this dialog:

ETA: I feel doubly dumb now. I accidentally burned debian twice, because when I wanted to burn the kubuntu cd for the kids' computer, I clicked on the kubuntu iso image in k3b's file manager, and it popped up the burn image dialog -- and somehow had remembered that last time I had burned the debian image (for the server, though I doubt k3b knew that). Result: 2 debian cd's, no kubuntu cd.

And another contributor: Edward Apap, better known on irc as Antiquark, has created a new dialog for krita that makes it possible in an easy way to extend the canvas size. This is a patch that we had in readiness for some time already, but with the imminent release of 2.0, we can add stuff to trunk again!

Welcome to the Krita team, Antiquark!

Yesterday, I took a day off from serious things like redesigning the library structure of KOffice, working on the Krita part of the redesigned KOffice website, trying to optimize the hell out of freehand painting and several other things, like being too sick to actually think straight for two consecutive moments and so not making much progress with any of these things.

I took a holiday, in short, a chance to add a nice little feature to Krita: image backgrounds.

An image background is a pattern that is tiled beneath the root layer, so that if there is anything transparent in your image, the pattern is seen below. Most useful to have a nice background, perhaps paper-like, when sketching.

This morning it was done:

Now this was just a little thing to play with, but there are several fun things about it: for one thing, I have resurrected a class that Patrick Julien wrote in 2002 and was originally responsible for painting the checker pattern. We've got different code for that now, that makes it even clearer that the checks aren't part of your image, but this class is very well suited to painting a tiled background.

Another thing is that MyPaint has a similar feature, so ideally we'd like to be able to interchange, through OpenRaster, images made in Krita and in MyPaint. We'll need to extend OpenRaster for that, though, since MyPaint saves the background as a layer as big as your image filled with the tiles, and Krita (will) save(s) the background as a property of the image.

And there is a small list of TODO's caused by this little feature, todo's that are actually almost all simple Junior Jobs:

• enable Add, Remove, Reset buttons for background pattern management.
• label the background patterns somehow, allow tagging
• add solid-color background patterns and use a categorized view for them
• add a custom-color background pattern
• add lots of nice patterns
• integrate with custom image widget (the one you see on startup)
• integrate with image properties dialog
• add to loading/saving of KisImage in .kra and .ora
• set pattern on double click
• allow non 64x64 pattern tiles

To read Chinese. Not very well, and only traditional characters (the simplified characters of the PRC were far beneath our dignity in Leyden, at least, when I was a student there). But that's two decades ago, and not much of the ancient skill still lingers.

Which is a pity, since I found four Chinese painting manuals for 50 cents each, dating from the seventies. It's all research for Krita! This one is, judging from the contents, especially about drawing women:

Of course, I still have got all my old dictionaries... But Chinese dictionaries are quite a pain to use. One has to know which "radical" -- the identifying part of the charachter -- the character belongs to. Then you have to count the remaining strokes, and that's generally enough to find the character in the dictionary.

For instance, I seem to remember that the first character of the title belongs to the "man" radical -- that's the two strokes to the left. The other three strokes are also a radical, namely the "earth" radical, but it's the "man" radical that's this character's radical. If I remember correctly, because it got less strokes than the other radical.

Look at this handout that still was in my New Practical Chinese-English Dictionary:

So.. We turn to page 39, where the "man" radical starts, and start looking for the characters with three extra strokes. That's on page 42/43. There we find:

We are in luck! The second meaning of the compound "shinu" means "painting portraying beautiful women". Yes, this book is about what I thought it was about!

Of course, when I studied Chinese you needed an extra board in your computer with all Chinese characters baked into ROM in order to be able to type Chinese. Internet was not for students, especially not for those language types.

These days, it should be easy to create a Chinese dictionary application that lets you draw the character using a stylus or your finger or even the mouse and then checks strokes and stroke order and comes up with the right character. However, I haven't found such an application -- most dictionary want you to find the characters using the Pinyin romanization. Which I don't know if I don't know the character...

Not that I am going to do that. I'm trying to optimize painting in Krita right now, and my compile has just finished.

That centralization is the way for the internet to go. Even though I work for Hyves, where we've got a silly number of messages, photos and chats stored on our servers, I still think the internet was intended to be distributed. Like email. Like the web. Like usenet.

But, well, I've got a hyves account now. I'm on linkedin. I'm on identi.ca (which forwards to twitter, which used to forward to Hyves, but I disabled that again). And now I'm on deviant art.

Our Krita Season of KDE student, Vera Lukman sort of prodded me -- we got talking about drawing and things. And I realized that I haven't touched my paints since we came to live in this house, in 2007. Probably more like not since 2006, even. I've done some sketching... Last year.

The question now is, of course, will this stimulate me to draw more? Will it finally make me use a computer for drawing? Will I get rich from selling prints?

What will happen to all my passwords if kwallet ever mangles my wallet? (Not that it has ever done so, touch would...)

I'm not sure how I arrived at the website of the Times Literary Supplement and found a review of a book based on Henriette Lucie Dillon La Tour Du Pin Gouvernet's memoirs, "Journal D'une Femme de Cinquante Ans". But is fascinating reading, these memoirs of a lady who was a maid-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette and who lives through revolutions, wars, exile and everything.

And I was so glad when I found the e-text! It was only released on March 15th... I haven't read a lot of French lately, but the nineteeth century French Lucie Dillon writes is really easy to read, probably because the French I was taught at school was already fifty years out of date back in the eighties.

But now for the sad part: it's only part 1! The fun bits, where she lives in America as an exile, making her own butter, and where she returns to Europe to hob-nob with Napoleon are missing! Please, Mireille Harmelin and Eric Vautier, I want to read on!

Only the KDE Summer of Code admins still have a huge task before them -- making the final selection for KDE of the summer of code projects. The mentors have been reading hundreds of proposals, scoring them, debating them -- the KDE sub-projects have had their debates, and now it's the time for the students to wait with bated breath. Will they get a slot and spend their summer productively, having fun with their favourite project? Or are they going to help their local burger joint out?

I thought it would be nice to look back at the previous summers of code, make a list of KOffice projects, note whether their projects were a success, and whether the students are still around.

Read more ...

Of people issuing "security" patches. Last week a couple of Linux distributions were suckered into updating lcms with a patch coming from a certain Andrea Barsiani. Because of an alleged security risk... Well, this patch completely and utterly broke lcms. And right at the time when we were tagging KOffice RC1, so people who run up-to-date distros started reporting crashes in Krita. We nearly got a heart attack thinking it was our code...

To quote Marti Maria, the lcms maintainer:

The short history is, a guy called Adrea Barisani, claiming to represent some obscure security company called oCERT, was providing a patch to fix a "vulnerability" they found.

At the end, the oCERT company was just Andrea Barsiani who setup ocert in 2008 to get google sponsoring.

The whole internet is now filled with hype about this "vulnerability", and in truth this "patch" breaks littlecms functionality, and probably opens some back door, so, please:

DON'T USE PATCHES FROM UNTRUSTED SOURCES.

I guess you were told something similar in school right? :-)

The problem, if any, is restricted to a very specific architecture (x86, no DEP, crafted profile).

With this patch lcms does not work at all. Please upgrade to 1.18 and let's forgot all this nasty stuff.

So, if you're packaging lcms for your distro, please upgrade to 1.18. And, please, if you patch lcms, make sure it's an official patch, from a trusted source. Like, Marti Maria...

Update: Kubuntu has a fix, and Marc Deslauriers has identified the possible culprit from the security patch. This patch was also in on 1.18b1, but removed in 1.18b2.

This week, at work, we released the 1.0 stable version of the Hyves Desktop, with source available (for almost everything but the photo uploader and editor plugin, more's the pity), and also the iPhone app, a java phone app and a firefox toolbar. It's nice to work for a company that actually ships!

KOffice 2.0 RC1 got tagged. There's a nasty file handling bug in Krita that we haven't been able to pin down, so we might need another RC, though. Or it might be an lcms issue. But getting here has been an enormous relief. KOffice 2.0 won't replace KOffice 1.6 or OpenOffice as a stable workhorse, but it is a release that really allows us to build on.

Update: : yes, it is an lcms issue -- 1.17 got a security patch last week which broke Krita. 1.18 is fine.

And then there's KDE 4.2.2 -- I'm using it with Qt 4.5, and it's pretty stable, except for some KRunner quirkiness, where urls get autocompleted but without hits, so pressing enter does nothing and I have to press end, then enter, and sometimes nothing gets executed although there are hits, especially with urls that are in the history.

I still haven't made use of them, but Irina has a nice article showing how she is using activities to structure her work.

This year I won't be able to attend the Libre Graphics Meeting, but I still wanted to bring the LGM fundraiser to your attention. The LGM is the gather for everyone who is interested in graphics, art and free software. There are developers, designers, artists, there is fonts, 3d, 2d, color and movies. It's a unique conference, this year held in Montreal.

For the Hyves Desktop application we are building at work, we really want some sort of automated crash reporting. Not that our code crashes a lot, it's a fairly simple application and mostly done in Javascript inside webkit, but still. We've already clocked up about 50.000 users, and we're not even out of beta.

There seems to be basically one choice in the open software world for crash reporting: the combination of Breakpad for integration with your desktop application and Socorro to handle the crash dumps on the developer side. As used by Last.fm, Google Chrome and Firefox.

This combo has a big advantage: they work with a dump format that's independent of the presence of debug symbols on the client computer, so work fine with release builds. And because you get dumps for all crashes, you can quickly get insight as a develop in which parts of your application get hit most: similar dumps are really easy to recognize. I would really like to have this in KOffice, too... But of course, the server-side infrastructure is going to be pretty demanding.

The problem with this solution is the complete lack of releases (just use svn trunk...), a relative lack of documentation, and a big slew of dependencies for the web application. And since I hadn't looked at apache since the version 1.x days, I'm a bit out of my depth installing modern web applications. Still, we'll get there.

And it might be useful for KOffice, after all.

I might make it to Fosdem, too... This year it doesn't, for once, coincide with Irina's birthday, so I'm going to try to pop down to Brussels tomorrow morning, and pop back to Deventer in the evening. It should give me a couple of hours of quality hacking time, at least. So...

I'm puzzled... Why is the KWin desktop grid (which I discovered yesterday) so much more convenient and pleasant to use than Apple's Spaces? It could be the difference in screen resolution -- my Mac is 1920xsomething, my Thinkpad 1024x768, it could be that the whole virtual desktop thing is better implemented in KWin... But I really am not sure what it is that makes me shun spaces because it sucks and actively enjoy KWin's desktop grid...

We've been working on Krita 2.0 since 2006; it looks like we'll release early 2009, which means it'll contain three years of work. That's about as much time as went in to 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6! (If you start counting the work towards 1.4 from when I started hacking krita.)

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Getting weirded out because some people claimed to have "cracked" the Hyves Desktop application Arend, Girish, Roop and had managed to release just before the holidays began. And not only that, they put the cracked version of Bittorrent and Usenet. As if there was anything to crack... And we're still trying to convince the Powers that Be that making the whole thing GPL would be a Good Thing, since it would be a nice demonstration of Hyves' public website API, as well as a morally good thing. Plus, we wouldn't have to provice binaries for all varieties of Linux, which is quite hard, really.

Becoming quite seriously worried about the outlook for 2009. Well, that goes without saying... But we're directly influenced by the current problems, since we bought a new house in 2007 and still haven't managed to sell the old one in 2009.

Watching more than the usual number of movies -- we got a great little combined second-hand bookshop/new dvd shop next door -- from Peter Sellers to The Hogfather, from Bright Young Things to Tous les matins du monde (we discovered that we actually rather like watching movies that are French spoken).

Upgrading to OpenSUSE 11.1, and discovering that the new bootloader configuration screen is really6 incomprehensible and that the installer gave the same grub problems on Irina's computer as on mine. And I'm wondering why X11 sometimes thinks it's necessary to grab 100% of one core...

Roleplaying... Lots of it. And I still need to do the write-up for the last really long session.

Which I never get to, because mainly I've been hacking on krita. Two weeks of nearly daily commits. We've got previews of the brush presets now:

And improvements in performance when painting, fixes to saving and loading. Which fixes have brought their own regressions, despite Krita having a very extensive set of unit tests.

There's been real progress in Krita over the past month or so, but it's so long since we started on the 2.0 road that I sometimes feel nothing has happened. Until I need to take a look at the old codebase and discover that almost everything has changed. What I should do, I guess, is make a nice long document listing all improvements (and also all regressions, although there aren't that many), in time for our 2.0 release.

And finally, I've been toying with making a simple sketching app on top of the Krita libraries -- it's a nice little project, but given that most of my time is spent on Krita, not going very fast. And it gives me a good insight where Krita's dependency on KOffice, KDE and Qt is indispensable, and where it actually is. Dispensable, I mean. (For the hosting, Gitorious and tuxfamily.org seem very ok, although there's still a lot of roll-your-own with tuxfamily).