Fading Memories

Day four was the last day of the LGM. Sad... But it was filled with action packed talks and some good hacking. Of course, today is already Day 5 so I'm a bit late reporting. It's not because I went to the after-party -- instead I went to the hotel room to hack and write this blog. But instead of blogging, I spent all evening helping people to get Krita up and running on #krita. Though I did have a nice beer with it.

The first talk was by Nicolas Robidoux. He gave us examples of greatly improved ways of scaling and transforming pixels. We really need to get these improvements in Krita as soon as possible, and Nicolas has promised to stay in contact with me. Jon Nordby showed off the history of MyPaint. Even though I'm a Krita developer, I'm also a regular user of MyPaint, and it's great to see its evolution. Many of the other talks were just as cool and though-provovking, but I'm at the airport, and I don't have time to philosophize on the need for open and free hardware to break the stranglehold of appstores. Rejon mentioned in passing that he expected Google to stop using the Linux kernel, and having used an iPad for a day, one thing is clear: this is a super-hostile environment for anyone who wants to have any freedom (except the freedom to be bled dry).

At lunch Animimtim and me gave a Krita demo to the Libre Graphics Magazine editors, eliciting many a wow!

Today we refreshed our mind at the Museum des Beaux Arts. I also saw an amazing bit of sculpture in an art gallery and even dared go in to see it up close. And then finally the LGM wended to its end. Until next year!

On Thursday, the most memorable event was the hacking night. Jon Nodrby from MyPaint, Pippin from Gegl and me sat together and started improving the state of OpenRaster. Next to us were Joao, the sole Gimp representative here, and Lukas from Krita, who was being sketched by Animitim.

Again, the presentations were of a high quality. One immediately sent me coding: DeviantArt had sent two people and they presented their new web api, making it possible to upload images together with their (.kra for instance) source files to deviant art right from an application. The only thing that's hampering me now is the lack of an OAUTH2 implementation for C++/Qt.

A day of confusion and chaos -- in parts. Some speakers were apparently a bit confused as to the time, or possibly the timezone. In that, my body whole-heartedly agrees. It's 21:20 here and it tells me I'm pulling an all-nighter. But much good happened as well!

(And not just that I've started a serious attempt at optional colord integration in Krita...)

The talks today were less focussed on application, but instead presented new and refreshing ideas on creating documentation, making fonts available and the ardours of creating a beautiful magazine dedicated to Libre Graphics Software.

Tom Lechner's talks on laidout are always amazing, eye-opening moments of art, and today's was no exception. He showed a t-shirt printed with a panoramic image...

Fun moment of the day was Sébastien Roy demonstrating lighttwist -- a project that uses compiz to combine images from different projectors in one screen. Huge and impressive -- and Sébastien mentioned that they use Krita to prepare the 16 bit/channel PNG images they use for a color LUT. The maths is beyond me, of course, but he asked for a small feature: not to lose the text annotations to the PNG image during the load/save cycle. Lukas could reassure him: that bug has been fixed already! And apparently using the smudge or warp brush on the LUT images produces wonderful psychedelic results in the final image. Maybe they should consider making the LUT programmatically, or even interactively paintable with Krita!

For the rest drinks, dinner -- and fun. Oh, and check out Rougelivre for a snapshot of Lukas and of Animtim, and a great picture of the cartoon Animtim did for his workshop! Also, Nathan Willis has published a very good writeup of the Krita presentations for LWN. I'll blog a link when it gets freely available! (Or get an LWN subscription to read it now!)

So here I'm sitting at my desk at my "Cosy Studio" in the Therese Casgrain student housing facility/hotel calles Les Studios Hotel in Montreal. Too tired to do anything but nibble cherry tomatoes and drink a beer, after the first day at the Libre Graphics Meeting, 2011 edition.

Perhaps slightly less busy than last year, and I'm missing a lot of familiar faces, but the quality of the talks has been outstanding so far. I'm working on experimentally getting colord up and running on my OpenSUSE laptop so I can check whether I can generate Qt bindings for the dbus interface to experiment with integration in Krita.

If the number of questions people want to ask after a presentation is a measure of success, then Lukas' Krita presentation was a huge success. By that metric, but also by any other metric was a huge success indeed! Lukas showed off all the new stuff we've created since LGM 2010 -- and was followed by Animtim giving a workshop on creating a comic in Krita. The audience was completely silent as he used Krita's mirroring feature, sketch brush, vector layers, hatching brush and color modes to quickly create the first panel for a comic. (But admittedly, I came away with notes on three points where Krita must improve, because Krita made Animtim fumble at times.)

Then we went per school bus to Lovell's printing museum in the heart of old Montreal. This was an amazing visit. There are, apart from Dave Crossland and Nathan Willis, many, many type and press freaks in the libre graphics community. And pro's, too, of course, like the Scribus team! I'm one of the self-confessed type and typography geeks, having made my first font when I was 16, for my first dot-matrix printer. Old printing machines, old type, the cauldron where monotype cast letters and linotype slugs where melted back into ingots.

Even more wonderful, our hosts, John Lovell, his wife, some retired printer employees and a young guy really, really digged what our LGM is about. We were all passionate, and there have been many great conversations this night. Apart from much, much useful and wonderful thing, osne thing I learned here is that sometimes people have difficulty finding the right free software application. John Lovell had never heard of Scribus yet -- but he had been looking for an In-Design-like application. And we all know Scribus is in some important (for a professional) respects even better than In-Design!

And I got a real lead monotype cast "v", in six points!

Tuesday, Marijn and me went back to the Netherlands after two weeks of pretty intensive hacking. Only KPresenter needs to be made compatible with QGraphicsView, and we got a long way there as well. Basically, where KOffce assumed that a canvas was a QWidget, it now assumes a generic base class, one that can be implemented by a QWidget, QGraphicsWidget or something we haven't seen yet.

It wasn't all hacking, though. I've already blogged about our first weekend, but since we needed to be in India for another Monday to hand over to Jos van den Oever (and have dinner with the students), we had another weekend. Friday night, we went home with Amit. The idea was to stay at his place so we could make an early start so we could do some sightseeing outside town. We spent an enjoyable evening with great food (I so miss South Indian food when I'm in the Netherlands that I returned home with a pound of sambar powder...) and looking at Amit's wedding pics

The next morning, we went for Nandi hills, a hill station about 50 kilometers outside Bangalore:

There were monkeys along the way

The view from Nandi Hills was staggering:

From there we visited a number of temples: first one on the hill itself, then one at the foot of the hill. In contrast to the temple in Somnathpur, these temples were in active use, and I've been blessed at least four times by Hindu priests that Saturday!

(This is not the big temple on top of Nandi Hills, but a small one with an endlessly looping praying blaring out of the loudspeakers.)

Especially the Bhoganandishwaraswamy temple at the foot of Nandi Hills is amazing. It's really big, more a complex of temples build over the course of several hundred years, all still in use.

On our way back we stopped at the Devanahalli fort. We didn't really know what it was, but on the way to Nandi hills we'd seen the huge old walls and wanted to investigate. Turns out this was one of Tippu Sultan's forts against the British. The gates are enormous:

And the village is right inside the fort:

And plenty of monkeys (which are not cute, not close-up and in real life):

At the Samrat restaurant in Bangalore we were able to forget the horrible lunch we had in the village at the food of Nandi Hills (that was a swanky place with cool pavillions and so on, but the food wasn't cooked very well). The dosa masala was great:

Finally we

(Amit borrowed my camera for this snap) visited Bangalore's famous Big Bull Temple, where the bull is, indeed, big:

It was a great day. Thanks guys! It was a great expedition.

Church

On Monday, when I told the people at the office that we had had a great weekend, with the trip to Nandi Hills on Saturday, Mek meeting with a KStars developer in Bangalore and me going to Church, Vidhya was surprised -- and a bit annoyed. If she had known I had wanted to go to Church, she would have taken me! Still, I am glad I went on my own, because I'd found an Orthodox Church quite close to our apartment: the St George Church in Marathahalli.

Going there was wonderful. Malayalam is a very nice sounding language, and the deacon had a really good voice. It's different from our church, of course, since the Orthodox Church in India follows the Syriac rite, but I could follow most of the service, went to confession and received communion.

The church in Marathahalli is really new, only a couple of months old, and already almost too small, with, I think, at least two hundred people attending, men to the left, women to the right, the opposite from Churches in Greece.

I was the only non-Indian, but I felt very welcome and had some good conversations over coffee after the Liturgy.

Coda

By the way: this might well be the tastiest crisps I've ever had:

Yeah, I know, I'm riffing on Last Week in Krita and Last Week in KOffice... Marijn and me have been in Bangalore for a week now. I think that, code-wise, we've made really good progress. I've completed most of the work to make KOffice's flake library flexible enough that a canvas widget can be implemented either as a QWidget or a QGraphicsWidget. Marijn has implemented a QGraphicsWidge-based canvas for KSpread, and I've done the same for KWord -- and now we're testing that, and that will probably mean we'll have to fix some stuff in our canvas implementations, of course. And Marijn has also been working on fixing memcheck errors and performance issues, notably a recent regression in loading speed in KSpread. Probably caused by the new text-on-shape feature.

Friday afternoon, we met with the students again. They've been doing some really good work. I've already written about a lot of it in my Last Week in KOffice blog, but this time they demoed it to us. Two new students are working on a QML front-end for KOffice -- and testing the Qt SDK with KOffice and FreOffice. They've also written a detailed guide on setting up the SDK to deploy applications to a device like the N900 -- and with Marijn's help, they succeeded in doing that with FreOffice. Tricky, because the SDK doesn't support CMake, and because they needed to deploy two extra dependencies both in the cross-compilation environment and on the device: the KDE libraries and the KOffice libraries and plugins.

Saturday we played the tourist. Bangalore really isn't a touristy city, there's a handful of Things to See -- the most interesting thing about Bangalore is the people. In the morning, we visited Lal Bagh, the botanical gardens. It's quite a restful place

Unless you're part of a school outing and are doing a running game.

Must be a muslim school because both teachers were heavily veiled (looking like Orthodox nuns, but I doubt they were...)

We actually had wanted to go to Blossom's House of Books -- but the hotel manager felt that we could squeeze in some more attractions. So from Lal Bagh the driver brought us to the Bangalore Fort a handicraft emporium. Sorry, nothing doing. (And the same happened today, when an auto driver drove us to a different handicraft emporium. He'd have earned 20 rupees if we'd have stayed inside for 20 minutes, but we weren't interested.)

The Fort has some impressive gates and walls. It's really a pity most of it has gone -- it's really only the gatehouse that is left.

The fort is in the market area, near the big white mosque.

I love the veg food -- and I have to say that the chicken center (nor the Meat Shop, Part of the Bangalore Ham Emporium since 1924) tempt me to try chicken biryani...

When you've done the fort, the next stop is Tippoo Sultan's palace. Only the darbar is still standing, and it's quite nice. The rest of the palace has disappeared, and there's a school right behind it.

It must have been pretty amazing, but like most tourist attractions in Bangalore you need your imagination to make the most of it. The temple in the corner of the palace grounds is said to be ancient -- but the statue looks quite new in style to me.

As for the books -- I got Foley and van Dam on Computer Graphics (finally! No Krita maintainer should be without it!), Aho on compilers, two books on Indian music, Learn Kannada in 30 days, a Wodehous I hadn't seen before and Vedic Hymns (2 vols) and the Dhammapadda in the Sacred Texts of the Orient series edited by Max Müller. Is it just me, or has research in this field come to a standstill? It's the same 19th century series of books I used at the University, and those translations are old.

Today, Amit -- who used to work on KPresenter for FreOffice -- took us out in the afternoon. First to the aerospace and heritage museum, where there are planes, a frog

And an adorable pair of four-year old twins watching the fishes. I didn't shoot a picture of them, though.

We visited the Karnataka State Museum and the Venkatappa Art Gallery. Weirdness of the day: making pictures is strictly forbidden, even of the statues, which surely cannot be harmed by taking a photo, but no guard tells anyone to stop touching the statues. There are some extremely good miniatures displayed in the museum, but the toute ensemble gives the impression that nobody did any work on the collection since the early fifties.

It was great to have Amit with us, since he could explain the background of some of the stories behind the miniatures and statues. Venkatappa's work is strange: his plaster reliefs are very fine, his busts are quite good, his paintings are pretty weird. He must have been very talented and his work looks like he has been struggling between Europe and India all his life. We could only make pictures outside...

With perfect timing, Amit then landed us in the Shiv Mandir, a temple dedicated to Shiva. I didn't take any pictures, though Marijn did. This was on many levels a strange experience. The temple is quite new, and built on a site behind a big shopping mall. There's a VIP entrance from the parking garage under the mall, and we took the VIP tickets, thus short-circuiting the enormous queue that stretched from the street all along the mall to the ordinary entrance. Our ticket was good for four kinds of worshipping activity....

Inside, everyone queued again along some kind of itinerary. We went through the incredibly kitschy decor, with reliefs of hills done in plastic glued to the walls around the courtyard, plastic imitation boulders separating different areas. Still... I was impressed by the devotion of the multitude who came here for evensong (well, it turning dark, and there was quite good singing by an enthousiastic though overly-amplified choir mistress, as well as an orchestra doing its best, so evening + singing == evensong).

First, my ticket allowed me to offer a coconut, some greenery, a flower and banana to a ling, and to pour a cup of milk over it. I would almost say "it could have been a spritual experience had it not been for the people pressing around me doing the same", but that's not true, strangely enough. After the milk pouring ceremony, people held their hand over a censer and then made a movement that looked like crossing themselves.

I was given back my plastic back with half of the greenery and the banana -- not sure why...

Next up was a gallery of dioramas represeting various lings from all over India. Some dioramas were animated, and in the (small, low, cramped) gallery there were also several animated statues. Many people in the queue paid their respects with complete devotion. I then realized that these were just the same sort of thing as our icons: windows on what is holy but what these people would probably never see in their life.

From there -- still along the route, there was a chance to buy a candle and let it float on water. Something I've always wanted to do and I didn't restrain myself. Apparently I put it in the wrong part of the water, but it kept burning, so that was all well. This was so close to the loud speakers that I couldn't hear the instructions of the candle seller. Like all non-priest, non-female staff of this temple, the man who sold the candles was a midget -- and I think a leper as well. The Shiv Mandir says -- everywhere, in big letters, that all the money they get from tickets, candles, everything, goes to children's hospitals and other humanitarian goals.

The candle pool was in front of the big Shiva statue. Again I was struck by the devotion with which people touched the lion's head, touched Shiva -- making the same reverent movement we do when touching an Icon.

The final devotion our ticket gave us a right to (they took two tickets at the milk-pouring, I'm still not sure why) was putting a stick on a fire in a pit and pouring oil on it -- and then walking around the fire, once. That was the moment I think I got a flash of illumination: all these rituals, presented as if it were a fun-fair in this temple, originate in villages. And people in an enormous city like Bangalore simply wouldn't be able to have their rituals if it weren't for a temple like this. But I may very well be wrong.

In the end, we sat down on blue cushions looking at the statue of Shiva and a screen on which the words the choir mistress was singing were projected. She really was singing with a lot of gusto and enthousiasm. I was just wondering about the difference between religion as I know it and as practiced here -- mainly that there is no sense of community, or of communion here. Every family does the round as a unit, isolated from everybody else. But then a small girl about four years old in a beautiful red sari sat down next to me and smiled at me, happily, sharing her pleasure in being here.

The morning talks I attended were extremely good, I couldn't keep from denting. The atmosphere is great, the sun is out in full force. And there are unicorns in town...

From Akademy 2010

Next to Akademy, there's a cosplay convention going on, and this unicorn was all too willing to strike a pose for me.

This year, there were no LGM t-shirts, but rather original aprons. And since we really needed a new apron for the kitchen, I got one, and it got used the day I returned:

From Libre Graphics Meeting 2010

Already the fifth edition, Libre Graphics Meeting continues to grow and to become more relevant. The meeting was held in Brussels this year, in a great venue: De Pianofabriek. Exactly the right size, cosy, comfortable, engaging and located in a lively neighbourhood. While LGM was going on, parts of this cultural centre were used by kung-fu, folk dancing and classical music classes. There was some good eco beer to be had in the canteen as well.

Both attendance and organization were amazing this year. There were, of course, the developers of the various libre graphics software projects: gimp, inkscape, scribus, mypaint, nathive, blender, krita, laidout, nodebox, shoebot, phatch and many more. But there were also users of these applications, and, making the attendance even more varied, people from the art schools and institutions as well as professors and art philosophers. I can't say I was in tune with all of them; the quilting guy, Pete Ippel, had some beautiful slides, but I didn't get it, and that went even more for some other talks. But having just returned from India, I felt I could really connect to Hong Phuc Dang talk on "How to get contributors to your Free/Libre/Open Source project from Vietnam and Asia".

The organization was so amazing. We had a wonderful lunch every day, middle-east, greek or thai (well, the thai lunch wasn't as good as the other two, which were utterly delectable...) The wifi network never ever failed for me: a conference first! Talks went smoothly, almost on schedule. The content of the talks was very interesting; there were highlights every day as well as total revelations, like the presentation of Laidout. And the organizers had also made sure there were teams of notetakes for the Bof sessions, people creating a conference magazine. I can't express, and I'm not usually tied for words, how impressed I was with the result of all this hard, thoughtful, inventive work. Yay Femke and team!

Some clear trends: designers (who are not a target group for Krita) are more and more turning away from the traditional design tools like Illustrator and using scripting to produce their work. We already saw that with Stani's Open Source^W^WArchitectore Coin, but we also had the news that the most prestigious design company in the netherlands has moved to a Python-based design method, not using any Illustrator anymore at all. Nodebox and similar applications fit in this trend, as well as the work presented by the team from Rotterdam, from the Piet Zwart Institute.

I wonder, though, how much this is a trend: much of work created by these programmatic approaches to design is very similar, almost (well, it's programmed) formulaic. It's a bit similar to when Photoshop introduced layers: suddenly everyone produced these murky collages of photo's, scratches and sketches superimposed on each other. Look through your stack of back numbers of Create Arts and see for yourself.

We had a really good BOF session on OpenRaster. The main work on OpenRaster is done in MyPaint and Krita, with one MyPaint developer, Jon Nordby, also developing the Gimp OpenRaster plugin. The BOF was extremely well attended. We're still working on updating the spec; Martin from MyPaint and me, we really lacked the knowledge to formalize it correctly, and I was too tired to track down the right people to help us and then do it.

Actually, tiredness was a big problem for me. I arrived after a rather difficult train journey around midnight and still an hour or so of work to do, plus, I've travelled a lot recently and I already was tired. I'm afraid I even skipped the closing ceremony because I was too tired to hang around and wanted to catch an early train to Deventer.

One highlight of this LGM was that it coincided with the release of Krita 2.2, which is the first release that starts approaching our vision. At this meeting, Peter Sikking helped me refine our ideas for the brush settings dialog -- he also helped f-spot to a vision! Soon, there will be no libre graphics app left without a vision!

Lukáš Tvrdý's talk, by the way, went very well! We rehearsed his presentation the night before, timing it to 25 minutes, but we hadn't counted with the delay on starting, so it was slightly compressed. But the most interesting paintops got demoed, and he showed some very impressive artwork by Enkithan, David Revoy and N-Pigeon. And then explained how to write a paintop. Lukáš will be improving and expanding this presentation and speak about brush engines at Akademy: be there, or watch the LGM video.

From Libre Graphics Meeting 2010

Kaveh Bazargan, from Rivervalley, was again present to record all talks. Many are already up. Follow the "tv" links from the Libre Graphics Meeting Program and enjoy them!

My hotel, finally, was a nice, a bit goofy place. The only real problem is that they apparently renovated the room Lukáš and me had the day before I arrived. We were the first to sleep in these beds or to touch the remote control for the television set -- but the room still smelled strongly of fresh paint. Result: instant headache. But the breakfast was good! My usual hotel in Brussels turned out to be closer to the venue, actually.

In any case, me and Lukáš, we are really grateful to KDE e.V. who sponsored our attendance to this conference. There were many more KDE users than last year (a few KDE 3.5 holdouts, still), but still, the majority of presentation was demoed with the latest Ubuntu. Next year, we will have to make a concerted effort to get a better presence of all the cool graphics projects based on KDE: krita, digikam, gwenview, plasma, kdeenlive, okular -- this is the premier place to showcase ourselves! Plus, LGM is so fun, so friendly, so cooperative -- had I said already that the Gimp guys went out of their way to invite us to their yearly community meeting? Also, there are people who know a lot about svg, pdf, css -- this is the place to connect with the source of the standards we try to implement.

But I was in Bangalore for only a week. Sunday I arrived home, and for most of the week I was too tired to do much. The absence of street noise in Deventer is squicking me out a bit, it's so quiet! And there are so few people on the streets here in Deventer... All the women have boring, drab clothes and it's cold -- about 24 degrees centigrade colder than on Saturday. But I'm happy to be with my wife and kids again. Here's a picture of them wearing the churidhars Vidhyapriya helped me buy for them:

The experience of being in Bangalore was fantastic -- working with the students was a great experience. They're now all busy with their final exams before coming back to coding. Three of them were productive enough during the training week that I asked them to get svn access, and I am sure the rest will follow soon. Mani was a great host as well.

There was a bit of a street between the hotel and the office, which we had to cross twice a day:

I very much miss the the wonderful food -- I want idly and sambar for breakfast! Unfortunately they are quite hard to make! Lassi and I went for dinner with Vidhya and her husband after shopping for churidhar for my wife and kids -- wonderful conversation and great food --, then I had dinner at with Girish at Roop's place (Girish and Roop have worked on KOffice before) where Roop's mom showed what real home-cooked Indian food looks and tastes like, then Amit and his wife took me to a cool place for dinner on Friday. Penne with chillies and some kind of masala... It was really all very wonderful. I had a ride in a three-wheel taxicab -- a good opportunity for impromptu prayer, but I wouldn't have wanted to miss it. My last blog had a really small picture of Amit, so here's one that's a bit bigger:

Apart from churidhars for Irina and the kids, I bought three shirts for myself, a saree and two skirts for Irina, a book and a small bronze statue. I think I did my best for the local economy! The scale of Bangalore is amazing, though. Officially, Bangalore has about half as many inhabitants as all of the Netherlands, but I guess it's a little bit more these days. We'll see what the official census will tell us.

With my plane leaving Sunday morning (1:45 AM...), I had all Saturday to explore, and Roop had promised to take me to an ancient temple at Somnathpur. I've always wanted to see South Indian sculpture -- and this was my chance. It was incredibly well preserved, at least the inner sanctum. There were restauration works going with the courtyard around it.

The ride over the country road to Somnathpur was very good as well. Beautiful scenery, tender coconut, interesting shrines, boys showing off the little statuette of Shiva-as-a-bull they were making.

On our way back food in a road-side restaurant:

Together with Roop

And finally, buying a saree for Irina:

(Yes, I did all the touristy things on Saturday... Why do you ask?)

Thanks again to Mani, Vidhya and her husband, Amit and his wife, Girish, Roop and his mom and dad, Lassi, Suresh and all the students. Last picture: the hotel cat. Not a real stray, the cook feeds him and his brother:

More pictures at Picasaweb -- Flickr being unwilling to handle the load. Lots of pictures of temple sculpture, in particular, and Roop has promised to upload his soon as well. Also, because I suck at working with websites, pictures of Palm Sunday in Deventer...