One of the links over on the right that nobody ever clicks on is “Torch Mobile”, my employer. It’s time to retire that link, and replace it with something from Research In Motion – my employer.

I accidentally made a 1000 pixel brush and crashed GIMP. It was very exciting.

I’ve always heard two opinions about Gimp: “It’s just like Photoshop, an incredibly complex and expensive piece of professional software, but it’s free! Behold the power of Open Source!” and “Gimp sucks. It’s better than nothing, I guess, but if you’re using Gimp instead of Photoshop you’re a chump.”

Of course, not having any need for a pro-quality image editor due to lack of artistic talent, it’s been 5 years since I paid any attention to this. My sister gives an update on how Gimp stacks up today.

Two items:

1. I feel pretty bad about the several months of silence. I swore this time I wouldn’t start a nice professional journal and then let it languish. Oops.

2. I also didn’t want to post links with no original content but, well, this is a pretty cool result and I have nothing more to add to it. So here you go.

(Brief summary: my coworkers found a way to significantly speed up image tiling in Qt, using a simple algorithm that’s easily applicable to other toolkits and environments. Briefer summary: It makes painting faster, which is always good.)

So what runs better - OpenOffice or KOffice? Anecdotal evidence says KOffice is slimmer but OpenOffice works better, but it’s very hard to find actual hard numbers on memory and resource usage. And when you do find somebody who’s done a comparison, it invariably dates back to 1995 and it’s totally obsolete.

How about Evolution vs. KMail? Evolution’s much more popular, but there are a few blog posts that offhandedly mention it’s a huge hog compared to Kontact. Which is odd, because there are actual filed bug reports that claim Kontact leaks memory like a sieve. How can I find the truth without installing both and painstakingly testing them in a wide variety of common use cases?

Well, we know that Evolution’s more popular because of the Debian Popularity Contest, where Evolution has a commanding lead. (The “Vote” column is the useful one.) popularity-contest is a Debian (and Ubuntu) package which automatically collects stats on what software is installed and how often it’s used, and I urge everyone to install and enable it now so that it can give a more accurate picture of what’s popular and where developer resources are best spent.

It would be great to have a similar program that automatically collects resource usage statistics for all running programs. Suddenly we’ll have actual hard, fresh data to settle arguments about whether your favourite app is a bloated hog or no worse than everything else! This info would be invaluable for both developers and packagers.