Older blog entries for cinamod (starting at number 68)

25 Aug 2005 (updated 25 Aug 2005 at 16:06 UTC) »
Paul,

What does garnome vs. jhbuild got to do with anything? The bug report clearly says "pango 1.9.1", which is their development series. "Cairo 0.9.0" is also a development release. Both now have stable releases (1.10.0, and 1.0.0, respectively). Development releases aren't usually supported by their own maintainers, even if they come in tarball form. I certainly am not going to support people using my library against unstable versions of other people's libraries. Further, if you look at the bug report, you'll see that it's not my job to track my dependency's dependencies. That's upstream of me, and should be handled by pkg-config.

What's rude is assuming that librsvg tracks or would want to track CVS HEAD GNOME dependencies, which it doesn't. What's rude is assuming that its development and release schedule is tied to GNOME's, which it isn't. We do things on our own timeline, and I'll release a tarball when I think that the thing is ready to be released, and not because you say so. What's rude is then asking your users to file bugs against my product because you've gone and done something stupid. I won't be a support line for your "highly unofficial" mistakes. What's confusing is that you used the librsvg HEAD branch instead of the GNOME-2-12 branch to create this "highly unofficial" tarball. Why haven't you submitted your 'make dist' patch upstream? Or your version patch?

You made several assumptions about librsvg and my intentions without consulting me or Caleb. You then acted upon those wrong assumptions (granted, with the admirable intention of wanting to help out your users) in a way that affected your users. Now you contend that your missteps and wrongheaded assumptions should somehow reflect poorly on me instead of you. That's absurd - pull your head out and get a clue. How you handle your users is your problem, not mine.

WRT bug 314400, librsvg has never had a promise of API/ABI stability. In light of that, I've marked those few functions as deprecated for the better part of 2 years. I've informed Sven and others that they're deprecated. So now in a *unreleased development version* of librsvg, I've removed the deprecated functions. As librsvg is in the midst of a major overhaul in terms of its API and what it's implemented in terms of (Cairo vs Libart), I don't think that's a problem. The HEAD version wasn't meant to be used against the GNOME 2.x series anyway. Use the GNOME-2-12 branch if you want the API/ABI stability, which I've left in to make folks like Sven happy. As far as I'm concerned, bug 314400 is a bug in the Gimp or your faulty assumptions. For now, I've reassigned it to the Gimp.

Anyhow, don't you think that it's hypocritical to file bug 313349 against librsvg because I allegedly haven't tracked new and unstable pango/cairo/gtk+ API/ABI changes, and then file bug 314400 against librsvg because I've broken API/ABI in an unreleased unstable version? By your reasoning, why shouldn't the Gimp be forced to track my unstable, fluctating API/ABI? So it's my fault both times. I contend that this is inconsistent reasoning. When you mix and match development versions of things - especially unreleased development versions of things-, caveat emptor.

Finally, WTF's up with your ChangeLog complaints? You're meandering and really ranting here. In an ideal world, I'd paste in the whole bug conversation and sample files, but I think that'd be a bit absurd. Learn how to use bugzilla. You can figure out what's been fixed in a certain module since a certain day. Don't be lazy and complain that you don't know "what's been fixed" when the ChangeLog and bugzilla both will tell you so readily. Don't cop-out and blame me for your own laziness, ineptitude, or both.

You could've avoided all of this if you'd just taken 2 seconds out of your day to join #librsvg and talk with me and Caleb. Pull your finger out and join the channel or write an email. But instead you decided to assume things and then act like a jerk because your assumptions didn't pan out like you'd hoped they would.

I've grown a bit annoyed at a certain MacOS competitor of - er, i mean "partner" of - AbiWord's that shall rename nameless for now.

This company has re-molded AbiWord's import/export capabilities into a standalone program. (Unlike one of their competitors still allegedly illegally using GPL'd wvWare after several C&D letters, $company does this in order to comply with the GPL, and kindly publishes their modifications to the AbiWord sources necessary to build this standalone program.)

Because Abi does such a good job of import/export, supports so many formats, and can competently speak RTF, $company can focus on just dealing with their core competencies - namely producing a nice MacOSX Word Processor. And from what I've seen, they have a very nice product. It's very well integrated with the MacOS environment, with quite the attention to detail. Import/export was just a mundane detail that they shouldn't have to pay attention to. This is how OSS is supposed to work.

However, there's a gotcha. There's always a gotcha. $company has been submitting bugs up to our bugzilla, which is a nice thing to do as it improves both our products. But their rep has a habit of geting a little crotchity if we don't attend to these issues quickly, as if we were somehow obliged to. (In his defense, I'm not exactly the nicest person you'll run across in a bugzilla.) It seems that they're willing to "work around" complex problems in their own code rather than even attempt to identify or fix the problem inside of Abi. It's as though they have some allergy to having their programmers fix bugs in what's substantively their own product.

There is no support contract in place. There is no "help" from them other than these bug reports. As far as I know, we're not even publicly getting credit for being "the man behind the man", so to speak. Yet, some of their developers are comfortable stating in their blogs that were are in a "partnership" with them. I ask - what partnership do they speak of? I'm not aware of it, and I'm allegedly 1/2 of this partnership.

I don't mind helping out. And I (usually) don't mind fixing bugs in my product. I sincerely appreciate these bug reports - Abi is a much better product because of it. I do mind being cajoled for not doing fixing things quickly enough by a company who is making money from my product (and worse still, not passing any of it down the food chain). If you want to call this a partnership, contract with some Abi devs to fix the bugs. Or "donate" some of your programmers' time to fixing these problems. Partnership means both sides helping each other toward a common goal. And so far, this has been a one-way street.

Morten,

I'm jokingly positing that the utility function is "wake Dom up" or "keep the union workers busy, or next year's budget will be smaller". Laugh, it's funny...

I was listening to Peter Gabriel's song "Big Time" from his multi-platinum album "So" (quite excellent album, fwiw). In it, he sings the lyric:

the place where I come from is a small town
they think so small
they use small words
-but not me
I'm smarter than that

I'm a geek, so "but not me, I'm smarter than that" sounded like a challenge. So I decided to test Peter Gabriel's vocabulary.[1] Please, judge for yourself:

Longest word: circumstance
Word with most syllables: adventure

Distribution of words by word length: 1: 15 2: 70 3: 87 4: 77 5: 32 6: 21 7: 12 8: 1 9: 1 10: 1 12: 1 Mean word length: 3.56

Distribution of words by number of syllables: 1: 281 2: 35 3: 2 Mean number of syllables per word: 1.12

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: (.39 * ~7 words/sentence [I'm being generous]) + (11.8 * 1.12 syllables/word) - 15.59 = .356, or understandable to children not yet in first grade.

1. nb:, the song itself may be ironic and is undeniably campy, but is undeniably autobiographical as well.

Public Servants

Yesterday, the City of Cambridge decided to jackhammer in front of my window at 0700, and then immediately fill the newly-dug hole with dirt.

Today at 0700, they jackhammered the dirt...

4 Aug 2005 (updated 4 Aug 2005 at 12:06 UTC) »
Librsvg news

We've been working on modularizing the rendering pipeline of librsvg, the Gnome SVG rendering library. In the process, we've gotten close to exposing the library's innards as a DOM object, which will hopefully lead to some neat hacks in the gnome 2.14+ timeframe.

In the recent past, Caleb Moore did a lot of work to support pluggable renderers (amongst a great number of other things... he rocks and definitely is underappreciated). Over the past weekends, Caleb and I split up the library into several smaller ones and I stubbed out a Cairo-based renderer. With that in place, Cairo's main man, Carl Worth has come along and filled in some of my stubs, and I've filled in a few pieces he'd left missing.

The end result? A gorgeous Tux that'll draw directly to GDI+, PDF, PS, PNG, X11, Quartz, OpenGL, you name it. And by the looks of things, (slightly) faster than libart did it, too. Of course, this all still needs a lot of work and testing, but it shows a lot of promise. Great job, Carl and Caleb!

Uraeus, you might want to tell Michael Benes that his code probably doesn't have any problems with the GPL. From what I've seen, the code borrowed from MPlayer is:

  • very small in both size and scope
  • rote boilerplate that one simply must write for DirectX to emit sound

These 2 facts taken together are pretty analogous to copyrighting "the" - it simply can't be done. IANAL, but that's just my $0.02

Morten, well, that all depends on what the definition of "is" is...
Christian, it's likely that Senator Clinton is doing what's called a "rush to the middle". That is, she is trying to appear more conservative and "moral" than she really is in order to appeal to the more conservative folks. This is probably a PR stunt leading upto her widely-rumored 2008 Presidential campaign.

Just my $0.02

Tomas, that's because in the US you get branded a traitor (or worse) if you suggest that the terrorists are anything other than whackjobs. The terrorists couldn't possibly have *any* legitimate gripes against us. They must hate our freedoms. Yeah, that's it. Our shit doesn't stink. We most certainly haven't done anything to upset them. Pesky questions like "why do they really hate us" are certainly not important, and are likely to get you into trouble.

  • No, we never gave WMDs to Saddam during his war against Iran...
  • The current war in Iraq is totally justified. So long as you're using whatever justification the administration is using this week...
  • No, we don't support the state of Isreal...
  • No, we never gave Osama and his Afghani army money, arms, and training during the 1980s...
  • No, we don't have military bases on Muslim land...
  • No, those female GIs walking around in non-Muslim garb on those military bases definitely don't upset some Saudi fundamentalists...
  • No, we never left depleted uranium shells in Iraq after the Gulf war, causing countless birth defects and other complications...
  • No, we didn't blow up Iraqi infrastructure (including lots of soft targets like acquaducts) during the Gulf war...
  • No, the sanctions against Iraq were a good idea, even though it's estimated that a million people died as a direct effect of them...
  • No, we don't ever try to manipulate political and social regimes in the middle east...
  • No, we don't support opressive regimes in Saudi and elsewhere...
  • No, Saddam and Osama definitely weren't our buddies in the 1980s...

I don't condone attacks against civilian targets, be they done by terrorists or the US military. I don't necessarily think that all of the things we've done above were "wrong" decisions. And I don't think that non-involement in the region will be a panacea either. But I won't pretend that those actions weren't controversial. Try walking a mile in their shoes. If I were in a Saudi's shoes, I might want to blow shit up. I'd imagine that most people would feel the same.

Our might does not make right. Our present and historical invovlement in the mideast is conveniently unknown or forgotten. Effects and causes are disjoint.

The West Wing's Toby Ziegler might be right - maybe they will like us when we win. But maybe they'll like us if we simply stop doing everything within our power to fsck with their lives. There's a good New Testament quote to the effect of "they will know you are a Christian through your actions and good deeds." Let's spread freedom through our good example instead of our tanks.

As you mention, it's the same way with crime. The only solution the US population will stomach is bigger prisons and offender databases. Criminalize everything. Issue Amber alerts. Run 24-hour coverage of blondes missing in Aruba, 40 days after they've disappeared. What you end up with 3+ million Americans in prison. Nevermind vicious cycles of poverty, inadequate education, lacking health care, broken homes, and all the other root causes. You don't solve crime by locking up everyone. You only breed more poverty, more broken homes. More criminals. The UK understands this. Why can't we?

</rant>

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