Older blog entries for lauris (starting at number 10)

Cool

3 and a half years passed from my last scribbing here, and I still do not have anything other to say than rantings...

Anyways... for a reasonable amount of time ago, I started to doubt in FS/OSS ability to empower little guys, independent programmers and developing countries. You can go and code, of course, and scratch your itches, but as soon as it comes to making living (read money) out of it, the one with marketing and managing skills and resources will be the one, who benefits. And unlike in proprietary software world, where often the easiest solution to get hands on your little IP, is to buy it, there is no obligation other than moral in the free software world. Moral obligation in contemporary business... well...

Actually things did become real, and my little cute sodipodi got forked in nasty way. And not by any secretive closed source company (well, they have resources to write better things themselves after all), but by people from OSS, who happened to have instant need for praise, and much more advertizing resources than me. Without even hearing any thanks, the original project is shadowed by new, flashy and hyped spinoff, which, for some weird reason, is still targetting 99% the same audience and design philosophy. Needless to say, that I am pissed off...

From the other camp, Creature House got bought by Microsoft. We can only admire the original creators of this excellent toolset, and envy them for their decision to keep their IP to themeselves.

Uh, and do not try to talk about how, in FSS, you can live by giving services and custom solutions. You can feed yourself and your family in various ways, and contract programming definitely is not very rewarding, neither intellectually nor financially. You can manage without either one, and usually people sacrifice instant material benefit for hypotetical FSS glory. But if the latter is gone, writing proprietary stuff is often easier and more rewarding (both intellectually and financially) occupation.

The youngest Kaplinski family member was born on 20 July, 13.24 GMT+0200. His name will most probably be Karl Aleksander Kaplinski, but we have yet one month to discuss it with Kersti. He was 50cm long (tall if he would be vertical) and weighted 3.67 kg, eyes are blue, hair (as much as he has it) seems to be brown. He likes to sleep (how nice for his parents!) and in general is very-very clever.

All concerned parties feel themselves very well. I spend yet day or two in hospital - which does not have yet net acess for patients. Not a big loss, although I much prefer email to phone for communicating with grandparents and other relatives.

Well - font rendering in gnome-print is making heartwarming success last days. RGB and RGBA were actually breeze - but Gdk one was bitch (and still is) - but working. Now I have to think and think and think about device independent glyphists - until something will evolve. And then we'll have it!

Still waiting for my Red Book, before being able to move gnome-print to unicode - once and forever, I hope. And then I simply have to jump back to sodipodi, to make it using all that brave new stuff.

X sucks, PostScript sucks, PDF sucks, as do many other things. But only wait! We are here to embrace and extend all 'em!

Total mental short-cirquit today.

The last week has been quite exciting. I got 2 new Lonicera vines, one with red the other yellow flowers. Then 2 interesting everglade Viburnum bushes, I have never seen before. All seem to feel well. Then, at last, I bought 4 small Apistogramma ramirezi I have always wanted. They are cute and seem happy, although having to hide themselves from big anglefish.

Gnome-font has done good progress. I wrote very simple device-independent glyphlist implementation, and it worked from the start, and worked well, what is quite unusual. Now I have to think out a nice way to pack it into pretty, understandable format so it can be thrown into gnome-print too.

I had a long talk with my father about buddhism, eco-dictatorship and similar topics. Western society is heading to doom - that is inevitable - but the question is: Should we do anything either to help it to collapse with smaller bloodshed or, if that cannot be achieved, at least to help ourselves or our children.

Gnome font can at last (theoretically) extract TrueType name strings in portable way. Now I have to start extending it both directions - glyph/outline and family/group handling.

Unfortunately most fonts do not specify anything other than en_US (en) names. Hopefully we can get over it, defining fake gettext strings with most popular font attributes and letting translators to do usual po files. Hooking these to library should be minor effort.

Working @home is exactly as I imagined it to be. Partially fun - at last I can do full day things I like and get paid for it. Partially pain - refrigerator is too close, there is nice summer day outside and children keep asking me all day, when they can at last play computer games.

kaplinski.com is registered! Yes!!!

Spent half a day, transfering mailing list subscriptions to new address, another half building computer for working@home. What resulted is certainly not the best one in block (K6-500/64/2GB/RivaTNT), but good enough for beginning.

Bought 5 Pseudotsuga taxifolia and 3 Phellodendron amurense trees, so the number of species in my garden is now 70. In spite of cold May, they all seem to be well, growing fast and having nice long shoots.

Tomorrow is a celebration of Estonian pagans, but the weather is terrible and I am afraid, nobody is able to do something with it. So maybe I should hack at home instead? Unfortunately more time in front of computer usually does not grow the amount of code produced, but the amount of coffe consumed. So maybe I should go? Or not to go? (This is the question ;)

5th birthday of my son Jerzy Edvard. So there will me much salad and coke, but no hacking.

Didn't believe that adding clipping to Canvas was so easy. Now I am just waiting Gnome 1.2 tarballs coming out, before breaking everything in gnome-print.

Seems that I have to start installing Win3.1/Opera/Edoura to my friend's 386. Never tell anybody you know anything about computers, or you are lost forever :( Who can nowadays remember, how this little Trumpet Winsock work?

Gnome print RGB(A) buffer can render text and clip at last. Still no clipping of bitmaps - it must wait, until I'll get Eudora running.