Older blog entries for lewing (starting at number 19)

24 Jan 2004 (updated 24 Jan 2004 at 07:34 UTC) »

Long Week.

Evolution work went very slowly this week. Fixing bugs can be fun when you can isolate them easily, I couldn't. In the process of trying to isolate those bugs I found and filed all sorts of nasty new bugs. There is a lot of work to do for the 2.0 release.

Late in the evenings I spent some time reading F-Spot code and adding things that occured to me along the way. You can now actually add and remove tags from images with the UI which means people can finally play with the treeview filtering stuff and see it in action. In the process I fixed a few bugs and sped up the icon view redraw a little. So many fun things to hack on.

Lookup Up.

Nat announced our F-Spot plans and I quickly heard from a lot of people. There were many kind offers of encouragement and help. It's a great feeling to be starting on something new and get such enthusiastic feedback. I can't wait to start harassing rml. Of course there is a lot of evolution work to finish before 2.0 is ready so I'll be focusing that until it is done.

I've spent my few free moments reading through the F-Spot code and thinking about future plans. The TODO Ettore left in cvs does a good job of covering where things are headed with F-Spot development. I'm sure it will grow and change as development moves forward but his ideas were strong and compelling.

On the evolution side of things network changes that happened durring the Ximian office move have made connector work slow going for the last couple of weeks. I'm completely cut off from the test server and after trying virtually every concievable method of getting access I've finally given up. I'll be using a different server until the network issues are resolved.

5 Sep 2003 (updated 5 Sep 2003 at 22:10 UTC) »

Drawing a blank.

More gtkhtml work. I finally unified the display type variable and the level variable, then reworked some of the stack code to use the new settings. The parser is a little more fexible now and I'm happy with the direction of the changes.

I talked to Radek a little about the code he has been working on, it sounds quite nice. Hopefully he'll be able to merge it back into the trunk soon. I think both of us wish we had a little more time to finish this round of refactoring before moving on to other things.

Lots of drawing lately. The first couple of drawings I went ahead and scanned and inked. Since then I've just been leaving them in the sketch book since they are largely just exercises. The drawing has been enjoyable and I've noticed some improvement since the boston trip.

14 Aug 2003 (updated 14 Aug 2003 at 06:26 UTC) »

Red Letter Day.

For a short time today I actually had my scanner, photo printer, laser printer and Wacom tablet all working at the same time. Eight years of wishing seems to have finially paid off. Wow.

Of course I tempted fate by bragging and soon after the gimp finally gave up and stopped recognizing that I was using the tablet when over the toolbox area which makes it a real pain to change tools, colors, brushes etc. Oh well, it was magical while it lasted.

While things were working I "inked" the sketch of Ettore . It was fun using the gimp again but fairly depressing to see that functionaly it is still pretty much the same as it has been since 2000. The UI is greatly improved but there is still no autosave, adjustment layers or line art helpers. Obviously I'm biased toward certain features but any one of those would have made me happy.

One of the things I keep coming across when trying to color the line art is that the fill tool is a constant source of frustration. The bordering effects you get when trying to fill solid areas require far to much manual cleanup. As a workaround I added an old hack back into my tree that simply grows the fill selection by two pixels before it colors it, but that is obviously less than ideal in the long run. Passing a grow radius to the fill function would be nice but it already has something like 13 arguments and I just didn't have the heart to do it.

I'm sure someone has come up with a good algorithm for bucket filling line art that avoids the fringing but a quick search on google didn't turn up anything. If I can come up with some more time I may try to do a more exhaustive search.

12 Aug 2003 (updated 12 Aug 2003 at 19:20 UTC) »

Back in Austin.

It's fun to to see the Evolution hackers getting excited and making good progress on 2.0. Ettore has finally gotten the 2.0 schedule in reasonable shape. The schedule combined with the reality of actually getting to write new code seems to have given everyone a little boost of motivation.

I went ahead and scanned some of the quick sketches that I did while in Boston. Sketching directly in pen can be challenging for me because I end up having to live with any errors in line or proportion. I'm fairly happy with the results but I can still see a huge amount of room for improvement.

The actual act of scanning is still a lot more painful than it should be. Every time I use xsane I'm reminded by how much of a pain it was to do image drawing back in the gtk-1.x days.

8 Aug 2003 (updated 8 Aug 2003 at 16:05 UTC) »

Good day yesterday.

It started with a morning conference call where Ettore and I talked to Radek about future plans regarding evolution and gtkhtml. Durring the call I drew a quick sketch of Ettore and the conference pnone (I didn' want to leave Radek out). I'm still enjoying drawing regularly and the quality of my work seems to be improving as a result.

As far as evolution goes I'm I'm feeling pretty good about the current schedule. We are aiming pretty high with this release but I think we can do it. Ettore is getting closer to announcing the plans, hopefully everyone will be excited. The parser refactoring is still progressing well, I think the next step is to rework the attribute code.

I went to dinner with Duncan, Miguel and most of the Evolution hackers that are in town. Several of us went out for drinks afterward and for the record a "Wet Passion" is indeed wet but not very passionate.

5 Aug 2003 (updated 5 Aug 2003 at 20:41 UTC) »

Strange Days.

Sat down with Ettore today and tried to discuss medium to long term hacking plans. Not sure how I feel about the results. I guess only time will tell.

The gtkhtml refactoring is coming along pretty well. I removed some of the oldest most painful code last week. The parser should be a lot easier to work on now. Next I need to go in and clean up a few of the special cases that still rely on the old logic. It feels good to finally be addressing some of the really old problems but it also feels too late. I guess I'll keep working on it as long as it is fun.

So it seems I actually got better.

So it seems I am actually sick.

Ouch, my throat hurts. I hope I'm not actually sick. This week has been long and tiring with almost no hacking. I did manage to get the second room set up as a passable office after a couple of trips to ikea in houston to go buy furniture. The house is now starting to look like some sort of bizarre ikea add.

The last trip to ikea turned interesting when the tire on the minivan completely lost its tread. The minivan was carrying the bluk of the furniture for two households and I was doing about 85mph at the time. It was a loud and shaking experience, but the tire stayed inflated despite losing much of its self and the car stayed under control as I pulled off the highway. I put on the temporary spare and we went and found a hotel. It was already late and the propect of finding another tire that night and driving the 2 hours back to Austin with a 9 month old baby in the other car was to much to handle.

It is impressive how much damage a tire tread falling off can do to the wheel well and surrouding bits of a car. It looks like the spining bits of tire managed to break the turn signal and brake light on the opposite side of the back end, as well as kill the antilock breaks. What fun. The neatest looking damage was the piece of metal that used to hold the bottom of the bumper and wheel well cover that is now folded and beaten into a polished archway that sort of wraps around the severed tail light wires.

Ettore, Radek and Jonas have been hacking on gtkhtml. It is quickly approaching a correct and usable state. Very cool. A couple of new rendering problems have creeped in as the old ones got fixed, but I don't think they should be too bad to take care of. I think I'll look at table printing right now though.

Wow, back in austin and still busy as always. Spent some time making pretty pictures for various things. I need to get back to gtkhtml and fix a couple of outstanding layout issues that will make editing go much more smoothly.

I've started to accumulate hacks for the path export code in the gimp. The latest writes out an eps based on the current path. I used this and epstopdf to make a path tigert could use and edit in freehand. At some point I need to clean this and the svg export hack up and actually make gimp paths a little more useful.

Speaking of paths, the gimp really needs to ditch the current code and use libart.

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