Older blog entries for neo (starting at number 20)

Fixed the strange bug kelly reported. I really thought we already had proper checks for the resolution values but it turned out that NaN is greater than GIMP_MIN_RESOLUTION (which is 1e-5 at the moment).

Eventually I'll rise the GIMP_MIN_RESOLUTION value to something that gets displayed as != 0 in the UI with the number of digits we supply for our units. Actually that would mean setting it to 1e-3. Will that be small enough? In the past each time we set a limit someone immidiately started to complain...

http://www.onlinephotolab.com is a nice thing. According to Raph good old Spencer Kimball is involved here. If you know The GIMP (of course you do), the effects will look very familiar to you and I expected Wilber to show up any second. IMHO this site needs GIMP ads all over the place, but then I suspect they do not want to show people that you can do all this at home.

Whee, finally finished the remaining bits of the manuscript for the new edition of GIMP kurz und gut. Took several months longer than I had expected, but mostly due to the fact that GIMP is a moving target and 1.2 should have been ready month ago too. However, both the book and The GIMP have definitely benefitted.

GIMP is now receiving the synthetic drop, but obviously there's more to it. Have to figure out how to pass the data with the drop. This is a nice way of learning a few things about X that I could safely ignore so far thanks to GTK+/GDK. But then I hope that Owen shows up on #gimp and just tells me how to do it correctly.

Nick tried to start another flame-war on the mailing-list and I couldn't resist to answer his mail. Well, it was just too provocant. If he's too stupid to recompile GIMP properly, why can't he just ask?!

The GIMP definitely needs something like netscape-remote, i.e. a way to tell a running gimp to open images. Of course doing it in CORBA would be nice, but then we do not yet support CORBA at all and we don't want to introduce this dependancy for 1.2.

Since we are very close to a stable release, there should be no or only very few changes to the core. One way to achieve this would be to use the already available feature that allows the user to open images by dropping files onto the toolbox. A small program gimp-remote could abuse this feature by creating the necessary Xevents to simulate a drop. This idea was born a while ago, but wasn't implemented. So I thought, I'd give it a try.

Ok, finding the toolbox Xwindow was the easy part. Now I have been reading docs, manpages and gdk/gtk+ code for hours and all I know is that creating a synthetic drop event is not as easy as I thought it would be...

It was time for a total system overhaul again and so I decided to try out Debian this time. Went to university to burn myself a CD and ended up with a set of four (and these are only the binaries...). After screwing things up a bit, the system is now alive again. Just have to find a way to make exmh work with NFS mounted mailspools. In the meantime, I can at least access the mailbox readonly, using mutt.

GUADEC kicked ass! So many nice people and so few time to talk to all of them.

Returned from Paris on monday, had a nice day with my girlfriend yesterday and finally found the time to dig myself through the mail today. Well, actually it looks like most the people writing interesting mail have been at GUADEC anyway...

I'm very excited about one of the job offers I got and I hope it can become true.

At Guadec. Headache. Probably too much beer yesterday...

Finally found a computer to look at my mail and check the GIMP ChangeLog. Whee, someone actually fixed a bug, so there seem to exist GIMP hackers that are not present here.

Next time I'll definitely bring a notebook, since even though the organisators did a great job overall, they didn't care much about the notebook-impaired. Three computers are definitely too few. But then I do not have a notebook...

After two days of having party I decided not to add a third day and did not join the main carneval event here in Düsseldorf. Was probably a good decision, since I had a few things left to do at my Diplomarbeit that has to be completed tomorrow and it turned out that my brain needed almost the whole day to get back to work.

It actually looks as if I would manage to finish my time at university tomorrow. I do not yet realize completely what this means, but we'll see...

Today my DVD player finally arrived after I sent it away for a firmware update five weeks ago. I was in the middle of writing a very angry letter to the service company when the packet arrived. Fortunately the new firmware allows to be updated via CD, so next time I won't have to send it away. Looks however as if it was worth the effort: Matrix doesn't jump anymore, it seems still to be codefree and it finally reads my MP3 CDs containing more than 24 directories.

Only a few days left to finish my Diplomarbeit. It's time this finally comes to an end; now turn off that DVD, and back to work....