One e-mail to me, and one NMU would have fixed the problem. Since this happened I have received no adequate explanation from any involved party, despite several polite inquiries via e-mail and newsgroup. Yes, the previous maintainer has been swamped with other work, and the package is now up for adoption, but that happened after the woody release. I do not believe I am misrepresenting anything, just highlighting something you might not be aware of.
Just back from the big city. I was struck with how dwarvish New York is. Everyone is a cave dweller, albeit with nice silicon-covered portholes to peer out of. And they have many tunnels with many ore cars to shuttle people around. By contrast, San Francisco is obviously quite elvish.
Debi-aint
My admiration of the Debian distribution has faded, as I've been continually exposed to the crankiness of their release machinery. Projects that are perfectly positioned at the start of the two year release process need continual vigilance to keep them in the game, as the constantly evolving standards and practices seem to invent new ways to reject working stuff. If the downstream maintainer gets distracted all their work (and the work of the upstream developer) can be removed from the release without so much as e-mail notification to either party.
I think there is a niche for a public ports-based distribution in the Linux world, similar to FreeBSD. GenToo is the closest I know of, but it seems the dominion of a .com, not a .org.
Off to a consulting job at a company that needs my skills because they laid off the employee who could do the job :-).
I'm extending the export mechanism on ivtools drawing editors to support SVG. It's rendering model is complete enough, so it looks like I'll be able to finish the job. The only remaining puzzles are how to implement stipple fill patterns and binary stencils. I might have to use rather inefficient paths that do a run-length encoding of the bitmap.
cross-platform vector graphic applications
Another puzzle I'm turning over in my mind is the appropriateness of SVG for interactive (cross-platform) vector-graphic applications. Is it a markup language the best starting point for applications that might incorporate video and sound as well? SVG seems a perfect fit for static rendering to paper (or even the screen), but it seems the representation of dynamic elements would quickly get unwieldy in the jungle of W3C standards.
So what is the alternative? Apple and Microsoft have adequate foundations for vector-graphic applications, but each goes out of its way to thwart cross-platform development. You might say Qt, but they have no particular support for vector-graphics as far as I know (yes, they have a painter class, but do they have classes for direct manipulation, undo/redo, rendering with transparency and anti-aliasing, save/restore/export/import, etc.?).
My thinking is reverting to X11 as the cross-platform development environment of choice for multi-media and vector-graphic application developers. Is running everything from within an X server any less aesthetically pleasing than running everthing from within a web browser?
(No, I didn't forget about Flash -- I just overlooked it for now, for reasons I might have to articulate later.)
Today I asked myself if the actions of the Bush administration are increasing or decreasing the likelihood of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction in this century. Yesterday I was amazed that Al Gore questioned the effectiveness of a unilateral pre-emptive attack on Irag. Perhaps fate saved him to serve a different 8 years in the White House.
vxl is a third-generation class library for image processing, recognition, and analysis. The 2nd beta for release 1.0 is now available. It uses an interesting cross-platform build tool called cmake, which I assume is shared with vtk, the visualization class library from former GE researchers.
I would love to be employed in a commercial setting to leverage these open source frameworks. They are high quality, seasoned and mature packages. As far as I know their use hasn't broken out of academic or government circles. In time I believe it will, because although class libraries take greater skill to wield than a plethora of linear functions, if you're developing a competitive commercial product with no room for inefficiency, they really are slack.
nymia
See my comment yesterday on sources of Flash info. Today's diary entry removed yesterdays's from the recent log, so you were never going to find the link. Oh for diary cross-referencing...
Just read Scott McCloud's The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln. In spite of what Scott says about his creation, it should be required reading (or at least available in the library) at every middle school in the USA.
Flash clones
nymia, visit the vector-graphics foundry for links to Flash-cloning projects.
Been filling out a certain online form for a certain form of state-sponsored insurance (for once I'm with the trend in Silicon Valley). Failed with the latest IE, Mozilla 1.0, and Netscape 4.*. Finally Netscape 7.0 could hack it (all on MacOSX).
It was over a few weeks ago, but after-effects lingered until now. Saw Oregon, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin all in one trip (hybrid drive-fly thing). The tricky bit was reversing our path, to make our way back from the beautiful northern Wisconsin lake to poolside California via Minnesota, South Dakota, and Oregon. Played golf twice and listened to a lot of (lowest-common denominator) top-40 radio.
sustaining development
I've been thinking about models for supporting ongoing development of free software. How do we get closer to the reality of proprietary software development, where the money that changes hands finances future development and lubricates communication about desired evolution of the product.
...more thoughts later...
ivtools-1.0.6 is out. Other than a host of build-from-source fixes, it most significantly speeds the asynchronous import of rasters from URLs by avoiding incremental display. You still get a placeholder image and return to interactive control before the connection is established and the download begins. But now you won't see anything but the placeholder image until the download is complete. The incremental display was pleasing in the era of 56k modems, but an inefficient annoyance for broadband connections.
RedHat 7.* and gcc-2.96
I finally faced up to what was required for compilation of ivtools on RedHat 7.* (it seems extraneous includes of string.h have been pulled from stdio.h, or something similar). The problem never was gcc-2.96 (a version of gcc never approved by the gcc steering committee). My bias about the ever-evolving g++ environment had blinded me to the simple fixes necessary to accomodate such a major distribution.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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