2004-12-29
Ineke Strouken en Olivier Rieter
Irina brought this book from the library; it's a publication by the Nederlands Centrum voor Volkscultuur, the Dutch Centre for Popular Culture. The various papers in the book investigate the difference between popular perception of traditions and the real history of traditions.
2004-12-28
Olivier Clement
The Orthodox Theologisch Vormingscentrum de Heilige Johannes de Theoloog has already translated many courses and books originally published by l'Institut de Théologie Orthodoxe Saint-Serge. However, being chronically understaffed and overworked, the translations are given to the students as soon as the actual translation has finished. There's no time for proofing, and no time for an accurate colofon either. So I don't know to which of Olivier Clements numerous works the book I just finished belongs -- the English translation of the Dutch translation or interpretation of the French title is, more or less, "The Heyday of Oriental Christianity", and it's Church history, not a contemporary sermon. Not that oriental Christianity isn't flourishing, because it is, at least in the occidental Netherlands, where we're looking for a bigger church building again, because we simply don't fit in the building we own now.
Anyway, apart from the forgiveable typoes and the rather flowery style -- Olivier Clement is a French intellectual from the twentieth century -- this book is the goods. It is a thorough investigation of the history of theological thought in the Orthodox Church, in particular as influenced by the Western Church during the century preceding and following the Great Schism.
Clement must be a gifted writer, and the translator has done his or her level best, because even in the hasty translation into Dutch, Clement manages to make the particular issues surrounding the filioque and other thorny theological issues quite clear, often in a single paragraph or even in a well-put sentence.
It's refreshing enough to get something to read that shows the Orthodox vision of the Great Schism, but it is admirable that the author doesn't get bogged down in a defensive (or offensive) position, but manages to show where both sides were right, and where they were wrong in an objective way, while at the same time not falling into the trap of considering everything through the distortion of a contemporary set of values, nor through an anemic impartiality where no longer any moral decision is possible.
It's a pity that the Dutch translation is apparently incomplete -- the footnotes are indicated as missing, but I also fear that there are rather more than the 100 pages we were given... Next time I'm in Brussels I should ask for the French title, so I can acquire it.
Volume 13 of Studies in Church History, edited by Derek Baker
Being temporarily outwitted by some hairy coding problems in Krita, I'm trying to clear some square metres of floor space by doing Fading Memory entries on books I've read in December, when I didn't have time to write anything. And Fading Memories was, after all intended to be a faithful log of my reading so I wouldn't forget what I had already read before. So, without further ado, a few notes on this curious book I borrowed from the Church library. (Which I'm librarian of for the Western section, with Julia doing the Cyrillic section. Not that I cannot read the Cyrillic script, if there's one thing that has always come easily to me it's been learning scripts, but my Russian has really detoriated since 1992, when I spent a year learning the language well enough to read a grammar of Tangut published in Leningrad.)
Anyway, this book, published Blackwell in Oxford in 1976, is typical of its kind: a regular series where scholars in a particular discipline can publish their papers, somewhat thematically ordered, but not too much, most of them read at one particular conference. The kind of book someone who hasn't published in it buys if one paper turns out to be really interesting, against all expectation, or which you have a subscription to if it's your field.
However, it turned out to contain a nice paper by Bishop Kallistos on the secret conversion to Orthodoxy by an English peer in the first half of the nineteenth century and a really amusing account of corruption in the Greek church under the Turks -- a bishop was said to eat lakes of yoghurt for breakfast and mounds of filleted sardines for lunch. Poor man... The article by Nicolas Zernov on the Russian diaspora in the west and its effects on the Christian West is probably why my unknown predecessor in the library has bought the volume; it's interesting, but a little too self-congratulatory for my tastes. And so the collection winds to its somewhat weary end: twenty papers from the late seventies, I should not expect all of them to be interesting in 2004.
2004-12-27
All was not well with the world, this Christmas, which makes me almost feel guilty that we had a thoroughly good time, this year. Our Church was so packed that it was next to impossible for the priest to actually get far enough into the reception room to bless the table. But despite the sometimes literal crunch, everyone was relaxed and glad to be there -- but it's true that we need a new, bigger church building, as the first four people I spoke with immediately told me. We're working on that.
Our Uzbek friends have won a small victory over our immigration and naturalization department and are allowed to start a new asylum procedure. And they joined us for dinner and the singing of Dutch, English and Latin Christmas carols afterwards.
The next day, yesterday, we had only twelve people in Church, but, well, that was to be expected, on Boxing day. A nice, convivial meeting with the priest afterwards, and an equally nice evening with my father left me in a fine mettle to tackle Irina's hard disk today.
But I must admit that working on Krita was far from my mind -- fortunately Sven, Casper and Cyrille have been working hard. Casper has almost finished a rewrite of the core code that should help performance a lot and make it easier to actually get at pixels to do stuff with them. Cyrille has done a lot of work higher-level code that should finally make it automatic to use selections in tools and filters. And Sven is working on something called autogradients -- a widget that makes it as easy to define and use a gradient as it currently is to pick a color.
And tonight, and tomorrow, I have reserved for finishing the cms stuff. When I'm done, Krita will have the infrastructure to achieve feature parity with Photoshop 6 on the color management stuff, and an actual implementation that goes a long way to have all those features.
And today it's snowing...
Ruth Dudley Edwards
This book is part of the series about Robert Amiss and Jack Troutbeck -- this volume is set before Publish and be Murdered, and is another really nice read. It's clear that Ruth Dudley Edwards main intellectual contention is that abuse of language to cover up for small-minded, spiteful, fuzzy thinking is something abhorrent. And in that she's right, of course.
In this book she makes fun of the academic crowd who confuse the person who performs a certain function in a meeting with a piece of furniture, and very good fun, too. Apart from the amusing invective against the PC crowd, there are some very interesting character sketches, notable Mr. Pusey and Mary-lou, and a horribly believable plot.
On to the third installment -- one about fox hunting.
For making backups. No, it's an excellent day. Trust me on this. I had been intending to make a backup for, and I hardly dare admit it, three months. So, Friday afternoon Irina's laptop crashed when noatun tried to reads its config file -- a config file that happened to be located on a bad block. And our last set of backups was from September
You can easily determine when we have had a major system crash by looking at the dates on the backups. A period where there is a cd for every two weeks means a crash has happened prior to that period. And when the backups become less and less frequent, you can bet that we have forgotten about that crash and that a new one is imminent...
Fortunately, I found the instructions at Namesys quite clear. First, I needed to create a list with bad blocks using /sbin/badblocks, and then feed that list to reiserfsck: reiserfsck --rebuild-tree --badblocks badblocks.txt /dev/hdc1, and everything went swimmingly. Once I had disabled DMA because using DMA on a broken hard disk made the computer hang.
So now we have backups again... And Dell is going to deliver a new hard disk today or tomorrow.
2004-12-14
That was what my daughter's presentation on Linux was. She'd taken six copies of Knoppix, but could've given away twenty to her classmates (there are twenty-three kids in her form), and one to each of her three teachers. Because not just the kids, but also the teachers were mightily impressed by Linux.
While she was careful to stress the freedom message, and touched lightly on the gratis aspect, what people impressed most turned out to be:
And in that order. This is interesting because it was not just the kids who apparently like something just for being different, but also the teachers.
The no-money aspect wasn't as interesting apparently -- reinforcing my impression that for Windows users software and money don't seem to be connected at all, but the it's-legal-to-copy-and-share aspect (which is a subset of the freedom aspect, but not apparent to them, I think) was a big hit. These kids like to share, to copy cool stuff and give it a try.
Oh, and everyone was enchanted by Tux, the Gnu, the SuSE gecko and the other geek stuff...
All in all, a well-done piece of advocacy and richly rewarded by the Dutch equivalent of an A. Naomi was elated with her success. Now I hope that none of the kids has a really weird computer Knoppix doesn't work with, or all is undone!
(For statistical purposes: more than half of Naomi's is not native Dutch. Most non-Dutch kids are Turkish and there is a handful of other nationalities. The mainland Chinese boy was particularly interested.
In another news... I'm not Gill, whoever he is when he isn't designing typefaces, I'm Boudewijn :-). And I have this inkling that it cannot be too hard to recognize iso images for what they are and have k3b act accordingly... And actually my first reaction was even more user-like than I wrote down. I thought that, well, maybe the image itself was a dud so I downloaded a new one, from a different website. Only then programmer mind kicked in and constructed a mental model of what went wrong. This mental model constructing thing is something I've noticed is what's absolutely absent by people who have never programmed, and it's something you cannot take for granted.
What would help, and what I would like to have as a programmer is the kind of movies Bart made of Krita where you can see exactly what people do and how they try to accomplish it. Those two movies were really helpful, and as a result, the palettes can now slide away into the window border when not needed. Krita's slowly getting complete cms integration with littlecms, too, but the going is hard, and complicated by me not being very fit and not knowing anything about the topic.
2004-12-13
The most frequently heard argument about usability is that programmers are such a special breed that they can no longer see that's what a perfectly fine interface for them is incomprehensible to the ordinary user. At which point the fifth cavalry arrives in the form of usability enthusiasts^Wspecialists, who proceed to tell the geeks where they get off.
However, I have just discovered that while I'm a certified (okay, it's a Sun Java certification, but it's a certification of sorts) programmer, I can be a stupid user with the rest of them. A very human feeling, I'm sure.
I tried to use K3B to burn a couple of Knoppix CD's for my daughter, who's doing a presentation on GNU/Linux at school tomorrow. I thought maybe she'd like to raffle them off to her class mates. (The brave kid is only ten years old, but I digress.)
I dragged the Knoppix image I had downloaded to the the big shelf with the cd and dvd icons, and started to burn my new project. Wrong... I had actually enveloped the iso image in a new iso image or something, and the freshly burned Knoppix wouldn't boot.
Of course, I should have chosen Tools/CD/Burn CD Image -- at least, when I did that, everything worked, except it didn't actually choose the right file. The image was in /home/boud/Desktop and selected in the file panel. When I choose the Burn CD Image menu option it assumed /home/boud/. But that was soon put to rights by my enormous geek skills -- there's a nice select file button. From that point on, everything was plain sailing.
And I have added "Genuine User" to my other credentials. Or was that luser? (And I'm still not sure my diagnosis was right, in the end. Could've been a freak incident that destroyed two CD's in quick succession from a box without any other duds. Could be.)
Makes a backup of his entire CD collection before the discs start doing their famous vinyl impersonation (hiss, crack, pop, scratch, hang and jangle). I'm not particularly prudent, but after a four or five CD's became essentially unplayable, I have decided to make a backup of all my CD's. It's not that arduous a task, I've only got maybe two hundred CD's, and konqueror's audiocd:/ protocol handler makes the task easy enough, and it turns out that those databases with track names even have the track names for the music I listen to, like Camerata Trajectina. (Bah, their website doesn't work, apparently with either Konqueror or Firefox)
One thing bugs me, though. Why can't I get rid of the message box that tells me "AudioCD: Disk damage detected on this track, risk of data corruption."? I know those disks are old. Just do you best, my dear audiocd:/, and give me the data as best as you can. No need to whine about it. Just give me that nice checkbox 'Never show this message again."
2004-12-10
And I managed to buy a new power-supply for my Pismo. As the man said who sold me the thing (it's the whiter iBook version rather than the more bronze Powerbook version of the Yoyo), the Pismo is a beautiful machine. Pity about the rotten LCD panel...
But at least we'll have money for a small laser-printer this January. And given that we're still using the HP Deskjet 500 we bought for my 386sx twelve years ago, a printer that has seen about sixteen computers pass, we may well feel it's high time.
Ruth Dudley Edwards
I've got an enormous backlog in reading matter owing to having been rather ill in the last few weeks. One of the books that have helped make the week bearable was this one. A really nice detective, I call it. There's even a Wodehouse reference in it -- rather in the open, but still.
2004-11-29
My poor Powerbook, a Pismo, is more or less dead. I used it mainly to quickly blog a bit or check mail from my comfy chair, but also to compile Krita and check it for endianness problems. And it's not even the machine that's completely broken; it's the yo-yo power supply. And I used it to make the acquaintance of OS X
2004-11-24
In today's Trouw: a short article on the provenance of the Frisian Kalevala, the Frisian Ossian: the Oera Linda book. It turns out that this one, long known to be a fake, of course, has, in fact, been faked by no other than Piet Paaltjens, one of the better Dutch poets. In the nineteenth century, of course. Brian Aldiss is going to be so right.
In other news, I've decided to make a start on integrating littlecms into Krita, complete with support for icm profiles and calibrated displaying of images and conversions between color spaces. This takes a fair bit of user interface work, too, which always takes more time than one would guess.
2004-11-16
And turns out to be a C19 invention -- I'm beginning to wonder, did mankind exist prior the ascension to the throne of Queen Victoria, or was it just the British isles that didn't exist before then?
2004-11-08
By Henry Holt
Lord John and the Private Matter was a washout, and one that came at a particularly inopportune time, namely the first leg of the train journey from Deventer to Paris. The prospect of having to travel for four or five hours by train without anything decent to read is something that makes the staunchest man flinch blanch, and while not being particularly staunch, I blanched, and flinched with the best. Fortunately succour was at had, in the form of Murder at the Bookstall, which Irina had bought for 50 cents just before our trip and which she had prudently placed in her bag. This book tided me over to Paris.
Diana Gabaldon
Buy this book -- at your peril.
I quite like an historical novel now and then. I particularly enjoyed Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, for instance. But LJatPM is probably not a historical novel as I know it but part of one particular sub-genre of the genre: the researched-to-death-no-need-for-a-plot historical novel.
C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters is one of those little masterworks of accessible theology that has done so much to foster prejudice against Lewis and his entire circle with the militant anti-church crowd that makes up the majority of the society where I live. Theology is bad enough, but acceptable if it stays stodgy and unreadable. Accessible theology, theology with a dash of humour and a sense of fun -- that is actively dangerous.
2004-10-31
So I decided to resize my home disk to make place for one or two experiments with distribution, and my first experiment was with Ubuntu. It's got a very good, if text-based, installer that installs my wifi card without problems. The default Gnome desktop does look slick. No KDE better than 3.2.3, though, so that side of my requirements isn't met. But I decided to explore Gnome at its best a bit... And there are plenty of niggles that make me sure that they have a long way to go.
2004-10-29
I feel a bit like a waif... I'm not sure I am going to like the next SuSE all that much. Yes, I'm a hobbyist. No, I'm a professional who uses his Linux laptop seven days a week, more hours a day than the ophthalmologist recommends to earn his daily bread, keep in touch with friends all over the world and to play an occasional harmless game of install-the-cool-app-from-source. So... Given that I'm a holistic person who does work-related stuff in his free time, and vice-versa, who regards his work as his hobby and his hobby as his work, am I among the target audience of SuSE?
Should I be? Do I want to be? It's a lifestyle thing, I guess. Maybe I shouldn't care. Brand loyalty is a thing of the past, after all.
Is being had by me. An unpleasant cold, a completely unrealistic deadline at work and the need to do some serious studying conspire against working on Krita. But that's no news. The big problem this time is that I blithely assumed I would be able to take Kivio's docker implementation and use that KOffice-wide.
2004-10-28
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger
I have been taught that Columbus discovered that the earth was round and not flat; and that he has been put to torture by the inquisition. That was not true; it was a nineteenth century invention. Apart from authors with a clearly allegorical intention, such as Lactantius, no educated person in Europe ever gave a hint of thinking that the earth was flat.
2004-10-26
I still buy every new Terry Pratchett as soon as it is published. Only... With this one, I hadn't noticed until someone mentioned it on the rec.arts.sf.composition newsgroup. I must be losing my grip -- or Terry Pratchett is losing his grip on me. That's a possibility, too.
2004-10-25
As this picture shows, lamb cutlets are in great demand in our family:
Grilled or quickly fried like a steak with a good sauce with mint and garlic and cream, for instance. Or a caper sauce. However, in the restaurant Le Caveau de L'Isle, (36 Rue de L'Ile St Louis), they do lamb cutlets that are a lot better than mine.
Not all their food is all that great, it's very much a 'drape-the-sprigs-of-chives-over-the-meat-sign-your-name-with-brown-sauce-we're-poshish' type of restaurant, and they serve the same gratin with all dishes. And everything is lukewarm -- but that seems traditional. But their lamb cutlets were fragrant, tender and tasty in a way that I don't seem to be able to emulate. Probably their cook is a better man than I am, but equally probably they have access to better meat than I can get from the local Turkish butcher.
But their cheese selection was poor; in the very same street there is a shop which has about a dozen different, great goat cheeses, and they served camembert, gorgonzola and two other bland cheeses. Ah well... That's something I can point at with pride: whatever may go wrong, I always have a good selection of cheese to tempt my guests with.
Season of mists and mellow coughs. In autumn, the passing of time seems more like a Javanese mudslide than the pleasant, leisurely rush of a timer's sand. It's a busy time. Business tends to pick up, so I'm really forced to contemplate working evenings for my day job, too. Exams rear their ugly head, even as the topic of those exams is really interesting. I didn't know there was so much fine, ripe stuff to be read in Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. But work and study means that work on Krita has to suffer. I wish I could afford to take a week off from work to do some connected work.
2004-10-21
A developer, a hacker, is a craftsman. A craftsman of the engineering persuasion, but a craftsman nonetheless. And a craftsman values their tools. To the point where one can become passionate about tools. Which is one reason I'm so glad to work for Tryllian Solutions -- they allow their developers to choose their own tools to produce the code with. When I arrived at Tryllian, I got the choice between a Linux or a Windows 2000 desktop machine, or a laptop with either OS. And if I wanted to put SuSE on that laptop, no problem. And no nonsense about company-wide standardization on one IDE.
Last weekend, we've been to Paris. For the children and Irina it was the first time in their life, while I'm an old hand, having been in Paris in 1991 or thereabouts with a school trip. We had a reason for the trip; friends of ours got married in the crypt of our bishopric's cathedral in the Rue Daru:
Of course, being in Paris means, especially if you're nine years old, seeing the Eiffel Tower and all the other landmarks, including the throng of Chinese tourists in front of the Mona Lisa. (More Chinese than Japanese, curiously enough. When I was last in Paris, that was definitely the other way around.)
Any way, I'm back to hacking Krita now, with fixing the crop tool and the selection handling being the top priority for now. Michael Thaler has saved the honour of Krita by keeping us in the intro to the cvs digest with his cool shearing code. This week, my hopes are for Cyrille Berger's work on ksjembed scripting for Krita...
2004-09-30
Our friends from Uzbekistan, asylum-seekers in the Netherlands have received the final decision. They are to be evicted from the Netherlands. Despite being husband and wife, they are to be separated. She, a muslim married to a Christian is to be sent back to Uzbekistan. He is to be sent to Israel. After many years in the Netherlands.
2004-09-29
S.D. Tower
I really wanted to like this book, no, I wanted to love it. It's that _rara avis_ a single-volume fantasy book, set in a world of its own, not a bastardized Ye Olde or Ye Nowadaisy England. The world building is of a high order, better than mine. There are hints of China, but also of India, and many, many details that are quite unique, such as the names of plants and animals, many aspects of culture (such as the particular kind of ancestor worship) and religion.
2004-09-28
I re-re-re-re-reading Strong Poison, one of the best, most rounded Dorothy L. Sayers novels (Nine Tailors is good, but this one has a dramatic quality over and above that prime example of the puzzle detective novel). And reading a little more closely than usual, I suddenly found the Dowager Duchess' remark on page 24 significant:
... I have been reading one her books, really quite good and so well-written, and I didn't guess the murderer till page 200, rather clever, because I usually do it about page 15.
And true enough, about page 15 (13 in this edition), we get the scene where Philip Boyes is actually administered the poison. Quite clever. I wish I had a first edition: perhaps in that edition, the fatal dinner is first described on page 13.
2004-09-27
Marc van Oostendorp
Not so long ago I hacked languages instead of painting applications, and I cannot, in fact, promise that I'll never hack languages again. And not programming languages, but human languages. I've invented quite a few languages for my invented world, the setting of two novels that I'm trying to sell. I've had the languages bug since I first discovered that our school grammar of French wasn't all that well laid out and could be improved upon. Later I learned about Tolkien, about Roland Tweehuysen (but not Mark Okrand -- I never was a trekkie). I joined a club of people interested in designed imaginary countries, world and languages.
After the last altercation, I felt a little disinclined to blog, after all a 'planet' doesn't offer the creature comforts Usenet offers for the practicing of the noble art of flaming. Plus, and perhaps more importantly, I have been busy. Work has been picking up and I'm doing a quite interesting job connecting medical information systems using agents. I've celebrated my thirty-fifth birthday with appropriate rituals, like the eating of rich viands and the releasing of Krita.
2004-09-17
Obviously, neither Aaron nor Matt have gotten my point. The point being this: I was a Kopete user, and from one moment to another, I could not sent messages anymore.
If you change basic things like keybindings in an application do not change them for users who are already using your application. At the very least warn them upon startup in a nice message box:
"Dear user, you have been using our application for a while. Obviously, you are happy with it, otherwise you wouldn't have launched it again. Still, we have determined that your by now ingrained habits are not consistent with those of the rest of the world, so we want you to relearn. Or you could go and change our preferred defaults back to what you are used to by clicking --here--."
So, to summarize:
Personally, I don't give a fig for what the rest of the world is used to (i.e, "other IM clients except for ICQ". I used Gaim before Kopete, and I distinctly remember having Gaim set to be consistent with the rest of my environment), and I don't give a fig for technical problems with having two KXMLGUIClients either , and I don't give a fig about IRC either (because the difference between IRC and IM is that with IM the messages can be a lot longer than with IRC).
I care about not being disrupted by the software I use. I care about being able to let my fingers learn the moves and about being able to trust my fingers.
2004-09-16
Aaron Seigo is raving about a recent change in Kopete that was also backported. Instead of ctrl-enter, now plain enter sends a message. I noticed... One morning, after the usual apt-get update I noticed that suddenly I couldn't send messages anymore. Damn. It took a while and some googling to realize that I hadn't stumbled into a bug, and some more googling to find out how to fix it(1). An hour later I had found the configuration option to get the old defaults back.
2004-09-15
I think a little re-organizing of blog entries has, despite careful keeping the creating dates intact, given Planet KDE the idea that I have suddenly started blogging faster than my shadow. Nothing is further from the truth... It's funny that I cannot find evidence of reordering in my rss feed -- and funnier still that there is a longish entry that doesn't get picked up. Oh well, I have to do something with my blogging software anyway, because it's cracking a bit.
To fit in with KOffice, one needs to do as KOffice does. Since Krita should be bona-fide KOffice citizen, that means Krita needs to fit in. Now, what's the first thing you see when you start a KOffice app? Right, it's the three-tabbed file window. Create, Open, Recent. And what do you see when you click create? Right, a host of templates. So today I created templates and made that dialog work. More or less -- but first a screenshot, and then I'll talk about the less.
Nice icons, innit? I like them, and I created them with Karbon. I wish Rob Buis would keep working on Karbon, because it's got all the potential and a lot of the features of an Inkscape, but as it is, it's still buggy (don't select the 'pattern fill' button, and don't use it on a powerpc). Anyway, these are bona-fide svg icons...
And then I ran into problems. Image editors differ from presentation apps or word processors that you cannot catch everything a user wants to do in a template. There's an infinite range of sizes, and besides, there are background colours, transparency issues and colour models. So I would need to add a page to the template dialog where the user can create a document from parameters. Haven't figured that one out...
The other, even bigger, problem is that apparently templates should not be the same as ordinary files. Krita crashes when I want to create something from a template.
Still, the icons are nice...
2004-09-14
Okay, so I have been working on Krita with some little concentration. That doesn't mean that I don't read myself to sleep with a book. It just means that I forget to blog about my reading on Fading Memories. Which is rather a pity, since logging notes about books read so I could refresh my memory was rather the raison d'etre of Fading Memories. But what with Krita, blosxom's quite unsatisfactory search function (don't know why I still keep that plugin around, it doesn't do anything useful), blosxom's rather unsatisfactory habit of showing everything in a subcategory and all subcategories blow that and the incidence of blogspamming, I didn't get around to it. However, in the expectation of the possibility that I might find better blogging software, here's a long list of short book notes...
is no security at all. I knew that, but still had a vague hope that my anti-blogspamming device would last a little longer. But the filthy dregs have found a way to pollute my servers again, and I have had to remove all talkback functionality until I've found something that allows moderated talkbacks for blosxom. Sorry folks, I really enjoyed all your remarks and notes... And I'll restore all of them when I've found out how to do that. I'm open for all suggestions, up to and including migrating to another blog application, provided the app works with plain text files.
All suggestions to boud@valdyas.org, since you can no longer put your comments here...
2004-09-13
Lindemans used to be a good brewery, specialized in lambic, gueuze, faro and other lambic-derived beers. Lambic is a spontaneously fermented beer with a pleasant sour taste, and the gueuze is a mixture from old, ripe lambic and young lambic. Or at least, so it should be. But despite claims on their website about producing a real gueuze to counter the modern trend of light and sweetened gueuze-type beers, the Lindemans gueuze is sweetened with an artificial sweetener. Such a waste of a lambic. It isn't as if there's enough of it. Now the Lindemans gueuze tastes like some light soda with a dash of vinegar and a little alcohol. And it leaves a horrible aftertaste, a bland bitter film all over the tongue.
2004-09-12
As I'd hoped for. I had taken two days off to work on selections, three days in all including the Saturday I'd reserved for Krita anyway. But Friday I hit a snag with the basic pixel-mangling code. Krita is quite old already, five years, and at least four different design philosophies have gone into the core, maybe even five or six. This means that it's not always all that apparent how to mess with pixels and pixel elements.
This Needs to be Cleaned Up, but ideas are still ripening on that account. It's also a bit much to refactor in nice, small steps. Anyway, that was Friday. Cut now works, and Copy too. And you can cut from Krita and paste into Kolourpaint, but you still cannot paste in Krita without meeting the good doctor. It's progress of a kind: cut, copy & paste used to work perfectly, but, and here's the snag, only with rectangular selections.
Then Saturday I had to jump into the breach and work on a bug in the combination of MySQL, FreeBSD and java for work, so that was a wasted day from the Krita point of view, although quite necessary, of course, and nothing to beef about. Sunday was going to be a non-hacking day anyway, with Church in the morning, followed by a panichida for the victims of Beslan, a visit to my father-in-law because of his eighty-second birthday. And then eating out, because our rather unpleasant neighbors were throwing a street-party. I'm not going to party with people who sent us semi-anonymous (signed with house-number, not names) letters threatening unspecified acts of revenge or who don't check their children when they are insulting ours. So we went to a quite decent eatery in Zwolle, Michelangelo's, where they had gave us good food and excellent wine. A mellowing experience.
And when I came home, faith in humanity was completely restored by finding that Daniel Molkentin has prepared nightly tarballs of Krita and has offered to do a special preview release September 24. Not even the silly discussion on Linux Weekly News has managed to break me from my feeling of complacency.
2004-09-09
Good progress today... I discovered yesterday that I had about ten more holidays left than I thought the day before yesterday, so I took two days off to hack on Krita. (Pity I didn't know earlier, or I'd had been able to go to either aKademy or to the monastery in Hemelum -- both equally attractive propositions.)
2004-09-05
My father is visiting us for the twin's birthday, and today we agreed to meet after Church at the 'Zevende Hemel', a nice little place with a good terrace at the Grote Kerkhof in Deventer. Not knowing that there was going to be real, live music. Jeroen Sweers Boogie Woogie Band played really, really good boogie woogie, ragtime, blues and a little jazz. Unbelievably dexterous piano playing, great drumming, and a bass player that just exuded fun. It was a great occasion. Little children in the public were bouncing up and down, the aged proprietor of of second-hand bookshop Lomonosov was dancing the boogie with a contemporary. At one point in time to small girls sidled up to the stage, and started to drum with sticks on the stage. I'm off ordering their CD's...
2004-08-26
I like refactoring. It gives a person the warm, fuzzy feeling he's accomplished something, without actually having had to do some hard creative thinking. And it can lead to nice results -- if most of the work remains under the covers. I've just spent three days refactoring Krita's painting code. We used to have a big class, KisPainter, which had a different method for each kind of painting: brush, pencil, airbrush, erasing and some very cool things Cyrille Berger is doing, with painting with filters (something that, as far as I know, is only done by Photogenics. But KisPainter was getting too big for XEmacs to comfortably fontify, and that's always a warning sign. So I started refactoring...
2004-08-25
Michael Pyne was kind enough to say that I rock re: Krita, but nothing is further from the truth... Adrian Page (gradient. tablet, line handling, bug fixes), Bart Coppens (fill, text), Cyrille Berger (filters, convolve, duplicate), Sven Langkamp (hsv color wheel, UI fixes) and Patrick Julien (core design) have done most of the rocking. I've just been messing a bit with selections and code cleanups. By comparison a mere desultory wriggling of the posterior parts. And we're all working on the work laid down by John Califf, Matthias Elter, Michael Koch, Andrew Richards, Carsten Pfeiffer and Toshitaka Fujioka.
Without the rest of the gang I would probably still be wondering how to go about painting a nice curvy line...
2004-08-24
Krita has really making progress over the past few weeks. We now have: selections, Gimp gradient loading, a gradient tool, a hsv color wheel, a fill tool that fills with colour or Gimp patterns, a text tool, a number of filters (sharped, blur, convolve, colour filters) and a baseclass that makes writing new filters really easy. The rulers can be shown or hidden according to your taste and inclination. Tools have got shortcuts. The handling of tablets and the painting of lines has been really improved. Drag and drop. Lots and lots of bug & crash fixes. Code cleanups. Work is being done on a really good image scaling algorithm.
I think we can cherish a measure of hope for Krita's inclusion in the next KOffice release. Here's a screenshot:
2004-08-21
I finally found an edition of Cryptonomicon that was actually luggable. I'll be waiting a few years for Quicksilver and other, more recent Stephenson books to come out in a similarly handy format. I really hate the big trade paperback format. But I'll probably buy more Stephenson books, something I wasn't so sure about after finishing Diamond Age. But when I found Cryptonomicon I knew I had to give it a chance, if only because of the unanimous recommendation of my colleagues at Tryllian.
It was quite hard to understand everything on the webcast of the freedesktop.org's representative at aKademy -- Daniel Stone -- but the impression I came away with was not favorable. The idea I got was that Freedesktop.org is led by people who don't know all that much about KDE, but pretend to set the standard for free desktop environments anyway. And if KDE people don't work to their agenda, then that's a pity, but it's their own fault if there aren't, for instance, Qt bindings to d-bus. As it appeared, those exist, but Daniel Stone didn't even know that. I'd expect people who want to set standards, to do that mainly based on existing, deployed, Free software, instead of developing alternatives to existing software. And I expect them to be equally aware of everything out there.
Today I watched Ian Geiser's presentation on KSJEmbed thanks to the webcast from aKademy -- it was a very interesting presentation and made me want to start coding scripting support for Krita immediately, but it didn't solve my quandary: which engine to use.
2004-08-19
I won't be at aKademy either -- like Rich Moore and Anne-Marie Mahfouf and quite a few other KDE developers. Even though it's only five hours by train and a return ticket is only E100,-, so I've got even less of an excuse than most. Didn't have any holidays left, for one thing, and I generally only start to really want to go to these things when the excitement is building up and it's to late to register. Maybe next year... But that's what I've been saying about Fosdem and EuroPython for years. We'll see.
2004-08-11
I recently came across an old article by Benjamin Meyer titled A Tribute to KDE. In it (no, dash it, it's in something else I read today which I cannot find now), he notes the dearth of advanced applications using KDE. And even two years later, that is still quite true. Of course, we now have Scribus, which comes close to being not only usable, but the Free Software standard in its category, but there still isn't a Qt-based vector app that's even close to Sodipodi, nor a Qt-based raster image app that's breathing in the Gimp's neck. And while KOffice is getting better, Gnumeric is more highly regarded by them that think they need a spreadsheet, and while KMail is a great e-mail client, people flock to Evolution, of all things horrible. So, why is this? (And where has planetkde gone?)
2004-08-09
In spring, I found four wrinkly little left-over potatoes in the cellar and decided to plant them anyway.
2004-08-06
Despite the best efforts of the Romans -- and creditable efforts, that have produced creditable results, notable a good Dornsfelder '02 and a Spätburgunder, Germany is a beer country. Not that the 30.000 breweries produce a lot of variety. It's pilsener, weisse or schwartzbier, and that's it. (Or maybe they do produce a lot of variety, but in that case they collectively fail to a) get it into the supermarkets or the Getränkehallen, and b) advertise it. I've seen six different telly ads for beer, and it was all for lager-type stuff.
We've indulged in an absolute orgy of movie-going last week. Achieving more than the yearly average of cinema visits in a single week. Saturday, we went to Zwolle to see the last performance of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. And Wednesday, we went to the Uitkijk in Amsterdam to see one of the last performances of Girl with a Pearl Earring. I'm sure I've seen enough talkies for a long time now.
2004-08-05
The Dutch newspaper Trouw had already reviewed this book before we went on holiday to Thuringia, which used to by GDR. They were enthusiastic, so when we saw the book in a shop window in Steinbach Hallenberg, we resolved to buy the book. (Turns out it was cheaper in the bookshop, that it is at Amazon.de.)
2004-07-30
Or Genever, as it is also spelled. And the expensive variety called Korenwijn, not to be confused with Barley Wine, which is a kind of beer. I like my glass of whisky or whiskey just as much as the next thirty-something, but being Dutch, I prefer to delve into the depths of jenever and korenwijn -- Dutch gin.
2004-07-27
We went to Göttingen one Saturday to see my father off, who was to stay only one week with us. Unfortunately, Max Maulwurf threw a shovel into the works, so we had to cope with a detour by bus, in addition to four trains. However, fortunately, that bus went through Arnstadt, and past the palace. This palace is in the process of being restored, and the contrast immediately grabbed my attention:
2004-07-25
When I gave Zeborah, our friend from New Zealand, a tour of Deventer on the occasion of her visit to us, we did not neglect to visit a few of the dozen or so second-hand bookshops that Deventer can count among its blessings. In one of those, I found The Yew Tree's Shade, a detective novel by Judge Cyril Hare.
Having hung out on rec.arts.sf.composition for quite some time, Charlie Stross is not an unknown to me; besides, his blog is in my blogroll. So when Singularity Sky turned up in the local bookshop in Deventer, I didn't hesitate to buy my copy. It is, by the way, quite a measure of success to get your books into the four metres of English language science fiction and fantasy Praamstra stocks.
When writing these blog entries -- I should be coding on Krita, but I forgot to put an up-to-date copy of CVS and the Qt docs on the Pismo Powerbook I take on holidays to offload the holiday snaps on, so I can't continue much -- I am in the little town of Steinbach-Hallenberg, in Thuringia, former DDR, about and around the place where 1632 is situated. No venomous spiders spotted yet, but a couple of cool snakes. Of course, not having Internet access in the little holiday home we are renting, you're reading this only because I've returned home safely (take note, gentlemen burglars), and because I turn out to still have Internet access, which wasn't the case last year, when we went to Greece.
2004-07-06
Phew! I've added the beginning of support for histograms to Krita tonight. A nice KisHistogram class to compute the stuff (done, apart from median, stddev and percentile, which I haven't got a clue about), a widget and a plugin. What I still need to do is create the bar chart pixmap and the gradient pixmap, but the rest is mostly done. Not bad for an evening's work.
2004-07-05
Some time ago, I played with qtjava and gcj, creating a native code version of a java application that called Qt. However, the qtjava library had already been wrapped in jni for us by Richard Dale. Going the other way, wrapping Java code in CNI and calling that from C++ was more challenging, especially since I have only a very sketchy knowledge of gcc's command-line options. That's what comes from trusting to automake. You don't learn how to craft a compile command yourself anymore. But today I succeeded in creating a small natively compiled shared library in Java which I could call from C++. Not rocket science, but nice nonetheless.
2004-07-04
My father went to North Holland for a week, to walk along the beach, to visit Egmond (where he and my mother had their first real house), and to visit Alkmaar, where I was born. And in Alkmaar he bought what call a real cheese. Old, ripe Edammer cheese. Red. Hard. Sharp. Delicious with a glass of port or on a slice of dark brown bread. He bought half a cheese for us to start with, and a whole cheese to keep for a while. And here's what remains of the first half, accompanied by lesser cheeses, like Stilton, grottin de chevre and a Basque cheese I forgot the name of:
Maybe I should attempt to do a painting of this cheese, it reminds me a lot of the 17th century Dutch paintings.
2004-06-30
Well, I've more or less switched over to KDE CVS now. Things are working, mostly, but there are one or two really weird glitches. First and foremost, in any dialog box with a default button, if you move the focus from the default button, pressing enter will not activate the button that now has focus, but the default button still. Space and only space will activate the focus button. And since my fingers are hard-wired for arrowing to the button I want, then press enter (a decade old remnant from my Windows days), I never, ever get the action I intended. It's very, very frustrating. And then there's Konqueror which pops up an completely disabled toolbar when opening a website -- and then makes it disappear again. Sometimes. I don't know what the toolbar is for, it's got some video-recorder-like buttons on it, but it is very insistent. And Kopete's chat window doesn't want to be resized anymore, it opens very wide, and I cannot get it to become any smaller. KMail tends to crash on resume: and it crashes when creating a new folder -- bug that first reappeared in 3.2.3, and which developers assure me doesn't exist anymore. Oh, and KOrganizer doesn't restore my active calendar on resume by session management, and KWord doesn't load the document I was working on in the same situation. And all of a sudden khtml renders every apostrophe with spaces around them, even if they aren't in my html...
2004-06-27
In my last about this subject I said I'd discovered a few more paint apps for Windows. These were:
2004-06-23
Acer, a fairly popular manufacturer of none-too cheap laptops is a very bad firm to do business with. Their hardware sucks; their warranty sucks; their knowledge of consumer law sucks, their helpline sucks and the idiots they employ suck, too. My advice: do not buy Acer. Ever.
2004-06-21
This book -- the first a moderately long series -- is really, really weird. It's the last gasp of a long-dead genre, the swashbuckling, China-men ridden adventure story of which Oppenheim was the last great representative. This book was first published in 1975, and apart from some token nods towards modern times (the cousin of the hero is leaning towards emancipation, that is, taking a boyfriend without intention of marriage), it's as if you're reading something written a hundred years ago...
What with one thing and another, I haven't been able to spend as much time on my poor little garden as I should have. But in compensation we're having a really old-fashioned Dutch summer, with rain and sunshine following each other in quick succession. And that means that all the greens are growing really well.
2004-06-18
While I've still not figured out how to make RSS feeds for different subjects, I do have spent some time finding out that Blosxom provides a little plugin, foreshortened, which can be used to present only the first line of a blog posting to rss. I hacked this to produce only the first paragraph, but that's all that will show up on aggregator sites like Planet KDE from now on. The full story is, of course, still available on Fading Memories itself, but I won't make you all scroll through three screenfulls of garden wibbling anymore. I haven't figured out how to make the appearance of the em-brackened three dots dependent on there actually being more to read, so you'll have to try your luck when clicking on the link to the story itself. But I'm a verbose kind of person, who seldom keeps himself to a mere paragraph. Look: there are the dots. (If you're reading this on Planet KDE, that is. Or bloglite. Or in Akgregator.)
2004-06-17
I should have gone for a quad-processor machine with a really, really, really fast raid cabinet... On my almost-new laptop -- a Dell Inspiron 5150 I have blogged about before, compiling all of KDE, excluding KOffice, takes a whole day. That's not something to do daily, and I haven't even checked whether this morning's CVS actually works. Still, I now know that this laptop has a pretty good fan, it's managed to keep the processor running fast and hard from ten o'clock in the morning until right now...
But in the end -- this version of KDE runs much, much faster and snappier than 3.2.3 from SuSE's apt repositories. The difference in responsiveness, especially in Konqueror is unbelievable.
I had forgotten for some time to empty the digital camera, and when I did (new pics of salad and beetroot coming up!), I discovered this quite decent picture of the IJssel bridge by Zutphen.
2004-06-16
2004-06-14
Fading Memories was a book log, originally. But I haven't read -- really read, from cover to cover, or at least the majority of chapters -- a book for a few weeks now. Dostojevsky is gathering dust in the study, Sophrony has somehow lost its way and now sits next to Java 2D Graphics and Accelerated C++, De Zilveren Hazewind did grab me, but then I put it aside and forgot to pick up again. De Drie Musketiers is bed-time reading, and the travel journal of Huc and Gabet was fun, but in small doses. And that fifth book in the Belisarius series, by Drake and Flint, Tide of Victory was fun to read, and I actually finished it, but that was because it didn't demand much from my mind.
The hot trend at the moment appears to be Planet. I have been reading Planet Classpath for quite a long time, and now we have Planet KDE, too. Nice initiative, but the consequences are a bit daunting, at least for me and my poor webserver.
Clarence Dang has just made Krita capable of drawing not just lines, but ellipses and squares in any brush! In other news, I have somehow messed up the ksnapshotwidget.ui.h file, and now my screenshot plugin is broken... Anyway, enjoy the spectacle provided by Krita's new features:
2004-06-13
It used to be a regular occurrence, the absence of Father Theodore of our Parish. And often a priest from another parish, sometimes even from another country, would step into the breach and celebrate the Holy Liturgy with us in Deventer. Today, for the first time since quite long, Father Theodore was in Russia again, and we had a guest priest.
2004-06-11
Being Dutch, I voted for the European Parliament yesterday. I thought it rather important to go and vote: the EP can only become a strong and democratic institution if it receives a strong mandate from the voters. And the way to signal that is to go and vote. Fortunately, more than 40% of the Dutch made the effort: up 10%.
2004-06-10
I've finally discovered why image resizing didn't work when scaling: I believe that when scaling the background layer the projection layer is scaled automatically. Scaling it on its own makes it much too small, hence the blacked-out backgrounds I was having. And I hacked the old KOffice scan plugin and KSnapshot together into a Krita plugin, so I can make snaps of Krita, downscale them -- and presto, Krita is usable for maintaining its own website...
2004-06-08
Unless you count the few times I've putty'ed to calcifer from my father's computer when I was visiting him, I haven't used a modern Windows computer at all. My tax computer is Windows, true, but it's Windows 95. My first laptop still runs Window 3.11 -- and while both Naomi and Rebecca have windows partitions on their laptops, neither is really aware of that fact -- I'll wipe them one of these days, giving them extra room for their /home.
While I'm bravely forging with Krita, I'm very well aware that mine is not the only game in town, and that it's often a good idea to check out what other people are doing. An interesting conclusion is that natural-media type paint apps must be easy to do, since there are several cheap options that are really good. So: here's an overview of what I've found floating about on the net. Most of it is Windows stuff; all of it trialware. Here's my very cursory survey:
2004-06-04
My laptop was broken -- the spacebarhad a nasty tendency to stop registering presses if I used the right-hand side of the thing. So I phoned Dell on Friday, and on Tuesday (it being Whitsun weekend) they came to collect it.
2004-05-28
It turns out that I really, really like silent moving pictures. I much prefer them to the talkies. Not only don't I have to strain to understand the faded sound-tracks of movies like Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, but I can sit down and enjoy the acting, the facial expressions, the music, and the pacing.
2004-05-19
That's what I am. I like my desk clean -- a corporate clean desk policy had never been able to hurt me -- and I like my computer desktop clean. Of course that has it's disadvantages. As someone, somewhere, on a website long since lost once remarked, there's a remarkable disadvantage to a trash-can icon that shows the can bulging with junk when it contains a single file.
2004-05-17
The little provincial town where I live, Deventer, recently put an astonishing example of newspeak in our letter box... Until recently we could have large junk ('grof vuil') collected by the relevant municipal service. It would cost nothing, and was usable and useful, even for people who don't have a car, like us. Or you could take a car, and bring the junk to the local junkyard yourself.
2004-05-15
Last Friday (I would've done a write-up sooner, but I had to rush to Brussels for a course in Orthodox Theology), I participated in my very first demonstration. One complete with police attendance. In view of the importance of the occasion, I am not going to split this entry in opening and 'more'.
The issue is this: software patents stifle innovation. That this should be clear can be seen from the fact that my father, who knows nothing about the issue at hand, immediately told me that this would kill all innovation, as soon as I had outlined the barest facts of the proposed bit of EU legislation. I would like to go further: the bill as proposed will make it impossible for my employer, Tryllian Solutions, to stay in business making new software platforms.
Allowing businesses to patent software is to allow patenting ideas, thoughts even. And then the gedanken will no longer be frei. As Germany has recognized, as well as other EU countries, but not the Netherlands.
Of course, when we were in The Hague, Minister Brinkhorst was in Paris, and somehow I have a feeling that the top-level civil servant who was so very civil and suave is not the most dependable intermediary for our message; besides, what he said was basically that he was full of confidence that the Parliament would in the end agree with the Council proposal, and that we would like that decision, because it was made for our own good, my dear children.
Still, a nice turn-out, for so abstract a matter: about a hundred people, among whom one current colleague, and two ex-colleagues.
2004-05-13
I don't think there's much doubt that the Agent327 comics by Martin Lodewijk are among the best, or even the best Dutch comics; and they shine even among Belgian or French comics. There are currently 18 volumes, with two more expected, and I count myself very fortunate to possess all 18. True, in various states of dilapidation, because these are comics to read, re-read and re-read again.
2004-05-10
Recently, Havoc Pennington and Miguel D'Icaza caused a big flap by starting a discussion about the desirability of using a managed language -- like Java, C#, Python or Lisp to develop the core applications that make up a Linux desktop environment. These two gentlemen are rather Gnome-centric, so it's perhaps excusable that they never realized that what they propose is already possible, and even easy, with KDE, thanks to Phil Thompson and Richard Dale.. Even better: you can use a managed language, and still have the fun of compiling your code down to native code -- thanks to GCJ.
In a previous posting, I mentioned in the passing that I had received my copy of the new SUSE 9.1. I first installed it last Friday; both on my laptop, and my Rebecca's laptop. Naomi wisely argued that she was satisfied with her 9.0 installation, and begged me not to bother. Ten years old, and already knows the value of the old adage 'never mess with a working system'.
2004-05-06
Yesterday, the postman tried to deliver my shiny new SUSE 9.1. Today, I had time to collect the package from the post-office, and even some time to try and install it on my new Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop. By now -- five minutes past eleven, post meridiem, I am feeling fairly frustrated.
2004-04-30
A recent, and very long-winded, thread on rec.arts.sf.composition about wysiwyg vs editors/formatters for fiction authors coincided with a blog posting by some high-ranking Microsoft manager who's worked on Word for a long time. And that combination unchained the reminiscing beast in me...
2004-04-26
Pamela Dean used to frequent the rec.arts.sf.composition newsgroup with some regularity some time ago, and any number of times she has helped other people with issues with pacing in their work. Which she's very well equipped to do, since she's a master in that art herself.
I've planted a fig in the front garden, a very little fig, no more than a branch. A figlet, so to speak... And it's getting its first leaflets.
2004-04-19
I've never much believed that there's much difference between 'real life' and 'internet life', but one difference there is -- 'internet life' isn't necessary real-time, and 'real life' is, and that means it can interrupt anything ongoing.
2004-03-23
Just a quick notice, because I've still got three books by DLS to write about and a Wodehouse, and because this was a book I finished in under an hour.
Apart from vi vs. emacs (or rather XEmacs!), there's nothing that can make passions fly high as a good, old-fashioned language debate I've got a book published by Baen that collects the first few years of Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Manor columns for Byte. And those are already stiff with language debate: byte-code (then called p-code) vs. natively compiled code. Easy basic vs. manly Fortran...
This time about two years ago I finished the first draft of my first complete novel. I had written maybe a dozen, maybe two dozen short stories before that, all in Dutch, a novella and an enormous amount of fictional non-fiction, rpg write-ups and a book on GUI programming with Python and Qt. The novel was my first bit of fiction in English, and I was pretty proud. So I spent a few month polishing, sent it off to a publisher, and started on the next novel.
Or seedlings, or whatever the correct term is. The first bright day of february, the urge came upon me, and I dug out the little window-sill greenhouses.
2004-03-13
Today's Trouw contained three very interesting articles on the separation between Church and State. Now this is a topic that is bound to make passions flame up and overheat arguments. Which is probably because most people don't know what 'separation of church and state means'. These Trouw articles did a good job explaining; I'll just summarize.
2004-03-07
As I noted before, I have been trying to figure out how to paint a lemon like it should be painted. I think, however, that I should admit to defeat. The result of the exercise is not bad, perhaps even commendable, given my lack of experience with the materials, but it falls short of the mark by a wide margin.
2004-03-05
Usability is hot -- especially usability for Linux Desktop Environments. After all, we (that's the lde (Linux Desktop Environments) developers) want the misguides Windows-using masses to switch, and join us, and be enlightened, now don't we?
2004-03-04
Corrie de Groot
A little book, illustrated with fine, well-executed pencil drawings on that perennial subject -- women's undies.
You know, when you search for "big money" on Amazon, you get 90.975 results, and only one of those is for this paperback... What are people thinking of, nowadays? Anyway, the paperback Gutenberg offers is one of those nasty 1991 vintage Penguins with horrible ragged right margins and bad covers. I've got a nice Ionicus Penguin, which show Lord Biskerton to his best advantage...
Summer Moonshine, a novel outside any of the famous Wodehouse saga's has never been, despite the presence of several memorable characters, like the Princess Dwornitzchek and her stepson Joe, one of my favourite Wodehouse novels.
My copy of this perfectly formed Jeeves and Wooster story has a very nice cover of Ian Carmichael and Dennis Price in the B.B.C. T.V. series "The World of Wooster", or so it claims. I've never seen the television series -- but the cover certainly is evocative, even though I rather think that Bertie Wooster -- despite complaints about no longer revelling in the clubs like a cub -- is a little younger.
2004-03-03
There's now a mailing list for people interested in using or hacking Kura: Kura Mailing List. It's quite quiet right now -- so don't hesitate to subscribe...
Katherine Blake (Dorothy J. Heydt)
The Interior Life is a rather strange book, in many respects. It tells the story of a supposedly ordinary American housewife, a none-too-bright stay-at-home mom who married her high-school sweetheart. She has three children, a front and a back lawn, and, when the story starts, a very dirty house.
2004-03-01
Well, really, I mean. It's not just George van Driem who maintains, with some justification, that Dutch is a Low-German dialect. (We do have a navy, after all -- even though I don't know what it's good for. The North Sea is a Mare Nostrum seen from the POV of the NATO anyway, and we had better get rid of the Dutch Antilles, the populace of which insists on electing certified corrupt separatist politicians.) But take a look at Dutch in past two or three centuries...
2004-02-28
2004-02-26
The goal of the Free Software Movement is to enable people to understand, to learn from, to improve, to adapt, and to share the technology that increasingly runs every human life. That's what Eben Moglen said in his 23 February address at Harvard, as transcribed at Groklaw.
2004-02-22
My old Pismo powerbook was slowly debilitating -- battery giving the ghost, cd/dvd drive dying, panel developing serious jaundice and also white spots. And there's no Java for Linux/PPC that works well enough to do my job on, and OS X isn't any too comfortable. But my laptop woes were nothing to those of Irina, whose laptop had always had the nasty tendency of running at one degree centigrade below the maximum temperature the CPU was prepared to allow, meaning that it shut down whenever you took the beast on your lap, or took it outside in the summer, or didn't keep it perched high up some support that allowed free airflow -- but the screen died, too, after only a year and a half of faithless and noisy (that b*****y fan) service. So we needed new laptops...
2004-02-21
By Lynn Abbey
To start with, Out of Time is part one, of three, but it doesn't say so anywhere that I could find. That's rather sneaky, because there are plenty people like me and Irina who never buy trilogies if they can help it. Trilogies nowadays are almost inevitably over-written, overly detailed, rather boring romps through enough plot for a novelette padded and stretched into three volumes.
2004-02-20
But the weather is very nice, if cold, and I've got this packet of 'year-round-lettuce' that you can, supposedly, succesfully sow even in January... And the neighbour whose back garden borders on ours is already busy clearing away the debris of winter. And I'm beginning to feel the urge, too.
2004-02-16
2004-02-12
Can spoil four evenings. Now I know that I am not at peak form when working in the fumes of paint, and we have had painters in the house for three days (they did a beautiful job, and I heartily recommend them: Steenbruggen in Deventer) -- but, dash it, see if you can spot the mistake in this Makefile.am:
2004-02-11
Mary Gentle
Time and again I try again to read something by Mary Gentle. Her Usenet persona is so engaging -- even though also a little bit tactless and clowning -- that I figure her books must be great. And others do think them great, definitely. So there must be good stuff in them.
There's this heading 'hacking' on Fading Memories, isn't it? Hacking, and not coding. But what's a hacker -- when it comes down to it? It's, perhaps, someone who's been sharing code against all odds for longer than he cares to remember, someone who has a sense of esthetic regarding code, even more than regarding ephemera like user interfaces. Perhaps a hacker is a coder who's just that little bit harder to herd.
P.G. Wodehouse
Another of those delightful standalone novels in the vein of Uneasy Money, even though written 23 years later, about a young, likeable man who meets a young, capable girl.
2004-02-09
Slightly less than a month ago, I made a begin with my first attempt at painting a lemon. Today I braced my self for the next chapter in the saga, by buying a tube of cadmium yellow lemon (azo) -- and, for good measure, a tube of dark naples yellow. Buying cool stuff is, after all, one of the main reasons for pursuing a hobby.
2004-02-06
I hope so -- I noticed that blogspammers find the writeback enabled blogs with a simple automated google query (possibly even using Google's SOAP API, which is in itself a cool enough thing), and they query for 'writeback'. If that's so, I thought, why not throw a small spanner in the works, and change that particular string into something different. So, here's the first fencing-enabled blog...
2004-02-05
Progress with Krita has been slow, the past two weeks, considering that I've been at home nearly permanently. Still, I've been working on some things, and thinking about others.
2004-02-02
Right, this is too silly for words. This morning the alarm clock radio woke me up with the NOS newsreading woman saying that "Deskundigen vermoeden dat Linux aanhangers iets met het MyDoom virus te maken hebben. SCO heeft een conflict met Linux." (Experts think that Linux adherents have something to do with the MyDoom virus. SCO has a conflict with Linux.) -- and today they declare SCO to be a 'software giant'...I've grabbed a screenshot before the story disappears:
Gosh. That was quick -- despite the long chronology you can see to the left, Fading Memories the blog isn't really all that old. A few weeks. The backlog came from my other Fading Memories site, the Zope site. It happened now and then that someone tried to add spam comments, but I had moderation turned on, and nothing slithered past my watchful eye.
Hacking is just as much a necessity of life as breathing, writing or eating. But sometimes, it's impossible to go on working, even though you're all in the flow.
I like to cook; Irina likes to cook, and we both like having guests helping us eat what we cook. We're not too bad at it, I am a dab hand with a duck and a whiz with steak, and Irina is great with things like saracen stew or cheese souffle. But we seldom have more than two or three guests
By J. Dek
After reading 1633 I suddenly realized that I, in fact, knew hardly a thing about Dutch history. It isn't taught in schools anymore, because history now has to be a fun thing children can relate to, about common people and their life. Nothing wrong with that; but the events that have created the nation I have to live in have some importance too. So, what does someone who needs a quick primer in his national history do?
Uneasy Money is a Wodehouse novel that I find myself returning to time and again. It is an early novel, written 1917, and therefore available from Project Gutenberg, and isn't part of any of the saga's Wodehouse is famous for.
2004-01-29
This article by an anonymous person tells you why -- near the bottom: And now a word from our corporate sponsors
Let the stuffed shirts and corporate bigwigs make money from the Free code. Let the pundits question what it will take for Linux to succeed on the Desktop. There is massive innovation in Linux userspace, driven by the same geeky joy that, in another era and in other fields is called "intellectual curiosity." That's what I see as the main force behind the Open Source movement; not corporate possibilities, as the LinuxWorld convention pretends, but brutal candor, mischievous smartness, self-mocking over-eagerness. The corporate successes of Linux are just the results of an overflow of energy, the excesses being mopped up. The hacker ethic is driving the corporations. We don't need them, but they need us.
2004-01-28
Gah! I never had proper maths at school, and I dare say that if someone had tried to teach me maths at the tender age of eleven or twelve, I'd probably have bucked like race horse that's harnessed in front of a brewery sledge. But the fact that my maths teacher walked out of the class when I was in the second form, to never return, didn't help either. Not that I ever thought I had missed something essential.
2004-01-26
When we came back from a visit to the Prinsenhof in Delft, I made a resolution that I would learn about the art of still-life. I want to be able to paint a lemon like Willem Heda...
Talk about a timely release -- just when I was down and out with a spot of pneumonia, Eric Flint releases the sequel to 1632 in Baen's Free Library. I rather liked the people in 1632, even though I didn't like Eric Flint's preaching that republicanism is the panacea for all evil, so I downloaded the html version, and began reading.
Kikkertje Lief (dear froglet) was the favourite pet-name of Aagje Luijtsen for her husband, Harmanus Kikkert, first mate on a VOC ship in the 18th century. Perry Moree found her letters to her husband in an archive in Great Britain. The letters had been captured with the ship Kikkert was sailing on by the British, and the British had the custom of archiving all papers found on such a ship.
Raymond Chandler is widely regarded as the best writer of hard-boiled thrillers, and probably rightly so. I don't care much about the genre, so I don't own many Chandlers. Pick-up on Noon Street contains four stories from The Simple Art of Murder, and most of them were interesting enough to finish them, especially when read with a writer's eye.
2004-01-25
From December 2002 to December 2003 I kept a booklog. I started the booklog both because I tend to forget that I've already read something, and to learn Zope. I did learn Zope, and I did keep the log pretty meticulously.
2004-01-23
I've spent the better part of this week rather feverishly (literally, I'm afraid) hacking on Krita, trying to bring it up to KPaint-level feature-wise, at least, and all that seems to happen is that my TODO list is growing.
2004-01-21
The Gimp nowadays comes with a small set of rather nifty brushes -- the so-called pipe brushes, recognizable from the file-extension .gih. The fileformat for these brushes is actually really horrible, a mix between text and binary. The first line contains the brush name, the second the number of brushes the brush contains, a space, and a bit of text detailing the way the brush ought to be used.
I am reading Oliver Twist to our children, once chapter a night. They really like it, recognize it as the real ginger, strong stuff. Naomi told me she particular likes the long descriptions of people and places -- as if you were watching a movie, as she says. And they also like Cruikshanks' illustrations -- we had a lot of fun spotting the bible story on the painting in Ms. Bedwin's parlour. It's the Good Samaritan, of course
2004-01-19
I just completed the first stab at pressure sensititivity support... It's still slow, and not completely correct in all places, but you can make beautiful galaxies with it and gorgeous blobs that look like you've been painting with a brush and thick india-ink.
I'd almost forgotten how easy Python is, how comfortable it is not to have to recompile, how nice it is not to have to type all kinds of superfluous interpunction... Java is better than C++ in this regard, but still... Compared to Python.
2004-01-17
It turns out to be remarkably easy to buy an earthenware pan (supposed to be the perfect vessel for stewing hare in cream among other things). Specialized shops touting their wide-ranging assortment deny categorically that such things exist; you cannot put earthenwire on the fire. (A bit like specialized arts materials shops denying the existence of bristol board.)
I've finally discovered how to do a decent brush in Krita. Turns out that the most time-intensive bit was the redrawing of the picture. This happened a lot in the in-betweening code, that painted a line between the previous and the current mouse position if Krita couldn't keep up with the mouse.
2004-01-16
Since I stopped doing the really regular updates for Fading Memories the booklog, I've read the occasional book or two. The habit is kind of ingrained, and so's the habit to make a short note of those books. Here are the notes -- I might have forgotten some books, but well, those were apparently instantly forgettable.
2004-01-15
I am finally being developing the feeling that I am starting to begin achieving the first step towards a modicum of confidence in my ability to achieve a moderate competence in C++. That's to say, last night I spent a few hours hacking the KisToolBrush class for Krita. I want to achieve what nearly all paint applications manage to achieve: to draw a beautiful, antialiased line that accurately follows the mouse or stylus and is painted in the right colour, gradient or pattern using the correct brush. And I don't seem able to figure out how to do that.
2004-01-10
The Prinsenhof in Delft is a very nice museum which had, when we visited them, a wonderful collection of still life paintings. As always, and no doubt as intended by the painters, I was very impressed by the lemons...
Dutch primary schools nowadays aren't terribly adequate when it comes to teaching their pupils that painting and drawing can be a whole lot of fun; neither do they teach them even the most basic of techniques. Naomi once came home with a reasonably competently executed sketch of a horse. It turned out that she was giving step-by-step, connect the dot instructions that would invariably lead to the exact same cartoon-like sketch no matter who executes it. Harumpf.
2004-01-09
Thanks to some tips from Michael Dunn, I've finally managed to get Kura working on OS X. Actually, it wasn't so much a matter of getting Kura to work, as it was a matter of untangling various previous attempts at getting PyQt and sip to work.
It's tacky I know, and I am very much running behind the herd -- so far behind, in fact, that the herd has already jumped the cliff -- to write on this topic in the winter of 2003. But I don't care all that much. I still feel the need... I am going to compare using OS X with using Linux+KDE
I like to sketch a bit, paint a bit, mess about with pen and ink, pencils, everything but chalk and charcoal is fair game. And in the grand Dutch tradition of interpreting and showing daily life, as discussed by Svetlana Alpers in The Art of Describing, I'm not afraid to turn my pen to other things than those that exist in my imagination.
2004-01-07