Create @ f.d.o

Brian Tarricone: Busy Week

Brian — 2006-10-13T23:06:40+00:00

I guess things don’t change all that much, but the past week has been relatively busy.

The week of the 1st was relatively pedestrian. Wednesday I helped out at SBDT’s free dance camp. I hadn’t seen most of the Stanford ballroom people since May or June, so it was good to catch up. Thursday was basketball; probably just about it for the season since sundown is getting to be so early. My new boss was out visiting for part of the week, so I ended up working with him quite a bit. I’m still not sure how this new group is going to work, or what my role is going to be. Right now we’re working on getting a product out ASAP, so I’m not sure it’s a good time to start talking about that stuff yet. I’d certainly like at least some of that cleared up by the end of the year. So far it’s been a nice change of pace, though.

Friday, James, Eugene and I went out for a quick drink around 6pm. Well, it was quick for me, at least; I had already made plans to meet up with Liz later, so I left the bar a little after 7. We ended up just going out for gelato, and sitting and chatting for a while. We were sitting up on the 2nd floor balcony outside. A fire truck and ambulance showed up, and half of the Indian restaurant next door evacuated into the street. We walked by while the EMTs were still there, but it wasn’t clear what was going on.

Saturday turned into a day of missed schedules, though it turned out to be more productive than most weekend days. I intended to get out around 9 or 10 to look at bikes and buy one. While I did get up early (for me), I didn’t get out the door until about noon. However, I did manage to decide what I wanted within an hour, and walked out of the bike shop with a nice Raleigh hybrid bike, with new lights, a new lock, and a new helmet. It was more than I originally wanted to spend, but I’m pleased. I managed to get the bike into my trunk (with the front wheel removed) and get it home without incident.

I had thought practice on Saturday was 2-4pm, so I opened up my email to check the location, and discovered that practice was actually 4-6. Great, I figured. I could take the bike out for a longer test-ride. So I rode up to Mountain View and back; only about 7 miles. It was a nice ride, despite the traffic lights. I got back home a little after 2, and spent some time chatting online and working on Xfce. Eventually at 3:40 I dragged myself out to go to practice, and arrived right at 4… to see that no one was there, and some other group was getting ready to start. So, I tried to call a couple people, and found out that practice was indeed from 2-4, at a different location, and that the 4-6 practice was the next week because our reservation was preempted for some reason. Great job, me. By the time I figured out where practice was, it was 4:20, and I figured pretty much everyone would be gone, so I gave Liz a call instead. She was getting frustrated with her work and was looking for a distraction. We decided to go to Gordon Biersch for some beer and to watch some baseball (and, as it turned out, football, too). The Dodgers were playing the Mets (who won); it was somewhat difficult to decide which team to dislike less, but I think I might have settled on the Mets. It was a decent game, though somewhat hard to pay attention due to the other two TVs in view showing different stuff. We spent about 4 hours there, until 9ish. One of her friends showed up for an hour or so around 7 and had dinner with us. He seemed like a pretty nice guy. So fortunately my practice-free trip up to Stanford was worthwhile after all.

Sunday turned out to be more of a lazy day. It was the last day of dance camp with a team info talk at the end, so I went to see people and whatnot. I just stayed up there for practice, and went home and spent some more time on Xfce, finally starting to make up for the neglect it’s been getting recently. I managed to close a few bugs, though more keep popping up. I have a bit of work to do if I’m going to nail them down before the second release candidate, but I think I should have some time this weekend and next week.

This week has been alternately busy and boring. It started slow: Tuesday I wasn’t even feeling up for our usual trip to the bar in the evening, though I did manage to bike to work. Wednesday I taught the first week of the beginner swing class with Marissa. As I expected, she’s pretty fun to teach with, so I’m looking forward to the next 5 weeks of classes (well, 4 weeks, since I’m traveling for the last one). My boss has been in town again, so there’s been more work with him going on.

Thursday I went out with a good-sized group for a drink after work as a send-off for Peter, whose last day is today. Afterwards I biked home quickly, dropped some stuff off, and headed to the studio to practice with Lidiya. Somehow I got roped/guilted into doing this performance tonight for some minor event on campus, and Lidiya was the other girl free without a partner, so despite the fact that the first time we danced together was yesterday, we’re doing a performance tonight. Hopefully it won’t be a train wreck. Today we also had a group lunch for Peter, at this mediterranean place called Athena Grill. It’s somewhat near work, and is really good.

Blah, so I guess that’s about it for now. I’ll probably try to get out of here at a decent time so I can have some down time before I have to head up to Stanford later.

Oh, right… Happy Friday the 13th…

Jon Phillips - Inkscape + Open Clip Art Library: Support Creative Commons

jon — 2006-10-12T21:57:14+00:00

Last night Creative Commons launched its 2nd Annual Fall Fundraising Campaign at the 8th CC Salon in San Francisco. It went quite well with David Pescovitz from Make Magazine, CC-alum Ryan Junell, and Mick from Revver.com talking about videon on the web post-gootube.

Please help support the Creative Commons.

Also, please help support the 1st CC Salon in NYC tonite, Thursday, OCT 12, 2006!

Dave Neary: Laptop purchase

2006-10-12T11:39:20+00:00

Joining in the recent trend of people blogging about their laptop purchases, I need advice on hardware.

I'm looking for a laptop in a €1500 budget, which is light, has wifi and ethernet, works perfectly with free software (including projectors), has at least 1GB of RAM, and is fast enough to do some hacking on. I'm not picky.

Any suggestions (in comments or mail)? The D420 Jeff got looks cool, but is a bit over my budget.

the GIMP: GIMP 2.3.12 Development Release

2006-10-12T09:23:04+00:00

Version 2.3.12 is a snapshot of the development towards GIMP 2.4. We are mostly polishing things at this point, but a few features are still waiting to be added. The source code for this release can be downloaded from the usual places. The NEWS file has a summary of changes. If you want to try this unstable development snapshot, please read the release notes for the development releases

Jon Phillips - Inkscape + Open Clip Art Library: Innovation Continues Post GooTube (Believe it or not!)

jon — 2006-10-12T08:13:39+00:00

Believe it or not, in the face of Google buying Youtube, there are other great services with video surfacing like the newly Microsoft partnered, Blinkx, a video search engine (M$ is smart with this one…it is just search engine!) I really like this services interface and the playlist function.

Another service is Freetube. Basically, one can watch TV on freetube through their streaming realmedia files. It works pretty well actually…

MenTaLguY: Loose Change Viewer Guide

MenTaLguY — 2006-10-11T16:55:39+00:00

The Loose Change 2nd Edition Viewer Guide is an invaluable resource when watching Loose Change.

Dave Neary: Dirk Hondel on GNOME

2006-10-11T14:15:27+00:00

On the occasion of the release of Portland v. 1.0, VNUNet digs up a classic quote:

"The KDE guys desperately wanted to look and feel like Windows, and the other guys desperately wanted to make it as hard to use as possible," said Dirk Hondel at LinuxWorld in San Francisco in August.

Dave Neary: The latest UnThing: Coworking

2006-10-11T12:03:34+00:00

Anyone who has worked for long periods from home gets lonely. You miss having a coffee machine where you can complain about the problem you've been having or chat about your dog's gastritis. You miss eating with other people. You miss having office noise around you (OK, maybe not so much that one).

So here comes coworking. What is it? It's a shared space, somewhere where you go to get your human interraction while working - an office with café culture, someone's apartment with an open door day for people tired of working alone.

Interesting idea. The next step is shared living space, for those of us who spend a lot of time travelling, and prefer to stay with like-minded people rather than in hotels.

Dave Neary: GNOME and sponsors

2006-10-11T11:41:28+00:00

Fernando: Your blog entry just got pointed out to me by Luis. It raises an interesting question about the relationship of GNOME to its main sponsors.

GNOME (through the GNOME Foundation) gets a lot of support from companies - in particular our advisory board members, Sun, Novell, RedHat, HP, IBM, Debian, the FSF, and the more recent additions Nokia, Imendio, OpenedHand, Canonical, PalmSource, Intel and the SFLC.

Part of the problem that we've faced in the past is that we go to the well for very concrete things - advisory board dues, GUADEC, the summit, a new server... or a local conference. To the company, it all comes under the heading "GNOME".

Ideally what would happen is that we would go to the company once, with a detailed list of activities for the year, have one single purchase order for "GNOME", and then at the end of the year publish an annual report of all the things we'd done with the money (including sponsoring local conferences) to prepare the terrain for the following year.

There are a number of reasons why that might not be a great idea. First, companies might like to support the foundation, but not sponsor one particular conference. Second, we still want to get one-off sponsorship from companies not on the advisory board. Third, all our biggest sponsors will already have their sponsorship bundled up in the foundation, reducing the scope for the organisers.

But the existing situation is untenable - it's easier for someone to justify a one-off payment of (say) $40,000 than five separate payments for $10,000, $15,000, and 3 x $5,000. So we do need to figure out a better way.

One way to improve things would be to offer sponsorship packages, varying from "Advisory board membership" through to "Deluxe cornerstone strategic partner". We will need to work out reasonable levels for those packages without making things too complicated, and pitch the idea to advisory board members to work out the details. And of course, it'll force us to be much more open about what we do - there are a bunch of things that the foundation has helped with this year which either haven't gotten much attention, or which we haven't really shouted about. When I get a chance, I'll make a list...

In short, I'm not surprised that Nokia hasn't sponsored you, but the foundation's sponsorship of Fernando's plane ticket is coming in part from Nokia and their support, so don't be too hard on them.

Jon Phillips - Inkscape + Open Clip Art Library: CC Salon Tomorrow night in San Francisco

jon — 2006-10-11T03:28:29+00:00

This is going to be a major event! Eric has done really great programming this one along with Melissa who is launching the CC Fundraising Campaign:

Please join us for CC Salon / Creative Commons Fundraising Campaign Launch Party on Wednesday, October 11, from 6-9pm (don’t worry if you’re late; there will be stuff happening all night) at Shine , (1337 Mission Street between 9th and 10th Streets). Shine has free wi-fi and a super cool Flickr photo booth. Note: Since Shine is a bar, CC Salon is only open to people who are 21 and older.

October’s line-up:

David Pescovitz of MAKE and Boing Boing.
David is MAKE’s editor-at-large and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. He is also a research affiliate with the Institute for the Future and writer-in-residence at UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. Pescovitz is co-author of the book Reality Check, based on his long-running technology forecasting column in Wired where he is still a frequent contributor. His writing also has appeared in Scientific American, Salon, the New York Times, Popular Science, and IEEE Spectrum, among other publications.

Micki Krimmel of Revver.
Micki is the Director of Community at Revver, an online video-sharing platform that rewards content-creators by giving them a stake in the profits. It’s her job to keep the Revver community happy and to spread the open media message. Micki used to work at Participant Productions, a film company with a mission to effect social change. She led the company in building an online activist community at participate.net, where film-lovers and activists can come together to make a difference. Micki is also nearing her one year anniversary as a contributor to Worldchanging.com, where she writes about global film, new tools for production and distribution and the democratization of the filmmaking process.

Ryan Junell of Webzine, Sagan, SLOMO Video, and more.
Ryan has created music videos for bands such as Spoon, The Soft Pink Truth, The Natural History, Lesser, and Sagan. He directed a short documentary about John Kerry on the campaign trail in 2003. In 2004, he created an experimental documentary video installation about the Republican National Convention in New York. Ryan is founder and curator of the SLOMO Video Festival, featuring 100 one minute slow motion short films by 85 filmmakers and video artists. Ryan is also an organizer of
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">Webzine, an event celebrating the art of independent online publishing. Ryan is currently at work on his third animation for Creative Commons.

CC Fundraising Campaign
Also, this CC Salon marks the beginning of Creative Commons’ annual fundraising campaign, so don’t hesitate to bring your checkbook (or PayPal login info — we’ll have laptops on hand) to show your support for the work we do. This is your chance to donate a few bucks and be the first person on your block to get the brand new CC t-shirt design (which is super awesome). Donating to CC helps support the development of tools that help enable a participatory culture.

About CC Salon:
CC Salon is a free, casual monthly get-together focused on conversation, presentations, and performances from people or groups who are developing projects that relate to open content and/or software. Please invite your friends, colleagues, and anyone you know who might be interested in drinks and discussion. There are now CC Salons happening in San Francisco, Toronto, Berlin, Beijing, Warsaw, Seoul, Johannesburg, and coming soon in New York.

Track this event on Upcoming.org

Alexandre Prokoudine: Open source math

Alexandre — 2006-10-10T22:46:14+00:00

Open source math is simple:

passionate user + interested developer = cool features

It took him just one day to make gaussian blur filter supported in Clone Tiles And please don’t forget how much we owe Niko Kiirala and Hugo Rodrigues for basic SVG filters implementation in upcoming Inkscape 0.45!

Update. I feel obliged to warn you about use of random option for blur. This is highly addictive. If you’re gonna play with that, you might as well stop working completely, just click “Create” over and over again, be fired, lose your family and friends etc. Definitely a very dangerous option!

Dave Neary: And the Ultras go to...

2006-10-09T19:12:11+00:00

Back in June, Sun gave us two Ultra 20s to give to deserving GNOME hackers and announced the donation at GUADEC. Finally, we can reveal the recipients:

We tried to think of two more deserving recipients, really we did.

MenTaLguY: In Search of the One True Layout

MenTaLguY — 2006-10-09T14:16:17+00:00

In Search of the One True Layout is a careful documentation of the various methods available for doing flexible pure-CSS layouts in the absence of uniform browser support for CSS tables. Destined to become a classic, it also seems to be somewhat regularly updated with implementation notes and reader contributions.

Position is Everything is a pretty cool site in general, by the way.

Dave Neary: Schumi - Alonso

2006-10-09T11:46:37+00:00

The cynic in me agrees with Damon Hill's analysis that Schumacher will go into the Brazilian grand prix trying to figure out how he can manage to score 10 points without having Alonso score any. Here are two scenarios which have come to mind.

Massa the missile. Massa qualifies ahead of the Renaults, and (either into the first turn, or after trying to slow down Alonso for a few dozen laps, and finally having him try to overtake) Massa takes him out à la Schumacher 1994. Bye bye constructor's championship, but hello driver's title
FIA to the rescue. Alonso has previously had trouble with penalties (in Monza and Hungary) and Renault have had some equipment banned in the middle of the season this year (which coincided with Ferrari's recovery). what are the odds of an Alonso disqualification either in qualifying or during the race?

Oh - and Calum, I'll thank you not to mention the weekend's international football.

Jon Phillips - Inkscape + Open Clip Art Library: Al Jazeera RSS Feed

jon — 2006-10-08T23:38:43+00:00

Since Al Jazeera’s English news site is pretty lofi, here is a link to a syndicated version of their award-winning journalism in English.

Jon Phillips - Inkscape + Open Clip Art Library: Keith Olbermann Articulates the Confusion of George Bush between Terrorists vs. Critics

jon — 2006-10-08T23:33:37+00:00

Jon Phillips - Inkscape + Open Clip Art Library: Mark Foley live from US Senate (on metavid)

jon — 2006-10-08T23:04:53+00:00

Metavid now has an embedded Java video viewer which helps in viewing videos they recorded of Mark Foley.

Ironically, Mark Foley discusses sexual predators and children in a few of these clips. It is quite amazing to do this research myself (with the help of metavid).

Jon Phillips - Inkscape + Open Clip Art Library: Watch Rumsfeld Get Schooled and White House Press Corps

jon — 2006-10-08T22:46:26+00:00

This makes me wonder. Doesn’t the White House press get invited to events and thus the government can allow and disallow certain press? This to me seems like it should be democratized and regulated outside the control of the White House. Ideally, the white house press corps is very powerful and has certain credentials for being able to ask questions. Do they not do a very bad job as the first line of extracting information from government officials?

Does anyone know how to get in touch with the white houses’ press corps? I just went to whitehouse.gov and called the switchboard to find the press contacts. How can just anyone get into the press corps? Is it based upon money, rank of news organization, etc?

I have a feeling that this is very controlled by the white house and if so, how can we break this open so that we can get some real information, questioning and logging of information. If you are interested in this, please contact http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/.

BTW, I just called the white house switchboard and they took down my name, number and publication (which I always use the SCALE journal because it has legitimate ISBN number with Library of Congress). I wonder if I will get put on a list now? I just received a return phone call by what the switchboard operator called the “duty press.” I picked up the phone and discussed with someone about this and will talk about it monday or tuesday of next week (as I realized it is Sunday afternoon and I probably interrupted someone’s relax time).

My girlfriend looked at me like I did something crazy, but I realized yet again this is the same approach I would use in Open Source. Basically, I wanted information, so I directly went to find it. Thus, hopefully, I will map out this space a little more and bring attention to it.

In the meantime please check out the white house press corpse article. Oh, and it looks like the information space on the White House Press Corps is pretty limited.

What I would like is something similar to metavid but for all parts of press events in government so that we can bypass the intermediaries (current press) and get our questions directly answered. Also, this is an attempt to lessen the power of the white house in hopes of democratizing and cracking open how we get media.

Kees Cook: art-creation pyramid scheme

kees — 2006-10-07T20:35:00+00:00

Gib started a meme I think sounds like fun. If you’re one of the first 5 people who comment on this post, I’ll create an original piece of art for you, but only if you promise to offer the same deal in your own blog. (And I urge you to release it under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license while you’re at it.)

I’ll likely be using inkscape to get it done, since I need an excuse to play more with the tile cloner and tessellation filters.

Jon Phillips - Inkscape + Open Clip Art Library: Nathan’s criticism of Garton’s iCommons Criticism-light

jon — 2006-10-06T17:09:12+00:00

Nathan has a nice rebuttal that points out the irony of Andrew Garton’s armchair criticisms of the iCommons conference.

Dave Neary: svn tagging

2006-10-06T14:15:14+00:00

Michael: Try 'svn cp -m "Creating a tag/branch" . svn+ssh://server/directory/tags/test_tag'

Dave Neary: Begining of a Great Adventure

2006-10-06T12:51:32+00:00

I have never been paid to work on Free Software, and have often wished I was - I would have loved to be able to spend my working day striving towards a grand goal that I am passionate about and believe in. But circumstances (and a lack of backbone on my part) conspired against me, and so for the first 8 years of my professional career, I have never been paid to do what I am passionate about.

Until now.

At the start of November, I will be joining Wengo, where I will be working on growing the community around the OpenWengo project, a Free Software, open-standards based VoIP softphone (and instant messaging client).

It's a big challenge, but one I am very happy to take on. Talking to people at Wengo has convinced me that there is a real willingness to open up the development process and be a good citizen in the free software world, which is a great starting point. My first job will be to look at the development processes of the company as it is, and identify ways that we can make that process even more open, even more welcoming to new contributors.

It's going to be a fun ride.

Brian Tarricone: Code Search

Brian — 2006-10-05T18:45:49+00:00

Google has recently unveiled their code search feature, which lets you search the internet for open source code. I already have more respect for it than for its competitors. When I search “brian tarricone” in Krugle or Koders, I just get mention of my name in a file of Gaim’s source, from a (small) patch I submitted to fix a plugin. When I try Codease, I just get a 502 Proxy Error. Great service, guys.

However, with Google’s code search, I see my name in a bunch of Xfce- and Xfmedia-related files. Rock on. “Results 1 - 10 of about 12,800,” it says. Awesome.

Jon Phillips - Inkscape + Open Clip Art Library: Aunt Brenda

jon — 2006-10-05T04:01:55+00:00

Heya all, my Aunt Brenda (57) passed away last weekend of a 12 year fight with cancer. She had an amazing turn out and I got to see tons of family and old family friends that came to her service. She is loved by many.

I’m heading back to San Francisco tomorrow morning for those of you that wonder (or don’t) where I have been. I’m flying right in and then straight to Creative Commons.

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: Err… No, not really.

2006-10-04T21:48:00+00:00

The thread is long, yes, but to say that matters have come to a conclusion, that it is possible to even arrive at an executive summary is premature. As far as I’m concerned, there have been no conclusive arguments in favor of Scott’s summary. But since the discussion is now apparently to be held in blog form, here’s my summary.

Dave Neary: 550

2006-10-04T06:45:59+00:00

There's nothing like lots of new people tasting freedom for the first time to get your day started. DAM brings us the story of a migration of part of a French group to GNOME-based thin-clients. 550 clients being served by 10 servers.

And thanks to the wonderful work that has been done recently to make free software applications cross-platform, even the people who have to use Windows on their laptops get to join in the fun, using Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.org.

MenTaLguY: The BBC's "Secret Vatican Edict"

MenTaLguY — 2006-10-03T20:37:07+00:00

Sigh. It seems like, when it comes to religious reporting, it’s getting harder to tell the difference between laziness, incompetence, and malice on the part of the UK press. Most recently, it’s the BBC Panorama special on the ostensible unveiling of a “secret vatican document” issued by Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) supposedly sheltering clerical abusers of children and adolescents.

Amy Wellborn does a nice job of treating the topic, including the fact that the “secret” document in question had been openly published after being issued in 2001, and also taking a look at what the document actually says.

Now, there certainly are a few cardinal bishops who have held on to their positions by supressing evidence of their wrongdoing, and done a lot of damage to their flock and the Church besides (those familiar with the landscape of the Catholic Church in the US probably know who I’m talking about). If only some investigative journalists would pay some attention to them rather than trying to manufacture news about Cardinal Ratzinger…

Brian Tarricone: Low Power NAS-like Device

Brian — 2006-10-03T20:13:47+00:00

Hey, lazyweb.

Recently I’ve been thinking about turning my desktop PC off to save electricity. Lately I haven’t even been using it all that much, instead opting to sit in the living room using my Powerbook. However, my desktop PC currently hosts a public SVN, as well as some private web resources that friends use relatively often. I could move the SVN elsewhere (probably mocha.xfce.org), but the private resources are not feasible to move to an external host. I also use the box as a backup mail server, but I haven’t needed it in some time (right now it’s more of a backup to a backup).

My main issue is storage. I currently have about a TB of storage in my desktop PC, which acts as a media source for my HTPC in the living room. For various reasons (mostly physical space), moving the storage to the HTPC isn’t really workable.

So, my next thought would be to build a NAS. In the process, I’d like to upgrade my storage to SATA, and use RAID5. However, this isn’t strictly necessary; I’d be OK just moving my current hard drive setup to a new box and putting off the upgrade until later (which is more likely, as I don’t really want to spend the money on 4 new 320 or 400GB hard drives right now).

So, here’s what I want. A low-power NAS box that can take a minimum of four hard drives. It would be nice if could be expanded later to support eSATA so I could add external boxes if needed. The software running it needs to be completely open source (Linux preferred, though one of the BSDs would do), or easily replaceable with an open source NAS stack. I need to be able to run a web server on it, and it needs to be able to handle RAID5. Gigabit ethernet is a must, even though my home network doesn’t support it (yet).

I also wouldn’t mind building this. A low-power, heavily integrated motherboard with a low-power CPU and 4-8 SATA ports would be fine. One or two PCI slots would be good. If the motherboard doesn’t have IDE channels, I’d need to get an IDE card for it until my storage gets upgraded. Ideally I’d like to be able to hook up a 512MB or 1GB flash card to it to host the OS so I don’t have to waste HD space on that stuff.

Oh, and I don’t want to spend any more than $350 or so on this (not counting hard drives). That might be tough.

Any thoughts?

Brian Tarricone: Philly Orchestra Rocks

Brian — 2006-10-03T19:33:49+00:00

The Philadelphia Orchestra, arguably one of the best orchestras in the world, has a clue. They sell their recording online, and many of them are available for download. No proprietary formats? Check. No DRM? Check. Lossless? Check. They’re using FLAC. Rock.

Alexandre Prokoudine: Charity

Alexandre — 2006-10-03T12:33:50+00:00

On 24th, September there was a charity event here in Moscow — Art-Strelka (Арт-Стрелка), organized by Life Line and several more organizations. The ultimate goal was to collect 200.000 rubles (ca. $8.000) to pay for cardiostimulators and surgery for 2 kids by selling photographs, drawings etc. created by famous artists. Turned out, they have collected over 370.000 rubles (ca. $14.000), which means that 1-2 more kids will be given a helping hand.
While I prefer to not sound pathetic usually, I say, way to go!

Inkscape: Linux Pratique Tutorials

2006-10-02T22:00:02+00:00

Inkscape takes up the major part of the special number of the French magazine Linux pratique. This one, dedicated to Free Vector drawing applications, has 5 Inkscape tutorials, making up half the magazine! More at http://www.linux-pratique.com/index.php?Sommaires.

MenTaLguY: RFK Misrepresents DNC Voting Report

MenTaLguY — 2006-10-02T16:19:15+00:00

Former Slashdot editor pudge checks RFK’s sources. Jaskeet Sekhon, one of the statistical experts who worked on the DNC’s Ohio voting report claims:

RFK’s article is misconceiving, socially damaging and simply wrong—much like his previous one on autism and vaccines. RFK selectively cites the DNC report. More voters supported Bush in Ohio in 2004 than Kerry. There is no scientific evidence that they did not. There were some irregularities (such as the allocation of voting machines), but they were not large enough to change the outcome. Bush won in 2004; Democrats have to admit that he really did if they are to fix their electoral problems much like how an alcoholic first has to admit that s/he has a problem.

(As an aside, Sekhon does believe that the butterfly ballot fiasco cost Gore the election in 2000. His report looks pretty damning, though I’m admittedly not a statistician.)

But also, in a way I think this may be becoming a useful distraction from our current, much graver problem: easily manipulable electronic voting machines. Going on about Ohio without addressing electronic voting is a bit like arguing over who forgot to change the batteries in the smoke detector last week while you’re still living in a wooden fire trap stuffed to the ceiling with oily rags.

While butterfly ballots and partisan influence in the allocation of voting machines may invite convenient incompetence, electronic voting is a playground for active malfeasance, and I’ve no particular reason to trust the Republicans or the Democrats. (It’s nice being an independent.)

Andreas Nilsson: Personal Summit checklist

Administrator — 2006-10-02T10:08:31+00:00

Put myself on the list - done
Fixed couch near the MIT - done (thanks Christine!)
Emptied the money jar - done
Ordered flight tickets - done
Made sure to not pack fluids - pending

Brian Tarricone: Mixed Weekend

Brian — 2006-10-02T01:48:56+00:00

The weekend has been fairly good, though with a bit of sadness involved.

Friday I was supposed to meet Phil at his office for their weekly 4pm ‘beer bash’, but there was too much work to do, so I didn’t make it. Since I moved into Mike’s group last Friday, I’ve had a bit more time-critical things to do. We have to have a beta build ready by tomorrow, so there was quite a bit of pressure to get as much done as possible on Friday. I eventually left around 7pm after getting a lot done; Liz had asked if I wanted to join her for dinner. After first trying Tofu House (small Korean place, despite the name), where we just couldn’t find parking, and there were people waiting outside for a table, we tried Gordon Biersch, which was ridiculoulsy crowded; we didn’t really want to wait at least a half hour. So we walked across the street to Empire Tap Room, which I hadn’t been to before. The food was good (and very filling), though a bit on the expensive side. I had a chicken/pasta dish with a light cream sauce. We decided not to get gelato, as we were both a bit full, so I dropped Liz off and went home.

Saturday I got up reasonably early, though I still haven’t gotten myself back onto the nice 8am schedule I had before last weekend. Andy had picked up the U-Haul trailer to pack for their move, so I picked up Liz and we went over to A&N’s to help them load up the cars. Andy was rather organised, marking and weighing boxes, and recording where everything was in a spreadsheet. We just barely made it to the public scale before they closed at 2pm (the Air Force is paying their moving expenses based on the weight of what they moved), and again just barely made it to Ming’s for dim sum. Since it was so late, the food selection wasn’t great (and wasn’t all as hot as I’d like), but it was still a good (albeit late) lunch. Afterwards we stopped for gelato, and I took everyone home.

I bummed around in my apartment for a while, and Daph came by to pick me up at 6:30. We headed to HP Pavilion for the Sharks game, where they ended up kicking Calgary’s collective ass, 5-1. The game wasn’t very well-played, I thought: Calgary actually had a decent offense, but SJ’s defense was based more on luck and the raw skill of the goalie than actual strategy. SJ’s offense wasn’t particularly noteworthy, but managed to get in several well-timed shots (a couple during power plays, IIRC). Annoyingly, there were these 4 annoying girls in front of us who kept talking (loudly) about things not related to hockey. Fortunately, to even it out, there were about 6 or 7 guys behind us who were a bit drunk and were absolutely hilarious. It was basically the perfect amount and type of drunk: funny without being overly obnoxious. They’re all season ticket holders, but unfortunately they don’t all actually have those seats, so we may not be treated to their brilliant commentary for the rest of the games. The game ran rather long for some reason; possibly due to a large number of stoppages and 3 or 4 fights on the ice, one of them the refs deciding to just let happen. I didn’t get home until 10:30 or 11 or so.

Today was a bit more relaxed. I drove up to Palo Alto around 10:30am to help A&N with the last-minute stuff, and to see them off. Liz joined a little bit later, and they left around noon. Andy has already planned something fun we can do at some point: Liz and I should fly down to them, and we’ll take a road trip up the CA coast. There are plenty of cool places along route 1 and elsewhere to stop. Should be fun; I hope we actually do it. It really sucks that they’re gone, though I guess it hasn’t really sunk in yet. They’re two on a very short list of friends in the area, and we’ve had a lot of good fun times since I moved out here two years ago.

Liz and I walked to Starbucks for a coffee; we sat and chatted for a half hour or so while drinking, and then I stopped at a couple bike shops to figure out what I want to get. Based on what I want to use the bike for, the opinion was unanimous that what I wanted was a hybrid bike. It’s basically a cross between a mountain, street, and racing bike. The frame is usually lighter than a mtn bike, the wheel rims are racing rims, but the tires are a bit wider (but not as wide as mtn bike tires). Since the last bike I bought (read: my dad bought) was when I was about 10 years old, I really have no idea. Fortunately it’s a bit less complicated than I thought, though I would have had no clue without help. Anyway, the viable brands here seem to be Marin, Diamondback, Giant, and Raleigh. I tried the latter two, and liked the feel of the Raleigh better, though to be fair they didn’t have a Giant model in the right size for me. The place in Palo Alto (The Bike Connection) sells only Marin and Giant; some of them are pretty cheap because they just had a back to school sale and are trying to clear out ‘06 inventory (apparently bikes are like cars both in that they have model years and that they release the next year well before the current year is over). I kinda got a better vibe from The Off Ramp; I felt like they were a bit more knowledgeable, and their selection seemed a bit better. They’re also a 5-minute drive from me, instead of 20 (of course, I’m moving in the spring, probably).

So, I’m just bumming around now. I did a little more bike research online. I’ll probably end up buying something by next weekend; based on what the guy at the store said about the different brands, my impression is that all the hybrid bikes are pretty similar and there are just a few details to work out. The cheapest I’m going to be able to go is going to be around $320, and that’s not including a lock (stolen with my old bike), tire pump (stolen), lights (stolen), and helmet (I think it’s in MD, but I don’t feel like waiting forever for my dad to mail it to me). So I’ll probably end up spending at least $450 total on this, which is about $150 more than I wanted. It’s a good way to spend money, though, I think. The gas savings might not be apparent for quite a long while (especially if I end up moving too far from the office to make a bike ride feasible), but there will be some savings, and I’ll be getting some much-needed exercise to supplement the running and lifting I’ve been doing sporadically.

On a final note, I’m a bit annoyed that the day I decide to go bike shopping turns out to be the first day of rainy season. Forecast says it should be sunny the end of this week and and over the weekend, at least. We’ll see.

Brian Tarricone: Bye-bye, Kitty

Brian — 2006-10-02T00:55:18+00:00

This past Wednesday, one of our three cats, Blackie, died. She was a diabetic, and had apparently developed stomach and intestinal cancer recently. She hadn’t been eating for a few days, and so couldn’t have her insulin shots.

I knew she hadn’t been in the best of shape over the past few months, but I was really hoping I’d be able to make it home to see her while she was still alive.

She was always the sweetest little cat. We found her back when we lived in NJ. She belonged to one of our neighbors down the street, but they treated her like crap. She spent all her time outside (and thus was coverd in fleas), wasn’t well-fed, and hadn’t been spayed. At a very young age she had already had a couple litters of kittens. From that, and beeing fed so poorly, she was a very small cat, and never grew that much. Anyway, she always used to come to our backyard, and we would feed and take care of her. Eventually we decided just to take her in and get her properly cleaned up and checked out. We of course took her with us when we moved to MD.

She was one of the friendliest cats I’ve known, but not in an annoying way: she would constantly want attention, but most of the time would back off if I was busy or just not in the mood. She just wanted to be loved, but respected my space. When she developed diabetes, we didn’t expect her to last all that long, but she did. I don’t recall exactly, but she would have been at least 15 or 16 years old this year.

I haven’t really seen any of the cats that much since I stopped living at home during (at least) the summers, but she’ll definitely be missed.

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: Getting at pixels

2006-10-01T21:17:00+00:00

As discussed in my blog on graphics libraries, common schemes for storing large images are tiles, scanlines and blocks of memory as big as the width * height * size_of_pixel. Tiles are the most common, though. Photoshop, JAI, Krita, GIMP, GEGL, MosfetPaint — these all break up the image in small squares.

The big difference is in how the application or plugin developer accesses the data in the tiles.

Jon Phillips - Inkscape + Open Clip Art Library: 5 ways to contribute to Open Source

jon — 2006-09-30T05:40:50+00:00

This is a great article on 5 ways to cotribute to open source that don’t involve coding. Step on up!

Plus, if anyone is interested in contributing to the projects I’m involved with, please email me and I’ll help plug you in

Dave Neary: Taking a step back

2006-09-29T08:50:51+00:00

Every so often I get so invested in something that I start to go off the rails a little when others don't see things in the same way. At the moment there are two situations like that - one I won't go into, and the other is a long-standing issue in the GIMP community about how to handle abuse in the community.

So I've been getting overly heated on both these issues, and have been trying to keep things moving in the right direction, but I realised yesterday that in both cases my intervention has been counter-productive.

So I'm going to take a step back for a while. Perhaps I'm not looking clearly at the issues any more, and others have ideas which will work better than mine. For the first situation, it means I'm going to take a few days to cool off, and see if anyone else steps up to the plate to move things along.

In the case of the GIMP, that means I'm finally, and definitively, leaving the project. I haven't written any code for the GIMP in a long time anyway, and the project has ceased being fun quite a while ago. I have unsubscribed from all GIMP mailing lists, and bolsh@gimp.org no longer exists. I will also be removing myself from the list of people who handle GIMP donations as soon as possible.

The failure of the project to control the limits of acceptable behaviour of its participants has been a long-standing problem, and needs resolution. But I'm not the person who will get that resolution.

Cyrille Berger: KOffice 1.6 Release Candidat 1

Cyrille Berger — 2006-09-27T21:38:17+00:00

After three weeks of bug smashing, and of polishing, KOffice 1.6 is ready for its first (and hopefully only) Release Candidate. Including a lot of bugs fixes since beta. As it is the last planned release before the final version, we will need a lot of people to start using it for real work.

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: Investigating Image Libraries

2006-09-27T15:38:00+00:00

There’s a tremendous effort being expended in the free software world to create great raster image applications. And that means that there are also a lot of free or open source libraries that could be used as the basis for an image editor application. Still, most applications use their own core. Krita has pigment for color management and kritaimage for pixel manipulation.

Alexandre Prokoudine: On coincidences

Alexandre — 2006-09-25T21:23:47+00:00

Well, I’ve just published a russian translation of a tutorial on GIMP, originally in German, how to draw an exploding planet. The original was published middle August this year at gimpusers.de.

And here is the fun: about a month ago some weird russian guy started a web-site where he claims that a comet is going to crash into Germany end of October this year. He doesn’t supply any facts of course, just some clearly homemade fake video of the comet.

Now the spicy part of the story: the gradient used in the tutorial is shipped with GIMP by default and its name is…. drumroll… “German flag smooth”! I think, God has an outstanding sense of humor

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: Generous!

2006-09-25T17:02:00+00:00

Today I got the official award notification mail from Albert Astals Cid. Seems like it’s not just honor I’m getting — very generously Staikos Computing Services has sponsored two high-end Linux mobile telephones, one of which I’m getting.

The incredible Laurent Montel, who did the lion’s share of porting KDE to Qt4, also gets one of these phones. Tink tells me it’s a Motorola Rokr E2. Very cool! Apparently it doubles as an mp3-player. You should have heard the agonized squeals from my three very jealous teenage daughters!

Alexander Neundorf, who contributed so much to the success of replacing autotools with cmake has gotten a video iPod sponsored by Ricoh. I’m not sure what would have made my kids more jealous…

Linux New Media — publishers of Linux Magazine, which is miles better than Linux Format (not a difficult feat) and which I read with more pleasure than Linux Journal nowadays, is giving all award winners a yearly subscription to one of their magazines. Yay for Linux New Media!

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: Birthday Bounty!

2006-09-25T01:59:00+00:00

Today’s my birthday — and, unsuited to my age as the sentiment is, I’m impressed by the bounty I’ve bagged. Episode 9 in Ken Don Rosa’s epic history of Uncle Scrooge. A flask of very, very nice peppermint bath foam. A box of delicious Belgian pralines. A very, very cool Danish design wrist-watch. A dvd of the 1917 Dutch moving picture “Het Geheim van Delft” (I love ancient moving pictures, I’m a complete Douglas Fairbanks aficionado) and a dvd of Eisenstein’s Potemkin, a movie I’ve always wanted to watch.

And to cap it all, tonight Thomas Zander phoned from Dublin to tell me Krita has bagged the Best Application Akademy Award! Whee! Yippee! Hurray! No way anyone is going to believe the width, height, brightness and general enormousness of the grin I’m wearing right now.

Hey, Bart, Cyrille, Casper, Adrian, Michael, Gabor, Sven, Sander (only Krita team member actually in Dublin), Emanuele, Ronan, thanks! Krita has a great team! And all our incidental contributors, bug reporters, testers, users — everyone who has helped making Krita a better use for processor cycles around the world, thanks!

Virtual Guinness for everyone! To Krita 1.6! And again: to Krita 2.0.

Cyrille Berger: On the road to Krita2

Cyrille Berger — 2006-09-21T22:05:20+00:00

While everyone seems to be packing and preparing for the Akademy, now that KOffice 1.6 is at the last stage of release, I started yesterday to forward port my changes from 1.6 to trunk.

My first impressions weren't so good. A lot of cosmetic changes, a lot of new stuff to relearn. But after a while, you get used to them, and most of them makes a lot of sense, even more sense than what was before in Qt3/KDE3.

Cyrille Berger: fewer bugs and new icons

Cyrille Berger — 2006-09-19T21:28:42+00:00

Fewer bugs

While I have been away in Fermo (a nice Italian city) last week to attend a summer school for my PhD, I was somehow expecting a flood of bug reports against krita 1.6 Beta1, but I got disappointed, or should I say: I got a pleasant surprise, there was very few bug reports, I can see two possibilities, either no one tested it or there was a very few number of visible bugs. Somehow, I tend to think that it is the second solution, mostly because krita's internal architecture hasn't changed much between 1.5 and 1.6 which means that there was less possibilities to add bugs in core functions. On the other, I tend to think that unfortunately, very few people test beta version, and that a lot of issues will be discovered after the release of 1.6.0.

New icons

If you look at the krita tool bar on the image bellow, you will notice the lack of uniformity of our icons, and how the interface really looks bad because of it:

A few weeks ago, an artist, Ronan Zeegers offered us to create a complete set of icons to replace what we had until now:

The result is really awesome, I really love those new icons and the look krita has now due to them.

While it brings uniformity to the interface, unfortunately it is not themable yet, but I think that those black and white icons won't cause any visual trouble with other icon themes than crystal. And hopefully for Krita2/KDE4, all those icons (or other ones, but specialized for krita) will be moved to the Oxygen theme, and we won't need anymore to maintain our own custom icons.

Dave Neary: No, I'm not bitter

2006-09-18T16:21:19+00:00

If Lyon had been chosen rather than sunny Birmingham for GUADEC 2007, we could have had a conference reception here.

I don't want to make people jealous or anything, just saying...

Dave Neary: The GIMP usability

2006-09-18T13:34:49+00:00

Over the years, the GIMP has taken a lot of stick about its usability - there's even a mini-fork to work around some of the most common complaints.

But fairly quietly, without any huge fanfare, Sven Neumann, the GIMP's co-maintainer along with Mitch Natterer, has been working on making usability part of the GIMP's DNA. First, he started working with Ellen Reitmeyer from KDE and OpenUsability, implementing techniques like paper prototyping. We brought Peter Sikking to the Libre Graphics Meeting in Lyon in March to discuss usability with the GIMP developers. And recently, we co-announced that OpenUsability would be funding work for a student on the GIMP.

In the past I've been critical of Sven, sometimes he can come across as abrupt, and there is no room for interpretation when he disagrees with you. But I have been very impressed with his management of the project and in particular with respect to usability, and I think that we're going in the right direction as a community.

So - I know we don't say it often enough - thanks Sven. Your leadership and example have kept the GIMP alive over the past few years.

Alexandre Prokoudine: VIPS magic

Alexandre — 2006-09-18T13:22:45+00:00

Recently a friend of mine gave me a whole CD of scanned public domain fonts waiting to be digitized. The usual way I did it before is importing scans of every glyph into Inkscape, then drawing Bezier curves over those bitmaps and saving the result as plain SVG files, then importing them into a FontForge project (sadly, I’m not keen of FF’s native Bezier curve tool).

The problem was that each file is a ca. 7300×12400 px large, 8bit, greyscale PNG, varying from 8 to 13 Mbytes. Both GIMP, Krita and display of ImageMagick practically freezed my X session, trying to load it (I do have 2 gigs of tile cache set in GIMP). No image viewer I had around could display any of them without eating all of available resources. But I was still going to find some tool that would let me view and visually blast each scan into separate glyphs.

The solution came as nip2 — a front-end to excellent VIPS — a “free image processing system half-way between Photoshop and Excel”. Not only it loaded each file in a couple of seconds, but let me pan around and zoom and crop without any painful waiting, not even speaking about killing X.

I wonder if the related code from VIPS could be massively reused in other graphics applications, so that noone would ever have the experience that I had.

Dave Neary: Rob Levin, RIP

2006-09-18T06:31:33+00:00

I have know Rob Levin through OPN and Freenode for nearly 10 years. He was committed to his vision of freenode as a place for free software projects to interract, and provided a valuable service to many projects. I know that his efforts to fundraise by broadcasting on the network annoyed some people, but so be it. Rob gave so much to the cause of free software, his influence will be felt for years.

The last thing I want to have to do on a Monday morning is read of the death of someone I knew and respected, so it was a shock to read this morning that Rob died over the weekend after being seriously injured in a road acident last week. My thoughts go out to his family. Goodbye Rob.

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: Er…

2006-09-17T21:58:00+00:00

At least once a year, I type rm -rf bla * instead of rm -rf bla*… Today was this year’s occasion. And before I knew what happened, the blog directory had vanished. I do have a recent backup, of course, but I cannot find it. Probably because I found a really good off-site place for it that I subsequently have forgotten. Just like a squirrel forgets his nut-cache. In any case, I found a slightly less recent backup — we’re back in May now.

Boudewijn Rempt - Krita: Computers we’ve owned

2006-09-17T21:56:00+00:00

The untimely demise of calcifer II, the server that was bringing you my blog entries, and the quick replacement of it by calcifer III sent me reminiscing about computers past and present.

Inkscape: Creating book cover art with Inkscape

2006-09-16T01:00:02+00:00

linux.com is running an article on using Inkscape to create book cover art.

Inkscape: Inkscape 0.44.1 Unleashed - Download Now

2006-09-15T20:00:01+00:00

The Inkscape community announced the release of Inkscape 0.44.1 today. This version represents several weeks of work by the community in order to fix several crashes on windows, Mac OS X, and other packaging issues which have come up from our last successful release, 0.44, which introduced substantial features like graphical layers, clipping and masking support, and native PDF export with transparency. For a full listing of changes, please see the Release Notes. Please visit www.inkscape.org and see what you would like to help the project in solving, download Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X packages, and see the community submitted screenshots.

Dave Neary: Common (?) use-case

2006-09-15T08:06:32+00:00

Our computer is primarily a home machine - there's myself, my wife, and now my son who use the computer regularly.

We want to keep some information (documents, bookmarks, email, saved passwords) separate, but we want to share a certain number of resources (family photos, music) across all accounts.

Ideally in this use-case, if Anne imports photos from the camera's memory card, I should have read/write access to the photos afterwards and they should automagically appear in f-spot. Likewise, if I import tracks from a CD into my rhythmbox repository, Anne would like to have those tracks appear automatically when she starts it up.

I know this is possible with some trickiness - I add all users on the machine to the same group, and set up /home/photos, /home/music and so on to have permissions ug+rwx with the gid bit set on the directories, and then set up symlinks to the relevant directories for each user so that things Just Work, but I imagine that this kind of usage (share some stuff, don't share other stuff, in a small household) is something that comes up quite a lot - most people probably solve the problem by just having everyone use the same account, and storing documents in different directories.

Is there a better way to solve this problem in fspot/gthumb/rhythmbox/...? A preference to let someone point to a shared repository of music/photos?

Ted Gould: UNESCO Young Digital Creators

2006-09-14T17:27:00+00:00

The University of Art and Design Helsinki along with UNESCO have created an kit for educators called the UNESCO Young Digital Creators. It involves giving software and lesson plans to educators wanting to teach young people how to create in the digital world. I think this is awesome. I'm so proud that they put Inkscape on the CD.

MenTaLguY: Bush Shows His True Colors

MenTaLguY — 2006-09-14T04:06:26+00:00

In the wake of Bush’s interview with Matt Lauer, Rod Dreher comments on the administration’s posturing over torture.

MenTaLguY: Lackadaisy

MenTaLguY — 2006-09-14T01:39:12+00:00

Lackadaisy is a manic tale of bootleggers and mayhem in Prohibition-era St. Louis, told with cute cartoon kitties.

Dave Neary: Mike Milinkovich, come on down

2006-09-13T13:34:52+00:00

Mike, if you hear about this, your eclipse.org address is blocking my mail with a blacklist.

Can you mail me from an address that doesn't use them, so that I can ask you a question, please?

Bryce Harrington: 9/11 Milestone

2006-09-13T01:00:04+00:00

This is pretty disturbing:

While President Bush and other Republican politicians spent the day
exploiting the memory of those we lost five years ago, the nation
overlooked a grim milestone: More Americans have now died in Iraq than
died on 9/11. Iraq didn't attack us on that day, and our misguided
policy there has now taken more American lives than Al Qaeda.

DARK MILESTONE: More Americans Have Now Died In Iraq Than Died On 9/11

Bryce Harrington: Inkscape PLUG Presentation

2006-09-12T09:00:06+00:00

Last Thursday I gave a talk about Inkscape at the Portland Linux/Unix Group at PSU downtown. It was extremely cool; the talk went _quite_ well. It was one of those situations where the audience members would pipe up with the perfect question to lead into your next slide. :-)

Rather than present a bunch of slides, I constructed my talk in a three part scheme: First, some canned slides to answer basic questions like what is Inkscape, and why do we work on it. Second, a lengthy demo of Inkscape, demonstrating drawing of a mock logo. And third, a slideshow of works from Inkscapers much more skilled than I. This format seems to work quite well for me; I cover the basics, then have plenty of time to interact with the audience, demonstrate solutions to questions they raise, etc. and finally wrap up with a quick run-thru of a bunch of stuff too advanced for me to easily show off.

Inkscape is embarrassingly easy to give presentations on. It's extremely visual, has lots of really cool (and directly useful) features, isn't already well known, and pretty easy to install anywhere. Oh, plus it won't crash in the middle of your presentation. ;-)

In semi-related news, Terri told her new 5th grade class about Inkscape, and has even gotten one of her students to try it out. :-) I've volunteered to go in and give an Inkscape lesson at some point.