TedPage

I finished Michael Moore's book Dude, Where's My Country? It was... okay. It seems like a rush job to get something out before the election, and feels like it needs a couple more drafts. It is written in a typical Moore style, which is antagonistic and slightly misleading. But, it does have lots of good material in it.

It is much like Fahrenheit 9/11. I wish that Moore would tone things down a bit, it would anger people less, and get the facts out to those who need to know. Instead, he overstates the impact of actions and extends some undo blame to the Bush Whitehouse. Not that they don't deserve much blame, but he goes too far. There is excellent material that doesn't get talked about, but it is hidden in hyperbole.

In the end, I paid $6 for the book in the Barnes and Noble bargain bin. I got my money's worth. I'm not sure I would have paid too much more.

posted on Mon, 27 Jun 2005 at 22:26 | permanent link

Kevin Wixson just sent me a link to the presentation that he gave at Kalamazoo LUG. It's a good overview presentation that is under a creative commons license, so you could use it to present to your own LUG! (and a more reasonable length than most of mine, I tend to get carried away)

He took some of the slides from my SCALE presentation, which is great, it is wonderful seeing this material used more. And especially to promote Inkscape. When we take over the world, we'll look back on these days fondly.

The other thing that is I found really interesting is that KLUG blogs the minutes of their meetings. I think this is really innovative, and a great way to keep up with the organization if you can't make the meetings. Other LUGs should think about doing this.

posted on Sat, 25 Jun 2005 at 12:09 | permanent link

Steve Phayre turned me on to Google Sightseeing. This website is a collection of links to places and monuments that can be seen using Google Map's satellite imagery. This is fun to play with, and useful for finding thinks like parking lots near places you are going. But, now I can truly travel the world without leaving my web browser thanks to Google sightseeing. Here's some favorites:

• Central Taxi hold at JFK
• Trimarans in Quebec
• 2002 Fritzlers Corn Maze

And, in the same spirit. Here are some places we went on vacation:

• Mt. McKinley (It's a touch overexposed, so I'm not sure I got the exact mountain)
• Denali National Park Visitor's Center
• Glacier Bay (Better picture from NASA)
• Skagway
• Juneau
• Ketchikan

posted on Wed, 22 Jun 2005 at 17:28 | permanent link

I've now returned back to sunny California from... sunny Alaska? Yeah, I took a vacation to Alaska and came back with a sunburn. The weather was unbelievably good for the entire trip. We visited cities that have almost 300 days of cloudy weather a year and had sun all but one day. Very nice.

Alaska is a very beautiful place - lots of mountains, greenery, animals, glaciers, ocean, fjords... Makes you think that we should drill for oil there.

I took a ton of pictures, I'll get them online. Also got some Inkscape work done, but that's already in CVS.

posted on Tue, 21 Jun 2005 at 17:12 | permanent link

Recently, Nokia announced their new Wifi tablet, the Nokia 770. It is cool because it runs open source software, but it also has a great form factor for many users. It's powerful enough to check e-mail, surf the web, and word process. It is also portable. I see more computers going this way in the future.

But, when I see a new device like this I think: How can I get Inkscape on it? Or, more specifically, Inkboard (which will be integrated back into Inkscape sometime soon). It would be very cool to be able to use the tablet features to draw, while working on the same document with someone else, even in the same room.

Plus, it would be fun way to play Pictionary with a large group. The person drawing can be using the 770 to draw. You hook a laptop to a projector which shares the same document. As the person draws it is up on the projector and everyone can guess at what is being drawn. Brings a lot more people into the game -- well, it lets a lot of people who can afford $3000 in hardware into the game.

I applied for a development copy of the 770 to try this out. But, I'm not sure if Pictionary is on their roadmap.

posted on Thu, 09 Jun 2005 at 18:38 | permanent link

Probably the most heated discussion in Inkscape 0.41 was the addition of a dialog stating that some extensions failed to load. When I first wrote the dialog it was fun, but it later got revised to be more mature. But, ever since then, it has been a constant discussion on the Inkscape mailing lists. Finally, someone put code behind their thoughts and Mental has removed the dialog.

Now, I don't know what the real solution is, but it seems the popular opinion was against the dialog. Many users got confused by it, and thought that Inkscape wouldn't work overall -- and some even reverted to earlier versions of Inkscape. These are not good things. But, the questions we got before that included "Why doesn't this feature work?" and "Would you implement this?". Having those questions constantly isn't good either.

I think that biggest thing I've learned from this is that users don't understand the difference between warnings and errors. We used the GTK+ warning properly, and the icon shows that, but people don't understand that. Any pop-up piece of data is an error.

What we'll do in the future versions of Inkscape is unknown, but I think that we need a solution that does the following:

• Inform the user that something happened that they can fix
• Tell them where to look for more information

Users are a non-trivial problem. (NP-complete?)

posted on Wed, 08 Jun 2005 at 17:14 | permanent link

Apple has done the previously unthinkable, they have converted to x86. While that's what everyone has said, I don't think that is what Apple really meant. I think what they are really saying is that they are going to support PPC and x86, and make them work together, unknowingly to the user. This is something that Sun tried with Java, and it never really happened. I think that Apple approach is much more sane.

I think that Apple is putting itself in an interesting position. They can, on a model by model basis, put 4 of the top chip vendors in competition for what ever they want. If Intel can't deliver, AMD or IBM can. If they want something with more networking, Freescale is on tap. They're in a very powerful position now, the point where they don't need any one company.

And, for the humor aspect, here is a post on Slashdot about how the changes effect this guy. I'm glad that I didn't make any bets on this.

posted on Wed, 08 Jun 2005 at 00:42 | permanent link

I was asked to explain how I deal with all my digital photos, so I'm posting it here. It isn't a complex process, but it is one that has gone through refinement over the last couple of years. I'm sure it will in the future too. One of the most daunting tasks creeping up behind the beginning digital photographer is managing their material. Here's one solution.

• I start by downloading the photos from my camera using GThumb over USB. The reason I use USB and not the flash card directly is an issue of the connector. After a long discussion once, a friend and I decided it was best to use the USB connector because it designed for greater wear. Plus, if it was to wear out, I could still use the flash cards independent of the USB. Good to wear that one out first.
• I have my photos organized into two high level directories: Publish and Unsorted. The downloaded photos first go into Unsorted. This allows me to do the rest of the work here without putting them on the web. Also, it allows me to choose the order that they get published.
• In the Unsorted directory I put the downloaded pictures into their own folder. This folder's name is in the format:

  number + underscore + description

  The number is significant because the first digit is the month in question, and the second is a sequence in that month. The month digit is in hex, so that one digit can be used to signify all 12 months. An example of this is 55_Prague, we went to Prague in May and it was the 5th event I took photos of in that month.
• The pictures are all placed into a Subversion repository. This is done so that changes to the pictures don't result in the originals being lost. I started out changing the names of the files, img_5323.jpg to img_5323.noredeye.jpg, but that became too difficult to manage. I'm using Subversion because it supports spaces in the filenames, and has good binary support. I'm not sure what the largest Subversion repository is, but mine is 7.5GB currently. I have found the the file system backend scales better with the larger repository size.
• I now start to add information to the slides. For this is use a tool called BINS, which also creates the webpages for me. It takes an XML file for each image, combines it with a template, and creates the webpage. This XML file can be edited easily using a little utility that comes with BINS called: bins_edit. The first step is just to add a location, which I try to do to each picture before the next step...
• Deleting pictures. I usually delete pictures in three phases. The first phase is just pictures that are bad. Out of focus, bad exposure, or someone stepped in the way. The second phase is more complex, usually it consists of things like having too many good pictures of a similar subject or just another really nit-picky details. The last pass is really painful, and sometimes doesn't happen. It usually only happens if I have nothing to say about an image, or I really can't fix it using post-processing.
• For post-processing, I use The GIMP. Not much more to say there, except that it is excellent and free. I always save as JPEG with 99% quality. Make sure to get a new version that caries EXIF data through the pipeline (otherwise your pictures don't rotate).
• After writing all the text, I then spell check it using Aspell. Because the Aspell command line doesn't use multiple files, I specifically do it like this:

  find . -name "*.xml" -exec aspell -H -c {} \;

• I then send the text to my editor (my wife) who makes sure it sounds sane.
• Lastly, I move them to the Publish folder and post them on the Internet for everyone to see.

So, perhaps that explains why it takes me so long to get photos online. I've thought about changing the whole thing many times, just to make it faster. But, in the end, I always like the quality of output that I get. I'm really not going to go back and make it better later if I don't have time now.

posted on Wed, 01 Jun 2005 at 13:05 | permanent link