Free Food (for Cowboys)

As part of the work I’m doing to add raw file support to F-Spot I’m making a public request for sample raw files. Anyone who is interested in seeing their camera supported should send sample raw images to fspotraw@gmail.com. In this case the more obscure the camera the better as I already have sample images from many recent Canon and Nikon cameras. Since the long term goal is to have some of these included in a test suite please explicitly state any licensing and copyright restrictions that apply to your images.

In related news I’ve been in Boston all week working on F-Spot and doing some basic usability testing in Anna’s lab. The testing has been extremely interesting and I’m excited to do more when F-Spot is more mature. As part of getting ready for things I’ve added some features and ui tweaks to CVS that are still only partially complete. So if you are runing the latest and greatest use a little care and don’t expect everything to work.

I planned on sharing some thoughts about the intersection between Joe’s desire to upload photos Nat’s plans for social lubrication through software and F-Spot. Then I realized I could just think them and save on the typing.

So instead I bring you F-Spot 0.0.9. This is a very friendly release, please be gentle.

This is just a short announcement F-Spot 0.0.8. This is the first F-Spot release to include support for importing photos directly from the camera via libgphoto2 and I’d love to get as much testing as possible. Please try give it a try.

Sunday was my brother Brad’s birthday and Tuesday was Kristy’s birthday. My family usually has one big meal with everyone to celebrate both, so Monday night we all went out downtown. We had a very nice time at dinner and stayed out later for drinks until Brad mentioned he wasn’t feeling very well and we all parted ways. By Wednesday night it was clear that I was sick with something and a few calls revealed that almost everyone who had been at the birthday dinner had also come down with the flu. Thanks Brad.

Brad looking happy at a different party

Fortunately I managed to make an appointment with my doctor and got some Tamiflu hoping it might help. Happily by the next day I was feeling noticeably better. Still very sick but uncomfortable sleepy sick instead of completely miserable sick. I’m willing to credit the Tamiflu for the relatively mild symptoms. I hope by tomorrow I’ll be back to full strength.

F-Spot work is still progressing nicely considering the circumstances. Last week I made a 0.0.7 release that pointed out that I need to be more careful about which version of gtk# I test releases with. The current freeze policy for the stable gtk# branch is slightly less than frozen. and in fact because of back ported fixes things are now even more fluid. Since I really don’t want to force anyone to use the stable branch directly from SVN (even though it is much better) from now on I’ll double check that I’m not using some as yet unreleased entry point. Mike has promised a new release soon.

On the positive side of API additions Ben has taken the time to add most of the methods in System.Drawing.Rectangle to Gdk.Rectangle and promised to add overloads to a bunch of the drawing functions. While the changes are small they’ll make a lot of f-spot widget drawing code prettier to look at, and that isn’t a bad thing.

$100 portable computers make me dream of a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.

In celebration of cedar season here in Austin I bring you Cedar: The Plague of Trees. If I’m a little slow in responding to people or processing patches for the next few days it’s only because I can hardly move.

I’ve spent the last few weeks working very hard on getting F-Spot into a very usable state. In an attempt to get all the new code out to the masses and tested I’ll be making weekly F-Spot releases for the next few weeks. So it is my great pleasure to announce F-Spot 0.0.6, please check it out.

All the news of the new Novell hires has been very exciting. It is great to see talented people working full time on projects that will help the free desktop mature.

img_6624

Originally uploaded by lewing.

I’m testing the flickr blog posting utilty. I’ve been working a little on integrating the flickr export code I wrote a few months ago into f-spot. Things are coming along nicely but there is still a fairly large amount of work to do. I also started work on a gnome-vfs based export, but ran into several problems with the current gtk-sharp gnome-vfs bindings.

Last night while testing the flickr upload code I managed to reach my free upload limit for the month. That made testing difficult, so I went ahead and paid for a pro account. I’m interested to see how much I’ll end up using it.

I thought that was enough pain for one night but it turns out that was only the beginning. While writting a tests case for one of the gnome-vfs problems I managed to wipe out my public_html directory here on primates. I’m in the process of rebuilding things but please bear with me.