Free Food (for Cowboys)

Today I discovered the fun of using Blam! to read CIA RSS feeds. It is a pleasant way to keep track of commits to projects I’m interested in, and I suspect I will be using it a lot in the future. Also today but far away in India Nat and Trow held a beagle hackfest and the results are impressive. The tomboy indexing alone would have made it notable but when you add all the other cool hacks it is positively inspiring. All told it was a very good day for Mono and Gnome so I won’t let the fact that I didn’t make any headway on the TextView problems bring me down.

Evolution 2.0 has finally been released and I’m still alive and passably sane. The actual release was sadly anticlimactic. Something that covered so much time, loss and pain seems like it should end with more than a slightly delayed announcement or two.

I tried out tomboy today, and was happily impressed. Then a little sweet talking from Alex ended up causing me several unproductive hours of bug hunting in Gtk#. Tomorrow I plan to share the pain with Mike.

It was my Mom’s birthday on Saturday so I spent the weekend in College Station visting family. While we where there the town was hit by its second infestation of love bugs this summer. Now even on good days I have a strong distaste for College Station, but if you add thick swarms of mating flies to mix it becomes nigh unbearable. Despite that we managed to have an excellent time celebrating.

Kristy at the pool

While I was there I managed to get a lot of f-spot hacking done at night after everyone had gone to sleep. I polished up the popup preview and added the start of a color correction dialog. Now that the feature list is starting to flesh out I’m getting a better feel for how to structure some of the internals and I’m excited to rework them a bit.

With that in mind try out f-spot 0.0.2

Spent last week in Boston hacking on f-spot and hanging out with the boston crew. Trow and Nat came up with some nice hacks. In a bit of interesting synchronicity Garrett pointed me to Adobe’s XMP a few minutes after Trow asked about embedding RDF into images. XMP looks interesting, the specification looks practical and Adobe is already shipping products that use it. I think I’ll try storing f-spot image versioning in XMP chunks this week to get a better feel for things.

Nat and Trow hacking

I’m working on rebuilding the db with the old entries, things should be running again soon.

Ready to Take the Leap?

Not much time for f-spot hacking lately. I checked in some of the changes I wrote while on vacation and integrated a patch from Peter Johanson that makes f-spot build with (and require) Gtk# from cvs. I’ve still got a couple of patches to review from other people I hope to get to them very soon. I also need to figure out some issues with how the UI should behave with draging multiple items to another widget with multiple active selections. It makes a lot of sense to allow this in the f-spot UI but there aren’t a lot of other examples of this type of behavior in the GNOME world.

Evolution work is still moving foward slowly but surely. The new “new” dialogs are in and only have some minor tweaking left. Hopefully things will be a smooth jog until 2.0.

In Evolution news I’m
working on implementing the new item dialogs Anna designed for Evolution 1.5. It is fairly straight forward process, but I keep finding myself wishing that I could write it in mono. I’ve definitely been spoiled while working on F-Spot.

After the monkey drawing I wanted to spend more time working on coloring in the gimp and getting more complete scenes done. When I’m just randomly sketching I tend to focus on faces and characters more than backgrounds. This is pretty common, people and faces are more interesting to most of us than backgrounds and therefore more fun to draw, but is also leads to a lot of unfinished looking work. So last night as an exercise I tried to
spend some time doing a full scene. I started with a pencil sketch, then I did
a very quick and dirty inking job with pen on a piece of vellum over the sketch. I scanned the vellum, then did some cleaning and fixups.

Progression

The results are technically pretty poor but overall I’m fairly happy with the drawing. It also feels like I’m beginning to shake the rust off the my gimp work. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep some time set aside for drawing over the next few weeks.

I spent some time this weekend getting Drag and Drop (DnD) working in F-Spot. It isn’t finished but basic DnD now works in the icon list. This adds a surprising amount of functionality, for instance now you can drag Images to the gimp toolbar to edit them, drag them to gnome-terminal to get the filnames, or drag them to nautilus to burn a cd. Many of these task will have more direct support inside F-Spot eventually, but for now the DnD adds a lot.

While I was busy dragging images all around the desktop I dropped one onto the face icon in the Evolution contact editor. It appears the addressbook needs to be more careful about resizing images it receives. A 3.1MB jpeg brings evoluton to a grinding halt as
it gets passed back and forth to evolution-data-server. This is a pretty common situation with 1.5, lots of promising new features but most still need polish.

Taking a step back

My bithday came and went with no new insight or loss of life. One of the presents I received was a new USB Wacom tablet. The new one is small enough to carry around with my laptop which means I may actually find time to do some more computer related artwork.
The monkey above is the first work I’ve done in a while and I’m definitely feeling rusty. On a side note restarting the X server each time I plug in the tablet is a constant reminder of how far we still are from Utopia.

I’ve been feeling very inspired by various plans and ideas lately, but I’ve been completely unable to convert that inspiration into any sort of action. As a result I’ve not accomplished much of note in the last week. That said I finally got drag and drop working to the various source lists in Evolution.

Miguel keeps telling everyone how much faster the mphoto icon list was than the F-Spot icon list, so I spent a tiny amount of time checking if F-Spot was doing something obviously wrong. The only change I’ve made so far is reversing the priority of the thumbnail loading queue which seems to have helped a bit but still didn’t placate Miguel. More hunting to go.

Searching

When I was young and a lot more reckless than I am now I used to joke with people I was close to that I would never live to see 21. It was only partly a joke, I had real trouble imagining the me that I was then ever managing to live through all the self destructive acts that I indulged in, or being responsible for
much of anything. Tomorrow I’ll be 30 and it is quite obvious now that the joke was on me.

Did some drawing yesterday. A small pen and ink sketch of a monkey inspired
me to fill a dozen or so pages with the same monkey in various poses. Went out
with friends later to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day.

I read Havoc’s proposal and while I don’t agree with his conclusions, the discussion is interesting. Paolo and Miguel have covered everything I’d like to say better than I could say it, so instead of adding words to the debate I’ll just vote with code.

I released F-Spot - 0.0.1 today, please give it a try.