Free Food (for Cowboys)

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.

Saw Blackballed: The Bobby Dukes Story tonight at the SXSW world premiere. It is an authentically funny mock documentary starring Rob Corddry about the return of a champion paintballer after 10 years in exile. If you get a chance I definitely recommend seeing it, especially if you enjoy Rob’s work on the Daily Show.

The actual movie poster is much better

Downtown Austin

Kristy and I spent the whole weekend out and about, every night was very distinct, and I’m after it all I’m feeling a little exhausted. No progress on evolution or f-spot. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken an entire weekend completely off work and it feels good. I wish it was easier to find the balance between relaxation and productivity.

More f-spot progress. Basic Gallery export is now working using the gallery remote protocol. The code and UI are still a complete mess but the basic functionality is
there now. Getting more familiar with c# and the class libraries has been fun,
I’m starting to feel more comfortable working with them. I hope to start attacking some of the remaining problems with the database soon and come up with a structure that is one step closer to final.

Evolution work
has been slow, especially refactoring the Drag and Drop work. I’m still having
a lot of trouble finding a grove with anything evolution related. Everything I
accomplish feels like it takes several times the effort it should.

The rest of life remains a bit tumultuous. I’ve been having real trouble feeling content or relaxing, too many thoughts running through my head. Tonight was a little better, Kristy and I talked about things for a while. It feels good to know I am deeply loved.

Kristy on the couch

Back in Austin after the Birthday weekend. Happily I got a lot of f-spot work done while in College Station. There were some changes needed to catch up with
gtk-sharp-0.17 then I
spent a fair amount of time looking over the .Net http classes for the first time. After I got some very basic posting and cookies working I found and fixed a
tiny bug in mono’s System.Web.HttpUtility class.
This is all preparation for some fun new f-spot features. Finally to top it all off Edd Dumbill wrote an interesting entry about GNOME content creation and f-spot.

Spent some time doing Evolution treeview Drag&Drop, not very exciting, needs more work. Evolution 2.0 seems to be slowly marching closer even if it still seems impossibly far away.

Mom decorating Gran’s cake

I’m in College Station, home of Texas A&M
and site of my greatest defeat, visiting my grandmother for her 87th birthday.
She lives here with my parents and I always enjoy visiting but if it weren’t for them I’d love to leave this town behind for good. I drew this sketch over Christmas and to me if captures something key about her , a sadness in her that is
both accurate and surprising.

Gran at Christmas 2003

More hacking on f-spot, things are going well. I think it is almost to the point of being useful enough that people should give it a try and let me know where it comes up short for them. I planned to make a 0.1 release a couple of weeks ago but I got a bit behind and haven’t had the heart to finish it yet.