Graphics Planet

Kees Cook: Ubuntu security repository structure

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:04:22 +0000

Miguel Ruiz asked about Ubuntu security repositories. Here’s how things are done:

The “security.ubuntu.com” archive contains explicitly only the “$RELEASE-security” pockets. It is included in all Ubuntu sources.list files so that the package manager knows what the most recent security release of a package will be.

The central “archive.ubuntu.com” server (and all the Ubuntu mirrors) also contain the “$RELEASE-security” pockets, in addition to the rest of the archive (and will continue to have all pockets — which answers the core of Miguel’s question). While mirrors are not required to mirror the -security pocket, it certainly helps with the load on the primary Ubuntu archive servers.

The “security.ubuntu.com” entry is last in sources.list, giving the option of pulling an updated package from an earlier mentioned mirror (resulting in a faster download for the user, and less bandwidth used by the central Ubuntu archive servers). In the case that the mirror is behind, the package is available directly from “security.ubuntu.com”. In this way, mirrors cannot (accidentally or intentionally) “go rogue” — the latest security updates are always visible on the security archive server.

Allan Brito: A arte dos clips de abertura e encerramento de filmes

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:18:41 +0000

A grande maioria dos filmes hoje em dia, pelo menos os que têm mais recursos financeiros para a produção, investem em pequenos clips de abertura e encerramento. Na maioria das vezes, esses clips são chatos e intermináveis, mas alguns deles são muito legais, integrando de maneira muito eficiente e mostrando sempre grafismos ou efeitos que [...]

Zack Rusin: Fast graphics

noreply@blogger.com (Zack) — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:05:06 +0000

Instead of highly popular pictures of llamas today I'll post a few numbers. Not related to llamas at all. Zero llamas. These will be Qt/KDE related numbers. And there's no llamas in KDE. There's a dragon, but he doesn't hang around with llamas at all. I know what you're thinking: KDE is a multi-coltural project surely someone must be chilling with llamas. I said it before and I'll say it again, what an avarage KDE developer, two llamas, one hamster and five chickens do in a privacy of their own home is none of your business.

Lets take a simple application, called qgears2, based on David Reveman cairogears and see how it performs with different rendering backends. Pay attention to zero relation to llamas or any other animals. The application takes a few options, -image: to render using a CPU based raster engine, -render: to render using X11's Xrender and -gl to render using OpenGL (-llama option is not accepted). It has three basic tests, "GEARSFANCY" which renders a few basic paths with a linear gradient alpha blended on top, TEXT that tests some very simple text rendering and COMPO which is just compostion and scaling of images.

The numbers come from two different machines. One is my laptop which is running Xorg server version 1.4.2. Exa is 2.2.0. Intel driver 2.3.2. GPU is 965GM, CPU is T8300 at 2.4GHz running on Debian Unstable's kernel 2.6.26-1.
The second machine is running GeForce 6600 (NV43 rev a2), NVIDIA proprietary driver version G01-173.14.09, Xorg version 7.3, kernel 2.6.25.11, CPU is Q6600 @ 2.40GHz (thanks to Kevin Ottens for those numbers, as I don't have NVIDIA machine at the moment).

The results for each test are as follows:

GEARSFANCY
	I965	NVIDIA
Xrender	35.37	44.743
Raster	63.41	41.999
OpenGL	131.41	156.250

TEXT
	I965	NVIDIA
Xrender	13.389	40.683
Raster	(incorrect results)	(incorrect results)
OpenGL	36.496	202.840

COMPO
	I965	NVIDIA
Xrender	67.751	66.313
Raster	81.833	70.472
OpenGL	411.523	436.681

COMPO test isn't really fair because as I mentioned Qt doesn't use server side picture transformations with Xrender but it shows that OpenGL is certainly not slow at it.

So what these results show is that GL backend, which hasn't been optimized at all, is between 2 to 6 times faster than anything out there and that pure CPU based Raster engine is faster than the Xrender engine.

So if you're on an Intel GPU, or NVIDIA GPU rendering using GL will immediately make your application a number times faster. If you're running on a system with no capable GPU then using raster engine will make your application faster as well.
Switching Qt to use GL backend by default would result in all applications running a magnitude times faster. The quality would suffer though (unless HighQualityAntialiasing mode would be used in Qt in which case it would be the same). This certainly would fix our graphics performance woes and as a side-effect allow using GL shaders right on the widgets for some nifty effects.
On systems with no GPU raster engine is a great choice, on everything else GL is clearly the best option.

Rodney Dawes: GNOME Summit, Calendar Widget

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 03:08:14 +0000

The Boston Summit is getting closer every day. The list of attendees is still fairly short though. But if you know you're going, add yourself to the list, and help another hacker make it to town, by booking your tickets and hotel stay on this site. You might even be able to find good weekend deals for the entire weekend, for what a single plane ticket could cost. Or if you're going to any other events, or just taking a trip, please book through this site as well. Much thanks to anyone who does.

In other news, I've gotten the basic drawing bits done for the month view of a nice MVC calendar application widget, done. I started working on it a couple days ago, and so far only have about 600 LOC, including the demo app code, to get what's in the screenshot below. Just a little bit more work, and it should be usable as the month view in an actual calendar app. This is just the beginning to some other stuff that I would like to work on, but don't really have the time, and can't afford to do, right now.

Allan Brito: Vídeos e informações sobre a Siggraph 2008: O Blender 3D está lá!

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:38:34 +0000

Com o passar do tempo, mais e mais material sobre a Siggraph 2008 começa a aparecer na internet, em especial os vídeos produzidos pelos afortunados que conseguiram fazer uma visita a feira desse ano. Infelizmente ainda não tive a oportunidade de fazer uma visita a feira, mas um dia quem sabe, consigo fazer uma cobertura [...]

Yuval Levy: Built To Last

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 00:03:48 +0000

A build for quickly testing the build chain is not the same as a build for packaging and distribution.

Steven Garrity: Branding Bums

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:21:00 +0000

Don’t worry, this wont turn into a baby-blog, but for the time being, that is my world. In looking at cloth diapers, I’ve stumbled across another delightfully odd branding sub-culture. It seems the world of cloth-diaper branding rivals the generic-brand cereal names in delightful absurdity.

Here’s a list of actual cloth diaper brand names:

Fuzzi Bunz
Bum Genius
Monkey Doodlez
Kissaluvs
Happy Heiny’s
Thirsties
Tiny Tush
Bumkins

I thought of a few of my own:

Itty Bitty Shitties™
Wise Old Bowel™
The Dirty Turdies™
Crev-Ass™
Fant-Ass-tic Fannies™

(trademark symbols used for levity only)

Allan Brito: Sistema de cursos a distância sobre computação gráfica atualizado

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 19:55:46 +0000

Como sempre digo nos artigos que escrevo aqui no Blog, uma das minhas atividades profissionais é ensinar computação gráfica, seja qual for a ferramenta ou dimensão 2d ou 3d, gosto de trabalhar com o ensino de aspectos relacionados ao ensino de computação gráfica. Para tentar expandir ainda mais as minhas possibilidades de ensino e ajudar [...]

Meet the GIMP: Episode 057: BLOOD!

info@meetthegimp.org — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:00:07 +0000

Uploaded a new video - all downloads from the first 1 1/4 hours are corrupt!

This week I have a guest on the show. Philippe Demartin from Chile shows how to make letters out of blood without pain and no need to clean up afterwards.

EDIT: Be sure to read the two comments from eBrnd below. They are really good additional material for this show!

No Gimps were harmed in the process of making this podcast!

Just an afterthought: You can use the bumpmapping also with photographies, inserting your logo for example. I’ll look into that.

Next week will see the publishing of the first product of the MTG-Plugin Factory.

Share This Uploaded a new video - all downloads from the first 1 1/4 hours are corrupt! This week I have a guest on the show. Philippe Demartin from Chile shows how to make letters out of blood without pain and no need to clean up afterwards. EDIT: Be sure to read the two comments from eBrnd below. They are really good additional material for this show! No Gimps were harmed in the process of making this podcast! Just an afterthought: You can use the bumpmapping also with photographies, inserting your logo for example. I'll look into that. Next week will see the publishing of the first product of the MTG-Plugin Factory. ;-)Share This

Alexandre Prokoudine: Interview with Krita developers

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:20:28 +0000

Here is the first post-LGM2008 interview. This time it were developers of Krita, the KOffice almighty graphics editor, who dared to cross journalism firing line

(more…)

Zack Rusin: Difference between working and usable

noreply@blogger.com (Zack) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:11:41 +0000

During the last few days I've read a lot of articles about Firefox Qt. I've had a hunting "I've been through this" feeling while reading all of them.

Ars Technica used the following picture to show that it's working:

If there's anything that I'm excited about it's the fact that the initiative came from Mozilla guys not from an outside group. A few years back when Lars and I did the Qt Mozilla port one thing we've realized very quickly is that due to some politics and time constrains on our part there's no way we could maintain that code. We have been talking about it and one of the conclusions was that the port will not succeed unless it's started from within Mozilla itself. Like this port certainly has.

Unfortunately it's not writing code, it's making it work and maintaining it that are the difficult parts. All the articles saying that there's Qt Firefox are just wrong. Code has been written that might allow Qt Firefox to be usable at some point, but just looking at that screenshot shows there's tons of work to be done before that happens.

In general I just don't think that Qt and Mozilla are meant to be mixed. There's ton of duplication all over the place. Qt has a GUI language, Mozilla has a GUI language, Qt is a toolkit, Mozilla has its own toolkit, Qt has networking library, Mozilla has a networking library, Qt has a JS engine, Mozilla has a JS engine, Qt comes with QtWebKit, Mozilla comes with Mozilla... Unless there's some kind of a discussion about integrating those parts then, especially in embedded scenarios, that duplication is far from optimal. I also think that while Qt Firefox port coming from within Mozilla itself 3 years ago would have all Qt/KDE developers compiling it within minutes, that window has closed with the release of QtWebKit in Qt 4.4. Qt/KDE community already has engines they're committed to (Qt engineers have WebKit and KDE engineers either WebKit or KHTML) so the code won't get any community traction from Qt/KDE developers and Mozilla guys will be left having to maintain it themselves.

I think it's certainly a great effort but I doubt the code can get anywhere without support from Qt/KDE community and realistically when talking about web in the the Qt/KDE circles Gecko doesn't even enter the discussion. Not even getting into a discussion about code quality and familiarity with it, big reason for that is that for KDE bug-for-bug compatibility with OS X, despite Mozilla's greater market share, provides a lot more attractive proposition due to similarity of usage of web engines in both environments, e.g. Dashboard widget compatibility. So all in all, great project, just a little too late.

Yuval Levy: Sneak Preview III

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:03:40 +0000

PTBatcher is another addition coming soon to Hugin. This year's Google Summer of Code was very productive.

Hylke Bons: Five new roomies!

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:13:36 +0000

A bit of a late post, but I couldn’t get my hands on a camera.
Last week my cat gave birth to seven kittens. :)
Unfortunately two of them didn’t make it, they were very weak from the start. :(
All are well now.

Pictures:

“Mother with five kittens” and “Dad”.

Allan Brito: Como funcionam as câmeras virtuais em ferramentas 3d?

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:29:12 +0000

O advento de ferramentas e renderizadores cada vez mais poderosos, muitos softwares oferecem opções para ajustar às câmeras virtuais com parâmetros parecidos ou idênticos as reais. Quem já trabalha com fotografia tem clara vantagem no entendimento desse tipo de configuração. Por exemplo, o Henrique Zorzan que anda meio sumido aqui do Blog é fotografo lá [...]

Andy Goralczyk: crappy cellphone pics of acm siggraph 08

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:36:18 +0000

i just returned home from LA after a 3 day trip. our flight was delayed over NY, so i missed my connection (among thousands of others) and had to stay over night. which was not a bad thing since i had the chance to do a little trip into the city.

anyways, siggraph was lots of fun, but very exhausting. i had a great time with Ton (blender guru), Bassam (director of Elephants Dream, now more american than ever), Sacha (director of Big Buck Bunny, now rocking in singapore), Nathan (rigging master and hugging ninja) and William (animation master and danish person)… plus many others from the blender crowd such as Claas E. Kuhnen. (from BlenderArtists fame), Fweeb and Tim Formica (BlenderNation) we had a right schedule, giving presentations at Disney, Siggraph CAF, Rhythm & Hues, lunchtime at Dreamworks. and manning a corner of the HP booth down at the tradeshow exhibit. it was in fact so busy that i missed almost all activities and presentations, oh well. siggraph this year was a bit messy anyway… kinda.

below some crappy pictures i shot with my crappy cellphone camera. i always try to take pictures of things nobody else takes pictures of, that’s why you wont find many photos about siggraph itself. read more actual siggraph stories at Victor’s blog, Claas also has some photos. BlenderNation has some stuff too.

this is nathan, need i say more?

ton’s head is sticking in on the right. we had a true american breakfast that morning: fake coffee with fake burritos, fake pancakes and fake coffee with fake cream…

that day we had also our disney presentation, sadly the mouse doesnt let us take pics of his territory.

the amazing american experience continues on a road trip into the desert on the weekend before siggraph.

nathan is reading 3D research papers during the trip. yes… research papers. needless to say that they were awesome. (texturing directly on the mesh without the need of UV mapping)

also in the blender bus: ton, margreet (front row), william, sacha, (middle row) nathan, bassam and me (in the cheap back seats). we’re on the way to palm springs, to counterbalance the geekfest that siggraph is.

here this strange place called nature. complete with trees and rocks. we were just amazed what technology can build, it must have taken ages to craft all those trees and get them up here into the mountains.

the morning of the first siggraph day, we bumped into Victor Yap who Sacha and i had met in singapore (he’s organizing the blender BOF at siggraph asia) we also finally found an awesome place with real breakfast close to the hotel. that day we had the blender birds of a feather meeting. the room was completely packed. we had a chance to rehearse our upcoming BBB presentation.

i also improvised a quick and dirty, but shameless self promotion of creature factory.

staring in awe at the amazingly ordinary dreamworks parking garage. we had an informal lunch that day with two of the dreamworks fellas (and blender veterans).

dreamworks has an awesome campus in ugly burbank, LA. complete with lake, table tennis, fountains, foosball and gaming room.

hijacking the maxon cinema4D meeting room for last minute presentation rehearsals. (ton has a hate-hate-relationship with maxon). the show itself the next day went by pretty smoothly.

on the pic next to it we see blurry LA lights, forgot when i took it.

ton is driving and william leads the way with his all-knowing iphone. right after the BBB talk we went straight to rhythm & hues to give a more technical presentation of our work. we were happy to see that people were interested in open source dev. someone even commented on how beautiful blender’s interface looks like!

after that we got a little tour of the place and even got a glympse of their in-house software (which basically looks like maya so their freelancers can pick it up quickly).

we also saw the bone-chillingly cold render farm room, crazy dark halls with huge black curtains… what seemed like an endless LAN party was their freelance worker space. upstairs long corridors with original cels from movies like steamboat willie and princess mononoke.

brighter and more artsy was their concept area, lots of casts and sculptures from their past and future projects. of course this is their standard show-off visitor area, so taking pics was allowed.

back at siggraph. nathan stumbled over some of his former teachers and colleagues at cogswell college.

they had a booth at the tradeshow floor, and looped BBB all day long with the caption “cogswell student nathan vegdahl animated and rigged for this movie”… sigh, i wish my school was that nice to me. ;)

on thursday we went to the reception party. the event was held at the LA. dodgers stadium during a baseball game. before i elaborate, some fun trivia.

left: ton’s amazing parking skills. right: corrected by jason van gumster of handturkey studios also known as groo, fweeb and (new, thanks to nathan) jaseeb.

the reception was - masterfully summed up by jason’s expression on the right (2nd pic) - slightly awkward. imagine 5000 geeks crammed into a tiny space in and under the ranks, eating hot dogs, cotton candy and drinking beer and soda. did i mention awkward? i did see a lot of people having fun though… so i still haven’t made up my mind whether this decision was pure genius… or just plain stupid.

some images of manhattan. i had only 5 hours to walk around, but i definitely want to come back. NY generally seems like a nice place. compared to LA it’s much friendlier and at least the streets aren’t dead after 8pm! i walked from times square over broadway into central park. went to the MoMa to grab a copy of the Design and the Elastic Mind book featuring Elephants Dream. down south through the city and north on the hudson river.

after a 3 day epic journey and tale of missed flights, waiting in lines for hours and hours, smelly airplanes and unfriendly airports i finally returned back home. as usual, what remains of siggraph is memories, paper and plastic.

.andy

Máirín Duffy: Fedora 10 Artwork Round 2 Deadline

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:02:09 +0000

Hi folks,

The deadline for round 2 of the Fedora 10 artwork process is 1 September 2008.
Work done for round 2 must be associated with one of the concepts that were proposed in round 1.

If you'd like your favorite F10 theme proposal to make it through round 3, you must have the following 4 pieces of artwork completed and uploaded to your proposal's wiki page:

At least 1 wallpaper draft design

At least 1 vertically-long piece of supporting artwork (for example, a draft firstboot graphic)

At least 1 horizontally-long piece of supporting artwork (for example, a draft anaconda banner graphic)

At least 1 square-ish piece of artwork (for example, the gnome splash or the firstboot/anaconda splashes)

Not sure what theme proposals are available to work on or want to learn more about how our artwork process works? Check out:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/F10Themes

This is a great opportunity to get artwork you worked on in a very popular Linux distro! So let's get moving!! :)

Allan Brito: Coleção de livros sobre animação e efeitos especiais

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:14:34 +0000

Já faz quase uma semana que publiquei uma série de artigos sobre livros relacionados à animação e computação gráfica, desde material estritamente relacionado ao Blender 3D até imagens com arte digital patrocinada pela Autodesk. Mesmo falando tanto sobre esses livros, minha coleção de material da área ainda é modesta se comparada com outras pessoas que [...]

Yuval Levy: Sneak Preview II

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:52:55 +0000

Another feature coming soon to Hugin is a new class of intelligent control point improvement. Celeste prunes bad Control Points (CPs) on moving clouds.

Yuval Levy: Sneak Preview

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 22:50:16 +0000

Google Summer of Code features coming soon to hugin: Fast Preview Window, an OpenGL accelerated preview. Sneak preview with screencast.

Jakub Szypulka: Cube

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:57:29 +0000

Tokbox is a web-based, installer-free VoIP application. Now, for the Tokbox Pidgin/Adium plugin, I created some Tango icons:

This is basically a remake of the original tokbox icons, including two high-resolution icons/logos.

Máirín Duffy: Another try

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 17:00:16 +0000

(let me know if you want the XCF; I don't have a good place to upload it right now. The SVG sources for the original gear shapes that Nicu created are available here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/F10Themes/Gears)

Vladimir Smida (GSoC student): Samples

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:04:46 +0000

According to the second variant of TM area representation (the first one is not clear in connection with samples yet), the “preview area” will be replaced by generated samples (pic1). All the samples will be displayed at once. User will have an opportunity to choose one. (I think one is pretty enough.
In my opinion the samples should be only contributory, without any anticipation of the exactly right options.)

The snapshots and ideas were built using Fattal only because of its numerous settings and also because Fattal is well-known as one of the the most favorite operators by Qtpfsgui community. As you can see in examples proposed below (pic2, pic3), there are not many images as samples. It’s caused by small visual differences in pictures with parameters of different values, so they were generated with a bigger step.

Parameters designed for the samples are:
Alfa (5 values): 0.001__0.2__0.7__1.2__2.0
Beta (6values): 0.6__0.7__0.8__0.9__0.95__1.0

pic1:

pic2:
Samples for alpha, other values fixed (in this case: Fattal[b=.882 s=.81 nr=0 Pg=1])

pic3:
Another example, with bigger visual differences -samples for beta, other values fixed (in this case: Fattal[a=.1 s=.81 nr=0 Pg=1])

One thing I haven’t understood, Giuseppe, is why the “alfa” slider is exponentially growing in your TM widget while beta is held linear? Because of the sensitivity of alpha factor in the Fattal TMO? Or does it have any other reason?

The pictures above propose the idea of generating samples by changing one parameter only. Exploring the factors that affect the resulting HDR image the most I maintain the idea of generating the samples by combination of values of these sliders (at the beginning). E.g. for Fattal (which has nearly the most options from all TMOs) we should consider alpha and beta as the key factors and 4 values of each parameter are quite enough. That’s 16 generated samples which should help to get the approximate result. Only then it would be more reasonable to continue generating samples / changing just one slider.

Alan Horkan: Nokia Fail.

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:09:43 +0000

"Out of memory please delete messages".

Have megabytes of memory on the phone card and yet I'm being asked to delete messages, WTF?
Fail.
The backup and archiving options are less than ideal either. Sigh.

Boudewijn Rempt: Sketching on Saturday

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:00:16 +0000

Yesterday afternoon I played hookey from hacking on Krita's brush engine and settings management code and grabbed pen, ink, pencil and paper and did some analog sketching. I feel I'm slowly getting back a little certainty of purpose in my lines; sketching really is something one should do every day, like coding. Behind the fold, also because there is some full dorsal nudity.

Akkana Peck: Fast Pixel Ops in GIMP-Python

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 04:30:25 +0000

Last night Joao and I were on IRC helping someone who was learning to write gimp plug-ins. We got to talking about pixel operations and how to do them in Python. I offered my arclayer.py as an example of using pixel regions in gimp, but added that C is a lot faster for pixel operations. I wondered if reading directly from the tiles (then writing to a pixel region) might be faster.

But Joao knew a still faster way. As I understand it, one major reason Python is slow at pixel region operations compared to a C plug-in is that Python only writes to the region one pixel at a time, while C can write batches of pixels by row, column, etc. But it turns out you can grab a whole pixel region into a Python array, manipulate it as an array then write the whole array back to the region. He thought this would probably be quite a bit faster than writing to the pixel region for every pixel.

He showed me how to change the arclayer.py code to use arrays, and I tried it on a few test layers. Was it faster? I made a test I knew would take a long time in arclayer, a line of text about 1500 pixels wide. Tested it in the old arclayer; it took just over a minute to calculate the arc. Then I tried Joao's array version: timing with my wristwatch stopwatch, I call it about 1.7 seconds. Wow! That might be faster than the C version.

The updated, fast version (0.3) of arclayer.py is on my arclayer page.

If you just want the trick to using arrays, here it is:

from array import array

[ ... setting up ... ]
        # initialize the regions and get their contents into arrays:
        srcRgn = layer.get_pixel_rgn(0, 0, srcWidth, srcHeight,
                                     False, False)
        src_pixels = array("B", srcRgn[0:srcWidth, 0:srcHeight])

        dstRgn = destDrawable.get_pixel_rgn(0, 0, newWidth, newHeight,
                                            True, True)
        p_size = len(srcRgn[0,0])               
        dest_pixels = array("B", "\x00" * (newWidth * newHeight * p_size))

[ ... then inside the loop over x and y ... ]
                        src_pos = (x + srcWidth * y) * p_size
                        dest_pos = (newx + newWidth * newy) * p_size
                        
                        newval = src_pixels[src_pos: src_pos + p_size]
                        dest_pixels[dest_pos : dest_pos + p_size] = newval

[ ... when the loop is all finished ... ]
        # Copy the whole array back to the pixel region:
        dstRgn[0:newWidth, 0:newHeight] = dest_pixels.tostring()

Good stuff!

Raph Levien: 17 Aug 2008

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 01:58:33 +0000

Thesis back on track

After quite some time of my thesis (on interactive curve design) being stuck, I'm now making good progress again. You can check out the draft chapter on the history of the elastica if you like (soon also to be published as a Berkeley CS tech report).

I had a lot of fun writing that chapter, digging deep into the history of the curve and getting to know the old mathematicians like James Bernoulli better. My advisor is encouraging me to publish it stand-alone. Can anyone recommend a good place, perhaps some kind of history of mathematics journal or conference?

Next up is a similar chapter on the Euler spiral. Then, after that, I finish up my argument characterizing the entire space of 2-parameter splines, and I'm over the hump - the rest is numerical techniques and applications, which will require making a bunch of figures (time consuming but rewarding), but no difficult conceptual work.

Spiro

Spiro is integrated with newish builds of Inkscape, which is awesome. Even more awesome is this YouTube video of spiro in action. (The author also has a three minute S using the original ppedit code; nowhere nearly as cool but still nice)

It looks like the word is getting out. There's also a screencast from heathenx. It's still only in development snapshots. I'm excited that when it finally starts shipping in stable releases, lots more people will get excited.

It's also integrated into FontForge, but sadly I haven't gotten much chance to play with it myself. These days, I'm trying to use all my free time on finishing the thesis itself.

You can also see Euler spirals (also known as Cornu spirals or clothoids) at NodeBox, and a nice project by Andren Novali using them. It's awesome that the free software community is carrying this integration work forward even when I have very limited time for coding myself.

Steven Garrity: Things I Learned in the Hospital

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:26:29 +0000

As our lovely little girl, Anna, came early, we had to spend a few extra weeks in the hospital with her. My wife and I learned a few things:

There’s a super-loud cricket that lives right outside the hospital entrance over by the mail boxes. Super-loud.
Nurses are heroes.
The hospital food was surprisingly tasty.
The hospital food was surprisingly unhealthy.
If you don’t eat your meal within a half-hour or so, they’ll come steal it away.
State-of-the-art round-the-clock medical care is free, but you have to pay for was parking.
Parts of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital look like a moon base.
The walking trail around the hospital grounds is surprisingly nice.
Communication might be the most important thing for worried new parents. The staff does well with this, but more is always better.
Hospitals are given baby supplies for free by the manufacturers in order to gain the favour of new parents. This should be disclosed as not to imply a false endorsement (though I assume they only accept the good stuff)
There’s a mystical fourth meal around 9pm called “night lunch”. I think it’s a bit like the “second breakfast” enjoyed in The Shire.
Everything is disposable. Even the disposable utensils come in disposable plastic wrap. At least I won’t get bird flu on my spork.
If you drop it on the floor, you throw it out (unless it’s the last of your prescription painkillers).
You’re often told to relax and get lots of rest, but you can’t go for 30 minutes without being woken up.
All farts in the nursery get blamed on the babies.
In the nursery, burps are hard-won and to be celebrated by anyone in ear-shot. Don’t take them for granted.
Two babies crying is 10 times worse than one.
There is such a thing as a “lactation consultant”.
Using a powerful alcohol-based hand sanitizer 25 times a day won’t eat away your flesh, as I had suspected. I got so used to this stuff that I look for it whenever I enter a room now.
The healthy babies are called “well babies”. I resented the well babies and wanted to play pranks on them (dip soothers in lemon juice, etc.), but then our baby became well, as well.
A cesarean-section can happen really fast.
Chanting “Nurse! Nurse! Nurse!” to encourage your baby to nurse isn’t a good idea when you’re surrounded by nurses.
A breast pump looks like (and may be) a medieval torture device.
Our baby was totally the best one.

Yuval Levy: Upgrade III

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 22:45:55 +0000

I've upgraded the environment in which I build Hugin to wxWidgets 2.8.8.

Bart Coppens: Akademy 2008: Album with pictures

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 18:28:32 +0000

After a lot of deliberating this, I decided to put online an album with a lot of the pictures I took at Akademy. Since most people at (big) conferences and community gatherings like it when they can have some form of memento (including me!) of themselves and the event, I think this outweighs the (very few) people who didn't seem to like their picture being taken. Especially since most of the people actually tried posing in different positions when I came near them with my camera, which I think means obviously that they would want to see themselves afterwards

To the best of my abilities of remembering those who did not like pictures being taken, I have not put online the pictures of those people, neither have I uploaded the pictures of somewhat embarrassing nature (like people sleeping during the presentations ). I've also not uploaded the worst out-of-focus ones, blurry ones, moved ones, etc. This brings me to a total of 685 pictures currently being available, out of 939 in my local album, which I still think is rather much (This means it's also rather much bandwith that this will suck, so please be kind to my webhost )

If you really don't want to be in one of the pics I put online, give me a sign and I'll try to fix it (to make sure it's not being indexed by the web archive and then you start complaining your pic is being archived over there, I put up a robots.txt over this, which is very very sad, but I really don't want people complaining afterwards). Similarly, if you really like a certain picture of you and want the original-sized one, also don't hesitate to ask for it.

So, after all that, here are my photos of Akademy 2008

PS: The weird ordering of the pictures (seemingly not chronological or alphabetically sorted by filename) is not my fault: I blame digiKam

Update 17/08/08: Removed 5 photos but added a few more, bringing us to a total of 690 pictures. Also added an explicit license: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0.

Boudewijn Rempt: Street organs

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 09:30:16 +0000

One of the advantages of living in the old town centre of a provincial town like Deventer is the street organ -- and Deventer has a very good one. Radio en Televsie orgel de Turk has been carefully restored last winter and now sounds better than ever. This street organ is exactly one hundred years old this year -- it was built in France by the brothers Limonaire in 1908. From Paris to Amsterdam to Leyden to the Hague to Deventer -- where it's been doing its rounds since 1961.

Image cropped and scaled by Krita 2.0

The current owner has a really great choice in music: there's mostly something new every Saturday and there's a nice mix between jazz, old rock, classical stuff and folksy tunes. And it's great coding to all that up-beat music :-)

lucille 開発日記: Course notes on Beyond Programmable Shading

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 07:21:13 +0000

(via ompf.org) SIGGRAPH 2008: Beyond Programmable Shading http://s08.idav.ucdavis.edu/ Extra infos on Larrabee, and next-gen graphics techs(parallel computing framework, raycasting, etc) Here’s my impression on these slides. Interactive Cinematic Lighting It’s a just review of previous works. There’s no impressive things. I know existing research has a serious drawback(to be solved in the future work), but Fabio doesn’t talks on it. Next Generation [...]

Yuval Levy: Allergy

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 23:57:01 +0000

Atchum! Bless you! Summer is allergy season for many people, although for contributors to Open Source projects sometimes allergy season is an all year round thing - namely when people who are not contributing much to the community demand for things to happen.

Allan Brito: Tutoriais para a área biológica e médica com o Maya e Cinema 4D

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:49:36 +0000

Uma coisa que sempre menciono para meus alunos é que o mercado publicitário e de cinema não sãos os únicos e maiores consumidores de produtos, oriundos da animação e produção 3d. Dentre as áreas que demandam grande quantidade de material sobre visualização destaco a de saúde. Os pesquisadores dessa área, precisam constantemente demonstrar e explicar [...]

Allan Brito: Tutorial de modelagem: Como modelar uma esteira no Blender 3D?

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 12:50:10 +0000

Alguns objetos apresentam altos níveis de complexidade e conhecimentos técnicos apurados, para que possam ser modelados de maneira realista em 3d. Isso se aplica a alguns objetos apenas, mas para outros a impressão de dificuldade na modelagem é apenas remanescente da aparente complexidade do objeto real. Ficou difícil de entender? Podemos colocar essa observação da [...]

Federico Mena-Quintero: Thu 2008/Aug/14

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 00:40:00 +0000

Sometimes Oralia boils water in the kettle, and adds a stick of cinnamon to make an infusion. The other day I heard the kettle boiling and I thought, "time for some green tea!". I didn't notice that the water was actually cinnamon, and made my tea as usual.

Well, hot damn, green tea made with cinnamon water turned out to be *good stuff*. I think I could grow an addiction to this.
Labels for RANDR monitors

When you configure multiple monitors, it is useful to know which physical monitor corresponds to each element in the configuration GUI. Both KDE and MacOS display cute labels on each monitor.

I implemented pretty much the same thing for GNOME, with the addition of color-coding. Hello, sexy:

This is in the following Git repositories (look at the monitor-labeling branches in all of them, and also tray-icon-rotation for gnome-settings-daemon):
This is just awaiting approval from the the release team to be committed to SVN :)

Yuval Levy: Anonymous Bug Reports Suck

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:31:17 +0000

Please post bug reports properly so that the developers can contact you for clarification.

Henning Schröder (GSoC student): Introduction video

noreply@blogger.com (Henning Schröder) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:21:16 +0000

I will try to add some comments later. Here you can see a recorded sessions with ScripterNG in action.

It includes

the object explorer
the script editor with interactive console
the error handler
the source checker
and an example script which shows to main window in full-screen mode

Dave Neary: Maemo profile changes and community council

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:37:55 +0000

A couple of major things are happening around Maemo just before my holidays (oooh, scary) - first is that we recently rolled out some improvements to Maemo profiles - there are many new fields, including IM and IRC usernames, and the possibility to enter multiple email addresses for karma, and in general we prettied things up.

One new field is the company that people work for - and this is particularly useful in the newly spruced up profile ranking page - previously this page listed only usernames and karma, it now includes company and real name, allowing you to see at a glance where contributions are coming from. Of course, for this to be really useful, now that the fields are there, we need more people to fill them in

The second big thing is the inaugural Maemo community council election. The entire Maemo community will be electing 5 people from among the most active community participants to represent the community’s interests to Nokia, and to co-ordinate community initiatives.

Nominations are open now - anyone with over 100 karma points can nominate themselves by sending a mail with their name, company affiliation and motivations for running to maemo-community@maemo.org before 23:59 UTC on the 2nd of September. The full list of eligible candidates is in the wiki.

lucille 開発日記: Reorganizing lucille project management

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:10:40 +0000

It’s not yet finished completely but I’d like let you know I’m been reorganizing lucille project management. lucille’s git repository Firstly, I am moving source tree repository of lucille from subversion to git. And git master tree of lucille is now hosted at github. http://github.com/syoyo/lucille/tree/master git repository is the newest source snapshot of lucille codebase. You can clone(checkout) recent lucille [...]

Meet the GIMP: OH NO! There is a PATENT on Gimp!

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:13:44 +0000

You find it here: http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6959948.html! (Link works now)

Sorry, couldn’t resist….

In other, this time true news: The plugin for getting “meaningful black” a la Versace is making real progress. Check it out in the forum. The attachments are only visible for registered members, but I’ll publish the script on this site when it’s really usable and documented.

Allan Brito: Livros de arte e computação gráfica

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:34:59 +0000

Uma coisa que sempre chamou muita a atenção na profissão de arquiteto é a enorme quantidade de livros de arte, especializados em fotografia relacionada a arquitetura. Qualquer escritório de arquitetura ou de design de interiores bem ambientado, é composto por uma pequena biblioteca desse material. Esse tipo de livro serve ao mesmo tempo de inspiração, [...]

Andy Fitzsimon: Andy moves to Hong Kong

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 05:27:11 +0000

It looks like HK will be my home for the next 1-2 years. Drop me a line if you live in the area!

a few people have asked me why I’ve left Singapore. To be honest, I had no reason.
Singapore is a beautiful city. In business it punches higher than its weight and for my lifestyle, I loved everything about it; The climate, my friend and the region.

My girlfriend Brenda has followed her career to HK and I’m here to support that. We both tried to make it work in Singers and after 6 months we’ve realised the best opportunities were further north. A hard pill to swallow when you’re so comfortable with such a lovely area.

But living in Hong Kong changes the perspective a little. The proximity to mainland china presents insight into what i saw growing 2 years ago, a furiously scalable resource pool, something I should be paying attention to. Plus, the tech and design communities here seem more grass-roots and enterprising (most design magazines I read growing up featured HK artists) it’ll be exiting to be a part of that culture.

This is an exciting move, thanks for letting me share the news. I’ll keep you posted.

Rodney Dawes: Recent Hacks

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 02:10:10 +0000

Today, I ended up getting a few hacks committed to SVN, and got a mostly working patch against leafpad together, to make it use GIO for file I/O. I fixed Beef to check the Last-Modified header using a HEAD request, for subscribed feeds, and got rid of the previous check to see if an update should be pulled. The previous method was just a timeout that checked against the last timestamp the update loop was run, to see if a specific feed needed to be updated. It worked okay, until I started subscribing to more feeds, and having the daemon restart, as all the feeds would just end up having very close timestamps for their last update time. Now, Beef compares the Last-Modified header, and stores that value instead. Recently, I had also ported Beef over to GIO, from gnome-vfs, for the case where embedded content might be pulled from a different protocol than HTTP(S). I also got rid of gnome-vfs in gtkhtml2's testgtkhtml program, replacing it with libsoup and GIO, at the same time. Today, though, I also committed the changes to make Encompass use GIO instead of gnome-vfs for loading data on protocols other than HTTP(S). This was a bit more work than the previous two patches, as I was using gnome_vfs_get_mime_type() to check the MIME type for URIs, so that I didn't end up streaming an exe into the HTML view. But GIO/glib doesn't have an exact replica of that functionality, so I had to end up writing a method using libsoup to check the content type. It works by requesting the first 1024 bytes of data from the server, and using that for the magic comparison with the GConentType API. It also checks the Content-Type header, and falls back to application/octet-stream on error. It's nice to click on a PDF and have it just open right up in Evince. I also haven't got the code together yet, but it will be extremely simple to pop up a dialog for RSS/ATOM feeds, so that the user can just subscribe to them.

As far as leafpad goes, I like very much how lightweight it is, and really wanted to be able to just click on patch files in the browser, and have them open right up in it. But, leafpad wasn't using GIO or gnome-vfs. And the text/plain handler that does support opening from URIs, which gets called, happened to be OpenOffice.org. Quite a bit much for just opening a small text file. I also don't seem to be able to find where the source repository for leafpad is, if there even is one. So, I took to using the tarball to create the patch. It's not a complete patch, but it does get the job done. I can open files remotely, and save to remote as well, though there does seem to be an issue with saving large files. I think there might be a bug in GIO (my sftp mount disappears off my desktop), but I'm not sure exactly, and haven't spent any time debugging it really. But here's a screenshot of www.gnome.org opened in leafpad using GIO:

Yuval Levy: Hugin-0.7.0_RC2

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 21:00:45 +0000

Bruno just released the source package for Hugin 0.7.0 Release Candidate 2 on Sourceforge.net. It is possible that the final release will be identical.

Allan Brito: Como usar o SketchUp para modelar terrenos com curvas de nível?

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:49:52 +0000

A construção de maquetes eletrônicas ou cenários virtuais envolve a elaboração de vários elementos para compor o ambiente, sendo que na maioria das vezes os artistas concentram todos os esforços na edificação e sempre deixam o terreno por último. Na construção do terreno é necessário um tipo de objeto comum no trabalho com topografia, que [...]

Máirín Duffy: F10 Artwork Round 2: Gears

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:47:37 +0000

I played around with Nicu's artwork for the Gears F10 artwork proposal and came up with a couple of different ideas:

GIMP source XCF

GIMP source XCF

Come join the fun on fedora-art-list! Also, check out the list of proposals we're working with from round 1.

lucille 開発日記: Intel AVX simulator is now available

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:47:23 +0000

http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/3848.htm http://softwareblogs.intel.com/2008/08/11/emulation-of-new-instructions/ http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/3849.htm (download) Intel has released the functional simulator(i.e., not a cycle-aculate simulator) for AVX, which can also simulate full x86 instruction sets. The emulator, Intel SDE(Software Development Emulator) is built on top of Pin: A binary instrumentation tool for x86. Any realtime raytracing program targeting for x86 SIMD should use this simulator to accurately and statistically analyze the efficiency [...]

Thorsten Wilms: Ubuntu Backgrounds 3

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:46:33 +0000

Cleaned up the background and worked on the horns. More refinement to follow

Full size, 1600 x 1200 px

Launchpad bzr branch

Allan Brito: Autodesk Maya 2009 lançado na Siggraph 2008

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 13:02:16 +0000

Essa é a semana da Siggraph, portanto espere por anúncios e promoções de web sites relacionados com computação gráfica, com produtos laçados diretamente do evento. A Autodesk está fazendo isso, ela aproveitou para anunciar o lançamento de várias ferramentas novas e também de uma atualização para o Maya. Segundo relatos da própria feira, o Maya [...]

Steven Garrity: Giant animals from the ice-age. I’ve always been …

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:43:00 +0000

Giant animals from the ice-age. I’ve always been terrified of giant sloth. They'd rip your face off, slowly. Also: 9-foot beaver and the bird that Gandalf rode in Lord of the Rings.

Jon Phillips: Latest Bio

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:38:13 +0000

When I taught at San Francisco Art Institute, I taught a class basically on Artist as Artwork, meaning one needs to work on him or herself regularly.

I updated my bio to reflect Jon 4.0 changes.

I need to spend some more time in the shop to work out the kinks before I really jump into any other big adventures like Creative Commons is the summary of my last few days

Máirín Duffy: A thought

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 03:19:48 +0000

conventional food. organic food.

proprietary software. free and open source software.

Actually I think it's harder to make an argument for organic food than it is for free & open source software since the latter is most likely to be less costly. (I'm sure the analogy has been made before but I thought it was interesting)

Bart Coppens: Pictures of Akademy 2008

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:06:09 +0000

So, 3.5 days of Akademy apparently means a lot of pictures being taken, I'm pretty sure everyone around has noticed this Now I personally took a lot of pictures (again, most of you will have noticed that), which means that I also have a lot of data. Since I'm not really in the mood to upload 2.1G of data (at least, that's the current count), I'm not going to upload all of that somewhere (especially since a lot of those are actually out of focus, moved, generally blurry, bad, etc). If any of you think I made a nice picture of you, though, feel free to contact me and I'll see if I can actually find any such picture to mail you

Now a some of pictures of me actually already online by virtue of being used in other people's blogposts and dot stories.

Still, here's some more (some of them slightly cropped) pictures, hopefully somewhat complementary to the ones already on the web.
Dot hero Danny promoting his favourite drink:

Here we see Matthew herding the people back to the talks using Adriaan's whip/riding crop:

Obviously Cliff did not think Matthew intimidated his audience enough, so he had to borrow Adriaan's riding crop as well to do this himself.

Here's an intense Amarok debugging session:

It's amazing how much more sportive Akademy seems to be, compared to last year. Not only do people regularly play table tennis, but they even made good use of the lunch break in the KDE e.V. meeting to play some frisbee. Here's Leo and Seb playing frisbee:

And here's Aaron and Chani playing table tennis against 2 other people during the eV break (apparently tennis can be very funny indeed!):

Lydia looking at me suspiciously:

And we finish with the renewed El Presidente who is using the stylus of his new N810 as a baton to conduct the KDE Orchestra:

It's too bad I don't think I'll be able to take much more pictures, since I unfortunately can't be there on Wednesday (I agreed to go somewhere else, in retrospect that was not the brightest idea ever), on Thursday I'm not on the boat trip, and on Friday most people will either be leaving or will already have left.

Federico Mena-Quintero: Tue 2008/Aug/12

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:50:00 +0000

Why I want to have the children of git rebase --interactive

Sometimes you are hacking madly and committing often. Your commit log looks like this:

* Add some fields for a popup menu * Create the popup menu * Refactor the base object to accomodate the menu's commands * Implement the signal handlers for the menu's commands

Then you type make and of course your code doesn't compile. So you do one-liner commits, one for each build error:

* Add missing include gtkmenu.h * Fix typo in popup_menu variable name * Forgot to declare a menu_item variable * Add missing argument for gtk_menu_popup function

But you don't want you submit all of those patches upstream! You only want to send perfect patches which are either additions or refactorings to the upstream code. You don't want the maintainer to know that you are a fallible human being who forgets include files and variable declarations; instead, you want him to believe that you are a coding god who sends a perfect series of patches every time.

git rebase --interactive allows you to pretend you are better than you really are. This is a good thing.

We have 8 commits in total (4 "good" ones that don't compile, and 4 "embarrassing" ones that are little fixes). So, run git rebase --interactive HEAD~8. This means, "let me fix any fuckups since 8 commits ago".

Git will drop you in an editor where you edit this:
```
pick ab365cf Add some fields for a popup menu
pick 2478bac Create the popup menu
pick 9180ffe Refactor the base object to accomodate the menu's commands
pick a6c2467 Implement the signal handlers for the menu's commands
pick 289cf1a Add missing include gtkmenu.h
pick 378ac2b Fix typo in popup_menu variable name
pick 821ac6f Forgot to declare a menu_item variable
pick 24acf67 Add missing argument for gtk_menu_popup function

# Commands:
#  p, pick = use commit
#  e, edit = use commit, but stop for amending
#  s, squash = use commit, but meld into previous commit
```
Now let's reorder the lines there, and replace some pick commands by squash. I've put in some comments about what each moved line does.
```
pick ab365cf Add some fields for a popup menu
squash 289cf1a Add missing include gtkmenu.h
# Oops, forgot to "#include <gtk/gtkmenu.h>" to have a field declared "GtkMenu *popup_menu"
	      
pick 2478bac Create the popup menu
squash 821ac6f Forgot to declare a menu_item variable
# Oops, while creating the menu items I forgot to declare my menu_item variable

squash 24acf67 Add missing argument for gtk_menu_popup function
# Oops, while creating the menu I also missed an argument to this function (how couldn't anyone?)

pick 9180ffe Refactor the base object to accomodate the menu's commands

pick a6c2467 Implement the signal handlers for the menu's commands
squash 378ac2b Fix typo in popup_menu variable name
# ... and I also mistyped popup_menu in a signal handler
```
When you are done, save that temporary file and exit your editor. Git will rewrite your commit history so that you have a clean log, with no commits like "fix this little thing". When you send that patch series to the maintainer, he'll have an easier time reading your code, and he'll be amazed at your meticulousness.

The important thing here is to do one commit per compilation error. Then it's very easy to reorder your commits, where you squash each fix with the corresponding "real" commit.

Allan Brito: DVD Creature Factory: Análise dos tutoriais sobre modelagem e composição

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 19:03:06 +0000

Depois de fazer praticamente contagem regressiva, finalmente o meu DVD do Creature Factory chegou na semana passada! Não preciso dizer que praticamente não saí de casa nesse final de semana, apenas assistindo ao material do DVD. Como de costume, resolvi fazer uma breve análise do conteúdo, para esclarecer os usuários que podem estar interessados na [...]

Meet the GIMP: Episode 056: Meaningful Black and Ironing Aprons

info@meetthegimp.org — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 16:00:53 +0000

What’s “meaningful black”? It’s a concept out of the book “Welcome to Oz” from Vincent Versac. It’s for this other program, but I try to convert it to GIMP. It’s not so easy - so we have to write a script to do the tedious work.

Information about the Zone System is at Wikipedia and a lot of other sites. Chris Marquardt has made a simple version of it for digital cameras.

At the end of the video I do some ironing. I made some promotional images for our organic shop around the corner. The team had donned brand new aprons with all the creases from packing still in them. Awful! I show you a way to iron them out after the shot. BTW, this works too with wrinkles in the skin of a portrait model.

The “Old Ink Challenge is still open. Give it a try!

I also have some updates about the forum and ask for input with a new design for this web site. Daniel (DRB) is helping me a lot - and he has made a great interactive and collaborative storytelling site at StoryEverTelling.com . If you are into telling stories with a twist or reading them - check this out and help him to build this up.

The TOC

Old Ink challenge update (1:30)
Forum update (1:55)
Daniel’s “Story Ever Telling” (4:40)
Meaningful Black (6:25)
- Zone System (9:42)
- Finding the Black Point (12:00)
- Twisting the curves (16:05)
- Building a Plugin (19:00)
Ironing an Apron with GIMP (20:10)

This video has ben rendered in a different way. Is the problem still there that it calls itself a MP3 audio file? Is it playing everywhere?

Share This What's "meaningful black"? It's a concept out of the book ldquo;Welcome to Ozrdquo; from Vincent Versac. It's for this other program, but I try to convert it to GIMP. It's not so easy - so we have to write a script to do the tedious work. Information about the Zone System is at Wikipedia and a lot of other sites. Chris Marquardt has made a simple version of it for digital cameras. At the end of the video I do some ironing. I made some promotional images for our organic shop around the corner. The team had donned brand new aprons with all the creases from packing still in them. Awful! I show you a way to iron them out after the shot. BTW, this works too with wrinkles in the skin of a portrait model. The "Old Ink Challenge is still open. Give it a try! I also have some updates about the forum and ask for input with a new design for this web site. Daniel (DRB) is helping me a lot - and he has made a great interactive and collaborative storytelling site at StoryEverTelling.com . If you are into telling stories with a twist or reading them - check this out and help him to build this up. The TOC Old Ink challenge update (1:30) Forum update (1:55) Daniel's "Story Ever Telling" (4:40) Meaningful Black (6:25) - Zone System (9:42) - Finding the Black Point (12:00) - Twisting the curves (16:05) - Building a Plugin (19:00) Ironing an Apron with GIMP (20:10) This video has ben rendered in a different way. Is the problem still there that it calls itself a MP3 audio file? Is it playing everywhere?Share This

Yuval Levy: Yahoo Unsafe? Or Firefox Wrong?

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 15:21:05 +0000

Firefox 3: Secure connection failed... ... to Yahoo.com - tell Firefox developers to relax, vote for

Allan Brito: Tutoriais de iluminação para estúdio fotográfico

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:07:51 +0000

O assunto iluminação sempre deixa a maioria dos usuários com várias dúvidas, principalmente se o modelo 3d ou cenário virtual precisa de um tratamento especial na parte de luzes. Sempre digo aqui, e não canso de repetir que a melhor maneira de aprender iluminação é estudar fotografia. Se fosse possível fazer uma comparação literal, seria [...]

Akkana Peck: Pho 0.9.6-pre1

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 04:30:00 +0000

I've been using my pre-released 0.9.6-pre1 version of pho, my image viewer, for ages, now, and it's been working fine. I keep wanting to release it, but there were a couple of minor bugs that irritated me and I hadn't had time to track down. Tonight, I finally got caught up with my backlog and found myself with a few extra minutes to spare, and fixed the last two known bugs. Quick, time to release before I discover anything else!

(There were a couple other features I was hoping to implement -- multiple external commands, parsing a .phorc file, and having Keywords mode read and write the Keywords file itself -- but none of those is terribly important and they can wait.)

It's only a -pre release, but I'm not going to have a long protracted set of betas this time. 0.9.6-pre1 is very usable, and I'm finding Keywords mode to be awfully useful for classifying my mountain of back photos.

So, pho users, give it a try and let me know if you see any bugs! It's my hope to release the real 0.9.6 in a week or two, if nobody finds any monstrous bugs in the meantime.

Get Pho here.

Yuval Levy: Upgrade II

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 23:59:34 +0000

Amazing! Alexandre Prokoudine, our Google Summer of Code admin, has a camera that is too big for the Nodal Ninja 3 MkII. Bill upgraded him to a Nodal Ninja 5. I am speechless. Now Alexandre is better to show us some nice panoramas from Moscow.

Fahim Mannan (GSoC student): 11th Week (Aug 5 - Aug 11)

noreply@blogger.com (Fahim) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:40:57 +0000

1. Further work on Load/Store mask
It is now possible to store the bitmap mask while saving the project. However I haven't yet figure out a good way to pass the edited alpha channel to the stitchers used by the preview frame or use the transformation library.
2. Bug fix:
a) fixed crash while changing mask editing mode
b) fixed editing problem while zoomed in/out
3. Wiki updated.

Not done yet:
==========
1. Work on remapping
2. Pre-segmentation in lazy snapping
3. Lazy snapping polygon boundary editing. Implement contour finding.

12th Week (Aug 12 - Aug 18) [Aug 18th is final day for uploading code]
1. Allow editing the vertices of the polygon in the polygon editing mode
2. Store the mask after proper scaling
3. Preliminary implementation for pre-segmentation and contour finding
4. Update design documents

Allan Brito: Iluminação indireta no Blender 3D com o projeto Lightcuts

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:14:09 +0000

Ao que parece, os projetos do Google Summer of Code, devem adicionar funcionalidades extras ao Blender, além das que já estavam previstas em cada um dos respectivos projetos. O autor do modificador Shrink Wrap está trabalhando em um modificador Simple Deform para o Blender, e agora o responsável pelo projeto que adiciona o algoritmo do [...]