Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

Somewhere in Dublin

Boudewin, of Krita fame, Investigate Imaging Libraries for free software. Some interesting reading.

Ralph Thomas posted his patch for Gtk+ support in ASL 1.0.20. That means that Adobe Source Library, which originate from Photoshop, can now be used to develop Gtk application in C++. Note that this patch is the result of porting Mission Photo work to the latest ASL.

For some screenshots, go there

I started directly with day 2 as I arrived Sunday in Dublin.

London-Heathrow aiport is definitely an airport to be avoided: very long lines to get you connection, going through security, etc. I envisionned much worse than it was, like being required to check-in my backpack (that contains only camera and laptop).

Trinity College is still like it was back in 2003 when I was at Guadec.

I attended the presentation by Kitware about CMake and Dart. CMake is a replacement to Automake that KDE now use for KDE4. I must say that I'm somewhat impressed: from scratch it took me 30 minutes to make a CMake build system for libopenraw (don't look for it yet, it is in my local bzr branch). Dart is a system that provide a view of the state of your project: how it builds (tinderbox), how it runs its tests, etc. I think both would make sense for AbiWord: we need to have one cross-platform build system (we currently have 3: automake, plain make for win32, xcode-based for Mac^[1]), and we need to have a better vision of the current state of the code (we used to have a tinderbox running at one point).

I'll be at aKademy 2006 in Dublin, Ireland, starting Sunday, until Thursday. Thanks to the generous conference sponsors to allow me to attend ODF Day.

If you want to meet me, let me know.

Mark did blog about Quickfile just a few days ago. Coincidence? I don't know but the only that is tru as that I'm in love with it as it fill one of the blannk left in Thunderbird list of features compared to KMail. In KMail you do that with the 'M' key. I can now file messages quickly without using the mouse. I still miss the manual filtering like Evolution and KMail provides...

Off course since Mark paid a bounty for it, it is in Dapper:

apt-get install thunderbird-quickfile

... until it deleted my INBOX.

Too bad, it had a real bunch of promissing features, including a working filtering system, but in 13 years, this is the first client the irrevocably delete all my email. I should have suspected that its IMAP implementation was broken by design.

Back to Thunderbird which still suck less than Outl^wEvolution.

Bug filed

libopenraw 0.0.1 is going forward. Yesterday I wrote a C API to call libopenraw that way I can have a stable ABI, and fixed compatibility with MacOS X (it was simply broken I don't know if it is because of endianness or just different type casting). I fixed the make distcheck, not yet committed to my local bzr branch, let alone the main CVS.

libopenraw 0.0.1 will be able to get thumbnails from CR2, NEF, DNG and ORF files. ARW is experimental. I'll support more file formats as time goes. CRW needs a complete parser, I'll work on that too.

Dear Lazyweb,

I need something more recent and less broken than gcc-3.3 on MacOS X 10.3.9^[1]. Apple is (un-)kind enough to no provide updated compiler. Their latest development tools always need the latest OS. I don't care of the bells and whistles, all I need is a C++ compiler (with Objective-C++ support).

So let's start being hardcore.

From the DevToolsAugust2006 release, I downloaded gcc-5363 that contains gcc-4.0.1. It did build fine (almost). I actually need to re-run the install using sudo prior really installing. See the README.Apple.

Then I grabbed gcc_select-58 to select gcc-4 as a default. Worked fine.

But I'm missing the libstdc++. That is where I'm lost. There is libstdcxx-11 and libstdcxx_SUPanWheat-10. Both fail as they insist on configuring for Darwin 8 (10.4). WTF? I found no way to override that.

Anybody has a clue?

Update 09/15: I found out how to build it, but I just discovered that I needed a new linker because once again Apple decided to change the command-line options of the linker, like they changed XCode at each and every release. Off course the linker does not build on a stock 10.3.9 as it miss some headers. *sigh*

Lennart has been playing with Cairo. I have been playing with porting Python to C++, and I ported this scripts. It was not that hard as 2 of the bugs were due to the Python-esque indentation (yes scoping with indentation, what a nice idea), one is due to C being permissive (stupid typo), and the last due to a bad transcription when the Python binding of Cairo tranfsorm cairo_text_extents_t from a struct with named fields to an array with index...

Otherwise the biggest technical issue was to modify a bit the data types that use Python list to something that works with C++. I used the standard C++ library and a few of boost classes like boost::shared_ptr and boost::format.

Get the source: fring.cpp Build it with

g++ `pkg-config --libs --cflags cairomm-1.0` fring.cpp -g -o fring

Maybe it would be worthwhile to be write a small library that help porting from Python.

Mission Photo is new photo management application for Gnome. It is written in C++ by Ralph Thomas, using the Adobe Source Library (that I blogged about recently) with a brand new Gnome support that Ralph wrote. It is an older version of ASL, but Ralph promissed to port the Gnome support to the last release 1.0.20.

Mandatory screenshot:

Advogato is closing. This is the end of an era.

Here is my thank you message (re-edited, I don't remember my tagging):

So long...

... and thank you for all the fish !

I must say it is the end on an era. Fortunately it is the beginning of another.

I started blogging on Advogato, then I installed nitlog on my own server (nitlog was a PHP hack written by a soon to be, now former co-worker in Montreal, dcoombs) to get more feature, then upgraded to dotclear (still on my own server), with a transition on LiveJournal on which I'm still online.

Thank you Raph, thank you so much for all these years.

Point your bazaar client to

$ bzr branch http://bzr.figuiere.net/ooo-thumbnailer/main ooo-thumbnailer

There is a ooo-thumbnailer that will extract thumbnails from OpenOffice.org files. The thumbnailer work (with some bugs I'll fix to refine the thumbnail), I'm not sure the install works fine for now. It is written in C and GPL. It was inspired by a hack in Python I found on the interweb ;-)

Patches welcome, as usual.

After month of slacking, after changing directions once (I switched to C++ and will not look back), this time I have something. I have spend most of the week-end coding on libopenraw to implement the extraction of thumbnails from CR2, NEF and ORF file. CRW is in progress (I need to write a parser for that) and MRW.

I'm pondering whether I should keep using automake or bite the bullet and switch to CMake.

Manu, you forgot to tell how one can view these video reports using a Free Software. So far, it does not work here on my Ubuntu system (because it is Flash).

Update: there is a link to an AVI in the comments