Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

So GimpShop has been released, it is a hack of Gimp to make it look alike Photoshop.

Too bad, it still require X11 on MacOS X.

I wish they spent more time doing really useful things like porting Gtk+ on MacOS X.

I want to move away from TWiki to MediaWiki. My problem is migrating the data, as TWiki is RCS files while MediaWiki uses MySQL database. Has anyone an idea beside writing it myself in Perl ?

There have been a lot of noise about nothing, concerning some annoying person (she is well known) that pretend to know everything, to want people to listen to her but to always be deaf when other people talk to her. I don't know why people still listen to her. I myself redirect everything she said to my friend Dave Null. The reason is that someone bitching out developer, but denying to even file the report in the project bug system, but instead spam the comments of a blog is someone we shouldn't even care about. Shall I respect someone that bashes other people work ?

On the other side I mostly agree what concerned people wrote about.

No the Banana Republic is not an obscure south-american country as it would be depicted in an Hollywood movie. It is a union of really modern and democratic countries, a big economic power in the world, called Europe. But it is no longer a democracy. Their corruption led to have "laws" passed without democratic vote. But basically they shoot themself a bullet in the head: they allow software patents.

Until now, I was proud of the construction of the EU. Now, I'm just ashamed.

One thing I'm sure: I'll vote NO to the European Constitution, and I'll let my political leader know about that. They want the European Constituion, I want them to know that their inaction will make me vote NO.

I'm not the only one.

Daniel Veillard has a list of companies that did welcome this decision.

So Adobe decided to release some open source libraries. Adam & Eve is only a set of libraries, and does not lead immediately to a fully fledged application, but it is really interesting to see what their research labs came up with for building cross-platform applications. I wonder if this is what they use for their major applications.

This is a premiere for them and I hope not the last thing they release. Adobe has often be really publishing file formats specifications: PDF, DNG, PostScript, OpenType, PPD, etc.