Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

I decided to make the slides for my GUADEC talk using OpenOffice.org Impress 1.1.3. This is the first time I use, and probably the last time. I currently cannot display the whole presentation as some images seems to be skipped. Same from the backup. And they are not always the same that are missing.

Any idea ?

Cross platform calendaring with Thunderbird coming at last. More details in Mike Shaver interview, the Lightning lead developer and screenshots. It should run on UNIX, Mac and Windows. It is just Sunbird integrated into Thunderbird.

Source: standblog (fr)

Since manufacturer do not want to do that, for some non-obvious reason, it is a good niche for open source software: a unified RAW file library.

The idea would be to write a library to decode and convery RAW files as well as their metadata, because currently there is information spread accross several projects, not one source.

• First, turn Dave Coffin's dcraw into a library. Dave does not want to do that and tell to just call dcraw in a pipe or call it's main() from the code. While this is sufficient for just decoding the image, it is not enough to decode the metadata. dcparse has the basic bits to do that... and contain duplicated code too.

• Wonderland.org spreadsheet or the CRW file analysis, accompagnied with Dave Burren Canon MakerNote would help filling the gaps, as well as Sven Riedel crwinfo

• Daniel Stephens has a NEF decoder, DeNEF, that can be used to help filling the gaps on the Nikon side

• exifprobe and libexif would help providing these meta data as EXIF data.

I'd be in favor of using GPL just because I dislike that commercial and proprietary software author just shop for these libraries without giving anything back.

And then we'd have to convince everyone to use it.

Since F-Spot is broken because of Mono changes.... I tried Digikam.

Digikam, a KDE application, has some good thing like a really decent speed and "Albums", something that make it impossible to use is that I'm obligated to copy all my pictures in ~/Pictures. Meh, I don't feel like copying 20GB in my home directory. Filed bug 105645. And historically, Digikam is one of the oldest front-end to gphoto for KDE.

Latest part of the story. News.com has an article about how Apple want KHTML developers to use Apple WebCore tree...

Here is the KHTML developers point of view. They seems to still be motivated, or at least to not have lost any hope about that.

The main problem I see is that using Apple CVS tree requires to have an ADC account and to to have an ADC account, you have to be over 18 as per Apple agreement:

By checking this box I confirm that I have read and agree to be bound by the Apple Developer Connection Terms and Conditions. I also confirm that I am 18 years or older.

That would have been fixed prior to any committment. Apple's definition of open source seems to require to be 18. Note that this is not to obtain the software as a tarball, but to obtain a CVS account... At least that is my understanding.