The Past

My first ever libre software gettogether was GIMPCon in 2000. The location at the CCC gave it the proper underground vibe. That gathering later became what is now Libre Graphics Meeting when the GIMP and Scribus folks thought there’s some possible synergy to benefit from.

The future

It may sound like a little blasphemy for a GNOME person to say LGM is my favorite conference. I dig GUADEC for its mix of developer and user oriented talks and workshops, but at LGM this synergy seems to be working even better. There’s probably a trend towards attracting more designers than engineers, and I don’t know of a tech conference where there’s pretty much 50:50 gender mix (perhaps in Madrid there were more women than men even).

I want more conferences or gettogethers like this. Feedback from an animator struggling to finish a task is million times more valuable than online polls asking for a feature that exists in other tools. Small community projects struggle greatly with focus and motivation. These user<>developer sessions should not mean folding every single suggestion into Inkscape feature and SVG spec, but seeing tools used is the best we have for user testing.

There were some humorous mailing list like moments too (I hope video archives will be posted, the sessions were recorded). We had a nice example of miscommunication between Boudewijn and Mitch during the GIMP Q&A, but there is room to turn that “but printing spot colors is way more expensive than CMYK, stop ignoring your users” to “it’s the actual workflow, retaining control over individual channels during the process, that makes CMYK a subset of stop color process, the output/print process remains the same.” when talking off a mailing list. People sometimes need to talk face to face to turn those faster horses into cars. I have lost all faith in non-technical or controversial topics ever resolved on a mailing list.

Workshops

I also really enjoyed the “get your hands dirty” sessions such as David Revoy‘s Krita speedpaint workshop that are the carrot-at-the-end-of-the-stick for potential new designers giving libre graphic toolchain a go. Seeing amazing art created with our tools is an amazing motivator that allows to overcome some bumps on the way and actually find strength to find unfamiliar solutions or actually bite the lip and start the dialog with the developers (it’s harder than you think). I don’t think my painting skills will improve any time soon, but the workshop did expose a significant omission from the Wacom settings for non-screen tablet users. It felt the Krita developers are on a good course working closely with David to shape the tool and getting amazing promotion and an actual product in return, in a similar way the open movie projects dramatically improved the quality of Blender.

Type

A significant number of talks related to type. Ben Martin and Dave Crossland presented the collaboration features of the new Font Forge. This sounded really intriguing for me, because a lot of the design process is tedious and horrible and things like metrics are a torture that I found much more bearable when we did it with Patrys the other day.

Ana and Ricardo made me feel guilty about never finishing or publishing some of my fonts, because I felt they are too raw but then never gotten to finish them. They mentioned their new foundry and some utilities like the autospacer, giving you a template workflow rather than starting from the dangerous and feared blank slate.

If you ever needed some hand holding for designing your own type, Dave pointed out an extremely nice guide to me.

Getting Started

I gave a short talk on the work we did on Getting Started, but in an expected way was dragged away before I could show some guts of the project. As there’s been interest to see behind the scenes more, I’ll try to blow the dust off the design team youtube channel and do a screencast.

LGM Rocks

I really had a blast seeing everyone again, and came back with a list of things to do and also the energy to do so. Big thanks to the organizers and in particular the GIMP folks for their continuous support of the event.

I’m not a camera geek. I don’t enjoy talking specs. I don’t follow the latest gear. But recently I got another camera that refreshed my interest in photography.

I was really excited when I got the Nikon D70 back in the day. When they say a camera doesn’t make a better photographer it’s usually true, but I felt a visible improvement after I moved from the digital pocket cameras to the amateur DSLR world. I invested considerable cash and I was willing to learn a bit what I’m doing (one disadvantage of Free software is that people don’t feel the need to invest any effort to get familiar with a package when they got it so cheap and effortlessly).

The best camera is the one you have with you, and with the GF1 you get almost all the good from an SLR without the weight and sweaty back from a camera backpack. The controls are great (especially with the latest firmware which adds a few useful hacks), the response quick and the f1.7 20mm pancake lens is surprisingly versatile.

Obviously nothing’s black and white (pun intended) and there are some drawbacks. There’s no landscape/portrait sensor or image stabilisation on the body. The 2x crop factor is not a friend to us wide angle lovers. Although some wide angle options are shaping up (but not cheap). And for a camera that has face detection and recognition (that actually works and is useful with an f1.7 lens) I would have dreamed for a GPS module.

A friend thought I spoke about a new girlfriend when I mentioned GF[1]. I think it is, just don’t tell my wife.

• Complete set

I had a series of hard drive failures in a rather short time frame last year. My backup strategy sucks as much as the next guy’s. I figured the drives are cheap enough to finally buy/build a disk array.

I have a very noisy and probably very power hungry dual pIII/700MHz box that I use as a file server since 1999. It holds my git repositories, my music, my photo library, videos. It has a bunch of internal drives and two firewire and one usb external drive. A mess. It also acts as a print server and DHCP/DNS Cache/PXE server. I use the awesome dnsmasq for this as my router’s DHCP server configuration involves an on/off switch.

I looked around for cheap NAS boxes. There’s quite a few of them, but I’ve ended up fancying Synology Cubestation. Looking at the feature list, I was a bit worried if those aren’t just bullet points. I expected this coming from the marketing department making sure to have more features than the competition, while the actual features wouldn’t really deliver. That fear was luckily unsubstantiated. Everything I tried worked marvelously as expected from an appliance, despite including features like torrent download and your own personal Flickr-like web service.

I’ve done the initial setup from a Mac, using the included client software. The client finds the CubeStation on the LAN and sets up a small ~2GB partition where it puts the kernel and the system software. There’s a Linux client for this included in the upcoming firmware package, which I was quickly pointed to on the company forum, a valuable resource. Once the root partition with the system is up, you can use the web frontend to manage your Cubestation. The UI is decent, I was highly suspicious when I read “AJAX frontend” on the box. It lacks the elegance of a WordPress dashboard, but gets the job done (crystal icons, yuck).

The initial creation of the RAID-5 Volume took longer than I expected. Somewhere around 10-12 hours. Then I was able to set up my samba sharing, ssh terminal access, iTunes (DAAP), printer and UPS (so it can shut down cleanly on power failure). That’s what the appliance provides out of the box. I had to upgrade the firmware (through the web-ui) to be able to serve media to my PS3 through UPNP (It presents the media in a much more sane way than mediatomb I was using).

This piece of hardware got me really excited because it’s what an appliance should be. It’s designed to solve a specific set of problems. But unlike something that would come from Apple, it allows customizations for those special cases you may need. Usually you don’t get both of these at the same time. Setting up all this on a stock Linux distro would take quite a lot of effort and I doubt I’d be able to pull it off. Having a solid foundation which you can extend is heaven. And extending I needed. Apart from the DNS/PXE/caching server I wanted to have a git server for my local repos I used to have on my Linux server. I was expecting to fight with building all these manually, but luckily things were a lot easier.

There’s tons of apps already compiled and packaged for the box. You need to download a script that installs a package management system, ipkg on your main Volume (so it’s unaffected when you update firmware) and sets up an /opt mount point. Then you can simply ipkg install package. Apart from dnsmasq and git, I also installed iptraf to monitor bandwith usage (And some other handy utils like screen).

I found the performance good, but if you fear the 64MB 266MHz PPC being too shabby for things like a rails server, they make an 500MHz/128MB variant as well, the CS407 and an 800MHz DS407. But for what it’s been designed for, the hardware is perfectly adequate.

Update: Not everything is pink. I’ve had some serious issues with the Seagate ST31000333AS drives and RAID5. Synology seems to be blaming the Seagate firmware issues, but Seagate seems to suggest I shouldn’t upgrade the firmware from CC1F. I’ve downgraded to RAID1, and things seem to be working fine for a week. Kick me next time I’m enthusiastic about something I have for 2 days

Darn, another lazyweb question time.

I was excited to see the photos I shot today. I had my desktop running when I came home, so I quickly took out a CF2 card from the USB reader which was likely mounted on a running system (had the monitor switched off) and quickly shoved the one from the camera in. No photos, only the DCIM folder appeared as a file. Unmounted, shoved it into the camera, no content. Eeeek! The empty space shows there is data on the card. So I dd the device into a file (`dd if=/dev/sdd1 of=backup.vfat`) and begin experimenting with fsck.vfat. It gives me 4 combinations of the following choices:

dosfsck 2.11, 12 Mar 2005, FAT32, LFN
FATs differ but appear to be intact. Use which FAT ?
1) Use first FAT
2) Use second FAT

#and

/DCIM  and
/.Trashes
  share clusters.
1) Truncate first to 0 bytes and restart
2) Truncate second to 0 bytes

None of the combinations end up having any files. The card is 1G and surprisingly doesn’t compress with bzip at all, but I would be thankful for any suggestions on how to get the rather fab photos back. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if this happened on my New Zealand trip for example.

Update: After some more googling (should have looked at the moderated comments here for some hints I found an awesome free software recovery tool, called Photorec (packaged for opensuse even). It supports multiple filesystems and is able to recover images even on a completely hosed card or image. Man I’m so happy. PhotoRec deserves to do much better on a photo recovery linux query on google.

My lame photo gallery script comes up as a first hit when you google for a generic term “original”. Google analytics reveals lots of interesting data about referrals.

It’s been a while since I made any photos that didn’t involve Linda.

The town of Liberec has bought the property back and will be reconstructing it for its original purpose. Can’t wait.

I bumped into this highly interesting story of a photo reporter using a few compact digicams instead of a DSLR with a nice example of czechnology to take burst shots:

He carried two C-5050 cameras on straps around his neck, with one strap cinched shorter than the other, so that the cameras hung at slightly different heights on his chest. The cameras were set for 3-shot burst mode. When a long sequence of shots was called for, Majoli fired a 3-shot burst with one camera, dropped it, grabbed the other and shot a burst with it. The first camera wrote
its images to the card, thereby clearing its buffer, while Majoli shot with the second. He just kept rotating from one to the other for as long as the action in front of him continued.

I couldn’t agree more on the suckiness of carrying a set of huge adapters for each and every gadget out there. If at least the hardware makers would standardize batteries/adapters within their product lines.

• Read the article

Today Garrett took us for some foliage photo shoot in Vermont. We got up insanely early (3:30AM) and managed to get some neat sunrise shots of a beautiful lake. You will probably be able to enjoy Tuomas’ and Garrett’s photos soon too.

I really enjoyed the trip, testing out the new lens. Extreme wideangle is really neat when you have little space, but I feel like I’m not dealing with open spaces well enough yet. And it’s absolutely hilarious when you break the rules and star shooting portraits
with it