It’s funny how I can get a mood boost. It’s not that I felt down or
anything, but I wasn’t feeling any good either. We stopped at a car wash.
Nobody in the line, good. Paid, drove in, talked to Iva about something. And
we’re almost done and I hear this nasty, an endless second long, cracking
sound. I immediately got this image of a hole in the roof, since yes, you
guessed it, I forgot to screw out the antenna.

The blower finished its destruction and we see this little top of the
antenna fall on the front screen. I turn pale and drive out the carwash. And wa
hey! It’s just the antenna! No hole in the roof! Luckily the engineers knew
stupid drivers like myself will be driving it into a carwash and made it out of
some fiber. Suddenly I fell so good I didn’t ruin my car completely! So now I
have this super sporty antenna .

I got such a mood boost, that I didn’t mind spending the rest of the day
scrabbling the leaves at our backyard. The M3 helped
me survive that too .

People keep requesting the Modo color scheme for blender. Here’s my bzipped .B.blend file. Enjoy.

Another very handy trick from Andy’s kitchen. When you do mirror modelling,
at some point you end up merging the two instances. But then you realise you
need to add more detail. What I did till now was to nuke the other half and
create the mirrored instance again.

However it is usually easier to mirror only the newly added detail. Just
snap the 3D cursor to the appropriate center, duplacate the new shape, mirror,
remove doubles. Voil??.

One thing I had trouble with when modelling was fixing my edgeloops.
I knew I had to “turn” but I couldn’t figure out how to re-face
the appropriate part without splitting my quads into tris.

One trick Andy did
during his modelling at the Blender
Conference was merging two vertices on a quad face that does the magic
edgeloop turn. And you end up still having quads. Lovely.

Went through the gnome icon theme bugs and fixed up some icons. Again, spent
a lot more time in evo, firefox, vim and bash than GIMP :/

Bought a new drive for my powerbook, since the 10G with osX was just a
temporary fix after my hard drive failure.

I must say I was really impressed. I was expecting some trouble. I thought,
hey, nobody cares about ppc much. But I was wrong, very wrong. The intaller,
although text-based, is very easy to use. Choices are nicely structured and
there’s been some thought given. You won’t end up lost in a list. If you chose
to be american, only timezone that apply to america are listed, but you can
still choose other...

One doesn’t need to use the brain even for partitioning. I don’t think
there’s been more questions asked than in the osX install I did a while ago.
In a few minutes I had a fully functional system, with my lastest gnome
desktop, sound, drI working. No package selection, no desktop selection. The
choice has been made before downloading the iso.

I was pleasantly surprised by the overall polish including a nice sound
theme.

If somebody asks me what linux distro he should try on his mac, I’m
resolutely recommending Ubuntu.
Especially the older hardware will come to new life.

GIMP 2.2 is comming and it’s getting a lot of polish. While most users think
about feature lists, the GIMP folks have been kicking arse in polishing the
interface. Some things will, however not make it. Let me use this space for a
little lobbing to perhaps get some hackers interested.

Bug #112859
is a perfect example where from the hacker perspective this “glitch” is
secondary and the functionality is there. However a major piece is
still missing. That is giving the user appropriate visual feedback of what’s
happening. Can anyone make me happy and finish it off?

#132204 is a
similar issue.

I started from an idea which in fact turned out not to be very original. I
thought, why not go for aperture blades (or whatever you call them in english)?
But make them colored like the hue wheel. Hmm, turns out I’ve seen that in Picasa and my brain fooled me into
thinking I actually came up with it. *sigh* So to save the day, I simplified it
into a bunch of polaroid snaps forming the aperture blades. The font is Arial
Rounded Bold, just like mono
itself.

Not sure if this is
distinct enough. In the end, perhaps the man himself could offer a
sketch, eh?

F-Spot Icon

I find the browsing interface in F-Spot, using tags to query the library,
somehow ineffective. Especially driven by my recent web export
effort I thought this would be a
lot better concept to go after.

Thanks to Peter Pouliot setting up pyxml on primates, I have a working
comment functionality in my blog now. Feel free to post your thoughts on the
issue there. Thank you.

I tried to make use of the tile widgets that beagle hackers seem to enjoy in
the QuickSearch
Applet. While I think it could work, it is a bit more demanding on screen
estate and in my opinion a little bit too much information at once than the
initial list mockup.

Another major issue is keyboard navigation, since we need to have two columns of tiles (600px of width may be too little for 4 tiles vertically). I hope we can do with tabs in the following order:

• First tab in the query entry will focus the result area, first tile specifically.
• Cursor keys now navigate within results (ie toggles tiles).
• Tab focuses the action toolbar within the tile.
• Addition tab focuses the search entry again.

I need to add proper actions and animate the mockup if this is decided to be
a better approach than the first one. But I realised I need to finish the
F-Spot logo/icon before I can do that . Stay tuned and feel free to blog/e-mail me your opinions.

Gimp Layer Groups

And btw, I REALLY, REALLY miss layer groups for
mockups like these. I have 12 layers even if I merge everything that’s doable
without losing editability. I’d be at about 30 if we didn’t have floats.

In fact, I talked to mitch on IRC and there is even a better solution for
this. Because layer groups define the physical structure of the image, the
overlay order, one could be able to define groups independent of the layer
stack. Selecting particular group would toggle the link layers button so one
could easily move stuff around by defining these groups.

Gtk+ Rant

And while I’m in the rant mode, can any brave gtk+ hacker look at bug #143668?
While Gimp 2.1 is rocking, this is
making it unbearable to open up image windows (something you do all the time).
I mean applying an unsharp mask takes less than opening an image! Not only
because the gimp folks sped up umask a lot, but mainly because the menu
populating is insanely slow. Nasty, nasty regression. Bug #153727 seems to
relate to this a bit.