Safe as Milk

Alpes d’Huez predictions

Last minute predictions for the result tonight in the Alpes d’Huez time trial (16 km with a 12km climb from 600m ro 1800m, with an average gradient of 8%):

1. Ullrich
2. Mancebo
3. Armstrong

I expect Ullrich to win back a minute or so off Armstrong. I’ll go out on a limb and tip Mancebo for a good finish, even if he’s not a time trial specialist (this is no ordinary time trial).

If I’m wrong I’ll come back and edit this later so that it looks like I was right 😉

Update

So, in spite of myself, I can’t bring myself to change the predictions. The top 3 were

1. Armstrong
2. Ullrich at 1’01
3. Kloden at 1’41

Poor Mancebo was 24th at 3’30. And Basso did well to only lose 2’20, he’s still well in second place. So Lance has (updated thinko) 3 stage wins from 4 stages now…

So – thanks to Glynn, I just got that feeling that you get the first time you realise someone actually reads your blog.

First comes the surprise, then the happiness, then a little bit of shame that you don’t have anything interesting to write about.

Thanks Glynn 🙂

Apartment news

So – I was off work last week painting, and I ran into a bunch of things I hadn’t thought of. That said, by the end of the week, I had painted all of the skirting boards and doors with 2 or 3 coats, and the walls of the living room, hall and corridor are now a nice bright lemon yellow (although the paint company called it something more inventive). The place is looking cheerful and livable again.

Some parallels I noticed between interior decoration and software development:

• Preparation is essential

  You need a plan, and you will pass over 70% of your decorating time doing things other than painting. You will fill in holes, sand and wash walls, put paper or plastic on the ground, move furniture away from the walls and cover it, and so on.I forgot about a bunch of stuff and found myself underequipped when the time came to do things like protect the floor (I had a few big 3m x 4m plastic sheets which were completely inappropriate for putting round the edges of the room). I ended up wasting a day doing things which would have been 10 times easier if I had protected the floor and furniture properly. Thankfully, we got a big bunch of free newspapers and I could work OK after that.

  When you’re writing a program, there are also a bunch of things which need to be done to lay groundwork for a project (plans, specs, basic architecture diagrams, source control, bug tracker, testbed, nightly build framework), and you will find yourself continually regretting that you don’t have them if you don’t spend the time at the start setting things up properly.

• Avoid false economies

  At one stage I got so frustrated that things were going slower than I expected, and I was wasting my holidays, that I did some really stupid stuff. I painted doors without taking off the door handles. I had to take them off afterwards in any case, to clean them, so why didn’t I just take them off to start with?

  Frustration is the enemy, and causes people to start looking for shortcuts. Sometimes the shortcuts are there (cutting features before a release, for example), and sometimes they aren’t. Usually, shortcuts that you take when frustrated end up coming back to bite you later on and costing you time. You might think you can save time by not testing code while you write it, but you will spend twice as long debugging it later. You have to test the code anyway, so why not do it when it’s easiest?

• Use the right tools for the right job

  I really didn’t see why I had to buy lots of paint brushes, so at the start I only had 2 brushes and 1 roller. I ended up going back and buying more brushes, because the ones I had were completely inappropriate for the task at hand.

  A bit of forethought will allow you to decide what tools you need, what tools are useful, and what tools you can avoid.

Anyway, we’re taking a rest before we do the bedrooms, Thomas will be away at his grandparents at the start of August, and we’ll do his room then. After last week, I think that things will go much better now.

GIMP news

The GIMP is up for an annual OSI award in Portland at OSCon next week. The awards will be presented at the Tuesday evening dinner in the Portland Ballroom, wherever that is. yosh and carol will be there to wave the flag for us, all going well. Good luck to us.

There has been a pretty good discussion on the GIMP Developers list recently about colour correction. I would love to see this get done for 2.2, but right now it’s unclear what the answers to the two important questions are. Those questions are, as always, what and who. That is, what is going to be done, and who is going to do it.

The discussion has proposed two ways to handle colour management – the first is to apply a colour profile at load time, and have a working colourspace os sRGB or some other RGB colourspace. The problem with this approach is that there will inevitably be some data loss if we start with 8 or 16 bit per channel data, apply a colour profile, and then quantise to 8 bits per channel for the GIMP. The second approach is to store the colour profile along with the image that we load, and apply it only at display time, along with the monitor profile. This has a number of problems too – for example, when we pick a colour to paint with, it is likely that the colour that we see after applying colour profiles will not be the same as the colour we picked.

Since the 2.2 release will be the stable release for at least a year, in all likelihood (and, given our track record, perhaps longer), I would like to see *some* color management support in there. This proposal seems workable to me, although there are certainly implementation details which will be problematic.

Update on paint colours

I found this game where you can pit your wits against the Dulux paint namers. I performed spectacularly badly, scoring 1/10 (the average if you just guess should be 2/10). Good luck.

The GIMP Conference leftovers

Like every self-respecting group of geeks, when the GIMP developers got together during GUADEC, we printed some t-shirts to commemmorate the occasion.

We sold some while almost covered the cost of printing them, and now we have a few left (6 in all, 4 Mediums and 2 Smalls). It’s not a coincidence that only the unpopular sizes are left – I knew that printing 4 Smalls was too many, but anyway…

Now – the question is what should we do with them? We can give them away, but the cost of sending a t-shirt by international post is more than the cost of printing the t-shirts. We could sell them, but they’d be expensive. Alternatively, we could just keep them until the next time there’s a presentation or something and give them away…

Any ideas? Answers on a postcard (or an e-mail) to me.

Following on the recent trend, there are my GUADEC paper and slides. I presented a paper (which went kind of meuh, due to lack of preparation mostly) on the basics of writing a GIMP plug-in. I happened to be talking at the same time as Owen Taylor was presenting the future of rendering in GNOME, which helps explain the small attendance at my talk 🙂

Woohoo! Advogato’s back!

So anyway, I am in the middle of decorating (so far I’ve stripped wallpaper, plastered holes in the wall, sanded, re-plastered the holes after sanding to get them smooth, re-sanded). All that’s left is a bit of sanding in one room, and some more “finishing” plastering in a few places that have had the finish a bit cracked. We should be good to go for undercoat by the 12th (I’m taking a week off to decorate).

The interesting thing that I’ve noticed while looking for paint is the names that companies give paint colours. And it got me thinking about the guy who probably does nothing but that all day. Someone hands him a swatch with a light blue, and he goes through some process like this:

“Hmmm, looks kind of marine. Maybe we could call it something-spray or sea-something? Nope not green enough. We need something more subtle, but unverifiable… Something like a seashell, but what type? cockle shell should be pinker, oyster shell needs to be greyer… How about a generic “something shell”? deepwater shell? Nice – but the colour would be darker. I know – “secret shell”.”

And there we have it. “Secret shell” is a pale blue.

“Hidden garden” is a dark yellow/light orange with hints of green.

“Rickshaw” is a deep red.

And so on.

I don’t envy that guy but I’d like to try his job for a day.

Submitted my GUADEC paper last Friday, in time for the deadline. Although I finished it at 2am. It’s online here as a .tex and a .pdf, as well as a trivial plug-in that does very little, but does it reasonably correctly.

A couple of factual inaccuracies – shadow tiles have nothing to do with render speed as I say in the paper. It simply means that you are drawing on a copy of a tile, rather than the tile itself, and then all of the tiles get merged up to the “real” tiles in one, undoable, step. Otherwise, if we don’t use shadow tiles when drawing in a plug-in, and we cancel, we are drawing directly on the image’s tiles. Bad stuff.

Also, a consequence of marking tiles as not dirty, even if we are going to draw to them, is that the data for those tiles doesn’t get passed back to the core. This is interesting for multi-pass algorithms like Gaussian IIR, which is the application of a decomposable convolution matrix. So we have an intermediate drawable where we apply a horizontal vector, and on which we apply a vertical vector afterwards.

Feels good to win at football again. My team has been doing particularly badly this year – we now have a record of 2-2-10 in the league we play in, and lost a couple of matches with double-figure scores against us.

So winning 4-2 against a pretty decent team (even if we didn’t really deserve it – their attack was more wasteful than the French government) makes it all seem worthwhile again.

Bought lots of clothes for Thomas over the weekend.

Realised that there’s a reason why kids DVDs are much more expensive than adult DVDs in brick & mortar shops (even though they’re around the same price online). DVD companies (esp. Disney) and shops realise that kids have an genetically inbuilt instinctive ability to give their parents headaches until they buy them what they want.

A parent will look at a DVD, automatically put a value on it, compare the value to the price, and either buy or not buy. A kid doesn’t do that. And the value of a kid’s DVD to a parent is the cost of not having a headache all day, so the parents usually cough up.

So far, we’ve been good. There was no way I was going to pay 25 euros for “Winnie the Pooh, the Movie”. And opportunism like that kind of pisses me off. But I guess that’s commerce for you.

Ah, the joys of being worked to the bone.

Still no web content for the GIMP section of the GUADEC web pages – it’s now pretty urgent that we get something that is at least not disgraceful. A placeholder would probably do.

Suggestions welcome at the GIMP wiki.

Aside from that, the GUADEC presenters info is coming along, I didn’t quite get it finished last night. And all going well, we should have some good news on the organisational front early next week.

Add to that long days at work, and I’m really looking forward to having at least a half day over the weekend where I do nothing.