Safe as Milk

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.

Heh, cool – on advogato one day and I already have 3 fans 🙂

The GIMP currently needs some content to put on the GUADEC site to advertise the fact that GIMPCon is happenning at the same time. Of the GIMP developers, myself, nomis, Dan Rogers, pippin and Daniel Egger have had talks accepted (unfortunately Dan can’t go). There are also interesting graphical based talks on GStreamer, typography and GPhoto.

Anyone interested in giving e a hand with this, please feel free to drop me a line.

Back from Libr’East in Paris (finally) – even though I was only there for one day, it was great fun. I met up with dodji, who kindly put me up, and lots of other gnome-fr people.

It was a little bit of a shock arriving back to the apartment at 12.30 am and checking whether the USB reader I’d brought with me worked with dodji’s laptop, only to find that I hadn’t brought my presentation with me :-} That’ll teach me to unmount my flash card before taking it out.

So anyway, I wrote the bones of a presentation between 1am and 3.30am (it’s here), and it came off OK, I think – it’s the first time I have given a GIMP presentation in French, and I think it was a little dull. I was never very good at humour. Next time I should tell more jokes. I also ran out of time, and ended up going about 10 minutes over.

Afterwards I gave a quick demo on removing red-eye and playing with layers and selections and the clone tool. Ran out of time, but I think it went down OK.

Thanks to everyone who organised this conference, it was their first time and was a great success (apart from the people going over time, hem hem).