GIMP

The page that describes what it means says:

"When you put the glider emblem on your web page, or wear it on clothing, or display it in some other way, you are visibly associating yourself with the hacker culture. This is not quite the same thing as claiming to be a hacker yourself -- that is a title of honor that generally has to be conferred by others rather than self-assumed. But by using this emblem, you express sympathy with hackers' goals, hackers' values, and the hacker way of living."

I became involved because I thought that the first generation of the GPL was the very best thing for extending knowlege and to allow people who owned computers to own the software used to run them and in turn, allowing them to really own the computers that they own.

I will never get to know what would have happened if I had contributed to a gpl project that had never been included on lists of Open Source Software. Maybe my mistake was in saying nice things about a certain line of books when my life was good and I was living where I wanted to live. Maybe the person I have been staying with is very simply a creepy little liar who is afraid of the dark and unwilling to live alone and unable to find roommates the traditional way. These are all guesses and there are so many many things that I do not know. I am able to make another guess that if that same little creep doesn't do what he promised and upgrade the project's computer, I will have lost EVERYTHING that I tried to do with that project. THAT has been promised since November 2005 and it is now July 2007; which should make one wonder what is the reason that so many people who contribute to the project are being so patient with *him*? I do know about my own disappointments in regards to where I have been staying and what I could have been doing and what I actually have been doing instead.

So, for the sake of extending knowlege, I apply the 'As is' to what the the bearers of the OSS inspired hackers glider and well-off developers like yosh will help you to accomplish when you live in their neighborhood:

astronomy photography as enabled by California 'hackers' and yosh

These last few years, I have been an observer -- whether I wanted to be or not. The section before this starts to address the problems of guessing. In a larger set of time, when telescopes were first invented and pointed into the skies; the users of these devices started to see incredible things; like the Whirlpool galaxy pictured here or what Wikipedia claims to be considered our twin galaxy, NGC 7331; and that is what this rant/lament is about. Using only that which you do know to guess what others are doing.

When I first learned that they had decided that our galaxy, The Milky Way (named because we can see (some of) the neighboring arm(s) and the center in our night sky) had been guessed about for classification, I remember an uncomfortable laugh and throat clearing. Later, that same physics department told me about the finding your keys under a lamp post problem; that if you lose your keys in the dark, the only place that you can look for them is under the lamp post where the light is.

I think now about the safety of guessing about the shape of the galaxy that your planetary system and planet reside in. I also think now about this guessing stuff because of the images I have recently been making.

When I first became involved with this software that is made with the personal computer in mind, there was in my line of interest GIMP and oggs a music format that really does sound better than mp3's when played on my computer.

Since my life became wrong; all I hear about are cellphones and ipods. I wonder even if almost every Mac computer out there is actually nothing but a large IPod that sends mail also. This musing is because about Macintosh computers all I can do is guess.

I was told that you can do simple things easily with a Macintosh computer. I was looking at one on display at a computer store. iMovie was open and they had a button which contained the name of the effect that this tutorial describes how to do with GIMP. Even with the computer on display and the button there -- it is difficult to imagine how one button could enable that effect without a whole bunch of learning something or other.

Then there is the problem of the Apple marketing.

Mathmapped here is Daff_Double_1.jpg from the public domain.

What causes a 'GIMP on Windows' person to write a tutorial for GIMP and put with it a file in the native Photoshop format?

I thought and thought and wondered and tried to determine the situation that would cause this. Perhaps the Windows user only uses GIMP for a few things and still needs to justify the cost of purchasing that application so still mostly uses Photoshop for things. Maybe, the user is still feeling good about having stolen a copy of Photoshop and likes to show that off.

More than likely, the case is that it is weird to run these free applications ontop of a system that was purchased by and pre-installed for that user.

It is not exactly like volunteer work for an application that you purchased but it is not exactly unlike it either.

I just don't understand all that forum stuff either.

Mathmapped here is Nadala Menuda (Narcissus Dubius) 05 from the public domain.

I am the Linux user here, so I can speak exactly about what I am doing and the ways I mess up. My brother was using an old and small computer with an 8bpp monitor when I first started with GIMP. I had to believe the software when it told me that my graphics looked good. I learned how to build software with gcc, the GNU compiler and I still think that building your own software is really cool. I don't like it when my distribution starts putting a lot of crap into the apps that I don't need, so recently I have had to learn to build my own browser and work around some of the "improvements" that have been made to the GNU build tools.

I also used to keep my dressy shoes in my car because it seemed that I only needed them when I went to places that I had to drive to. I don't fit easily into most groups of people, but if you look at the reasons I do some of the odd things that I do, it makes sense.

I had just enough mathematics and computer classes to appreciate this software and the people who write it, even when they are behaving like little affected girls.

Mathmapped here is Daffodils_in_a_vase_DSCF0284 from the public domain.

I muse about this now because Mathmap works on Windows, OSX and Linux via GIMP and on other Mac operating systems via Quicktime. So the plug-in itself causes this sort of effect with the users of it. I sit on the strand of GNU/Linux users and look at other strands of users and it all comes together at this one plug-in.

Mathmapped here is Daffodils by Michael Feagans and used by permission granted by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.