Yet Another Bikeshed

xrandr options

2006-12-28T13:28:49-08:00

After spending most of the morning thinking about the ex-President Ford and wondering if the odd conversation I had had in the lavoratory of the San Jose Airport had been influenced by the fact that I was drinking tap water from a previously purchased and recycled (and therefore mislabeled) water bottle -- I gave it up and got back to the reason I had put the little toys/ornaments on top of my computer monitor. That reason being, because it seems like the only reason things work on my computer is to interrupt my ideas and my plans.

I mentioned this on #gimp and Tom Rathborne (Tommer) was available to help....

The irc log in the screenshots shows a few things. Tommer helping me, for one thing. Jakub Steiner doing what he does best (which is getting into the interesting screenshots). Instructions for how to use this awesome software to rotate my display the same way I can rotate the screen which is displaying it.

carol@bread:~$ xrandr -q
 SZ:    Pixels          Physical       Refresh
*0   1680 x 1050   ( 427mm x 267mm )  *60  
 1   1280 x 1024   ( 427mm x 267mm )   75  
 2   1024 x 768    ( 427mm x 267mm )   75  
 3    800 x 600    ( 427mm x 267mm )   75  
 4    640 x 480    ( 427mm x 267mm )   75  
Current rotation - normal
Current reflection - none
Rotations possible - normal left inverted right 
Reflections possible - none
carol@bread:~$

Credit for the "what about that guy" joke goes to Rich Hall, from the Saturday Night Live years he was on. He used to contribute to their news show by showing photographs of famous occasions with himself pasted into them. Jimmac did not invent this. Nor did David Letterman when he would point out weird people in photographs on his show in the nineties.

Credit for making the irc moment for Jakub to paste himself into goes to me and Tommer. Credit for remembering who did this in my life (or on my television set) goes to me as well. Credit for the screenshot that is not inverted goes to whoever wrote xwd to do that and Tommer and yosh for finding such a great computer and allowing me so much more indebt-ness to him so that I do not have to sit here alone in Sillycon Valley with the hand-me-down I brought with me when I came.

Credit for misspelling personnel goes to me, Carol Spears.

New GIMP Color Dialog Palette Picker and GIMP Image Color Display Questions

2006-11-25T13:33:31-08:00

While trying to lay low and not interfer with the holiday weekend, I happened to notice the new color picker which is available now in GIMP's Color Dialog.

I also opened an image and GIMP asked me if I wanted to apply a color profile to it (or something like that). I agreed. It seemed to make no difference in the image being displayed. There is an old joke I kind of remember hearing once about how the goal when applying cosmetics to a face is to see how much you can apply and still see no difference.

Show here is the new color picker displaying the Visibone (336) palette.

Elven Bisquits For Wilber

2006-11-10T09:25:31-08:00

Another lgm another fantasygirlfriends.oreilley.com!! If you are like me and like to watch people who watch people who watch their wives, you might be interested in the tour of free software travel package I am about to make available.

It is quite a package also. Karines husband has a *nice* camera. She knows how to speak elven and can write photoshop-like plug-ins in C!

The three of them weave a tale of intrigue and romance unseen in todays usual humdrum standards and I can testify myself to the power that the combination of these three people can have on your life.

Please write me to schedule your watch the people who watch their wives vacation now! Slots are filling in quickly!

How the credit for colorhtml is given:

2006-11-08T04:33:58-08:00

It is interesting how license works. I have an example of a script authoring which would not even have happened without my knowlege being added to it -- yet the way the rules work, there is no reason to give me any credit for this. If it worked the same way in the print world, like that a translation from one language into another totally disassociates the original author -- then everything that Sven Neumann writes for GIMP would be owned by the person who translated his book.

Here is how the "great men" do it.....

Marc Lehman wrote the script originally. I used it quite a bit; I enjoyed it.

I figured out a way to make it work with css and thus produce xhtml. Using Marc Lehmanns original script and my instructions and understanding of xhtml that I shared with a person who wore the guise of friendship back then, Manish Singh -- he rewrote the perl script into python giving credit to the original author, Marc Lehmann.

Years later when I found no mention of my name on that script, I see how I have been giving people credit and how they also legally are allowed to take credit. When Manish informed me that it was his choice to put my name on it or not and he was putting it there simply to humor me, not because there was any rule that he had to give me credit -- I did not question his honesty about that.

Interestingly enough, Manish bore that same guise of friendship when he explained to me that it is assumed that you are financially stable before you become involved in free software. He was also was looking like the same kind of friend when he explained to me that he has no respect for an accomplished older woman who had not made money from her accomplishments.

It is somewhat obvious the reasons that the developers of software do not want me to interview them. I give them credit, they take credit -- I keep giving them credit, they keep taking credit. My dreams go down their toilets or something.

Updated Resume

2006-11-07T10:11-08:00

Using every single human resource I have here in Mountain View, California, I have finally found a subset of my original resume which should be worth about (100K USAD/year) on the local market.

I will be honest, here in my web log about it. One of the accomplishments I have listed there is less accurate than the others.

My apologies for not understanding what is important in life.

Fix vs Repair

2006-11-07T10:10:56-08:00

There are two words which get used interchangibly, repair and fix. I have been thinking about this lately. The definitions are not so interchangible though. One definition guarrentees an outcome and the other definition is more about making wrong and broken things to be not wrong and working again.

The definitions can get even more refined than this. For instance, some repairs are to make things that do wrong things stop doing wrong things. So the repair would be to break something. It has to be really wrong though -- for the definition to work.

Friend, foe, family, political action group, messengers from god -- whoever you are today, how about a day (or more even) of repair for somebody who needs it.

Exemplification, Salubriousness, Differentiation and Accumulation with GIMP

2006-11-02T22:17:08-08:00

Over the last week I had a little fun with everything I learned about black and white photography and lens filtering in the 1970's and 1980's (which sadly isn't that much), GIMP and the photographs from my tour of Norway taken right after GUADEC 4 and GIMPCon3; almost but not quite culminating into a slew of new (and somewhat useful) 'layer effects'.

If that is not enough, pygimp has a new console now and I made a place to put the good scripts.

I need to finish the cameo effect and it is probably a good thing that I did not make the sepia galleries as well. Automated scripts that work are dangerous even in this time when hard disks are so inexpensive.

Desaturate vs Decompose

2006-10-18T23:52:47-07:00

I had a little fun with comparing desaturate with deompose. It turns out, it was not that much fun.

There is also my layer-effects as well as some new dribble about paths.

Developer Version gimp-2.3.12 is on the loose

2006-10-16T12:20:06-07:00

I just read that gimp-2.3.12 has been released.

This is the release with mitches beautiful icons contained within.

I don't have any additional icons installed, so my software sees only those icons that the application brings with them. mitch was trying to encourage Jakub Steiner to make icons that are less ugly than this.

Spooginary Position

2006-07-20T11:47:47-07:00

Spooginary Position is when you just deal with the way other people make money without having an opinion on it.

The original context for this word is from restaurant culture. Spooge is the name for the bloated nasty soapy-water soaken pieces of food and other restaurant ingredients that can be seen after the restaurant closes.

funny and fun screenshots

2006-07-12T17:02:23-07:00

There is a commercial on the television right now in which a persona of a Windows computer is bragging about having a calculator. This is a screenshot of my calculator.

I don't feel so badly about this. My goal was to build a minimum of software to get as much very productive and picky software working properly as possible. First everything between bash/x11 and gtk+. My idea became to install what ever x11 files were needed myself, leaving Debian to run the display and whatever software I build to use my files to work with. GIMP with GAP and the python interpreter, xscreensaver with gl, mplayer and I couldn't stand it with twm any longer and broke down and installed everything that I needed from xfce4 from xfwm backwards and then from xfwm4 forward to the panel and a working menu-editor. The goal here is to get a screenshot with everyone who is here in this one and mplayer playing Elephants Dream right after I repartition a harddrive and move the movie to its home.

I messed up in the middle of the mesa gl stuff trying to make my own xscreensaver. I have all sorts of debian '-dev' binaries now. I am trying to put together my notes to see where I failed.

It's interesting to see what icons every application brings with it.

My small GIMP

2006-07-04T14:15:29-07:00

Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.

                -- H. L. Mencken


carol@crouton:~/>

Classic GIMP Layout

Unencumbered with a desktop environment and with only twm interfering with me and GIMP, I set up what I thought was a nice classic GIMP layout which keeps the spirit of gimp-1.0 and gimp-1.2 yet adds some of the nice things that are not so easy to find in gimp2.

classic-gimpuser.tar.gz

bash: fortune: command not found

2006-07-04T14:11:12-07:00

bash: fortune: command not found

carol@bread:~/> gimp&
[1] 21992
bash: gimp: command not found
carol@bread:~/> /usr/local/bin/gimp&
[2] 21993
[1]   Exit 127                gimp
bash: /usr/local/bin/gimp: No such file or directory
carol@bread:~/> /usr/local/bin/gimp-2.3 &
[3] 21994
[2]   Exit 127                /usr/local/bin/gimp
carol@bread:~/> This is a development version of GIMP.  Debug messages may appear here.
carol@bread:~/>

Screenshot gallery

I was unable to install planet today because I did not have bunzip2 or even libbz2. I was also unable to work with pyblosxom on my new computer because I do not have enough c++ compiler. What I do have is a bunch of screenshots that are at least funny (i broke down and changed the color of twm because I couldn't stand it any longer). I am working right now with most of the software that had been available to me in 1998. Installing things slowly and looking at it while you are installing it -- it really starts to read like a beaten up path through a really nice native land, or something.

Hanoi Towers

2006-06-30T11:59:03-07:00

I got a new computer and Debian must have thought that I needed a break from the joy of it all to enable me to play Hanoi Towers for a little while.

Things could be worse than this. Or better.

crouton

2006-06-25T21:33:15-07:00

You can be replaced by this computer.
 
carol@bread:/> uname -a
carol@bread:/> Linux bread 2.6.16.7 #1 Mon Apr 17 21:38:42 PDT 2006 i686 GNU/Linux
carol@bread:/> lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C693A/694x [Apollo PRO133x] (rev 01)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C598/694x [Apollo MVP3/Pro133x AGP]
00:07.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C596 ISA [Mobile South] (rev 05)
00:07.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
00:07.3 SMBus: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C596 Power Management
00:09.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone]
00:0a.0 Multimedia audio controller: Ensoniq ES1371 [AudioPCI-97] (rev 08)
00:0b.0 Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905B 100BaseTX [Cyclone] (rev 30)
00:0c.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB12LV23 IEEE-1394 Controller
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Graphics, Inc. G400/G450 (rev 04)
carol@bread:/>

If I knew what I do, I would know if this was a compliment or not.

It would also be nice to know how many other people can be replaced with this computer.

Fathers Day 2006

2006-06-18T18:30:10-07:00

I was thinking about this photograph yesterday and what my dad said about the situation that the photograph was taken in. I was thinking about it while I was making new nectar for my "pets" which are hummingbirds who by their own choice come from their own world to eat there and are free to go back to their own world. Today is about dad though....

"I feel bad for these birds" he said about my brothers pet doves. "Just open the window and let them go." Except that you can't just do that either. They might not belong in world that is outside that window and will die in the environment -- or, they might flourish in the environment and tip it the wrong way. Thoughtlessly released pets are just as bad as pets you probably should not have had to begin with....

Most of my problems living in this land where people made fortunes early on in the evolution of computers goes back to this man, my dad, and the simple knowledge he passed on to me. I am stuck here, in many ways, not unlike the dove in that photograph. A cruel situation and one of the reasons I do not belong here is that I know where I came from and I know who my dad is. Not a perfect man, but a really good teacher. Here is the reason I really do not want to write a resume so that you will consider hiring me for a job with computers....

In 1972, I was 10 years old and the Homebrew Computer Club had not even met for the first time. I built a computer. My dad loved the idea of these computers and passed that love on to me. He had taught me how to count in binary and he had taught me how to determine the name of the resistor by the color code painted on them. He provided access to the instructions (Popular Mechanics) and the materials (a cigar box, some of those paper securers that look like nails, wire and a light bulb). It did not work, but I understood how it should have worked. I found those instructions and followed them myself. Dad was the kind of dad who did not do the homework for his kids; he was available to answer questions though. My mom did not teach me to do these things -- my dad did.

Sometimes I wonder about the children whose parents do their homework for them. They look better on paper, but how do they feel?

In 1975 or 1976, dad built a KIM from a kit. I got to download programs from a cassette tape and run them on that funny little computer. I played Hunt the Wumpus on it and toyed with it for the better part of a weekend. I went to visit him; by then my parents were divorced and my house was horribly divided.

For all of the problems my family had, both from internal pressures and external pressures, it is a simple fact that I honestly think that people should be submitting their resumes to me and not me trying to write one that is acceptable to them. I know who my dad was and what he was able to teach me.

All of my life, and mostly because of what my dad taught me, the only way you can keep me down is to deny access and money. It is pathetic.

Happy Fathers Day dad! I am just like you now, I guess. Lesser people make a lot more money than I do and little small brains make me buy my own products. Sometimes I wonder how much my brains were in and are in the big brain pool. The compliment is that they can only keep you down with imaginary things like money and barriers and for me, my own lines in the sands of morality. But compliments like this only go so far.

And look at me! I can totally justify shoving my resume up their HRses without the even mentioning how much me and the gimp developers stirred this world up!

Learning how to make graphics with GIMP is not unlike learning about computers from/with my dad. The education will always be with you, even if the application itself makes you take some of those step yourself.