Archives for the month of: August, 2007
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Gnome Turns 10 – as does the Gnome/KDE war

August 15, 2007 //
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So the Gnome desktop environment turns 10 today. Of course I took a look at Miguel de Icaza’s announcement post. But I found the single follow-up post to be interesting too! ;) 

On Fri, 15 Aug 1997, Miguel de Icaza wrote:> We want to develop a free and complete set of user friendly> applications and desktop tools, similar to CDE and KDE but based> entirely on free software:

IMHO this is a knee-jerk reaction to a nonexistent problem.

Best of luck doing this with GTK... it has a long ways to catch upwith Qt.

-Dan

Clearly not only the start of Gnome, but the start of the Gnome/KDE wars too! :)

Personally, I have always ran Ubuntu with Gnome, but I run KDE and GTK apps interchangably. Besides, my new found love is OpenBox anyway!!

Here are a couple of screenshots of my current desktop setup:

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Categories linux

Photo Printing in Linux

August 15, 2007 //
0

A recent article in LXer points out that printing photos in Linux is a nightmare. And while I can’t comment on most of the apps that she’s tried, I can say that I’ve been quite satisfied printing in the Gimp.

I recently bought a new Epson R380 printer. So new in fact that Feisty didn’t have support for it. It turns out that the Gutenprint project added support for this printer as of version 5.0.1. Installing these drivers was a bit of a quagmire, but I got it done. And luckily, the next release of Ubuntu (Gutsy) will support this printer out of the box.

So contrary to the LXer author’s findings, I can print photos quite happily in the Gimp. Yes, even high quality borderless ones (I’ve printed borderless 8x10’s and 4x6’s so far). Colour profiling and correction for the printer is not easy, but I have to say that with a little tweaking to lower the greens and increase the magenta levels, I’ve managed to get very nice colour prints. And besides, my dad has an older model Epson R300 that he uses with XP (and the Epson drivers) and his prints always end up magenta-heavy, so colour profiling is not something that’s really easy on any platform - it’s a feature that requires simplification everywhere - and no, getting your printed output to match your screen in Photoshop is not that easy either - definitely not easy enough.

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Categories linux, photography

Shattered Photo – Inkscape Screencast

August 14, 2007 //
0

I’ve finished another Inkscape screencast, Episode 032 to be specific. This one shows one way of creating a shattered glass effect with a photo image using Inkscape. I’ve uploaded a lower quality version to YouTube and of course you can find it in significantly higher quality, along with all of our other screencasts at: screencasters.heathenx.org

Hope you enjoy it and find it useful. :)

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Categories graphics, inkscape, screencast

Gaming nostalgia and a possible time sinkhole…

August 13, 2007 //
2

Back in the day, I used to enjoy me the odd pc-based videogame. I was heavy into the racing sim games which varied from the high quality (Indy500 from Papyrus, Geoff Crammond’s GP1,GP2 and GP3) to the very low (Bill Elliot’s Nascar Challenge, and the old Road&Track Grand Prix Unlimited game - eeewww, what’s that smell??).

But my pc-gaming experience extended past the racing sim genre to include a few other favourites. Two of which I’ve recently re-experienced using a neat utility called DosBox. DosBox is an open-source DOS emulator. Indeed, I have been using DosBox at work for some time, since it’s the only way I can get a favourite old DOS-based design program running within XP. From their website:

DOSBox is a DOS-emulator that uses the SDL-library which makes DOSBox very easy to port to different platforms. DOSBox has already been ported to many different platforms, such as Windows, BeOS, Linux, MacOS X…

DOSBox also emulates CPU:286/386 realmode/protected mode, Directory FileSystem/XMS/EMS, Tandy/Hercules/CGA/EGA/VGA/VESA graphics, a SoundBlaster/Gravis Ultra Sound card for excellent sound compatibility with older games…

So locating the files for two of my absolute all-time favourites, 4D Sports Boxing and Out of this World (which was called ‘Another World’ in the UK), I immediately fired up DosBox, mounted the C:\ drive to a specified folder on my system and it ran them both flawlessly, sound included - just like they ran on my old 386 and P75 machines.

Out of this World is still a marvel of interesting gameplay. The theatrical intro, ultra cool background music and polygon based graphics made this one a cult hit then. It’s still a great challenge to play. Think of it as Prince of Persia but much more elegant and involving. I remember spending countless hours trying to figure out solutions to the problems I faced in the game, without the benefit of Google or it’s associated cheat and hint code environment.

So indeed, if you’ve got a hankerin’ for that pc game from long ago, check out DosBox and let the retro roll!!

And if arcade gaming was also your thing (think Zaxxon, Galaga, Q-bert, Omega Race and Joust) then you could always check out the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator or Mame for short. You can find the mame site here, or if you’re a linux user, check your repos, you might be a quick ‘sudo apt-get install xmame-common’ away from retro gaming nirvana like I was. ;)

Caution: This post holds the potential for a massive time sinkhole. You have been warned!! :)

Were you a gamer in years past? Share some of your faves in the comments.

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Categories Uncategorized

The graphic app that will change the world!!

August 13, 2007 //
2

via Digg,

Finally! Something windows users can be proud of, and Mac users can just sit and drool over:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hxx2KcPWWZg]

:)

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Categories graphics, humour

Excuses Excuses

August 8, 2007 //
0

Too much work + not enough time = very little blogging

But in the meantime, I did find this hilarious:

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Categories blogging

A source for free comic fonts…

August 4, 2007 //
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Among the 1001 other things I’ve wanted to learn more about is comic design and creation. A nice find this week was the Comic Tools Blog. Via that blog, I found a homey 90’s looking website of the very experienced comic letterer Todd Klein. Lots of interesting information there.

Of course, being into Inkscape I was keen on the computerized end of things. Long story short, I ended up at the Blambot Comic Fonts and Lettering site. They sell a wide range of comic fonts, but wouldn’t you know - they also offer several high quality free fonts for non-commercial use.

I’m sure experienced comic artists already know all this stuff, so for any of you aspiring web comic artists out there, you might want to check it out.

Incidentally, one of the free fonts there was called Evil Genious. Dave Slusher would be proud. ;)

ps - Come to think of it, I miss Earl’s comic-captioned photos too. Where’d they go Earl?

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Categories graphics, inkscape

Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

August 2, 2007 //
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Watching the horrible news of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. CNN is currently listing 3 fatalities. Watching the footage, I'm thinking the news will get significantly worse. :(

As a structural engineer, things like this scare the hell out of me. I'm not sure if it's naive to take the safety of our buildings and bridges for granted, or a testament to our engineering and construction know-how when we realize how few and far between failures like this are.

There are many variables that can lead to a structural failure: errors in design, errors in construction, and errors in maintenance. And make no mistake, engineers, designers and constructors are only human. And humans make errors. Let's just hope they find out what those errors were, and what we can learn from them.

Categories Uncategorized

Check out The GUIdebook

August 1, 2007 //
0


If you’re interested in screenshots, icons and splash screens of various GUI’s over the years from GeoWorks, Amiga Workbench, CDE, NextStep, BeOS, OS/2, Windows, Mac and others, check out GUIdebook.org. While the front page notes a last update of Oct/06, I still found plenty of good images, and info on the development of various GUI systems.

The navigation on the site tells me that they were planning (or maybe are still planning) to provide a very wide breadth of information on GUI’s and OS’s from timelines to graphics and news. There are a quite a few areas to explore, but naturally some areas are thin on information as you might expect. A nice find anyway though.

One GUI I couldn’t find on the site was the old OpenWindows desktop (a piece of which is shown above). I used this desktop during graduate school for my thesis which dumped me into the deep end of C programming, make files and gcc. Nevertheless the OpenWindows desktop (and unix in general) seemed like a revelation to me at the time (just previous to the launch of Win95). Very high resolution - for that time - and a desktop capable of really multitasking made me frown when I went back to my apartment where I was running Windows 3.11 at 800x600 and bombing around the Compuserve forums using OzWin.. ;)

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Categories linux
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