How to butcher a good text

Published on January 30, 2012 in Docs. 0 Comments

So you want to write an article. But what if people actually try reading it? What if they (oh, the blasphemy!) understand a good part of it?

No way Jose! You didn’t spend hours doing a research for everyone to understand it. If you made an effort, people’ve got to show some respect! The’ve got to spend as much time on reading it as your spent on writing it. Or else they are cheating.

Tired of people cheating on you, my fellow blogger? I’ll show you the way forward. Then left, right, left, left again, forward, right, upside-down, inside-out, left… Nearly there!

The Core Concept

Forget it. You are a man of ideas, are you not? Put as many ideas in your text as you can think of. Don’t separate them. Instead, let them tie in crazy knots like a headphone wire in your pocket.

This is your ideal text visualized:

Upd and Down

The Navigation

Huh? Navigation is for sissy girls. You write stuff only for the deserving who are tough enough to dig through ten layers of crap. In other words:

  • Never use headings. Train of thought may do Brownian movements, but that’s no reason for stopping.
  • Use inline lists. Because the colon was invented for a reason, dontcherknow.
  • Put as many hyperlinks in your text as you can think of. Take that, Wikipedia!

The Text

  • Write long, very long paragraphs. People’ve got to see you put some work into it!
  • Right after those very long paragraphs use very short ones, no less that a single sentence. After all, you are not a monster.
  • Nevertheless, most of the content should be made up of sentences with no less than 3 levels of nested complexity. Solve the puzzle, sukkas!

Illustrations

Eeeek! That’s abomination unto machismo. Make it a wall of text. No treacherous image should sneak in! Guard the perimeter!

On a second thought, you can get some extra points for making people go through illustrations with gritted teeth. Just use a really psychodelic color palette for all the diagrams and never ever put a legend on.

Tables

Yeah, baby. This is where you can go nuts. People may think you wear underpants on your head, but I say use long tables!

In fact, make all of your text a table. And put some nested tables in. I mean, aren’t all geniuses crazy? That must be it!

Conclusions

If you follow these simple instructions, few people will read more than 1/10 of your article. This is how your gain a true following of the like-minded! And with luck everyone will just skip your text! How cool is that?!

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: uh, oh, this sukka broke every rule he listed. Does the bugger ever follow his own advices?

And that’s my point exactly: never follow your own advices. This will only make it more interesting!

Die Hard 5: with kernels

Published on January 19, 2012 in Development, Graphics and Music. 0 Comments Tags: .

It’s been a while since I last posted some opinionated crap. How could that possibly happen? :)

Last week Bitwig folks finally announced upcoming beta of Bitwig Studio, a new commercial DAW for Win, Mac and Linux. As it often happens, some folks in the community started speculating how this is going to affect existing free software and the community itself. After all, it’s not that we’ve got huge teams slaving away to make music production a breeze on Linux, eh?

Well, one thing I really liked in the LAU thread is that most folks who cared to comment didn’t express extreme views. I seriously hope that it’s a sign of the community becoming mature enough to treat things in a relaxed, no-fanatic way.

What I’ve been seeing on the desktop layer is that free/libre and commercial software can perfectly coexist without kicking each other in the nadgers and turning half the city to ruins. Just a few examples:

  • Bibble Pro (Corel AfterShot Pro since last week, btw) didn’t make any existing free software die. Instead we got darktable.
  • A month ago BrainDistrict announced PaintSupreme. Can you see Pinta folks crying in despair, because noone’s gonna use it again?
  • BrainDistrict has also been resurrecting MainActor, and yet commits to Kdenlive, PiTiVi, Novacut and OpenShot keep piling up.
  • Renoise didn’t kill any free software project, and they even added support for DSSI, a (currently outdated) free API for virtual instruments.
  • Mixbus folks have been contributing to upstream Ardour project for a couple of years now already, and aren’t they proprietary guys?
  • Loomer is busy porting their commercial synths and effects to LV2, the state of the art free API for virtual instruments and effects.
  • linuxDSP started with Linux support from ground up and has been supporting LV2 since day one.
  • ..and the list can go on.

The only fluctuation I can think of is the 8 years old story with Jorg Anders overreacting and abandoning NoteEdit after hearing about a, frankly speaking, fantom possibility of Finale port to Linux. And he started NtEd few years later anyway. That he doesn’t get much acknowledgment for NtEd either is a whole different story.

And even if you could recall all the epic OMG!Ubuntu threads about likewise phantom possibility of Photoshop port for Linux, you’d soon figure out that most people who expressed their interest weren’t going to use GIMP anyway. No love lost.

So if you think that some proprietary app suddenly available for Linux is going to do BLOOD NEEDLESS VIOLENCE GUTS OUTSIDE CITY TAKEN OVER DEAD BODIES ALL AROUND to your favourite free application, stop worrying. Fire up that free app and do something awesome with it. Work on your skills, become damn good at using free software, and then share what you know. This is how you become your own John McClane.

Zero tolerance

Published on November 14, 2011 in Development and Graphics. 1 Comment

As LGW owner and primary contributor I’m supposed to be neutral to various projects and try to be at least in good relations with everyone. That, however, doesn’t mean that I should like bigotry.

I haven’t covered Oyranos and related apps in a while simply because I found it increasingly difficult to explain why anyone would need them in real life, except ICC Examin which is a nice ICC inspection software (fails to work on Intel GPU, but that’s another story). However, the more I observe the whole colord/oyranos situation, the less I wish to have anything to do with Oyranos. Here is why:

Colord developer on Oyranos:

I don’t think it’s likely we’re ever going to see any interoperability between the colord and Oyranos projects in the future. Not for any huge ideological reason, but just because the feature overlap of the two projects is too small. Colord is of very limited scope, is installed by default and tries to make things just work. Oyranos is a project of huge scope that wraps many other libraries and tries to be involved in every part of the color workflow. It’s kind-of orthogonal to what colord is trying to be, and that’s the main reason I chose to start a new project rather than trying to fix Oyranos.

Note the courteous tone.

And now Oyranos developer:

What counts today is a very different understanding about, what makes a good colour management system. The colord author has failed to meet many criteria and was so far not very cooperative to accept some very common demands from various people in the colour community…

Beside that I believe, Oyranos is from a architectural level much better designed, because it relies as good as possible on existing standards, which colord does not care about.

Here is a clue. Colord is catering to Linux users who want color management to just work and not be pain in the arse. Oyranos is trying to work on all possible platforms and support all kinds of workflows. Which is why colord is now becoming mainstream (recent Fedora and Ubuntu relases have it), while Oyranos can mostly be found in the upcoming new version of OpenSUSE. Hence the bitching.

This kind of childish behavior is precisely the reason I’m getting less and less involved with some projects lately.

Switching CMS and moving on

Published on October 6, 2011 in Graphics. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Last week we switched Libre Graphics World to a new CMS. Most important 301 redirects are in place, XML sitemap is coming, there’s still a bunch of work to do, but new material is already pouring in. Here is some of the latest stuff:

More is coming.

Forums and software directory will be merged later as least important parts of the project.

“Excuse me, sir/madam”

Published on September 15, 2011 in Graphics. 2 Comments Tags: , .

Nearly forgot how I love taking interviews, so started doing it more often than usual:

  • A talk to Thomas Krijnen on IFC based workflows, Blender and architecture
  • An interview with a LibreOffice GSoC student and her mentor on implementing support for Visio files
  • Short interview with folks from Argentina who customized MyPaint for their open movie project

Some more interviews, articles and tuts are coming :)

5 common misconceptions about GNOME 3 and GNOME Shell

Published on September 7, 2011 in Development. 10 Comments

Seeing repetitive false statements can be tiresome. Here are some regarding GNOME3 and Shell.

1. GNOME3 is designed for tablets, not desktops.

This one is controversial. There clearly are mobile inspired solutions in the Shell. At the same time, GNOME 3 is designed for desktops and is tested on desktops by people who use desktops, including dualhead configurations (an older screenshot by Jimmac below).

G3 icon design by Jimmac

Oh, and these people do some quite cool things with Blender, Inkscape, GIMP and FontForge. So we are talking about serious software, not just facebooking and instant messaging.

I’ve yet to see a tablet running GNOME 3. Yet all the time I keep hearing about people who were handed a desktop with GNOME Shell and were able to immediately start using it.

2. GNOME3 is designed for using mouse rather than keyboard and requires too much activity.

I dare say there is a nice balance between use of keyboard, mouse and a combination of both.

3. GNOME3 is not extensible, and it’s about dumbing down user experience.

Quite the opposite. A lot of work has been done to make GObject introspection usable. Hence you can write your own extensions to GNOME Shell, and there are 15 extensions coming in GNOME 3.2, including system monitor that quite a few people have been missing in 3.0. There’s also SweetTooth project in works that simplifies management and installation of extensions.

Quoting the very same SweetTooth page:

Using extensions should never feel shameful for the user: they should be branded and recognized as “things that can make your Shell personalized, cool and more featureful!” We cannot see them as hacks, workarounds, prototypes, or fallbacks but instead as pieces of functionality that users may enjoy using, sometimes even more than the GNOME UX. We cannot blame them for challenging “the divine GNOME UX, the holy and blessed way to do things,”

Does it sound like dumbing down the desktop experience? Think again. And here is some advanced info on customization.

4. GNOME3 is designed and developed by new people who don’t respect GNOME2 users.

Quite a lot of people who work on G3 come with extensive G2 participation background (Andreas Nillson, Lapo Calamandrei, Mairin Duffy etc.), and some come even from the middle ages, that is, GNOME 1.x: Jimmac, Owen Taylor… You know them all, don’t you?

5. GNOME3 designers don’t listen to users, and the process isn’t open, because they don’t care about you.

A quote Jon McCann:

Some of the feedback is certainly valid and we are going to use that to make informed decisions in the GNOME3 cycle – remember we’ve only had one release so far. In couple of the talks we pointed out that it took us eight, nine years to get to where GNOME2 ended up and we’ve had like four months of GNOME3. So there are plenty of things we still have to do. There are a lot of holes in our story. People will look at some things and say “Why is this there? Does this really make sense?”. And in many cases that’s because we didn’t get to really finish that off. And that will start to fill in, the story will become a little bit more complete as we go through this cycle. I’m not saying that all this people will be completely convinced and that’s unfortunate but I think over time people will realize what we are doing has been at least thought through.

A quote from Allan Day:

Feedback does get read and gets weighed up against the other evidence that is available. I think it would be great if we had a more visible process there, however.

A quote from Shaun McCance

Just because I don’t publish reports doesn’t mean I don’t do user tests. And the constant assertions that nobody is looking at feedback are getting a bit insulting.

What about typical polls and surveys? Shaun McCance, again:

All methods have flaws. But user testing, at least, gives results that are personal and actionable. When I get results like “all 5 users were uncertain where to click when instructed to click the ‘user menu’”, I know what to do. I have no idea what to do with “63% of respondents report they are less happy than they were a year ago”.

Finally, on the transparence of the design process. Back to Allan Day:

The challenges that GNOME design faces are the same as any other part of GNOME. Writing documentation and communicating your activities is always difficult when you’re busy and focused on other things. This isn’t to say that we don’t need to do better, of course.

Hopefully that clears things up for you.

The endless GIMP name debate

Published on August 25, 2011 in Development and Graphics. 4 Comments

— I’m sorry, son, there’s something we’ve got to tell ya.
— Er, mom? Dad? Granpa in hospital again?
— No, not as such. It’s about your name.
­— What about it?
— Well, the thing is… It’s not good. We’ve got to change it.
— What’s wrong with the name Boyo? I’ve been a Boyo 15 years of my life. I love it!
­— Apparently in Chinese it means few different things, not all of them nice.
— Exactly how not nice?
— I’m not sure you’re old enough to know.
— But old enough to have my name replaced because of what some people in China could think?
— It’s, you know, down to marketing.
— Er, WHAT? Are you up to selling me to China???!!!
— Sorry, son, the times are harsh.
— And what will my new name be, may I ask?
— I don’t really know. We had a family meeting, and no single person agreed with anybody else, so you don’t have any new name, but that’s all right, ’cause we are all just one big loving family, aren’t we? Aren’t we?

*sound of a falling body*

— Son?

*curtain falls*

On Cinepaint, GIMP and GEGL

Published on August 17, 2011 in Development and Graphics. 4 Comments

The Cinepaint/GIMP crusade will probably never die. Sad but true. I keep reading the same bullshit over and over again, for years, so I thought I should probably write about it once and never get back to it again.

The legend runs, as an ill-informed Phoronix user recently suggested, as this: “Just think, its only been 11 years since the functionality was handed to them on a silver platter and they rejected it unanimously in favor of vapor ware. It has got to be one of the biggest boneheaded moves in software development.”

It has got to be one of the biggest boneheaded moves in software development indeed, except the author of the statement is out of touch with reality. Let’s go back in history.

Cinepaint is a new name of FilmGIMP, the project born out of “Hollywood” branch of GIMP which was started in 1997. The first commit by the joint username “People doing a 16 bpc version of gimp” (more on that later) was done on December 15, 1997, and the last commit was done on August 27, 2002. Got the dates?

Now move to GEGL’s commit log. It starts on January 2, 2000, with commit of the very same username, “People doing a 16 bpc version of gimp”. The last commit from that username in GEGL was done on December 22, 2003.

So the idea that the pro-Cinepaint folks are trying to sell is that GIMP developers refused FilmGIMP developed by R&H developers in favour of vaporware GEGL developed by the very same R&H developers. Amazing, isn’t it? That’s some unbeatable logic if I ever saw one.

And yes — “People doing a 16 bpc version of gimp” is the joint username of Jonathan Cohen, Calvin Williamson and Caroline Dahllöf, all of them being developers at the famous Rhythm and Hues company at the time.

If you really want to understand how the actual FilmGIMP/GEGL developers (not either project leads) felt around 2002 when the whole unpleasantness was unleashed, read Jonathan’s mail to gimp-developer from early December 2002. It also answers the “why projects did not converge” concern re Cinepaint/FilmGIMP and GIMP. Then compare it to what you thought you knew.

You can choose to believe, or you can choose to find out what things really are—it’s entirely up to you. Either way, don’t fall for politics. And it’s the best advice I can give you at this time in the morning :)

On Linus, GNOME 3 and morons

Published on August 5, 2011 in Development. 7 Comments Tags: .

One thing that is somewhat depressing is willingness of some people to take words of celebrities and go around saying “But X says so! Obviously (s)he’s right because (s)he’s X!”. Some people just don’t get the hang of thinking for themselves.

This time it started with Linus trolling on GNOME 3. It was quite clear from the very beginning that both GNOME 3 and Unity are going to be love-or-hate desktops. So it was only a matter of time till Linus spoke his mind. But ZDnet’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols picked the story and wrapped it in a dozen of layers of bullshit.

What the story actually boils down to is that a Linux celebrity (well, THE celebrity, really) is trying to tell us that his truth is better than someone else’s (especially since not all of that is truth), and everyone who disagrees is insane.

I think we have a problem with our celebrities. Linus is a troll, RMS is a big annoying baby, and both have a huge following. You think that doesn’t shape evolution of free software and the way we are seen by the world? Oh, it does.

What Mr. Vaughan-Nichols is trying to tell us is that an opinion of one celebrity should suddenly put a stop to ongoing development of GNOME 3. Because Linus says so.

So the other problem is that people who should be writing for Vogue or Cosmopolitan happen to be columnists of leading IT websites due to a fluctuation in time and space.

Edit. I can see now why Steven adores Linus’s point of view. In an earlier article he writes: “First, did we really need a “completely new desktop?” I don’t think so. I quite liked GNOME the 2.x series. It worked well for me and I didn’t need to learn anything new to use it.” Note how he jumps between “we” and “I” as if it was same thing.

Let’s make it clear: I don’t think there is such a thing as a perfect desktop environment. I’ve tried pretty much everything there is to try and I’m sticking to a combination of GNOME 2.32 + Docky + GNOME Do at the moment. I was rather annoyed by Unity first, but after a while I can see some of the points and I’m sure I’ll try it again after release of 11.10. I like many aspects of GNOME 3 and it’s quite possible that I will make a switch to it after release of v.3.2.

Both desktops are reportedly appealing to newly arrived users who don’t have particular habits and hence don’t have to go through mistakes and imperfections of early desktop metaphor implementations.

And yes, it’s entirely up to you whether you want to be a moron and dismiss both background and perspective of the story off-hand. Just as long as you understand that drawing conclusions has a prerequisite of studying facts instead of making things up.

Graphics tablets configuration in GNOME

Published on July 27, 2011 in Development, Graphics and Uncategorized. 1 Comment

I was actually going to blog on Novacut, but thought better of it. I think there’s enough tension growing already :) Instead I’d like to draw your attention to planned graphic tablets configuration tool for GNOME 3. It needs some work to get included upstream.

There already is some design/UX work done by Jimmac, with some useful comments from Hylke Bons to take into consideration.

What’s more important, there already is real code by Peter Hutterer that basically lacks calibration part. So all it needs is someone (yes, jonnor, I’m looking at you) willing to take existing code and add few missing things.

Then we can all make artsy types much happier users of GNOME. Because you can’t possibly dive into matrix calculation and come out a happy (or sane) person :)