Me, myself, and I

Springtime in Germany

2011-04-03T21:10:00.001+01:00

This weekend the weather in Frankonia was superb. Mid 80'S, blue sky and sunshine. What better reason is there to take a bike trip with the family?

Pumping along on my bike I felt the sun on my skin for the first time this year. It was wonderful.

Near the river we spread out a blanket to lay in the sun. Jonathan made a mess trying to get his feet wet and a raft came by with two women and a man paddling after a lost pair of shoes floating downstream, they finally caught up with them. Everything was well in the world.

Relaxed, refreshed, reinvigorated I spent some time testing out a new (to me) nikkor objective I received as a long-time loan from a friend.

Manual everything, 135mm 1:2. It's incredibly sharp if you can focus it well with a modern DSLR (without a focusing screen). When you get it right it is amazing. I should probably rephrase that: it is amazing if you get it right but when you do it is really amazing :-)

Dream Job

2010-12-03T22:29:00.000+01:00

Carrera Slot Racing - Testing and Design

(It's not just for the Christmas holidays any more)

Raw Photo Treatment Photos and More

2010-08-29T23:20:00.000+01:00

I just uploaded a few examples of the "raw" photos taken recently at the Canonical London office. Hopefully some of these photos, when properly edited, will help define the future Canonical/Ubuntu photo treatment. Thanks to all those who agreed to have their photo taken :-)

In other news, I've agreed to work on a Season of KDE T-Shirt (Lydia talked me into it!)...more on that soon.

On being famous...

2010-08-27T19:16:00.000+01:00

I called the registrar's office the other day to ask a question. The person on the phone was very helpful and quickly answered my question. In order to do so, he asked me for my name, which I told him. He started making odd "hrm" noises and repeating my last name. After a bit, a light went on and he announced "I know who you are" which, considering that I am not a criminal or a rock-star (yet) seemed unlikely.

Somewhat scary, but he knew quite a bit about me. Make and color of my car, particulars about family members, events I have attended and more. How did he know all of this?

He's a fan of my flickr page

Doing the Polka (dot), step by step

2010-06-30T12:42:00.010+01:00

Anyone who has seen the new visual identity for Ubuntu and Canonical probably noticed the marketing material includes several stunning images created of differently sized dots; inside the Ubuntu Lucid CD sleeve, on banners and such. What most probably didn't know is that they were created using open source software.

Inkscape made it easy to create a pattern of objects which traces a source image using the "Create Tiled Clones" dialog. A clone is a linked copy of an original vector object and changes when the original changes.

Start by opening the image you want to trace (the source image) with Inkscape. Your source image can be anything, bitmap or vector objects. It helps to use an image with enough contrast, the right perspective to make the subject discernible when simplified, etc.

Next, create the original object you want to use to trace the source image. You can use any vector shape or object. Select the original object and make sure it is at the top left position of your image (or where-ever you want the dot grid to begin).

For the sake of this explanation, I've used an image of my son and gone through the process.

The menu item Edit->Clone->Create Tiled Clones... opens the dialog which contains several tabs.

The Shift and Trace tabs were of specific interest to us. Shift allows you to add spacing between the tiled clones (Shift X;Per Column, Shift Y; Per Row), offset them and more.

The Trace tab is where the magic happens. Be sure to select "Trace the drawing under the tiles" to turn the effect on. After that, there are 3 simple steps: 1) get a value from the source image, 2) do some optional processing on that number and 3) apply the final value to some attribute of the clone.

In Detail:

Choose what information should be read from the source image. You can choose between "Color", "Opacity" or any single channel of the RGB or HSL color models. Anything other than the "Color" option averages the value of the channel chosen over the area of the source image covered by the bounding box of the clone. This is used to change one or more attributes of the clone in step 3. We found that "L" (luminosity) best accomplished the task. Note: If you use the "Color" option be sure to unset both the fill and stroke of the original tile.
Process the information read from the source image. "Gamma correct" increases/decreases the value chosen and allows you to fine tune aspects of the pattern, "Randomize" sets the percentage of randomization and "Invert" flips the value.
Define which attribute of the clone should be effected by the value resulting from step 2. The "Color", "Size", "Opacity" and the probability of "Presence" of a clone can be changed. Any combination of these is also allowed. We chose "Size".

Finally, depending on the ratio of source image to your original clone set the correct number of "Rows, columns" or set the "Width, height" of your the area you want to trace with tiles - remember the original tile defines the top left point.

After that, just hit create. Undo is your friend, given the right source image and with time and practice it is simple to create a tiled pattern which traces and image. Here is what I came up with, kinda spooky - it's going to be the cover of my first book.

My tip: check out Dmitry Kirsanovs' "The Book of Inkscape" from No Starch Press. It has *everything* you need to know about Inkscape.

Last week in London and Brussels

2010-05-31T21:30:00.001+01:00

I spent the first part of last week in a small room in London with Andrea Cimitan, Daniel Foré and Otto Greenslade working on the amazing Murrine theme engine and the Ambiance (and Radiance) themes.

In a few days we accomplished quite a lot: a new expander style, a new handle style, new radio and check button styles , focused and default button theme states, etc. More on this in the near future.

Thursday evening Otto, Daniel and myself travelled to Brussels to attend the Libre Graphic Meeting. I really enjoyed myself and learned quite a lot including; best practices in font design, releasing and maintaining open fonts, font design and features for African languages, device specific colour management, and diffusion curves (amazing stuff).

Colour management

2010-05-22T23:05:00.001+01:00

I've been looking for a local store which offers a colour sprectromitor and chanced upon the spyder3. I have to say that it is a total let-down. It doesn't work on Linux to begin with. I feared this going in but the gracious return policy at the store allows me to buy things and simply return them within two weeks without any reason - my standard answer is "It doesn't work with linux". They smile and give me my money back - great store, they get a large part of my earnings :-)

In the case of the spyder3, it didn't even work with windows, really. No more whites, everything is blue, the colour profile it creates is horrible. I tried it with daylight, incandescent, etc and to be honest I can do much better with my eye. Definitely returning it when I get back from my trip to London and the Libre Graphics Meeting. Crap in a box for 99€ if you ask me.

Ubuntu Maverick UDS Group Photo made with the Hugin Panorama Creator

2010-05-17T19:42:00.007+01:00

Due to the weather and the layout of the hotel grounds at the Ubuntu Developer Summit for 10.10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) it was impossible to take the group photo outside and from above (which I prefer). The next best place was the auditorium in which the daily plenary's took place. Unfortunately the room is quite wide and my 24mm objective didn't fit the bill (it was quite dark as well).

I decided to try creating multiple photos and stitch them together....note that the last time I made a stitched image was 13 years ago. I went into this assuming that there would be some Gimp plugin that would take of it, albeit with a lot of post-processing on my part.

I took the photos quite quickly, which turned out to be a mistake. The lights in the room were quite low and my autofocus didn't always do so well. Luckily I made several passes so I had enough data to create the final image. I had borrowed a tripod without which the task at hand would have been much more of a problem.

I searched the Ubuntu Software Center for "Panorama". The first result was "Hugin panorama creator".

Before I started Hugin I had no idea what to expect. What I discovered is that the interface is a bit complex and could definitely use some design love but the results the app produces are top-notch. The "Assistant" tab caught my eye so I tried that.

First, I used it to load my photos.

After loading the images it found control points and tried to compensate for vignetting and exposure differences between the photos. All of this happened automatically, so I sat back and watched it go through it's paces.

When finished a preview image is displayed with, among other toolbar buttons, a row of buttons just above the stitched image which allows to toggle the view of each image in the series. Very helpful if you aren't sure which images work best.

I used 10 16bit TIFF files at 12MP (34.5MB per image) and I ran all this on my Lenovo X60s so it took about 7 minutes to get this far. I was impressed with the speed, expecting it to take much longer considering the amount of data I fed it.

The Assistant did a lot but I still wasn't happy with the results so I closed the preview and searched for answers. I arrived at the Optimizer tab by simply going through all the tabs one by one (design needed!) until I found something which seemed to promise to do everything for me. Honestly, the interface is full of things I had no clue about. If I knew how it worked I am sure I could suggest some improvements.

In the Optimizer tab I selected "everything" from the drop-down and clicked on "Optimize now!". It goes through it's paces and presents a pop-up with information about what it changed and asks whether it should apply the changes. Since I didn't have the preview open I just clicked "Yes". This screams to me for a design change although the result was excellent.

The Exposure tab allowed me to optimize the photometric's of the images (which means, I again found something that seemed like it would automate the process). My camera was set to "auto white balance" so I selected "Low Dynamic Range, variable white balance" and clicked on "Optimize now!".

Again, all of the hard stuff simply worked. I didn't come away from this having learned details of creating panorama's or advance non-linear math although I will learn more about how to use Hugin (and report back soon with my results).

Last but not least I selected the "Stitcher" tab and selected "Stich now!". The results speak for the quality of this app. I was amazed at how well it turned out, and how easy it was :-)

Ubuntu Visual Identity

2010-04-29T00:21:00.003+01:00

Drum roll please....
After a *lot* of amazing effort from the Canonical design team I am pleased to announce that preliminary Ubuntu visual identity is online and available to all!.

If you've never worked through such a process before the amount of work truly involved will astound you. Every piece fits perfectly into a well-thought master plan and is lovingly executed.

As this propagates throughout the project and materials it will become clear that everything fits together like puzzle pieces. Hats off to everyone who devoted their skill and love to make this a reality.

Ubuntu Wallpapers

2010-04-21T12:35:00.001+01:00

In case anyone is missing their favourite wallpapers from Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) in 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) there is good news!

The ubuntu-wallpapers-extra package is installable from the universe repository. In order to install it from the Software Center, make sure your software sources have the "Community-maintained Open source software (universe)" enabled and then install "ubuntu-wallpapers-extra".

Weekly Design Team Picture

2010-03-08T01:00:00.000+01:00

Here's a photo of Iain, design team project manager, edited to expose his love of colour:

New in lucid...

2010-03-05T17:45:00.001+01:00

If you're running lucid with the latest updates be sure to try click n' drag the window from anywhere in the top dark area. In other words, the windeco and menubar are both dragable now. Thanks go to Cody Russell!

Sunday night

2010-03-01T02:16:00.000+01:00

Just uploaded a pic to the Lucid wallpaper pool hoping it makes the cut.

Also, I took a nifty pic of Michael last week. Turned out quite well considering the lighting.

Cat at the Lotus

2010-02-20T08:08:00.002+01:00

Cat at the Lotus
Originally uploaded by kwwii
This is a tale of weary over-worked designers, days spent toiling in the colour factory. Nights searching, yearning, I dare say for some of us, groping, for some magical libation, some flame, to lighten our burdens and free heart and soul.

Amazing Lunch at Canonical

2010-02-19T00:08:00.002+01:00

20100216-_DSC7110
Originally uploaded by kwwii

Otto's friend Elsa has a catering service, WASHOKU we've used in the past but recently they went from good to excellent.

She went to Japan and came back much the wiser :-) She and her partner brought in various dishes which really impressed.

From the salad, mains, to the desert, everything was top notch.

They make a Japanese minestrone which has a very clear and delicate vegetable flavour. I'm not a fan of pumpkin but with this soup they managed to define the balance of flavours so well that the pumpkin turned out to be the slightly sweet, nutty flavour which sealed the deal.

The pork, slow cooked to perfection, melted in your mouth. The cabbage that accompanied it was a wonderful contrast to the soy and garlic of the meat.

I didn't get to taste the Salmon...I was busy enjoying what I had on my plate and simply missed it :p It's rare to find someone who knows how to combine ingredients in new ways to produce something which satisfies all your expectations and yet goes a step beyond.

I applaud them for their skill and highly recommend their service.

Lucid Day

2010-02-15T23:30:00.001+01:00

Lucid Day
Originally uploaded by j_baer

Ever feel like that?

Lucid Community Artwork Push

2010-02-10T12:25:00.001+01:00

Lucid is well under way so I thought it is time to remind everyone of a few initiatives you might want to get involved with:

The Ubuntu Artwork wallpaper flickr group
Submit a theme for the Community Themes package in Lucid
Help us with identifying, testing and fixing Papercuts

Together we can make the 10.04 rock ;)

Dressing for the Occasion

2010-02-08T22:14:00.000+01:00

Watching a new Nena video today on VIVA, I realized that a) she's hot for her age but makes crap music and b) I really need an evil-bunny-man costume.

Naturally, that made me think of Jono's wonderful costume (not to mention the effects it had on the ladies and other random people on the street).

We should make a rule that in order to get Ubuntu membership you need to have a pic of yourself as your alter-ego.

New Toy

2010-02-08T13:57:00.001+01:00

Picked up a N900 the other day. It's really quite amazing. Best of all it's linux *and* the keyboard is big enough for my thick fingers. The design isn't as nice as the iphone though.

Platform Sprint in Portland

2010-02-02T20:29:00.003+01:00

The Ubuntu platform sprint in Portland, Oregon has been an amazing experience.

We've gotten loads of work done and are having a great time in a wonderful city. Compared to Dallas, this city rocks ;)

Fresh off the press

2009-11-24T15:49:00.003+01:00

I just got my copy of "The Book of Inkscape" by Dmitry Kirsanov. It has excellent information for inkscape users both new and old ;)

Ubuntu Karmic Desktop

2009-09-25T10:46:00.002+01:00

Yesterday was a big day for the Karmic desktop. Lots of pieces came together like switching icon themes, colour changes in the UI, a new dark theme for GDM, a new default background and, 19 photos chosen from the flickr group we started earlier this year.

The results of the flickr submissions is simply amazing. 639 members submitted 2001 photos. Selecting the images to include in Karmic was a big task, and if there were more free space on the disk, I would add more.

First, we chose a short-list. To do so, a group of Ubuntu artwork community members and Canonical employees collected their favourites and we invited the photographers to include their images in the short-list group. That same group then made a selection of 20-30 top photos and from that we have 19 stunning images for users to select from.

Anyone and everyone who took part in this deserves a big round of applause, and perhaps a beer from me :)

Vacation in Southern France

2009-08-28T22:07:00.005+01:00

Just got back from vacation. In the last 14 years vacation has meant spending a few weeks in America visiting family (or driving my wife's family around America) with the occasional long weekend visiting something nearby in Europe. All things considered, that sucks in the long run.

A bit more than a year ago my father-in-law met a couple who live in Southern France who normally "house-swap" their vacations...that is, trade houses with someone around the world. This year they had something planned and didn't need to swap with someone so they offered it to us. Sounds too good to be true, right?

It was a dream. The beaches: we found 5 that impressed us and stuck with those; swimming, snorkeling, body-boarding, a dinner picnic at the beach...walking into town to get an ice cream, visit the shops, markets and artists. Every town in the area seems devoted to fine-art.

We visited Valbonne, Mougin (amazing food, art pure), Grasse, Nice and Cannes (extremely rich people), drove into the mountains to see Rougon and Moustiers-Sainte-Marie and drove up and down the coast of the Côte d'Azur.

One thing I learned by driving 11+ hours through Austria, Switzerland, along the border to Liechtenstein, into Italy, around Milan and down the coast to Cannes:

Germans drive really fast (duh!)
Austrians want a lot of money to get through their country, the Swiss want more and they drive slow
Liechtenstein is on the other side of the Rhein river and looks amazingly similar to the Swiss side
in Italy, the lines seperating lanes on the street are treated like grafitti...a German driver (going as fast a possible, naturally) should be aware, they weave back and forth without rhyme or reason.
in France, at least where we were, in a car, you are the bitch to anything with two wheels and a motor. I honestly saw a guy going 120km/h on a motorcycle while text-messaging; a guy on a moped with his foot against the licence plate of the moped in front of him, pushing it (and the girl on it); and last but not least, the guy standing up, hands in the air, going down a curvy hill at about 100km/h.

All in all, it was perfect and if I had to sum it up, it would be with this:

ubuntu flickr photo submissions

2009-07-18T00:01:00.002+01:00

The flickr group photos are coming along very well! ( http://www.flickr.com/groups/ubuntu-artwork/ )

Keep up the good work!

Karmic Wallpapers

2009-07-09T11:47:00.002+01:00

Ubuntu would like to include a beautiful set of images for our users to choose from in our next release. In order to accomplish this we have set up a wiki page to explain things and guidelines for inclusion.

In addition we've started a flickr group to attract current flickr users and encourage new contributors to step up and take the plunge.

If you have amazing photos which you would like to share with the world, please add them to the list!

Breathe Icons 1st Release

2009-05-31T10:48:00.004+01:00

The Breathe icon team just announced their initial release. Check it out if you haven't seen it yet on the ubuntu wiki or on gnome-look.

They've come a long way and are moving ahead at a steady pace. Breathe is an excellent example of the ubuntu artwork community's "theme team" model and proves it's effectiveness and strengths.

Breathe is a growing team and is always looking for new contributors. Specifically, they're looking for someone to help with releases and so forth, so any developer with some free time would be highly appreciated.

Breathe out

2009-01-20T18:54:00.002+01:00

Most of the modern world just sighed in relief - GWB is out, thanks be to God. Hopefully some things will change, even a small change for the better would be amazing after the last 8 years.

Intrepid and beyond

2008-09-24T20:59:00.002+01:00

Things are winding up for Intrepid. This time, we spent quite some effort on trying out new things. Our dark theme test seemed to pay off. Next time I would announce it better :-) There are quite a few changes coming in Intrepid soon, sounds (hopefully) as well. The ubuntu-sounds package, with new sounds from Mads Rosendahl, ended up being somewhat larger than the previous version and therefor awaits sign-off. You can get all these changes for Ubuntu Intrepid (and some of them for Hardy) in my PPA

Slowly but surely the ubuntu artwork community seems to coalesce. Hardy proved that people can contribute to the process (wallpaper and gtk work, among others). Intrepid is proving that teams can work together and produce amazing results, just look at the community-themes package.

Intrepid specifics are still in flux. There are still quite a few bugs to fix. The wallpaper and gdm are not final, just ideas to test.

I'd also like to take a whack at removing some of the cruft in the available themes. Certainly there are better things to include, theme-wise (gtk and metacity). Getting quite late for this stuff, so the sooner, the better :-) If it was up to me, we would use the dark theme - NewHuman is the working name. It would, perhaps, force people to include dark theme ideas in their plans/code when developing an application.

What's next?

In my mind, Kyūdō. Check the other pages linked at the bottom, there is more info than you think.There are some really good people behind this. Thorsten Wilms is leading the effort with help from Cory Kontros and others. Troy James Sobotka has probably influenced this more than he thinks, I hope he can help in this effort. It is a solid foundation for improvement in the future and can, with lots of hard work, define how things should be done.

At Canonical things are moving forward as well. We're building a team of experts in user experience and visual design which can put ideas into practice and lead the field.

The pieces are coming together...from pure graphic design, platform artwork, platform usability, application usability and prototyping skills to the technical competence necessary to help every team achieve their goals. We can deliver an outstanding user experience across all communications medium.

on being pessimistic

2008-06-04T22:01:00.002+01:00

Just heard this one....
Pessimists think things can't get any worse, optimists know they can.

Jono (apparently angry at the similarity of their fake names) had this to say about the difference between God and Bono: God doesn't think he is Bono.

UDS Intrepid

2008-05-26T21:13:00.004+01:00

I spent the last week in Prague at the Ubuntu Developer Summit working on our next release, the Intrepid Ibex. In my eyes this was the best UDS yet. Pretty soon you'll be noticing some pretty major changes in the artwork. Due to Intrepid being the first release of the next LTS cycle and because it is still pre-alpha we have pretty much free reign to test out some wild ideas, so keep an eye out (and don't bitch too much!).

Stephan Hermann noticed the pics and short video of myself singing Whiskey in the Jar (for the first time) and invited me to sing Karaoke with him this weekend at Linuxtag in Berlin. Lucky for him, I'll be attending Linuxtag again this year. Stephan mentioned that I was not there last year but actually I did show up for one day, we must have missed each other :-(

After returning I went directly to band practice and in the space of 3 hours we recorded 4 songs...all in all the last couple of weeks have been great :-)

Oops

2007-11-25T01:07:00.000+01:00

After going out with friends from India this evening we made our way back home and cooked dinner. As some of the people were vegetarians we also prepared vegetarian food. By mistake I roughly cleaned the spoon from the chicken marsala and stuck it in the vegetarian dish. Result = Try again, player 1?

It turns out that our friends have a philosophical problem with the fact that the spoon touched the vegetarian dish without being washed. I started from scratch and began questioning my skills in cooking a good vegetarian curry in a hurry. After creating something that matched my advanced needs for "hot and spicy" I turned it over to them. They added one more Indian chili and a bit more of the homemade curry they brought with them and decided that I had not only ruined their meal but saved the evening with interesting conversation (about how stupid I am, my wife loved it).

12 years ago today...

2007-11-13T23:49:00.000+01:00

I moved to Germany. What have I learned in the last 12 years here (other than German)? Patience and how to make one heck of a schnitzel.

UDS Boston 2007

2007-11-02T21:35:00.001+01:00

Spent the last week in Boston at FOSSCamp and the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

Obligatory group picture

Oxygen wallpaper contest continued

2007-09-06T00:51:00.000+01:00

We have received around 1900 contributions for the Oxygen wallpaper contest - amazing, eh?

The final selection will be concluded soon...keep your eyes open for the final selection!

Oxygen Wallpaper Contest

2007-08-01T16:04:00.000+01:00

Ruphy set up a page for accepting uploads of wallpaper ideas for Oxygen (thanks Ruphy!). Go to the Oxygen Wallpaper Contest page and upload your pics while they're hot!

If you have a good idea for a wallpaper to use in KDE4 get them in now. Most important is that they look nice - no limits on colors or, well, anything :-) Of course, all pics submited need to be under a free license.

internal Oxygen Icon meeting minutes

2006-12-28T22:50:00.000+01:00

This evening I wrote a blog entry about this and then lost everything I wrote. What fun...here it is again, I hope that this once again explains the meeting we had tonight about the Oxygen Icons...

We decided:

1) to start a style guide...Oxygen Style Guide Working Ground

2) a naming spec wiki page

3) a list of basic KDE icons needed for the first release. Aaron Seigo is helping with this. He is our developer contact with a gold tooth. Honestly, I think that Aaron has done more for KDE4 artwork than any other developer (although we have had a lot of help, which has amazed me).

4) to go through the icons to make ensure consistency (this will be a reoccurring process. We will begin with the action icons to make sure they have the same shadow and size Nuno Pinhiero promised to do this because he was the creator of the shadow for the action icons.

all in all, there is now a lot more info on http://developernew.kde.org/Projects ... check it out!

Oxygen and more

2006-12-20T21:45:00.000+01:00

On Monday we had a semi-spontaneous meeting concerning the Oxygen style and window decoration. Actually, we had already started this stuff but nothing really ever became of it and in the meantime some very courageous people stepped up and started work once again.

So here is what it was all about

1. Explicit division of labour (e.g. who's doing what)

Boemann has been and will be working on code. Ruphy will help on this as well.

Zack and Aaron will help both by fielding questions/issue as well as probably contributing code (see below).

Pinheiro and Eriolloan will keep making the artwork.

Ken will help with disseminating artwork information as well as trying to coordinate things.

Zack would like to see graphical side of things build from blocks. He'd like most effects in kde4 based on an actual physical model - that's what will give them organic nature. For that we need an image manipulation framework that does animations and physics engine connected to it. Zack has code
started on each of those elements.

2. Communication between artists and coders

We need to put everything in reach of the public in order to gain as much support as possible and to avoid bitterness from all sides. With things out in the open we can move as quickly as possible without any deterrents or wasted time/effort.

In addition, we will soon experience a problem with our style/windec and certain applications which do not behave well. This information needs to be attained as well as acted upon. By having a central place for code people can test it.

Once we know which problems are occurring we can do one of two things:

a) Let the developer in question know of the problems and ask them to fix them.
b) Fix them ourselves. Aaron mentioned that he has done and will do such in the future on a case by case basis.

3. communicate our expectations for this style to each other so we're working with the same aim in mind

In order to properly communicate the artistic needs to developers we need to include not only mockups of new ideas but also simple storyboards which explain interaction ideas (the organic building blocks from part 1).

Once an idea is "ready for coding" the artists need to include the mock-up and storyboard as well as precise details on the placement, size, and coloring, gradient definitions, et cetera, of all elements as well as any other information deemed useful.

In certain cases, including screenshots of gradient information taken directly from the graphical editorshould/could be very usefull. This information needs to be very fine, as Boemann put it "he wants truedecimals" :-) Using a copy/pasted and much simplified information cut from an SVG will be very useful here.

----

So that is what happened, as best I can remeber :-) Things are finally rolling along. Oxygen is really close to a first release and all is well.

Ohhh...almost forgot: you can get all this warm-goodness in the kde-svn/playgound/artwork/Oxygen

the last several months (busy, busy, busy)

2006-11-12T22:39:00.001+01:00

It has been a while since I wrote a blog entry. Let's see....

I spent some time with my family in America. Drove around a bit between Wisconsin and St. Louis, visiting my mother, father, sisters and brothers, and their respective families.

Snapped this one in Wisconsin...nailed to the side of my fathers' shed:

From there I went to the Ubuntu Developer Sprint in Wiesbaden, Germany to work on Kubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft):

I spent quite some time working on Edgy (think purple - although it is really blue) and am very happy with the results. I think that this release will pave the way for even better artwork in future Kubuntu releases.

Next, I attended this years KDE summit "Akademy" in Dublin. Met lot's of great people and learned a lot. Spent quite some time discussing Oxygen and it's inclusion in KDE4. While there I made mugshots of quite a few developers:

Edgy was released shortly thereafter. People like the new look, hurray! Dapper was my first experience working on Kubuntu. Looking back I realize that it took me a full release cycle to fully understand the working practices (launchpad, wiki, etc.). After many years working for SuSE I thought I had it all down but working on Kubuntu has shown me what the real OSS world is like.

Since then I have been looking forward to the future Kubuntu, feisty it shall be.
At the UDS (Ubuntu Develper Summit at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California) we working on darfting specifications and discussed Feisty Kubuntu, including Oxygen in Kubuntu KDE4 packages, the xdg icon naming spec conversion and automating the artwork process. Here's a pic of the KDE/Kubuntu crew:

Other than that, I found this pic of David I took in Berlin when we first met a couple of years ago. Funny how time flies when you are having fun.

KDE Love....it's better than a kick in the face

2006-06-23T13:22:00.002+01:00

I attended the Canonical Ubuntu Paris Developer Summit this week. Several other KDE representatives attended and we "Spread the KDE Love" to use a popular term. I am certain that it will take quite some persuading to get me to come back to Paris again.

On the first day of summer there was a huge musical festival with millions of people walking through the streets and having a good time. Unfortunately at the end of the evening we came upon a group of 5 North Africans beating the living shit out of a Frenchman. Sebastian Kuegler (from now on known as "my hero") jumped in to help the poor man and in return got a kick in the face :-(

A lucky day...

2006-06-02T23:02:00.000+01:00

Today was an interesting day. Today being the 13th of June :-) I have been watching all the World Cup games. All games are broadcast in Germany on free TV, which is simply amazing. Less than amazing was the USA teams' match against the Czech Republic.

I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette and think about where to sell my USA jersey now that we are betting that we win a game and another team looses in order for us to advance.

While doing so I noticed that the flowers my wife planted two days ago are doing very well....and 3 seconds later I extend the telephoto, closed the aperture and press the shiny little button on my camera 3 times with success. I guess today is just a lucky day.

Amazingly, the flowers on my balcony seemed to want to be photographed. Without touching up anything other than over-all curve correction this is what came out. A second pic was really nice as well, proving my theory that a really nice objective and a big digital sensor can do wonders. It was hard not to take this pic. Here is the URL to the full-sized image, in case anyone is interested - http://bootsplash.org/finallySummerInGermany.jpg

This pop-up, shown when starting Digikam for the first time, is now officially my favorite (although this icon was made with a scaling filter that somewhat reduces the quality of the text and finer, higher contrast parts of the image...We are still "perfecting our production process"). Actually I made "Yet Another Camera Icon", no idea why...I guess when I am frustrated I draw cameras...funny eh?

Digikam, which I had never really tried before turned out to be an excellent program which fit my needs exactly and was really quick in comparison to another equivalent program from another desktop. All in all, I was happy for a few minutes, but expect me to bitch about things in the future.

Since the subject has changed to programs, here is one recent experience. I installed the 4.4pre3 inkscape on my laptop and desktop system and was really impressed with a few of the improvements to the UI. I think having the palette at the bottom, as seen in other, somewhat older, programs is nothing new but a big improvement on the previous UI.

One thing that still keeps me from using it 100% is the exactness of the off-setting algorithm and the problems with visually editing multiple stop gradients. Either implement a better gradient editor (as Adobe has done) or continue down the path of directly editing the gradient on the element itself. The functionality that is there now seriously rocks and adding this would make things even better.

On another point, someone asked me where the usability of inkscape went to and I answered, "oh, it is still there...it's just hidden behind a key combination".

The air in Portugal is full of Oxygen

2006-05-29T01:14:00.000+01:00

In addition to great food, even better wine, and much better weather than Germany, Nuno's hospitality has made our week long meeting simply wonderful and very productive so far.

After the first two days of intensive work on the Oxygen Icons (http://oxygen-icons.org) things are looking better than ever. Aside from random acts of spontaneous and unprovoked artwork we (David, Nuno and myself) have made most icons used in several core KDE apps (Kontact for instance) as well as those for the panel and desktop.

In addition to the Mimetypes and Devices which were already well underway we will have a first release for KDE4 ready sometime in the near future.

Akademy logo

2006-03-16T00:35:00.000+01:00

I made the first Akademy logo for this years event. It is one of three ideas I had and simply the first to be finished in time for the first announcement on dot.kde.org

Other versions are sure to follow.

KDE, Kubuntu...the future!

2006-03-12T16:12:00.000+01:00

I attended the KDE eV board meeting in Berlin a week ago, finalizing the HCI working group stuff. An announcement should follow soon.

From Berlin I flew to London for the Dapper UI Sprint. Thanks go to Jonathan Riddell and Mark Shuttleworth for making this possible and everyone else involved for making this a great experience. We created an amazing amount of work in a few short days. Without this perfect mix of people and creative influence it would not have been possible. Hats off to the *buntu community.

Schnee von gestern

2005-12-05T23:34:00.000+01:00

Now that I haver a bit more time on my hands I have spent quite a bit of time taking photographs.

This one was taken on a path along the Main river a day after it snowed. The crystals drew my attention - I am amazed that it turned out so well considering the problems with noise at high iso levels in digital cameras (not to mention that I did not use a tripod).

SUSE 10.0 available soon!

2005-09-19T22:18:00.000+01:00

Sometime soon the 10.0 will come out (no idea exactly when, so no new news here) and we will all live in heavenly bliss at the amazing new features - check the reduced boot time - about 20 seconds quicker on my powerbook compared to the 9.3.

Oh, yeah, there is that "little thing" about an available PPC distro - long live SUSE PPC! The developers put their hard earned time into this because they love it and deserve a big "Thank You" from all of us. As an old-school SUSE employee I can clearly remember when our PPC Box sold quite a few more in America than anyone expected.

My first dabblings with boot graphics were, in fact, on PPC, starting with the first non-official SUSE PPC "releases".

How many Distro's use the bootsplash or related ideas? Quite a few. It is amazing what can come out of a few months drinking and smoking too much with a good friend after hours at work. Good job, huh? Think again. At the time we were unloved for wasting our time on this stuff. Years later was I told by a former boss that he was amazed that the bootsplash stuff is here to stay although "we" didn't even want it at the time. Funny, how that works.

new ideas

2005-08-31T10:22:00.000+01:00

As of today my new hobby is to run up to a developer and say "Hey, I have an icon that I need a program for!" Maybe it'll work!?

A Portugeuse guy in a Mexican Restaurant in Spain

a breath of fresh air

2005-08-23T18:57:00.000+01:00

I have been working on a presentation of Oxygen for aKademy in Málaga (Andalusia Region), Spain in a few days. David Vignoni started Oxygen with new ideas for an icon theme, a plan which quickly grew to bigger proportions when it became part of the APPEAL project (a living experiment in progressive development and organizational concepts as applied to KDE).

While I thought that writing it would be hard due to the complexity of the project and its relation to other projects it turned out to be quite easy. Mainly it describes the concepts, innovations, and goals of the project and will hopefully win more friends than enemies :-)

(I admit to learning a few more things *not* to do with OpenOffice)

Lately...

2005-08-20T12:32:00.000+01:00

In the past few weeks things have been quite hectic taking photographs for ads in magazines, working on a presentation for aKademy '05, screen design for SUSE Linux 10.0, designing the openSUSE website and, and, and.

I did manage to take a few days off and go to Legoland with my wife and son.

Luckily, aKademy '05 in Spain is coming up - the best informational hackfest ever imagined, even if you need a vacation afterwards to catch up on sleep.

I hate blogs

2005-08-19T13:37:00.000+01:00

Just to get things straight - I hate blogs. Not sure why, maybe it is just the name, but all the same I hate blogs.

And wikis too.

But it is a wiki-wacky world. Perhaps I can convince myself that this is not a blog. Just a bunch of crap that I post which nobody reads :-)