Diese Kuh, wohnhaft oberhalb von Flumserberg, wollte mich doch wirklich auf die Hörner nehmen. Unglaublich! Im Hintergrund die Churfirsten und dahinter der Säntis.

I heared rumors that my blog is dead.
However the report of its death has been greatly exaggerated.

Finally, after quite some debugging (of the very same bug for months), I committed preliminary support for the global Mac OS X menubar to GIMP trunk.

It’s the result of a project I’ve been involved with at Imendio. Check the project page.

For seeing the coolness without compiling yourself, check the video.

Antenne made a new GIMP wallpaper!

Enjoy Wilberstreet: 1280×854, 1280×1024, 1400×1050, 1600×1200

Jetzt ist es amtlich! - stand ja schließlich im SPIEGEL

Ein mit GIMP gemachtes Bild hat beim SPIEGEL Bildbearbeitungs-Wettbewerb gewonnen. Glückwünsche an den erfolgreichen Manipulator!

One of the last remaining bits of antique code in the GIMP are the parts that talk to plug-ins, namely the plug-in handling code itself, and the PDB (procedural database) which provides a way for plug-ins to call GIMP’s internal functionality and which keeps all procedures provided by plug-ins.

Everything was organized around some crufty C-structs, lived in files without proper namespace, and was basically untouched by all the refactoring that was happening during the last few years. To illustrate the evilness: the PDB did not even really know which of its procedures were dynamically allocated, and which were constant structs that are defined at compile time (not to speak of the part where perl code generated perl code that generated perl code that…). This had to stop.

Right after LGM, I entered refactoring mode:

• All the perl-that-generates-perl stuff had to die. Every procedure definition in the PDB files (tools/pdbgen/pdb/*.pdb, they are still perl) now looks the same: Inargs, Outargs, Code.
• The homemade system to specify a procedure’s arguments and return values doesn’t exist any more. Everything is based on GParamSpec now. A lot of new GIMP-specific param specs was added in app/core/gimpparamspecs.c.
• The procedure’s arguments from the same prehistoric era had to go too. Procedures now take and return everything as GValue, organized as GValueArray.
• Procedures are GObjects now (app/pdb/gimpprocedure.c). Their memory-management was modernized a bit (they have memory management now). Plug-In procedures are a proper GimpProcedure subclass now (app/pdb/gimppluginprocedure.c), which made lots of code much more straightforward (they were separate structs before which had a pointer to the procedure they implement).
• The PDB is now an object itself (app/pdb/gimppdb.c), instead of a bunch of global variables with some API around. The PDB instance emits signals when procedures are added or removed, so the GUI can for example create menu items for new plug-in procedures. No more direct calls from the core to the GUI via the ugly GUI-vtable.

The plug-in system is a similar mess, closely related to the PDB, but even worse. It has seen some refactoring, but just to the point where it was unavoidable to fix misbehavior or to get rid of calling deprecated GLib APIs. While the PDB cleanup has come a long way, I’m still in the middle of chopping and re-assembling the plug-in stuff:

• Lots and lots of global variables have been moved to a new object, the GimpPlugInManager (app/plug-in/gimppluginmanager.c). Well they were not really global variables before, but members of the global Gimp instance, which is supposed to be the only “global” variable in the GIMP, but that doesn’t make much difference here.
• Lots of functions are now methods of the GimpPlugInManager, which greatly helps finding them. Before, it was mostly unclear which function belonged to the plug-in instances themselves, and which to the infrastructure around that keeps is all together.

That’s where I am today, but there are still quite some hacks ahead before the stuff can be called “finished”:

The PlugIn struct (app/plug-in/plug-in.c) has to become an object, and this object needs some signals. Some code needs to listen to these signals, so cross-calling between unrelated scopes doesn’t happen any more. At some point people will even be able to understand how the plug-ins’ memory management is supposed to work Currently the calls to plug_in_ref() and plug_in_unref() are not really in places where one would expect them. I bet there is more uglyness that will go away as soon as I find it.

Now what are the benefits from all this work? Well, refactored code looks soooo much nicer

But seriously:

• The refactored code does look nicer, is easier to read and understand, is easier to change and fix.
• The PDB can check the passed arguments much better now. Thanks to GParamSpec GIMP can tell a plug-in/script developer which of the passed arguments was wrong in which way.
• Every argument has a default value now. After GIMP 2.4 this will allow us to change the plug-in side of calling PDB procedures to something that has named parameters with default values. No more breaking scripts just becuase somebody added an optional argument.
• (actually, optional arguments were impossible before).
• Now that it’s all cleaned up, people != hardcore_longtime_developers can understand and change it.
• And many other benefits that usually show up after the refactored code is in use for some time.

And now, please get GIMP from CVS and test it until it breaks. Then report the bug so the new PDB will be as solid as the old one.

Die Hochwasserente in Wangen markiert den Pegelstand des Jahrhunderthochwassers von 1999. Da alle Gelenke der Ente beweglich sind, trifft man sie meistens total verrenkt an.

While spending some time in the south of Germany, I took the opportunity to do some Night Skiing.

The location is really nice. As an extra goodie, there is a small wooden cabin at the top of the lift, where they serve some small dishes and drinks. We stayed there until the lights were turned off, and had to go down in the dark, which isn’t exactly easy after two beers

Inzwischen ist’s Winter und der Blick von der Terrasse ist immer noch schön. Heute morgen mal mit zugefrorener Spree.

Heute bei Sonnenuntergang war der Blick über Berlin wieder mal besonders sehenswert.

Ich war heute beim Berliner Kunstsalon, so einer Art “Kunstmesse” in den ehemaligen Flohmarkhallen bei der Arena. Ich muß sagen ich war positiv überrascht, nachdem ich seltsame Sachen gehört hatte (Kunst in Cubicles…?). Ok, es war nicht die beste Ausstellung aller Zeiten, aber es waren viele Dinge drunter, die mir einfach gefallen haben. Und ja, die einzelnen Künstler waren in “Kästchen” untergebracht, aber das ganze war sehr offen und weiträumig (und schließlich muß man ja Wände einziehen, damit die Bilder wo hängen können, oder?)

Komischerweise hab ich das hier als allererstes gesehen:

Kleines Manko trotzdem: unter einem “Salon” stell ich mir eigentlich was kuscheligeres vor als ne riesige helle Halle wo im Prinzip zu viel hängt als daß man es sich auf einmal angucken kann… na ja.

I’m very excited today My co-worker Anders Carlsson has spent the last two months with starting a port of GTK+ to the Mac OS X Cocoa framework, so GTK+ applications will eventually run natively (without needing X11) on that platform.

The port is still in its early stages and incomplete, but after these few weeks it’s already complete enough to give compiling GIMP a try.

I was trying to run GIMP on the port for about a week now, but the port was not complete enough, so I almost fell apart when I tried it again after Anders’ latest commits last night:

Wheeeeeeeeeeee! This is just amazing, especially after just two months of hacking. And Anders will continue improving it. The source will be public soon for others to help improving, and I will definitely keep GIMP running on it constantly. This will be a lot of fun!

(Disclaimer: the screenshot above is really a very early state, GIMP was just generous enough to not crash but show these three windows instead. It will be constantly improving, both look-and-feel and desktop-integration wise, so please don’t complain that GIMP on OS X should actually look a bit different ;))

I ran across uncyclopedia.org before, but really discovered it last night. I couldn’t stop laughing for hours, this site is so full of crack, it’s unbeleivable.

Read for example the truth about Gnome and KDE, learn what hides behind this alphabet thing and wonder why you never thought about these truths before.

(And no, they have no idea about Bielefeld either)

So, M$ tried to hire ESR, funny…

I wonder if they shouldn’t just insist, despite his even more funny answer.

Und wir dachten alle, Ost-Berlin war mal… denkste

Die Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung rockt (irgendwie zumindest…). Jedenfalls hat sie ne Sammlung aller Bundestags-Wahlplakate seit 1949 online gestellt, außerdem alle Wahlwerbespots.

Leider sind die Plakate nicht in anständiger Auflösung vorhanden und die Spots sind RealVideo, trotzdem schick!

Gefunden auf BoingBoing: schöne alte Schwarz-Weiß Aufnahmen aus allen Teilen Deutschlands.

Ne Menge Zeuch, sicher erkennt jeder das eine oder andere wieder.

oder auch fliegende Spagettimonster (nach neuer Rechtschreibung) ist die Gottheit der Religion der Pastafari und nebenbei ein herrlicher Schlag ins Gesicht des Kansas School Board.

Ein schönes Beispiel dafür, daß man Dummheit, wie groß sie auch sein mag, am besten mit Humor beikommt. Weiter so!

It could easily have been forgotten, but Federico remembered it. GIMP is going to be 10 years old on November 21st

That cries for a birthday party, doesn’t it?

It seems to become popular: Sven and Antenne already mentioned it in their blogs. Now Akkana Peck has created a small script that allows to do “Paperless Menu Prototyping” using GIMP layers.

Just enter a newline-separated list of words and the script will create an image featuring each word on a layer that can be dragged around. Add some guides for proper alignment, some separators and soon you’ll have a prototype that you can share with others, while keeping everything editable.

Here is how it looks:

See also Akk’s original post on gimp-developer.

gimpfoo.de hat jetzt auch ein eigenes Logo. Dank an antenne!

Besser spät als nie? Oder was lange währt wird endlich gut? So oder so, hier ist mein blog Hurra!