Techwriter's den

Closed

2006-05-20T07:56:00.000-07:00

This blog is closed. Visit http://prokoudine.info/blog instead

GREYCstoration

2005-12-04T17:14:00.000-08:00

GREYCstoration has slightly improved over last few months. It uses autotools and is fully translatable now. I've just sent my translation into Russian to Haypo :)

If you care about i18n, go grab the sources from SVN and translate this great plug-in. There are just 13 messages.

Photofonts

2005-11-30T04:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I read about photofonts in a russian typography community at LiveJournal.

Even if you don't read in Russian, have a look at examples that are provided there.

At the moment photofonts are supported only in several applications, but this might change, because the idea was "floating in the air" and is likely to be widely adopted soon.

Inventors are a russian firm Fontlab Ltd. that is known for its great proprietary typographic tools, oriented towards western users.

Homepage

Open specification of photofonts

KTU's gig in Moscow

2005-11-06T20:04:00.000-08:00

This is most likely the best "King Crimson family" gig this year.

KTU adequates to Kluster + TU, where Kluster is Kimmo Pohjonen and Samuli Kosminen - two crazy finns, crazy in a really beautiful way, and TU is, of course, Pat Mastelotto and Trey Gunn.

It turned out that most people who came didn't really know what kind of music Kluster plays, so it was a kind of surprise that most of attention was drawn by Kimmo, whose excellent perfomance just couldn't leave anyone emotionless.

Samuli and Trey were not really that interesting as shooting targets :) And Pat was superb :)

If you care listening to a studio record of KTU, you can buy their "8 armed monkey" album.

Winter...

2005-11-02T16:44:00.000-08:00

Winter has come early this year

It's really great to live just 5 minutes away from a huge park :)

So far...

2005-11-02T03:58:00.000-08:00

It looks like I will finally pay for hosting and finish my website. I'm just really tired by having snapshots here, there and everywhere. They should be in one place really, and Jakub's Original looks like a perfect tool for a web gallery.

So far, CREATE is moving forward. There is still no common decision on name of root directory, however.

To my excitement, after setting up SpamBlacklist extension on mediawiki we have much less issues with spammers.

Several interesting software project are about to release new code: Inkscape 0.43, Audacity 1.2.4 and 1.3.0, Hugin 0.5, Grisbi 0.5.8. And all of them except Inkscape require updated translation into Russian :)

Besides, Bulia claims to have ~120 Kbyte of diffs of new code in his local Inkscape development tree, which means that I should once again forget about using stable version of this awesome application ;)

Ubuntu

2005-09-26T16:54:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately there are places where Ubuntu is way too old.

LittleCMS - 1.13 instead of 1.14
GIMP-Print 4.2.7 instead of Gutenprint 5.0
linuxwacom - 0.6.4 instead of 0.7.0
Freetype - 2.1.7 instead of 2.1.9!!!

Scribus complains about possible errors when compiling with this old release of Freetype.

Even openclipart is 0.13 only.

I was under impression that Ubuntu is the best place for artists, because Andy Fitzsimon and others are there. It turns out, it's not really the best place.

Also, I'm still fighting setting up my Graphire3/USB in GIMP. It does see all three devices (cursor, stylus and eraser), but I cannot make it remember what tools each one should use. In an ideal case I just should take wacom stylus and choose an instrument with it and GIMP will apply appropriate settings and remember them. But all changes with stylus are applied only to Core Pointer device.

If I use Carol's devicerc, GIMP turns these three devices off automatically.

I might be doing something wrong, because under Windows wacom works like a charm.

Tea House

2005-09-21T14:16:00.000-07:00

It's been more than three years since I first came to a classical chinese tea house.
Lots of things happened since then, still I feeel like home every time I'm there.

(the photo is clickable)

Interesting is that in China people don't drink tea that way any more. What moscow tea house holders do is what only monks in chinese temples keep doing.

Breigel on OpenBSD :)

2005-09-16T14:48:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I visited my grandparents and occasionally found an album of Breigel's drawings and paintings.
One of them looks like a sysadmin is trying to get rid of OpenBSD in his server ;-)

The next morning it was raining a bit, so when I came out, I had a chance to take some snapshots of rain drops on flowers my grandma is raising.

Sharing canvas with Dia

2005-09-05T05:54:00.000-07:00

Alan brings up a very valid pont about possibility of reusing Inkscape's canvas in Dia. While Dia is nice in many aspects like import/export, routing etc., it still lacks many things users just got used to in other applications. To name a few: usual page layout, object-senstitive properties dialog, and an on-canvas text widget.

There probably would be not so many thigs to be ported (isometric grid, object border highlighting on MouseOver event while routing etc.). AFAIR, even Dia's native file format (at least .shape) is a subset of SVG.

2005-09-03T22:48:00.000-07:00

I've just updated shared resources specification, taking into account remarks from discussion in CREATE's maling list:

http://www.lrn.ru/~avp/specs/shared_resources_spec_0.0.4.htm

The source DocBook/XML file is here:

http://www.lrn.ru/~avp/specs/shared_resources_spec_0.0.4.xml

There are two issues that need to be addressed now:

1. We still have no consensus on root directory name. As of v0.0.4 it is "art-supplies". Should we go on with this one?

2. When it comes to support of Photoshop's brushes on Windows and Mac OS X platforms, we are about to face two directories with them: our spec's directory and the native one for those who have Photoshop installed on their systems. Basically I see two solutions:

- to keep using art-supplies/brushes/photoshop/ and add another "Custom" directory in Preferences dialog for each application;
- to add a couple of default paths to the specification especially for those brushes.

If you are still not subscribed to the list, where the main discussion happens, you can do it by visiting http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/create

2005-09-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

So, Scribus has got experimental Cairo support in 1.3.1CVS.

Just

export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@scribus.info:/cvs; cvs login; cvs -z3 co -r Version13x Scribus

and add '--enable-cairo' to ./configure options. You will need at least v0.9 of Cairo (1.0 preferred).

It's not what you would want to see as production ready as of now, just like the whole 1.3.x branch now is :) Still, hopes are high. At least letters with small font size (like Tahoma Regular 9) look less overantialiased, which annoyed me for quite a long while.

Blogger против LJ

2004-10-27T06:53:00.000-07:00

Кто выживет? Два блога я точно не потяну :)