Inkscape
MenTaLguY: atomic_ops
atomic_ops is a library of portable primitives for building lockfree multithreaded programs in C, by Hans Boehm of libgc fame. The basic atomic operations portion of the library is MIT-licensed, although it also includes a GPLed addon library which provides nearly lockfree stacks and a lockfree malloc implementation.
Gail Carmichael: Don't Underestimate the Importance of Role Models
The article's survey was conducted by Research In Motion and found that there just aren't enough smart female role models amongst the Britney Spears and Paris Hiltons of the world. From the article:
"Never underestimate the power of role models. If young women can see a career path which has been enjoyable and rewarding for another, they are more likely to follow it themselves," said Maggie Philbin, former host of popular British science and technology TV show, Tomorrow's World.
Funny. This is one of the major points brought up last week during my mini-course for girls about computer science and games. We had been discussing why girls don't get into the field, and they figured it was like a vicious circle. There aren't many girls in the field, so the younger students don't think of it as something they'd want to get into, so the numbers never grow.
But this isn't the only finding that matched up with my students' suggestions. Other reasons given for not wanting to pursue a technology career included the belief that it would not be exciting, the jobs are seen as too geeky, they don't realize the pay is good, and there isn't enough help in school for exploring opportunities. Again, all things that my class suggested.
So it's our job, as some of the "few" female computer scientists, to try and turn around these perceptions, and more importantly, to be the role models younger girls are looking for. How are you (or your classmates and coworkers) doing your part? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!
Jon Phillips: I missed the flame of shame in Guangzhou
Last week I took cc biz trip to Tokyo and missed the flame of shame outside our place in Guangzhou…totally bummed! Lu shot tons of HD footage of it and many photos of the endless security here…crazy!
Ryan Lerch: Australian Fedora Users: I will burn a Fedora 9 DVD for you!
If you live in Australia and don’t want to waste 4gB of your precious download limit on downloading fedora 9, I will happily burn a DVD for you! (i will be only downloading the i386 - Install DVD, so that is all i am able to burn for you…)
Here’s how:
- Shoot me an email at ryanlerch at gmail dot com to get my mailing address.
- Then, send me a stamped, self addressed envelope with a blank DVD in it.
- I’ll burn the DVD for you, and pop it back in the post.
- if you feel like it, do the same for someone else.
Hope i can help people out!
Jon Cruz: Next eraser toggle
When that mode is enabled (which should be the default) the eraser tool acts more like a vector eraser than a raster eraser:
As you can see, it allows someone to zig-zag around and delete objects very selectively. The functional details need to be tuned up a bit, as it doesn't behave well with clicks as opposed to drags. However, it should be enough to see what the feel is and how it's different from the other mode.
Now all I have to do is get my tablet happy with Hardy and I can get those details like width, etc., nailed down.
MenTaLguY: Adobe Does Not Suck
(This is a follow-on to my post The Adobe Flash Player Deadlock)
I’ve been very pleased to see that, after my original post on March 9, many of my criticisms have been addressed, and I’ve learned that some were simply founded on poor communication. Let’s run through some of them.
Criticism: There is no way for the general public to report flash player bugs.Originally, your options for reporting bugs were posting comments on a certain blog, or filling out the Adobe feature request form at http://www.adobe.com/go/wish. The blog wasn’t particularly encouraging since few of the issues raised there got addressed or even received a positive response (I’m also not linking to the blog because towards the end the exchanges between frustrated Linux users and a beleaguered Adobe project manager make both sides look needlessly bad).
I had also not been aware of the wishlist form as an accepted avenue for reporting bugs, but the current version of the page makes that a little more clear and easier to find in a search on Adobe’s site. However, the wishlist form still isn’t very ideal. Rather than a black hole to send “wishes” into, I’d really been hoping for a public bug tracker where you can actually see the fate of your problem report. Even Sun, in their most obnoxious days, had such a thing for Java.
Thankfully, as of April 8, Adobe finally has a public bug tracker for flash: http://bugs.adobe.com/flashplayer.
This criticism is now completely addressed.
(Many thanks to Marnen for filling me in on this point.)
Criticism: Adobe is not devoting sufficient resources to the Linux Flash player for it to remain viable.I had based this criticism on Adobe’s public statements and history so far. After an initially promising release of Flash 9 (Linux Flash had previously languished buggily at verison 7 for an extended time), subsequent Flash 9 releases were increasingly infrequent and full of new regressions. Adobe was supposedly going to make a big push for Linux with the release of AIR, but when Adobe actually released AIR 1.0 in February, they omitted support for the Linux platform since (according to the AIR FAQ at the time) they had to “wait on the core Flash Player’s support for Linux to be finalized.” All these things together painted a very ominious picture for the future of Flash on Linux.
On March 30, however, Adobe released an alpha version of AIR for Linux, showing that they were making a serious effort to support the platform. I suspect that the reason for the falloff in Flash 9 support is the result of Adobe reallocating programming resources to Flash 10/AIR, although it would be nice if Adobe publicly announced their plans the same way that they did for 64-bit Photoshop, so people wouldn’t be left to conclude that, absent released software, they didn’t have any serious plans at all.
This criticism is probably unfounded to the extent that Adobe is doing the best they reasonably can as long as they are not accepting outside help by opening development of their own player (which itself would require a significant initial investment of resources that Adobe may not have).
However…
Criticism: There is no finalized release of the Flash player for Linux which is stable enough to use for development work.It’s still the case that the latest Flash Player 9 takes out my browser multiple times an hour if I use it heavily (FlashBlock has helped mitigate this issue for casual use). Since Linux is my preferred development platform, there’s no way I could see myself developing for it until this changes.
(A few people have asked me why I think Adobe has to be altrustic and expend resources supporting Linux. They don’t, of course. But then I don’t have to be altrustic and bend over backwards to develop for an RIA platform that doesn’t have good support for the development platform I normally use either. Remember that the original post was about why I personally didn’t want to develop for Adobe’s platform.)
For now this criticism remains unaddressed, although with the alpha release of AIR for Linux I have hope that it might be addressed this year.
Criticism: Adobe is putting up roadblocks for open source Flash player implementations.Even when Adobe finally published specifications for the flash format, they carried restrictions which prevented using them to implement your own flash player. Interviews with Adobe employees in the past had also indicated that Adobe was concerned about retaining control of its platform. Worse, in March they had announced their intent to make DRM part of the flash platform, introducing an additional obstacle for Open Source players.
However, just this month (May), Adobe launched the Open Screen Project and removed the restrictions on the use of their specifications. Some have called this a PR stunt, since the way it worked out Adobe hadn’t relaxed the restrictions on the specifications until all the information published in them had been reverse-engineered by the developer community anyway. However, I think calling it a PR stunt misses an important point—the Open Screen Project is specifically a signal that Adobe is no longer directly hostile to alternate Flash Player implementations.
This criticism is largely addressed; DRM remains an issue on the horizion, but Adobe’s public stance against non-Adobe players has clearly changed.
Criticism: Adobe doesn’t consider broad platform support for Flash to be important.Historically, aside from Flash Lite (which is fairly different to the regular Flash platform), Adobe’s official support for Flash has mostly extended to PPC OS X and x86-32 OS X and Windows. There’s been the rather flaky and inconsistent support for x86-32 Linux (and the zombie-like revival of some version of the PPC Flash 7 plugin for the Wii), but that’s about it. The thing is, until you are able to support a certain number of platforms, the incremental cost of supporting each additional platform is extremely high. There’s essentially a knee in the graph, and Adobe is still quite far from reaching it.
As Sun discovered with Java, truly broad platform support is really only possible with an open source implementation of the platform. The community-developed zero-assembler Hotspot has enabled the JVM to be brought to a wide variety of new platforms which didn’t have Sun Java before with extremely little initial effort, and soon may start leveraging LLVM for cross-platform JIT performance. Flash will not be able to catch up in terms of platform support until at least one solid open source implementation of the Flash platform is available. On the evidence of the Open Screen Project, and their previous open-sourcing of the Tamarin runtime, I think Adobe finally realizes this.
I think this criticism was unfounded. Their release of Tamarin in November ought to have been a clue to me that they were waking up about this.
MenTaLguY: Blogging Again
Job stress had really gotten to me the past couple months, to the point where I really didn’t have the time or energy to blog. Now that I’ve made some needed changes, I’ve got quite a lot of ideas piled up to blog about. I will try to pace myself and do it in small chunks, to avoid a yeggesplosion.
Jos Hirth: Create TTFs Online with FontStruct (it's fun)
Some of you might have seen FontStruct over at Slashdot. It was at the front page yesterday or the day before. The usual thing happened of course - it got slashdotted to death. Fortunately it's back online. It's time to give it a shot.
In a nutshell: FontStruct is a web-based font creation tool. Apart from a few minor issues the Flash-based interface is perfect. It's surprisingly awesome in fact. Well, it's not intended to be used for professional font creation; it doesn't handle kerning or hinting for example. There aren't even any vector tools (all you get is a set of building bricks). But all those things aren't really necessary for less-serious/pixel fonts.
Jon Cruz: Adding another little feature
The first half of it is done, but it's the half that notices changes and reloads that still needs to be worked on. Oh, and then there is also the half of trying to figure out what to invoke, and the half of needing to deal with embedded images...
Well... it's a start. Feedback on that bug would help get more things going.
John Bintz: Video: The DC Conspiracy at Beyond Comics for Free Comic Book Day
Not since LGM2 have I put a video up on YouTube — I was just waiting for a good one to post, that’s all, and here it is!
Myself, Rafer Roberts, and Rebecca Simms (and Evan Keeling, but I left before he arrived) were all at Beyond Comics in Frederick for Free Comic Book Day. For the two or so hours I was up there it was pretty sweet. I gave away a lot of minicomics, and I know the other DCC members did well for themselves. I also had the opportunity to talk with the very cool owner of Beyond Comics, Jon Cohen. Watch and enjoy.
Thanks to Alex for running the videocamera, and, of course, the entire movie (except for the music which was from Garageband) was edited using Open Source software.
Gail Carmichael: Mini-Course: Finished
In all seriousness, though, I am so happy with how the week went that I can hardly put it into words. So I'll begin with a summary of what we did after day one, and end with an attempt to capture my feelings as they are just two hours after it all ended.
On Tuesday, we kicked things off with some material on game design. I wanted to squeeze a bit of that in before we started working on our own games in the lab, but also wanted to give as much lab time as possible, so I only did an hour's worth of lecturing before moving on. In the afternoon we were back in the classroom, and covered topics of usability, using principles from Donald Norman's Design of Everyday Things. I used CS Unplugged's Chocolate Factory activity to get the girls thinking about issues of design.
I spent some time on Wednesday morning talking about computer graphics. This was a tricky one, since the theory behind it is pretty complicated. I wanted it to be mostly understandable, yet deep enough to make the class feel like they actually learned something. So I didn't spend much time on it, but gave a flavour of what vector and raster graphics were, as well as what some of the topics of 3D graphics would be. I even showed that first movie made in Blender, Elephant's Dream. I capped off the morning with the rest of my game design material, and we spent the afternoon in the lab again.
For both Thursday and Friday mornings, we worked in the lab finishing up our games. I covered some basic artificial intelligence on Thursday afternoon, talking mainly about finite state machines and the Turing test (again using two activities from CS Unplugged). I particularly enjoyed the discussion we had about AI, since the class had an unusually good insight into how computers worked and what they were capable of. They understood inherently that computers essentially stored information and could maybe deduce new things from it, but that they couldn't do anything we didn't tell it to do (I did tell them a bit about neural nets, which seem to be more like learning, but not so much in the sense we humans do).
Finally, we grouped a couple of the games classes together Friday afternoon and tried out each others' creations. I think the boys were definitely impressed with what we were able to do.
I kind of already mentioned one of the reasons that I am so happy about this course, and that is the awesome discussions we were able to have. These girls are so smart! What's more is that they looked genuinely interested, not just while in the lab, but in the classroom as well. When I asked if anyone was interested in trying computer science out in high school, they pretty much all said yes! Wow! I thought if I had made even one or two interested, then I would have succeeded in my mission. I really hope they can find joy in the subject as they get older, because I can tell you right now, they have HUGE potential.
So that about sums up my very first experience teaching a real class. I hope this is just the beginning! Watch this space for some more info about my course notes. I may post them for all to see, and if so, I'll link to them here.
Jon Phillips: links for 2008-05-09
- BBC NEWS | Technology | TorrentSpy ordered to pay $110m This is bullshit. What year is this? (tags: copyright, 2008, bittorrent, pirates, sharing)
Ryan Lerch: The Fedora Community & encouragement…
Even though I have only been an active member of the fedora community for about a month now, something happened about an hour ago just to reinforce how awesome the community is. I was reading the fedora-art mailing list this morning, and was pleased to read a short and sweet message from Jon Roberts that contained encouraging words about the art-team’s echo icons project. So thanks Jon!
I would also like to jump on the encouragement bandwagon and give a shout out to the fedora-docs team and thank them for the awesome Desktop User Guide, which has been a valuable source of information for myself in making the switch to Linux and Fedora.
Niko Kiirala: LGM has begun
Niko Kiirala: When PCI is not PCI
Jos Hirth: Improve Your Documentation with Generated Directory Listings (XHTML/Text)
- There shall be structure.
Hierarchical structures are always rather hard to explain with words alone. You've to identify the key items and then lay out their relation to each other - two at a time. This can take a couple of sentences and you'll also have to carefully check if everything is at the right place.
But it doesn't stop there. The worst part is probably that every user will have to parse your explanation very carefully. Of course that only adds a few seconds to the whole process, but those seconds accumulate. Your thousands (or even millions) of users might have done something more important during that time. They could have picked their nose for example, which is an activity many people enjoy more than reading documentation.
Yes, it's true. Reading documentation is really that exciting. So, we really should try everything possible to make it as quick and pain free as possible.
Gail Carmichael: Mini-Course: Day One Complete
Yesterday was the official orientation session, where we showed students and their parents around to the classroom and game lab, and today was the first actual day of classes. I think both went well!
At orientation, the parents seemed quite enthusiastic. The girls were quieter, but eventually asked lots of questions, which I thought was a good sign. They wanted to know how much time we were going to spend in the lab, how we were going to make the games, and what I meant by "you don't need to code."
The first student arrived to class shortly after I did (20 minutes early!). After I set up my laptop with the projector, I played a movie from the Good Game show, just for something to do before everyone arrived. I found that the projector played movies ok on the default settings, but that my slides looked pretty bad. I actually went into my video card's colour settings and brought down the brightness so my slides looked good, but then videos got worse. Can't win them all.
Once everyone had arrived, I dove right into my introduction slides. I talked about who I was, and asked them to interview each other to see where they were from and why they signed up for the course (they either said it was because it looked "cool" or because they wanted to know how video games or computers worked).
We talked about what computer science in general was, including the many other areas of interest it could be combined with (like psychology, biology, mathematics, and so on). There was a brief definition / introduction to games, and then a quick idea of how (in my opinion at least) the two were well related.
The next major section was to talk about women in computing. I particularly enjoyed this topic because they girls were really tuned in on the issues. They brought up ideas and suggestions on why few females get into the field, and how to fix it, that showed a lot of insight, and even agreed with the literature. When I had them read pieces of articles, then discuss their pieces with the rest of the readers of the same article, they seemed to have interested looks on their faces. They did an awesome job relaying the main points of the content they read to the rest of the class. Definitely a smart bunch!
Finally, in the afternoon, we went to the game development lab and went through some tutorials on GameMaker. Everyone just worked at their own pace, and when they were done the tutorial, they played around with their own ideas. From what I could tell, we should be getting some really good games out of them by the end of the week!
So that was my first day's experience of my very first time teaching a real class. I think the only thing I really need to improve is my knowledge of GameMaker for tomorrow's lab time. Speaking of which, gotta go finish up that tutorial I started a moment ago...
Jon Phillips: The Real Carbon Offset
For anyone trying to offset your carbon footprint: Get a shovel, dig a hole, and bury yourself. I’ll take volunteers to do this first and I will document the whole process from start to near finish.
Jon Phillips: Photos from Guangzhou China Town Demolitions and Linux Photo Sharing Question
AhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHhhhhhh! Our time in Guangzhou is nearing an end for this spell. I have not adequately covered what Lu and I have been up to. Here are some immediate photos taken of Guangzhou which illustrate the dynamism of where we live right now.
Photos below by Lu Fang under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
We discovered this village a couple of blocks from our house was being destroyed to make way for new housing and skyscrapers which you’ll see at the end of this.
Also, a few of my colleagues will be happy to note that a W hotel and Ritz-Carlton are being built on these grounds — ironies abound. The other day as well, helped my wife’s parents plant some plants. They wanted me to help dig out this huge *rock* in the ground. That rock happened to be a big multi-colored chunk of rubble from the village that lays under where we live — some kind of rock!
I need to get into photo dumping online. What is the linux workflow that others use to get photos from camera, to desktop, to flickr, Internet Archive, etc? I just took a hard look at just uploading all my photos to Internet Archive, but the interfaces are not there for photo fun nor conversion to other formats, and the biggest part is lack of active community. Any thoughts?
