Shallow Thoughts : : Jan

The GIMP Book is Done!

Although I haven't been writing about it here, for most of the past year I've been working on a new GIMP book for Apress, called Beginning GIMP: From Novice to Professional.

Today the work was over: the last bits shipped to the printer! The rest is just waiting (... and waiting ... and waiting ...)

Amazon has a page on it already (complete with typo in the description; sigh) for folks who like to pre-order their books months early. Scheduled release date is currently late April. (I think they have to grow the trees first.)

In case you haven't already heard other authors say it, writing a book is a lot more work than you think it will be. Even if other authors have already told you that it's more work than you think it will be, it's more work than that. If you thought you already knew the subject you were writing about, think again. You'll find out how little you really knew. You'll discover all sorts of options you never noticed in your favorite tools, and new (and often better) ways to do things than the methods you'd been using for years. You'll discover bugs in plug-ins no one's used in a while, and why things you always thought were bugs really aren't.

That's the good sort of "too much work": the kind that keeps you learning, so that you come away from it with more than you started with. It's been fun. But I confess that I'll be glad to take a rest for a while and work on some long neglected coding projects.

I celebrated ship-to-printer with a little GIMP hacking (adding that feature list to configure that I wished for last week, so now GIMP will warn you of any missing features before you start your 45-minute build); and with lamb kebab with zereshk polo at Chatanoga.

Tags: gimp
[ 22:38 Jan 30, 2006    More gimp | permalink to this entry | ]

What Features will be Disabled in this GIMP?

I've been frustrated for some time at GIMP 2.3's inability to save EXIF data whenever I save a JPEG image. There were several bugs report on the problem, and I just assumed that this was something which had broken somewhere along the line and hadn't been fixed yet.

It turns out it was a stupid build problem on my machine: I didn't have libexif-dev installed on either of my Ubuntu systems, and GIMP's configure script wasn't warning me about it in any obvious way. (Of course, had I taken the time to read through the 3679 lines of config.log, the information was buried in there around line 2199.)

So now I have EXIF again, at least on the laptop (hooray!) but I also learned something more important: after running configure for the first time on any new system, before running make, do this:

grep -i "will not" config.log

That may not flag everything, but at least it's a start at getting a list of features that have been disabled because of dependencies you forgot to install (anything which configure is smart enough to tell you "will not be built").

Schumaml had the great idea of putting a list of enabled features in the About box. Maybe I'll look into doing that in a week or two (when the current crunch is over and I have more time to upgrade my development machine so that it can use gtk 2.8 and I can actually build GIMP again).

Update: I added a printout similar to the one I thought I remembered, so there should be no further need to grep for "will not".

Tags: gimp
[ 15:11 Jan 24, 2006    More gimp | permalink to this entry | ]

The New Rootkit Technology

Anyone who's been following the Sony CD rootkit story -- the one where Sony audio CDs come infected with a program which, when the CD is played on Windows PCs, installs a rootkit which is virtually impossible to uninstall and which makes the PC susceptible to all sorts of third-party attacks -- won't want to miss Trend Micro's information page regarding Sony's rootkits.

Highlight:

This tool works by applying a relatively new technology called rootkit technology. Rootkits are used to hide system information, such as running processes, files, or registry entries.

As a standalone application, it is non-malicious. However, certain malware applications use it [ ... ]

Good thing Trend Micro is there to give us the lowdown on this new (and non-malicious) rootkit technology!

In a vaguely related note: a speaker at my Toastmasters club today planned a Powerpoint presentation. (This is unusual in Toastmasters, but does happen occasionally.) He diligently showed up early to set up his computer and the projector so he'd be ready before the meeting started. As we were about to begin the meeting, with the projector showing his first slide, suddenly a dialog popped up on top of the slide, informing him that his system auto-update was finished, and he needed to reboot. It offered two buttons: [Reboot now] [Reboot later]. The later button was greyed out.

Isn't it nice when your system helpfully gives you automatic updates?

He fiddled for a while but finally gave up and rebooted. I couldn't help noticing that the first screen that appeared upon reboot was a Trend Micro screen.

Tags: tech
[ 21:17 Jan 12, 2006    More tech | permalink to this entry | ]

Who Says GIMP Skills Can't be Profitable?

Slate's "Today's Papers" column brings us word of a Wall Street Journal article (alas, subscribers-only) describing a new service: Friends Beyond the Wall Photos. For a small fee, an image from a prison photo can be combined with photos of families, vacations, or posh cars to make it look like you've been on holiday with the kids rather than behind bars! No more need to explain why those visiting room photos have such a drab background!

And here I thought learning GIMP skills was just an amusing hobby.

Tags: humor
[ 21:41 Jan 07, 2006    More humor | permalink to this entry | ]

Ubuntu "Breezy Badger"

I installed the latest Ubuntu Linux, called "Breezy Badger", just before leaving to visit family over the holidays. My previous Ubuntu attempt on this machine had been rather unstable (probably not Ubuntu's fault -- 2.6 kernels and this laptop don't get along very well) but Ubuntu seems to have some very sharp kernel developers, so I was curious to see whether there'd been progress.

Installation: Didn't go well. I had most of the same problems I'd had installing Hoary to this laptop (mostly due to the installer assuming that a CDROM and network must remain connected throughout the install, something that's impossible on a laptop where both of those functions require sharing the single PCMCIA port). The Breezy installer has the additional "feature" that it tends to hang if you change things like the CDROM while the install is in progress, trashing everything and forcing you to restart from the beginning. (Filed bug 20443.)

Networking: But eventually I found a sequence that let me get a network-less Breezy onto the laptop, and I'm happy to report that Breezy's built-in networking tools were able to add networking after the first boot (something that hadn't worked in Hoary). Well, admittedly I did have to add a script, /etc/hotplug/pci/3c59x, to call ifup when my cardbus network card is plugged in; but every other distro needs that too, and Breezy is the first 2.6-based distro which correctly calls the script every time.

Suspend: Once up and running, Breezy shows impressive laptop savvy. Like Hoary, it can suspend either to disk or to RAM; unlike Hoary, it can do this without my needing to hack any config files except to uncomment the line enabling suspend to RAM in /etc/default/acpi-support. It does print various error messages on stdout when it resumes from sleep or hibernate, but that's a minor issue.

Not only that, but it restores both network and usb when resuming from suspend (on hoary I had to hack some of the suspend scripts to make that work).

(Kernel flakiness: Well, mostly it suspends fine. Unplugging a usb mouse at the wrong time still causes a kernel hang. That's a 2.6 bug, not an Ubuntu-specific problem. And the system also tends to hang and need to be power cycled about one time out of five when exiting X; perhaps it's an Xorg bug.)

Ironically, my "safe" partition on this laptop (a much- modified Debian sarge) mysteriously stopped seeing PCMCIA on the first day away from home, so I ended up using Breezy for the whole trip and giving it a good workout.

Hal: One problem Breezy shares with Hoary is that every few seconds, the hald daemon makes the hard drive beep and whir. Unlike Hoary, which had an easy solution, Breezy ignores the storage_media_check_enabled and storage_automount_enabled hints. The only way I found to disable the beeping was to kill hald entirely by renaming /usr/sbin/hald (it's not called from /etc/init.d, and I never did find out who was starting it so I could disable it). Removing hald seems to have caused no ill effects; at least, hotplug of pcmcia and usb still works, as do udev rules. (Filed bug 21238.

Udev: Oh, about those udev rules! Regular readers may recall that I had some trouble with Hoary regarding udev choking on multiple flash card readers which I solved on my desktop machine with a udev rule that renames the four fixed, always present devices. But with a laptop, I don't have fixed devices; I wanted a setup that would work regardless of what I plugged in. That required a new udev rule. Here's the rule that worked for me: in /etc/udev/permissions.rules, change

BUS=="scsi", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]*", PROGRAM="/etc/udev/scripts/removable.sh %k 'usb ieee1394'", RESULT="1", MODE="0640", GROUP="plugdev"

to

BUS=="scsi", KERNEL=="sd[a-z]*", NAME{all_partitions}="%k", MODE="0640", GROUP="plugdev"

Note that this means that whatever scripts/removable.sh does, it's not happening any more. That doesn't seem to have caused any problem, though. (Filed bug 21662 on that problem.)

Conclusion: Overall, Breezy is quite impressive and required very little tweaking before it was usable. It was my primary distro for two weeks while travelling; I may switch to it on the desktop once I find a workaround for bug 352358 in GTK 2.8 (which has been fixed in gnome cvs, but that doesn't make it any less maddening when using the buggy version).

Tags: linux, ubuntu, laptop
[ 22:43 Jan 04, 2006    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]