Month: October 2008

Categories
Burningbird

Maintenance Tasks

I’m incorporating my Just Shelley weblog into my regular feed, and several of the stories showed up “fresh” yesterday. My apologies for your getting inundated with my writing from yesterday.

We resolved the planetsvg.org domain. I will be donating the domain to the SVG Interest Group, and they will be creating a Planet SVG as part of the new general SVG web site. Hopefully, we’ll be able to find more SVG-related feeds to add to the aggregation lists, as I know there are sites I’m missing.

I’ll keep the current aggregation site up and running until we make the transfer.

Categories
Just Shelley

Blogher Women in Tech Series featuring…Me

Virginia DeBolt did me the honor of interviewing me for her first Women in Technology series at Blogher. If you’re curious about my early years, my views on the semantic web, women in technology and how to modify the computer tech curriculum in order to obtain greater diversity, whether I like animals more than people, as well as some of the tech folks I read on a daily basis, you might want to check it out.

Warning, though, it is all about me, me, me.

And you will be tested.

Categories
Connecting

I hate haters because they’re moonbat wingnuts

I was reading posts and comments at Mathew Ingram’s weblog, when I ran into a comment where the person referenced “Google haters”, and I stopped reading the comment at that point. I no longer cared to read what the person had to say.

I have developed an intense dislike, loathing really, of the term “hater”. It’s little different than the term “hysterical” when applied to women commenters in order to demean the person or persons referenced, rather than views, attitudes, writings, or other work. It’s a lazy noun by lazy people who don’t want to take the time to write about why they agree or disagree with what the person is saying—just use the word “hater” and that should be sufficient. And quick, too.

I feel towards “hater” about the way I feel towards moonbat, wingnut, or any of the other terms used by indifferent writers incapable of writing a detailed, thoughtful criticism or disagreement. These writers don’t have time to spend on their arguments, because they’re too busy looking for the next hater, moonbat, or wingnut to vilify. My suggestion to them is to pick their targets and write well, rather than quickly. Don’t use epithets like shotgun pellets, firing haters, wingnuts, or moonbats hither and yon in an effort to blanket as many people as possible. This approach might net them a bigger following, but of what kind of people? The barely literate xenophobe?

I’m also becoming less enamored of the “us” and “them” writing where entire groups of people are lumped into categories, with little or no individuality allowed. I must admit to my own share of “us” and “them” writing based on the current election, but all I can see that this has accomplished is seeing how long our thrown mud sticks on the wall between us. It may feel good to throw the mud, perhaps even empowering, but eventually the mud will dry, fall off the wall, crumble into dirt, and be trodden under foot. A well-formed argument forces us to question the bundle of assumptions that supposedly make up our “side”, and fragments what was once a perhaps incorrectly aggregated whole. Effective writing shouldn’t make us angry, it should make us stumble, caught awkwardly on our assumptions and expectations.

Last night on television, the reporters were interviewing people waiting to get in to here Bill Clinton speak at a high school down the road from where I live. One woman said that she normally votes Republican, because she’s pro-life, but this year she had to weight all the issues and all the problems and in the end, made a decision to vote for Obama. She didn’t draw lines of divisiveness, or make one reference to “hater” or “moonbat”. What she did do, with a few simple, eloquent sentences, was fragment the cliched clump of expectations we have about voters; she made me re-think my own opinion about what “pro-life” really means to people. I wanted to sit and talk with her and explain what I really mean when I say I’m pro-choice. I, for one moment, actually believed that both “sides” might be able to find an accord some day. It was a stunning moment in an election remarkable only for its vile level of vituperation and equally vile dependence on clichés.

But I digress. To return to the “haters”, the “wingnuts”, and the “moonbats” we find littering our current discourse, there is no greater demonstration of skill in both writing and reasoning than a thoughtfully crafted disagreement or criticism. It can have a stinging bite, or only nibble playfully, and painfully, at the edges of a topic; it can flash brightly, or send whispers of fog to obscure; it can elevate, or bury, with equal panache. In my opinion, an effective argument is one that never makes people mad, but frequently leaves people worried.

Categories
SVG

SVG Planet

I noticed this thread on the SVG Interest Group email list about an official location for the SVG community page. Sounds like the group will be using the planetsvg.com site, though planet sites are typically aggregation sites. However, a “planet” can be many things, and the name is comprehensive.

I still have planetsvg.org created to provide an SVG aggregator site, but I’ve not had luck finding feeds for people writing about SVG, nor have I received many requests (any) to be included. I’m not an “official” member of the SVG inner group, so I’m not sure about continuing the site. Perhaps if I can find more feeds that actually work and are related, at least in some way, to SVG, I may continue the effort. Otherwise I might as well close the site down.

Categories
Graphics/CSS Photography

Gimp 2.6 alive and well on the Mac

GIMP 2.6 is now available on the Mac OS X, in addition to both Windows and Linux. On the Mac, you can install it via Macports, or you can use a pre-built version of the application, available for both Tiger and Leopard. I have the Macports version on my Leopard machine, the pre-built on my Tiger laptop.

First impressions of the newest version is that I like the improvements to the user interface. The original application (Toolbox) toolbar has now been merged as part of the image window, simplifying the interface. The application is still a MDI, or Multiple Document Interface, but it’s simple to keep all of the tool’s components visible.

The necessary photo enhancement tools are all present and accounted for, including Layers, Curves, and the all important Gaussian blur, as well as several of the other handy enhancing tools. The application still interfaces with UFRaw, the separately accessible open source tool that provides RAW image pre-processing.

One of the new additions to Adobe’s Photoshop CS4, I gather, is the addition of seam carving whereby the tool can determine where pixels can be compressed and still maintain most of the image’s integral look. GIMP 2.6 also incorporates a plug-in known as Liquid Rescale that is based on the same algorithm. I didn’t have a photo with a long, unending beach, but I did have a photo of a bright red mumdahlia. Following are two versions of the photo, a before and after scaling with Liquid Rescale.

Red Mum before

Red Mum after

The red flower is distorted, which isn’t surprising. However, the bud, leaves, and even some of the background are relatively untouched. Interesting effect. The plug-in’s web site has examples that show how to use Liquid Rescaling to enhance photos without obvious distortions.

Another major change with GIMP 2.6 is the addition of the GEGL (Generic Graphics Library). From the GIMP 2.6 release notes:

Important progress towards high bit-depth and non-destructive editing in GIMP has been made. Most color operations in GIMP are now ported to the powerful graph based image processing framework GEGL, meaning that the interal processing is being done in 32bit floating point linear light RGBA. By default the legacy 8bit code paths are still used, but a curious user can turn on the use of GEGL for the color operations with Colors / Use GEGL.

There’s also a GEGL tool, which provides access to several operations, though I’d use caution when applying any of the operations to a large, RAW image. Among the more familiar of the operations is an unsharp-mask; among some of the more interesting is the whitebalance operation, demonstrated in the following snapshot.

The new modifications for GIMP 2.6 go beyond making our photos prettier. The new Brush Dynamics feature is a kick to play with, and one can see how it would be useful when creating specialized effects. With the Dynamics, I can create a wonderfully fun fairy sparkle effect, just by setting the pressure, velocity, and random settings for the brush opacity, hardness, size, and color.

Some of the more popular plug-ins, such as the Layers plug-in, which emulates the Photoshop layer effects capability still have not been ported to 2.6. Most of the effects, however, can be created by scratch until the plug-ins are updated. Plus, there’s enough to the basic tool, including the new GEGL operations, and the Brush Dynamics to keep one occupied for hours.

GIMP isn’t the tool for everyone. If you’re proficient with Adobe Photoshop, work in an operating system in which Photoshop is released, and can afford the rather expensive upgrades, you should stay with Photoshop. However, with today’s troubled economic times, and an increased interest in being frugal, you can’t beat GIMP 2.6’s price: donate what you can to the project. In addition, the new Photoshop CS won’t run on many older Mac architectures, including both my Leopard and Tiger laptops.

Paired with UFRaw, you have what you need to do sophisticated photo processing with GIMP. And with all of the graphics plug-ins, filters, scripts, and so on, you can do most other graphics work with the tool, as I hope to demonstrate more fully in the future.