19 Oct 2005
Open Source Xara Xtreme
Someone alluded to this on a mailing list I’m a member of (Roy Schestowitz, on lyx-users), and, being the day before an exam and all, I couldn’t help but check it out. I remember playing with Xara tools back in the day of bundled garbage on computer magazine CDs (that was also my first brush with a full version of Flash, at version 3, but that’s another story. I’d played with FutureSplash sometime before then, too.) — it looks as though it’s come a long way.
I’ve used Sodipodi on Linux to do some useful things, but haven’t had a chance to play around with Inkscape yet… though it looks similar, maybe even a fork? Definitely on the to-do list. Anyway, the folks at Xara want people to spread the word they’ve got a cool GPL’d app coming for the Linux desktop (Mac OS too), and I think it’s a great thing for the Open Source community, which is why I’m pimping it here.
There’s a version on their xaraxtreme.org site that is functional already, though it only views files at present… editing functionality is… presumably some way off.
I think if someone offered Pantone swatches for sale with a good quality open-source app, I’d go for it. Their business model seems solid enough after they’ve got it off the ground, but only time will tell. One hopes they stay around, because this appears to be a far better contribution than Corel’s abortive attempts to launch a graphics app on the Linux desktop (closed source, of course — Photo-PAINT 9, if I recall correctly. It was a RAM-guzzling beast that I may have even enjoyed at the time — circa 2000 — had it not been for the fact that I was trying to run it on a middle-of-the-road Pentium (1) with 32MB of RAM) before their silent acquiescence was purchased by Microsoft.
If nothing else, it’ll stir up the space a little bit and hopefully the mention of open source will get otherwise-complacent Adobe innovating again in the Mac space… or, alternatively, it could go the other way and they might just ditch that platform altogether in favour of Windows, though I doubt it.
*Listens as creatives the world over unite and raise arms in an unprecedented revolution against a software company. Hey, it could happen.*
18 Oct 2005
No, this isn’t a creationism/evolution post. But, if you care, I think that whole debate is kinda stupid because it’s hardly as though the two are necessarily exclusive.
Now that that’s out of the way (to self: must stop choosing obscure titles), I thought I’d announce I’ve decided that Evolution really isn’t so bad as it’s cracked up to be (by me, in previous posts. Yeah, so I’m contradicting myself in the space of 24 hours. It doesn’t really matter how long it takes me to contradict myself, because anyone capable of using the search tool on this site proficiently can juxtapose the two contradicting pieces quite anachronistically. Yeah! English buzzwords! C’mooonnnnn, Thursday!). I spent part of today (more than I should have) checking out other clients, and I’ve decided that, unless I want to go with mutt or something (I’m not going to say how tempting that was lest I be pushed into a big geek hole and buried with free software), I’m actually doing okay.
Which is kind of a depressing thought, truth be told. Not that Evolution is acutally that bad, but it’s fairly far from perfect. It’s more stable now I’ve re-installed Ubuntu (gosh that sounds like Another Operating System), and little interface quirks are becoming slowly less significant, but I’m… rather annoyed that it ate my contacts list. Or, that GAIM ate my contacts list and Evolution let it.
Actually, I just remembered that I haven’t tried Opera’s mail client in several years… so I might do that. It doesn’t integrate particularly well (I’m currently trying to figure out some arcane command to make the damn thing print, because it’s not reading from my printcap file or something, and I use it to print in preference to Firefox because Firefox’s print rendering is second to none in the bad-quality stakes), but I’d rather a standalone app that worked really well over a vaguely-integrated app that often crashed and allowed other applications to steal its data, as well as making backup in open formats impossible.
Speaking of open formats, I’ve discovered that OpenOffice.org 2 is storing its documents in OpenDocument format. This means that the SXW extension is now ODT. I’m a little disappointed that this seems to be binary data rather than something like XML… although it seems there are elements of that to it, but they’re scattered amongst binary junk. The XML part might just be OO.o’s implementation rather than a core part of the spec, I don’t really know. There appears to be some kind of XSLT going on, judging from references to styles.xml in the test document I created. Another possibility is that there are several pieces of data contained in some kind of compressed format, but I don’t know exactly what and don’t have the skills to find out! Or, at least, don’t know where to start and hence efforts are frustrated. It’s probable all this information is on the OpenOffice or Oasis websites, but I can’t be bothered looking. I care, but not that much.
My main motive in discovering what’s going on here is the potential integration of OpenOffice with web frameworks, and how open formats (particularly SGML/XML based ones) simplify parsing by an order of magnitude.
17 Oct 2005
Hopefully it’ll come back if I disable integration between the two. Possibly. If not, it’s been needing a prune for a while and I might just start from scratch rather than restore backups (incidentally, Evolution makes it impossibly hard to backup your contacts list, and it’s in a closed format. Far out. It seriously sucks at that whole thing.)
Will work it out sometime tomorrow.
16 Oct 2005
Someone remind me next time I say I’m going to do something stupid like reinstall an operating system too quickly, that databases aren’t stored in my home directory. Far out. I’ve just created hours of work for myself trying to piece together what used to be in various MySQL databases on this computer. Yeah, I know, I should backup, but seeing as I never make major changes (it’s all just incremental little stuff for sites still in the development phase) and really don’t understand how things are meant to be backed up with MySQL (do you export queries, or do you copy the folder, huh? HUH!??) I don’t anywhere near as often as I should.
For me, the databases are generally ancillary things that are merely there to fill in spaces in CSS-based designs, so I always backup design aspects, but rarely the database itself, because there’s no original content there. Well, yeah, but there’s vitally important structure that’s just been thrown away. Doh!
Oh well, nothing I can (read: should) do about it now, maybe between tomorrow afternoon and Thursday. Think of it as post-humous ITF study. Because that’s all it’s going to get.
16 Oct 2005
Note to self, PHP’s mktime() function breaks when you use leading zeros. Thankfully, that means I’ve got 18 hours left to cram, and not nine. Bizarre.
p.s. Now’s a good time for the RSS people to come out from the trees and look at the now fixed hh:mm countdown on my site.
p.p.s. The first post-script will be irrelevant this time tomorrow.
p.p.p.s. Trackback spammers, have a heart. I haven’t got time to deal with your crap right now, and really won’t feel like it tomorrow afternoon. Just go away for a while, okay? Thanks.