Summer of Clipart

setuptools

2005-09-20T16:38:00.000-07:00

In the interest of doing the Right Thing, I switched the clip art browser installation system to setuptools this weekend (well, setuptools isn't officially the Right Thing yet, but its the successor to distutils, which is, and I've read that it will included in Python 2.5). This forced me to clean some stuff up, such as the way that I was accessing non-code resources, as doing the Right Thing usually does. It should be super easy to install now, although I say that every release.

Integrating CVS with the setuptools was tricky initially, but once I sent my plea for help to the correct mailing list, I got an answer in 3 minutes. And people claim no one supports open-source.

Apparently, the setuptools allow you to specify dependencies, and have the installer automatically resolve them, CPAN-style. I totally can't get that to work. But hopefully once the bugs in setuptools and me are worked out, that should make it easier for windows users to use.

You can't handle the truth!

2005-09-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

In an interview with the Washington Post, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani describes an episode in Saddam Hussein's pretrial proceedings:

Talabani, based on a conversation with the judge in the case, recounted a scene right out of the movie "A Few Good Men." Asked about the mass killings, Hussein sat silent, refusing to utter a word, Talabani said. But Hussein was taunted, asked if he was afraid to say he carried out such an act. Hussein said, "I am not afraid," and defiantly admitted he ordered the killings. Talabani said the judge has a video and recording of the confession.

What a buffoon. While this makes it clear that the Iraqi people really are lucky to be rid of such a murdering egomaniac, it also reminds me of how little of a threat Hussein really posed to the U.S.

Law and Economics and Code

2005-08-31T17:43:00.000-07:00

My most interesting class by far this semester looks to be Law and Economics. Today, the professor used government-imposed minimal standards for apartments as an example of how interference with the market leaves both buyers and sellers worse off. Economics 101 teaches that when sellers costs are increased like this, the price of the product will increase, and consumers that believe those features are worth the extra money will get what they would have paid for anyway, while those that don't will be forced to spend money on something they would have rather spent on something else.

As a liberal free software geek, I'm torn about where to side on these kinds of issues. My liberal instincts nudge me toward feeling that this argument incorrectly assumes that local apartment markets are efficient; in my experience, there can be an extremely large range in the quality and price of urban apartments, enough so that what seems like one market of 60 landlords can actually be more like 20 markets of three landlords offering different kinds of products. And this isn't a response just to the apartment problem; trends like the skyrocketing pay of corporate CEOs, the increasing domination of American retail industries by a single provider (Walmart/Starbucks/Blockbuster), and the increasingly obvious effectiveness of corporate lobbying all point to an American economy that sits far, far from perfect efficiency, and which cries out for protection from monopolies.

At the same time, free software actually provides a powerful example of the productivity of markets that are governed purely by supply and demand (as Paul Graham has recently written), once you're willing to think of developers as consumers who are trying to decide where to spend their coding talents/time. Given the freedom to work wherever they think their time is best spent, as opposed to where supervisors/executives/Microsoft think their time is best spent, amazing increases in productivity are possible (not that I think the primary value of open-source is in its development methodologies, as ESR does... but there's no denying that its development methodologies are efficient).

So should authorities interfere in the activities of the little people? Based on the above, I'm half-tempted to answer, "Yes, unless the little person is me." But the real solution, unsuprisingly, probably lies in the GPL, which does place restrictions on developers, in exchange for certain protections. But extending the analogy that far will have to happen some other day.

w00t

2005-08-30T15:35:00.000-07:00

So, I put out another significant release of the clip art browser today. As always, the damn thing took three times as long to write as I expected. For some reason, my personal projects always take an unexpectedly large amount of effort, and my school projects always take an unexpectedly small amount (which is good, since I generally start them as late as possible). Anyway, here's a screenie.

If you're wondering why your version doesn't look as incredibly cool as mine, its because you're not using the awesome Gartoon icon set, and (less likely) because you're not using Clearlooks (which happily will be the default theme in Gnome 2.12).

Speaking of advances on the Linux desktop, I'd be cautious about running the browser if you've got an older version of librsvg... I had major crash problems when I ran it with librsvg 2.8.1. Right now I'm using 2.11.1, which is relatively stable (with the exception of the office/telephone category of the latest OCAL... some image in that one folder causes the whole thing to die on my machine), but I've had the best luck with 2.9.5... I tested for a while with it a few days ago, and couldn't cause any big problems. Occasionally librsvg won't be able to render an image, of course, but as long as it doesn't cause the whole app to crash, the browser will notice that and try to render with another renderer instead (if you've told it to in the config file).

What's next? Documentation (somehow, that's always next...), a more powerful configuration dialog, a convenient windows installer (using py2exe and Innosetup), the implementation of some performance gimmicks that are already hinted at in the code, a gui for downloading and extracting the latest OCAL release, and, hopefully, work on the server side of OCAL as well, if I can ever bite the bullet and learn Perl.

0.32

2005-08-24T23:11:00.000-07:00

I'm releasing version 0.32 of this project, which is now called the Clip Art Browser. Get it from

http://download.berlios.de/ocalhelper/clipartbrowser-0.32.tar.gz

This is largely a bugfix release. Changes include:

Copy-paste works- sort of. You can copy-paste into the GIMP, but not into Inkscape. For now, I'm assuming this is an Inkscape issue.

The indexClipart.py script has had a number of improvements, including a "-c" option to update the configuration file automatically, a "-h" help flag, better error messages and smarter placement of the output index file.

The localocal index file can now be placed anywhere, which helps to avoid permissions issues that had cropped up before.

The partial dependency on pyxml has been removed. The code doesn't need pyxml at all (for now... its very concievable that it might become needed again in the future).

Jon Phillip's cool Makefile has been included, but I need to update it based on these latest changes.

Dependencies are Python 2.4, GTK 2.6 and PyGTK 2.6.

To install, make sure you have a recent OCAL release extracted somewhere on your system. Then, extract the package and copy the contents of the clipartbrowser directory into your Inkscape extensions directory. Copy the clipartbrowser.conf file into the .inkscape directory in your home directory. Then run "python indexClipart.py -v -c -f ~/clipartindex.dat DIR" where dir is the root directory of your OCAL dump. That should do it.

0.31

2005-08-20T08:44:00.000-07:00

I've released version 0.31 of the Clip Art Navigator. Its available at http://download.berlios.de/ocalhelper/clipartnav-0.31.tar.gz

There's plenty of changes in this version, but the coolest, to me, is that I was able to drop the requirement for an embedded SQL database for indexing local clipart (before, I'd been trying both SQLite and Gadfly), instead just using Python's own built in datastructures and pickling format. The net result is no dependencies on 3rd party libraries (for the searching code... the interface still requires PyGTK, since the python devs refuse to drop, or even make plans to drop, the albatross of tk) and lightning-fast searching (at least, 5 times faster than SQLite by my benchmarks).

The major issues outstanding now are the awkward procedure for indexing local clipart (I need to make a GUI), copy-paste functionality, and, somehow, figuring out a sensible visual interface for browsing OCAL by category. This last one will be particularly troublesome, since I designed the Clip Art Navigator to search multiple repositories simultaneously, and that's difficult to recconcile with the metaphor of the single category tree provided by OCAL.

Postgres -> SQLite

2005-07-09T09:57:00.000-07:00

I switched the OCAL server system I built to use SQLite instead of Postgres. Should make it much easier to setup and play with. Its available at http://developer.berlios.de/project/filelist.php?group_id=4098 under the "server" listing. The README forgets to mention that it requires the Python bindings to lilbxml2 also.

DMS

2005-07-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

So, I don't know as much Perl as I should. I've tried installing the new OCAL DMS using cpan, but got errors during compilation and testing. So instead, I built my own. I'm not sure if its something the OCAL people can use- there may be too much planning and momentum for DMS at this point- but it works. Its basically just a custom postgresql schema, which an xml-rpc server stuck in front for easier connectivity. At the very least, its helped me find some ways to implement boolean searching and given me some idea of what general API repositories that the client connects to should provide. The server depends on postgresql, python 2.4, libxml2, the libxml2 python bindings, and psycopg (including mxdatetime if you're using psycopg 1.x). So installing it takes some work, but isn't impossible (and, after all, you should only have to install it once). The only big concern I have with it is performance... postgres is slower than most other RDBMS's, and slower than whatever filesystem-based repository that I assume DMS uses. But if that's an issue, there are things that can be done (heh, heh, heh).

I'll try to get a tarball of my server system up to the development site tonight.

First Post

2005-07-03T14:27:00.000-07:00

I've been accepted for the Google Summer of Code. W00t! I'm pretty sure that my proposal- creating an interface to an online clipart repository- is the least technically interesting of any of the 410 that were accepted, but I'm not complaining. And the the fact that the completed project should be useful to lots of projects, not just Inkscape (my mentoring org) makes me feel better.

This blog will hopefully serve at least two purposes: providing a record of my technical progress and some pseudo-documentation on my project for other developers, and showing ~~the world~~ ~~the Inkscape/OCAL developer community~~ my invisible friend Jose what it's like to go from being a mere supporter of the free software movement to being an actual contributor. But in all likelyhood, it will probably just end up serving as the final, definitive proof that Google has too much money.

Anyway, I intend to release early and often both on here and on my SVN repository. Keep me honest.