Just recently is finished “Svartir Englar” by Ævar Örn Jósepsson (I read the Dutch version) although I was pretty bored after the first twenty pages. After finishing the book I realized that I should have stopped after those initial pages since this has just been a waste of my time. The question then came up how many books I was going to read about the end of my life.  In his book “Metamagical Themas” Douglas Hofstadter learns us that it is actually pretty straightforward to come up with answers to questions such as “how many books are there in all the libraries in the world”. In my case it is far more easy: I will probably live for another 40 years and I finish 1 book per week on the average. So I still have about 2000 books to go. Might be a bit more or a bit less, but for sure I’m not going to finish 10.000 books.

How much shelf space will those books take? Let’s suppose those books are 2 cm thick on the average. That makes a total of 40 meter shelf space I need. In my house I have a wall that is 5 meter long. If I can put 8 shelves against that wall it will be completely covered with books. So my whole life that I have in front of me only fills one single wall.

Maybe I should start selecting my books a bit more critical

I started programming in 1983 on a Sharp PC-1251 with an amazing 3486 bytes RAM. It had a Basic interpreter and we had to use it for a Calculus course at the university.

So that’s 25 years ago. That made me suddenly wonder how much code in different programming languages I have written in all those years. A completely useless question of course, but fun nevertheless. I don’t have all the code available anymore so I have to estimate some numbers from memory. The numbers I present include comment and blank lines.

The list:

1. C: 100.000
2. C#: 70.000
3. Java: 20.000
4. C++: 20.000
5. Pascal: 5.000
6. PV~Wave: 5.000
7. Basic: 2.000
8. Matlab: 1.000
9. Lisp/Scheme: 1.000
10. Assembly: 1.000
11. Fortran: 200
12. Perl: 100
13. Python: 20
14. Boo: 20
15. Nemerle: 20
16. F#: 20
17. Ruby: 10

This totals 225k lines of code in 25 years.In other words, about 10k LOC’s per year, or 30 lines per day. Other interesting questions that could be asked:

• how much of this code is still in use
• how much of this code is forever lost
• how much of this code is still archived somewhere on a company network
• how much code would this have been if it all had been written using language xyz
• how many bugs did I introduce over the last 25 years

About 10 years ago I had Fortran on my resume but I always felt a bit embarrassed about that. I didn’t really like the language, to put it very mildly. When people inquired about my Fortran knowledge I always mumbled something like `just the basics’ and tried to steer the conversation into another direction. There was this other language I had the same feelings about. It is called Visual Basic. Why? Mainly because I associate Basic with people educated in any topic but computer science. Often these people seem to be hired by software houses that don’t care about the quality of their employees, as long as they can make money out of them. And as long as there are customers that don’t really care about the quality of the software that is written, they get away with it. Mind you, I’m not saying that you need a degree in computer science to become a good programmer. One of the best programmers I’ve ever met had an unfinished degree in sociology.

Ok, enough of this ranting. Despite my dislike for Visual Basic I downloaded and installed Mono 1.2.3 and the VB compiler yesterday evening. The goal, as usual, is to support yet another programming language for GIMP#. We already have C#, Java, IronPython and now VB is next. I already did some initial experiments and I expect to have a working GIMP plug-in written in VB pretty soon. Some minor problems so far:

• as advertised, the vnbc compiler is pretty basic yet. Error messages are very cryptic which makes it sometimes hard to find the real error.
• it seems that VB doesn’t have the yield keyword. So writing a custom Enumerator takes a bit more code
• I felt kinda dirty after having written a few lines of Visual Basic…

I hope to report on the performance of the Average Blur plug-in written in VB, compared to C#, IronPython and Java soon.

Sometimes you need to download a useful program from the internet, say Google Talk, and install it on your PC at work. And suddenly you are confronted with company policies about certain url’s that are blocked. I very well understand that you shouldn’t visit the Playboy site during working hours, but sometimes these url filters really become annoying. Of course I could have downloaded Google Talk from a different site that wasn’t filtered, but there is another straightforward approach:

• Just do a ping traceroute to the site you want to visit. I used this website to do that on-line.
• The Google IP address I got was: 209.85.165.99
• I entered http://209.85.165.99/gtalk in my browser and happily downloaded Google Talk.

Disclaimer: this approach is probably not going to work if your company uses a somewhat smarter url blocking program than mine. Secondly: I’m not encouraging anyone to visit sites that your company probably has blocked for a very good reason.

I’m not happy at all. My 3 yo daughter has scribbled on my tft screen with a permanent cd/dvd marker. Hopefully when I’m back from work I can remove it. I know quite a few people read my blog, so if there are any useful tips to remove the ink from my screen, I would be very grateful.

Edit: thanks everyone for the tips! In the end the marker pen was quite easily removed by alcohol-free baby wipes. Now we only need some educational advice to prevent these kind of things to happen in the future

Seems that over the last couple of years at least some of my tax money was well spent: for the first time I was able to fill in my income tax using a native Linux program. Hooray for the Dutch tax department. Now can I please have some of my money back

Today this lovely little girl is having her fifth birthday!

Photo was taken just before Christmas 2001 during baby swimming lessons. And yes, this post is GIMP related because this pic featured in the red eye removal tutorial written by Carol

I just found a nice article (in Dutch). It describes an experiment from Ruper Sheldrake that “proves” that people know when they are stared at. In this article they debunk that experiment by showing that the test setup described by Sheldrake wasn’t actually that random at all. He has made the same mistake as the people from the Heartmath institute that claim that your heart can predict the future. Look in one of my previous blogs for more details.

Oh, and if you want to be utterly bored, you can read Sheldrake’s articles here and here.

Now imagine that my mom uses a Linux system. And let’s also imagine that she just bought a new 20 inch LCD because her eyes are getting worse and someone gave her a nice video card because her old one didn’t have DVI output. Then the following conversation over the phone could take place:

mom: hi son, how are you doing?

me: fine, it’s just that….

mom: never mind that. I have a problem with my Linux system. I got a new video card. Our handy neighbour put it into my PC.

me: great! Does it work?

mom: well.. allmost. The system starts. But the resolution sucks (in reality moms of course never use the word sucks, but this is fiction, right?). So I entered the display configuration and you know what? My new card was recognized. It’s an nvidia geforce 4 something.

me: that’s a nice card. So just select the right resolution.

mom: yeah, but that’s where the problem begins. The optimal resolution of my LCD is 1600 by 1200. And it isn’t in the list. My neighbour advices me to install Windows XP and just use the drivers that come with the card.

me: hold on mom. I think nvidia has a great set of drivers for Linux. You have to download them from their site first.

mom: hm, why aren’t they on that installation disk you gave me?

me: that’s a bit difficult to explain right now. Just go to the nvidia site and download the driver.

(After a long time explaining the right url, the right version of the drivers, etc. etc., mom manages to download the driver)

me: now you have to chmod that file so you can execute it and it will install the right drivers for you.

mom: huh?

(more time passes as I explain how to open an xterm, chmod the file, become root and execute the binary)

mom: it doesn’t work. I get a message. It says that you should stop X windows first.

me: * sigh *. Ok, I will explain.

(a very long time passes before mom is in a console without X windows running)

mom: hm, it asks me if I want to compile the module. What does that mean?
me: just click on ‘Yes’

mom: I can’t click. The mouse doesn’t work anymore. Did I do anything wrong?
me: use the Tab key untill the Yes button is highlighted.

mom: this is very complicated, isn’t it?

me: maybe. Now have you selected the Yes button?

mom: yes. Something is happening. It says busy compiling.

me: great. We are almost there.

mom: it’s ready. It says that it can’t install because the kernel is compiled with a different version than this module.

me: arghhhhhhhh. Ok, I will come over next weekend.

Ok, this conversation never took place. Yesterday I just tried to install a video card which I bought cheaply second hand. It’s a geforce 4 and has DVI so that would be great for my new monitor, a Samsung 204B. It will replace my ancient Matrox G400 Max Dual Head. After spending the whole evening messing with the system it still didn’t work. And ok, this is partly my own fault since I am using gcc 4.0.1 while my kernel is still compiled with 3.4.

I have two choices right now: either downgrade my compiler to 3.4 or compile a new kernel with 4.0. The second option seems to be the smartest. More on this later…

Recently I found the following comment on a GIMP forum.

“If you have any thoughts about using the Image Map tool in GIMP to create an image map, my advice is: don’t bother. It’s FULL OF BUGS! I created ONE area for an image (admittedly with quite a few points), saved it, and when I reopened it the area was totally messed up! Points were moved to strange locations, lines overlapped. It’s also extremely cumbersome and slow to use. Clicking on a line to add a point is practically impossible (it took me over 20 tries one time to click the line just right). In sum, it’s a total waste of time.“

Now, why would I bother with this? Well, I created the Imagemap plug-in back in 1998 and it has been part of the GIMP distribution since release 1.2. Since the very first release I have recieved mail that can be classified in four different categories:

1. I love your program, thanks.
2. Can you implement this new feature? Oh, and I love your program, thanks.
3. I think I’ve found a bug in your program. Can you fix it? Oh, and by the way, I love your program.
4. Hi, I’m from Google HRM. We love your program and we would like to hire you.
Ok, I’ve made up that last one. But all in all I’ve never had a negative reaction. So lets look now at the comment of the obviously dissatisfied user. He has found a bug, so what were the options for this poor guy?

1. He could have silently switched to another program and live on happily with whatever program he has choosen.
2. He could have looked at the About dialog in the plug-in where my e-mail address is shown, and send me mail along the lines of one of the above four categories I’ve mentioned
3. He could have looked at the source code (it is OSS, remember?), fix the bug and send me a patch.
4. He could have filed a bug in Bugzilla.
5. He could try a later version of GIMP to see if this bug is already fixed
6. He could write a comment in a GIMP forum on how much the plug-in sucks.

He choose option 6. Does this help him? Does this help anyone else? Obviously not, since it doesn’t solve any of the bugs. It only helps in letting him get of some steam.How about option 1, would that be any good? This is probably the option most users choose. If it doesn’t work, just try something else. This is too bad, because the whole idea of OSS development is based on continuous improvement of the code by people using it, looking at it, contributing to it, etc. But at least this option doesn’t hurt anyone’s feelings and it doesn’t produce negative advertisement. Option 2 is ok. He (she?) could have send me an e-mail explaining what was wrong in the plug-in. I would have listened to him and fix the problem, especially when the line “and I love your program” would show up somewhere in his mail Option 3 is even better. It’s the same as option 2 but it saves me the work of fixing the problem. And it would be another great contribution to OSS from an individual, instead of letting a limited group of people do all the work.

Option 4 is nice if you are not a programmer yourself. Just file the bug(s) and someone will solve it if it’s urgent enough. A small improvement here is to first see if this bug has already been entered or even been solved. If this disgruntled person has taken the trouble to do so, he would soon have discovered that one of the bugs he mentioned has already been solved a couple of months ago.

Option 5 would have helped him. As mentioned in the previous option this bug was already solved in most recent versions of GIMP.

Ok, after analyzing these possibilities, can we still understand why he choose option 6? Could he have opted for example to solving the problem himself by fixing the code? I looked up his profile on the forum and found out that he has programmed since the days when punchards were common. Hm. So this guy at least claims that he can program. And since he is a programmer, he also knows that programs contain bugs. Most probably he has created a few himself during his career. So it’s quite difficult to understand why he choose to write such a negative comment in the forum. For now I will just assume he had a bad day.