Recent content on A Nerd's Tale
So, recently I started using windows for work. Why? There are a couple of reasons, one that I needed to use MSVC, that is the Microsoft Visual C++ toolchain and the other being, I wasn’t quite comfortable to ifdef stuff for making it work on GCC aka, the GNU counterpart of MSVC.
After an anxious month, I am writing a Krita Weekly again and probably this would be my last one too, though I hope not. Let’s start by talking about bugs. Unlike the trend going about the last couple of months, the numbers have taken a serious dip.
A lot of things have been going on with Qt these days. It all started with The Qt Company trying to get an increase in their revenues, specifically this blog post.
So one of the toughest Krita releases is up today. Tough not in the sense there were a lot of regressions to solve but the mountain of build issues faced by the team.
Was experimenting with rendering text in Qt, of course for trying to see if I can land some improvements over Krita’s existing text tool. And now that as I have played with it a bit, jotting some notes over this blog post.
So, a lot has been going around these days, 2020 hasn’t been the best year so far. Nevertheless don’t panic, maintain proper hygiene and you should be fine for the most part.
It has been some tough few months and this would probably linger for a bit more. Nothing much serious but then my calendar is facing some trouble to sew some recreational hours into the schedule.
It has been more than a year that I had push rights for all the KDE repositories. So this is an obligatory anniversary post. I got introduced to Linux while searching for development environments that came with all sorts of compilers & interpreters by default and I don’t have to manually install those stuff.
Honestly, you don’t want to know the number of bugs in our bug tracker at this point. But I assure you these are just our broken unit tests rather than bugs.
With everyone getting back into work, we have managed to control the number of bugs. There are 2 fewer bugs than what I reported last time. I know it is still not a lot, but with Dmitry not available for most of the time and team having to divide its time between the resource rewrite & bug fixing, it is pretty good that the number is decreasing.
The number of bugs has risen to 457 as it was a vacation season. Also, Dmitry is on parental leave, so the increase is quite normal. As Boud is back from vacation, he is sharing his time between, bug fixing & triaging and administration stuff.
Linux doesn’t have Photoshop. One common rant I get to hear when I try to help someone to switch to Linux. It is almost 2020 and say what? people still agree with this statement.
A little bit background, I am a final year undergrad student, looking for a job, which of course who isn’t these days. With that being said, my job search isn’t going quite well.
My exams are over and hopefully I would back in for doing weeklies again, unless there is an Internet Shutdown in my area. Anyway, looking at the bug count we have 440 bugs open, 11 more bugs than what I reported in the last weekly (which was 12 days back).
We had a release last week and boy, I would just skip talking about bugs for this one. But we currently have 429 open bugs, 14 more from what I reported last week.
This week we got 13 new bug reports while 22 got fixed, a net decrease of 9 bugs. The bug tracker says that there are about 415 bugs remaining, so still a long way to go.
Phew, I am late this week for the update, kudos to my university exams nevertheless better be late than never. One more week passed, we are now closing on the 4.
The number of bug reports have rose from 18 to 33 this week, out if which my magnetic lasso is guilty of a couple. I promise I will take care of them as soon as I get rid of the university exams which are coming up.
This week in Krita has been more around features, rather than bug fixing. We had around 18 bug reports but at the same time 18 bugs were fixed too. We can now import jpeg2000 files into Krita.
Preface Okay, so recently one of Boud’s posts sparked some conversations in hackernews and reddit. So this is my part of taking care of a couple of the points raised in those discussions.
October has been really great for me this year. It started with the Ada Lovelace Day meetup, or better, the after meetup party. The following week, my 6 months of effort got merged to master.
A pilgrimage is a journey, often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about the self, others, nature, or a higher good, through the experience.
So, finally it seems like, after crossing the deadline by a couple months, Magnetic Lasso is going to get merged, as Boud told me. Lets see how many more weeks it takes, so presumably it is complete feature wise but who knows from where a bug might pop up.
So my mid semester break begins next week, finally I can take sometime off my academics and get some shit done. To start off the weekend, I started working on the Magnetic Lasso again, it is almost complete, there are still some UX issues remaining, but I don’t think it won’t take much time, considering that most of the work is done.
If someone has been following my posts, they would sure know, I write C++ for most of the time, I spent to write any piece of code. The reaction to which most people resonate is, “ouch, you write c++, that must be really tough”.
To be fair, my speaking skills probably haven’t improved that much, but I no longer feel nervous while on the stage, like I used to feel earlier, thanks to the session that I took on the recent ILUGD meetup.
Definition: Duck typing in computer programming is an application of the duck test—“If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck”—to determine if an object can be used for a particular purpose.
Three months of fighting with boost, qt, having a proper plan, multiple individuals to get help from and still unable to hit the target in time. That will be software engineering 101 for me.
Update: This feature is now merged into master and can be tested out by downloading any of the Krita Next version. The UX has changed a lot, here is an updated post about the UX.
The sprint has officially ended yesterday and most of the participants have already left, except me, Ivan, Wolthera and Jouni. Well I would have also left as planned but I read my flight timings wrong and it would leave after 3 hours of what I thought the departure time was.
This would be pretty big post, might take up a day or two more than a week to complete, so please bear with me. Context I had a flight for Amsterdam to catch, was a long flight, writing a post seems to be the best time killer.
Well, I did manage to get some work done during the start of the week cause after that it was just dripping nose and back to back headaches along with a sore throat for around the next 3 days, and I also had to prepare for Krita sprints happening next week.
Adding a feature by yourself is a lot satisfying than requesting someone to add that for you, cause now you are both the producer and the consumer. But to be honest, I never thought I would be the one implementing the Magnetic Lasso for Krita when I requested it 4 years back, leave the fact that I even getting paid for doing so.
Honestly, working on correcting the checkpoint procedure made the tool explode. So I decided to take a couple of steps back and rethink the strategy. And for inspiration, I fired up YouTube and started watching tutorials of Photoshop’s Magnetic Lasso, cause that was the one which made me write this thing in the first place.
After digging for around a month and a half, I can finally do some selections with the Magnetic Lasso tool, which I wrote with utter laziness as I would say. Though it still demands a lot of work to be done, so it will be just polishing the existing code into perfection for the next one and half month.
Finally, I can write myself as a professional developer, cause for the first time I got paid, that also by cash, for writing code. So after the boost battle of last month, it was time to test the algorithm out in the wild and not limit it to the confined boundary of the tests.
Finally done with the first phase of the feature I wanted, 4 years back. Though just the unit test for the algorithm is implemented. At least for now, we can detect edges and stick to it.
This would start with a quote: Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing.
<prelude> In the previous post, I discussed boost::astar_search and ignored the most important part of the whole setup, the graph itself. This I would say is a little harder to comprehend than boost::astar_search.
Right now, I am having a hard time understanding BGL’s (the Boost Graph Library) template spaghetti, so decided to write a blogpost while I decipher it, one at a time, documenting the whole thing along the way.
The title is a running joke now, please don’t hit me, I know that this is one hell of an aloof conclusion. But why? Let’s retrospect the situation. Linux is just the kernel Add a display server on top of it Add a window manager Add a compositor Add a display manager You will get a desktop, yes a desktop and not a desktop environment.
Note: Not a Game of Thrones fan, yet to watch even a single episode, but I wanted a catchy title This will be a story, so get prepared to be bored, 😸.
I never expected such a dreadful day would come such that I have to install Windows, cause I didn’t have enough money. And yes, you read it right, nothing is wrong in the previous statement.
Note: The title may be misleading, 😛 I started dabbling with graphic design back when I was in 7th grade, that time I saw someone working in Photoshop, probably was extracting a person and putting that extracted piece on top another picture, the wow moment that was and I be like I also want to do that, so got a copy of Adobe Photoshop 7, technically a pirated copy but well, Photoshop 7 was not…
The story begins in PyCon India 2018, I, with a tired soul (registration desk is not a quite nice place for resting), shivering in freezing cold, after a dosage of Paracetamol, asked fhackdroid to tell me about any project which uses Go, so that I can also put some patches during devsprint.
If you don’t get the meme reference from the title, here is one more for you : Enough of memes, lets talk about something trendy, something that everyone is talking about cause January 2019 is all about setting up goals and resolutions, I am not being punny here.
tl;dr, Typical end of the year post as you may expect. Well, 2018 was a significantly productive year for me compared to other years, learned so many things which I wanted to, plus added more things to the bucket list for the coming year.
Let me start this one with a story. Once there was a kid who loved to play games, after a while, he wanted to make games of his own and tada a programmer was born.
So apparently one of the oldest community in probably the whole India, celebrated its 2nd anniversary on 28th after it was revived back on 2016. And you know what, this time it was a Capture The Flag event, something new tried by the new group of people who joined hands to not let this community go in hibernation again.
ILUGD better known as India Linux Users Group - Delhi, a LUG, based in Delhi NCR. Bear in mind that it is “India” and not “Indian”, a lot of people get that incorrect, “Indian” means it is exclusively for Indians which we are obviously not, but our group is based in Delhi which comes in India so, hashtag_blah_blah.