Recent content on Pat David
As part of my work infrastructure I run an instance of the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) as a data center. Things were running along nicely for quite some time before I was alerted to the site being down yesterday afternoon. Investigating things I found the server was getting hammered by requests with rotating IPs. It wasn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things…
I was fiddling with some site designs recently where I wanted to use an HTML <figure> tag and to include a <figcaption> with it where the <figcaption> text wouldn’t grow past the width of my image . This is easily demonstrated with this photo of possibly one of the greatest U.S. authors (at least in the top 3 - probably Hemingway and Washington Irving would round out the list). Mr. Mark…
I was recently put in charge of some (Microsoft SQL) databases for monitoring meteorological (and hydrological) data down here in Mobile Bay. One of the fun things I’ve found is that it’s apparently common to identify this data based on its ordinal day in the year. That is, a sequential count of the number of days since the first of that year. (Not to be confused with the Julian date…
After spending the last 20 years (!) of my career in shipbuilding (and 15 at a shipbuilding software company doing R&D with the U.S. Navy) I was given an incredible opportunity to switch gears to something much more aligned with my personal convictions. I am the Data Architect for the Dauphin Island Sea Lab ! I had already been spending the last fifteen years working on data problems for…
I got a new job (more on that later)! One of the things I needed to setup is multiple GitLab accounts. I want to continue using my personal account but I also want to automatically be able to use a new work account as well. My personal repos were in ~/personal/ and work was (gasp!) ~/work/ . I tried out a few different things I read online such as this article on Medium by Arnelle Balane that uses…
I finally got around to updating this site to use my static site geneator of choice these days, Hugo ! In case you hadn’t noticed I’m a big fan of using Hugo these days (see: RawTherapee.com , digiKam.org , LibreArts.org , and Siril.org ). It does many things right and it’s fast, fast, fast (over 500 pages for this site, not including assets, renders in about 1.4 seconds)! It…
Over a year ago my friend (and fellow GIMP er) Alexandre Prokoudine asked me if I’d be willing to help him build a new site for a transition of Libre Graphics World to something broader in scope that he was calling Libre Arts . Of course 2020 managed to get in the way and I didn’t really get a chance to work on it as much as I would have liked. Fast forward to my December break and I…
Last weekend I was honored to be a guest on the Open Source Creative podcast with the one and only Jason van Gumster! Before recording he made the mistake of telling me to feel free to go off on a tangent. I’m thinking I probably made him regret staying that. :) I was super excited to get a chance to talk with Jason and prattle on about all sorts of odd things. We had actually been orbiting…
I’ve been meaning to write up something more comprehensive about the Free Software tools I use daily to help me work remotely or with distributed teams. I have no idea if this will be interesting or helpful to anyone but my hope is it might in some small way… In B.C. ( Before Coronavirus ) time I was already working towards being able to work from anywhere. One of my personal…
“We are not superstitious in our profession, sir,” replied the doctor, “but the sea makes people so.” The story this week moves the haunted house concept to sea! I started these stories with a haunted room in The Red Room so here is a haunted cabin on a ship. This seafaring tale from F. Marion Crawford is related by a solid and grounded character (Brisbane) presented as…
This is a story whose fame precedes it, I believe. So much so that I think I’d be surprised to find someone that hasn’t heard of at least the basic premise of the story: someone is granted three wishes but finds that the wishes don’t quite work out the way they had intended. This is not a new idea of course, but W.W. Jacobs manages to perfectly capture the horror of being granted…
This is a quite short story by Richard Middleton that I love for its simplicity and brevity. In talking about the story here, I drop a couple of spoilers. If you’ve never read it before scroll down now . Do come back when you’re done, though. This story delights in playing with words to dance around the question: who is really dead ? We know it’s a ghost story, so there should be…
A little too late I realized that it might be fun to do a daily post of my favorite short ghost stories through October (to honor my favorite month and holiday!). Last year I shared one of my personal favorite stories, “Smee” by A.M. Burrage . I will do my best to try and get a few good stories out this October. I feel like I could probably at least get one good story every week until…
There’s no shortage of posts and news items that tout the benefits of keeping a journal. It seems like everyone loves to tell you about the positive effects it will have on your psyche, mental-health, sex life, and the happiness of your pets. I’m not sure about all of those but I can see how keeping a journal can help in one very important way: it gets you writing . I am not a…
Just over a year ago I started a redesign and rebuild effort for my friends over at https://www.rawtherapee.com . Then life happened. After a long hiatus I was finally able to spend some time working on it and we finally launched it just a few days ago! For those not familiar with the project, RawTherapee is a wonderful tool for developing raw photographs. It’s one of the first Free Software…
Blackjack. It’s one of the most even odds game you’ll find in a casino short of flipping a coin. Assuming the house rules are favorable, the house edge when playing perfect blackjack strategy is as low as 0.5% (you’ll lose ½ cents for every dollar you bet). Not the best National Lampoon Vacation movie… I’m sure it’s common knowledge to much more experienced…
tl;dr - To speed up loading a large HTML table on the client, start with the table CSS set to display: none; . Once the document is ready, set it back to display: table; . This reduced my client-side render time from 60 seconds to 6 seconds on a table with ~400,000 cells. I recently had a need to build a large-ish HTML table of data (5,000+ rows and ~75 columns) and display it on a page. The data…
I’m really looking forward to the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting in Saarbrücken, Germany next year! For those unfamiliar with the meeting, it’s an annual gathering of Free/Libre software projects and artists. There’s an amazing community of users, developers, and hackers that attend every year to talk about all sorts of cool topics like fonts, photography, painting, performance,…
Being a part of a community of smart folks means that inevitably there will be personality clashes. I was reminded of this recently, and found myself needing to remember to be empathetic. Thomas Watson Sr, discussing the early IBM motto, 'THINK'. ( wiki ) darix was kind enough to link me this wonderful post from Jeff Bigler over twenty years ago that is still quite relevant today: Tact Filters…
Demon: What an excellent day for an exorcism. Fr Karras: You would like that? Demon: Intensely. Fr Karras: But wouldn’t that drive you out of Regan? Demon: It would bring us together. Fr Karras: You and Regan? Demon: You and us. The most chilling exchange in the movie. Particularly if you’re familiar with how it ends. The lede image to this post is the inspiration for the scene of Fr.…
Unless you know me well personally, you may not realize that I’m a nerd for ghost stories. Big time. That particular topic is for another time, though. This post is to celebrate the spooky season with one of my favorite ghost stories, Smee by A.M. Burrage. Set during a Christmas Eve, it’s a delightful look at an innocent game of hide-and-seek called “Smee” (a portmanteau of…
With deference to Dieter Rams (and courtesy of Vitsoe ), his 10 principles for good design. This list is worth revisiting every now and then. Good design is innovative The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and…
Much to the chagrin of my friend darix , I run an Ubuntu server at home for various things like Nextcloud and Plex . (Chagrin because it’s not openSUSE … yet.) I had installed the previous Long Term Support (LTS) version, 16.04 because I just need the thing to run and be solid. The time had come for a new LTS release and I figured I might as well sit down and get upgraded to 18.04.…
I was outlining some ideas for an article I want to write concerning online privacy and connections to the recent Facebook fiasco. Part of the outline had me talking about the “middleman” layer that many big services like Facebook and Google created through their free offerings like ads, webfonts, comments, and social sharing options. I started mentioning this in a post from last year…
I got the bug recently to finally do something that’s been annoying me for some time: set up a dark theme for this website that is user selectable and that will persist. Normally I prefer the white background (default) that I originally designed but I understand that some prefer a dark background. When it’s in the evening and I want to write/edit a new post (like I’m doing right…
This post is a little more esoteric, but in the spirit of helping others from the future we’re gonna dive into this. I'll stop posting relevant xkcd comics when Randall stops making relevant xkcd comics... I picked up an Amazon Kindle Paperwhite over a year ago, and I have been tearing through books at an alarming rate. In the course of finding more books to read I did what I’ve always…
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: If you can dream—and not make dreams your…
The virtue of being forgetful I suck at passwords. To be fair, so does everyone else. Everyone else being bad at passwords doesn’t help me, though. It only increases my awareness every time I hear about the latest data-breach , password leak, or programming error . The thing is, I know what I should be doing, but the one-two punch of laziness and procrastination constantly seem to beat me…
I finally got around to setting up my own Nextcloud ! I’ve been a file-syncing service user for a long time. There’s just so much convenience in services like Dropbox and Google Drive . File syncing and access across all of my computers and devices is awesome. The ability to automatically backup all of my phone photos to the account is also awesome. However… Only having 7GB of…
Writing is hard . Just look at the post dates for my own blog posts to see what I mean. It takes discipline and hard work to put together any sort of non-trivial writing. If the topic is about a community as diverse and loosely collected as Free Software projects then the effort is exponential. Most Free Software projects don’t have a media/public relations person to interact with. Today I…
Happy New Year! Way back in May of 2017 I made my first commit to start a new project for some friends of mine. Seven months later and we were finally able to publicly push the results: a new website for the awesome folks at darktable ! (I already published a post about this on the darktable blog.) For comparison, the old website is on the Wayback Machine . Why? I think the first question for…
So, I’m on Mastodon . Well, I’ve been on Mastodon for a while now, but thought I’d talk about it briefly here. On most modern social networks, you are the product. Your habits, friends, and interests are all consolidated, packaged, and sold to anyone willing to pay a few bucks to rent your attention (whether you like it or not). If not you directly, then your habits, likes,…
I updated some old GPG keys last year after using the same 1024-bit RSA key from 2004 . (Honestly, I was just impressed that I managed to dig up the private key in order to revoke it.) I had set the new subkeys to expire every year, and while renewing them I took another look around to see if GPG/encryption had gotten any easier. As usual, relevant xkcd . It hadn’t. On the other hand, there…
My wife needed a headshot recently for a work related thing. So I broke out some old and simple equipment to do a quick impromptu shoot for her. This is one of the outtakes from that shoot (she didn’t like how her hair looked in this shot so it wasn’t used). Dot. ( On Flickr ) ƒ/6.3 50mm 1 ⁄ 250 ISO200 Ages ago I had made a DIY softbox that has worked so well that it’s pretty…
Comments were something that I wanted to include on posts from the beginning for PIXLS.US . My problem was how to include comments in a way that would lessen exposing visitors to third party tracking, that would let users control and keep their comments if they wanted, and that would integrate nicely into the community in some way. Luckily all of those requirements were nicely met by integrating…
Yes, yes - Static Site Generators are all the rage these days. It seems like there’s (multiple!) options for every language out there (including homegrown options from back in the day). There’s a bunch of benefits to using them and once you get past thinking you need a “dynamic” site they make perfect sense. I use Metalsmith ( NodeJS ) for this site and pixls.us . I used…
I’ve always had a sensitivity to light. I don’t mean in a Mogwai sort of way, but rather I’ve always felt aware of the feeling and mood that light plays around me. Gremlins was for kids?! I think this manifests in my photography when I favor single strong light sources for my subjects. Particularly Rembrandt and side lighting. This also manifests in my seething hatred for…
The Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is the annual meeting for creatives from across the Free/Libre project spectrum. I’ve written about the previous meetings I was able to attend in Leipzig (2014) as well as London (2016) . It’s an amazing opportunity to meet with other Free/Libre Software users and projects. I won’t be able to make it out to this year’s LGM (I seem to be on a…
The Bus Factor for a project is usually defined as the minimum number of team members that would have to disappear (get hit by a bus) for a project to stall due to lack of knowledgeable people. A low Bus Factor means that the loss of just a small number of people can stall out a project, while a high factor means there is some resiliency in the project. This was how PIXLS.US was very early on with…
When we built the new website for www.gimp.org we moved from a homegrown build system to using Pelican , a Python based Static Site Generator . That migration deserves its own post over on the GIMP website to talk about the process and the specific things we did to support the new site design, but we did use the migration as an opportunity to step up the security of the site substantially . (This…
Jehan Pagès recently published his interview with GIMP maintainer, mitch . If you haven’t read it yet, it’s a fun interview with a very colorful person. I highly recommend checking it out! Mitch at LGM /London last year. Some of the responses in various places online were pretty normal for GIMP news (eg: full of vitriol), but there was one comment that questioned the inclusiveness of…
It’s About Time For almost a decade I had been using blogger to host my personal website. That just didn’t seem to make sense any more, and I wanted an opportunity to fiddle with things a bit. I thought it might be fun to put some constraints on designing a new site for myself while migrating to something better. I’m leaving these images of P!nk that I used during my initial…
A little while back I had a big streak of averaging anything I could get my hands on. I am still working on a couple of larger averaging projects (here’s a small sneak peek - guess the movie?): I’m trying out visualizing a movie by mean averaging all of the cuts. Turns out movies have way more than I thought - so it might be a while until I finish this one… :) On the other hand,…
What’s been going on?! A bunch! In case you’ve not noticed around here, I’ve been transitioning tutorials and photography related stuff over to PIXLS.US . I built that site from scratch, so it’s taken a bit of my time… I’ve also been slowly porting some of my older tutorials that I thought would still be useful over there. I’ve also been convincing all…
I checked the first post I had made on PIXLS.US while I was building it, and it appears it was around the end of August, 2014. I had probably been working on it for at least a few weeks before that. Basically, it’s almost been about 10 months since I started this crazy idea. Finally, we are “officially” launched and live. Phew! Help! I don’t normally ask for things from…
David Tschumperlé has a blog over at OpenSource.graphics and it appears that after releasing G’MIC 1.6.2.0 he had some time to write down and share some thoughts about the last 10 months of working on G’MIC. He covers a lot of ground in this post (as you can imagine for not having reported anything in a long time while working hard on the project). He talks about some neat new…
After a bunch of hard work by someone not me (darix), there’s finally a neat solution for commenting on PIXLS.US . An awesome side effect is that we get a great forum along with it. Discourse On the advice from the same guy that convinced me to build PIXLS using a static site generator (see above), I ended up looking into, and finally going with, a Discourse forum. The actual forum location…
Anyone who has been reading here for a little bit knows that I tend to spend most of my skin retouching time with wavelet scales. I’ve written about it originally here , then revisited it as part of an Open Source Portrait tutorial , and even touched upon the theme one more time (sorry about that - I couldn’t resist the “touching” pun). Because I haven’t possibly beat…
This is old news but I just realized that I hadn’t really addressed it before. The previous work I had done on Film Emulation with G’MIC in GIMP ( here and here ) are also now available in RawTherapee directly! You’ll want to visit this page on the RawTherapee wiki to see how it works, and to download the film emulation collection to use. This is handy for those that may work…
Photographer Ian Hex was kind enough to be a guest writer over on PIXLS.US with a fantastic tutorial on creating and using Luminosity Masks in the raw processing software darktable . You can find the new tutorial over on PIXLS.US : PIXLS.US: Luminosity Masking in darktable I had previously looked at a couple of amazing shots from Ian over on the PIXLS.US blog , when I introduced him as a guest…