osp blog - Ivan

diff git imagemagick

2010-10-19T12:03:00+02:00

From wikipedia: In computing, diff is a file comparison utility that outputs the differences between two files.

We have been playing with git. There's more coming! For now, this quick prototype (30M) illustrates some ideas about diff, and images files. It will hopefully be improved in the future :)

In the context of a configuration file, we are combining git's flexibility regarding the choice of a difftool with the image compare features of Imagemagick:

[difftool "mydifftool"] cmd = composite $LOCAL $REMOTE -compose difference x:

It's a digest of two stackoverflow threads:
Are there revision control systems for images?
How do I view 'git diff' output with visual diff program?

It's all lo-fi.

Standards and their Stories

2010-09-01T08:36:00+02:00

I'm looking forward to the stories that may be unfolding these days here at SVG Open.

[openbook booknumber="/b/OL16960548M"] Here are some quotes from chapter 1 of "Standards and their Stories", edited by Martha Lampland and Susan Leigh Star. Among other things, this introductory chapter makes a point for the invisibility and pervasiveness of standards :)

standards are so pervasive that they have become taken for granted in our everyday environment, they may become completely embedded in everyday tools of use.

We have to listen to infrastructure and bring imagination to understanding its components and how they work.

With time, this process can lead to what Callon calls "irreversibility" [...] functional irreversibility--what would it take to change the meaning of a red light to "go" and a green light to "stop"?

The strangeness of infraestructure is not the usual sort of anthropological strangeness [...] Infrastructural strangeness is an embedded strangeness, a second-order one, that of the forgotten, the background, the frozen in place.

Interleaved formats

2010-07-23T22:21:00+02:00

This interview may be a good read. It deals with some aspects of the "current state" (June 2010) of SVG implementations.

It's got a really sweet format. It's a two-sided interview, meaning that Doug Scheppers and Patrick Dengler interview each other. It's not often that I come across interviews that are interleaved:

I asked Patrick some questions, and he asked me some.

To read about technologies that I may (or may not) get a chance to explore is super enjoyable. This time, my favorite was: an HTML version of SMIL called HTML + Time.

The interview has an addendum :)

Foundry

2010-07-01T10:34:00+02:00

We're happy to launch our foundry, today. Have a look

http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/foundry

There's no excuse to not write more this summer!

They've been made using free tools: FontForge, Inkscape...
They're released under free licenses.
Some are collaborative works.
Some will be in development.

Little materials light peculiar happy.
Little long length there louder.
Enjoy your weekends.

Les enfants du transparent

2009-05-21T16:44:00+02:00

These days i'm in Malmö for The Art of the Overhead festival.

For some years now, this art festival has done media archeology about the overhead projector. There was a workshop/space this week, there will be performances this weekend, there will be a psychedelic closing party next weekend, etc.

We're happy to see that the print for the festival was done with free software: scribus, inkscape, gimp, openoffice...

From the festival's documents:
The reason for why we used simple overhead projectors was because of their open surface, where you could directly work with your materials.

Over a two-week period, the old school overhead projector is re-activated as a powerful instrument for projecting alternative visions of our contemporary new media culture.

lgm top nine

2009-05-10T18:31:00+02:00

1. The show must go on.

2. The slides are not the content.

3. I try not to open a terminal in front of people.

4. It's the engineers who are responsible for the bugs and explosions.

5. The preferences are the graveyard of any good idea.

6. The more links an architect got on the internet, the greater the rank on the coin.

7. When we say it's planned, it's not only planned -- the commits are actually happening.

8. You take a picture of a tomato, and the end user sees a lemon.

9. If that purple is not really purple, you need to tune your monitor.

wish you were here at lgm

2009-05-06T15:48:00+02:00

parallel publishing II

2009-03-06T11:06:00+01:00

the workshop's first publication is ready. every participant has created a fictional petites annonces for it. some pictures of making, collating and distributing.

we're also on irc at #crying_room on irc.freenode.org :)

http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/image/?level=album&id=26

parallel publishing I

2009-03-05T15:05:00+01:00

on the first day of our workshop at bordeaux, we decided to collectively re-enact an esther ferrer performance. this is a youtube that gives an idea of her movements.

with this as starting point, we drew our own paths in the capc...

SHMN (Inkboard)

2008-10-26T19:55:00+01:00

Inkboard is an Inkscape extension that allows remote collaboration over the network. In inkscape-devel, there's a thread where people get all excited over it, and manage to bring down a server as a result :-)

It's hard not to get overexcited over tools that have collaboration built into them. They give rise to book covers that I'll repost again&again, and to LAN parties, like last week's Software History Mapping Night.

Strange, that the tech back kitchen for this was also about software history. As far as I could tell, Inkboard isn't part of Inkscape's lifeline at the moment. Nothing wrong with that. This was a constraint that Nicolas answered with very nice php.

Inkscape compiles fine with Inkboard support in both Ubuntu and Gentoo. We have been able to see the extra menu between Effects and Help:

We have been chatting away with the Pedro XMPP client, but we have not been able to share and work on a common SVG document, which was one of the ideas for the SHMN. Another idea: collaboration is not entirely in the tools :)

In Gentoo the Inkboard useflag is called jabber, and this is the recipe for compiling Inkscape with Inkboard support (and other things) in Ubuntu.

Radio Luz mixtape

2008-09-12T18:56:00+02:00

This was the playlist when OSP went on a radio station in Wrocław. A few months after, it's hard to reconstruct the exact sequence of events that led us there. It was something like this: there was a gig at an alternative space, David met us there, he had helped us set up the pre-LGM workshop at OPT, and he invited us to his friend's show on Radio Luz.

Our compilation was about the long tradition of appropriation in pop. Afrika Bambaataa sampled Kraftwerk, everyone sampled The Winstons, and M|A|R|R|S sampled everyone. Though I ~~didn't~~ find the pictures of OSP donning the big headphones [found them!], I did find a lofi recording of the show. The typography workshop had just taken place a few days before:

There was another font made with letters from around the OPT buiding. We took pictures of graffitti, of old signage, of shops, of these kinds of things. We extracted the letters of the alphabet, and we constructed a new alphabet with them. It's the same principle as the music that we heard. Music with samples. Taking things that others have made, and you create a new thing that then you can share and that others can modify and use again...

1. Kraftwerk. Trans-Europe Express.
2. Afrika Bambaata and the Soulsonic Force. Planet Rock.
3. Public Enemy. Fight the Power.
4. The Winstons. Amen, Brother
5. M|A|R|R|S. Pump Up the Volume.
6. Atari Teenage Riot. Destroy 2000 Years of Culture.
7. Pierre Normal. Attraction.

Print, flip, and turn

2008-06-29T15:11:00+02:00

At the Polish print party, we tried a possible automation of the nineteen steps. We gave out numbered tickets at the entrance, and at the end there was a numbered copy of the booklet for everyone. The booklets were all different via Python and Scribus. The imposition and printing was very simple Perl.

If you just want to print a number of copies of the same booklet, grab the modified versions of the scripts, and skip step 1. The $people variable is the number of copies to be printed, and the $pubName variable is the name of your pdf file, minus .pdf extension ;)

So and then:

Create a .sla file by following 1 to 7 of the nineteen steps. For the importing to pdf, use layout.py, or better yet write your own script for making all the pdf documents different :)
Steps 9-13 are now handled by the printprintprint.pl script. This is imposition and the printing of even pages.
When the printing is done, take the warm stack of paper and `flip and turn' it so that your printer knows that it's upside down.
Finally, the printing of the odd pages is handled by flip_and_turn.pl
~% perl flip_and_turn.pl

What this looks like.

Asynchronous live blogging

2008-05-10T07:38:00+02:00

These past few days I've been navigating a sea of acronyms, neologisms and tiny iconic metaphors here at LGM. The thing that I can't get out of my head is the tool that pippin of GIMP used for his talk. At first it looked like a PowerPoint clone, but then he started correcting it on-the-fly by tweaking C code. I got the impression that it was a custom tool that he was using to showcase the library he was talking about. `got the impression' because, to be honest my mind went blank ten minutes or so into it. Anyway... it was about GEGL, and GEGL is ``the next generation core of GIMP.'' I don't know if I regretted not getting into the talk at a technical level. It was great to see so much code fly across the screen with such proficiency, and it was a great privilege to see one of the GIMP developers at work. The fish that he occassionally sent swimming across the screen was also nice.

The Flow of Text in MasterPages

2007-04-23T20:33:00+02:00

The scripting in Scribus happens in the house of Python. The Scribus module is loaded into scripts with the standard import scribus or from scribus import *. In this post, we'll be using only one function off this module:

createText(x, y, width, height)

This function puts a TextBox of the specified width and height at the (x, y)-coordinates of your document. This is its documentation.

The TextBoxes of Scribus Templates are eerily insular. Since we really didn't find a way to make text flow in Scribus MasterPages, we were forced to write a script. It builds on a script that was posted some time ago on the Scribus mailing list.

We have added an alternate to the Flow of Text that may be useful to the users of the script. The TextFlow in the original is fine, but ours is fine, too. To push the Text as a River metaphor a bit further: the text must flow, and we're redirecting it with a Dam.

To see the difference, it's probably best to run the script itself. Fetch the TextBoxes.py and Boxes.py files, and put them in the same directory. Open Scribus and load a document. Things will only work if there's already a Scribus document open.

even = [[30, 30, 10, 10], [50, 50, 20, 20], [80, 80, 30, 30]]
odd = [[30, 240, 10, 10], [50, 210, 20, 20], [80, 170, 30, 30]]

The above are the lines in Boxes.py where you specify the size and position of your TextBoxes. It uses the same units as your Already opened Scribus document. Note that you can have different layouts for odd and even pages. Once you've written a layout, execute TextBoxes.py from the aptly named Script menu.

Boxes.py may be the only file that you will need to edit. It has a couple of other tweakable parameters. Explore : )