alex’s blog

For anyone that cares, I have been working on snippets of Ubuntu now for around 3 months. It’s damn interesting, being able to see real-time large scale development. After reading countless wiki entries, trailing launchpad and even reading mailing list archives like a LUGRadio presenter, (which incidentally is a very funny podcast, seriously considering LUGRadio Live 07), I am finally getting to grips with how this process works.

It’s strange that I never really saw it going this way, basically a core team of developers are the only people who can really change the code, but below that it’s really a structured free for all with anyone being able to edit anything, the only boundary is your knowledge. This is really appealing to me, as I know a fair bit about computers in general and Linux now, but being able to learn and work and actually feel like the work I am putting in is actually worth it. Unlike other OSS projects I have worked on, I am not getting tangled in the web of bureaucracy, with administrators and moderators who think they are 10 times better than you because they started on the project years before you, thus it’s their right to live there forever.

But meh, it’s a great little distro, a solid community and one that I actually want to be a part of, one that’s dragging me in, not that I am fighting my way into.

Meh, stupid hosting companies. Whilst doing the updates I have managed to be without email and for the vast majority of the time without FTP access, quickly having to jump on and upload. Hopefully this should be fixed finally.

Thanks Chad.

Right, you all know about The GIMP, the free image editor? It sounds great and ever since I moved over to Linux permanently its been doing a reasonably good job and simple image editing jobs, resizing photos, small touch-ups etc.. But now I have a project that requires a full set of imagery and as the title suggests its like trying to create images without any kind of user interface!

Coming from a full fledged Photoshop Graduate to this I feel very limited and somewhat annoyed about this product, simple things such as a non-visual layer representation, so you have to scroll through the layers, looking at the selection’s produced to know what layer you are on.. The move button is virtually useless and as for any kind of half decent in-built functions, you must be kidding..

The guys developing GIMP have done a great job but just now, I am downloading Photoshop CS2 and am going to have fun with that and WINE.. *Big weight lifted*.

EDIT: Meh, stupid Operating System checks. To the windoze partition!