Finally the rain stopped

What a shit weekend, although at least I didn't get flooded out or anything.

Spent the whole weekend hacking on ImageZ ... although mostly hacking it to bits and making myself grumpy. I decided that obviously storing images as pre-multiplied alpha wasn't going to cut it for the integer types, so I converted the code to store using non-pre-multiplied alpha but blend to the target using pre-multiplied alpha. Straightforward (once i got the damn equations right) except for the common case where the tool layer is blended to the target layer first. God what a headache that was.

Also played with adding tool markers for things like editing the selection. For that I'm using Piccolo2d. Probably a bit of overkill but it'll let me do whatever I need for tool controls and it's easy as pie to use. It was also easy to connect up to the main window. I would also like to eventually use it for structured layers ... although I'm not sure how doable that will be since the layers are not rendered as normal components. It did throw a spanner in the works for the whole input event handling which I still haven't removed though.

And I got deeply into the image loader stuff. I was just loading into whatever ImageIO gave me and then copying across to a target layer but that doesn't scale terribly well and is pretty slow. I found out you can force it to write to a compatible type of image fairly easily (it doesn't have to match exactly the image type specifiers it gives you when queried) and is usually pretty fast. So I added yet another few more backend image types to support the common formats of images I work with and cleaned up the image loader to write directly to the target layers.

Finally I played with a translation tool which moves the origin of the layer. And that left a lot of crap to fix up which i'm sure I haven't finished yet. Everything from undo to painting broke in big or little ways.

I was hoping to just focus on a few polishing details for a while to clean up the whole thing and make it solid, stable and usable. But given how much I broke on the weekend that could be a long way off ... I had even started poking around looking for somewhere to put it, but i'm not sure I could be bothered with the approval process for Savannah, Google Code i'm not sure about since I seem to do everything on Google, and i'm not considering clitorous or github because git is offensive and the whole repository maintenance thing is a hassle I don't want to deal with. Tar is starting to look attractive.

Shed Be Gone

The council *FINALLY* came through with the approval for some building I'm doing around the house. Jesus, it only took them 10 months ... how shit is that. So given today wasn't drenching the yard with rain I thought i'd get cracking and start on some of the big tasks that need doing.


This spot is destined to be for a big shed ... so all that shit has to go, and the ground needs levelling off. And I want to kill that horrid huge ivy growing in the corner.


So I made pretty good progress today. I also loaded up the ivy with some glycophosphate which managed to kill most of the rest I have. Would've helped to have a hand but I managed doing it alone, although I might be sore in the morning. My foot was very sore last week and I don't think it was really healed enough so I'll probably aggravate that too which isn't a good thing :( Just got some tendonitis again and last time I had it that took a couple of weeks of doing almost nothing to get better. But the yard can't wait forever ... i'll have under 2 months to finish it off.

I'm surprised the yard was so relatively dry - we had over 40mm of rain over the weekend. And a shitload of wind but the house protects most of the yard from that.

Invisible man

I was in a weird state on the weekend, probably stressing about the yard more than anything (e.g. I think i put a retaining wall in the wrong place before I should have, so I may have to undo some ... which is an extreme amount of hassle) and for some reason I thought i'd see how easy this blog was to find. Not very it seems, at least with google. And obviously it is something only google is doing because it's on the first page of a search for 'notzed' on yahoo - maybe i swear too much or pick on google too much. I gave up trying to find it on google - the best I saw was a link to my 'blogger profile' on page 5. Given that Advogato was the first result I even considered re-starting to use that, but without pictures it's not much use and it seems pretty quiet on there. I went and reset Advogato anyway and might look at restarting the internode blog again and doing it all manually using static html (oh the shame!). It's not like comments are thick on the ground around here.