Michael J. Hammel – The Graphics Muse

I've added a new gallery, Cafe Press, which shows all the designs I've created for the products I sell on my Cafe Press site.  These are pretty simplistic, except for the star field, but they have to be if you're trying to make designs for shirts and other prints for clothing.

The other update is that I've added links on the right sidebar to my wife's business, Brinda Kay Designs.  This is hosted on Etsy.com.  She makes hand made purses and belts from recylced vinyl albums.  Pretty cool stuff, actually.  Take a look if you have an moment.

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I'm working with libvirtd/virt-manager/qemu at work.  I have a bunch of F11 systems installed and working just fine.  Today I tried one of the extra lab boxes, same OS config, but when I tried to use the virt-* commands I'd get an error:

mjhammel(tty0)$ sudo virsh –connect qemu:///system
error: failed to connect to the hypervisor

It took quite a while to figure this out.  libvirt has qemu's location hard coded in it.  Since the same command worked on other F11 systems I checked for qemu:

mjhammel(tty0)$ type qemu
qemu is /usr/bin/qemu
mjhammel(tty1)$ rpm -qf /usr/bin/qemu
qemu-system-x86-0.10.6-1.fc11.x86_64

Checking the other system I find that qemu wasn't installed:

mjhammel(tty0)$ rpm -qi qemu-system-x86
package qemu-system-x86 is not installed

Installed qemu-system-x86 and tried again:

mjhammel(tty0)$ sudo virsh –connect qemu:///system
Welcome to virsh, the virtualization interactive terminal.

Type:  'help' for help with commands
       'quit' to quit

virsh # 

It works.  The problems here are that

• libvirt hard codes the locations for qemu
• libvirt doesn't tell you why the connection fails

fixing the first might make this problem go away.  Fixing the second would make it easier to debug.
 

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It’s a good thing I check my blog stats otherwise I never would have known about this.  Linux Format has released, through TuxRadar, the PDFs for 18 of my GIMP tutorials from my column in their magazine.  Pretty cool.  I’d always hoped they’d get a wider net audience.  Too bad I can’t put them on my book site too.  Ah well, at least everyone can see them now.

Note that the downloads are by BitTorrent only at the moment.  So I can’t link to individual PDFs from here.

The tutorials include the following:

• Product Design For Geeks – How I made a T-Shirt design (which you can find on my CafePress site)
• Shattered Face – Fast and easy way to break an object into many pieces
• Leopard-style Icons – Icons like what you get on a Mac
• Sin City Style – A little artwork similar in style to the popular Sin City movie.
• Summer of Love – sun beams and a happy couple
• Travel to the Stars – making space images
• Going to Warp Speed – a warp effect like you might see on older Star Trek movies
• Create a Fire Goddess – burn baby burn
• Decay in the City – life after the apocalypse
• Enhance the Interface – introducing GIMP Paint Studio
• iPod Fun – guess what this is?
• Use other tools – GIMP with Scribus, Inkscape and OpenOffice
• Text Effects – making a wine bottle
• 3D effects in GIMP –
• Speedy Color Fixes – fixing colors in photos
• Printing and Color – GIMP, CUPS, and Gutenprint
• Know Your Selections – tips on using selections
• Creative Text wtih GIMP – Map an image onto text so that the entire image is nothing but colored text but still looks like the image

You can see some of the resulting artwork from these tutorials in my LXF gallery.

Oh and one note for TuxRadar:  it’s spelled “GIMP”, not “Gimp”.  :-)

But thanks for posting those!

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I've posted a page linking to my Slideshare presentation on Crunch Cloud, a product my company (or rather the software group) is working on.  This presentation has the added bonus of audio – my voice reading from a script I wrote for the slides.  Kind of a cool process to create one of those, though I won't go so far as to say "I sound interesting."

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I'm in the process of creating a set of slides at work to describe a software product we're working on.  Making slides is easy.  I just use OpenOffice.  Publicizing the slides is just as easy.  I use Slideshare.net.  An interesting feature of this site is the ability to add audio to each slide after you've uploaded the slides.  You just create the audio file in MP3 format, upload it and then use their on site editor to sync the audio with the slides.  I haven't tried their editor yet, because I'm the process of trying to create the audio.

Creating audio in Linux is supposed to be easier than editing video.  Until recently that was true simply because of Audacity and the lack of any easy-to-use non-linear video editor for Linux.  Sure, there are Cinelerra and Kino and LiVES but these haven't been particularly easy to use.  There wasn't a tool that let you drop in a video file, open it and edit it, merging multiple video files with simple transitions.  Then along came OpenShot.  Now video editing on Linux is a breeze. 

I'm not saying OpenShot is sophisticated.  I'm saying its easy.  What extended features it might have I don't know because I haven't needed them yet.  But its just plain easy to make a few screencasts with recordMyDesktop and stitch them together with OpenShot.  The learning curve was less than 1/2 day, including figuring out how to run it from source on Fedora (for which there is no premade package).  Compared to the others, that's pretty good.

As for Audacity, its the power tool of audio editing.  As such, and by the needs of its users, its not particularly easy to figure out.  What I mean is that it isn't completely obvious how you open a file, drop it in a project, open another file and stitch them together.  I'm sure with some fiddling I will find it *IS* easy, but its not obviously easy.  And that's the rub.  For tasks like creating audio to drop into Slideshare it isn't easy.

Which leads me to Jokosher.  This handy little tool is the audio equivalent of OpenShot.  This one had a learning curve of just about an hour, mostly since it was prepackaged for Fedora.  It may not have all the bells and whistles of Audacity, but its easy to use.  Which means more of us can create audio to merge with our slides very quickly.

My task is simple.  I wrote a script to go with the slides.  I read the script to make recordings.  I NEVER read the entire script straight through without mistakes.  So I need to read the script for each slide one at a time and then later stitch the good takes together.  It isn't rocket science and there are lots of command line tools to do this.  But I like the ease of a desktop tool for this kind of thing because working with audio isn't something I do a lot. 

So having found Jokosher (mixed with GNOME's sound recorder to create the individual takes, though I can probably do the recording with Jokosher too – I just haven't tried yet), this task is much simpler than I first imagined.

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The movie industry inundated us with 3D this past holiday season.  If you didn't catch Jim Carey's take on Dickens, you didn't miss much.  My wife and I saw it in 2D, sans glasses.  Turns out the movie is a flop if you're not into being wowed by 3D tricks.  Without the glasses you're treated to long spans of effect laden scenes that are completely lost in 2D and add absolutely nothing to the story.  C'mon Hollywood!  How could you possibly screw up a story as good as Dickens?  And of course last summer we got animated dinosaurs in 3D.

And then there is Avatar.  At least Cameron realized that 3D is just a tool and not the focus of the movie.  Unfortunately, it suffers the same problem all 3D movies do:  headaches.  See, if you don't have equal vision in both eyes then you tend to get headaches from the stereoscopic view.  Avatar wasn't too bad but those glasses are about as comfortable as placing a cardboard box on the bridge of my nose.  My daughter also reports, having seen Avatar in 2D as well, that the colors are washed out in 3D and that the movie was actually more visually stunning in 2D. 

What is it with the entertainment world that we have to do everything in 3D now?  Has everyone just given up on story and content and now relies soley on explosions and mindless flash?  Even the computer world is heading that way.  I just read that NVIDIA was demoing their stereoscopic 3D technology at CES recently.  And of course 3D TV is on its way too, or so they say. 

But let's get real here.  Who the hell wants to put on glasses to watch TV or sit at the computer?  I don't but I have to wear them or I can't see monitors!  I'm sure there are a few nut cases out there who think this looks cool but once you get over "cool" – and there are some who never do – you realize that wearing glasses in your living room when you don't have to is not what you want.  Not to mention what happens to glasses.  If you don't wear them you probably don't know:  lost, squished, bent, smudged.  And if we can't find the damn remote how the hell will we remember where the glasses are?

No, this 3D concept is not ready for the masses.  If the TV just worked in 3D that would be fine.  Having us put on glasses to use it just isn't going to fly.  Even if it didn't give us headaches.

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I’m was working on the 2nd edition of The Artists Guide to GIMP Effects tonight when I ran into an ugly bug.  The documents I exchange with my publisher are in RTF format, possibly because its easier for them on the production side though I’m not positive of that.  Anyway, I’ve been editing these with OpenOffice for quite some time and all has been well.  Until tonight.

Two nights ago I copied and pasted some plain text into the document and then saved and quit.  Tonight when I tried to open it up again the file refused to open.  After about an hour of manually reviewing the RTF my wife suggested trying to open the file on her Mac.  So I copied it to a FOB, took it to her machine and double clicked.  The file opened up to a specific location and stopped.  It displayed everything it could read up to that point.  That gave me a clue to find that point in the RTF (using vi) and remove that line. 

It worked.

I was able to recover the file, sans that one line.  But I also learned a valuable lesson:

OpenOffice doesn’t like you to paste text and save as RTF. 

Nasty behaviour if you ask me.  I’m checking with the publisher to see if I can switch to ODT format for all our editing.  If not, I’m going to work on much smaller files so if this ever happens again I won’t risk losing nearly as much.

And maybe its time I put these files under source control.  Mere backups aren’t quite enough to cover this situation.

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In a twist of fate that I personally found less than humorous, on Tuesday I had to use an article I’d just submitted to Linux Journal to recover from my own stupidity.

rm -rf $HOME

It doesn’t get any stupider than that when logged in as a non-root user.  I managed to stop the command quickly but not before it had done significant damage, like trash my .bashrc file and associated scripts.  Fortunately, as my article states, I had been doing backups to a remote drive for some time.  I’d never had to use them until now, however.

Reversing my rsync command used to create the backups was all that was required to restore from the backups.  And only the files that had been trashed got restored.  In the process the only files that were permanently lost were two outbound emails sent that day just before I pulled my stupid human trick.  During the restore I never had to log out and the system continued happily as if nothing had happened.

Moral:  do you backups, kiddies.  You only have to muck it up once to know it was worth it.

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I got word in late November that Linux Journal had accepted two more proposals for articles.  The last acceptance (in mid November) was for an article to be published in issue 190 (Desktop) which I wrote and submitted without a proposal.  The next two are for issues 191 (Systems Administrations) and 192 (Software Development) and were submitted by proposal first.

The article for issue 191 is focused on automating remote backups.  I finished and submitted the article last night.  Since much of my previous writing has been tutorial based and required many screenshots I had to ask if they needed more images in this article.  There is plenty of code in it, but not many images.  However, for this article I don’t think it really will benefit much from screenshots of terminal windows.  I’ll wait to see what they need from me.

The article for issue 192 is in development and will be about programming with an embedded web server.  This is based on a project I’m doing at CEI related to cloud computing though the article is about an open source tool we utilize within that project.

So that’s three issues in a row for me at LJ.  Glad to be working with them again.  I have to get a proposal for issue 193 ready now.  I have ideas.  Now I just need to put keyboard to email and get it out the door.

Interestingly, that’s two full years of non-stop articles for me in various magazines.  In fact, I think I’ve only had about 12 months off of writing in the past 10 years.  Mixed with my day job of software development and writing proposals for government projects, my eyeballs are about ready to fall out of their sockets. 

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Despite the obvious geek bent of my blog it would appear, based on web stats, that once a year I'm far more popular for my Deptartment 56 village setups than I am for Linux and open source.  The spike in visitors isn't huge but its obvious and they're all headed for tips on setting up their villages, especially on how to light the display. 

I love setting up my villages every year.  It reminds me of the time I spent with my dad as a kid at local model building clubs putting together dioramas of planes and military vehicles.  I've mellowed in my old age and have now trade weapons for Dickens, which I find far more meaningful.

Feel free to comment on my Dept 56 page to let me know if you have ideas or questions on setting up your village.  I'm especially interested in people who find the most realistic setups. 

BTW:  this year I've discovered that the short 35 light strings of indoor LED lights work far better for lighting my display than some of the lights I've purchased from Lemax.  Yes, I mix Lemax and Dept56 items, but I only use the smaller Lemax items like benches, trees, and lights.  All my buildings and figurines are Dept56.  Anyway, the only place I've found the 35 light strings with standard plugs is Michael's but I can't find these strings on their web site.  Lowe's carries the 50 light strings.  Other places carry smaller strings that run on battery but these are useless if you leave your displays lit as long as I do each night. 

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