Michael J. Hammel

Building a better today…because tomorrow is in question…

Art and Graphics

How they integrate w/ computers.

I just did an update on my FC5 boxes and found that FC5 Extras will update Xine in a way that removes functionality that was there previously. This includes the ability to play DVDs. I’m not sure the reasoning, though I think it has something to do with removing "non-free" […]

FC5 extras/ FC6: update to Xine removes support for ...

Fri January 12, 2007 in Linux / Open Source / Video tagged Fedora / livna / rpm / yum (updated 6672 days ago)

This is pretty cool. I just saw on Slashdot about MIT’s Introduction to Copyright Law course, which is free and part of the Open CourseWare Consortium. This is an interesting idea, offering college level courses for free over the Internet. What’s even more inviting is that universities like MIT, Notre […]

Open CourseWare Consortium: diverse education, FOSS-style

Fri January 05, 2007 in Art and Graphics / Education / Open Source tagged Education / graphics

I just got word that my book is now planned for a March 30th post to the printer. I don’t know if that constitutes “publication” date, but it’s close enough for me. I guess I’ll be opening the book’s companion site the first of March then, unless I find out […]

GIMP Book: publication date set for 3/30

Tue December 12, 2006 in GIMP tagged GIMP

I finally finished the production edits for my next book, The Artist’s Guide to GIMP Effects. Now the book is in copy edit. I’ve received a sample chapter in final layout form. Woohoo! Although this is close, the book still has an April publication date. I don’t know squat about […]

Status of my next GIMP book

Wed November 22, 2006 in GIMP tagged GIMP / lwn / Writing (updated 6735 days ago)

Let's face it: the old GIMP Gallery was the ugliest hack of PHP knonw to mankind. Hey, I was fiddling. I couldn't find a good gallery product so I wrote my own. Well, I finally found one that works under WordPress . It's called PhotoShow. Very slick and easy […]

GIMP Gallery moved inside of the blog.

Sat October 21, 2006 in Art and Graphics / GIMP / Wordpress tagged GIMP / graphics / Wordpress

Adobe released the Flash Player 9 plugin for Linux this week. I downloaded it and tried it under identical software configs (FC5 & Firefox 1.5.0.7) on two different machines. I tried viewing my two favorite sites that contain Flash content: ABC's Lost and SciFi.com's Battlestar Galactica . With the old […]

No joy with Flash Player 9 Beta under Fedora Core ...

Sat October 21, 2006 in Art and Graphics / Linux tagged Fedora / Linux / Lost (updated 6767 days ago)

After many, many years of using Applix Words for documents at home, I have just become aware that FC5 no longer includes the C++ library I needed to continue running the old Applix binary. It was bound to happen. But I need to convert those old documents (all of them […]

Applix to OpenOffice: forced migration

Mon October 02, 2006 in General / Open Source tagged Open Source / yum

This blog entry tells me one thing: software developers are still stupid. Have we not learned anything from bloated Windows environments? Why don't we just tie the X environment into the kernel and then embed all our X applications inside that! WOW! Let's see if we can keep the CPU […]

OpenOffice to embed Thunderbird and Sunbird? Bleck.

Wed September 20, 2006 in Linux / Open Source tagged Linux / lwn / MythTV (updated 6798 days ago)

I posted a few new images and added more descriptive filenames to my GIMP Gallery.Â All of the new stuff is under the LinuxFormat and Logos pages.Â Nothing earth shattering.Â Just stuff I’ve been meaning to do for some time. I had to fix some bugs in my admin scripts […]

GIMP Gallery updates

Sun May 21, 2006 in Art and Graphics / GIMP tagged GIMP / graphics / Linux / linux format

See the Elephants Dream web site. This is kind of cool – a 3D animation created completely with open source tools. They’ve even included the production files for everyone to examine. The download is 99MB at it’s smallest resolution, or up to 450MB in other formats.Â They say it’s playable […]

Open Source Animation: Elephants Dream

Fri May 19, 2006 in Art and Graphics / Open Source tagged Open Source

I don’t know how everyone else got them working, but I’ve tried all kinds of combinations of existing and recompiled drivers for the kernel and Xorg. Nothing worked with my Wacom Graphire4. Let’s face it. Graphics on Linux is only as good as the hardware support. And the tablet support […]

No joy – drawing tablets don’t work

Sat November 05, 2005 in Aiptek Tablet / General / GIMP / Hardware / Wacom tagged graphics / Linux / Wacom

Glyn Edwards pointed out to me on the Aiptek Users mailing list that the CVS code under unified_package/src/linux_kernel_driver/2.6/ is the same as the 1.9 source. There are other versions in the same repository – the repository needs a little cleaning out to avoid confusion. I checked out the 1.9 and […]

Debugging the Aiptek driver

Sun October 23, 2005 in Aiptek Tablet / General / GIMP / Hardware tagged Linux (updated 7129 days ago)