20 November 2010

Good experience with GooCanvas

Today I just finished my client software to design a t-shirt and the likes. Not sure why she don't just buy legal but cheaper general-purpose graphics software rather than hiring me. Anyway I'm back on pygoocanvas to deal with this basically compositing image software, previously I ever tempted to make usable 2D CAD software that way beyond my ability that time.

Pygoocanvas is really a time safer library should you ever make graphics application based on Python and GTK. With basic animation support (not as robust as clutter though) I can imaged a presentation software would benefit from it. And cairo canvas also make PDF generation a snap. Really like this library!

15 November 2010

Django-1.2.3 Docs in CHM

Meet Django

Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Developed four years ago by a fast-moving online-news operation, Django was designed to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of a newsroom and the stringent requirements of the experienced Web developers who wrote it. It lets you build high-performing, elegant Web applications quickly.

Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY principle.

They will prepared for version 1.3, right now 1.2.3 is the last stable version. Ning in this site has made a bookmarked and clean chm version (download). Great for windows user!
I decided to made it myself it's plain easy actually: "make htmlhelp" and let Html Help Workshop do the rest!
For Django 1.3:
Djangodoc.chm

12 November 2010

Two monster that beat 7-zip

This is just a remark for my experience way back 5 years ago. That time I just barely heard about 7-zip and found a monster called WinRK (still in version 2.16). I conduct a benchmark (just a little) to my amusement today.

The test file is unfortunately just one: emule.exe (damn that WinRK is too slow for my processor). Here is:

emule 0.50 : 5.49MB
WinRK : 1.25MB
Uharc : 1.65MB
7-zip : 1.68MB
WinRAR : 1.79MB

All set at best (slowest) setting, WinRK did insane deep analysis for an exe file and took 6 min. to complete! (not multi-threaded) while game warez cracker's de-facto choice UHARC is the one that better with a little time overhead. I choose Emule because it is already a composite file, have few megabytes of unicode text, dozens bitmap images and the binary itself. Zip and BZip2 result is more than 2MB.

Analysis did take important part of compressing especially in solid mode. While 7-zip and others separate executable from data file by file extension (not by actual content) then sorted based on similarity (again only by filename) this often lead to inefficiency (in compression not time) due to mis-detection unless you came up with your own filelist. WinRK took this seriously, maybe their compression method isn't much better than LZMA (7zip) but their analysis did! It has some passes where it will chop most file into more edible chunks before compressing like no others. Imagine if I had to compress the whole Gimp with WinRK! probably will take the whole night :)) on my E2160.

If you are someone with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder try WinRK! maybe version 3 have multithreaded support? (note: it's not free)

11 November 2010

Portable GTK theme selector

I modify the old gtk2_prefs.exe (GTK theme selector) to only able to modify host application's gtk (a.k.a per apps setting), for example if you put this on inkscape installation you can only modify theme for inkscape and wont affect other (e.g Gimp). This is great for portable apps? or admin user who have privilege over %programfiles%.

The original version defaulted to current user setting which effectively render all GTK based apps you're installed to obey it. If you already apply this setting you must delete %USERPROFILE%\.gtkrc-2.0 (note: this is a file not folder).

gtk2_prefs.exe  (place this along side main executable e.g gimp.exe, inkscape.exe, mypaint.exe)
Refer to this post to add some themes
Enjoy

New PyGTK for MyPaint?

I've been playing PyGTK 2.22 for a while now, and I think it could make its way into next MyPaint, no more major bugs (of user interface) as far as I know and windows theme bugfixes already there. Finally a real successor of 2.16.x version after skipping 2.18 and 2.20

I'd like to see PyGTK team build this version with Numpy support though, but if not I will uploaded it here. Still waiting official binary...

edit:
Ah and the answer is absolutely NO, it turn out that pressure sensitive tablet has problem

edit:
gtk.Recentdocument assertion failed... my my I'm a bad tester am I? Folks of linux said it has something to do with specific Icon Theme! Well gtk win32 doesn't even have such! what should I do then? :)