Category: Articles

GIMP in 2012

  By Articles, FLOSS, Imaging, OSS

As 2013 is fast approaching, we’d like to take a quick look at 2012 and what we did during the year.

In May we released the long anticipated new stable version, v2.8, with many improvements such as layer groups, tagging of resources, new Cage transform tool and more.

We also started the final transition to GEGL as a new image processing core. All legacy from the libgimp has already been removed.

Unstable version of GIMP is now capable of working in 16 and 32 bit per channel modes, both integer and float. Color management has been improved as well, and thanks to support by AMD and Google the GEGL library can do GPU-side rendering and processing with OpenCL.

We successfully participated at Google Summer of Code 2012. Our students ported more GIMP filters to GEGL operations, created a node compositing application for testing GEGL, and implemented a unified transform tool for GIMP.

In past years we let our work with community slip, so this year we also tried to establish a better connection with our user base. Our Google+ page, where we now regularly share project news and useful GIMP tutorials we come across, is currently circled by ca. 22.000 people (as compared to 1.000 in January 2012).

Last, but not least, we are happy to see the community actively promoting GIMP of its own accord. E.g. this year the GIMP Magazine project was started, with two issues already published and the 3rd issue currently in the works.

Thanks to all contributors our project vision is becoming a reality. GIMP already works in HDR, partially uses GPU for rendering and processing, has better transformation tools.

Our primary focus for 2013 will be finishing the transition to GEGL. We don’t expect it to be an easy job: it’s likely to keep us busy most of 2013, if not longer. You can help us to boost the development. Come join us to complete the rewrite and deliver the new generation of GIMP as a polished stable product.

Samba 4 to hit the Enterprise with Active Directory Compliance.

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Samba LogoAs the culmination of ten years’ work, the Samba Team has created the first compatible Free Software implementation of Microsoft’s ActiveDirectory protocols. Familiar to all network administrators, theActive Directory protocols are the heart of modern directory service implementations.

Samba 4.0 comprises an LDAP directory server, Heimdal Kerberos authentication server, a secure Dynamic DNS server, and implementations of all necessary remote procedure calls for ActiveDirectory. Samba 4.0 provides everything needed to serve as an ActiveDirectory Compatible Domain Controller for all versions of Microsoft Windows clients currently supported by Microsoft, including the recently released Windows 8.

 

 

Full article: https://www.samba.org/samba/news/releases/4.0.0.html

GraphBuilder: Revealing hidden structure within Big Data | Intel Labs

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Big Data.  Big.  Data.  We hear the term frequently used to describe data of unusual size or generated at spectacular velocity, like the amount of social data that Facebook has amassed on us (30 PB in one cluster) or the rate at which sensors at the Large Hadron Collider collect information on subatomic particles (15 PB/year).  And it’s often deemed “unstructured or semi-structured” to describe its lack of apparent, well, structure.  What’s meant is that this data isn’t organized in a way that can directly answer questions, like a database can if you ask it how many widgets you sold last week.

GraphBuilder – A Scalable Graph Construction  Library for Apache™ Hadoop™

GraphBuilder: Revealing hidden structure within Big Data | Intel Labs.

 

 

Five out of six developers now using or deploying open source | ZDNet

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Five out of six developers recently surveyed by Forrester Research say they have used or are using open source tools as part of their application development or deployment and the top five classes of software used are operating systems, web servers, databases, developer tools and configuration management tools

Five out of six developers now using or deploying open source | ZDNet.

GIMP Gets ICC v4 Color Profiles Support

  By Articles, FLOSS, Imaging, OSS

For the last few weeks GIMP has been capable of using ICC v4 color profiles thanks to a patch by Laurent Martelli who ported the color management plug-in to use LittleCMS v2.

There is also an ongoing work by Elle Stone to adapt that plug-in to the new GEGL-based architecture and make color space conversions just work between various bit depth precision levels — from 8-bit to 32-bit floating point.

Once it’s done, GIMP will be capable of converting images between different color spaces with little to no loss of color fidelity. In fact, it already works, with some caveats.

Meanwhile Michael Natterer is busy porting plug-ins for loading and saving files to GEGL and GIO. The latter means that GIMP doesn’t create temporary files anymore when loading files from remote locations, and previews in the Open File dialog 100% match actual images.

There is still a lot of work to do before GEGL-based version of GIMP is completely functional. We encourage you to join the team and help making the future closer.

Hortonworks Cofounder: Hadoop Rivals Cant Touch It|Dr.Dobbs | Dr Dobbs

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Hortonworks Cofounder: Hadoop Rivals Cant Touch It|Dr.Dobbs | Dr Dobbs.

Hadoop is the best and most economical option for extracting value from massive data sets, according to Arun Murphy, Apache Hadoop project management committee chair. In addition, the up-and-coming data management platform has quickly become the “de facto standard” for big data, he claimed.

Given Murphy’s background, it’s not surprising he’s a bit biased in favor of Hadoop. One of the cofounders of Hortonworks, an enterprise software company focused on the development and support of Hadoop, Murphy has been a major participant in the open source project since its beginning in 2006.

“The exciting part of Hadoop — and the way things have gone the last 12 months or so — is that a lot of really big and important enterprise software companies are starting to work with it,” said Murphy.

Take Microsoft, for instance. At last week’s Strata Conference in New York, Microsoft announced the preview release of HDInsight Server for Windows, the first beta version of the company’s Hadoop software distribution. Read full story on InformationWeek

KDE-Edu Project

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The KDE-Edu project was started in July 2001.  The goal of the project is to develop Free Educational Software (GPL license) within the KDE environment.  This software is mainly aimed to schools,  to students and to parents at home as well as to adults willing to extend their knowledge.

A new KDE module was created, the kdeedu module.  The applications in that module are fully KDE compatible (use of KMainWindow, XML GUI, …)  and get a proper documentation handbook in docbook format.  Thus, all applications interfaces and documentation are translated in more than 65 languages,  via the l10n KDE teams.

The kdeedu module joined the KDE 3.0 official release.

 

Download OSS Educational software from http://edu.kde.org/applications/all/

Python 3.3.0

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Python 3.3.0 was released on September 29th, 2012.

Python 3.3 includes a range of improvements of the 3.x series, as well as easier porting between 2.x and 3.x.  Major new features in the 3.3 release series are:

  • PEP 380, syntax for delegating to a subgenerator (yield from)
  • PEP 393, flexible string representation (doing away with the distinction between “wide” and “narrow” Unicode builds)
  • A C implementation of the “decimal” module, with up to 120x speedup for decimal-heavy applications
  • The import system (__import__) is based on importlib by default
  • The new “lzma” module with LZMA/XZ support
  • PEP 397, a Python launcher for Windows
  • PEP 405, virtual environment support in core
  • PEP 420, namespace package support
  • PEP 3151, reworking the OS and IO exception hierarchy
  • PEP 3155, qualified name for classes and functions
  • PEP 409, suppressing exception context
  • PEP 414, explicit Unicode literals to help with porting
  • PEP 418, extended platform-independent clocks in the “time” module
  • PEP 412, a new key-sharing dictionary implementation that significantly saves memory for object-oriented code
  • PEP 362, the function-signature object
  • The new “faulthandler” module that helps diagnosing crashes
  • The new “unittest.mock” module
  • The new “ipaddress” module
  • The “sys.implementation” attribute
  • A policy framework for the email package, with a provisional (seePEP 411) policy that adds much improved unicode support for email header parsing
  • A “collections.ChainMap” class for linking mappings to a single unit
  • Wrappers for many more POSIX functions in the “os” and “signal” modules, as well as other useful functions such as “sendfile()”
  • Hash randomization, introduced in earlier bugfix releases, is now switched on by default

See these resources for further information:

Reproduced from: http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.3.0/