e-Volve Internet Services

For the past few weeks, we have been receiving reports that some users can’t download our installer packages for the Microsoft Windows platforms. Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 mark them as corrupt and discourage users from running them.

Turns out this is a policy change by Microsoft, gone into effect on January 1, 2016. The new policy affects all kinds of security certificates as of specific deadlines, and this includes code signing certificates. Jernej Simončič, who creates the Windows installer packages, signs them to make their authenticity verifiable. But the way this signature is done is no longer considered safe by Microsoft, and there are justified technical reasons for that.

Administrators and users of Microsoft Windows systems are well advised to make themselves familiar with the implications of this policy; the TechNet article on the subject is available at Windows Enforcement of Authenticode Code Signing and Timestamping.

We are working to resolve the issue — this requires a more recent code-signing certificate and signing the installer packages with it. Stay tuned for updates.

As a temporary workaround, you can use other web browsers to download the installer packages.

Last weekend, we released a new version of GEGL, graph based image processing framework used by GIMP and other free/libre graphics applications. Here are some of the most important changes.

There are two new operations: Saturation (works in both CIE LAB and CIE LCH color spaces) and the port of GIMP’s Selective Gaussian Blur filter. The operations for loading and saving video frames have been updated to work with FFmpeg 3.0. We also disabled the dcraw-based operation for loading raw images by default: the LibRaw-based operation does the job just as well and provides a better API.

Additionally, there have been some improvements in the ‘gegl’ binary: now you can change graph composition (namely, connect buffers to aux and other input pads) via the command line, and when a project is loaded for viewing, you can zoom in/out at cursor position on scroll wheel events. Moreover, you can now specify properties of operations on the command line, e.g.:

$ gegl input.png -o output.png -- threshold value=0.23

Among general improvements, copy-on-write handling for the gegl_buffer_clear function is now available. This should make clearing of buffers an initially cheaper and faster operation, with the actual allocation of tile memory (copying) amortised over subsequent pixel data writes to the buffer.

GEGL 0.3.6 is available at download.gimp.org.

There are still many GIMP filters to be rewritten as GEGL operations. Contributions are welcome!

This week, StreamComputing launches an educational initiative that aims to get more developers to study and use OpenCL in their projects. Within this project, up to 20 collaborators will port as many GEGL operations to OpenCL as possible.

Vincent Hindriksen and Adel Johar who organize this project seek a way for the group to educate themselves. One of the ways is to gamify the porting by benchmarking the kernels and defining winners, and another way is to optimize kernels within StreamComputing to push the limits. Victor Oliveira, who wrote most of the OpenCL code in GEGL, joined the GEGL-OpenCL project to advise.

So far 7 participants have joined the project, so if you are interested in learning OpenCL and helping GEGL and GIMP get hardware acceleration for more of their features, email Vincent.

All work is being done on GitHub (check out the project’s description there for information on porting and benchmarking). The communication between participants is taking place in a dedicated Slack channel (request an invite from Vincent or Adel).

StreamComputing is a Dutch software development company that provides training and consulting services in the area of GPU programming and parallel processing.

GEGL is a free/libre graph based image processing framework used by GIMP, GNOME Photos, and other free software projects.