Exceptional recursion

Eclipse.
Error seems to be sometimes caused by not-enough-free-memory. Very valuable diagnostic information, don't you think?

Liquid Rescale gimp plugin

Liquid rescale is "content-aware resizing". You can make your picture wider or narrower with cutting unnecessary picture element and resampling filling elements, so they keep looking good. This posting is just an example of practical use of the effect. All the mathematical grounding and much more samples can be found on official site of corresponding GIMP plugin

Original picture
Here you can see original picture, with three men walking out of sea. It was taken on the Black Sea coast. We want to remove central man, as his photo is fragmental and has no sense here. It is easily done with Clone Stamp - we just need to fill place taken by the man by water elements taken nearby. Doing so would consume lots of time, if we want picture look realistic. And, I think, there are not that much people who like spending hours stamping the picture. Also, I tried doing this with stamp - and failed :).
There is another solution. We can make this task faster, much faster with Liquid resize. By its nature, LQR cuts off those parts of picture which are considered less valuable. More explanation on how LQR calculates value of a pixel path, can be found here (Russian :) ).

Practical view
Now we are going to enhance this picture with just single effect applied. I already have LQR plug-in installed. If you wish to install it for your Gimp, go here.
Now, we start Liquid rescale plug-in from Layers menu, and create two layers. First layer will hold object masks to be saved during resizing, another one - to be deleted.
I have painted in red in deletion layer, and in green in preservation, in order to see future picture composition easily.
Now, starting the resize...
It takes some time - calculations are not that lightweight.
Also, before running plug-in you can decide to store all the path being cut in separate layer so you could see which pixels are cut.



Resulting image
And this is the image after effect application. Just after single action, without sitting for hours and clone-stamping picture. Et voila.
Better examples can be found on the official plugin example page (even with video).

Here is my useage pattern - if you have some photo with elements that you don't like, and the picture itself is not that valuable to spend a day or two on enhancing it, you can use LQR for quick fixes.

Blog purpose

For anyone reading this - I am going to use the weblog for storing some interesting and non-straightforward technical solutions - mostly not to forget about them.

Awesome

Awesome
Awesome is not just an exclamation - it is a name for perfect window manager utilizing tiling windows concept. It can be used for X windows systems on the *nix and BSD systems. I'm using it now, and I would like to share awesome experience.

Background
The idea of multiple windows shown at the same time on the single screen is known for times. Curses, TurboVision creates interfaces capable of showing pseudo-windows with ASCII characters. Bunch of software called terminal multiplexers (see Terminal Multiplexers on Wikipedia) is used for showing several text program outputs on the same text terminal. The best use case I can see is tailing several log files to monitor distributed activity in runtime. Or I can run some commands in the active console, and watch their output (which goes to file :) ) on other virtual terminal.

Nowadays people mostly use graphical user interface. In the Unixes X Window system makes all the low-level work on rendering data and basic manipulating windows. In the Redmond-like GUIs we got used to window decoration, overlapping windows, task bar showing tasks being executed, ability to drag and resize windows with mouse. All this stuff in the Unix world is done by Window Manager (WM). There are different WM's doing their job in different way.

You might have noticed monitor aspect ratio change trend. Monitors are going wider. Resolution goes higher. Have you ever tried maximizing any file manager on the 1920x1200 resolution? One may feel uncomfortable and lost in such a wide space with lots of icons. There is not that much tasks that really require that much information shown on-screen simultaneously. On the other side, if you open lots of windows to utilize informational space, you can run into problems with finding appropriate one.

Tiling window managers
The descendants of the terminal multiplexers are tiling window managers. General idea is to split the screen into non-overlapping areas, and put each window into appropriate area. With this concept, you can see all the information at the same time. And you don't need press Alt+Tab all the time :).
Tiling concept is extended with various features, such as different focus models, static or dynamic window arrangement, virtual desktops/tags, tabs to arrange windows in the single slot, and much, much more.
I am using Awesome window manager.

Awesome features

• Dynamic layout model. When new window gets opened you do not need to position it somewhere manually. Awesome decides where to put it based on the windows role, current configuration and layout.
• Full keyboard control. You can do everything with keyboard. Move focus forward/backward, switch layouts, rearrange windows, change cell size, etc...
• Full mouse control. In addition to keyboard, you can do all the stuff mentioned above with your mouse. It is very handy when working with graphic editors, for example.
• Tags. You might have heard of virtual desktops - concept, used heavily in Unix desktop environments. Tags are different. Instead of setting single virtual desktop for window you can assign several tags to it, and window will be shown in each of these tags. This feature allows you to show some important windows on all the tags (so they are visible all the time)
• Layout models. Awesome allows to assign different layouts for tags. Windows can be arranged vertically, horizontally, full-screen, maximized, centered (active window is in center of screen, all other are in background tiled vertically), spiral, flying. The least one is the layout all of us got used to - overlapping windows. Yes, for some tasks it is very handy.
• Performance. Awesome does no windows decoration. No borders, no headers. Awesome uses XCB - the fastest way of talking to X server by now. Size of the program is 8 MB. Even when I do full compilation of my project, and both kernels are fully loaded, I can manage windows normally.
  
• Programmability. Awesome itself is written in C, but all less important features (menu, key bindings, tag switcher, task bar, tray icon, clock, etc...) are written in Lua - scripting language. You can easily change anything you want. This does not even require recompilation.

Screenshots
Here are some screenshots made on my workstation.
1. Vertical layout. Red border across top window (FireFox) indicates focus. Top line is the task bar. Small icon is the menu icon, 1-9 are tags. Taskbar is long, and spans across all free space. Clock is the widget i wrote myself in Lua. The lease element is the system tray having Skype and Pidgin icon.

2. Dual-monitor setup. The left screen has several IM windows with horizontal tag layout, the right part has Thunderbird and terminal opened. Two monitors are my laptop primary screen (15" 1680x1050) and external Dell monitor (24" 1680x1050). The Awesome setup shown here is outdated for me.
3. Current layout in centered mode. One window is in center, but allows seeing other. Yellow border is a mark border. You can perform single operation to several marked windows. So, window group operations are supported in Awesome, too.

Hope this posting may help someone find own way :) at least in computer interfaces.

Developer hell

The one who knows would understand me veeery well.

I'm now working on the project which looks in the following way. It started to be developed 8 years ago. There were about 4 teams of long-term hired outsourcers and a couple of consultants sustaining that sh%t-code for these 8 years.

And now - just listen - the code looks the following way.

• .Net 1.1 windows application, which has a tree on the left, and different panels showing up on the right, depending on the node selected in the tree.
• Sometimes on the right .Net winforms components are shown. Sometimes, ASP.NET 1.1 pages within hosted browser (IE ActiveX) are shown.
• There is a couple of situations, when inside that ASP.NET 1.1 pages shown within IE Activex shown within Windows Forms application, Visual Basic 6 ActiveX control gets up.
  
• Haven't you lost the story thread yet?
  
• And - the best one. Where do you think does that custom VB6 ActiveX take data? You'll never believe. From the ASP.NET 2.0 Web service, which is published on the same server where the ASP.NET 1.1 pages containing that VB6 ActiveX are published.
  

Have you ever thought this is possible.
And - the last.

Users of this system were completely satisfied with this state for almost 2 years, and only after that lifetime system started to slow down...

Would you like such a job? :D