So, I was planning on discussing something a bit more serious, but it was not to be. It'll probably come in the next few days or so. What I've been working on instead, though, is the photo. No, it's not really any different than any of the others, but yes, it took a lot longer to get ready. Thus is the nature of Yak Shaving.
I shot the above image at a MITSO concert in December, 2007. I really like it. Exposure is 1/25s at f/2.8 and ISO640 (I'm not sure about the ISO, for reasons I'll get into soon). And by soon, I mean now.
I like cool features and doing testing, so I tend to use the development branches of software when I can. So, for instance, I wanted to try preparing the above image with the HEAD version of The Gimp. That's all well and good. So I fire it up on the image and… oh… some random gegl module has undefined references. Well, it's probably related to that big library upgrade I did last night. It probably won't affect what I'm working on, but you never know…
So I recompile and reinstall gegl. All good. We rerun `gimp-2.5` and… oh… poppler. Now, poppler is a PDF/postscript library. I'm not going to be needing any of that functionality, but, you know, there's no time like the present to keep from getting frustrated in the future. Right? So I hit the gimp compile again… oh, weird, configure isn't detecting poppler. It seems to be installed, but… oh, it's the glib version. That was easy.
So I open the image, mess with it a bit, and… hmm. How am I gonna sharpen this thing? The gimp-plugin-registry package is only compiled against gimp-2.4, and neither refocus nor smart sharpen (redux) are standard plugins. Well, it shouldn't be too hard to compile them against gimp-2.5. And all I need are those two, so I'll just go ahead and start with refocus… hmm… it's not detecting gimp. Oh, I wonder why it's hard-coded for gimptool and not gimptool-2.0. OK. Here we go… but… I told you to use gimptool-2.0. What are you doing?!
Oh well, this is taking longer than I expected. I'll just go back to gimp-2.4. Err… you know what, I should just start writing this entry, and I can deal with the photo after that's done. And I don't have time to write a serious post, so I'll make it about yak shaving. Hmm… what's a good URL to explain yak shaving to folks who haven't heard of it? Aah, this Seth guy has a nice post about it. I wonder if there's something special I'm supposed to do when referencing posts from other blogs? Some sort of ping… track… thingie. You know what, I bet someone on Zephyr knows… Oh, yeah, I guess I should've checked Wikipedia. Oh… hmm… blogger does things differently…
Man, this is taking too long. I'll just link it for now, and maybe figure this protocol out later. Hmm… I'd better check out geeqie to see what exposure this was. OK, 1/25s at f/2.8. It's probably ISO640, because that's how I typically shoot concerts but lemme check… segfault? What? Oh well… I'll just fire it up again quickly… can't open shared library libexiv2. Oh, I guess this is also from that big library upgrade.
Well, I've compiled this thing a million times, I'll just do that. Oh, hmm… there are updates in svn… Well, maybe they're bugfixes… Wait, why is there a linker error now?
If it weren't for me wanting to eat breakfast and actually get out on my bike today, I'd still be at it. Anyway, something more serious coming in the next few days. As for the quote, here's one for you bike fans, from Bike Snob NYC:
"I steer clear of political debates the way roadies steer clear of gravel."
