Luite visited me last weekend at our (fairly) new place.
We were planning to do some hacking, and that was quite some fun. Luite has been working on a photo
editing tool which makes use of the GPU to do most operations on the image. He was already able to
show editing levels, emboss and brightness / contrast in real-time. His program is using the OpenGL
shader language to do those operations in the graphics card. With his Radeon FireGL T2-128 (Radeon
9600 Pro), 30 FPS was easily possible. Nice, maybe we’ll see this in krita at some point in the
future, it is currently in a proof-of-concept stage.
I myself had been testing a couple of network setup programs during the last weeks, none of
them worked to my satisfaction and I ended up various times with having a bunch of different
configuration files in /etc/network/interfaces.* and symlinking the ones that I’d use to
/etc/network/interfaces. That part has been automated now and put into a systray application that
makes use of the “Debian infrastructure”. It works well until now. I’ve also added the option to
scan for open wireless access points and connect to those. My neighbours were friendly enough to
provide me with a testing environment (although they’re probably not aware of that). :-)
I might polish KNetSwitch a bit more and release it to the public, but I don’t know
if it’s really worth it and if I find the time to make it releasable. If someone is interested,
email me to get the code. It’s written in Python, using PyKDE for the GUI stuff. The program that
does the actual switching is implemented as a console program that’s called via sudo or kdesu
(configurable). Anyway, it seems to work well and does the job at least for me. A possible extension
for this program would be a guidance module that allows you
to edit the config files by hand. Judging by the manpage of
/etc/network/interfaces, you’ll get a lot of useful functionality ‘for free’.
Last friday, I submitted a paper for FrOSCon. It’s
about the work in the Marketing Working Group. Danimo was kind enough to invite me and Adriaan to
his place. Guess it’ll be fun over there. Ow, if the paper gets accepted, that is…
Update: I’ve received quite some requests to put knetswitch online, so
here it is.