Prepare for typical Dutch weather, it seems we have skipped the summer….

You can invest a lot of time and effort in making a nice product, make a great release and have great publicity. Really trying to build and maintain a good imago.

You can spend millions on television & radio commercials, news paper & magazine adds. But if there is a single negative newsitem about your product, you again have to invest ten times more to correct that single negative item.

Everyone is allowed to publish (almost) whatever he wants in his own blog, but please try to have and mention some argumentation behind it….

As I don’t have any line in any of my blog entries (I also received a ‘you are hypocrite’ lately), let me continue the serie.

I recently was hacking on some internal web application at the office and while doing that I noticed that I was hacking without a vcs behind it. That scared me a bit. Every change I made could not be reverted without inserting the tape of yesterday. Made me think twice before moving large blocks of code, merging two php files and randomly including some header files. I’m so used having svn saving my life, you simply trust on it…

A while back I read about bzr on the blog of Mark Shuttleworth. That was on my todo list to checkout since then. Now I did. It is great. To get a directory under revision control, all you have to do is issue a ‘apt-get install bzr’ (debian and ubuntu, others), ‘bzr init’, ‘bzr add’ and ‘bzr commit’!

Really that simple. It works as you expect ‘bzr st’ gives the status ‘bzr diff’ the diff, etc, etc. Since I’ve seen The Light, I’ve been installing it on every server I touch. It is something different then svn and cvs as there is no configuration needed, no permission system or whatever.

You can also use it to work together on files. But the concept is different. You don’t work on a checkout, but you work on a branch. So you commit to your branch only. Whenever someone else wants the changes you made, you can make your branch available, for example via your website and the one who wants your change can merge with your version.

Hmm, that’s it in a very tiny nutshell. I’m not sure if the working with others with bzr will get me enthusiastic, but I certainly am enthusiastic about using it in all those places where something crucial is taking place. In fact you can argue that this should be default for all things you – as a user – use. Basically bzr init on your home directory, of course nicely intergrated within KDE and GNome.

Much more info at the Bazaar-NG site. Also a nice tutorial about /etc in bzr can be found here, for frequent svn users that tutorial can be read in one breath.

Photographing is very popular (or is it over already?). When you want to make them publically available there is always the trouble how to do that. Untill now Digikam, KPhotoAlbum, Showimg and Gwenview where a bit low on features in this regard.

With the release of the second release candidate of the kipi-plugins there are two new plugins which you can use with all above applications.

The first one is SimpleViewer, written by Joern Ahrens. It is based on the SimpleViewer project. Here is a screenie:

[img_assist|nid=74|title=simpleviewer|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=640|height=307]

It is flash, that is why it has smooth transitions from one picture to the other. The screenie is a bit static, for a better impression, you can look at a demo.

The second one is named HTMLExport is written by Aurelien Gateau. It is a replacement for the old, buggy imagesgallery. A screenie of the new plugin:

[img_assist|nid=73|title=htmlgallery|desc=|link=none|align=center|width=640|height=348]

It is themeable (above is the Matrix-theme), so if you are a webdeveloper and want to help kipi, here is a possibility to contribute! Most plugins now have new motivated maintainers and we hope to produce regular releases from now on.

You can download the tarball from here, there is already a Mandriva 2006 package available here.

… he will be the second driver for Red Bull in Monaco. Yeah, I know that are rumours, but these are getting pretty strong now.

/me is happy