lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

An interesting mail that came in the Linux User's Group - Delhi mailing list.

hi pradeepto,
On Jan 1, 2008 9:21 PM, Pradeepto Bhattacharya <pradeeptob@...> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> >         IIRC, Niyam mentioned one nice colour management tool during
> > freed.in / 07. Does somebody remember that tool's name?
> >
> >         Cheers!
> >
> > Pradeepto

there's some confusion here. someone recalls it as agave. however, agave is a tool to aid you in finding hopefully pleasing and aesthetic color combinations. It is Agave : http://home.gna.org/colorscheme/

agave is based on some fundamental research that happened towards the end of the 19th century and through 20th century on human cognition and perception of color, specifically on work done by a.h. munsell, and then by johannes itten, not counting several other researchers including a german researcher who took the work of newton and munsell even further.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Itten
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Henry_Munsell
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_wheel

pradeepto mentions color management. this is quite different from color-combinations. color-management is a science, and is explained further down. the first step to color-management is color-calibration.

color-calibration is all about tuning your device to input, display, or output the right colors. think of color-calibration as the art and technique of tuning your guitar so the strings are in tune. then go ahead and tune in all the other instruments in your band.

the tool for color-calibration under foss is called LProf. this tool is leaps ahead of the color-calibration tool that ships with adobe, called 'adobe gamma', that sits in the control panel of your mac or windows operating system. http://lprof.sourceforge.net/

think of color-management as the more complex science of understanding how to tweak your microphones, mixers, recording equipment, and finally, your mix-down, so your music sounds the same (or similar) on anything from a 5.1 surround sound home theater system, an open-air concert, in-ear headphones, television broadcast, fm radio, am radio, plus all kinds of radio devices, various levels of mp3 compression, DVD-audio specs, mobile ringtone, and even blared through a cheap megaphone in a crowded market.

the color management engine under foss is called littlecms, and in terms of engineering it outclasses apple's colorsync and microsoft's ICM engine. http://www.littlecms.com/

always surprises me how color is so easily understood when explained with analogies from sound. this again thanks to the groundbreaking research by hermann von helmholtz from the 19th century, on physiological psychology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz

pradeepto, hope this helps, and do share with us what you intend to do. kappy new kear to the kde team

-- niyam bhushan

Executive summary - I fond the Sharma Transport people to be unfriendly, uncaring about their customers and plain out liars. Do not use their bus service.

On 21st December, I had made a trip to Pondicherry. I had booked a ticket in the Sharma Transports (Bangalore) bus for this journey. When the bus reached, we saw that the bus is a derelict piece of junk. Some of the seats were missing, there were holes in the roof and there were rats in the luggage cabinet. The passengers who were there in the bus told us that the driver was extremely rude. When one of the passengers had complained about the seats and the rats, the driver told him that the passenger was quite welcome to leave the bus.

All the passengers refused to board the bus and we called a policeman to the Sharma Transport's office. After around 2 hours of arguing, they arranged a different bus for us.

It looks like this is their common mode of operation. They oversell their buses and hope that the passengers would not create a fuss. If you are planning a trip, avoid Sharma Transport at all cost.

Links

• Reviews of Sharma Travels on mouthshut.com

Older editions of Scientic American are now available on Gutenberg.

Let me admit this openly - I am in awe of RRD. I am planning to use it in one of my marginal hacks. A very good introduction on RRDs can be found in the book Building a Monitoring Infrastructure with Nagios by David Josephsen (Print ISBN-13: 978-0-13-223693-5), Chapter 7. Visualization. If you have a safari account, you can read the chapter here