“I juni måned” (In the Month of June) Laurits Andersen Ring
James Russell Lowell’s paean “And what is so rare as a day in June?” reveals this poet, literary critic and Atlantic editor, as a native of the upper latitudes of North America, for June on this part of the seaboard, my home, takes one’s breath away. Lowell spent most his life here. In the latter decades of the nineteenth century, he circulated almost exclusively in the environs between New York City and Boston.
Here above the horse latitudes, on the American eastern seaboard, these rare June days of crystalline air and low dew points straddle the summer solstice, and soon give way to a conveyor belt of Gulf Stream sogginess that persists, with intermittent relief, for the balance of the summer, propelled by an anti-cyclonic high pressure system known formally the North Atlantic (Subtropical) Anticyclone, and informally as the Bermuda High. I hope that it leads to pleasantness in Bermuda; its effects are imperfectly welcome here.
June sped by quickly, but a few tutorial pieces came to the fore. The effort to bring antique program control tutorials to a 2.9x setting has come to past:
- The “iffis” lead the way on May 31:
-if…-fi…-elif…-else…-endif.I think the tutorial was one of the earliest written of the 1.6x series (2013) and all of the old examples utilized file or directory existence conditions, a scheme no longer supported after 2.6.; it was this that set off radioactivity alarms in the control flow realm. - -repeat…-done was pulled into th 2.9x realm on Sunday June 6 and was largely re-written. The 1.6x examples were no longer workable, so the example was re-tooled.
- -local…-endlocal was similarly dragged into the 2.9x on June 12, much of it also re-written from scratch. The old tutorial had no working examples and was not complete; methinks it was published before it was finished. The most missing discussion was, to my mind, what happens when G’MIC merges local and global numeration.
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-rbf a new tutorial on Radial Basis Functions, rounds out June. Longish, but somehow just scratching the surface. How could I have left out generating warping vector fields on-the-fly, à la Interactive deformation and morphing
. Well,-warp_rbf awaits in the wings for a future tutorial play, as does morph_rbf, the animated version… a great deal in store for extrapolators along a curve.
July, a steamy month in this locale, threatens anyone’s desire to Get Things Done: It’s Too Darn Hot. That said, there are still many basic, fundamental control flow commands that have never had benefit of any tutorial. Expect work along that course.
Along the lines of addressing the extreme basics, I have been given much thought to how rank beginners get through the very basic learning curve of the G’MIC command tool. Part of this is motivated by the collaboration with @myselfhimself in conveying to pythonistas what to feed the run() command. Part of this is also knowing that those who get initial success in obtaining what they set out to do have a rewarding sense of accomplishment — and so they set out to do more. Conversely, those who hit brick walls are just motivated to use something else. The game is to improve the success rate on those very early, rank-beginner explorations, but I don’t wish to duck the issue by presenting a portfolio of easy commands, as done here as they bypass the heart of the matter. Rather, I want to get to the heart of the matter, which is — I think — coping with the broad (and difficult) image manipulation freedom that the command line tool offers. It overwhelms. So I have been going though many old discuss.pixl.us and gimpchat.com posts in a forensic frame of mind, wondering how best to ease people into this. Not sure where something like this will wind up in the tutorial tree. Stay tuned.