Since the GIMP edits JPEG images superbly but obliterates their IPTC metadata captions, and gThumb, my main image editor of the past three years, outputs horrible resized images in version 3.0.1 in Debian Wheezy, I need a new image editing application.

And did I say that I need it now?

I go through many dozen images a day. Shrinking. Cropping. Recaptioning.

The software needs to work.

Yesterday I set up Wine the non-emulator, whatever-it-is Windows-compatible environment in Linux that enabled me to install and run the IrfanView image editor/viewer.

Not that other choices don't exist. There is the KDE app DigiKam.

And a little searching brought me to an app I always meant to try: Fotoxx.

It's in Debian, so I installed it. After a lengthy indexing of my appointed directories, I dug in and started working on photos.

Quality of resized images is great. It will be even better when I tweak the sharpen settings just right.

I can edit IPTC caption data, and though it's a bit awkward, also the byline field.

I wouldn't call it a speedy app, but so far it is getting the job done. With a little practice, I just might have a new photo-editing app.

I'm here trying to get work done, and the Windows XP box I barely used today is totally locked up. The disk light isn't on at all, but nothing is moving on the desktop.

I'm rebooting, but I'd rather just do some f&^%ing work.

Here are two blog posts to read about the current uneasy feeling(s) over the GNOME Project:

• Staring Into the Abyss by Benjamin Otte (the post that led to hundreds of comments and dozens of blogged responses)

• Staring Into The Abyss: Some Thoughts by Jono Bacon (He's the community manager of Ubuntu, employee of Canonical)

• And there's my previously linked-to An opinion on the future of GNOME by Andrew Wyatt

More from me when I get some time ...

It's no secret that full reimagining of desktop environments in Linux/Unix can make people unhappy. It happened with KDE 4, and it's happening with GNOME 3, too. I wasn't around, but I've been told that the transition from GNOME 1 to 2 wasn't without its bumps and lumps.

Read 'An opinion on the future of GNOME' at Fewt.com, and don't skip the comments. It'll give you a bit of an idea about what users think.

As for what I'm doing about GNOME 3, I'm still in the evaluating it, not committed yet stage. I recently upgrade my Debian Squeeze laptop (with GNOME 2.3x as the only desktop environment) to Wheezy, the current (yet frozen) Testing branch. It upgraded to GNOME 3.4.x, and I added Xfce 4.8.

I'm switching between the two environments -- GNOME and Xfce -- and I haven't decided to stick with one or the other. I've run both for years on various systems, and it's been nice to seen the improvements in Xfce over that time.

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I don't know if it's because the new GIMP 2.8.0 is in Debian Wheezy, or because I'm working on more multi-layered images, or because I'm less happy with my go-to image-editing application gThumb, but I'm using the GIMP -- the GNU Image Manipulation Program more and more.

I'm working in the GIMP's native .xcf format and exporting as .jpg or .png when my image is ready. To get better at using the GIMP, I really should get No Starch Press' The Artist's Guide to GIMP, Second Edition: Creative Techniques for Photographers, Artists, and Designers by Michael J. Hammel. No Starch has another GIMP book coming out in October: The Book of GIMP.

Rob Reed, who created the Ode blogging system in Perl, writes about how he's looking into Python but still finds a whole lot to like about Perl in his entry titled I Like Perl:

Like many other people who work or play at web design and development, I've spent a considerable amount of time learning new (to me) languages in recent years. Now I'm starting to take a good look at Python. Why? First, because there seems to be a lot of promising activity around Python. But more importantly, I suppose it's because Python, like Perl, is readily usable beyond the web.

Keep in mind that I'm an IT guy more than I am a developer. That tends to be the way I look at things. Perl is a fantastic language for accomplishing all sorts of programming tasks (virtually anything you're likely to want to do that doesn't require a dedicated team of developers). Python is the same sort of language. By comparison PHP, Ruby, and others are not so much (which is not to suggest that they aren't perfectly fine languages for what they're used for).

The interesting thing is, the more I learn about these languages, the more I appreciate just how sensible Perl is. It makes me appreciate Perl all the more.

There's a lot more to this thoughtful entry, and I highly suggest you read the whole thing.

For quite some time now, the newest version of the gPodder podcast-catching client has not included the ability to sync podcasts with devices such as an iPod or non-Apple audio/video player.

Kind of a stopper in upgrading from the 2.x to 3.x version of gPodder, which I've been using throughout my tenure with Debian Squeeze and Wheezy, the latter of which is still shipping gPodder 2.20.1.

In a bit of very positive news for fans of the application (of which I am most definitely one), gPodder 3.2.0 has been released, and device sync has returned to the application.

Hopefully this means that Linux distributions will begin pushing the new version of gPodder into their repositories. Debian has 3.2.0 in Sid, but due to the Wheezy freeze I don't know if the update will make its way into the current Testing (and future Stable) distribution.

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If you're running LibreOffice in Debian Wheezy, you've probably already seen the approximately 30 updates associated with the office suite present themselves on your system.

It's not a major version update, just a newer version of 3.5.4.2 (3.5.4-6 in Debian's package-numbering scheme).

Just moving from Squeeze to Wheezy (and from the squeeze-backports version of LibreOffice to the Wheezy version) fixed my problem with the libreoffice-pdfimport not working. Prior to Wheezy I needed to uninstall that package and manually download the pdfimport extension from an OpenOffice site.

Now Debian's libreoffice-pdfimport package works perfectly and allows me to open and edit PDFs in LibreOffice Draw application.

Not that I understand it, but here is the changelog for this particular update of LibreOffice:

• debian/patches/CVE-2012-2334-clip-max-entries.diff: add additional fix for CVE-2012-2334 from Florian Weimer which we missed to apply so far..

• debian/templates/soffice-template.desktop.in: fix Icon= (remove obsolete 3), thanks Miros◈aw Zalewski (closes: #678313)

• debian/control.in: make -filter-mobiledev Break libreoffice-core (<< 1:3.5~) (closes: #633929)
• debian/control.mediawiki.in: add missing epoch to -core dependency
• debian/rules: re-enable -gcj

I'd like to report that I fired up the 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt with its 233 MHz Pentium II MMX processor, 144 MB of RAM and 3 GB original hard drive. The laptop is running Debian Squeeze, to which I upgraded from a Lenny installation some time after Squeeze went stable.

It's been 240 days since the machine last booted. I updated the installation, and here I am in Xfce writing this quick and painless blog post (using Mousepad and gFTP).

P.S. The SpaceFun theme of Debian Squeeze is so much better than Wheezy's Joy theme, it's hard to overstate.

P.P.S. You can run Xfce on a 13-year-old laptop.

I was prepared to embrace SpiderOak as a more secure, better-suited-to-me backup/syncing service than Dropbox. I thought I'd like the ability to sync any directory/folder, and not just items under /dropbox.

I've been using Dropbox for a few years now, and I recently installed and ran SpiderOak on my Debian Squeeze desktop.

While the SpiderOak software seems to be undergoing fairly consistent improvement, I found it hard to configure and use, and when I unknowingly exceeded my 2 GB file limit, the service basically broke and I couldn't seem to either pay for more space or get access to bring the amount of data I had on the service under the 2 GB limit. And yes, I did contact SpiderOak for help.

Dropbox is extremely enthusiastic about supporting Linux, the /dropbox "limitation" makes it easy for me to regulate what I do and don't store with the service (though I'd like the option of selective syncing across the filesystem like SpiderOak).

In the end, it was a combination of service, reliability and software -- I really like the way it works -- that keeps me using Dropbox. I suppose you can throw in familiarity.

Had my SpiderOak experience gone better, I'd probably feel differently (or indifferently).

And now that Dropbox has doubled the amount of data you can store (or halved its prices, depending on how you look at it), the service is more attractive than ever.

It certainly makes my work across multiple computers a lot smoother and trouble-free.