Some time ago, El Jeffe decided he’d visit a few places in the South-West. Namely, some vineyards near Perpignan, in France, in the Priorat region near Reus, Spain, and in the Toro region, between Valladolid. So last Thursday we flew there:
Short trips in his private jets followed by longer trips on the road. We were home by 8:30pm. But quite tired…
My frequent flyer cards overheated just at the thought of it.
Update
One trip to JKT added to the lot, oh so happy…
Update
One side trip to Kuala Lumpur, and another to Denpasar, Bali. Sigh. Life’s a bitch, eh? 
I am a bit early but I am guessing, from the things are happening at the office, that I won’t have the time later to post it. So there,
新年快乐
새 해에 福 많이 받으십시오
etc etc etc
My new job starts today, with a one-week crash course in [some of] the company’s products, the company’s procedures, yada yada. They have some vineyards abroad, but apparently me and another guy who joins today too won’t get to see them… Ah well, I’ll do enough traveling in the months to come!
I have written over the last two days RB bindings for libgd, in the continous search for a replacement to the Picture object, which is missing in console apps. As long as the promised-and-long-forgotten SwordFish project won’t be released, there’ll be little need, I think, or more accurately little clamoring for a Picture object – but once people start writing web apps in RB, you bet your ass they’ll want to produce images on the fly, like everybody else…
So. GD’s one option I had been thinking about – while still thinking I could build my own. And fPic works well enough, albeit with quirks. And it covers lots of ground – including PDFs, thanks to CoreGraphics. But it’s not very portable – my attempts to make it work on Linux, sans PDF and vImage.framework, failed so far. Since gd works on all platforms, I thought I could try it out. And sure enough it was easy to write bindings to the library, with very few quirks – I am having problems with saving to wbmp format, but who cares about that format anyway? 
One format that’s missing in GD is TIFF – which fPic handles very well, na na na – so I re-read fPics Tiff code [a wrapper to libtiff really] and converted that to RB. Which means I ended up writing bindings to libgd *and* libtiff, oh so much fun! It only reads TIFF files for the moment, as I haven’t worked out how to get access to the int **tpixels array from RB, in order to save as Tiff. Might have to write a small dylib to go with it – or use fPic’s very own manip.dylib!
Like in fPic, when using freetype2 to draw text, one has to pass the path to a .ttf font file. It’s not exactly user-friendly, so I am trying to find a way to provide for a better interface into that. Maybe a Font class that’ll take care of the nitty gritty work. I found a good code sample to retrieve the name of a ttf font. Could be useful…