All sorts of craziness, but recently I have been working on learning the GTK+ API. It’s slowly starting to sink in, and here is the progress of my current little test application:

That’s the screenshot. It doesn’t do very much yet, but I have usually always written my programs without graphical interfaces. Learning GTK+ has involved a lot of curse words. Eventually, it is meant to be a simple motion tracking utility. You’ll be able to select some points in the image, and it will track their motion in a video clip. This is really useful for a lot of special effects, but I won’t go into the detail now. It was sort of inspired by reading a description of how the motion tracking algorithm in a program called ras_track works. I was curious to see if my understanding of the description of the algorithm was correct. The algorithm itself is fairly simple, but all the peripheral work making a program that uses that algorithm took me slightly longer than I had intended. A week later, I’m about two days away from maybe getting started.

The point of using custom widgets derived from a base class finally sunk in today: The API was designed by a pack of drunken monkeys hell bent of poking themselves in the eye with something sharp – consequently doing things in a more sane way than using custom widgets is fairly annoying.

Now, ras_track inspired this project and also inspired a *lot* of other motion trackers since it is sort of one of the grand daddies of motion tracking along with “Track.” I mean, it dates back to the same era as a program which is simple named for what it does because at the time there wasn’t any confusion with other things that did similar tasks. Anyhow, Thad Beier, the author of ras_track, has been working on updating some of his old software to Qt according to his blog. Qt is sort of like the arch nemesis of GTK, so I find the timing vaguely amusing. You can read Thad’s blog here:

http://thadbeier.blogspot.com/

He is awesome, and knows everything.

Anyhow, this is what I have been killing some of my time with since the start of the year, in case you were wondering where the hell I have been. I have a lot of ideas for a compositing program I want to write… But, that’s ages off if the slow pace of progress on this mini-tracker toy is any indication. Like usual, I just need to be twice as clever and twenty times as dedicated.

Obscure TV recommendation: “The Strangerers”
British comedy about Aliens. I swear, one of them reminds me so much of Dan Aykroyd that it took me about four episodes of watching the credits and seeing some other guy’s name before I was completely convinced it wasn’t him.