I kind of miss the age of freeware and shareware. It was often created by passionate individuals who put in a lot of care into the end product, which made it a joy to use. Once you paid for the software, you not only got the full version, but you felt good supporting someone who genuinely deserves it. There are still some examples of this, perhaps more so in the Apple ecosystem where proprietary/commercial software is the norm, but high quality software worth paying for is still rare.
Nowadays most software on Linux is open source, which is great, but the average quality is low, a lot of it is produced with little care and effort, it's quickly abandoned, and now in the age of "AI", even more so.
When my kid, now almost 22, was very small, she would sit on my lap in front of the computer, with XV displaying a picture of Elmo. “Green Elmo!” she would demand. I would adjust the sliders to turn the reds green, and we would laugh uproariously at green Elmo. Next it would be “Purple Elmo!”, and we would laugh even harder.
This kept us both amused for quite a while.
(Update: Here's a picture of what that control panel looked like. The turn-Elmo-green control is top center. https://xv.trilon.com/manual/xv-3.10a/color-editor-1.html)
That control panel was really great! Particularly for scanning, it was nice to be able to adjust some of the color curves slightly to correct the scanned image.
However, one thing I REALLY used that control panel for was greyscale images, you could adjust the curve so that things that were barely legible in the image suddenly popped way out. Almost like that trick of rubbing a pencil across a blank page to reveal what someone wrote on the page above it. Or smaller adjustments just to make a greyscale more uniform.
That was really one of xv's superpowers.
fyi Affinity Photo has recolor and hue filters that will do just that.
I used it for my video game art.
I actually bought a license for XV, and I have the manual.
We have to go back
https://dav.lbl.gov/archive/NERSC/Software/xv/help/xvdocs.pd...
I think the "Miscellaneous Ramblings" on the final page really illustrates the color of his personality:
Section 13.3: Miscellaneous Ramblings
And, of course, thanks to everyone else. If you contributed to the developement of xv in some way, and I somehow forgot to put you in the big list, my humble apologies. Documentation and careful record- keeping are not my strong suits. “Heck,” why do you think it takes me a year and a half to come up with a minor new release? Because, while I love to add new features to the code, I dread documenting the dumb things. Besides, we all know that writing the documentation is the hardest part of any program. Particularly when the good folks at id Software insisted upon releasing DOOM II...
And finally, thanks to all the folks who’ve written in from hundreds of sites world-wide. You’re the ones who’ve made xv a real success. (Well, that’s not actually true. My love of nifty user-interfaces, all the wonderful code I’ve gotten from the folks listed above, and the fact that xv actually serves a useful purpose (albeit “displaying pictures of naked women”) are the things that have made xv a real success. You folks who’ve written in have given me a way to measure how successful xv is.) But I digress. Thanks!
By the way, when I last counted (in October 1992), xv was in use at 180 different Universities, and dozens of businesses, goverment agencies, and the like, in 27 countries on 6 of the 7 continents. Since then, I’ve received messages from hundreds of new sites. And xv has been spotted in Antartica, bringing the total to 7 of 7 continents, and allowing me to claim that xv is, in fact, truly global software. That’s probably a good thing. Does anybody know if there’s a Unix workstation in the Space Shuttle?... :-)
For John Bradley, it is xv and xcalc.
For Hisham Muhammad it is htop and LuaRocks.
And for Jason Donenfeld it is wireguard and cgit.
Perhaps some of you have other examples.
xwininfo -tree
xdotool windowreparent 0x1e0000b 0x2c0001d
The entirety of the works of Fabrice Bellard. QEMU and FFmpeg are the most well-known ones, but there's also a full blown x86 emulator fully and exclusively written in native JavaScript, a greenfield image compression format, a JS engine and probably a dozen other things I only randomly stumble upon and think "oh, wtf, another Fabrice Bellard thing?".
“New Halting Problem solver,” ok, sure buddy, “by Fabrice Bellard”, ok, so tell me how this works…
It's the web, it's not supposed to get local files it gets web files and we don't ole for a reason. microsoft tried that with IE(activeX) and found out the hard way. but despite that it does a pretty good job linking and embedding javascript. to the point that they had to invent the whole CORS lunacy just to slow it down.
I still use xv today when I want to print out a map on a black and white printer. It's quick to click print, greyscale, and max to shrink to fit to a sheet of paper.
I think it was during the 1997 Soujourner Mars rover NASA mission that on the first day NASA showed a pic from Mars and they used xv. It said unregistered and someone got NASA to register their copy. That always made me smile to see xv on TV
RIP John, you gave us a great piece of software that is still useful over 30 years later.
RIP John.
Bradley wrote xv a long time ago and appears to be better known for his later work, including his music. Here's how he described himself on Soundcloud [1]:
> Guitar player, music producer, graphic designer, and "that guy who wrote XV" a very long time ago.
Moderators replaced that link with one to voxday.com, where it was posted by someone who was a bandmate and friend of Bradley.
Looking at that site it also seems rather out there, but it isn't a social media site. It is the site of Theodore Beale, a rather controversial writer and former video game developer [2].
The crucial difference is at the original site, being a Twitter-like social media site, if you scroll down you get a bunch of other posts they are promoting.
At the current link, the page is just about John Bradley. There are links to other things on the site but they at most suggest that the site is probably quite a bit outside the mainstream.
Compare to the original site. After scrolling past the posting about Bradley and 3 comments on that posting you get to section showing recent postings from the paid version of the site that they have chosen to promote, presumably to convince you to upgrade to the paid option.
Here's what it gave me.
• Someone saying they drive 5 miles to get gas from a white owned station instead of the one down the street from them, because an Indian is behind the counter.
• One about how the US was founded 100% by white Europeans and was 80-90% white for 200 years, and it is the flood of third world trash that is tearing down America. (In the replies to this one we learn that the real problem is the Jews who are the ones enabling this).
• Someone who says his radicalizing moment was when a non-citizen ahead of him in line at urgent without insurance was treated for free. (He would have been treated for free too if he did not have insurance, BTW).
• Someone saying any shortages of a variety of things are being fabricated. The comments of course mention that it is the Jews and the "bitches" that are doing the fabrication. Also blacks (whose presence in white countries is facilitated by Jews). Also, there is no such thing as a fossil fuel--oil is abiotic and continuously replenished but this info is being buried.
• A picture of Charlie Kirk and a quote by him. Nothing wrong with this one. The comments on it however...Jews were the ones that killed Kirk, Kirk was actually a Mossad agent, Kirk is not dead, several hinting at dark thing about his wife (and one wondering how he could have married her since she is a Catholic).
• Another one that doesn't seem bad until you get to the comments. It says that we are not trillion in debt, we are trillions in fraud. The comments let is know that this is what happens when Jews take over your country. Also blames Democrats because they can't count on the base (blacks, illegals, gays) so they have to steal. There is one that says 30% of the debt is attributable to Trump and then in 5 years Trump added more to the debt than Obama in 8 but it is near the bottom when sorted by likes so does not appear to be a popular sentiment there.
• A picture of a sticker which it says is being placed on gas pumps around the country. The sticker shows a man dressed like on Orthodox Jew, with a grin on his face and the stereotypical "Jewish nose" [3] that has been used in anti-Jewish caricatures since the 13th century. He his pointing the side, which if you place the sticker co.rrectly would be pointing toward the price on the gas pump. The text on the sticker says "THE JEWS DID THIS!". Plenty of agreement in the comments, and people noting these stickers should be on a lot more than gas pumps.
• Another one about Jews trying to destroy western civilization. Mentions Jews supported Black Lives Matter and immigrant rights. Some new craziness in the comments, like Trump is a free mason in the synagogue of satan.
I'm only halfway down the page at this point, and it will automatically load more the farther I go so this is just the tip of the iceberg.
It is no wonder that the submission with that URL got user flagged.
[1] https://soundcloud.com/john-bradley-298288478
i just built it on my machine. works!
A button (thanks for the github link, em-bee):
https://github.com/jasper-software/xv/blob/main/src/xvbutt.c
good actor != good person
good writer != good person
good programmer != good person
good person != nice person
nice person != talented person
TANJ TANSTAAFL SLATFATF
People like this only get "better sources" when they go on a shooting spree.
This should be the main link, we should replace this link instead of the Gab one.
going to go pet the cat for 25 minutes
I had a friend that wanted to scan the cover of his album to start selling copies of it online. This would have been in like 1995 maybe. I went out and bought a HP ScanJet and wrote a command-line program run the scanner and grab that image for him.
I started thinking about making a GUI companion to it. I kept thinking "I need to do this like xv does, I need to do that like xv does." I finally realized: What if I just added a scanning screen to Xv? But because of the license, I couldn't just release it as open source.
I contacted John Bradley, thinking it was probably a long shot that he'd answer. But he did, and he accepted my idea: I'd sell xv with scanning for $50, and send him half. Real nice guy, though the majority of our interaction was me just sending him periodic checks.
I had a domain, tummy.com, because it was a fun name for a fat guy, and when I registered the domain my provider (back in the early '90s) wouldn't let me register a .org unless I was a non profit org, so I went with .com. Because of this deal with John Bradley, I registered tummy.com as an LLC to start selling this software. Over around a decade, I sent John well into the 5 digits of licensing fees. Mostly it was one-offs, but there were a few organizations where it was handfulls of copies for their site.
I had done that software in the evenings while I did a contracting gig at the Telco (USWest). When that contract was up, I was tired of working for a giant company, so I wanted to start doing Linux sys admin consulting. So I started doing that under the tummy.com brand. Did that for around 20 years until around a dozen years ago.
RIP John Bradley.