John Bradley, author of xv, has passed away
John Bradley, the longtime member of this community who was the founder, producer, and lead guitarist of Booster Patrol, died on March 20. He was 61. I couldn’t think of a better way to pay tribute to the man who was both a bandmate and a friend than to write a song for him in […]
To expand on this a little bit:
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.
For others whose Linux experience is almost exclusively on the command line, xv is a desktop image viewer, capable of some basic edits:
XV was excellent, and had some features I've never seen anywhere else. For example, it had a control panel that would allow you to take part of the color space and map it uniformly to a different part of the color space, for example, turning all the reds (and just the reds) green.
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)
>a control panel
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.
linsomniac