digiKam and memory

After working on 27 photos the memory consumed by digiKam 1.2  is currently at 1 560 268 kB (as reported by KDE System Activity under Memory column).
This is reported when no photo is edited at the moment.
Things start to slow down - and the computer starts to use a page file.
I've restarted the application and displayed the same photo - now the memory consumption is 160 404 kilobytes.
Looks like some bad memory leaks to me.

Red eye correction in digiKam

Hmm.. I can't seem to find a Red Eye Correction in my digiKam 1.2.
Is this a bug 234545 or am I simply blind?

Ubuntu - a problem with two souncards

So I got a brand spanking new Kubuntu 10.04 installed on my desktop PC.
After a few days I noticed I have some intermittent problems with sound - sometimes Youtube videos were mute and sometimes everything was OK. Tried to reinstall flash plugin but there was no change.
I figured out there might be a problem with two sound cards in my machine.
I have an on-board Intel HDA sound card and a PCI Creative X-Fi Fatality. During the start of the system - in some cases the primary card was X-Fi and in other cases it was HDA.
Since for quite some time X-Fi drivers work in Ubuntu out-of-the-box then HDA audio was redundant.
How to disable it from Ubuntu (I could  probably have done it from BIOS)?
First - list soundcards in your system (in terminal):
more /proc/asound/modules


the output I got was:

0 snd_hda_intel

1 snd_ctxfi

How to get rid of HDA?

You have to edit the file: /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

In my case - I press: Alt + F2 and enter kdesu kate in the command prompt.
I opened the aforementioned blacklist.conf file and added the following line at the end:
 # Disable onboard HDA audio
blacklist snd_hda_intel

Save, restart, back to the terminal:
more /proc/asound/modules

0 snd_ctxfi

Success?

2010-04-17 Mt Usher Gardens

digiKam and Vignetting tool

The new Vignetting tool in digiKam is really cool but I have some issues with it.
The most irritating one is the fact that digiKam not only adds a dark oval around the image - but also lightens the centre of the image.
See below:
Unmodified - (PNG):

With Added Vignette (PNG):

See the nose?
It's much lighter. How much exactly?
I loaded both photos to the GIMP and measured the colour of the same pixel.

Pixel coordinates: X: 235 , Y: 351
ORIGINAL: 
Colour: Red: 197, Green: 191, Blue: 198

VIGNETTE ADDED IN:
Colour: Red: 234, Green: 227, Blue: 236

30+ Awesome Free and Open Source Audio Applications List

http://open-tube.com/15-awesome-free-and-open-source-audio-applications-list

Ubuntu Tweak

Any Ubuntu fans out there?
There's a nice little utility that can make your life a bit easier.
http://my.opera.com/ubuntunerd1/blog/h-4