without effort

it is said that when one is able to perform a task without effort that you have truly mastered that task. by that measure i've mastered exceedingly little thus far in my life.

while bloggin about cyrille's water color work in krita, boudj mentioned that all this work was for something "that nature does without any effort". it's easy to forget that nature is a highly parallel computation machine consisting of some 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 or so atoms and even more sub-atomic particles and what not. it accomplishes these amazing and "simple" feats, like forming what are often emotional textures as water colour paint dries on a piece of rough paper, through the tremendous effort of mind boggling numbers of interactions. it only appears to happen without effort. the universe, unlike myself, has mastered much.

that said, krita is doing some amazing things these days (e.g. water colour simulation). and now that they've started in on the optimizations, i can only imagine what we'll end up with in koffice2. something, probably, that appears to work with little effort at all.

on the topic of mind boggling interaction, sebas put out a call for journalists to write for kde, particularly theDot and the response was nearly immediate on kde-promo. i count five responses already and i'm sure even more are on the way.

there are times when it feels like there is a tremendous amount of weight levied upon the shoulders of those involved in open source projects. granted, it's mostly self-inflicted, but we tend to feel that there is so much we want (or even "need") to do compared to the time and energy we individually have. and then someone simply asks for some help and it turns out that there are people just waiting for a bar to be laid low enough and directions made clear enough for them to join in. these are people who have often benefited from our work in the past and that becomes their motivation.

so a huge hug to sebas for asking and one for each person who has stepped up. you all help make it look like it happens without effort, even though we know it takes more than a little.

you know, there should be a free software contributor appreciation day. =)