digital home of MacSlow

… so… I wrote my first particle-system ever. It does not look photorealistic - by far not *g* - but implementing something like that is great fun! You see a cluster of 5000 particles in the screencasts below. Right now I’ve two emitters (a “singularity” one and a rectangle one) with a gravity force-field being applied to the particles. WASD/Quake-like camera-navigation I implemented too, so one can “walk around”. From here numerous things could be added: wind, general turbulence, attraction-/repulsion-forces between particles, collision-detection with obstacles… the visualization could be improved with motion-blur, lighting, shadows etc. Rendering- and simulation-loop are coupled and run at 60 Hz. Screencasts were recorded with 30 Hz.

Arrived at the hotel/summit. Going to head to the venue with a couple of folks soon.

And a small screencast for the day. Testing out the new blur-cache meant for notify-osd:

It’s easy on CPU. So light actually, that I was able to record this very screencast with recordmydesktop on a Dell Mini 9. This is finally also using the subtle text drop-shadow the design folks asked for. Color, font, size and all are just randomly picked by me, as this is a test-program to exercise the small interal APIs I created for implementing the blur-cache.

Edit: I forgot to mention it, that I’m doing this work in a branch currently. It’s lp:~macslow/notify-osd/blur-cache.

It’s that time of the year again I’m about to start my trip to the summit. Uff… 5:00 in the morning and a trip of roughly 14 hours before me. But can’t wait to see all you GNOME-heads again face to face!

Ubuntu:
The heron took off… nuff said! It’s running on all of my machines for quite some time now… I’m happy! I leave the marketing-talk to the people that know this kind of business *g*

gdm-face-browser:
A first look at what will become the OpenGL/clutter-based face-browser for the new gdm…

With still a lot of work left on the graphics-side, it will take some time until I can start integrating it into gdm. But it’s rather weeks than months.

clutter:
During my ongoing entanglements with clutter I deeply miss support for mipmapping. But that will land in a patch I’m writing atm. It will do wonders to the nasty shimmering during scaling and zooming of text and images (well, textures really) in the gdm-face-browser. Check this stand-alone example-screencast…

Thanks to a tip from Matthew Allum I grabbed Ivan’s current clutter-branch, which offers a rewritten cogl (clutter’s core GL-abstration if you will), that will make written the patch a lot easier. Sofar I worked against clutter-0.6.2.

Big Buck Bunny:
Not really news anymore, but still impressive none the less was watching “Big Buck Bunny” at its world-premiere in Amsterdam. I don’t want to give away anything or provide spoilers for the people that still have not seen it. But let me say this… it is cute and funny short-film, which showcases blenders capabilities wielded by capable artists. The whole atmosphere of seeing and hearing this second OpenMovie as a 35mm print in a cinema gave me goose-bumps! It was a wicked feeling being aware of the fact that I was witnessing a small part of movie-history in the making there at the Studio-K cinema. Also seeing “Ubuntu” being explicitly mentioned in the movie-credits gave me a cozy feeling. Thanks so much to the whole blender-community and the foundation for producing something so cool that once more is a shining example of OpenSource. I can’t wait to get the DVD of the movie and the game! After the movie I had the chance to talk a bit with Andreas Goralczyk, Brecht Van Lommel, and Ton Roosendaal… a 10 on the OpenSource-rock-star-scale *g* What a terrific experience all this was!

gtk+-hackweek interviews:
This weekend I should get the time - finally - to edit and upload the first bunch of interviews from the gtk+-hackweek in Berlin. Big big sorry for the delay! Anybody who wants to offer hosting- and/or mirror-space?

I just arrived in Berlin for the gtk+-hackfest after maning the GNOME-booth at CeBIT for a week. Gosh do I feel exhausted right now! Reporting about that is something I do later, after I had a good sleep!

So the gtk+-hackfest is about to start. Too bad that there was no reliable wifi in the Linux-park at CeBIT. At least not when the room allocation was put up on live.gnome.org. It’s a bit unfortunate that I was not able to directly place myself in the appartment with the folks behind cairo, clutter, X11 etc.

Who adds that…

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~144 KBytes)

to cheese before feature-freeze tomorrow? Here’s the code.

In order to congratulate the GNOME-project to its first decade of existence, I dedicate the cairo-clock 0.3.3 release to it. I present you cairo-clock 0.3.3, the “GNOME anniversary”-release!

I finally moved cairo-clock to a proper git-repository at f.d.o. The project-homepage of cairo-clock has not yet been updated. A page on launchpad has been started. I still need to figure out how I can hook up my git-repository there, without making a full copy in a bzr-repository.

Added features:

• localized for da, de, en_GB, es, fi, fr, it, nl, pl, pt_PT, ru, sl, sv, tr, zh_CN and zh_TW
• using GOption, GList and GString now
• checking for a composited desktop-environment, thus depending on gtk+ >= 2.10.0
• brand new gremlin/gremlin-24 theme included (courtesy of Christian “ChipX86″ Hammond)
• smooth hand animations
• no more flashing of backgrond-clear-color upon startup

Bugfixes:

• close button in about-dialog works now/again
• work-around for “white rectangle”-bug in Xorg (#11109)

Packages:

• tarball
• Ubuntu 7.04 .deb (x86, 32bit)

Prebuilt packages for other architectures and distributions will follow soon I hope. I’ll keep you updated.

The obligatory screencast…

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~5.9 MBytes)

The reason for me being very calm on my blog is due to a busy schedule in the recent weeks. There was my personal financial disaster that was CeBIT, where I did a talk on the state of things regarding multimedia on GNOME. Sorry, no slides for this, because it was 80% demonstrating applications (or at least pretending to be using them). On the side of end-user-ready applications there is still a lot to do, in order to provide well-integrated native multimedia-applications for GNOME. Folks, PiTiVi needs you, seriously… give Edward Hervey a hand!

Next was a small brainstorming weekend in Hamburg with a few core gtk+-developers from Imendio. We stayed at rambokid’s place and did talking and tossing around ideas for the most part. My take from that weekend is this… if gtk+ gets the resources (developers, designers, funding) the sky’s the limit. I was invited to that meeting by Imendio after some of the Imendio-bunch saw my talk “bling it up - make it sexy” at FOSDEM 2007. The role I had at the meeting could be best described as “API-user stating wishes for gtk+’s future”. I also showed a few examples of stuff I’ve written, that offers things currently not possible within gtk+ itself today.

Upcoming is my internship at Fluendo in Barcelona starting this friday… rock&roll! During that three month period I’ll also be at the LGM2 and UDS Sevilla. I’m equally thrilled and intimidated by this intense road ahead.

On the software-development side of things I’m trying my best with getting stuff done that’s on my mind/TODO. Currently this means some base-work I need for lowfat and a few other things. One could call it a side-effect of those projects. Since I’m not in the mood for writing a whole essay on the topic, here’s a glimpse of that in unnarrated screencast-form…

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~5.6 MBytes)

While feisty fawn herd5 is ruining my nights sleep, due to wifi not working with my prism54 card, I wanted to drop some notes of other stuff that’s cooking in my head and on my hard-disk for some time now.

lowfat will get an updated page with a proper design-document, a “10000 miles from above”-view, project goals and an additional long-term vision. I also plan to do a talk about it at Guadec’07. Apart from that I have to do a ton of hacking and further research on it (e.g. I want such a multitouch-display setup like Jeff Han has… somehow I got to get my hands on much a setup or build one myself!). lowfat is far from being finished! And yes it is OpenSource for all you sceptics. See here. But please remember, due to my lack of time (read: need to accept offers for paid work) I cannot waste any time to do handholding for end-users or review patches you might want to send in for a project that’s still so young and whichs code-base and design has not settled yet. Furthermore do not even think about packaging it for any distro. It would suggest a finished product to end-users, which is definetly not the case yet. In addition to that such actions would give it a bad reputation before it’s reached a stable state.

A humble attempt to avoid further misunderstandings comes now. lowfat is not meant or going to replace compiz, f-spot, elisa or similar projects. It is a thing of its own. You will see. If you think Apple does cool stuff, I can just mildly smirk.

Please remember, I’m a student, always suffering form a chronic lack of cash, eager to get my degree. As much as I would love to do nothing but work on putting my ideas for Gnome 3.0/4.0 into working code, real life asks other things from me.

I still need to finish the talk/demonstration about “multimedia on GNOME” for CeBIT next week, prepare for my internship at Fluendo (that’s a requirement for cs-studies) next month, maybe even a trip to the LGM2, continue and finish some contracted work. I try to do as much as I possibly can.

People have asked me for the slides of my talk. Note, that I generally don’t see much sense in putting just the slides of a talk online. In general a video-recording of a talk would make more sense. But this is not available, as there was no recording done in the GNOME dev-room at FOSDEM 2007. Be sure to read the license information once you grabbed the tarball of the talk from here. From the audience reactions I got during the talk and after it, I conclude that it was well received and people enjoyed it (and hopefully learnt something they did not know yet). I was really very nervous especially since some of the maintainers and contributors of projects I stressed and “criticized” sat in the audience. In retrospect, considering what I got to know about X.org and cairo at this FOSDEM-weekend, my talk should have had a revamp before presenting it. But this flexibility-presentation-fu I do not master yet. Keith Packard clearly put this into one sentence going something like: “You have to live with these kind of things, when dealing with the bleeding edge.”. Who am I to argue with the Packard *g*

FOSDEM itself was great. I almost managed to meet all the people I planned to meet and talk with them about the things that are on my mind. Sadly the brainstorming I wanted to do with Sven and Philip totally did not take place. I blame myself for not trying hard enough and being too distracted by the amount of other interesting things at FOSDEM. But at least Sven and Tim made sure I remember to stick around the gtk-devel mailing-list for discussing the things I wish would be available in future versions of gtk+. BTW, did you know that gtk+ and X.org need contributing man-power? Step in, contribute now and become world-famous!

As somehow expected, I mainly hang around with the X.org and gstreamer people as those projects are among the most interesting ones for me… from a desktop-graphics-stack perspective. I was glad to be able to meet Carl Worth, Keith Packard (the stuff X.org is made of), Michel Dänzer again and was lucky to meet Kristian Høgsberg (his talk on AIGLX… lots of very crucial information) and Øyvind Kolås (check out his talk on GEGL… I had no idea!) in person for the first time. Furthermore I also met Stéphane Marchesin again this year and enjoyed his talk about “X.org Myths”. Kristian’s call to arms “Let’s finish COMPOSITE” and Matthias thorough lecture titled “Video on dope” were also great. Sadly I didn’t make it in time for Stéphane’s update on nouveau and Keith’s summary on video drivers.

I also could not make it to Edward’s talk about “What’s new in gstreamer” and I could barely make it to Miguel’s Mono workshop. FOSDEM was really packed with a lot of things worth seeing… too much to see it all. The schedule made choosing talks to attend very hard for me this year.

I had good chunks of time chatting with Thomas and Philippe about Elisa. I’m looking forward to my time at Fluendo in a few weeks. As part of my requirements for an degree in computer science I need to do an internship. Finally the talks with Christian at Vilanova last year turn out to become reality. I’m thankful for this opportunity! My semester abroad, also needed for the degree, is hopefully going to turn into reality in 2008 as well. Then I aim for Bosten, USA.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Nat Friedman attending FOSDEM and being able to meet and talk with him in person for the first time ever. Also a great opportunity was meeting Michael Meeks, right after I gave my talk. I think Michael was around GUADEC’06 and LRL’06, but only this FOSDEM-weekend it worked out to be possible to chat with him a bit. A modest attempt to file a bug with OpenOffice in real life failed. So here is the result of doing things the correct way *g*

A large portion of people I saw again this time around are not mentioned here. Nevertheless meeting up with them again was as enjoyable as meeting folks I just mentioned. But I draw the line here as I don’t want to bore readers to death *g*

Finally, thanks to Thomas for his great guidance to the restaurant landscape in Brussels this weekend, and thanks to intel for paying for the great dinner on sunday evening.

Oh, there is one more thing… within the next 24h lowfat will start its breathing in the open at f.d.o, but I still have to do some preparations. It’s tough for me as the amount of and work (and noise) I expect is going to be huge. It will get a dedicated blog-entry.