digital home of MacSlow

LUGRadio Live 2006 was a terrific event well put together. The only drawback I saw was that it was just too packed with interesting talks. But thankfully everything was recorded with video-cameras so it will be possible to catch up with everything in a few weeks. I enjoyed Sarah Ewen’s talk on Linux on the PS2 and PS3, Mike Hearn’s talk on autopackage and his general idea of rethinking the way of package-distribution. During the “Hour Of Power” I was delighted to see the demo-scene being represented at a Linux-related event and a MAME-based home-grown arcade-machine.

LUGRadio Live 2006 was a two-folded premiere for me. On one hand-side it was the first LUGRadio Live event I’ve attended and on the other hand-side I did my first (lightning) talk ever (on lowfat), which was well received according to some members from the audience. Still I was nervous as hell and did not think it went as smooth as it could. But at least I know what to do better next time. I was awarded with the “coolest technology presented”-prize. Super big thanks for that to the four large gents and everybody else who was influential to making this decision. Thanks to this my library of books has grown by five books sponsored by O’Reilly. I might now even learn Python.

Accessibility-issues for lowfat will be much more present in my brain know, due to some talk I had with the guy, who did the talk on accessibility in ubuntu (sorry, I forgot your name). I also might rethink my rigorous stance about a publicly accessable source-repository for lowfat. Or let’s say the lack thereof.

On the social side of things it was great to meet “old” friends (only really know them since Guadec 2006) again like Adrian Bradshaw, Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Karl Lattimer, Bastien Nocera, Edward Hervey, Christian Schaller, Paul Cooper, Simon Phipps, Michael Dominik, Ted Haeger, Matthew Garrett and Rob McQueen. Finally I was given the chance to meet new people for the first time like Matthew Revell, blackwire, Mike Hearn, Ben Thorb, Phated, schwuk, Adam Sweet, dotwaffle, Bruno Bord, Aaron Quill, pickle, Xalior, neuro and that dude from down under.

Never trust the Karl regarding stupid british laws about haystacks in trunks of cabs. Karl, you bloody bastard… I knew you were winding me up with this story *g* While not really believing this one I still was able to make a complete fool of myself in front of Rachel and Michael wondering about the verisimilitude of this “fact”. They then continued with leg-pulling me by trying to convince me that Ronan Keating is a gay icon of british pop-music culture. No way, folks! All in all it was a marvelous and funny weekend in Wolverhampton.

Well… that’s (here or here) almost as unexpected as this one. I’ve not fully made up my mind on those issues as I’m still a bit in a LugRadioLive-2006-aftermath-cloud. My LRL2006-impression write-up will follow shortly.

… and has rendering-issues with cairo-clock, please try out this (admittedly) unusual work-around now:

cairo-clock -w 127 -g 127 -s &

If you are one of the poor souls, who unsuccessfully tried cairo-clock on your AIGLX-driven system in the past, please report your experience with that hint as quickly as possible. Either comment here or email me. Thanks in advance!

Some mindful norwegian called Henning Kulander brought this interesting work-around to my attention in the comments here and later described his tests in an email. Apparently on AIGLX-driven systems cairo-clock isn’t refreshed for some unknown reason, if the set width and height of the window are not power-of-two values. Play around with that a little. Right-click in the clock and bring up the preferences-dialog. Activate the second-hand display and try different values (either power-of-two or non-power-of-two) for the window-size.

A few weeks ago I first found out about MPX and put a little note in my blog. But I did not have the time to dive deeper into the information presented on that site. Well, I have done so now and have to say, that this is so utterly cool I could cry…

long dubbed video explaining MPX
move and resize at the same time
great interaction demo with several xeyes-windows
dual pointer use in unmodified gimp
18 pointer frenzy

I hope to see MPX evolve into a proper X11-extension (right now it’s a seperate X11-server) for Xorg and common window-managers, toolkits and applications to become multi-pointer aware. Can you say multi-pointer touchscreen/tablet input *very.loud.dr.evil.laugh*. This gives me almost wet dreams for the UI-interaction possibilities on the free desktop systems. Remember this?

Some weeks ago, when I tarred up a first version of cairo-dock I was kind of lazy and stuffed some SVG-icons from /usr/share/icons/Tango/scaleable (officially from the Tango-project) in the programs directory. I also renamed some of the files because I did not like some of the large strings. Of course I gave credit to the used icons in the main source-code file. Without knowing better I thought I had thereby complied to the terms of usage of the Tango-project. But I was wrong. I should have better RTFM. Some of the things I did are not ok for “CC Attribution/Share Alike”. Ripping some of the icons from the typical distribution package, renaming them and not stating the “CC Attribution/Share Alike”. So a huge apology from me to the people making up and working on the Tango-project. Your work should not be dealt with unmindfully. It will not happen again! Some may call me a nitpicker (is this the correct english term?) now, but if we among ourselves - within the OpenSource realm - do not follow and foster our own set rules, how can we demand others to comply to them? I heard something about YouOS messing up even more severely in that particular apect of Tango art-work usage.

Other (unrelated) bits:

seeing this makes me proud somehow (left side, middle of screenshot)
a first step for creating a pool of tutorials for cairo-jazziness
things to come

Thanks to this nice gem (screenshots), which is written in C#, I can now enjoy listening to the stations from last.fm with a nice UI as icing. Thanks Iain! Opps… Ross already blogged about that. Sorry for that redundancy p.g.o

I did a little update to gl-cairo-cube (only glitz-utilization still pending) and learnt from others, that the transparency doesn’t work with setups running aiglx (on intel-based graphics hardare). 1st bummer! Similar things I could witness in person at guadec, when someone asked me for help getting cairo-clock displaying properly on his aiglx-powered X11-setup (that was on ATI-hardware if I recall correctly). So from my experience the “winning combination” eye-candy-wise (at least regarding my hacks) is either Xgl/compiz or Xorg/xcompmgr on nvidia-hardware running the proprietary driver. 2nd bummer! I’m not doing anything special (read: nvidia-specific) in my code. What can I do to help out fix this current grim situation? I would like to hear about more people successfully running a composited setup without having any rendering problems. Or is patience the only game I can play… waiting for the developers working on drivers and aiglx to progress those projects further? Any inputs about your made experiences regarding this topic are most welcomed in the comment-section!

Apart from hacking on graphics-related stuff the other part of my brain is keen to be occupied with being in mid-air… the longer the better. While Guadec was not the ideal environment for flipping-sessions (way too hot and humid, so much cool OpenSource-distractions) I still got a few opportunities to throw my limbs around. Daniel Holbach of Ubuntu-fame, was the friendly camera-man to capture some of my gravity-antagonizing you can see below. My folks from banGang (german and english) will be very happy to see, that I represent our team everywhere.

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~6.8 MBytes)

(click to play back, avi/h.264, ~5.4 MBytes)

For the marketing-team… “Using Gnome makes you flip around of enjoyment!” Ok, next time I do this I will wear the foot-shirt Should anybody have futher footage or photos of me looking for trouble with the gravity-police, please send them to me. Thanks in advance!

Without being in the midst of guadec anymore and finally able to concentrate again, I have fixed the example-hack I started in Vilanova, which was intended to show how one could go about using animated cairo-graphics as a source for dynamic texture-mapping in OpenGL. I also tried to use the new compositing-query function - gtk_widget_is_composited() - in gtk+ 2.10.x, but it turned out to be broken. At least it does not return true if I run under Xgl/compiz or Xorg/xcompmgr. The same error occurs with gtk+/tests/testgtk.c. Is this maybe a shortcoming of the used X11-server? Against which project should I file a bug now?

The presented hack, cleverly called gl-cairo-cube (although not really a cube), does not use the glitz-backend for cairo on purpose… for the moment. Just in case you wonder why your cpu is being hit hard during runtime. From now on I will put my examples, hacks and programs at my cozy spot at people.freedesktop.org. Over time I will move more and more of my stuff there. You can grab the current hack via…

git clone http://people.freedesktop.org/~macslow/gl-cairo-cube.git

If you are not running under a composited environment you will not see the nice transparency like shown in these screencasts, but get the typical black square in the background…

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~2.9 MBytes)

(click to play back, avi/h.264, ~4.4 MBytes)

Guadec
Guadec probably means many things for different people, and it is very likely that every attendee had a very special experience during the last week in Vilanova. While several folks have already blogged about their impressions I want to add my personal view to this sharing of memories. I do not exaggerate by calling the past week in Vilanova to be one of the most intense, impressive and enjoyable times I had in years… this is not coming from my keyboard lightheadedly. Two weeks before guadec it was not clear I end up being in Vilanova in the first place. Once that somehow did fall into place (huge thanks to Quim Gil and Jeff Waugh again) I was just expecting me to be a mere beholder and lurker during the conference. Fair enough and certainly more than one could ask for. Instead of me just running around drooling about who I could meet and talk to, there were even people who came to me and were glad to see me and talk to me. This absolutely knocked me off my feet, really! Everybody was so down-to-earth and approachable no matter how much of a figurehead or contributer to the community he or she was. Note, this does not imply I expected anyone to be arrogant. One could also hardly tell (well, ok except for branded t-shirts maybe and if you happened to know who was with which company) the bunch of people where from competing companies… it felt more like one community forming an entity. If only one could have been able to fill part of this spirit and atmosphere into bottles and take with them back home to share this with peers and friends, who don’t know about the stuff yet, which makes us tick and do the things we do. How can this be topped next year in Birmingham, I wonder Thanks to everybody for making a greenhorn like me feel so welcome and being part of the community! To prevent extensive name-dropping of individuals (not that the people would not deserve it) I want to shell out special thanks to the fine folks from RedHat, Novell, LUGRadio, Fluendo, Sun, Nokia, Imendio, Canonical and about two dozens of individuals I was able to spent time with at this guadec… you rock my world!

LUGRadio Live! 2006
I am already looking forward to be going to LUGRadioLive 2006 in Wolverhampton, England roughly three weeks from now and meeting people from guadec again and new faces of course! There I will do my first talk ever… on lowfat and what I have in mind for desktop-related things. New ideas and concepts I gathered at guadec will also be incorporated into this talk now. I will also try to add my twist on things which might be of some value for Topaz with this talk.

Screencasting
Here is is the long overdue mini-tutorial for my way of going about screencasting. Read it as it is, take from it what is of value to you and do not ask questions. I made this stuff work for me, on my special setup of hardware and software. Things might turn out to work slightly or largely different for you and your setup. This is totally not fool-proof and you need to know how to help yourself if parts turn out not to work as described.

I grabbed the plain debian .deb of xvidcap from here and installed it on my Ubuntu 6.06 machine. Compiling form source turned out to be too much of a hassle for me (just to get screencasting working). But doing this forced me making a dummy sym-link for /usr/lib/libpng.so.2, because the binary of givdcap (gtk+ frontend of xvidcap) wants this in order to successfully start. Yeah, that is an ugly hack. Because of this I only use gvidcap to capture to single .ppm frames. To assemble the single frames from a screencasting-session into a video-clip I’ve written a small bash-script with two commands, which utilize the combined powers of convert (ImageMagick), ffmpeg, mencoder, ffmpeg2theora and file. Start gvidcap, select the area of the screen you want to capture, make sure you capture to single .ppm frames (preferences menu), don’t use more than 20 fps (using more usually make gvidcap crash for me), record your session, let one of the commands (encode_images_to_avi or encode_images_to_ogg with proper options) from the bash-script run over the resulting bunch of single image-files and be happy about the final screencasting clip. Why do I not use currently maintained tools like istanbul, byzanz or the like? They impose limitations on me, which I can not tolerate. It is usually about sub-par image-quality, inability to capture fast graphics (animated OpenGL or cairo) or not working in composited environments (compiz, xcompmgr), questionably formats, missing option to just record uncompressed high-quality single frames (which are invaluable for later “beautifying” and stageing in movie-editors and sound-adding).

If you - as in hackers on current screen-capture tools - want good input on what is really needed, listen to people like Quim Gil. People like him (the marketeers, evangelists and pimpers) are very keen on getting their hands on solid and powerful tools and wanting to do the screencasts to pimp and show-off the bells and whistles of our beloved desktop-environments. The ultimate OpenSource-approach for solving this very sore spot once and for all would be (imo) to go about it the “Jokosher-way”… let Quim & Co write a thorough spec of what they want in a screen-capture toolchain of dreams and let the capable community-hackers do their coding magic. Coders, be the enabling amplifiers for getting some serious show-off power into the hands of our marketing-team! JFDI!