digital home of MacSlow

This is something I wanted to get out there before 2007… more cairo-utilization love. Soon you will get two new tutorials at cairographics.org/OpenGL. You will get some nice examples of how to setup your gtk+/cairo-programs with a glitz-backend, some funky effets with cairo and a nice trick for free anti-aliasing (under certain conditions) in OpenGL using cairo as a helper. As a little appetizer have a look these screencasts from one of the examples (glitz-cairo):

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~1.3 MBytes)

(click to play back, avi/h.264, ~4.7 MBytes)

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~1.3 MBytes)

(click to play back, avi/h.264, ~4.7 MBytes)

So, I hope you all had a merry christmas and will have supreme 2007… see you all next year!

We (banGang) were asked to do a few shows at certain benefit-events in the next few months. When this happens normal training routine shifts a little away from pure martial-arts towards stage-fighting. Coming up with visually interesting, entertaining and funny (pretended) fights is anything but easy. Here’s a glimpse of a first idea for 10% of a show…

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~16 MBytes)

cairo-clock is now officially included in the repositories for Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) and upcoming Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn). This is quite something for me, sending chills down my spine!

There is more to come on several fronts. You just wait, see and be delighted *g*

So far I only know of Ubuntu now offering cairo-clock in its repositories. I have not yet heard about other distributions including it in their repositories. There are more than enough packaging contributions from the community for the different flavours *hint.hint*.

This is a very wicked release of Mesa I’m happy to read about. The two coolest bits are the new DRI memory manager and the almost finished support for OpenG 2.0 and 2.1. Finally people on OSS graphics-drivers are very close to reach feature-parity with nvidia’s proprietary driver, which is a very good thing!

Please take part in the second poll (see the top right of my blog-page) about the OpenGL version installed alongside your Gnome-environment. Thanks in advance for your participation.

Hint: You can easily identify the OpenGL version by opening a terminal-window and entering…

glxinfo | grep "OpenGL version string"

… at the prompt followed by hitting the return-key. Only the first two returned numbers (x.y of x.y.z) are of importance. You can ignore anything following those first two numbers (e.g. some systems print out something like “1.3 Mesa 6.5.1″, here only the “1.3″ is interesting… or under Xgl you might see “1.2 (2.0.2 NVIDIA 87.76)”, here ignore the “1.2″ and just note the “2.0″ of “2.0.2″).

There is a nice patch for gtkglext 1.2.0 finally adding multisample-support, which did not move upstream yet. I tried it under Linux and it works nicely. The reason for this valuable patch to be in limbo-mobe is the fact, that it’s still missing the win32-part. So someone with gtk+/gtkglext coding-experience on windows and a few hours to spare (my vague guess is 3-4 hours) would do a great deed to complete this patch with win32-support. I’d do it myself, but have no access to a windows-box around here. You’d be my hero of the day!