digital home of MacSlow

For those of you who where not able to come to FOSDEM and are interested in the eye-catching parts of my talk, I provide you with a screencast of the demo I hacked up to accompany my talk. This one is the second of the three demos (one, two, three) I showed in my talk to underline the facts I chatted about. To all trolls out there… this is about the effects and techniques used, not the content itself. So please spare me the “copycat”-reprovals.

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~1.1 MBytes)

(click to play back, avi/h.264, ~2.6 MBytes)

Here is something I wanted to show also (at least in video-form as it does currently not work on a i915 graphics-chip with current drivers) during my talk, but was not able to finish it up properly. You can clearly see the remaining glitches. Running on a GeForce 7900GT using nvidia’s proprietary driver. It provides a modest glimpse of what a future gtk+ might be able to do if it is fully composite-aware…

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~0.9 MBytes)

(click to play back, avi/h.264, ~2.0 MBytes)

All shown screencasts do not do the smoothness justice you see when running for real without the screen-recording going on. These kind of things will get much slicker once we have full EXA-accelerating drivers (paths for Copy, Solid and Composite) available in common distributions running on the latest and greatest X.org can/will provide. The screencast are all done under compiz.

BTW, the gtk+-developers are absolutely aware of missing features, shortcomings and expectations of users (both for end-users and for application developers). They have the drive and urge to improve and change things. So to the trolls… please just die! To everybody else… let go of everything and start helping out now. The more help they get form you, the faster we reach UI-toolkit heaven!

Any questions that might arise you may put in the comments-section or send me via email. And I have not forgotton about lowfat.

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 KolÃ¥s (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.

inkscape:
Just came across this. It is impressive to witness what kind of talents OpenSource-tools are able to attract these days. Have a look…

compiz:
Have you ever seen a recent build of compiz running? David Reveman implemented a fragment-shader based blur-plugin which allows clients (could also be done by a toolkit, e.g. gtk+) to define - via a X11-property (_COMPIZ_WM_WINDOW_BLUR) - which parts of a drawable (a whole window, just a widget or a part of the decoration) to blur. The blur is even opacity-dependent. To emphasize the last fact I slightly changed his provided blurdemo program and made a screenshot (note the change in the weight of blurriness from top to bottom in different parts of the window)…

blender:
New site, new version, new everything! Honestly it feels like I just truned away for a moment to look around, look back at blender and have the impression to see a completely new program infront of me. It is most remarkable what the team behind blender put together for the 2.43 release. Super sweet!

FOSDEM:
Finally I want to tout my talk I will be giving this sunday. Though I am not sure that I will be able to draw a large crowd or that I even want to draw a huge bunch of folks. Speaking isn’t something I feel really comfortable with (yet).

Should you be in the vicinity of Aachen, Germany tomorrow and want to avoid typical german-themed carnival be sure to come to…

It’s a benifical party for the social project Mus-E in Brasil. Doors are open at 22:00 and entry as low as ˆ 5,-. You’ll get a full helping of brazilian south-america in the middle of good old Aachen in terms of fun, atmosphere, music and dance. There’ll be live batucada, a samba act, tons of forró-, samba- and basilectro-music and buckets full of caipirinha among other things. We know how to party, trust me… don’t miss this!

P.S.: Sorry to all p.g.o- and p.u.c-readers for this off-topic blog-entry.

(note in advance: anybody from the osso/maemo/nokia engineering-teams should not feel attacked by my following rant, but the tie-wearing folks making guiding- and final-decisions about what goes into a product and what to leave out should feel the beating… really bad!)

I was lucky to receive a N800 on developer-discount. Thanks a lot to the Nokia/OSSO-people involved in this. As much as I want to like the device I just cannot. Everybody else seems to like it, so what in the world is wrong?

case, design: The hull of the N800 is a regression in my eyes. It feels fragile compared to the N770. While I don’t expect such a device to withstand an aircraft-crash, I like the tough feel of the N770-case far more. The look/design of the N800-case itself reminds me of some fm-radio form the 80s. This is not what I would expect form a stylish “internet/digital-life in your pocket”-device of today.

camera: The image-quality produced by the built-in web-cam is very bad. Especially for a device that usually costs ˆ 400,-. I would certainly expect much better image quality. In the N93i phone (it’s rather a monster camera with a cell-phone wrapped around it) they use such a high-quality camera. While it does not need to be this kind of a high-end camera, a CCD-sensor based one, which doesn’t spit out those terribly grained frames, would be nice.

bundled software: The flash-player plugin, coming with the N800, is crap! Why, oh why, no smooth playback for flash-videos, Nokia? Kick Adobe harder to provide a proper product for which you pay them. I don’t think the flash-plugin can be included for free on the N800. This Orb-workaround does not count! It’s all about end-users, not geeks, isn’t it!? The processing-power of the N800 should be enough.

graphics/rendering-capabilities: OMG, the sorest and sadest spot of them all. When I read about the specs of ImaginationTechnologies’ PowerVR MBX built into the TexasInstruments OMAP2420 used in the N800, I got really psyched and thrilled about having hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG 1.0 available. My dreams and ideas went wild… but only to be blown into oblivion by the fact that there are no drivers available for it on the N800. This is so stupid I cannot grasp it. But wait it gets even better/worse. ImaginationTechnologies actually seem to offer drivers for Linux and also the SDK from TI seems to pull them through. But there’s nothing to be found on the N800. Instead there is some strange X-server altered to restrict screen-refreshes to 14 Hz using only an external framebuffer. WTF!? There you have a large multi-million dollar company like Nokia, which decides to put a real 3D-graphics core into on of their products. They pay their supplier for it… and don’t get driver support for the OS they intend to use on the device… although the supplier has driver-development experience on the said OS… @#!?&%$??? Gee… give me a break… honestly I could hit someone for this!

Isn’t there anything I like about the N800? Sure there is. The screen-quality is very good. It being based around a mostly FOSS-stack and open standards is a sure merit in my view. The sound coming out of the built-in speakers is nice. The virtual thumb-keyboard I like a lot. The darker default UI-theme I greatly enjoy.

But, like it or not, Nokia, you are going to loose many potential customers to the iPhone this year and next year, if Apple not somehow severely screws up. Regarding the graphics on the N800 you screwed up for the moment. I’ve seen your nice “view of the future”-videos promoting your ideas about potential embedded devices having all tricked out UIs, smoothly zooming and juggling around 2D and 3D graphics. I seriously hope you don’t expect to reach these dreams making business-decisions displayed with the N800.

Boy, do I feel like hitting someone hard in the roda today!

Just my ˆ 2/100.