digital home of MacSlow

Ubuntu 7.04 (x86, 32 bit)
Fedora 7 (x86, 32 bit)
Fedora 7 (x86, 64 bit)
Fedora Core 6 with Extras (x86, 32 bit)
openSUSE 10.2 (x86, 32 bit)
openSUSE 10.2 (x86, 64 bit)
openSUSE Factory (x86, 32 bit)
openSUSE Factory (x86, 64 bit)

Please give them a try and report your experience to me. Thanks in advance!

I used the buildservice from openSUSE for the first time to provide these packages without needing to ask any external contributors to do the tedious task of building and packaging my code. Hats off to the openSUSE hackers for putting this service together. This is an awesome tool to have! But I failed to force buildservice to create RPMs with the distribution name-tag I wanted (e.g. .fc6.rpm or .fc7.rpm). If you are interested in the buildservice-page of the cairo-clock package go here.

Another nice thing to notice is this software search. Nearly within a minute after the builds of cairo-clock were done the newly created packages were discoverable and downloadable via this very simple web-frontend.

[wishful-thinking]
Now if launchpad and buildservice could be combined… what a magnificent software-deployment system we would all have at our disposal?! I think launchpad is missing something like buildservice and buildservice is missing something like launchpad. Furthermore it would be nice if launchpad would not be so bzr-centric, but would also allow git to be directly supported.
[/wishful-thinking]

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)

I am in the middle of polishing cairo-clock a bit (bug-fixing, smooth animations, new themes, public repository, localization etc.) and need some help with translation. Here’s the german po file. What languages are needed? Well except for german and english there is nothing else yet. Any contributions should be send to macslow at gmail dot com. Please also state your full name and email for the credits!

Thanks in advance for your consideration!

EDIT: Already received translations for danish (da), finnish (fi), french (fr), italian (it), dutch (nl), polish (pl), portuguese (pt_PT), spanish (es), russian (ru), slovenian (sl), swedish (sv), turkish (tr), simplified chinese (zh_CN) and traditional chinese (zh_TW). Holy crap… thanks sofar everybody!

Sneak peak…

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

Recent hacking:
Always interesting to see what’s possible with “old” hardware (three years old intel i915 in this case), if you care to properly look into its capabilities and make use of it. Even if it’s hard and more work than on other platforms or GPUs. And there’s more in the pipe.

(click for full view)

Elsewhere:
Kristian Høgsberg and Dave Airlie at work doing mighty fine work with redirected direct rendering on free drivers.

So something like this…

(click for full view)

… which currently only works with nvidia and their proprietary driver, will finally be possible on a composited desktop with free drivers. Sweet and wicked times ahead!

I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to imagine what kind of “super-hideous” visuals we’ll be tossing around soon (er or later).

Die you nasty timeout-causing blog-entry http://macslow.thepimp.net/?p=125!

EDIT: Apparently that did not work.

This works now on nvidia-based systems and should also run on machines with i945/i950/i965-based graphics. Many color-conversions still missing though. GPU-Filters not hooked up yet.

Still not push-worthy is my messing around with emboss/blur/sobel-effects done via the GPU. While fun and easy to implement on nvidia, doing the same on the i915 is harder, due to its limits in the GL-driver. The lack of pbuffers or FBOs for the i915 ruins much of the fun. I use a workaround via glCopyTexImage2D(), but that’s nasty and is taxing the CPU/bus. What I gain in moving the filters onto the GPU, gets lost again by doing glCopyTexImage2D(). That’s needed for stacking filters on top of each other or separating the 2D-gaussian-blur in two 1D-blur-passes in order to speed up this heavy convolution filter. Furthermore a 11×11 gaussian kernel is the best I could shoe-horn on the i915 GPU.