Clutter 3D Effects

Been experimenting with some clutter effects recently, as mallum mentioned on the clutter blog. One of many cool new features in clutter 0.7 (trunk) is the new cogl drawing API. It makes messing with textures, curves and so on dead simple. After porting tf's excellent 'odo' demo to the new API (which mostly involved cutting out huge wads of code) and adding a few new features (face culling (with software fall-back), h/vflip, backface-texture, shading), I wrote a few new demos. Along with Neil's abuse, hopefully we'll kill this whole '2.5d canvas' nonsense once and for all :)


Click to download video

Of course, all of this is available in the clutter repository, under the trunk/toys/odo directory.

Joined Twitter

Hopped on the bandwagon, twitter username: cwiiis.

Guadec approaching

As Guadec approaches, I find myself preparing space in my drawers for whatever awesome new T-Shirts my inner student and I can pick up. I'm sure everyone appreciates these - I know I do, I wear them to work and the gym all the time, sometimes even going out (no one knows what 'GNOME' is, people occasionally mistake it for some trendy new clothing brand).

This all leaves me wondering though, shirts are definitely fully exploited... But what about... Trousers? I'm terrible at buying clothes, every time I go out to buy something, I always end up coming back with T-shirts, and possibly some weird gadgety thing or a new pair of shoes or something along those lines... But for some reason, rarely trousers. Just think how awesome GNOME/guadec trousers would be! This seems to be a missed opportunity, is it just me?

Measure Tool

Meant to stick it online a little while ago. The other week, I wrote a small tool to help with quickly determining screen measurements (in pixels). Handy if you're writing graphical apps and you want to see if your allocations are working correctly, and that sort of thing. I present; Measure Tool 1.0:

FOSS rules

I decided to buy an ebook reader recently as there's a lot of manga I want to catch up on and after borrowing mallum's Sony Librie for a while, I've found that it's a great format for reading comics. Brilliant to de-stress while things are compiling. Anyway, Linux tools for such devices seem to be woefully lacking, so I figured it couldn't be that hard to write my own (for my own particular needs) - and thanks to FOSS, it really wasn't :)

Thanks to The GIMP's scripting engine, I have a script that can transform images into the required format; thanks to bash, I have a shell script that can get all the images to the script; and thanks to cairo, it was incredibly easy to write an app that turns a load of PNGs into a PDF. Source for all can be found here - handy if you have a Sony Reader/Librie or an Irex Iliad or something along those lines. Probably less useful for Kindle users..?

Good news everybody!

It's now ok to read the SWF spec and create an independent SWF decoder? I don't know if there are any catches here, but taking this at face value, that's great, right?

Why IE7 feels faster than both WebKit and Gecko

Try doing anything with this page in the foreground. This sort of page isn't entirely uncommon and makes both Gecko and WebKit completely unusable on my monster of a machine. On the other hand, IE7 handles this fine and the interface remains responsive. Acid 3.0 is all well and good, but whatever it is that makes this page (and pretty much any page featuring a static background and/or semi-transparency) slow to crawl really ought to be fixed...

Microsoft, taking the initiative once again

As those who've read my past blog posts may have ascertained, I love Windows Vista. It trumps Gnome (and KDE of course, but that's a given) in just about every way, and once again, Microsoft are taking the initiative in what must be one of the best examples of viral marketing ever:


YouTube link

Why hasn't the free/open-source movement copied this? We've copied just about everything else, I think we'd see much greater success if we concentrated on marketing too. This video is a great example of why Microsoft are winning the OS war.

History meme

Well, everyone else is doing it... I only installed a week or two ago, so this probably doesn't say much (or maybe it does?):

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
74 make
60 ls
59 sudo
47 cd
33 svn
31 [censored]
30 git
23 vim
14 rm
13 grep

My work-pattern is to do my coding in anjuta (with the odd bits here and there in vim) and to have a terminal open that I build in, so that explains the high instance of 'make'... Not sure about the rest of it - sudo probably because I've had to edit a lot of config files/install a lot of packages... Interesting that for almost everyone else, 'cd' comes above 'ls'...

Hey jimmac

Portal does work under wine. Also, your blog comments are broken.