Woohoo! 3Dwm 0.3.0 has been released. Granted, this was Wednesday last week, but the rest of the week was too hectic for me to be able to get a diary entry in somewhere. I'm already preparing for 0.3.1, which will be a bugfix release and will remedy some of the minor problems that have appeared since 0.3.0 hit the street.

In totally unrelated news, my girlfriend Johanna has received an Au Pair position in Milan, Italy, and will be gone for nine months. This is both good and bad news: good, since this is what she has been wanting to do for some time now, and I'll get to visit Italy for the first time ever; bad, since this means that I won't get to see her that often and I am going to miss her like crazy. Oh well.

Hacking away at 3Dwm almost feverishly now, I am just an hour or so away from release. Writing this as the system is compiling (which is taking more and more time). Everything is ready for the new release, including updated documentation, translations of most of the vital documents, some new autoconf checks, and, of course, the source itself. This is going to be a major release. Lots of stuff has been done since the last one in the beginning of June.

Other cool and important stuff is the new 3Dwm tutorial that I put together recently, and the interview that just came up on LinuxPower.

Throat a bit sore, nose a bit runny, thesis on schedule. Wait, I just realized that my diary entries tend to be a bit arrogant in tone. I'd better cut down on this high-and-mighty attitude that seems to plague some many people around here; better to walk softly and carry a big stick. :)

So, on with the updates: Tying together many parts of the 3Dwm source code in preparation for the 0.3.0 release I will be putting out shortly. I am currently looking at how to design the configuration file stuff for the display server, and XML is rather high on the list. We are also looking at texture coordinate generation and ways of doing it within the existing framework of the scene graph. Still routine stuff, but it will be nice to get a new release out the door soon(ish).

A quick update between compiles: CSG seems to be working (as can also be witnessed here, here, and here). I had just enough time to stop and congratulate myself before continuing. I need to incorporate all this cleanly under a nice and elegant interface and hide all the nasty implementation details from the client programmer.

Must. Finish. Thesis.

Out.

Away from my current CSG implementation for a quick breather. This stuff is getting pretty complex, and I'm not sure whether my solution is very efficient and/or nicely designed. My approach to software design these days is very much based on my gut feeling as opposed to sitting down for hours with UML diagrams and design guidelines before doing anything. And this is after four years of university CS training! That only proves that design is a very individual process. I prefer to sketch my designs in code in something akin to XP, while others want (need to?) work it all out on paper before they implement something.

It's funny how design patterns change your life. Not that I didn't use them even before they had a name (of course I did), but I can't for the life of me remember how I used to think about stuff like trees, traversals and factory functions and so on. Actually, by now, I'm having a hard time remembering how I used to traverse trees before visitors, decorators and composites came along!

Ahh, well, enough with this, now it's time to go back and pick up where I left off with this CSG code.