Why Python will never be fast

Yesterday, when reading the Tracemonkey stuff, I realized this. The question “My code runs slow, how to make it go fast?” has two answers: “Improve the compiler/runtime to make it go fast.” and “Rewrite it in another language that can go fast.” As long as the second option is possible, there’s just no need to spend a huge amount of brain on the other option.

Besides, I’m back from my holidays where I’ve played with Flash 9 scripting in Swfdec. While it won’t make it for Swfdec 0.8, I’m positive 0.10 will play ABC-scripted Flash.

Syndicated 2008-08-24 12:45:20 from Swfblag

Holidays!

Yay, I’ll be on holidays on Madeira for the next 3 weeks. So if I don’t answer to email, now you know why. (I didn’t break the GNOME build on pourpose, I swear!)

To not leave you without code to break, I did releases of Swfdec: 0.6.8 (stable) and 0.7.4 (unstable) with corresponding swfdec-mozilla and swfdec-gnome releases.

Last but not least, I also uploaded the slides for the talk I gave at LugRadio Live and GUADEC. Of course it’s a Flash file. Navigate using space, left and right arrow. Mouse click (un)fullscreens. Flash is a pretty great presentation creation framework, especially because everybody can just watch the presentation in the browser the same way I did it.

Syndicated 2008-07-30 20:38:58 from Swfblag

If we’d do power management like that…

It’s sad when all we have to offer to sexually frustrated people is hate and social exclusion. I’ve started to wonder if the bad reputation of Open Source communities is more related to their unsympathetic behavior than to their photos.

Syndicated 2008-07-15 08:04:05 from Swfblag

conference stuff

I’m looking for accomodation at LugRadio Live, for 3 nights: arriving on Friday leaving on Monday. So if that sounds interesting to you, and you’re not scared of sharing a room with people that know too much about Flash, get in contact.

Also, it seemed that noone had yet set up a page for arrival times for GUADEC, like last year. So I did it. Please add yourself here.

Syndicated 2008-06-30 15:48:19 from Swfblag

0.7.2

I finally made it! Swfdec 0.7.2 is out in the wild. And now I don’t know what to blog about, because I haven’t used the stable series for such a long time that I don’t even know what the coolest new features are. I had to read the git log for half an hour to remind myself of what we’ve done in the last 3 months.

The coolest thing for me about Swfdec development was when Youtube released their new player and it just worked. But it also works in the stable release, so for end users that’s boring. What I also found cool was the time we invested into our (de)compilation framework that gets used internally to make Flash files easier to debug. We spent a lot of time on it and now have a vivi-rewrite tool, that can do all sorts of interesting things to Flash files (like remove randomness). And again, it’s a feature that I think is very cool, but it’s absolutely uninteresting for end users.

But there are some user-visible features. Swfdec does fullscreen properly now. That’s good for 3 things. First, it’s awesome to watch videos in fullscreen. When hey are fast enough. That’s the second thing: It’s easy to figure out if your X driver setup has Xrender properly accelerated. Because if you have a stuttering video, it isn’t. And last but not least I hope that these weird guys want to watch videos in fullscreen and therefore accelerate render properly.

We’ve also been working together with Mozilla and Gtk Webkit. So Swfdec is the only plugin on Linux now that is translucent and obeys stacking order.

So now, you can all stop asking what’s happening with Swfdec. We’re well on our way to our next stable release in September.

Syndicated 2008-06-25 18:39:00 from Swfblag