Older blog entries for gilbertt (starting at number 24)

Iain: it may help you to know that of the 80 people normally in #E, maybe 2 of them are Enlightenment developers. The flack you get is from users (and non-users) of the window manager. This is par for the course when it comes to IRC, from my experience, abusing people who don't know the facts make people feel big, or something.

There are maybe 4 people who hack on E and related projects full time, and about 6 more who do stuff now and again. Only a couple are in #E a lot. I idle in there all the time, but all serious #E related talk occurs in a vastly higher signal/noise developer channel.

The developers that do hack on E are genuinely busy working on it pretty much all the time, and so won't sit in #E answering questions about obsolete test software like EFM. We respond to bug reports and offers of help, and to any discussion involving nudity, goats or pants.

There is zero elitism on behalf of the developers, we are really genuinely busy trying to cut an awful lot of code. It's just the standard IRC bullshit you have to try and filter out IMO. There are a lot of people sitting on IRC in an awful lot of channels, waiting to look good by making someone else look bad. There's nothing special about #E in that respect.

What would be nice would be if those bitter folk would turn to the light and help us write the damn software! But I don't see it coming ;-)

Damn. Traditions can be pretty screwy. I was walking past a fireworks display today, and paused for a moment to watch a crowd of children and adults dancing and cheering as a man-sized dummy was burned at the stake. It chilled me a little. Then I realised I'd been doing the same thing for 20-odd years without a second thought. I wonder if half the people around that bonfire really knew what they were symbolising? I mean, not only is burning someone at the stake a pretty morbid thing to get excited about, it's also pretty nasty to be celebrating the horrid death of someone by such means for a couple of hundred years, no matter what they did to "deserve it".

Of course it could be just me. This crack pabs sold me is pretty nasty...

aaronl: 3 ghosts will be visiting you in the small hours to put a bat up your nightdress.

Now playing : Coldplay - Trouble.
Looks like I maybe got me a new job. Will know by the end of the week. Looks like a good 'un.
I'd say things were looking up, but then I don't have a good track record with that kind of prediction lately.

In an effort to put the evil lack-of-job related stress out of my mind, I coded for 17 hours straight today. I feel kinda fulfilled now, although I'm currently having trouble seeing. I got two complete apps written and a lot of hacking done on my long term projects. Here's what I ended up with:

scrot
scrot (SCReen shOT) is a commandline screen capture utility which uses imlib2. I wrote it from scratch as a handy alternative to ImageMagick's import command. It has the benefit of imlib2's dynamic image saver modules, meaning I support lots of image formats without much work. Plus I like the name ;-)

camE
camE (continuing the funky naming tradition) is a v4l webcam grabber, using (can you guess?) imlib2. This means you can label your cam image using antialiased truetype fonts and blend them onto the image with transparency if you like. Lots of other features, like ftp or scp uploading and the ability to run as a daemon forever (no X connection needed). It's pretty fun and you can see the results on my webcam page.

Geist
Geist now has font styles (antialiased truetype fonts with shadows, outlines, blurs etc), a font style editor, a selection rectangle, half-written polygon code, a faster wordwrapping algorithim, and a slightly more optimised renderer.

Feh
Feh got some long needed luvvin' and I fixed a coupla little buglets that had been around for a while.

e17
Got some work done on more of the backend libs we will need for Enlightenment's DR17 release. As some of you may know, this is a complete rewrite (see DR16's codebase for hints why ;-)) and so there is a lot to do. But using imlib2, evas and some of the other abstraction layers we are currently working on, e17 will be a wonderful thing. In maybe 2 years time ;-)

Anyway, I feel better for that. I put up snapshots of most of this stuff on my site, even some rpms (will make debs tomorrow) for people to check out. Now we have finally made a stable imlib2 release, I thought I may as well get some example apps out there for people to toy with.

Python
Yesterday I took a look at Python. I have to say, I kinda liked it. The OO stuff is quite nicely implemented, and no matter how much source code I read, it always seems unusually readable... Now that's a nice feature. Plus the XML and ODBC modules are really, really nice to use. I might play some more.

WAP
Continuing my experimental mood, I also wrote a WAP/WML interface to my website. You can view it at http://linuxbrit.co.uk/wap/ if you have one of those fancy phones. I don't actually have such a phone, so I have no idea if my WML is clean, or even renders, but it looks good from here. The big plus is that I set it up to automatically generate from the meta language I write my site in, so it's no extra work to maintain. Super ;-)

At some point soon I'll start freaking out about the job thing, but today for the first time I appreciated the extra time I had for Open Source. Just wish I could keep a roof over my head and continue coding :-) I guess we all do though?

As my eyesight blurs and fades, I think I'll head off to bed.

Trying to put my life back together. Picking up the pieces, dealing, etc.

For legal reasons I still can't really talk about the reasons behind our closure. I'm sure you can all make a good guess though, huh?

There is some light at end of the tunnel. Lots of people have gone out of their way to help me find a new job. I have had help from unexpected sources, which was flattering, to say the least.

A couple of slim chances for next week. Great jobs which I am unlikely to get, after that I have to get less fussy.

The resume is up to date, and out there. I guess I have to sit back and hope now. Maybe brush off the suit too ;-)

It's times like this I really resent all this real life stuff and want to just curl up in a corner and code. It is a shame that even corners cost a lot to maintain in London, and a corner without a roof is no fun in winter ;-)

8 Oct 2000 (updated 8 Oct 2000 at 19:15 UTC) »

The really scary thing about taking the plunge from a steady, dependable, stable career in a stiflingly large corporate environment into the dynamism, involvement and whirling pool of instability that is a small startup is what happens when it all goes horribly wrong and you end up in the shit.

There is nothing worse in the world than being given something better than you ever expected, realising it is exactly what you wanted, where you wanted to be, and suddenly having it all taken away.

Well, maybe there is, but it hasn't happened to me. Yet.

Fucking useless uselessness.

aaronl: That's nothing. I just forked wget because it links with xlib. Oh wait. It doesn't. Duh!

So anyone coming to apachecon next month? I'll be there, my company has a stand (between Sun and IBM) and I'll be there showing off some web clustering and video streaming etc. Should be a lot of fun.

Oh, I'm all moved in to my new place in London now. It's really nice. I ate out at Waggamamma the other night. Awesome Japanese food. Really cool place.

Gonna join Lonix next week, they tend to meet in a pub in SoHo - London rocks :-)

*sigh*

I am sending an infiltrator to steal RMS's crack.

That way at some point we could maybe just get back to writing (and sharing) code, instead of having to get involved in politics and legality every time we sit down at a keyboard.

*shrug* oh well. On with life. I'm moving house on Thursday, gonna be in London by the weekend. Coolness.

New job starts next Monday. Woah.

Well, now I know how complex polygons got their name =P

I'm currently enhancing the drawing routines in imlib2. I have already added line and rectangle clipping, and polygon drawing. Right now I'm doing polygon filling, then polygon clipping and image blend clipping. It's really quite a lot of fun, if somewhat mind-bending...

Still, I always wanted to learn how to do this stuff, so it's great to play with

Hrm. Thinking about it, I have to do text clipping too. That should be fun, with antialiased truetype fonts to content with =P

So I found myself a flat in London. Small, but right next to Tooting Broadway tube station, so handy for work/town. I start my new job in 10 days. Argh!

I have 2 weeks to finish this drawing code, as imlib2 is gonna see a release soon. What with moving etc, that actually gives me about 3 evenings to do all this.

On that basis, what the hell am I doing here, writing this drivel?

*Off hacking

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