So. 4 weeks until I start my new job :-) I'm starting to get pretty nervous, but it's gonna be great.

For those who don't know yet, I'm gonna be Senior Consultant at ID-Pro, a UK startup of the solid German parent company.

Pretty exciting to be involved in something from the beginning, but nice to know there's a stable parent company behind it...

Currently looking for a flat in London. Eeesh. Scarce and expensive... I'll get there in the end, but I don't know if I'll sort something out in time.

Handed in my notice at my current job last week. Pretty tearful moment actually... I won't miss the work, but I'll miss the people. Lots. Especially the totally cute French chick I'd always hoped to end up with...

So geist (my new project) is coming along nicely. There are text, image and rectangle objects right now, all of which can be resized/dragged around and layered. The partial rendering engine is done, and pretty fast, even without any optimisation, so I'm pleased about that :-)

Today I wrote some code for saving documents. I've chosen XML as the file format. It's the right kind of structured hierarcial format for the needs of geist. Plus it's not binary, so humans can grok it and manipulate if necessary. The really cool thing about XML as a file format is that older geist versions will be able to load documents from newer versions, just by ignoring the stuff they can't grok.

The other reason I guess is that libXML is a cinch to use, and nice and fast and stable. It avoids all the nasty endianness and compatibility issues I would have had creating a binary format. Plus I loathe binary formats ;-)

Anyway the TODO list for geist is as long as my arm, and I still haven't put up a page for it or released an up-to-date snapshot. I should stop yip-yapping and go get on with it ;-)

If anyone knows anyone who's also starting at ID-Pro soon, put them in touch with me, as I'd love to meet 'em.