I've been more or less under a rock for a while, trying to focus on getting stuff done. And, in fact, I have been getting quite a bit of stuff done.

For one, I've checked in a reasonable cut at the new libart intersector. This one is not only more robust, but quite a bit faster than the old one. There are still a few more bugs to wring out, but I'm confident - the concepts should support 100% robust intersection, even for the really nasty cases, even if the implementation currently has some flaws.

I've also integrated Bruce Q Hammond's aa rendering speedup, which keeps the steps list in sorted order as it renders a scanline, rather than just dumping the steps into an array and calling qsort later. Combined with the new improvements, this is at least a factor of two speed improvement. Now I get 6 tigers a second at 72 dpi on my 900MHz PIII laptop. When I started with libart, the tiger took about a second and a half.

I've also put out the 7.03 release of Ghostscript. This is a good one - lots of bugs fixed, and Jack's new automated regression testing should help us keep it that way.

I just bought a new server for Ghostscript and put it up in colocation at transbay.net yesterday. It's a 1.7G P4 with a gig of RDRAM. Performance is better than I expected - a full Ghostscript compile is about 128s.

Now that I've put out a bunch of fires, I'm going to spend some serious time finishing my thesis. That's been on hold for too long.