GNUstep Cairo backend

After some effort, I finally managed to find a solution to the annoying scrolling bug in the Cairo backend... There's still some little graphic glitches appearing sometimes -- it looks like some clipping/refresh issues -- but overall it's nearly there :)

For the intrepid, the code is committed on the gnustep trunk. The above screenshot shows the Etoile desktop (with the new compositing manager) and the work-in-progress Narcissus theme, running with the Cairo backend.

AlpenStep '07

I was at AlpenStep this weekend, you can check some pictures.

It was a very cool event, thanks in particular to gerold's organisation. The location, in a small swiss village, was really nice -- I can say that some fresh air after beeing in london is good !

It was also a small-scale event -- only 7 persons (though gurkan came but left saturday before lunch :-/), which made it a very intensive event as well: lots of discussion, lots of coding too. Fred Kiefer was probably the busiest person in the room, as everybody wanted to ask him questions/advices... ;-)

Riccardo Mottola gave a nice GAP demonstration, and during the weekend he and Nikolaus Schaller were busy working on SimpleWebKit:

Nikolaus also made a cool presentation of QuantumSTEP running on the OpenMoko platform :)

The OpenMoko device is actually fairly nice, very high-res screen, and some interesting hardware to tinker with.

Quentin was working on ContainerKit for Etoile, a very interesting way of specifying UI using a generic data model (so you can switch representations on the fly for instance), also allowing very nice introspection features with inspectors generated on the fly. I tried to convaince him to introduce some Magritte-like magic, i.e. adding metadatas to your model...

Quentin and I also made a presention of Etoile, describing the various components/frameworks/applications, and how everything is supposed to fit...

Finally, I can only be admirative of gerold organisation skills... to the point were he got us a GNUstep cake:

Which was delicious !

In short, looking forward for AlpenStep'08 ! (and Fosdem'08 before...)

Cairo/GNUstep

I was at AlpenStep this weekend (photos will follow..) which was quite cool. I teamed with Fred Kiefer (the GNUstep gui maintainer) to try to iron out some of the quirks of the Cairo backend. The main problem (recopy of surfaces is not always done well, which impact scrolling) is still here, although we improved some things, and it looks now like it should be solvable with a bit more work. We also added 32 bit surface support when choosing x11 visuals : a cool side-effect is that you can then use directly the alpha channel on the window :) and thus draw semi-transparent windows.

David will like that ;-) -- he's working at the moment on Etoile's compositing manager...

In the above screenshot, I simply fill the view with NSCompositeClear (so it's just transparent), and then composite an image on it, with 0.8 transparency. You can then see that parts of the window are fully solid, while some are completely transparent, and others partially transparent.

Et merde.

On est pas sorti de l'auberge maintenant. Ca donne pas envie de revenir en france en tout cas... :-/


Resultats de l'election presidentielle

Hard Disk Crash

...You know when people tell you to do backups ? Feeling guilty ? :-)

Well, most of my data is usually backed up, but... even so, there's still a lag usually, particularly for "not-so-important data", etc. Add to this usual mix some data put away "temporarily" from my main computer... and that's when my LaCie 250Gb external drive choose to die. Around 200Gb of data lost, among them some that I could get back with various difficulty somewhere else, eg on some dvd or other computers (the LaCie *was* the main/more used backup plan), and some truly lost (yes, this "temporarily moved" data, yes, it's you I'm talking about), or some data recently copied only on the LaCie... Of course this drive is around 3 years old, and I actually had some thoughts recently of doing a proper backup of everything there was on it, for convenience, and for fear of such an accident. Of course too, I ended up way too busy to actually do it...

Still, a bit of luck: there was no scratching noise, in fact, there wasn't any noise at all: the disk just didn't start, which meant that it was more likely an electronic fault than a mechanical one. Removing the hdd from the LaCie enclosure and plugging it directly on a computer didn't do anything either (so it sadly wasn't the LaCie controller board). So that left us with the actual hdd electronic board... I then looked on the web for an hdd from the same brand and the same model -- and found a cheap one from an online reseller. After receiving it, I checked it -- yes, it was the same model, yes, the same year, yes the same firmware... ah. No. not the same firmware ! well, still, only two months separated those drives, so I crossed my fingers and started removing the controlling board of the "new" drive to swap it with the one on my crashed drive. Never having done that, I wasn't quite sure what to expect :-) but it's in fact really straightforward (you just need the right kind of screwdrivers -- Torx). The only difficulty is in finding a control board that is compatible with your hdd!

To cut the story short, the "patched" drive started happily and worked fine, so I passed the day swapping and burning dvd of the drive's content ;-)

One thing for sure is that I will seriously think of building a proper backup solution (ie, automated/redundant) for hosting "home" data (photos, videos, music...) asap... I was lucky to save this drive ! these kind of content is annoying as they quickly take so much space, yet (for at least some of them) they are invaluable...

NeXT videos & WebObjects

I found these two videos, the first one showing Steve Jobs demo NeXTstep 2.0, the NeXTCube 040 + Dimension, the slab, DBKit, in 1990.. it's always surprising to see how far ahead NeXT was, or reversely, how slowly did we progress on the software side, while the hardware we have now is insanely more powerful...

The second one shows again Steve Jobs, five years later. NeXT stations didn't sell, their state-of-the-art factory closed, they stopped producing hardware, and reconverted as a software only company. The tone of the talk seems to reflect those disappointment, with Steve trying to be excited about Distributed OLE and Portable Distributed Object (PDO), but you can feel it's not really anymore about changing the world... and yet, when analysing the state of the WWW and its future, Steve is absolutely dead on, and he then goes on to demo a beta version of WebObjects, which in the end will save the company (until it took over Apple). WebObjects was an absolutely amazing tech, and still is. The move to a J2EE implementation instead of the ObjC implementation, the availability of other solutions, and its curious downplay by Apple (while they use it for their store, they aren't exactly pushing it on the market, although they dramatically cut the price from hundred thousands of dollars to $500, to finally make it free). WebObjects had a huge impact on current "web application servers", many of them openly inspired by it. My preferred one is Seaside, a fantastic Smalltalk framework... for a great example of what you can do with Seaside, try dabbledb :-)

Note that there's two free software implementations of WebObjects in Objective-C, GNUstepWeb and NGObjWeb (part of SOPE, the web application framework used by Opengroupware.org).