digital home of MacSlow

The 61 is a nice site for discovering and listening to music. Sure I enjoy last.fm from time to time, but sofar I like the presentation and recommendations of 60 1 better. Fits my taste better.

If you like electronic music, be sure to check out these tracks:

• “Misson Complete” by Kap10Kurt
• “Revolte At 22H10″ by Danger
• “In The Right Path” by Tektoog

The first alpha version of blender 2.50 (what will become blender 2.60 once final) is officially out. It is being stress-tested by their user-community and by the artists working on “Sintel” (the newest installment of the OpenMovie-series by the blender foundation).

I’m really looking forward to this new short, even more than I anticipated the last two ones. Because this time around I, or rather the martial-arts team I’m a member of (banGang), is going to help out the creative minds behind “Sintel” with fighting, acrobatics, stunts and reference footage.

I’m leaving for Texas, USA soon. Me being a German living in - guess - Germany, causes the need to apply for the US “Visa Waiver Program” using https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov (thanks again to Otto for reminding me *g*) these days. While clicking through and filling out the forms of the electronic variant of that “green sheet of paper” (the one you used to have to fill out on the plane prior to landing on US soil) I was greeted by this notice…

It’s almost 2010! Have the people, who implemented that web-interface, ever heard of Unicode or do they expect international travelers to not use anything but ASCII to supply their (usually non-english) names, which carry the high probability with them to not use ASCII characters only? For me it’s just the ü in my surname. I wonder what people with funkier names do, when they have to diverge from the correct name-spelling to something this ESTA-system accepts. Once they succeed there, I bet they have a hard time trying to convince the staff at customs, that they are really themselves, because the spelling of their name on the passport doesn’t even remotely match the spelling in the visa-waiver-form.

I once almost wasn’t let aboard a plane in Germany, because the travel-agency booked my flight on “Mueller”, but my passport says “Müller”. Is all that the legacy-fault of Cobol?

… so… I wrote my first particle-system ever. It does not look photorealistic - by far not *g* - but implementing something like that is great fun! You see a cluster of 5000 particles in the screencasts below. Right now I’ve two emitters (a “singularity” one and a rectangle one) with a gravity force-field being applied to the particles. WASD/Quake-like camera-navigation I implemented too, so one can “walk around”. From here numerous things could be added: wind, general turbulence, attraction-/repulsion-forces between particles, collision-detection with obstacles… the visualization could be improved with motion-blur, lighting, shadows etc. Rendering- and simulation-loop are coupled and run at 60 Hz. Screencasts were recorded with 30 Hz.

Today is the day, the day of the Karmic Koala aka Ubuntu 9.10. Get it here…

High-5 to everybody in GNOME, KDE, Xorg, Ubuntu and Canonical! Now where is that Lucid Lynx running around?

Someone not so familiar yet with living in the OpenSource realms asked me why we constantly push for free drivers (graphics drivers in particular) as much as we can. Apart from “with enough eyes all bugs are shallow” (famous quote from L. Torvalds) and making the user more independent from a hardware vendors fate, protection from cheating is another good reason for our attitude. In the referenced article it is demonstrated how a vendor does benchmark-specific optimizations to obtain better results in those and thus positively, but incorrectly, manipulates review-results for their product. Within the world of OpenSource Xorg/DRI-drivers this cannot happen. So to speak xorg-video-ati/intel/nouveau are more honest towards the user than fglrx and nvidia-glx (speaking in Debian/Ubuntu package-name terms here) are. In all fairness I want to mention that fglrx and nvidia-glx provide more complete and robust support for OpenGL and its extensions, when compared to the OpenSource counterparts. Still, looking at my own experience with them, I like the way xorg-video-intel and xorg-video-ati are going in recent times.

Fixed the throbbing animation for over- and undershooting of the value indicator in notify-osd:

How cool is that?! How do you rehearse and time something of this scale? This even tops flashmob stuff like this imo.

This is not how to be cool or make people feel good *g*

(all those are safe for work)

Big, big, big thumbs up to the Xorg/Mesa-developer crowd and the hackers behind the intel-driver for OpenGL 2.x support (especially FBOs and GLSL)! Also big props need to go to Bryce Harrington and Alberto Milone for integrating this and pulling in all the needed bits and bytes into Ubuntu! It’s one thing to see stuff landing on f.d.o git, but only when it reaches “mere mortals” in the form of repository-updates it’s truly there (read: where the end-user “sees and feels” it).

“Yeah, yeah nice talking, Mirco. But what’s in it for me?”

Unless you’re not into developing OpenGL-based code yourself, but want to see direct results of this new feature-slickness in a full FOSS-GL stack, I’ve something for you… a screencast of course (make sure to download it to disk and play it back from there):

So there you have it. Under current Karmic Koala you can now enable the gaussian-based (read: good looking) blur. While that’s nice and dandy, this by itself does not mean much in terms of new features or productivity-enhancing applications. But it’s another important step towards OpenGL-feature-parity with the proprietary GL-drivers. BTW, what works here with my i965, should also work with ATIs R500-class GPUs under the free driver afaik. I think the free intel- and radeon/ati-driver are about at the same level of implemented features for i965 and R500. Not sure though about the R600 and R700. I guess they are a bit behind still.

Note: In this screencast you see two personal tweaks I maintain and usually carry around (read: reapply them on updates). That is to say, genie-look for the magic-lamp effect of compiz animation-plugin (gee, what a mouth-full *g*) and use of the blur-hint for compiz’ blur-plugin in libgksu.

If you like to try them yourself you can grab them for current Karmic Koala (upcoming Ubuntu 9.10) from my PPA here. Note that I do not always update these in my PPA once either libgksu or compiz-fusion-plugins-main got updated via normally published updates from the repository.

The pedantic reader now might ask, “Why don’t you push your patches to the relevant packages (or upstreams) proper?”. Regarding the blur-hint in libgksu the answer is, that my patch hardly would pass update-policy and this visual tweak is not part of Ubuntu’s visual features. Also we’re well past feature freeze. For the upstream-part of the answer is: Isn’t libgksu meant to be replaced by something else soon? So why bother shortly before the switch. Please correct me if I’m wrong here. For the patch to compiz-fusion-plugins-main the (upstream) answer is: The genie-look of the magic-lamp effect once was part of upstream, but was removed due to fear of some patent-issues. Still, I like the genie-look best, that’s why I “resurrected” this bit.

Major user-visible changes are the new vertically centered positioning of bubbles, the initial fade-prevention (if bubble opens with mouse-pointer over it), tweaked fade-out opacity and updated body-text height.

ChangeLog:

• updated sizing-factor of body-text height to be 0.9 EMs (of system-wide setting) according to body-text spec
• implemented fade-prevention when bubble is opened while mouse-pointer is over it/within proximity-fade area
• fade-out value now set to 40% as stated in interaction spec
• added support for automake-1.11’s slient output
• added valgrind make-rule
• experiment with centering bubbles vertically, sync. bubble always goes above center-line, async. one always below it
• ensure GErrors are correctly freed