Week 1

Hi, all!

I was in Barcelona at UDS last week, so I didn’t get that much work done, but I also started early so as to get something done.

So far:

* I started (and got a good ways on) a much-cleaner and more-modern-seed rewrite of Lights Off. There’s all kinds of awesome brokenness (mostly a result of airport coding practices) so I wouldn’t suggest installing it at the moment.
(http://jayne.hortont.com/git/cgit.cgi/lightsoff3.git/)
(http://hortont.com/files/lo3.png)

* I created a PPA for those of us working on GNOME Games to publish our work; I’m going to get introspection and Clutter and seed and whatever you guys need in there shortly, and once all that is working, I’m going to merge all of the GSoC GNOME Games branches, build a copy, and push it to the PPA (and wash, rinse, repeat, at least once a week). (if anyone has working debian packaging for the as-yet-unreleased gobject-introspection-0.6.3, let me know, I’ve been fighting with it all morning)
(https://launchpad.net/~gnome-games-experimental/+archive/ppa)

* I worked with racarr to get seed-0.8 out the door while at UDS, which includes an important GC-related fix that affected ClutterAnimations, so we reduced leakage (or hacky code to avoid leakage) in all of the seed games.
(http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/seed/0.8/)

* I blogged about the Lights Off tiles (just for fun!), and got about 1000 votes, choosing the new ones 4:1 (not even remotely surprising).
(http://www.hortont.com/blog/2009/05/lights-off-tiles/)

Week 2

I spent a good part of the last five days (my last status report was late, so the duration between these two is less than it ought to be; do let me know if Sunday night is the wrong time for these!) working on various things:

* I created a branch of GNOME Games for myself (gsoc-seed-games) and imported the rewrite of Lights Off from last week into it.

* I finished populating the PPA that I mentioned that I created in the previous cycle. It has fresh-from-Git versions of webkit, seed, opengl-glib, gobject-introspection, gir-repository, gnome-js-common, clutter, and clutter-gtk as well as a copy of gnome-games which includes my branch, Guillaume’s branch, and Zhang’s branch (so, as far as I know, all of the GNOME Games GSoC Goodness).

* I talked to both Guillaume and Zhang to fix tiny packaging problems in their branches in order to achieve the above.

* I spent the better part of an entire day deep inside the Clutter source, trying to determine the source of a bug; I eventually found the _source_ of the bug (#1631), but do not have a proper patch; the PPA includes a patch (which is also in the seed repo, in the patches subdir) that removes the broken optimization, but I’m not sure how to appropriately /fix/ it… in any case, this means that the most significant animation bugs are fixed.

* I cannot wait until Clutter-1.0’s API stability. There was lots of updating Lights Off to the changes caused by the merge of the integration-1.0 branch into head, this week, too…

All in all, a week of bugs and packaging, and not a whole lot of awesome new code… but these are important things! I also made a very overview-y next-steps-to-do list at Thomas’ request:

1) Get libgames-support installed + building gir/typelib.

2) Consume libgames-support inside LO so I get game-related stock items and stuff, finish LO UI.

3) Move LO + Same into gnome-games git. (this is half done, now)

4) UI for Same (consuming libgames-support stuff); high-scores, preferences (?)

5) Mines!

Week 3

Hi, again!

This is going to be a terse status report, as I’m currently running around rather busy…

This week, I:

* got libgames-support installing into prefix/share/gnome-games-common (commondatadir)

* got libgames-support build generating introspection data

* consumed the aforementioned introspection data in Lights Off, and started (about halfway) to consume it (for high scores) in Same

Next, I want to:

* move Same into my branch of gnome-games, and get it building as an option (alongside the C version)

* figure out what to do about ggz introspection data

* finish high scores code in Same, menu, etc.

Week 4

Another week! Another short, last-minute status update.

* Fixed a longstanding bug (#579008) in gobject-introspection, which was requiring us to carry around a patch to Clutter that would /never/ get applied (it removed annotations to work around the bug). Hasn’t been committed yet, but since it ended up only being a single line (once I realized what was going wrong), I’m sure it will be soon. Also, filed a bug (#1653) against Clutter to *add* some necessary annotations once this gets fixed…

* Worked a bit on getting the SVN version of GGZ to generate its own introspection data. This is proving to be slightly annoying, because GGZ is split into numerous parts, and I’m having awesome crashes and stuff…

* Moved Same (the JS version) into gnome-games repo, get it building properly (right now, it installs beside the real version, should become a switch at some point).

* Same (when it was still in the Seed repo) has a C version that I’m using to figure out some oddities with Seed+Clutter, and both that and the JS version work with Clutter head now.

Stuff in the gnome-games repo hasn’t been pushed yet (just got home from NY, fighting with Git, I hate losing the ability to rewrite history, etc.; it’ll all be up by tomorrow).

Week 5

* Made a to-do list to keep up to date (http://hortont.com/gsoc-seed-games-todo.html) Right now, it only has stuff that I could think of off the top of my head this morning, but it’s already a relief to no longer need to keep such things in my head. Anyway, I’ll continue updating it and checking things off from here on out.

* Cleaned up animation and events and stuff in Same, which fixes some strange flickering when you move the mouse over the window, and makes most of the animation smooth again (update to match the fact that Seed handles animation memory now, too). This is incomplete, still, there’s a little left to be done.

* Wrote a tiny ‘gettext’ C module for Seed, so that we can _(”asdf”) from JS. I still have no way to scan JS files (xgettext in C mode pulls out all of the strings for some reason), but my to-do list links to a promising project (I don’t know what licensing problems would be involved in utilizing a MIT-licensed project to do this, though…) that scans JS for gettext calls.

* Added an About dialog to Lights Off, after getting gettext working as above.

* Finished the LO menu (except for “Help”), fixed keyboard accelerators.

* Fixed the blue corruption around the LED display, and make drawing much more logical and efficient (not sure what I was thinking making dozens of ClutterCairoTextures)…

* Theme names are pretty printed now, not just the name of their directory.

* Keyboard-based play (use the arrow keys and enter) – move around a small glowing dot, and play without the mouse. It’s not fun, but I saw it somewhere else — Same, maybe? So it seemed like a good thing to have. Accessibility in games? I’m not sure.

* GConf schema for LO prefs! Whoops; this one should have happened a long time ago.

* Got most of the PPA updated. However, for some reason, gnome-games refuses to build on non-x86 architectures. If anyone wants to help me, please do

Anyway, LO is almost done (needs “Help” and various bits of cleanup, but it’s mostly happy)… Same isn’t far behind.

So, this week, I went ahead and created the gnome-games-experimental PPA. It currently contains all of the dependencies for my branch of Gnome Games (including WebKit, seed, gobject-introspection, and Clutter), as well as a build of Gnome Games itself. This build includes three branches:

gsoc-seed-games – my ports of Same Gnome and Mines to Clutter+Seed, and a new game, Lights Off

gnibbles-clutter – Guillaume Beland’s port of Gnibbles to the Clutter canvas

sudoku-tube – Zhang Sen’s implementation of joint Sudoku games over Telepathy tubes

Keep in mind that we’ve only been coding for a week and a half, so if you go ahead and try out the PPA today, expect to see very little working, and within what works, lots of horribleness (I personally know of numerous gigantic animation bugs in Lights Off that you’ll get to experience!). However, if you do decide to jump onto the cutting edge, you can feel awesome about yourself for helping us out, and you’ll also get to play with the finished products long before anyone else.

I plan to update the packages in this PPA once a week at the minimum; you’re welcome to use it (please, use it!) and let me know how it goes… I’m new to packaging things (relatively; I packaged bits for Seed before, but that never went well), and I’m probably doing it slightly (or totally) incorrectly. Let me know, and I promise I’ll fix it!

It seems to install properly against a fresh Jaunty install (just add the repository, upgrade gnome-games, and watch as the dependency list explodes in your face; most of those won’t end up actually being dependencies of Gnome Games, it’s gir-repository’s fault…); Karmic builds will be ready soon. I make no promises about stability or about these packages not screwing up your machine (especially things that use WebKit)… but if you have trouble, again, please let me know!

Say what?!

On Saturday, just after 10PM, Delta flight 6372 from JFK to BTV landed on the tarmac in Burlington, and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief! I was finally home, after my first solo trip, my first trip across the Atlantic, and my first UDS.

I was in Barcelona attending the Ubuntu Developer Summit for the next release, Karmic Koala (that’s 9.10, for those of you counting)… talking (mostly listening, actually) about GNOME, fast boot, X, mobile stuff (Android and Moblin), NM, prettiness, and who knows what else! I met lots of awesome people, saw lots of awesome sights and ate lots of awesome food (sometimes). I don’t think it’s possible to properly describe the last week, so I’m just going to write bulleted bits to the best of my ability, separated into UDS-things and Barcelona-things.

UDS

• Scott/Mark want boot in 10/12/15 seconds on a Mini 9.
• It’s not clear if all of gnome-games is going to be in main (partially my fault; oops).
• Ekiga isn’t going to be in main anymore, but WebKit will!
• GDM Face Browser? Maybe! (just like every year) That would mean Clutter in main, too.

• Non-KMS systems and wake-from-hibernate lose bootsplash.
• “OS switcher” during boot and GDM.
• Running a demo (Moblin) on alpha hardware is not a good idea, but it looked shiny anyway.
• KMS by default on Intel and ATI. Damn NVidia. (nouveau KMS maybe someday)
• Canonical has a design team; they all seemed very cool!
• Someone (design team?) wants to have a theme that has both dark and light bits which applications can request.
• Ryan wants windows to be able to display whether they have escalated privileges or not (PolicyKit).
• Client-side window decorations!! Also, discussions about what happens if you draw to (0, 0) now, and how to solve that…
• Some talk about putting Wayland between X and the video card, mostly for fast-user-switching and the like. Probably not Karmic? I really just want a system where Wayland is easy to install…
• 10.04 or 10.10 is going to be LTS, so we can’t expect to change anything drastically after Karmic and before then… so this release is probably going to be very experimental..
• Compiz, gnome-panel, and nautilus (was it nautilus?) are the big problems with GNOME startup. Has anyone tried anything more intelligent and useful than printf? DTrace? If not, I’ll do it, later this week…

• gobject-introspection is going to be packaged; I don’t remember exactly what we decided on but it was mostly “make upstream get typelib generation out of gir-repository and into projects themselves”.
• I started a Seed+Clutter+Cairo+DBus nm-applet mockup based off of a blog post about NM 0.8 which I can’t find right now… just for fun!
• Got lots of work done on LO3 in the airports and stuff.

Barcelona

• The region around the airport is slightly frightening compared to the rest of the city; I was a little uneasy until I got off the metro at Zona Universitària. The fact that I’d just been dumped somewhere where it was really hard to understand everyone (even with 4 useless years of Spanish) certainly didn’t help any either.
• The power is a lie. You need the grounded plug or it doesn’t work, unless you’re in the rooms (not the lobby) of the Hotel Rey Juan Carlos. The Palau and my hotel both require the big plug, somehow. This is a problem; a brand new 15″ MBP battery only lasts 3-4 hours in a fresh install of Karmic.
• There’s a train to Valencia about 2 minutes before the train to the airport, from the same platform. Far too tempting…
• Universitat de Barcelona students are significantly more kind and helpful than the average RPI student.
• It’s a poor choice to schedule a conference during what is practically a national holiday (the Barça vs. Manchester United soccer game). The city was insane that night and the night after…

• Parc Güell is beautiful and crazy; Gaudi must have been insane, but that makes it all the more worth a trip.
• Apparently carrying around a DSLR suggests to people that you’re qualified to use their strange point-’n-shoots; I took quite a few pictures for other people while wandering around the Parc.

• Sagrada Família is actually still under active construction (I didn’t believe it until I got there)… going to finish in 2026!? But it’s one of the most ridiculously complex and beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen…
• It’s really hard to find Casa Batlló (I failed).
• The Mediterranean is pretty much the same as any other harbor-bearing sea, at least from the Paral•lel region. The sunset from down there is really nice, though!

• There are lots of street musicians, especially around the touristy parts, like Parc Güell. A good number of them were pretty good; then there were these subset who make the strangest noises with their mouths… they sound like irritating birds or something
• The whole philosophy of tapas seems like a much better way to do dinner than what we do here in the States. I much enjoyed the various tapas bars, especially the night of the game, out with the GNOMEites.

I probably have a lot more things to say, but I can’t keep writing in this post! Too many words! I’ll probably tell more stories as the days go on or something…

Transportation

I walked a lot more than I usually do during the trip; I also rode the metro to many different places around the city. I totaled the distances of the walking and public-transit parts of my trip with Google Earth last night (approximations, of course), and discovered that I’d walked about 41 km (26 miles), and ridden (on the ubiquitous trams and metro) somewhere in the vicinity of 101 km (63 miles). I took notes while I was measuring, too, detailing the trips of each day to the best of my ability.

Anyway; the Lights Off tiles from the video are from six months ago, and were made in a matter of minutes in Inkscape, designed to look as much like the physical copy of the game as I could achieve (I am not an artist). Robb has since been trying to convince me to try again, suggesting that they might not be the most Gnome-y tiles in the world. I decided to grab the nicer, Tango-colored tiles I made for my Seed port of Same Gnome, create a black tile, and see how that looked (redesigning most of the rest of the somewhat-minimal UI in the process)…

In any case, I’m not sure what to use! I’m pretty sure I’m going to have a few swappable themes, but I don’t know what to use as the default… or even if either of these were the best we can do. In the meantime, I figured I’d let you guys vote between the two, and if you have any ideas for improvement (or, even better, SVGs!), send me a note!

Newer style is on the left, the originals (from January) are on the right. Click away (your last vote is the one that counts, and voting is immediate when you click the link)!

P.S. There’s Seed-y, Cluttery, shiny stuff coming soon, hopefully! Then, Barcelona!

I started out as a lurker in this community almost a decade ago, when I was deciding what DE to use on my hand-me-down 100MHz IBM desktop my parents got me so I’d stop breaking their computer by installing a different distro every week. I was still in elementary school at the time, so I was (reasonably) encouraged to not participate in the community for privacy and maturity reasons, and eventually I drifted off to OS X for a few years.

Over the course of the last two years, however, Robb has dragged me to a FOSSCamp and a GNOME Summit Boston (and, we’re going to UDS Barcelona, too!), and I’ve been quite reintroduced to the community. Being off at University (I’m at RPI, studying Computer Science) means I can participate all I want.

Anyway… Robb, Matt (another friend of ours from RPI), and I are the developers of Seed, which many of you have probably heard of (if not, try it out!). I’m using Seed this summer in order to port Mines to Clutter, as well as to complete my port of Same Gnome, and the new game, Lights Off, both of which I wrote during the development of Seed as examples.

I have a feeling that I have a good bit more time in the summer than is required to finish and polish these three things, so I expect to end up doing more; I’m currently in the middle of sending an email to my mentor, Thomas Andersen, to say hello and start to form a course of action (perhaps, once all I’ve promised to do is done, he’ll have some ideas to move forward with!).

In any case… hello, Planet!, and I hope to see you all again, soon.

I moved this site to Dreamhost last night, so it’ll probably act a little differently. Also, stuff like the Aperture archive, Git, SSH, Planet, etc. won’t be back up for a few days, and I’ll post about what’s up when that comes to pass.

For now, I’ll just say that I’ve had a great semester and I hope that the summer is even better.

P.S. As noted here, when everything comes back, Git, SSH, and things like that will be on jayne.hortont.com, instead of hortont.com directly, since they require more Jayne-eyness than Wordpress and stuff…

Kaylee and Simon

• Reinstall OS X and Jaunty, and install Windows 7 RC on Kaylee.
  • Get Steam and friends working in 7. No more Wine!
  • I’m currently consuming 245GB in OS X. This can be reduced to 200GB.
    • Don’t install FCS/CS4 content, this time.
  • I think a 260/10/50GB split (OS X, Linux, Windows) should do it.
  • Install 2.6.30, pray that WiFi works now. (still no WiFi)
• Install Fedora 11 final on Simon.

Jayne

• Move racarr.me to Dreamhost.
• Move hortont.com to Dreamhost.
  • Get better DNS control, put Jayne-services and stuff jayne.hortont.com.
  • Archive and remove Ease wiki.

• Install three additional disks (750GB, 1TB, and 160GB), at about 230$ cost.
  • 1TB, 750GB, 160GB, following my usual choices…
  • Move all content we want to persist to the 1TB disk (use ext3).
    • Don’t persist backups (maybe Matt’s); don’t persist Star Trek.
      • In theory, without those things we’re under 1TB.
      • Otherwise, start harassing Amy + CYGNUS for storage.
  • We now have 3×750GB + 3×1000GB + 1×160GB (5.41TB total).

• Install FreeBSD-8-CURRENT on the small disk.
  • Quickly make sure that all hardware, AFP, git, Apache, etc. work.
  • Recreate users, groups (share, www-data, etc).

• Create a RAID-Z pool across the 750GB disks (2.25TB zpool).
  • Create filesystems:
    • /srv/share/public (setgid=share,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/public
    • /srv/share/www (setgid=www-data,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/www
    • /home/* @ /tank/home/*
    • /git (setgid=share,setperm=770) @ /tank/share/git

• Copy the data from the single 1TB disk to the zpool.

• Add a second RAID-Z pool (consisting of all of the 1TB disks) to the zpool.
  • This brings the global zpool to approximately 5.25TB. For all intents and purposes, that should last us through the next two years with no problem, even with me taking video classes…

• Backup Kaylee to Jayne, see what happens. Fix, rinse, repeat. Win.

Below the jump, you’ll hear the story of what happened next. Click on!

Fast forward another week. I’ve won a Nikkor 180mm f/2.8 AI-s: one of Nikon’s sharpest lenses ever, the flagship of their 80s prime telephoto collection (and was still produced, though in limited runs, through 2006). Now, I’ll note to you that this lens still regularly sells new for well over 700$, and used for not much less than that, so acquiring it for less than a seventh of that was quite a bargain (not to mention comparing that to what it must have cost originally, in 1983, a number I can’t seem to acquire)… luckily, it’s in absolutely outstanding condition, practically like new except for minor external scars.

The picture above is of the diaphragm of this lens, at f/32. I had a bit of trouble getting both my flash and my camera at an angle appropriate to take this picture, but it came out OK. The colors are cool, too. Below, you can see this lens all the way on the right, next to my macro (next from the right), my normal zoom lens (left of middle), and my 50mm f/1.8 (all the way to the left). As you can probably tell, it’s rather heavy, and even dwarfs my camera.

This lens poses a few challenges for me. Actually, all of the challenges. Since I have a D80, and not one of the über-high-end Nikons, I don’t get metering, so I’m all alone with full-manual there (I don’t mind that so much); in addition, the lens is pre-AF, so I have to manually focus. This is posing more of a challenge than I’d initially anticipated; I don’t really think I can get my eye close enough to the viewfinder to do a satisfactory manual focusing job very quickly. I think it’ll come with practice – I’m planning on taking it out some day soon and trying to take, say, 50 completely-in-focus pictures in a row, just to try to train myself as to how to focus!

That image of adorableness is one of the first successful pictures I managed to get out of this piece of glass; the pictures that follow it in my Aperture library make it clear that I can’t refocus while walking very well (yet!), as they’re all rather out-of-focus in comparison. Still, it proved to me that the thing works, at least, and can produce pretty awesome bokeh while it’s at it!

One night, I went down to the first floor Davison lounge, stopped this lens all the way down to f/32 (making for a miiiighty slow picture, so I had a tripod), and took a shot of the chalkboard, just to see what would happen. A lack of formal training makes experiments quite required, as well as being entertaining!

Later, Matt got a red fedora (yeah, yeah, make all the Red Hat/Fedora jokes you want, that was only partially the intent!). The first few shots were crappy, owing mostly to the fact that I have to stand in China to take a picture of a person, but this one came out wonderfully:

Finally, at PJ’s opening day (which Matt, a good deal of my family, and myself attended, to quite happy stomachs), I cranked up the ISO for a film-grain-y shot of PJ hard at work. When I get back to my computer, what do I see? Exactly what I was looking for… (except the hard at work part… he enjoyed posing!). Awesome.

In any case, I hope to have a great deal of fun with this lens in the future. I might be helping (or at least trying) to take Amy’s senior picture, so who knows – maybe it’ll get some use then! She doesn’t have that big of a nose, though, so it’s not really necessary over the (faster, lighter) 50mm f/1.8 teehee.