28 January 2005

I am on an airplane and I feel like rambling.

I really need a haircut.

Tuesday night I arrived in Utah and went straight from the airport to Brewvies (featured prominently in the Nat Friedman City Guide), only to discover that they had some kind of very strange film festival going on called Tromadance.

To say that Tromadance features “independent films” would be a gross understatement of the facts. My friends I invited seemed alternately amused and horrified.

At Tromadance.

Utah continues to bowl me over with its sheer physical beauty.

My early-morning meeting.

Those demos I made whilst apartment-bound by the blizzard generated a lot of traffic on my web server, but not as much as they would have generated if they hadn’t been Flash files. One of them is 2 minutes, 31 seconds long and only 730k. Also, Beagle had a new release this week which you should try.

Federico and I have been talking about how nice it would be to have an X compositing manager that can write SWF files for you, instead of having to create a separate server to run vnc2swf. Then you could just hit a ‘start recording’ button when you’re ready to record. This would probably make bug reports a lot more informative too.

Also, if anyone is interested in improving vnc2swf, it never disposes of the Flash objects that it creates in the generated SWF file (two objects for each damage event: one for the bitmap, and one for the shape). With long recordings, you hit Flash 7′s 65,536 object limit and it starts recycling the old objects, which causes the playback to go haywire and be useless. As an example, check out my attempted Evolution demo, which collapses after about two minutes. If you look carefuly, you can see the exact way in which it fails: early screen tiles from the first few frames of the recording are reused to paint the mouse cursor, new windows, exposed regions, etc.

This should be easy to fix. If there were a general bounty web site, I’d put money were my mouth is.

Some of you may have seen the recently-resurrected photos of Bill Gates posing for Teen Beat magazine. Well, let’s just say that things get a little crazy at the Novell offices after hours. And so I offer you the modern, open-source alternative.

I’m glad he’s married since people no longer spread rumors that we are gay lovers, but I hope everyone can see from these pictures why Miguel’s my best friend.

(These pictures are copyright me, so ask to use them).

Boston got another 10 inches of snow this week, so I’m going to spend the weekend in San Francisco. The bad part is I won’t get to hang out with Miguel and continue to deliver humiliating beatings to him in chess, which we have been playing every night since I got a chess board and one of those fancy clocks that we ignore but which is fun to hit everytime you make a move. We are both pretty terrible at chess so the game comes down to whoever makes an idiotic mistake first, but it’s still pretty engrossing.

Robert expressed concern at the state of the Cambridge office’s breakfast bonanza this week. This is the second time he’s complained about the new tradition of having free breakfast at Novell in Cambridge. The first time was when I woke him up at 7am on a Monday morning using our special “Fortune 100 customer emergency” pager code to get him to help me carry all the groceries into the office.

When he got to the car and saw the back was filled with boxes of cereal, he was very angry but I think the hunger overcame his rage and he did help me carry the groceries in. The next day, I got even more breakfast materials, and the following day the only way to trump the previous day’s performance was to wake up really early and make waffle batter and bring it into the office with a waffle iron and syrup and jams and so on.

Landing time.