Archive for February 2005

9 February 2005

I’m really tired but also very excited so I have to type a few words about something.

David Reveman, who became a Novell employee a couple of weeks ago, has been writing a new X server on OpenGL/Glitz called Xgl. Because Xgl is built on GL primitives it naturally gets the benefit of hardware acceleration. For example, window contents get rendered directly into textures (actually they get copied once in video memory for now), and so you get the benefit of the 3d hardware doing the compositing when you move semi-opaque windows or regions around.

But there are other benefits too. Simple GL operations on the windowing system can suddenly produce incredible results. Want live, running thumbnailed versions of iconified windows? Done. Want your six virtual desktops to be the six faces of a cube that spins, with lighting? Done.

Xgl running GNOME.

David has a lot of ideas like these, and you probably do too. Apple’s cute hacks, like Expose, are inspirational but now that space can be ours to explore. Xgl opens up a whole world of hardware acceleration, fancy animations, separating hardware resolution from software resolution, and more.

I’m personally pretty excited about this. I think running the X server on hardware-accelerated GL directly seems like a very elegant way to go. David was educating me tonight on how X’s last lingering limitations are being cast off. With Gtk moving to Cairo, the X server running on Glitz/OpenGL, and hardware vendors providing 3d-accelerated OpenGL drivers for their cards, we will have a UI/graphics platform as powerful as OS X or Windows.

David is going to be demoing his server at XDevConf in Boston this weekend. The source code for Xgl is here.

Update: Thanks to David’s help, I am now running Xgl on my laptop (ATI FireGL T2). Some observations: dragging windows doesn’t generate any expose events, and is incredibly smooth and solid; antialiased text rendering is hardware-accelerated and so vte now screams (though it still uses all my CPU, so is not useful for compiling); it is a bit unstable, but far better than I expected.

Cool!

I also just learned a neat trick to create direct peer-to-peer network connections even in the face of two restricted NATs. This technique does require an “introducer” server on the public internet, but after an initial connection is made all data goes directly between the peers.

This method is probably common knowledge to you if you run in the right circles; iChat AV uses it, and probably Skype and others do as well. There is a good description on this page too; search for “bubble packet” in the text. Brady Anderson of iFolder fame taught me about this tonight.

4 February 2005

The whole RSS revolution always makes me think of the “feed sites” from Transmetropolitan.

1 February 2005

Alex got a phone!

And he can pay for breakfast!

We walked up to Twin Peaks.

The results of my Wiki survey:

MediaWiki 9 DokuWiki 5 GracefulTavi 2 QwikiWiki 1 PmWiki 1 Instiki 1 Total 19

I’m going to go with MediaWiki. It runs Wikipedia so it scales, it can export its contents, and it has a really active community.

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that Wikipedia maintains a list of available wiki software.

Joe Shaw faces off with a banana (interpretive).