Minor updates on my life: I did a little more on the same-gnome rewrite and now the planets spin. We finally got to see Super Size Me. Started trying to select colours for repainting the windows; all we have decided so far is that we need more test-pots. Finished reading Kernighan and Pike’s “The Practice…

Late yesterday I read Knuth’s “The Errors of TEX” which details his debugging efforts with TEX from 1978 until 1989. Aside from an interesting commentary on the more interesting bugs there is also his complete error log (i.e. a ChangeLog). I only skimmed the fifty odd pages of the log itself, but at the top…

Following a suggestion on ddl I have created an optimization subsection on developer.gnome.org. Contributions and criticism are more than welcome. Currently the content consists of a single article by myself on using Massif. There is also a brief, and to-the-point, piece from Rob Love on disk seeks that I will upload this evening. In the…

As I noted earlier I am doing an experimental rewrite of Same GNOME. There is still no code publically available on the grounds that it is very incomplete and very experimental. For example, the last weeks work is going to be thrown out. I had been working on the “flicker problem” where, when resizing the…

So Ross has been trying to lose weight. I too have been caught up in this terrible endeavour: I get to lose weight for the wedding, Cushla gets to put in on. I’m doing it the old fashioned way: exercise and reduced energy intake. Here are some notes: The common advice of “don’t weight yourself…

I don’t seem to have been up to much lately. But little things have happened: Started shuffling all the minor patches that were too late for 2.8 into gnome-games HEAD. There is support for resizing Four-in-a-row in CVS (thanks to Paolo). The window size isn’t remembered yet. I went to my first meeting of the…

gnome-games 2.8 is finally out the door. So far it looks good for not being a brown paper-bag release, but I always get worried with these big releases. I did make an awfully stupid error with the OMF files only a few days ago. Shaun put me right, but I’m sure he could have done…

For some strange reason I was taught how to chop down a tree in primary school. Naturally they didn’t set us loose with a chainsaw on the local flora. It was, like most things taught at school, something in a book. I suppose it was meant to be one of those things that was meant…

Ange (a PhD student) walks into the office where Tapio (a Postdoc) and myself (also a Postdoc) are already sitting. Ange: “Hey, have you ever had the computer start beeping contantly.” Tapio (a theoretician who doesn’t understand hardware): “It’s a bomb.” Callum: “Is everything else working ?” Ange: “I’ve tried rebooting, it still beeps.” The…

Same GNOME is one of the games in gnome-games that has not received a lot of love recently. It is largely bug-free, but the drawing engine needs a rewrite and the graphics are looking tired. It is near the top of the list for major attention in the 2.9/2.10 time-frame. This time, rather than bolting…