Project Daydream

So, I’ve signed on as the third developer of Project Daydream.

Project Daydream will be an open source, cross-platform, networked physics simulation sandbox. We’ll be implementing the base layer and online support. Users will be able to script and extend the sim with LUA. The (extremely) longterm goal is to make it an MMO.

Since we’re all busy students, this obviously isn’t going to be complete anytime soon. But we’ll hopefully have something interesting to demonstrate sometime in the next few months.

GLDirect – OpenGL to DirectX Converter

Attention internet! If you have an ATi Xpress 200, Xpress 200m, Xpress 1100, or Xpress 1100m graphics card affected by the OpenGL firmware bug, this is for you. I stumbled across it randomly; it’s called GLDirect. It converts system calls to OpenGL into DirectX calls. So, if you can run DirectX games fine but you’ve been having trouble with horrible (read: completely unplayable) performance in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Savage, or another OpenGL game, give it a whirl.

I’d love to test it, but I no longer have the time or the affected hardware in question. If you try it, let me know how it works for you in the comments. Thanks!

The deal with Linux music players

In reply to this guy, who should really either open up comments or allow trackbacks.

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Congratulations! Different shades for different people. I personally enjoy not having to mess around with file hierarchies, but whatever works for you.

What we really need is a Linux port of foobar2000; the Windows version is extremely customizable and behaves exactly like the user wants it to. I’ve been known to run it in Wine occasionally in lieu of using a native player; it’s just that good.

Blatant plug!
Think about it, internets! A clone of the Foobar2000 interface using XMMS2 written in Python or LUA that is extensible using plugins. Tell me that wouldn’t be amazing.

The real issue I have with Linux music players is that only XMMS and derivative players actually have integrated equalizers. What’s the deal with that? An equilizer is pretty much essential for listening to any music at all on a laptop.

Hey, look. You can buy notebooks online!

So, the book store is out of those blank composition notebooks with the marbley cover. WalMart is also out of them, as is any store within reasonable driving distance. Clearly, something must be done.

Thus, I find myself at this juncture; laughing hysterically while contemplating if I should order a bulk shipment of the silly things off Amazon (Who conveniently allows them to be sold used).

It would be amazing. A package comes in the mail. Excitedly ripping open the packaging, my eyes light up as the covers of two stacks of new used Mead brand notebooks gleam in the morning sun for the first time.

Of course, all this is pure fantasy. I would never check my mail that early.

In the morning, after this post is convenantly aggregated by all manner of social networks and RSS readers, it will make no sense at all. That matters not; at the moment, it is completely halarious.

Why I hate online stores which are not Amazon

So, I’m trying to buy access to MyTechCommKit, an online service required for one of my classes this semester. The typical process for this sort of thing usually involves going to a secure web page (yay HTTPS), entering some payment and billing info, and checking email every ten seconds for a an automated confirmation.

Unfortunately, online stores hate me. The feeling is mural (although I make special exceptions for NewEgg and Amazon, for reasons which will become clear presently). When the time came for me to enter my credit card verification number, authentication failed. Which was OK; because my card was on the verge of expiring and I just got an updated card yesterday with a different security code. The system must not have updated for the new card. Merely trying the old code should work. Except that it doesn’t.

The priority of the issue suddenly jumped several levels on my internal bug tracker. This is An Issue.

I tried to contact support. For some reason, they decided that it was way too hard to maintain an 800 number, so they have live chat instead. Cheapskates. I spent several minutes figuring out how to classify my issue in their arbitrary category system, entered my name and contact info, double checked the hours of operation, and hit “Chat.” A window appeared, the chat interface popped up… and then it all closed again. A message informed me that my chat had been disconnected. Well, that’s just wonderful. I love you too, impersonal buggy javascript application.

Look, if you’re going to have a system which will randomly fail, either by your fault, your customer’s, or some random middle man, it’s good to have a backup. Like, a real person for your customer to sort things out with. Perhaps a phone number someplace? It really feels like you don’t want to talk to me and/or don’t care that I want to give you money. Work that out, ok?

Kubuntu w/ KDE 4.1 stream of consciousness

I took a brief break from coding to try out KDE 4.1 in Ubuntu 8.04. I used the procedure to install outlined on the Kubuntu page. This release was billed long ago as the one which would be ready for users. Observe my amazing stream of cosciousness, typed in real time as I explored the basic KDE 4.1 desktop.

All the hotkeys on my laptop’s keyboard have been disabled. I can’t adjust the screen brightness, which defaults to “solar flare.”

Ripping off the Vista search-as-you-type style menu is only a good thing.

No Tango in the icon switcher? I thought one of the big deals about Tango was that it was one of the first complete icon themes to use the new-two-years-ago FreeDesktop.org icon naming system?

The plasmoid whatever it is method of resizing the taskbar confused me for a while. Also, am I missing something? I messed around with these wierd tabstops and justification buttons that pop up when you want to resize the toolbar, but nothing happened. Don’t know what they’re supposed to control, but the UI metaphor isn’t working for me.

No obvious way to turn off text labels on toolbars

The menu that pops up when a flash drive is inserted is extremely nicely done. There is a my-computer style device icon persistent on the taskbar, and the popup dialog is attached to this icon. I don’t know. It takes up valuable space on the taskbar, but I like it. It would be nice if my home folder was in there, maybe with a separator to distinguish it from the devices or something.

Window compositing!
Alt-tab highly meh.
Can be replaced with Aero win-tab rip off or what looks like an itunes coverflow clone.
No compelling reason to use KWM with composite over compiz. Or even over KWM with no composite. Aside from shadows and the window becoming a little transparent when you move it, I’m not seeing a big difference.

The mouse pointer theme is under Keyboard & Mouse, not appearance. Which makes sense I guess, except that that icon is under the Computer Administration category. Even though every option in the mouse section easily falls under Look & Feel.

I don’t like single clicking to open folders. I don’t care if it’s more efficient, I want my double click back. Where is the option? It was around in previous iterations of KDE, but I can’t find it now.

If there are enough items for the scrollbar to kick in on the k-menu, the last one will be halfway off the screen.

Does this have integrated desktop search? Deskbar in Gnome hooks into tracker. The k-menu search should do something similar.

What is the deal with Lost & Found? Why did it just dump everything from my neatly organized Wine folder on the Gnome menu in there?

Why does the “Desktop theme” affect the taskbar, not the desktop? I went looking for the taskbar theme by right clicking on the taskbar first.

I installed some desktop theme using the “New Theme…” button and nothing happened. I thought I’d misclicked because the progress bar went by, but nothing happened.

Oh, you have to install it, then back out and select it on the list. I’d like to at least preview it though. The screenshots are too small, and going back and forth is annoying.

I *think* I installed the Haron theme using the interface, but it’s not in the list for some reason. Hey, it didn’t work twice in a row.

How can I get rid of that annoying button on the end of the taskbar? Oh, I can hide it by locking stuff.

Why is there an annoying button in the top right corner? Can I get rid of it? What the heck? Why would anyone want to zoom out their desktop like this? Is this for if you’ve got like 20 virtual desktops and they all need different widgets or something? Weird.

Gah. I’m going back to Gnome. My eyes can’t stand the glare anymore.

Ok, why are there choices for log out/standby/shutdown/restart on the menu, if they’re just going to pop up again as a seprate dialog when I click one of them?

Verdict: Kubuntu 8.04 with KDE 4.1 feels funky and unpolished. This isn’t nearly as usable as I expected. I’ll check back around 4.2.

Please don’t flame me. Gnome is good, Windows Vista is good UI-wise (until you need to configure something), but KDE feels pretty meh.

AbiWordBigChecklist

The title of this post, AbiWordBigChecklist, also happens to be the title of a Tomboy note which has been permanently opened on my desktop. It’s essentially a todo of all the bugs and features I know about in my GSOC project, and I’ve been whittling it down steadilyish over the summer. As of right now, I’m leaving for school on the 10th, so I need to complete as much of it as possible before then; that’s about 1.5 weeks.  >_<

Bold items are urgent, italic items don’t affect usability as much and are considered less so.

• Pretty blue selection not shown after first row/Backspace does not erase letters after the first row
• Cursor messed up on up & down arrow keys
  • ::getPageYOffset ::_findPositionCoord ?
  • The cursor is almost literally just moving up and down without regard for horizontal pages.
• Scrollbar fix for fit to page width zoom. Unneeded if auto-tile is the only mode usable, ala Microsoft Word.
• Normal page view needs a little work; page separator line not getting erased properly
• RTL
  • Earlier pages in same row not redrawn properly. (Though they work fine when opening an existing doc or when forcibly refreshed by moving another window over AbiWord when not using Compiz.) Related to redraw issues above?
    • I’m handling RTL right now by just having pages start at the left and then moved a space to the right when the end is reached and a new page is started. This allows minimal code changes from LTR mode, but I don’t think AbiWord redraws older pages to start with. Also, this happens on the first row, meaning it’s probably not related to the above urgent. Crap. I need to write stream-of-consciousness more often.
    • I initially tried drawing the page at the right side of the screen, but it was kinda flickery and felt sluggish and hackish when the window was resized. I’m running out of time to make this, I may have to revert back to this and submit some patches after summer of code ends.
  • Make RTL use document preference (easy fix?)
  • Bottom of page shadow cut off when col > 0
• Top ruler (figure out how left ruler is moving and mimic that. once this is located, easy fix?)
• GUI for using this feature (I have several ideas for how to implant it, the simplest just being a View menu entry for “Multiple page view.” Still working out how menus work.)

So, yeah. I’ma be spazzing out over this until I leave. Packing for school is pretty straightforward, anyway.

Save coinage on your semesterly educational bibliotheca

There are many ways to achieve the goal stated in the title of this post. Crime is one option. Several student bodies hold that organizations such as campus bookstores engage in it on a frequent, if not regular basis; though we can hardly blame “them.” We can, and do, blame semi-anonymous people on the internet however. People like “Thor”, who shoot lighting from their fists while cutting up cardboard yogurt boxes for use in shipping illicit materials via our great nation’s postal servicemen.

Allow me to elaborate. One of the used textbooks we bought off Amazon arrived today with the phrase, “EXAMINATION COPY” plastered in large, unfriendly letters across the front cover. An explosiony star-burst encouraged instructors to “keep the cost of textbooks down!” by “See back cover.” It was an intriguing invitation, though I am but a student. Yet, must not all good instructors frequently lower themselves to the status of student in order to expand their mind and return to professoring refreshed anew? Having thoroughly rationalized my position in the matter, I flipped the tome over. There were several lengthy paragraphs to which the star-burst indubitiously referred, but as the son of a lawyer my eyes were immediately drawn to the small print at the bottom.

Behold! Engraved in ink was a message from the publisher informing me that dissemination or resale of the work was prohibited.

I sensed irony.

About the Facebook redesign

Dearest Facebook,

You have no Linux users in your UI testing groups. Either that, or you ignore them. Or they don’t actually test. It’s one of those. I state this merely because Firefox 3 on Linux is not compatible with your new design. This has been tested in Arch Linux and the version of Ubuntu that came out back in April.

So anyway. The links on the main page don’t work. You must click a link, then refresh the page to be taken to your destination.

On a completely different note, it’s somewhat disappointing to see that you switched from one fixed-width style to another. I used to be able to have a web browser on the left sode of my desktop and IM windows on the right side. Now my browser needs to be about 170 pixels wider, so it overlaps. The worst part is how much seems to be dedicated to ads (a large number of which are either completely irrelavent to me or offensive. I shamelessly block them) and whitespace. Yeah, the new layout seems a lot cleaner, but a lot of that is because you bought the whitespace by making the user resize the window larger. And what’s up with 1/3 of the viewable area not being used while looking at wall-to-wall conversations? It would have been a lot more nifty if the layout flowed depending on how wide the window was.

Just some thoughts.

Sincerely,
–James

P.S. Oh, just remembered. That you know that guy Joe Minifeed? Why are you calling him “Mr. Wall” now?

P.P.S. Try loading the main page with the window not full length. Scroll to the right. Note the fun redraw issues. I’ll bet we see Firefox 3.0.2, “Facebook Edition” pretty soon.

Summer of Code II: Code Harder

Hey look, I’m on Planet AbiSource. If you’re the type of person or poorly programed bot who clicks every link they see, you now have a slightly higher chance of endless recursion. Huzzah.

It’s been slow going recently; there were thunderstorms all last week. In between frantically unplugging every electronic device in the house and being bored listening to thunder and watching the lights flicker, I spent a lot of time using GDB looking for the source of a mysterious drawing glitch which turned out to be the margin of the first column drawing over all the other pages. Whoops. My debug-fu is still somewhat weak.

Here is le current running changelog for the past week or so, which is accompanied by rather meager source edits. (I hate it when that happens.)

• Smooth scrolling is disabled with multiple pages due to jerkiness.
  • It also fixes an auto-page-tiling bug, which I didn’t actually know existed until I was seconds away from tweaking the line of code which corrected it. Convenient!
• Multiple horizontal pages should only show in VIEW_PRINT
• Margins now draw correctly, not over other pages. (I’m an idiot; took way, way too long to figure that out)
• Made FL_DocLayout::getHeight() slightly easier to read; the output is identical.
• Page height fixed. Again. No, seriously, it works this time. I think.

Stuff I need to fix:

• Scrolling is really messed up when in single page mode; it’s all jerky and slow. I suppose I brought this upon myself by running all the multipage algorithms with “1″ as the number of horizontal pages, but I didn’t expect this huge of a slowdown. It popped up in my last SVN submission, so I should probably backtrack and see if there’s yet another obvious thing I missed.
• Scrolling is funky. Stuff just isn’t being drawn consistanly when you scroll up or down. Figuring this out is a rather high priority right now.
• The cursor jumps up a page when you use the up arrow key. IIRC what my mentor said, this is apparently being caused by a preexisting bug. The easy fix is to just duplicate the functionality of a particular function I’m calling. I don’t much like this solution, but it’ll work for now.
• No text is drawn on the 3rd+ rows. It’s like this in all AbiWord builds, so while I’d like to fix it, I’m not going to sweat it too much if I don’t locate the cause before things end.
• The pretty blue selection rectangle is not being shown on second+ row of pages, and on random letters on the first row.
• Auto page tiling doesn’t update until _draw(…). This can be an issue as when the zoom is changed, the tiling doesn’t update.
• Now that the page is approaching being drawn properly, the top ruler is starting to look tempting. I was overjoyed to discover that the left ruler requires no modification at all; I leave rulers turned off pretty much all the time. I wonder how much code is
• Left to right tiling. I haven’t actually explicitly coded anything which sets this up (following the popular “get basic functionality first” philosophy), but it’s been in the back of my mind while I’ve been coding. I don’t anticipate having a really hard time with this
• After that, interface stuff to actually use this feature. Then it’s over? Wow.

In conclusion, I have now drifted into Honolulu, lost all productivity, and should seriously consider sleeping. James out.