I wrote my own blog software in 2003, and today is the day I’m giving it up. My custom blog code just generated static files, so it never had a security bug or a performance problem. But it was kind of annoying to use. If all goes well and it doesn’t break, I’ve set up […]
Wishing I could be at the GTK+ hackfest this week. Hoping the heroes there will discuss converting GTK+ to a nice canvas library. I think it’s a couple person-months of work… but it may not be work there’s time to do for 3.0. Implement a “hovered” or “contains-pointer” property to replace enter/leave notify event in […]
I’m not the sort of programmer that runs around quoting design patterns and drawing UML diagrams. However, maybe it’s useful to discuss this rule of thumb, in the context of toolkits such as GTK+ and Clutter: It’s best to avoid code that “knows about” the scene graph or toolkit as a whole. Here are some […]
Disclaimer: I’ve never followed XCB development, this may have all been discussed already, but I hope this post is at least helpful as a data point illustrating what I understood and didn’t understand. Julien Danjou was disappointed recently because after porting dbus-launch to XCB, we had a bit of a “what’s the point?” reaction to […]
Nat Friedman has interesting results up for his informal survey on computer frustration, noting that “About a third of these issues could be addressed by webbook efforts like ChromeOS and litl, although the webbook model will probably raise new issues as well.” Seems like a good time to discuss how we designed the litl webbook […]
We’ve had lots of great comments on the litl webbook (see here and here for samples). Some discussion about whether a “webbook” is really different from a “netbook.” Here’s why litl webbook is not a netbook. litl OS is completely different from Windows 7. You can’t even run Windows or Linux very well on the […]
For GNOME summit attendees we’re buying some coffee, dessert, and snacks on Saturday afternoon from a local French restaurant. litl’s founder John Chuang plans to drop by as well to meet people and learn. This isn’t a talk or a big announcement (litl will still be in stealth mode post-summit) – the idea is to […]
“If synchronous IO becomes a problem, it can be made asynchronous later.” Tempting to imagine that some operations on local files are “fast enough” to implement with synchronous IO. “Premature optimization is the root of all evil,” right? Wishful thinking. Async vs. sync IO is not a performance issue (in fact synchronous IO can be […]
Chris mentions JavaScript embedding using SpiderMonkey. When GNOME first started out, there was much talk of using Guile as an embedded language. The concept was similar to the architecture of Emacs, Firefox, or all the games using Lua (such as World of Warcraft). I would define an “embedded” language as one that doesn’t come with […]
Reading Planet Mozilla, Vladimir says programming is like this and like this. Love it. (I’d seen the Mario video before, but I wasn’t clever enough to notice it’s the perfect metaphor for software development…) (This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2008-07.html#28)