Just committed shader support to clutter-gst. When your card supports it and gstreamer decides it's the format to use (often it picks rgb over yuv, I've no idea why this is), YUV decoding will now be handled by a pixel shader instead of the CPU. This should give a reasonable boost when it gets used (in terms of CPU use).
Even more interesting in my eyes, is the YV12 shader I've also committed. Normally YV12 hardware-assisted decoding would be done with 8-bit textures and multi-texturing. This is also the sensible way to do it, mind, and I do realise that... But also committed, is a YV12 shader that will decode YV12 uploaded into a 24-bit rgb texture. I've not seen a shader that does this before, probably because it's an insane thing to do, but if you build clutter-gst with USE_YV12_SHADER defined, YV12 decoding will be handled by the graphics card, using a single rgb texture. Note that this shader is completely untuned, however, and very experimental.
The win here is that not only are you offloading a lot of work from the CPU (most videos tend to be stored in YV12 format), but you're also halving the texture upload (YV12 has quarter-resolution chroma). I imagine I'll get back to this after guadec and implement it in the correct way. Patches welcome of course.
Been experimenting with some clutter effects recently, as mallum mentioned on the clutter blog. One of many cool new features in clutter 0.7 (trunk) is the new cogl drawing API. It makes messing with textures, curves and so on dead simple. After porting tf's excellent 'odo' demo to the new API (which mostly involved cutting out huge wads of code) and adding a few new features (face culling (with software fall-back), h/vflip, backface-texture, shading), I wrote a few new demos. Along with Neil's abuse, hopefully we'll kill this whole '2.5d canvas' nonsense once and for all :)
As Guadec approaches, I find myself preparing space in my drawers for whatever awesome new T-Shirts my inner student and I can pick up. I'm sure everyone appreciates these - I know I do, I wear them to work and the gym all the time, sometimes even going out (no one knows what 'GNOME' is, people occasionally mistake it for some trendy new clothing brand).
This all leaves me wondering though, shirts are definitely fully exploited... But what about... Trousers? I'm terrible at buying clothes, every time I go out to buy something, I always end up coming back with T-shirts, and possibly some weird gadgety thing or a new pair of shoes or something along those lines... But for some reason, rarely trousers. Just think how awesome GNOME/guadec trousers would be! This seems to be a missed opportunity, is it just me?
Meant to stick it online a little while ago. The other week, I wrote a small tool to help with quickly determining screen measurements (in pixels). Handy if you're writing graphical apps and you want to see if your allocations are working correctly, and that sort of thing. I present; Measure Tool 1.0:
I decided to buy an ebook reader recently as there's a lot of manga I want to catch up on and after borrowing mallum's Sony Librie for a while, I've found that it's a great format for reading comics. Brilliant to de-stress while things are compiling. Anyway, Linux tools for such devices seem to be woefully lacking, so I figured it couldn't be that hard to write my own (for my own particular needs) - and thanks to FOSS, it really wasn't :)
Thanks to The GIMP's scripting engine, I have a script that can transform images into the required format; thanks to bash, I have a shell script that can get all the images to the script; and thanks to cairo, it was incredibly easy to write an app that turns a load of PNGs into a PDF. Source for all can be found here - handy if you have a Sony Reader/Librie or an Irex Iliad or something along those lines. Probably less useful for Kindle users..?
Try doing anything with this page in the foreground. This sort of page isn't entirely uncommon and makes both Gecko and WebKit completely unusable on my monster of a machine. On the other hand, IE7 handles this fine and the interface remains responsive. Acid 3.0 is all well and good, but whatever it is that makes this page (and pretty much any page featuring a static background and/or semi-transparency) slow to crawl really ought to be fixed...
As those who've read my past blog posts may have ascertained, I love Windows Vista. It trumps Gnome (and KDE of course, but that's a given) in just about every way, and once again, Microsoft are taking the initiative in what must be one of the best examples of viral marketing ever:
Why hasn't the free/open-source movement copied this? We've copied just about everything else, I think we'd see much greater success if we concentrated on marketing too. This video is a great example of why Microsoft are winning the OS war.
Well, everyone else is doing it... I only installed a week or two ago, so this probably doesn't say much (or maybe it does?):
$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
74 make
60 ls
59 sudo
47 cd
33 svn
31 [censored]
30 git
23 vim
14 rm
13 grep
My work-pattern is to do my coding in anjuta (with the odd bits here and there in vim) and to have a terminal open that I build in, so that explains the high instance of 'make'... Not sure about the rest of it - sudo probably because I've had to edit a lot of config files/install a lot of packages... Interesting that for almost everyone else, 'cd' comes above 'ls'...
