21 March 2003

linux.conf.au

Had a nice dinner with the other LCA2003 organisers. The proceedings CD took a bit longer to finalise than expected, but it is pretty much done now.

XFree86

Some very weird stuff is happening in the XFree86 project at the moment. The characterisation of Keith Packard by some of the XFree board just doesn’t mesh with my experience dealing with him. His approach of working with the people who will be using the code has worked really well (it is no accident that Xft and fontconfig have become so popular and widely deployed so quickly). His post to the forum list seems very sound from my point of view.

EggToolbar

Started doing a bit of work on toolbar customisation for EggToolbar. I have basic DnD drop highlighting working in the toolbar. I think it might be necessary to add an optional input only window to EggToolItem to make dragging them easier in toolbar customisation mode. It looks like it should all work fairly well.

Of course, these bits are relatively easy, so we will see how things go …

GTA: Vice City

Ran into a weird bug while playing it a few days ago. At the end of one of the missions, there was a short cut scene where one of the characters (Phil) was meant to limp from the car to the doctors. During the mission, the cops had started chasing me. Since the cut scenes are run through the game engine itself (and in the game world), the cops were still racing down the street. The next thing I knew Phil got mowed down while walking to the doctor and the cut scene effectively hung. Gives an interesting insight into how bits of the game were implemented.