Since all of the other Nemiver hackers are moving on to new jobs (ok, so there’s only me and Dodji, but you can help fix that by joining us!), I figured I may as well announce my own job-related news. Last week I gave my notice at my current job, and I’ve signed a contract with Collabora to do work related to WebKit. I’m really excited to be able to spend more time hacking on free software and to have the opportunity to work with some really talented people on interesting projects. Also, it feels great to be able to escape the cubicle farm at last.
Feeling Productive
All the recent talk about tetris and canvases and animation prompted me to pick up the C++ bindings for clutter again and play around with it. I’ve added support for the clutter-cairo library and ported the ‘flowers’ demo to cluttermm.
I’ve also spent some time in the past week adding a marginally useful feature to nemiver: highlighting memory values when they’ve changed since the last time the debugger stopped. Adding this functionality required some significant modifications to the shared GtkHex widget that we use, so it’s not checked into svn yet, but hopefully will be soon. I’m not sure how people did significant refactorings and API additions before tools like git-svn were available. It’s so nice to be able to try out different things and make changes locally with full version control support instead of trying to maintain a mega-patch or committing half-baked ideas to the central repository.
I also released a new version of cairomm to coincide with the 1.6 release of cairo.
Fiddling
A belated happy first birthday to my beautiful daughter. It’s been a fantastic year.
Since then it seems like I’ve been sick most of the time. Instead of doing something useful, I’ve taken to fidding on a re-write of my Agave colorscheme designer, and I’ve made a decent amount of progress. It still lacks a lot of features of the original, but it benefits from my vastly better grasp of gtkmm and related technologies. I still don’t know if I’ll ever actually get around to releasing it. It’s currently serving as a way for me to relax and take breaks from my other projects. It’s become sort of a playground for me to try out new technologies, and I think I’ve succeeded in making it nearly impossible for normal users to build as it requires quite a few very new or unreleased libraries (goocanvasmm, giomm, glibmm-utils, etc).
Here’s a little screencast of what I’ve done so far:
I’ve set up a repository on github for anybody that’s interested in playing around with it.
Also, I’ll be taking over some glibmm maintainer duties from murray after the 2.16.0 release.