Ying Tong Iddle I Po

Woot! I rock (from here thanks to ):

eXpressive: 7/10
Practical: 8/10
Physical: 5/10
Giver: 6/10

You are a XPIG–Expressive Practical Intellectual Giver. This makes you a Catch.

You are a magazine-cover, matinee idol dreamboat. Parents love you and want to set you up with their kids. However, first dates are tough because it takes time for your qualities to come out.

You are generous and kind. You think first and act later. You are cool in a conflict, but your practical side means if your partner throws out emotional appeals (”why can’t we do what I want for a change?”) they will grate on your nerves, even when the conflict is resolved.

You’re a romantic. You enjoy the thrill of the hunt, and you don’t just fall into bed with anyone. You pay close attention to your significant other’s needs, and this makes you an excellent lover and partner. The problem is that your friends and lovers may find it so easy to express things to *you* that they lose sight of whether you feel as comfortable with *them*! This doesn’t necessarily make you feel under-appreciated — you’re too well-adjusted and self-aware for that — but you may feel restless. Thus you seek adventure in your life outside the relationship to prove and actualize yourself.

Of all the types, you would make the best parent.

You are coiffed.

Didja see “Big Fish”? ‘Cause you’re like Ewan MacGregor in “Big Fish.”

Of the 11399 people who have taken this quiz, 8.5 % are this type.

Using a meme from .

My word is ‘and’ and this is my image.

Loads of interesting stuff by the good ol’ BBC on their upcoming Creative Archive stuff (release of BBC archive material to the public). The nice lady doing the presentation started it off by saying that the archive will a) have no DRM and b) allow you to do what you like with the media (e.g. re-editing, etc) and that they want it to be as open as possible. Apparently few firm decisions have been made (mostly because they want to be flexible) but the lack of DRM is one of the few definites. This is a Good Thing TM.

The other talk was about metadata within the BBC and how the recently redone Radio 3 website was the first to include the concept of a single URL for a programme that will work in perpetuity. This is also interesting although there was a large laugh when I posited that the Radio 3 website was modified first because Radio 3 doesn’t matter. This was all intertwined with some lovely free ice-cream courtesy of O’Reilly.

Finally, I’ve certainly fulfilled my geek celeb quotient here. Not only have I now met Tim O’Reilly but I’ve chatted DVDs with Jon Johansen (of DeCSS fame amongst other things) and spent an hour and a bit teaching improvised comedy to the CTO of O’Reilly. This is aside from all the other Names here I recognise and have talked to. The nicest thing was when someone came up to me at the bar and said thanks for writing Desktop Manager. That is the best thing, having written something people find useful.

Well, can’t sit around in the bar typing all night — beer and people to drink/meet.

Good fun talks now. One on ‘Brain Hacks’ all about how to dick about with perception and stuff to foll and disorientate people. Also some interesting little observations on human neurology. I’m currently sitting in the Blinkenlights talk which is great eye-candy.

Mmmm… dutch breakfasts. Lots of cheese, bread and smoked ham. Of and coffee to face the morning.

*phew* What a day!

Got up at 6:15am to catch a bus at 7:15am to the train station. From there a train to Kings Cross, then Tube to Victoria, then Gatwick Express to, erm…, Gatwick then aeroplane to Amsterdam, then train to station closes to Eurofoo then taxi to the hotel. All in all, 9 hours.

From that point on it was quite easy. Got registered, got my laptop registered for the WLAN, got dinner (courtesy of O’Reilly) then sorted out the conference schedule. Lots of exciting looking talks going up.

Need to sleep now.

OK, code hacked together, polished CVS diff-ed and put into GNOME bugzilla. Now we can all hopefully have eye-candy like this in GNOME 2.8.

Aha! Partial success. With some caveats you can now blow an alpha-mapped GdkPixmap to a window and magic happens. See the below screenie to see how the title bar is translucent whereas the text is 100% opaque. Now if only I had done this in a portable manner :(. Usefully this is still only a two-line fix for metacity but its some pretty deep Gtk ju-ju otherwise. I’m thinking that its probably going to be easier to port metacity to Cairo than to make GTK work correctly.

Update: There are now two bugs in GNOME’s bugzilla dealing with this now. These are just to stop the windows disappearing totally!

Update 2: Finally got some more issues sorted. I can now blow holes in some windows:

*Boring techie rant warning* I have a problem. I’ve got the new shiny X.org X server up and running along with a compositing manager so transparent windows are now possible. I’d quite like to get my window manager set up to be able to use the fancy new ARGB visual so that I can have alpha-blended window borders and transparent inactive window titles a la OS X. I’ve been hacking about; making metacity use the new ARGB visual is a two line fix - no problems so far. The problem is with GDK. GdkPixbuf and friends were all written before the joys of an ARGB visual and hence are not terribly well suited to being retrofitted onto the new model. From a top-level PoV I should just be able to render an ARGB GdkPixmap onto an ARGB window and magic should occur. Unfortunately no such luck. The reason appears to be the vast, thick layer of glue in between which eventually results in an XImage suitable for XPutImage-ing. Specifically GdkPixbuf obtains an XImage by way of GdkRGB which is, as its name suggests, funadmentally unable to hangle ARGB. My query therefore is whether to hack in a special case path in GdkPixbuf to bypass GdkRGB or whether to create a new ‘GdkARGB’. So far I’ve managed to hack GdkRGB to plot an RGB image as an ARGB image with alpha of 1.0 if we’re using the correct visual (note that since X core doesn’t understand a 4-plane TrueColor visual deciding that a particular visual is ARGB in a portable manner is non-trivial). Looks like some deep Gtk guru-ness will be needed to make this work nicely. The problem, as always, is fundamentally due to the huge decoupling you need between a rendering model nice for developers and the archane X Visual/Colormap system. And here was me hoping against hope that I could forget all my Xlib once and for all :(.

Today I are bin’ mostly writing a technical report. That and reading the entire PhD Comics archive again. I present my current mood via the medium of webcomic: