Telling a Tale for Ten Years

Exactly ten years ago I started this ridiculous blog as a way to collaborate with other game developers. At the time I thought I would dig deep and push out at least one title. This eventually led to the "Desktop Distractions" studio concept, and the nascent title Deskblocks. I also worked within the CrystalSpace engine as an entrant to the PlaneShift team. I just couldn't give these projects traction however, so I gave it up and moved on to tinkering.

Even though the driving force behind the blog had faded away, and even though no one else reads this blog (aside from the State of .NET Integration Frameworks post), I kept updating it. Writing - even if it exists only for your own edification - really does help with communication and critical thinking regardless of what you write about. Even though my day job has nothing to do with garage door openers, my posts on my garage door security system helped me organize the build in a way that informed the Hack Clock project. Back in 2006 I began investigating vector processing, and the resulting frameworks have helped me think about and design microservice architectures. Of course, there was plenty of venting as well with my favorite software companies being dissolved or SuSE Linux winning and failing and winning and failing again. All of this writing helped me when performing comparative analysis at work, or designing parallel architectures, or watching trends in software development.

It is hard to believe a decade has slipped by. It doesn't even seem real. I don't think I've evolved much since that one cram session in a crystal chair, but I'm glad to have my collected ramblings to reflect back on.

Can't Quit Qt

I’ve been dorking around with DeskBlocks lately, trying to find a way to get things to build & run within OS X. My ODE references were already many versions behind and the physics codebase is in need of an overhaul. Looming overhead was also the issue that Nokia was not entirely dedicated to the Qt4 platform that DeskBlocks is built upon, so I started to debate if I should find a new framework to build DeskBlocks within. I was pretty down on Nokia’s acquisition of Trolltech back in January of 2008, although it kinda made sense for the maemo platform. Still, with Nokia going all-in for Windows Phone it seemed like maemo and Qt was heading for the dustbin.

Sure enough, last week Nokia announced it was selling off Qt to Digia Oyj, even reportedly taking a significant loss in the process. Digia had already been running Qt licensing since 2011, so it’s not a huge surprise for it to take over the whole kit and kaboodle.

I’m of the mindset that this could potentially be a very good thing for Qt. I’ve seen Candyland get paved over so many times in the past decade, with big industries wrecking my favorite technologies over and over again. Going smaller may make things more agile - and it seems like many in the Linux community might agree. In a very smart move, Digia has already written an open letter to the KDE community emphasizing their commitment to Qt going forward. If they actually follow through on this dedication to the ecosystem, this could be a huge win for Digia Oyj.

Finland wins yet again.

A Return to Code

My blogging juice is running low as of late. For the past several months I have been getting paid to blog... which is weird. Now the din of typing that has usually prefaced a post here ends up being posted elsewhere. It's awesome to get paid for something you love doing, but it does mean that free time is sparse. For example, it has taken me a good four days just to write this post.

In the pauses between work and life I've been trying to look at DeskBlocks again. I still really like the idea: a physics sandbox that plays directly in your window manager and interacts with your desktop. I have a working version on SourceForge, but it requires a version of ODE and has a few bugs. I would like to ensure it plays nicely with multi-monitor setups as well, especially on dual displays with disparate resolutions.

Of course my code has rusted in the months that it has gone untouched, and the algorithms I used to constrain the physics to two dimensions (instead of ODE's three) have become antiquated. 2D is a much more out-of-the-box affair now, and building with the newer library versions brings an instant segfault on object creation. Qt has matured over time as well, and I need to leverage the newer functionality of Qt 4.7. Not to mention my C++ brain has atrophied and need some exercise.

I'm glad I wrote down most of my thoughts in a design journal - a discipline I've been doing for a few years now both at work and with personal projects. Old notes have saved me on a number of occasions, especially in scenarios like this where I'm picking up something after a long pause.

I'm not sure how much progress I can make when my development time will only come in fits and starts, but I'm hopeful I can finally release something worth playing.

Java DeskBlocks

Right before I started my latest hacking-for-cash endeavor I was working on DeskBlocks, a physics sandbox rendered directly on the desktop. I was using Qt 4 for development, mostly so I could use ODE and refresh my C++ coding. One problem in development was that things would work perfectly fine in X11 - rounded edges, nice circles bouncing around, render speed was great - then things would work horribly in Windows. Or vice-versa. I could never get things to behave properly cross-platform.

With Java's big update, it's windowing toolkit now allows for translucent and shaped windows on platforms that support it. That means the rendering issues I had with Qt 4 may be solved with Java 6u10.

It makes me start thinking if I should move the project to Java instead. It appears there are Java bindings for ODE... so it just might work.

Left Undone

I'm so damn tired. And I'm leaving so many things left undone.

It's amazing to me how close Novell can get with openSUSE, and how far away they still remain. I've known even anti-SuSE people converting away from Fedora Core or Ubuntu lately, due to its (relative) stability, out-of-the-box Compiz and working wifi drivers. But it seems they're ignoring fixes to some pretty obvious issues, even when the answer is served up to them on a silver platter.

Case in point: Intel wireless 3945 not connecting openSUSE 10.3. Ben gave patches, source RPMs, binary RPMs, explicit debug steps, log files... everything. In freakin' October. And its still not released via Novell's update service. It's a big, obvious issue... and getting no attention.

There are so many things I need to take care of, too. I have an entire graveyard of half-completed electronic assemblies that need to be pieced together into some working mechanism. I need to research how I can get XvMC to freakin' work on my VIA EPIA box. Evidently I decided to pick the one "pro" chipset that works with virtually no other distributions out there, due to the complete insanity behind driver support. No accelerated MPEG2 to for me until then.

DeskBlocks and ConsultComm are both abandonware right now, too. I really want to devote some time to them... especially DeskBlocks... but there's absolutely no freakin' time. I can't get over feeling extremely guilty over leaving a half-eaten OSS project sitting out on SourceForge... bitrotting with the rest of the half-eaten projects out there.