Planet Compiz

My New Bash Prompt

2010-02-04T19:31:26+00:00

Last night, I set up a new bash prompt. It's a modified version of my old prompt with a bit more information added:

In a normal prompt, it's pretty much the same as my old one: user, host, date, time. I added a seconds display, moved the path into the brackets, and then added a new line. When in a git repo, I can see the current branch name, whether I have modified files lying around, and whether I have yet to push (if I'm ahead of the current branch). I'm thinking of expanding this to subversion and Bazaar, both of which I use quite a bit. When a program returns a value other than 0, I also display that after the current time, in bright red. If I'm root, the prompt symbol changes from a green $ to a red #.

The more interesting things to note are why I have so much information there by default. I ssh to a lot of different machines and sometimes into different users, so it's good to be able to identify what user I currently am (whether it be `klange` on my personal systems, `lange7` on a university system, or any of the random users I `sudo --` into on my server). For the same reason, I always need to know immediately what machine I'm connected to, but I don't need the full hostname (I know what machines are part of the ACM network and which are part of EWS, and which are mine, based on naming schemes). I use the clock because my panel is on auto-hide, so the quickest way to glance at the time is to look at the prompt, rather than having to move my mouse to show my panel. It's also good to see when a command ended.

Code:

function prompt_command {
    local RETURN_CODE="$?"
    local ASCII_RESET="\[\e[0m\]"
    local ASCII_BOLD="\[\e[1m\]"
    local USER_COLOR="\[\e[1;33m\]"
    local PROMPT_COLOR="\[\e[1;32m\]"
    if [[ ${EUID} == 0 ]] ; then
        PROMPT_COLOR="\[\e[1;31m\]"
    fi
    local HOST_COLOR="\[\e[1;32m\]"
    local DATE_COLOR="\[\e[1;31m\]"
    local TIME_COLOR="\[\e[1;34m\]"
    local DATE_STRING="\$(date +%m/%d)"
    local TIME_STRING="\$(date +%H:%M:%S)"
    local CYAN_COLOR="\[\e[1;36m\]"
    local PINK_COLOR="\[\e[1;35m\]"
    
    local PROMPT_PREFIX="$PROMPT_COLOR"
    if [[ $RETURN_CODE != 0 ]] ; then
        PROMPT_PREFIX="$DATE_COLOR$RETURN_CODE$ASCII_RESET " # do nothing
    fi
    local GIT_STATUS=`git status 2>/dev/null`
    if [[ $GIT_STATUS != "" ]] ; then
        local REFS=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD 2>/dev/null)
        REFS="${REFS#refs/heads/}"
        if [[ `echo $GIT_STATUS | grep "modified:"` != "" ]] ; then
            REFS="$REFS$ASCII_RESET ${PINK_COLOR}modified"
        fi
        if [[ `echo $GIT_STATUS | grep "ahead of"` != "" ]] ; then
            REFS="$REFS$ASCII_RESET ${CYAN_COLOR}not pushed"
        fi 
        PROMPT_PREFIX="$PROMPT_PREFIX$USER_COLOR$REFS$ASCII_RESET "
    fi
    
    
    PS1="$ASCII_BOLD[$USER_COLOR\u $HOST_COLOR\h $DATE_COLOR$DATE_STRING $TIME_COLOR$TIME_STRING $PROMPT_PREFIX$ASCII_RESET\w$ASCII_BOLD]$ASCII_RESET\n$PROMPT_COLOR\\\$$ASCII_RESET "
}
export PROMPT_COMMAND=prompt_command

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Easy Compiz Tricks

2010-02-04T07:46:48+00:00

A while ago I tweaked Sam’s simple animations plug-in for Compiz, mainly so windows I minimized would slide away to match some of my other settings. This was to strike a balance between usability and performance, since none of these effects use alpha blending. During this time I made some jokes about a Spinner Rims plug-in to illustrate how people rev the Compiz engine when they first hop behind the wheel. Oddly enough, I’ve actually had others ask me for this plug-in and had Google Alerts on random forums about it – as if it was real, which perplexes me.

Sometimes applications don’t always (or can’t) describe a window correctly, which can make Compiz use a different animation. For example, when I drag a tab out of Google Chrome it uses my open animation for the window, which really disrupts the feel of drag and drop tabs that otherwise is very elegant. Another example is with generic frameworks like Adobe AIR or Java Swing, where all the widgets are treated the same. How do we work around this?

Luckily, Compiz is well equipped to handle this. You’ll need the Compiz Configuration Settings Manager (CCSM), which I think almost everyone has installed, and it should exist out-of-the-box so users can see how powerful the software really is. In the case of Google Chrome:

Open CCSM (ALT+F2 ccsm or Preferences/Compiz Configuration Settings Manager)
Click the Animations plugin
Press the New button underneath the list
Select None for the animation with the lowest possible duration
Click the Add icon near the Window Match field
Click the Grab button and target Chrome (it should give you class=Chromium-browser)

Make sure this is moved up the list so it overrides any other settings, since it’s specific to Chrome. You can later go back and click the Grab button again and add more windows to the blacklist. Now when you drag tabs in Chrome they won’t be so awkward. After getting used to no opening animation with one application, I ended up disabling them for all. I still use the other animations, but I’ve enjoyed not having any opening animations for non-decoration windows.

Reddit AMA?

2010-01-30T07:50:12+00:00

Going to try to get Sam and whoever else is still working to do an AMA on Reddit. Why? idunno, I'm a bit bored at the moment, not much to work on.

If we do, we'll be using the account IAmACompizDev.

Just an idea though.

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No Glow

2010-01-29T16:04:38+00:00

I finally uploaded a C++ port of the group plugin to git today [at 3am, yes, I know ....].

It’s currently missing two things:

Number one is glow: This is the functionality where group paints a special ‘glow’ around windows that have been grouped. Apparently it’s useful for telling which windows are grouped, but it’s been the number one difficult thing to port of the entire plugin (asides from tab bar drawing perhaps) and I personally find it annoying. However, despite my toils, calculations (I’m an arts major, what maths did you expect) and uninterrupted proofreading, I can tell that I have the calculations correct (the numbers between 0.8 and 0.9 match up), but alas the glow is drawn upside down, and I have no idea why. And no, I can’t just scale by -1, it doesn’t work like that. Perhaps I might be able to work it out for 0.9.2
Number two is text drawing. I intend to add that within the next few hours if I can.

Other than that, I have all major plugins 100% ported asides from DBUS which I have deferred to 0.9.2 anyways.

So I guess now is the time to say “But seriously, there will be a release soon”. Because there will be. As soon as I fix number two and get the plugins-* sorted there will be.

Promise.

We interrupt your usual programming with this special message

2010-01-25T16:35:08+00:00

“The worst thing about censorship is ——– and ———-”

Tomorrow is Australia Day. A day where we, for some reason, celebrate our European invasion of native land and subsequent “colonization”. Back then, Australia was a penal colony, designed to house prisoners from the overflowing gaols of England. Basic freedoms such as speech, movement and publication were not even thinkable back then.

Fast forward to today and, as a highly advanced commonwealth democracy, we still do not have enshrined basic human rights in any sort of constitution. They are only implied to be inherited from Britain.

Well, our rights are under threat; and very little noise seems to be made about this. In case you don’t know already, the current Australian government plans to introduce mandatory internet censorship for every Australian internet connection next year, despite massive outcry. A large amount of spin has been placed on the debate, which has degraded to the point of name-calling opponents supporters of extreme content. Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, subtly sidestepped Hillary Clinton’s criticism of Governments who support content filtering such as China and Iran, citing the very same reason they do for his plans; that “Now, all societies recognize that free expression has its limits.”, which sounds similar to China telling internet companies they can operate with freedom “according to law“.

When it comes down to it, this filter is not about protecting children, or stopping the proliferation of extreme content, which arguably leads to messed up people. It is about quietly putting in place a system of regulatory controls for a media which has been totally unregulated for the past 20 or so years, finally adding it to the list of other regulated media such of print and digital media.

I’m sure everyone reading this has already heard the reasons as to why implementing such a filter, even in it’s current state, is a bad idea, but I will re-iterate it for those who have missed it, or for those who have not seen additional reasons.

Filtering technology is nothing new and has been circumvented since it’s inception; we have a complicated system of routers in China and Iran and that can be easily circumvented using widely known technologies such as Psiphon, TOR, DNS Tunneling, Secure VPN’s over SSH and a vast array of open CGI and PHP Web Proxy Servers. The kind of people who would likely be engaging in the proliferation of extreme content are likely to have half-a-brain about the possibility of surveillance, and the implementation of such technology will likely be a signal to drive more of these people to use the technologies listed. In effect, this makes any effort to censor the internet a waste of a taxpayer funds.
Filtering technology will likely slow down internet connections, as there is a high negative correlation between the number of false positives and time spent inspecting traffic. Bandwidth and internet latency is already sparse in Australia, and adding excess filtering overhead will likely cause bottlenecks in speed. This nullifies the advantages on spending money to construct a fibre-to-the-home National Broadband Network (NBN). Even filtering a list of URLs doesn’t scale well.
The blacklist of content that is effectively blocked or “banned”, refused classification [RC] doesn’t just include widely condemned images of child abuse. It also includes politically motivated sites, such as sites supporting the construction weapons, euthanasia and even civil disobedience. While such sites are disruptive to society, there is no good reason we should pretend they don’t exist and hide them from society. People have the right to be aware of differing political opinions. Controversially to be found on the latest leaked blacklist was Wikileaks [No link provided], a civil accountability website for governments and large organizations.
The blacklist of content is a national secret. This means that it is an offence to enquire as to whether a specific site is blocked, or why a site is blocked, or how a site is blocked. The process is completely opaque and sites may be added for any reason.
Filtering technologies give a false sense of security to parents, or even people, who are concerned about their own safety or their children’s safety online. Filtering mechanisms will only censor extreme content, and not adult content. While it may help to prevent people from stumbling on to such websites online, it does nothing to address the wider issues of malware, compromise of personal privacy and secret details, cyber-bullying and more. The current spin is that such a filtering scheme is designed to protect people online. In reality, that is further from the truth.
The scheme will allow additional funds and incentives to ISPs to further block content. Although the majority of ISPs oppose the filtering scheme, some dishonest ISPs may take the money as an incentive to filter additional sites as suggested by lobby groups such as various religious organizations and the Recording Industry. It is also the first step towards removing network-neutrality, by encouraging ISPs with potential conflicts of interests to utilize filtering to their advantage.
Finally, the implementation of an infrastructure to support internet filtering is likely to stay beyond the term of the current Labor government as it is a useful tool for controlling public opinion. The maintenance of the blacklist will be left to an “external organization”, which will most likely be ACMA, which has been heavily influenced by the former lobby groups in the past. Such infrastructure is crucial to the implementation of ACTA, which mandates packet inspection to determine if copyright infringement of recording industry content has taken place. This infrastructure could also be use to block altogether P2P and BitTorrent file-sharing networks, which are used to legitimately distribute open source software. As governments change, the blacklist of content will likely grow to include more politically motivated sites and sites that oppose or hurt organisations with significant lobby groups. This is a dangerous precedent which must be avoided.

What you can do:

If you are an Australian, you will notice that Compiz is participating in the Great Australian Blackout. A small reminder will pop-up when you navigate to any of our sites for the first time to take action against the internet censorship. With that, I would say the following is a good course of action:

Talk to people: A lot of people don’t read technology news because they think it is beyond them or it doesn’t concern them. Tell them about the implications of such a filter. They will surely be outraged; currently opinion polls show that 56% of the population ’strongly disagree’ with the implementation of a filter with a further 26% ‘disagreeing’ while a small minority, 2% ’strongly support’ it.
Write to your MP and more importantly your Senator about your disagreement as a voter with the planned scheme. The EFA has provided a great template to writing to your MP. Some tips with this: Writing to Kevin Rudd or Stephen Conroy are going to be futile since a) they will likely already be receiving loads of email about this, and will not be able to personally consider your thoughts and b) Stephen Conroy is stonewalling and unlikely to change his position, and neither is Kevin Rudd going to speak out for the sake of public image. Instead, write to your local MP or Senator. I can tell you that they DO read your letters and you WILL remind them of their responsibility to represent their electorate. I received letters of intent of consideration to oppose the legislation from both my Senator and MP. Remember, any such legislation needs a clear majority to pass, and by convincing your MP and Senator to vote “nay” that is one less vote that Conroy will have.
Join in the protest: Compiz ‘blacks out’ it’s webpage with a simple one-line of javascript that you can find on line 221 of the page source. Just copy and paste that into an appropriate spot on your website/blog if you can do so. You can also darken your avatar on twitter/identica/facebook/chat/forums in protest using the instructions here. More importantly, join the protest by attending in person at the venues and dates announced on the Great Australian Internet Blackout.
Sign the petition: If you haven’t already, sign the petition by the EFA which will be presented to the Senate if the bill passes the House of Representatives. The more signatures here, the better.

If you are not an Australian: then be aware. I can tell you that other countries, such as Canada, the UK and Germany are watching Australia very closely as to how difficult it would be to implement internet censorship. Make sure you make other people aware of our situation and it’s relevance to you. Remember, that no political issue is ever a local problem. If you feel strongly for us, then you can take action similar to the above, asides from writing to MP’s since they will likely not listen to you.

Remember as part of our national anthem, we declare, on Australia Day “for we are Young and Free”. Let us keep our land that way.

STOP MANDATORY INTERNET CENSORSHIP IN AUSTRALIA. SAY NO TO A “CLEAN FEED”

Additional: while not strictly related, if you are living in WA, make a stand against increased stop and search police powers. They represent a further dismantlement of your civil liberties.

-Sm

I accidentally the whole headtracking

2010-01-25T05:26:23+00:00

Yay, it’s in C++ now!

Queue terrible YouTube video recorded with my 5 year old RAZR

-Sm

Bah, nvidia drivers

2010-01-23T17:18:57+00:00

So I had a great idea today.

cornelius1 and onestone still haven’t come back from whatever they are doing yet, so I was like “Lets port stackswitch!”. It was only 1000 lines, took maybe 4 hours and was like the other switchers. No big deal.

Too good to be true

Until

NVRM: Xid (0001:00): 13, 0003 00000000 00008297 00001310 00000000 00000040

Aannnddd GPU Hang. Well that sucks. Now I can’t actually see if what I ported works. Oh well.

Which gives me more incentive to move to nouveau. Because on supported cards [like mine], there is compiz support in their Gallium3D portion. Bare compiz support but it’s there. I won’t miss blur – well, I’ll just have to get it on my intel laptop [how ironic, since this was the reason I moved to nvidia in the first place].

Been a While - Yet More Compiz Headtracking

2010-01-23T02:41:17+00:00

Okay, so there are still some issues with the old code in the repo, but that aside, I've gotten things running on my desktop now.

(If you are coming from the Compiz Planet, please click the Discuss link down below to see the videos)

Specs are in the video description.
I'm going to try to clean everything up and do a more professional video when I get it in top-notch shape, but the basics are working. I've also discovered that it looks terrible with two displays, so I've got some tweaking to do to fix that.

e: I see I've been reddit'd. Yes, I'm the `klange` posting in the comments. I guess a better explanation is in order!
All of the tracking seen here is done with a webcam video feed. OpenCV (Intel's computer vision library) detects the location of my face in the webcam feed using HAAR detection. This then gets run through some trig to get the final location of the head. The current code base does not detect distance to face, so it's not perfect (this is why I'm picking up the code again). The hardware I used isn't special in anyway. Any laptop with a webcam can do this - the original videos we have from a year ago were recorded on a Dell netbook with a 1.3MP camera. There is no head-attached tracking hardware, it just detects your face (specifically, your eyes).

e: And since someone always ends up asking, the code is right here. The update I just made recently removes depth-perception, primarily because it didn't work with the code I was using. I'll add it back in once it's working again.

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While you're waiting...

2010-01-23T01:23:36+00:00

I'm driving back to college tomorrow (or this morning to be accurate).

I noticed this video on the Planet and since it's pretty awesome I figured I'd post it here as well (Planet readers, no need to worry, you've seen this already).

Kevin Lange has a pretty awesome video showing an updated version of the desktop head tracking, and it demonstrates its effectiveness much better than Sam's video that I featured a while back.

I may review this in one of my videos depending on the situation, though a video of it in action may prove difficult as the only camera I own in my dorms is my laptop's webcam.

Compiz, Patents, and Ubuntu

2010-01-22T17:22:09+00:00

No, this isn’t about the stupid max_waves conflict with Apple’s patent that everyone has been ranting (and working around) for the last few years. From what I hear the future 0.9.0 release won’t be hampered by it, but how does Compiz fair with patents? Who made Compiz, and who’s working on it today?

From my understand the original Compiz, before all the forks and subsequent merges, was developed by Novell via David Reveman with help from others. Now, in the aftermath of whatever happened, most (if not all) of the core developers aren’t around – and Novell has moved on too. While the developers are gone they did take a little something with them.

SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR EVENT-BASED RENDERING OF VISUAL EFFECTS is patent application #20080313540 by Anna Dirks, David Reveman, Stephen Carter, and Scott Isaacson filed back in 2007. This patent would go to someone who deserves it, but can it ever be used against the project in the future? Now Apple is filing for a patent on head tracking, which is something we’ve seen Compiz devs and plug-in writers have been doing for a while now. We want developers to get attributed for their hard work in Open Source, but nobody should have control over the ideas that power these projects.

Ubuntu is using the old 0.8.x branch written in C, while the team has moved on to the 0.9.0 release written in C++. With Ubuntu 10.4 (Lucid Lynx) being an LTS, it’s obviously not going to be in that release. Even once the package is more mature, there is still a big dependency issue lingering. While it’s obvious that the refactoring of the code yielded performance and maintainability benefits, it’s using libboost and favoring C++. With GIMP kicked off the CD to make space, what’s going to happen to Compiz?

Update 1: There is a thread going on UbuntuForums.org related to this, although some of it’s just anti-Apple rhetoric. I wish people would stop hi-jacking real discussion with this crap.

Update 2: I asked Novell if they could shine any light on the situation on January 26, 2010. Hopefully they are willing to at least take a look and get back with something besides a dear-john letter.

Ignore the apparent fail

2010-01-21T15:10:26+00:00

Hello, this is SmSpillaz;

This is probably the most complicated port I’ve done, the diffstat is around 4000+ lines.

Everything works (mostly), I just need to fix those stupid drawing issues, which I have absolutely no expertise on. cornelius1? onestone?

Once this is done, and refactored, it will be the last plugin that needs to be ported. When it is complete, surely the plugins shall fuse to form THE compiz 0.9.0. And when that happens, forward development can only follow.

Stay tuned

- Sm

Bugs with GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS

2010-01-18T14:30:00+00:00

There are two bugs that I encounter a lot in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) that irritate me a lot. Both bugs involve mouse clicks not being registered. I’ve got some workarounds and fixes, but first some background on these bugs.

Flash Bug (#410407)

This bug has been misidentified as a bug in Compiz, when in fact it’s a bug in Adobe’s Flash Player plug-in. It causes mouse clicks to not be handled by the Flash application. The bug is inconsistent – it’s an all or nothing thing. You’ll either get the bug on a video, or you won’t, and sometimes it can be coaxed into working by spamming clicks.

Eclipse Bug (#443004)

This bug has caused a lot of wasted time. Similar to the bug with Flash, clicking on a button with some dialogs will not register. It’s also inconsistent, which can be a real pain. Some dialogs in Eclipse can span many pages, such as the Export to JAR dialog.

Both of these bugs are related to a change that happened regarding GDK, the underlying method GTK-style applications use to draw things instead of calling X directly. I think the core problem is:

A small gotcha is that the GDK_WINDOW_XID() call is no longer a trivial accessor for the XID of the window, and thus must not be called from another thread without taking locking precautions.

This matches the inconsistency of the problems, since it’s a related to concurrency.

To combat the bug in Eclipse I’ve started using the repository version, since the SWT-related bug was fixed and they added support for user plugins.

The workaround for the Flash bug isn’t as nice, since Adobe is the master of making horrible “fixes.” For example, they pulled the rug out from underneath a lot of websites using Flash player to do the heavy lifting of uploading multiple files by requiring the file selection dialog to be initiated by a user interface interaction. Essentially you have to tell Flash not to enjoy the benefits of client-side windows by modifying /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/i386/linux/npviewer to look something like this:

#!/bin/sh
TARGET_OS=linux
TARGET_ARCH=i386
GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=1
. /usr/lib/nspluginwrapper/noarch/npviewer

So that’s two features Adobe has nerfed in one configuration file (64-bit and client-side windows)

Another Thought

2010-01-15T15:52:58+00:00

Sorry that the website theme is a bit messed up at the moment, this is due to me losing the hosting I had gotten before. I might be able to use my campus online storage to host the images in the near future. I'm going to clean up the design soon.

Also I changed my Twitter username to gavintlgold, and it's not just FusionCast-centered anymore.

Feel free to follow me :) > http://twitter.com/gavintlgold

On the subject of capturing my desktop

2010-01-15T15:26:01+00:00

So, after hearing the response of the readers I think I may start up again, maybe not just for Compiz Fusion but other things as well. Even though there haven't been that many comments I know that my 400+ subscribers on Youtube might also appreciate more videos.

However, I can't keep using the system I have been so far. Xvidcap, as good as it might seem, is not the best option. All my screencasts were actually sped up because of frame dropping, and the performance wasn't phenomenal even so.

I'm considering buying a capture card to plug in to my graphics card (which has s-video out) to record the video. On Newegg it seems like I can get one for around $25 to $30.

This way video would be nice and smooth and I can show you guys the real truth behind my desktop, which, though it's not the most top-of-the-line in terms of hardware, performs amazingly with Compiz Fusion. Screencasts taken with software just don't do the cube justice.

Also I'd rather not use a camcorder like I did for my big million views video. Having such a capture card would also likely open the doors for linux gaming and other features.

Now, I know capture cards are not designed to capture video from the computer to record onto the computer, but I'm thinking this should be all right. Then again, I could be totally wrong about this increasing performance. Would recording with the capture card on linux be a CPU hog or would it be all right? If it's a CPU hog I suppose the situation isn't any better.

If anyone could give me advice about this or another method of using hardware to record the desktop it would be greatly appreciated.

Finally, I'm removing the Adsense ads and replacing them with a Paypal donation button. I don't think any of the ads are really relevant, they must be annoying, and I've only gotten about $35 total through Adsense after all these years. If you would like to speed up the process of me getting started up again I would always appreciate a small donation. Perhaps if I get enough I could use it for the capture card!

Once again, thanks for your patience and helping me out with this capture card business, I'm not an expert with hardware like this.

Not much happening...

2010-01-09T08:04:02+00:00

I figured I might as well update you by now. I assume most of you have given up hope of seeing a new video.

I'm in college now, studying Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I still use linux on my laptop (on my desktop I play computer games so I'm forced to use XP).

My current Linux setup uses Compiz Fusion (of course), Docky, and the Global Menu Applet to emulate a sorta pseudo-mac look.

Since Compiz hasn't undergone any major visual changes I haven't really found it necessary to update this blog with anything. However, the underlying code is being restructured completely and ported to C++, which I consider a big step forward. As for me I still like coding in Python but I have a better understanding of how C++ style coding works so I could probably begin to read and tweak the Compiz code myself.

Anyway, the main reason I wanted to post this was to see how many people still visit this site or have it in their feeds. My Youtube account still seems pretty active and I've got a lot of subscribers, so I suppose a new video wouldn't go missed.

However, I'm not sure what to make a video about. I suppose I could make a presentation of my current setup, which I think is excellent for getting work done, or I could make a video showcasing my 30-second boot into Ubuntu Karmic.

If anyone's alive out there let me know in a comment, and give me your opinion about where I should go with FusionCast. Thanks :)

Not quite

2009-12-18T15:02:28+00:00

A while ago, things looked on track to get 0.9.0 out by xmas, although the development pace has slowed a bit, and we’ve hit a few bugs we’d like to get fixed first. Although I can say that functionality-wise we are almost on-par with 0.8.*, group is half-done (tab functionality has yet to be implemented), animationaddon is half-done and dbus and stackswitch remain.

I’ll keep you posted, sorry things are taking so long, it will be here soon but don’t hold your breath since there aren’t any major user related changes and we can push back the release as long as necessary to have some kind of stability.

Look familiar?

2009-12-17T17:14:14+00:00

e: Someone posted this on the Ubuntu Forums, and I finally found it and responded. Here's an excerpt from said reply that will hopefully shed a bit more light on what happened here:

Where do we begin... I guess I'll give an overview of the real story:
Back in December of 2007 I saw the famed Wii Remote head-tracking video by Johnny Lee. It was awesome, and I popped into #compiz-dev as I usually did back then and said "I'm porting this to Compiz". I didn't have a wii remote at the time, but SmSpillaz (Sam, a fellow Compiz developer, and now one of the head guys for community management two years later) did, so I wrote up the code, which took a few weeks of poking around with other plugins. This was my first functional plugin for Compiz. Eventually, we got it working and SmSpillaz recorded what is one of the worst video demos ever. This is all in January-February of 2008. A few months later, Apple files this patent. Two months after that, with the help of a forum-goer / programmer, we had it ported to a webcam with OpenCV using the OpenCV facetracking demo. It worked great, and we have videos of it in action, clearly doing its job. Eventually, I got a system with a webcam (yeah, finally, I can use my own plugin!) and recorded the last video we ever took of the thing, and that was it. It's been idle since February of this year. Eventually I moved to another (completely unrelated) community and my Compiz work was a good conversation piece. A few days / weeks before the patent went public, one of my friends on this community was rather obsessed with my work (...), and the day before this news release came out I took the time to get everything squared away to continue work and try and get my tutorials fixed up so they could actually use it. I did a git-pull that night. Now, like any other Internet denizen, I read a lot of Gizmodo / Engadget / what have you, and as with any other morning I made the rounds. And found this news article. And I got pissed. You see, I'm mildly bi-polar, and I'm a bit cranky in the morning to begin with, so this definitely isn't helpful. The blog post the OP linked was what resulted from an entire day of link hunting, after blowing off steam at a chemistry final (which I got a B on, and this probably didn't help that, but you won't see me contacting my college about it any time soon).

Well... That looks... oddly familiar. I could swear I've seen this before.

The patent was filed in June of 2008, while the last commits to our original prototype were made on "2008-02-11" (that's February 11th in this date scheme) ~ We have videos from the same year of the Wiimote prototype. The entire thing was working on a Wiimote in January of '08. I do believe I win for prior art (though the webcam-enabled version wasn't out until seven months later, two months after the patent). More specific window-stacking video from September of '08. And more importantly this video from February of '08 proves our prior art.

The article on MacRumours.

e: After reading and verifying, the way the patent describes the "sensing mechanism" leaves it open to the infrared camera and light setup of the Wii remote, so our original plugin should fully suffice, and we have video footage of it in action long before Apple filed the patent.

Discuss this news post here.
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Re: Spam

2009-11-29T01:59:23+00:00

Hey guys;

REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY big apologies over the spam issue. Now that my inbox has been flooded with complaints this issue is much larger than I originally thought. For some reason, my mail address has not been hit with the waves of spam, so I was totally unaware of this issue

If you are able to take actions against the spammers in YOUR jurisdiction, then please do so.

Also, thanks to everyone for pointing out that file on the server. I have arranged for Guillaume to get it removed ASAP as soon as he or someone else who has access to the server is around. edit: done

Once this entire ordeal is over we will launch an investigation as to how the security of our server was compromised. If there is ANY sensitive information you’d prefer not to have leaked then PLEASE remove it from the wiki. The forums are locked down.

Kind Regards,

Sam

Abandon Fail Boat

2009-11-28T15:38:28+00:00

The web team is in a bit of a situation. You see, we’ve been having numerous problems with the forums recently, including but not limited to:

Not being able to log in AT ALL into the Moderator Control Panel or Administration Control Panels intermittently
The ‘Edit’ button being broken for over a year
‘Delete posts as spam’ not working intermittently
Spam getting worse every day, we recently had someone post sexually explicit and extremely objectionable to the boards which we had trouble deleting since the forum software is so horrendously broken
And the most recent incident where confidential user data has *somehow* been leaked to spammers.

This leaves us to conclude that there must have been some exploit performed on the board. This is an extremely bad security risk and as of now the forums have been locked down until we replace them.

However, we can no longer use vBulletin. Asides from our trust being lost in its security for a product we PAID for and the fact that it is a proprietary product which, as an open source project, we cannot support, our licence key as well as user name and password for downloading the forums software has gone missing which means that we cannot upgrade the forum software.

Guillaume and I consulted with the council and a majority decision was made (2 FORs, 2 ABSTEINs, 1 NOT PRESENT) to say ‘good riddance’ to vBulletin and move onto phpBB.

phpBB has the tools for us to import the existing database as well as the theme. Guillaume made it clear that he would rather spend time adjusting the theme so that it works on phpBB rather than fixing broken proprietary software.

edit 1: the new forum has been made – no theme as of yet; it will be ready soon-ish

Elements changes for today and the future

2009-11-26T13:42:08+00:00

Remember the last time I said elements was ported? Well, turns out I lied. It only compiled and loaded, then I went off to study for exams, totally forgot about it and in reality it was really really broken. I had to spend about 3 days fixing it.

Anyways, obligatory screenshot

Fireflies and OSD

One of the key changes is that all the internal elements have been removed completely. So what, you say, we’re back to separate plugins?

Well, yes and no – we are using the new buildsystem to integrate the build process between elements and its sub-plugins. This was done using the new CMake buildsystem and was implemented in just a few lines of code.

The other key difference is that all the main code has stayed pretty much the same and it has been rethought with C++ to use polymorphism and other cool object oriented concepts. This means that instead of having 6 huge 1000 line plugins, we now have one 1500 line plugin, and each sub-plugin comes in at just under 100 lines. They are really really simple and look something like this:

#include "stars.h"

COMPIZ_PLUGIN_20090315 (stars, StarPluginVTable);

StarElement::StarElement ()
{
}

StarElement::~StarElement ()
{
}

static float
starBezierCurve (float p,
 float time)
{
 float out;

 out = p * (time + 0.01) * 10;

 return out;
}

Element *
StarElement::create ()
{
 Element *e = (Element *) new StarElement;

 return e;
}

bool
StarElement::init ()
{
 float init;
 StarScreen *ss = StarScreen::get (screen);

 ELEMENTS_SCREEN (screen);

 dx = es->mmRand (-50000, 50000, 5000);
 dy = es->mmRand (-50000, 50000, 5000);
 dz = es->mmRand (000, 200, 2000);
 x = screen->width () / 2 + ss->optionGetStarOffsetX (); /* X Offset */
 y = screen->height () / 2 + ss->optionGetStarOffsetY (); /* Y Offset */
 z = es->mmRand (000, 0.1, 5000);
 init = es->mmRand (0,100, 1);

 x += init * dx;
 y += init * dy;

 return true;

}

void
StarElement::move ()
{
 ELEMENTS_SCREEN (screen);

 int updateDelay = es->updateDelay ();

 float xs, ys, zs;
 float starsSpeed = anim->speed () / 500.0f;
 float tmp = 1.0f / (100.0f - starsSpeed);

 xs = starBezierCurve(dx, tmp);
 ys = starBezierCurve(dy, tmp);
 zs = starBezierCurve(dz, tmp);

 x += xs * updateDelay * starsSpeed;
 y += ys * updateDelay * starsSpeed;
 z += zs * updateDelay * starsSpeed;
}

StarScreen::StarScreen (CompScreen *screen) :
 PluginClassHandler <StarScreen, CompScreen> (screen)
{
 type =  ElementType::create ("stars", "Stars", StarElement::create);
}

StarScreen::~StarScreen ()
{
 type->destroy ();
}

void
StarElement::fini ()
{
}

bool
StarPluginVTable::init ()
{
 if (!CompPlugin::checkPluginABI ("elements", COMPIZ_ELEMENTS_ABI))
 return false;

 return true;
}

This means that it should be easy to add new elements to the mix and have them integrate seamlessly with the whole plugin. the entire process is transparent – we just use virtual functions and function overrides to handle everything.

Later this week I will comitt a change that will permit you to toggle each element using separate keybindings, I am currently working that out now. This gives you the ‘old’ behaviour of the old plugins and elements plugin. You will still need to define the element in the list however (even though all the ones that ship with the plugin are in the list by default now).

The Future

Ideally however, I’d like to take elements out of compiz completely and make it into it’s own separate application. It doesn’t make sense for a window manager to be drawing random things on screen – the only reason that we did was because we get an alpha channel for free when drawing in Compiz GL context. However, with DRI2 for almost every major piece of hardware, we now have redirected direct rendering, which makes OpenGL applications with an alpha channel in a compositor a viable alternative. It also makes things like drawing under windows a lot neater. However it does mean that we will not be able to have elements ‘coming off’ the cube anymore.

Taking elements out of compiz will give me an easy way to use it with other compositing window managers like mutter, kwin, xfwm etc, it allows us to work around some of the problems the compiz options system poses to it and it also removes another area where compiz could malfunction and crash (especially with element’s plugin system).

Cube Addons

Cube Addons (i.e reflection, cylinder and sphere) were also ported last week, if you’re on 0.9 and want to check them out

0.9 Release Plan?

Considering that there is only the group, animationaddon, stackswitch, 3d, atlantis and dbus remaining to port, I would hope that we can get a 0.9.0 out before $FESTIVE_HOLIDAY. I’ll be running through some of the other improvements that come with the new architecture before the release. My free time will increase *a lot* after Dec 4.

edit: removed debug message ….

edgurgel

2009-11-16T00:11:11+00:00

Almost one year ago we presented Swap plugin here. Now we renamed it to Swapper and ported to Compiz++ (future Compiz 0.9).

Just to remember that it allows you to swap the geometry of two windows. Basically we changed Switcher plugin to swap active window with another window.

Swapper could be inserted on new Compiz if everybody likes it. Waiting for replies!

Video:

Code

Tagged: compiz, compiz fusion, development, fusion, linux, management, plugin, swap, swapper, window, window management

I’ll be making my notes available

2009-11-08T14:18:32+00:00

After the TEE (November 19th) if any student in WA finds them useful (although most of them will sadly be for outdated subjects that are no longer taught next year).

They will be in PDF format, Copyright to me but licensed under BY-CC-SA.

Subjects are:
TEE Applicable Mathematics,
TEE Physics,
TEE History,
TEE English Literature,
Media Production and Analysis 3AB
Computer Science 3AB.

You’ll have to put up with my messy handwriting and drawings though, sorry.

I’m just going to leave this here

2009-11-04T12:27:12+00:00

c++ube parity achieved with KWin!

Cube finally ported!!!

2009-11-04T11:42:39+00:00

I’ve finally finished the Compiz++ port of the cube and rotate plugins.

Cubeaddon is next

How-To transfer notes from your computer to your HP39xx/40xx calculator

2009-11-02T09:14:31+00:00

[This post isn't compiz related at all, regular readers can skip over it, this is perhaps to save the few who have been desparately searching Google / the HP documentation with no useful results]

Ah HP, how your documentation for one of the most convoluted programs I have ever used is completely useless to anyone.

COMPLETELY USELESS TO HUMANZ!

Thank you for pointing your users to a completely useless piece of documentation on the subject of trying to transfer notes from notepad to your calculator. May your documentation team be forever fired.

So seriously, here is how you do it:

Step 1) Actually use the bare documentation above to make some form of a start.

Plugging in the calculator and installing the Windows [TM] only software (sigh) is fairly self explainitory. Once you open up the terribly named Conn3x application, plug in your calculator and it should automagically pick up and give you a totally useless view of your filesystem and not an interface to your calculator.

Selecting a directory

On the sidebar have some new empty directory ready that you created in Windows Explorer. Highlight that dir and ensure that your calculator is plugged in.

On the calculator press Shift+ 0 (Notepad), create a new empty note then hit send. When it asks you where scroll down until you see ‘USB Disk Drive’ and pick that. Pick the first option on the next menu then it will complain that it needs to format the drive (yeah I know, wtf right?), anyways, go ahead and hit yes if you are sure the directory you have selected in Conn3x is empty. Once that’s done you can send your empty note over.

Step 2) Work around bad designs

There is one problem when you send that empty note, it gets saved as a .000 file. That’s really … useful? Anways, right click it in explorer, open with, blah blah blah wait for Redmond to do its thing, open with Notepad (what, you were expecting to edit it with Word? Hahaha) and type in your brilliant note that will help you pass your Graphics Calculator OK test/exam/whatever. Save the file and don’t change it’s extension

Then back on your calculator, delete the note you just created earlier, hit the RECV hotkey, select Disk Drive (USB) once again, pick the file, download it, done.

Yay!

Hope it helps anyone in need – Sm

Debunking the ‘compiz is so bloated’ myth

2009-10-31T03:26:24+00:00

I’ve got a Google Alerts hint set on compiz. That means that whenever something new pops up in Google’s index about compiz, I’m usually one of the first to know. Google sends me a nice little email saying exactly who is saying what about it.

A recent trend I’ve noticed is this myth that compiz is bloated.

My argument here is that compiz is not bloated but rather it is modular.

That last link is a nice little definition of bloat from Wikipedia:

Software bloat is a term used to describe the tendency of newer computer programs to have a larger installation footprint, or have many unnecessary features that are not used by end users, or just generally use more system resources than necessary, while offering little or no benefit to its users. – (c) Wikimedia Foundation

So the way I see it, there are three ways of defining software bloat:

Large installation footprint
Lots of unnecessary features
Large memory / CPU footprint

I’m going to be focusing on the last one more, since that is the one that would be of most concern.

Large installation footprint:

Considering the fact that compiz has tons of plugins, the installation footprint of compiz tends to be quite large. Perhaps not as large as most windows applications these days but certainly larger than your typical window manager. However compiz by definition is a modular window manager. The size of the actual executable for compiz-0.8 with debug symbols and all is 909.3KB as I measure it here. Metacity comes in at a more lightweight 531.1 KB but it doesn’t have a plugin interface (that I know of). Compiz 0.9 is slightly heavier at about 3.3MB but is written in C++ which means lots of symbol mangling and repetition but it has the OpenGL and Composite bits ripped out. This makes it rather lightweight for a C++ version of compiz. (libopengl.so is about 2.0 MB, libcomposite.so comes it at about 842 KB)

Compiz has gotten a bit bigger in that sense but it has been redesigned so that it is not as bloated by including so many features in it’s core. You can use compiz as a similar window manager to metacity without all the opengl and composite stuff.

What tends to be large is all the plugins compiz comes with. You have move, resize, place and decoration as sort of essential plugins (all quite small) but then you have the plugin packs with quite large plugins. However compiz itself is quite small.

Lots of useless features that nobody ever uses

A fairly good example of bloatware was probably the first one that comes to mind, which was Windows Vista that comes from our friends at Redmond. You’re probably thinking though ‘You so crazy! Comparing a window manager to an OS!’. But consider this, most of the ‘features’ that came with Vista that nobody ever used or wanted (*cough* Windows Mail *cough cough* Windows Activation) were part of the core distribution of the OS. The compiz plugins, asides from Move, Resize and Place are not really.

YouTube videos tend to show off how much bling you can fit in a 10 minute screencast with compiz. That causes some pundit to say ‘Wow, look how pointless that is’ which eventually manifests into ‘Compiz is bloated because some pundit saw useless compiz features on YouTube and didn’t actually use a minimal version of compiz’. Remember that all this ‘useless bling’ are implemented in plugins, we have very strict rules about what goes in core and the more stuff that can be taken out of core the better. (Example: OBS plugin, or more recently the entire OpenGL and compositing bits).

In compiz 0.9 we have a CMake buildsystem that allows for very flexible builds of lots of plugins in one pack or just a few. It is possible for distributions to ship a version of compiz with just the core functionality quite easily.

Memory / CPU footprint

People seem to be concerned these days with ‘the amount of memory and CPU time compiz take up’. First of all, if compiz or Xorg have high CPU time /when idle/ than it is most likely your broken proprietary graphics driver. Rendering should not happen on the CPU. Secondly, just in case the WRAP loops for lots of plugins do happen to take up CPU time when they just check variables then disable them, we have added code that allows plugins to have their functions called at all, which means less CPU time wasted on superfluous variable checking every paint cycle.

Planet readers, here is where it starts to look ugly, so for the memory argument, please just hit the more tag

Memory footprint is another issue. We’ve been doing lots of work to try and reduce memory leaks in compiz. I did some investigating and here is what I found.

EDIT: Lucas Murray (KWin developer) suggested that top and normal system monitors aren’t an entirely accurate measure of memory usage. This post should really be rewritten in terms of the exmap tool which is more accurate. However, the numbers don’t necessarily matter here, rather just that compiz is on-par with other window managers in terms of memory usage and that loading lots of compiz plugins will obviously make it take up more memory.

That is compiz 0.9 running with one window open and with OpenGL and composite modes disabled with only Move, Resize, Place and Decoration. As we can see here, compiz uses about 4.4 MB of memory, shares about 5.2 MB most likely with GLX or the X Server and has about 29MB swapped out because it’s not in use. Not too big of a memory footprint. Now let’s compare it to Metacity with no compositing.

Metacity with no compositing comes in at about 2.6 MB. It’s lightweight but it does not need to deal with having a plugin system loaded in. Stepping things up a bit, let’s turn on compositing.

Here we have Metacity using 9.9 MB of memory and lots of swapped out memory. This is compositing using XRender only, so there is no need to worry about texture memory and the like. But what about compiz?

Compiz is on here using only the OpenGL, Composite, Move, Resize and Place plugins which is the core functionality I keep referring to. We are using about 8.2 MB of memory and 10.3 of shared memory with is probably for storing GL Textures in RAM. Not too much virtual memory – only 50MB, although virtual memory is not a good measure of real footprint (The kernel on Mac OS X uses up to 10GB of virtual memory sometimes!). Metacity doesn’t have a GL-based compositing mode that could be close to compiz functionality wise, they are only adding that in Mutter and that is, as the name suggests, clutter based. Unfortunately, I’ve not much luck getting Mutter to run on my own machine, so I’m running it in a VM with Ubuntu Karmic Beta.

Probably not as visible here – obviously the DRI implementation in VirtualBox has some issues (But keep it up VBox devs! ), but as we can see the basic gnome-shell mode of Mutter uses 36.5 MB with GL based compositing. To be fair, Mutter probably pulls in a lot of clutter code into it’s execution and thus it’s memory footprint will obviously be higher. But even compared to a lightweight window manager, compiz is still not bloated in it’s modular form. I decided to take things up a notch a little to demonstrate my point, I also grabbed a screenshot of compiz in the default ‘extra’ settings mode in Ubuntu Karmic:

Here we can see that compiz uses about 26MB of memory, that is with expo, cube (iirc), wobbly, animation and friends enabled. Showing that as you increase the number of plugins loaded, the memory goes up. I also decided to take it to the most ridiculous level ever for the sake of proving a point.

That there is compiz with pretty much every plugin enabled. It looks so ubly that I don’t know why anyone would really want to use a setup that looked like that O.o

I tried really hard to get this screenshot, which I had trouble reading initially (with bling on top of your windows it looks crap). As we can see here, we are using about 57.8 MB of memory and about 18 MB of that is shared.

Point is, loading every plugin in the book is going to make compiz use far more memory than metacity with no compositing.

tl;dr: So please, don’t just call compiz bloated because people enable every single plugin then make a 10 minute screencase of wobbly spinning firey watery cubes at a framerate of 2FPS because their system is frying eggs, making toast and running screencap software because compiz is not like that. Compiz, by design is a completely modular window manager. There are just loads and loads and loads of plugins for it. You don’t call GNOME or KDE bloated because there are lots of applications for it or lots of themes for it right?

Anyways, back to study. I have the TEE to get on with in a few days.

- Sm

The iPhone/iPod Touch scene is starting to fall apart….

2009-10-23T14:47:47+00:00

This post is going to be a whole bunch of Apple whoring and hating at the same time. If you find the whole thing irrelevant then please, move right along .

Ever since the launch of the Apple iPod Touch, I’ve owned once since December 2007, had it repaired once, but still a device of the same generation (1st Gen). It’s a great little device for what it is worth, I have found it incredibly useful as a music player (for which it has transformed me into a total music buff) and as an internet device. I don’t really use it for much else. But the nature of the air seems to be telling me that it’s time to move on to something more open.

I’ll save most of my concerns for Apple for another blog post (which will be far more interesting than this one), but the general feeling is this: Apple has been super-monetizing their industry since mid-2007 and has gone totally downhill. They’ve reported their most profitable quarter yet.

I guess the most interesting thing about the scene was Jailbreaking. I was on 1.1.1 at the time and jailbreaking was as easy as pointing your device at a website. Apple’s locked it down a bit since then, now exploits must be done at the non-rewritable firmware level. I have a lot of respect for the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic-Dev for this.

The best thing about Jailbreaking was that it gave you total freedom. And there was a community that really enjoyed this total freedom, there were free and sometimes open-source applications distributed through an (although closed source) Installer.app. People were beginning to write an API, everything was going well. It was reminiscent of the current Linux scene we have today.

Then came system 2.0. System 2.0, as you probably know introduced the App Store which introduced the ‘Apple’ model for iPhone hacking. It was no longer about community spirit but rather $$$. How much money could you make out of the iPhone. Apple gets a 30% cut. Quick everyone, make an iPhone app, they are profitable! Soon, lots of developers left the community scene in pursuit of bigger dreams of making money on the App Store. I don’t blame them – If developers want to be paid, developers should be paid. The only problem is that creating an environment where hacking turns into a buisness where rather than empowering users you are now making them subservient to you ruins the community.

Apple of course, was ridiculously draconian. No NC-17, No Emulators, No Turn by Turn GPS, No this, No that. Probably the biggest two were no executing arbitrary code and no background processes. That eliminates 99% of potential applications that could improve the iPhone/iPod Touch itself. Developers new to the scene found this really annoying and quickly found the much larger jailbreak audience, which Apple continues to try and mistakenly plug up. Of course, these developers are used to the ‘Pay me for my software’ model rather than ‘I’ll give a bit to the community and let it grow’ model that open source software provides. The jailbreak distribution model then picked up this model to accomadate these developers. Soon the other ‘hacker culture’ developers noticed and started using this model.

Now what this has done is alienate the very users who came together for the sake of freedom on a restricted platform. Anything mildly useful is now a pay-for app buried amongst 1000s of not-so-useful themes. Even developers of previously FOSS applications are negotiating with their original copyright owners to close source them and licence the software so they can make a profit. It’s an absolute mess. Abusing the community that created you. As a user of this software, I am now alienated because it’s not possible to pay for it unless you are over 18 years of age (credit card needed).

I’ve been looking at a Maemo based phone (N900) for a while now. Hopefully that will stay open…..

Compiz Documentation Tag Style Vote

2009-10-22T12:29:52+00:00

I’m getting mixed opinions about what kind of doc tags to use in the Compiz project. Overall there are two choices that everyone seems to be okay with. In no particular order the two most popular methods are:

///
/// This does that
///

/**
 *  This does that
 */

The latter is nice because it matches how javadoc works, which I think has made Java (and it’s APIs) one of the best documented languages around. The former I found nice because it’s easy to align in all text editors quickly (always type three forward slashes), but is more verbose. In source the former also seems to make it easier for me to quickly scan for doc tags, since most multi-line comments in C++ are done with /* notation.

Erkin pointed out that we can easily nest /// style of comments inside of /* comment blocks, which makes it easier to comment out portions of code that are documented, such as this:

/*

... code ..

///
/// Method we don't want
///
int foo();

... code ...
*/

Feel free to make your arguments known here. If you see me on IRC feel free to bring it up, but please use the poll below or make a comment so we can get a real idea of what to commit to before we start merging all the doc’d code. This is a good way to avoid many git quilting sessions later.

[poll id="2"]

Why things are the way they are

2009-10-21T08:04:13+00:00

(or: Why isn’t my feature being implemented!)

Someone in the comments asked me to address the issue as to why we don’t yet have commonly requested functionality such as minimized window previews and input redirection. This post will address this and some of the solutions that we may have in the future.

Minimized window previews

This applies to a whole bunch of things. From the fact that we don’t have minimized taskbar thumbnails, showing minimized windows in scale, showing minimized previews in switchers instead of ugly icons etc etc etc.

The right way of doing things

The whole problem begins with the fact that there is no right way to handle minimized window previews. At best we could have something like this right now, in order from hacky to clean

#1 Snapshot the window and raster it to a texture before the window is minimized. This is what we used to do in Beryl for the window previews plugin:
- Pros: Easy to implement, no need to mess with the window itself
- Cons: No animated window thumbnails, takes up unecessary memory, causes lag when rastering large thumbnails
#2 Temporarily unminimize windows:
- Pros: Easy, just tell all the windows to minimize
- Cons: Severly messes with windows, lots of unecessary havoc going on as we unminimize a bunch of windows, lots of unecessary hacks in order to prevent animations etc etc etc
#3 Tell windows they are minimized, but really just animate their minimize, set the minimized hint, don’t display them and shape out their input
- Pros: Window is always mapped, we always have it’s texture to draw, live thumbnails
- Cons: Messes with windows, window thinks it’s minimized but it really isn’t so it might stop drawing or do erratic things
#4 Don’t tell windows they are minimized, animate their minimize, don’t display it and shape it’s input
- Pros: Window acts as though it was still displaying, videos still play etc
- Cons: Games etc would still expect input from the user, would not pause etc

You’re probably leaping to hit the comments button and say “But KWin and Mutter do #3 and #4!”. Yes they do, although it’s always been disabled by default in KWin.

The main problem comes with the fact that there is no way to tell a window to keep displaying but not expect any input.

There are a number of solutions but they require changes elsewhere:

#1 Have an input minimize event in X. This requires a _lot_ of work in the X Window System and might result in an ABI change – the last time that happened was when XI2 was introduced.
#2 Adjust EMWH to accoutn for this as KWin developer Lucas Murray suggested to me

Both would provide a standard way of telling windows they have this particular state, so any application that doesn not behave as expected would simply be broken.

X Server Input Redirection

Yes, we’ve been waiting for years for this.

The good news is that all the code to do this is there. You can go compile an X Server and XComposite with input redirection right now if you want.

The problem is that it keeps on getting delayed. This is understandable since there are a lot of architectural changes going on in the X Server.

We probably need to push it harder though.

Compiz 0.9 C++ compared to 0.8.4 C

2009-10-21T05:13:52+00:00

Here is an early look at some of the changes I’ve been investigating as documentation continues on the new Compiz 0.9 branch. The community and development team are pretty awesome folks, and I would like to take a moment to thank everyone in the IRC, Forums, and Planet.

This graph is simply information I collected about the size of the source code files for various plugins. There is also a general graph comparing the sizes of the core. I had started to do a comparison of binary sizes, but because of the optimizations and debugging builds I have – it might be a while before I could get accurate numbers for that.

The Road to Compiz++ Part One: Plugin-Plugins

2009-10-20T15:28:27+00:00

So from now until we finally make a Compiz 0.9.0 beta release I will be doing some short blog posts on what the differences between Compiz 0.8 and Compiz 0.9 are for both users and developers. Compiz 0.9 is a complete re-thinking of Compiz 0.8. It’s like KDE4 was to KDE3. Totally new frameworks. Totally new buildsystem. Totally new API. It’s supposed to clear the ground from major architectural flaws that were in older versions of compiz to make development far easier and faster even for future version of compiz.

So without further ado, here starts the series:

Plugin Plugins (or Plugin Plugin Plugins or Plugin … Plugins)

One of the main problems with the 0.8 compiz series was that it was not easy to extend plugins and it was not easy to make library plugins. You could expose functions to other plugins from within your own plugin but it only just sort-of worked and there were all kinds of problems that needed to be overcome for it to work with a lot of unclean code that was essentially redundant, made the whole thing unstable and wasted a lot of time. It’s not quite as simple as importing some plugin as a lib then calling it’s functions, rather it had to do awkward function maps that were inserted as what looked like new plugins that other plugins then accessed with a special number then had to rely on the function map being correct and nothing moving around then had to call functions indirectly.

Compiz 0.9, with it’s object oriented design, strives to fix a lot of the problems associated with this. To understand this, we classify any plugin that works with other plugins into 2 categories:

Extension plugins

These plugins exist soley to extend the functionality of other plugins. For example, cubeaddon extends cube directly by hooking it’s functions as does scaleaddon extending scale. Animationaddon extends animation by working with animation’s internal animation manager to add new animations. It’s a one-to-one relationship between plugins.

Getting both these methods to work is complicated enough, for the former you need to handle internal functions being hooked by other plugins and for the latter you need more function maps to explain to other plugins how to add more objects to their plugins.

Compiz 0.9 has an Object Oriented design. This makes sense considering that we are working with all sorts of real things evident to the user, windows, screens, outputs, animations, plugins etc etc. It’s not like everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. This has large benefits because it means that a lot of the code to manage objects is already there and you don’t need to worry trying to tell other plugins exactly how to add objects to a queue. You just provide a base class their object derives from and that does all the work. As for the former case, there is now far more control over how functions are hooked.

Library Plugins

Library plugins are plugins that are loaded into compiz but don’t actually do anything on their own, rather they just provide functionality that other plugins can use. An example of this is the text plugin or the mousepoll plugin. The whole purpose of these library plugins is to provide functionality to other plugins that would otherwise be very similar code that is duplicated again and again. It also allows some kind of consistency.

Library plugins in Compiz 0.9 now provide real objects to other plugins rather than just function tables to manage internal variables. This means that you can take some text, render it and draw it in a few lines of code rather than having to go through a whole bunch of internal functions to make it work. The plugin only needs to be loaded for some context settings bits and pieces. Lots of functionality will be collected into library plugins for use by all plugins because they are now really easy to write. For example, we already have a compiz-toolbox plugin which performs miscellaneous functions used by a lot of the switcher plugins and both staticswitcher and switcher now use that plugin rather than duplicating lots of code. It means that any plugin now that will be similar to switcher and staticswither can just use those functions rather than having to understand any potentially confusing internal code.

The end result

Things are organised much better
Tricks that certain plugins do can be expose to other plugins rather than having to rewrite them
Extension interfaces are now easy to write

Compiz Fusion Plugin Development

2009-10-18T23:55:18+00:00

In between the massive changes to the site (see my twitter) and setting up new developer relationships, I was inspired to work with Compiz Fusion – or what most now just call Compiz. I’ve always wanted to do some plugins, but the problem is jumping into their largely undocumented API. That’s changing a bit now, since there seems to be a better effort and they’ve got a nice start with the Compiz Wiki. Doesn’t it always seem you can just throw MediaWiki (or in this case MoinMoin) at something and it appears to fix itself.

In the past we’ve all pimped out Compiz to the point where we’re basically expecting a Spinner Rims plug-in, but I want to change that a bit. Firstly I think that many effects use too much blending with Opacity, which can be sluggish on older or low-performance hardware. Plus I think the Dodge focus effect, Show Desktop, and other effects that simply “move” windows look really clean.

A nice developer on the Compiz Forums helped me out in my post about modifying the animations plugins, which led me to this git repository:

git clone git://git.compiz.org/users/smspillaz/simple-animations

From there you can follow the thread on how I simply modified his Fly In effect to be capable of using the Minimize and other events. It doesn’t do exactly what I want, but the point is that the code is already integrated with Compiz, which is easily half the battle. I’m now in the process of doing a couple of neat things:

As I decrypt the inner workings of their plugin API I would like to document
The best way I can think of to document is to wrap it in Java and provide bindings. This kills two birds with one stone: Java bindings and it’s a lot nicer to use javadoc over something like doxygen. (see our doc/ archive)

The result so far was this:

Flash video haters can download an Ogg Video (1.5Mb)

Let me know what you think. I’m also looking for some help with building 32-bit packages. If you want my code it’s available here:

bzr branch http://santiance.com/bzr/compiz-fusion-plugins-simple

And just for kicks anyone with 64-bit can have this package that seem to be working rather nicely for me.

Update:

Anyone interested in compiz 0.9 docs (C++) see: http://santiance.com/doc/compiz/html/annotated.html

Compiz 0.8.4

2009-10-14T15:32:38+00:00

Compiz 0.8.4 is now out! This release brings two new plugins, translation updates, many bug fixes, improved stability, and better screen resolution change handling. Also included is additional integration work for KDE 4.

You can find the official announcement in Compiz Community list archives.

Have fun using Compiz!

Poetry

2009-10-07T05:48:37+00:00

When will our compiz
Be supported on haiku
That is the question

Forum

2009-10-05T01:09:30+00:00

Hey everyone,

If you see spam on the forum, please don’t feel shy to report it, it seems that we are getting more and more these days.

If the spam takes a while to go away, we apologize, it would either be that none of us are awake / around or that we are having trouble with the forum software again (recently I spent about an hour trying to prune out spam because I couldn’t log in _at_ _all_)

I am discussing things with the forum admin and iXce.

- Sm

3 things:

2009-10-03T09:57:20+00:00

1) Your favorite switcher

2) Your second favourite switcher

3) Desktop of the week - featuring embedded projectM + gnome-terminal + conky-colors + mirav2 + cairo-dock

Bits and pieces:

I’m on final year-end university entrance exams so I’m pretty quiet in all facets of life these days
We are still doing maintenance 0.8 releases and the next release will have some fixes for some rather annoying bugs:
- Not crashing when there is no mipmapping extension when mipmap blur is on (very rare case)
- Wobbly and resize obey the constrain_y option in move (so windows can’t be resized or ‘thrown’ offscreen where they cannot be dragged by titlebar)
- Getting the largest possible icon from libwnck for Shift, Ring, Switcher, Staticswitcher [this fixes blurry looking icons in /some/ cases]
- Fixed some crashes on 64-bit arch due to 0 != NULL
Still waiting on cube from rcxdude – I sent him a mail about it, last I heard it is almost done but he tends to drift away from compiz at places
0.9 release is still coming, hopefully by the end of this year.
I finish exams in the middle of November, so hopefully things should move a little faster then.

Ping?

2009-09-27T07:16:49+00:00

*poke*

Discuss this news post here.
(2 comments)

Why zsh rocks

2009-08-24T13:22:21+00:00

I think the following makes this a post about why $SHELL is better than $OTHERSHELL

zsh: sure you want to delete all the files in /home/smspillaz/Source/compiz/dev/plugins/mblur/build [yn]?

I can’t think of the number of times that has saved me from doing something stupid at 3AM.

Also, there’s the prompt
With the built-in autocompletion.

The bar down the bottom is the awesomeness that is screen coupled with byobu.

So there is the case. My zshrc can be found here. Credit to who-t for the git-branch display code, the shell is the well-known ‘petes-shell’ the synergy related stuff is from synergy+ and the kde functions are from the kde project to simplify building kde.

And on the compiz front:
* Ported showmouse, firepaint, ezoom and mblur (although showmouse is broken :<). I am currently working on DBUS but it’s quite a load because the plugin is so huge and depended on quite a lot of the old interfaces in 0.8

- Sm

[BTW, if you saw my rant on reddit about BoycottNovell - I was perfectly serious about it. BN, don't link to this post or else you will see mono bindings to compiz].

So I'm sitting in the Siebel Center...

2009-08-24T00:31:39+00:00

... with Michael Lynn, who is going back to college to get a degree so he can later become a professor. "Apparently they want you to have a degree for that.."

I've changed the picture on his Wikipedia page. We'll see how long it lasts.

Discuss this news post here.
(No comments)

Eclipse of down

2009-08-18T11:15:30+00:00

Looks like our unlucky day.

Just to let you guys know – both Dreamhost and FusioBox (our two hosting providers – one by iXce) are down either down or really slow at the moment.

Don’t worry, we have backups.

EDIT: They are back up again – just in case you are wondering why I didn’t say.

- Sm

7 months later

2009-08-15T15:06:46+00:00

We are pretty close to a 0.9 Beta now in terms of functionality. Most of the plugins have been ported in some form to compiz++ although some (mostly the one’s I’ve done) are broken in some way which makes them unusable. When I say ‘most’, I mean that it is about 80% feature parity with 0.8, just some of the *big* plugins have not been ported yet. Asides from some of my own plugins and other users, most user plugins (especially big ones) still need to be ported. Additionally, we still have the following on our list:

Core:

Desktop Cube (which I believe rcxdude is working on, but I have yet to get ahold of him)
Rotate Cube
DBUS
Video

Main:

Colorfilter
EZoom (which I am working on right now)
Group (This one is a bit of a hotcake)
Ring
Shift
Session
Workarounds

Extra:

Bicubic filtering
Stackswitch
Firepaint
Showmouse
Animation Addons

Pretty much everything else is almost done or has bugs unless specified above.

Special thanks also to Erkin Bahceci [cornelius], Joel Bosveld [b0le], Dennis Kasprzyk [onestone] and Danny Baumann [maniac] for continuing to work on the project despite their lack of time due to other commitments.

Also, huge thanks to our userbase for not exploding / forking the project [1] / getting impatient over the long period of experimental development. While it has been a bit slower than we previously aimed, we are almost there and couldn’t do so without the continued knowledge that we have a faithful and understanding userbase which makes our contribution so worthwhile.

Other developers will be posting what they have been working on within the next few days. As we get closer to the beta, I’ll be going over some of the fundamental differences and changes for the better in compiz-0.9 compared to compiz. It will begin at the developer level and slowly go to the user level. Most of the changes here are for development but are there for the long term and as such I believe that they will affect users and the entire freedesktop community in the long term as well.

As soon as the 0.9.x release cycle starts rolling ahead and I finish high school, I will be writing community news blog posts again as part of our strategy to really push compiz-0.9/1.0.

[1] I don’t consider that ‘Beryl back from the ashes’ packaging of Beryl for Intrepid a fork. That was just plain stupid.

- Sm

ATTN: Compiz People

2009-08-05T20:55:04+00:00

My summer is coming to an end, and as I move on to college, I'll also be moving back in with the Compiz dev team.

Hi guys! It's been a while.

You're not dead yet, are you?

Discuss this news post here.
(2 comments)

Epic Fail

2009-07-28T14:10:13+00:00

Note: Don’t ever do that again. That is, don’t ever start working in one git tree, make a whole bunch of commits there, start another git tree, pull from the old git tree to the new git tree, do git init in the new git tree somehow pulling in the refspec from the old git tree then push in the new git tree only to realize you push to the old git tree inadvertently overwriting everything in the old git tree then having to revert every single one of those commits individually. >.<

And in other news, I have done another plugin for you because I am bored of porting thumbnail. It’s called autoresize and is based off a suggestion by Travis Watkins a while ago which has compiz automatically resize all your windows to fit the screen size if your resolution changes. Of course, it will only work to the extent that the window allows it’s minimized size to be, but should solve the issue of ‘I changed my screen resolution and now cant move or resize windows anymore and get to the control to change it back’

I’m also in the TEE end of schooling which means big-time studying up for me (especially considering that my exam timetable sucks – I’ve got 3 writing intensive subjects right next to each other). So, as I’ve been saying all this year, don’t expect to see to much of me over the next little while (TM).

- Sam

AVG incorrectly marking iTunes as trojan

2009-07-25T06:59:53+00:00

As of today or so AVG for Windows is marking iTunes as a “Trojan horse Small.BOG”. As you can see several files show up as infected including every translation file. This is obviously incorrect as it didn’t happen yesterday, happens to the iTunesSetup.exe file downloaded from http://itunes.com and happens to multiple people. Hopefully AVG fixes their definition files soon. If people choose to “Heal” these infections it actually breaks iTunes in such a way that for some people uninstalling and reinstalling is not a solution.

That doesn’t look right…

Notes from a GNOME 3 Mockup

2009-06-27T14:26:43+00:00

Accuse me of blogspam and whatnot, but I saw this, it was really cool and I thought I just /had/ to share it with you.

Yes, I’m talking about that UI mockup on the front page of reddit today. Some of the stuff I saw there just made me think “Why isn’t some of the stuff there already in compiz today?”.

Granted, most of the effects show in the video are already in compiz (such as wobbly, dodge, etc) but it was the 2 at the end that got me. The first is where the user drags the window onto the taskbar and it minimizes. Makes. So. Much. Damn. Sense. Why have I been wasting so much time trying to reach for a little button on the window decoration when all that time I could have just used fitts law as we already do with the launcher menu, hotcorners etc to minimize windows. Why? The same concept is (rather neatly) applied to the workspace switcher as well.

This could all work out in the panel interface I’ve been thinking of but not really acting on at the moment. Sigh – internets, plz give me some developers to help me with this. kthx.

Fedora

2009-06-21T15:55:14+00:00

So I had a rather unfortunate event over the past two weeks. Upgraded my kernel – no matching kernel sources, boot up, dkms dies, fsck dies and my file system table gets trashed in the process. Fun.

/Thankfully/ I had just gotten around to installing rsync on my server and had run a few backups by that time so I didn’t loose much that was important. I just had the issue of no linux system and I honestly can’t be bothered to wipe this machine and re-install all four operating systems because I don’t really have the time to. So I’ve been trying things out in VirtualBox on Vista (which I haven’t booted into for about 4 months now). Suprisingly, it’s quite stable if I don’t mess with it and are careful about what you do, although I have noticed in the two weeks I’ve been using it performance has degraded somewhat.

Anyways, openSUSE isn’t really heading in a direction that suits me anymore – no plymouth, no KMS, no DRI2 are geared up for 11.2 and fighting some of the stuff that comes with it is starting to become a pain. If you don’t want to mess around too much though, openSUSE is a great distro – I recommend it over Ubuntu, it’s just my interests have changed.

I noticed that most of the awesome X Devs like Peter Hutterer and Kristian Hoegsberg (and let’s not forget Linus Himself!) are using Fedora, and I’ve heard it’s geared towards developers (being bleeding edge and all) – and I guess I’m not ready to delve into the DIY distro territory of Gentoo and Arch.

I’ve always craved this GDM setup – simple and functional. If I recall correctly, openSUSE has it now too.

I also want to try to move back to KDE as well because it has some pretty cool things coming up for it. Although, I’m finding it difficult somewhat.

Fedora also has nice support for other DE’s as well like XFCE and LXDE which I am also considering. (Although XFCE lacks support for gvfs…)

Surprisingly Compiz works under VirtualBox while running under Windows which is quite a testament to how far both open source software but also Virtualization software has come today. It runs at quite a decent framerate (120fps), there is support for ARB_fragment_program and it quite usable. The only glitch I’ve noticed so far is opacity related where blending does not occur properly. Oh well.

In the Compiz 0.9 development department I’ve been silently working on the Thumbnail plugin. It’s actually been quite a job considering the way it works and I’m also adding a few well deserved features like setting a thumbnail region hint (Sadly no EMWH spec for this yet, so I am doing it both for KDE and genericly), so that you can peek windows you have hovered the thumbnail over. Also, I should probably write an Aero Snaps-eqsue plugin so that Windows 7 doesn’t have anything on us on day one .

I’ll probably re-install my system in about 2 weeks during school break and during that time I should be able to do some compiz related work.

-Sm

Late Entry

2009-06-15T15:56:13+00:00

Strange how something so far away

2009-06-07T10:30:58+00:00

Can come so close to home.

I should probably take my books home – at this rate I will soon be quarantined.

Bzzt! Update!

2009-05-27T04:20:38+00:00

Kazzap!

Activity!

Woo!

Compiz Related Stuff:

Elements(++/0.9):

[DEBUG] * Plugin 'elements' successfully loaded!
init function called
PrivateElementScreen  constructor call!

Sam@XPS-SUSE:~/.compiz/options> PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/opt/compiz/lib/pkgconfig pkg-config --modversion compiz
# 0.9.0

I’m quite glad to say that compiz isn’t dead! Far from it! One of my bigger plugins, elements, has finally been ported, after sorting through about 500 unique compile errors in the past week. Unfortunately, while it is ported and it loads, it isn’t really finished yet as I can’t get a config file for it from the ini plugin. And besides that, even if I were, I’d have to use CCSM for most of the multi-list stuff and … well, that’s going to take me a while to sort out and get working with my own install. So, it’s ported and I’ll probably come back and finish it later =)

You can get it at:

git://git.compiz.org/compiz/plugins/elements

I’m probably going to start porting other smaller plugins while I’ve stuff got spare time.

CompizShell?

I was thinking about how I might implement this, and hopefully if I can get MacSlow’s RGBA-GLX code working the way I want, then I should be able to draw a fullscreen window for the panel that will smothly resize and use XShape to handle input.

Hopefully, a minimalistic implementation should be enough for compiz users who want to use compiz with future gnome version.

Real Life Related Stuff:

Evatt

So my partner and I won the 2009 UNYA Hammaskjold Trophy Competition (Model United Nations Debating), so we’re off to the 2009 Evatt Trophy Competition later in December! Whee!

Also, I’ve heard tentative news that one of my friends has been selected for the final 4 WADL State Team, which is just awesome!

.eu

It was awesome of course. Germany, France, Poland. Nuff said.

Exams

Yay, they’re over! FreeTime++!

XBMC

I also managed to rebuild a server out of spare parts on junk collection day. So far, although the average age is about 7~ years, it’s pretty awesome!, It’s got a 10 year old HDD (10GB at 5200RPM IDE), DVD Burner at 2x (Woo!), P4 2.4GHz, ATI Radeon 9850 (R300, which is supported by both KMS and DRI2), a truckload of USB bays and an ASUS MyCinema Europa for TV. And the motherboard is a Foxconn which came with the CPU. It’s plugged into my TV and acts as a full-on HTPC and it’s got the XBMC-PVR-VDR patch applied so I can watch TV. I should really do a review of XBMC one day, it’s just plain awesome. Runs Ubuntu 9.04 like a fox.

-Sm

Beryl back from the ashes

2009-05-15T04:39:15+00:00

Linux_Ubuntu_geek
writes:

Wake up all at Compiz as Beryl is alive and kicking !

You might be interested that over a weekend a mate and myself introduced Beryl back in to the fold. This is a direct result of our frustration of how bloated Compiz has become and is becoming more of a fashion thing rather than functional for having multiple desktops.
OK so I have been using Ubuntu 7.04 on and off for a couple of years now and Beryl comes as default. After Ubuntu 7.04 Compiz Fusion (now Compiz) came as default. To begin with this was not a problem but as Compiz became more complex with spheres, globes and other useless features, performance was becoming impaired.
Late one night I started looking at introducing Beryl to Ubuntu 9.04 (Alpha 6). As expected there were numerous depedendency issues.
Piratesmack looked in to the same possibilty and together we pooled our resources and after running many scripts and testing by myself Piratesmack compiled some dependency free deb. packages.

Piratesmacks Beryl 0.2.1 deb. packages for Ubuntu 9.04
http://files.filefront.com/beryl+fixed+904tarbz2/;13596520;/fileinfo.html

Save to home directory

extract tar.bz2

cd beryl-fixed-9.04

sudo ./install.sh

Piratesmacks Beryl 0.2.1 deb. packages for Ubuntu/Mint
http://files.filefront.com/beryl+packages+021tarbz2/;13508777;/fileinfo.html

Save to home directory

extract tar.bz2

cd beryl-packages-0.2.1

sudo dpkg -i *.deb

Beryl 0.2.1 on Ubuntu 9.04
http://s266.photobucket.com/albums/ii256/Linux_Ubuntu_geek/?action=view&current=Screenshot.png

Beryl 0.2.1 on Mint 6
http://s266.photobucket.com/albums/ii256/Linux_Ubuntu_geek/?action=view&current=Screenshot-1.png

One thing you cannot do is knock the simplicity of Beryl and how much more useful it is than modern day Compiz.

So for those who wish to mock I say Beryl is far from dead and people want it as they are downloading it for the very reasons I have outlined above.

LUg.

New blog

2009-05-14T09:24:24+00:00

Here is my new blog: http://lizards.opensuse.org/author/cyberorg/ update your feed bookmarks to point to the new location

Misinformation and miscommunication

2009-04-30T13:47:58+00:00

A while back I said a few (looking back on it, rather harsh) words about gnome-shell. I’ve probably miscommunicated what I was trying to say with regards to that situation.

First of all, such comments are (roughly) my own opinion and my stance has changed to be a bit more neutral since then – of course with the status quo and the way GNOME-Shell is written, it would be difficult to make it WM-agnostic as it is now. Looking at the code the job may be a little harder than I thought. Of course, it’s important to note that though I am a member of the compiz council (an ill fitted one at times), usually my comments don’t represent the entire view of the compiz project (even though it might look like it).

Secondly, I get the impression that people are starting to think GNOME is some kind of evil project. They’re really not – and I think GNOME-Shell has a lot of merit to it and is certainly a step in the right direction for bringing a composited desktop to the masses.

The only concerns that I had outlined with it was that it integrated the panel with the window manager. This has it’s merits and can make things a lot easier, but also means that if you were to start another window manager (i.e compiz) you would lose your panel. There are replacements for the panel (like AWN, Kiba) but for people who like the normal panel (like me), this isn’t the best scenario.

I guess the best thing to do now is to let matters cool down and cross the bridge of the issue of the panel when we get to it.

So please – don’t turn this into some kind of holy war, because it really isn’t. I always try to live by the rule ‘Assume best intentions’ i.e people aren’t evil for the sake of being evil – there is always some good intent in actions. The shell issue will sort it self out, it’s just one of the many little things that should probably be addressed in the future.

Untitled

2009-04-25T23:59:22+00:00

Compiz is being ported to c++, and this (as well as the usual problem of time) has lead to a temporary postponement of work on jasper. To say that "it lead" is probably a bit deceptive, as I had not made commits for quite a while before the port was announced - but my intention is (in due time) to rewrite it (or, rather, write it again) in c++. Also, since compiz is now a reparenting wm, I have to look into how that affects the decorators. Hopefully, c++ will make it easier to do what I want (which I was having difficulty doing originally, which started the long period of no-commits)

In order to get better acquainted with c++, I started another plugin: tag. This is based, somewhat, off a feature request on the forums.

The idea is that the user can create a number of tags, and assign various tags to different windows. Each tag is either activated or deactivated, and a window with an active tag is considered active (the window with focus is also considered active). Non-active windows are drawn translucent, while active ones are drawn opaquely. Activating or deactivating a tag will restack the windows, so that active windows are sitting on top, while non-active windows are below - the original stacking order is maintained (apart from the active ones are pulled to the top).

There is a slight issue with this, in that it wouldn't work without patches to compiz's stacking code. Unfortunately, these patches haven't yet been committed to compiz, but if anyone is using master and wants to test them they are here (one and two).

There is still some things to do:
- Currently when you entering a tag, things don't work like they should if you press space or shift, etc. I need to copy some code from scalefilter to make this work properly.
- Currently, the only way to create tags, add/remove tags to/from windows, activate/deactivate tags, is by pressing a keybinding which grabs input and catches what you type (nicely displaying it on the screen at the same time). Ideally, you should be able to use Dbus, or add a specific keybinding to say, activate tag foo. The first should already be possible (except dbus isn't yet ported), and the second will need some reworking of the options code (which I hope to do, one day...)
- Let other plugins extend what tag does. For instance, another plugin could use the active status of a window (or whether it has a specific tag, etc) to decide whether it should be, for example, displayed in a scaled mode on the side of the screen, or as a normal window. On the other hand, other plugins should be able to influence the active state of the window (eg, if it is focused, some match rule things, etc)
- Automatically adding tags based on rules (eg, I could make a rule to tag firefox, xchat, pidgin as internet, and another rule to tag gnome-terminal and gedit as dev). At the moment all windows are just tagged with "default"
- Whatever I have forgotten
- Something about tiling?

I've also been accepted for Google Summer [or, rather, winter] of Code. Peter Hutterer will be my mentor, and I'll be working on getting input redirection in X :) So, if my work goes well, we will hopefully have IR next year.

Also, for those with ATi cards, dri2 is working almost very nicely :) Thanks to the work of Dave Airlie and Jerome Glisse (and others). Unfortunately, since I am using compiz master, I have no cube + glxgears to show-off, but it does work very beautifully in scale mode. [though, I don't think I really want to use the word beauty: "Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite." - C.S. Lewis]

I love spinning my cube round and round and round…

2009-04-15T06:39:34+00:00

Enjoy!

Edit: You’d need to click on post link to see embedded video if reading this from planets. More videos here.

CCSM

2009-04-06T00:03:35+00:00

“I think the Compiz guys and girls need to work hard on making ccsm more accessible, in such a way that it doesn’t require a degree in physics and geometry to figure out how it works.” -OSNews

In terms of CCSM, such a comment has always troubled me. Apart from graphical glitches and ‘pointless bling’, CCSM seems to be one of the main areas compiz is seen as ‘weak’. Of course, there is a point to which we need to know – are we doing it wrong, and what can we do to fix it.

A lot of the comments on CCSM come down to it’s sharp learning curve and learning the plugin-based configuration and not feature based.

Anyways, considering that we’ve been using CCSM for ages, all the developers find it incredibly easy – but we acknowledge that perhaps it is not as simple for newer users. So my question is this – what can we do to improve CCSM’s usability. What would make it make more sense? You are free to make any suggestions, however the only restriction we have so far is that it needs to be flexible over multiple plugins – i.e it should be consistent for every plugin as every plugin has it’s own metadata.

-Sm

(On a side note, I thought I might share with you that my partner and I were selected to train with on the Western Australian Debating Legue State Squad of 2009, a prestigious recognition and certainly a fufillment of a long-term goal for myself)

Edit: Thanks for all the feedback, as far as I can see these are some of the things that need to be done (and are doable)

Remove plugin-centric view – make it feature centric (as best as possible) instead: I.e. for ‘cube’ just have ‘cube’ then everything that depends on it can be put inside the ‘cube’ page or group all the switchers into one? (Or make them plugin-plugins). Where this would really work is animation and elements – that way we can really separate it out into ‘engine’ plugins and have them all under animation/elements respectively.
Do something about window matching – make the match editor more obvious?
This wasn’t brought up, but probably something done about actions – the same option shouldn’t really repeat itself 3 times if it was to be triggered with a key, button and edge. All the bindings buttons should be one option for each actual option.
Add launchers for simple/medium CCSM
More GNOME-HIGness i.e not having close where back is.

Maybe it's time...

2009-04-04T19:44:21+00:00

Maybe it's finally time we put some serious consideration into a Compiz Desktop Environment. With GNOME pretty much throwing us aside on support and with KWin replicating our features left and right, it's hard to stay on board. This all comes on top of the numerous issues we've always had with the two big ones.
So, I figure it's time we look a bit bigger. As 0.9.0 starts to build back to the status of 0.8.* in plugins, we should look at things we need to build a solid, effect-filled DE. Sam mentioned the possibility of forking GNOME, but do we really want to go that route? I can see the backend systems in GNOME being reused in the "CompDE", but I don't see us forking their panel and desktop: we don't need to. Compiz has always been an add-on to existing DEs, and we need to consider that: We can build the basics, we already have. We have numerous panels, and we're working on a deskop. The rest is integration systems.

Hm. I'm limited on time here, so I need to wrap it up. I'll try and make a more suitable argument later when I have time.

Discuss this news post here.
(2 comments)

New Mesa Fixes UXA/DRI2 Transparency Issues [Ubuntu]

2009-04-03T12:18:20+00:00

*happiness*
Jaunty just got a new package of Mesa 7.4, and it fixes a long-standing bug in DRI2/UXA (it was there back before UXA was even impelemented) where transparent windows that didn't already set a suitable RGBA colormap appeared corrupt because they had overvalued pixels (so stuff appeared white when it shouldn't have). It's finally been fixed!
I'm sure there were other things fixed and updated in this release, too, but I don't actually know what they are, so I can't talk about them.

Discuss this news post here.
(4 comments)

Drop Everything

2009-04-01T10:50:06+00:00

At Compiz, we have a very important announcement to make:

Forget MPXIR

Forget Compiz++

Forget NOMAD

Forget every other thing we have been working on.

Something better has been in the works for a long time. Something you would never notice unless you were a dev yourself. Something will see the light of day once again for 2 years. Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you:

Yeah, we all know you have wanted it

BERYL 0.2.1.0.0.0.0.0.1!!!!!!!!

We know. Compiz development has been slow. It seems we are being outpaced by other projects. But now we take the lead once again from the ashes of the glory-days. Beryl has been developed under secret wraps until now – right at home with git://git.compiz.org/inactive/beryl. We modified gitweb and cgit to not show any commit activity, because we knew nobody cared about Beryl. Well you were wrong! Beryl has been unleashed to take over the world from KWin and Shell busting features like:

Allowing you to send IMAP and POP email from the titlebar – take that metacity
It has t3h spinnan cubez!! and aslo t3h woobly windowz!
It doesn’t require OpenGL to operate anymore. In fact, it doesn’t even use OpenGL anymore. OpenGL only allows for drawing in 3 dimentions (plus the fourth for time). Well we use ALL EIGHT. Our RnD team took a long time to get to that one. Makes you think twice before posting a feature request eh?
Using our new FROG (Feature Request Auto Grant) system, Beryl will auto-detect when you post in the feature requests forum and grant that wish for you. Yes. ANY WISH. *
Violating all laws of physics – we have have implemented some features people have long wanted
- Input Redirection: When you click on a transformed pixel on your screen, Beryl BECOME your kernel and force, due to the fact that it is a higher process hierarchy than X.org, X.org to put that input in the right place. Don’t open up your system, it gets really ugly in there when this happens…
- Thumbnails of minimized windows: When a window is minimized, Beryl captures it before it flees to the taskbar. When you hover the taskbar, the window will appear in REAL TIME and cry out for help. The window is released with an NDA about it’s encounter when you ‘unminimize’ it
- By copying some unknown patents from microsoft, we are able to make the icons displayed in, shift, stackswitch, ring, switcher and staticswitcher less fugly. The icons used to render from WNCK at 32×32. We can boost the quality of this rendered image to 32.5×32.5 and because of this, we can display it at twice the size. Yes people – the difference between 1/3 and 1/2 is the same as the difference between 1/5 and 1/4. I had this sudden realization during physics and handed in a fail test because of it.
- OMG WE HAVE DESKTOPS ON TOP OF THE CUBE NOW!!!!!!!
Due to our advanced technology, Beryl now only runs on TomTom OS. Right now, TomTom is being sued out of existance, so it runs on nothing in reality
Fixed a damage bug present from the 1.x days
Fixed the black window bug with nvidia
Fixed general ati fail
Forced intel hardware to do shaders right
Adjusted the perambulic merimbulator
Megatronized the gigapixel shared arithmatic megaprocessor RAM unit

Developers:

Guess what – you have to rewrite your plugins AGAIN! But don’t worry, we picked a really nice language – LOLCODE. I’m sure you’ll have fun.

* Be careful what you wish for

Finally Windows users can get Compiz easily!!

2009-04-01T05:31:03+00:00

On behalf of Compiz developers and the super smart guys at Novell-Microsoft Interop lab, I am happy to announce the easy way to get Compiz for Windows users.

Download Compiz for Windows users.

Run the .exe file, follow the familiar on screen wizard, reboot, that simple.

Special thanks to Jordi Massaguer Pla and his team for making this possible.

Here is another great use of Compiz(sic), you can now spin openSUSE installer cube.

Edit: This was april fool joke for all the people still(It’s November!!) leaving comment here after trying to get compiz on their Windoz. Hard luck fellas get the real OS that can run compiz.

Compiz 0.8.2 fully released

2009-03-19T13:49:25+00:00

Compiz 0.8.2 fully released!!

Packages for openSUSE 11.1 users running KDE4 Factory and GNOME 2.26 are available from here.

Bugs/enhancement requests as always goes here.

Have a lot of fun, Shane would have wanted that!