Planet Compiz

Conky

2010-03-08T22:06:36+00:00

Also, rain. Lots of rain.

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A 2D GTK Window Decorator

2010-03-04T15:23:28+00:00

Hi everyone

Not compositing

Above is a screenshot of a GTK Window Decorator running in the non-compositing mode of compiz.

This isn’t blingy though. So why is it significant? It means a significant amount of work is done on the GNOME side of things so we don’t need need to change window managers when you want to switch off compositing. It took a particularly long time to get right, simply because the original GTK-Window-Decorator wasn’t architectures with the fact that it might be painted to a window in mind, which meant that I had to rewrite the entire event handler, for example.
There are still a few bugs and I am in the process of fixing them.

Emerald

2010-02-12T04:18:43+00:00

I did the adjustments to make emerald work with the new decoration API today ….

*cough*

I figured that while we don’t have another custom decorator, it’s probably worth while keeping it around, even if it is somewhat broken.

Don’t ask if its supported because it isn’t. I would advise distributors not to ship it, ever. When we do a release, emerald would only ever be released under 0.5.7 NOT 0.9 if at all.

In other news, development has been progressing nicely. Dennis fixed the Glow issue in group, a whole bunch of reparenting bugs, the incorrect initial window stacking bug etc. I am porting the gtk-window-decorator to use the 2D Mode (emerald will NOT support this) and hopefully can have something to show for that in the next week. Then release?

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.
(No comments)

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

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

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

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"]

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.

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!

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

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.

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!

Workshop for the Baroda High School teachers

2009-03-03T15:01:11+00:00

Had a workshop for the IT teachers of the Baroda High School, a group of 4 schools today. The teachers loved openSUSE, were swept off their seat looking at some of the Compiz effects(at least I am sure they liked fishes in the bowl).

Don’t they all look happy with their openSUSE DVDs?

Next on their agenda is set up all their labs to run LTSP with a ton of openSUSE-Edu applications.

MSU FootPrints ‘09

2009-02-19T06:11:05+00:00

Starting tomorrow I will be at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda’s national level tech-fest: Foot Prints 2009.

Over 5000 students from engineering colleges from all over India are expected. There are many workshops, quizzes, exhibition, talks and also a grand performance by popular music band Euphoria scheduled.

The home page of the event is here: http://msu-footprints.org/

Details of the workshop I will be leading at the event here:
http://msu-footprints.org/kaleidoscope.html

We will be distributing openSUSE 11.1 PromoDVDs from the stall we have at the venue for three days.

If any of you are coming to Baroda in next three days do drop in at the MSU “Techo” faculty to say hello.

Git master going wild

2009-02-11T01:35:45+00:00

So this weekend I finally got the core Compiz 0.8 branch mostly finished, and master was freed up for development. Compiz++ was essentially renamed master.

I bet that was fun for all the folks using semi-automated git scripts to build compiz. Suddenly they get a real development branch with a small fraction of working plugins. This is assuming that the equally automated build process actually succeeded.

Anyway. Git is dangerous these days. If you for reasons unknown need it, either use the 0.8 branch and the merged plugin repositories, or be prepared to spend a few hours to get master working to some degree. There will be significant changes in the days to come as we set up submodules. You may already have noticed that we’re not using fd.o for git any more. Frankly, if you’re not a developer, just wait for Compiz 0.8.0. It’s right around the corner.

There are also some plugins which we are intentionally leaving behind in Compiz 0.9. GConf being one, as ccp has gconf support. This, in turn, should render the glib-plugin fairly useless. And then there’s the whole build system being up in the air as we’re about to shift to CMake, submodules and a different language which comes with different deps. If you’re not a core developer, I urge you to wait for 0.9.0 or use 0.8.0 once released. Compiz 0.9.0 will still have plenty of issues for you to find, but it should at least be functional.

Oh, and Guillaume told me we’ll finally have compiz.org. It’s being transfered, so a day or three from this should do it. Then you can reach me at kristian@{beryl-project,compiz-fusion,opencompositing,compiz}.org. And we can start worrying about re-branding everything.

(Edit: Testers: Wait for 0.9.0. Normal users: Go for 0.8.0)

Long time no post

2009-02-10T23:38:47+00:00

Hello, I'm still alive, but busy in High School, finishing my senior year. I hope that I will have time in my college years to continue this, as compiz moves in new directions.

Indeed, as Compiz Fusion seems to be coming to an end, I may have to rename the cast. At the moment I do not have time enough to make more episodes, and compiz fusion hasn't developed much anyway.

I am pretty sure that this summer I will be able to start 'er up again, maybe with a new name, and start fresh with all new bleeding edge compiz++! :)

Another reason for me posting this is an important message: DO NOT INSTALL VIA GIT ANYMORE. As Kristian mentioned, the new work on Compiz has moved to git, and confused up scripts and how-tos. Just use what Ubuntu ships with; it's up-to-date enough to have all the plugins I've reviewed.

I don't know how many people still check this blog, but I hope to start something again sometime in the near future. :) Thanks for staying subscribed all this time!

--gavin

Invitation to VCCI exhibition and MSU Tech Fest

2009-02-07T12:59:07+00:00

We would be taking part in this year’s VCCI mega exhibition 12-16 Feb 2009, our stall no is E Dome, D-19. We would of course be distributing openSUSE 11.1 DVDs that Martin Lasarsch has kindly sent for the event. Our participation at VCCI is sponsored by Novell

I would also be conducting a workshop at MSU Footprints Tech Fest: http://msu-footprints.org/ . The details of the worksop and other activities is here: http://msu-footprints.org/kaleidoscope.html

It is a marathon 5 hour track covering the following:

Introduction to Open Source world & GNU/Linux.
Compiz Fusion - Transforming your desktop with amazing effects.
Virtualization - Running Multiple Operating Systems Simultaneously.
KIWI-LTSP - Using your Old PC at the speed of your new Hardware.
Creating “Your Own” Operating system using KIWI - A step-by-step process to assemble your own operating system, with softwares of your choice, that you can take home.

We also have a stall running openSUSE “InstallFest”, promoting Linux and FOSS at the Tech Fest venue.

With this post I invite all of you to visit us at both the events if you happen to be in this part of the world.

Looking forward to seeing you all there.

The Future of Compiz – Take two

2009-02-04T17:47:11+00:00

In late December, I sent a mail to the Compiz mail list, where I expressed my concern for the future of compiz. Basically, it all boiled down to a lack of direction and leadership, made worse by a lack of documentation, a project structure that’s nothing short of messy and two-three significant branches that had appeared.

Luckily, the community rose to the challange, and we’re finally getting the project back on track. For those who used my post as a basis to predict the doom of Compiz; Sorry, we’re here to stay.

This morning I sent an e-mail to the Compiz mailinglist and forum on behalf of the Compiz Council, announcing the creation of the Council, the decision to unite the project under a single banner and the preliminary road map.

This was made possible through three separate conference calls (I missed the first) with members from the community. Thanks are due to Michael Meeks and whoever else helped make that happen. I regret that it was necessary, but it was definitley efficient, and it will allow us to work.

I would’ve expected more discussion on the forum and mailing list, but so far, the response has been somewhat slow. Hopefully, people will realise that we just revived a project that’s been dormant for the last two years when we start dropping releases in their lap.

On that note, Compiz 0.8.0 will probably be released within 2 weeks. And, I hope, closely followed by 0.9.0, the first development release with Compiz++.

Compiz presentation at NUUG’s monthly meeting in Januar

2009-01-31T03:39:02+00:00

I’ve been invited to speak at the Norwegian UNIX User Group’s January meeting. I’ll be giving much of the same presentation that I gave at the last Linpro Evening, with a good bit of news regarding the latest and very exciting developments in the Compiz-world.

That means a good bit of demonstration, a quick walk through of what makes Compiz work (and not work), how the project has evolved (Compiz, Beryl, Compiz Fusion, Compiz…) and some hopefully exciting news regarding what’s going to happen this spring.

So if you live in the Oslo-area, drop by on February 10th at 18:30. The place is Oslo University College, Pilestredet 35. For more information, see http://www.nuug.no (Norwegian).

Upcoming events

2009-01-16T12:34:41+00:00

I, along with Kartik Mistry would be leading two workshops/presentation/sessions at Sardar Patel University colleges.

We start at 11.30 am at the G H Patel P G Department of Computer Science & Technology and 3.00 pm at the C P Patel & F H Shah Commerce College on 23 Jan 2008.

We will be showcasing the latest GUI enhancements from Compiz Fusion and KDE4 projects and various FOSS development tools available on Linux platform.

edgurgel

2008-12-26T14:42:13+00:00

Massimo Mund, Marco Diego and myself have been working on Smart Put plugin.

Smart Put is a kind of Best Fit algorithm to Compiz Windows. This plugins tries to find the best(largest area) gap for windows.

If it can’t find a good gap, Smart Put can(if option is enabled) :

Stack the window onto an underlying window.
OR shrink to fit.

And finally, Smart Put has a undo too

All these new features were developed by Massimo Mund. Thanks man.

Here’s a video:

Video link

Try it out and tell us about any request,input,feature,…

$ git clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/users/edgurgel/smartput

P.S.: I’m working on a Smart Put port to Compiz++. Till there.

Tagged: compiz, compiz fusion, development, linux, marcola, plugin, smart put, window management

It’s out!!!! compiz++ branch

2008-12-24T13:04:54+00:00

Infos at: http://lists.compiz-fusion.org/pipermail/dev/2008-December/001127.html

Merry Christmas

Compiz Fusion Git snapshot for openSUSE 11.1

2008-12-21T10:29:11+00:00

Following up on the release of openSUSE 11.1, the fresh new packages from Compiz Fusion git snapshot are available here.

1-click install of everything there.

Or add http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/cyberorg/openSUSE_11.1/ manually to the repository and install whatever you need.

This repository contains many more plugins and features that are not yet part of official releases. The latest development in this release is use of Google’s Protocol Buffers: a technology that gives massive performance improvements to compiz as well as ccsm and simple-ccsm.

Note: The git snapshot packages are meant for testers and developers only, stable packages for everyday use are available from X11:XGL repository, see this post for more.

edgurgel

2008-11-30T22:18:51+00:00

Almost one month ago we presented New plugins. One of them was Swap plugin. Let me explain it better now:

Purpose

We were missing a plugin that could just exchange properties. Sometimes you just need to minimize a window and “unminimize” other. To do it, you would need to perform 2 or more clicks. So, we created Swap!

Description

It allows you to swap the geometry of two windows. Basically we changed Static Switcher plugin to swap active window with another window.

Here’s a video to show what Swap can do:

Get it here: Code

P.S.: Forró is the genre of the music. Forró is a kind of Northeastern Brazilian music.

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

edgurgel

2008-11-19T01:48:57+00:00

Transitive verb
To cause to combine, unite, or coalesce [1]

Maximumize Plus and Minimumize plugins were shared one month ago by me and Marco Diego (Bacharel Marcola).

October 20th,
Maximumize2 (Maximumize Plus) release:

http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=10077

October 23rd,
Minimumize release:

http://forum.compiz-fusion.org/showthread.php?t=10097

Yesterday Kristian Lyngstol (Maximumize maintainer) talked with me to merge our code. Result:

Massive import from maximumizeplus

We’re luck that Compiz-Fusion uses the Bazzar[2] way of developing. After one month we are helping to develop CF and noone opposed our development!

So, if you can help, come on!

P.S.: I really needed to expose my happiness

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/merge
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

Tagged: compiz, compiz fusion, development, marcola, maximumize, minimumize, plugin, window management

edgurgel

2008-11-07T22:52:00+00:00

Well, on the last post we (Eduardo Gurgel aka edgurgel & Marco Diego aka Bacharel Marcola) said that new useful plugins were coming soon. This is a brief look on what we’re currently working and a preview on what else is coming.

Compiz has been well taught since its inception as a beautiful, feature-rich (in terms of bling and effects), modern window manager. Although we agree in most of what is said about compiz, its abilities for window placement, window distribution and good use of screen real state were terribly lacking compared to other window managers such as tiled-window-managers (ion, wmii, dwm…). We’ve been working to minimize this inferiority.
For those who can’t wait for a better explanation, here’s a video showing whats is going on:

Plugins used:

New Maximumize
It expands the window on a specified direction as much as possible. It is totally based on Maximumize plugin.

Code
Video

Minimumize
Resize to half size of the window in a particular direction.

Code
Video

Smart Put
Cleverly find the best gap suitable for the current window.

Code
Video

New Put
It’s equal to Put plugin, but you can move only through empty spaces.

Code
Video

Toggle Decoration
Simple and very useful plugin to enable/disable window decoration(on a window, or all of them on the same desktop). You will discover how much space you waste with your window decorator. Toggle Decoration is totally necessary for us because we don’t use maximize and minimize anymore.

Code

Swap
Swap window’s location and size. Simple like that.
Useful when you have a main frame and others smaller windows on same desktop. You can quickly change the scope.

Code still not available. We will release ASAP.

Next steps
We noticed that all we need is love.
Just Kidding.
All we need is an automatic layout windows definition. So you can easily define YOUR own window arrangement. We will work on it on next weeks (maybe months).

P.S.: No mice were harmed during the making of this video.

Tagged: compiz, compiz fusion, development, fusion, linux, management, marcola, maximumize, minimumize, new put, plugin, smart put, window, window management

Startup Time Improvements (Part 1)

2008-10-19T15:46:49+00:00

One thing that bothered me about our settings managers (and Compiz) was that they take too long to start. A major reason for this was the XML metadata loading and parsing. Settings managers (ccsm, simple-ccsm, and simple-ccsm-kde) do the metadata parsing through libcompizconfig, whereas Compiz does some metadata parsing itself and some through libcompizconfig when used with CCP (CompizConfig plugin).

Google recently opened up their data interchange format called Protocol Buffers, which has the potential to greatly speed up metadata loading for libcompizconfig and Compiz. So my plan was to load the metadata from binary Protocol Buffers files instead of from XML files in libcompizconfig and Compiz. The libcompizconfig part of that is now complete. The Compiz part will come in the future.

Protocol Buffers metadata parsing works like this: On the first run of Compiz or one of the settings managers, metadata is read from .xml files as before, and then written to binary .pb cache files under (UPDATE) $XDG_CACHE_HOME/compizconfig/ if $XDG_CACHE_HOME is defined and ~/.cache/compizconfig/ otherwise. On subsequent runs, metadata will be read from the .pb cache files resulting in reduced program startup time. If the locale has changed or if new plugins are enabled, the necessary .pb files will be updated at program startup.

Use of Protocol Buffers is enabled by default, but will be disabled automatically at compile time if the protobuf packages mentioned below are not installed. It can also be disabled explicitly at compile time with the –disable-protobuf configure option or at run time by setting the COMPIZ_NO_PROTOBUF environment variable to 1, yes, or true.

Aside from using Protocol Buffers for metadata, there were other changes that improved program startup time, namely removal of global metadata used by libcompizconfig and loading of plugin icons in the background when ccsm starts.

So the overall startup time improvements compared to Compiz Fusion 0.7.8 (at least on my system) are as follows:

Simple-CCSM: starts about 4.5x as fast (78% less time)
CCSM: starts about 2.4x as fast (58% less time)
Compiz (when used with CCP): starts about 1.25x as fast (20% less time)

When Protocol Buffers metadata parsing is implemented in Compiz as well, you will see more startup-time improvement for Compiz. Also, note that these results are for hot startup, that is, not for the first run after a reboot. Cold startup time improvements will vary.

To get the full speedup while testing the changes, make sure you install the protobuf packages as explained below and install the latest git versions of libcompizconfig, compizconfig-python, ccsm, and compiz. NOTE: You may need to do “make distclean” before compiling libcompizconfig.

If you run into any problems, please let us know by filing a bug report at http://bugs.opencompositing.org/.

How to install Protocol Buffers (to get the full speedup)

Ubuntu/Debian users should install the packages libprotobuf0, libprotobuf-dev, and protobuf-compiler. For Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) and Debian-unstable, they are available in the official repositories. For Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) they can be downloaded from
http://ppa.launchpad.net/davidf/ubuntu/pool/main/p/protobuf/

or can be installed after adding the following lines to /etc/apt/sources.list and doing an apt-get update:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/davidf/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/davidf/ubuntu hardy main

OpenSUSE, Fedora, and Mandriva users should install the protobuf and protobuf-devel packages. If not available in the official repositories, they can be found at
http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/LenzGr

Users who want to install from sources can find the latest Protocol Buffers sources at:
http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/downloads/list

For packagers: On Ubuntu and Debian only the libprotobuf0 package is needed at run time, so no need to make the protobuf-compiler or libprotobuf-dev packages run-time dependencies for libcompizconfig. Similarly, on OpenSUSE, Fedora, and Mandriva only the protobuf package is needed at run time.

My new Xwinwrap gui Gwinwrap

2008-08-05T17:08:20+00:00

I'm pleased to announce the first public version of my pygtk app Gwinwrap. It's still very new, and most likely buggy, but if you feel like trying it the code is at Google Code.

Basically, it finds all your xscreensavers and lists them, with a preview. You can choose to start the xwinwrap screen with opacity, and choose whether or not to use a nice command before for better cpu management. Xscreensaver Arguments are also accepted in the input box.

Hope you like it!

FusionCast VI -- New Plugin: Stackswitch

2008-06-20T13:41:36+00:00

Well, here we are already with another episode. Keep in mind that I plan on making shorter, more specific episodes now for easier searching on Youtube, etc. Because of this, the episode numbers are less important and more emphasis is on the plugin/features outlined.

Watch the original video here for annotations, and/or if you're coming from the planet.

Can you Digg it? >> Thanks everyone for putting this on the front page! And welcome, diggers!

This episode, we show you an all-new plugin: Stackswitch! Added by Onestone to gitweb, this plugin is a neat hybrid of the scale and shift window switchers. Take a look at the video for details!

Thanks a whole lot to Kate Linford for personally offering her track, "Hip Hop Bond" to use on this cast. I think you'll find it quite outstanding! A link to the track may be made available later.

Links:
Stackswitch on Gitweb
Original Announcement (onestone's blog)

Please email me at fusioncast at gmail dot com!
I am on IRC occasionally under the nick of gavintlgold on irc.freenode.net #compiz-fusion.
Also, comment by clicking on the link below.

Tip: did you know that you can sort my posts by the label "episodes" to only see my episodes and cut out the announcements and stuff?

Just another switcher: Stackswitch

2008-06-19T00:23:53+00:00

To thank Mark Shuttleworth for the invitation to UDS in Prague, I’ve asked him what he would like to see in Compiz. He send me a mockup of a new switcher plugin based on the idea of Matthew Thomas. And here is my implementation of it as Compiz plugin called stackswitch.

You can download it from Compiz Fusion git:
git clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/fusion/plugins/stackswitch

FusionCast Episode V - Ghost + Dodge!

2008-06-16T17:47:52+00:00

NOTE: I would seriously recommend watching this from the Youtube page. You'll get the annotations that way and they'll clarify a few things. I'm putting the video here anyway for lazy people:

Here's a new episode of FusionCast! This time, we run through a couple of things you can do with the similar plugins Ghost and Dodge (not to be confused with the dodge animation!). These plugins are available only with the developmental version of Compiz Fusion (GIT).

Ghost: This plugin (in its default settings) makes all normal windows set to "Always on Top" transparent and inputless. In other words, you can click underneath the window but still see it. This can be useful for typing in commands, but also (I imagine) for image editing without having to import a photo into the image editor (see the video's example).

I changed the settings to this because I found it worked better (Allowing windows that aren't "normal" to ghost too):

Dodge: This plugin also lets you have windows on top without worrying about using their input. Instead of making the window transparent, it slides it out of the way when your cursor would be over it. Other ways of dodging are making the window go all the way off the screen and physically move (where it will remain until it is moved again). The wobbly effect really makes this plugin great. My custom configuration follows:

Oh, for those who thought this was pointless because the plugins are already pretty old, I am active now and you'll get a more useful, up to date video soon. This video is after all geared towards those who don't have GIT compiz I suppose. :) Horray for summer!

Links:
Ghost on gitweb
Dodge on gitweb

Please email me at fusioncast at gmail dot com!
I am on IRC occasionally (at irc.freenode.net #compiz-fusion) under the nick of gavintlgold.
Also, comment by clicking on the link below.

FusionCast on Twitter!

2008-06-16T14:13:48+00:00

I just joined Twitter as FusionCast. If anyone is interested feel free to add me :) Videos coming very soon... I've updated my compiz and am now figuring out which new plugin to feature! (see the twitter for more updates!)

Youtube Annotations + More Vids to Come!

2008-06-14T21:19:26+00:00

A very interesting feature that may be extremely useful for me is the new Youtube Annotations feature. Take a look at the page of my latest fusioncast for an example. It allows me to put notes in the middle of the cast. I think it'll be very useful in the future. What do you think?

Speaking of the future, I am now out of school (summer!) That means that I'll have considerably more time to work on video casts. Expect quite a few coming up! And tell me if they should have annotations too. Thanks!

Fusioncast Episode IV

2008-06-14T21:16:34+00:00

(if you are seeing this from the planet, without the youtube video, visit the actual blog post to see this episode)

NOTE: I'm experimenting with the new "annotations" feature on Youtube. You'll have to go to the video's page to see them though. Let me know what you think!

Yes, you read that right! It's another episode of Fusioncast, this time reviewing:

Cube cylinder
Mag plugin
Showmouse
The new expo curve
Updates to atlantis
An excerpt about the wii head tracking plugin

Notes:

You will have to compile compiz fusion from source to get the cylinder and other new plugins. Some plugins may already be available in the Hardy beta, however.

I don't have a Wii controller, so I took a segment from Smspillaz's video (see below). Learn more at his blog.

Since everyone always asks about my theme, I'll just let you all know right now: This time, it's the Ubuntu Hardy "Human-Murrine" with customized colors (I like that they finally included this option for the Human theme!). The wallpaper is linked below. Using the "Glossy" metacity theme. Running Hardy Heron beta.

I'm also (as usual) using Kiba-Dock, SVN version. It's extremely alpha software, and quite buggy since it's not a release (I'm not complaining), but I like to run it for fun (and because it looks so cool).

I used Blender to make the little 3d compiz-cube, and I will upload the source files soon. Patience, guys. I intend to upload all the source videos and files as well for your tinkering benefit. It's coming.

EDIT: Sorry for forgetting to mention the video editor! I use kdenlive (as in the other fusioncasts). It's a little improved in the Hardy repos, but still extremely buggy. I'm waiting for all those MLT bugs to get fixed, guys!!

Please comment if I've forgotten to mention something. I'll set it aright.

Links:

Wallpaper
Dock on the bottom of the screen
Link to the website of the amazing cute movie with the rabbit (it's an open source movie!)
The original Wii head tracking video by Johnny Lee
Wii head tracking with compiz fusion by Smspillaz
Where the cool music came from

Kdenlive

Original video file + all source files coming soon!

Please email me at fusioncast at gmail dot com!
I am on IRC occasionally under the nick of gavintlgold.
Also, comment by clicking on the link below.

My New Compiz Fusion Effects on Compiz’s Gitweb

2008-06-05T15:09:10+00:00

The compiz fusion guys gave me a repository on their git servers to host some of the animation effects that I wrote! I compile all of compiz from the latest git and advise that you do too for building these effects. I recommend you follow this official distro-independant guide to install a bleeding edge compiz version. Don’t worry, its not too tough. Anyway, if you want my new effects, install compiz from git and follow these steps.

git clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/users/kdubois/extra-animations
cd extra-animations
make
make install (I think this by default installs to ~/.compiz)

Once installed, fire up ccsm and look for the plugin called ‘Animations Plus’. Click it, and a message will show up asking if you want to disable the Animation plugin. Select “Disable Animation Plugin”, and you’ll have the new effects available to you, and configurable from the AnimationPlus icon in ccsm. Enjoy! :-D

As of today (June 5,2008) there are two new effects, Helix and Blinds, as well as hexagonal tessellation for the leafspread effect (the window assembles from hexagons instead of rectangles). There are some neat particle-based effects in the work, as well as triangular and gaussian distribution point tesselation (both of which are likely to give rise to new effects). The new effects I just mentioned should be cooling on the windowsill soon, so I’ll announce them when they come out of the oven! :-P

Text plugin for jasper

2008-05-31T23:08:29+00:00

Well, I haven't had much time to work on jasper the past few weeks, but now there is a few new features.

Firstly, there is a new build script, thanks to some-guy. This is very useful to me, as it makes it less work for me to add new plugins. It also adds "make like" output, which can be useful if something is failing (if you pass quiet it will only display errors). Also, passing clean ("./build.sh clean") will clean up all files generated by building, which is also a very nice feature.

The only other visual change was the addition of the "text plugin", which is used to display the title of a window. Some things which I still have do do for this plugin is make it update when the title changes, and also properly handle the case when the title is too long (at the moment it will just keep on writing, potentially over-top of other buttons). The font and font-size is the only part which is currently editable by the theme, though I do hope to add some other options (such as colour, style, etc)

The updated theme now looks quite a bit more bulky, but I'm only updating the theme to show (and test) new features, so I'm not concerned with usability yet.

2008-05-19T10:31:21+00:00

I have seen a couple posts on the forums regarding the new decorator, codenamed: jasper, so I thought I would post a little information on it.

Rather than basing the decorator off emerald or g-w-d, I decided to base it off comipz. It is similar to compiz in that it uses a plugin system very similar to compiz (in fact, the code that does this is copied from compiz and only slightly modified).

Something I hope to accomplish with this, is to allow for excessive customization through the use of plugins. I decided to make it after trying to add customizable buttons to emerald/g-w-d. I think that doing customizable buttons cleanly requires plugins, so that is why I use plugins. Another benifit is that if you want to draw something differently, all you need to do is use a different plugin. One theme could use an image plugin to draw a buttons, while using another plugin to draw a pulsating border using cairo.

Per window themes is also another thing which I want to add (so different windows get different decorations), or a decoration based on which user is running the process that the window is associated with (so, for instance, if you are running an application as root, it could receive a different border). So much is possible (at least, I can't yet see why any of the afore mentioned things would prove problematic - however, that often changes when actually coding it :D)

As DarknessssenkraD said in his post (at least according to google translations), the state is "ultra mega alpha" - and I think that is a good indication of its state, it 'works' (sometimes), but there is a lot of work to do (both in stability and features).

For those who want to try it out (also from DarknessssenkraD's post):

git-clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/users/b0le/jasper
cd jasper
./build.sh
./jasper --replace
(only need the second one if it doesn't work first time)
./jasper --replace

It would be good to note that my build script isn't very good (feel free to volunteer to fix it). One problem is that if compiz is not installed to /usr/local, you may need to run 'CPATH="$PREFIX/include/compiz" ./build.sh'
So if you have, say, a normal ubuntu package, you would run 'CPATH="/usr/include/compiz" ./build.sh'

Currently the only dependencies are X, cairo, libxml2 and libdecoration (so to compile it you will need the appropriate files)

2008-05-17T10:43:46+00:00

Well svg loading now works. Although, it isn't displaying the svg's, it is using the shape of the svg and then drawing colour (it is used in cairo as a mask). At the moment the colour is specified by the theme, but I hope to add the ability to get the colour from gtk. Also, it should be relatively simple to use gradients rather than plain colours, or use an (svg) image instead.

I added (well... copied from compiz) a timeout system, which basically allows plugins to get functions called as often as they want (they specify a time, and when it is done, the function gets called). I used that to allow 'animated' themes. By animated I mean the colour slowly shifts between two colours (although alot more is possible)

For those who are trying it out, and want to disable the animation (I will in the 'default' theme soon), just remove the target and dif tags (within cairoanimation). Also, one thing to notice is that you can use the different methods at the same time, one button could be a png image, while another could be a colour fading svg image.

Next is work on the state handling (of windows and buttons), this will allow things like changing decorations when maximized or shaded.
Maybe add gradient support.
Add a dbus plugin and a plugin that allows buttons such as shelf and maximumize.
Moveable tabs.
Proper theme loading / settings loading (parse the themes when you start decorator rather than when you open a window)
And many more things :)

EDIT: seems that it doesn't like xml tags in there...

Compiz Fusion Sphere is here! Yay!

2008-05-12T18:27:33+00:00

All hail Desktop Sphere!

Finally, onestone has managed to code the desktop sphere many people were waiting for! He wrote about it on his blog. It's quite a neat plugin, and also merges the cubecaps plugin with the cube addon plugin, making for less plugins to worry about (the cubecaps plugin was sort of minor in the configurations, anyway).

Only available in git of course, but great to try out for those of us who have access to that ;)

And digg it too so others know: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Compiz_Fusion_Truly_Spherical_Desktop_View_Arrives

Blog post: http://dev.compiz-fusion.org/~onestone/blog/?p=10

Edit: sorry about messing up the planet, it's an annoying bug :(

Edit 2: To clarify, the sphere is available in the "Cubeaddon" plugin.