This is still based on my series of G+ posts But Chris! I don't care about Unity. What does Mir mean for me? The two common concerns I've seen on my G+ comment stream are: With Canonical focusing on Mir rather than Wayland, what does this mean for GNOME/Kubuntu/Lubuntu? What about Mint? Does this harm other distros by fragmenting the Linux driver space? What does this mean for GNOME/Kubuntu/etc? The short answer, for the short-to-mid-term is: not much. ... Read More

This is based on my series of G+ posts Standing on the shoulders of giantsWe've recently gone public (yay!) with the Mir project that we've been working on for some months now. It's been a bit rockier than I'd hoped (boo!). Particularly, we offended people with incorrect information the wiki page we wanted to direct the inevitable questions to. I had proof-read this, and didn't notice it - I'm familiar with Wayland, so even with “X's input has poor security” and “Wayland's input protocol may duplicate some of the problems of X” juxtaposed I didn't make the connection. ... Read More

I've been meaning to write more, or indeed at all, on this blog. In the interests of making this easier, I'll try to ease my way in with a bit of a gripe post. Always easier! So this will be deliberately more extreme than my actual views. With that said... The concept of "definition" Why does it seem that education academics find this so difficult? This morning's 5500 lecture featured a slide titled " ... Read More

The Will to Macros The excellent MapTool full of useful features. One of which is the ability to associate macros with tokens - particularly useful it 4E D&D, since the maximum number of different attacks a character can have is less than 10. Sadly, the documentation is somewhat sparse. Let's remedy that, with a worked example: writing Graham Tom's basic attack macro. So, at its simplest, a basic attack is d20 + Str modifier + 1/2 level + proficiency vs AC, with [W] + Str mod damage. ... Read More

Adventures in future upstream nightmares I clearly need to move "Write a 'How to be a good upstream' Ubuntu wiki page" closer to the top of my TODO list. This piece of wrongness seen in #ubuntu-motu: (20.24.31| screennam)) folks, I am sent here 'cos I have a bit of software to release under a modified gpl (20.24.53| screennam)) and I guess I've not done this before so I'll need some advice on making it publishable ... Read More

My friend Bice came up to Sydney for the first time at the beginning of this week in order to burn off some of his annual leave. He's so lazy that he hadn't bothered organising any leave for the three years he's been with his company. Habits are easy to fall into and hard to break - I doubt I'd do much differently. Speaking of which, I have a habit of accumulating TODO items and insufficient time management to do anything about it. ... Read More

Sam's gone off to a materials science conference, where she will be presenting some of her work. This means that she's not here. Somehow, a couple of years ago this wouldn't have mattered. Wow. Before she left, I tried to update her Windows XP laptop. I'd forgotten how strange windows is. I needed to install three install programs before I could actually install any updates.

Sam and I bought some wardrobes and a desk from a post-doc who's moving off to England to take up a position as lecturer. This is good: no longer will our clothes horse have to do double duty as our entire clothes storage space. The bad is, of course, that we needed to get the furniture home ourselves. Now, getting a removalist/furniture taxi would've cost about $140. Hiring a ute for the day, cost $69. ... Read More

So, on Friday Sam and I went to see the new Transformers movie with SpockSoc. And it was good. Who'd have thought that battles between huge, city destroying robots could be so cinematic? I'm learning dvorak, now that I've got a lappy that I can move the keys around on. Except, curiously, for the 'b' key, which is different to every other key on the keyboard. I'm now at that awkward phase where my fingers kind of know where they're meant to go, just as long as I don't think too hard about it :) ... Read More

┌──../../../src/EGL/libegl.c─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │153 { │ │154 if (_eglPointerIsDereferencable(ptr)) │ │155 return *((void **)ptr); │ │156 return NULL; │ │157 } │ │158 │ │159 static EGLBoolean IsGbmDisplay(void *native_display) │ │160 { │ │161 void *first_pointer = SafeDereference(native_display); │ │162 Dl_info info; │ │163 │ │164 if (dladdr(first_pointer, &info) == 0) { │ │165 return EGL_FALSE; │ │166 } │ │167 │ >│168 return !strcmp(info.dli_sname, "gbm_create_device"); │ │169 } │ │170 │ │171 static EGLBoolean IsX11Display(void *dpy) │ │172 { │ │173 void *alloc; │ │174 void *handle; │ │175 void *XAllocID = NULL; │ │176 │ │177 alloc = SafeDereference(&((_XPrivDisplay)dpy)->resource_alloc); │ │178 if (alloc == NULL) { │ │179 return EGL_FALSE; │ │180 } │ │181 │ │182 handle = dlopen("libX11. ... Read More