Worse and worse… 12 days and no news. I hate holidays, heh. Nevertheless, I have written more than 2500 lines during these 12 days. Let’s have a quick overview over all this code 
What’s new?
Two Compiz plugins!
The first one is something that I missed from Beryl, bottom cube caps. The new “cubecaps” plugin supports top and bottom caps, correctly blends caps color with the images (e.g. if you select a black cap color, the result won’t be completely black whatever the image is as with the previous “cube” plugin caps, but will be your image on a black background), and supports caps when there are more than 4 viewports (actually one could also enable them for 3 viewports by changing a single integer in the source file (currently at line 288 of cubecaps.c at commit 6d463e3), but it might look wrong if image is too big). Finally, clamping is done using clamp_to_border extension if available, which avoids weird lines when using non scaled images with alpha.
I’ll add some screenshots when I’ll be able to upload them… I am currently using my cellphone to post this, sadly.
The second one is a lot more specific : it displays some visual feedback of what you are doing with your mouse and your keyboards. More specifically, when you hit one of your mouse buttons it displays (when enabled) a little mouse in the bottom right of the screen with the button you hit highlighted, until you release it. Likewise, when you press a modifier key (Alt, Shift…) it displays a nice rounded rectangle in which the name of the modifier is written in the bottom left corner of the screen. It’s pretty hard to describe how it actually looks with words, but I hope you get it anyway. The main use case if for showing used key bindings when demonstrating/teaching the usage of an application.
Again, screenshots will come
I began working on a third plugin that would handle metacity -> Compiz -> metacity switch and move windows from the workspace they were on to the corresponding viewport upon startup and do the opposite upon shutdown, but there’s another core problem that blocks it (plugins are initialized after screen and windows were initialized, during which windows are all moved to current workspace).
I also happened to need a quick way to test some Cairo drawing before using it for the final application (which could, for instance, require compiling before testing, which is kinda annoying when you are trying to find right values for a simple drawing). I wrote a “cairoDrawingArea” PyGTK widget which handles the drawing of a Cairo surface (plus a patterned background and/or borders). One just has to write a child of this function and write the draw () method to do the actual Cairo drawing. I included the whole thing at the end of this post. I know I could/should have just used the write_to_png function on the Cairo surface, but dealing with nautilus/eog is just so unhumane and slow, while I needed (again) a fast way to view the result of my changes.
Most of the code for this script comes from a quick PyGTK Tic Tac Toe game I wrote to show a friend how one could write a fully working “software” in less than 2 hours. By the way, I am wondering if it would be possible to write an AI that would have no clue on the rules of a simple game such as Tic Tac Toe, and learn them round after round.
Last but not least, I fixed some bugs and mem leaks in my colorfilter plugin and cleaned the code a lot. There is now only one remaining thing to do for this plugin before it gets considered as done : fragment program parameters. Shouldn’t be too hard, but I am not sure of the way to cumulate filters using parameters (maybe it is just impossible).
What’s wrong?
I definitely can’t fix Filters Manager problems :/ I tried writing the base rgb -> hsv -> rgb fragment program using Cg, but it resulted in a 120 lines long fragment program, while poor Intel 900 GMA chipsets only support 96. Pretty sad, heh. The other problems (randomly borked cumulative filters preview and a strange OpenGL Invalid Operation error on first action on one of the previews when they are both displayed) are still there as well, but I think I could probably workaround them by having just one OpenGL drawing area which would process a queue of drawing operations
What’s next?
I’m quite unsure… I’d like to finish my Summer of Code, but it’s sadly held by the Filters Manager problems and by some bugs in Compiz Core that won’t be fixed before next release (which should hopefully happen pretty soon… I guess I’ll have to wear back my release roller hat for Fusion). I have done a lot of Compiz coding (some patches which I discussed with David and finally got a wider solution, fixing numerous other problems, some other patches that might make it after next release, and the two plugins), and I currently don’t have much ideas on what I could do (even though I would be very happy to find a good reason to learn more about OpenGL ). I have some mathematics related things planned as well (involving convex hulls, hypercubes and such), and some web coding which is becoming really high priority. Getting CamlUI ready for Windows and fixing the handling of toplevels must also be done (I would like to write a similar gedit plugin, if I can find some time to do so). And I do need to finish cairo-swissknife. So much things to do and so little time 
Off topic.
I am looking for a real touch screen bigger than 10″. I would really really like to try to code some touch screen specific apps, but all I found was either fake touchscreens or unavailable laptops (which would actually be better than a simple touchscreen, I don’t really care about money as long as it’s less than 2000€). Hints welcome 
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After waking up a bit before 5 AM this morning and about 6 hours on the road, we finally arrived in Dijon around 11:30 AM. We left Sophia-Antipolis (the biggest French technopolis, located near Nice and the Italian frontier in the South-East of France, where my sister is going to get her very first job in a few days, working as a software development engineer) after one week of various operations to find a flat for my sister, and we had planned to stop there in Dijon to take a ride on a Segway. Indeed, the local tourism agency (or an affiliate, I’m not exactly sure of the legal situation of the whole thing, but who cares…) offers rides in the town center on Segway’s for just 15€, while similar trips in other cities are much more expensive (e.g. 75€ for a trip in Paris, which is likely to be way more crowded and a lot less nicer for a Segway ride).
We learnt a bunch of weird stories about local myths and nice informations. The fact that we were only three (my dad, the guide and I) made it even nicer cause she hadn’t to look after ten crazy guys or gals who could have hit a poor child in the street or whatnot.
I finally got CamlUI 0.3 working on Windows. Syntax highlighting is now powered by the brand new gtksourceview 2.0 (which will also power gedit 2.20). I have reworked the process handling a bit, but I still can’t get the “Interrupt” feature right :/ Windows process handling sucks so much, without the ability to send a single signal to a random process :/