Tue, 15 Aug 2006

Seventh report

Screenshot with web page relations

Web page relations.

After too much procrastination, I have something to report for a change. The Compiz plugin and the Firefox extension are fleshed out to the extent that curious and helpful people might want to alpha-test them. I don't have precompiled binaries or even source packages yet, but compiling shouldn't be laborous (see InstallationGuide in the wiki).

Otherwise, I needed to merge upstream changes of Compiz to the plugin, which meant getting more experience with Git. Some is still pending, as the documentation work isn't properly merged yet. Comparisons of version control systems seldom extend on the different work-flows they imply. The closest this far and thus useful reading was What people Love about their VCS - Part 3 of 4. git, which a friend pointed to me.

Something historical I hope someone would've reminded me of earlier when I told of my debugging setup is core dumps. They're off by default these days, but tell ulimit -c unlimited to bash before running a program, and you can start the debugger after the crash. This is good for big processes such as Xgl or Firefox, but it also removes the need of remote debugging in case of Compiz. Just start Compiz again, and examine the core file with gdb ~/inst/bin/compiz core.

While I'd like to think there's still a month left of the summer, there's actually less than three weeks. I don't expect to get the project fully closed down the last day of the month anymore. Luckily the semester starts slowly in the Finnish universities, so I'll have time to finish documentation and revise patches. But before that, I need to achieve a couple of major sprints. I'd almost hope the summer weather of the century to turn into focusing autumn rains. I'll try to add more features to the Firefox extension, and make the Compiz plugin look acceptable if not good.

Posted at: 07:46 | Permanent link | Comment page

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