English

Okay, I knew PHP isn't the most well-designed language in the world. I knew it grew up from a hobbyist language and that it is used for things today it never was meant for. I knew that it's function names sometimes aren't very intuitive.
But today I started to hate it. Now, beside various other strange things, this one let's me wonder which drugs the person that implemented this was consuming:

PHP is, by design, syntactical similar to C, meaning it has curly brackets, same comment syntax, same syntax for if, for and other basic commands. Now, one would probably think that a function named the same in C and PHP would do the same. Or at least something similar.
Due to the fact that C is very low-level, it has a function called sizeof() that gives you the amount of bytes a variable type uses in memory. E. g., an integer is the basic type of the current architecture, not always the same size (4 byte on i386, 8 byte on amd64). With sizeof() you can get the size of the type.
Now, I was looking for a function to get the number of elements in an array. I searched and found, well, sizeof(). Which I couldn't really believe. Due to the abstract structure of PHP, it seemed quite impossible to me to have something like sizeof() in php. It really gives you the number of elements in an array.

After the release of mesa 6.5.1 and some patches added to xorg-server, I was able to add compiz to the portage tree. So we now have a running aiglx/compiz-setup in Gentoo.

It comes along with a script compiz-aiglx that runs the neccessary options and loads all default-plugins. If you're using ~x86 and have a card supported by free dri drivers, you should be fine. If you're using stable, a package.keywords suitable is in my overlay.

If you were using my overlay in the past, make sure you emerge rsync and svn up in the overlay, after that update mesa, xorg-server and compiz from portage. If you relied on the autodetection-hack I previously had, this is removed in the portage-ebuild, so you need to set LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1 and add option --strict-binding (or just use the above mentioned compiz-aiglx script).

Further stuff (configuration tools, quinnstorm stuff) will follow. Submit problems to the Gentoo bugzilla.

Thanks to all the testers and helpers, especially thanks to David Reveman and Kristian Høgsberg for their great coding work.

The weekend I was at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin. I was so engaged that I didn't find time to blog from there (and the »freifunk« wasn't very stable, but they told me it's the fault of the Deutsche Telekom).

It was a very interesting conference, met a lot of cool people. I spent most of the time with the people of the Free Software Foundation at their booth.
I met people from the »Bayrischer Rundfunk« (german public television station) and discussed about abolishing the GEZ and free content licensing of public television materials. I talked to a free radio activist about historical copyright issues and we ended up in discussing the kyoto protocol and uranium mining in Kongo. Had some discussions about politics in latin america with one guy coming from argentinia. That may give you a short impression about the variety of interesting people I met there.

On the conference topics, it had the theme »Free Software, free culture, free infrastructure«. An interesting panel I want to mention was the discussion about open frequencies. It was basically that only a small number of the frequency spectrum are available to the public at the moment, but wireless lan is already creating some interesting things (freifunk), so the conclusion was that more open frequencies might lead to much more interesting technology. There was a guy from colt telecom talking about the political issues of this subject and the old telecommunication lobby (for example the ITU). Another guy was from Indonesia and talked about projects they did with public wireless technology and their efforts to build own antennas.

Lawrence Lessig helt the keynote, he is definitely a good speaker, while it was far to much »popstar«-like to me (book-signing session afterwarts). His topic was the «Read-Write-Society«, and for one thing I can fully agree with him: It's time to fight DRM.

On Saturday, I was on the come2linux event in Essen, organized by the local linux user group.

Slides from my talk (3D-Desktop with Linux) can be downloaded as ODP and as PDF. It's a bit longer than my previous slides to that topic, because it was a »real« talk, not just a lightning one.

I had the strong impression that things are moving forward with linux on the desktop. One impression I had on my trip when I went into the magazine store in Düsseldorf mainstation, where the first thing I saw was a bunch of linux magazines. The GameStar (quite popular german computer game magazine) has a topic »Linux für Spieler« (which means Linux for Gamers).
The gaming-issue could be interesting, on the come2linux there was a quite big booth about linux gaming. Wine (the free/original one) is improving much in this area (although most people still refer to cedega when talking about games on linux).

Another thing I often notice is a growing interest in CAcert. The guys at the CAcert-booth were quite happy that I stayed there a while as I am able to give out 35 points (just like Pylon on Sunday). I had a CAcert sign and some cravat guys asked me to assure them when I walked around.

I just did some large updates to my »fun with x«-overlay after some experiences from the weekend where I installed it on various other people's machines, so I thought it's time to post some up-to-date information.
A few days ago I got a bunch of new patches from Kristian Høgsberg that should be much less hacky than the previous ones. You need to re-compile xorg-server and compiz together to use aiglx with compiz.
The compiz-ebuild has no longer a gnome and kde useflag, because the kde-window-decorator is not working at the moment and it doesn't make much sense to build compiz without any window decorations. Also, compiz now comes with two startscripts (compiz-aiglx and compiz-xgl) that basically just run the decorator and compiz with all default plugins. I noticed that the autodetection hack (whether it's running xgl or aiglx) doesn't really work, so the script also has all neccessary parameters. The patch is still in, but I'd like to have some better solution for that in the future.
In the main dir, I placed a sample package.keywords for people using the stable (no ~arch) tree of gentoo.

I've -*-keyworded the metacity-ebuild (because upstream isn't working at the moment on the libcm/metacity-stuff and compared to compiz it's boring anyway) and the compiz-quinnstorm-ebuild (because I don't work on it currently). You can still use them though if you add them to your package.keywords.

Probably one of the more interesting news: I have now commit-access to coffee's overlay, which means we work together to merge improvements forth and back. For the common question which overlay to take, I could say that mine is more polished, just contains the basic things to run xgl/aiglx and compiz and nothing more and is probably more stable, while coffee's contains more stuff (e. g. the now split up quinnstorm stuff).

Beside that, mesa is going to have a new release within days, which will make things much easier (and probably let us merge some stuff into main portage soon).

To get the fun, just
svn co https://svn.hboeck.de/xgl-overlay/