Stormy Conditions, Outlook Fair

Right now I'm swamped. I landed frame display lists yesterday (woohoo) and I've been fixing a few regressions today. Unfortunately there was a small size and space hit, and I have more work to do to analyze where the growth came from and cut it back. I'm hoping that stopping certain functions from being inlined will help a lot. Also there is view system code that is no longer used that we can remove.

Now that frame display lists have landed, we can move quickly to finish the caret work so carets will use the normal paint path --- killing the infamous "caret disappears when over IFRAME etc" bug. This will also enable caret in SVG-transformed HTML. Which reminds me that another thing I plan to do very soon, based on frame display lists, is reenable SVG <foreignobject> on trunk, for cairo builds at least. Painting and event targeting to transformed HTML should work, but invalidation will not work immediately, so dynamic effects in the transformed HTML won't look right yet. Getting invalidation to work will happen during view system removal, and I've decided to delay that until after widgets get removed, which depends on plugin widgets being hoisted to the top level --- so that's an upcoming major project. Before that though, I'm working on getting native GTK themes working with cairo as well as they can. This will let us turn on GTK theming for HTML content, which will be cool --- we haven't done that before because we could never print them. With my new code, we will be able to.

Apart from all that, I'm also supposed to be judging extension contest entries over the next week. I've done a few, and so far I'm impressed.

I'm going offline for most of next week. Friends from the USA are visiting and I'll be spending as much time with them as possible, climbing volcanoes, getting sunburned, that sort of thing. So don't be surprised if blog comments don't show up, email doesn't get answered, and trunk regressions take a while to be fixed :-).

One Year On

Well, I've been back for a year.

Overall it's been everything I hoped it would be. We've revived relationships with friends and family that laid dormant for many years. We've settled into a new home and a new church, and made new friends. That kept us busy during the year but we've still had time to enjoy much of what Auckland has to offer. Work has been satisfying, exciting at times.

Over the coming year I'm looking forward to more of the same. Hopefully we will be more giving and less receiving, and dig deeper into relationships with friends and family. I'm also looking forward to some longer-range trips to explore more of this lovely region. A few friends from the USA will be visiting us, which should be wonderful.

Workwise, I'll continue hacking away along the lines I've previously talked about: eliminating widget and view hierarchies, and helping with other projects --- cairo, reflow branch, units. Novell will probably have me spend some more time on GNOME integration. I may also do some work on development tools. My travel options are a bit more flexible this year (US tax issues restricted me last year) and I'll probably visit the USA a couple of times. I'm sure it will all be fun.

Morning Light

After my weekly 5am teleconference, I decided to walk to the office via a long route --- from our house to the summit of Mount Eden, then down past my old high school, through the Domain, Auckland University and Albert Park to downtown. Apart from the exercise, I wanted to view Auckland from Mount Eden in dawn light. Indeed, it was spectacular. I wish I'd brought my camera, but in some ways I'm glad I didn't, because I'm not enough of photographer (nor is my camera enough of a camera) to do justice to the misty glow and purple shadows.

A bonus surprise was finding a film crew at the summit. The focus was on a woman wearing an astonishing costume of gilded Speedo plate mail which rattled as she walked. I would have guessed it was a Xena shoot if that show was still in production, and if they hadn't been using the sunrise over Auckland as a backdrop. I can't imagine what it was about.

The rest of the walk was good too. I really like how the scattered joggers and walkers on Mount Eden smile and say good morning. Walking past Auckland Grammar School brings back lots of memories. In the Domain I took the Glade Path through a grove with tree ferns and waterfalls. Altogether it was a lovely way to start the day.