Today was my last at Trolltech. Some of you already knew that, the others are likely getting mouth to mouth reciprocation right now while a heavy set man is charging defibrillator paddles next to them (breath, breath!).
Technically Qt is years ahead of all of its competition and with Trolltech's amazing engineering team it will continue doing great. I felt that other parts of the Open Source graphics stack could use my work a little more at the moment.
We (Open Source community) move at an astounding pace but the lower parts of our graphics framework are lagging a little bit behind. I wanted to go back to working on those parts of the graphics stack and it made sense for me to join a company that would directly profit from my work on Mesa, DRI, drivers and X.
This Monday will mark my first day at Tungsten Graphics. The engineering team at TG includes the likes of Brian Paul, Keith Whitwell, Michel Dänzer, Alan Hourihane and others, which reads almost like "Who's who in Open Source graphics". Clearly the only thing that was missing there was someone who looks really good naked. That's me. I also know a thing or two about this whole "graphics" thing which tends to help.
I'll be living in London for the next ~2 months or so. In England, while mainly working on Mesa, I'll be filling the void left by the departure of Victoria and David Beckham.
Friday, August 31, 2007
Monday, August 20, 2007
Small steps
I was on vacations last week but I'm being all jealous of my luggage. It got a free trip around the world. During my last 8 flights my luggage has been lost 5 times. Is that a record? Confetti anyone? It's a celebration. If you're going to meet me during any of the upcoming conferences I'll be the outgoing and highly sarcastic naked guy with a sign on my chest saying "for my face look this way" and an arrow pointing up.
I neglected to mention that, as Simon said, QtWebKit is working on Windows. Simon did an amazing job of porting all the quirks of the build system but "amazing" is the default state for all of his code so it's not a surprise at all. While he was doing that I've sat down and ported XML tokenizer to QXmlStream from LibXML. If you never wrote a web rendering tokenizer (and unless you're crazy, the chances of that are pretty high, and if you did you're crazy and won't remember doing it anyway) you know that "fragile" is a term that nicely describes it. After it was ported Lars and I sat down to fix the regressions and they didn't even know what hit them (ha! ninja reference).
In other news I've merged in FreeType2 rasterization algorithm patches in Qt. Our raster engine, uses the beauty that is FreeType's rasterizer, with a few patches on top. Because they break BC in FreeType's public interfaces we can't merge them back at the moment. In any case the patches improve rendering speed in general antialiased paths of the raster engine (meaning on Windows, Qtopia Core and in general whenever rendering to a QImage) by about 10% which is gangsta awesome ("gangsta awesome" is a very high level of awesomeness, at least judging from MTV).
I've also optimized the path clipping code. Andreas uses the path clipping code in GraphicsView for collision detection, so when I say "path clipping code" you should read "path clipping and GraphicsView collision detection". A lot of the time in that algorithm has been spent on vertex allocation for tested paths. I've used a few tricks to speed it up by about 15%. The code for that algorithm is the number two reason why baby seals die (the first is still undisputed). It's not even the algorithm itself but the inherent complexity of the problem. I'm a big fan of computational geometry in computer graphics because it makes grown man cry, except me and I like feeling like the lean, mean, killing machine that I am. My favorite part of the path clipping problem is that there are two ways of solving the precision problems and neither of them really works. The trick is that paths operate in double coordinate system, efficient snap-rounding implementations that I've seen operate in fixed-point coordinate system which falls apart in this case because of absolutely random distribution of vertices across the full double spectrum. Tessellation and clipping itself can be done in a screen coordinate system, which makes it possible to consistently represent your coordinates with fixed-point representation. That doesn't work for paths because, e.g. boolean operations on paths need to be done in native path coordinates not screen coordinates. So the algorithm forces an absolutely crazy mix of dynamic fixed-point size, reduced-predicates, magic and good-will to work. Aren't you happy that I'm doing it for you? You better be.
Yours(1) Latino(2) Lover(3)
1) Not really "yours", more "community". I love "you" but "you" need to realize that I need to be seeing other people.
2) Not really "Latino". Unless of course my Spanish or Brazilian friends would like to name me an "honorary Latino" or "Latino by association". I'd be definitely down with that. The only food I can make that is eatable and doesn't force the fire department to evacuate the building before are nachos. I'm a definition of grace in the kitchen. "Whatever you have in the kitchen I will make it burn" is my motto. Plus I'm sporting quite an attitude to boot. "Make Zack a Latino" campaign. We can make it work!
3) Not really "lover". More "no feelings haver". Though technically I've worked on software for so long that hate is, next to sarcasm, my primary export.
I neglected to mention that, as Simon said, QtWebKit is working on Windows. Simon did an amazing job of porting all the quirks of the build system but "amazing" is the default state for all of his code so it's not a surprise at all. While he was doing that I've sat down and ported XML tokenizer to QXmlStream from LibXML. If you never wrote a web rendering tokenizer (and unless you're crazy, the chances of that are pretty high, and if you did you're crazy and won't remember doing it anyway) you know that "fragile" is a term that nicely describes it. After it was ported Lars and I sat down to fix the regressions and they didn't even know what hit them (ha! ninja reference).
In other news I've merged in FreeType2 rasterization algorithm patches in Qt. Our raster engine, uses the beauty that is FreeType's rasterizer, with a few patches on top. Because they break BC in FreeType's public interfaces we can't merge them back at the moment. In any case the patches improve rendering speed in general antialiased paths of the raster engine (meaning on Windows, Qtopia Core and in general whenever rendering to a QImage) by about 10% which is gangsta awesome ("gangsta awesome" is a very high level of awesomeness, at least judging from MTV).
I've also optimized the path clipping code. Andreas uses the path clipping code in GraphicsView for collision detection, so when I say "path clipping code" you should read "path clipping and GraphicsView collision detection". A lot of the time in that algorithm has been spent on vertex allocation for tested paths. I've used a few tricks to speed it up by about 15%. The code for that algorithm is the number two reason why baby seals die (the first is still undisputed). It's not even the algorithm itself but the inherent complexity of the problem. I'm a big fan of computational geometry in computer graphics because it makes grown man cry, except me and I like feeling like the lean, mean, killing machine that I am. My favorite part of the path clipping problem is that there are two ways of solving the precision problems and neither of them really works. The trick is that paths operate in double coordinate system, efficient snap-rounding implementations that I've seen operate in fixed-point coordinate system which falls apart in this case because of absolutely random distribution of vertices across the full double spectrum. Tessellation and clipping itself can be done in a screen coordinate system, which makes it possible to consistently represent your coordinates with fixed-point representation. That doesn't work for paths because, e.g. boolean operations on paths need to be done in native path coordinates not screen coordinates. So the algorithm forces an absolutely crazy mix of dynamic fixed-point size, reduced-predicates, magic and good-will to work. Aren't you happy that I'm doing it for you? You better be.
Yours(1) Latino(2) Lover(3)
1) Not really "yours", more "community". I love "you" but "you" need to realize that I need to be seeing other people.
2) Not really "Latino". Unless of course my Spanish or Brazilian friends would like to name me an "honorary Latino" or "Latino by association". I'd be definitely down with that. The only food I can make that is eatable and doesn't force the fire department to evacuate the building before are nachos. I'm a definition of grace in the kitchen. "Whatever you have in the kitchen I will make it burn" is my motto. Plus I'm sporting quite an attitude to boot. "Make Zack a Latino" campaign. We can make it work!
3) Not really "lover". More "no feelings haver". Though technically I've worked on software for so long that hate is, next to sarcasm, my primary export.
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