Silence abounds. Except, that is, for the Beethoven Concerto coming from the Dynamic Duo's speakers, recently retrieved from Ziyal's repository. The bounce meister has departed, along with Festery.

Bitscape is feeling rather sleepy at the moment. Were I in the mode of coding up a storm, this would actually be the point at which productivity could skyrocket for a couple hours. When the brain is too tired to have intellectual inhibitions, the merriment has died down, making distractions minimal, and the algorithms just flow straight from the subconscious to the screen.

You don't know quite why something is going to work, but you know that it is. You may not be able to see the whole picture right away, or maybe you see it all clearer and better than ever before. Whatever the case, once this mode is achieved, it can result in some of the best programming experiences of your life. Or so us festers would like to believe. :)

Perhaps in some contrast to the ideal festing theory, I have done very little programming on this fest. Right now, getting Argo taken care of just seems more urgent. Getting hardware accelerated OpenGL going is up there on the list. I also want to figure out what the deal is with my mixer stuff not working. (The next thing to do, after the current massive download finishes and surfing again becomes possible.)

Reading the literature on the 3d stuff... so many choices, and such a bright future. To do it with XFree 3.3.6, or go for the more risky, bleeding edge, but potentially higher performance and more elegant 4.0 with DRI? (I elected to do the former for now.) And the kernel... apply the patch to 2.2 for agp performance, or try the 2.4 pre-release, which has it all nicely integrated? (Again, I'm going with the former. For now.) All this stuff is so majorly cool.

While I was pulling the glx code out of cvs, I was just thinking how cool it would be to get in on one of these really crucial free software projects, even if it just means submitting minor patches. There's so much that needs to be done.. Like the dri people... looking for contributors right now. To work on the code that would not only get my stuff to work better, but potentially do the same for everyone else in the world who happens to own the same hardware, both now and in the future... would just be really awesome, I think.

This tempered by the hard fact that doing 3d drivers is almost certainly way out of my league. I dunno. That just seems like a really hot spot right now.

I mean, there's open source projects out there, like the zillion and one window managers being developed, that all do more or less the same thing. Yes, there's features and aesthetics that each one has that the others don't, and there's different optimizations, targeted at utilizing different strengths, configuration methods, etc. But when it comes down to it, they all pretty are doing the same thing. And don't get me wrong, I think it's cool to have such diversity. But personally, I just don't get as inspired to get involved when it's about reinventing the same wheel that's been done ten different times before, in ten slightly different ways.

Ah, but when I see something that I find fundamentally innovative (I hate using that word after the way Microsoft has pretty much mangled it into a dopey catch phrase for pointy haired stupidity, but here, I mean it in the original sense)... When I see something that's significantly different and better in some crucial way than what's already being done (the smartplay code, for example), I get excited.

The other thing I get excited about -- and here's where the 3d stuff comes into play -- is when somebody is laying a solid groundwork upon which the success of so many other projects lie. The DRI code, taking X into the high performance, hardware accellerated graphics world, and doing it the Right Way. Not some ugly kludge. That just rocks.

The mozilla project, amidst a hale storm of criticism and derision from both the press and some of the fans, taking the time and the effort to implement a truly world class, fully standards compliant, seamlessly cross platform browser. I admire that.

Well whaddaya know? My kernel download is done! Bitscape will now stop the babbling, philosophizing, and preaching in order that he may continue the task of getting these drivers other people have written to just install and work with his hardware, much less hack the code itself. More fun awaits.