One thing one can do in this amazing summer heat, is cut the 0.24 release of desktop-file-utils. It's rather a small thing, but since the last few releases have been happening at roughly three-year intervals I felt it merited a …
Continue readingBattle of the Bilerps: Image Scaling on the CPU
I've been on a quest for better bilerps lately. "Bilerp" is, of course, a contraction of "bilinear interpolation", and it's how you scale pictures when you're in a hurry. The GNOME Image Viewer (née Eye of GNOME) and ImageMagick have …
Continue readingThe worst ANSI art renderer, except for all the others
Chafa (github) started out as a small piece of supporting code for an obscure personal project I may announce at some indefinite point in the future. Then I decided to release it as a tongue-in-cheek thing for the VT100 anniversary …
Continue readingWhat ails GHashTable?
I promised a closer look at GHashTable and ways to improve it; here's that look and another batch of benchmarks to boot. This time around I've dropped most of the other tables from the plots, keeping only khash and adding …
Continue readingA hash table re-hash
Hash tables! They're everywhere. They're also pretty boring, but I've had GLib issue #1198 sitting around for a while, and the GNOME move to GitLab resulted in a helpful reminder (or two) being sent out that convinced me to look …
Continue readingIntroducing Chafa
Here's something I didn't know: The DEC VT100 turns 40 in August. This factlet comes courtesy of Wikipedia, as I'm not quite old and wise enough to have made its acquaintance outside of a museum. None the less, the VT100 …
Continue readingGNOME and Rust
I've been keeping an eye on Rust for a while now, so when I read Alberto's statement of support for more Rust use in GNOME, I couldn't resist piling on… From the perspective of someone who's quite used to C, …
Continue readingNew toy
I got a new toy. It's a WASD keyboard with Cherry MX Clear switches. The picture doesn't do it justice; maybe I should've gotten a new camera instead… I guess it'll have to wait. Mechanical-switch keyboards are pricey, but since …
Continue readingYear of the Linux Desktop Debate
It's been interesting following the recent discussion about the Linux Desktop and how it failed. It's a notion that's been around for some time – I'd say approximately since people tired of discussing whether next year was going to be …
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