Free The (Crispy) Bits!
Recently I've been joining the memory reduction mission in a hard-core stylee, by poking at the lower libraries in the GNOME stack.
A few partial patches to Pango were submitted which chipped away at the non-constant data bit by bit, before Owen decided to knock the wall down and do a comprehensive review, saving 12K per process.
Fontconfig is an interesting program to work on, and during the hacking it is quite easy to end up with a Fontconfig which doesn't think there are any fonts, or more amusingly gives you Isabella or Mistral when asked for Vera. However, I did eventually fix these bugs and now Fontconfig patterns (the core data type) use less memory and are a lot faster. Excellent stuff, but Fontconfig is still allocating a lot of memory when there are many fonts (fc-list | wc -l says 435 faces on my desktop), which Pango then copies for some reason (probably a sensible one but what do I know).
Of course, working on this more will have to wait until I get back from India...
Contact Lookup Applet 0.11
Version 0.11 of the Contact Lookup Applet is available from here. It requires GNOME 2.10, but don't worry if you don't have that as there are very little actual changes. Because of this I don't have any Debian packages yet, but Ubuntu Hoary already has this version.
- Request the focus when pressed so that it works with GNOME 2.10
- Follow the panel background (Vincent Noel)
- Handle the sources gconf key not being set (Sylvain Pasche)
Sound Juicer "Smile Kindly Then Rip Your Life To Pieces" 2.10.0
Sound Juicer "Smile Kindly Then Rip Your Life To Pieces" 2.10.0 is out!
- Rocking updated user guide (Shaun McCance is a hero)
- Trivial UI fixes
- Some more const keywords
- Use G_DEFINE_TYPE in SjExtractor
And of course, thanks to the translators: Abel Cheung (zh_TW), Emrah Unal (tr), Paisa Seeluangsawat (th), Rajesh Ranjan (hi), Danilo Šegan (sr).
Life, T-Shirts, and Music
Life? Life is good. We're off to India and Nepal for two weeks tomorrow, which promises to be totally excellent. This weekend was quite busy, we went to my parents on Friday evening for a family meal and drinks, which was good fun. I finally got to show my dad the 300D, and took some photos during the evening.
To try and finish off the series I had to get Vicky to take one of me on Saturday.
Then on Sunday, we went over to Vicky's mum's house and cooked a meal for six people. We had salmon, roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, and vegetables, with apple crumble for pudding. Thankfully there were no major panics and it all tasted good, so that is okay. We normally cook for two, so cooking for six was quite a shock!
Oh, and on Wednesday or Thursday or some time we actually had snow which lasted more than an hour. It had gone by lunchtime, but I took some photos of the grass peeping out through the snow in our garden and with a little GIMP magic blew the snow right out (I would be a man and use a flash gun, but mine isn't quite strong enough). Very simple picture, but I quite like it.
T-Shirts? T-Shirts are cool, especially ones from Threadless. Last week I bought Death By Music and Captain Awesome, both of which are really cool. They'll be getting more of my money later.
Music? Music is plentiful. Recently I've been listening to lots of music I've wanted to try but have never listened to, so I borrowed some Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Squarepusher, and Tricky, and picked up more Miles Davis, DJ Shadow, and Thievery Corporation. All in all I've been pleased, it's all interesting and enjoyable, although Vicky doesn't entirely agree with me... I think she called GYBE "crap", and didn't like DJ Shadow.
NP: The Cosmic Game, Thievery Corporation
