eglib

Not much interesting in the way of updates this week. PySoy is facing a bit of a transitional period. We're wanting to move away from GTK 2.x, because gtkglext does not support nVidia cards, among other reasons. But the question has been -- moving where? We toyed with GTK 3 but we need something with better bluetooth support, etc. Clutter was an option but seems to be no good because it does not support OpenGL features like cubemapping, which will become very important to us.

So now it looks like we are going to be writing our own library to work with EGL. It's called eglib. It sounds like an interesting proposition, but I worry that it may be increasing the scope of our project beyond our ability to quickly roll out. We'll see what happens.

The best way isn't always the sexiest

This week I had to abandon my attempts to develop on Ubuntu. It seems NVidia's Ubuntu drivers lack support for some of the OpenGL calls libsoy's windowing system is making. So I am now developing solely on Mac OS X. My OS X install has X11 support, so after my initial struggle trying to compile libsoy at the beginning of the summer, I've been able to run libsoy almost without a hitch.

One thing missing, though, is cwiid support. That's fine, since cwiid is an optional dependency for the Wiimote controller. It's easy to set a dependency as optional in wscript: you just add the "Mandatory=false" flag to your conf.check_cfg(). So the configuration doesn't error out. However, the one deceptively difficult issue was in telling waf to avoid compiling the Wiimote.gs controller if cwiid is not installed. So the build breaks.

I'm the only one really affected by this issue, so I set out to learn a little about Waf (by reading the Waf Book). And I found myself trying all afternoon to make a change that on its surface seems quite simple. There are too many source files to add them to Waf's task generator one by one, and bld.add_subdirs() does not make it easy to add constraints. So I toiled around with extending Waf's TaskGenerator class for a while. Nothing doing. So, failing that, I just used ant_glob to generate a list, and wrote an if statement that removes the file Wiimote.gs from the result, if cwiid cannot be found in the configuration.

I spent hours trying to build a sexy solution, only to settle for a kludge. It's a lesson I have a hard time learning -- I should have rolled out that little bit of hackery to begin with. Sometimes the best way makes you feel a little dirty, but it's still the best way. Problem solved; onto the next one.

I have diabetes

I have been diagnosed with Type I diabetes. I am the first in my family to have it. It's been a rough ride but on the plus side I now know why I have been so tired and practically non-sentient over the past month. And suddenly having insulin in me makes me feel once again as though I can take on the world.

The past few months of gradual emaciation has affected a lot more in my life than just GSOC. My odds of failure are tremendously high at this point, for GSOC and other areas of my life. But I'm not so far gone as to believe my actions cannot effect the outcome. There's still ~6 weeks to go, and I plan to do some damage with them.