Wherein I spend three days demo’ing the Oculus Rift, hacking on a portable VR rig with a Raspberry Pi, riding RiftCycles, and mobilizing the entire medical emergency and firemen staff on call due to an extremely nuclear chili experience (rumours of my demise were greatly exagerated).
The Aftermath After finally getting rid of a really bad cold, here I am reporting about the DevX hackfest that took place right before FOSDEM, at the Betagroup Coworking Space, a very nice coworking place in Brussels with excellent access and great facilities. The hackfest, organized by Alberto Ruiz (thanks!) and sponsored by the Gnome Foundation, had the goal of improving the application developer experience on the desktop, and lasted for three days, with plenty of discussions on a variety of topics, from tooling and IDEs, documentation, languages, libraries to bundling, distribution and sandboxing (and more).
The Mono & Gnome Festival of Love 2012 is in full swing here in Boston, thanks to the wonderfully stubborn David Nielsen, which got everyone together, got us a great room to work in at the Microsoft NERD Center, and sponsorship by Fluendo, Xamarin, GNOME and PluralSight.
Day 2 of the hackfest has just finished, and it was quite an eventful day. After a slow start yesterday (particularly for me, as I managed to completely kill OSX so thoroughly that it wouldn’t boot and required a full restore (all hail up to date Time Machine backups)), today was a pretty interesting day.
This morning I decided I needed a case-sensitive partition on my MacBook Air. It comes with a nice juicy 250GB SSD and I still have about 140GB left, so, having woken up in an adventurous mood, I open up Disk Utility, peer at the partition, note it doesn’t complain at me if I shrink it a bit, so I go ahead and resize it. I do this, of course, without killing any of the 30 tabs open on Chrome, or closing down the 3 server connections and about 30 channels on LimeChat, not to mention the 10 terminal sessions running various scripts and remote shells, or any of the ton of widgets and apps happily fidgeting in the background.
A couple of days ago Jeff Stedfast ran into some problems with gcc 4.4, strict aliasing and optimizations. Being a geeky sort of person, I found the problem really interesting, not only because it shows just how hard it is to write a good, clear standard, even when you’re dealing with highly technical (and supposedly unambiguous) language, but also because I never did “get” the aliasing rules, so it was a nice excuse to read up on the subject.
First off, Moonlight news: 2.0 is almost upon us (or upon you, in any case). The official release date is not set yet, but it is going to be in the next two weeks, so if you have bugs that need fixing for the release, speak now or forever hold your peace. Well, not forever forever… you know what I mean :)
A simple phone This week I got supremely frustrated with my phone(s).