Journal

Montréal is hotter than ever in this month, under the broiling sun, it was an exhausting quarantine. The first month I remeber I was feeling fortunate I got this aleatory chance for advancement of taiwins in this global pandemic, right now all I felt was the painful experience converting all the Taiwins server code away from libweston. Implementating of server side wayland objects was indeed unpleasant experience. Without libweston, I have to implement every little thing and get it right, even the basics 2D homogenous matrix operations for coordinates transformations. Just a days I ago I discovered my mistakenly used rotations in the “Y-up” coordinate system (like OpenGL) in the “Y-down” coordinate sytem (like Wayland protocol). The good news was that I did not give up, it seemed I overcame one difficulties after another, now at least I can paint my taiwins shell objects using a primitive renderer. In the end, hopefully I will end-up with a working and cleaner compositor library than libweston. This is certainly an encouraging news as I used to think a compositor library was not possible to finish with only two hands.

Forcing a monthly blog update seems to be a good idea, giving myself a reason to keep paying for this Domain. Also, I don’t usually has a topic to address specifically, a monthly update can fill this role. Anyway, time passes rapidly in quarantine my friends. I hope a few years forward when I look back at this moment, I would not feel I wasted so much time. I don’t actually feel I made much progress through this month. I would say, I am digging into my memory right now, it is hard to recall much in detail. yeah, that is life in quarantine, “stagnation”, like the blackwater.

I update this blog less frequent than once per year, which sometimes makes me question why do I keep paying for this site. Be able to update blogs is always my pursuit, unfortunately there were always more code to write. It has been more than one year, last time I was still on how to MSAA on OpenGL 4, somehow it felt like a decade ago. The peaceful developing world took an interesting turn. A long run bull market is killed and NYSE triggered circuit break 4 times in 10 days. People are joking they now have 75% of Warren Buffet’s experience. Will this gonna be the story we told our grand children born after 2020? “You know back in 2020, it was a crazy year…”. We just saw the quarter of it, I am kind of expecting the crazier in the rest, will it be massive unemployment and a scary recession will be waiting? This week the market has recovered a bit of its confidence somehow, despite the Covid-19 cases are surging. A friend used to tell me, it would be a point where many will be killed by the virus and people just don’t care anymore, looks like the market is at that point.

The last post I laid out the story of me with wayland. Technology is fascinating isn’t it? Every once a while, there are plenty of new projects that aim to start an revolution, getting people excited. Projects like systemd, Wayland, Vulkan make us think how come we did not think of those before, they seemed perfect at the moment. Technologies always work like a rush of hot wave, our sights are limited at the moment we are in, maybe 5 years from now, even vulkan is not sexy anymore. For ten years, community has been urging everyone to jump on the boat of wayland. Some major platform adopted it, just there is no money in it. Major platforms like GNOME and KDE are not even mature yet, KDE developers also worries about the future of the wayland, will it last 30 years like X window?

It was a good will.

5 years ago, I read a blog about the future of linux desktop, I was using a window manager called Awesome (one of my friend introduced it to me, I was enchanted by how he opened two terminals side-by-side, one for coding and one for compiling). A voice about next generation desktop was just raised in the linux community , a group of hackers demod the weston project, where you can rotate the application windows. They also pointed out the existing problems in the x server architecture(basically it is too old, let us just replace it). It is cumbersome, too many components, easily dead after package upgrade.

I have been studying in programming for 6 years, since my first day of undergrad life. I haven’t realized it has been so long, this studying life already took away most of my youth. I was a kid without knowing the toughness of life, to a young man need to worry about jobs and how to start having family.

The computer industry changed vastly in this period. There was no Cloud Computing, Machine Learning was only known in Academics. Universities taught students how to code in VC++. Now everything is different.

这是我的第一篇github上的博客，感觉落后时代好多年啊。因为完成自己的博客生成器不 久。所以写的第一篇博客就以生成我的博客站点的项目mkblogs说起，来说说如何写一个 博客生成器吧。