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XScreenSaver 5.05 [Sat, 1-Mar-2008 9:45 PM]
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[music |Brassy -- Everything You Need]

XScreenSaver 5.05 out now. Two and a half new savers this time, and a bunch of bug fixes (I hope).

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can it, in fact, sink? [Wed, 6-Feb-2008 1:47 PM]
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[music |Submerged -- Last Gasp of the Shitbat]

I find this message hilarious* in several ways.

(Did you know usenet still existed? Wacky. I'm tempted to tag this with "retrocomputing" on that basis alone.)

From: Moshe Goldfarb <brick.n.st...@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy
Subject: Re: Gnome-screensaver ... nice touch
Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2008 14:38:14 -0500

On Wed, 06 Feb 2008 04:31:51 +0000, [H]omer wrote:

> Usually I just stick with xscreensaver,

Yawwn.......
Is this what Linux advocacy has sunk to?
Don't you guys have anything more interesting to talk about than patents and screen savers?

--
Moshe Goldfarb
Collector of soaps from around the globe.
Please visit The Hall of Linux Idiots:
http://linuxidiots.blogspot.com/

* Where by "hilarious" I mean "mildly amusing".

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XScreenSaver 5.04 [Tue, 13-Nov-2007 12:47 AM]
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[music |Rogue Traders -- Watching You]

XScreenSaver 5.04 out now. Three and a half new savers this time.


The OSX binaries were built on 10.5 but should work fine on 10.4.

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how to goof off at work [Tue, 6-Nov-2007 10:38 AM]
[Tags|, ]
[music |Trauma -- Open Your Mind]

Hey kids, here's something fun to try!

Remember those Magic Eye "random dot stereogram" things, where if you crossed your eyes just right, you could see 3D pictures?

So. Run the rd-bomb screen saver. Increase the grid size until the seed points are about two inches apart. I like -width 250 -height 220 (it looks better when the width and height are slightly different.)

Now sit about a foot away from the monitor, and cross your eyes slightly so that two of the boxes merge into one, just like you'd do with a random dot stereogram. Now it looks like your monitor is a window and the seething pattern is about ten feet away.

Ooooooh, trippy.

Keep this up for a couple hours and it'll be time for lunch!

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SurveillanceSaver [Mon, 5-Nov-2007 5:17 PM]
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[music |The Crystal Method -- Ready for Action]

This is awesome:

SurveillanceSaver is an OS X screen saver that shows about 400 live security camera videos from public accessible Axis network cameras. It shows surprising scenes from underwater pool cameras, cows in milking machines, to shopping malls and street cameras.
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XScreenSaver 5.03 [Tue, 17-Jul-2007 3:10 AM]
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[music |The March Violets -- Snake Dance]

XScreenSaver 5.03 out now. Four new savers; two by me, two by others:


Incidentally, this week I have reached another milestone. I have two computers at home: one is a (headless) mail server, and the other is my iMac desktop. The server was a Linux box until a few days ago when either its power supply or mobo died.

I meditated on this, and came to the conclusion that it was worth several hundred dollars to me to not have to fuck around with the PC hardware dance again, so I replaced it with a Mac Mini. This means there are now no Linux machines in my house*, and even at work, I no longer have any Linux machines that have video cards in them**, which is as it should be.

So, if this release doesn't work on Linux... uh, that's why.

except Tivo, which doesn't count.
** except the kiosks, which almost don't count. (Ha.)

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someone spilled screensaver all over the floor [Mon, 16-Jul-2007 6:39 PM]
[Tags|, ]
[music |Love Spirals Downwards -- Sunset Bell]

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Dali Clock 2.24 out now [Sat, 28-Apr-2007 10:59 PM]
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[music |Cop Shoot Cop -- All the Clocks are Broken]

Dali Clock 2.24 out now for MacOS 10.4, PalmOS, and X11. This release includes a MacOS screen saver version of the clock, and there are a few minor display-glitch fixes to the PalmOS version. Also the PalmOS version has a color application icon now, ooooooh.

So, I tried to add a preference to the Mac version to let you hide the dock icon, but I couldn't make that work... )

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XScreenSaver 5.02 [Fri, 20-Apr-2007 9:12 PM]
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[music |Propellerheads -- Take California]

XScreenSaver 5.02 out now.

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delete yourself from the internets! [Fri, 29-Dec-2006 12:26 PM]
[Tags|, ]
[music |Ladytron -- Commodore Rock]

From: Jim <JimHudock@comcast.net>
Date: December 26, 2006 3:27:26 PM PST
To: jwz@jwz.org
Subject: I mneed your help

I do not quite know what I am doing when I get to your site. I want to download the 200 screen savers. I'm running fedora core 4 on and hp computer. What ever I click it doesn't give me the option to install, can you give me a little help please?

From: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
Date: December 26, 2006 9:53:40 PM PST
To: JimHudock@comcast.net
Subject: Re: I mneed your help

Fedora packages a version of xscreensaver for you. Just install the Fedora "xscreensaver-base", "xscreensaver-extras", and "xscreensaver-gl-extras" packages instead of downloading the source code.

From: "Jim" <JimHudock@comcast.net>
Date: December 28, 2006 10:04:16 PM PST
To: "'Jamie Zawinski'" <jwz@jwz.org>
Subject: RE: I need your help

Why don't you just tell me how to get them from your site, because it takes too long to reinstall the software?

From: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
Date: December 29, 2006 2:50:42 AM PST
To: Jim <JimHudock@comcast.net>
Subject: Re: I need your help

Because if you didn't understand the instructions on the download page, that means it will be far, far simpler for you to figure out how to install Fedora's binaries than compile it from source. It's not easy.

From: Jim <JimHudock@comcast.net>
Date: December 29, 2006 12:14:59 PM PST
To: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
Subject: Re: I need your help
Reply-To: JimHudock@comcast.net

Then you should remove yourself from the download site, if you don't have the patience to tell me.
Since it took you so long to answer me, I had time to figure it out for myself.
I do not need your help anymore.

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WebCollage for OSX [Sat, 11-Nov-2006 12:03 AM]
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[music |Machines of Loving Grace -- Casual Users]

I finally ported the webcollage screen saver to OSX. This will be included with the next release of xscreensaver, but here's a zip of just the one. Let me know if it works...

I had some trouble getting the sub-processes to die properly when the saver deactivated or when you changed option settings. I think it works, but be paranoid about that.

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xscreensaver 5.01 out now [Mon, 18-Sep-2006 8:03 PM]
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[music |The Prids -- All Apart and No Fall]

XScreensaver 5.01. Mostly minor bug fixes this time.

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menger [Sat, 26-Aug-2006 12:42 AM]
[Tags|, ]
[music |Les Jumeaux -- Carroussella]

The Business Card Menger Sponge

After 9 years of effort, involving hundreds of folders all over America, the Business Card Menger Sponge was completed. The resulting object is comprised of 66,048 cards folded into 8000 interlinked sub-cubes, with the entire surface paneled to reveal the Level 2 and Level 3 fractal iterations.

On Sunday Sept 10, Dr Mosely will present a lecture on the logical challenge of decomposing this fractal form into manufacturable subunits and on the structural considerations of building such a large object out of business cards.

Dr Jeannine Mosely trained as an electrical engineer at MIT and is a leading practitioner of business card origami. In the emerging field of computational origami, a branch of mathematics that explores the formal properties and potentialities of folded paper, her research focuses on the use of curved creases.


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AutoCollage [Wed, 24-May-2006 3:57 PM]
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[music |New Order -- Everything's Gone Green]

AutoCollage: this paper makes me feel very dumb.

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xscreensaver 5.00 released [Tue, 23-May-2006 4:40 PM]
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[music |Low Pop Suicide -- Your God Can't Feel My Pain]

Stick a fork in it: I hereby declare XScreenSaver 5.00 to be good enough.

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XScreenSaver 5.00b5 [Wed, 17-May-2006 5:55 PM]
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[music |Metric -- Wet Blanket]

XScreenSaver 5.00b5 out now. This is likely the last beta release before the real thing. X11 users, please test: I've integrated a bunch of patches from the Fedora and Debian folks.

I've had a report that the MacOS version of xanalogtv is crashing when trying to load images, but it works for me. Anyone?

Since the last beta:

  • New hacks, topblock and glschool.
  • xmatrix -mode pipe displays the text of a subprocess.
  • endgame has higher resolution chess-piece models.
  • webcollage takes a -directory option to get images from a local directory.
  • The RPM spec file no longer auto-restarts xscreensaver when a new version is installed. Restart it manually.
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xscreensaver [Mon, 15-May-2006 2:33 PM]
[Tags|, , , ]
[music |Ladytron -- Cracked LCD]

I think the fact that I just can't bring myself to care about working on any of the remaining things on the xscreensaver todo list probably means that I ought to just release it. Though [info]brad says I should just leave it in beta forever, since that's the Web Two Point Oh Way.

If one of you massochists out there wanted to download a copy of xlockmore and see if there are any interesting changes in any of the savers that exist in both, that'd be nice. (This would also be one of those tasks that I will never, ever get around to.)

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XScreenSaver 5.00b4 [Mon, 24-Apr-2006 4:19 AM]
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[music |Daisy Chainsaw -- Natural Man]

XScreenSaver 5.00b4 out now.

  • Should be somewhat faster than 5.00b3.
  • All the savers should work properly on both PPC and Intel Macs.

Please let me know if you find either of those to not be the case.

See todo.

I think this is getting really close to being called a non-beta release, since at this point I'm not sure I'm not sure I'm going to be able to make any further headway on performance. I'm pretty much out of ideas on that front, short of "throw away most of the work I've done so far, and re-implement Xlib in terms of OpenGL instead of in terms of Quartz". Which, as you may imagine, I'm not particularly eager to do.


The reason it works on Intel Macs is that Apple finally replaced my busted iMac, and the replacement is an Intel Core Duo. And it is OMG fast! Seriously, it seems like compilations are around 2.5× faster than before, and all the screen savers run way faster too (so there goes any hope of having decent xscreensaver performance on slow machines, since I won't even be able to tell there's a problem any more...)

The one exception to this speed-up is, of course, Photoshop. Photoshop is a fucking dog, since Adobe still hasn't released an Intel build of CS2, meaning it runs in the PPC emulator. It feels like it's running at 75% to 50% of the speed it ran on my PPC iMac, and it uses a truly gargantuan amount of memory. Like, after editing a dozen pictures, closing them all, and hiding Photoshop, minutes later it was still consuming 6% CPU and almost 1.5 GB RAM.

So if you use Photoshop more than XCode or other Apple-provided software, I'd say stay the hell away from the Intel machines until Adobe gets their shit together.

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dear XCopyArea, please stop exploring your frame buffer, it freaks me out. [Mon, 17-Apr-2006 12:35 AM]
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[music |The March Violets -- Children on Stun]

Dear Lazyweb,

Here's today's unanswerable Mac programming question:

When I'm copying bits from an image to a window, Shark seems to show that I'm spending more than half of my time doing colorspace conversions:

    29.9%   CGContextDrawImage
    29.9%     CGContextDelegateDrawImage
    29.7%     ripc_DrawImage
    20.6%       ripc_AcquireImage
    20.0%         CGSImageDataLockWithReference
    19.8%           img_data_lock
    16.5%             img_colormatch_read
    14.6%               CGColorTransformConvertData
    14.4%                 CWMatchBitmap

My understanding is that this should only happen if my image and context did not have the same colorspace; if the colorspaces were already the same, then this should turn into basically a memmove(), which is what I want. (And what X11.app appears to accomplish somehow.)

In the case I'm looking at, I'm trying to copy a rectangle from a window, back onto itself, without scaling. Say, 50x50@10,10 to 50x50@200,200. I'm getting the bits off of the window with:

    NSBitmapImageRep *bm = [NSBitmapImageRep alloc];
    [bm initWithFocusedViewRect:rect];
    CGDataProviderRef prov = CGDataProviderCreateWithData (...);
    CGImageRef cgi = CGImageCreate (...);

The colorspace I'm using when creating that image is the default one of this window's CGDirectDisplayID, so it should match:

    CMGetProfileByAVID ((CMDisplayIDType) cgdpy, &profile);
    colorspace = CGColorSpaceCreateWithPlatformColorSpace (profile);

Then I draw the bits back onto the window with CGContextDrawImage(). CGImageGetColorSpace() says the image I'm drawing has the color space I expect. So how do I tell why I'm getting a colorspace mismatch?

I also hate that this process involves copying the image data at least twice, but I don't see any way around that. But the main problem here seems to be that not only is it copying it, it's bit-twiddling it too.

Reading the bits off the window is also slow, but according to Shark, it doesn't seem to be calling any obvious "convert" routines; looks like it spends all of its time directly inside of _NSReadImage:

    30.1%   -[NSBitmapImageRep initWithFocusedViewRect:]
    28.5%     _NSReadImage
     3.4%       _NSImageRealloc
     0.4%       CGSLockWindowRectBits
     0.4%       _NSImageMalloc
     0.4%       CGSUnlockWindowBits
     1.3%     -[NSBitmapImageRep initWithBitmapDataPlanes:...]

The thing is, I'm just implementing the X11 routine XCopyArea() here. When running an actual X11 program against Apple's X11.app, XCopyArea() is fast, so I know that it's possible to move bits around in the frame buffer fast, in a 2D-graphics context. I just can't see how. I'm guessing that the real X11 server is not going in via NSBitmapImageRep and CGContextDrawImage(), but I have yet to find any lower level API that will give me more direct access to an NSView's backing store.

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XScreenSaver 5.00b3 [Thu, 6-Apr-2006 2:41 AM]
[Tags|, , , ]
[music |The Dresden Dolls -- Mandy Goes to Med School]

XScreenSaver 5.00b3 out now.

  • Should be a lot faster. (It needs to be faster still, but it's much better.)
  • Crashes in CGBitmapContextCreate should be gone.
  • Sonar can ping! Turns out DGRAM ICMP works unprivileged on OSX.

See todo.

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