November 27, 2003
November 24, 2003
Wallabies defeated by England! :(
Religiously like most Australians, Saturday morning I watched the grand final of the world rugby championships, held on the mother turf in Sydney, Australia.
The game was extremely tense and looked to be all over after the first half with England leading Australia 14 to 5. In the second half though, Australia crawled their way back to score a drop shot penalty in the last seconds of the game, pushing it into extra time.
Extra time was just as close, with both teams equalling 17:17, but in the last 15 seconds of the game England scored a drop shot for 3 points, winning the game.
Disappointing for us Australians for sure, but definitely was high quality and knucklebiting match to watch.
Translucent X-Windows!
Was just browsing Freedesktop.org when I came across some screenshots of the translucent window work Keith Packard has been working on here. Some amazing effects there, and an article describing how some of it is done.
November 13, 2003
Stockholm!
Tomorrow I'm flying off to Stockholm for a fleeting weekend visit with some friends of mine. Looking forward to it, last time I was away was when I visited Sylvain in Toulouse.
Hopefully will be able to catch up with Daniel and the other Swedish Cocooners while I'm over there. A former lecturer of mine from Melbourne is also living over near Uppsala as well, so I'm looking forward to catching up with him as well.
The last time I was in Stockholm (1999) I had an awesome time, I stayed in a hotel south of the "old city", and spent a lot of time in Gamla-Stan (the old city), Skansen, Stureplan and the Archipelago (a huge collection of islands near the city itself).
Should be a really great weekend, will take lots of photos while I'm there and put them online when I return.
November 11, 2003
Jelly & SWT!
Well, not much blogging from me recently! I've been busy with a new project writing a lot of SWT code recently. SWT is the GUI toolkit behind Eclipse.
SWT is really great. It uses the native underlying toolkit on the system to draw widgets on the screen, rather than painting them on a canvas like Swing. Yes, it's more like AWT, but done much better IMO. On Linux, the underlying toolkit can be GTK2, Motif or QT, on Solaris/AIX/HP-UX it's Motif, Windows its MFC, etc.
The use of the native toolkit is so good that (at least under Linux) you can't tell that it's actually a Java application thats running under the hood, and in the case of Linux GTK (the toolkit used by Gnome), your application GUI uses anti-aliased Pango Fonts, track Gnome themes, and generally rock :)
Just before I started development I came across JellySWT, a SWT tag library for Jelly that lets you write GUI's using XML markup.
Really great stuff, as it allows you to develop and think of the GUI in a hierarchical and structured way (which I find much more natural too). Along with that, all of the other Jelly tag libraries are available as well which gives you great flexibility for writing dynamic code (there's also a JellySwing tag library for the Swing developers out there too).
Jelly seems to be really versitile and flexible software. Check it out :)
November 02, 2003
Dresden!
Just arrived back from a wonderful weekend in Dresden, which is in the far east part of Germany. Kristin, Mel, Bern and myself travelled over for the weekend to celebrate Bern's birthday - our present to him, a Trabbi tour where you can drive one of the olden East Germany cars :)
We spent the weekend sighseeing and visiting lots of places, especially around the old city. Above is the Semperopera house. Many more photos will be online shortly.
Update: Photos are now online