I’m leaving soon for FOSDEM
and getting all my stuff in order. (Unfortunately due to my lame
setup I won’t be writing any blog entries while I’m away… I really
need to fix this. I’ve been eyeing bluehost, since that is what Elyn
uses.)

At FOSDEM I’ll be giving a demo on using Eclipse to develop
Classpath. Not super deep, but something I’m passionate about. This
switch gave me a a major productivity boost, and I think this is
something that most Classpath developers can benefit from.

In fact this boost is one reason I’m interested in changing g++ to
be better — moving from the Java world back to the C/C++ world is
amazingly painful, and not for any good reason. One way that GCC’s
relative dominance is a bad thing in that there’s no competition to
force it to improve quickly. That is, there is competition on the
back end from things like icc, but nobody is carrying the flag for
developer productivity and front end improvements.

Medi8

I’ve done a little Medi8 hacking lately. I have thumbnails
working better and it can now turn its internal model into Westley
XML. This means we’re a big step closer to, you know, actually
doing useful things like playing or exporting the resulting
movie.

libjit
looks pretty nice; pity Mono didn’t take this route. I’m not sure
why you’d use this rather than LLVM though.

I’ve been using mock lately.
This is a nice tool that makes it easy to build an SRPM in a
particular environment. I’m trying to set up an auto-builder which
will build gcj from svn, then use the result to build all the
java-based RPMs in Fedora. The idea here is, continuous testing as
close to upstream as possible will let us avoid ugly regressions late
in the release cycle.

Aspect-Oriented C++.
Madness! But, I suppose, one more reason that one might want an API
to the compiler’s internals.

I didn’t realize this before, but Chandler also has a copy of
libgcj in it. I suppose this is for PyLucene… funny. Their plan
for integrating
into distros mentions using the system libraries, python, etc… I
wonder if they know about the BC ABI.

I’ve been interested in Deming’s 14
points lately. I’m particularly interested in number 8, “drive
out fear”, since it has a personal application, but really all of them
are worth a read and a think.