George Wright's Blog: Category Cambridge

Terrifying beauty...

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 01:33:00 +0100

Now my college can wake up to this in the morning:

Dhoom Clock

New office, WebKit, Mission Control

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 01:20:00 +0100

On Wednesday Collabora moved out of the old office which we had outgrown and into our new amazing 4-room office opposite King’s College, Cambridge and above the Fudge Kitchen on King’s Parade. The old office is a shoebox in comparison! We now have a large front office, a large back office, a smaller back office (which I think we’re letting out to Ept Computing) and a large conference room. This ought to improve productivity, and as an added bonus it’s situated right next to my college supreme convenience!

To respond to some of the comments I’ve seen about Alp’s and my WebKit work; yes, I will be trying to get it to work on the Nokia 770 as I personally own a 770 and not an N800 and we may well be making a public release when it’s more stable. Currently I’m investigating the upstream source code and hoping to start working on adding the features we need to WebKit itself and submitting patches which implement them. Alp already has commit access to WebKit and will be working upstream anyway.

Last week, Tobias Hunger blogged about my involvement with standardising Mission Control, which is the abstraction layer which sits between Telepathy’s Connection Managers and the client. To anyone who’s interested in the work, the preliminary specification is online. So far, we still need to work out a sensible API for the Channel Handlers and iron out a few problems with the current specification, but we’re getting pretty close to coming to an agreement about it all. I personally would be very happy at the idea of having a standard API for this which can be shared between KDE (Decibel) and GNOME (Nokia Mission Control).

Summer Work

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Thu, 24 May 2007 01:00:00 +0100

This summer I’ve managed to land an internship at Collabora Ltd to work on freedesktop.org projects.

Collabora’s current projects include Telepathy, Farsight and Nice. I will be working on something related to one of those projects.

So far we’re still in the brainstorming phase of what to work on, but Rob is keen that I work on getting TCP-like stream properties (flow control, ordering guarantees, retransmissions etc) into Telepathy’s “Tubes”, so that applications can communicate using stream-like Tubes over whatever UDP connection ICE has NAT-traversed. This will effectively provide a generic method for applications utilising either D-Bus or their own protocol (over a SOCK_STREAM) to communicate through NAT routers whilst still speaking something like TCP.

Of course, I would like to get the community’s opinions on the projects and most of all I’d like suggestions on other things I can spend my time hacking on which will benefit the populace at large. Any criticisms (constructive or otherwise) are welcome. The work will almost certainly be in glib but if there’s any relevant work that needs doing in KDE, Collabora may consider letting me work on that.

LinuxWorld and other assorted beasts

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 01:46:00 +0100

LinuxWorld is looming ever nearer.. under a week now until it starts! I’ve managed to get at least one other KDE developer to come - Ivor Hewitt - to whom I am eternally grateful for taking time off to help out. We have quite a nice set up too - Torsten Rahn has kindly supplied us with two KDE floor posters and I’ve got a Kubuntu floor poster courtesy of Jonathan Riddell. We will also have 20 of the KDE 10th Anniversary t-shirts to give away for free and another 200 KDE pins to sell. Not only that, but Canonical have kindly stepped in and said that we can borrow a machine from them for the duration of LWCE. It looks like LWCE this year is going to be the best yet!

In other news, Cambridge is getting hectic. Work is starting to stack up and 9am lectures are getting more cumbersome by the day. I’ve decided to rearrange the furniture layout in my room to give myself more usable floor space and I appear to be fanboying a maths student in my college. Hrmm.

The computer science stuff is still fairly elementary. We’re doing functional programming in ML and it’s not so bad. It gets a lot harder though so I’m not complaining! Physics is still very easy as we’re only doing special relativity which seems to be fairly easy, but again, the pace picks up later apparently. Oh well - it was my decision to come here to study!

First few days at Cambridge

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 00:51:00 +0100

So the time finally came. I am now in Cambridge! I arrived on Thursday to shoot archery with Matthew Johnson who kindly invited me to the pre-season training “week”. I have a really nice room and the other guy on my corridor is friendly so it’s all great here.

Last night I was at Matthew Garrett’s house to celebrate Rob and Daf’s birthday which was fun. Rob got fairly drunk and hurled copious amounts of abuse at me for not drinking, after which I left because it was 4am and I needed some sleep.. It was great because some people I hadn’t seen for a while turned up, including the legendary Wookey (who we ascertained had lived in Cambridge for longer than I had been alive) and Paul Sladen, who turned up completely unexpectedly. I also met various minions of Rob^W^W^Wpeople who I had met previously at aKademy in Dublin.

Lastly, today was matriculation day. This is basically a ceremony where we all dress up in academic gowns and sign our lives away to the university, after which we become a student. Or it’s something like that anyway. We also had the matriculation dinner which was amusing, as red wine was served (which I didn’t drink as I’m not an alcohol-drinker), but there was much comedy to be had from some of the other freshers around me. Yay!