wingologA mostly dorky weblog by Andy Wingo2011-04-05T06:16:26Ztekutihttps://wingolog.org/feed/atomAndy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/new beginningshttps://wingolog.org/2011/04/05/new-beginnings2011-04-05T06:16:26Z2011-04-05T06:16:26Z

Friday is my last day at Oblong. It's been good times: my colleagues have all been generous, intelligent, respectful folk. It has been a real privilege to work with them for these few years, and I wish them all the best. Oblong is in a great position to emancipate both pixels and people from the proxy world of mice and windows.

At Oblong I was mostly focused on video, but if you're a regular reader of this electro-rag, you'd see that my passion is more on the side of compilers and free software, especially Guile. So when the opportunity presented itself to do something more directly aligned with those interests, I let myself be tempted.

igalia ho!

So what's next? Igalia is what's next! I'll join their new compilers group later this month, with an initial focus on JavaScriptCore optimization work and on Guile projects.

Igalia is a Spanish free software consulting shop that is fairly well-known in the GNOME community, but perhaps not so widely outside of it. I admit: it is refreshing (and relieving) to return to free software "on the clock", and to hack compilers for a living. This is fantastic. But that's not the thing that's really awesome (and unique, as far as I know) about Igalia.

No, the truly great thing is that Igalia is an entirely egalitarian organization. All important decisions are taken by the assembly, using consensus and similar collective decision-making procedures. That includes research, business development, budgets, hiring, salaries: everything. After a few years working there you become a partner, which makes you an equal co-owner of the business.

Wild, no? And wonderful. Igalia has been around for almost 10 years now, so the system definitely works, and I am very much looking forward to seeing how it works. It's a project, and I'm pleased to be a part.

pottage

My last note of this kind quoted Thoreau, ending with:

If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, neglecting my peculiar calling, there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.

Time passes, and it turns out that, among other things, Guile is my "peculiar calling". So the thing that I've worked out with Igalia folk is to go back to full time, though still with a nominal split between JavaScriptCore work and Guile work.

To be honest this split seems to be something akin to therapy. Before, I sold my time for sustenance, and if I could get interesting projects and nice folks on top of that, then great. But now, the prospect of drawing passion and work closer together is daunting at the same time that it's exciting. Hopefully, eventually, this split will heal itself, into a state in which I do what needs doing, while doing what I love. We'll see.

I'll be staying in Barcelona, at least until the fall. Until next time, dear readers, happy hacking. It's good to be back!

Andy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/shoptalkhttps://wingolog.org/2010/06/21/shoptalk2010-06-21T21:23:12Z2010-06-21T21:23:12Z

Sup, tubes. Time to talk shop!

about

I should say first that I don't work for Fluendo. There it is! And indeed my longtime readers do know this, but one would not have known it from looking at my about page.

I did my best to sow confusion, noting that though the page was last updated in 2006, that the previous update had been in 2004; but such shadow-facts stuck in folks' minds. So, I have replaced that page with one much less informative.

Two points of continuity remain. One, I am (at this writing) still in Barcelona, a pleasant place on this planet. Two, I still have the good fortune that my current employment shares space with GStreamer folk: Wim and Edward from Collabora Multimedia. Sometimes people ask me about how the job with Collabora is going. Well it isn't!

the hack

Indeed, I don't write much about work, so one can be forgiven for mistaking my work, if such forgiveness were even necessary. The work hack goes well. We have always had customers, since the beginning, but now it really feels like the adoption curve is starting to tick up.

I'm sure the founders and business people are quite pleased about this. As for myself, it is a mixed blessing -- and my technical readers will understand me here. I don't work on the input side of things, so I am free to appreciate their progress, which is indeed wonderful. I work more on the side of the toolkit used to develop spatial applications, specifically on the video integration, and it is a huge challenging scaling problem (limpidity, documentation, orthogonality). The market gapes wide before us, and we race to stuff its maw with digestable API and such; and meet it, mostly, and barely. It is a race.

picture elements

Thankfully some of this work has seen the daylight recently. The novelties that prompt me to write are:

  • John, talking at TED this year. I cannot tell you what a privilege it is to work with John. He is how he is in this clip: articulate, verbally and in code, and compassionate.

  • My goofy self, on the UK's "Gadget Show". But fortunately, the UK keeps its "Gadget Show" to itself, denying the rest of the world the pleasure of my visage.

    The mechanics of that show were interesting. The presenter and the producer showed up one Sunday, the latter with a simple camera and tripod in tote, and four hours later they had their footage. All that trimmed down to some four minutes for the final cut. The whole thing very professional, but agreeable -- nice folks, doing their job.

Andy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/dangling pointershttps://wingolog.org/2008/11/19/dangling-pointers2008-11-19T10:38:57Z2008-11-19T10:38:57Z

I have here three pointers into the ether.

with apologies to rubén darío

A conversation between Dave Moon, Dan Weinreb, and Cliff Click on Azul, a massive multiprocessor Java machine.

The Azul is a Java machine like the Symbolics that Moon and Weinreb worked on was a Lisp machine. Easily the most interesting read of the last week or two, via Michael Weber.

This one will be on the final exam.

house in order

The company I work for, Oblong Industries, just opened up their web site on Friday. Go check it out!

I like how they hook visitors with the videos, then pull a Yegge with all of the text they have there. I approve!

on repeat

Silver Jews' latest album, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, is quite addictive. It's no American Water but I can't get enough of Party Barge.

Send us your coordinates, I'll send a Saint Bernard...

Andy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/breathe it out, let it inhttps://wingolog.org/2008/03/27/breathe-it-out-let-it-in2008-03-27T15:41:51Z2008-03-27T15:41:51Z

"LA is really weird," a friend of mine was claiming back in Barcelona. "People walk around all the time with coffee cups in their hands. I was in Santa Monica and it was creepy, between about 7 and 9 in the morning it must be obligatory or something, everyone on the street had one."

I'm in Los Angeles, until next Friday, hacking at the lab. Sounds much better than "working at the main office", doesn't it?

Andy Wingohttps://wingolog.org/in which our protagonist changes jobshttps://wingolog.org/2007/12/18/in-which-our-protagonist-changes-jobs2007-12-19T02:19:27Z2007-12-19T02:19:27Z

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous of my freedom. I feel that my connections with and obligations to society are at present very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which I am serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful, and only he is successful in his business who makes that pursuit which affords him the highest pleasure sustain him. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, neglecting my peculiar calling, there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage.

H. Thoreau
10 January, 1851

This has been an excellent, excellent year. The underlying factor was a shift in my working arrangements. I started on 4-day weeks in January, and since March or so have been on 3-day weeks -- Monday to Wednesday, eight hours a day. I'm pleased as punch.

This situation has allowed all kinds of things to develop -- yoga, sailing, hacking for fun, travel, and for once I'm in a healthy relationship -- as if they were simply waiting in the wings for space on stage. I cannot recommend this arrangement more highly.

all good things

The time has come, though, for me to try something new. Tomorrow is my last day at Fluendo. It's been great -- the GStreamer work, hacking the stack, molesting the do-goody Python for fun and profit, acquiring a disturbing intimacy with Twisted and its perspective broker distributed object system. We built a streaming server platform that the commercial people are selling like crazy. Good stuff.

But I'm down for new problems now, new systems to build. After coming back from the winter holidays, I'll start work for Oblong Industries of the inscrutable web site. They've been in stealth mode for a while, but will be opening up in the new year.

Theirs is an incredibly compelling story. Here's the version as I prefer to believe it. The producers of what was to be the movie Minority Report were ambling across the globe, searching for someone who could tell them a convincing story of how the future would be. When they found John Underkoffler at the MIT Media Lab, they knew they had found the one. They asked him to come down to LA to work as the science adviser to the movie, and the cinephile in John couldn't refuse.

John wrote a two hundred and fifty page manual of a gestural interface system that was, to him, how people would interact with computers in the future. If you haven't seen the movie, the essence is that the computer takes its input from your hand motions ("gestures"), in three dimensional space, instead of via other peripherals such as the mouse. The writers then took these ideas and scripted out how the interactions would work in the movie. The scenes were acted out with blank screens, and the computer graphics people later came in and filled in the images for film.

A couple of years later, John decided to actually build the system that he designed. He called on his mafia of programming and business contacts, and that brings us to the present. The system they have is truly impressive -- lagless, precise, robust recognition of hand orientation and a wide variety of hand gestures, along with an innovative development platform on which to build applications. They have a number of systems installed in the wild, and as the company comes out of "stealth mode" they'll be looking to push more systems into industry and academia to see what kinds of applications people build with these new interfaces.

There's all kinds of problems to hack on in the system -- optics, image recognition, OS work, system work, framework hacking, applications, 3D graphics. I'll be doing some of everything, probably initially concentrating on the system and framework levels. We're opening an office here in Barcelona, where I'll be working from. I'll also help the company make the transition from in-house software to free software -- the plan is to release a number of libraries as free software over the course of 2008.

I just realized today that the address of the space that we're looking at is on a street that has two of the fundamental constants of the universe in it: carrer del pi, commonly abbreviated c/pi. Nifty.

And yes, in case you're wondering: for me it will be a three-day-a-week job. Oh, oh yes. May the year 2008 rock even more than 2007.