Weekly report on xzibit

[marnanel]

Surprisingly much work got done on xzibit this week, despite my being at Guadec.

Week 30 (of the year, not the project):

• Metadata can be sent about windows. This is trickier than it sounds, because the window might not yet be mapped on the receiving side.
• Demonstrated the system in a talk at Guadec on Friday.
• This got Xzibit mentioned in a German magazine (seventh paragraph).
• Discovered why menus don't get drawn: GDK doesn't receive expose events on override-redirect windows (at least in some circumstances).
• Made a start on multiplexing the various streams so it will be easier to send them over Tubes, and wrote tests for the marshalling.

Plans for week 31:

• Discover why expose events don't get received on override-redirect windows, and either fix it or use something else.
• Finish multiplexer.
• Make gtk-vnc be able to read from fifos (if it can't already) so that we can easily hook up the windows on the receiving end and still run them in separate processes, without having to mess around with TCP. May need to send a patch upstream for this.
• Consider the ramifications of using a single gtk-vnc process for all received windows; maybe it could just eavesdrop on the received multiplex stream without any other interpretation.
• Switch to sid so I can run Daniel's spiffy build of Xephyr, and use it to test the MPX work.
• Send window icons in the metadata.
• Send transiency information in the metadata (including Cartesian offset from the parent window, something I realised we need in this place last week).
• Start thinking about how to implement the doppelganger cursor. Someone in the audience suggested decorating it with a hackergotchi, which I think is a wonderful idea.