Le blog de Olivier Crête

On July 9, 2000, my first patch to a Free Software project was accepted. It was a patch to fix a small bug in GnomeICU, which was then the best ICQ client for GNOME. From there, I contributed a few more patches, then a lot more, then I re-wrote the protocol backend (to use the newer protocol) and before you knew it, I was the co-maintainer. The original author left, another maintainer joined, then left, and, in 2004, I was left as the only active maintainer. Then I lost interest and became the unmaintainer. I haven’t made a release since 2007, or written any code to justify one, so with GNOME 3 coming up, and after many years of non-maintenance, I have to admit the truth, GnomeICU, as a project, has died many years ago.

There were some changes left in the git tree, along with many translation updates, so I made a last release, for anyone who cares. To my surprise, we still get between 50 and 150 downloads per month from Sourceforge, hopefully it will be useful to some.

It was a fun project, I spent countless nights having fun programming, and I hope other did too. I learned a lot about programming, communities, etc. But more importantly, I’ve met some amazing people like Vincent Untz (rumor is that I committed his first patch to a GNOME project), Seb Bacher and even Philippe Kalaf.

After months of envy, I decided that since GNOME 3 is to be released in almost two weeks, it was time to try it out. I must say that is is pretty damn cool. Yes, it has a few annoying bugs and glitches, but nothing out of the ordinary for a first release. It is definitely going in the right direction.

That said, we’re in 2011, and it’s still impossible to use OpenGL on two monitors without tearing. How incredible is that! The thing is, my second monitor is a 50″ Plasma TV and I really hate tearing there when I watch a movie. So when I have two monitors, I want the VSync to be on the second monitor. Luckily NVidia (yea sorry) has an environment variable to select which monitor an OpenGL application syncs on, the annoying thing is that this has to be set before the application is started. So after a little messing around with Looking Glass (which is pretty amazing), I was able to set the variable into the shell and have it re-exec itself. After getting that to work, I couldn’t resist writing an extension to do it for me. Be warned that if you switch screens at runtime, you also want to apply the patch from bug #645408 for now.

Update: I’ve been informed by our very own Daniel Stone that free drivers are better and can actually do the VSync correctly.