Wow, I havn't written in this for a long time.

The librsvg hacking has been going fairly well. We have heaps of features now that we didn't have when I was still blogging. Masks, clip paths, transformable, decent quality text. We have much nicer images now, we have relative urls and filenames so images look great in context. We have a completely overhauled high level structure so it does all the parsing before it attempts to render anything. It also allows inter-file linking. We now have patterns that display nicely. The gradient transformations have been fixed so they look good. We have markers, we have well... pretty much most static things I guess.

The cool thing is that we now can use the batik test suite to test our program, and for the most part, it looks awesome. We are really catching up to pretty much every other renderer on the planet in terms of standard support, but we are still second to none in terms of speed. Basically, if you can't already tell, I'm feeling pretty happy about the project.

Personally speaking, my life isn't quite as positive. I'm getting kinda bored with university, it is beginning to look like I just really don't like education. I've submitted an application for transferal from the civil engineering/computer science degree that I am in at the moment to a straight computer science one, since I'm not really as interested in civil engineering as I thought I was when I chose it. I am not sure how it will go though, since university bureaucracy is hard and inflexible. I had hopes of temporary respite when Uraeus tried to get funding for librsvg's continued advancement, which would have allowed me to defer my education for a year in favour of full-time work. But that didn't really work out. If it had however it would have been really cool.

I've been doing a little hacking on the side, apart from librsvg. I am working on a little space rpg called "ripoff", so called because it was originally going to be a ripoff of "Escape Velocity" by ambrosia software. However with the massively multi-player capabilities I'm building in, it will be far more than a ripoff, but I still havn't thought of a name for it. It's already quite playable, although it kinda lacks content. I havn't actually put it online yet, because I can't be bothered making packages. I really should release it though. There is a copy on my university webspace somewhere

Oh, and also, a few weeks ago I fell in love with the language known as "brainfuck". It's quite a challenge. I made an interpreter for brainfuck written in assembly. And I also made a compiler that transforms simple c into brainfuck through the miracle that is bison. If anyone's actually interested with this, um, "unique" technology, email me and I'll put the source code online.

Anyway, I've been having quite a good hackfest recently and I've been loving it. It's a shame that uni has to get in the way :)