Archive for March, 2009

The Lightspark Project, a modern flash player implementation

lighspark-demo1When some months ago Adobe released the com­plete SWF file for­mat spec­i­fi­ca­tion I though that it would be nice to develop a well designed open source flash player. Now I’ve been work­ing for some time on this idea and I’ve recently relased the code on SourceForge.

The project objec­tives are quite ambi­tious, as the flash spec­i­fi­ca­tion are really com­plex. The project is designed to take advance of the feau­tures present on mod­ern hadr­ware, so it not sup­posed to run on older machines. All the graphic ren­der­ing is done using OpenGL and in the future pro­gram­ma­ble shaders will be used to offload even more cal­cu­la­tions on the GPU. Exten­sive mul­ti­thread­ing is employed to make use of mul­ti­core and hyper-threading proces­sors. I’ll write a more detailed post about some tricky and inter­est­ing part of the project soon.

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The Lightspark Project, a modern flash player implementation

lighspark-demo1When some months ago Adobe released the com­plete SWF file for­mat spec­i­fi­ca­tion I though that it would be nice to develop a well designed open source flash player. Now I’ve been work­ing for some time on this idea and I’ve recently relased the code on SourceForge.

The project objec­tives are quite ambi­tious, as the flash spec­i­fi­ca­tion are really com­plex. The project is designed to take advance of the feau­tures present on mod­ern hadr­ware, so it not sup­posed to run on older machines. All the graphic ren­der­ing is done using OpenGL and in the future pro­gram­ma­ble shaders will be used to offload even more cal­cu­la­tions on the GPU. Exten­sive mul­ti­thread­ing is employed to make use of mul­ti­core and hyper-threading proces­sors. I’ll write a more detailed post about some tricky and inter­est­ing part of the project soon.

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A Nice Little Book of Semaphores

We’re cur­rently busy work­ing on assign­ments for the inter­nal exams here at Sant’Anna School1 and we (well, Mirko) found a nice book for our par­al­lel pro­gram­ming project. It’s “A Lit­tle Book of Sem­a­phores”, freely avail­able here.

It’s a very nice col­lec­tion of con­cur­rency prob­lems, it deals with pretty much every one you could think of. So thank you pro­fes­sor Downey!

  1. Well, we’re also work­ing on the usual stuff (ways to make big money, strange web 2.0 appli­ca­tions, high-performance-emulators, big robots, small robots, our many-times-acclaimed edi­tor for Wikipedia, world dom­i­na­tion, ...). []

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A Nice Little Book of Semaphores

We’re cur­rently busy work­ing on assign­ments for the inter­nal exams here at Sant’Anna School1 and we (well, Mirko) found a nice book for our par­al­lel pro­gram­ming project. It’s “A Lit­tle Book of Sem­a­phores”, freely avail­able here.

It’s a very nice col­lec­tion of con­cur­rency prob­lems, it deals with pretty much every one you could think of. So thank you pro­fes­sor Downey!

  1. Well, we’re also work­ing on the usual stuff (ways to make big money, strange web 2.0 appli­ca­tions, high-performance-emulators, big robots, small robots, our many-times-acclaimed edi­tor for Wikipedia, world dom­i­na­tion, ...). []

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A little VIM trick

This is a lit­tle use­ful trick for VIM users. As you may know VIM sup­ports tabbed edit­ing using the :tab­new com­mand. It is then pos­si­ble to switch between tabs using the :tab­next and :tabprev com­mand. A faster short­cut is to add these two lines to the vimrc


nnoremap <F1> :tabprev
nnoremap <F2> :tabnext

Now you can use F1/F2 keys to switch between tabs.

2 Comments

A little VIM trick

This is a lit­tle use­ful trick for VIM users. As you may know VIM sup­ports tabbed edit­ing using the :tab­new com­mand. It is then pos­si­ble to switch between tabs using the :tab­next and :tabprev com­mand. A faster short­cut is to add these two lines to the vimrc


nnoremap <F1> :tabprev
nnoremap <F2> :tabnext

Now you can use F1/F2 keys to switch between tabs.

2 Comments