Waltham: a generic Wayland-style IPC over network

I have recently been occupied with a new project (and being with a cold all this week), so I have not been much present in the Wayland community. Now I can finally say what I and Emilio have been up to: Waltham! For more information, please see our annoucement.

Wayland has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code organization

Now is a high time to start discussing what you might want to do, for both student candidates and possible mentors.

Students, have a look at our project idea examples to get a feeling of what kind of projects you could propose. First you will need to contribute at least a small but significant patch to show that you understand the workflow, we have put some first task ideas together.

There are our application instructions for students. Of course all the pages are reachable from the Wayland GSoC wiki page and also the Wayland organization page.

If you want to become a mentor, please contact me or Kat, the contact details are on the Wayland GSoC wiki page.

Note, that students can also apply under the X.Org Foundation organization since Wayland is within their scope too and they also have other excellent graphics project ideas. You are welcome to submit your Wayland proposals to both projects.

A programmer's view on digital images: the essentials

How is an uncompressed raster image laid out in computer memory? How is a pixel represented? What are stride and pitch and what do you need them for? How do you address a pixel in memory? How do you describe an image in memory?

I tried to find a web page for dummies explaining all that, and all I could find was this. So, I decided to write it down myself with the things I see as essential.