Thursday, January 19, 2006

Resource Information

When a program loads a resource like a font, or an image, the client should send a message back to the program with a data structure that contains information about that resource that might be useful to the program running. The program can wait for the return message, or not, depending on the needs of the program.

Currently NewI\O does not do this, but that is the plan.

Friday, January 13, 2006

Island Hopping Campaign

Do you know the strategy the U.S. used during World War 2 against the Japanese? The Japanese had many well fortified islands, and it would have taken a long time to take out each one. So instead what the U.S. did was to skip some islands and just take on certain ones. The islands left in the rear would be isolated and then wither and die on thier own.

Pointer events are difficult in a network context, because it is very difficult to make the delay not noticable to the user. Using TCP_NODELAY to disable Nagel's Algorithm, and UDP do not seem to make a significant difference.

On the other hand, the mouse is a relative newcomer in popular computing. Computers were used for years and years very productivly without a mouse. I am thinking of taking out, or at least de-emphasizing the mouse, and just pressing on in other areas. I can always re-visit the issue later when and if I have more resources than I do now. This way I will not get bogged down in one technical area.