Big day! Up at 6.10, but didn’t get a Raspberry Pi, sadly.

Was graciously granted a FreeBSD build machine at work and spent lunchbreak getting my port to run smoothly. It’s now the fastest of all platform builds, has the most comfortable shell environment to work in of all our build VMs, and will probably be supported for longer and better and run more stably than our assorted cronky old Linux platforms we support, the contemporaries of the slick, shiny, FreeBSD 7 box we now have. I’m not satisfied or anything; it’s just the beauty of those TWM hues in Xvnc that makes me smile.

I heard from Adrian today, still in Barcelona, that the WebSockets plugin from last month actually (somewhat?) works, provably now that we have a viewer for it.

Working hard on some proposals for the next version of RFB. Draft 1 of the very first informal scoping document is already overwhelmingly formalistic, but at least the LModern is friendly and inviting. I’m hoping that without too much work we make the new messages we introduce readily can be transport-agnostic (currently, RFB requires a reliable transport). This is handy because a 16×16 tile is a perfect UDP packet, so if I get it right, we should manage to make a neat and lightweight flow control that’s powerful enough to allow framebuffer updates over UDP. That’s very important down the line for mobile access, because it’s a killer when you’re constrained by the TCP stack doggedly resending stale pixel data.

Finally, the fifth most important operating system of the year released its consumer preview today, in case you were living under a rock. I gave it a spin, and it seemed pretty unsurprising. Deep down, I know that all these years they’ve been working hard on producing a wonderful bourne shell for us, but as far as I can tell, it’s just too ambitious for them to quite make the next release with it, but maybe in Windows 2012R1… It has some new runtime of some sort, WinRT, or so I gather from co-workers, but I don’t get the hype. It’s the same old beast as NT4 really, with a bit of boring UI work that grabs the press. Luckily, there’s more interesting systems programming going on elsewhere at the moment.