Recent blog entries for DizzyD

It's been a _long_ time since I posted. The only thing that even make me want to post was aaronl's comments about GNOME (and KDE I would guess, given that he's so against using memory..)

I really wish I could come up with some comment that make aaronl realize how inflammatory/silly he sounds. He quotes numbers about how terrible memory consumption is in GNOME apps, then turns right around and states that he knows the numbers are inaccurate -- beyond that, he's makes the statement that he's not even trying to _be_ accurate.

*sigh*

I wrote Gabber. I've had my own concerns about memory consumption (X-Virge can vouch for that :)). Fact of the matter is tho, that the GNOME libs provide some great functionality. They do it in a modular manner and overall in a fairly clean way. I've considered removing GNOME stuff from Gabber, but on review I've found that there's just too much good functionality -- I'd wind up with an ugly client that nobody would use, and all for the sake of having one less dependency. No thanks.

Monday (late nite)
Another day has passed by. I've been visiting my grandparents and little (tho he prefers "younger") brother in Panama City this weekend. It's been nice, I guess...nice as being away from the fiancee and one's projects can be. I hate to travel, but I love to move. Weird, huh?

Gabber is coming along nicely and I've learned a lot about gtk--. It is an excellent adaptation of the gtk+ toolkit. The sigc++ signaling toolkit is great and I have even integrated it into jabberoo. It's excellent for doing any kind of event based system that neats strong typing and/or ref-counted objects.

Another great lib I found is the Views Template Library (VTL). I'll have to post that link later. Basically it's another layer of abstraction that allows you to view a container via multiple views. Hence, you can view the container as sorted by a certain key, w/o having to actually sort the container (of course, you trade performance for lesser memory).

I do like C++. I know some people complain that it's too complicated, or too slow, or too low-level. *shrug*. It works for me and I believe it's a language that's gonna stick around because of its complexity and richness. I would be remiss to not quote graydon's excellent summary of the language:

"C++ is the mecha godzilla of the programming world: learn to pilot it, and you will be able to lay serious waste to tokyo. Don't learn to pilot it, and king seesar will whup your sorry ass."

Well, I survived my trip to Denver. Actually, it was a most excellent trip. It was good to meet jer & temas IRL. They are Cool Dudes (TM), and I'm proud to say that I work with them.

My fiancee's birthday-weekend-rama has been completed successfully -- now back to my normally scheduled programming. :) Today, I've been working on getting gpg setup so my emails are signed and am currently working (read: waiting on openSSL to build) on transitioning the Gabber source code over to SourceForge.

This week should be a big week for Gabber as I plan to get proper support put in for agents/services and groupchat. I've also heard some rumblings that a gtk-- person want to help us move to gtk-- 1.2pre. That needs to be researched a bit as I'm not sure that the gnome-- 1.2pre has been released yet.

Gabber has finally started to reach critical mass. It can now send/recv messages, chat -- groupchat will be implemented after I get back from Denver. At that point, most of the Jabber clients will support groupchat and I'd imagine that we'll start to move away from using the #jabber channel on IRC.

Jer is trying to get me to write an article detailing our rather unique approach to using libglade/gtk-- in the gabber. I might just do write a piece about..wonder how much flak I'd get from the Gnome people about using C++. :)

In other, less techy news, I'm trying to get my workout routine re-instated in my life. I miss my kata workouts and have lost a fair amount of flexibilty. It's gonna be hard, though..especially the first week or two. Blech. It hurts just thinking about it. Fortunately, it's fun once I get started and I know I'll start feeling better once I get in the groove.

Flying to Denver early tommorow morning. Woohoo. Finally get to meet jer & temas in person. Great fun all around, I'd say.

Tuesday (now Wed.). My eyes can hardly stay open. It's been a better day than yesterday, but I'm ready for it to end. One more time, I managed to get the fiancee upset at me. I'm becoming quite the expert, tho I suspect wedding-stress is a major factor in the anger-at-dave algorithm. Whatever, the case, I love her.

In less emotional news, I managed to rewrite my deleted programs and get a spec for the next software iteration from my client. Of course, I won't be doing anywork on that until I get gabber working...tommorow, I think. It's do or die on gabber, now. I'm starting to get a rep for all talk and no code..time to change that.

With that, Adeiu.

Monday -- Well, Erbo, I'm with you. You can just wipe this day off the calendar. It was a pretty bad day, even for a Monday.

For kicks, early this morning, I thought I'd try and clean up the NT machine I use for code maintainence. Win32 complied and proceeded to completely wipe the directory containing 3 wks worth of uncommitted work. Blargh. Of course, my the old company I'm maintaining the code for, then decides that they want some updates by tommorow...updates which include the now non-existant code. So, I've spent all day reconstructing Win32 programs from memory..which is a complete drag. To top things off, I proceeded to make the fiancee exceedingly displeased with me this evening. Not a good way to end a miserable day.

I *had* some cool stuff lined up for gabber. Now it looks like it'll be Wed. before I can get kicking on that.

Saturday. I don't imagine I'll get much productive coding done today as I have to help my fiancee do more wedding planning. It's fun, but can become tedious rather quickly.

I left the #jabber FLUSH meeting last nite in the middle of the meeting..very unlike me. I'm still wrestling with jabberoo and have found some inconsistencies in the design that don't make it as flexible or as powerful as I'd like. Of course since I *designed* the thing originally, I can't really complain about it. :)

On Monday, I'm planning on trying to hack a .glade -> C++ code generator. I'm really dissatisfied with libglade right now as I can't get it to release a dialog after I've loaded it. The signal connection code doesn't exactly meld with C++ either.

<cough, cough> I hate feeling sick.

A new day. :) It's been a while since I last posted...too easy to fall out of the habit I guess. As you may have heard from Erbo a new company has been spun off to do commercial Jabber development. Very cool, IMHO. Of course, being employee #4.5, I am a little biased.

So I've started working full time on Jabber. It's nice to be able to get up in the morning and hack all day on Jabber..especially now that I can use Linux fulltime. I've been learning gobs about C++ and jabberoo is finally getting some much needed attention. I hope to get into rosters and presence today; next week I'll start hacking on the UI side again.

Well, things have gone quite well the past few days. Made a trip to Denver for an interview with a new company. Denver seems like an awesome place to live, tho I didn't really see much outside the office building I was in. Also, I got to meet Erbo while I was there -- he's one cool dude. :)

I stopped off in Atlanta for the weekend for Dad's 50th birthday. We threw a suprise party; great fun for everyone. Of course, a fair amount of acting and deviousness was required. :) It has been refreshing to be with my family again and I'm ready more than ever to get back into programming...after some time with the gf tommorow. ;)

My dad just got a cable modem put in yesterday. Techie came out to install it but didn't have a clue. My dad and I watched for an hour then intervened and got it working in 10 minutes. I wish you could just option to do the modem installation yourself. Speaking of cable modems, I'm really torqued at BellSouth for suddenly reversing their decision to roll out ADSL in Pensacola. They didn't even have the courtesy to tell anyone. Now I'll be stuck with my lovely 48k connection for who knows how long...hmm..that's one more reason to move to Denver. :)

Well, it's nearly 3.30..my time to leave for an interesting meeting. :) Actually, the meeting is tommorow, and if everything goes like I think it will...ahh..life will be good. :)

I'd love to comment on the whole trust-metric issue, more specifically on reactions of people on advogato when "Jabber people" started ranking among themselves. I should prolly refrain though. Aww..what the heck. The power of the Open-Source movement lies in the complete freedom of expression. Inversely, the weakest point in the OS movement is the lack of responsibility when it comes to exercising this freedom/right. It should be fairly obvious that with rights come responsibility.

Most people (hopefully) get an introduction to this simple relationship when they get their driver's license. If you have the license, you may drive. If you drive, you must respect the other drivers on the road by complying with generally accepted standards of behaviour. If you don't, you forfeit the right to drive. It's as simple as that.

I believe these same concepts of rights/responsibilites should apply to activities within the OS community -- especially when it comes to commenting/flaming on other projects. It's absolutely ridiculous that we (the OS community) have attained a reputation for being quick to judge and slow to consider the implications of some piece of software/hardware, be it propietary or OS. We should measure more carefully the power we have to encourage or discourage the development of a project before we dole it out so generously.

In the final analysis of the whole concept of two developers certifying each other Master, I wonder how much the people who made rash judgements about our project really trust the whole advogato trust system.

That's it for me. There's more where that came from. I'm off to Denver.