Older blog entries for DizzyD (starting at number 11)

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.

More stuff. :) I ran into some design problems with jabberoo today..actually it's a trap I keep falling into -- designing a solution for too many problems. I was (as crazy as it may sound) trying to write a wrapper which handled async/sync sockets with one interface (impl, platform specific of course). Obviously, there's a host of problems that show up with this approach, not the least of which is integrating the events into another object cleanly (which I needed to do). What it basically came down to was re- thinking and restricting the Transmitter abstraction to a simple goal: send data or throw an error. Nothing more.

This fires some interesting thoughts on the way that OO design is approached as a whole. I fear too many of us (myself included) view the OOP as a complete solution for every implementation issue. The fact of the matter is the objects simply provide us with a way of wrapping up functionality into neat pieces. OO provides a nice way of writing resuable chunks of code that can be platform independent. However, once you hit a certain level of abstraction, you should by all means, embrace the platform specifics. That's where a good object-oriented design is most powerful I think -- packaging code for reuse in such a way that dependicies on platform-specifics are minimized, but at the same time are fully utilized. :)

Ahh..my head feels lighter now.

Another day, another piece of code to fix. Writing code is lots of fun -- maintaining it..bites. Why is that? Initially, I would guess that the challenge of writing/conjuring the code is what captures my attention as a programmer. I can't help but wonder, however, if the relative enjoyment of maintainence is directly correspondent to the tools which we have to work with. Personally, I would imagine that the overall experience would be significantly eased if a comprehensive & centralized set of tools were available that provided a structured environment for tracking bugs, revisions, design specs, etc.

It seems a large part of the problem with maintaining source code is the lack of structured, relational information about the code, modules, architecture, etc. Not only does the information need to be structured and interlinked, but it is also crucial that it be accessible. Of course, the Web provides a perfect medium for this representation.

Bah...rant must end.

Hrm. Long gap between entries...I've taken the last few days and really scaled back on programming time..I'm simply worn out.

This next week looks to be very exciting. I'm taking a trip up to the mountains for some business discussions. Next week, is my last week at my current job. Ah...finally.. :)

Yesterday I worked some more on the dialog loading on gabber. I still can't get libglade to release the dialog & XML tree when I'm ready to delete the dialog. At any rate, it doesn't allocate more memory after I load the dialog once, so I'll probably just have to live with it. I'm really going to start on Jabberoo high-level interface tonight and would like to have gabber connecting to a server by tommorow night. :)

So many opportunities have suddenly come my way of late. It's both frustrating and exciting. Waiting on things to develop is the hardest part. I'm hoping to get a job that will allow me to develop on Linux..I'm so sick of win32.