Older blog entries for chipx86 (starting at number 254)

Trouble Users

Sometimes I think and wonder why we develop these projects. We may all have these reasons.. We do it for ourselves, we have an itch to scratch, we want to further open source/free software, etc.. How often does a person say they do it for the users?

It's really great when we get a "Thank you" from a user, and on most projects, yeah, they come. They're very appreciated, and it makes my day. The problem, however, are the trouble users, and these are the vocal ones. Working on Gaim, we get more than our fair share of these users. They're the ones who threaten us, insult us, yell at us, etc. for not having their bug fixed right away, for being a little late on a release, or who knows what other reason.

It's these users that make me contemplate quitting the projects. That's unfortunate, since I love what I do, but sometimes these types of users get to be overwhelming.

Now, it's one thing to have annoying trouble users that just complain, but insults? This is something I'm seeing far too much. One guy took our former lead developer's screen name awhile back for who knows what reason. He had a method for suspending it, and now, because I was busy and said to forward his patch to another Gaim developer, he's threatened me with the same. Why? Why would a user sink so low for something he's even trying to contribute to, and why should I have to take it?

Someone told me what he's now saying to his trouble users. Something along the lines of "We're doing this on our own time without pay. If you want to complain and don't want to help fix the problem, sit down, shut up, and say thank you." It's not a bad attitude, imho, when addressed to those users who do nothing but complain. Unfortunately, it doesn't always seem to help the situation much, as those types of users are very vocal and sometimes choose to spread around lies or insults about the project.

I think it's too bad that these users are giving all of the good users a bad name, and I think it's about time that we get the point across that developers and supportive users no longer want to deal with or hear from these problem users.

So, is there anything that we can do about such users? Is it this bad for other projects, or being an IM client, is Gaim more of an exception? I'd be interested to know.

Gaim for Qtopia

Last night (well, actually early this morning), I released version 0.1 of Gaim for Qtopia. It got delayed a bit due to last minute bugs, and I discovered my gconv-tiny package, which provides the /usr/lib/gconv/* files for i18n, was missing the little config file, so I had to remove that package and have everyone get the 1.8MB gconv-modules package instead. Ick. Ah well, it works, and it looks good.

Version 0.2 should be really nice. My mind is running with things I want to try, such as something similar to our current tray icon, a Today plugin, and some new features.

Gaim for Qtopia

Gaim for Qtopia finally got a website today. Development is going nicely. Only a few more things left before the 0.1 release. I'm going to have to update things so the protocol icons on tabs are as cool as the ones that were just committed to gaim 0.67cvs.

School

School starts in about 20 days. I have to sign up for classes tomorrow, but I have this fear that I won't be able to get the ones I need, which means even more time at that school.. ugh. I guess I'll see tomorrow. I have a backup plan, but it might be tough, since the school is suffering a bit due to Gray Davis's budget cuts.

Gaim for Qtopia

A lot was done on this project tonight. The build system has improved a bit, which is cool for me, but the best thing is that chat support is now mostly in, complete with a user list. I took my PDA into the kitchen and bathroom (to take out contacts!) and continued to talk to people. It was really cool, and it works so well. I can't wait for the 0.1 release. I have a few things I need to fix up first though.

Life

So here it is, 07:18. I woke up about 30 minutes ago, and went to bed about 4.5 hours before that. The pain killers that I have from the oral surgery take awhile to take effect, and I simply can't sleep. Combine that with the fact that I'm babysitting my hyper little sister in a couple hours, and it makes for a fun day. Normally babysitting her is fun, but at this point, it's just a little tough.

Gaim for Qtopia

I have a few more bugs to fix here, but I'm going to have my first official release rather soon, I think. I still have to make some decisions about the future of the project, which I'm still unsure of in ways. Not whether or not it will continue, but other things.

Gaim

Jabber made its move to being nearly core/UI split last night. With the exception of the g_show_info_text() function, which is begging for a rewrite, the work in the prpls are complete. I was able to replace the MultiEntryDlg vCard stuff, which was not core/UI split, with our new core/UI-split multi-field dialog. It has the upsides of using core code and a better GTK+ dialog, and the downside of being just over 640x480. However, with Windows and Linux now defaulting to larger sizes, I don't really see this as an issue. If it is, some parts of the dialog just won't fit. Oh well :P There's not much we can do about it, really.

Gaim for Qtopia is coming along very nicely. The account editor dialog is near completion, and I just have a couple of other dialogs to create before I can do my first release. I'm going to have to hurry at get the site created for it..

Life

Today was certainly fun. I had two of my back teeth that were acting as wisdom teeth pulled. They said I wasn't using them for chewing. There just wasn't enough room back there, so removing them won't affect me in any way, except of course for the minor recovery period, which gets better by the hour (though I still have to watch how and what I eat).

Gaim for Qtpoia

This little project is moving along nicely. I wrote a good portion of the add/modify account dialog tonight. It'll probably be a day or two before I finish with it, but it's one of the last major things before I can get a preview release out. Off the top of my head (and it's late, so this head is going to hit the pillow in a second), I need to finish the Add/Modify Account dialog, Add/Remove Buddy dialog, and the New Message dialog. Getting chats working would be good too, and shouldn't be tough, thanks to the core/UI split. I know many people are looking forward to this project, so I want the first preview release to be a good one.

Life

Two of my friends got married Saturday, and asked me to help out at the wedding. It was a whole lot of fun. I've never seen them so happy. They played Chrono Trigger music as they walked out the door for the first time as husband and wife, which is very appropriate for them. All in all, it was a lot of fun, and gave all of our friends a chance to get together and, well, be ourselves.

mibus: It's not fully core/UI split yet, but it's close. Close enough that we have a private tarball and patch that removes what's left of the UI code in the core (and unfortunately crippling it slightly) and turning it into a library. A Cocoa version is being developed by Rob Flynn, but don't ask about it :) It's going to be a long time before it sees the light of day, I imagine, and he'd rather not be asked about it until there's something out. I'm working on a Qtopia port of gaim, which will have a public release hopefully next month.

It's been a long time since my last post. I used to be so much better at this.

Gaim

We're finally releasing 0.65 of Gaim. I managed to do quite a bit for this release, and am proud of it. Lots of bugs were fixed, thanks to Cae, KingAnt, and SimGuy, mainly, and faceprint and I did a lot of rewriting. It's a nice release. I was supposed to have support for the new Trepia protocol bundled, but Sean took that out. Grr...

Gaim for Qtopia

Thanks to the core/UI split work I've spent the past 7 or 8 months on in Gaim, I was able to finally go and write a port of Gaim to embedded devices running Qtopia (such as the Sharp Zaurus PDAs), linking against a custom version of libgaim with all the left-over UI code removed. It's really nice looking, but my Zaurus's touch screen seems to have gone bad, so I'm primarily developing in the Qtopia Framebuffer on my PC.

Life

Well, things are starting to go back to sanity in my life again. I think things are better now. I'm getting a lot more work done, and I have focus again. I spent the past two days setting up a Dell PowerEdge server and 5 workstations at a small business. Windows 2000, WinXP Home, WinXP Pro, and WinME didn't all want to play together too nicely, but in the end, they were all happily communicating. The clients are very pleased. I'm heading back over there when the new stuff comes in to set those up too.

Gaim

We've been working hard the past two weeks on Gaim 0.65. There was one complaint that we didn't meet our once-every-two-weeks-on-Thursday release schedule, but anybody reasonable knows that the delay is needed. 0.65 will be mostly core/UI split, with only a couple of additional components remaining that weren't split. It features a new preferences and accounts system, new APIs, and support for the new Trepia instant messenger service (which was okay'd by the CEO), to name a few. However, we have a lot to do before we can release. Buddy pounces must be saved, as well as away messages (and those must be core/ui split). There is a whole list of segfaults to fix, and memory leaks. It's going to be a good release, though.. perhaps a little buggy, but it's definite progress. We're looking forward to it.