Older blog entries for itp (starting at number 16)

Galeon, among other things, has inspired me to start keeping a diary again. It's a somewhat convoluted path.

Work has been hectic but exciting lately. I sent an email to the red-carpet list today talking about the shutdown of the Red Carpet server in preparation for a launch of the stable version. It's been a long haul for the past 8 or 9 months, and it feels good to be at the point where we're ready to say Red Carpet is a supported product.

So, feeling somewhat punchy, a bunch of us took off from the office to go to Trident Cafe and get some food. Along the way we were wishing everyone a happy Earth Day, until we found out we were still a few hours from Earth Day. Sigh. But then midnight hit while we were waiting for the T, so we paid a T performer ~$8 to lead those waiting for the train in the Happy Earth Day song.

Looking back, I can't see why it was so funny.

Weekend (and Monday): met phil, totally cool guy. We bummed around all weekend (with vladimir), played Dreamcast Virtua Tennis and Power Ball 2, watched some movies. Felt pretty lazy.

Today, I got my new hard drive for my T20, pulled the old one, got Debian on the new disk. Still need to make suspend to disk work again, but everything is sane again. Now back to serious work.

Crashed Rob's party. Gave out some Helix stuff.

RPMv4 is nice, but I'm not sure I understand what the point was. So far, the API changes are incrementally better, but with the additional burden of making you #ifdef your way around stuff. Eh.

Needless to say, I'd still give almost anything for some relevant documentation.

Debian continues to remind me of Xanadu -- good vision, sketchy implementation.

Just read a terribly amusing diary entry by mathieu. Here's what he has to say about my company (Helix Code):

Sounds really crazy knowing how many non-existant business and marketing people they have (sorry for the rant). I feel concerned by this. I hope no one will feel bad about me saying this but having too many marketing weenies is bad but having none is even worse.

I knew there was a reason I'd been getting so much work done lately. I'm not sure why he thinks we need more "marketing weenies" when we've been doing as well as we have on the basis of our product alone.

<pedantic>
I feel really bad for Red Hat lately, as I now know how annoying it is to deal with the StuddlyCapCrowd, who insist on butchering your name. It's Helix Code. Is it really that difficult? ;)
</pedantic>

I'm using a Mozilla build that Vlad recommended. 2000091021, and it's the first one I've really felt comfortable in. My faith in the Mozilla project has been renewed.

Sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes it rains.

aaronl: campd put it beautifully, and much more calmly than I could have.

uweo: you have to keep in mind the audience we're targeting. We've set out to develop a new generation of applications for the desktop. Component reuse through Bonobo means common libraries and foundations. We're fighting bloat in a different way; by reusing objects and components where appropriate, we hope to make the desktop more usable than before.

There are definitely people who aren't interested in this, and for them, GNOME doesn't make much sense. My point remains; aaronl's self-appointed job of de-GNOME-ifying applications will soon be impossible as more and more of them derive much of their functionality from components.

I guess we disagree in approach; nevertheless, aaronl's method of slandering GNOME programs by abusing statistics which are inherently difficult to measure, and willfully abused and misrepresented, is still inexcusable.

aaronl: I think you'll be surprised by the number of people who do use and like GNOME. Nevertheless, you certainly are free to modify free software applications as you see fit. I would only ask two things.

Please, please, please spend some time reading up on memory, address space, ammortized cost analysis, etc. before continuing to push your concept of bloat. And please don't tell people who disagree with you to "piss off".

I think you'll find that your task of de-GNOME-ifying programs will rapidly become more difficult with the continuing move towards component technology. With bonobo become the backbone of most new modern apps, you won't be able to remove what you consider "bloat" before quickly hurting your users. And that's a good thing. Yes, it's an extra dependency, but it's a massive step forward for both the programmers and the users. I think you've completely missed the boat on this one, and it shows.

aaronl: a free software implementation of a generic non-debian-specific fully featured package manager for Linux/Unix systems that has both a GUI and command line version? That's the one.

Now, just to clarify, are you sure you want to pick a fight with us? I made it clear my views are my own, not my companies. Were I you (and, given what an ass you've made of yourself, I'm glad I'm not), I'd stop and think a little more before mouthing off about GNOME, or Helix, or difficult concepts like shared memory that you don't seem to understand.

For the innocent bystanders: aaronl has been on a kick recently to "remove the bloat" from a variety of programs by removing functionality, in this case, the consistancy, user control, and other benefits provided by the GNOME framework. Specifically, he has posted a number of misleading facts about the memory used by a GNOME application. For a much better explanation than I could give, have a look at mjs' recent diary entries.

I guess I've grown more pretentious again, or something, but here's another attempt to keep a diary. We'll see how it goes.

Red Carpet is doing well, but I'm feeling a little bit deflated right now. I guess I'm feeling overwhelmed by how much all (and I do mean all) of the linux distributions and package managers suck. It's really depressing.

My project that goes well is Mr. Rupert's Ripping and Encoding Tools, also known as the Networked Fast Simultaneous Helix Unified Ripping Tools (NFSHURT). Basically, it's a couple perl scripts that lets you turn the ogg-ification of your CD's into a highly streamlined and automated process. It's pretty cool; we've done 21G of music in 5 days or so. Not bad, eh? Oh yeah, I'm getting some help cleaning up my scripts and then I'll add them as a project here.

Jacob got drunk Saturday night. LOL

Our apartment continues to not be finished, and it's like dealing with 3-year olds when talking to our landlady and the contractor. Sigh.

I'm glad there's IRC.

Oh, and aaronl is an idiot. An unabashed idiot. I probably shouldn't say that, and it's not Helix policy, but in my opinion, he's a complete idiot. I wonder how he even got to be an intern at VA?