Older blog entries for jdub (starting at number 80)

pfremy
Just give it up. The GNOME and KDE hackers have a healthy respect for each other which far outweighs your trolling in value for the Free Software community. Perhaps you should learn from your peers and contribute positively. The rest of us, hacking on both desktop environments, have no time, desire or need to troll.
I find those people, who are at most peripherally involved and manage to represent the rest of as flaming idiots, incredibly frustrating. You are discouraging user acceptance of both systems, so please, shut up and grow up.
The "desktop war" is a fiction, nothing more.
Uraeus
Please don't fight trolls with trolls. :-)
18 Oct 2002 (updated 18 Oct 2002 at 08:13 UTC) »
The Ever Astounding Advogato Employment Status Update
With this post, I am now an Advogato cliché! Hooray for me! Ahem.
This whole "shifting from consulting to permanent employment" thing is both exciting and irritating all at once. I've done consulting either by myself or within a company for too long now, and would like an opportunity to work in a team, rather than having to be the crucial link or driving force. Much closer to how I work with GNOME, really - it's so nice to be a part of a thriving team.
Yes, I'm on an upward swing. :-) I've had a fairly negative week or two all things considered, but it has finished well enough. Have an interview on Monday morning with a systems manager who uses... Evolution. Then I have a couple of good clients lined up to round out the day. So it can't be all that bad, really.
GNOME
Gearing up for 2.1.1 release. Looking like a nice incremental update to the development series, nothing especially interesting thus far. We're also looking at doing a 2.0.3 release in early November, to keep the ongoing bug and accessibility fixes rolling out.
Oh, if you haven't tried building Mozilla 1.2b with Xft2 support yet, run, don't walk, to your nearest mirror and download the nightly source tarball. It's very sexy, especially with unhinted, anti-aliased fonts. Can't wait for Galeon 2 for yummy GNOME/Mozilla lovin'!
Love & Free Software
Dude, I'm gobsmacked every day by the behaviour of some (ab)users of Free Software. I'd say you're providing insight into just about everyone who works on it! :-) I've explained it a couple of times to audiences and people involved in Free Software communities like this:
Arse: So, that's a pretty shitty car you've got. Look at how dirty it is! What kind of fuckwit would drive a car like that? I bet you can't even drive it. Can you? You can't! You're hopeless.
Dude: Um, ok.
Arse: So, can I borrow your keys?
In the end, after all of this raving and ranting, the person is still asking you to do something. Asking for a favour. Perhaps it's the medium, I don't know. But on a purely selfish level, if you want something, you do what it takes to get it, whether it's politeness, dressing up, etc. You don't shout and flame, simply because it's ineffective and does not produce results. It amazes me that this concept is so hard to grasp, even for the kinds of selfish people who are so demanding and unkind.
Life
It's heartwarming to have someone to call when things go right. Even more so than the comfort of having someone to be miserable with when things go wrong.
16 Oct 2002 (updated 16 Oct 2002 at 09:27 UTC) »
Silver lining...
... or this week's most significant evidence pointing to the systematic cynical oppression of the metaverse?
So, today has been a nice little package of bad news... But at the tail end, a silver lining in the acceptance of my linux.conf.au abstract. Which is great, were I even remotely financially capable of actually going. "Oh, but there is this great new Regional Delegates Program sponsored by Sun", you say! Which would be great, were I not the president of SLUG, and therefore unable to participate as both a selector and selectee.
Systematic cynical oppression it is, then.
15 Oct 2002 (updated 15 Oct 2002 at 06:05 UTC) »
habes
There is no good reason to throw away so many years work on X - it's such a good platform. Your specific points are so close to being solved:
  • Too hard to configure: Work is being done to make XF86Config optional (required only for setups that are too difficult to detect, or old monitors).
  • Fonts suck: Whilst fonts are incredibly expensive and generally out of our reach for the time being, the infrastructure is getting a good rehaul with Xft2 and fontconfig. We've still have a fair few nice fonts available though.
  • Changing resolutions: Very close to doable with the RandR extension, a side-benefit of its main role.
DirectFB can't and shouldn't compete with X on the desktop. It's a great embedded solution for specific purposes (X is also a great embedded solution), but leaving X for it would be like carving off the top of your head because it gets in the way of doorframes.
Additionally, users don't have to deal with text files and driver names in modern distributions. See Red Hat 8.0 for sane user-admin tools. Very sweet.
6 Oct 2002 (updated 6 Oct 2002 at 05:59 UTC) »
gman & jaq
88MPH: The speed at which Doc's Delorean - equipped with a 1.2 gigawatt-sapping plutionium-powered flux capacitor - disappears in temporal displacement, leaving nothing behind but a pair of flaming tyre tracks.
With the 2.1.x unstable development branch, GNOME has gone Back to the Future...
daniels
But wait - not making a release is the true easy route.
<center>"The aim of the release process is to finish software, not to develop it..." - Havoc Pennington</center>
8 Sep 2002 (updated 8 Sep 2002 at 01:08 UTC) »
GNOME
Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2001 06:31:02 -0400
From: Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: GNOME2 team conf call

  Okay, let's try to get this rolling.
... and what an incredible roller-coaster ride it has been. I'm so glad to be working with such an awesome group of people, and being part of such a giving and friendly community.
Proud and re-energised. We kick so much arse.
Meanwhile, we're putting out 2.0.2 RC 1 today, will be a very tasty release. Lots of polish since 2.0.1.
GARNOME
So, after much procrastinating and finding better things to do, I've finally migrated to the latest upstream GAR. It was less work than I thought, and I'll probably even make the big layout changes I was planning before the next release. Upstream has improved immensely, so this will give us quite a few more toys to play with.
Life
Deliriously in love, working on very cool stuff, almost settled in to the new house. Rawk.
Dave Winer writes...
Is it me or is it weird that so many open source purists, people who swear by it, argue it to death, and would die for it, seem to like Apple, which isn't open source? Maybe I'm missing something.
Because it's great technology! Do you perceive these 'open source purists' as having no appreciation for excellent work, regardless of its license? That's a pretty long straw.
BTW, imho, "open source" is a vestige of dotcom mania. Sure, you can do anything with free money, but that's over, for good (fingers crossed) so let's get real, okay? Thanks. One more thing, open source zealots, like all zealots, checked their minds at the door when they joined the party. They're anti-intellectual, can't handle disagreement, are about anything but freedom.
I'm really sorry the zealots have got up your nose - not everyone who works in Free Software / Open Source is like that at all. We love what we do, and we're really happy when our work is enjoyed by others. Much like other creators, software or not.
In the late 90s open source defined a club that excluded many well-intentioned hard-working developers. Now it no longer has the power to do that, because the hype is over, and the money that was funding it is gone.
Yeah, this is cool. The hype is over, so now we can get back to doing what we always have - writing great software - without all the frenzy and distractions. Sure, it was an interesting time, and a lot of great work was accomplished, but it really did confuse a lot of people. The Free Software community seems a lot happier now.
1 Aug 2002 (updated 1 Aug 2002 at 05:41 UTC) »
Working for $0
Dave Winer writes:
OSCON, last week, has done its job and stirred the embers of the Great Open Source Debate of the 1990s. I found myself writing in an email yesterday: "Very little really usable software has come from people who are willing to work for $0. (I chose my words carefully, infrastructure is another matter entirely.) Further, it's weird to say, as Richard Stallman does, that by coercing programmers to work for $0 that that's freedom. To me it seems obvious that that's slavery."
My response, in an email to Dave:
I'm surprised by each of these sentiments: that we're not writing usable software, that we're not making money, and that it's coercion (and thus slavery).
Some background on me. I work as a consultant using almost 100% Open Source / Free Software, providing new solutions and support for existing software. I contribute to The GNOME Project as release team manager and other things, and am president of the Sydney Linux User's Group. So yeah, I really enjoy this stuff. :-)
I'll speak mainly from my experiences with GNOME.
On the usability front, we've seen some massive improvements in our 2.0 release. It's really hotting up. The Sun Microsystems hackers working on GNOME are pushing us towards 100% Section 508 compliance - we have the framework in place in 2.0 - which means that our accessibility support will be up to US Government standards. We have an awesome desktop environment, plenty of great apps (and a few first class ones such as the Evolution groupware suite). Yeah, we're still playing catch-up, but in four years we've covered a hell of a lot of ground. It only gets better.
We're making money, too. Plenty of GNOME hackers are employed to hack on GNOME. That's a simple 'software company pays programmer' equation. The various OS/FS-involved companies are doing a good job of bringing in the dollars too (I don't think OS/FS handicaps them very much at all compared to other service-based software businesses). I also earn my keep with OS/FS. :-)
The last point about programmers being coerced and thus enslaved is *very* interesting from a Free Software perspective. There are lots of reasons to work on OS/FS, so it's hard to sum up why we do it. Linus Torvalds' simple analysis "just for fun" is probably the most accurate.
Constructing cool software with a bunch of people across the planet, and being able to play with and improve it is *fun*! Sad as it may seem, I get a kick out of just helping this process along, in my role as release team manager. I'm not the greatest hacker in the world, so I help out in other ways. ;-) But I also do it because I think it's a good deed (plus, I think it's 'right', but I don't think everything else is therefore 'wrong').
It takes all types. Some of the paid hackers do it as their job, some of them are pretty chuffed that they can be paid to do what they enjoy. Some of us have wives and kids and need a hobby, some of us find that we learn more from the practice of software development than the theory we learn at university. Some of us do it out of a sense of purity, some as an actively violent response to proprietary software. Some of us do it because we're bloody good at it, some of us because we look up to those who are, and want to help them. In the end, I think most of us do it because it's fun - if it wasn't, we wouldn't do it at all.
Bloggers
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