Recent blog entries for jleader

At work, I've been taking a bunch of CGI scripts I wrote, and making them use template files for the HTML that they generate.

A typical build-or-reuse situation; in this case, I'm building because the need is short term (my client might hook a big investor if I can get this thing running soon enough) and the requirements are so simple. In the long run, it'd probably be better to spend the time investigating something like PHP or Perl::Mason or some such, but I'm in a hurry, so I just whip out pattern 20.9 from the Perl Cookbook.

On another front, I put a little more time in on my (eventually to be) open source project last night. I'm using FLTK, mostly just to learn about it, and because I will want to be able to run it under both Windows and Linux eventually. In a typical cross-platform quandry, I'm trying to decide how much effort to put into Windows specific code, things like making it display different task bar icons when the program's in different states.

A bit of personal cross-platform history: my first cross-platform code was written using a commercial library called XVT, which at the time supported Windows 2.0, MacOS, OS/2, and Motif. I was amazed to find that it's still available.

Miniver has some interesting points about how the Advogato certification system is measuring 2 dimensions with one measurement: programming ability/knowledge and open source experience/contributions.

I'm one of those people who thinks that open source is a great idea, but much of my professional career has been spent working on proprietary software. I've used open source tools, and I think once or twice I made some changes to them, but it was a long time ago.

I've tried half-heartedly a few times to persuade employers or clients to open source some of the projects I've worked on, but usually the code was written in such a rush that I wasn't all that eager to expose it to strangers anyway.

Advogato... interesting.

I stumbled across a reference at the very end of last Friday's Need To Know to the Salon article. I was taking some time off from work (and non-work programming) to help my wife care for our newborn son. Soon I'll be starting back to work, which will probably mean I won't have much time to revisit Advogato. Oh well.