14 Aug 2001 johnm   » (Journeyer)

Transit lounge interlude

I'm currently in the transit lounge at Sydney airport, en route from New Zealand to the UK. The world is looking better than the last time I was stuck in a transit lounge in the US: they have free Internet kiosks here in Australia! Of course, it's a mutant version of Internet Explorer that will only let you have one window, and the keyboard's set to some weird Chinese layout (it took me a long time to find "w" and "."!). But you can get to the usual Windows telnet client without too much difficulty :-).

prc-tools

Since I'm sitting on a plane for 24 hours, I've got plenty of time to work on prc-tools. (I had better sign off here soon and go and steal some of the airport's electricity for my batteries though.) I've been working on installation issues for a while now. I kind of want to spend this time working on GLib shared libraries, because a few vocal people keep bleating about them and fixing them would shut them up once and for all, but I'm really not very motivated to work on those.

pilrc

Oops. I seem to have offended a few people by questioning the quality of some of their recent patches to this project. (Since I'm sitting on planes at the moment, I'm not going to be posting to the thread I started for the next day or two. Hopefully not too much momentum will be lost.)

Actually I certainly didn't intend to offend them; if anybody, I was intending to offend the maintainer.

Well, not really ;-). But if it were my project, I would be a lot more selective about what I accepted. It seems to me that pilrc is being pulled in several directions at the moment, and the dominant direction is not the long time user base of application developers. And that's fine, but some of the additions are making things worse for the project and for those developers, in particular by making pilrc's source code unmaintainable. If it were my project, I would be emphasising correctness and thought-out-ness rather than breakneck pace of development, which is what one faction seems to want at the moment. It's fine for them to want that, but not at the expense of the long term users.

It's not my project of course, but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to lobby the maintainer!

And I know Aaron is reading this... :-)

[Later] More airports, and airports at airports

Now at Changi Airport in Singapore, where there's a free 802.11 network. If you don't have a wireless ethernet card, they'll lend you one. Sweet!

Unfortunately, at 4.00am I can't be bothered figuring it all out (Linux 2.4.whatever recognised the card, the interface partly came up, but the network wouldn't speak DHCP to me), so this is coming from Windows. Bugger. Can't download my email properly.

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