And what's up with the linux-audio-dev mailing list sending out messages like they're on crack ? I subscribed on Sunday night and had 60 new messages when I got to work the next morning ! Good grief.
Thinkpad battery
My Thinkpad battery started to die last week. I'm pretty sure it's related to the cold weather sweeping in. (I suppose some tradeoff has to be made for all the beautiful snow.) At any rate, the symptoms are the same as before : The battery discharges normally until it's about 1/3 full and then suddenly drops to empty. This sudden drop cuts the battery life to about an hour (the original life was about 2.25 hours, back in April or May). Fortunately, Raph's Thinkpad 600 battery problem page has a hint from Javier Valero about covering the pins that communicate the battery level (but only while discharging !). So far, it seems to be working well. Thanks, Raph and Javier.
Work and code generation
We finished up a very preliminary version of our component code generator, which is pretty exciting. This tool can generate CORBA component logic by reading an IDL file (specification version 3.0) ; the only code a person needs to write is in the interface function implementations (the "business logic"). When we compiled and ran the first test component, we all wandered out en masse from the R&D floor and scoured the building for beer ... but (strangely) finding none a coworker had to drive to town to get some. :-)
Since the generator is written in Java and Python (Jython)—and because Jython can't follow symbolic links when importing packages—the path config stuff was a headache, to say the least. So I've spent the last week or so translating the Python into Java, which is kind of amusing. I guess I just think anything involving Java is amusing. Any language that has a split() but no join(), or that routes you through three classes to get a useful file.readLines() method is pretty silly, if you ask me.
Props to braden : checking out OpenVRML helped a lot in smoothing out the automake build process with Java.
Open source development at companies
So now we've got this useful tool, and some documentation and examples for it as well. Wouldn't it be nice to share it with the rest of the computer science community ? Well, I think so, but I work at a company ... that makes money by writing and selling proprietary software ...
But fortunately my coworkers are big Open Source fans (shameless plug : check out confix, just released by a coworker), and our department manager is as well. So maybe we'll be able to convince the boss boss that we should release the project.
What happens if we can only release part of the project, say the API library that the generators use ? Would that be worse than releasing the whole tools package, or ... ? I tend to think that any movement towards Open Source that a company makes would be positive. But there might be drawbacks, I don't know. Is it acceptable to release code as Open Source even if the motivation behind such a release is to leech free testing and bug reports from the user community ? I've thought about this ever since starting this project, but I haven't had any truly productive thoughts yet. Suggestions welcome. :-)