So, this is my first entry on advogato. I've been vaguely aware of the site for some time, but seeing the GNOME guys blog here made me think maybe I should too. I share a non-geeky (mostly) blog with some friends, but one devoted to my free software work seems fun.
Wine
I join this site at an interesting time - I'm engaged in a race against the clock. I have precisely 1 week, and 1 day left to make my companies app (a groupware product in development) work completely under Wine before my contract is up and I leave. If it doesn't work before I go, the porting effort will be abandoned, as I'm the only one there who can do it.
I've been working on Wine for about a year now, no real area of specialisation yet. I've worked on the common controls library, core window handling, I wrote the XEMBED/freedesktop system tray integration code (currently working its way through the peer review process), and at the moment I'm battling with COM/OLE. Hopefully the results of my work (which builds on work done by Ove at TransGaming) will soon be meaning a major COM/OLE upgrade to Wine.
Seeing an opportunity to get paid to hack on Wine full time was great, and I've been having a fun time for the past few months. As I reach the end though, I'm getting pretty tired, both mentally and physically - the areas of Wine/Win32 that I'm currently working in are poorly documented, partly incomplete and deal with parts of Windows that are old, rickety and generally massively baroque, even moreso than usual.
Stay tuned to find out who wins - Microsoft, or free software. It cannot be both :/
What else do I do?
I am the principal designer, maintainer and author of autopackage. It makes packages. They are kind of unique, in that they are distribution neutral, can do interactivity etc. If people are interested, I'm going to blog more on autopackage, how it works and why it's so important in future. I noticed there was an articles system, perhaps I'll submit something there in future.
OK - compile over. I have to get back to work, no time to lose. Rock on my friends.