Older blog entries for mrd (starting at number 56)

The US-Australia "Free" Trade Agreement (FTA): Linux Australia just released its position paper on the FTA and the negative effect it will have on Open-Source in Australia. This is a very important issue, so if you are in Australia, consider writing a letter to your local member of parliament, submitting something to the senate committee considering this treaty, or raising awareness of the issues in your local IT community. Our mailing list will soon provide details on how you can get involved - but don't wait - the senate committee submission period closes on April 30.

GNOME 2.6: Good write-ups over on ars and this one by Sayamindu Dasgupta. The next step to WorldDomination(TM) starts today...

Rocking interview with rml on ars including stuff on Project Utopia - desktop nirvana!

OT: Only a couple of days left to own a piece of history - FreeBSD hacker Greg Lehey's beard.

Job interview yesterday. Went well.

Useful Project Utopia link: http://www.joeshaw.org/#20040308.

Interesting article about whether Looking Glass will go open-source. A big test for Sun to see if they grok open-source, or whether they're just trying to skim the profits.

Could this influence the Thoughts on the future of open source desktop development (aka Java vs C#) discussion by some cool dudes in the GNOME world? Is this body of code cool enough to make a difference? What if Sun open sourced Java and made Looking Glass technologies patent free to [L]GPL projects? Can this be done legally? Is this an NPL situation? Is the eye candy good enough to influence what we hack on? Is GNOME destined to not make a decision on these technologies going forward? Will Xim^WNovell continue down the C# path anyway? Will Sun stay stubborn on Java staying closed source?

It shall be an interesting time to see how all this pans out :-)

Linux Australia : We issued a press release about the USA-Australia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), along with some summary position papers (on anti-circumvention laws and software patents) about how all this could be very bad news for the Australian software industry in general, and the Open Source community in particular.

As part of all this, we've updated OpenSource.Org.Au, your portal to Open Source in Australia. This is long overdue - end-users, business, government, education, and the press all want to know about how Open Source is a good thing right now. Our time in the spot light is now!

[OT]: One of my birthday presents was a CLA-4 adaptor for my Olympus C750UZ.   Woohoo!

Java, Glow, Open-Source and Sun Microsystems.:

"Of course this is why no interesting part of the Java Desktop System today uses Java, because there's no GPL-compatible Java implementation and thus no wide usage of Java in the open source desktop community. " -- hp #

Wow. Havoc just hit the nail on the head.

Please Sun, open-source Java!

C#: So I needed a reference to a string object, so that some XML could call the String.Concat() method to concatenate 2 strings in XML.

This will be trivial I think - inside my XML parsing engine we create a new keyword, making available a string object:

case "STRING":
    currObj = new String();
    break;

Ahh, but there's no constructor that takes zero arguments. Looking through the API docs, there's a version that takes a char *, a char[], a string etc for a total of 8 variants - but no default zero param constructor! None of these are really suitable for this particular purpose (this is managed code, no pointers for you!). Why no standard default constructor of String()? Java has always had that available - another trap for people writing in both C# and Java.

The simple work around was:

case "STRING":
    String foo = "";
    currObj = foo;
    break;

so I could then do something like this in XML:

<ACTION NAME="CallMethod" UID="202" REFERENCE="{SetProp Application, SomeLabel, {STRING.Concat(XMLVAR1, XMLVAR2)})}"/>

Not a big deal, but another of those simple differences between these two languages (really their supplied library APIs) that just needn't be there. The level of compatibility at a source code level could be better.

Java and open-source: Interesting article over at The Register, continuing the discussion on whether Sun should open-source Java. The thing that amazes me is that Sun appears to be choosing to be the big fish in an ever-diminishing pond, rather than have a bigger pond where everyone, including themselves, would grow beyond their current size. It looks like the fear of not being the biggest player in the Java market is more important than possibly growing bigger than they currently are, but relinquishing the market leader spot. Amazing. Did we learn nothing from the Unix wars in the 80's?

How long before Java3^WdotNet overtakes the market everywhere? How long has Java got before it becomes totally irrelevant?

I hope it doesn't happen. I like Java. I don't envy its future though.

Helium: My simple python photo management application might just have been superceeded by f-spot. My python might just end up being just more junkcode...