Older blog entries for ta0kira (starting at number 1)

I finally put Resourcerver on public subversion and public browsing today. It's been a long time coming. I had the project on CVS a long time ago, in fact when the project started, but my early source-tree structural changes were so frequent and drastic that neither I nor CVS could keep up with tracking them. I set aside version control for all releases up until now. It took about a year of design and programming to get it to the point where I felt confident releasing an alpha version, but I dropped CVS a few months before that. It would be nice to have those changes tracked for regression testing, but in the end the project has quite a bit more structural efficiency than I would have had the patience for using a VCS.

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about having the non-packaged files out there. I don't have anything private, but it does include a few scripts and other files I don't ever intend to include in the package.

Anyway, it's out there now, so please take a look if you have an interest in the project. Reading the source and changes online certainly beats downloading and extracting a package. It is a lot of code, just to warn you (~53k lines.)

Kevin

I don't do a lot with peer-networking sites. I've never had a blog. In fact, I don't really know what to write here, nor anywhere else on this site. I do, however, write software and I've never been paid for it. I started with BASIC on an Apple IIgs in 1991. My father fried the RAM around 1995, and the only thing available to program on was my HP-48g, which I programmed day and night for lack of a real computer. I lacked other programming resources until 2003, when I finally had a computer of my own. I sought out and learned what I know about programming independently, mostly through websites, message boards, manpages, tearing apart code I've come across, and coding for days at a time until I figure out how to make something work. Programming steals my life, so I try to save it for good ideas. It steals my sleep, my dreams, and even the world right in front of me. My life is elsewhere, yet I remain a slave to my text editor.

I'm not a professional developer, I don't have a degree in CS, nor will either apply to me in the future. I study cognitive science and mathematics. I'm sure I'll have more to say about that later.

I don't generally use IDEs and I don't have much of an interest in GUI programming. Most of what I develop takes the form of algorithms, frameworks, infrastructures, libraries, and many other things not readily usable by the non-programmer.

I have several "open-source projects," made so by virtue of being hosted as such, but I put most of my time into one. Ironically, the one that consistently has zero downloads. I actually don't program for others to use my work; I publish my work so my time doesn't go to waste. I'm a compulsive perfectionist with my code, so when I get something right I like the idea of someone else being able to come across it and see what I've done. I'd like to think that everything I write can be of some use to someone, but that really isn't the point.

This isn't to say I don't care about what I put out there or what other developers think. I often retract a download after noticing a misspelled word in the README for fear of publishing something with an error. I feel quite ashamed when I come across bugs in my own work, even in the alpha and beta versions. It always strikes me as a misrepresentation when I put my name on something with a bug.

I'm just starting to get into collaborative development for a research project I'll be working on. I'm the informal development lead, but the actual algorithm design will be done by computer scientists.

For now, please take a look at Resourcerver, my main project. I'd really like feedback on the design; however, please keep in mind it's only loosely related to dbus, dcop, etc. (multi-process app control vs. IPC framework.)

Kevin