I’ve been an Open Source developer and hacker for a loooooong, long time. It has become far more than a part of what I do. It has become part of who I am.

At first, it was mostly about the freedom to run what I want, where I want, how I want. Desktop Linux has always been exciting to me for that reason.

But then it grew beyond that and enabled me to contribute back. Open Source allowed me to teach myself new programming languages. It allowed me to make friends literally all over the world. It became the thing that I enjoyed doing most, technically, especially since my daytime jobs didn’t let me do the kind of programming and development that I wanted to do.

It helped me to get the best job of my life.

I’ve been working at VMware for more than 4 years now. I only have this job because I’ve taught myself everything I know about programming languages, and most of that has been through my work in the Open Source communities I’ve participated in over the last 15 years.

Most recently, I’ve had a blast as a KPilot/KDE PIM developer. I’ve met more people from all around the world and I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. But KPilot and Palm Pilots in general have long since lost relevance. And sadly, I was never able to find a new itch to scratch and a new area to start contributing to. It’s been years now since I’ve contributed any sizable amount of code to any Open Source community. I’ve waited, hoping that I’d find more time, or that I’d find a new itch to scratch, or that I’d get the urge to start hacking on Linux Desktop stuff again. But it hasn’t happened, and I have no reason to think it’s going to anytime soon.

Over the past several years, I’ve become increasingly irritated and frustrated by the ever-changing-and-not-always-in-good-ways Linux Desktop. I’ve blogged before about this and got quite a bit of feedback about it. That was two years ago, almost exactly. What has changed since then? In my mind, absolutely nothing. Now we have Ubuntu turning the desktop on its head again with Ubuntu Unity and destabilizing applications that have worked perfectly well for years and years. I know this because I’ve been working on VMware’s Workstation and Player products for the Linux Desktop for the last 4 years and I can’t tell you how much time and frustration and energy I’ve had to put into last minute bug fixes to work around new and broken in “exciting ways” behavior in Linux Desktop Environments. That’s the kind of thing that really sucks the life and soul out of you, especially when it’s something that you’ve cared so deeply about for so very long.

You have to understand… I have been one of the most outspoken and zealous of Linux Desktop proponents you’d ever want to meet. And I do believe that the Linux Desktop is awesome and a worthwhile thing to use, if only to keep down on the amount of ongoing upkeep you have to do to your PC thanks to viruses, malware, etc. But I have decided to move away from caring about Desktop Linux and I don’t know if I’ll be back, personally.

I’ve always looked at jwz’s “final straw” rant and thought that I could never get there. I’ve invested too much time and energy in Desktop Linux and cared too much about it to give up on it, right? Well, I was wrong, I guess. =:)

So, this isn’t meant to be a slam on Linux or a slam on KDE or a slam on Open Source or anything else. Just chalk it up to an old, cranky dude who became disillusioned with the Linux Desktop if you want. Or chalk it up to said old, cranky dude finally having enough money to buy a Mac and seeing how beautifully it runs and really enjoying it and not wanting to deal with for Linux Desktop on his personal daily equipment anymore.

But anyway, I just wanted to put this out there. I feel like I’m losing part of who I am by doing it officially and all. But I have been using and developing on Apple’s OS X lately and I’m thoroughly loving it. A couple of months ago, the opportunity presented itself at work and I made the switch from the VMware Linux Workstation/Player team to the VMware Fusion team, and I’m really loving it. I had been feeling like I’ve been stagnating lately and not learning or growing as a developer. I had been wanting to make a change and learn new technology and languages. And thus far, I’m really liking Objective-C and Mac development.

So at this point, I’m going to remove myself from planet KDE and take a break from Linux Desktop for a while. I’ve actually been not blogging for quite a while now because I know it’s not going to be relevant to planet KDE and that’s been another source of frustration, so I’m going to rectify that now too. I’ve been meaning to remove myself from the planet KDE feed for a while now, but 1) I felt like I should say some kind of goodbye and 2) I can’t seem to be able to log in to my svn+ssh account anymore to remove myself from the planet feed. =:/

Anyway, sorry to all my KDE friends. I feel like I’m letting you guys down. But truth be told, I haven’t been doing anything in the last couple of years anyway. =:/ I guess it’s just a normal part of life and different phases of it or something. We’ll see where this road goes. I’m hoping that at the very least, this will let me feel like I can start blogging again. =:)

KDE and Qt Developers Meet Android

I believe I am one of the last few die-hard nutjobs on the face of this earth who still use (and “use” here is a highly subjective word meaning that I have a bunch of Palm devices lying around, am currently the only semi-active (and “semi-active” means that I get probably a good 2 hours of KPilot hacking in per year =:( ) KPilot developer, and occasionally even turn some of them on) Palm PDA devices. I have successfully resisted the siren call of the iPhone for the last 2+(?) years–partly because there is no functional synchronization solution between my Linux desktop and it, partly because it’s pretty bloody expensive, partly because Cingular has atrociously high data plans compared to Sprint, partly because I’ve endured the lunacy of FLOSS developers trying to keep re-figuring out Apple’s iPod/iTouch/iPhone database structures that would otherwise allow me to synchronize my music and movies with said Apple devices and have an extremely bad taste in my mouth from said frustrations, and partly because I’m one of the cheapest geeks you’ll ever meet (also, being the sole income-provider for a family of 5 only solidifies my inborn cheap nature). All that being said, however, I hereby declare the good old Palm OS officially dead and uninteresting to me anymore. Okay, truth be told, that was an obvious statement to make 2 years ago, but I’ve been in denial since then and am only now trying to face reality and get help. =;P

I am a gadget geek–I always have been–and I have wasted more money on Palm gadgets than I care to remember. I clearly remember agonizing over spending $400 or so for the Palm IIIc when it came out (but OOH, it had a nice color screen!). And the $400 or so I spent on the Clie NX70v was a week-long ordeal that involved me hemming and hawing and spending many an angst-filled evening at the local Circuit City. And the $400 or so I spent on my Treo 650 (which magically turned into a Treo 700p in a couple of years after the 650 became deathly ill) was also quite the emotional ordeal. And yes, I realize that these series of purchases contradict my statement that I’m a cheap geek, so I’ll defend my previous statement by saying that I’m apparently a selectively cheap geek.

Palm was a GREAT gadget and a good OS that allowed me to sync my data with my Linux desktop and enjoy being cool and geeky. In fact, it was (and still is) the only PDA solution that I have found that synchronizes (for the most part) very smoothly with my  Linux desktop. It was never as flashy as the Windows-based devices, but it sure was more stable. And there were a huge number of applications for the Palm OS. But seeing the spartan Palm OS 5 interface nowadays, especially when compared with the iPhone bling, or even the Maemo interface… it’s like looking at the old OLWM Window Manager compared with the current KDE4 sexiness. There’s just no comparison. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 2 years (or have been cheap and/or in denial like me and/or just so in love with the old Palm OS), it’s painfully obvious that very few care about the old Palm OS anymore. Everybody and their pet turtle has an iPhone now (or so it surely seems). And being a FLOSS advocate/hacker/supporter/proponent/religious nutjob, that concerns me and I’d like to again put my money where my mouth and soapbox are.

So what’s my point with all of this? Well, it’s time for me to get a new phone/geek toy, I think. I want to be as FLOSS-supportive and interopable as possible, and I’m really curious what other people who are FLOSS-conscious are thinking about this and have done about it. While none of the options that I see are 100% FLOSS-perfect (being that we’re still dealing with proprietary bits/pieces/networks/hardware with cell phone companies), Android seems the closest, while the Palm Pre (assuming it runs on Linux and allows itself to be open enough to be hackable/customizable/extensible) seems a strong second, whilst the “what do you mean you don’t have an iPhone yet” seems a distant third, being that you’re totally under Apple’s friendly-dictatorship-and-heavily-taxed thumb.

Here’s my short list so far, with my take on positives/negatives. I’m very curious to see what people (especially Planet KDE people who are actively working on providing/improving/supporting FLOSS) have done and are thinking with regards to their cell phones.

  • The Apple iPhone. The current definition of sexiness–just ask the entire planet. Unfortunately, from my understanding, it’s very tightly controlled by Apple, and while you can jailbreak it, you’re still under Apple’s thumb as far as transferring music/videos (at the very least) to it from a Linux desktop. Want to back it up? You’d better have either a physical Windows or Mac machine or a very good virtual machine provider like VMware Workstation or Player and cross your fingers a lot. The other major downside in my book is that you can only get an iPhone if you use AT&T/Cingular as your cell phone provider, and their data plans are the highest in the industry ($30 per phone–and that’s if you don’t want to be able to connect to it via Bluetooth for laptop internet accesss???). Also, it doesn’t look like they have a shareable family data plan, so I’d be looking at $90 per month, at least, for just data access?? And then there’s the fact that it’s the absolutely least FLOSS-friendly geek toy of the bunch, from my understanding. There are a lot of positives, of course, and there seems to be no shortage of 3rd party application developers and applications. Of course, if you want to develop for the iPhone, don’t you have to pay the Apple tax and buy a physical Apple computer as well??
  • Android phones. Really slick and awesome looking! I would LOVE to just have the PIM applications from it be able to run on my Nokia N810 and be able to sync flawlessly with my Google calendar/contacts data! The biggest downside for the Android for me is that only T-Mobile has an Android phone–and I can’t get T-Mobile service in my neck of the woods (literally). I’d really like to leave myself as open as possible to being able to get an Android phone as quickly as possible, so I’m thinking that I’d like to sign up with whichever cell phone service provider will give me the best shot at that. I think that because Google is backing this platform, it has the second-best chance of attracting application developers/hackers and should mean that it’s pretty future-proof from the standpoint of being able to look forward to years ahead of good, solid applications for the Android platform. Is it reasonable to think that even if cell phone companies don’t sell Android phones themselves, that one would be able to pick up an HTC Touch or Diamond or similar and slap the Android OS on it and have a fully functional Android phone?
  • And finally, the soon-to-be-released Palm Pre (and here we tie in nicely with the title… the Palm is dead! Long live the Palm!) I cannot find a whole lot of information about the Palm Pre right now, but what little I see looks good. Based on Linux(?), supports a bunch of audio/video codecs out of the box, sports a slick new interface that looks very much like the iPhone/Android UIs, has a built-in GPS, and is being aimed squarely at the iPhone/Blackberry camps. The things that concern me: it has a custom web browser (why didn’t they use one of the existing FLOSS browsers???), lack of information regarding add-on external storage (does it use microSD?), will it support Bluetooth tethering/DUN(?), and the fact that this is yet another new platform that requires a healthy influx of 3rd-party app developers/hackers. Can Palm pull in a huge number of app developers to breathe life into the Pre and its new WebOS? To me, that’s the biggest question, since if they cannot, I don’t think they can stem the tide of iPhone-exclusive applications and developers. On the positive side, my current cell phone provider (Sprint) will be offering the Pre in another week or so, and they have pretty attractive data plans.

So I’d love to get comment feedback from folks about this. What are you currently using if you’re using one of these solutions? What are you planning on doing going forward?

That’s my prediction. Of course, the truth of the matter is that KDE 4.2 (trunk) flat out rocks today. Seriously. I have never been more excited about the Linux desktop than I am right now. And this, 2+ months out from our actual KDE 4.2 release. I’ve been running OpenSUSE 11 for a couple of months now, and thanks to the awesome nightly/weekly KDE 4.2/trunk packages, I’m thoroughly enjoying pretty-darned-bleeding-edge 4.2/trunk packages, but with half the carbs, and I am loving what I’m seeing! Recent KMail improvements are awesome. Plasma is getting more and more bullet-proof and gorgeous by the week. Kwin just keeps getting more and more stable and purty. Kdevelop4 and Kate are getting some SERIOUSLY cool enhancements and RAD-helping juju. Even our lowly KPilot has been getting some bugzilla lovin’ from yours truly lately, and I’m about half-way through porting the old memofile conduit to our groovy base conduit syncing goodness. Whereas a few months ago, I just could not use KDE4 as my main work environment (gots ta make a living too, don’tcha know!), I have long-since switched and am thrilled with what we have right now. (of course, BIG thanks to the Linux nVidia team for improving their X11 driver!!!)

I can just feel the momentum behind us, can’t you?

If this were a corporation, right about now, you’d expect to see some old dude get up in front of everybody, work himself into a frenzy, run around on stage (“developers, developers, developers”?), and try to get everybody motivated to keep pushing hard at making our software the most awesomest, bestest, most stablest thing you could ever want.

But we’re not a corporation (thank God!!).

And we don’t have an old, sweaty, balding dude to put up on stage and try to whip everybody into being motivated (also, thank God!).

We just have us. And that is the magic of Open Source. It is up to us to keep our momentum going, to not give up, to keep pushing ourselves harder, to keep improving our software stack, to keep squashing bugs, to try to have the best desktop environment possible.

So keep up the awesome work, everybody. You’re doing it right!! =:)

Looking for the best distro...

I got bored with my Ubuntu Hardy install last week and decided to have a look at what some of the other guys are up to these days. Mind you, there wasn’t anything horribly wrong with my Ubuntu host. I still ♥ apt; IMHO, there’s still nothing faster (although the new package management in OpenSUSE 11 comes darned close!). But anyway, it was an interesting trek across the newest distros and while I was looking to end up with something other than SUSE (again, nothing wrong with it at all–I just like change), I am totally impressed with OpenSUSE 11 and am going to feel satisfied sticking with it for a decently long while, knowing that I’ve shopped around as it were. And I think that that’s really the main point, now that I think of it. It’s why I got involved with Linux originally: I hated Windows 3.1 and didn’t like the fact that there was no way to shop around and make it better. Oh–one other thing I was looking for in a new host: nightly/weekly KDE trunk (4.2) snapshots–and from what I found, only OpenSUSE offers that. Anyway… some random thoughts about the voyage…

OpenSUSE 10.3… I ran this when I worked at CVS. Awesome, solid, stable. Really, really good. I installed this on my work laptop when I started at VMware and was pretty happy with it. What ended up pushing me off of it and onto Kubuntu Hardy was the fact that debugging with gdb on OpenSUSE 10.3 was really, really painful. Just about everything that I tried to “p” or “pt” on ended up making gdb itself segfault. Frustrating and work-inhibiting. Time to switch.

Kubuntu Hardy… Also very stable and well-done. Apt just plain rules the package management scene, I’m convinced. I believe there are architecture issues or something that make other distros not like it, but it is danged fast. Nothing really to complain about with Kubuntu. It worked, worked well, and I don’t think I really had any problems with it. It was awesome to not have gdb segfault on me too. =:/ I started looking for nightly/weekly KDE 4.2/trunk builds and couldn’t find them. Feeling frustrated and stagnant (through no fault of Kubuntu), I decided to switch distros and see what else is out there. A Fedora 9 DVD came in one of the Linux magazines I bought at B&N lately (plus a friend of mine from work runs F9 on his work laptop), and it has been staring me in the face for a month now. I couldn’t resist any longer. Oh! Also, Ubuntu’s graphical boot stuff, while nice, manages to screw up my video card on my laptop if I stop kdm/xdm/gdm from running (which I need to do frequently lately to try out the nVidia beta drops). It stops the display manager and then goes back to the bootsplash screen and when it returns me to my VT, it’s totally messed up and unusable. Impetus enough.

Fedora 9… Words cannot express…. I’m trying to block out the painful memories…. Okay, it wasn’t completely horrible, but they’ve done so many things with Fedora since I last used it that I feel totally uncomfortable in it. I think wireless networking worked decently well. I set SELinux to disabled and kept getting popups warning me that such and such a thing would have been denied if SELinux wasn’t disabled and how that was bad… Couldn’t figure out how to turn that off. Getting my existing LUKS-encrypted home partition working was a pain. I LOVE the RHGB graphical boot magic. That was honestly (shallow, I know) one of the reasons I was looking forward to Fedora 9. Well lo and behold… when the boot sequence has to stop and prompt me for my LUKS passphrase, it drops completely out of RHGB mode (reasonable enough) but then fails to go back into it. Sexiness– and still no KDE 4.2/trunk nightly/weekly builds. On we go.

UPDATE: I had forgotten the biggest reason I ran away screaming from Fedora 9: they’re using newer Xorg packages than nVidia has drivers for. Aiyeeee!!!!

One of the coolest KDE dudes I know (/me waves to Helio) works for Mandriva, so I’ve been meaning to try out the latest Mandriva for a while. I used to use Mandriva on my work laptop when I worked at Rite Aid and was always impressed with it. The package management used to suck a lot, though, which is one of the reasons that I stopped using it. You used to have to go into one application to add packages and another application to remove packages. =:/ I’m happy to say that Mandriva 2008.1 (or maybe an earlier release) fixed the package management stuff and now adding and removing packages happen in the same interface. Yay! =:) Mandriva has always impressed me with its eye candy and extremely solid and well-crafted UI, and Mandriva 2008.1 is no exception to that. Very nice, very pretty, very solid. I’ve hit a couple hiccups with package management, but nothing that a retry (1..n times) didn’t fix. And I like the grouped package management idea, where instead of a single run of 200 package installs, it will group them into logical/related packages and do X at a time… so you have “A of B packages in this group installed; Y of Z total”. And Mandriva is really fast–it always has been. I ended up replacing the OpenSUSE 10.3 install that I had on the kids’ desktop downstairs with Mandriva and we’re all extremely impressed with it. And I really, really, really wanted to keep using it on my work laptop. Until I started trying to get wireless networking to work, and that’s where the wheels fell off. Mandriva uses its own wireless networking configuration and management, instead of using NetworkManager, and when it fails, it fails hard–especially with WPA, it seems. Switching between wireless networks just started to fail miserably and I could not grok what was going wrong enough to fix it. And then I just stopped caring and burned an OpenSUSE 11 DVD… Mandriva: you should really use NetworkManager. It really does Just Work (TM). Oh–and you can install networkmanager in Mandriva, but it doesn’t actually work, from my experience. =:(

And then there was OpenSUSE 11. WOW is a good word for this. They’ve done a really awesome job on the installation process. It has never looked better or been more functional. And there is some serious go-fast juice in the package management now. I don’t know if it’s as fast as Apt yet, but it is so fast that I no longer dread using it in SUSE. And the 1-click install YMP stuff is pure sugary sweetness that is Good For You Too. And wireless networking works perfectly. I’ve not yet seen it fail. And the knetworkmanager changes (Will, I think??) are AWESOME! And the eye candy is delicious. And everything works. And it is really fast. And I like it. Here I’ll surely stay for a good long while, now content that I’ve shopped around and that I’m not just settling for the same thing I used before–that what I’m using really is the best… for me at least.

One last note to squelch any potential “yeah, but you can fix XXX by doing YYYY, you stupid person” comments…. This was a whirlwind tour that happened over the last week or so. I still have to work for a living, so when I switched distros, I did it at night and then actually had to spend the next day working on it for my job. So you could say that this was a trial by fire for these distros and probably more representative of what a new Linux user would deal with and expect than a patient hacker, hell-bent on spending whatever time is necessary to get things working. I’m finding myself sort of between the OS X “I just want it to work and not have to think about it” camp and the hard-core Linux hacker who will stay up all night to figure out why thingey XXX is not working and beat it into submission. I still love the latter, but being that I have to work and be productive on my laptop, I can’t afford too much of it.

Anyway, there’s one brain dump for the week. I have several more I need to do (preview: THE NOKIA N810 JUST PLAIN ROCKS (but DANG we need to get some good PIM apps on there)!!!!!!, and spending all day Saturday to change interior lights SUCKS!, and Opera is still awesome again and getting better!!), but those will have to wait. =:)

Review Board and KDE!

February 2, 2008    Category: KDE, Open Source   No Comments »

Ooh, just saw this excerpt from Aaron:

in other news, Matt Rogers has set up a review board installation which i want to start using to streamline the patch review process in plasma. Matt has set up a group for Kopete already, i’ve noticed, too. if all goes well, we’ll find a permanent home for it and maybe even start getting other kde projects using it =)

Awesome! I can tell you from experience that Review Board is one seriously cool tool. Having been the initiator of the code review process at Rite Aid, I would have loved to have had it as an available option, but was stuck using cvs diff, a2ps, reams of paper each week, and large amounts of coffee. I firmly believe in code and peer review and love the results they bring. But doing it without a good tool-set is PAINFUL, and just wears you down. I’m excited to see our KDE guys using such a cool solution!

… and friends were made

October 9, 2007    Category: Google, KDE, Open Source   4 Comments »

KDE and Chris DiBona

I had absolutely the most amazing time at this year’s Google Summer of Code Mentor’s Summit. I’m sure I’ll sound like quite the gushing fan-boy, but so be it.

I’ve been involved in the KDE project for the last couple of years. I can thank Adriaan deGroot fully for getting me hooked, and also for being a great mentor and friend throughout. Until this last weekend, I had not actually met any other KDE geek in the flesh. Living in the United States as I do, I’ve met many a GNOME zealot and developer, but nary a KDE kindred spirit. And so, I am still coming down off of the “high” of getting to spend this last weekend with both Thiago and Seb. Yeah, there were a bunch of other Open Source developers there too, and I’ll get to them in a second. But first, this weekend did much to further cement my feelings about the KDE project and our amazing community. We, the KDE geeks, are a really rare and cool thing. Oh sure, we have our share of flame wars, passionate people, and occasional un-professionalism. But at the end of the day, we have an extremely talented group of people who share a common vision, try to treat each other with respect and professionalism, aim to mentor and grow each other and new-comers, and can even have some serious, geeky fun together. I see a lot of Open Source communities (and no, I’m not going to point fingers) who don’t have all this going for them. And after a weekend like this last, I am once again excited about being a part of our community, the KDE team.

To add to the above, it was an absolutely amazing opportunity that I shared with Thiago and Seb to represent KDE at Google’s SOC Mentor’s Summit. It was a surreal experience. I mean, just being at the Googleplex and interacting with the Google staff was wild. Chris DiBona is a real, honest, down to earth, cool guy, and he spent a good hour at least chatting with a group of us about anything and everything that came up. You know… just like a real person. And then there was the opportunity to mingle with, talk to, make friends with, share ideas with, enjoy mass quantities of pizza with (thanks Leslie!!), have some drinks with, pay $44 for a less-than-stellar dinner with, and in general hang out with fellow FOSS developers… many of whom have written software that I’ve been using and enjoying for years! Too cool!!! Kind of like listening to Sting for the last 15 years of your life and then getting to go out to dinner with him and spend a day chatting. =:)

So (noticing that it’s now 1:47 a.m. and I have to be at work in 7 hours), to summarize…

  1. We, the KDE community, have a unique and amazing community. Let’s keep it that way!!
  2. Google’s Summer of Code project was a huge success for an awful lot of FOSS projects. Let’s all (FOSS community-wide, I’m talking) get even more involved next year. Let’s challenge ourselves to bring more students in and get more mentors involved! Check out the pix…
  3. Oh yeah… I’m moving to Palo Alto.  You may now congratulate me and then go out and buy a VMware product of your choice (I recommend the free Player product).  =;)  I’m going to have a heck of a time hiding this smile….

What Microsoft Meant Was…

July 25, 2007    Category: Linux, Open Source   No Comments »

In an effort to catch up reading through the last 2 months of eWeek magazines that I have stacked on my dresser yet never find time to pick up, I read through the May 28 issue this morning and found this very insightful statement by Jason Brooks. The article is called “Free software shines on” and can also be found here…

When Microsoft representatives state that everyone must play by the same rules, as they often have during recent months, what the company means is that the business and technological realities under which they’ve built their empire shouldn’t be allowed to change (emphasis mine).

Very true. Very insightful. Nice job as usual, Jason. Of course, I (and all Open Source developers) will strongly disagree with Microsoft on this one. =;) Thomas Jefferson was absolutely right.

“As revolutionary instruments (when nothing but revolution will cure the evils of the State) [secret societies] are necessary and indispensable, and the right to use them is inalienable by the people.” –Thomas Jefferson to William Duane, 1803. FE 8:256

“When patience has begotten false estimates of its motives, when wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality.” –Thomas Jefferson to M. deStael, 1807. ME 11:282

“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” –Thomas Jefferson: his motto.

Also, welcome back Adriaan! =:)

Repeat after me:

I will never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever, never, never, ever, ever, ever, never, ever, never buy a proprietary (read: non Open Source) computer ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever again, no matter how attractive the packaging is.

I don’t know what from the bowels of hell itself possessed me to buy a Powerbook, but it was quite possibly one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done.  It has been nothing but trouble from the day I got it (though it was a nice little mental exercise and challenge for a while in getting Linux to run on it).

I have given up on it for my own personal use. I’m back to using my work laptop for all things at work and home.

But I thought that at least I could let my darling bride use it for her personal stuff. You know… it’s OS X… what could possibly go wrong?

So, 8 hours ago this evening, I started trying to get OS X (freshly upgraded to 10.4.9, don’tcha know) to allow my darling bride to edit OpenOffice files that are stored on an NFS server downstairs. Nope. Cannot do it. Everything comes up read-only. And yes, I did play (for hours) with all possible permutations of setting/unsetting SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING in soffice. I even tried the new version of NeoOffice (it’s the only one you can download, by the way, which is also teh suck), the new version of OpenOffice, and version 2.0.4 out of desperation. SUCK! I don’t know what the flippin’ problem is, but it’s sucked 8 hours too much out of my life, thank you very much.

Pissed off in general and getting no sleep again…

Love,

Me

BLEH!

Zack Rusin‘s blog post from a week ago really resonated deep within me on a couple of points. His post, titled “Disappointing”, was written in response to some negative feedback he got from some mis-guided souls who were commenting on one of his earlier posts about some very impressive Qt graphics results he’d shown. While blog-commenters behaving badly is not something new, certainly, nor is one (very) talented Open Source developer having to set said folks straight, that’s not what caught my eye. I was truly impressed with the benchmarking results that Zack reported with Qt, compared to some of the other toolkits, but that’s not what caught my eye either. What jumped out at me most was his definition of self and purpose, if you’ll forgive the generalization:

I am first and foremost an Open Source developer. Yes, I do prefer to write desktop code in C++ than C which was the basis for me joining KDE in the first place, but that’s all. If I’ll decide to quit Trolltech at some point and will get an offer from company supporting GNOME, I’ll start contributing to GNOME the next day. It’s all Free Software, that’s what’s really important to me. Qt is Free Software, that’s why I work on it. I’m an Open Source developer, I just happen to work on KDE. I moved half way across the globe, to a country where I knew I’m going to be hungry all the time, just to be able to work on Free Software full time so please skip my blog if you want to bring something as ignorant as that here.

Well-spoken, Zack!

Here’s a (lengthy) explanation of my affinity to this paragraph…

Zack speaks with the passion of an Open Source developer–a man who loves what he does, is passionate about it, and who gains meaning and joy from it. I completely share this passion with Zack. I have met plenty of folks who are in the IT industry who sort of landed here with not much thought–many of whom could care less about software (much less Free Software) and would just as soon be working in any other industry. That’s definitely not me. Ever since I first laid eyes on the Apple ][e’s in grade school, I knew that was what I wanted to do.

Fast forward 8 years or so from grade school, and you’ll find me buying the first computer that I could afford–a 486 with Windows 3.11 Workgroup. About a month or so after that, I discovered Linux and bought a Linux Unleashed book which came with Slackware and  kernel 1.2.13, and Windows was promptly forgotten.

I. Was. Hooked.

I started hanging out on the #linux undernet irc channel as Rembrandt and then vanRijn, and made friends with a bunch of like-minded geeks. I learned tons through living in #linux. One of my fellow geeks went by the nick of nyztihke (shortened later to nyz and seen lately as bhughes). He started writing his own window manager for X11. It was not nearly as feature-rich as the prevailing AfterStep back then, but I was intrigued and helped out where I could. Brad called his window manager blackbox and it has become one of the best, fastest, and most-enduring window managers. I joined in somewhere during 1999 and wrote the keyboard handling counterpart to blackbox, called bbkeys. Sometime later, I joined forces with xOr and we whipped together the bbconf blackbox-configurator in an astonishingly quick 2 months. The coolest part of all of this, though, was contributing to and being a part of a really fun Open Source community.

From there, I started using KDE and contributing to the KDE project in the PIM space (mostly kpilot), and still am. And again, the greatest part of doing so lies in the essence of being an Open Source developer–being a part of an Open Source community, being a part of a huge world-wide team, making quality Free Software, and supporting, helping, and providing features for users. If you know anything about me, you’ll likely know that I am passionate about Open Source and Free Software, as is demonstrated by what I spend my time doing, the solutions I bring to the table at my place of work, and the conversations that I constantly find myself in. It drives me nuts to see people (and companies) still paying money through the nose to the likes of Microsoft for the privilege of using software and services that are readily available from the global Open Source world for free. The most interesting area for me personally is the Free Desktop, which is why I’m spending my time there.

So, let me tailor Zack’s paragraph to my own place in life:

I am first and foremost an Open Source developer. It is who I am.  Yes, I do prefer to write desktop code in C++ rather than C which was the basis for me joining KDE in the first place, but that’s all. If I were ever to get an offer from company supporting GNOME, I’ll start contributing to GNOME the next day. It’s all Free Software, that’s what’s really important to me. I’m an Open Source developer, I just happen to work on KDE. I would gladly make some large life adjustments (pending wifely approval, of course) just to be able to work on Free Software full time.

So, please, if you are looking for an Open Source developer who has a history of working with Open Source communities, has corporate experience in providing large, mission-critical applications, has a demonstrated passion and commitment to Open Source solutions, and would like said person to work on Open Source desktop solutions, please, please please feel free to contact me. =;)

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