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Daily Rumblings

March 23rd, 2001

Even if it is hard to believe, I’m still alive :) . So, time for excuses: I’ve been so busy. Of course nobody will buy that. The truth is that I’ve been busy building something, which I like to think, needed a lot of creative work and the time frame was kind of relaxed, you can’t rush creativity. It required such an effort ;) that I missed my schedule with around three months. I know that 10 minutes is not so much time to spend for this page, but my big ego would disagree with you.

So, events! Well, in November or December last year I gave an interview for the Application Development Trends magazine, and then in the same time we had a TV crew from NHK public television for some Internet related documentary. What really impressed me about the TV shooting, among the fact that they filmed around 2 day/10 hours per day for around 5 minutes of broadcast, was the kind of focus they where having. Starting every morning at 9 AM till 10 PM, no coffee breaks, no lunch break. No wander Japan is where it is (or was ?). I never got the tape with the show, so I have no clue what was that they actually broadcasted :) . And after that came the relaxation time, spending the New Year’s eve up in a very remote area of the Romanian mountains. Hope I will have the time to scan some pictures, because
the peisaje was really impressive.

I’m the kind of guy who likes gadgets. So, now I have an Compaq Armada M700, an Psion Series V and an Nokia 6210 mobile phone. In this idea now I’m mobile (TM) and perfectly interconnected, you know my notebook talks with my phone, my phone talks to my Psion, in one word everything talks with everything. But of couse one is theory and other is reality. The Nokia Data Suite is a crap piece of software, which really doesn’t matter since I don’t use Windows anymore (I don’t have to much against Microsoft, so that’s not the reason), but under Linux there is little software available and what exist is not for my devices. Bad luck. I would write them, but no time. Anyway the morale of the story: there is no such as smart devices if you don’t have the smart software.

The Open Source and Linux in Business game is over. This hurts, because I believed that this model really offers (if it’s done properly) a plus to the client. It’s true it’s hard to find a revenue model in the movement, I’m not even sure if there is one. I agree that Open Source might not be appropriated to every type of software but for some the benefices offered to both the companies and to clients is huge. What is most annoying is that I feel that not necessarily was a model which didn’t found a place in the business sphere because it lacked real value and therefore died. I have the feeling that it died because of bad conjuncture (the dot-com phenomena, and the problems with the American economy) and because of an aggressive marketing with no real value behind.

The truth is that now maybe the whole software industry might get a bit calmer. I always had the feeling that what happened lately was not OK. We are not a special industry, and the software engineers are not a separate species, who deserves special thratement. We are workers like peoples in any other field. We have to produce tools, which other people will happily use. Customers don’t care if it is JNDI, J2E, Java, C# or Net based. They are still using Cobol and 10 years old applications because of the simple fact that they work and does the job which is supposed to do. Wake up people.

And of course one game ends another one begins. The name of the new game is: Hailstorm, .Net, SOAP, and Web Services. A new madness begins. Aldo not sure about the benefits of the Hailstorm for the average user (except that if he would use real cash, his wallet would be a lot lighter :) , the new game will change a bit the Internet, which might be good. Just like the Open-Source/Linux game revitalized the movement (lot’s of new software, lot’s of new quality peoples) maybe the Internet will be a bit more after the new game.

Related to RUE, without any update since October, people begin to be more and more interested in it. Great daily activity and downloads, that’s good, the 2 year prediction seems to be true.

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Posted in Linux, Noise, Open Source, RUE

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Daily Rumblings

March 14th, 2001

Eazel, a company in which many (including myself) has put their hopes to improve Linux GUI and usability is going down. Unfortunately not many Linux companies remaining, I’m wandering when Ximian is going to close their gates.

Even if the unfortunate dot.com bang wouldn’t be associated with the OpenSource and Linux, Microsoft war machine is all over Linux these days. There seems still that one thing they can not understand. Yes they can demolish Linux (OpenSource) based companies (what’s left whatever) but they can not make Linux disappear. Linux is not a company and doesn’t depend on corporate
financing, Linux is volunteer work and passion, you can’t fight that :) )), in fact I have the feeling that they will grow our numbers :) ).

What amazed me this morning that I found an article about Linux in an magazine. Then I see the date August 1999. Which magazine have now the guts to write about Linux, even the truth ? Still I learned one amazing thing from it, Jon Hall, the executive director of Linux International (an organization which promotes Linux) is an manger at Compaq !.

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Posted in Linux, Noise, Open Source

Daily Rumblings

November 4th, 2000

Spent some time reading from Joel on Software archive, I like the guy (not to mention that I found that we have the same idea about how a software company should be, sure, he has more chances than me, not everyone had the “luck” to be a Romanian). He is simple, pragmatic, and I found the things he discuss conform my experience. Also he does not try to build a whole theory around his ideas like some do.

Still related to software management. I read a ebook about Extreme Programming. I’m in no position at this moment to critique anything related to XP (since I didn’t even finished the book), but even after I listened the interview with Ron Jeffries on technetcast, I still have trouble understanding the two programmers one machine concept.

I have some concerns with this issues:

  1. Programming is an intimate thing, and I’m not the only one who thinks this way. I have no problem with others watching my programs, but I can not work if someone is staring at me. At least not that efficient. However I do agree that reviewing is absolutely necessary. So after a portion is considered ready, somebody else look at it. Also I think that sharing implementation plans (before the coding) are good.
  2. Productivity. You will hardly find two programmers who have the same programming rhythm. If the “pair programming” might work at the beginning, in time one programmer (the one which review) wich have a more static role, will lose rhythm, become distracted, and finally his participation will end up being only physical. This is even worse, because you will consider code as reviewed.
  3. If I understood that right, the major reason for this idea is that when someone start the coding, he loses the overall aspect of the problem and concentrate on syntax, and other issues. I don’t think this is true, and I base this affirmation not only on my experience but on talks with other developers. I leave this issues on my development environment, who does auto-completion, special indentation (I notice when I forgot something), and the compiler.

For anyone who wants (dreams) about joining an open source project here is a thread from the Tomcat mailing list, in which the real big ones describe their background and what they consider as necessary.

The conclusion ? “You guys all make it sound like much less pain than I had previously thought.“. And what it takes is:”… maybe it is not as much pure expertise as it is willingness to learn and contribute to the project…”.

Open Source ! Last week, again on the Tomcat mailing list was an interesting thread on the Open Source licensing issue. I finnaly understood (exactly) what is the difference between X kind of licenses (X, BSD, APL) and GPL licenses (GPL, LGPL, …).

What is about ? To quote a kuro5hin posting “GNU’s “freedoms” taking away MY “freedoms”. Basically JBoss (GPL)included some Tomcat (APL) code. Perfectly right (the X kind of license basically says, here it is my code, do whatever you like with it). The issue started when the JBoss guy’s offered some code to Tomcat (nice gesture). The conclusion ? Not possible. Including GPL code in APL code would result in APL changing in GPL (not good).So here we are both teams are fighting the same war, but still one has to reinvent the wheel all the time, and not because peoples are against sharing code (on contrary), but because the legal problems faced by the two different licenses APL and (L)GPL. My questions is, deep inside, isn’t this just a personal war between the two leaders (RMS, ESR). This war is really not helping our cause.

With this occasion I also found a good (human understandable) article on licenses, named “The Open Source Definition”, written by Bruce Perens who also happens to be the initiator of the famous “Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution” book.

This was a big posting, sorry :-)

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Posted in Linux, Noise, Open Source, Programming

My First Place

September 30th, 2000

I’m the happy owner of a three room apartment. I’m completely broke, and the place it’s a mess. At least I don’t have to break anything (cose it’s broke :) ) and I have a clean start.

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Posted in Noise

19 Sep 2000

September 19th, 2000

Go read this article. It’s written as a letter from his future self on what life will be like in 20 years. Kind of scary and certainly worst case scenario, but his point gets across, if you know what is happening outside, than for sure it won’t really look like science fiction. That would be the only case when I would have more to fight for.

What else ? Study, Study, Study. Did I told you that I enjoy my job. The moment I’m back to straight comercial applications I will be back on 9-5 until then 9-0 it’s a lot more fun.

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Posted in Noise

Peer Reviewer

September 14th, 2000

Lot’s of news. First I am now a Peer Reviewer at sXc, which is just great. Not to say, but: “You’ve been approved as a SourceXchange Peer Reviewer by Brian Behlendorf, our founder and CTO.” how can you not to feel good after such a news. A friend of mine pointed out that “we (from Eastern Europe) have to run twice as much just to have the chances other have”. I’m not sure if he is right, since Internet gives almost everyone the same opportunities, but in some things there is a huge difference.

New Tyrex, was released, and I have to make a sensor for it, therefore I’ve been reading a bit about JMX, but I guess I will have to read a lot cose I still don’t know how to introduce JMX support for RUE. I can choose (IMHO) between implementing SNMP support for RUE or to write some PA’s (Protocol Adapters) for JMX.

Configured another Internet/Linux server today, I just hate to do that, it’s so time expensive, all those little tidbits, set a few thing here, adjust a bit there, don’t forget to do that, next time I will write the whole process, because what’s worst is the feeling that maybe you forget something. And almost all the settings have to do with security. Man there is no such thing as security !.

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Posted in Noise

Perception

September 7th, 2000

I’m just amazed how much relativity is in our perception, I mean I’m not the best and I’m aware of that and makes me feel bad. On the other side others are feeling bad because they are not like me. Than the question, is the best feeling good because he is the one or he’s not thinking at all at this kind off little questions. Or maybe he’s feeling bad because he’s afraid than one day he might not be the best.

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Posted in Noise

JMX

September 6th, 2000

Lucky me I posted the monitor API initiative on Javalobby, otherwise who knows when I was to find about the JMX (Java Management Extension). I don’t know but i have the feeling that there is so much happening on Java, it’s very hard to get the news to people. The JMX was started basically at the end of 99, and when i started RUE (march 200), I’m sure I’ve been looking all over the Internet for something like that and I found nothing.

By the way I took a little vacation and I did a little face lift to this site, hope you like it. Also another news is that my sound card is working finally with SMP. After the “reorganization” of Aureal i was really concern that I will never get the drivers with SMP support but thanks to a few great hackers, a new project started at sourceforge. Yes its aureal.sourceforge.net, and those guys did a lot. That’s why I love open source.

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Posted in Java, Noise

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RUE

July 19th, 2000

Well it’s been some time from my last entry. What happened during the last months. Well a lot. Why a lot, because I’ve got my open source project. If your interested go check http://rue.nolimits.ro, yes it’s hot and strong, maybe not exactly now, but for sure it’s going to be. Am I satisfied ? No, i mean i was for about a day, when the last version was released, but after that things got normal.

There is also a lot of disappointment in this project. I’m not going to build it for me (do i will also use it), since I’m going to spend my nights on it, all i wanted is some kind of feedback, what people would like to have. I wanted to know that I’m working for something people will appreciate. After the announcement, i had almost 1000 visitors, ask me how many letters I’ve got. Answer 1. Tell me how many user subscribed to any of the mailing lists. NONE. Now maybe you will understand. Then i think-ed a bit about this, I’m sure if now there is no interest in this project one day will , I’m sure about this. Finally maybe a good optic would be to build it for me. I enjoy writing code i, like Java, and It’s not something obsolete to say that I’m loosing my time on it, so i will do it for me if anybody will afterwards be interested in the project will be welcome, until then it’s only my satisfaction.

On personal domain, i didn’t really had time for life, nor that here would be anything to desire attention (except my wife and friends, but they are all here with me), oh yes and now I’m one year older.

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Posted in Noise, RUE

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Windows 2000

March 2nd, 2000

I’ve seen today Windows 2000 and I must tell you that I’m not impressed at all, have the same look as 98 but It’s twice as slow. I don’t know what those Redmond guys where working but they hided it very well. I’m just so happy that I’m a full time Linux user. By the way Happy birthday Nic!

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Posted in Noise

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