Older blog entries for deven (starting at number 2)

I guess I'll give Mozilla M17 a chance for a while. I hope I don't regret it like last time...

Since some people were apparently offended that I "requested" Master certification, I have re-certified myself as "Journeyer". I suppose that's a better balance anyway. I believe my computer skills are strong enough in general to justify a "Master" designation, regarding that metric. However, my visible contributions to free software have been minimal as yet, as I noted as much in my first diary entry. By that scale, I might be an "Apprentice". So I guess "Journeyer" is a reasonable compromise. At any rate, I never requested anything.

I have been serious about programming for over 20 years, since at least sixth grade. (I had more casual exposure to computers and programming for several years prior to that as well.) Back then, I used BASIC as my primary programming language, since there were few other options available to me. (At that time, on a minicomputer at a nearby high school; I took a programming class that year for access to a computer, not to learn anything new.) By seventh or eighth grade, I was also working with Z-80 assembly language on the TRS-80's the school had.

In ninth grade, I also started using BASIC, Pascal and TECO on the RSTS/E system available at the high school, which was a PDP-11 (I think) that was owned by the town. I literally learned the Pascal language (including the use of structures and pointers) in one week by reading a textbook cover-to-cover in ninth grade. While I continued to use BASIC through the rest of high school (it was the most suitable language available for the platforms I was using), I much preferred the power and cleaner expressiveness of Pascal over BASIC.

TECO was a strange text editor and an even stranger programming language. It was psychotic but an interesting challenge in its own way. I've still got a printout of the most interesting TECO program I ever wrote, which renumbered BASIC programs (line numbers and references to them, including ON...GOTO and ON...GOSUB); it's about half a page of code printed, and it's dated May 1984 or so. One of these days, I'd like to scan in this TECO code and put the image on my homepage. I might even deconstruct it in an HTML page to show how it did what it did, but it would take a lot of analysis after so many years. Maybe when I find some time to waste on it...

Sometime early in high school, I got an Atari 800 and learned Atari BASIC and 6502 assembly language. My first exposure to the C language was "Lightspeed C" for the Atari 800, but it was a very limited environment. (I bought the K&R book around that time to learn what the real C language was like.) Although I didn't own an Apple ][, friends did, and later the school, so I did a fair bit of programming Apple BASIC also. I even had some exposure to QNX and Altos UNIX during high school, as well as dBase and the Clipper compiler. (I even played with LOGO at one point, which seemed useless but amusing.)

To give you an idea of the depth of my interest in computers, I purchased a copy of the "Dragon" book even before I graduated high school, because I was interested in learning about compiler design.

My computing life was completely overhauled in the fall of 1987 when I went to college at Rensselaer. That's when I got introduced to SunOS and the Internet. I immediately stopped programming in any dialect of BASIC and never looked back. C became my preferred programming language, and UNIX my preferred operating system. (BSD flavors such as SunOS 3/4 in particular.)

Unfortunately, I'm out of time at the moment, so I'll have to continue this story later...

[This is a little strange. I wrote this on July 27, but when I noticed a typo and fixed it, the system now calls it July 31. Sigh.]

I visited this site a few months back, and found the trust metric system very interesting. I always meant to look into it further, but maybe you're familiar with how things you put off can miss the back burner and end up on the floor behind the stove, forgotten? (I have this feeling I'm mutilating metaphors, but such is life.)

Life is too busy. It's inescapable. I never find all the time I need to do the things I want to do. Obviously, I want to do more than I can hope to find time for, even in the best case scenario. I have countless computer-related interests I'd like to pursue. At the same time, family time is a top priority. Yes, I would get more programming done if I didn't have a family, but I wouldn't give up my daughter for anything in the world. (I've already lost one daughter to "SIDS", 14 hours after she received 6 vaccines. But that's a long story...)

I worried a bit about what level I should certify myself at, once I finally got around to creating an Advogato account today. At risk of coming across as arrogant, I certified myself as a Master, albeit with some trepidation. Basically, I feel that I have very strong skills, but (due to that lack of time problem) I haven't visibly participated in the free software community to the extent that I've been emotionally involved in it.

One reason is a personal project that has been under development since November 1992, yet remains unreleased. Another reason is that my employer from July 1996 to March 2000 had a draconian intellectual property agreement that basically kept me from doing any outside work of any significance. (That, and they overworked me enough that I didn't have the time or energy anyhow.)

I've long viewed myself as a member of the community (since about 1987, when I first discovered GNU software and Unix), but my public contributions have been relatively limited. I'd like to change that, but I haven't quite figured out how best to go about it. There are a number of projects I'd like to help out with and/or create, but I've got very little free time to do any of it. My (living) daughter is 10 weeks old today, and demands (and deserves) much of my attention. (My first daughter died at 9 weeks old.) It's hard to figure out how to prioritize what little free time I can find.

The long-running project mentioned above is a CMC (Computer-Mediated Communications) system named "Phoenix". It started out in November 1992 as a simple chat program for the sole purpose of talking to family members that had Internet access. (To save long-distance charges, of course.) It evolved into a fairly robust backend single-threaded select-based TCP/IP server with a text-based user interface (which some consider primitive) based on an older CMC called "CONNECT" that I used to use when I was at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). (CONNECT predates IRC, and I grew quite used to the interface, but I've had others tell me they can't stand it.)

I could talk for quite a while about the existing features of Phoenix, but I haven't the time. Suffice it to say that my time was scarce enough during the original development that what could have been a couple months of development work stretched out over nearly 4 years, often with months between even minor code updates. It was completely dormant for the duration of my employment mentioned above. (I didn't want to risk them "owning" it because I worked on it while in their employ.)

Nevertheless, the server has been continuously running for at least 5-6 years now (probably closer to 7 years) with a very few active users. Most of the potential users (who are already familiar with the CONNECT interface) use a CMC at RPI called "lily", a successor to "Clover", which was a successor to CONNECT. (RPI has a long CMC history!) Phoenix is intended to be a community-building system, and establishing a community is a chicken-and-egg problem. Similarly, finding time and motivation to improve the system is harder when there's nobody to benefit! (Yet I have a TODO list a mile long!)

Okay, so the obvious question -- why haven't I released the code? There are several reasons, though I'm not sure how good they are. One was pragmatic -- I wanted to build a userbase for the system, and releasing the code before establishing a userbase would risk having someone else take my code and get the users by virtue of finding more time to work on the features they wanted. (The obvious alternative is to seek a different community of users to attract, which probably involves a new UI.)

Another reason was that I always wondered if the code could potentially serve as the basis for a commercial product of some sort, with the goal of making me enough money to live on so that I could spend my days programming free software as I'd prefer. (Maybe that's not the best way to achieve that goal?) It's part of that classic question of "how do you make a living while writing free software?" (I'm still not sure about this one.)

Another reason is that I never felt the code was quite "ready" to be released. From the user perspective, many of the basic features in the "competing" systems were still missing, although they weren't necessarily hard to add. More importantly, I still had some core architectural changes in mind, which I wanted to accomplish before exposing other developers to some of the ugliness in the existing code. Equally important, I wanted the code to be a good demonstration of my coding skills, and not all of the design or code meets my personal standards for such a use.

I suppose I'd still like to be able to release the code, but I'm still not sure I'm ready to do it yet. At the very least, I'd like to reach a clean "stopping point" with the code first. Sure, I could release it today, but I think some things really need to be cleaned up first, some core features added, and some architectural changes made. Then I could see releasing it. (I'm still a little wary of the possibility of forfeiting any monetary potential it might have; any thoughts on that?)

If anyone has bothered to read this far, who is interested in trying the system as a user, send me email at deven@ties.org and I'll tell you how to get signed in and look around... (If you haven't read this far, then nevermind! :-)

Deven