15 Dec 2000 (updated 15 Dec 2000 at 15:44 UTC)
»
David A. Desrosiers, who sometimes calls himself
hacker, writes:
Palmsource 2000 is winding down
[...]
I was asking
them some pretty heavy questions about their position on
linux and
unix support with Bluetooth. They were hesitantly evasive
[...]
Again, somewhat evasive
[...]
Ugh. They're so blind sometimes.
Sometimes, David, I wish you would be a little less
confrontational and perhaps give people the benefit of the
doubt occasionally. "Hesitantly evasive" usually means that
the person hasn't previously considered the point you've raised,
doesn't want to give an implicit commitment to something
that they haven't thought through, wants to be helpful so
wants to avoid a
flat NO, can't give you a full answer for stupid
confidentiality reasons but doesn't want to turn you away,
isn't involved in that area and doesn't know what other
people in the rapidly expanding company might have already
done in that area, or generally a combination of all of the
above.
I happen to know all of the people in the talks you
mentioned, and I can tell you that it's not very fair to
accuse them of being evasive or blind. On the contrary:
they're all very keen to help people's cool ideas become
reality. Your cool ideas, so don't alienate them!
:-)
A lot of engineers work at Palm. Not all of them know much
about what we're doing with Linux or with free software, but
that doesn't mean that it's not happening. All of my work
and Keith's work is free software and runs on Unix. I think
David knows that there are many people -- such as Kenneth,
Flash, and me -- inside Palm who care about pilot-link a
lot. We also spend a lot of time evangelising for these
things within the company.
To be perfectly honest, it's kind of hard to stay motivated
to fight the good fight when people oversummarise and tell
you you're
blind and you get close to zero support or assistance from
the community for your open projects!
In other news, in the labs tonight the Llamagraphics
people showed me another bug in CodeWarrior which
partially screws up something we're trying to do in our SDK
(yeah, that one that David's going to interrogate me about
tomorrow). It whines that you can't do this static_cast
with an incomplete type:
struct S;
S* foo (void *pv) { return static_cast<S*>(pv); }
By my reading of the C++ standard, this violates paragraph
10 of 5.2.9 ("Static cast"), in particular because a pointer
to an incomplete struct type is indeed a pointer to an
object type (3.9 paras 6, 9), and see also 3.2 para 4 (and
pretend it's decreeing the converse :-)).
Bah. Fortunately, while walking back to the office after
talking to Catherine and Stuart, I realised there's a
workaround
for full on C++ programmers who don't want to fall back to a
C-style cast: use reinterpret_cast. Okay, so that's not
great either, but it's not our fault! Get a real compiler!
3am. Still writing my slides for my talk
tomorrow. Silly boy.
7:30am. Still here. Slides almost done. My talk is in three hours. I'm cobbling together a 2.1pre1 release to collect all the
miscellaneous
little bugfixes over the last few months. It's on the fourth hour long RPM build now, and it should actually work
this
time. Unfortunately I've just found out that not only does SourceForge have scheduled downtime tonight so that
nobody will be able to download my release, but also the uploader has been broken for the last week so I can't
upload it either.
I sure picked a good day to try to make a release on SourceForge!