Older blog entries for pphaneuf (starting at number 40)

Low-cash Montreal hacker looking for a couch to sleep on in Ottawa during the OLS. Charitable souls contact me by e-mail.

Thanks!

I got contacted by someone that wanted to hack a cross-platform, open source COM implementation (as in "following the COM specifications"). He contacted me and a bunch of other people that had COM-like projects, mostly on SourceForge.

While XPLC has differing goals and thus wouldn't fit into his goals, there was two or three of the projects (the Generic COM project, the nCOM project and the FreeDCE and DCOM project) that had similar goals. So instead of starting a new competing project, it looks like they'll be banding together, merging code and hacking into the sunset.

We didn't get feedback from the FreeDCE/DCOM people yet, but the nCOM guy is enthusiastic, and the GCOM guy is pretty busy, but seems to be willing to participate.

I don't want to become maintainer or too involved with coding to participate that actively, but I'm helping them with the merging and initial project management.

Among the projects listed in the message, there was one, iCOM, that seems to have goals similar to XPLC, I'll be checking out if we can do something together...

Note: since a while, I no longer read the recent diaries attentively, so if you want to reply to something I say here, do so by e-mail, thanks!

On one hand, I finally got some motivation and ideas for my ACS+Zope in Apache/mod_perl thingy, but on the other hand, there is a pile of dirty dishes this high.

Oh well, damn dishes, here I come...

Ohh, my head... Where am I? Oh yes, reality!

Ok, so I'm back around, after being in deep thinking mode to do requirements and design for a project at work.

Good side: I'll be hacking Perl, web and databases, which I missed a bit (been a long time I didn't do this), and the project is very leading edge, not conservative at all, so I think we'll have fun.

Bad side: Since I worked on XPLC during work (we usually don't work much here, so I'm doing my open source projects), since now I have actually something to do at work, that means I'll have less time to work on XPLC, damnit.

Time is really working against me. The sooner XPLC is usable, the more components it will have written for it and the more it will be good for it. For the web stuff, the thing is the core engine will be open source (yay!) and I intend on using it for after I leave my current job, maybe for consulting work or whatever, so I want this thing usable before I get out the door...

Oh well, like anyone's life is perfect... :-)

Hmm, vacations rules!

I'm trying to hammer the Alpha into something usable, but various versions of Red Hat won't install on it, I'll try some Debian now... Aww, why can't it work? The creepy old SPARCstation 5 at work all installed fine on the first try, why can't the cool Alpha box do the same?

Been a while I didn't write...

XPLC

Hmm, got a good deal of input on XPLC! I still check once in a while if there aren't any new comments, until it falls off the main page. I got differing opinions on many things, but I expected that.

I also have a number of e-mails in my inbox which I do not have the time to reply to in a proper manner (taking the time to carefully consider the issues and suggestions), to those who sent me these, rest assured I will read them all and reply to those requiring a reply.

If you posted a comment on the article and felt that one of my subsequent comment didn't cover your comment, do not hesitate to contact me to poke me further! :-)

Life

One of my friend is getting divorced, I'll be spending time with him in the next few weeks (taking some vacations). Such is life, sometimes...

Other

Got myself an old DEC Alpha, a 21066 Multia, with quite reasonable memory and hard drive! I'm eager to play around with it!

Got my hair dyed black again, after a few years that I didn't dye them... Feels a bit funny. :-)

XPLC

I'll submit a news to slashdot to try attracting some eyes to help on the peer-review. All my news submissions in the past were rejected, so I'm not building too much hope in this.

I am a bit disappointed by the results of my Advogato article, as I expected a whole lot more bashing and discussions.

I guess that some things that we never had, we never miss.

It was nice getting a comment from hp, as he's dipping in those things (with GTK+ 2.0 objects and stuff like that in GNOME), but I would have loved seeing miguel do the same, or his KDE counterpart for KParts (I don't know his name). Oh well.

Whew, a good one from Linus, taken from Kernel Traffic #83:

It is NOT true that "shared code means less bugs". People, wake up!

It's true that "simple and tested code means less bugs". And quite often, code sharing will imply that the code gets (a) more complex and (b) has cases that people who make changes will never be able to test.

No, I'm not saying that sharing is bad. Sharing is good. But anybody who makes a blanket statement like "sharing reduces bugs" is full of crap.

Good and clear interfaces reduce bugs. Avoiding complexity reduces bugs. Using your brain before you code something up reduces bugs.

This is just echoing what Stéphane once told me that I talked about in a comment of my article. At a different time, he also warned me of any kind of blanket statements, because they tempt you to avoid thinking. Ah, the wisdom.

And it also echoes what I think about XPLC. XPLC promotes good and clear interfaces. It also tries to avoid complexity as much as possible. And as ever, you have to use your brain before coding (nothing will let you avoid this).

Thanks to Linus for the good quote. :-)

Whew, about a feet of snow fell on Montréal. Two belgian tourists took a picture with me while I was digging out my car.

This is not good.

Going to a party at a friends house tonight to celebrate the real millenium. :-)

XPLC on Advogato

I'm writing an article on XPLC for Advogato, I should post this soon.