Older blog entries for ta0kira (starting at number 3)

After nearly 4 years of hosting my projects at SourceForge, I've finally decided it's time to move on. I haven't decided for sure where, but the best option at the moment seems to be BerliOS. The commercialism at SourceForge is just getting too out-of-hand.

The first two projects to move will be those I have listed here. In case that changes and you read this later, those would be Resourcerver and hparser. These are my "flagship" project and it's unsung "working horse," respectively. Resourcerver actually relies heavily on two of my C++ template libraries (a list class and a series of data-encapsulation classes,) also. I'll put those up here later, probably after I transfer their hosting from SourceForge.

Kevin

Why are there so many inactive observer accounts? Maybe I should have checked the list before signing up. I feel like an impending casualty of a popularity contest. I'd like to think my work is worth something, but what can one do when one's blog entries are bumped down by automatically imported entries from other sites? All of this blog activity got me excited until I realized most of them are from people who aren't actually logging in to post. Chances are 99% of the users reading this come from the 9k observer base.

Anyway, I'm in a negative mood today in case it wasn't apparent. I normally loathe "how I'm feeling" blogs; therefore, I'd like to say something important rather than waste your time.

I went searching for a new host for a few of my projects today, and I must say, the outlook was very bleak. I understand that hosting costs money; however, the commercial sites don't seem to offer anything better than the free sites. Many of the more optimal free sites strike me as exclusive, or they're missing something like web hosting.

I'm sure there's a large group out there with the mindset that a project needs a strong purpose and a place in the open-source world to be important. This might well be true, in which case I should pack up my projects and go home. The principle of "find a requirement in need of fulfilling" is very relevant and valid; however, nothing I've ever programmed arose from a requirement. This is partly my fault for not seeking out projects in need of help, which was a side-effect of thinking my imperfection/"uniqueness" as a programmer was equivalent to "of no use." In any case, my own unfounded endeavors provided me with a lot of practical experience in programming, documentation, and software design.

Whether or not my work be of use to anyone is at the whim of the community. With projects living near the bottom of the ocean, visibility comes only by chance. I suppose the real question, then, is if I got enough out of my experiences with my projects for my time to not have been wasted if those projects never go anywhere.

If the context in question is all-around programming in research and academics, the answer is definitely "yes." I'll still use my projects even if no one else does. In the context of the open-source community at-large, the answer is "uncertain" at best. A great weakness of mine is advertising myself. I can promote a project all day because that's somewhat tangible and quantifiable, but that's subject to projection onto a larger context.

In any case, this is getting too long and this is indeed the Web where everyone can read what I say, even ex-girlfriends and my mother. This is probably a good time to shut my mouth.

Kevin

I finally put Resourcerver on public subversion and public browsing today. It's been a long time coming. I had the project on CVS a long time ago, in fact when the project started, but my early source-tree structural changes were so frequent and drastic that neither I nor CVS could keep up with tracking them. I set aside version control for all releases up until now. It took about a year of design and programming to get it to the point where I felt confident releasing an alpha version, but I dropped CVS a few months before that. It would be nice to have those changes tracked for regression testing, but in the end the project has quite a bit more structural efficiency than I would have had the patience for using a VCS.

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about having the non-packaged files out there. I don't have anything private, but it does include a few scripts and other files I don't ever intend to include in the package.

Anyway, it's out there now, so please take a look if you have an interest in the project. Reading the source and changes online certainly beats downloading and extracting a package. It is a lot of code, just to warn you (~53k lines.)

Kevin

I don't do a lot with peer-networking sites. I've never had a blog. In fact, I don't really know what to write here, nor anywhere else on this site. I do, however, write software and I've never been paid for it. I started with BASIC on an Apple IIgs in 1991. My father fried the RAM around 1995, and the only thing available to program on was my HP-48g, which I programmed day and night for lack of a real computer. I lacked other programming resources until 2003, when I finally had a computer of my own. I sought out and learned what I know about programming independently, mostly through websites, message boards, manpages, tearing apart code I've come across, and coding for days at a time until I figure out how to make something work. Programming steals my life, so I try to save it for good ideas. It steals my sleep, my dreams, and even the world right in front of me. My life is elsewhere, yet I remain a slave to my text editor.

I'm not a professional developer, I don't have a degree in CS, nor will either apply to me in the future. I study cognitive science and mathematics. I'm sure I'll have more to say about that later.

I don't generally use IDEs and I don't have much of an interest in GUI programming. Most of what I develop takes the form of algorithms, frameworks, infrastructures, libraries, and many other things not readily usable by the non-programmer.

I have several "open-source projects," made so by virtue of being hosted as such, but I put most of my time into one. Ironically, the one that consistently has zero downloads. I actually don't program for others to use my work; I publish my work so my time doesn't go to waste. I'm a compulsive perfectionist with my code, so when I get something right I like the idea of someone else being able to come across it and see what I've done. I'd like to think that everything I write can be of some use to someone, but that really isn't the point.

This isn't to say I don't care about what I put out there or what other developers think. I often retract a download after noticing a misspelled word in the README for fear of publishing something with an error. I feel quite ashamed when I come across bugs in my own work, even in the alpha and beta versions. It always strikes me as a misrepresentation when I put my name on something with a bug.

I'm just starting to get into collaborative development for a research project I'll be working on. I'm the informal development lead, but the actual algorithm design will be done by computer scientists.

For now, please take a look at Resourcerver, my main project. I'd really like feedback on the design; however, please keep in mind it's only loosely related to dbus, dcop, etc. (multi-process app control vs. IPC framework.)

Kevin