The Goldfish Chronicles

If you have the soul of a programmer, you go home and work on code. You might still be useless, but the soul is there. People who only code 9 to 5, do not have the soul of a programmer.

Java is a language for teams, not for individuals.

Few people go home and work as teams, a lot of open-source projects have a backbone based on a pair at the same company, or occasional local meetings, and others are orbits of individuals around a codebase. There are a few good online team projects I imagine, but probably not that many.

I believe you have to have the soul of a programmer to be a good programmer, so, good programmers code as much for themselves as for a company, and Java is not a great choice for a single person. Ergo, good programmers probably shy away from Java, while teams shy towards Java.

Being your own admin is a great way to learn. Today I slowly pieced together how to set up an OpenBSD firewall, during going to the movies to watch Shrek 2 (poor), marking homework and reading JSF in Action appendices.

The one annoyance is that the 60 dollar server I’m going to use as a firewall has only got one on-board NIC, so with the addition of a network card via the riser, I am stuck at 2 and not the desired 3.

Biggest lesson. Firewall needs to be implementing every ip address I want to map through to the network beyond. It’s obvious, but just not something I considered as I sat learning how to NAT and block.

Now I just hope the machine proves stable, and that I can find some kind of monitoring tool for the tcpdumps.

I’ve also recently been learning how to setup a Debian box, and will be setting another FreeBSD box up in the future. The slowly approaching migration to Roller beckons

I’m sure there are people doing this somewhere, but why not just start patenting things willy-nilly too?

IBM and Sun can resolve a patent-spat by playing swapsies with their patent-portfolio. Is there any open-community group who are organizing patent-pools?

I’m not suggesting it for Europe, as they’ve not got the problem yet, but in the US, the EFF or someone could assist (information, time) any member of the community to patent an idea. When Sun or IBM decide to throw a fit at someone’s 1-click, the open-community’s patent-portfolio can be thrown onto the floor.

I imagine it would come down to the old chestnut of whether the open-community innovate, or replicate. Could the Apache community go out and patent 10 things tomorrow morning, based on their codebase.

Anyway, probably happening somewhere already.

Yet Another Continuous Integration System.

builds.osjava.org

I superbly call it Integration. Very original I know. I’ve just finished porting it from bash over to perl. The aim is not to be a superb system at building things (it’s very tied to Maven), but to focus on the website itself.

As well as having the basics, success/failed builds; it also has a lot of attached reports, hopefully creating glue to get developer’s to goto the site for things other than just the build info.

At the same time, it’d also be nice if I could come up with a way to output something build-like in a javadoc way. Unsure how it would look, but each project’s output would somehow be javadoc based, and it could integrate into Multidoc Probably trying to make a square peg fit into a pentagon hole for that though.

Pondering trying Orion out as the Java server for osjava.org. Went to their website (http://www.orionserver.com/) and clicked on the stable download.

I decided I didn’t in fact like the licence that it said I had to agree to. Too many things I was agreeing to compared to Tomcat. So I hit Decline, expecting to get dumped back on the front page and wondering if they’d have a special page for people who refuse. It was not to be.

It took me to the download page

From a CNet article:

“Other expansion options include taking over an existing open-source project or writing its own integration and process automation software.”

CNet don’t style it as a quote, but they attribute the remark to a JBoss VP.
I just love that idea, taking over an existing open-source project.

Another nice quote is from Fleury in a linked article from last year:

“We go out and hire these guys and turn them into professionals, as opposed to an amateur or a hobbyist,” (refering to the project leads on Tomcat, JGroups, Hibernate, Javassist and Nukes).

–

I hope when I grow up, I can be a professional.

On a more serious note, this is quite interesting on a GPL vs BSD view-point. While BSD’s wide-open licencing means that professionals can convince their company to let them work on such a licence, GPL’s stronger licencing makes it a lot harder. Apart from the lucky few who work for GPL-centered companies, that would mean most open-source happens at home, and appears to be done by hobbyists. I wonder if this is what leads to the quote.

I have managed to do some interesting things recently. One is ‘multidoc’, a novel (I think) addition to the javadoc idea.

Originally created for Jakarta Commons, I’ve published the OSJava version as it’s lot more standardised in structure and easier to create.

http://www.osjava.org/osjava-multidoc/

It will be available for download at some point soon.

And of course there’s the Jakarta news I’m the madman who has volunteered to chair the Jakarta PMC.

Terry Pratchett quotes a curse from somewhere: “May you live in interesting times”.

Slowly my world is returning to a semblance of long todo’s (rather than constant mustdo’s).

I’m into the appendices on a draft manuscript for Manning and have only 1 class left to teach (then 2 exam classes to prepare for). Two new servers for osjava.org are sitting in the basement, waiting for installation (debian and openbsd). After discovering a water leak dangerously close to where I kept some older equipment, I’ve nearly finished a complete reorganization of the basement computer lab.

My unborn son is a happy little kicker (he kicked the stethoscope away at the last checkup ) and wife is deep in the happy-pregnancy stage (third trimester has started now). Plus we have a new safe, spacious, rally car.