Author Archives: Dorian

Open Source Gamer Goes to Ontario Linux Fest 2008

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Last, last weekend (October 25) I attended my first conference, Ontario Linux Fest 2008. And what an awesome event it was! The event turned out be a somewhat low key event. Not a huge number of exhibitor booths, but the Eclipse, Fedora, FOSSology, FSF, OpenStreetMap and Drupal people had setup shop there. The event featured 4 tracks, and a number of great speakers. Got to meet Jorge Castro from Canonical, Ross Turk and Daniel Hinojosa from SourceForge, Jon “maddog” Hall, Jeremy Allison from Samba, Ian Darwin and Bradley Kuhn from the Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC). It is always an amazing thing to meet the people “in the flesh”, who make a difference in the FOSS community, and read from blogs. The seminars were fantastic and inspire me to further my own open source/free software involvement.

One of the organizers, Richard Weait tried to convince me to start up a Brampton LUG. I might try it out, once I have a little bit more time. Nothing fancy mind you, just one night a month at the Coffee Culture, a few ads and a mailing list. We will see how it will go.

Also I got to go out to dinner with Bradley, the Red Hat and FoSSology folks. And thanks to Google for providing yet another free service in life, in the form of free drinks at the reception/ after-party.

So thanks guys for the awesome time. Sorry for not blogging earlier. Life keeps me busy as always. And lets make the 2009 event even larger!

Silent Running

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Please excuse the long silence. Recently I’ve had to concentrate on my offline life for the most part. Hence the lack of blog posts.

I’m still writing and plan on publishing one of my older “books”. The science fiction novel is inching along. More details about the potential publishing, once I find out more details.

On the gaming front, I working on justCheckers again. Check out the new home of the project: justcheckers.org. I still need to setup a good deal of stuff for the site. I am still thinking how the site should look and feel. At the moment I need to transition the current wiki on Sourceforge to the hosted site. Without revealing too much, I plan to use justCheckers as a model for a larger project. Watch this space for details in the future.

For the time being, I’ll be in silent running mode. Expect long delays in my blogging. The reasons for all this foreshadowing will become evident in the coming weeks.

Incremental Progress

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I owe a short update on what I’ve been up to:

The majority of my life still revolves around work. And also the necessary preparation and commuting to work. Still I manage to have some free time. Most of that time is on catching up with tasks and work I planned to do months ago.

I put off writing for a bit. Not stuck, but rather I find it easier to listen to podcasts and read e-books than actually write. If I’m not too stressed out, I’ll try to get some headway on Chapter 4.

Developing justCheckers a little bit at a time. I’m kind of ashamed to say that JSP programming without any particularly fancy framework is harder than it seems. The point of that exercise, is to use the least complex technology to get job done. It also means less dependencies and easier to read code. Still justCheckers will take some time to get going again. And SourceForge’s migration to a new datacentre isn’t making my life easier.

I’ve also got some other projects I’m working on. I’m going keep those under wraps for now. When I have something to show off, I’ll blog about it.

On Hacking with Maemo

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Time is the ultimae in precious and scarce commodities. With work and travelling up North to kayak, I spend most of my spare time away from a workstation. Hence the convenience of owning a N810. I can code and write anywhere!

Ok so I haven’t tried putting gcc or other c development tools on this tablet. While with Jalimo I can run Java code… I’m not sure on the feasibility of running Tomcat. And there is no way Eclipse will fit. Actually Tomcat would need an SDK, so running a full Java web development platform is most likely a no go. Instead I could set up a hosted test server.

Still I can edit the code itself. Originally I installed Vim. Then I tried PyGTKEdior and it works for me. Additionally I installed subversion. So now I can work on justCheckers while on the go.

Experimental Web Application Branch

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Yesterday I started upon moving justCheckers into a web application. I didn’t want to pollute the trunk of the subversion repository. So I created the webappbranch. You can grab it by running:

svn checkout https://justcheckers.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/justcheckers/branches/webapps

My next major task to tackle is updating the documentation on the wiki and in the source code. After that I just need to create a few JSPs, and link up the code properly.

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Reopening the justCheckers Project

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Made the plunge today into FOSS development again. As I mentioned in my previous post, I considered and started work on the next version of justCheckers. There are a few reasons why I restarted the project. I want to play around with Java web technologies. I also want to experiment with project management and FOSS development, again. And I am emotional attached to the project.

One of the failures of my past involvement with the project, was the assumption that people would be as excited about the project as I was. I assumed that people would flock and essentially build my dream for me. I underestimated the challenge of motivating people and managing progress. Drafting an excellent design, a todo list and increasing communication throughput would result in vast source code contributions. Managing a non-commercial open source project turns out more complicated than that.

The future of justCheckers requires a more nimble approach. That is one of first task is to streamline developing the codebase.

As I mentioned the next version of justCheckers will use Java web technologies. The majority of work for version involves migrating the Swing GUI to JSP. Also I plan to refactor the code to use the Model-View-Controller pattern.

Part of streamlining the development process, includes a serious reduction on other activities. Since I am sole remaining developer, I decided to reflect in reality. My team members no longer contribute to the project. So I removed them from the team. Since I don’t have a team, I am also removing the team mailing lists. I never found the current mailing lists useful. Instead of that, I will come up with a simple way for the community to communicate with the project. It probably won’t be a world writable forum or wiki. I can’t be bothered with cleaning up spam.

I’ll keep you posted.

If you wish to contribute to justCheckers, please leave me a comment.

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Maemo Hacking and Project Revivals

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With such a cold wet summer, I thought I would spend more time hacking. Yet this year spare time is a scarce commodity and most of that time I find myself far from a proper development workstation. Fortunately with an Internet tablet in my pocket, I can at least start on learning about Maemo development.

For an embedded device, the maemo platform is neither the easiest nor the hardest device to start hacking. Setting up the SDK on Ubuntu takes only a few minutes. In fact I also managed to setup Eclipse to do maemo development too. But I didn’t try to compile any source code so far.

Developing on Maemo, requires knowledge in both Linux and C programming. The N810 itself uses a heavily modified version of the 2.6.27 Linux kernel, Gnome and GTK. GTK seems to handle the GUI side of things in much that the same that Java Swing does. And I like the fact that GObject brings some semblence of OO programming to C. I’d prefer to learn Qt instead of GTK, but I guess I have to start somewhere. Judging by blog posts from KDE developers that got N810s at Akademy 2008, the state of Qt and KDE on Maemo is in its infancy.

In a recent conversation with Dan D’Alimonte, he suggested that I should think about reviving the justCheckers project as a web application. Considering the state of the codebase I work on a daily basis, the justCheckers codebase is very much maintainable. As a web application, the releases can happen faster and casual users can play with the program. And I’d like to play around with some more advanced Java web technologies. Now whether or not I actually revive the project is another matter. It is a definite maybe for now.

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A Call to Action and Progress in Writing

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I’m disappointed folks. Where are all my comments on my excerpt? Did you even read it?!? Bah!!!

Well so far, one my coworkers mentioned the wordiness of the passage. I know. I’m guilty of wanting to jam pack my sentences. This makes them almost unreadable. I know. I know. I should use terse short brief simple sentences. But where’s the playfulness?

A few lucky privileged people can read the entire work so far on Google Docs. In fact I’ll probably let a maximum of five people to read my current work. I’d like to know your initial impressions.

I’ll admit it. Even that one short passage needs work. Ten rewrites later, it still needs work. But I’m holding off with major editing. I’m write a rough copy of the novel. Then I’ll edit the hell out of it.

Writing chapter 4 right now. Wish me luck.

Some Thoughts About Life and Consulting

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Some thoughts to think about:

  • Set expectations early. It avoids confusion and hassle in the future.
  • Assertiveness instills confidence and helps achieve what you need.
  • Smiling helps keep everyone positive and repels negativity from you.
  • Show progress cause it encourages people.
  • Review your goals and schedule time lines. This will make them concrete.
  • Break up goals into manageable tasks. This will make your goals achieveable.
  • Be patient. Nothing will improve in your life overnight.

Todo Progress So Far

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Remember my TODO list for this year? No, I’m not gonna tell you when I posted it. And no if you find it, you are not allowed to post a link or a hint to it. If you are long time reader and you found it, consider yourself part of the in-crowd.

So how well am I doing? Out of the 8, only number 3 actually is realized to date. Realized late April to be more exact. Item 1 fell through the cracks. justCheckers is dead and served its purpose for me. Number 2 is a real work in progress, and I plan on realizing it before the end of the year. Number 4 is still a dream. With number 5, I’m currently stumbling around with. Maybe a certain someone out there somewhere can help with that. Number 6 is something I need to badly do before the inclement season starts. Number 7 and 8 are still in the initial stages.

Totals so far: 1 success, 1 failure, 3 in progress and 3 that need work on. Not the greatest score. I’m only 12.5% to maybe 25% done. Still have much to do.