Tag Archives: justCheckers

Forward Looking, Backwards Loss

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Eric S. Raymond, once said that open source is about a “developer scratching an itch.” Thats what I tried to do with justcheckers. Unfortunately that itch disappeared a long time ago, and now the project just exists. I have different goals now, and different needs. So while I hate to admit it, I am tried of justcheckers and stepping down as lead developer. If anyone wants to pick up the reigns of that project, contact me and I will get you set up appropriately.

I am looking forward to concentrating on doing other work.

Review of 2007, the Promise(s) of 2008

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The year 2007 has been quite a dynamic year for me. Instead of writing a long article about each thing… cause that might take me an year to write and edit, I will just present a list of lists of things that happened.

Academics

  • Completed my undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.
  • Picked my diploma for Bachelor of Science.

Travel

  • Traveled to Italy and Poland.
  • Walked down Unter der Linden in Berlin, Germany.
  • Checked out the Tower of London, National Gallery and Museum of Natural History in London, England.
  • Saw the sights of Florence, Rome, Assisi, and bunch of the Umbria region of Italy.
  • Walked around Gdańsk, Szczecin, Poznan, Gdynia and Malbork in Poland.

Software Development

  • Increased my knowledge of information security.
  • Restarted my involvement with the justCheckers project.
  • Deepened my understanding on software libre and open source.
  • Learned Javascript, CGI-Perl and JSP.
  • Joined the Ubuntu Toronto Users group.

Business

  • Led a mock-up startup for a course.
  • Learned how to read and understand businesses.
  • Discovered the many aspects of open source businesses.
  • Read My Job Went to India, or how to stay in IT.

Art

  • Wrote six articles on quantum computing.
  • Wrote seven personal essays that form my Hacker, Gamer, Lover book.
  • Wrote and voiced in an audio documentary, Casanova.
  • Started writing a science fiction novel.

Social Activity

  • Learned of the open access movement.
  • Learned the basic ethical theories: utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, and Rousseau’s social contract.
  • Debated for network neutrality.
  • Read Stallman’s Free Software, Free Society.
  • Read about the anti-software patent efforts in the EU.

Personal

  • Went to Taize in Montreal.
  • Made a lot more friends.
  • Learned the subtle art of dating.
  • Survived the downs of 2007.
  • Got my G1 driver’s license. Again.
  • Invented task logs, an organizational tool.

Things to Do for 2008

  • Finish justCheckers.
  • Write and publish two books.
  • Get a software development related job.
  • Start a company.
  • Find a real girlfriend.
  • Learn to drive and get my full G license.
  • Learn C and C++.
  • Get involved in a major FOSS project.

Merry Christmas

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Just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. To everyone expecting a card… its coming… hopefully sooner than later. Also no release of justCheckers yet… I broke it badly with the refactoring of the game package. Hopefully I can release something before the new year.

Good night. Long day, too much partying and eating cake.

Travel-o-mania

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Okay today was catch up day. Too tired to write much. Too much planning of the trip, and getting the front yard done. More stuff tomorrow, promise. Maybe.

At least I finished editing the Style Guide for the justCheckers project. Also played a bit of World of Padman and S.T.A.L.K.E.R., both are quite fun and impressive in their own right. But I will not write a review of World of Padman, until I have the time to play around with it more. Whenever that will happen.

Goodnight.

The Insanity Returns

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If one looks for trouble, one usually finds it. I guess the same applies to work. After a few months, huddled in the sanctity of university studies, I emerge to realize how much work needs my attention. A computer glitch almost killed my graduation. Weeds sprouted on the front yard, where the planned stone and stepping stones will be. My name needed to appear on the convocation list. And I need to get back to a bunch of people’s emails. I could on and on listing things, but that would sound like whining. And I try not to torture my readers with that. Fortunately, I seem to be making progress, in tying up all these loose ends.

As I mentioned in my last post, I resumed working on the justCheckers project. More accurately I resumed planning the future of the justCheckers project. With my disappearance for months at a time, most of the other developers seem to have lost interest. I sometimes wonder if I did not loose interest myself. However I challenged myself to build an open source game.

The challenge now revolves around putting momentum back into the project. justCheckers never had a community clammering for its release. And my designs did not pan out, with the development team being able to work on the project independently of me. For this reason I am working on fleshing out the details of running the project. This means reviewing the style guide, and core component design. My knowledge of Java now spans the entire project, so I should be able to come up with a simpler, cleaner and more efficient design. The most crucial point of the design is get the development team back on-board, and pumping out more releases.

Attack of the Lettuce Monster, and the Return of Work

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After disappearing for a few months, I went back to the justCheckers website again. Much to my horror I discovered a group of spammers decided to “borrow” my forums. Now I have to engage in anti-spamming. The forums are cleaned of NSFW content, and I began the process of deleting and banning users. Joy. I think that sailors feel the same way, when cleaning barnacles off their ships. Spammers are just as pesky, and I don’t have the online equivalent of a high-pressure water hose.

Even my brother is not as pesky. Even when he turns into the dreaded Lettuce Monster, and begins eating all the lettuce leaves before I can finish the salad, my brother is not as pesky. Nor obnoxious as a earn-a-quick-buck spammer. Bad comparison, but my brother wanted to be mentioned as the Lettuce Monster in my blog.

In other news, I need to tie up a bunch of loose ends before I leave for Europe. After a few summers of work or school, I decided that I need a vacation. But I need to finish off my work and plan for the trip. I am still figuring out the itinerary. I wonder when should I start looking for a job too. So many decisions.

My friend and fellow justCheckers admin, Chris Bellini recently switched over to Ubuntu from Windows. And he nuked his Windows too. Wow. Even I am not quite prepared to leave my Windows yoke complete due to some of the PC games I bought. But 2007 really seems like the mythical year of the Linux desktop, with all the talk of switching away from Windows. But I think we still need more commercial game studios to start making Linux clients, before we see a more dramatic exodus.

Adjusting to Easy Schedule

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I am not good at adjustments. The switch from a super-busy, near-hyper-kinetic schedule to a “normal” lighter schedule keeps on throwing me off. Hence the lack of updates since Friday.

Yesterday was the great chill day. Today was the great after-chill day. Meaning, I did not get too much done when it comes to assignments or studying. Anyone who follows the justCheckers project got lucky with the new daily updates (at least on the wiki). Everyone else… kind of lucked out. (At least you lucky denizen of the blogosphere get a neat treat today – 3 make-up posts. Why? Because I love you and enjoy having a regular audience.)

Still, I rejoice at the thought of the “evil” over-busy semester finishing. With the exception of three moderately difficult exams, a wack of writing for my writing portfolio and two assignment-papers, my goal of finishing a B. Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, just got a semester to completion. The very thought of finishing in April-May 2007, makes me euphoric. Now assuming that I pass every course this semester, only 4 more courses await me next semester.

I only worry about what I do after-university. People assure me, there is a life after university. I am not too sure. I guess I will need a job, to pay off my meagre debt. But kind of a job? Where can I work? Sure I do plan to work for myself one day, only I need money to bootstrap any sort of business. I would prefer to entire self-employment on my own terms, rather than “starving” myself into it.

So where should I work? Most jobs want some sort of work experience, something I lack in the professional sense. Take gaming firms like Valve, Apogee, id or EA: everyone wants an artist with a portfolio (but can I build one in less than 6 months?), a project developer (do you know that I never worked in let alone managed developing a commercial game?) or a programmer (does Java AWT count as graphics experience? No I don’t do OpenGL, at least not yet). How about NASA’s JPL? Would love to code rovers to race around on Mars, yet neither engineer nor US citizen I am not.

Realistically, I should contemplate working for IBM or Canonical (makers of Ubuntu). Man too little dreamy options (Valve), and too many risky (Canonical) or dirrery options (IBM, Microsoft *shivers*). So long as all effort does not land me a low paying sys admin or code monkey job.

Chillin’ and Dreamin’

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Elation!!! I finished work for yet another course, Business of Computing, and an assignment for the Foundations of Research course. So all the work for my Computer Science courses out the way, I can concentrate on the assignments for my two other courses. Staying up all night, sure wore me out but nothing a make-up nap did not help.

Right now, I am sit chilling and relaxing. I can finally concentrate on my “other” projects. Well after I finish my assignments and write my exams, but you get the point.

Taking about my side projects, I am pleased to say the justCheckers project is moving along well. I am impressed the amount of attention project received lately. A lot of this attention comes from the increased ranking on SourceForge.net. The ranking seems to increased, thanks to migration to Subversion and the recent updates to the site. I set up a wiki that should speed up development of specifications. Maybe we will see a new release soon too.

In other news, Arnold Rosenbloom – my professor for many past course including this semester’s brand new Informational Security (CSC347) – will post my article on RSA cryptography and its demise thanks to quantum computation. I plan on resurrecting the SiteChunks project. Also as promised last Friday, I will post an update to the Self-Experiment: Fast Personal Context Switching, later on today.

Quiet Morning

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This morning seems so quiet. The lack of any real sounds, with the notable exception of the wind, make everything seem so un-alive. Its quite disquieting actually.

The only real sound (other than the typing of keys) is the sound of mental lemmings, walking around. That my friend, is the sound of writer’s block. Coming up with a main theme for an article, placed me into such a state. In an effort to shorten, and ease up on my articles, I had to cannibalize parts from three different articles, and plop them all together. I feel like a literary Dr. Frankenstein. And my article in its current form, plays the part of a half-zombie, half-robotic chicken monstrosity. Oh wait. That would be the robotic chicken… oops, wrong show. Anyways, with the current state of the article makes the lemmings inside my head want to throw themselves off a mental cliff. I mean walk off. Cause thats what lemmings do.

Lemmings aside, I resuscitated another of my projects yesterday. Yes justCheckers will return in all its Java-ish gory err… glory soon. On the topic of justCheckers, Chris Bellini, an important contributer to the project, just turned 30 yesterday. Happy birthday and I am glad you shrugged off the coming age. Is that a grey hair? *ducks*

The marathon of finals continues! Only 9 assignments, 3 exercises, 4 classes and 7 days to go. And the previous experiment seems to be paying off. Better run off now, and take care of my mental lemmings.

Why Open Source Projects Make Sense Career Wise

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Greetings Earthlings! (OK enough silliness for one day, back into the pocket you go Martian.) Once again I have to bring up the sort of lame excuse of being too busy to blog earlier. Well yes, it was lame too much work. Actually I killed my “1337” Gentoo box doing an update. So I basically installed the new Ubuntu 6.06, and I am in the process of setting things up. More on the new Ubuntu tomorrow.

Today’s rant is why open source projects make sense. At least from a university student’s point of view. Undergrad in CS to be exact. All other information from me will have to be extracted via torture, slyness or greasing of palm. 😉

Back to the topic, I am in the process of finding an internship position for the next 12-16 months. So far my own personal experience has mostly unsuccessful. The interesting part is that for the two interviews I have received, my interviewers were most interested in my open source projects. They glossed over my “work” experience, if you can call it that in my case. University courses were not even mentioned. Nope, the thing that stood out were the two projects I am currently actively involved in. For those in the unawares, I actually have 3 open source projects in the works. While initially I thought that working on these projects would be fun and simply educational, it turns out that they mean more than that.

There are three main reasons why I believe employers are interested. These being experience, portfolio and marketing. When you work on a project you have to not only have a grasp on the technology but also on the subtilties of team relationships, and organization. Any open source project will showcase your performance as a developer and/or project leader. The final product is interesting in itself. A look into your source code will reveal your work ethic, organization, knowledge, talent and creativity. Finally comes marketing, which applies mostly to the employer and sometimes to yourself. The words “open source” currently flow with the hype and buzzwords of the business world. By hiring an open source developer, the company gains a zen and almost messanic reputation of by part of what the business world sees as the future. Personally I think open source means plain old fashioned politeness and embraces the ethics of old (the “new” standard of “Western” ethics is quite dissettling). In some rare cases if the project is successful enough, the product becomes a brand onto itself. Any developer of said project also gains a certain amount of worth and can use this to his or her advantage when looking for work.

Well that is all great and everything but how can one gain these advantages. Simply put start a project for something that you need or want. Treat if it were a real life product to sell not just a “pet” project. This is how many open source companies themselves started out. Show your professionalism throughout the process. Try new things, and over time maybe that project will pay off in hard, cold cash.

Till tomorrow,
Dorian