October 2004

Up late building Evolution from CVS in preparation for the EPlugin hackfest tomorrow (plug plug, plug plug).

Miguel and I just noticed that there are seven networks going through our apartments.

A must see: Fredrik’s implementation of Christian’s desktop notification spec.

I hope that everyone will join us in IRC tomorrow for the EPlugin hackfest! Bring your curiosity, your ideas, and your emacs buffers and vi ..uhm…whatever you call them in vi. The only thing I use vi for is to edit /etc/hosts for some reason, it’s a strange habit but I am incapable of editing that file with anything else.

(Since Garrett outed me for my superb management skills, I had to use the image.)

A couple of hack ideas to supplement JP’s list:

• Build an EPlugin that makes Evolution behave like The Insidious Big Brother Database, automatically adding contact entries for anyone whose mails you answer to a special addressbook for completion purposes. Bonus points for parsing address/phone information out of sigs and adding that to the addressbook.
• Add an EPlugin pre-event for sending a composed message. Then, write an EPlugin that detects when you’re about to send a message that alludes to an attachment that doesn’t exist, and issues a warning. KMail seems to do this by searching for the i18n string “attach”, which is good but could be improved on.
• A dashboard frontend EPlugin that builds and sends cluepackets when you read emails.
• An EPlugin that uses Babelfish/Google to translate emails from a foreign language to a language you understand. There’s a great Firefox plugin from Paul Grave to do this that I use all the time.

It should be fun! JP mentioned the hackfest ends at 5pm Boston time, but I think it’ll probably go a lot later than that; I’ll be joining late and staying late, since I have meetings all morning.

Today is the fifth anniversary of the incorporation of Ximian, née Helix Code.

Monkeybutter!

We don’t like to talk about it very often, but at a certain point Tuomas became unable to draw any more monkeys, and they all came out looking very sickly. We had to give him a vacation after that.

Monkeypop is a desktop notification tool based on Gecko and running on Mono.

One of the most interesting changes in the last five years is that Microsoft has become a depressing place to work.

Microsoft embodies the old-world software mentality: large-scale, abstraction-driven, developer-focused, client-based, all founded on high-margin licenses of intellectual property.

Their all-at-once approach to software development means long, risk-prone release cycles and frequent slips. Meanwhile, even Apple puts a new version of Mac OS X out every year, and of course Linux is highly modular and new functionality is continuously available to those who want it.

Microsoft’s focus has always been on developers, and when you hear Ballmer and Gates talking about Longhorn, you hear them talking about WinFS, Avalon, and Indigo: terms that mean nothing to software users, but that are endlessly interesting to developers.

Or at least, Microsoft hopes that they’re interesting topics. But what if they aren’t?

The web has taught people that low-tech stuff can be really productive. Lots of people are using PHP, Perl and Python in areas you wouldn’t expect. These are real, salt-of-the-earth tools. By contrast Avalon and some of Microsoft’s other recent efforts at programming environment design look like out-of-touch erudite fluff, with a rank odor of cubicleware evident from miles away.

The greatest lesson of open source may be its ability to excite and galvanize developers, for whatever reason. Microsoft has feebly tried to copy the best bits, with blogs.msdn.com and channel 9.

But indications are that for the world’s most talented hackers, the bloom might be coming off the Microsoft rose. Gates keeps lamenting that talented people are losing interest in IT, and has recently been stumping for the field. But what if he’s got a dark window on the IT world not because software is failing to attract bright developers, but because Microsoft is failing to attract bright developers?

And the worst bit of news for the Company that Copyright Built is that software business models are changing. People often ask me what the business model is for open source. Lately I’ve been telling them that they ought to ask what the business model is for software. The only thing that’s for sure is that no one is going to get their own private jet for writing a spreadsheet program anymore.

Now, everyone knows that Microsoft’s market and cash position give them more room for error than any other company in existence. And Microsoft has stood up remarkably well to the decline of IT fortunes, while other companies have fallen hard. And above all, they are fighters. But things have definitely changed in Redmond.

The day they offered me a job five years ago, the employment brochure (which I just found the other day, cleaning out my office) was full of testimonials from young Microsofties talking about how cool it is to write software that millions of people use.

My dad urged me to take the job — “it’s a million-dollar offer!” he would yell into the phone, speaking metaphorically, I guess — and he and certain other of my relatives expressed concern for the safety of my eager young ego when I went off and started a long-haired communist company with a dirty Mexican.

Microsoft’s stock has since come maybe 40% off their high; a fall, but not a big fall compared to the other companies squeezing through the eye of the needle after the tech stock bubble burst. The real change appears to be in the climate. I’m glad I didn’t go to work for Microsoft, but not because I got to do something cool elsewhere, or because they’re “bad people;” I’m glad I didn’t go to work for Microsoft because that place doesn’t seem like fun anymore.

You’d be surprised how much of my referer log is people embedding these two images in their web pages:

This practice seems especially popular among 20-something girls on livejournal.com. Usually talking about some boy issue.

In the fall in Boston there are always thunderstorms. After watching SLC Punk I blew a roll of film trying to take a polaroid of a lightning bolt.

My friend Watson.

I’ve just noticed that Alex is now on the planet.gnome.org aggregator. If anyone wants to make a hackergotchi for him, here is a good starting point.

Also, he’s put a donation link on his Tomboy page. The poor crazy fool is unemployed, so consider sending him your pocket change. For just a dollar a day, you can support a hacker-poet halfway around the world. Or you could just hire him.

Coming from a generation that really does get its news from The Daily Show, Jon Stewart’s autotelic calm last night on Crossfire reminded me of John Doe from Se7en.