Tom at 16

Week of January 27th, 2003

Latest Update: Thursday Friday 31, 2003 17:00

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Friday January 31, 2003

My friend Svenson is a frequent visitor to my Inbox. He never misses an opportunity to twist something I've said into the sublime or laughable -- his humor is always welcome, and on more than one occasion given me the belly laugh I needed to break the tension of the day. This morning, however, Svenson's response to yesterday's post had an uncharacteristically serious tone to it:

It never ceases to amaze me that people find it impressive
when something just works as it is supposed to.

Tell me what's impressive about it.

I mean, like, you write a book and publish it. Should I be
amazed that it is readable just because it has sooo many
thousands of words in it? Should I be impressed that all the
page reference in the index are correct? How many people are
impressed by tha fact that their new car doen't fall apart
when they start it?

What is impressive is that software engineers/marketeers have
manipulated thier clients to accept bugs as an inevitable fact.

How true. Svenson's note reminded me that I'm as guilty as the next person in this regard. When I get in my car, I expect it to start and deliver me to where I want to go. Safely, efficiently, and without error or incident. On the flip side, I don't update the tires or fuel injection system on my car every week to "see what's new in the industry". But his point is valid. We, as software consumers, have come to expect newly released applications to be buggy and error prone. And when we stumble across a product that's not, we impressed -- as I was yesterday. I'd like to think this trend is changing. More and more Open Source projects are being released "when they're fully baked". KDE 3.1 springs immediately to mind. As does Gentoo 1.4 final. And I think this is a Good Thing. As our expectations of the programs we use every day "normalizes", hopefully this will push software developers to reshape their thinking as well. One can only hope...

On a similar thread, I did something last night I don't do very often -- I installed an early alpha release of a program on my notebook. My reasoning -- in retrospect -- probably had a lot to do with: (a) the positive experiences I've had running Mozilla Phoenix, and (b) my confident in the KDE project. The application is Kontact. As noted in my post earlier this week, Kontact is the client end of KDE's upcoming Kroupware Project sponsored in part by the German government. The version I installed, 0.1 <grin>, is the first public release of the product.

Frankly, I did not expect it to compile cleanly. To my surprise, it did -- I simply followed the build instructions posted on the aforementioned Web site. Ta and Da.

Kontact is not a "new-from-the-ground-up" product. It has two components: KmailCool, which is essentially a remake of Kmail rewritten using Kparts, and Kontact which is a rewrite/integration of the KDE PIM suite, collected into a single interface. So far I like what I see. Some key bits are missing or non-functional, but what works, works well. I've been using it most of the day, and it's yet to die on me. This is one to keep your eye on folks. One note of caution -- when you build Kmailcool and Kontact, it rebuilds some of the base KDE PIM components. So to back out, you'd probably need to re-install the latter. Other than that, I see nothing radically amiss with it. If you use Kmail, you might want to take Kontact for a spin. So far, I'm enjoying the ride.

Be well, and have a good Friday.

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Thursday January 30, 2003

KDE 3.1.0 finished compiling late last night. I've been running it all day, and it's rock solid. I'm thoroughly impressed. The wait was worth it. And when I think about it, it really is amazing and awe inspiring... of the thousands of lines of code I compiled over the 12 to 14 hours it took to rebuild KDE, not one error. Not one. Other than the MD5 mismatch I had, but that's no fault of the code; that's a download error corrected by simply deleting the source tarball and re-fetching it. I built everything. The Edutainment packages, games, everything. And I've yet to find an app that doesn't work as advertised. Yep. Pretty impressive.

Thanks to everyone who send me CVS-SSH-CHROOT URLs. So far, I'm familiar with them all, and tried them all at one time or another. Unfortunately, none of the scripts I've tried or HOWTOs I've read work as written. Which means I'll have to roll up my sleeves and get some dirt under my fingernails. Such is life.

Tonight I'm busy reading a pile of documentation on Macromedia ColdFusion MX. So far, from what I've read, it looks like a capable Web development environment. I'll have a better handle on its capabilities when I've had a chance to install and play with it a bit. Hopefully this weekend sometime. Yeah, in one of my copious spare moments :-) ...

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Wednesday January 29, 2003

I actually feel half-human today. Still tired and a bit stiff, but at least I have a modicum of focus back and I'm getting my share of things accomplished. I've got a doctor's appointment later in the week. Time for a thorough physical. I'm at the age where subtle aches and pains can have a deeper meaning, and I'm the type of person who prefers to be proactive about life. In short, I don't like surprises. Besides, I haven't had a full physical in over two years, so I'm due.

I've also managed to clear my desk -- both literally and figuratively -- over the last two days. Which always makes me feel better. I don't like my workspace cluttered. Mentally or dead-tree-based.

With the backlog on my desk addressed (well, as addressed as it gets around here), it's time to move forward with several new projects that have either been sitting in the wings pending further research or purcolating in the dark corners of my mind. At the top of the pile is CVS. I need to implement and document a CVS repository that's accessible only via SSH, that's chrooted, and supports a range of access permissions. "No problem", he chuckled absently to no one in particular. There's a handful of tools and scripts around that -- when combined -- come close to the functionality I need, but unfortunately they don't play nice together. Plus there's a new release of CVS out (which, IIRC, addresses a buffer overflow vulnerability) I need to investigate and tinker with.

Our weather has returned to what I'll loosely term "a seasonal norm". Minus 15C, clear, and a gusty wind which is driving the true ambient down to about -26C. Warmer temperatures are forecast for tomorrow, with snow by the weekend. All in all, normal weather patterns for this time of year.

I decided to go ahead and rebuild my KDE installation on Phaedrus last night. The process would normally be complete by now (12-14 hours on a 1 GHz PIII with 512MB RAM), but one of the downloads quit last due with an MD5 mismatch. I corrected the problem this morning, and restarted the update. So far so good. Should be done later today, barring any further errors. I don't anticipate a huge difference between KDE 3.1 RC-6 and 3.1 Final other than perhaps a few performance tweaks here and there. You'll know when I do...

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Tuesday January 28, 2002

My week did not get off to what I'd call a firey start. I woke up yesterday feeling like someone had beat me with a stick during the night. I stumbled through the day, stomping out fires, only to have several re-ignite later in the day. Thinking I just needed a break from the action, I went out with a friend for pizza and beer. No Joy. By 9 o'clock my head was nodding and the conversation at the table became a dull background "buzz". I returned home, and retired to the couch (I tend to move around a lot in my sleep when I'm not feeling good) to hopefully sleep off whatever was ailing me. Again, no joy. Whoever was beating me Sunday night returned last night.

I either have the flu, or "stick-itis". Bother.

KDE 3.1 final was quietly released to the wild last night. The official announcement is up. Don't expect a speedy response from the site, though -- I suspect KDE.org will be slammed for several days. The final ebuilds are already in the Gentoo Portage tree, but again, expect long delays for a day or three. I'll probably wait until the weekend to update.

A good overview of the new feature list is here. For a sneak peek at the new Kontact client (part of the Kroupware Project and due for inclusion in KDE 3.2), check out this screenshot. Whooo Hoooo... gotta like the look of that...

Time to go find the Advil...

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