The Pædantic Programmer

Farm animal noises, I tell you.

Okay… after this morning’s post, I decided to make Jenkara build. It is now. You can get it thus:

$ svn co http://svn.colliertech.org/svn/trunk/jenkara

or

$ wget http://www.colliertech.org/downloads/jenkara-0.0.1.tar.gz

You can build it with ye olde

$ ./configure && make

there’s no install target, so run it with

$ cd src && ./jenkara

but it doesn’t work for ‘cuz the glade file it reads doesn’t work with the new libglade. I did write this stuff in 2001, after all…

So if any of you know how to make the following glade file work with the new and shiny, it would be great to get some of that info!

http://svn.colliertech.org/svn/trunk/jenkara/ui/jenkara.glade2

One day I will re-write this in C# and run it on mono. Promise!

There’s an opening at Canonical that I’d like to take after the current contract is up. It’s an opening for a OpenGL dev on the Ubuntu desktop team.

Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy working with my current group quite a bit. We’re building a pretty neat tool. However, building OpenGL into the GNOME desktop has been a personal goal of mine for quite a while now.

I bought a Voodoo II in 1999, just after I graduated from high school with the hopes of building a video game. The tools for Linux were sparse. There was Blender, but the learning curve is very high, the source was not then open, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to build the whole game by myself. So I started building a 3d modeler myself.

I got as far as building a quake .mdl loader with rotation, scaling and primitive animation. I was pretty proud of myself.

I haven’t gotten too far along the path since then, however. Time required by work has increased, and I haven’t been able to find a way to make the two projects (food on the table, continuing work on the modeler) mesh.

In 2006, I was able to take over maintaining gtkglarea and fix a couple of minor problems. I wrote a c# wrapper around the widget library using Mike‘s excellent gapi tool. I was able to help Rob, Dave and Dylan with Tao.OpenGL (which led to a bit of work on Prebuild). I helped Sam a bit to make gtkglarea-sharp production-ready. But I haven’t had a chance to get that modeler finished…

I’m nothing if not persistent, though :)

My background includes experience in system administration, network operation, technical support, and development of applications on server and client side.

My primary operating system is Debian GNU/Linux.
My primary programming languages are C# and Perl.
I run a small family ISP on a not-for-profit basis: http://colliertech.org/
I am a “charter” member of a group originally know as “The Linux Internet Support Co-Operative” (LISC). The group is now known as the Open Projects Network (OPN) and is best known for its involvement with the freenode.net IRC servers.
I hold r/w access to the source code repositories of many “open source” projects including Mono, GNOME, and many projects hosted by sourceforge.
I self-identify as a Free Software developer, non-pauline christian, democratic socialist and egalitarian.
I find the work done by the free software / open source community fascinating and attempt to contribute to the project with time available to me.

Hello public,

I’m putting some effort into GtkGlAreaSharp again. The supporting bits aren’t really production-ready, though, so rather than hacking on the widget itself and its associated examples, I’m beefing up the underlying platform.

The first step in the process is making Prebuild a viable meta-build system. Right now it works pretty well for generating NAnt, Visual Studio 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and MonoDevelop build systems. The Autotools target is a bit lacking, however. There is not currently support for recursive projects, ie, solutions with multiple projects. There is also no support for versioned solutions or projects. This makes it difficult to strong-named assemblies, without which, libraries can’t be added to the GAC. Production-quality code is usually added to the GAC, so getting the feature addressed is pretty high priority.

The reason I’m focusing on Prebuild is that the Tao framework, a cross-platform C# binding to the OpenGL API, uses Prebuild to generate its build systems. I use Tao in the examples distributed with GtkGLAreaSharp in order to demonstrate the widget’s usage, how one might allow one’s users to interact with objects rendered in the OpenGL widget, etc.

My work so far on the Prebuild Autotools templates is living in my own subversion repository until I get it to a better state than the stuff at sourceforge. If you’re interested in taking a peek, browse on over to https://svn.colliertech.org/mono/dnpbAutotools/

After we convince Prebuild to generate robust Autotool build systems, I’m going to see how much effort it takes to push Prebuild into the Ubuntu core. After there is an Ubuntu package, it will probably take much less effort to get it packaged up for Debian. One day I will become a DD, but that takes a lot of time, and I hear a rumor that someone has to kick the bucket before they start accepting more :)

There are also a couple of nearly-complete bugs blocking gtkglarea from working smoothly on win32. This seems like a good place to focus effort after Prebuild does what I want. Plus, then, I will move the gigantic project of adding OpenGL support to GTK+ core forward a few steps.

The following is what i wrote on “43people.com” about the boss. I thought it was worth keeping in my own archives, since it’s actually a story about my life as it pertains to Mr. Bezos.

Anyway, the prof didn’t require that we buy any books, but he made some suggestions. And he also suggested that we buy them on this new fangled “Internet” thing through a few of his friends down south in Seattle at this place called Amazon.com.

And thus was my introduction to O’Reilly and Associates. I soon thereafter bought a book called “Open Sources.” It quickly shaped my outlook on life and the way I viewed software, information and communication. The professor of the class told me that O’Reilly and Amazon got along quite well and that Amazon sold mostly technical books. I thought to myself “self, it might be fun to meet some of the folks at Amazon and maybe even take a job there.”

And that was about as far as I got on that train of thought before I hopped off and got distracted by the shiny bling of 3dfx and internet service providing. During this distracted period of my life (as opposed to the many and varied distracted periods that followed), I spent many an hour curled up in a comfy chair reading books published by Tim and friends that I bought from Amazon.

Then there was a period of weeping and gnashing of teeth when everyone got disillusioned by the whole humanity taking advantage of the VCs that funded development of the intarwebs thing.

I was happy to note that neither O’Reilly nor Amazon tanked during this period. This seemed like a well planned and well executed failure to fail.

After the fall of civilization, I found myself living in a social nexus called “Fey Abbey.” My fellow residents and the visitors were very supportive; I learned quite a bit about building intentional community, social networking, and the connectness of all things living.

I came up with some ideas about integrating these social networks with computational networks. I never implemented any of them to much extent, but shortly after I shared the ideas with the hive mind, sites like “friendster.com,” “tribe.net,” and “orkut.com” started showing up. Coincidence? Perhaps. Perhaps I had merely “tapped the zeitgeist” as Jeff is wont to say.

Either way, it taught me something about one’s involvement in community and the impact that such involvement triggers, in whatever direction the impact happens to travel.

But back to the story. I kept O’Reilly’s and Amazon.com’s success in mind as I delivered pizzas, sewed my wild oats, and dreamed of returning to the life of high technology.

I mentioned it to one of my confidantes and she said to me “get thee to a computery!” or something not unlike this, so, with her help and the help of my network of friends, I did. And shortly thereafter, but after more time than I would have liked at the time, I had an offer to take a contract working for Mr. Bezos and his company.

The contract went well; I learned a lot, and I like to think I imparted much wisdom, but rather than riding it out until the bitter end, I took some time to train with some Europeans on how to make software that lasts much longer than anyone would have expected (and maybe hoped).

I returned to the doors of Amazon.com barely a year later with resume in hand, some ideas that I wanted to implement, and a great deal more experience. The folks with whom I interviewed fought hard to get me on their team, hinting that the group would be getting close attention from senior members of staff.

So here I am, working with a crack team to build the pet projects of “senior members of amazon staff.” It’s challenging work, but it’s work that I’ve been intending to get done for a few years now. If I read him right, I think Jeff has many of the same ideas about software and perhaps the world as do I. Perhaps I’ll talk to him about it tomorrow night…

Thank you _Alan_ for putting together this report on Mono.Xna’s implementation status.

A quick overview is that we’ve got 95% of the methods stubbed out and maybe 1% fully implemented. Thank you jendave for your hard work on this!

https://colliertech.com/~cjcollier/Mono/Xna/Status/20061221/FinalPage.html

Hey, look. My name is mentioned down at the bottom.

http://www.go-mono.com/archive/1.2/#contributors

testing aggregator’s ability to de-dup this update

Updated @ 20061214T1717
Updated @ 20061215T1140

I couldn’t sleep this morning. I woke up early and mostly watched Firefly. Between episodes, I hacked on gtkglarea and updated some of my bugs over at the gnome bugzilla system. I added a couple of components to the gtkglarea product page, namely build and docs.

Next on my list of things to do for the project include working kinks out of the mingw build, getting some folks with msys/mingw systems to test the build, merging the gdkgl.c and gdkgl-win32.c files and adding some gtk-doc docs. At that point, it should be good to release.

I also took over ye olde gtk + OpenGL bug. I plan on having a suitable GL widget in the core of gtk+ within a year. Whip me if I slack :)