TTK Ciar's Journal: Whoo boy .. much much

Woo! Finally posting!

A lot has happened, but I haven't much time, so I'll make it brief.

I (finally!) left the Internet Archive to work for a stealth startup, which was great except that it couldn't actually pay me until it received capital investment funds. Two months of that motivated me to look for employment elsewhere. and I found a gem of a place just a few blocks from Archive HQ. It's called Discovery Mining and I'm very happy there. I'm in a room with a dozen other programmers cranking out perl and wrestling with a complicated data-mining system of interconnected databases and special-purposed data servers and processing nodes. I'm learning a lot, which makes it a welcome change from The Archive. My position there hadn't exposed me to anything new for nearly a year. This new work is a happy mix of the new and the familiar -- it's familiar enough that I could get up to speed quickly and make myself useful, but new enough to stretch me and teach me useful stuff. I've been there about a month, and they seem as pleased with me as I am of them. We'll see how it goes, but I'm optimistic. They made me sign the nondisclosure agreement from hell, so there isn't much I can actually say about what I do .. so, moving right along ..

As you might remember, I've been giving Enlightenment17 a try. Several months later, I regretfully report that it just didn't work out. The developers decided to lose the third dimension of virtual desktops, and even after using E17 for all this time I miss that feature most terribly. E17 also seemed much less stable than E16, and stability is always at the top of my priority list when it comes to technology. Speaking with the developers proved fruitless. So I'm back on E16 at home and at work, and wondering what I'm going to do. E16 just isn't supported very well on newer versions of linux distributions. It relies on the freetype1 libraries, which haven't been ported/maintained for years, and the newer distributions are different enough from what freetype1 expects that the freetype1 installation process gets weirded out and refuses to proceed. E17 has been weaned off of freetype1, and uses freetype2 exclusively (later versions of E16 use both, freetype1 and freetype2, which raises its own set of problems).

If I really want to stick with E16, I have a few choices:

(1) I could stick with an older linux distribution version which still supports freetype1. On one hand this means I'm just putting off the inevitable, but on the other hand it coincides with my upgrade habits anyway. I tend to stay with what works for me, incrementally installing security patches and bugfixes, until I am presented with an irresistable reason to change to a newer operating system version. Then I put off upgrading some more until I can find a version which is stable enough to be worth my while. Instability in my operating system is utterly intolerable to me, and bad versions crop up far more often than they should. My migration path since 1996 was: Slackware 3.0 to Slackware 7.1, to Slackware 8.1, to Slackware 10.2. But anyway, even though 10.2 has been working very well for me for a long time, I know eventually modern applications will stop building under 10.2 and I will have to change again. So I'd rather have a backup plan.

(2) I could take up porting/maintenance of freetype1, and make sure it will install on future systems, thus ensuring the longitivity of E16 as well. This doesn't appeal to me much, as freetype1 is something of a pain in the arse. There's a reason the developers rewrote it, and I don't relish the notion of picking up someone else's can of worms.

(3) I could fork E16 and maintain my own version of it. The E17 code is available, so I could conceivably figure out what they did to shed freetype1 and apply those changes to the E16 codebase, hopefully without losing the three axes of virtual desktops in the process. Similarly I could incorporate bugfixes (if relevant) from the E17 code to the forked E16, and have the best of both worlds. This approach has a lot of appeal, but it's also a hell of a lot of work. I don't shy away from work, but I don't have a lot of time these days, and what time I do have I prefer to spend on other projects. My window manager is just supposed to *work*, and maintaining it is not something I want to do just for the sake of doing it.

So .. I don't know what I'm going to do. It's not critical yet, so I'll be pondering it some more.

House! We finally closed escrow on a house! W00t! Finally, a place of our own, a proper workshop, privacy, security, stability! I'm looking forward to it. I've got some pictures up here with more on their way. More on this later.

Aaaaaand I ran out of time! Maybe I'll get to write more tomorrow. Topics I want to touch on: calc3, dvm, and more about the house.

-- TTK