How I Spent My Weekend

Source

...well, I watched two hockey games and a lot of football. But other than that... The official Mandriva Tcl packaging policy is now live. It's basically the Fedora one with a couple of changes. Thanks, Mysterious Fedora Tcl Policy Writing Guy, whoever you are. Kompozer - the HTML editor formerly known as nvu - now actually works, in Cooker, and in 2009 if you grab the package from /main/testing (it should show up as an official update soon). Many who use it have discovered that the 2009 package would crash immediately on startup. This was because the code had a buffer overflow in it, and GCC's code fortification was protecting you from it. Willem van Engen was smart enough to provide a patch to fix the overflow, so thanks to him. Pygame-based games now work again, in Cooker and 2009. There was a permissions bug stopping anything that used Pygame and relied on its default font from working, which includes at least childsplay. You can use Portaudio-based applications - the most important of which is Audacity - with PulseAudio now, in Cooker, and in 2008 Spring if you use the packages from /main/testing. I can't get it into 2009's /testing because of a problem with the buildsystem. This is pretty neat for anyone who uses Audacity a lot, because previously, you had to either disable PulseAudio, or suspend it while running Audacity. Thanks to Fedora contributor Kevin Kofler for that patch. Cooker and 2009 /contrib/backports now have a fully working and up to date set of Spring packages. Spring is the open source RTS game engine based on the popular old RTS game Total Annihilation. It's been around for a while, but has really got smooth in the last couple of years; the game works very well and the springlobby front end makes it very easy to set up online games. I worked with one of springlobby's authors - 'braindamage' on fixing several issues with it, so thanks to him for his invaluable help there. If you haven't tried Spring in a while, now's a good time. Cooker has NVIDIA 180.16. This is utterly untested and may eat your babies. It probably won't show up in 2009, as the other 180 betas so far haven't; we're not keen on the idea of backporting beta releases. Finally - I've been thinking what I'd do if Canonical offered me a job. They haven't, and I have no indication at all that they will, but I just got to thinking what I'd do if it did happen. When I first found out I'd be leaving Mandriva I pretty much figured I'd dismiss it out of hand. But since then, a couple of things have happened to change my perspective a bit (won't go into that), and now I'm not sure. If Ubuntu is going to be the most significant pure desktop commercial distro, I'm not sure if refusing to work on it would be cutting off my nose to spite my face. I have a fairly deep skill set in a very specific area - basically, fixing, hacking around, or otherwise avoiding all sorts of issues with using Linux in a normal, home desktop system, and helping to develop a user community around that. It's not a skill set that's very transferable. I know I wouldn't work for Novell - I respect a lot of the work Novell do, but my objections to the Microsoft deal are a lot deeper than any problem I have with Canonical, I just couldn't see myself working in that situation. So with them out, the only other two companies really in a position to pay someone to do what I do are Red Hat and Canonical. So if Canonical offered me a job, and the only other option was going back to doing tech support for the local cable company, would turning it down really be the best thing to do, the way I could best contribute in my own small way to the Linux community in future? I'm really not sure. So I don't entirely know what I'd do. The problems I have with Canonical that I wrote about before haven't gone away at all, but I don't know if it would be the right thing to do to refuse on those grounds. It doesn't seem at all productive, in the end. If any of you have any thoughts, do let me know. Probably academic anyway, but it's something that seems important to me personally, if nothing else.

Comments

reinouts wrote on 2008-12-15 17:11:
Not that I have any kind of relationship to them, but given your praise to Fedora, what about if RedHat offered you a job?
admin wrote on 2008-12-15 17:19:
Oh, that I'd jump on. That one's a no-brainer. I like Red Hat, they're a good company, and I quite like Fedora, and it's by far the most similar distro to Mandriva, so less of a transition shock. I'm very much hoping they will.
admin wrote on 2008-12-15 17:25:
Here's one point against. I'm looking at an Ubuntu posting: http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/canonical_UGDE/ "Work with the rest of the Ubuntu Desktop team to incorporate improvements they make (in the form of patches to the individual components) into the packages, and ensure the patches are maintained for each new upstream version." EPIC FIAL
admin wrote on 2008-12-15 17:29:
...although to be fair it does say "Work with the individual upstream projects such as GNOME, Freedesktop.org, Compiz, etc. to correct problems, and ensure that work done in Ubuntu furthers the development of their project. ". Still, though. Sigh.
samsoul75 wrote on 2008-12-15 20:20:
Looks like an exhausting WE...Is Luongo still on fire? Your profile is probably what big companies need when they switch from Win to Linux. Linux consulting is a growing maket I guess and your know-how has a pretty good value there IMO.
samsoul75 wrote on 2008-12-15 20:23:
By the way, thanks for your dedication to Mandriva all over theses years. Since I know such good members of the family like you are sacked, something is broken between Mandriva and me.
admin wrote on 2008-12-15 20:31:
Luongo's injured, worse luck :\. Been out for a couple of weeks now. Curtis Sanford is his main backup, and we've also been playing Corey Schneider, a kid who's been doing well in juniors, for a few games. He makes some flashy saves but he's bad on breakaways and shootouts, and he plays pucks behind the goal WAAY too often. I like Sanford but no-one else does. Need Luongo back anyhow :\ I kinda see consulting as something you get into on the side while you still have a steady income in case it doesn't work out! Right now I have no job, nothing. I'd rather get something that pays steadily than chance my arm on trying to get consulting gigs. People don't often hire 26-year old consultants, for whatever reason.
samsoul75 wrote on 2008-12-17 14:52:
Well, when I mean consultant, I mean a guy who works as a technical adviser, an expert in one very specific domain, not especially as a freelance but also as an employee of a well established IT service company implementing Linux for their customers (for instance IBM, one of the biggest player on this market). A lot of goalies are not in a so good shape nowadays... Luongo, Khabibulin, even Price seems to be a bit shaky...but it 's good for their backup to show themselves, look at Cristobal Huet, the best french player in the NHL ;D.