September 21, 2000

Power of open source

How many people have accidentally typed in 'www.advogato.org/dairy/' instead of '/diary/'? Wouldn't it be funny if one day you saw a cow there instead of a 404?

Word has come down from the mount: OpenInteract (and SPOPS) shall be open source by Thursday (Sep 28). I'm not celebrating just yet (still haven't settled on a license, but leaning strongly toward Artistic/GPL for the core framework), but this is deeply rewarding.

I've still got a million things to do with it -- particularly in terms of efficiency, as we've been striving to make it right first and then efficient -- but at least other people will be looking at it. I'm a little leery of this and have to remember that people generally just want things to be better, that it's not personal. (A problem with working remotely for a small company is that you have little-to-no feedback on your actual work -- code -- just on the results of the work.)

It's also kinda funny (some would say ironic) because I leave on Thursday (Sep 28) for Germany. So I won't get to respond to email questions as quickly as I would like. So it goes.

The DBD::ASAny author sent me a new version of the driver that includes $sth->{TYPE} support -- woohoo! I ran some tests and all tests passed 'ok'. (It's very satisfying to type 'make test' and see that little 'ok' come back as many times as you ask it to do something.) He also modified the DBI->connect string so that it's more in line with other DBD drivers. I love this community.

It's taken longer than I thought (thanks largely to the efforts of my boss), but my work situation -- at home, alone, all the time -- is getting pretty old. I didn't think I'd miss people as much as I do, since I'm slightly introverted. But there it is. We'll see how it plays out.

(Originally posted elsewhere)

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