Who I are/Who you am
May not be the same as who I was or who I want to be. I had a spectacular day
at work. I bashed through a bunch of bugs, and since they're demoing it
tomorrow morning at Macworld, that's probably a good thing. Deadline drama and
namedropping isn't why I fired up vim though, so lets trek back to the first
sentence- my happiness is kind of disturbing.
I did good work, but honestly, it was trivial work. I bashed a set of classes
into shape so we can switch from the old SOAP authentication server to the new
RESTful one whenever the server crew gets their act together. I went spelunking
in some Qt xml files and changed a bunch of stuff we didn't trust them to get
around to. I ran down what I guess was bitrot in some OS X file-monitoring
code, and stuck in a call to stat(2)[1].
There's that, and the fact that I spent a lot of the time talking through what
I was doing with my boss. This made me surprisingly cheerful, but it's really
damaging the big lie I keep telling myself, that I can be alone all the time
and love it.
Circling around to get into hailing distance of a point, I don't really want to
be a chatty bug fixer. I want to be Paul Lutus in the hills, not snot nosed
Hank in Berkeley. I suspect that this is not to be. I lost my mind a little bit
living alone last year, and most of my trouble in college came from an
unwillingness to speak and my subsequent crushing loneliness. You can only
stare at a wall for so long before you think you deserve it.
I told a friend of mine last night I was saving up money for some rainy day,
when I'd strike out on my own and build my own little product. I used to want
that. I used to believe it when I said that. I've never been happier than I am
now. I guess I could bleed every day, but for what? An abstract sense that I
could do something awesome, some vestiges of my own vanity, a long string of
tales I've told.
Maybe it's not worth it.
[1] This seems like a strange bit of detail, but it means everything to me.
There are two teams working on this codebase, and a lot of tension over coding
style. This code is "owned" by people who favor mazelike layers of indirection,
so this felt a little like repairing a bridge and painting the side of it with
a veiny triumphant bastard.
A quick review of Intel's Mobile Linux efforts
- Moblin rewrites NetworkManager
- Moblin merges with Maemo to make Meego
- First Meego Phone
- Intel goes back in-house, announces Tizen
- First Tizen release
This is not a serious contender as a mobile OS, and reporters need to stop
treating it as such. It is a pet project for Intel engineers. They've switched
distribution bases, brought it inhouse, rewritten projects instead of fixing
bugs, have switched from GTK+ to Qt to EFL, sponsored a project to replace X11,
and god knows what else.
The pathetic thing is,
this Mobline 2.0 announcement
video is still a pretty compelling demo. It would be nice if they'd worked
on that instead of throwing it out and rewriting the UI from scratch multiple
times.
Alpha Sun Hat
That's not music you hear, that's the devil
That's not the sun in the sky, that's a human heart