rastplats

I’ve been reading quite a few articles the last days on how Microsoft is dropping Visual Basic 6 in favor for versions built on the .NET framework. This has angered quite a few businesses that market software for the Windows platform that are written in VB6 since the newer versions of the compiler are incompatible with their sourcecode (or vice versa). Not only do they lose their development platform, Microsoft isn’t putting support for the VB6 runtimes on their upcoming operating systems at a high priority. This leaves all the VB6 developers with a rotting codebase and with rotting operating system support.. and the decision to either rewrite their products or dropping them from the pricelist. Gee, now thats a healthy development environemnt if I’ve ever seen one. Microsoft is marketing the VB.NET as the alternative for these developers but the big question is, for how long and when will that compiler be replaced aswell?

There is an important lesson to be learned from this, by using compilers and/or languages based on closed standards and implementations you jeopardise your your product and hand over your business decisions to the compiler vendor. Why? If all these millions of products that now face an uncertain future had been written in an open independent language such as C, C++, Perl, Lisp, Java or insert favourite language here this would never be a problem.. and not only that, the customerbase would be even larger since the product wouldnt be locked in the Windows family of operating systems. Only support the customers running Microsoft products is like a car vendor only supporting users driving on tarmac.. Most of these developers will however choose to wander along on the Microsoft path and go ahead with .NET arguing that Microsoft actually promised support for it until 2012.. and then back to square one.. and they will give you the old “that software will have been replaced by then” argument.. remember Y2k?

The Visual Basic community is standing at a crossroad that all Microsoft users/developers/resellers/etc either already have faced or will face (again and again and again). They can either choose to go ahead and continue to lock themself in, letting their business decisions be steered by Redmond (and their wallets drained in the same direction) or they can look around them and find a world full of alternatives that give them full unconditional freedom. Just like Instinct Soft once proclaimed now in an updated slogan-version, Open Source, We kick your ass for free!.

The past week has been somewhat insane, racing to meet the deadline on the Distributed Systems assignment I’ve spent 10-14 hours a day coding and attended school and boardmeetings. We still missed the deadline though which sucks bad.. a small comfort is that I know I did my best. The assignment was submitted about an hour ago now just in time for the easter holidays which although late at least is ahead of all other groups in the class (which says more about them than us though). The result turned out quite nice in the end and I am quite pleased with my code but the main impression is still somewhat sucky since I had to do way more than my share of work.. just like in every other group assignment I’ve participated in to date.. I wonder what I do wrong since I always end up doing too much. No approach to even out the workload I’ve tried sofar has ever worked, I guess I’m downright unfit for management.

The easter holidays kicked off today and hopefully I’ll be able to spend them working on my malloc(3) implementation for FreeBSD. Getting my hands dirty with some C code will be a nice break from the past weeks which have been filled with Java and plpgsql.

To celebrate that I actually had time to work on my own stuff I spent the night polishing off my DataHotellet.com backup software Piccolo and released it on my vode page.

The past days have been filled with endless hacking on all levels, objectoriented Java on the distributed RSA cracking software, ia32 Assembly on the RTOS and plPgSQL/PlPerl in the examproject database.. top to bottom and back. Although I like having a lot to do, this assignement load is a bit too extreme even for me. The fact that all the projects are quite kickass programmingwise is some sort of comfort. If all goes well, I’ll be able to showcase the distributed application on the coming monday. Another cool hack is the dynamic information storage we’ve implemented in the examproject database, I added the searchengine today which features quite advanced heuristics, this will definately become a stand-alone spin-off.

Sleeptime is approaching fast, my original plan to wait up and witness Binary Time wasnt synchronized with my eyelids unfortunately.. perhaps being a bit un-nerdy is good for my karma though since I scored 83% nerd.. The time is now 1111110084 beep

After a quick visit up north, I’m safely back in the Malmö region again. The weekend was spent with relatives I hadn’t met in quite a few years which of course always is nice (meeting them again that is). Sleeping in the same apartement as two playful kittens proved to be an interesting experience, my face was obviously quite a fun toy.

Due to this workfree weekend, the coming week will be disastrously busy with schoolwork, I hope my batteries got recharged to cope with the load. At least I got some proofreading done on my essay, the implementation of the work is about to commence which will be quite interesting. But now it’s off to bed, class starts in around 7 hours.

I’ll be heading to our nations capital tomorrow to to hang out with relatives, it will be a short trip though and I’ll be back in Malmö sometime around noon on Sunday. Not much exciting has gone down the past week except for having a pleasant coffee with a very charming girl today. Schoolwise, work has progressed some aswell but I’m still swamped. Getting it all wrapped up and ready to go abroad to study after this semester kind of feels distant at the moment.. Why cant realworld TODO lists dump core and have to be restarted cleared from entries just like crapcoded linked lists with stray pointers ?

Yesterday was spent hanging out at the LinuxForum conference over in Copenhagen which became a nice fieldtrip. The keynote by John Maddog Hall was the usual Linux-zealot rant on how proprietary software is Satan and that Linux is God, amusing but hardly realistic. He did though present some interesting business models for opensource which I had’nt thought about. The next presentation was by FreeBSD coreteam member Robert Watson about FreeBSD SMPng. This presentation really blew me away, both content and presentation was of top quality and I gained further knowledge on the work being done. After a quick lunch, it continued with a presentation on using OpenBSD for embedded devices which mostly consisted of live demonstrations but too gave enough detail and background information to be really nice. Following that was a three-hour chunk of PostgreSQL administration, I had some fears that it would be too much but it turned out nice and time seemed to fly. The last speaker and also the closing keynote was Poul-Henning Kamp (whose phkmalloc memory allocator I am writing my essay on) who held a very good speech on how the UNIX opensource community must stick together around standardization to stand a chance in the future marketplace. The following questions was turned into a battle between John Maddog and Poul-Henning with the latter as clear winner.

All in all this was a very nice day and a big asskick of motivation for further hacking. Listening to interesting talks and speaking to nice people all day, things could be a lot worse. I definately plan on visiting more opensource conferences.

More work is piling up and my schedule is more and more resembling the physical world we live in. Setting sail for the sunset won’t take you to the edge of the world but only to more parts of the world, the more I do the more work get’s added to my TODO list. I’ve managed to squeeze in a much needed reinstallation of my laptop which was in quite bad shape. Every time I do this kind of work I get baffled by the same things.. how great FreeBSD actually is and how poor the state of modern hardware is.. quality engineering seems to be a thing of the past.

The coming Saturday I’ll go to LinuxForum to kind of combine business with pleasure. FreeBSD developers Robert Watson and Poul-Henning Kamp will give speeches on SMP that I plan on attending. Since Poul-Henning Kamp is the author of the allocator implementation I’m basing my essay on it will be interesting to actually kind-of meeting him. Another really cool thing is GeoURL, go check it out and add your site! Check out my neighbours.