fifo.nl

Our site has remained dormant for quite a while and we get the occasional visitor on the irc channel poking us with a stick to check for rigor mortis. It’s not that bad, actually. We’re very close to a 1.0 release, code-wise, and have been for quite a while. But the devil is in the details and the details are definitely in the packages. When we started the project, Debian 4 and CentOS 4 were sensible stable targets. Obviously, they’re not anymore. So our first effort into getting ready for a testable pre-1.0 branch is to pick up whatever pile of paperclips and rubber bands we used to autobuild the packages for both these platforms and re-adopt the contraption to work with their newer distro brethern, CentOS 5 and Debian 5.

The whole operation of converting to newer distros turned out to be a tremendous pain, basically leaving us at square one packaging-wise. At that point we decided to concentrate resources even further and focus first on Debian 5 as a target for OpenPanel. Right now we’re getting help from Tomas Šiaulys who is kicking the builds into submission. If you’re not afraid of a compiler and know a bit about packaging, perhaps you could help out as well. Drop by in #openpanel on the oftc irc network and ask around. We could also use a couple of CSS/javascript people to take a look at any dangling issues in that department.

Speaking of the GUI, it has become quite a magical environment. Widgets respond correctly to keyboard commands and focus events. We’ve been paying a lot of attention to little details. The look has been completely refreshed from the alpha release, following a more modern layout style. The GUI also scales with the browser vertically, leaving less screen real estate wasted:

A precise E.T.A. for the public release is hard to give. We’ll try to post more frequent updates as the 1.0 target approaches. Thanks for hanging on.

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pa href="http://blog.madscience.nl/Site/Podcast/972012cc-b8c8-4600-bec3-cc3e4dd36ebb/pim_van_riezen-to_the_moon.mp3"img src="http://blog.madscience.nl/Site/Podcast/972012cc-b8c8-4600-bec3-cc3e4dd36ebb/icon.jpg" style="float:left; padding-right:10px; padding-bottom:10px; width:128px; height:128px;"//aPim van Riezen (MadPodcast) - 00:04:49/p

pa href="http://blog.madscience.nl/Site/Podcast/95d9cc5f-ab79-4323-aa8b-2df08c723551/pim_van_riezen-seeing_you_laugh.mp3"img src="http://blog.madscience.nl/Site/Podcast/95d9cc5f-ab79-4323-aa8b-2df08c723551/icon.jpg" style="float:left; padding-right:10px; padding-bottom:10px; width:128px; height:128px;"//aPim van Riezen (MadPodcast) - 00:05:29/p

pa href="http://blog.madscience.nl/Site/Podcast/a843a101-a2bb-4278-b7a6-f92a06998a0c/pim_van_riezen-blue_people_of_kentucky.mp3"img src="http://blog.madscience.nl/Site/Podcast/a843a101-a2bb-4278-b7a6-f92a06998a0c/icon.jpg" style="float:left; padding-right:10px; padding-bottom:10px; width:128px; height:128px;"//aPim van Riezen (MadPodcast) - 00:04:22/p

Pim van Riezen (MadPodcast Sessions) - 00:03:03

Pim van Riezen (MadPodcast Sessions) - 00:08:07

Pim van Riezen (MadPodcast Sessions) - 00:04:34

Greenhouse (Industry Inside) - 00:05:36

Recently I decided to bring some life to the Grace homepage. I always expected it to spawn some controversy so I’ve not been surprised by seeing a vocal group of people dismissing its ideas out of hand. One of the most colorful reviews is one that could only make me chuckle: “it’s like Java and PHP gang-raped a Makefile”. I’m not likely to make too much out of reactions like that, these are questions about taste where you just can’t please everyone (and shouldn’t try).

Another reason why I don’t worry about art critics in this context is that, even if Grace were a library with only a single user, it would still help me get my stuff done in a way that I enjoy. It has already proven its value and given me an excellent return on investment using it in a lot of roles. It scratched my itch and that is fine.

I do find some of the negativism on sites like reddit interesting as a phenomenon. I’ve thought of this as a factor of the functional programming cartel that seems to be hanging out at such places. And I realized that this way of looking at it is just as dismissive and childish, so it made me wonder how it can be that there seems to be this great wall between that crowd and the typical ISP/Unix nerd demographic I normally interact with.

When looking at software, I reckon there are two approaches. Some people, when they think about code, see a world of math. For me, what I mostly see is flying bits, an interconnected lego-world of action-reaction patterns that makes intuitive sense. I think both approaches are valid, but obviously they lead to a completely different view on software development.

Naturally I may be suffering from confirmation bias on this subject, but I get the impression that those of us that are more into this direct approach to programming are the ones producing most of the real, living software out there. I can definitely see areas where a more distanced and abstract approach like functional programming can make a difference, but a lot of software development is really about moving bits from A to B, more about rolling up your sleeves and building it than mulling about algorithms and monads; lego, not math.