Zac Bowling’s Blog

Been a busy week, my first week here at Match.com. I love it! Scooters to get around the office, casual dress, great people, free starbucks coffee/breakfast/lunch/soda, and a bunch more. It couldn’t get any better. My job is challanging and very stimulating.

I’ve been working and building a new gtkembedmoz for win32 whenever I get a chance. It takes so long to build mozilla that it takes a while to fix just one little bug. (mostly enviromental hacks and not accutal code hacks to make things work on windows). I have a fix for those binary compatablity issues. Should make it so we don’t have to roll our own GRE and we can use the Mozilla and Firefox ones. (even though its not porper to use the Firefox one because its a striped and not shared GRE but gtkembedmoz doesn’t use anything that isn’t provided in Firefox’s GRE) That means the installer with the GRE can drop by about 8-9mb since all you will need is just the gtkembedmoz.dll to make it work (may have to included a dll for each major version though since some apis are not frozen and do changed but thats not to bad). The cool thing is that NVU can use my fixes to make NVU smaller by 11mb for win32 as well. I’ve also fixed crashing issues and a memory leak I created in my last testing version with the new SSL and Mozilla plug-in support. Should have it released sometime next week (crossing my fingers for thursday) because I want it to be perfect for both Mozilla 1.7.x and 1.8.x and Firefox 1.0.x.

More to come!

I got the job at Match.com. I’m officialy working for Telligent Systems now, the company I mentioned in my earlier blogs but I’m will spend my time contracted out to Match.com International. I’m so excited. I’m going to be helping the Match.com International team bring everything up to date with the main Match.com site. From the looks of it I’m going the starting on tomorrow morning. That means I’ve got today to get a ton of stuff done and ready. Its just to much fun.

GAPI demystified…
For those wondering how to wrap your favorite gobject library just like the professionals do in Gtk#, GtkSpell#, Gecko#, GtkSourceView#, Gst#, and Gsf#, you have to check out what I’ve got so far on Mono’s wiki.
http://www.mono-project.com/GAPI

‘Match.com International’ Interview
I’ve got an interview today over at Match.com doing intergration/migration of their existing Windows/.NET systems with their existing Linux+Python+Sendmail backend email systems. Wish me luck!

HotOrNot.com
Found my old HotOrNot.com profile this morning thinking of my interview at Match.com today. Enjoy.

I can’t stand this machine anymore. Its too slow. Getting hard rebuilding over and over every day. Down to 3 gigs of free space too. Time to buy a new one. Anyone care to contribute with the ‘help Zac get a new PC so he can program his open source stuff’ fund?

(Yes, I have no shame. hehe :-))

This is from any email I sent explaining my side on the best operating system to program on. I though it was interesting enough as it hashes up a bunch of feelings I know friends of mine have. Might sound a little bit more evangelistic (if thats the right word for it) that I orginally intented but I think its still a good read. Enjoy.

“Honestly, I really don’t have a side. I have what I want on ether system now days to program efficently and I can make anything do anything I want on ether system so it really doesn’t effect me as much as it does the with the advocates of the operating systems might make out.

The main foundation of the reason I work on top of GTK+, glib, and Mono is that I believe in it because its platform independent, and I’m not on the side of the OS vendor but the side of the programmers who I don’t want to see taking part in the OS deciding battle as most are forced to that use technologies only provided by a single OS. I really don’t care about my customers not using open source operating systems (although I do like the security it provides to me as I can patch holes myself on my own systems), but I love the fact that the library I use for porting from system to system is open source (but not open source as in GPL because that is really to restrictive but open source as in public domain, X11, BSD, and LGPL) because it means that another company I can’t control can’t get its hands in where my software I’m writing can go or can’t go or what it can or can’t do.

It gives me the ability to let my customers choose the OS they want and if they don’t want to use Windows or FreeBSD or Solaris later they can switch without loosing my software which is better for me and my customers. It also gives me the ability to package as closed source for anything I want but retain that freedom as well. Also one of the greatest advantages is that if it doesn’t do what I want it to do in the library or its broken in some way, I can change it or reuse its code somewhere else that I come up with, unlike Java or many other libraries in the same catagory. Who can’t see the benefit in that? “

Man, I haven’t been posting as much as I used to.

I posted GtkSpell# into the Mono repository. Check it out at http://svn.myrealbox.com/viewcvs/trunk/gtkspell-sharp/ Seems to have some activity already too. One line of code and you can add it to any TextView. Multilingual support as well and something that Tomboy has been doing themselves. This should build on Win32 as well and you can get the gtkspell dlls from the default Gaim installer and the aspell dictionaries from http://aspell.net/win32/ if you don’t feel like building yourself. If you haven’t seen it yet: http://www.polystimulus.com/Screenshot-GtkSpellSharp.png

I went to meet with the guys at Telligent. They work on the popular CommunityServer software which is really neat stuff. CommunityServer is awesome, pardon the licence as its not normally what we consider open source in the Linux community, but it is still very flexible. I recently had it working on Mono myself (sorry, no link anymore as it was more of an proof of concept at the time). It is used currently on channel9.msdn.com, www.asp.net, weblogs.asp.net, XBox forums, the MSDN blogs, and so many other places. I would say these guys are the most elite developers in the ASP.NET community I’ve seen. Very nice and very relaxed development environment as well. These guys were the most enthusiastic developers in a single company that I’ve ever seen and only comparable to the energy and drive that I see in people related to different open source projects. Maybe because it is a business made up of nearly the best developers in this field. They work hard and play hard as well as evident by the notorious XBox room. I was very impressed with their setup and I hope I get to work with them very soon.

I’m working on a lot of little things I hope to release soon, but mostly its been pretty busy lately.

Also, my prayers go out to Paco and his family. I’m happy to see him again after what must of been the hardest week of his life loosing his son to the war in Iraq. Take care Paco.