Nothing, in the Pursuit of Perfection
I have fallen into the most dangerous trap of a computer programmer: doing nothing in the pursuit of perfection. When I left my job at Saint Patrick’s I promised that I would have my new weblog running very soon, and promised an exciting new development to boot… which was silly of me, because I had great plans but no working code to go with those plans. So I have not had a weblog for almost six months, because I kept telling myself that I would get up one day and my new weblog software would magically write itself.
I have given up those silly perfectionist dreams and returned to WordPress on my new website, and found a nice surprise: WordPress is a lot better than it was, and it has solved a lot of the complaints I originally had with it. I will be looking into WordPress extensions to make this blog even easier for you (my readers) to use: please let me know if you have suggestions.
It is good to be blogging again, because I have lots of ideas and decisions that I need to talk about. I have a backlog of ideas that I’ve wanted to blog about for the past six months, so expect some serious blog output in the next few days while I get caught up with myself.
Most importantly, the Mozilla Foundation has hired me (working remotely from Pennsylvania) to take XULRunner and libxul by the horns and wrestle them into a workable software solution. I am also spending a significant amount of time on the build system and such for localizations.
I’m aware that my website has broken links here and there, and that the import of the old blog database has left some dangling links. I’ll fixup what I can when I can, but it’s a low-priority task ;-) .
July 10th, 2005 at 1:02 am
I’m really glad to hear that the foundation is devoting some resources to promote XUL as a stand-alone application environment! I looked at it a couple of years ago to do a real-time data collection application for a client, but decided that it was too unstable and unsupported at the time.
I’m really interested in contributing to this project, for the selfish reason that I really want to see certain XML-related features make their way into the XUL codebase. I haven’t built Mozilla since 2001, so I’m still trying to get my Win32 build environment together.
I’ve never really done Open Source development before, so I’ll apologize in advance if I’m asking obvious questions, but is there a list of work items/issues for XULRunner beyond those on the Wiki? I looked in Bugzilla and didn’t see anything.
Anyway, happy to hear that someone’s taking charge of this project!
July 10th, 2005 at 2:00 pm
1. Congrats on being hired by MoFo
2. WordPress is a rather solid product, if you don’t take the easy route and just hack files. Use extensions and templates as much as possible. I’ve been using WP for several months now, and it’s been great. Just make sure not to start hacking, or your’ll create an update nightmare, and waste so much time. Keep it in extensions, and upgrades take seconds. And let you get the latest improvements quick. I also like some of the spam prevention plugins for WordPress. So much better than what exists for MovableType and others.
August 7th, 2005 at 3:09 pm
“I have fallen into the most dangerous trap of a computer programmer: doing nothing in the pursuit of perfection.”
Same here! For about 3 months now (since I migrated to Gentoo) I have stopped doing a lot of things because my system wasn’t perfect yet. It’s alright now, but I had stopped using Thunderbird and Firefox until I had them automatically building every night and backing up previous builds (for regression testing) and backing up my profile and logging build errors. I could easily have downloaded nightlies and used them, but I was “doing nothing in the pursuit of perfection.” It happens alot to me. I also haven’t started a blog yet because I want to create my own blogging system. Same as how I haven’t opened a forum yet. Ah well, such is the life of a developer…
Oh yeah, supar congratulayshuns on being hired. I think XULRunner is fantastic, hopefully a world-changing product.
August 8th, 2005 at 2:33 pm
[…] Bugzilla is a pretty good bug tracking tool, but it’s painfully unsuited at task management and software scheduling. Joel recommends a simple spreadsheet, but that has some serious problems when I need to expose the data for lots of people on the web, and probably need to allow multiple programmers to fill in data. Instead of doing nothing, waiting for bugzilla to get better, I have written a little tool to help me manage XULRunner. It uses a custom XML dialect and some XBL magic to create a hierarchical list of tasks, with estimated and actual times for completion, and automatic totals. […]
August 18th, 2005 at 9:47 pm
Well, I fully agree with your comment. :-)
BTW: I visited your blog earlier today and I just wanted to congratulate you on a well presented, and informative resource.
It’s not often that I come across a web site that offers a wealth of quality. ;-)
Martin (aka POS Software Man)