November 2005 Archives
It’s been a couple of years since I looked into boost. I thought it was cool then, and apparently it has just kept on rocking since. Lambda functions, threads, unit testing, assignment helpers, serialization, and much much much more. There seems to be a library for every missing part in the C++ standard library, and also a bunch of new functionalities. I’m as amazed as the first time I looked at it.
Browsing the code is also something. Some of the stuff is just outright beautifully done (depending a lot on the definition of beautiful, and accepting that C++ is an ugly language from the start of :) ).
What is sad for me, is that I cannot use this in Mozilla. That’s why I normally keep away from stuff like this in the first place — it only makes me sad in the long run. I need to start a “pet project” where I can actually use C++…
Peter has talked about it for some time, but now his MozzIE project is available on Sourceforge! It is a plugin that allows you to use Gecko as a rendering engine to display XHTML and XForms (and SVG I think) in Internet Explorer. It also includes various patches of his own, that we (slowly) are incorporating in our codebase.
I haven’t tried it myself (I have no Windows installation), so I have no idea how it works, etc.
Argh! I would have liked to buy “KT Tunstall — Eye to the Telescope”, but once again I’m unable to buy music because of the messed up music industry.
If I go to the store, the “CD” is copy-protected which gives playback problems on my stereo. Ok, even though I’m old-school and would like to have a physical CD, I could also buy it as a downloadable album… or not! I have no Windows installation so I cannot use WMA, and not iTunes either.
Why oh why does the music industry set up these obstacles for the customers? Seeing everybody as a potential pirate is heading down the wrong path IMHO. Come on “major record label”: Make the music available easy and cheap, and live with the fact that somebody will steal it. That will happen no matter what — face it! No amount of obstacles will ever stop that. Instead you are hurting sales with this. I used to buy 2-10 CDs a month, now I’m down to 1-2 because of all this cr*p. Nice going!
Update: In my anger I totally forgot to mention the Sony rootkit affair, as a fantastic example of how twisted the minds of record companies are. Schneier (of course) has a good entry about it.
The rumours about cuts at Novell were true, and it hit our Novell XForms R&D office quite drastically: We (including me) exist no more :(
Talk about bad timing. Firefox 1.5 is about to hit the shops, opening up for XForms — and I believe XForms in general is starting to pick up speed. I’m really sad to leave the colleagues, the office, and “the XForms project” in general. I hope to be able to finish off the XForms extension somehow, but frankly I’m having a hard time finding the motivation right now.
I hope to find the motivation, and possibly a “sponsor” to at least get XForms 1.0 done for Firefox. I’ll probably hang around irc until the end of November, and try to do some Mozilla work.
Let me say that I’ve really enjoyed working with Mozilla, and all the good and smart people involved in the project. After November the future’s quite uncertain. So, if I do not get a chance later: Have fun with the project, it was really nice to be part of it as long as it lasted!
… Allan (allan @ “guess what” dot dk)
