Latests posts in category: Koala

Well, it has finally happened, the dual-faced Janus what makes both the beauty of Open Source projects, and its Dark side, have come to visit the twiki Project. The Fork is here! Strangely this time, it is the project founder, Peter Thoeny who "forked out" most of the active developers of the Open Source project by locking them out of the project. Ironically he seemed to have so much dreared a fork that he finally decided to provoke a "preeemptive fork" to clear things out, and reach an often seen configuration where a private company sells a product based on an Open Source offering, with a community knowingly contributing to enhance a product belonging to a single company, but getting a better product in return. This is not a bad situation in itself, for wikis it is already the case with xwiki and deki, the problems came in TWiki case as the company came very late in the picture, and could be seen as "highjacking" the TWiki built by the community.

We will see what happens, but I would like you to read the excellent article made nearly a decade ago, WHY LINUX WON'T FORK - And why being able to fork is still A Good Thing. If all goes well, it will end up in more technical directions explored, each project incorporating the good ideas of the other one. If not, the crisis will show the bad side of many people, and will discourage contributors watching from the outside 2 communities dying from the lack of a critical mass.

As I was asked to take sides, I chose the "fork" camp, as I feel that it is where lies the heart of the community that actually made the modern TWiki. We will see how it evolves, but the beauty of open source is that both projects will be able to use the advances of the other one - if one do not end a proprietary fork. May we live in interesting times!

For more info, see:

• On the TWiki.net Company side
  • the announce
  • the site
  • The twiki irc logs at the time of the fork,
  • the meeting log of the release meeting the fork was decided
• On the Community side
  • the new site (Nextwiki is a temporary name)
  • The twiki_fork irc logs at the time of the fork
  • testimonials

In the news:

• Hostile takeover of Open Source Project TWiki on slashdot
• TWiki.net Kicks Out All TWiki Contributors on slashdot
• TWiki's hunt for cash fractures its community on CNet
• Quarrel over TWiki - Friendly Takeover by Founder? on Linux Magazine
• reddit entry
• digg entry

On the blogs of:

• Koen Martens
• Michael Daum
• Kwang Ern Liew
• Sven Dovedoit
• Kenneth Lavrsen

I stumbled upon the blog post "Is it important to write good code?" the other day, and became more and more ill at ease as I realized that I thought that I preferred the original code, that the author was trying to ridicule, over his new "improved" object-oriented version. At first I guessed this was another manifestation of the the "Worst is best" scenario - enhancements are often not worth the added complexity - but I realized that it was perhaps a more profound factor:

The original code is very good because it ... is small!. It fits on a teminal screen, so an human being can read it at once and have less items to maintain in his short term memory and also understand it easily because it follows a natural way of thinking with sentences using IF. This becomes obvious by reading the body of the blog post surrounding the code samples, where you can see that the author is using phrases such as "if I need this I do that", showing that in plain english, the if statement is the best way to make people understand what you mean. And making code that people understand is the best way to make debuggable and maintainable code.

At this moment I noticed the citation in the blog header: "Good programmers write code that humans can understand"

Indeed :-)

PS: I know I am a bit exaggerating the issues there, and that I unfairly nitpick on Fredrik Normé, but it is that it seems to me from my personal experience that the two changes I see most in my coding efficiency as I grow older is a decrease of my short term memory capacity, and that I make more and more typos where I realize I mix up totally words with totally different meanings but that sound the same, for instance writing "never" instead of "nether, making me suspect that our natural way of thinking may be much more language-based that I imagined...

For some time now, I have seen the light and I switched to the new wave of the Distributed Source Control management systems. Linus famous video of his Google talk decided me to try. I was a bit apprehensive at first, wary of engaging myself on a technology that would bring more problems than solutions, but after some days of use, the realisation dawned over me: Distributed Source Control may be one little step for a programmer, but it is a giant step for programming. Why? because, its mental model actually follows your first intuitions that most of us developed as young programmers before using any source control system. Suppose you want to try a feature? instead of just copying the directory, you clone it. You mess an operation? you just remove the directory, no embarrassing traces left to keep the burning scar of shame on you for the following decades of a central repository. You are used to think of your enhancements as patches, you can work with patches. I could go on and on, but many people have done it much better than me so I'll just say that you should definitely try it.

By the way, between the 3 main contenders, git, mercurial (aka HG), and bazaar, I chose mercurial because of its simplicity, its better support of windows (I work in Linux since 1995 but my coworkers currently use Windows), and because some people at ILOG started using git so I wanted to be able to try something else. I did not choose bazaar as I wanted to stay close enough of git, to be able to switch to it if ever my dream to work in a windows-free world materializes one day...

So I started to set up a public web repository of my Open Source personal work with mercurial, which gave me a simple way to publish my work in full detail, but, although mercurial is quite easy to use, but I had a bit of trouble figuring out how to customize its look & feel. So I have made a small cookbook on how to do it that you can find at the page Customizing the style of a HG / mercurial web repository

I am an avid windsurfer, or maybe I was. The sport is now mature (I have started in ... 1975), and have somewhat lost the excitement we enjoyed before as the state of the art was constantly progressing, but have stagnated for some years now. It even kind of became an "old people sport", as the new generation - even my daughter - took on kiteboarding instead which is easier to learn and less physically taxing, especially when you must carry all the gear on soft sand.

But the excitement is back, in the form of a... return to the roots! First a lot of people began to put a windurfer rig on top of a surfboard, specifically the new large SUP boards, able to support more weight than regular surfboards, not unlike tandem boards. It is really a return to the roots, as the first windsurfer was conceived exactly in this manner (putting a rig on a longboard). However, this time, thanks to the progress both in windsurfing technique, sails, rigs and fins, and board construction and shape, the result has nothing in common with the early sailboards. Even Robby Naish, our God of windsurfers has tried it too.

Then,what happened to surfing has been happening also to this "new old" surfing-with-a-sail reinvention of sailboarding. First, we saw the "hotdogging" movement I witnessed in my surfing youth with wide and shorter boards, with a fin placed full forward and a step to release the water flow at the tail. For surfing it was the famous 1970 stingers of Ben Aipa, for windsurfing the Kona with a step bottom, and modern windsurfing traits that are the pad and straps.

And now, we are entering surfing's 1960s and its the twin finned short fish, with the new AHD Sea lion, a strapless twin fin, and even some custom boards like the one in the picture

We are even seeing the return of soft cloth (aka Dacron) sails, in the form of the new superfreak. Although I must confess that I am not ready to move back from my beloved Ezzy sails.

So, I am back on a windsurfer after 33 years, with my new Kona and Sea Lion, ready for new adventures... see you on the water!

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Update 2008-10-20

See some nice descriptions and photos (french) of a trial day of the sea lion at the U-ride forum, and videos of this week-end ( video1, video2, video3 ).