Enfranchised Mind » Robert Fischer

I Don’t Get It

Robert Fischer — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:29:31 +0000

When encountering a bug in an open source project, most Java people seem unwilling to either fix it themselves or pay the maintainer to fix it—they’d rather abandon the project or kludge their software painfully and repetitively. WTF?

Comments

February 5, 2010, Hamlet D'Arcy wrote: In the past my problem has been that my organization would not let me rely on a personal or nightly build of a project. So when you need a workaround by the end of the week, waiting 2 months for the next release candidate of an OS project is not an option. ... now go release JConch 1.2.
February 5, 2010, Dave wrote: I've encountered this a few times. Sometimes, I'm trying to get things done, so I hack around the problem and then there's not always time to go back and learn a new codebase to submit a patch. Further, having submitted a few patches to a maven plugin (a piece of software I cannot stand, but submitted anyway), it's been months since I uploaded a freakin' zip file to their JIRA and no movement. I also think compared to, say, Ruby, a lot of Java packages are very large and complex. If I find a bug in Spring or Hibernate, my chances of even navigating the codebase to find out where the problem is are nil. And Spring is actually pretty clean code; I mucked through JSCh and the maven release plugin and was HORRIFIED at how awful the code was. And then there's the myriad build systems and spotty tests; One of the Castor devs asked me write a test or he wouldn't accept my patch; my patch was to make his code actually compile. And their tests on trunk (and release tag) didn't pass. Meanwhile, on github, I've submitted patches to things that I wrote and tested in less time than it took to find the svn link on Apache's site. I've also incorporated others changes to my code (that they didn't even submit). Granted these things are not as complex as Spring, but, well, maybe that's a good thing?
February 5, 2010, Dave wrote: @Hamlet D'Arcy in your case, I have imported the released version I'm using into our company's svn repo and made changes I needed against that, then deployed THAT to our maven repo. It was painful, but worked.
February 5, 2010, Robert Fischer wrote: Argh. I've totally forgotten about JConch 1.2. Just released it. It's now a Gradle-based build (I wanted to OSGi-ify the project and have a Maven repo).
February 5, 2010, Peter Niederwieser wrote: From my experience, most developers aren't even willing to take the time to report a bug they encounter...
February 6, 2010, Aristotle Pagaltzis wrote: I agree with Peter – I actually tweeted the same observation just a few weeks ago. I got one response to that that didn’t satisfy me either. It’s not limited to Java either.
February 6, 2010, James Carr wrote: Yeah... this has often surprised me as well. I've witnessed a team try to use some open source solution and give up because of a minor bug and go to a much more difficult to use proprietary solution (which amusingly had more critical bugs). I was also surprised when at my current client site they actually asked me spend a week working on fixing a bug in an open source project and submit a patch... that's definitely the best attitude to have. :)

This post was by Robert Fischer, written on February 5, 2010.
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The Gradual Death of IE6 Just Got a Nitro Boost

Robert Fischer — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:51:27 +0000

From the Official Google Enterprise Blog:

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.

w00t! Die, IE6, die!

This post was by Robert Fischer, written on February 2, 2010.
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Going to be at Twin Cities Software Symposium (Spring)

Robert Fischer — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:59:36 +0000

I’ve been scheduled at the Twin Cities Software Symposium (Spring) — it’ll be my first time presenting back home, and I’m looking forward to it. You can see my schedule over on the NFJS site: as of this writing, it’s three concurrency talks and “Agile Practices Overview: A Tactics Retrospective”. Looks like fun.

If you’re from MN and coming, it’ll be great to see you there. If you’re not from MN and you’d like to see me in your area, let NFJS know or contact me via the form on SmokejumperIT.com.

This post was by Robert Fischer, written on February 1, 2010.
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New Layout and Design Facelift

Robert Fischer — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:07:02 +0000

Thanks to Alicia Weller. It started a minor clean-up of the previous theme and (like most software projects) evolved into something much more interesting and exciting. There’s now a big area for features (e.g. open source projects), a space for “Classic Enfranchised Mind” posts, and an excerpt (instead of full-text) based front page. We’ve also shifted to the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking, which helps speed up load times.

We stuck with the same header: the stylized picture of Downtown Minneapolis as scene across Lake Calhoun. That set the color palette, and the rest of it fell out from there. All in all, I’m really happy.

The development was all able to be done in one day because Alicia leveraged the Thematic theme framework for WordPress. It was pretty impressive to watch things come together so fast.

Swing over to the home page and check it out.

If you want her to do some updates for your website layout and/or design, contact her via GraphicKarma.com.

This post was by Robert Fischer, written on January 31, 2010.
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WPTouch Enabled

Robert Fischer — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 03:19:02 +0000

If you’ve got a smart phone, would you mind hitting http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog with it and letting me know how it looks? I’ve installed a plugin to add mobile support to WordPress, and I’d like feedback.

Comments

January 27, 2010, Cody Brimhall wrote: Looks great from my iPhone!
January 27, 2010, Nathan L. Walls wrote: I just checked Mobile Safari and it looks good. Actions for showing/hiding post summary from the index page works. Good default view per post.
January 28, 2010, Mike wrote: Looks great from an iPhone. Great plugin, like the share features.
January 28, 2010, Luis Arias wrote: Looks great from my Motorola Milestone running Android 2.1
January 28, 2010, Jason wrote: I checked with my android browser. Everything looked good there too.
January 28, 2010, Alicia wrote: Looks great. Remind me to have you take a peek from my touch.

This post was by Robert Fischer, written on January 27, 2010.
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