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Some guy called Caolan asked B^>:

• what editor do you use?
  Vim, but its not a religious choice. The first manuals I got for unix had the vi chapter before the emacs one :-). Though I really got into vim when on co-op I had an awesomely slow connection back to skynet and vim was far easier to use over the link.

• Do you use revision control systems of some kind, and have you any serious thoughts on the matter?
  The abiword project uses CVS and I use CVS there. Apart from that I have little experience with it. I do think that there are some serious flaws with using CVS for globally distributed projects such as gnome, Mozilla kde etc etc. Putting the Linux kernel into CVS for instance would be a disaster. What people forget when they suggest using CVS is that there is one central server that you have to contact to keep in sync. A project running from a CVS server in the US is a project which is difficult for a european to work with. A single point of failure, and slow connect and update times. I really feel strongly that CVS is something that shouldn't be used for gnome or Mozilla. It's fine if there is a committed group of core developers who live near the server :-), but it makes it very difficult for the casual hacker to sweep in and make a few modifications, you have to find the server, CVS login, CVS checkout, CVS update, compile, it doesn't compile, you mess with it for a while, it compiles but at this stage you're bored because you only wanted to see if it is supporting graphics yet so that you can test adding tiff support to it etc....
  CVS to me is inherently a catheral masquerading as a bazaar, CVS is a small moat to keep the hordes one step removed from you code.
  You can make it work correctly though, I think the wine project has the best CVS system for this kind of project, i.e.
  • Regular weekly/biweekly tars and diffs of the tree that actually build which are mirrored everywhere, and are close enough to the current CVS tree that an update takes a very small time.
  • Mailinglist of changes that were made to the tree.
  • Its in Denmark which is reasonably fast for me :-)
  
  Maybe the CVS people should work on a CVS mirroring system, would be a toughy to do I think, but worth looking into. Also someone (we are planning it on skynet) should provide a service to automatically convert CVS tree to regular tar files and run test builds. Plonk them in ftp archieve files marked with the date and their build status. Point the script at the main CVS trees around the world and let it rip, a very positive service methinks.

• Favorite language, C, C++, some half arsed scripting language like perl? (duck)
  Definitely C, I have some fondness for C++, but you have to keep a tight rein on yourself to stop overdesigning some very aesthetically pleasing class hierarchies which provide clean interfaces and hide complexity, which might look nice but do nothing :-). I find myself eventually looking at a very nice structure which nevertheless achieves nothing. Lots of passing the buck around the system sort of pushing the execution flow about the place aimlessly, but thats probably just me. As for stuff like tcl,perl and so on, nice stuff but use them for glue between other things, using them to write something serious seems like a disaster to me.

• X vs console?
  X, loads of xterms I admit, but I like a good graphical system. Couldn't live without netscape.

• Favorite hardware and os platform?
  Whatever I can get, I've been happy with x86 and Linux for ages. So many of the other unices are sucky when it comes to third party utilities and libraries. I hate platforms that lack standard stuff like libpng libjpeg etc etc.

• did you ever attempt to write yet another
  • window manager?
    Thought about it, dismissed the idea pretty quickly.
  
  
  • widget set?
    Oh yes, I did some serious thinking and started into a widget set before QT and GTK came out. Written in C++ and called chameleon, it was supposed to be uber-configurable with each widget a shared library and some dlopen trickery to allow for instance a fileopen dialog to be completely swapped with another one completely different in look and feel. Panning widgets could be swapped so that you can go from a system with scrollbars on the left and bottom to one where you got the panner style of scrolling that you see in apps like editres. Nice idea, never really got off the ground because I spent my time trying to munge the exiting Xaw and other Xt based widgets into the framework. I wanted to leverage all the existing widgets into the system and failed miserably.
  
  
  • X replacement?
    No way, I do want to see some X improvements though. Printing and fonts are really a painful area that we come against over and over again, but I think they can be sorted out with custom extensions and so on. But replacing X sounds foolish to me. Sure you can attempt to change the architecture of our Xservers completely and that might be nice, so long as we can run all the existing X programs and use the same protocol I'm happy.
  
  
  • programming language?
    Hah!, nope.
  
  
  • operating system?
    Nope to that too.
  
  

• Has anyone offered to pay you/hire you based upon your open source product?
  Yep :-), 8 job offers in 10 months and a few small contracts for modifications and extensions, nothing big but got me out of overdraft a few times, though I'm back in it again.

• What application or component is Linux most lacking?
  Video editing tools like adobe premier, and the lack of sound creating and editing tools is woeful. We have StarOffice for word processing, we have Gnome for looking good, Gnumeric for spreadsheets, Oracle and MySql etc etc for databases, Gimp for graphics. Basically we're looking good. Some work needed to round out the full suite of applications, but no real sound tools, no real video tools. No equivalents for any good multimedia work.

• Is that your first interview by anyone?
  yes.

Damien O'Sullivan asked:

• When are you going to cut your hair like airlied and Kate??
  When I'm as old and senile as them?

• Do you feel tempted to answer this question on list??
  No, just to stick a fork in your eye.

Mark Twomey asked a question in two parts...

• In your opinion if Linux is to become a mass market solution, available to users of different technical ability and skill, what segments in the community's current development process (if any) do you believe have to change...?
  Some of the larger Linux companies need to do some serious user studies of the usage of the systems, identify the bottlenecks that users perceive and get actual evidence of what Linux needs. Some actual field studies, formal testing and evidence gathering. There are far too many unsubstantiated opinions on what needs to be done or what direction Linux should go in. I think we need to actually video tape a couple of hundred Linux users in their workplaces and study what they do. See what applications they use, what problems they face and what the requirements are. Free software is reaction based, find a problem and fix it. I think that we need to identify clearly some of the problems that are so big and obvious that we cannot even see them anymore.

• Following that, how soon do you believe we can move from the "hard and fast" development cycle, to delivering elegant, usable solutions that will appeal to a mass market?
  The hard and fast development cycle gets stuff done. Designing elegent solutions that live in the clouds and never actually get implemented is a trap that we must avoid. I do think that it would be a good idea for RedHat and LinuxCare etc to hire polishers. People who's job is to keep an eye on the software scene and add the last layer of polish to programs, i.e. Make them look good. Port programs fully over to Linux, modify programs to use standard libraries. Break programs into reusable libraries etc.. A small team of "software gardeners" to add that last few percent to programs to bring everything that last step.
  But I do think the commercial Linux companies have a large part to play, and it's to their advantage to support the existing software model. I think they could be a very positive force to improve the overall level of usability of Linux.

Mel asked:

• What made you work on MsWordview in the first place?
  Same as most gnu style projects, I needed to read word documents, and nothing was available for Linux, even staroffice at the time could only handle non fastsaved documents. And strings didn't really cut it :-)

• What is your motivation for working on free software?
  Sticking it to the man? No really it was just to fill a void. Programmers abhor a vacuum maybe? No-one else was doing it, it needed doing and I reckoned I could make enough of a start to get the ball rolling, though I have to admit a certain lack of submitted code. I attribute most of that to my lack of comments, unclear code and hodge podge approach to problem solving :-)

• Do you work on free software because it's entertaining or because of the "fame" it gets you?
  Entertaining, I could regale you for hours on the joys of parsing undocumented structures. Theres nothing like finding the solution to an intractable problem to get that fuzzy glow of accomplishment.

• What do you think motivates people to work on free software?
  Its not fame based. I see many projects starting from large public announcements and grandious crowd pleasing plans that never seem to pan out. The sucessful ones start with a few people who have a well defined problem that affects them directly in their own day to day life and they attempt to solve it. The "free" bit is an afterthought for most people. Free because it was to solve a problem of their own, and now that they have achieved that, why not solve everyones else at the same time. Personally I was motivated to release it for free because of all the free stuff that *I* had used, where would we be without gcc, Linux and the gnu project. If you havn't the money to donate to gnu etc etc you might as well give code in return.

• If you had to start MsWordView again, would you?
  Yeah, it was good fun.

• Is the "fame" worth the grief?
  Theres no fame, maybe an email or two a day saying thanks, which is nice . But temper that against four or five looking for a new feature or moaning that it doesn't compile under sgi or hpux or sommat and it can get you down some days as well.

• Do you think the reward for msWordView (many kudos) exceeded the effort it took to write it in the first place?
  I suppose it has balanced out fairly well for me. Im content the way things have panned out.

• What brought you from computer engineering to software engineering which are VERY different disciplines?
  Im not too sure what you're getting at here, as I'm not doing software engineering, Im currently doing Human Computer Interaction, which was part of my masterplan to gain the kind skills that I believe are necessary to design and write quality software which people directly interact with, it ties in nicely with computer engineering where you never consider the people that use the system, just the technical issues. Raw HCI on the other hand can often lack a certain hard focus that you get in engineering disciplines, so I think they both tally well together.

• Do you think you will continue work on MsWordView even though you will be paid by Star division to work on their stuff?
  Dunno really, we'll wait and see. I need to move on a bit, Ive stagnated in Limerick far too long, so I'd like a clean break from everything that I'm doing right now.

• Are you going to cut your hair or is your programming ability tied to the length to your hair like Samson?
  Is a programmers ability connected to the length of their hair?
  Yes, it's definitely directly proportional to the length of hair. Never heard of a good shorthaired programmer. Hair is a bogon shield, the more you have, the less bugs you get.
  ( http://www.it.com.au/jargon/bogon.html)

• In your opinion, how important is facial hair to GPL software?
  Facial hair is completely different of course, beards are strange attractors and cause all sorts of problems. I'm a bit concerned about this strange obsession with bodily hair that crops up frequently in these questions, odd people.

Harry Walsh asked:

• How much time do you spend every week on your projects?
  Far far too much, my thesis has suffered incredibly, I spend about 2 days of my 9-5 time working in it, and usually every evening, though the evenings are usually spend reading a book while checking on the progress of the automated testing searching for crashes and malformed output html.

• Why do you do it? Why the word format? wvWare has become a very useful library now. But in the beginning it must have looked like such a mammoth task. Did you always intend it to get this far, or is it snowballing like Linux did?
  It completely snowballed, there were a few text extractors for word docs previous, basically strings with bells and whistles attached, but I gave the spec a read when it came avaiable and decided to implement the "fastsave" algorithm so as to be able to dump just the text of the document. That required a load of code :-), tables seemed natural after that, and lists, then graphics. Some character properties seemed like a good idea then, just bold and italic I said to myself, that got out of hand quickly. Para properties, etc etc. The abiword project started and began using mswordview as their word import filter, and mswordview was always intended as a quick and dirty word to html filter so I had to call a halt and restart the whole thing as wv, so that abiword and others could use it. This time round I added word 6 and 7 support. Then I had to implement a wmf converter as well because there was none for Linux, then I got sucked into implementing the "escher file format" in which most of the graphics are embedded. Its escher that I'm looking at today for instance.
  The encrypted word97 document problem annoyed me for a long while, it was always low priority, but niggling at me for ages. It was a real internet power of colloboration thing that got that started and completed, once 97 was done I could do 95/6 encryption in an evening as its poxy encryption. I started, but stopped as it was getting really off into a tangent, a word6/7 encryption recovery program. You don't really need the password to decrypt them, there is so much available non encrypted information which you can use to decrypt it anyway.
  The thing was that I got a bit obsessive about the whole conversion thing, I believe that it's of paramount importance for Linux/unix to be able to interoperate transparently with the rest of the computing world. Better samba, better office import ability, up to date readers for .ra , modern html, vector file formats, etc etc. These are vital. Its the interoperability of data that I believe is a prime limiting factor for the take up of Linux by ordinary users. You can have the best filesystem, fastest graphics, coolest interface, but it's all nothing unless you can move over to Linux from your older system and bring both your own older data with you and keep interoperability with your friends on their legacy systems such as windows and macos.

• What next? wvWare can only go so far. Do you intend to chase Microsoft file formats for ever? I think someone with your initiative and motivation could move onto more important things if a strong and motivated wvWare development team were to form. What are your thoughts on this whole area?
  Im joining stardivision/sun in janurary (signed contract today), initially to continue on in the same vein as before, and certainly into different areas after that. But the whole data transformation thing facinates me (at the moment anyway). Data transformations and serious code reuse is what Im thinking about at now. The kind of things that I envison are metaformats and transformation routes between data formats, data translation and handling orbs. Universal data formats for various data families. XML is an envelope into which you can put data and unicode is a format in which you can store your raw text, but theres more to be done yet. Universal drawing, word processing and spreadsheet formats, mechanisms to find a route with the minimal loss of data between formats, methods of determing a numerical value to put on the quality of a transformation route. You receive something in your mail, click on it and the client contacts its local translation broker with a list of what you can handle and it get munged into one of those formats.
  Other things that bother me in this family of problem is that not alone should we use libraries for everything, one libpng, one libjpeg. But we should follow this technique through to everything. Extended to the absolute hilt. You can use XML to describe a UI, you can use libraries to reuse and share code, why do we have so many window managers, email programs, crap browsers, editors etc etc etc. We should have one -lWindowManager which provides all the core code that a window manager needs, one libpop which will pop mail down for you, one libimap, etc etc etc. One core WindowManager program whos ui is a XML description that can be tweaked and utterly modified. Not just change a few skins, but change the layout etc etc. You can see feelers in that direction in many well designed programs that you see, the new Mozilla for instance. Just about every program that exists on a unix system should be max about 50 60k, with the vast majority of code in big documented libraries that you can grab functionality out of in an instant. That whole perl reimplementation of all the unix basic commands that I saw underway at one stage is something that should be done in C for Linux. I want libls dammit !, I've got a brand new interface for ls and I want to do it now, yesterday. system and pipes et al are all very well, but you really need to link against the bastards to do everything you want without grief. One bloody link list implementation, give me more of that glib stuff and ill take a dash of STL while I'm at it, and give me more useful libraries. If you write a graphical program put the vast majority of your non graphical code in a seperate library and link against it. It makes the world a more pleasant place.

John "Kate" Looney asked:

• What do you think it is that drives perfectly normal people to re-write "hi-profile" software, like window managers and mail clients, when there are so many out there already, in desperate need of improvement?
  I reckon most of these types of rewrites are slightly outside the usual "I have a problem, I must fix it". They are usually of the "I want to write some software to get some practice/kudos/learn something about how it all works". Which are all admirable reasons to do something, the catch with this approach is that you don't have a well defined goal. So as soon as you gain that practice/realize noone want to hear about your yet another thingy/learn what you want to know, then the project tends to dissappear into the mud again. Usually half finished and missing enough functionality to be useful. I also wonder how many projects stop because in the rewrite of an alternative to an exiting project with a certain flaw, the new writer realizes that the flaw they want to avoid in their swishy new project is a workaround for a problem which is intractable otherwise. Or they find that their shiny new feature is going to be incredibly difficult to achieve, like for instance yet another replacement for X. But as to precisely answer why they don't improve an existing project, I imagine that its a combination of a few factors, maybe
  • The initial time taken to get up to speed with a couple of thousand lines of the original is offputting, and the author would rather just get straight into coding.
  • People want to have their *own* project, not to be a spoke in someone else's wheel.
  • He may just be unaware of the other project
  Personally I think you can avoid a and b by sticking everything in multiple libraries document the api carefully, and then people can *own* their own project which sits on top, which also gives them a good reason to improve the understructure. If window managers worked like this, I imagine we'd have 10 more window managers, but they would all be far more closer to completion and much much much more compatible and bug free.