1.9 Jitters... Nervous again

I'd have to say in my experience, that's not true. Sure, people have lots of different ways of relaxing that they use at different times, but every single one of the people I know who codes for a living (and I can think of 20+ offhand), also codes in some portion of their spare time, for projects they have a personal interest in, for free, simply because they derive some personal pleasure from it. Apparently you don't, but MANY others do.

I must say, when I was still actively programming, I also worked at night, programming... trying out algorithms that fascinated me, and optimizing basic programs for performance on my Oh So Slow TI 99/4A

It was good for testing optimizations, cos the difference between 1 sec lag and 0.2 sec lag is quite noticeable

11 PM was an OK time to stop, but like being in SL, not always possible to end off THAT early! But 4 hours a night? No Problem!

I guess it depends how your job is, whether it kills you or not.

NOW, I am also in burnout recovery (not from programming, though)... so I chat in SL and don't touch coding at all. I wouldn't do it for money, either...

... I can just imagine what Prokofy Neva would say, if we so-called "techi Wiki" types rewrote SL! (How he would put it.)

His "belief" in the financial security of SL would start at zero, and drop rapidly and very loudly!

It would need a VERY good concept from LL to guard against this perceived loss of security.

Still nervous about 1.9, by the way

Must admit, some of the most enjoyable coding I have ever done was shaving 2 tenths of a second off some database routines (I have an old laptop I use for that kind of thing)



I could have done that 10 years ago, but not anymore, Long work day, get home, family commitments, food.

I am lucky if I get logged on by 9pm, SL is about all I am good for by that time. I have tried writing code for my own private (GPL) projects late in the evening but you only have to spend a couple of hours the following morning unpicking it to realised you shouldn't have bothered.

Stimulant fuelled all nighters can produce weird results. Sure the code works. and its very very fast. But its usually polymorphic, recursive, involves large 4+ dimensional arrays and has no comments anywere. You spend the next 2 days trying to figure out WTF you managed to create, and why it even works!

Say, did YOU write the SL client?

100% sympathy! XD

This quote made my morning!

Zen and the Art of Computer Programming. ^.^
I program like this a lot. I'm not even sure I know what I'm typing when I code it. >D But it got me A+'s in college so I must be doing something right.

1.8.4.7 download is gone by now! Finally a sign that someone at LL is actually listening Still, no communication, just found out while checking on updates.

Edit: And there we got an answer! Thanks for the message, Karen! /263/3a/94240/1.html

Zen is great! I am currently reading an online book on Unix Programming, and EXACTLY that is the core of the the author's message. He also references the Tao, the principle of wu-wei (he sees it as least action, that is the action that is most in harmony with the essence of what you are doing, and not as inaction in the passive sense).

He sees "Zen" and "wu-wei" as the essential principles of good programming practise and something that is evident in all good unix/linux programs, even if at first sight they appear to be bloated and full of redundancy.

I don't have the link here, I will try to think of it when I get there again, and post it, if anyone is interested.

Sure. As I heard one guy put it, once, "When you work with computers all day, you find you're less interested in playing with them in your free time."

By example, I still run my own file/web/email server, at home. I started doing it before I was working as a sysadmin, for fun and to learn. I still do it as a sort of test bed to learn about new things, but it's become much more of a chore. An OS upgrade is now something I do because I think I have to, not as a recreational activity on a free weekend.

Nowadays, I mostly just want my home computers to WORK. I spend way too much time fixing other people's machines.

The Linux development model isn't democratic at all. Other people can submit ideas, but the eventual direction is always dictated by Linus Torvalds. (Anybody who thinks otherwise should go read Kernel Traffic for a while.) That's probably WHY it's been so successful; you don't have people running off in 20 different directions, doing stuff that interests them but totally ignoring what they break in the process.

True. And that is why it works! All have a right to contribute, and one person decides what is a valid contribution One head, many many hands...

I can imagine what would come out of it, if everyone who can code a few lines could add to the official source tree!

On the other hand, if some hard headed developers decided that the software has gone way off track, they can fork the source and get it going where THEY think it should go. This is also handy for preventing "buy outs" of Open source - no one can stop you using the sources to develope in another direction, if you can manage a project like that

Here is the link : http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/

Interesting reading for programmers and anyone contributing to, running or wanting to run an open source project. I suggest you look at the contents and skip to bits that interest you; it's a long book!

But you do have a lot of unofficial kernel patches. Very few distro's ship with a vanilla kernel.

http://research.microsoft.com/~daniel/uhh-download.html

(Ignore MS in the URL, they have nothing to do with the book)