May 2004 Archives

So I've been unemployed for a week, as of 3 hours ago. =)

In Fink news, I've been working on entirely repackaging PostgreSQL 7.3, and packaging PostgreSQL 7.4, so that they can coexist (and so that the bugs in the 7.3 packages are fixed).

Other than that, it's been all business. My resume has gone through a number of revisions (and will probably see more). I've applied for a number of jobs (including one at RedHat, phear). I've applied for individual insurance. I've applied for unemployment benefits. It's crazy how busy you are when you're out of a job. =)

I've gotten a bunch of pledges for doing development on Fink/KDE full-time, although nothing anywhere near a living wage, I'm sorry to say. I don't really see how on-demand development would make that any different; especially since there are still big infrastructure things that would have to happen in all of KDE before there's any specific features that could be worked on. It would be great to be able to do it full-time, but it seems unless I get a big benefactor, it wouldn't be enough. Feel free to prove me wrong, though... <grin>

I guess I'm just rambling so that I could have an update, it's been a strange ride being simultaneously insanely busy and having nothing I have to do. There's a lot going on right now that will hopefully bear fruit. Wish me luck!

I am now officially unemployed.

The company I so recently worked for has now shut it's doors. We had an incredible product, but the money ran out and the VC wasn't willing to continue funding. There's various hypotheses why, but I don't want to air the dirty laundry here. Suffice it to say this is by far the best group of people I've ever worked with -- everyone there was simply stunningly talented, and fun to work with to boot.

If you know of any work in the Raleigh area (or telecommute), especially in the open-source and/or macintosh arena, drop me a line.

Oh, and my resume's here. =)

[Update:]

So let me ask you a hypothetical question. If I were to do what Yoram Snir suggested in the comments, would you pledge? Because there's nothing I'd love more than to be able to just work on Fink and KDE full time. Is it worth bothering some kind of pledge thing to gauge it? This would be a dream, but I don't know if I could pull enough to live off of.

[Update:]

A number of press sites picked up our press release about Oculan shutting down:

• Triangle Business Journal
• CRN
• News and Observer
• NetworkWorld Fusion

Someone from the N&O is supposed to call me today, they're going to be running a piece about how we all stay in touch after the company imploded. I set up a mailing list for our ex-employees to keep in touch, exchange resume help and job leads, and just goof around. Maybe the exposure will help me get something. =)

I've got Mono 1.0 Beta 1 in 10.3 unstable now. It's not in 10.2 because of some library-loading issues I haven't worked out yet.

This release includes gtk-sharp (which almost entirely works now!), and monodoc, the C#/mono/GTK# documentation browser. It also includes cairo and libgdiplus, which add the Mono.Cairo and System.Drawing APIs, respectively.

I ran a buttload of the tests from gtk-sharp, screenshots are here. If you have any suggestions of apps to port to make sure things are generally working, let me know. =)

I've got a new CheeseTracker binary built for Mac OS X, using Qt/Mac 3.3. It's looking pretty good, although sometimes it freezes on logout, seems to be some kind of thread-locking issues in CoreAudio.

If you want to give it a try, you can grab it here. I've registered with VersionTracker so I can put it up there as well. Whoo!