Poor
Slashdot has a little story on how much money developers make, relative to the national (US) average.
Having read through this little discussion, with people saying that if they made a dinky 50k for programming, they’d start checking gas meters for $20/hour, I felt the need to vent.
I have three years of software development experience, including one year of R and D management experience, and I make half of the lowest wage mentioned. I’m paid hourly, I get no vacation time, no benefits, and I make 12k a year (that’s about 15000 euros). I have a food budget of 20 dollars a week, for both me and my wife. I’m the lowest paid person at my company (all my “employees” make more, marginally, or some make the same). Currently, the CEO is investing in a product built entirely under my supervision as the manager of the dev team.
Before I started, there was some vague talk of putting the code in CVS, but all of the devs were convinced that it would simply create overhead on projects that were all perpetually behind schedule. CVS was mentioned because it was the only form of version control these guys had heard of.
I put everything in subversion, setup a ticket tracking system, pushed as many of the complete lummoxes out the door as I could, began setting up daily builds and automated testing, and established rules about the CEO never speaking to my team directly, all via me. The team has never been more productive, and I saw the first project to ever ship on time.
I hired testers, wrote documentation, and I still program when I get home. I’m the only one to dedicate myself to a regular schedule (though it’s suffered since school started) so that I can be available whenever people need me, and I’ve taken the blame for everything that’s broken, and given the credit to my team when ever something worked (they deserved it, dammit!).
I have never recieved a raise.
*sigh*
Anyway, thanks for putting up with that. I now return you to your irregularly scheduled programming
xffm package separation
Starting with xffm-4.3.4, individual packages which are currently part of xffm will split into individual packages (fgr, xfdiff, xfsamba, xffm-libs, etc.). SVN for these packages will still be nexted in the xffm tree. Today the first of these packages, called libtubo, is released. Libtubo is a small library that only depends on glib>=2.0. Libtubo is the engineblock behind xffm. With the library xffm communicates with other applications to do stuff like samba browsing, finding files, mounting volumes, copying and scp, and just about everything. As from today, this library can be used by any other package and does not require xffm to be installed. Source tarball is available at http://xffm.sf.net/libtubo.html where you will find complete API Reference Manual. The source is also available from svn tree under xffm/libtubo.
Xfce News – From Then Till About Now
Let’s pretend the last several months haven’t happened, and I’ll pretend that more than three of you read this.
That said, it seems like the best thing to do is to lay out where we are going, where we are, and what’s happening to get us there. If you care what’s been going on in Xfce, but haven’t been following the various blogs and lists, this is your chance to get caught up.
Mousepad! Finally!
Okay.
So, I finally just crawled through my email till I found the right URL to do a checkout from the Xfce repository.
I felt very very stupid.
Having done so, I pulled a fresh checkout of Mousepad (since the one I had was corrupted), and made a branch for 0.3. Since I was without internet for so long, I was working on Mousepad a few minutes a day in a local repo. I commited those files to the new branch with surprisingly little difficulty.
It’s amazing how easy that was, once I remembered to not be a douche.
You can pull it from the anonymouse repository this way
svn co http://svn.foo-projects.org/svn/xfce/mousepad/branches/mousepad-0.3.x mousepad
And you can build it with a simple ‘make’
Currently, it does very little that’s interesting, just a window with a GtkTextView in it. The Makefile is even handwritten. The goals of this rewrite are:
- Eliminate deprecated stuff where possible
- Organize the code into a maintainable structure
- Take advantage of the Xfce platform more fully
- Make it faster
- Make it smaller
- Add some small features
- More fully learn C, Gtk+, and autotools
We’ll see how much of this I manage to acheive. However, so far, all looks good.
If you see a bug in Mousepad, please let me know. It is highly likely that there are memory management bugs inside. It’s also likely that I do things in ways which are not cross platform, or reinvent the wheel.
As an anecdote, the reason to fork leafpad was I needed printing support. Since I could read C poorly, and write it hardly at all, a good chunk of the printing code was copy and paste from the inside of the “Save” routine. Turns out the old save routine reimplemented a GtkTextView method, and poorly, so the printing code did the same.
Had I realized I didn’t need to fight with it to add printing support, I might not have bothered with the fork, really.
Zoology??
I knew the ‘z’ probably would give them some trouble, but come on, zoology??
So, maybe it only works with your real name:
oh dear, sabotage…
/me goes to have a good look at his bugzilla entries ;-)
Tales From The Xfweiner
So, everything that has possibly gone wrong has gone wrong. Basically, life sucks.
But I’m not going to go into that. Things will get sorted out. Until then, however, my Xfce participation is a mess.
However, I’m hoping to pick up a few hours a week on Mousepad, and get the damn thing finished.
In other news, Robert Moog, the father of electronic music (Leonard Theremin being the grandfather), died from a brain tumor. I got the chance to meet Bob several years ago, he settled down in the smallish town in the mountains where I live. He was one of my heros, and I will miss him.
Also: This is what God intended. I’m tired of apps like Abiword having no Gnome dependecies mean “Just libgnomeprintui”. And Totem depending on gnome-vfs. But that’s really another story, since gnome-vfs isn’t going to go into GTK+. But the principle remains.
Patch for Compaq R3000 laptop
Off topic, but since I’ve been working on this mostly for the past few weeks… I’ve prepared a workarround to an incredibly crappy harware bug that cause the timer to run 3 times too fast on some of the Compaq R3000/HP zv5000 laptops.
The page is here : http://www.xfce.org/~olivier/r3000
Thoughts
I may have mentioned this to a few of you already, but I’m currently undergoing a bounty of family concerns. My grandma (technically my great grandmother) slipped into a coma last weekend, and that’s added to the stack.
I feel like I haven’t been doing my part around here, with Thunar still being written primarily by Benny, and 4.4 looming, and Mousepad still in pieces on my harddrive. I hope things get sorted out soon, and I can be a useful community member again.
As a comment on the recent KDE posts: the thing I noticed most is where KDE wants to become more like Xfce. Namely, the respect that both of those posts had for simple, small applications that did their job and nobody elses. I have some more deep thoughts about that, but it’ll have to wait till later.
deskview background
To keep things simple, xffm-deskview does not set the root Pixmap, but rather takes whatever Pixmap any other application sets for the root background. Unfortunately, many programs are screwy with the root Pixmap on exit. Most will not set the persist-on-exit, but will neither destroy the property. Since the atom will persist until X exits, this leaves a bogus root Pixmap. To deal with this problem, on startup xffm-deskview will automatically assume the Pixmap is bogus (even though the Pixmap set by fvwm-root —for example— is not bogus) and fall back to a solid background. Thus, to set the background image, the root Pixmap must be set by the background setting utility after xffm-deskview is up and running. I’m thinking about wrapping fvwm-root in a gtk GUI to provide this application, if I have the time. This won’t be for 4.3.3 because the release is already on the horizon.