Mr. Aznar's Messenger

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: General | 0 Comments

This is how Mr. Aznar's Messenger looks like, with the contacts and all (sorry, only for Spaniards, but I found it hilarious!

)

Not much but...

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: General | 0 Comments

Not much to tell lately... Vappu (1st of May) was last weekend and we have some drinks, you know, just some...

I perhaps will be uploading some pics here so that you can see, though this time I couldn't take many first of all because I was an hour late to the celebration and second, I forgot to charge my camera :S

In the meantime, have a look a this article titled "Patent Piracy, or Goliath's comeuppance", about software patents and how they are being abused (the case about the guy suing the Red Cross is simply disgusting)

Contradictions

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: General | 0 Comments

It's quite a contradiction that the main developer of one of the blogging tools with the most potential to become a successful one (ok, that was a bit biased

), is unable to keep his very own blog updated. But it's true! I have very little free time nowadays and this project takes it all up. Also, I have started not to like blogs as much as before... but that's another story.

I didn't say that the tool has potential because I'm full of it but because it's true. Quite a few inteteresting pLog-based communities have sprung up lately, not only in Spanish or Catalan, but also in other languages like Chinese. Also over 3000 users have downloaded the latest version, according to the statistics that SourceForge.net keeps for our project. It's very rewarding to see that you can do something for people, but it is also very exhausting. Despite some very nice contributions which I really appreciate, most of the project has been developed and taken care of by me. It's not only maintaining and improving over 20.000 lines of code (thanks God, we paid some attention to design when developing it and now it is relatively painless to add new features), but also working as a release manager, documentation writer (the wiki idea helps a lot), plus being pretty much the only person who really cares about support in the forums.

An increasing number of users also means an increasing number of problems and feature requests. I cannot take care of everything as much as I wanted and my attention to some of the areas has lessened as of late. Not to mention that spending 2 hours answering posts and helping people in the forums doesn't leave me much time to develop the new version. Also people request things that I have no idea how to tackle. I don't think I'm a particularly good coder (average, most likely) but it hasn't been much difficult for me to reach the current status of almost feature complete, but I'm very bad at designing user interfaces and I am an even worse designer... We have tried to ask for help and the responses were a bit disappointing...

We are at the moment working hard on the next version. I am mainly working on developing the core classes/platform and there is somebody, finally, taking care of redesigning the interface (he's much better than I am so expect outstanding results!!

) I sometimes wish that the community got a little bit more involved with the project instead of just asking and asking without giving anything back.

I should also start thinking on how to make some money out of this. I'm a bit scared as to what my current employer has to say about it and if it's compatible with my current job. I wouldn't like to quit my job and take the risk to start something based on this because despite not being so exciting, it is a proper job after all... It might also be that sometimes I lack an entrepreneur mentality... who knows?

Patents

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: General | 3 Comments

I really dislike the way some enterprises are abusing the patent system, specially in the US (but we'll see what happens in Europe!) See these two articles in Arstechnica, "Patent Poutpourri" and "Clear Channel scoops up live CD patent". Or in other words, how to make the best of a stinking patent (though these are just two examples out of hundreds nowadays!) And it is said that patents are there to "stimulate" innovation...

NOTE: I might even start writing here every now and again once more

Email disclaimers

25/12/2004 20:29 | Categories: General | 1 Comments

Very good article about those stupid "email disclaimers" that many corporations attach in the end of every email message: E-mail Confidential Who's afraid of Time Inc.'s legal disclaimer?