fun, ZeD, svn

i've been reading the "is GNOME still fun?" blogthread over on planet.gnome.org since it started a few days ago. it's interesting reading. introspection is generally a good thing, and i hope that those GNOME hackers who aren't finding it as fun as it was or as fun as they want it to be find that spark. we need fun, which is to say enjoyable fulfillment, in our lives. especially in the things we do with and/or for passion.

the most interesting part of that discussion for me has been reading about all the different ways GNOME is interesting or fun for different people. everyone seems to have a different answer for the question, each equally 'correct' as they are a reflection of each person's experience, which just... is

so i asked myself, "is KDE fun?" after pondering that for a bit (quick answers to questions that profound can be deceptive) i've decided that it certainly is fun for me. the challenges of the technologies are enjoyable and hacking on things in KDE's code base is, well, fun. on top of that, the other project members generally kick ass; the creativity, intelligence and general humanity is constantly refreshing (and occasionally challenging!) for me. exciting things are happening all the time in the audience as well: new users, new deployments, new submissions for art and what not. i get to travel as part of my KDE things, which is also fun. i get to speak to people, which i enjoy doing.

so ironically, the bit of work i just finished up the other night on kicker was very, very boring. basically switching away from QPtr* collection classes, partially to trim some unnecessary memory bloat but also to prep for Qt4 porting. and boy, do i wish Qt3 had foreach. a 2069 line patch for not one single visible bit of difference, assuming it's all correct.

and svn is finally here. we all get to re-check out everying and rebuild. an unfortunate burn of time, but over time probably well worth it. unfortunately for those of us who haven't used svn much, it means learning new tools. fortunately svn is fairly similar to cvs, but it's also quite different. hopefully more projects will switch to svn this year so that the knowledge of how to use svn becomes as common as cvs know-how is in the larger community of open source developers. every tool that a new contributor has to learn to contribute to a project lowers the chance that they will.

in Canada, we have "open source television". aka Zed. i think i've blogged about it before, a long time ago and on a different blog. so i figured i'd plug it again. Zed isn't really Open Source television, though. it's more of a community driven content site that runs on Open Source software (which they released a year or more ago now). they have a weekly show on T.V., which i never see because i don't have cable (a decision i made in January of last year), but i still get to see the content via the web site. it's really cool. i recommend checking it out, even if you aren't Canadian. ;)