Today I started work on my GTK 2 SILC client. I expect this will take a long time as I am a newbie to automake, autoconf, glade, gtk2 and silc. It is kinda depressing thinking about all that has to be learned. Hopefully I can approach it in a positive and open attitude.
The project is nearing completion at work. It is actually very surprising. Two weeks ago, all I saw ahead of me were problems. Quinn and I had a lot to do and we had no idea how we were going to get any of it working. It’s been a long (and fun) two weeks. No matter what the problems, I enjoyed the stimulation of being faced with a problem that required work to fix.
Now on to other stuff (quickly). First, India decided not to endorse Free Software in government. I personally think they wilted under pressure from Microsoft and from Indian companies beholden to Microsoft and I think they will be adversely affected in the long run. The path to success lies not in kow-towing to multinationals and hoping that some scraps from their table will fall to you, but pushing out, creating your own platform, extending your own ideas and creating your own multinationals. As long as India keeps spending on MS software, they’re losing any ability to shape the software platforms of the future. Another story came down the newswire in the form that Microsoft is intent on competing with google. Great. Is there anything that Microsoft does not want to compete in? We’ve got operating systems, office suites, business management software, web services, SCM systems, phones, console gaming systems, pc games, PDAs, cable services, TV channels, ISP and embedded systems (the notoriously crashy BMW 7 series iDrive).
Now they want search engines as well. I fear for a future in which everything (or close to) is held by Microsoft. It is a very scary thought. At any rate, Microsoft doesn’t have to compete against google. All they have to do is integrate a “Search Bar” pointing to MSN into IE and before long everyone will be using that instead. Welcome to the monopoly. Who would you like to crush today. Either that or they’ll buy out google. Great. There goes independent, excellent search engines.
Incidentally, I got a graphic introduction into the world of “government procurement”. I can say _with certainity_ now, how the government manages to literally drain money out of the public coffers. Very depressing. If you want to know, I’ll tell you sometime… I think it should be _mandatory_ for a wannabe politician to be placed in a position where they can see money being wasted and not have any recourse to stop it. Maybe they can feel the helplessness and frustuation that I feel about this situation. Maybe they can do something to stop it (Haha! Who am I fooling? They’d participate!)
Do you know that Amazon.ca does _not_ sell software? I am not a happy camper at all. I’d wanted to buy a boxed copy of RH 9.0. Incidentally – I think it is really stupid of Mark deVissier (RH Marketing Manager) to plan on bumping the major version number up with every release. That would be _highly_ foolish of him and would not endear Red Hat to the community at all. Besides, he also has some explaining to do about the horrible transfer rates that RHN users are getting…