personal

I want to write. Well, of course, I do; but I don't mean programs and technical documentation, but novels. My New Years resolution is to finish the book that I started some time ago and get it published. Why this sudden change of mind? Just a few months ago I wanted to start a business based on WebIssues. I even managed to briefly bring the attention of the management of the company I work for to it. But their idea of investing very little in order to hopefully get some profit wouldn't make too much sense. My own vision wasn't downright rejected, but considering all the political aspects that rule a corporation like this, and my complete lack of influence on these things, I can't realistically expect that this is ever going to happen.

Obviously, making a living from writing is an even more insane idea. It's a very demanding market, and in Poland also quite a narrow one. It also requires a lot of pure luck, probably even more than running a successful business. Not to mention that writing a novel requires huge amounts of time. But the real problem is that I'm really starting to hate programming. Commercial or open source, it's tedious, repetitive and rarely creative. And writing is not a new idea. I wrote some stories as a child. In high school I started writing a book with two friends; it didn't last long, but it was a lot of fun. But this time it's different, because I already have most of the plot in my mind, so the ideas are there waiting to be put on paper.

I already mentioned the novel I'm writing once or twice, but perhaps this time I will shed some more light on it. The idea came to my mind in summer 2011, while I was reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, but it was also influenced by Lev Grossman's The Magicians which I read shortly before. It's basically a cyberpunk story, taking place largely in two different virtual worlds, but it also has some elements of contemporary fantasy and techno-thriller. The main characters are a few students of a school for young hackers, which is called the Academy of Magic, because in a virtual world, the boundaries between hacking and magic are blurred for the uninitiated. As my younger brother described it, when I told him about the novel today, it's like a "rolled pancake" :). I admit that mixing genres is risky, but if I do it well, maybe something interesting will come out of this.

And by the way, yesterday was my son's first birthday :). I must publish some new photos soon because I haven't done that in a while.

Yesterday was the seventh anniversary of mimec.org, but I will not elaborate on that. It suffices to say that the last year was very different from the previous ones. My son Adam changed from a blurry ultrasonographic image to a little boy who runs around the house. There is no time for anything. I can hardly keep up with my paid job, not to mention the open source projects, but I still managed to make four minor releases of WebIssues, an one release of Saladin (with another one pending), Fraqtive and Descend.

A few days ago I finally got a new laptop. It has a 15" Full HD display, which for some reason is very rare these days, powerful CPU and GPU and plenty of RAM. Minecraft runs at about 50 FPS at full screen with far viewing distance :). The bad news, though, is that my company run out of Windows 7 licenses, and I was forced to install Windows 8. I'm not going to rant about it, becuse enough has been said about it already. After installing the English language pack and removing the metro-garbage from the start menu, I'm getting used to it without having to change my habits too much. It's just hilarious that the now so called "desktop" applications suddenly became legacy and are only temporarily supported for backward compatibility. It reminds me of how all existing applications suddenly became "unmanaged" when .NET was created, as if they were crippled in some way. Microsoft suggested that in a few years all applications would become "managed", and finally support for those "unmanaged" ones would be dropped. Of course I don't mind .NET; it's just the kind of marketing speech that makes me laugh.

But when I saw Office 2013 with the black and white UI and icons designed for displays that support only 8 colors, it actually made me a bit upset. For a long time Office was setting the user interface design standards for a lot of Windows applications, especially regarding toolbars and menus, because the default ones always had a very plain look. Obiously I also always tried to keep up with the trends. Over ten years ago, in Grape3D, I used third party menu and toolbar classes for MFC which mimicked the flat, semi-transparent highlighting style know from Office XP. Later I wrote my own set of classes which broke out of the Office trends for a while and looked more like IE 6. But soon after that Microsoft released Office 2003 with the spectacular bright blue and orange UI which automatically changed its colors to match the Windows XP theme. Whether it looked good or not, it became a long time standard. Just take a look at version 0.9 of the WebIssues Client, or the so called "modern" Qt style which I wrote in 2008, and you will know what I mean.

The so called "ribbon" introduced in Office 2007 was something that people complained and ranted about nearly as much as the Metro UI in Windows 8, but it eventually turned out to be a very good idea. It was not just a cosmetic change, but something entirely new. Currently all my programs use a similar concept, which is available as part of the XmlUi component. At the same time the bright colors were toned down and the whole thing looked equally good with classic Windows style as with Luna and Aero. But now that I'm getting more and more used to Windows 8 and Office 2013, even the soft gradients and slightly rounded corners of XmlUi are beginning to look a bit odd. So what is the next logical step? Should we, developers, all turn to creating rectangular, black and white UI? How soon will Microsoft change its mind and what will be the next "standard"? Or perhaps it's time to stop bothering?

It's been a while since I last wrote a post, but I've been quite busy. First of all, in a week or two I will release the first, official beta version of Descend. It will be quite an event, because I made several attempts at writing it in the last eight years and I've never come that close to finishing it. In case you missed the earlier post about Descend, it's a program for drawing 3D surfaces (and curves) based on parametric equations. It's sort of a conceptual project, so it's not going to have a lot of features, but it aims at being very fast and producing high quality graphics.

Another thing that has been bugging my mind in the past few months is the future of WebIssues. I came to the point where it simply doesn't make a lot of sense to put more effort into it without actually getting something back. I made lots of analysis how to make money from this project, especially focusing on controversies around the open core model. I came to the conclusion that the best solution is to create a specialized, commercial system based largely on WebIssues and dedicated to a narrow group of users, while keeping WebIssues itself a free, powerful, general purpose tool for bug tracking, project management, etc., which it already is, and letting it continue to evolve.

The idea is not new; I've been thinking about profiting from WebIssues since I started working on version 1.0 three years ago, but now I have a much clearer vision of what I'm trying to achieve. Most of all, I don't want to be an outsourced developer for the rest of my life. I got as far as I could in this area in terms of both allowance and career development. I need to change something sooner or later and this could be a great opportunity to do that. Of course, I could just get a highly paid job and forget about all this open source shenanigans; but in the end, what you achieve in life is a matter of much more than just money. So as always I'm choosing the harder way, and it's going to take time, but I think it's going to be worth the effort.

At the moment, however, I'm already planning to start working on version 1.1. The updated roadmap includes a long description field, roles and groups, LDAP authentication and project summary. I have an initial design for some of these features, others may be added as well, the roadmap is not closed yet. I will be posting more information on webissues.mimec.org and might even release the first beta version by the end of the year, but I'm not enforcing any deadlines on me. As long as I do it for free, it's nothing more than a hobby, and as such it competes for my time with other hobby projects, including Descend, Saladin, and especially the new update for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition that's coming out soon :).

Before I get to the point, just a few updates. I just finished refreshing the components available on this website, so now they're finally all up to date. I also published some recent photos of Adam. He's growing and changing so quickly that it's hard to keep up :). Last but not least, I released version 1.0.2 of WebIssues some time ago with some minor fixes and improvements.

Why do I write about Minecraft? It's simply impossible to avoid it. I had a short adventure with the free Classic version in January, when Adam was still at the hospital. I knew I shouldn't even think about the full version, because I'd be stuck with it for a long time. I managed to forget about it until recently I bought May Payne III and I was looking for an online review. Then I accidentally found that an Xbox version of Minecraft is available. I didn't even finish playing Max Payne (which is great, by the way, almost as much as the original version was 12 years ago) and bought Minecraft. It's not hard to guess that it costed me a few nights with hardly any sleep.

I think that there are already a few dissertations about the Minecraft phenomena. A world made of blocks that you can freely dig and move around is simply every geek's dream. Games like Max Payne have great graphics and action, but it's sometimes annoying that you can't just get off the linear path and venture into the Sao Paulo favelas. Games like GTA don't solve the problem - you can go anywhere you want, but there's not much interaction with the world other than shooting people and running them over. In Minecraft there are no limits. You are a god in a digital world. Add to it a few zombies and retro style graphics and you have a recipe for success.

The Xbox version of Minecraft is still quite bit behind the PC version. It lacks enchanting, potions, a lot of biomes (there is only forest and desert, at least in my world) and structures like villages and strongholds. Hopefully they will add these features soon, but even as it is now, it's a lot of fun to play. The size of the world is limited to 1024x1024 blocks, but it's more than enough for a single player or even a few players. It took me quite a while to travel around the entire world using a boat. Also there is still a lot of bugs. It happened to me once that after saving the game deep underground and loading it again, I was moved to the surface, surrounded by three creepers. It was quite annoying :).

I could just as well buy the PC version, but I like to separate playing from working, so I prefer not to have any games on my laptop :). Not to mention the effect of having a big screen and surround sound. Mouse and keyboard is probably more comfortable for this type of game, but you can get used to the pad. At the moment I'm a little bit burnt out, and I can definitely use a break. Fortunately in a few days we're going to Germany to visit my wife's sister. Besides the Euro Championship is more important at the moment :). But Minecraft is definitely the kind of game that you want to keep returning to, especially when new updates will be released. Keep up the good work, Mojang!

Recently I came across Jordan Mechner's blog and the news that he just found the original source code of Prince of Persia on some old floppy disks after being lost for 22 years. That made me think about the time when I first played POP; I was no more than 10 years old and it was one of the first computer games I've seen. It was about that time when I started thinking that computers are fun and that I want to learn programming and create games myself.

I wonder if I also still have some floppy disks from Amiga 500 (and later Amiga 1200) hidden somewhere, with old pieces of code written by me. The oldest program that I wrote which survived to this day is called Polyglot. I wrote it in 1997 (being 15 years old) under the nick name "CompLex". It is still available in the Aminet archives, although only in binary form. I no longer have the source code. Maybe it still exists on the hard drive which I damaged many years ago by screwing it with too long screws which caused a short-circuit :). The oldest source code which I still have is Grape3D, written almost 12 years ago. It's almost completely unreadable, with lots of bitwise operations, pointer math, abbreviated variable names and literally zero comments, but it remains a really ingenious work of art that would be hard for me to match today.

I also read Jordan's diaries from making POP in late 80s and early 90s. It's really interesting and also quite inspiring. It also reminded me that I kept a diary between 1999 and 2007. It was mostly dedicated to various frustrations caused by my social life (or the lack of it), girls (or the inability to meet any), and general uncertainty of what I should do and what awaits me in the future. There are few mentions about the programs that I were writing at that time, because I deliberately avoided that topic. Anyway, from the perspective of a decade, life doesn't seem as bad as it used to, but it's definitely not getting any easier. It's just running much faster.

Jordan wrote a lot about his dilemma whether to write computer games or movie scripts. It's quite similar to the problem I currently have, trying to reconcile writing open source programs and the novel that I'm working on. I guess that's just the problem of people that are too creative :). There are a few major differences, though: Jordan had royalties from Karateka, and I need a full time job for living and for paying my loans; he was 21 when he started and I already turned 30 and have a wife and a kid to look after. So I'm not in a great position to disappear for half a year and write a bestseller book, or to invest in starting my own software company.

I really can't complain about my job, but I can't imagine working as an "outsourced" developer for the rest of my life, and being paid by the hour and not by the actual value of what I create. This is actually kind of frustrating and counter-productive, because the better and more efficient I work, the less I get paid for it. There are some ideas on the horizon how to change, or at least improve this situation. Perhaps I will finally be able to make some profit from the countless hours I spent on WebIssues. But so far, the only way I can do something to make me feel more accomplished is to pull all-nighters. I'm even doing it now writing this post. That's also not something I want to do for the rest of my life. Living from WebIssues royalties, travelling and writing books sounds much better.

Another lesson from Jordan's diaries is that even if you do a great job, there are still many things that may go wrong. Poor marketing decisions almost sank Prince of Persia, even though it was getting excellent reviews. I fear the same may happen to the commercial version of WebIssues. I know the value of this project; it can successfully compete with other applications, and the competition in this sector of the market, both open source and commercial, is very strong. But being able to make a profit from it is a completely different story. Of course, the only way to find out is to take the chance, and I will do it, but until I see some serious action going on, I will remain moderately enthusiastic about it.

Oh, and by the way, a new version of WebIssues is coming out probably next week. I'm just waiting for one Mac related bug to be fixed. And in the meantime I'm making some last minute improvements.