From the Life of Jaakko
<i>This post was originally made by <b>skyjake</b> on the dengDevs blog. It was posted under the categories: Blog, Releases.</i>
I thought it would be time to give a short update on what's going on with me nowadays.
Now that I've graduated as MSc and have a job as a researcher at Nokia, it's about time I move out of my cramped student apartment. During the Easter holidays (actually starting tomorrow) I'm moving to a new and quite a bit more comfortable apartment. It's actually only a kilometer away from the student buildings, but the distance to the Nokia Research Center office is actually 50 meters shorter => yay! The downside is that I still haven't got an internet connection set up at the new place, which means I'll have to rely on web mail at the office for communications.
To make things a bit more interesting, the hard drive of my trusty 21 month-old PowerBook G4 died yesterday night. It appears the Toshiba drives have been a bit unreliable in PowerBooks (judging by people's comments on the net). If this wouldn't have happened, I could have taken the PowerBook and used the university's free student-WLAN for internet access (a 5 min walk from home). The telephone company guys tells me that it might take a few weeks before my internet connection can be installed, so I hope that I can get the PB serviced before that. In any case, it looks like my only net access for the next week or two is from the office. I'm not too keen on setting up a Doomsday development environment in my work laptop, so most likely I'll be without SVN repository access during this time.
The primary reason I've been a bit passive in Doomsday development for the past year is my job. A year ago I was just starting to write my MSc thesis, a process which eventually took 6 months and all my time and energy to finish. I'm quite happy with how that turned out, but any spare-time activities had to be postponed. To top it off, I only had a few days worth of actual holidays during 2005, so there were no chances of dusting off the old deng source directory and getting back to work on it. The way things have turned out, the only time I feel up to working on Doomsday is during weekends, or Sunday afternoons in particular. The rest of the time I need for other Real Life(tm) activities and general resting. Ah well, I guess I'm getting old.
Fortunately, I've got a good three week summer holiday coming up in July. I'm confident that after a few days of sunbathing and swimming at the summer house will put me in the right mood to work on some code.
When it comes to the Doomsday release schedule, I think we need to get Beta4 released as soon as possible. This can be done as soon as we've fixed all the remaining issues in the Win32/Mac/Linux builds. Once Beta4 is out there, we should get a pretty good picture of any remaining dmu/arch issues or other bugs introduced by the recent changes. I think it is important that Beta4 is stable enough for usage, though, so that people can start moving on from their old 1.8.6 installations, if they want to experience the new features. Beta4 should also give us developers a solid base to work on. A number of major changes is still being planned for 1.9.0, though, so most likely we'll see Beta5 and Beta6 sometime later this year. It is quite impossible to say when 1.9.0 will actually be released, though, thanks to the general busyness-at-work situation. As to my participation, before my summer holidays I will most likely have to keep on working on Doomsday like I've been doing so far — a little bit a time.
I thought it would be time to give a short update on what's going on with me nowadays.
Now that I've graduated as MSc and have a job as a researcher at Nokia, it's about time I move out of my cramped student apartment. During the Easter holidays (actually starting tomorrow) I'm moving to a new and quite a bit more comfortable apartment. It's actually only a kilometer away from the student buildings, but the distance to the Nokia Research Center office is actually 50 meters shorter => yay! The downside is that I still haven't got an internet connection set up at the new place, which means I'll have to rely on web mail at the office for communications.
To make things a bit more interesting, the hard drive of my trusty 21 month-old PowerBook G4 died yesterday night. It appears the Toshiba drives have been a bit unreliable in PowerBooks (judging by people's comments on the net). If this wouldn't have happened, I could have taken the PowerBook and used the university's free student-WLAN for internet access (a 5 min walk from home). The telephone company guys tells me that it might take a few weeks before my internet connection can be installed, so I hope that I can get the PB serviced before that. In any case, it looks like my only net access for the next week or two is from the office. I'm not too keen on setting up a Doomsday development environment in my work laptop, so most likely I'll be without SVN repository access during this time.
The primary reason I've been a bit passive in Doomsday development for the past year is my job. A year ago I was just starting to write my MSc thesis, a process which eventually took 6 months and all my time and energy to finish. I'm quite happy with how that turned out, but any spare-time activities had to be postponed. To top it off, I only had a few days worth of actual holidays during 2005, so there were no chances of dusting off the old deng source directory and getting back to work on it. The way things have turned out, the only time I feel up to working on Doomsday is during weekends, or Sunday afternoons in particular. The rest of the time I need for other Real Life(tm) activities and general resting. Ah well, I guess I'm getting old.
Fortunately, I've got a good three week summer holiday coming up in July. I'm confident that after a few days of sunbathing and swimming at the summer house will put me in the right mood to work on some code.
When it comes to the Doomsday release schedule, I think we need to get Beta4 released as soon as possible. This can be done as soon as we've fixed all the remaining issues in the Win32/Mac/Linux builds. Once Beta4 is out there, we should get a pretty good picture of any remaining dmu/arch issues or other bugs introduced by the recent changes. I think it is important that Beta4 is stable enough for usage, though, so that people can start moving on from their old 1.8.6 installations, if they want to experience the new features. Beta4 should also give us developers a solid base to work on. A number of major changes is still being planned for 1.9.0, though, so most likely we'll see Beta5 and Beta6 sometime later this year. It is quite impossible to say when 1.9.0 will actually be released, though, thanks to the general busyness-at-work situation. As to my participation, before my summer holidays I will most likely have to keep on working on Doomsday like I've been doing so far — a little bit a time.