Tim Boudreau's Blog

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Tag and I'm it

• I'm a musician/singer-songwriter/audio engineer (tried playing professionally after college and decided I didn't want to spend my life singing American Pie for drunk tourists). I still write and record songs, and am working on a cd's worth of acoustic neo-folk/rock songs in my nearly non-existent spare time. Here's an mp3.
• I don't actually live in Prague anymore, I just can't figure out how to change the blurb that shows up at the top of this page.
• I'm homeless - I put all my things in storage last June, since I was travelling for work so much, and have been experimenting with living out of a suitcase. So far, so good.
• I spent a couple of years in the early 90's doing 3D graphic design, and still do a bit of photography
• I was once a taxi driver on Martha's Vineyard, while performing in clubs there in the evenings

Interesting things you can do with a giant telephoto lens for a Pentacon TL 6 and a bunch of extension tubes, adapted onto a Canon EOS

More Macro Lens Fun

Evangelizing Evangelism - Bay Area Event

The event is on December 4, 2006, in Santa Clara, California. There is an excellent line up of speakers, and it is sure to be an interesting event! If you are wondering about technology evangelism — or wondering if you are an evangelist yourself — it's sure to be of interest.

You can register for GNoTECon here.

Stories about John Ponte

I met John in 1986 when I was a freshman at UMass. We were both part of a community of extremely eccentric individuals that used the Cyber mainframe there. It was a community bound together by primitive local newsgroups called "notesfiles" and a proto-irc called "Confer". And by the fact that the terminal room closed for cleaning on Thursday nights, so everyone would gather in the campus coffee shop for "coffee break" - and to scare the mundanes with whatever bizarre behavior we could muster, including showing up in costume, more than two people making out together, musical interludes and anything else anyone could dream of that could make people think we were all crazy. It was easy - we all were.

John was one of the administrators of the system. You could get online from the dorms, but whenever conversation on Confer got heated and interesting, the buffer pushing data to your 300 baud acousticouple modem would be flooded and you'd be timed out and miss everything. So the terminal room was the gathering place.

One of the other admins of the system was the gatekeeper to the community via a simple technique: he would mercilessly hit on anyone who logged in for the first time, be they male or female, with lots of S&M overtones. If you couldn't handle that, you'd probably never dare to log in again. This was to scare the mundanes away. It worked. My first-ever electronic chat began with a man I didn't know announcing to me "I am a bottom." I think I replied that I was a left-side. Apparently I passed the test.

I really got to know John the summer of 1988 - my girlfriend Mara rented a room in the house he lived in. John had had severe problems with depression at a young age. He was quite matter of fact about it being biological and simply something he had to live with and take medication for. Aside from meds which imposed severe dietary restrictions, he had a unique and memorable way of dealing with it: Do anything that looked like fun, no matter how ridiculous. "Anything" tended to heavily biased toward physical comedy and practical jokes.

I Really Need a Shower

This led to a host of other ingenious indoor uses for the garden hose...which eventually came to an end after the linoleum in the kitchen started coming up - the floorboards had to dry out enough to glue it back down.

We're Not Drunk Enough to Work on an Italian Car!

John did his once a year off-the-meds month that summer, which was a bacchanal of pizza, beer and other normally forbidden foods. On another morning that July I got up at seven AM or so. I was working mornings at Augie's Tobacco Shop in Amherst (a truly surreal bit of employment - but that's a story for another day). This was a Saturday and I was not working.

I sit down at the kitchen table with my coffee, and John takes the coffee, pours it out and replaces it with an 18oz beer. "We're not drunk enough to work on an Italian car," he says. Well, drunk we got and work we did. I don't remember Mara being too happy when she got up at ten to find us reeking of beer and WD-40. I also don't know that anything got fixed. But it sure was fun.

The Flour Cannon

Returning from a trip to the grocery, it occurred to John that it would be fun to empty a bag of flour over our friend Andy's head. This, of course, left a huge pile of flour on the kitchen floor (not to mention on Andy). Naturally, it needed to be cleaned up. That only led to another opportunity for mayhem: An upright Hoover vacuum will clean up flour. But it's much more interesting if you remove the bag. Thus was born The Flour Cannon. I don't know that the results were ever completely cleaned up.

John was the one person I knew from our little online community in the 80's who kept in touch with everyone - I couldn't believe how many people I'd lost touch with whose lives he could tell me about when I saw him last year.

We got together a few times after college, whenever I was passing through Colorado on one of my between-contracts road-trips. He had dropped all the meds sometime in the early nineties, and as he told it, drove nonstop from Massachusetts to Colorado with a box of Wheat Thins for sustenance. When NetBeans was acquired by Sun in 1999, I did some name searches, figuring that one or two of our very peculiar group from the Cyber at UMass must be working here. And sure enough, John was working for Sun in Colorado. And was doing well - as funny as ever, and as smart as ever, and working as a sysadmin in Sun's Broomfield office. I last saw him a bit over a year ago; he was in great shape, happy with his job at a startup there and doing well. We talked for hours later by phone - he was planning the world's most obnoxious baby shower gifts for Mara and Neal, and making sure everyone from Cyber was part of the conspiracy. Captain Underpants figured heavily in the plans.

I can't really imagine a world without him in it.

If you knew John Ponte, and have a story you'd like to tell about him, you're welcome to share it or a link to it below. I'm sure others of us would enjoy reading them, and perhaps they can be gathered together for his family, if that seems appropriate.

Why I'm Proud of the NetBeans Community Awards

The recipients were Vincent Brabant, Maxym Mykhalchuk, Manfred Reim, Bruno Souza, and Rich Unger. Rich, Vincent and Bruno I've met personally; all of them I've known on the NetBeans mailing lists for a long time. Vincent did a huge amount of work localizing both NetBeans and the NetBeans web site in French, and getting the translatedfiles project off the ground; Maxym did similar things for the Russian translation of NetBeans, and manages the Russian language NetBeans mailing list, and contributed code to make mnemonics work in Russian; Rich contributed the FeedReader tutorial on building plug-ins, the "cluster harness" for building NetBeans platform-based applications in 4.0 and 4.1; Manfred Reim localized the platform in Dutch; Bruno Souza has done amazing things for popularizing NetBeans in Brazil. Vincent, Maxym and Rich have all been members of the NetBeans governance board in the past; all have been involved in the community in one way or another for years.

There's a really important thing here: We gave awards to individuals - people who made an outstanding contribution to the project, by getting involved and doing real, and really good work. Of the five, only Rich works for a company that has anything to do with NetBeans. An open source project is about people - and it's the inspiration, perspiration and talent of the participants in the project that make it successful. If we'd been giving awards to companies that built plug-ins or built applications on NetBeans, it would have been a nice little PR-fest (and maybe we should do that at some point) - but I don't think I would have been as thrilled as I was seeing real people that I've known on our mailing lists for years, that I've known were doing outstanding things, receive a big thank-you. It's individuals that do the work - a community is made up of people - and I'm glad that in five years of open source NetBeans, we've never lost sight of that.

Congratulations, guys!

Should there be a "codeforager.org"?

A few months ago, I had an idea to write a newsreader plugin for NetBeans. So I looked around for a handy JavaMail NNTP provider. There was one out there, part of a project called Knife, which pointed me at ClasspathX, where I downloaded the sources, tried to build it (building Java with Make...ick), found I needed another library...which needed another library...and the whole thing seemed to be set up to cause maximum pain to anyone trying to just build with a standard Sun JDK - after all, I wasn't setting out to redistribute, just to test my code.

So I checked out the source for Grendel, and put some work into splitting out the NNTP pieces. It's old code (pre-Collections), but basically sound, and written by some fairly respectable folks like Jamie Zawinski.

So in my spare time, I've got it working, added support for posting, written a ton of JUnit tests for it. Not finished, but I'd like to contribute it somewhere.

But the point is - how many other dead projects, open or closed source, out there, contain good code, if it were just librarified? I'd love to see a site for such things, and encouraging people to do this sort of task, providing guidelines and a place for them to live. The guts and glory might be in writing something from scratch - most developers prefer to, for better or worse. But there would be tremendous value in "liberating" some of the nifty and valuable things that are out there.

Who wouldn't want to work in an office with this view?!

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