Niall’s virtual diary archives – June 2003

Wednesday 11th June 2003: 7.40pm. Spent a bit longer in London than I had thought I would last entry because I got some manual labour work installing computers for Red Hat - for which they still have to pay me. However yes, I'm back now in Ireland, been here for ... is it two weeks now? Wow. That's longer than I had thought.

Cork is still Cork, though it's a much richer Cork than when I left more than seven years ago. Our telephone exchange was recently connected to ADSL, but that just makes it more frustrating when they say our phone line isn't suitable - this they do without actually sending a man to test it, but from some internal database. So my father purchased a block of 120 hours by modem on the internet every month for thirty euro a month on the basis he'll be saving himself perhaps sixty euro a month in call charges (yes, a local call here is 1.3c/min off-peak). And also because, god bless him, he says he'll keep me in food till I get my company started.

As it turns out, a fellow up the road whom I've known since I was young is heavily involved in technology venture start-ups. He reckons he can get me on a programme which pays a small stipend, plus more importantly handles the accounting and sales for you. So, technically, I can write Tornado, release it as a stop-gap product in some targeted fashion, and thus make enough money to take it all the way to market.

So that's precisely what I'm doing. For the last week or so I've been porting Tornado off Qt to FOX, not least because Trolltech wouldn't give me a job (and therefore are showing extreme lack of good business judgement ) - and also because the exception and threading classes needed an overhaul anyway (they're now running really sweetly indeed, I hand-coded the mutex in x86 assembler and through that found a bug in my r/w mutex which explains some bugs I had been getting). I estimate I'll have ported the lot by the end of the summer - and it also means a new project on sourceforge called TnFOX which is my fork of FOX for the Tn library (Tornado's new name). This all means good things, not least a free set of Python/FOX bindings which the Qt ones were not, plus finally some control over the future direction of the GUI library.

Right so, back to work - I'm struggling through automake right now - why the hell are there so many incompatible versions of Unix libraries? I'll be heading back to the UK to tidy things up soon, but only for a few days then back here more or less permanently from here on in. Be happy!