Well, I'm not really that famous. But a couple things happened this week which are imperceptibly whittling away at my alloted 15 minutes.
Tracy emailed me a with Bob Young, Chairman of Red Hat where he says that Linux won't rule the desktop anytime soon. Tracy knows I'm a Linux weenie, and a Root Hat weenie in particular. A Red Hat weenie who uses Linux as a desktop OS. So she thought I'd like the link, and she was right. I especially liked the part where Young says that we shouldn't be wiping Winders off our PCs in favor of Linux. Kind of an odd comment from a guy in his position, you know? "Don't buy my widgets!" yelled the widget manufacturer... Anyway, I read the article with interest, and after I read it I thought maybe the Slashdot trolls might like it. So I submitted the link and it was accepted. Kinda lame, I know, but it was nice to see my nick up there on the front page.
The other semi-precious moment of the week concerned an email I got from the package maintainer for the KDE Addons package.
I was a GNOME user for a long time (you have to love E -- it's just pretty as hell), but I recently switched to KDE because GNOME just started pissing me off (isn't being able to choose your GUI great?). So getting mail from the KDE guys was sorta weird. The gist of the email was that they are going to include my stock quote grabber script (the ouput of which you see over there to the right) in the next version of Knewsticker. Which is flattering. But a couple things bother me.
First, they hacked up my script to spit out RSS. No problem there, except that they did a real bad job. Admittedly, that script wasn't the paragon of stylish Perl coding (hey, what do you want for three hours work one Sunday?), but at least it was commented. And there was a little thought behind it. And it was written to be configurable so that other people could use it easily (even if they didn't know anything about Perl). The guy who altered it (identified only as "anonymous coder" -- likely because of the hatchet job he did on it) did so not only badly, but I got to hear about it after the fact. "Hey there, yeah, we messed with your script, and we're going to put it in this KDE package, hope you don't mind." I'm a wee bit torqued over that. And maybe a little cheesed off. I'm not altogether sure I want my name anywhere near that messed up script.
When they altered it, they change it so that it links back to kde.org. (The newsticker scrolls in the taskbar, and you can link the text that scrolls by. The links in their version are all to the KDE main site.) I would have made it link to the yahoo site that has the news info. So if you saw that your stock tanked, you can click the link and see the biz.yahoo.com page that has the news about why. Why would you want to click a stock quote and go to kde.org?!? But it's not like they asked me to help them modify it for the newsticker applet...
They said they are going to use my (altered) script now, but will be re-writing parts of it, ostensibly to add features. Hope I don't mind. Thanks. "Your script sucks, but we're going to use it for now until one of us can make it better." Lame. Judging from their alterations, I wish them the best.
Which is why I wished they would have asked me to help them. I've been meaning to update it so that it spits out RSS. I have this RSS/RDF deal going on at work, conincidentally enough. And I thought my ticker script would be a perfect fit. So I'm thinking of ways to add RSS functionality in (and add it in such as way as to allow other people to use it as well, not just bury it in some package) and I get the email saying they already did it. But they did it badly. To add ticker symbols, you have to edit an array in the script itself. Well, the whole point of the script was for people to be able to not have to edit code! I made it customizable from the command line so that there'd be no need to edit any Perl. Nice and simple. After all, if people were going to edit the code, they might as well just use the Finance::Quote module directly and forget all about my wrapper script. So I was going to change it such that you can add a command line flag and get RSS output. I was also going to change it so that you can use it as a CGI script and get quotes remotely (so that a bunch of machines could query the script on one central place -- this is handy for work purposes). And I was going to give these changes away. I'd update the version on the web site and other people could get the benefit of the work. But there's no way I'm putting the altered script on the web site. For one, it means there'd be two versions of the script. Or I'd have to work their changes into the old script. Which means to add the RSS functionality, I might as well just add the changes that had already been in my head and forget their stuff.
It's just a wrapper script I'm getting worked up over, but I've had 20,000-something downloads. A lot of people have emailed me and said they liked how it encapsulated the Finance::Quote module, and how it made it easy for them to have quotes on their web site without having to write code, edit files, etc. That's nice. So maybe I'm making it out to be more than it is, but it's a little important to me. I don't mean to sound like I'm whining about it. I guess I would have liked to have been more involved is all. At least it's going to be distributed. So my tiny little script is preserved for posterity. Which is good. And it's going to get me off my ass and make some updates to it.