Setting up the office

And here's a couple of pics of our office's internals. As you can see we are currently setting everything up. We bought some desks and other furniture in Ikea. For some time we've changed ourselves from software developers into constructing workers ;-))

Yesterday and today we were assembling kitchen closets:



They don't look impressive but that's not the point :-) Here's Slawek and Marek:



We have a lot of empty rooms occupied by some trash:



As you can see - walls are painted with nice colors, and the floor looks also nice.

Here's our open space (will be occupied by developers) and a lot of desks that were assembled recently:



We bought them with the biggest (I think) table available, so everyone will have a lot of space.

I wonder who's going to clean it up ;-))



Here's our open space again (as widest view I could get with my lens):



You can see this fancy window on the left.

And that's not all!!! We have more than 200 square meters. A lot of smaller rooms I had no time today to photograph. There's a lot of space - our building has 2 floors (including base). We'll post other photos as we progress with work :-)

Our new home ;-)

Here's a couple of pics I took today of our new office. If you wonder where it is check a map at the end.



Here's a photo of the whole building from front:



And a fancy window (to our open space):



Here's the promised map:


View Larger Map

Drop in if you're in the nearby ;-)

15 biggest disappointments of 2007

PC World published a list of 15 disappoinments they would want to forget ASAP ;-))

It won't be a surprise that Microsoft Vista in on the list (guess which place?), but it's not the only one idea from Microsoft that was laughed of. There's also a lot of other crazy sh*t ;-)

So, here's the list, enjoy :-)

PS
It supposed to be a "funny post", so laugh :-D

We have just signed a deal, w00t!

Let me be the first on the team to announce (sorry guys :P) that we have just signed a deal with Atlassian. We will represent them as support people in Europe and do software development on a cool new product for them (stay tuned on this).

I will leave longer and more comprehensive posts on this subject to some of my colleagues that are more skilled than me in writing long essays.

Almost re-implemented

Yesterday we finally signed the articles of our general partnership. Thus we have founded a new entity, which we called SPARTEZ. A couple of days more (maybe weeks) and our business will be officially registered in the court. This act should end our status of being “unimplemented”.

Surprisingly, the most difficult thing to establish a company was not legal stuff (although it was not so simple – 8 partners to satisfy isn’t easy and amount of papers to sign unbelivable) – but rather finding some sexy name, which does not exist yet on the market – read: Internet domain (.com) is not occupied by somebody else. It’s extremely difficult now – almost everything reasonable (or unreasonable) we invented was already there.

Before we got laid-off I had had no idea, how great demand is on the market for IT services (of all kinds). It was enough to assemble some simple web page, write a few e-mails, make several phone calls and ask several friends to start their contacts – and, behold, we were having serious concerns which way to go – so many companies and people (from several countries) answered and wanted to offer us something interesting.

However we stayed focused. Very soon, I hope, we will finalize the deal with one of the most reasonable and coolest software companies in the world. Many of us dreamt of working there. Now, we are really close to be on board with them and work together on a great stuff.
As soon as we have all papers signed, I will let you know the details. However if you google really intensively or read all blogs in the world, you may even guess by yourself.

Another thing worth mentioning is that you can really work as a team now even if you have no office and no money for enterprise software. Free on-line collaboration tools from Google (especially Google docs, calendar & maps), mail groups, Skype and many other stuff let you work quite efficiently with others staying at home. I wish there was some free public wiki (like Confluence) hosting with security features available in the net. JotSpot is still closed for new users after it was acquired by Google.

You may be interested why name SPARTEZ was chosen, just ask. There is a story behind it…

See you soon,

Wojtek

Visual Studio

Does anybody know how much Visual Studio costs? I tried to check it but Google doesn't know it or I simply couldn't find such information.

Is there any really valuable open-source alternative product to VS (for both Windows and Linux platforms)?

I don't get the Microsoft's policy - VS should be free for developers. The truth is that MS would earn a lot of money on it anyway - VS is able to produce applications only for Windows platform...

Fedora Core 8 and failing Java

Early adopters doesn't have an easy life ;-)

Few days ago I installed the newest release of Fedora Core. It looked stable and functional. Livna had extra packages available for it (drivers, codecs, etc.) so I decided to give it a try.

Everything went ok, I upgraded my system withing few days. I had practise with it and every time it takes me less and less to switch between new Fedora release :-)

But as with every new software sh*t can happen - this time Java 1.6.0 doesn't want to work, I've got:

xcb_xlib.c:50: xcb_xlib_unlock: Assertion 'c->xlib.lock' failed.

Sun knows about it and there's already a fix for 1.7.0. There's also a dirty hack for previous Java versions. I can say it worked for me :-)

Qmail - WTF?

So, today Dan Bernstein anounced that qmail - one of the most popular mail transfer agents (years ago) is from now on placed into public domain. This means that everyone is able to modify and distribute qmail.

This is something personal for me because I was one of the fans of qmail. Years ago I put a lot of effort to translate qmail's manuals into Polish, I worked on patching qmail, making it easier for other administrators to install it and maintain (I even started project called qmail-patches and a second one called virtual qmail). And by that time qmail's license was so stupid that it did not let you modify and distribute modified version. You could distribute only qmail provided you by Dan Bernstein.

After qmail was announced and used other MTAs followed - postfix was created and it gained a lot of popularity, there was also exim (I think it's not so popular anymore but was years ago). But to be honest I think qmail's architecture was superior. But Dan Bernstein discuraged everyone from making enhancements. It was not possible to distribute new version of qmail. Because of that qmail lost a lot of interest and posibilites.

It could be the first MTA on the Internet (it was the second one for many years) but because of the stupid policy it had no chance at all. Now, Dan, after years decided that he will let go this project.

That's an interesting decision. I think that he did it because qmail stopped being one of the MTAs of the choice. People stopped caring about it and just went for others and were happy with them. And for a developer there's nothing worse than when people stop using his tools and don't bother to think about them anymore.

That's sad that Dan because of his mentality was not able to use attention that qmail gained some time ago. It could have been a great system. I'm sad because I put a lot of effort in making it better and I always wished that it was a normal Open Source on a decent license.

I still have the knowledge of internals. I still remember this beautiful C code that I read and changed. This was an amazing experience for me to change so complicated system and to undestand it. I feel bad that qmail didn't get his chance :-(