Monday, 09 February 2009 03:03
Christof & team recently won our February Thank You Award. Like all winners, we asked him a few questions with regards to his activity in the Haiku community:
Christof Lutteroth & team recently received their Thank You Award funds, and will be having a pizza party with it I'm told :)
I asked Christof if he wouldn't mind answering a few questions, and here's the result:
1) How old are you and what do you do to pay the bills?
I am 30 years old and I work as a lecturer at the University of Auckland. This means I teach students - mostly in Software Engineering but also in other areas such as Computer Graphics - and do research, such as the work on ALM and Stack & Tile.
2) In your nomination, it says: "developed and applied window stacking and customized widget placing on Haiku." How difficult (or easy) was it to accomplish these tasks? Have you done other things these past two months that we missed and that you'd consider even more interesting or successful?
The groundwork was done by our students, who successfully implemented prototypes for Stack & Tile and GUI customization. They proved that the implementation on Haiku is feasible and found solutions for all the technical intricacies that had to be dealt with. They got excellent support from the Haiku community.
After the prototyping stage (and after my students had successfully completed their degrees and got good jobs in the IT industry), the code had to be revised to refine the concepts and to make the code base more mature. In particular the concepts for the Stack & Tile system were not fully fleshed out yet (and we are still working on it), so a lot of work went into this. It was not extremely hard, but developing such things is often a creative process where different possibilities are explored, and then discarded, until some of the more suitable concepts crystallize themselves into something useful.
There are quite a few things, for Stack & Tile as well as ALM, that we still want to do. At the moment I am working on making the Stack & Tile configurations persistent. So when you open some of the windows that were stacked and tiled again, e.g. after restarting the computer, they should automatically be arranged in the same Stack & Tile configuration as they were before. Apart from that, there are numerous ideas we want to work on, but many of them are long-term projects. This year Gerald and me will supervise some final year projects again, and one of them will most likely be about user notification. We intend to do this project with Haiku, probably using the InfoPopper application as a base.
3) What would you love to have that would make working on Haiku easier?
More documentation in the source code would be great (e.g. in the form of Doxygen comments), not just for the APIs but for all the parts of the OS. Also, having an IDE that supports easy navigation through the code base can be very helpful.
4) What interesting book, band, podcast, website, magazine, movie, TV show etc. would you like to recommend. [You can pick more than one item. Tell us why you picked it in one or two sentences.
Gerald and me, we are currently watching episodes of the TV series "Angel" on DVD. It has funny dialogues, and makes a good laugh at the end of a long working day. We also recommend the band "Rush".
Christof Lutteroth & team recently received their Thank You Award funds, and will be having a pizza party with it I'm told :)
I asked Christof if he wouldn't mind answering a few questions, and here's the result:
1) How old are you and what do you do to pay the bills?
I am 30 years old and I work as a lecturer at the University of Auckland. This means I teach students - mostly in Software Engineering but also in other areas such as Computer Graphics - and do research, such as the work on ALM and Stack & Tile.
2) In your nomination, it says: "developed and applied window stacking and customized widget placing on Haiku." How difficult (or easy) was it to accomplish these tasks? Have you done other things these past two months that we missed and that you'd consider even more interesting or successful?
The groundwork was done by our students, who successfully implemented prototypes for Stack & Tile and GUI customization. They proved that the implementation on Haiku is feasible and found solutions for all the technical intricacies that had to be dealt with. They got excellent support from the Haiku community.
After the prototyping stage (and after my students had successfully completed their degrees and got good jobs in the IT industry), the code had to be revised to refine the concepts and to make the code base more mature. In particular the concepts for the Stack & Tile system were not fully fleshed out yet (and we are still working on it), so a lot of work went into this. It was not extremely hard, but developing such things is often a creative process where different possibilities are explored, and then discarded, until some of the more suitable concepts crystallize themselves into something useful.
There are quite a few things, for Stack & Tile as well as ALM, that we still want to do. At the moment I am working on making the Stack & Tile configurations persistent. So when you open some of the windows that were stacked and tiled again, e.g. after restarting the computer, they should automatically be arranged in the same Stack & Tile configuration as they were before. Apart from that, there are numerous ideas we want to work on, but many of them are long-term projects. This year Gerald and me will supervise some final year projects again, and one of them will most likely be about user notification. We intend to do this project with Haiku, probably using the InfoPopper application as a base.
3) What would you love to have that would make working on Haiku easier?
More documentation in the source code would be great (e.g. in the form of Doxygen comments), not just for the APIs but for all the parts of the OS. Also, having an IDE that supports easy navigation through the code base can be very helpful.
4) What interesting book, band, podcast, website, magazine, movie, TV show etc. would you like to recommend. [You can pick more than one item. Tell us why you picked it in one or two sentences.
Gerald and me, we are currently watching episodes of the TV series "Angel" on DVD. It has funny dialogues, and makes a good laugh at the end of a long working day. We also recommend the band "Rush".
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Comments
Oh, and since you're at a source of talented, mouldable minds... maybe you could shanghai a few student for Google's Summer of Code if Haiku again makes it in?
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