Mini Interview - DarkWyrm

Wednesday, 16 June 2010 06:58

DarkWyrm recently won our June Thank You Award (with Pier Luigi Fiorini). Like all winners, we asked him a few questions with regards to his activity in the Haiku community:

Q1: How old are you and what do you do to pay the bills?

I'm 33 years old and I live near Columbus, OH with my wife and two children. By day I teach computers and music at a Christian private school in the area. I also am the local unofficial technical support and network administrator for the school. I've done a bunch of other things for the school over the years, but that's what I've been doing the last couple of years, anyway...

Q2: In your April 2010 Thank You Award nomination, it said: " For Paladin and his fantastic introduction to C++ programming and the Haiku API". How difficult (or easy) was it to accomplish these tasks?

It's actually been really easy -- I kind of fell into both projects.

The lessons just snowballed after a friend of mine in the community asked for some help in learning how to write code. I've done a fair amount of writing since I came into the community -- I had what amounted to a blog before blogs were cool, I wrote the initial draft for the Haiku Interface Guidelines, and I have a mostly-finished manuscript on OpenOffice.org's Writer word processor that I've been meaning to finish. This year at school was my first year teaching computers to junior high and high school students and it was a learning experience that I really enjoyed, and writing the lessons just came naturally out of things that I already do and love: code and teaching.

Paladin was an experiment. I was doing a little work with the Niue guys for a few weeks and wanted to clean up the code, but it seemed like a lot of work. One weekend I got really curious how hard it would be to write an IDE a lot like BeIDE, which had been my #1 development tool since the days that I was first learning to program using BeOS. It took a little time to learn how to work with gcc directly, but I was surprised how easy it was. It's also probably the most satisfying project I've ever worked on -- any improvements I make on it help me (and others) code better.

Q3: What would you love to have that would make working on Haiku easier?

Stability, stability, stability. How I wish that Haiku were as stable as R5 or even Zeta. Without the bugs, Haiku would be an complete knockout for development even if it weren't feature complete yet.

Q4: What interesting book, band, TV show etc. would you like to recommend?

Well, I'm not much of a TV watcher and there are *so* many good books out there, so I'll just recommend a band I've been listening to a lot of lately: Skillet. Their earlier stuff is a little bit rock, a little bit electronica, but their last three albums are nothing short of amazing rock albums. I'm a big fan of their last one, Awake -- every single song is really good.

Comments

+1 # RE: Mini Interview - DarkWyrm — karl 2010-06-16 07:09

I'm also a musician. Just curious, which instruments do you play?

btw, both Pier and DarkWyrm received their shirts :lol:

+2 # RE: RE: Mini Interview - DarkWyrm — darkwyrm 2010-06-16 11:35

I'm a music teacher, so I play just about all of the regular orchestral instruments to some degree or another. My major instrument in college was oboe, but nowadays I spend most of my time playing piano, guitar, and electric bass.

+2 # Thanks! — andrewzx1 2010-06-16 17:01

Thanks for all the great apps and tutorials!

+2 # Thank you Darkwyrm — hey68you 2010-06-17 00:23

I voted for you. Your tutorials are really well written and very helpful even for experienced programmers.

Regards,
hey68you

+1 # RE: Mini Interview - DarkWyrm — andrewzx1 2010-06-17 08:15

In a discussion I had with DarkWyrm we discussed give Paladin the ability to read old BEIDE .proj project files. BEIDE was licensed from Metrowerks. The .proj internal format was never publically listed. There was a Japanese developer who sold the specs but his links are cold.

So if someone wants to reverse engineer the BEIDE .proj file format and provide that to DarkWyrm, it is possible Paladin could gain the feature to read classic BeOS projects. Apparently it is a tag format, which makes the challenge a bit easier.

+2 # RE: RE: Mini Interview - DarkWyrm — karl 2010-06-17 08:48

Why not ask Metrowerks to open/donate the format to Haiku Inc? There can't be any commercial interest in that regard anymore, and an announcement here, by Haiku, or OSNews, would be good PR and a boost in their company's interest + advertisement.

+1 # RE: RE: RE: Mini Interview - DarkWyrm — andrewzx1 2010-06-17 08:58

I suspect they still use the same format in the existing CodeWarrior products. But it can't hurt to ask.

+1 # RE: RE: RE: RE: Mini Interview - DarkWyrm — karl 2010-06-17 09:04

you're good at asking :lol:

-1 # RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Mini Interview - DarkWyrm — Memson 2010-07-09 09:43

The format is most likely documented in the greater code warrior documentation. For example, the CW PowerPC object format that BeOS PowerPC used was fully documented. The project format is fairly trivial in comparison!!

+1 # RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Mini Interview - DarkWyrm — Memson 2010-07-09 09:55

Oh, and to be clear - the version of BeIDE we all used back in the day, was born out or MW Code Warrior for Mac. The Project format will likely be similar. I've moved BeIDE projects to Code Warrior for Mac (4/6/9/X) and IIRC, it did work up to a point (the main issue was with paths.) The Code Warrior Mac can (and will) compile BeOS PowerPC apps. The main issue is with the C++ Standard lib, which is not compatible and needs to be hacked around.

Yikes! I'm remember far too much "useless" info today :-*

+1 # RE: Mini Interview - DarkWyrm — andrewzx1 2010-06-17 09:23

OK, I'll contact Metrowerks...

+1 # RE: RE: Mini Interview - DarkWyrm — MaxOS 2010-06-17 09:29

+1 # RE: RE: RE: Mini Interview - DarkWyrm — Memson 2010-07-09 09:46

Good luck! MWRon was always very helpful, but I think he has since moved on. MW as a company is a completely different beast now as they were bought out at least 1 time.

I spoke with MWRon about the BeIDE Source. He was looking in to the viability of donating it, but never got back to me (this was in, like 2005/2006.)