Mini Interview - Oliver Tappe

Written by Karl vom Dorff Monday, 13 September 2010 12:06

Oliver Tappe (zooey) recently won our August Thank You Award. 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 40 years old and I work as a freelance software developer to pay those bills.

Q2: In your nomination, it said you helped: "Integrate localization into Haiku's POSIX layer." How difficult (or easy) was it to accomplish this task?

As usual with tasks that one tries to tackle without really knowing all the details they will involve, it was (still is) a bit more work than anticipated. All the difficulties were in the details of getting the services of the localization library haiku uses as its backend (ICU) to match the exact expectations set by the POSIX API. At several instances, problems were caused by de-facto standards (software expecting things to be a certain way) that are not even specified in the POSIX standard.

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

The one thing I miss most on Haiku is a working Java runtime, which I would use to run Eclipse. On Haiku, I use Pe for development works, which is ok, but nowhere near as feature-complete as Eclipse.

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

Recent stuff that got my attention was the album 'Teen Dream' by the U.S.-band 'Beach House' - very fine stuff indeed. Additionally, I wholeheartedly recommend all crime novels by the British author 'Sophie Hannah'. Her books are very stylish as well as nerve-wrecking, just what I expect in a good crime novel :-)