Almanac: 1 August 2001
By J.D. Hildebrand
Hello, my friends.
Today is the 213th day of 2001; 152 days remain in the year.
August 1 is the birthday of writer Herman
Melville, who was born in New York in 1819. In addition to Moby Dick,
Melville wrote Billy Budd, Israel Potter, Typee, Omoo, and other works.
Melville is often compared to Nathaniel Hawthorne; both wrote symbolically
charged fiction full of moral battles between good and evil. I must admit
Hawthorne is more to my liking -- his tales of ordinary (but meaningful)
everyday life seem somehow more relevant than Melville's adventure stories.
Still, it's hard to do better than Moby Dick. It's quite a book.
Celebrate Melville's birthday by picking up your old copy and giving it a fresh
read.
Or celebrate the birthday of Grateful Dead singer Jerry
Garcia, who was born on August 1, 1942.
The results of the first U.S.
census were published on August 1, 1790. The population of the 16 states
(plus the Ohio territory) numbered 3,939,326. With 747,610 residents, Virginia
was the most populous state.
I am just back from a visit to sunny California. I spent a few days at
Borland's Scotts Valley headquarters getting caught up on product news and
touching base with my boss, developer relations VP David I. And then it was off
to Long Beach for BorCon
XII.
I spent most of the conference week holed up in my hotel room producing a
daily newspaper for conference attendees, the BorChronicle (1,
2,
3,
4).
This year's newspaper deadlines required that I spend most of the day writing
and laying out the paper instead of attending conference events, so I saw less
of BorCon than I usually do.
And I've seen a lot of BorCon over the years. This is my 12th year as a
member of the BorCon Advisory Board, a group of corporate users, members of the
press, consultants, and others who use their expertise and industry contracts to
help build the technical program for the conference. Serving on the board has
been a real high point of each year for me since the first Borland Developers
Conference. I really love helping to build the program. The required skills
include reading submissions for relevance and accuracy -- the same sorts of
things I did for years as editor of Windows Tech Journal and other
magazines. So the job has come easily to me.
These days there is something that is not coming easily to me. And I
suppose it's another reason you might not have seen much of me if you had
attended BorCon. After a decade together, my wife and I have split up. It's
still so recent that most people don't know, and it's hard for me to talk about.
We ran Windows Tech Journal together and she always attended BorCon with
me. So every time I ran into an old friend at BorCon, he would ask if she had
come to Long Beach and I would have to make the painful explanation again. So I
kept to myself this year, licking my wounds, looking forward to bouncing back
and feeling like myself again. I know, I know -- this sort of personal detail
isn't what you look for from the Borland Community site and the Almanac column.
But I think that part of being a member of a community like this is knowing that
you can count on the support of friends. I've been part of the Borland
community...well, forever, it seems like. So it didn't seem right not to tell
you what's up with me.
If you were unable to attend BorCon this year, make plans right now to attend
next year's conference. It's scheduled for May 18 to 22 in Anaheim, California.
(No one knows for sure yet, but it seems fairly safe to assume that a visit to
Disneyland could be part of the festivities.) Check out the call for papers and
sign up for the conference listserv by visiting www.borland.com/conf2002.
THE BIG NEWS. Surely the biggest news stirring up the developer world
these days is the release of Kylix
Open Edition. This is a completely free version of Kylix for Linux
programmers. If you've been waiting for the right time to apply your PC
programming skills to the Linux world, you've just run out of excuses.
Linux Today devoted a
big story to the Kylix release on July 25. Check it out here.
There's a ton of good commentary at Slashdot,
too, mostly about GPL licensing. I like this comment by niccodicco:
The Kylix Open Edition ships with CLX libraries under the GPL license.
[Therefore], any applications that are built with a CLX library must make
their sources freely available and distribute them under terms of the GPL
license as well.
Hmmm this is a very interesting approach. Being optimistic, I think this
can only result in:
- More Delphi developers (free-as-in-beer is always an attraction)
- More Linux developers (Delphi is already a popular and easy-to-use
language, but it is not free for Windows)
- A set of libraries maintained by said developers
- More GPL'd code.
A win for both Borland, open-source software, and Linux. You might argue
that this excludes other "free" licenses, but IMHO the GPL is the
only way this could have been done. Eat that, M$.
For more great Kylix information:
- Kylix
special offer. Get Kylix Desktop Developer, a $999 value, for just
$199 through August 23 through Borland's online shopping site. Offer valid
in the U.S. only.
- A
first look at Kylix. This about.com article, written in June, 2001,
covers the commercial release of Kylix. (For more about.com coverage, click here.)
- Borland's
Kylix: Turbocharging Linux development. This LinuxPlanet review was
written by Scott Courtney. Summary: "Kylix is not difficult to learn,
but neither is it intuitively simple. Nor is it suitable for a true novice
programmer, in my opinion. This reality, though, does not diminish its value
as a serious tool for a professional developer. If you are moving to Linux
from a Windows environment, using either Delphi or Visual Basic, then buying
Kylix should be a no-brainer. For programmers who need to develop
sophisticated, high-performance code where the user interface is only a
small part of the project, Kylix may not be the right way to go. On the
other hand, for a corporate developer writing vertical applications --
especially for in-house use in an environment where many such applications
are needed in a short time -- Kylix is a splendid choice."
- Delphi
6/Kylix review. This one's by "RaiderAdam" at
MaximumLinux.org. This article isn't the most informative I've seen, but
it's generated lots of responses.
- Product
review: Kylix. Here's Linux Journal's first Kylix review, written by
Petr Sorfa. The bottom line: "Kylix is an extensive development
environment and delivers more than any other commercial equivalent for Linux
through its business-oriented components. Borland is serious about being
part of the Linux community and has shown this by releasing the Open edition
for no cost to download and $99 for physical media, as well as making the
CLX components available as open source. If the Object Pascal programming
language is not an issue, Kylix is the development tool for commercial Linux
development. Although there are one or two hiccups, Borland has bravely
paved the way for commercial development on Linux.
- Code
Central Kylix contributions. Check out the latest code submissions
by your fellow programmers, including useful components and reusable source
code modules.
That's it for today, my friends. I'm setting up a new household and I'm
trying to get my telephone wired up so I can get online from the home office
where I work on Borland Community content. I'm sort of camping while I wait for
furniture to be delivered. Waiting to see what this new phase of my life will be
about.
Keep hacking.
JDH
P.S. While I was in Scotts Valley I learned that Borland's accounting
department has a new policy regarding payments. In addition to the assignment of
rights and copyright agreement you send when you submit an article via our
GetPublished application, the accounting dept. now requires a W9 -- a U.S.
government document with your Social Security Number or Tax ID number on it. If
you have submitted an article and are awaiting publication, or your article has
been published and you are awaiting payment, write
me and I will get this form to you.
