Andrei Zmievski

I’ve switched.
For the last 3 years I have been using Linux on a Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop. It’s been working fairly well, but lately the age of it has begun to show. The laptop emits loud fan noise, has problems with shutting down occasionally, and it’s a pain to switch between wireless networks. Linux is great to develop on, but I have not come across any desktop environment that I would feel it excel at.
So, having looked around, I narrowed my decision to IBM ThinkPad and Apple Powerbook. Rasmus has recently bought one of the former (T42, I believe), but read his posting and note how much time he had to spend to get certain things working (like suspend and wakeup). That is exactly the sort of thing that I am sick of. More and more of my friends and co-workers have been praising their Powerbooks. And why not? It’s Unix under the hood after all, with a sexy GUI on top, all glued together with tight, usable, fast desktop glue, ready for coding, multimedia, connectivity – whatever you want.
As of last Friday, I have a beautiful 15″ aluminium Powerbook in my hands and I love it so far. Put it to sleep? Just close the lid. Wireless? I go to a coffee shop with free wireless connection and Powerbook discovers it and connects automatically. Development? I have full power of BSD, X11, gcc, vim, and all the rest at my fingertips. Mutimedia? Don’t even get me started. Now I just need a list of cool apps/tips/tricks to make the laptop even better.
I have switched and I am not going back.

Hard to believe it’s been over three years since I first released PHP-GTK. A community has grown around this tool, but in the last year or so I really did not pay it much attention until I read a big thread on the php-gtk-general list called “what is going on with gtk.php.net?”. And when I read it, I felt ashamed. Here were people who have come to depend on this tool, who are trying to contribute to the best of their abilities and time constraints, and who are frustrated by the incomplete documentation and lack of updates to the website, and I was absent from my duty.
Yes, when you release a piece of software into the wild, wild world, you have certain obligations and duties as the author or the primary maintainer. There is plenty of abandonware in the world already, and adding one more corpse to the pile does not help anybody. Software is only good if there is someone behind it, whether it’s a single person, a group, or a whole company. So I wrote a Letter to Community, apologized for my prolonged absence, and tried to kickstart the project again. And it worked! People came to my call for help, and now the website is getting updates, the documentation is getting new content, and I have gotten back to my responsibilities of developing code and overseeing the project at large. PHP-GTK 2 is on the horizon, boys and girls, and that’s all I’ll say for now.