My Lucky Week
It’s only Wednesday and I’ve already had the luckiest week that I can remember in a while.
First, on Monday I released my new language project, Nu, and had thousands of visitors to my new site, Programming Nu. Of those, over 200 downloaded my binary installer, and so far I haven’t heard of any problems with installation or any of my examples. That binary installer was the scariest part of the release for me; I just figured out how to make it last Friday! There’s nearly 50 people in our new Google group, and there’s a small but sharp core of people pushing the boundaries of what can be done with Nu. I see a lot of improvements coming as we learn more about what it’s like to approach Nu for the first time.
My grandmother used to say that “you make your own luck.” Part of the making of Monday’s good luck was weekend testing and proofreading by Matt Mower, David Phillip Oster, Colin Barrett, and Patrick Thomson. A lot more testing has been done in the last two days, which you can see from all the discussion on the mailing list.
But yesterday something happened that I can only attribute to luck, karma, or fate. In the evening I took the train up to San Francisco to attend last night’s geekSessions, fast becoming my favorite technical and networking event in the bay area. That was true before last night’s door prize drawing, when Cindy Phung pulled my business card for the evening’s grand prize, a Sun Fire X2100 server. Thanks, Cindy! And thanks also to Stephen Rossi of Sun for providing the server and to Christian Perry for organizing the event and for convincing Sun to donate my new toy, er, server.
That opens an interesting direction for me. It’s been a long time since I’ve worked on a Solaris system and almost as long since I’ve used anything that wasn’t running Mac OS X. What should I do with my new box? Is it time for a GNUstep port of Nu? Is anyone out there still using Objective-C on Solaris?
p.s. If you’ve downloaded my Nu installer and had problems, please let me know! I won’t take it as a break in my luck!
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gnustep on solaris: http://www.gnustep.org/resources/sources.html#solaris