Premature Optimization

From time to time I get reminders to why I love open source so much, and why I see it as having little to do with software and a lot to do with promoting a culture of sharing and of openness.

A few days ago I released my first C open source app - Glista. It was a little tool I wrote to scratch an itch and to sharpen my hardly-existing C skills. Deciding to release it was natural, but I didn’t expect much attention from such a simple tool competing in a category where many alternatives exist.

However, it did get noticed and I had several people e-mailing suggestions, reporting bugs and generally commenting on it, giving mostly positive and useful feedback. I was able to fix several bugs in the last few days and I did learn a few things on creating better build scripts, which I was clueless about before.

And the best thing is that at less than a week after it’s initial release, Glista was ported to run on an iPaq PDA using the OpenEmbedded cross-compiler. I even got some screenshots to show off:

How cool is that?

This is done using the unstable branch of OpenEmbedded so there are no official builds yet - but the author, Dmitry, has attached a recipe file to this bug report in the OpenEmbedded tracker if you want to try it.