I am interested in helping with the mac porting project and I'd like to introduce myself. I have been in the "computing" business since 1965. I started with machine language programming on an IBM 1401. Since then I have migrated through too many languages to remember, some of which were written on clay tablets (80-column pasteboard!). I have primarily been involved in operating system code (some of my patches have made it into IBM releases, it's always fun to see your code "outed" that way!) and more recently I have been working for a large US aerospace company keeping the infrastructure stable. I currently work mostly in Perl but have done some projects in Java, PHP, Embperl, SQL, and other languages. I have always prided myself by being moderately conversant in many languages. My specialty, if you can call it that, is interfacing disparate systems using whatever tools might be available, building custom interfaces.
Recently I migrated from Windows to a Mac. I just wasn't happy with the way that Microsoft was headed and, being familiar with the Sun Solaris and Slackware Linux platforms I figured that OSX would be a lot more fun than yet another install of Windows. I even convinced my wife to migrate to a MacBook Pro and there is where my interest in OO gets interesting. She does some side work for a friend that was using MS Office Mail Merge and I've set her up to use OO instead. But as it (for her) runs under X11 it's a "little clunky" plus I would like to build a custom app for her to be able to do her tasks very easily. Her application fits into the "mail merge" category but is really a "one off" version of that. Thus my interest in joining this project. So, to explain where I am right now. In the background is the build process for OO SRC680_m225 with the aqua/cocoa updates. I had no idea that it would take so long for the initial build! Hopefully it will complete sometime tonight. My system is an iMac 24", 3 G memory and 500Gig HD. I'm still feeling my way around OO development and, especially, the Mac porting project. I certainly have learned a lot in the few days that I have connected. I'd like to take on a small task and get some guidance on how to proceed. At work we are rather informal and, although we use CVS and other source control tools, I'm still trying to figure out the structure behind the OO development environment. This is bigger than anything I have been involved in before. I'm a pretty good debugger (meaning that I can break almost anything at will!) and I suspect that fixing broken code would be a good place for me to start. But I'll be happy to jump into anything that needs doing. I hope you can find a spot for me in this effort! I am quite wiling to do whatever needs doing. Thank you for your attention! Bill Waggoner Bethel, Connecticut, USA
