Open Source Victory: hacking a screen hack
When RedHat was installed on my new work machine, the presence of jwz's XScreenSaver was a definite highlight. As luck would have it, RedHat 9.0 ships with XScreenSaver 4.07. My video adapter supports two monitors, but the windowing system only sees one double-wide monitor. Thus, screensavers likeLevi Burton's popsquares, which adjust their display to the size of the monitor, end up looking a bit smooshed, even when they take up the entirety of both screens. XScreenSaver 4.12 recognizes the two monitors, and thus runs a separate instance on each one. popsquares looks much nicer when the "squares" are 1.33:1 instead of 2.66x1. I was still curious, though, to see what 1:1 would look like. I downloaded the source for 4.14, poked around, figured out how to add more configuration arguments, recompiled, and voila! I had an itch, I scratched it. This is a fairly minor victory as such things go, but it's fun!
My other open source success story dates back to my first encounter with TNT, an emacs-based AIM client. At home, it worked very well. Back in the days when it didn't seem like such an egregiously bad idea to use AIM at work, I needed to get through the firewall. There are several ports which are passed through without question, and you can bet that the AIM port isn't one of them. The AIM servers, on the other hand, listen on oodles of ports, anticipating precisely this kind of situation. TNT's authors had hard-wired the port number for the server. I merely changed the port number in the source, recompiled, and it worked. A slightly more ideal solution would've involved making the port a configuration option, but I wasn't interested in spending quite that much time on it. I should, though, as it's about damn time I gave something back.
My other open source success story dates back to my first encounter with TNT, an emacs-based AIM client. At home, it worked very well. Back in the days when it didn't seem like such an egregiously bad idea to use AIM at work, I needed to get through the firewall. There are several ports which are passed through without question, and you can bet that the AIM port isn't one of them. The AIM servers, on the other hand, listen on oodles of ports, anticipating precisely this kind of situation. TNT's authors had hard-wired the port number for the server. I merely changed the port number in the source, recompiled, and it worked. A slightly more ideal solution would've involved making the port a configuration option, but I wasn't interested in spending quite that much time on it. I should, though, as it's about damn time I gave something back.