Several months ago, Julian Oliver wrote:
We take great pleasure in announcing that The Artvertiser source code is now
(finally) available, licensed under the GPLv3.
Introduction:
The Artvertiser is an Improved Reality platform, designed for the live
substitution of advertisements in a video stream with alternative 2D content.
The code was initially developed by Julian Oliver before being significantly
improved by Damian Stewart.
[etc]
This is another thing I have been meaning to comment on. I haven't
seen the work (and probably never will) but I did look at the code.
The interesting thing about this collaboration is the difference in
their techniques. Damian is a bit of a programmer's programmer. He
cares about internal elegance and correctness, knows his algorithms,
configures rather than integrates, doesn't repeat himself. It's all
exactly right in a 21st century neo-textbook style. Some of his code
even contains comments that make sense. On the other hand, Julian is
the ultimate software bricoleur. His work is structurally precarious,
all found snippets of rare code cobbled together using brazenly
specific glue. Each program is written for an individual computer,
and often tailored for a specific site. His code would conventionally
be called unmaintainable, inexplicable, a mess; but he clearly does
maintain it, so a more accurate term might just be "personal".
Looking at his code reminded me of this:
http://selectparks.net/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=395
where Julian celebrates his students' tendency to do things that are
theoretically ridiculous. Without rereading that or providing any
other backup, I claim that the worse a solution is from a technical
viewpoint, the more Julian admires it -- problems that don't need to
exist lead to the most interesting solutions.
It would be interesting to see what they came up with if they
collaborated on something from the start (Damian came late to the
Artvertiser), though I suspect that might prove impossible.
Douglas
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