My blog has been moved to ariya.ofilabs.com.

Thursday, March 12, 2009

bias

Readers of my blogs might notice the remark "heavy corporate bias" [1] which was the most interesting comment after I showed the result of JavaScript benchmark test. Interesting? Because I work for Nokia [2] and none of the product shown in that benchmark result is from Nokia.

Of course I am not stupid. It is just because I am paid to hack on QtWebKit [3], right? It does not matter if I never pushed QtWebKit to replace KHTML or KJS. It does not matter if I never (God forbid) bad-mouthed or insulted KHTML, KJS, KOffice, or any other KDE sub-projects, or any of its developers. It does not matter if I (and other KDE developers and ex-developers here in Qt Software) give our best [4] to ensure that the latest Qt release plays well with KDE 4.x.

I guess some people are just hostile, not matter what I do. The greatest lessons of it are (1) I try to be active again in KDE, despite Real Life (tm) would make it a difficult task (2) I will post more food pictures, apparently these did not annoy people enough :-)

On a slightly unrelated side note: after all these (tough) years, "biased" is probably not really my thing (those who know me well, please speak up!). I use all major browsers on an almost equal basis. Of all three phones I use since I start working for Nokia, none of them are Nokia ones. I enjoy working on QtWebKit, yet I like the simplicity and easy-to-follow KHTML. My home machine runs (the beautiful) KDE 4, my work desktop is still with (the trusted) KDE 3. I am a proud vim user but hardly recommend it to novices. My main debugging tool is still gdb but everyone knows how I praise VS integrated debugging. I like and use git (rebase) with passion, still I believe mercurial patch-queue rocks. I contributed a lot to KOffice but I am a great fan of Jody Goldberg and Michael Meeks' work on Gnumeric and OpenOffice.org.

If you come to me [5] and tell me how bad my code is, likely I will buy you a drink. And I am usually still the one who hates my code most.

[1] The phrase "heavy corporate bias" starts to become an insider joke here among my fellow Trolls :-)
[2] The disclaimer in my blog explicitly states do not necessarily represent the official view of my employer.
[3] If you fail to see the connection, Chrome and Safari are powered by WebKit as well.
[4] We are still human^Troll, and there are only 7 days a week.
[5] Nokia employees may not enter the contest.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is a real shame that people feel the need to be nasty in the comments. I usually try to write it off as that person just having a sucky day that day, and probably would of toned down their comments.

I for one, can't wait for WebKit to replace KHTML in Konqueror. WebKit is one of the few pieces of actually exciting technology in the web browser space. And Qt is also an awesome piece of technology. Bring the three together WebKit, Qt and KDE and you get the most compelling and exciting technology out there. I glad that there are people like you and all the trolls at Nokia, helping bring so much awesomeness into computing.

Thanks.

Edulix said...

I don't expect Webkit to replace KHTML anytime soon but on the other hand it would be very nice to see webkit kpart working better in Konqueror. Kudos for your work and for the work!

Anonymous said...

I, for one, believe you should simply ignore such comments. That people have their own (sometimes misguided) opinions is a fact of life. It doesn't make what they say true or representative of the larger community.

You are doing awesome work, so you should let the results of that work, and the very good impact it has on the free desktop landscape stand up for you.

Cyrille Berger said...

Yes you shouldn't listen to negative comments, they are unfortunately annoying, but I (and many others) enjoy your post both technical and food :) Especially QtWebkit WYSIWYG which is something I wanted to use for one of my pet project :)

Albert Astals Cid said...

Bias is inherent to a person, and that is not bad. I as KDE developer am biased towards KDE when discussing with friends about programs et al. You as Trolltech developer are biased toward Trolltech products. This is totally fine and ok. The problem is when the bias is so bad it makes you look silly or you simply lie.

So sumarizing:
* Bias is intrinsic to the human being
* "Moderate" bias is not bad
* You are moderately biased imho
* So just keep it going, you're doing good

Anonymous said...

Accusations of bias are just another form of ad hominem argument. When you can't find fault with the material, attack the presenter!

p.s. I've found that those who go around shouting "corporate bias" tend to be blind to their even wrose anti-corporate biases.

Thomas said...

I think its perfectly Ok to remove such comments as they add nothing to the blog. Many will counter to my position that its wrong to remove comments from people that disagree, but my rationale is that if someone is incapable of being constructive and not abrasive they can find a different place on the web to disagree with me ;)

JohnFlux said...

> If you come to me [5] and tell me how bad my code is, likely I will buy you a drink. And I am usually still the one who hates my code most.

Sounds like you're going to be buying yourself a lot of drinks :-)

Anonymous said...

I'm biased and I like it.

In my line of business we are in a constant fight 2 companies and we are working rentlessly to be the best amongst peers and to be perceived as such.

Customers like that - If our customers consider us to be best, they have made a good choice. Our pride will be their pride.

I believe that KDE and QT is in a similar symbiosis. QT is not a stay cat with lost direction under Nokia - Quite the opposite. It might come as a surprise to someone but there is a deep financial crisis ongoing.

Trolltech/QTsoftware is far better protectet from that crisis under Nokia than being on their own.

After the release of KDE 4.x i've seen a lot of FUD from KDE users. It's embarrassing and destructive, not only to the target - KDE, but to the entire OpenSource/GNU/Linux community.

The arguments they are providing becomes increasingly irrelevant by the day. No reason to respond to it - the lost battle of these people is a great victory for KDE, QT, OpenSource and Gnu/Linux.

The OpenSource desktop is no longer a framework for imitation - it's the reference that any desktop will be measured against this fall and onwards.

Anonymous said...

keep on rocking, Ariya :)