20081007245 | Q&A with Urias McCullough

Urias recently won our October Thank You Award. He decided to donate the money back into the award because he already owned two Haiku golf shirts!

We thought it would be a good idea ask if the winners wouldn't mind answering some questions in a brief interview - Urias agreed, and here are the results:

How old are you and what do you do to pay the bills?

I'm currently 31 years old. For those interested, I also have three
awesome daughters and a lovely wife.

For my day job currently (for the last 8 years), I write policy
management software for public risk insurance (usually
government-sanctioned self-insured pools). This is generally pretty
boring stuff (unless you're the administrator of a self-insurance
pool) and our flagship product is currently written in C# using a
Microsoft SQL Server database backend. My responsibilities range from
the software development aspect, to some internal IT administration,
as well as business analyst and customer training on occasion.

In your nomination, it says: 'For his continued commitment to get Haiku Inc.
to a viable state. Haiku Inc. is an important part of the Haiku project,
being the official contact for businesses and other organisations and for
collecting donations for PR and development purposes. Also, he worked with
Coverity to get their code analysis tool to work on the Haiku source. Many
bugs are fixed already and Haiku is more stable for it, esp. when stressing
the system in low resource situations." How difficult (or easy) was it to
accomplish these tasks? Have you done other things these past two months
that we missed and that you'd consider even more interesting or successful?

To clarify, I certainly wouldn't attest that we've returned Haiku Inc.
to a solid, viable state quite yet. We're still very much working on
the legal details internally. Over the last year since Michael Phipps
retirement from the project, I had taken more of an "assistant" role.
I have been helping to keep some of the assets maintained such as the
domain management, the donations, the Haiku store, and a few other
mundane details. Only recently have I stepped up my involvement
somewhat to help get things back on track from a legal perspective and
also taking on some additional responsibilities that Jorge had been
doing previously.

I also have assisted on some of the marketing/PR aspects wherever I
could, including doing much of the footwork to make LinuxWorld 2008
happen for Haiku this year (however, I could not have done this
without Jorge Mare).

As far as difficulty to accomplish some of the tasks, it's difficult
to say in retrospect. The difficulty usually ends up being lack of
time, and many things take time and patience to push through to
completion.

LinuxWorld for example was something we started working on in February
when we originally submitted our application for a booth spot in the
FREE .Org Pavilion. In May, we found out that our .Org Pavilion
application was rejected, and instead we were offered a
cheaper-than-normal rate on a turnkey booth, but still much more
expensive than we could afford.

Ultimately we were able to share the booth space with ReactOS, and
also negotiated a rock-bottom rate with IDG for the space, but we
didn't actually have a signed confirmation that we were actually
attending until mid-July. I could not have managed all the
back-and-forth communication, negotiation, or planning without Jorge's
expertise and assistance during this time, it simply would not have
happened. I also learned a lot during this process, and I feel I'm
better prepared for the next time.

Many in the Haiku community don't know this, but I have also helped
the ReactOS project get their code online with Coverity in the last
month as well (with great success).

Working with Coverity has also been a bit challenging at times. We
started our discussions with David Maxwell (who is very, very busy) in
April, but there were some setbacks preventing Coverity from moving
forward and publishing our results to the developers. After
LinuxWorld, I had resumed our efforts with Erinn at Coverity, and she
has been quite helpful in getting our requests processed and
implemented. I think this was a great opportunity for Haiku, and I'm
very glad I was able to assist in bringing this service to the
developers.

What would you love to have that would make working on Haiku easier?

I'd love to have better C/C++ experience so I could actually jump into
the code and start developing as well :) Unfortunately, I haven't had
the time and motivation to start teaching myself the skills I need for
this; perhaps in the future when I have fewer personal projects on my
plate this might become a reality.

What interesting book, band, podcast, website, magazine, movie, TV show etc.
would you like to recommend. [You can pick more than one item. Tell us why
you picked it in one or two sentences.

This is actually a hard question for me... the only thing I can think
of offhand is a shameless plug for Team Haiku's site
and on IRC at: irc://irc.freenode.net:6667/teamhaiku. Team Haiku
is always in need of more members and devoted crunchers to help us
increase up through the ranks and shine as a successful project and
distributed computing team. The Team Haiku distributed computing team
has been diligently plugging away at 80+ different distributed
computing projects now for several years. This is a great way to
increase awareness of Haiku and use your computer to help solve
complicated mathematical/science related issues for the world at the
same time.

Email This

Comments (11) add comment

Subscribe to this comment's feed

umccullough said:

	Just a note, it seems the website link for Team Haiku has a typo here (a , at the end). Thanks for the votes guys, I appreciate the encouragement - Urias
	report abuse vote down vote up

October 10, 2008 | url
Votes: +0

karl said:

	Sorry about the link; it's fixed.
	report abuse vote down vote up

October 10, 2008
Votes: +0

thenerd said:

	It's about time Karl
	report abuse vote down vote up

October 10, 2008 | url
Votes: +0

karl said:

	someone else around here has editing privileges too
	report abuse vote down vote up

October 10, 2008
Votes: +0

Humdinger said:

Thanks for that interview, Urias!
Hey, and I'd like to point out that the 2nd question said "...continued commitment to get Haiku Inc. to a viable state." So, it wasn't implied that Haiku Inc.'s already there.

@Karl: The thing in the square brackets was only meant as clarification for the interviewee and shouldn't appear in the published interview.
Will you send the questionnaire also to the past winners, to be put up in the Hall of Fame?

Regards,
Humdinger

report abuse

vote down

vote up

October 14, 2008
Votes: +0

umccullough said:

Heh...

Yes, I realized it was a suggestion that we were still making progress, but I wanted to clarify just in case anyone was reading and thinking that it was all better now - One thing I absolutely stand for is clear communication whenever possible smilies/wink.gif

Also @Karl - i didn't notice before, but the IRC channel/server link has been turned into a "mailto:" - there's a way to make it into an irc:// URL that most browsers understand, but I don't have the time right this moment to look it up...

report abuse

vote down

vote up

October 14, 2008
Votes: +0

karl said:

	i didn't notice before, but the IRC channel/server link has been turned into a "mailto:" hmm, I don't know what you mean? Where? http://www.haikuware.com/chat that seems to work
	report abuse vote down vote up

October 14, 2008
Votes: +0

umccullough said:

In the article, after the teamhaiku website, there's the text:

IRC at # This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it his e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .

When I hover over the link, it says "mailto: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it " and clicking on it opens my mail client.

report abuse

vote down

vote up

October 14, 2008 | url
Votes: +0

umccullough said:

	It seems the agreed standard URI for accessing an IRC channel from a web browser would be: irc://irc.freenode.net:6667/#teamhaiku Just based on a quick search
	report abuse vote down vote up

October 14, 2008 | url
Votes: +0

umccullough said:

	Actually, just irc://irc.freenode.net:6667/teamhaiku (without the #) - it launches properly in my IRC client that way when i click on the HREF.
	report abuse vote down vote up

October 14, 2008 | url
Votes: +0

karl said:

	Oh sorry, I didn't know what you were referring to at first, but it's fixed now. Thanks!
	report abuse vote down vote up

October 14, 2008
Votes: +0

Write comment

You must be logged in to a comment. Please register if you do not have an account yet.

< Prev		Next >

Login

File Search

Most Popular Files

Nov.09	Senryu Personal Edition Vmware Image - Weekly 7254
Sep.26	Senryu Virtual Box Edition 1530
Nov.23	Opera 944
Jul.09	AbiWord 888
Oct.17	Senryu Developer Edition Vmware Image 859
Jul.08	BeOS 5 PE Max Edition 522
Aug.15	ICH AC97 Driver 508
Aug.24	Ati Radeon Graphics Driver 397
Apr.25	Senryu Qemu Edition 318
Jun.06	HaikuPC-Info 291
Jul.29	Niue 272
Sep.30	Firefox 203
Oct.28	HaikuLiveCDScript 189
May.21	Links 172
Oct.04	Haiku Radeon Driver 170
Jul.23	Open Sound System (OSS) 142
Apr.25	Senryu Parallels Edition 134
Sep.15	BeFar 129
Sep.15	Aural Illusion 128