Yeah, this is gonna be a long post.
Today aMule project becomes 2 years old. Time does indeed go fast, much faster than I expected.
It's thank-you time.
So first for that main guys that made it all possible:
- Merkur (Germany): who created eMule on May 13th 2002, starting what would be a p2p revolution, bringing the proprietary ed2k network to public development.
- Tiku (Finland): who created lmule on January 27th 2003, bringing the eMule code and "feeling" to the linux public, and started what would become aMule over the years.
- Bigbob/Creteil (France): who refocused the development after all the stuff that happened since lmule demise to aMule creation. He was the creator of aMule, starting with the xMule codebase at that point. He's also a nice guy. We're glad to have him back around.
That's a short list isn't it. Now for a not-so-short one
This is no special order. I'm making the list up as I think of people, and the point they started working here, and adding the rest of the people from the resources I have.
- uberpenguin (USA): which is the oldest guy around since lmule times, yet the youngest one in real life (afaik!). I swear this guy has done absolutely nothing for the code, more like he did things against the project, like that krokodil song that I just can't get out of my head. Ok, he made the logo
He's a graphic artist since lmule times, also did the xMule logo, and right now he's our graphic artist. And he's great, don't dare say the opposite. He's also one of the weirdest guys I ever met, yet one of the most intelligent guys I ever met too.
- deltaHF (Germany): who, even when not coding or coding really small pieces of stuff, it's the greatest web admin aMule ever had. Well, it's the only one we ever had, but you get the point . He has also devoted an incredible amount of time over the years to this project, and has spent all kind of resources, even his own money, for project's good. And he's not only web admin - he does a lot of stuff! From forums work, to keep the team together and managing aMule info all over the net in sync, he's a big part of this project's soul.
- Hetfield (Italy): was there from the aMule beginning also, and he first contributed with the gtk systray code, which, even being deprecated now in favor of the wxWidgets one, was a fine piece of code that helped a lot to raise our popularity. And not only that! He also contributed a lot of code and he was an admin of the project for a long time. Unfortunately, he isn't now - mainly because he has no time anymore! But he's doing well at his studies, and that's what matters. Even with all the fights we have for different opinions about management, kudos to you, Het. A project needs people with different views after all
- seneca_ (Germany): What a nice guy. If you ever got happy to have your aMule on your own language, thank him. I just told him: do this incredibly huge amount of work all over 150 thousand lines of code, and guess what? He did. Just so you could have aMule on your own language! He also did a lot more stuff, of course, but that's a nice highlight.
- falso (Portugal): He's the 'cas' creator! Worked a lot on i18n too, you know, the reason you can get aMule on your native language. He's one of the guys still around, and part of the big family we all are. I you ever met him, tell him to pay you a beer. He still owes me some
- shakraw (Italy): Webserver anyone? You bet. This guy, among a lot of more cool stuff, made aMule have a webserver. Italian guy always willing to help, and always nice to have around. A big round of applause for shak, who went out for inet connection problems, but is back for good. And he has still a lot to say on this project, I'm sure.
- Madcat (Estonia): You probably know about this one! He was there at lmule times, then at xMule working very close to me. One of the most clever guys I ever met, and always a pleasure to work with him. Unfortunately (for us), he was only a guest star at aMule - he has his own project, now named Hydranode. But he anyway did great contributions, with code, knowledge and friendship.
- pure_ascii (Germany): With uberpenguin and Madcat, the oldest guy around. He did some work from aMule, and did a lot of work for lmule that we inherited. He somehow fell off the project at some time, but he'll always be welcome. If your reading this pure_ascii, pay a visit
- Emilio Sandoz (France): What can I say about Emilio. A lot, to be fair. He did, as everyone on this team as you probably already noticed, a very good work - he's the guy that made the statistics take much less CPU than before, and his programming skills were way beyond most of us. Of course, he's an experienced coder, so that's not strange. Let this be my invitation for him to pay a visit also.
- lemonfan (Germany): A not-so-well-known guy that should be paid much more attention than he gets. Tho not an aMule team member anymore (he never left tho - just timed out), this guy did a great contribution to the multiplatform goals of the project. His work on endianness problems did lead me to making aMule work on Mac and other cool platforms. I swear I couldn't make that far without him, and so, I demand another round of applause. But keep your strength, because there's still a lot of people to be mentioned.
- Jacobo221 (Spain): If you're reading this, you probably know Jacobo. Really, it's kinda impossible to be part of the aMule community and miss him - he does an incredible amount of work, most of it support, with occasional coding. Do you like the wiki? He's the Chief there, keeping things in place, helping people to make it more complete, watching for spammers... and that's only his new toy, because he does also INCREDIBLE amounts of work at forum, and to be fair, he mostly takes care of the spanish forum alone, while keeping an eye on translation forum, and doing general help. A spaniard like me, but still a cool guy
- olonho (?): One of the few guys around here on the start. Played a fairly good part on aMule's success, because he was there making new stuff and fixing the existing one, so we started to really differentiate from xMule and had no more need to depend on their fixes. M.I.A member too.
- umale (Germany): When no-one had a 64bits arch, he had an AMD 64bits. And he fixed aMule code to work on 64 bits arches, so if you own one of those, just say thanks to him. If you can find him, because he's one of the M.I.A old members. Dude, where are you hiding? Wherever you are, thank you for all your work, and hope to see you again.
- stefanero (Germany): You can't miss stefanero, just like you can't miss Jacobo221. Mainly because he's involved in everything: Irc channel, wiki, forums, translations, for every single thing that means "support", he'll be there. If you ask anything on forums, chances are this forum-junkie gets the first reply to you, and it's probably all you need, because he is a HUGE database of aMule common problems and newbies questions. He nearly got killed by me for yelling "KAD KAD KAD KAD" to me for months, but after all he got me to code Kad on aMule so I could tell him to STFU. So, if you were asking for Kad on aMule, thank him
- Unleashed (Spain): Why did I ever mention this guy? I dunno, maybe because he's one of the guys that go and drink beer with me several times a week, so I feel like mentioning him. Has he done anything useful? Well, yeah. If you like the fact that your aMule has no (known) security problem, it's probably his fault. He did some serious review of the code for common possible security problems, and fixed them all. Of course, that was only a way to gain knowledge and code his own C ed2k client for his University Thesis so he could steal that Thesis from me. That backstabbing bastard. Still, he deserves a kind note here: Dude, I really hate you, so you pay the beers on sunday.
- croaker (Sweden): I didn't really got to know this dude well, but he was a developer, and reviewing changelog, I can see a good one (but anyway we're all a great team! Yahoo! Go aMule Team!). Or maybe I did get to know him and now I forgot. Alcohol does that things to people. Kids, don't drink alcohol. Stay away from it. You'll kill brain cells, and forget developers of your team, then you'll look like a non sensitive guy on a public post. He paid a big role on BSD compatibility, btw.
- Ganael Laplanche (France): There's no way to forget about this one, because he doesn't let me forget about him. You know, whenever we do release a new version, usually less than two hours later I get a mail with the FreeBSD port for it. You own a FreeBSD box? Thank him for having aMule. And then thank him again.
- thepolish (France): His definition on berlios' aMule page says "undefined", meaning he did a lot of stuff, and was good at all of it. Also known as "efe", he worked hard on the Win32 linux build (after Madcat did a lot of it). He also wrote wxCas, aLinkCreator, and did a lot of work on the standard build system for aMule too. Where are you, efe? You don't seem to love us anymore
- niet (*): Just one word: DNS. Ok, is not a word, but you get the point. He donated and maintains the DNS records, so every time you type "www.amule.org", think of him. He also made "xas", the xchat plugin for aMule statistics. Cool, isn't it?
- Phoenix (Brazil): Well, well, well, this is serious stuff now. What has this guy NOT done for the project?. Hard to say. But we can highlight some stuff he did: He helped a lot with unicode, and he added the Proxy support, all by himself! Now that's amazing work. Good friend of us all, nice guy, funny when drunk and funny when not. Glad to have you around, dude.
- GonoszTopi (Hungary): Look, I did write your nick well at first try!. Well, no, I lied. I had to correct it, I keep writing "GonozsTopi". Anyway, that's off-topic, but as most of this is anyway, that doesn't matter much. Ok, back to the point: do you like core/gui separation? You owe a beer to this guy and the next pal on the list, lfroen (we'll talk about lfroen soon). When the EC protocol was text based on version 1.0 (my stupid lame implementation), I gave some guidelines to him, and he totally made them into gold. This guy has an special touch to code, and what he has done to EC communication (core/gui) is totally out of this world. But did he keep his hands at working at EC? Of course not. He worked on making a lot of aMule code better, including the new stats code you're going to see on the upcoming aMule 2.1.0 (before you ask: soon). Sad we are when you have to travel for work, and happy we are every time you return.
- lfroen (Israel): So it's lfroen's time. What can I say about lfroen? A lot. Would it be suitable for children? Probably not Everyone reading forums knows this guy and me fight a lot, and that's because we both have terrible social skills most of the time and we get carried away on discussions. I already did mention his work on the Gonosz's item, but lfroen was also focused on something: aMule daemon. Most of aMule daemon is his work alone! Amazing as it may seem, it really is. He works really hard on the stuff he focuses on, and is now preparing an outstanding PHP interpreter for aMule's webserver, which will allow you to use PHP templates for aMule. And again, all by himself. When I grow up, I want to be half as good as lfroen. But with better social skills
- Xaignar (Denmark): I hate this guy. I really hate this guy. If there's someone I REALLY hate on this project, is Xaignar. Why? Well, because he reminds me of myself at his age (which is a big compliment coming from such a big ego as me), but smarter. And better. And so I feel I should have been him and met aMule at a more young age. you gotta check his changelogs, they are HUGE stuff, and well, he loves to show off, but then again, we all do. I can't highlight anything: he started as code janitor and didn't really got out of it, but he pretty much touched every bit of aMule code after all this time. Sometimes I think he knows the codebase better than myself, and that just adds to the hate. But you all have to be nice and thank him a lot
- Ken (USA): Ok, forget about me hating Xaignar. I changed my mind. I hate Ken much more than Xaignar. "Why?", would you ask. "Is he even better than Xaignar and so you feel even more jealous?", is your question. Hell, yes. I'm a worm compared to Ken when it comes to C++ knowledge, and of course, he has a Mac, and that's always cool. Ken paid a big role on endianness problems, and without him, aMule would work on Mac, but my grandsons would be coding it by that time. Thanks for all that time spent with us, smartass, I did learn a lot thanks to you. I would put you and Xaignar in a bag and throw you at the sea, but that's something completely different.
* Kry still trying to think anything good about ken
<ken> If you figure something out, let me know. I've been wracking my brain for years.
- Aleric (Carlo Wood) (Netherlands): Aleric is not part of the team anymore, his views were much different than ours and he just didn't fit on the team as a person. But still, he dod some good work, so he deserves a part here. Thanks for your contributions, Carlo.
- Citroklar (Germany): Citro! The Great Chief of Testers. When you have a bug, call Citro. He'll change your "This doesn't work" in something we developers (strange beasts that speak a weird language) can understand as something we must fix. He is some kind of bulk-worker, and he pays also a good role on the general feeling around the team. I hope to have you around for a lot of time, and I hope you hope the same. Try to say that after drinking 10 beers. Hah!
- nich(Brazil): I CAN'T forget nich! Our official whiner and complain addict, makes everything you wish aMule had true just by being *incredibly annoying* and reporting hundreds of thousands of bugs. He's also a funny guy. That's why he's still alive, of course, by this time I would have already killed him but then again, if I didn't kill stefanero for the "Kad! Kad!" lines over the months, I can't just kill nich. He's... such a nice guy. He's trying to learn coding now, so beware of the new Coding Hero!
- bootstrap (Germany): Is he a coder? No! A translator? No! A plane? Hell, no!. He's the guy that donates hardware resources to aMule: namely CVS/SVN repositories, and the daily tarballs from CVS that you can download from his severs!. And he is ALWAYS willing to help on anything related to it, whatever it is, even when working. He's such a nice guy I don't have words to define him, so just fill this space with the best you can say about someone: "----------------------------------------------------------------------".
- thedude0001 (Germany): Recent guy, yet an important part of the team already. Sometimes someone joins the team and you just know he fits there so well you keep thinking where was he hiding all this time. A great tester, he'll always be there willing to help on anything, even if that means closing his running aMule! (and that hurts!). Great addition to the team, and I hope he's around for long, long time.
- lionel77,hellimod,one_2_one,PowerMike,hoschy007... Lots of Mac testers that made this all come true. PowerMike was the one that let me access his Mac, VNC included, and then hellimod almost devoted his dual G5 to me, completely, VNC included, till I made aMule work on Mac perfectly. Which means I still use, of course . one_2_one was I think our first tester, and lionel77 our oldest tester, and he also made aMule binaries for mac for a long time while testing. They're a good bunch of great guys, kudos to them all.
- ender,Ateo,MrFaber,mad_soft,skolnick,Kanniball,xushi,... What's an app without testers? There are a lot of guys that should be on this list, but I have been writing this for hours, so I just can't dig them up. I swear I will before the week ends, tho. And they'll have their own news post. Please NOONE feels excluded from here, or I'll be very sad. (UPDATE: xushi felt excluded and started whining, so I added the little crying girl to the list
- GhePeU,piarres,mad_soft again, punkyxd, Supersnail... And a lot more! those are the ones that made aMule languages possible. I'll dig them all up, and include them on my second news post somewhen this week, along with testers!
.
Ok, I give up for now. I have been writing this for HOURS! If anyone, and I mean anyone, feels left out, my sincere apologies. Pay a visit to the thread, post your flame to me, and you'll be there very soon. I hope this post to end up on wiki for posterity, so you ALL will be there, either added by me or by some slave... uh... I mean... coworker here on the team.
Just a few more notes:
- Thanks to eMule developers. Their help was critical to this project success, and their support and friendship was just as nice as... hum... something very nice. Hi to you all, and hope to keep working with you for 2 more years! (hah, yeah, I'm THAT evil).
- Thanks to #wxwidgets on irc.freenode.net, specially to BrianHV, leio, and everyone helping and having fun around there.
- Thanks to everyone at #amule. Some names come to my mind, but I did leave enough people out already, so I will just say: Hope to keep you around for a lot of time!
- Thanks to everyone at forums, helping, asking, and reporting backtraces, bugs, anything. And of course always having fun and keeping the community feeling that makes this project special to me.
- Thanks to you, reader, for being so bored as to read this HUGE post. But I had to do something like this, and should have been done earlier.
Told ya it was going to be a long post!
