Eve has certainly changed. Taylor, Eve, and I socialised a lot in school, and spent a lot of time discussing our Media-IRC project, and just exchanging news or gossip. I also saw Eve hanging around Israeli or Jewish kids speaking in Hebrew. Asking her about it in one of our mutual gym sessions, she said that she secretly still read the Hebrew books she owned, so she won’t forget the language.
One day, I was standing across the hallway from Taylor’s locker, and saw Eve and Taylor kissing each other passionately. I wondered if it was a pleasant or revolting sight, but then realised I had to talk to both of them.
“Hi!” I said as I approached them.
“Hi Jenn!” Eve said, as she let go of Taylor. “Hi Jennifer!” Taylor added.
“Listen, regarding M-IRC, I’ve been thinking that maybe we should start converting the server to C. The Perl version probably won’t scale too much beyond what we have now, and we are probably getting more and more users.”
“Right, ” Eve said, “the Perl version was only a prototype, anyhow.”
“Now regarding making it multi-processed or multi-threaded, that’s something I could use some guidance with, as I’ve never really done it.”
“Hmmm… ” Taylor said, “kernel-assisted multi-tasking is a can of worms. Especially multi-threading. But I don’t suppose it’s substantially different than what other plain-IRC servers are doing.”
“So you mean I should just read their code and see?”
“I guess. Cannot really hurt.”
“OK.” I said.
A few days later, I was sitting next to the computer, and checked my E-mail. Then I noticed one E-mail to the Media-IRC mailing list that said “[PATCH] Client - Implement Logging.” from someone called “Jean-Pierre Gordo” from .fr (France). This was our first contribution from outside the user-group! I was so excited, that I decided to call Taylor on his cell-phone.
It took some time to answer, and then Taylor said, “Hi Jenn! What’s up?”
“Hi Taylor! Guess what? We received a patch from some French guy!”
“Eve, ” I heard him saying on the other end of the line, “we received a patch from someone outside the LUG.”; “Aaaa!” I heard Eve shouting happily. “OK, Jenn, we’re coming right now. Meanwhile, review the patch.”
They arrived shortly afterwards, “So, you two were together. ” I asked “What were you doing?”
“We were watching a movie.” Taylor said decisively. I took a closer look at them. Taylor had lipstick smeared on his cheeks, and smelled like women’s perfume (Eve’s). Eve’s hair was a bit disorganised. But I decided not to comment about this.
“OK. Well, the patch looks fine from what I saw. It’s pretty long, though.”
“Maybe we should take a look as well.” So together we went over all the code, and reviewed it. Took us some time, but we were finally convinced that it worked well. Then we applied it on our local copy, and tested that it does what it should do. After we were happy with the results, we committed it into the version control system (while acknowledging Jean-Pierre), and sent him a “thank you, your contribution has been reviewed and applied” E-mail.
Man, it was so exciting!