Interview with the original creator of Plucker, Mark Lillywhite

View this article as: [ xml / txt ]

Who really was the original creator of Plucker? A gentleman named Mark Lillywhite from Australia. I had the chance to interview Mark (online) to see just what gave him the idea for the project. Below is the full interview.

DD: When did you first get the idea for Plucker?

ML: Well ... I moved to Canada to work on some medical software and they gave me this nice new laptop which ran Windows NT. I decided to get a Palm Pilot and it came bundled with AvantGo, and every morning during the 30 minute ride on the subway/bus I would read news etc that AvantGo had collected. When I finally got sick of NT on my laptop (as you do) I installed Linux, but of course AG didn't work with linux. I always wanted to do some coding for the Palm and I saw this as an opportunity... so that's how it started.

DD: What year was that?

ML: It would have been '98 I think. It's hard to remember now.

DD: Have you ever wanted to go back to AvantGo? (I had to ask)

ML: No, never haha!

ML: Sadly at the moment my pilot is broken so I can't use any of these packages.

Editor: I've sent Mark a spare TRGPro since this interview, so he could continue to use Plucker, a project he started for all of us.

DD: Did you ever imagine that Plucker would take off as it has done?

ML: No, I had no idea. After I released it I wondered if anyone would actually care.

ML: Really it's a personal project gone horribly out of control

DD: (stops tape recorder) I actually used to hit your website and poke around at your webcam pics, and found your Plucker page a few years back.

DD: That's how I found the project myself.

ML: It used to beep every time someone looked.

DD: The core team has grown from 1 person, yourself, to almost a dozen people, and now Plucker is used in major distributions by thousands of people every single day. Do you have any wishes that Plucker should have done 'Feature X' or 'Option Y' since you started the project?

ML: No not really. I mean the Plucker I released - the one I was happy with, 0.03 - had basically everything in it that I wanted. Now I see all these e-books and so forth, I think they're really, really great ideas -- but I never imagined them myself.

ML: I mean that's the thing with free software right, that's why I released it.

DD: "Release Early, Release Often", right.

DD: People are using parts of it in their own free software projects now.

ML: Right on, but of course you have to release something useful too, otherwise people won't pick it up.

DD: ..and people are using it in major institutions (the medical-interest topics on the lists lately)

DD: Hey, version 0.01 was pretty rough ..and it was also only 7k in footprint size.

ML: Cool, you know I didn't know that it was in distributions.

ML: I also didn't know about medical apps using it, which is odd 'cos I used to work in the medical industry.

ML: 0.01 was very rough.. I couldn't get the linker to work properly so I had to put it all in one ginormous file, I hated that.

DD: If you could change anything, what would the top three things be?

ML: Probably I would have liked to release a parser that I was proud of!! I think everyone probably thinks I'm a crap programmer (but maybe I am).

DD: The awk parser wasn't so bad... it was just cryptic as heck.

ML: I would have liked to have more time to spend on Plucker, I am a bit of an outsider now and am only really tolerated 'cos I started it all.

Editor: We do more than tolerate Mark, we rely on him to keep the mailing lists running, and for other things related to Plucker. He's a bit more pivotal than he admits.

DD: Personally, I wish I had more time to work on the perl parser..

DD: The same could be said of Eric Raymond and fetchmail, or RMS and emacs though.

ML: And I wish my pilot hadn't died, or that I could justify the cost of a new one, but I'm waiting for the MP3/cellphone/pilot magic combo.

DD: There are now OS/2, Windows, Macintosh ports which work, as well as many Unixes. Now people are talking about browser plugins and web-based sync services for Plucker. What do you think of all these ideas?

ML: Oh I think it's great! Really, I love the fact that I started all that stuff you know?

DD: Actually... .if you want, I can send you a Palm... I have way too many units. Gratis. What Palm did you have that died?

ML: I mean I don't take credit for anything that Plucker looks like now, I just love the idea that my code bootstrapped it!

DD: What's next on the Plucker horizon, for you that is?

ML: Well for me, just to get it working again would be nice. I would really like to grab some time and just look at the code and get some of these ebooks.

DD: Well, I'll just have to send you some hardware, so you can get it running again.

ML: One of the most exciting things I've seen lately is that guy who's working on the forms support.

ML: The thing I find exciting is that these people have picked it up and said, Ok, we need this, let's do it.

ML: Someone is getting paid to work on this, I think that's so cool, I've indirectly employed someone!

DD: We have developers in Sweden, Germany, California, Texas, and Australia... as well as from dozens of other places on the globe, and Plucker is now in major linux distributions' standard installations. Other tools are beginning to support Plucker's format as an output format (Sitescooper) and now some tools are using the Plucker format in their own code (CSpotRun's new update includes full Plucker support).

ML: You said earlier that 0.01 was a bit rough and it was. Mike once said to me that if I hadn't released 0.03, where I managed to get the linker to work (by upgrading gcc) then he would never have bothered to suss out the structure of the thing.

ML: So in a way, I almost released "too" early because the 1st release was so hard to read, 'cos I couldn't split it up.

DD: It's getting larger now, and almost time to begin using segments, and "snap-ins" to support new features like DOC support, etc.

ML: Yeah, I think it's important to keep in mind that one of the huge advantages of Plucker over a.g. was that it actually loads and renders much more quickly because of the pre-parsing and a small binary footprint.

DD: 74k is the current size, and aside from any online functions (which we don't use), it still surpasses AvantGo in features and is still 8x smaller.

Editor: The code has since grown, with the addition of VFS support and other features, to a current size of 101k

ML: I would hate to see pure HTML stuck onto Plucker (though I imagine a tag-encoded XHTML would be feasable). I think parsing on the pilot is silly.

ML: ..at least, trying to parse such a stupid format as HTML

DD: I am still of the belief that the configuration files should be XML, and there should be some sort of storage format for the content which is in some way XML'ized, but that's not going to be possible until we begin having sites support Plucker directly. Having Plucker handle RDF/RSS though, should be somewhat trivial to add.

ML: Right, yeah. I'm a huge fan of XML, I'm actually writing XML in my other xchat window.

ML: The use of pre-encoded XML tags would make the file size very small while maintaining the advantages of XML. I think you can have both small size and XML, just not unicoded-XML.

ML: It's just tokenizing, token #1 represents <xhtml>, token #2 prepresents <p>, etc. etc. then the "XML" is not really much different from Plucker

ML: In fact you could make an XML format that represents the actual plucker database I suspect.

Editor: The conversation diverged from here into a discussion of XML, but I'll save that for another time..