Older blog entries for AlanHorkan (starting at number 344)

How could you not like Disney?

Some people might wonder why Disney gives me the creeps and why I am much slower to say favourable things about them or buy their products (including their takeover of Pixar, and aside even from the issue of the quality of their products). Sure dont they make cute cartoons and family films? Take a look at an example of them throwing their legal weight around in attempt to stifle freedom of expression and fair use so as to distract from hate speech. There are no shortage of examples of their litigiousness if you care to search, and their rabid protection of their copyrights is in stark contrast to their plundering of the Public Domain for inspiration.

Syndicated 2007-01-07 20:05:31 from alanhorkan

Software Development: Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Been taking some of free time to read through various mailing lists of projects which I am no longer involved (a project from which I was so rudely and unceremoniously and unilaterally banned). Not only are the same questions reoccurring but also the same condescending replies and complaints about the questions are reoccurring. Even if the people involved are not likely to read this I feel it is worth writing a little about the problems [and possibly make updates to this document in the future] so that others may learn from their all too obvious mistakes.


Question: Why do users keep asking the same questions?

Answer: Some users will always ask the same questions and never make any attempt to figure out the answer for themselves. It is easier and better to say nothing than respond rudely to these users, or failing that provide a short response that developers are aware of the issue. There are ways to reduce the number of questions asked but the sooner you accept the inevitable the better things will be for all involved.


Question: Why do developers keep asking why users keep asking the same questions?

Answer: Every question is an opportunity, questions often highlight various problems of some kind or another. Not all developers realise this. Many think they do but only understand it on a very superficial level.
If a project does not have good documentation and a clearly marked section for Frequently Asked Questions then developers should not be at all surprised when the same questions get asked over and over again. At the very least it is important to back link to previous discussions because it increases the chance of search engines leading users to the right answers.
If features of a program are difficult to find or understand then further testing and usability review may be needed. I know this sounds so obvious as to be patronising but all too often developers blame the user and fail to consider ways in which the software could be improved to make things even more obvious and questions avoided. If bug are known or features are missing long enough for the same questions to be asked frequently then once more it is worth expanding the list of Frequently Asked Questions or even creating a separate list of Known Bugs


Question: What to do? This isn't very encouraging!

Answer: Always try to create new contributors.

A collaborative system like a Wiki makes it easier to encourage users to help answer questions and write up the answers for future reference.
With more technical problems users should be encouraged to submit patches. Telling users to fork the project is not encouraging, not only that it is actively turning contributors away, and failing to instead of compromising and finding something mutually beneficial for them to work on.
Not all (not many in fact) users will be in a position to submit patches and even those who do may submit work that is more hassle than it is worth to maintain.
Expecting them to write patches with a very low chance of being accepted is not encouraging either. A project with clear goals where users get a sense of what is beyond the ordinary scope of the project can help reduce the number of unrealistic requests and proposals which would be too difficult to maintain.


I would hold up Inkscape and Abiword as projects which often do a good job of these tasks. Inkscape has been particularly successful in incrementally documenting problems, making it increasingly easier for the next brave soul to solve (case in point: better support for Macintosh users). Bullying unsuspecting users might amuse some but pointing people in the right direction is far more productive in the long run. There are far too many projects which fail to understand the need for maintainers to manage and guide as much as develop. Creating more contributors should create a self sustaining cycle and more active contributors should mean more time to work on the problems which really interest you.

Here's looking to the New Year and doing things a little differently, hopefully better.

Syndicated 2006-12-27 14:53:06 from alanhorkan

Dead Horse

American Pie was a crude but funny and fresh take on a tired genre, teen sex comedies. The franchise was stretched out to three whole films, although the third film was thankfully better than the second and we all thought it was finished off nicely. Then came along the unwanted direct-to-video fourth installment "American Pie Band Camp" which barely managed to get two of the original cast to put in an appearance, although it did feature the lovely Arielle Kebbel.

Little did I know the horse was in for another flogging, a fifth American Pie title "The Naked Mile". It seems American Pie is trying to become a franchise and be like National Lampoons and churn out endless barely related sequels. Speaking of which National Lampoons are releasing a sequel to Van Wilder, with the Indian guy set in England.

It could be worse, someone might decide to make a sequel to the awful film Tenacious D, The pick of Destiny. A terrible film which forces me to reevaluate how I ever found Jack Black amusing but still only the second worst film featuring Tenacious D. The prize of worst film featuring Tenacious D still goes to the Pauly Shore film Biodome, blink and you'll miss them but Tenacious D do make an appearance.

Syndicated 2006-12-06 15:22:26 from alanhorkan

Beer and Crisps

If you aren't Irish or have not lived in Ireland at least for a while the following entry may not make much sense.

Crisps

Tayto is synonymous with crisps in many part of Ireland and it seem strange how only now have the released the deceptively simple "ready salted" flavour. The package resembles an Argentinian Football player, light blue and white vertical stripes. The crisps themselves are fairly predictable, my only complaint is a more lightly salted crisps would make it easier to eat excessive quantities but in the long run that is probably for the best.
Not only have Tayto released this new flavour but they have released Podge and Rodge branded crisps for culchies. The crisps are rippled and seem suspiciously like existing varieties but I've only tried the Buffalo Breath flavour so far.

North Side Guinness
Guiness must have realised that any new product would cannibalise their existing market so for a little over a year now they have run the Guinness Brewhouse Series releasing variations on the traditional Guinness Stout. The most recent Northstar stout has been entirely underwhelming and for my money you may as well drink Beamish. The previous Toucan brew was nice enough, less heavy for the summer months. Still I'd much rather go to the Porter House and drink their various stouts. For such a nation of drinkers it is a shame we have such limited variety in our beers.

Syndicated 2006-12-03 01:33:23 from alanhorkan

IFI French Film Festival - Cyrano De Bergerac

Saw Cyrano De Bergerac at the IFI as part of the Cafe Noir French Film Festival. Classic.
Will probably go see Horseman on the Roof later in the week, maybe others too if I have the time.

Syndicated 2006-11-29 00:18:27 from alanhorkan

Climbing Photos: Irish Bouldering League - Galway 2006

A gallery of photos from the Irish Blouldering League (IBL) was posted on the Climbing.ie website. These things are always more fun with captions which unfortunately the site doesn't allow so instead I will add a few comments of my own and point out some of the photos which may be of more interest to Trinity climbers.

I will only link directly to one image, as it not polite to hot link other peoples images. I should also warn that because it is an outside link it could easily break or be changed and I cannot take any responsibility for any of the links breaking or images looking any more horrific than they already do. Other links will be normal links to the Climbing.ie website.

Call the Exorcist: Paddy Clarke Possesed.
Paddy Clarke climbing in a snowstorm. Maybe it wasn't snowing indoors and there was just chalk everywhere but I like my explaination better. Paddy starts from sitting, watched by Brian and Tanja.

Watching and waiting. Crowds of climbers await there turn and puzzle out how to approach the problems. Hamish can be seen in his orange/red top with Brian standing beside him, and Heather on the right at the middle. Katriona can be seen back centre wearing her pink top and Tanja is on right wearing a blue top. Heather climbing problem 11 jamming foot hard in the corner. Hamish watches Heather scoring, I mean keeping score, clipboard in hand.
You can tell by the shirt it is Brian, if that is in fact his real name! Brian and Brian again.
Photos of peoples backs are not particularly interesting and it can be difficult to tell who is who, I only recognised my own photo by the hoodie I was wearing. Not the guy climbing, but on the left Alan (me) can be seen trying to figure out climbing problem 14, the one with the odd stickey outey bit. Got quite close and I know I could have done it on a good day but couldn't get it in the required three attempts.
Katriona climbing in her pink cardigan. Tanja stands up to start on problem 9. Looks like Leena.

Message scrawled on the grey masking tape on the wall instucts climbers to start from a seated position. It is not a suggestion to wear your own ass for a hat, easy misunderstanding to make. The climber reaches for the first bonus point on problem 9.

Syndicated 2006-11-20 01:26:14 from alanhorkan

GIMP developers in Copyright Violation scandal!

Now that I've got your attention I actually want to mention Google code search. Google code search was released a while back and people found various funny things to do with it. The obvious thing for any geek to do is an ego search, and amongst the results of the google code search for Alan Horkan the following comment jumped right out at me:

;; Alan Horkan 2004.  Copyright.
;; I'll fix it and license it differntly later if anyone cares to ask

The comment (spelling mistake and all) is from a gimp script to insert a guide by percent.

Okay so maybe not a huge copyright violation scandal but it gives you an idea of how little code review gets done. No wonder big corporations have serious concerns about where code comes from and SCO were able to create so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Without explicitly asking first the developers committed code I had never intended to be included. Scripts were an easy fix for my own use and I had attached them to a bug report as a good way to show what I thought was needed. I had hoped for a better properly integrated solution written in C instead of several smaller scripts cluttering up the menus (see also Inkscape). Rather than argue it I took the easy out and decided to let them continue on, one less argument I didn't need. In truth I did argue the point, this was just one of several scripts, and I did repeatedly ask them to correct the copyright information on at least one of the other scripts (which they eventually did) but it seems this last one slipped by.
If I were a litigious person where would the responsibility lie, the developer who committed the code, the maintainers, or the distributors? Not only did the GIMP developers fail to adequately review the code but none of the distributors reviewed the code either, contributory infringement anyone?

Comparesoft (founded by Michael Robertson) also appear to have violated my copyrights by distributing two of my scripts. Mostly I am unimpressed by their failure to ask or inform me of their intention to use my scripts and distribute them to users. Not sure how to proceed or if I should do anything about it at all. My scripts were marked as copyright, not GPL and were not intended for redistribution beyond personal use and I had expected people to ask before doing anything with them. Irregardless it is common courtesy to ask and vigilant lawyers usually insist on their clients asking (as can been seen from frequent letters from magazine publishers requesting permission) even for software released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Comparesoft are well within their rights to distribute rebranded open source software but I do hope their customers understand that they are really only being charged for the technical support and the same software is freely available from other sources.

The ego search reminded me of quite a few projects I had contributed to and where some of that copious spare time spent on Open Source software had gone to. It gave me a good feeling to realise quite how many different projects I have managed to have even a small influence on. A million monkeys on a million typewriters?

Syndicated 2006-11-05 23:34:25 from alanhorkan

Good old Dublin town: Traditional Singers

Sometimes you see things and it feels obvious they must exist only you may not have noticed them before. Dublin has plenty of live music, more than the tourist trap music of Temple bar. The trick is knowing where too look.

After several failed attempts to meet my old friend Jonathan Tennant for a pint - he running around like a mad thing trying to sort out his show for Radió na Life - we eventually decided to meet in Mayes pub on North Fredrick Street. He mentioned there would be a session, of the musical not drinking variety, but I didn't realise it would be signing only, unaccompanied by any music.

It was different and very entertaining. Singers take turns and perform old tunes people seemed to know and original tunes, including a humourous tune one about the alcohol induced misadventures of a certain Aussie Rules football player after the compromise rules match against the Gaelic football players.
Not knowing any of the songs I remained more quiet than I have ever been before in any pub, but with some of the easier tunes I made an effort sing along at the chorus as did most people. Perfoming is welcomed and encouraged but not a requirement.

Next time you are in the mood for traditional Irish music perhaps you will check out the Góilín singers club, most Friday evenings from 9 o'clock, upstairs in Mayes pub.

Syndicated 2006-11-04 02:10:31 from alanhorkan

If you do not understand English you will not know what this means

Reading through bug reports and feature requests I saw yet another user who wanted to use a program in a language other than the default language of their Operating System. I have seen this request many times. The usual answer is to move or remove the .po language file and allowing the American text to show through. There is also the more complicated old school approach of mess setting command line variables, which as you can imagine is lots of fun for beginners who have never ever used the command line before.

As with most requests there is an underlying problem users are trying to solve and developers have to figure out what the real underlying problem might be if there even is one. Imagine a doctor being asked for a prescription of Viagra and trying to figure out if the patient has health problems that need to be dealt with. At least part of the problem is that translations are crappy, but translation is hard work so I mean no disrespect to the translators. Even then there are languages for which no translation exists and users have no option but to use English and struggle through as best they can. This means the original interface needs to be as clear and simple as possible, as a rule of thumb if you cannot translate out of English and then back again and still make sense then things need to be simplified even further. The complexity of the English only makes translation work harder and the frequent use of slang and over-complicated jargon or un-translatable acronyms certainly does not help. For example the acronym URL cannot be translated but the words address, or link, or resource, can easily be translated. I have been told Dutch translators end up using the equivalent of "URL Address" to crudely work-around the problem. In truth this is two problems, depending on the context the original word should have been Address in the first place and the translators should not have taken the easy option but instead made sure the original mistake was corrected. Unfortunately that almost never happens, understandably translators would rather translate than try to swim upstream and become programmers.

No doubt many applications already do offer such a feature, each in their own unique and horribly inconsistent manner. The idea of ever application providing an option to change the language independent of the Operating System doesn't feel right to me. Perhaps what is needed is a small application allowing users to easily launch an application in another language? Maybe such a thing already exists but is hidden away as a tool to help test translations?
Anyone intersted in taking on the challenge of creating a tiny application to start a program in a langauge other than the current default?

Syndicated 2006-11-02 00:37:46 from alanhorkan

World Trade Center - Lies of Omission

It is strange that Oliver Stone a director normally known for the strong political message of his films would commit such a huge lie of omission in his attempts to make very non-political film. It would have been easier to accept the lack of politics in the film had it not been for the ridiculous portrayal of Marine Dave Karnes. The sentiment of a religious man determined to help with the search and rescue for survivors was noble but the film portrays him as the kind of disturbing American religious zealot that worries the rest of the world nearly as much as other types of religious fundamentalists scare George W. Bush. The film ends with a message telling how he went on to serve two terms in Iraq, which although true unfortunately feeds into the mistaken belief promoted by the Bush administration that there was a direct connection between Iraq and the terrorist attack of September 11.

The film is not without other flaws. The visions of Jesus were visually interesting but unfortunately broke viewers away from the reality of the film and lead me to wonder about the alleged heavy drug use of the director. The film makes it appear as if officer Dominick Pezzulo committed suicide when in fact he fired off one last shot to draw attention before his massive injuries killed him. Arguably Oliver Stone made the film he intended to make, a very small film set against the backdrop of a very big tragedy but the limited scope of the film is ultimately unsatisfying.

The destruction of the World Trade Center was a powerful and tragic event which is where the true impact of the film comes from. Truth is stranger than fiction. A fictional film like Oliver Stone's World Trade Center does not do the events justice. I would recommend instead the documentary film 9/11 by the brothers Jules Naudet and Gedeon Naudet. I have not yet seen the film United 93 myself but I have heard good things about it too and it may also be worth considering.

http://www.slate.com/id/2147350/nav/tap1/
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=40&ItemID=10775

Syndicated 2006-10-11 17:21:14 from alanhorkan