Advogato blog for Telsa

4 Sep 2001

Tue, 4 Sep 2001 00:56:08 GMT

Ilan, you missed out options five and six:

Get on the cooker list or whatever the Mandrake beta litst is called and see whether anyone else has met this problem;
Report the bug to Mandrake, not to Advogato. It won't get fixed unless they know it's there, after all.

30 Jul 2001

Mon, 30 Jul 2001 16:00:35 GMT

pjdowner, I can't get email to you via the address on your website. What's all this about a South Wales LUG? And Swansea? When?

My email is off my homepage which is in my info here. I hope it works :)

29 Jul 2001

Sun, 29 Jul 2001 10:10:35 GMT

Advogato is a great place to read normally, but oh dear, now I see the right to arm bears is back. Just to support jschauma's point, I'll say that I live in a country with very strict gun laws: and I don't feel any of my rights are being infringed, I don't feel unsafe, and I seem to recall that it was a national petition (google for the Snowdrop petition) five years ago which led to the tightening of the gun laws.

In other advogato delights, someone talks about how he wants to screw someone from his class, presumably assuming she doesn't read this and that even if they started going out she wouldn't start reading his diary; and someone else thinks that a poster about "even if you win, you're still retarded" worth linking to. There are some surprisingly elitist attitudes around here. Mental handicap is something for jokes. The need for gun rights is apparently justified in part by the number of psychotics running around the streets (having worked in an acute admissions ward of a psychie hospital, I find this a little ill-informed); kids who kill should be locked up for life rather than any attempt at rehabilitation made (that's the best a civilised society can do? Remove people from itself? Not do something about stopping it from recurring?), parents who don't fit someone's personal criteria should be neutered so they can't breed, and several other delightful sentiments. It seems almost as though... no. I don't think I'll go there.

Ilan, what is your problem with keyboard navigation of a GUI?

Finally, is it only I, or are other people seeing advogato refuse to respond increasingly often? Heading to the site, following internal links and reloading pages here often seem to result in... well, nothing. It no talk. I put it down initially to other things, but I begin to think it's the advogato site. What is the traffic on it? How many hits does the recent diary entries page get?

11 Jul 2001

Wed, 11 Jul 2001 11:22:45 GMT

Oh look. Another run through the recent arrivals.

Ten people with no information. One with a name and nothing more. Two with information that's not enough to certify on. That leaves eight. Hello, Google...

misa's name shows up all over rpmfind. pop has a vim/mutt script and an opportunity to practise my French :) garett, ts, geekd and ahvezda all have links to free software straightaway. mdz is a Debian maintainer. I suspect someone with a better appreciation of what's involved should re-certify the latter two. Way over my head. I suspect those are journeyer-level things, but I don't know.

Then some not-sures. I am not sure whether surveys count, and I don't know what else grex does. I followed the links from hawk but they only refer to a game. I can't find it anywhere. Googling on the game produces only references to it or dead links. I need to find my dictionary to know what to make of the site hns linked to. And finally, there's nile and dloo. I recall the dloo announcement on Gnotices, but I haven't seen anything since. So I'm a bit stuck there.

My certificates are very low, I know. To those people who feel affronted: the usual disclaimer. I can't judge other people's code. If I know something about the project or the person then I can make a guess on where they might rank. So some people get higher ratings because I know enough about them. I don't know the projects that came up following links in this lot. With luck, someone who understands these things will follow the same links and adjust certifications accordingly.

As to people complaining about certification or lack of them, please please please provide links to contributions that are out there. I spend a few hours (not much, but more than some) trying to certify new arrivals. I try very hard to find a reason to certify someone that is in line with the guidelines. Seeing people complained that they are not certified when I've just finished the latest run through irks me, frankly.

If you want to fork Gnome, Ilan, go right ahead. But until I see a package out there I can download or a HOWTO I can read, I can't certify someone who largely complains about what's wrong with things without explaining to the uninitiated (that's me) what would be right, and how to fix the wrongness. Deven, all I found on your pages was articles from a few years ago (the certs guidelines suggest evaluations should cover the work done in the last year) and a conferencing system which didn't have much info about it. It's also not the number of certificates you have that swings it. It's whether any of those people are close enough to the trust root for their appraisals to make a difference. Well, as I understand the write-up of the trust metric anyway. I dropped maths at 17, and I got lost in the trust metric write-up as soon as I saw "each certificate is a directed edge". Um. Right. But I assume hackers know more maths than I do.

Oh yes. And I should be an apprentice, but I can't change what other people put. (If you put higher, please reconsider.)

I think that's it for another month. I shall return to lurking and enjoying the threads of conversation that meander through the recentlog page.

19 Jun 2001

Tue, 19 Jun 2001 17:30:41 GMT

DV, whatever are you talking about when you compare sheep and goats and suggest goats win out? Just look at my sheep and dare to compare it with that silly GEGL.

Hmph!

Oh yes, the sheep is the one in the red hat, thank you.

(Thanks to Jody for the photograph.)

That said, your analogy is rather good. But my sheep would like an apology :)

11 May 2001

Fri, 11 May 2001 00:55:28 GMT

[edited to remove non-existent email address].

I would just like to dissociate myself totally from Phoon's preferred analogy for software licensing. Actually, tripp is the one who started this, and I hope s/he doesn't pick such an analogy in future. However, phoon is the one who came up with the pseudo-statistic that infuriated me. I have taken this to email. But I just wanted to say how much I disputed the alleged statistic phoon came up with. Grr.

Software. Um. Broke some, but less than normal. Reported a few bugs but ran out. Turned to the other side and started wading through gnome bugzilla and trying to sort gnome-core/general into the right categories. Next stop: "general". That's going to be fun. mmarker threatens trouble if I assign anything to imlib and I don't think Gman is speaking to me. Hey, one misassigned bug out of many isn't too bad!

26 Apr 2001

Thu, 26 Apr 2001 22:46:01 GMT

Ho hum. How nice to have a backup diary. For those wondering why the usual link doesn't work: it wasn't me. I didn't do nuffink. I am not even too sure what's going on. But it appears that someone put a JCB through a bunch of fibres and cut off a pile of the local university and associated small business centre.

I must say, the rest from constant email was nice. However, if this keeps up, I suspect I am going to have a lot of mailman pages to go through, setting myself off no-mail.

In a stroke of genius, the local networking expert, who is of course conveniently absent for a while (grrr), put the backup MX records on a machine here. The practical upshot is that I can't receive email until someone goes and fixes this. I am not quite sure how you fix these fibre things. I have Scrapheap Challenge-inspired visions of welding and soldering, but I fear I am somewhat off-target. Allegedly it will all be fixed imminently.

I await the imminent fix and the return of the immanant email spirit. In the meantime, it is sunny, Alan is away, and I can make garlic bread without his silly complaints.

[edited five years later to remove dead links :)]

24 Mar 2001

Sat, 24 Mar 2001 08:59:07 GMT

I dunno why I bother. Twenty-five new accounts and eleven have "No personal information available". Several more have links to company pages or Lynx-unfriendly sites. Will people please stop doing this? Pretty please? bagder's stats page shows a rise from observers being 57% of the total to 66% now...

Oh, I know why I bother. Just found the synaesthesia author in the list. (One of those programs you just find, and think "oooh. Pretty!")

Someone was complaining about #gnome ignoring auto* questions and the lack of auto* docs. They too have a link to their home page and I can't find an email address, so in case they didn't know: the ORA-published auto* book is also online. Hope it helps. I tend not to answer questions I don't know answers to on #gnome. Sorry. :)

Justification for current journeyer status: um. I dunno. Broke some more GNOME. Answered some more questions. That's about it.

1 Mar 2001

Thu, 1 Mar 2001 18:52:49 GMT

There's twenty-five new accounts mentioned on the front page. Of those:

nine have no personal information filled in at all.
two have websites which are unreachable
four have websites which have no information about software or which are unreadable in lynx
one has a link to a project website and I can't find his name mentioned anywhere in it

That's more than 60% of the people. Of the remaining, found about four I could reasonably certify, since I was able to find free software or docs or something on their pages. I am not qualified to judge 'em, so sorry if the certifications appear low to you.

Now back to beta destruction.

29 Dec 2000

Fri, 29 Dec 2000 12:29:45 GMT

Um, RyanMuldoon, I can't email you as you suggest because I see no email link on your page or from your company webpage.. :) But stuff about clipboards and X for Gnome off the top of my head:

X Selections, X Cut Buffers, and Emacs Kill Rings gets mentioned a lot
the Googlizer is a tiny program that uses X-selection in Gnome with some GDK stuff which is covered in the GTK+ docs

That's the best I can do, and not being a coder means I am not even sure whether that's the kind of thing you want: but "How do I use selection in GNOME?" comes up a lot on IRC and more or better examples or doc pointers would be very welcome.