Older blog entries for duff (starting at number 4)

I was just looking at shapr's diary entries regarding his Bicycle Repair Man project and it occurs to me that there should be another relationship type between people and projects: Commentor (or is that Commentator?)

The category would be for people who normally go in the "special thanks" section of a book. People who don't necessarily contribute code, but give lots of ideas and insight. I guess they would be contributors (since they contribute ideas), but my impression of contributor is contributing code.

All you people who read recent diary entries ... feel free to comment :-)

So I check advogato this morning to find that I'm suddenly a Journeyer. How did this happen? Wish I could say. I have 1 Dimwit, 2 Apprentice and 1 Journeyer certifications ... How that translates to Journeyer is beyond me. I guess I'll have to read the trust metric document again.

In reading the recent flurry of posts in response to "Meta", I think I have to agree with the certification titles need to be changed. Here's what I like (with associated numeric ranking):

Guru 10
Developer 5
Apprentice 3
User 1
Troll -1
Wacko -3
Inept -5
Anti-Guru -10

Anti-Gurus are people who actively try to destroy the free software community.

Why does advogato suddenly seem like a big neural net project?

I just certified StevenRainwater as a Journeyer.

On what did I base this decision? He seems to be On The Road as a Lead Developer in an OSS project and a Contributor for mod_virqule. That's assuming I can take him for his word. (It may be naive, but I'm a trusting soul ;-)

Oh! And this bug in Preview is annoying. I posted it as a reply to an article as that's where I noticed the problem. I just did a Preview of this diary entry and it doesn't seem to have the problem. How odd. I would have thought that they would use the same code for both operations as they are nearly identical.

ARGH! I just noticed another Preview bug (at least for diary entries). If I screw up the HTML in this diary entry it hoses the whole page. You'd think that with the plethora of HTML parsers out there and since only a very small subset of HTML is accepted in these entries that the text could be validated before Preview.

It appears that a few people have certified me. I guess that makes me certifiable. :-)

lilo seems to have the same conundrum as I with regard to certification. And kelly thinks I'm a Dimwit (no, kelly, I didn't take it personally) but also thinks that there's no difference between Dimwit and Master. Maybe I should certify myself as a Master.

And that's another thing ... why do people certify themselves? I think some sort of negative bias should be instituted for self-certification because you can't trust what people say about themselves.

Today is my first day using advogato. It's neat.

I really don't think this ranking system ... excuse me ... "certification system" is really a useful metric of anything.

BTW, where do I fall in the ranking?

• I have all of the skills necessary to participate in an OSS project, I just haven't because of other things in my life right now. Therefore I'm not an Apprentice.
• I haven't made any contributions to OSS other than a few minor comments here and there on various mailing lists. Therefore I'm not a Journeyer.
• I'm not the lead in any OSS project. Therefore I'm not a Master
• I'm not a dimwit. Therefore I'm not a Dimwit :-)

I guess the current entry is accurate. I'm an Observer But we'll see what other people have to say about me. That is ... if anyone says anything about me.