3 years since my last entry (6 since my first - though it feels like way, way longer). And wonder of wonders everything is still here, everything works, nothing deleted. How many gig is the database now? Must be huge! If only the rest of the world was as reliable.

Thank you Steven!

Sitting here watching the killing and feeling depressed... seems like the longer the world goes on the more power bastards everywhere get. Immediate imprisonment for all people who design and make weapons, that might be better. Daisycutters? Life. Cluster bombs? Life. Anthrax? Life. I couldn't get into all this 'evil' rhetoric flying around before; but I'm starting to see it now.

Went down to Parliament Square from work: the governments tolerance for opposition is definitely wearing thin - rank on rank of police, clearly ready to close things off and force people to spend the night there as their punishment if they get too noisy. Left; didn't see the point of staying in an obvious trap. Nice to see Archaeologists Against the War there, though.

Software? What was that?

What is this obsession with ranking people? I understood the original user ranking to be part of the trust metric system; a way of stopping the site being wrecked by trolls and first posters... Well, advogato hasn't been wrecked, but that's maybe because people haven't been bothered to try - the few people who've tried to play games with the system don't seem to have had any particular problems doing so. But that's another question. User rankings (the whole observer/apprentice/etc classification) just as a way of giving information on who people are have never seemed quite right - the number of people happy with their own rankings seems pretty small. I'd guess that's still mainly due to ambiguity in the original definitions, nothing to do with how the trust metric itself works.

But now we have diary rankings? If I understand it right, this has no connection with the trust metric itself - it's purely a popularity poll. So what's that going to push people towards? Increasing blandness? Copying the most popular styles? And it's too personal - rating someone's contributions to free software is semi-objective, so is rating their programming skills. But rating their diaries is like rating them as people - why make people whose diary entries are boring feel bad? It's their life...

I guess I'll go back to lurking for another couple of years ;-)

Work

Left teaching and now working in a web-based startup (ok, yawn) - codix.net - as far as I know, one of the few free software companies in the UK (free software in the sense that almost everything we do is either Linux/BSD based, and that we're gradually releasing all our main in-house tools under gpl). Definitely a good move; such a relief not to be dreading work in the mornings...

Software

Thought I should somehow justify my apprentice status; released a little bunch of perl scripts first (cos someone asked for them), now working on some retro PAL design software for gEDA. Releasing stuff makes you incredibly aware of how terrible your code can be...
Hoping to go to the annual Chaos Computer Conference, to talk about Open Collector and related things, but somehow have to find transport from Oporto (where my in-laws live) to Berlin and back just after Christmas... Anybody else going from Oporto?

Personal

My kids now both left home... Absolutely wierd. Seems parents depend on their kids more than the other way round..

Work (the old one) is collapsing around me. After steady leakage of experienced people from the central computing staff over the last year, we're now down to one (1) unix person and a bunch of novell/nt people drafted in to help him out. So far this week 1 day's emails have gone missing completely, there's been 'a small explosion' (WHAT!!??) in the main server room, half the disks in the uni are no longer being mounted, and the system has been disconnected from the outside world for several hours every night. Seems like saving on staff costs may have some minor disadvantages... On the other hand it's probably going to convince management that Unix is completely unreliable and that they should accelerate the movement to NT. Boy am I glad I'm going.

Certificated jpb on grounds of general solidarity and wishing luck (and being unable to publicise gMems otherwise due to problems quoted above). Am I right to think you can't effectively certificate above your own ranking?