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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..
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?
Started reading SICP. It's brilliant, I think it's the best programming book I ever read. Why did I try starting Scheme with the Little Schemer? You need to be brilliant to pick out all the implications in that. Only problem is I think its going to take a year or so to get through SICP. MIT use this with first year undergraduates!? I'm in total awe..
Still trying to sort out Savant. libstdc++2.10 has been removed from the Debian ftp site (they say they're sorting it)... I still seem to have g++ issues. Reminder to self: avoid anything dependant on unstable c++ libraries...
mdillon: O vir doctissime, scripta Pictorum verticaliter incisa sunt, propter naturam literarum (Ogham).
Satan: you must be the advocate's devil. Seems rather backwards and demeaning for a being of your stature. What's with all this miserable plagues, pus, patents stuff? Snap out of it and give us some of those tunes you're famous for.
In between trying to get a horrible tangle of Perl/PHP3 into shape to move to a site where I can't just su to sort out problems, thought I'd have a break and do a VHDL CiphreSabre. Savant (the free VHDL compiler) then proceeds to fall over because I've upgraded my g++ libraries since installing it. Back to installing/deinstalling c++ libraries. grr. Don't you just hate it when you do something trivial... which then leads to endless sorting out of something unrelated you HAVE NO INTEREST IN AT ALL.
Any opinions? btw, I'm in the UK, not the US
incredibly slow on the uptake
Like, more than 20 years to get the point...
Started in computing in the mid 70s as an operator for Burrough's Machines (never seen
a computer before). The first programs I see are Star Trek and a bit later
Colossal Cave. Don't understand why they don't cost any money; but hey,
the entire program is there. Doh. Learn my first programming (Algol68) by making selected stars vanish
but keep their gravity ('black holes", yeah!) and similar tinkering. Rewrite some of the company's
accounting software so it no longer runs over a weekend on an antique B500 but in a couple
of hours on the amazing dual B6700. Everything works, lots more time in the pub.. Get put
through disciplinary procedures. Now, if you told me a novice programmer rewrote the entire
end of month accountancy procedure for the uk for a company and didn't get the output
checked by an accountant, I'd understand. Then, I was pissed off. No more of this programming
stuff for me; lets work on the hardware instead.
Bought a ZX80, rebuilt the keyboard, the memory, the graphics system. Left Burroughs and went off to work on hardware... I thought. City & Guilds in electronics should be enough, shouldn't it? Doh again. Worked as a wireman for a couple of years, then back into computers repairing BBC micros. Lots of pirate software, no free software. Assembly language test routines coming out of my ears, built my own ICE system and pushed up the overtime money (piece rates, you see). Managers find out, make me sign a piece of paper accepting 400 pounds for the design and promising never to design anything there again. That one I still don't understand. Someone told me the entire company was meant to be a tax-writeoff and intended to lose money. Maybe. Whatever, definitely need more qualifications to get out of this trap.
Work as a lab technician in assorted polys/unis. In between helping students, lots of little board designs, homebrew PAL programmers etc. - and day release. Finish the course and get a job teaching. Assembly language, helping out on programming courses. Meet Unix. Oh, you don't use Sun's C compiler? This gcc thing is better? And free? How bizarre. Doh. Can't run Unix on PCs though, better to concentrate on DOS, then Windows, instead. You're using Minix on your PC? How bizarre, why not use a proper system like Windows? Doh. The internet - great, what a nice atmosphere, everyone's so helpful, loads of people sharing software I can develop and use for classes. It's just there, no need to feed my own changes back (they're not good enough anyway). Doh.
Linux mania starts. The penny drops. After 20 years you may now officially certify me as a dimwit (but you can't because it's been abolished!... Chuckles manicly). Rest of this story may or may not continue another day.
Thoughts for today: the free software 'community', its self-image, outsiderness (or how can
anyone be so slow?).
Free software is something with absolutely no historical precendent. People make parallels
with pre-industrial gift cultures, but really the comparison falls to pieces as soon as you look
at the details (say, the Kwakiutl). Superabundance of salmon and bits really isn't the same thing.
And people seem to feel that: I've never seen anyone
propose names for developers based on these societies (who would want to be called 'chief' ;-).
Instead, there seem to be 3 instinctive identifications: Tolkienesque and fey: wizards, dwarves,
even trolls (everyone forgets its from fishing, the attraction of this theme is so strong!);
mediaeval: apprentices, journey[.*], masters; or technological: technocrats.
I don't feel happy with any of them. Technocrats is maybe the worst: the illusion that because
you know how to do something, you have the right to rule others. It brings up
images either of the 60's and white-coated 'scientists', or worse, Russia in the 20's and
engineers believing that only their work involves skill, so that perfection for non-engineers
can only come through glorying in the routine; the world of Zamyatin's 'We', futurism, the
man-machine, fascism from the left.
The mediaeval theme seems cosier; its based on skill levels, so it doesn't seem exclusionary,
people progress through stages. It still relates to remnants of skill in the non-digital world,
to other crafts that have been kept alive. But it does exclude: the whole point of the original
guild system was to exclude people who hadn't passed through it, to say 'you can only get
the skills if you pass through this certified process'. It was rigid, and ended by blocking innovation,
so that the towns where the industrial revolution began were the ones outside the old guild
system. Personally I have a gut reaction against it from associations with portuguese fascism:
the imagined nostalgia of bringing back a time when there was harmony between master and
apprentice, when guilds existed but not unions, imposed by the brutest of force.
That's not to say that Advogato is somehow proto-fascist, but the terms are still exclusionary.
Who is being excluded this time? Mainly, all the people who are having the skills
sucked from their jobs by computerization itself. Working a check-out till looks like a pretty
demoralizing job, but at least you can keep your brain going by being fast at mental arithmetic.
Then the till gets computerized and replaced by one with images for each product. Someone
maybe got into writing the code for that till; but its one more step in removing the slightest pleasure
from work for the person on the recieving end. And its one example from millions, an example
I only chose because I just saw it happen to someone. Computer sales people love to go along
with the image of a world divided into the technical elite, and the 'moms and pops', people
who supposedly could never handle or enjoy any complexity or skill in their work, when any
part of that that is true is only true because the skill has been quite deliberately taken away
from them. How do those people gain entry to the guild? Partly, its a real problem, not
just a problem of names; but the names and the ideas that go with them don't help.
So what about the Tolkien terms? People either like fantasy or they don't. Some have extreme allergic reactions to anything that sounds fey, or whimsical. The one big merit for those terms is they don't try to resurrect the past, they never belonged to the real world. But they also encourage a vision of hierarchy (with wizards and deities at the peak) that doesn't need to be there. Free software is something new, it needs terms and organization that are new too; so why not choose terms that don't reinforce hierarchies? I'm sure Miguel, or Rasmus, or esr (if its really him) don't need to be told that they're 'masters' in some sense, let alone deities, and nor do the rest of us. For the particular areas we work in, we already know who the masters are. And for all the lip-service paid to non-programmers involved in free software, calling those people alone the masters reinforces the idea that non-programmers can never be masters, that those with other skills really are, in the end, excluded. Instead, why not call people by their roles? Someone who has written a good manual or book can be a master; but they are also a writer. Someone who organizes a Linux conference of a 1000 people may have master level skill as an organizer, but their title should be organizer, not master. Someone who creates a Unix-like operating system from scratch is a programmer; the world will know if he (in this case ;-) is a master.
OK, a concrete proposal for titles: organizer, writer, programmer, co-ordinator, teacher, designer... The list is indefinitely expandable (the category 'programmer' in particular is likely to fission and multiply). People in this community may in the end value programmers more highly, but that is their choice, not imposed by the terms used. It can still be used to filter out people not involved; to be a writer you should be able to point people to what you have written. It will not filter out trolls, any more than the current system does. It does have one big inconvenience: there is no-one in the world who knows who all the 'masters' in all these fields are, so the initial seed verifiers will have problems; but then the seed system doesn't seem to be perfect even within the world of coding alone as various other diaries have pointed out.
Ran out of time for the more personal part of this... another day.
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