Older blog entries for jfleck (starting at number 57)

The GNOME flamefest of the weekend seems to have largely cooled, and some progress is being made on the technical questions about configuration systems that precipitated the ugliness.

I'm not sure the same progress is being made, however, on the process issue, and how we find a way to make decisions. I'd been mulling a piece I wanted to write comparing free software development with emergent properties. I've marveled at the way things work with no one in charge, and the way things emerge from the actions of relatively independent agents. This weekend's flamefest suggests to me that the metaphor breaks down in ways previously unanticipated.

Had a happy encounter yesterday with my friend Nancy, who is training for one of those 100-mile a day charity rides. I'd been feeling rather uninspired, but hooking up with her and riding together for an hour (hour two of my ride, hour five of hers) was a tonic.

Gotta travel for work this week, to a lovely mountaintop setting with an expensive hotel that has trout on the menu for breakfast. Mmmm. I love it when someone else pays.

Much ugliness in the GNOME world today, flaming in an argument that has become a tangle between technical issues and the Right Way(tm) to make decisions for the collective.

I have no dog in the technical fight. But it's clear that the decisions now being so furiously debated were not made the Right Way, in a good public thrashing, but have been foisted on GNOME, with the thrashing only happening now, after the fact. I do not like that.

At the very least, communication was extraordinarily poor about whether Gconf or Miguel and Dietmar and Michael's bonobo-config was the tool of choice for handling configuration details.

And then, just when it was beginning to sound like some sense was settling over the whole affair, our beloved Miguel offered this bit of wisdom <sarcasm>sure to help calm the flames</sarcasm>:
I would love to see GConf fully and totally gone.

Sigh.

I have much to learn about the tribal rituals of this strange new clan I have joined.

csm: Every death is a terrible drama - for you, for your friend Scott's family. The drama is the loss and the left-behindness. Condolences.

I dont' have much energy for this, but our photo editor Paul had his last day today, and the story of his leaving is worth sharing. Five years ago he became a volunteer fireman in the little community of Placitas, where he lives. He trained as an emergency medical technician, and again and again he had the experience of helping people in a profoundly meaningful way.

So he quit the high-powered life of a newspaperman, took a huge cut in pay, to become a fireman. I admire him greatly.

Still dead. There is no respite.

But life continues.

I spent yesterday evening looking at Mars through a telescope. It was at opposition, which means it rises at sunset and is on the opposite side of Earth from the sun, which means it's a "full Mars" (think "full moon") so it's been putting on quite a show. It's the bright star you see in the southwest after sunset, brightest thing in the sky.

We were using the little telescope at the LodeStar Astronomy Center. They were testing out some new filters for a public viewing they're doing next week, and I insinuated myself into their evening. David, the director, brought his son Gabriel, and they gave me a private screening of their new planetarium movie, a lovely trip through time and space.

There was Mars of course, and Gabriel was very much alive, talking robots and demanding to climb the little ladder so he could look through the telescope at whatever it was pointed at.

His very much aliveness was a good tonic.

I work at a newspaper, so we do this every single day. Every single day people die in dramatic ways and we chronicle it, trying our best to give their lives some dignity and meaning.

Paul, who writes obituaries, sits across from me, and every day I hear him on the telephone: "I'm so sorry for your loss," or, "My condolences to your family."

Today he's sitting there with one the guys from the photo staff, talking about Ed. Today it's one of our own. Jeff, the cop reporter, is doing what he always does, tracking down police reports, trying to get the blood alcohol level of the guy who hit Ed.

Only now we can talk with a different sort of certainty about the subject matter at hand, about how Ed loved Star Wars, drove up to Denver to see the last movie open, about how he was working the night shift and didn't come back after lunch, about how many of the staff drove by the accident scene last night on their way home from work, not knowing it was Ed.

This is normally a loud and boisterous place. It is what I love most about spending my days in a newsroom. It is not today.

Imagine this bargain. I have developed a new technology that would be of great benefit to society, but it comes with a price: thousands of people will die each year using it. When we, as a society, evaluate such risks up front, we usually turn such bargains down. Note the great discomfort many people attach to nuclear power, and our insistence that the chemical industry reduce potentially dangerous emissions to essentially a zero risk level.

Yet we've made this Faustian bargain with the automobile. 41,000 people died last year in the United States in car crashes. That's 112 people per day. If chemical factories or nuclear power plants killed more than a hundred people a day, we would not stand for it.

Ed died last night. He was a kid who worked here as a photo technician. He has a family who loved him. I am pissed.

After a little enforced down time, the great GNOME bugzilla fest continues. But I wonder....

I have a very distinct memory, as a kid, of the time my elementary school teacher read us "The Phantom Tollbooth." I remember when Milo was told (this is how I remember it, and it still terrifies me) to make a tunnel through a solid rock mountain with a needle.

Score today: 25 verified, 3 sorted into proper categories, 3 closed. But then, all I seem to have is a needle.

I had a lovely Father's Day yesterday, made all the more lovely by the fact that my flakey family got confused and celebrated it a week early. We realized it in time, but we were having so much fun we celebrated it anyway.

I got up very early and took a bike ride in the mountains, up old Route 66 and then north. It's a pretty big road, but not too busy early on a Sunday morning, and it's got a wide shoulder, and I'm getting more comfortable with the high-speed descent on the way back into town.

I sped back because of the lure of pancakes, which I knew Lissa to be making for me. We did presents (I got sunglasses and two beautiful blue cut rock bookends) and lazed about.

In the afternoon, we went over to mom and dad's and swam for a couple of hours and celebrated father's day too. Lissa got a bunch of dates for my dad. Their new apartment is so small we've got to think quite creatively for gifts that do not take up space or add to clutter. Books are out. Food is good.

Got the first releasable version of the libxslt tutorial done. It took longer than it should have because I had to actually understand all the code I was writing rather than my usual cut-and-paste-hacking style. Free software is a revelation in this regard. I get away with understanding remarkably little and still getting jobs done by simply finding someone else's code that does something similar and borrowing it, only understanding enough to customize it to the particular job at hand.

I also have been sucked into the Great GNOME Bugzilla Cleanup. Spent some time pecking away at the gnome-applets module, where telsa has been making a valiant effort to tame the unruly. I've also begun work on verifying all the gnome-utils bugs that kmaraas and vicious squished over the last couple of weeks.

Sadie loves to look out the front window, and her favorite spot to do it from is on top of this low, glass-covered table-like thing. But this is not allowed, which she knows. So now, every time we get ready to go out, she parks herself right next to the table, waiting. It is so transparent it is hilarious.

This morning, we left to go out for breakfast and she did it. So I drove around the block, and sure enough, there she was, sitting on top of the table, the curtains pushed up out of the way so she could look out.

Nora and I thought it was hilarious. Lissa was less amused, as she had recently washed the window which was now being slobbered up.

gleblanc - My Old Route 66 ride up the canyon east of town: 14 miles, 1,200 feet net elevation gain. The first 8 miles are a steady climb, about 500 feet gain, the last 6 miles are a 700 foot net gain, but a bit of a roller coaster with with steep climbs, flat stretches and a few big drops, so the total climbing is more.

Then, of course, I ride back down and my legs get all stiff and the headwind is ugly and the potholes loom large and dangerous. /me hates the descents