Older blog entries for lkcl (starting at number 25)

hi jb318, do you (or anyone else, for that matter), happen to have an html-parser-checker function? i'll add it in to the code i'm submitting to raph. i'm not an html expert, so am reluctant to spend time coding it up, myself.

i wish the message-board i cut/paste from diary.c was already running, live on advogato.

crazy nights. i think i am currently on a 25 or 26 hour day. how else do i explain going to sleep 2 hours later each day? thursday i was up all night (again) on mod_virgule (can't get enough), with the result that at the company lunch i spent half of it asleep. this of course caused great merriment as it was considered that i would not notice if a (very pretty, origami-folded) paper napkin was placed on my head.

i also managed to miss helping a colleague write a document because i went home at 3pm, and woke up as 12:30am to discover that he had left two messages asking for help. oops. that pissed me off [missing out on helping him].

... *pause*. how do i explain this? i think advogato is *really* important. i'll leave it at that.

ANS: when the damn .tgz file is smaller than the .patch :)

*giggle*. when is it more use to post a .tgz instead of a .patch?
href="http://advogato.org/person/lilo/">lilo</a> , i got it. message passing. the rules are, if you are "Observer" and above, you can post a message to anyone, as long as *they* haven't certified you as "None".

i.e. you are still able to post, but their opinion of you is that they don't want to hear from you. that means, if you *really* want to contact them, ask someone else to send them a message on your behalf, or maybe even post an article, if you're feeling that strongly about it [whatever].

by what appears to be popular demand, and common sense, i have even the "None" setting able to post diary entries, where "None" is the same rating at the moment as "Observer".

maybe it would be worthwhile renaming "None" back to "Observer", and "Observer" to "Novice".

hmm... no, that don't quite work, because the default is "one off the lowest rating".

. hmmm...

more, more, gotta dash. patch no 3 on its way... mod_virgule-3.patch

hi kelly,

i agree with you and mbp about not fostering an adversarial community, so i picked more appropriate names ("None", for lowest certification).

from an analysis of the flow-algorithms, it is quite _difficult_ to certify someone as "None" under the modified scheme (default is "Observer"). if someone already has a trust-rating from someone else, even a "Master" cannot, individually, overturn that indirect rating, even if they are one of the top-level seeds. only when an entire *group* of cross-linked individuals is cut off from the trust-metric flow (i.e everyone *else* agrees with your assessement of a lower rating) can they be dropped down to "None".

i guess that this may be a problem with the metric rating system, itself, although i think... if you have a large number of people all rating each other as "Master", then that simply becomes the only rating. it means that everyone thinks that everyone else is trustworthy, and there's nothing wrong with that :)

help! i messed up my diary by leaving out a quote in a url!

what is it with programmers and late nights, eh?

i forgot that i had not updated mod_virgule.patch onto

interesting reply by martin, working towards not providing confrontational mechanisms in a community. i know *exactly* what he means. the u.k. government system is essentially confrontational (and the australian one is modelled on that). there are two sides to the "house". one of them is called "the opposition". instant invitation to fight and basically get absolutely xxxx-all done (ok, of course, it's not quite that bad.

that having been said, the current advogato trust metric system already provides a means to "fight". it already provides a means to "become elitist". so, why do i want to provide a further means to promote fighting and elitism?

well... because that's one of the way societies work (as well as the more progressive, more respectable, socially accepted ways that actually further what is usually considered to be community spirit, development etc). some people geniunely get a kick out of in-fighting. that's not going to stop [for example, on advogato], just because [for example] advogato does or does not provide a means to stop it dragging the rest of a community down with it, unless the whole point of [for example] advogato is to tolerate in-fighting.

*that* having been said, i think that the way that the flow-diagrams work, it is extremely *difficult* to promote someone to certification level "none", unless you also certify an entire inter-linked group to certification level "none", or remove all certifications.

which reminds me, i must provide a means to remove certifications: this is different from certification "none".

Just had an interesting discussion with mbp. I am putting these things down, here, so i can think about them, and carry on the discussion. i know that i have difficulty explaining concepts, sometimes, it may take me several days to come up with something.

He was concerned that giving a community a means to take away privileges from others is an *invitation* to develop a community with the potential for communication breakdown.

hmmm....

he also said that he doesn't see the point of a certification below that of "Observer" with no privileges associated with it.