Older blog entries for matt (starting at number 15)

Jury duty over with. Didn't get impaneled. This time I got to sit around for 4+ hours with a dead TV. I'm still trying to decide if a blank TV or E! is better. I'm leaning towards the former.

My ADD seems to be catching up to me again, long after I thought I had it fairly solidly under control. In school, I'd been stamped "gifted" on my way out of preschool, and sat under that label for quite awhile. It looked to everyone like I was some really smart kid or something, but in reality, it was just that everything they were teaching was covered in books that I'd read. I used to read lots of books, and today I read lots of web pages.

Given that the American public school system values book knowledge above critical thinking (and the liberal indoctrination is really easy to fake), I did remarkably well until a few years before college. Anyway, to make a long story short, I insisted that I get checked out, and lo and behold, Ritalin made me brilliant for awhile. It didn't sit terribly well with me, though, so I quit it and worked really hard on pushing myself without the drugs. Up until these past few weeks it's worked relatively well. I'm not sure what's changed, but I'll keep watching for awhile.

Well, other than that, nothing new on the free software front, except that I have to figure out a term to use that is not "free software". Open source smacks of marketese. Suggestions welcome.

Jury duty again. Might actually get impaneled this time. Sigh.

Oops, there goes the toaster. Tune in next time.

Interesting reading the responses. I don't have anything else that I feel is worthwhile to add, so that's why I am not responding to the followups. In any event, there are a few points to ponder.

My c-client sync script is halfway done, but I quickly realized as I started to code that it has the potential to destroy my inbox if I match one list to another incorrectly, so I'm leaving what I've done for now to mull over it a little more. I wish Palm's developer zone had information on how the MailDB file is structured, but they don't seem to for some odd reason, just some generic stuff on databases. I find that extremely strange, especially since pdbdump from the Coldsync Palm libs shows there is a field called "id" in each message that I think I can use safely.

As nymia pointed out, we've apparently been down or something... but it's all better now.

On the software front, I've been trying to piece together a coherent conduit for mail to my Visor, so I can stop spending over an hour daily going through misc@openbsd.org, ports@openbsd.org, tech@openbsd.org, etc. and do some of it on my lunch break at work. (If only we had a decent 'net connection there, sigh.) For as much flack as it catches, IMAP-UW's c-client library is really quite good (with the Perl Mail::Client lib), and I can add it to Coldsync's Palm Perl libs to complete the picture.

I would really like to use Coldsync, but /usr/local is taken up by OpenBSD ports right now, and I don't want to throw extra stuff in there. One of these days I'm going to have to seriously sit down and figure out enough about the infrastructure to permit my old trick under FreeBSD (/usr/contrib) to work. /usr/contrib is a better place to put this sort of software anyway, it's written by someone else, maintained by us specifically for our OS, but not supported by us. That, historically, is the role of /usr/contrib. /usr/local, OTOH, should be for truly local stuff that can be blown away with no ill effects on the rest of the system. At least that's how I've always felt about it. Unfortunately, /usr/local is ingrained into a lot of places in our tree right now, so massive changes would need to take place, and I don't think a lot of others see the value in it. Maybe I'll go on a crusade sometime. There's no real reason why the system can't discover what your preference is for everything. I've got a few ideas on that front...

deekayen: that's no way to live. I wish you had smarter parents. Alcohol abuse really sucks. Get them help if you can.

Just posted a heavily revised version of my "abused trust" article, which I think addresses my thoughts below. Crossing my fingers for as good a reception to my points as I've had in recent diaries. Thanks, everyone, for your support.

I love working with the window open during a thundershower. It's great. Everyone should have an openable window next to their workstations. Of course I could also go outside and get wet... that's always fun.

Gave in to curiosity and installed Tomcat on gamera, even though I was going to make it a work-only project. I figure, though, since work gave me a reprieve from the otherwise tedious pushing of the inventory data into our Oracle apps system through a terminal session -- we were going to do that tonight -- that I can do some semi-work-related stuff at home. (Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Oracle did not see fit to make interfaces for physical inventory, so we spent many $$$ a few years ago to have an interface written so a Perl script could talk directly to the human interface.) But now one of our DCs isn't going to do their third (cleanup of discrepancies between first and second) count today, so we won't be entering anything till Monday at the earliest.

Anyway, back to Tomcat. I'm pretty impressed with what I've seen so far. Obviously, Java developers are already really into the whole servlet and JSP thing. I haven't done any serious Java since I wrote half of a DNS resolver library in JDK 1.0.2 years ago, but the whole thing just screams well-engineered to me, especially when contrasted to last month's exponentially mounting frustration with Zope. I think what I like most is that it tries to do as little as possible and allows you to build your own framework (or use others') on top of it. Right now all I've managed to do some basic header/footer stuff, and automatically-generated breadcrumbs... but more is coming.

I'm noticing several people using the word "diarist". It's one of those things where I wonder if people started using it because I did, because it was one of those words I thought might be a real word but had to look it up. (It is a real word, for those of you who are wondering.) Then again, the rest of the world might have just been using it and I only noticed subconsciously, kind of like when you get a new car and for the first time in your life, you notice the other people driving the same model.

Humm. It's 8:05 AM over here, so I suppose I can't say nobody else is up in my time zone anymore. When my pager went off at 6:45, I don't think anyone was. :-) Work is doing inventory this weekend, and when I started this job I inherited the Perl-based RF barcoding system that our DCs and factories use; it gets used very heavily this weekend, and our DC liaison thought this morning in the shower that she hadn't asked me if our new-style UCC shipping labels would work for inventory scans. Thankfully, I'd tested it last week.)

I finally got a usable source tree! Note to self: NEVER use cvs-over-ssh unless committing changes to a tree. pserver is a much more reliable method for large updates (and not too slouchy, either).

Everyone who wrote in and/or left supportive messages in their diaries -- thanks. But I'm not posting it, and I'm glad I didn't, and here's why.

I noticed a few folk seemed to be offended by my suggestion that they might not qualify for the rank to which they'd risen. At the risk of re-offending, I'd say some of you don't. The guidelines are clear -- this is about contributing to free software, not about being in IT for many decades. While those decades of experience may help you to contribute, it doesn't mean that you are more than an apprentice at contributing.

My problem, though, was that even after editing my sentences several times, I still had it wrong, or at least it appears so from the interpretations. Contributions to free software are not necessarily measured in terms of code, although it's hard to take someone seriously who hasn't contributed code. :-) It's about being involved. Being involved doesn't mean playing around with a particular free software project, it means helping it to be better, whether through code, advocacy, assisting with infrastructure, whatever. I guess it's really hard to quantify, and because of that, I don't feel I can do it justice with my words. I only know that when I look at some ratings, I feel they're wrong; and when I look at others, I know they're right.

Bottom line: I fear that having posted my article outside the still-public but less exposed confines of my diary would have offended far more, and not accomplished anything for the goal of free/open/whatever software. When I thought about it, I discovered someone being labeled purple or blue doesn't really hurt me or the community. If I need to find a real free software journeyer or master, I know where to find them, regardless of the color of their cert.

Or maybe I'm just a gutless wonder. You decide. :-)

I wrote this article up, but at the last minute decided not to post it. Maybe I'm just afraid, but I wonder if it's too flame-prone to put on the front page. If you think otherwise, mail me at matt@zigg.com and tell me otherwise, and I'll consider posting it.

Meta: Abused trust?

Lots of recent diary entries (disclosure: including one of mine) are highlighting the feeling that our web of trust is growing in a disturbing direction: away from its original intent to allow folks to certify fellow free software developers, and instead turning into a hyperlinked old boys network.

NOTE: There are those of you who may think this article is very unfriendly, maybe trolling, or perhaps even elitist. Consider this a free pass -- you don't have to read it. Then again, you might want to, and voice your opinion in opposition. I welcome that.

Without going back and highlighting any particular diarists' entries, I think there's a feeling that there's both overcertification going on and certification where there really shouldn't be any. Folks are getting marked up because they know someone else, while their pages mention no involvement whatsoever in contributions to free software projects. I want to believe that these folks just haven't put their contributions up, maybe out of forgetfulness, maybe out of self-deprecation. Unfortunately, there are several who state they're working entirely in proprietary circles; they may use free software tools, but that doesn't make them a free software contributor. Perhaps an apprentice, in some cases, but I'd say they would at least have to have a desire to contribute first. I don't feel anyone who doesn't at least work on one coherent free software project (contributing code or at least infrastructure) should be more than an apprentice, ever.

I'm an apprentice. I don't deserve to be anything more at this time, no matter how brilliant someone may think a piece of code I've written is (and I sure as heck can't think of any code I've written that even approaches brilliant right now). I've contributed bugfixes to various projects and I do some work with the OpenBSD ports tree, but I'm still learning.

This sort of thing makes we wonder about the web of trust concept in general. When passing around of trust happens liberally, and apparently without much thought, the web breaks. A common security axiom is "a secure system is only as good as its weakest link", and that applies to the web of trust in security circles as well. I submit that it also applies here.

When I first started writing this, I thought perhaps it might generate some useful discussion, but maybe I'm too rooted in Slashdot and Usenet flamefests to believe that. Again, if folks think I should post it, let me know; but I'll just leave it here instead.

Damn! The latest Mozilla nightly build is FAST! Much better than what I'm used to from Moz.

(For the curious: build 2000072708. I guess it's a day old) :-)

Ho hum. Watching my crufty old SPARCstation 20 (at work) crawl along doing an Oracle 8i install; we plan on moving to 8i here at work late this year or early next. The machine itself is really quite a sight, especially since in lieu of new hardware, I scrounged up three external 2GB drives and concatenated them into a 6GB volume. I am geeked about one thing -- with Oracle iAS (which we'll also be deploying; getting sick of the italics yet?), just about everything is dependent on Java in some way, and the idea of finally getting a chancel to figure out servlets and JSP at my job instead of yet another project at home is cool. I'd played with Tomcat some, and thought it might be cool to pick up sometime (especially considering my frustration with Zope's bugginess and shortcomings). Of course, it looks really good on a resume too :-)

While I'm talking about Jakarta, I should mention that they have some really cool stuff there that Java's been missing for some time. Daniel Savarese, formerly of ORO, Inc. has donated ORO's software to Jakarta. ORO's regex package is pretty much the de facto standard for regular expressions in Java, especially considering they're Perl 5 compatible. I hope more software donations like this come up, and especially under more friendly licenses like Apache's; Java stuff as of late has been (IMO) very well-engineered and useful, and contributions like this make it more so. Now maybe we'll see Java moved away from that icky SCSL and into an Apache-style license... :-)

Committed a few ports changes last night; got maintainer approval for kaffe to FAKE it and clean it up, and also grabbed ownership of the previously unowned enscript port, cleaning it up in the process. I think I'll stick to easier ports like these for awhile until I'm more comfortable, and to minimize the permanent etching of my mistakes into the OpenBSD source tree.

nymia: I'm not sure if you'll ever see this, and I really, really wish there was some way for people to see whose diaries are linking to theirs (sometime I'll have to look at the code and contribute that feature, I suppose), but glad you were impressed, and you seem to be on the right track.

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