Tag: me

Life Blogging

i have always been reluctant to talk about personal stuff on this weblog. mostly i post what i find interesting, sometimes what i’m working on. maybe it’s time to blog some more 🙂 i found this interview with justin hall.

I would recommend this to anyone — if you see someone who you like through the smoke and noise online, and you can saunter over and stand at a slight distance and watch them to see how they carry themselves, to read their tone of voice, to observe their links and interests. In a way, personal websites are like personal advertisements, or a way to circumvent the matchmaker.

i’m having a bad hangover today, and i’m kinda anxious about the conference. also i’m a bit tired of getting project x off the ground. it takes so much effort to get anything done. it’s definitely a downside of projects where you don’t see your coworkers in the lobby.

there seem to be very few weblogs in zurich, kinda disappointing. although i’m exploring some right now. more later.

Protecting developers from users

typically, rookie open source developers like the ones now boasting how they “act in the interest of users” over at postnuke have just not been around long enough. user interaction is overrated, as whiprush points out.

I think a lot of OSS developers are probably sick of backseat drivers trying to dictate features and direction of something they’re doing for free anyway. The more OSS project mailing lists and forums I read, the more I am glad that developers choose to ignore more and more user requests.

here is my prediction: postnuke will switch to a less open development model within 6 months (just look at cvs commit logs, there is nothing happening already) or the ones carrying the torch will be burnt out.

Quoting & metadata

ralph levien talks about quoting netiquette.

It is considered good etiquette not to quote email without permission. However, these days, emails are often part of a broader discussion spanning blogs, web fora, and so on. It’s increasingly easy to run afoul of this etiquette rule. Thus, I propose the 2-character string “+ as a shorthand indicating that permission to quote, with attribution, is granted. Permission is also granted to integrate the email into any copylefted documentation (most copylefts do not require attribution).

“+ is a nice idea until we figure out how to attach rdf metadata to arbitrary text fragments. semantic web here we come. raph is right, quoting is increasingly a problem.

A less than clued-in person recently accused me of wanting to spam a mailing list when the intent was to use affero to provide users a possibility to give back by donating to select charities. that person was in possession of the whole trail of discussion, and only used that conclusion to discredit me. a generalized quoting system would allow anyone to trace these tidbits back to the source, and decide for themselves.