Roblag
Just like a diary, only without a way to dot the i’s with hearts; robla, margl, and hazel’s blog

When I was running the Helix Community IRC channel, I would get mildly frustrated with people who would show up and say “can I ask a question?” or something to that effect.

Apparently, the phenonena isn’t unique to Helix, and the frustration isn’t unique to me. I’ve seen lots of topic lines on Freenode stating “don’t ask if you can ask, just ask”. That lead me to think “hey, there should be a term for this”, so that when someone says that, you can reply with something short and sweet.

There may already be a term for this, which would be great. Please let me know. Otherwise, the most obvious thing is to acronymify it. So, here goes: daiycaja. “don’t ask if you can ask, just ask”. I’d love to see the following exchange on IRC someday:

• <newbie> can I ask a question?
• <grouch> daiycaja
• <newbie> diacaja?
• <grouch> google it
• time passes
• <newbie> i can’t find it
• <grouch> you spelled it wrong
• time passes
• <newbie> oh

Of course, they’d probably be pretty ticked off for getting the runaround, but they’d learn. Of course, if you’re in the grouch’s shoes, you could say “just ask” up front, but that just makes it look like you’re the only grouch in the world. Responding this way makes it a little more obvious that they’ve just violated some basic IRC ettiquette that they should learn a little more about.

This category of my blog isn’t called “nerd” for nuthin.

I’ve been working on a bunch of miscellaneous stuff this week which are loosely related to the “Spectaclar” project:

• A lot of wiki cleanup - I think I got most of the dead links, so that there’s at least stub articles everywhere there’s a link
• Patch to MediaWiki - not a huge contribution, but one that really helped me understand the access control model in MW
• Wrote a development planning doc for WordPress. There’s been a lot of acrimony this week about the WordPress development process, which the planning doc is a response to. I’m waiting for a review from Lorelle before floating it on the wp-hackers list. The acrimony has already died down, but I’m hoping this will provide some structure for requesting features.
• I’ve installed Bugzilla/CVS (2.19.3+) - thinking about taking a stab an OpenID plugin for BZ, since I’m somewhat familiar with the BZ auth plugin model.

The Seattle Bus Monster is one of the cooler examples of Google abuse that I’ve seen yet. Merges Google Maps and the funky real-time bus tracker app.

Here’s the site for a guy who embellishes the crap out of kids’ drawings. They still are very recognizable as the kids’ orginal work, but he takes them in a freaky, surreal direction.

More on Spectaclar. Haven’t done much today on the site, as I’ve been working on Mediawiki and riding my bike and enjoying being a slacker.

There’s a blurb that I just added to the site that’s probably worth blogging.

The primary focus for this site, at the time of this writing, is authorization, as opposed to authentication or accounting. I plan to go with the flow, so if there ends up being a bunch of interest in authentication or accounting, I’m not going to fight it, but it’s not where I plan to spend the bulk of my time. There are a lot of folks (Liberty Alliance, OpenID) thinking about authentication and identity issues, so I’m hoping for a little division of labor.

Both authentication and authorization are big problems. The funny thing is there seem to be more solutions for authentication than authorization, probably because authentication is the first “A” in “AAA”. They tend to run out of steam by the time they get to authorization, which is why I want to start there.

However, it’s not as though there’s a specific piece of software that we’re writing here yet, and it’s not as though the “authentication” community and the “authorization” communities are entirely disjoint. We’ll see which way it really swings after a while (if it does anything at all).

Want to buy 16 acres (under roof) of warehouse space in Missouri? My parents have just the thing for you. They tend to buy a lot of things they don’t need.

Well, I’m ready to start talking about “Spectaclar“, which is my new website (and hopefully community) around open source access control. I’ve written a rather long explanation of what Spectaclar is about. To summarize, I’m trying to find a few really good open source web applications, understand their access control mechanisms, and begin to try aligning them. I’ve added an announcement list and discussion list, and I’ll start bloggnig here about my progress as well.

It’s official: I’m no longer an employee of RealNetworks, Inc.. I’m now starting a new phase, which is one where I’ll hopefully be a visible part of many other open source projects (e.g. I’ve already started poking my nose in on Mediawiki development).

I started at “Progressive Networks” nine years ago, on March 11, 1996. At the time, the company was just finishing up RealAudio 2.0, and was trying to solve “the firewall problem”, i.e. making it so that users behind corporate firewalls could listen to RealAudio. The “firewall problem” really isn’t solved now, so I guess I didn’t do a very good job, but somehow, that didn’t get me fired

In the intervening nine years, I wore a lot of hats. Standards nerd (working on RTSP and SMIL), QA Manager, Developer, Development Support Manager. Watched the stock split twice, and then fall down to almost the same amount as the per-share cash in the bank.

It was a pretty amazing ride, but it feels good to be off for a while. People have been asking me if this is some sort of statement about where Real is at or where it is heading. Let me say for the record, no. Things are a little tougher than they used to be at Real, but there’s a lot of persistent folks there, so they’ll be fine. For me, it’ll be nice to think about things other than multimedia for a while.

Presumably, I’ll have more time to post here. We’ll see if that happens….