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

There’s a bit of a flamewar going on right now between the main PulseAudio developer, and another Linux desktop developer who grew frustrated by some very real problems caused directly and indirectly by it. PulseAudio is the latest of many savior technologies that promise to make audio on Linux not suck. I’m actually pretty optimistic that the fifth(?) time’s a charm here; there’s a lot of very sensible things about the design.

Anyway, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote a series of blog posts culminating in “PulseAudio: I told you so“. In these, he documents his frustration with being given the runaround when trying to point out PA problems that he ends up debugging to the point of finding and/or filing several bugs/patches in various bug trackers. PulseAudio creator Lennart Poettering had enough, and posted to his blog with a long rebuttal, claiming that Stedfast’s blog post “flamed my software and hence me”. It’s a pretty run of the mill developer flamewar, which only caught my eye because I’ve had a few frustrating problems with PA myself and was hoping to learn more.
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This article in CIO Magazine touches on things that you should look for in choosing open source software:

• Project stability: Can you trust the project to be there when you need it?
• Project support: Can you get support when you need it?
• Internal software management: Does your company know what open-source programs it’s using? How it’s developing and deploying them both in-house and to customers?”

I’m not so sure that these problems are truly bigger problems for open source as they are for software in general. When people in companies select a new piece of software (for use as a standalone product or as an integrated component of a larger system) they miss one important thing: it is much more like a hiring decision than they probably realize. Many of the considerations people make for new employees (reputation, cultural fit, how they are to work with) are equally applicable to new software components and systems.

(CIO article via Matthew Aslett @ The 451 Group)

Here’s a description of the organic open source panel at OSCON (which I’m participating in): “The OSI’s Open Source Definition attempts to set the minimum bar for a software license to be considered “open source”. However, there’s much more to a software project than just the license. Are software projects dominated by a single company still open source? Does a project need to be ‘organic’ to be truly open source? What does “organic” even mean in this context?”

My answer to the first two questions is “yes, of course projects dominated by one company are still open source, and no it doesn’t need to be ‘organic’”, where “organic” is (arguably) defined as a project which the first release included source, and is generally characterized as by a distributed development team with no single company truly in control, and “inorganic” is generally code that started off life as a proprietary effort. Yay, panel concluded, thanks everyone!

No? Ok, the line of questions above implies a question of quality, and there are very real qualitative differences between “organic” and “inorganic” open source…..
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Matt Asay wrote a blog post “Cash, code, or free-riding in open source communities?“, which was a good post on a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about myself. He used the term “free-rider” which caused a well documented uproar.

I’m saddened by the sense of entitlement inherent in the uproar. What’s wrong with asking members of a software community to do more than just use the software? Personally, I feel that if I can endure the twice-a-year NPR pledge drive banter (which centers around making “free-riders” feel bad), I can deal with being asked to throw a little something back to the authors of the software I use. In the end, just like NPR, no one is obligated to donate, but no one should fault them for asking, because it’d suck if no one did donate.

Some of the negative responses to this article exhibit a behavior that is gets under my skin as someone who is in a similar boat as Matt. It seems fashionable these days to bash on the vendors associated with single-vendor open source projects. Do we really not want to see more vendors release their source code, or do we instead want the investment dollars to go toward the creation of more proprietary software? Don’t we think that skeptical proprietary software purveyors look at that kind of thing, and think “wow, glad that’s not me!”? I realize that most community members are aware of the nuance and hard problems, and its often the blowhards that are the most vocal, but often, the blowhards go unchallenged. Why should we let them feel cool about doing trashing those people making an honest effort? Like Savio Rodrigues, I want to see open source software production get a larger percentage of the overall investment in software than we’re seeing today.

Dave Neary has a great blog post about Sun trying to do the right thing. It was refreshing to read this, and quite insightful. I’ve been watching the naming debate with some interest, if for no other reason than this is a conversation I’m quite interested in pushing my view in, and it helps to have a shared vocabulary.

I can’t help but think that the Linux vs OpenSolaris debate is like if two candidates for the Green Party got into an Obama vs Clinton style fight over the Green Party nomination. The free software community is going to have a tough enough time winning in November, so to speak, without scaring off the newcomers.

A little bit of work talk. I’m going to be speaking tonight (January 31) at the Seattle Social Media Club about Second Life, along with my co-worker Greg Tomko-Pavia (aka Periapse Linden)
Jeff Barr at Amazon, who has been doing really innovative work promoting Amazon Web Services using Second Life, and Brian White, the author of Second Life - A Guide to Your Virtual World.

If you’d like to show up, please RSVP for the event. It’s happening in downtown Seattle at Text100

For those of you wondering what I’ve been doing at Linden Lab, now I can tell you.

Google’s social networking site Orkut was the coolest thing since sliced bread back in early 2004. It was a social network that actually had interesting people on it. It had a fun user interface. And then, the reliability problems kicked in, and then the Brazilians invaded every corner of it. So just about everyone I know pretty much abandoned it. I never had the heart to take it out of my bookmarks, so I would still check it every so often, confirming its still pretty much dead.

Flash forward to late 2006…

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I’m off to Boston, to be among fellow nerds at Wikimania, where I’m hosting a discussion about enterprise use of MediaWiki, as well as hanging around beforehand for Hacking Days. We’ll see what sort of attendance there is for my session; there’s a lot of parallel tracks at this thing. I’m hoping to figure out if it’s viable for me to make a living doing MediaWiki development. I haven’t been very good about getting fired up for work since Hazel was born, but I’m hoping this will help jar me into gear.

I’m not an Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have to hand it to them with the new laptops.  Not points on quality, but on revenue maximizing genius.  Specifically, charging $150 more for a black laptop.  People will pay for the cachet, and charging $150 is just enough to make sure it maintains cachet.  That said, please shoot me if I ever think it’s a good idea for me personally to spend $150 more on a laptop just to get the color I want.

A friend recently told me about yet another mobile startup who I won’t name, but suffice to say has yet another one of those generic amalgams of “Mo” or “Mob” with some other word. It got me thinking “hey, I can automate this; maybe save everyone some time”….which I did (at least the first part). Applying my proprietary formula to the not-exactly-exhaustive-but-close-enough word list that comes with in most UNIX-y systems, I came up with a list from which investors, domain squatters, and edgy industry soothsayers can all pull from to define the vocabulary of the 21st Century. Particular favorites of mine include “Mobarrassing”, “Mobgoblin”, “Mocabre”, and “Mosogyny”. Definitions for “mobnobbing”, “mocialite”, “mocreation”, “mobauchery” and “mobsidize” practically write themselves, and it’s only a matter of time before some hack tech columnist uses one/all of these words with a straight face (or whatever face they make when they write that stuff) More after the fold…
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I’m on the right, talking to Brian Aker down at the MySQL User Conference. (photo by James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media)

Stumbled into Jon Udell’s Library lookup bookmarklet and thought I’d give it a spin. It took some tweaking, but now I’ve got a Seattle Public Library/Amazon Bookmarklet

To use, just drag the bookmarklet above to your toolbar. Visit Amazon, search for a book, and then click on the bookmarklet. It’ll check the availability of the book in the Seattle Public Library.

technorati tags: library, amazon

….and of course, now that I’m sitting in front of this really easy to use interface, I don’t have anything useful to say.  Well, that’s a blog for you.  Plus, I’m feeling all Web 2.0-y now.

technorati tags: flock, allthecoolkidsaredoingit, iftheyalljumpedoffacliff, wouldyou

For the past couple of months, I’ve been working on Electowidget. Electowidget is a plugin for MediaWiki designed to make it possible to conduct Internet polls and elections using many different voting systems, including the Schulze method, Instant Runoff Voting, Approval voting, and even plain old Plurality.

Electowidget isn’t designed for secure public elections. Rather, it’s designed for the types of informal polls and elections that currently happen on wikis today. It’s also designed as a tool to help election theorists provide comparitive examples of how a given result will be tabulated comparing multiple different systems.

All data is stored on wiki pages, in JSON format, and some parts of the system currently require you to get your hands dirty editing JSON. My next step is to hide as much of the JSON away from the end user as possible, so that editing raw JSON
isn’t necessary. One nice bit about JSON is that it’s a very machine-friendly format, so I don’t anticipate that step being too tough to accomplish.

The ultimate goal is to make a library that can plugged into most any CMS or other PHP application. A lot of the functionality is already such that this is possible.

This work is seemingly unrelated to my work on Spectaclar (user management project), but there is a tie-in. I’ve done some initial work on a CMS-independence layer which can be helpful in porting plugins to different CMS systems. I haven’t decided yet just how far I’ll take this, but I keep this idea in the back of my mind whenever I’m in that part of the code.

Anyway, I hope people find this useful. I anticipate it’ll be useful for at least some of the things I’m doing, so I suppose that’s good enough for me.

Looks like Dan Libby posted a [Wikitech-l] MediaWiki OpenID patch. I’ll have to give it a spin after I get done with my current project.

If you want to get IRS tax statistics, looks like you better have a computer that supports .exe files (Microsoft Windows executable). SOI Tax Stats - Filing Season Statistics / Taxpayer Usage Study

There are so many things wrong with this, I’m not sure where to start…

I haven’t had a chance to update things on Spectaclar or engage in a while, but I’ve at least updated the Spectaclar news feed with some interesting things I’ve culled from the past month of backed up blog entries. I won’t be very active on Spectaclar stuff for a little while longer, as I’m working on a voting plugin I plan to deploy on Electowiki

I’m working on a PHP app that uses JSON, and I realized I needed a validator. Hrm…nothing seems to be out there. However, if I was using Ruby and YAML instead, I could use Kwalify. Alas, neither is an option for what I’m working on (an election plug-in for MediaWiki), so I’ll have to wing it.

Grrr….I’m ticked off at myself for not posting here more. I went to OSCON and shared the love on Spectaclar. I haven’t been as active as I’d like on Spectaclar, but things aren’t completely dormant. I’m starting to mull over the idea of using Electorama as a testbed for some of the work that I’m doing, since there’s a pretty big community there, especially on the election-methods mailing list