Older blog entries for Telsa (starting at number 10)

11 May 2001 (updated 13 Sep 2006 at 07:55 UTC) »

[edited to remove non-existent email address].

I would just like to dissociate myself totally from Phoon's preferred analogy for software licensing. Actually, tripp is the one who started this, and I hope s/he doesn't pick such an analogy in future. However, phoon is the one who came up with the pseudo-statistic that infuriated me. I have taken this to email. But I just wanted to say how much I disputed the alleged statistic phoon came up with. Grr.

Software. Um. Broke some, but less than normal. Reported a few bugs but ran out. Turned to the other side and started wading through gnome bugzilla and trying to sort gnome-core/general into the right categories. Next stop: "general". That's going to be fun. mmarker threatens trouble if I assign anything to imlib and I don't think Gman is speaking to me. Hey, one misassigned bug out of many isn't too bad!

26 Apr 2001 (updated 13 Sep 2006 at 07:54 UTC) »

Ho hum. How nice to have a backup diary. For those wondering why the usual link doesn't work: it wasn't me. I didn't do nuffink. I am not even too sure what's going on. But it appears that someone put a JCB through a bunch of fibres and cut off a pile of the local university and associated small business centre.

I must say, the rest from constant email was nice. However, if this keeps up, I suspect I am going to have a lot of mailman pages to go through, setting myself off no-mail.

In a stroke of genius, the local networking expert, who is of course conveniently absent for a while (grrr), put the backup MX records on a machine here. The practical upshot is that I can't receive email until someone goes and fixes this. I am not quite sure how you fix these fibre things. I have Scrapheap Challenge-inspired visions of welding and soldering, but I fear I am somewhat off-target. Allegedly it will all be fixed imminently.

I await the imminent fix and the return of the immanant email spirit. In the meantime, it is sunny, Alan is away, and I can make garlic bread without his silly complaints.

[edited five years later to remove dead links :)]

I dunno why I bother. Twenty-five new accounts and eleven have "No personal information available". Several more have links to company pages or Lynx-unfriendly sites. Will people please stop doing this? Pretty please? bagder's stats page shows a rise from observers being 57% of the total to 66% now...

Oh, I know why I bother. Just found the synaesthesia author in the list. (One of those programs you just find, and think "oooh. Pretty!")

Someone was complaining about #gnome ignoring auto* questions and the lack of auto* docs. They too have a link to their home page and I can't find an email address, so in case they didn't know: the ORA-published auto* book is also online. Hope it helps. I tend not to answer questions I don't know answers to on #gnome. Sorry. :)

Justification for current journeyer status: um. I dunno. Broke some more GNOME. Answered some more questions. That's about it.

There's twenty-five new accounts mentioned on the front page. Of those:

  • nine have no personal information filled in at all.
  • two have websites which are unreachable
  • four have websites which have no information about software or which are unreadable in lynx
  • one has a link to a project website and I can't find his name mentioned anywhere in it
That's more than 60% of the people. Of the remaining, found about four I could reasonably certify, since I was able to find free software or docs or something on their pages. I am not qualified to judge 'em, so sorry if the certifications appear low to you.

Now back to beta destruction.

Um, RyanMuldoon, I can't email you as you suggest because I see no email link on your page or from your company webpage.. :) But stuff about clipboards and X for Gnome off the top of my head:

That's the best I can do, and not being a coder means I am not even sure whether that's the kind of thing you want: but "How do I use selection in GNOME?" comes up a lot on IRC and more or better examples or doc pointers would be very welcome.

Damn. I really must update the Gnome FAQ stuff. I took a list of it to Austria with me, and got sidetracked bug-dinking (categorising and speculating and stuff).

Tried to certify a few more people, along the same lines as last time. Yet again, a good half of the Observers have no personal information and no link to look for such information. I can't certify people who put nothing. It would be silly.

1 Nov 2000 (updated 1 Nov 2000 at 18:50 UTC) »

Let's see. What have I done in the free software world to justify that scarily long list of certifications recently? Um.

  • More GNOME Users' FAQ stuff. Needs more work. Much more. I have a bunch of additions on my machine, but jade is being a pest about some of it, and I have this thing about commiting DocBook which will pass jade first time.
  • Alan and Malcolm did loads of work on gnorpm, whose bug reports were getting a bit out of hand. I went though and closed a lot of bugs with the aid of other people's scripts. Malcolm worked out we'd closed over 900 of the things. I got about five responses, one to say that the URL I suggested for an update didn't exist. Ho hum. Only 800 to go.

Saw someone making a valiant attempt to certify people languishing at observer level. They said they'd got tired towards the end, so I started from Z and worked my way up the list. Found several names I recognised. Please don't be offended if I put apprentice and you think you deserve more: I can't judge other people's code, and some things were in C, javascript, C++, php and all manner of languages. If I could find the sources of a program off someone's homepage, I put apprentice for now: one or two got more because they were people of whom I knew more. I also decided that "How I got this working" documents were contributions and included those. I got to the top of the 'w's, and stopped there. The number of people who put no contact details and no home page (or a home page consisting of one gif in one case) was quite incredible.

Not that I can talk, having to have it pointed out to me that I didn't close a tag on here :) Edited to correct.

21 Aug 2000 (updated 13 Sep 2006 at 08:04 UTC) »

Updated the GNOME FAQ. 21 names in the contributors now. Woo! I really need to sit down and work out how I mark up and fill in the right bits for the GNU docs licence, and then it goes into maintenance mode, with luck. Because it's not currently on the main GNOME pages, just in CVS, shoved a version onto my [edited to remove dead site] pages, and started weeding out potentially useful threads from a far-too-full folder of messages saved from gnome-devel-list so that someone else can provide the answers and drake can do the developer FAQ.

Talked to jdub and terral about whether developers and users have any shared understanding of what makes a useful bug report (frankly, I just guess) or how much work you can actually expect a "switched new computer on, started exciting free OS up, something broke, now what?" person to do digging for relevant information. Wondered whether getting a bunch of people who fix bugs, resolve them in the BTSs, or send in patches and people who find them and try to report them together in the same room would help, and considered attempting this in Australia (because I'm going there, apparently, in January). Started thinking about ways to get some useful info before that. This is mostly spawned by a thread about "help! bugs.gnome.org is feeling full!" on one of the GNOME lists and the different attitudes to different... um... styles, shall we say, of reporting bugs.

Saw glenn's comments about "some people were a bit rude but I coped" and it reminded me that I need to flame pointlessly about people flaming pointlessly. Or something. Another on the to-do pile. Basically, I don't like a lot of the forms of what pass for communication on the web and net today, and I think more people need to think about how they are coming across and whether someone who is paying by the minute for their access really needs to be flamed when they ask a question. It's possible to explain "this is the wrong place for this" without some of the more obnoxious comments I see. At least, I hope it is. If this is the example we set people arriving now, we're going to regret it when they pass it on to the next generation to arrive and we'll be complaining about "youth of today... no respect...grumble grumble..." and next thing it'll be "bring back national service" and I'll be voting for the tories or something. And that would be bad, really it would. Especially because the aforementioned next generation will outnumber us substantially...

Lots of people are talking about LWE, which apparently claims it's the biggest Linux show. Not that I have seen reliable numbers, but I suspect this will surprise the LinuxTag folks. LinuxTag actually sounds to have been more fun, and that's not just because of the parties, truly.

Lots of people seem to have completely missed the point of the GNOME Foundation. But then, I had the advantage not only of the press reports but of seeing raph type in the summary of the RA broadcast of the thing for we bandwidth-challenged types. (Wow, he's a fast typer.) The press missed out Miguel's comments about GNOME being about people, and by individuals all over the world, completely. Of course, I could have missed the point of the Foundation, too, but my take's at least more optimistic :)

I was going to applaud thomasq for his mention of rugby, but I just saw that he missed Wales out of great rugby nations, so I'm going to sulk instead.

Long entry, but then I seem to be making them once a month, so you can live in peace for a bit. I do actually have a couple of potential article/rambles in the pipeline, but most things in that pipeline seem to get stuck half-way along. Oh well.

If Russ has not yet finished that book, I suppose I should probably not discuss the ending. Paah. (Boglet, indeed!)

Have done very very little to justify apprentice rating, let alone journeyer, over the last few weeks (busy, away, busy, guests, away, busy). Hmm. Now, if this keeps up for a year (I hope it doesn't!), it's really going to screw the ratings up, since they're supposed to be based on the last year. I think Advogato needs a time-out system. When you login, you could get, "Note: your rating of the following people has expired. Recertify?"

Just a thought.

I can't think why someone whose entry has now scrolled off the recent diary entries thinks I'm so good with DocBook. I still haven't figured out tables or the CDATA stuff. But it was kind, if not accurate :)

Steven Rainwater was asking about FidoNet. I remember that. All those poor posters to Usenet talking about "Mind your language, this echo is moderated!" when posting to alt.* :) More seriously, I have several friends who used it, and one who was looking at it as a simple way to get younger siblings onto the net since they had such happy memories of it. And this was last year.

I found the Godel, Escher, Bach book really hard going, but I am going to have to look at this stuff that schoen mentions. Um. I hope it's the same author or I'm about to look stupid. On the subject of authors, I see there's yet another person here who's read David Brin's "Earth" and is making connections and comparisons.

I suppose, that since this is a developer-type site, I should say what I've actually done recently, but there hasn't been a lot, largely because I am not a developer... But anyway, sent a bunch of bug reports in -- and one got bounced by one BTS and others were to GNOME's bug-tracker, which is apparently down. So that was productive. Solved a friend's woes getting Linux installed and set-up correctly, which was a mistake, because now he thinks I know more than I do and I shall have to find out more when he hits the next snag. Whoops.

Oh yes. Someone said "Telsa, if you're reading this..." in their diary a while ago. Only problem is, I forget who that was, and what they wanted. Email would be good: the diaries are getting a little too numerous to go through everyone's to find something.

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