17 Apr 2000 (updated 13 Sep 2006 at 07:50 UTC)
»
So apparently jamesh and
sad share
a birthday. Still I know no-one with mine. The closest person is Dick, who,
fortunately lives in the same town, so joint celebrations
are easy. And JennV
shares one with my sister, but they live about as far away
as sad and jamesh.
I'm writing here because I think putting Advogato-related
thoughts in my diary
will confuse the people who read that. Oh dear, two diaries.
How ostentious.
The whole certification thing: loads of
people have certified me, and I feel a bit rotten not
certifying them back. My problem is that much of the
certification looks to me like I would have to make
judgements about things like -- well, code. Yeah, right. I
could probably decide based on other things: many of the
people here are people who have spent time and effort fixing
bugs, explaining things (everything from fonts to find
syntax) or rescuing me from near-disaster at very short
notice from mailing list woes, DocBook travails, and CVS
horrors. That's certainly something I can
comment on :)
"anti-"certification: yuk. If you don't
think someone does anything positive, then don't certify
them, or certify them as Observer. I've seen loads of
comments about the colour ranges: reading Advogato mostly
with Lynx, I have managed to miss that, so my impressions of
people are based on the info they provide about themselves,
the links to their projects (wow, there's some cool ones
about) and what they write. It's fun like that. If ever the
day comes when diaries are too many and voluminous to read
all of them, I won't be selecting on the basis of
certification anyway. Like Ankh, I'd
want some kind of random element in addition to the list of
diaries I read regularly. I think I'm the one who first
mentioned the connection with David Brin's "Earth" book to
him (brilliant book: read it!) after seeing his mention of a
"buggy algorithm".
roguemtl's
article:
Nice to hear from the other side. Some of the comments refer
to saying thank-you being enough. It's quite true. There are
plenty of people who don't reply to feedback, and plenty who
reply with, well, fairly off-hand comments that make me
disinclined to approach them again. But there are also
dozens and dozens of people who say thanks if you contact
them about their program, (even if the comments are
rubbish!) and it really does make a difference. I'm not
alone in this. I get email from people who foolishly think I
can help with something and I talk to people at shows, and I
see and hear "I did tell them, but I heard nothing back, so
I stopped using it/am switching to the rivals" quite a bit.
And as for seeing your name up in lights: I dunno. I don't
entirely subscribe to the ego-inflation thing that
esr wrote
about. The first time I saw myself being referred to as
having fixed something (in a ChangeLog after I sent some
corrections to a manual), I was actually embarrassed,
because it was in there with all the people who Made It Work
and stopped it core-dumping and so on. But seeing "fixing
Telsa's weirdo bug" in CVS commits is rather... well. Yes.
That's fun.
I have heard that previewing can do dangerous
things to HTML tags, but here's hoping it all survives...
[Edited quite some time later to remove dead links: if it's going to get archived, they had better go]