Older blog entries for fxn (starting at number 105)

Please, remember the username in the person tag needs to coincide exactly with the actual username in Advogato, case included. Otherwise, the generated link is broken.

In its next release MyAdvogato will highlight the username without taking case into account. At least you won't miss those occurrences.

I added a screenshot that shows a wrapped recentlog with user name highlighting and hidden diary rates to MyAdvogato's project page.

I attended a talk yesterday where Luiz André Barrozo, from Google, offered a technical overview of how Google works. It wasn't too much detailed but very interesting. He explained, for instance, they are so focused in robustness and efficiency that they have written all their software, but some small and controlled fraction of Linux. As far as it seemed, that includes web servers, indexes, network communication (based in HTTP, TCP and UDP), load balancing, and so on. He said they program mainly in C/C++, there is some Java as well, and a lot of Perl and Python scripting.

It seems they radically avoid any fancy things that aren't necessary, and this comprises from interface design to hardware choices. I love that attitude. I had the impression that they have clear, well-defined goals and a pragmatic and effective way to accomplish them.

I sent a proposal to give an introduction to Perl for programmers in the forthcomming V Congreso Hispalinux, to be held in Madrid next November.

The seminar would be largely based on the talk I gave some months ago in the company where I work, but with some improvements. A new section explaining the comparative C/C++/Perl/Java/Awk found in The Practice of Programming would be included, and I'd like to present updated timings.

Hey Jordi, nice to see you here again.

Incredible, Ton Hospel has 65 (key)strokes of Perl that perform topological sort, he is at the top of the TPR(0,4b) leaderboard by now, the game ends next Monday.

Yet another MyAdvogato release. This version by default highlights occurrences of the user nick in recentlog, either linked to his personal page or not. I took a screenshot.

Firstly I thought passing a regexp as parameter to the CGI would be the best, but being that general I realized it would be hard to know in advance how to deal with the HTML correctly. For instance, if nick was the regexp not every match would be good because the occurrences in URLs had to be ignored (otherwise we were putting spans into them), but if a regexp for linked occurrences of the nick was given, then any match would be probably good. Thus, by now ad-hoc code has been implemented for that particular case.

The project page has been updated too, there is a list of features now and the screenshot of the graphical browser is new.

The tarball is available from here, and the Zip file from here.

Update: There was a pair of bugs in the highlighting, one of them reported by chipx86 (thank you!). Please, download the script again if they affect your nick.

The sync release of MyAdvogato is out.

I don't understand on what basis people expect the diary rating system to be more accurate than the current certification system. If you think people is being too generous having guidelines to certify (I think what is actually generous is the algorithm that assigns a level to you, algorithm that changed somehow a year or so ago since until then it was way harder to be a Journeyer), what is going to happen if the only thing that accounts is one's view of what is better than what in the diary of someone else? Linear Algebra corrects this? I think it has no sense. Linear Algebra can do things with raw data, but people argue as if it was going to work on the actual meaning of the rates, for each person in Person, for each meaning in person->meanings.

Anyway, I dislike diary rates from a pure human being point of view, so MyAdvogato provides a flag in case you don't even want to see those numbers, as I do.

In case you do want to see the rates, which I respect and is the default in the script, as a provisional solution until the CGI handles cookies by its own one needs to pass a valid cookie via the new parameter cookie to view them, since they are only shown to authenticated users that have certified someone else AFAICT.

The tarball is available from here, and the Zip file from here.

Chicago, I was not talking about certifications, but about the new diary rating system.

Certifications are fine with me, I think most of us will agree level definitions are ambiguous, but they have to be, you cannot give a formal procedure to characterize that kind of thing. One tries to interpret those levels and decide whether some of them apply to a given user the best one can.

I have found most users do not provide enough information to be certifiable, maybe they are not really interested in the certification thing, in that case generally one does not certify them.

Then there are experienced programmers that do not report work in free software, so they do not fit in any category in my opinion.

Certifiers know the rules are somewhat flexible and certified users know he is being certified from a subjective point of view. If we try to be fair, I think that can work. That's why I participate so much in this process.

On the contrary, I don't understand diary ratings.

Here one has a diary, in a diary it's licit to write things of no public interest, so I do not understand on what basis are users going to rate each other entries. I see recentlog as a convenient interface to read recent diary entries, but I have never forgotten that I am reading diaries, so I didn't judge mirwin entries, for instance. He could write whatever he wanted and I had no right to judge him, I had the right to ignore his entries, but rate them? I don't think so.

Being an active certifier, who tries to be as accurate as he can in his understanding and application of the level descriptions (not definitions), googleing, or even privately emailing people to get some more information, I think I won't use that rating system.

As soon as I can I'll sync MyAdvogato to display those numbers.

There is a new release of MyAdvogato. The only visible change is a little form to go directly to pages of persons or projects that is added in the home, below the menu. You can see how it looks in Konqueror in this screenshot. Some minor details are registered in the ChangeLog.

As announced, this time there are available a tarball and a zip file.