- Congratulations to Heather and Raph for their
new son Max. - It’s sad to see someone
comitting suicide on Advogato. I don’t care if he is
removing all his certifications, but removing all his diary
entries as well means that some (valuable) information is
now lost. Including the last diary entries that could have
explained what happened (and of course, the other people who
were involved in that discussion edited their diaries too,
so it is now very difficult to understand this mess.) This
reminds me of the WikiSuicide
that was mentioned in an article two
weeks ago. It’s just sad. And stupid. - I was hoping that yosh would wait
until this week before releasing the Gimp 1.1.20. Nope. It is
out now, so my patches will have to wait until 1.1.21. Ah
well… - Yesterday evening, I updated the template that I use for
my home page.
The icons look better with some anti-aliasing, but they
still need more work. And I also have to include the
contents from my old pages, because the current draft does
not contain much.
Month: April 2000
I see that someone has fixed the strange </ul> that
had been escaped in my article after I previewed and posted
it. I suppose that I should thank raph for that. Now even
Lynx displays it correctly. Great!
I will be away until Tuesday. I wonder what kind of
replies will be posted while I am not on the ‘net.
Maybe I will take some time during my short Easter break
to
update the gimp_tips file and to create a new splash screen
just for fun (using some of my bug
images). Hmm… Unless yosh
decides to release 1.1.20 before I have the time to submit
my patches…
And Sven hasn’t replied yet to
my questions about my Script-Fu patches. I wonder what’s
up. Hi
Sven! 🙂
My account has been switching several times between
Master and Journeyer during the last two months. Every time
I log in, I wonder what color I will have. Isn’t that
funny? Anyway, I don’t think that I deserve this purple
color, at least not for my current contributions to
the free software community.
Phew! I finished the first part of my article and I posted it a
few minutes ago. I still have to update the second part,
which is more tricky because content filtering involves more
subjective things. This essay on “moderation and
certification” is growing way out of proportion. Tell me
that I need a doctor…
I had to resort to some ugly HTML + CSS tricks in
order
to make my article look like I wanted to. I hope that raph will not be
upset about that. At least Lynx and Netscape display it
almost correctly, except for the next problem…
For a reason that I do not understand,
Advogato escaped one of my </ul> tags when posting,
although it looked fine in the preview. It also added some
extra <p> tags that should not be there.
Help! My article
looks ugly now, with this broken indentation and this
</ul> sitting in the middle of the text. I still have
the preview on screen to check that I was not dreaming.
What’s up?
I see that a couple of people are abusing Advogato,
or at
least being creative:
- flomo855 is
the worst offender. This account is incorrectly registered
as a “Lead Developer” for every large project that exists.
I will not comment on the diary entries… - nwv is an
interesting experiment that started two months ago. I
wonder what this account would become if the system that I
propose in my article is ever implemented. - God and Satan are the
most recent additions, probably created by the same person.
I am curious to see if anybody will certify these accounts,
and if a symbolic certification war could start between
them.
Nothing serious so far, but I am still afraid that some
script kiddie could come, create a few thousand accounts,
and start updating those diaries like mad.
I just read nether‘s diary
entry about diaries, finger and links. He hits the nail
right on the head! Lots of good points there.
I eventually took the time to scan my photos
from GUADEC and to put them on my web pages. I also
spent some time hacking some Script-Fu things for the Gimp.
But no time left for my Advogato article. Sigh!
Awww… I just saw the new article about
Advogato meta-issues. There is a lot of overlap with the
article that I have been slowly preparing about
moderation
and certification. I was too slow… Now I will
have to
re-work my article again. 🙁
Well, the replies to that article contain a lot of
interesting comments that I can now integrate in my
article. I will try to have it ready next week. In the
meantime, I will be off the ‘net for a couple of days (even
my mail server will be down.) I hope that I will be able to
catch up with the discussions and the diary entries when I
come back.
Hmmm… I see an interesting new account: esr. Real or
fake?
I decided to update my home
page. I created a new template yesterday, then I
decided to rewrite it using WML and a set of Makefiles so
that I can maintain the site easily (hopefully). In the
spirit of release early, release often (which does
not really apply to web pages, but I did it anyway), I
already converted some pages to the new template. Of
course, this means that there is even less interesting
content than before because many pages have not been
converted yet and there are no links to them, but this
should be fixed in a couple of days. I am not really happy
with the quality of the images I created for the tabs. I
should be able to do much better than that. But hey, it’s a
first draft…
I am cleaning up my Advogato certifications. I try to
keep only
the certifications for the developers I met in real life and
those who are not certified by many others (and
thus need my certification to stay at their level). This
means that I removed my certification for alan, for example,
because he did not really need it. There were also a couple
of accounts that I rated as Apprentice or Journeyer when
they joined (based on a best guess from the info available
on their page) and who have been certified as Master by
others since then. In these cases, I removed my
certification because it was only there to allow these
people to get in.
I read the Romeo&Juliet article. The article itself is
moderately funny, but the comments are really depressing.
We do not need OS flamewars here… (FYI, my girlfriend
uses
Windows and I don’t blame her for that.) Also, I
do not think that it is a good idea to use the certification
system as a way to influence what gets posted or not.
Certification (of people) and moderation (of articles)
should be two separate things.
It looks like more and more diary entries (ab)use HTML
tricks to achieve some special
effects. Let’s see how long it
takes before some script
kiddie posts an article containing a huge
background picture or some JavaScript alert() bombs…
advogato is getting crowded. The People page is now at 263 Kb. Also, it becomes
more and more difficult to look at the list of diary updates
on the front page: if you do not check the front page often
enough (e.g. if you are away for two days), then you miss
some entries and you have no way to know what you have
missed. But the list cannot be much longer than it is now,
unless it is moved to a separate page. Hmmm.. That’s an
idea.
It looks like Advogato is approaching its first (minor)
scalability hurdle. In a way, this is good news, because
this shows that the site is successful. Maybe I should have
a look at the code and see what I can do to help the site to
grow further…