content/blog/2022-09-04-lights/index.md

@@ -1,51 +0,0 @@
----
-date: "2022-09-04T00:00:00Z"
-title: Lights! ...
-url: blog/2022-09-04-lights/
----
-
-The kid has been gearing up to record an audition video for a dance company,
-and I've been studying up on how to set up lights, so it looks cool.
-
-I think I did pretty well,
-for about $140 worth of parts.
-It's primarily clamp lights,
-and some el cheapo colored acrylic from Amazon
-that I cut with Amy's CNC cutting machine.
-Also some aluminum foil.
-
-![Lights!](lights.jpg)
-
-I know now that this is just standard 3-point lighting,
-that somebody smarter than me figured out.
-Looks pretty good though!
-That back light provides a sort of halo, to give depth on the screen.
-And the colors against the black fabric (bedsheets) provide texture.
-
-That's about all I know about lighting so far.
-
-For sound, we played music through a mixer,
-and hard panned both channels to the left side.
-The dance pad has a mic inside it,
-that we hard-panned to the right.
-Hopefully this makes it so the postprocessing can mix feet in with stereo music.
-
----
-
-I was up until 01:00 porting woozle's stuff over to a more unified login.
-You still need three different passwords for various things,
-but at least now it feels a little more like a single offering.
-
-Today I moved my web site (and this blog) off of GitHub,
-which provided web hosting for free.
-Now it's on my cloud VM,
-which is also free (because it's so dinky small),
-but should be easy enough to move elsewhere if I need to.
-
-And with that, I think most of my work is back on stuff I own.
-
-I tell you what, though,
-WebDAV is a lot nicer than I gave it credit for.
-I've got my NAS on the public Internet now,
-password protected,
-and being able to get to my files from anywhere is pretty handy.

content/papers/floss-sucks.md

@@ -0,0 +1,187 @@
+---
+title: FLOSS Development Sucks
+section: computing
+---
+
+This Article Is A Work In Progress
+====================
+
+I'm not even sure where I'm going with this.
+Maybe I just needed to vent.
+I think there might be advice in here somewhere,
+but right now I'm tired of feeling pissed off,
+so I'm just going to save this and move on with my day.
+
+------------
+
+This morning I thought I'd mention to a couple old colleagues
+that I was still working on our codebase,
+and I was considering splitting it off into something new
+because it was looking like it might diverge pretty significantly.
+
+I've been on this IRC channel for about a month.
+There have been a sum total of 5 lines pasted,
+all of them saying "hello" and "help" before anybody answered.
+5+ years ago,
+it was just me, the author of the package,
+and another guy (the author of ratpoison),
+mostly just shooting the breeze about bicycles.
+The author had mentioned several times that the package was basically out of his hands,
+once it got merged into emacs.
+
+I've submitted a couple patches in the past,
+and they've been accepted upstream.
+
+So I tossed this out there expecting, if anything, a multi-day turnaround,
+hopefully from the author:
+
+> 08:32 neale> hello  
+> 08:32 neale> I think I'm going to have to fork rcirc :(  
+> 08:33 neale> I'm making too many changes and I don't have time to get them merged into emacs.
+
+And then went back to work.
+
+> 08:44 ams> what changes are you doing?
+
+Whoa, somebody responded!
+
+> 09:09 neale> I added a notion of "network" so you could have and distinguish multiple connections to the same server  
+> 09:09 neale> umm...  
+
+At this point I struggle to do a diff against the upstream source,
+to see what else I've done.
+I definitely wasn't expecting this right away,
+I figured I'd maybe put things up on github or something.
+
+> 09:11 ams> you can already do that afaik  
+> 09:11 [neale raises an eyebrow]
+
+Who is this person?
+I read over the code pretty thoroughly before I added this in,
+I think I would have noticed if anything resembling my changes had existed already.
+
+Back do the diff, it looks like all my prior changes have actually been merged upstream,
+after five years or so!
+That's a pleasant surprise!
+
+> 09:12 ams> but if you cannot .. that doesn't seem like a hard thing to merge  
+> 09:12 neale> I'm going to have to figure out a way to hack in support for channel passwords  
+> 09:12 neale> that's going to probably need to break syntax  
+> 09:12 ams> break syntax? of what?  
+> 09:13 ams> you are being incoherent.  
+> 09:13 neale> next on the list is I need a way to have channels default to lowpri/ignore when created, so, probably going to tack that on to rcirc-server-alist
+
+This happens sometimes on IRC.
+While I was writing that long line, they posted two more.
+I see I should now answer their other questions.
+But now they're insulting me?
+Who *is* this person?
+Are they just wasting my time because they like arguing?
+
+> 09:13 neale> of /join  
+> 09:13 neale> right now /join takes a space-separated list of channels, I'll probably need to bring that in line with how other clients handle multiple channels with a single join (or more likely change it to space-separated)  
+> 09:14 neale> sorry, change it to comma-separated
+
+I'm getting flustered here.
+I wasn't expecting to need to defend my changes.
+
+> 09:14 ams> why?  
+> 09:14 ams> setting default priority should be trivial, and no need to change rcirc-server-alist  
+
+This didn't even register with me until I started writing this paper.
+I told them I needed channels to start with a certain priority,
+so I was going to add that to the list of channels to connect to at startup.
+They referred me to the mechanism to set a global default.
+
+> 09:14 neale> ams: see, this is what I was saying about not having time to merge upstream :)  
+> 09:15 neale> but it's good to know that there's somebody alive in here :)
+
+Yeah, I think this person isn't going to help.
+It's pretty typical that you have to do a sales pitch,
+over and over,
+to get your changes accepted.
+And I don't have time for that.
+I've already wasted enough time just trying to convince this one person
+that there was even a need for the work I've done so far.
+
+> 09:15 ams> you just said you haven't even written it ..   
+> 09:15 ams> there is nothing to merge.  
+> 09:15 neale> LOL okay
+
+Still feeling this person is just trying to waste my time and get me into an argument.
+I probably should have just stopped here, but...
+
+> 09:15 ams> and half of the things you mention can already be done  
+> 09:15 neale> maybe you could write up how to do those things then, because it certainly wasn't obvious from the code :)
+
+If this person had been paying attention,
+a full 20% of last month's channel traffic had been requesting this exact feature.
+
+> 09:17 ams> i don't see the use for multiple connections to the same host on the same port, most networks prohibit that.  
+> 09:17 neale> hahaha, excellent  
+> 09:17 ams> you can already connect to multiple hosts though with different port numbers  
+> 09:17 neale> Stop Wanting That!
+
+Now I'm mad!
+They're not even interested in why I would want the feature I coded up.
+They just want to tell me I'm wrong.
+This is the point at which I completely gave up,
+and was just saying words out of anger.
+
+I don't do well when I'm like this,
+but I know some people who are *excellent* in this situation,
+like my friend Nick.
+Sometimes I wish I were better,
+because people like this,
+I feel,
+need to be put in their place,
+and stop being hostile to everybody.
+
+> 09:17 ams> simply specify a different port  
+> 09:17 ams> ok, you are trolling.  i'll go back to doing something else.  
+> 09:18 neale> I'm trolling, eh?  
+> 09:19 neale> Man, look, I'm coming in with a need, you're telling me that a) it already does what I want, b) I don't actually have changes, and c) there's no need for me want what I said
+
+I'm still trying to (angrily) convince them
+that this is a horrible way to treat people they don't even know.
+
+> 09:19 ams> no, i didn't say that at all. now you are just spouting lies.  
+> 09:19 ams> 17:19 /ignore neale  
+> 09:19 neale> Who's trolling? Anyway what happened to rcy and sabetts? They were friendly :(  
+> 09:20 neale> Wow, infuriating.
+
+But it's a lost cause.
+
+----
+
+This is pretty frequently how things go.
+I wish I'd saved the 20-minute argument I had to endure
+to convince some plan9 people
+that some users might want a their three-button mouse to have a scroll wheel.
+They eventually accepted that,
+yes,
+some users might actually want that,
+and what was the mouse I'd found that does this?
+
+This is not okay.
+The community is selecting for people who are good at arguing.
+We should not require every code contributor
+to champion their code's worth
+by besting the local troll in combat.
+Even though I envy Nick's level-headedness during empassioned debate,
+that skill has no correlation to the ability to make useful code contributions.
+
+In the troll's defense,
+this is just human nature.
+Say there's this group of men discussing mortise and tenon joints,
+and you have a better technique.
+The way things work in FLOSS, currently,
+is that you must step into this group an tell them they're doing it wrong.
+It takes an extraordinary individual to *not* tell you to fuck off.
+And you know that,
+which is why your social instincts are screaming at you to be very uncomfortable.
+So when the "fuck off" happens,
+you've steeled yourself for it,
+and then you get a slap fight.
+
+There has got to be a better way.

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