Blog Fiasco

August 24, 2010

Is Twitter just a crippled version of IRC?

Filed under: Musings,The Internet — Tags: , , — bcotton @ 12:24 pm

Back in May, Karsten Wade posted “microblog format/interaction is a crippled, radically transparent form of #IRC. Otherwise, seems to serve same purposes.”  I don’t know if that’s his own conclusion or if he was quoting someone else, but I disagree either way.  The other evening, I had a related discussion with a friend.  Her take was that Twitter is a less-featureful version of Facebook status updates.  I don’t believe that either, but it seems to highlight a problem with Twitter: it’s utility isn’t readily apparent.

Twitter easily supports one-to-one and one-to-many interaction.  Many-to-many is possible, but requires some searching and/or client configuration.  That makes it a rather poor replacement for IRC.  IRC is also more real-time than Twitter is necessarily.  Although Twitter is often used for real-time events, it doesn’t have to be.  The big difference between IRC and Twitter is that IRC is self-contained.  This is a point I made several times during the Mario Marathon, when people in chat felt they were being ignored.  IRC can be very active, but no one outside the channel will notice.  With Twitter, the message gets spread each time someone posts.  If a topic begins to trend, that can pull in even more participants.

There’s a better case for saying Twitter is just like pulling the status updates out of Facebook.  Several people I know post Facebook status updates with their Twitter accounts, so it seems reasonable.  I’d agree that they are mostly the same, but there are a few differences.  The primary difference is that Facebook more easily allows threaded discussion, whereas a tweet stands alone.  Neither way is necessarily better; in certain circumstances one is preferable over another.  There’s also the lack of passive support.  In Facebook, you can “like” a status with impunity.  On Twitter, to express support, you must re-tweet and therefore own the statement.

To me, there’s a clear use for Twitter.  That’s not the case for many people, and until they can figure out a use, they simply won’t use it.

August 17, 2010

How helpful is helpful enough?

Filed under: Linux,Musings — Tags: , , , , , , — bcotton @ 10:18 am

I have a confession: I am a compulsive favor-doer. When someone asks for my help, I have a hard time saying “no”. Since there’s only so much Ben to go around, this gives me a tendency to over-commit.  I recognize this as a problem, but I can’t help myself.  It’s in my nature to be helpful.

So how helpful should I be?  My wife works at the county library, and last week a gentleman was checking out a book about Linux.  In the course of small talk it came up that he’s trying to dual-boot Ubuntu and Windows 7.  Angie mentioned that I run Linux at home and he wrote down his phone number and e-mail address for her to give to me.  I’m not mad at her for it, she hasn’t committed me to anything, but it got me wondering.

My initial reaction was to e-mail the guy and introduce myself.  After all, I’m a nice guy and that’s what I do.  Then I realized that this would probably make me his go-to support.  I don’t mind helping people, but an open-ended commitment isn’t exactly what I’m in the market for.  I already do a fair bit of free work for strangers.  I answer questions in the #fedora IRC room, on LinuxForums.com and on Serverfault.  Additionally, I write this blog, and I write documentation for the Fedora Project.  Maybe I don’t do as much as others, but I’m definitely contributing back to the community.

So maybe, I thought, I should set a rate and charge him for help.  That seems like too much effort, though. I’m not really interested in doing enough consulting/contract work to make it worth the trouble of filing the appropriate paperwork.  Besides, I have such a hard time asking for a reward for being nice.

Where does that leave me then?  I have no idea.  In the meantime, I’ve gone with the head-in-sand approach.  I’ll just pretend like this never happened.  Perhaps someday I’ll be able to solve this quandary.

August 6, 2010

In search of the local flavors

Filed under: Musings — Tags: , , , , , , — bcotton @ 8:18 am

I will readily admit to enjoying national brands.  I eat fast food, I drink Coke, etc.  That’s not to say that I eschew any regional or local vendors, just that I’m unrefined enough to enjoy the mass-produced things in life.  There’s a lot to be said for the local flavors, though.  Two of my favorite restaurants in Lafayette are completely local.  When I travel, I like to eat at local restaurants — both for the food and to see what the locals are like.  Even more interesting than local restaurants, though, are local (or just rare) soft drinks.

Whenever I’m in the Jasper, IN area there’s one task I must accomplish: buy all the Ski I can.  This delicious beverage is not to be found around here, so I have to stock up.  I think the same might happen for Ale-8-One, a Kentucky favorite that I’d bet mixes quite well with Bourbon.  Big Red is a drink I grew up on that is becoming more widely distributed.  Every once in a while, I’ll stop at a gas station that sells Nehi and I have to buy a bottle.

Imagine my distress when I stopped for gas in Clinton, Tennessee last weekend.  I needed something to drink, so I looked in the coolers — there were no local drinks at all.  I thought about it for a while and realized that the absence of local beverages is the norm, and it’s uncommon to find those interesting local flavors.  So where have they gone?  I’d guess that many have been purchased by larger companies and have become national brands, but is there really no demand for local soft drinks?  There’s only one thing I can do: I must whine about it on the Internet.  In the meantime, I’ll just keep looking in all the gas stations.

July 19, 2010

Why am I giving my work away for free?!

Filed under: Musings — Tags: , , , , , , , — bcotton @ 8:17 am

Recently, I began writing a regular weather blog for the local newspaper.  I’m not getting paid for this, so people may wonder why I’m giving free content to a for-profit organization.  I asked myself this very question, and the answer is that I don’t find the terms sufficiently objectionable.  Although the blog appears on the Journal & Courier website, they likely don’t make too much money off the ad revenue.  And while I don’t make any money either, I get the chance to refine and showcase my writing skills for a different audience than I currently have, and I get the chance to bring a little bit of traffic here (maybe I should start selling ads).  Of course there’s always the joy of sharing my knowledge, proving a public service, and keeping all of that meteorology I learned in school in my head a little longer.  Finally, I’m a compulsive favor-doer.

More than any of that, though, I am philosophically in favor of sharing information.  The vast majority of the writing I do is released under some form of the Creative Commons licenses.  The Fedora Project requires me to use the CC-BY-SA license, which does not prohibit commercial use.  In that sense, writing documentation for Fedora and writing my weather blog both could result in people who are not me making money off my work.  That’s fine, because I’m not doing it for money (although if someone wants to leave an envelope of cash on my doorstep, that’s okay).  In both cases, I consider the free access to my effort to be fair trade.  My Fedora work is my way of contributing to the project that provides me with free (both gratis and libre) software that I use on a daily basis.  The writing I do for the Journal & Courier I see as contributing to the betterment of my society (or at least the lowering of my blood pressure. Weather-related stupidity angers me quite effectively).  The fact that one is a non-profit and the other is for-profit is not a consideration for me.

I am a firm believer in freedom for users, but I also believe that content creators should be free to license their works as they see fit.  Copyleft licenses like the GPL are preferable to more restrictive licenses, but if someone wants to put a restrictive license on his work, that right should be available.  In each case, a decision must be reached as to what is and is not acceptable.  In the cases I’ve discussed here, I have determined that, for my own criteria, the terms are acceptable.  The nice thing about volunteer work is that if I determine at some point that the terms are no longer tolerable, I can simply stop contributing.  In the meantime, I hope as many people as possible enjoy the fruits of my labor, and I look forward to enjoying the works of others.

July 12, 2010

There are two kinds of sysadmins in the world

Filed under: Musings — Tags: , — bcotton @ 8:09 am

I mentioned recently that in my experience there are two breeds of sysadmins: the long-hair and the short-hair.  I think we all can picture the long-hair breed.  They’re the stereotypical representation of sysadmins in the media: long hair (duh!), often bearded, generally overweight, sloppily-dressed, anti-social, addicted to caffeine.  Think Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons”.  The lesser-known breed is the short-hair sysadmin. The short-hair has short hair (duh again!), generally no facial hair, professionally-dressed, often with military experience.

Although it might seem like these two breeds are polar opposites, they do have some traits in common.  Because they are still sysadmins, both breeds tend to see themselves as the rulers of their domains (interestingly, the short-hairs tend to be more flexible and accommodating to end-users).   Security incidents are seen as an unforgivable personal insult, so paranoia is a desirable trait. Though short-hairs are more likely to have a social life, both breeds are quite geeky and prone to obsess over technical details.

Now I don’t claim to be an expert on the subject, and these are my own personal observations.  Nonetheless, I can’t think of any sysadmins that I’ve come across that don’t fit generally into one of the two breeds.  Not every one fits in precisely, but close enough that there’s no question which breed he or she is.  What’s interesting is that these two breeds don’t seem to clash professionally, perhaps because the easiest way to earn a sysadmin’s respect is to have unquestionable technical skill.

July 9, 2010

The joys of doing it right

Filed under: Linux,Musings — Tags: , , , — bcotton @ 10:18 am

A while back, I wrote a post about why it’s not always possible to DoItRight™, and that sometimes you just have to accept it.  Today I’m here to talk about a time that I did something right and how good it felt.  Now, that’s not to say that I’m eternally screwing up (although a good quarter of my Subversion commits are fixes of a commit I previously made), but there’s a difference between making something work and making it work well.

I decided that since we have a Nagios server, I might as well have it check on the health of our Condor services.  From what I could tell, no such checks currently exist, so I decided to write my own.  Nagios checks can be very simple: run a command or two, and then return a number that means something to Nagios.  Many checks are written in bash or another shell script because they are so simple.  For my checks, I wanted to do some parsing of the command outputs to determine the state of job queues, etc.  Since that kind of work is a little heavy for a shell script, I opted to write it in Perl.  Yay Perl!

Since there aren’t any checks available, I thought my work might be useful to others in the community.  As a result, I wanted to make sure my code was respectable.  This meant I spent some time designing, coding, and testing options that we don’t want but others might find useful.  It meant putting extra documentation into the code (and eventually writing some pod before I share the code publicly).  It meant mostly following the coding style of the Linux kernel (I chose that because “why not?”).

Some readers will (correctly) note that the Linux kernel coding style does not guarantee good code.  I don’t mean to suggest that it does, but I’ve found that it forced me to think about my code more deeply than I otherwise would.  Not being a programmer, most of the code I write is to fit a small need of mine and the quality is defined as “does it do what I want it to?”  Writing something with the intent of sharing it publicly and forcing yourself to not cut corners can make the work more difficult, but the end result is a beauty to behold.

July 5, 2010

Charitable giving in the United States (inspired by Mario Marathon)

Filed under: Musings,The Internet — Tags: , , , — bcotton @ 8:57 am

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Sundeep Rao.  I present it to you unedited (except for a few minor style changes and the insertion of URLs where appropriate), because he is the master of grammar, spelling and punctuation.  Any errors you think you see are a figment of your imagination.   P.S. Felicia Day, if you read this, Sundeep is a good guy and I would never throw him under a bus.

To make one point absolutely clear: I am by no means ignoring the contributions of the non-Americans who donated to the Mario Marathon — our Aussie and European contingents were pretty strong there! We even got some money from Croatia, if I recall correctly. This short essay came up as one of the answers that surfaces whenever people ask me (and they ask often): “What is it that you like about the United States?”

Two years ago, a month before I went home to India, I placed an empty gallon-jug outside my office, and sent an email out to office mates asking for their spare change for an orphanage that I knew about. I remember GrumpyRich walking up to it with his desk drawer, and emptying out saved pennies into it. Other colleagues would return from a breakfast or coffee run, and throw their change into the jug. Sooner than I knew, I had $400, which was received with great joy by the orphanage.

Mario Marathon currently stands at $82,113 raised for Child’s Play Charity — a mind-boggling amount by any reckoning. What makes this even more special is that I know that many of the donors didn’t really have cash to spare — for this or any other cause. What motivated them to give? Why did we need to start adding “donate, but donate only what you can — if you can’t donate, you can help by spreading the word” at every exhortation subsequently? Why were there people apologizing because they couldn’t donate any more than they already had to the cause?

As a person surrounded by numerous individuals of great generosity, I come across fundraisers and fundraising attempts on a reasonably regular basis. Some notable ones (other than Child’s Play/Mario Marathon) are the National MS Society and the various Pounds/Animal Shelters/Humane Societies. I see a similar outpouring of generosity from supporters of those causes. Breast Cancer, March of Dimes, United Way, Red Cross, Good Will- the list just goes on and on. The effort to raise money covers the gamut: local stores have a plastic candy jar with a slot cut out of the top, and a handwritten note highlighting the cause- while The Race For The Cure is so huge that just the logistics of organizing a race in one town can be daunting.

How charitable giving came to be so pervasive (perhaps from the idea of tithes?) is not part of this discussion, but its ubiquitousness is clearly visible.

In my experience, people from other countries and cultures share what they have- typically their houses, and their food. Americans feel the same connections, but they provide their hospitality to vast numbers of complete strangers. I think that the best thing that could happen to any charitable cause is to have a bunch of Americans hear about it and take some interest.

When I first hung out on BBSs in the Internets’ nascent years, the one overarching idea one walked away with is just how neat the people using the Internet were. Some of the people I “met” online during that time are still friends of mine IRL. Over the years, weirdos started hanging out- and one would run into them with increasing frequency (Online daters: make sure that “having teeth” is a prominently listed requirement). But spending time with the MM Social Stream and Chat reminded me again just how much fun the interwebs can be.  WTG, MMers — making any sort of dent in my cynicism is no mean feat!

My assertion has long been that charitable giving is now an essential part of American culture — and the Mario Marathon epitomizes this. I’m glad to have played a small part in this effort.  One last thing that I’d like to make sure to mention: The community response to the cause was so scintillatingly phenomenal that it left me speechless, and more than a little verklempt.  It was an honor and a pleasure doing this, and interacting with all of you.

OrangeShirtGuy (Sundeep) is one of the Elders of the Internet and a Keeper of the Sacred Pun. An Eastern Mystic, he can be followed, but probably not understood at twitter.com/orangeshirtguy

June 30, 2010

Mario Marathon 3 was made of win

Filed under: Musings,The Internet — Tags: , , — bcotton @ 3:32 pm

Last night, as Mario Marathon 3 was drawing to a close, Brian announced that it is likely that the Mario Marathon series will remain a trilogy.  After over 250 hours of gaming across the three marathons, raising approximately $113,000 for Child’s Play Charity, the stress has become too much.  There can be no doubt that what Mario Marathon has accomplished is incredible, but with the increased strains on family life, it’s hard to keep something like this going.

For myself, I am terribly sad to think that this might be the end.  It’s been a great deal of fun interacting with the fans and being a part of the great Mario Marathon mission.  I’ve made many friends and had great opportunities (who else gets to talk to both Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day in the same weekend?), but I know how much work goes in behind the scenes.  I’ve seen Brian spend his time working on code, publicity, prizes, decorations, etc.  I’ve watched him spend his own money buying equipment to improve the quality of the stream for the viewers.  Most importantly, I’ve seen the pain that he and Shanna feel when they send their two-year-old son to grandma’s for days.  I could never ask anyone to make the kind of commitments that Brian and Shanna have made these past three years.

Still, it has been for a worthy cause, and I know everyone involved is proud of what has been done.  All of the Mario Marathon team are very giving, not only of their money, but of themselves.  I have no reason to believe that Mario Marathon is completely dead.  I believe it will be re-born in a different form, likely smaller and less intense, but some part of it will live on.  Certainly the awareness, and the community it fostered, will be the lasting legacy.

I had intended this post to be a recap of all the fun times I had during the past week.  I got to work with some great people, and I have now done two celebrity interviews.  I’ve experienced the joys of watching donations come in faster than we could keep up, and the frustration of power outages.  This has been a great experience for me, and one that I won’t forget.

To all of you who donated and/or interacted with us, thank you.  Despite the sacrifices of the team (and their families!), the real success of the Mario Marathon has come from the fans.  It is the 2000+ donors from around the world who have made the true difference in the lives of so many children.

I’d also like to give a shout-out to the chat moderators, who did a tremendous job of keeping the IRC room family-friendly (even when 4Chan showed up).  These guys deprived themselves of sleep and leisure, too, all in the name of helping.  They asked no reward (although we’re cooking up something for them anyway), and put in many hours of labor.  @Collin1000 put forth a lot of effort, too, keeping track of donations on a Google spreadsheet and crunching numbers for us.

It’s crazy to think that sitting in my friend’s living room and reading messages from strangers on the Internet has earned me any fans, or has contributed to the well-being of children across the world, but it’s apparently true.  There is nothing that I’ve done in my life that I’m more proud of than the past two Mario Marathons, and to be a part of it has truly been an honor.

Dear Internet: thank you!  I love you all.

June 21, 2010

There’s no such thing as too much blogging

Filed under: Musings,The Internet — Tags: , , , , , — bcotton @ 6:28 am

At least, I hope there isn’t.  If there’s an upper limit to the amount that a person can safely blog, I might run up against it soon.  It’s been an exciting week in FunnelFiascoLand.  In addition to all of the storms we’ve been having, and a sizable to-do list both professional and personal, I received some news.  The first news is that I’ve been selected for the LISA ’10 blog team.  In November, I’ll be off to cloudy San Jose, California where I’ll be writing multiple posts per day for the duration of the conference.  Additionally, I’ve been told I might have a few writing assignments in advance of LISA in order to help promote the event.

A bit earlier in the week, I was asked by the Managing Editor of the local newspaper if I would be willing to write a weather blog on their website.  Since I am incapable of turning down requests for more work, I readily agreed.  This is a voluntary/slave labor/public service matter, but I’m trying to finagle a fedora with a “press” tag out of the deal, or maybe I can score press credentials to outdoor events. The thought process behind my willingness to do this, and some discussion of licensing issues involved, is a blog post that will probably appears in the next week or two.  In the meantime, my “Weather Watch” blog starts on www.jconline.com/blogs today.  I plan to update it twice per week, on Mondays and Thursdays.

It seems my writing is starting to get noticed, and that pleases me greatly.  I’ve still got a long way to go until I catch up to my great uncle Ralph, the New York Times best-seller and a Pulitzer nominee, but it’s exciting to know that there are people out there who care about what I have to say.  (Of course, I know my loyal ones of readers here have always cared about my thoughts. You guys are awesome).  What this means for me is a fair deal of extra work, but it’s exciting and I’m really looking forward to it.

June 18, 2010

Increased complacency about severe weather benefits no one

Filed under: Musings,Weather — Tags: , , , , , , — bcotton @ 1:54 pm

The number of meteorologists in the United States is very small.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, less than 10,000 people are employed as atmospheric scientists in non-faculty positions (anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of people holding meteorology degrees is significantly higher. To wit: of the 12 people in my graduating class, four are meteorologists).  With such a tiny fraction of the population trained in atmospheric science generally, and severe storm meteorology specifically, it should come as no surprise that the public knows relatively little about severe weather.  With the small number of meteorologists, a heavy reliance is placed upon the media and local officials to convey information.

However, while the media and local officials may get more exposure to weather information, they do not necessarily understand it any better than the rest of the general public.  This leads to newspapers reporting that a “local tornado warning was issued” (only the National Weather Service issues tornado warnings officially, and causing confusion about this does not help the public interest) after a “funnel cloud on the ground” was sighted (a “funnel cloud on the ground” is more properly known as a “tornado”, but in this case it was more likely a mere “scary-looking cloud”). It leads to emergency managers sounding warning sirens when the greatest threat is heavy rain and sub-severe winds.  And it leads to confusion and eventual complacency for the public.

Meteorologists have enough trouble fighting complacency as it is.  The most recent data from the National Weather Service indicates that 76% of tornado warnings are false alarms.  This is not because of incompetent meteorologists.  It is a limitation of available observation systems (radar), of the understanding of tornadogenesis, and of the (quite reasonable) belief that it’s better to overwarn than to miss a tornado.  Additionally, since tornadoes are often relatively small and short-lived events, it may be that some of these false alarms are not so, but there are no reports thus the warning remains unverified.  The upshot of all of this is that it’s very easy for the public to not take warnings seriously.

I can, perhaps, understand the reason the Tippecanoe County Emergency Management Agency (TEMA) decided to sound the sirens last Saturday.  A street festival was about to begin in downtown Lafayette, and many people were moseying down Main Street.  The wind and rain had already begun clearing the streets before the sirens sounded, and no one seemed to be in any additional hurry when they heard the beautiful wail.  It can argued that the sirens were sounded appropriately in that case, but the public mindset is that the sirens are “tornado sirens”, so sounding them for non-tornadic events (especially events that posed such a dubious threat) does a disservice to the public because it increases complacency.  In this specific case, the sirens added nothing helpful, and thus should have remained silent.

Were this an isolated incident, I would not have felt compelled to write this post, but TEMA during the Mark Kirby era has been quick to sound the sirens.  In my circle of meteorological friends, there are two common consequences to rainfall: 1) the Indianapolis radar goes out of service, and 2) the tornado sirens are sounded in Tippecanoe County.  If I’ve associated the sirens with rainfall, surely there are others in the county who have done so as well.  So who benefits from sounding the sirens so much? No one.

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