Code: Rich

Re: Bringing the War to America

rlaager — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 02:59:33 +0000

Curt Wikstrom, who is my boss, posted a recent article entitled “Bringing the War to America“. In general, he and I agree on a number of things, and disagree on a number of things. My comments here are mine personally and are not to be construed as being related to my employment, and have not been vetted or approved by Curt or Wikstrom Telephone Company, Inc. (my employer).
Text marked in emphasis (like this sentence), which typically means it will display in italics, is quoted from the article:

Home valuations have almost doubled in the past several years. Unemployment is low. Oil prices are down. And the federal deficit is coming down. We have come out of the recession that we were in about six years ago. Our leaders’ strategy was to grow ourselves out of the recession, rather than hunker down, raise taxes, and cut services. So far that strategy has worked.

I agree with the idea of keeping taxes low. I prefer that the government keep taxes as low as possible. The federal government is currently involved in more than is necessary to achieve its Constitutionally stated goals.

Do we seriously want to change this? Do we want higher taxes, lower business profits, lower pension accounts, higher unemployment, higher energy costs? That is what the Democrats promise us. There is absolutely no question that their first order of business will be to increase taxes. They promise that almost daily.

Unfortunately, there are bigger issues right now than money. The current government is running secret prisons, shipping people to other countries to be tortured, jailing people without charge (see also: a legal brief, Rasul v. Bush) and (supposedly, until they were rebuffed by the Supreme Court) without recourse to the writ of habeas corpus. Many people say, “Well, it’s okay because they’re terrorists.” The problem is: The Executive Branch of the government decided they were terrorists, not a court with defined rules of procedure and evidence which are designed to protect the rights of the innocent. If these people are guilty, then why not charge them and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they’re guilty? We do this every day for things as small as traffic offenses. Surely we should do it when a person’s life is at stake. Unfortunately, our elected representatives disagree.

Because of these issues that I feel are more important, I’ll be voting Democrat this election. I’d be willing to give up economic welfare (and I’m not claiming that voting for Democrats will have this result) to ensure that my rights as a human being are not being usurped by the government. We can recover from a depression. It’s much harder to recover the loss of civil rights.

However, this highlights a fundamental problem. Our voting system is so broken that I’m forced to choose between civil rights and fiscal responsibility (assuming the Democrats are not, which I don’t really care to take a stance on in this article, as it’ll cloud my points). This is the biggest problem of all. If we had, for example, instant runoff voting, I could vote for a candidate with views more like my own. I could then choose the Democratic candidate as my second, third, fourth, or whatever choice, to ensure that my prioritization of civil rights over finances would be heard.

The biggest mistake that will be made in this generation is to cut and run in the Middle East.

Anyone with any knowledge of the situation and a reasonable clue will agree that we shouldn’t “cut and run”. The issue here is that our engagement in Iraq has no direct rational link to stopping terrorism (since the “weapons of mass destruction” didn’t turn up), and by becoming bogged down in what’s about to become a civil war, we’re giving terrorists political ammunition (which they use to recruit new attackers) and paying a huge cost (in dollars and in lives) for very little future gain. Additionally, having our troops in Iraq has meant we’re spread too thin in Afghanistan, a country we know for a fact harbored terrorists. We don’t need to cut and run, but we need to admit that there are problems and work on a solution. The Democrats are not at all unanimous about a desire to “cut and run”. Voting for them doesn’t mean voting to “cut and run”.

Bad Bug Reporting

rlaager — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 20:17:39 +0000

Here’s a perfect example of behavior that irritates me to the very core: [ 1589673 ] Text Color Bug From Alienware

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gnome-blog and Wordpress

rlaager — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 06:27:05 +0000

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gnome-blog, version 0.8 has support for Wordpress blogs. However, it seems that selecting wordpress appends “wordpress/xmlrpc.php” to the URL. This results in silent failures if you enter, for example, “http://coderich.net”.I ended up choosing Self-run Other, then entered http://coderich.net/xmlrpc.php as the URL, and everything works. Yay!

Update: Apparently gnome-blog doesn’t set the title properly with BloggerAPI. I switched to MetaWeblog in the options and now it works!

Gaim on Slashdot Again

rlaager — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:21:58 +0000

An article about Gaim hit Slashdot again a few days ago.

You can find the article here: A First Look at Gaim 2.0 [linux.com]

After several attempts with the linux.com comment interface (and three mispostings), I finally created this posting: Various Thoughts

The Slashdot article is here: A First Look at Gaim 2.0 [slashdot.org]

In general, when Gaim hits Slashdot, lots of users spend lots of time making lots of comments. Many of these comments represent honest questions, many are completely irritating, and a few can be very insightful.

I try to address the legitimate questions as much as I can, because I like being helpful.

However, when it comes to the second category of comments, some things just really drive me insane. Here’s a good example: Re: What happened to Gaim-vv I don’t disagree with them that having videoconferencing support would be nice. However, to suggest that the developers just “hop to it” is incredibly irritating. (I’d love to write voice and video support, but other things are more important to me, and I have limited time.) It’s not just this one individual either… this is a systemic problem with large numbers of open-source users.

As far as insightful comments go, I really liked this one: Agreed, but people need to know that.

I’m biased, but I think my reply to that comment, and especially my conclusion paragraph therein, applies nicely to both of these situations. I’ll reproduce it here:

The whole issue of “do it yourself” is very complicated. In many cases, people ask for huge features (say voice/video support) and expect that it’s incredibly simple to do. Also, users often think they should still be treated like “customers” when they’re not contributing anything to the project. It’s not fair to take something for free and then complain that you want it improved to do what you want, but you don’t want to help in any way.

The amount of work required to fix a bug or add a new feature is highly dependent on the size of the change, probably even more so than the size of the whole codebase. The Gaim software is pretty compartmentalized. When I started out, I fixed a few bugs without knowing much at all about the general architecture. So, it’s not really that hard to fix little things. The problem is, *most* of the little things have been fixed already. Addressing more fundamental issues does take quite a bit of startup time to learn the codebase.

In general, I try to help out anyone who has a legitimate bug report, suggestion, etc. However, the amount of things that the developers can take on is extremely limited. There are a million things on my TODO list, and that’s just the top items I’d like to accomplish. So often times, “do it yourself” is the only response.

There is definitely a big opportunity for non-coders to help, though. Graphic design, web design, bug triaging, documentation, etc. are useful to all open source projects.

People who like open source because the product is free need to remember that the product is free. If they expect anything more than zero support, they’re going to be disappointed. People that view open source as a community are much better off. Not everyone in the community is a coder, but everyone that contributes is important.

– Originally posted to Slashdot as comment #16585466.

I’m not sure what the solution is. Maybe I should just ignore these people. Maybe we, as an open-source community, need to better communicate with our users, encouraging more non-code contributions?