In the last few days, with very little discussion among developers, an implementation of brainstorm was setup on the pidgin.im site. I would like to emphasize that taking this site down is not because we are indifferent to user feedback, nor actively ignoring it. Here, particularly, nothing could be further from the truth.

Our concern is two part. Firstly, the brainstorm site is built on top of drupal, which requires significant resources on the part of the server. We are concerned that under the load we have seen in the past, our servers will be unable to run drupal, and its existence, rather than furthering communication between our users and our developers, will in fact impede it, by bringing our website down entirely.

Secondly, our concern is that, like the forums we used to have on SourceForge, the brainstorm site will become a backwater of sorts, where users submit feedback yes, but also a site where that feedback goes largely unheard.

The brainstorm site, to be useful, will require a very active developer presence. Partly because proposing and voting on features does no good if developers do not see the votes, but for more mundane and fundamental reasons as well.

Already, in the couple days the site is been up, we see some problems. Duplicates here, as in the Trac tickets, are quite common, and quite frequently going unnoticed by the average user. Over time, duplicates like this will mean that the same idea will either have its votes split across so many different items that it will appear, falsely, relatively unpopular, or will be voted up so many times by the same user (once on each instance), that when it is noticed and merged, it will, equally falsely, appear disproportionately popular.

A separate concern of my own is that users seeing the brainstorm site, with its high emphasis on voting, will fail to take head of the note that it does not and will not significantly affect the direction development takes.

Open source developers work best, work at all in many cases, when they are given free reign to work on projects and subprojects that interest them,. If I, or anyone else, tried to tell our developers that they must drop everything and work on the 5 most popular ideas, most of them would quickly find that their free time could be more enjoyably spent on other projects. In an ideal world the ideas that most interest developers would closely mirror the desires of the larger community, but when users fail to step up, develop a trust relationship with others, and join in the development process, reality deviates from the ideal. In such cases, things of great importance to the larger community will languish.

The idea behind this voting system, as I see it, is to answer the question “What can I do to help?”. When an idea is highly popular, but not yet being worked on, we as a community, if there is to be a community, and not just a clamoring mob of users, need to realize that help is needed to achieve that goal. A highly voted for idea should thus be seen as an open invitation for a patch, or more realistically, a series of patches, from someone who has never before worked with us, or who, having worked with us some in the past, is looking around for what to tackle next.

For this reason, along with my concerns about resources, I feel it to be very important that a voting system be integrated in with the normal development process. While this might somewhat increase the burden of submitting a new idea, most if not all of the ideas submitted so far reflect tickets already submitted in Trac. However, once an idea is submitted, having the voting integrated in with the development process will ensure that it is, in fact, feedback; that it is seen by those working with the Pidgin, Finch and libpurple code base.

Dr. Mike Adams quotes Saint Jude’s Epistle several times in his article, “St. Jude, Don’t Make it Bad”¹. I need to read it. I need to read more non-fiction in general.

You Are A: Turtle!

These reptiles, famous for their hard outer shells, spent their days roaming for food and relaxing in the water. As a turtle you are not very speedy, nor are you soft and cuddly. You tend to hide in your shell and you aren’t much of a sprinter, but you are quite tough. You also happen to be as cute as you are fascinating.

You were almost a: Kitten or a Bear Cub
You are least like a: Duckling or a Chipmunk Cute Animal Quiz!

Sea turtles also help keep down the jelly fish count, and thus make the oceans a safer place to swim.

☺

The quote¹ actually says

• science != consensus
• politics == consensus
• science == ∃ X such that ((X == investigator) && (X == “correct”); where (“correct” == “results are verifiable in reference to the real world”))

The problem is that skepticism does not reign throughout much of science. Rather, dogmatism reigns. Anyone who dissents is silenced. If the environment we have today existed, Einstein would not have been able to publish, he upset too many careers. But back then the science journals were not as tightly controlled as they are now, and it was more possible then for a radical idea to get published.

It is then asked, “what does it mean to say in reference to the real world.”² A valid question. What is meant here is that results have to bear out, taking relativity for an example again, we can see that the data fits better than Newtonian physics. However, Global Warming doesn’t account for a great deal of the data out there. Relativity fits the real world. Global warming is questionable at best.

“The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.” – Michael Crichton¹

On a nearly random side note, metacity’s default keystrokes are woefully substandard to my (admittedly customized) fvwm2 keystrokes. I have yet to randomly hit upon the right keystroke to change virtual desktops.

In other news, I have spent a little bit of time modifying the css for ikiwiki to attempt to match the css I use elsewhere. It is a fustrating process. I ended up changing the theme I use for everything else in an attempt to be more ikiwiki friendly, but while I have ended up with a collection of style.css files that mostly work, I cannot be entirely happy, there is a decided lack of cohesion here.

I suspect I will need to dive into the template files for ikiwiki to make more progress.

As a correction to my previous post, libfuse2 is not in fact at fault here. I am able to mount an sshfs with the suid option. The problem is that gluster does not implement the -o option, and so I cannot pass the suid option to the mount, and thus the default of nosuid takes effect.

I am still quite disappointed.

Discovered tonight that libfuse2 forces fuse file systems, such as gluster, to mount with nodev,nosuid. This means that I cannot host an ikiwiki with CGI support on a gluster file system. This does not please me.

I would really like to see this, and read/write shared mmaps (for spamprobe and similar) to be supported in fuse file systems (and naturally gluster in particular).

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s great civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from spiritual faith to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependency, from dependency back to bondage.” – Alexander Tyler (A Scottish professor)¹