marcus ramberg

Simon Wistow worries that the distributed nature of git results in fragmented software projects:

That model works well for Linux. Maybe. I’ll presume it does. Git eases the pain points expressed by Andrew Morton, the maintainer of the -mm tree, in this message entitled “This Just Isn’t Working Any More”

In short, it makes siloing easier.

My immediate reaction to reading his post was to think of the old saying ‹‹Guns don’t kill people, people kill people››. In fact, my experiences with forks so far has been two cases of forking repos on github, and doing a pull request to the author when my fixes were fit to be included in the main distribution. In both cases the authors included my changes in their versions.

Just because there exists a lot of works-in-progress doesn’t mean that they represent different authoritative versions of a given module. The situation for the rails OAuth plugin might be a bit muddled, but thanks to github’s excellent network map, it’s easy to track all of the 12 forks on github (substansially less than 27), out of which most seems to have merged into a new mainline.

It is clear that this project suffers from a inactive maintainer, but I believe that Git forks has lowered the barrier to contributing substantially, thus ensuring vitality for open source software projects. Our own Catalyst OAuth support, which resides in SVN is still non-working, despite several promises from people to look into it. These people might have working support in their local applications, but if that is the case, I’m unable to get to them or merge it into the started efforts in Catalyst SVN.

To summarize, Git lowers the barrier to contribution. Building or avoiding silos is up to the software maintainers, and giving support for patched versions is madness any way we look at it. Just the same way as developers are on their own when they use development versions of software, they can’t expect support for forked versions of that software either. If you live on the bleeding edge, you are going to bleed a little.

Forgot some of the plot details of this classic adventure game? Get a quick and humorous reminder with this awesome flash movie. I just realized my two most memorable childhood games involve pirates and ninjas. Guess you can’t go wrong with ninjas and pirates.

An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.

— Charles Bukowski

As you might know, we run a software site for mac users, i use this. The site is free to use, and we finance it through the use of advertisments. Mostly we get advertisments from the Google ads program, as well as indie shareware developers, and occationally promotional programs like macheist.

I figure Apple Products would be a good fit for our users, so I was pleased when a quick Google Search turned up the Apple Store Associates Program.

On going to the ‘Register’ link, I noticed that they use the linkshare program, where we are already signed up as part of the iTunes Store program. However, using the linkshare site I was not able to locate the Apple Store Associates program. At this point I was a bit puzzled. I figured maybe I needed to sign up with a new account on linkshare, so I try that, is redirected to a newer signup form, and after registration, is just landed on the regular linkshare homepage. Still no sign of the associates program.

I figured I should try to contact them by mail. They list a contact email on the frontpage, but unfortunately it bounces:

    The Symantec Brightmail Gateway program : host elderberry.apple.com[17.128.115.181] said:
   550 5.1.1 unknown or illegal alias: storeassociates@apple.com (in reply to
   RCPT TO command)

Now I am ready to give up. Anyone got a lead? Drop me a mail at marcus@nordaaker.com.

JSON has become a popular data-exchange format lately, and it’s even been adopted as a config format by some. It’s apparently useful for this, with an easily definable syntax, and fairly simple to understand for the en user. However, one factor that could hamper the adoption of JSON is the lack of comment support. This is a really strange omission. After all at JSON is really just a Javascript data structure, and JavaScript does support both the // and /* comment */ style.

In any user-editable text, comments is useful both to explain sections, and to temporarily disable a section. I’ve been looking for a new generic data structure representation to replace YAML, and JSON seemed like a really promising candidate, until I found out about this limitation.

*Update: The plot thickens. According to the JSON Wikipedia Page, the JSON spec used to include support for /* comments */ (c-style). Seems they changed it. Conveniently, this helps to make JSON a YAML subset. I’m pretty sure it is not worth that tho. Anyone have a link on the process that resulted in this?*

Aaron Swartz has been taking a closer look at Wales’ claims that Wikipedia is being written by a small group of people.

When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content.

I think this enforces the idea that any good user driven site requires both good gardeners, and a mass of casual contributors who aren’t experts in the workings of the site, but contributes with some factoids that works as seeding for good content. We see the same trend on iusethis, where some user creates an app entry, which is improved upon by others, and maintained by the group as a whole. I still believe we have some way to go in clarifying and giving power to the site gardeners tho, at the moment, we do too much of this work. Delegating this to our power-users would be doubly beneficial, as it would empower them, and free us up to spend even more energy on improving the site.

I know I just posted about the big picture’s carnival photos, but I can’t resist linking to this post as well. Robots are just so awesome! I want the Tuba playing one.

I just received a mail from Spotify about a security issue:

Along with passwords, registration information such as your email
address,birth date, gender, postal code and billing receipt
details were potentially exposed. Credit card numbers are not
stored by us and were not at risk. All payment data is handled
by a secure 3rd party provider.

Oh well. At least they hashed our passwords and secured the credit card transactions. All in all, I think they’ve handled themselves very well. Kudos for being so up front about this as well.

Graham writes about lessons from Hacker News, his social news site for nerds. Interesting for anyone who works with user-driven content.

Wulffmorgenthaler is one of the web comics I follow religiously through my feed reader. The other day their comic didn’t want to load. I tried following the link to their page, only to be presented with One of the coolest error pages I’ve seen. Of course, we all strive to keep our sites up 24/7. Still I think it is a sign of greatness to be able to put a smile on the lips of your readers even when your service your service is down.