Entries in Life

Last night, dvfmama and I got to talking.  In her macroeconomics class, she asked a question about slaves.  Does economics consider slaves “labor” or “land”?  (For those too lazy to click the links, economics defines land as a resource used to produce a good, while labor is the human efforts that are used to produce a good.)

Despite the eye-rolls from her classmates, she was specifically thinking of the brick-making slaves (including children) that were discovered in some Chinese factories recently.  Economic powerhouses, she pointed out to me, seem dependent on cheap labor to reach the powerhouse status.

Anyway, this conversation got me thinking about the Chinese workers that I met while I was in Uganda rafting the Nile.  They were helping to build out the cellular infrastructure, using money the Chinese government had loaned to Uganda.

At the time, I was confused by this.  China has a lot of its own people it could be helping: why this apparent philanthropy towards Africa?

Poking around last night I came across a story by Peter Hitchens about his experience in Congo: How China has created a new slave empire in Africa.

Congo, for the geographically-illiterate among us (including me, usually), is on the western border of Uganda.

China is poised to become the next economic powerhouse.  It looks like imperialism is an almost inevitable step on the path to becoming a major world power.  The UK did it, the US is doing it, and now China wants in on the game.

I talked about Jetpack before, but it looks like Dave has finally decided to come out for real.  He has a video where he reveals all.  Jetpack is looking awesome.

I’m in the Wikimedia Offices this week in San Francisco, so when we had a one-hour A/B test where we showed banners to 100% of users who weren’t logged in, I got to see something I don’t usually get to witness: Brandon Harris, whose personal appeal was being tested, let us know how awesome it was that he was mildly kicking Jimmy Wales butt at fund raising. That, in itself, is good news. For too long, Wikimedia’s fund-raising efforts have relied too heavily on Jimmy Wales. Even though it only ran for an hour, people noticed. Which is weird.

But in a good way. I love that I can be a part of an organisation that is so influential that when we’re just doing a quick test, people notice.

Among MediaWiki developers, there has been some discussion about which extensions should be bundled with the MediaWiki tarball. But, up till now, no one has really done anything about it.

In order to get the ball rolling, I posted a request for an idea of extensions that people would like to see bundled with MediaWiki. There is even the possibility of (eventually) different bundling options or a “MediaWiki lite” that has just the bare bones.

Chime in and let us know how you think this should look.

The nolug mailing list has been taken over by the perpetual whine again: “New Orleans Sucks.” Even though I still love the city and sometimes dream of living there again, when it comes to crime or politics there are many ways that it does, indeed, suck. But the thing that got me to move away — before Katrina came and made the problems worse — was opportunity. I had to post my experience with New Orleans and opportunity.

TL;DR: Even freetards need people skills.

I am telling you why I love and miss New Orleans. It has nothing to do with tech or politics. I don’t live in NOLA because of opportunity, remember?

I should clarify. I did post about politics. And even while living there, I was bothered by politics. But politics didn’t make me move.

Even rampant crime — my wife and I were robbed at gunpoint once — didn’t make us move.

It was opportunity. At the time, I was working as the “anti-spam” guy for McDermott. When they replaced my Solaris MTA with a Barracuda appliance and terminated the contract, I really wanted to continue working as a fairly-well-paid person working with Unix.

Most of the readily available jobs that met my criteria in NOLA at that time required an Oracle certification. I did think about getting one — the cost-benefit ratio for an Oracle Certification is pretty good and demand was there — but I am too much of what Fake Steve Jobs calls a “freetard” to get one. The GPL really does mean something to me.

We sold our house in Carrolton, and, for a few weeks, I worked as a Perl subcontractor for a guy in San Francisco on a mod_perl project he had.

After that, I went to work on a presidential campaign in Little Rock.

Even though the campaign was a flop and the pay was abysmal, it was one of the best decisions of my career: I made a number of friends from around the country and worked closely with them over the course of a few months. Those relationships led to more opportunties than I would otherwise have, living here in rural Pennsylvania.

So, yes, NOLA sucks as far as opportunities. Any place outside of a major metropolitan area like New York or San Francisco probably sucks a similar amount, at least for Tech jobs.

Which brings me to my point: It isn’t WHERE you are or even WHAT you know so much as WHO you know and HOW connected you are. You can have great tech skills and still be stuck with a job in a New York City bodega if you don’t know how to leverage them.

Yes, a person in the right place with the right set of technical skills can do amazing things. But if he doesn’t have any way to build and maintain some relationships that will help him when his current situation is finished, he’ll be stuck.

Let’s just use Emacs presents a compelling case for Emacs as a writer’s tool — not a geek’s tool — a writer’s tool.

In the process he takes us through his history and frustration with Emacs to the modern day where tools like Org-Mode, elements of a modern UI, and darkroom-mode, plus (in my experience and in his) a more active development community, have made Emacs into a great writing environment.

So, I decided to try out the new PhotoCommons. As you can see, it looks pretty nice. I did manage to find a bug. But, hey, alpha software. Good work, guys! (Of course, then, I had to check out their inspiration, WordPress Media Flickr.

Wikimedia has gotten some complaints because we don’t listen to users.  As part of an effort to be more responsive to users’ problem reports, I’m now in the role of Bugmeister,

You can see from the chart of activity on wikibugs-l that activity on Bugzilla has really shot up.  This is a direct result of the Foundation paying closer attention to its users.

I can’t guarantee that everyone will be happy, but what I am trying to do is make sure everyone has a chance to be heard, and that they aren’t ignored.

This robin showed up a couple days ago at our front door and has been keeping a sharp lookout for us and its eggs.

Sumana Harihareswara, our Community Development Coordinator, is a very valuable person to have around. She’s helped me incredibly during the weekly bug triage and uses her experience and insights from the Gnome project to great effect.

On my philosophy of bugs post, she asked a couple of great questions and made some really useful suggestions:

• How high-quality is the bug database overall? That is, what proportion of open bugs contain adequate reproducibility steps, and are currently reproducible?Sumana follows this up with a helpful anecdote of her experience from triaging Empathy bugs: I was able to clear out a big backlog by testing the repro steps in old open bugs and sending the reporter a kind boilerplate notice basically saying: “not reproducible in the current stable version; have you upgraded?” Given the number of open bugs on this project — 1620, 70% of which were opened before 1.16 came out — this sounds like a good thing for me to do, to weed out the unreproducible bugs. Guess I have my work cut out for this week!
• What are the strategic priorities of our community and our product? The WMF product whitepaper is probably useful here. We have the ability to think of priority in a more sophisticated way than simply predicting numbers of admins and users affected; we can also weight the importance of the feature.She’s right again, of course. I’ve had reading the white paper on my TODO list for a bit. Looks like it is time to get it done.