The shame comes because this curiosity is at the expense of people suffering (still) because food is so scarce. I’m fascinated that the father and son have held on to power so tightly for so long and control so much of the information in and out of the country. While walls crumble, and others march backwards, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) still manages to keep its people at home and dependent upon their government for, well, everything.

Two recent books have provided a veritable bonanza of information for people curious about the country. The first, Nothing to Envy is the result of Barbara Demick‘s interviews and meetings with North Korean refugees. She turns their memories of life in the hermit kingdom and the accounts of their escape into a compelling narrative. It was the first time I’ve read anything from the point of view of someone who actually lived in the country and I’m glad I found it.

The second book, Pyongyang is a graphic novel written by a cartoonist who actually worked in the country. Before my kids checked this book out (I was ignorant of it till then), I wasn’t even aware that the country was trying to selling its people’s labor to foreign companies. The idea that they would do that seems to undermine the purity of their Juche ideal. Not that I really expect intellectual purity from them or anyone else.

Still, I just looked at the “Business in DPRK” page and their presentation seems straight out of 1984. Especially this part:

As opposed to other Asian countries, worker’s will not abandon their positions for higher salaries once they are trained.

Right. Because they are no higher salaries.

I didn’t until last week when Brandon Harris, a designer at Wikimedia, shared his hair care tips during a Reddit AMA.

This led someone to quote a bit of the Wikipedia article on Shampoo:

Shampoo has only been used with fervor since the 1970s^{[citation needed]}. Before then, either regular soap was used a few times a month or, just after the early 20th century, shampoo was used only a few times a year. It was in the 1970s that shampoo use became prevalent. Ads featuring Farrah Fawcett and Christie Brinkley asserted that it was unhealthy not to shampoo several times a week.

I mentioned this to my dad, a long-time Prell user. He was surprised. This didn’t fit with his memory. He said that in 1963, when he was first married, he used Prell and Head and Shoulders. It looks like this is one of those times my father was setting trends. Fourteen years later, in 1977, the New York Times reported that those two shampoos were the most popular (according to a footnote in the Wikipedia article).

I think its impressive how little it takes to generates a controversy. The No poo wiki page is (like the first linked article in this blog post) filled with assertions with nothing to back them up. I would expect to see a controversy around articles like Creationism (and, indeed, Creationism’s talk page is filled with warnings about the proper place to debate the validity of the topic) but there is quite a lot of discussion on Shampoo’s talk page. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people become so impassioned about (what I consider to be) a prosaic topic.

At noon the previous day, a horse-drawn wagon carrying hundreds of pounds of explosives and deadly shrapnel exploded in front of the headquarters of J.P. Morgan at 23 Wall St., the heart of America’s financial district. The final death toll was 38, with more than 400 injured.

Great, now people who think there is a problem with extreme wealth inequality are just about to bomb us! The editorial goes on to say:

The suspects were surprisingly similar to the spectrum of leftist protestors who are occupying Wall Street right now. They ranged from radical progressives to socialists to communists to anarchists, from homegrown Bolsheviks to Italian Galleanists to Communist Party USA.

I haven’t seen any Galleanists, Bolsheviks or violent anarchists, but then, I haven’t been following it very closely.
Still, that list of ideologies reminded me of Chris Hedges “Death of the Liberal Class” (Interview with Chris Hedges). Chris Hedges book starts around the turn of the century and moves through the violence of the 20s, the Great Depression and beyond.
An interesting counter-point to this columnist is Robert Reich’s take. As he points out there is something happening today with the OWS:

Even more startling is the change in public opinion. Not since the 1930s has a majority of Americans called for redistribution of income or wealth. But according to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, an astounding 66 percent of Americans said the nation’s wealth should be more evenly distributed.
A similar majority believes the rich should pay more in taxes. According to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, even a majority of people who describe themselves as Republicans believe taxes should be increased on the rich.

Even more interesting is the comparison that many people (even Republican politicians) see between OWS and the Tea Party movement.
Republican House Speaker John Boehner said:

I understand people’s frustrations. The economy is not producing jobs like they want and there’s lot of erosion of confidence in our government and frankly, under the First Amendment, people have the right to speak out.

There is something going on the people on the right throw tea parties and people on the left start occupying everything. Something is deeply wrong and change is coming. Hopefully there won’t be any crazies with bombs.

Scandals, page 1

That lasted until I sat down in PJsand looked at the front page. The top three headlines each reminded me of the corruption and cronyism that Louisiana and New Orleans are known for: Public defenders are ambulance chasing, an audit of a 13 year old construction project reveals invoice padding, and a local businessman pleads guilty to bribing the sheriff.

So, I’ll visit, I’ll enjoy hacking MediaWiki with my friends, staying with my sponsors (who live next door to my old home here), enjoy the food, and then, when it is all over, I’ll enjoy returning home to the quiet Lancaster County, PA.

The story, though, was irritating for its fanboi-ism (even though a woman reported it).

As far as I can tell Steve Jobs was no more a “computer genius” than Bill Gates. He certainly didn’t invent the smart phone, nor was he the first person to release a cellphone with a camera. The story attributed both of these things to him, incorrectly.

He was a marketing genius. But he was also a micro-manager who would look at, say, versions of the Mac or iPhone that his engineers brought him and make design changes on the spot. He expected long hours from his workers.

He also was good at controlling the Apple brand. When Jobs left Apple, his replacements wanted to imitate IBM’s success with the PC, so they licensed out the specifications for the Mac so that people could start developing clones of the Mac. The Mac really suffered during this period. When Jobs returned to Apple, one of the first things he did was kill off the clones.

I respect a lot of what he has done as a business man — he knew what Apple needed as far as business and marketing. I respect his taste for design. He was able to market the iPhone and iPod as the devices to have.

But over the years, I’ve become more attracted to the sort of people Fake Steve Jobs called “freetards”. And, truly, the parody does seem to really have insight into how Steve Jobs actually thought.

I’m not happy Steve Jobs is dead. And he is a significant person beyond just the tech world. He did a lot to popularize computers during my life. He’ll be missed by many.

I’m just more interested, now, in making computing resources (and knowledge) available to everyone. I respect his focus on usability — we freetards use a lot of the ideas that Apple engineers developed and popularized — but while I do want to sustain my current standard of living, I’m interested in making resources available for everyone, not selling more shiny widgets.

Still, there are places where it could be better. Engineers at Facebook took this challenge and created HipHop. We at the Wikimedia Foundation would love to have HipHop packaged so that we can deploy it on our cluster. And, ultimately, while we realize we might need to do the initial work of packaging HipHop, we don’t want to be the ones responsible for keeping the package up-to-date.

Since I have some experience with packaging PHP applications and am a sometimes-active member of Debian’s PHP maintainers team, I felt this was a natural place for me to jump in.

And, because I’m lazy, the first thing I did was look for any other work on packaging HipHop that had been done. I found James DuPont’s work and built on it. Now it comes time to move this forward.

I’ve already taken his ITP for HipHop.

You’ll note that it depends on two other bugs to get the HipHop patches for curl and libevent included. These were essentially dismissed by both maintainers.

The curl maintainer pointed out that it that patch was un-needed or, at least, needed better a better defense. I can’t really provide that. I’m not sure that I can adapt the HipHop code to the suggested APIs, but I’m willing to try if the HipHop developers aren’t.

The libevent developer pointed out (in response to the Debian bug), that the patch was against an old, unmaintained version of libevent. Newer versions evidently make half of the patch un-needed and the other half needs to be adapted to the newer version of libevent.

I really want to make this happen. I really want Debian (and Debian derivatives like Ubuntu) to have HipHop packages. But I’m not sure how much time I can give to this right now since we’re in the middle of pushing out a new release of MediaWiki. If you can help solve any of the packaging problems mentioned above, please dive in!

Since I don’t follow news, except the big stories that hit the Interwebs, I didn’t realize that we were getting the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee. But we were.

So, at 6:15am as we passed through a low point, we saw a trailer park near a creek flooded, its residents standing at the roadside watching the water threaten their homes.

We got to the study group at 6:30AM along with a few others but my priest, who usually leads the group, wasn’t able to make it because of flooding on the road. So those of us who got there continued in his absence.

On the way back home at 7:45 the highway (US 222) was closed, so we took the slow road (PA 272).

Along the way, we passed the trailer park again. This time the flood waters had clearly reached some of the homes and were just about a foot from the road. But we slugged on and soon we were safely home.

Shortly after dvfmama left for work in Lancaster, but she soon returned. All the roads out of town (we live on a hill) were closed. Evidently, our children’s school got the same message: school was canceled due to the flooding.

(Here come the graphs!) My neighbor gave me links to some charts of the flooding. And it is pretty striking. The amount of rain in the past few days has caused local rivers to rise significantly, and meant that they’re carrying a lot more water. In some sense, because I live on a hill outside of a flood zone, this was a nice reminder of New Orleans, but still, it is good too keep in mind that others suffered.

Good Friends

This past weekend, someone from New Orleans that I’ve been working with for the past eight or nine years was in New York City and said he wanted to get together. It provided a nice excuse to go up to NYC. We had a great dinner and had fun catching up. Even though I’m not a businessman, I have a few friends like this one who own and run their own business and I love their perspective.

While I was in NYC, I made good on a threat I’ve made before to this open source power couple that I know, Leonard and Sumana. I met Leonard seven years ago when we were both working on the Clark campaign. I didn’t realize then how truly bright he was, but if you google “Leonard Richardson”, you’ll see that he has written quite a bit. And he maintains a fairly humble attitude and has a wonderful sense of humor. You can see this in his O’Reilly Bio: Leonard Richardson has been programming since he was eight. Recently the quality of his code has improved somewhat.

When I said I wanted to meet him, he asked what I wanted to do. I suggested Museum of the Moving Image since it was near where he lived and, as it happens, was hosting the traveling Jim Henson exhibit. I vividly remembered Leonard playing the Manamana video for his fellow Clark staffers, so I thought this might be right up his alley. I was right.

I didn’t know Sumana before the WMF but she was brought on as our Volunteer Development Coordinator this year (in the TL;DR group, which I am a part of and I can only find a brief mention of in this “Platform Engineering” blog post) and, lo, open source runs in small circles. Sumana and Leonard are married!

Hurricanes

Of course, Hurricane Irene was on our minds. As someone who has lived through several hurricane seasons in New Orleans (but not, I admit, Hurricane Katrina), I was a little more amused than I should have been that NYC was evacuating parts of the city because of predicted 50 knot winds (though, I admit that I thought shutting down the subway was a good move — I will condescend at least that much).

Even if the storm that hit NYC didn’t meet my stringent standards for impending doom, it was still good to hear that Sumana and Leonard survived.

School

Oh, and as if that isn’t enough trauma in my life: tomorrow is the first day of school for my children. Given that and dvfmama’s work outside the house, it’ll be my first day for quite some time by myself.

I don’t know if I can handle the solitude.

Over ten years ago, someone coined the word “blogosphere” to describe the culture and interactions that formed around weblogs. Today, I feel the need to adapt that word to describe the microcosm that evolves around a particular instance of Bugzilla (or any other public bug reporting database, I’m sure): bugosphere.

As the bugmeister, I’m sure my experience should not be considered normative — you shouldn’t expect to jump into a bug reporting tool and find any sort of community. Still, I’m sure other bugmeisters (I only know a couple) and other committed bug reporters experience their own version of the bugosphere.

This past week, the bugosphere really came into focus for me. During the preparation for this week’s collection triage, Tomasz and I found a bug reporter (Helder.wiki or mybugs on bugzilla) who had reported numerous Collection bugs) and asked xyr to join the bug triage this past week.

It was through Bugzilla that Helder.wiki and I connected. Through that connection and xyr participation in last week’s triage, I decided to have a Wikibooks triage on the 14th.

I had a hint of the social aspects of working on bugs before this week (six months ago I said “Bugzilla is my social website”), but this week the bugosphere really came into focus. These are my people, they’re not bound by any one organization, like the WMF, but they’re interested in problems we experience with this software. Social bonds, social “networks”, have been forged over less, but the goal we share, sharing the sum of human knowledge, is an especially powerful one.

Bugzilla captures our struggles to make Wikipedia (and Wikibooks, and Wikisource, etc.) better. The bugosphere is a great place.