Entries in Life

Today, someone quoted Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians in which he says “if any would not work, neither should he eat.”

This quote (or at least, this sentiment) is used a lot to support welfare reform in the United States, so I was amused when I found that the Wikipedia article “He who does not work, neither shall he eat” was part of the Socialism Portal and included quotes from the Soviet Constitution:

In the USSR work is a duty and a matter of honor for every able-bodied citizen, in accordance with the principle: “He who does not work, neither shall he eat.”

In this presidential political season, the term “Socialist” has been bandied about a bit too easily by the president’s critics. My wife pointed out, though, that it is a good thing Jesus didn’t read Paul’s admonition before feeding the multitude of irresponsible adults with food from a (relatively) responsible child’s knapsack.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, this week is Cheesefare week and last Sunday was Meatfare Sunday — the last Sunday to eat meat before fasting begins in earnest.

What struck me this year, though, were the first two sentences of the Epistle this Sunday:

Brethren, food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.

Right when I could get bogged down in legalism and judging others, they have to give me this thought: I’m no better off.

They really know me.

Related to this, Fr Stephen writes about the scandal of the Gospel in a way we don’t often think of it:

…the radical forgiveness of everyone for everything…

This week we did our first roll out of MediaWiki 1.19 on some of the smaller project sites. This staged roll out is a great way to find out how you are using the software in ways we didn’t expect and to give you a warning: “Beware! This thing you are doing is going to break!” Of course, I would prefer to avoid that wherever possible, but there are things I can’t control.

So now, I get to say “Beware!”:

Beware!

If are using document.write() in some javascript, whether in a gadget, in your common.js, vector.js, monobook.js or even global.js, you need to change it. In the cases that I saw, people had used a code fragment like the following:

function importAnyScript(lang,family,script) {
document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="' + 'http://'
        + lang + '.'
        + family + '.org/w/index.php?title='
        + script + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript"></script>');

This has to be changed to something like the following:

function importAnyScript(lang,family,script) {
mw.loader.load('//' + lang + '.' + family
        + '.org/w/index.php?title='
        + script + '&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript');
}

And it looks like I’m training my kids right..

Just over a month ago, I read The Checklist Manifesto and I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts on it ever since. Since I’ve waited so long to write this, I’m going to rely on the notes I typed up one night when I was thinking about this book as well as a another related article that I read along the way.

I first heard about this book a couple of years ago from a review I read in Powell’s now discontinued review-a-day. Based only on the reviews I read and my initial experience developing MediaWiki, I started MediaWiki’s Pre-commit checklist. Last month, when Guillaume Paumier told me he had started reading the book after looking over the checklist, I decided I really should read the book myself.

Atul Gawande wrote the book to write about how worked with the WHO to introduce checklists into the surgery room. He talks about the history of checklists, starting with the pre-flight checklists that were developed after a tragic accident involving an experienced test pilot and a new, more complex, B-17 in 1935.

In each of these situations, you’re dealing with complexity and helping a person with superior domain knowledge avoid silly mistakes.

In the surgery room, this involves empowering nurses and anesthesiologists to call the surgeon out if they see something amiss. Everyone agrees, and even gets the patient to agree to what procedure will actually be performed. Getting surgeons to use these checklists wasn’t easy, but when they did, errors were caught.

The past century (even the past 30 years) has seen great strides in what we can do. Our ability has jumped exponentially. At the same time, the amount of complexity that we have to deal with has grown exponentially. We are only starting to develop are ways to manage the complexity but those who have managed to master some of the it are treated like rock stars. It isn’t uncommon to hear someone use the term “rock star” to refer to a really proficient person. Even they can make mistakes, though, and so we have things like code review where all code written is examined and critiqued by others.

I’m no where close to a rock star programmer, so those code reviews would turn up some of the same things every time. As a result, the checklist was born and has been adopted and maintained by the community since then.

But back to the book. The Checklist Manifesto outlines the successful use of checklists to enable communication between the expert and people around him. This is one the real benefit of checklists. Recognizing that everyone makes mistakes and needs to be open to correction from others that they are working with is one thing that checklists are really good at whether they are used in the cockpit or the surgery room.

Other activities still benefit from cooperation and communication, but as Susan Cain says in her editorial “The Rise of the New Groupthink”, it is dangerous to fetishise cooperation and team work. Her piece ends with this great bit of insight, though:

Before Mr. Wozniak started Apple, he designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, a job he loved partly because HP made it easy to chat with his colleagues. Every day at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., management wheeled in doughnuts and coffee, and people could socialize and swap ideas. What distinguished these interactions was how low-key they were. For Mr. Wozniak, collaboration meant the ability to share a doughnut and a brainwave with his laid-back, poorly dressed colleagues — who minded not a whit when he disappeared into his cubicle to get the real work done.

Collaboration is important, but the surgeon still needs to be the one holding the scalpel.

When I showed my kids my last post they said I should write about some of their experiences.

I should post a picture here of my kids. I know they don’t look like your typical Mennonites, but neither do they look very asian. But, yes, I’m biased and I see them every day, so I could easily be missing something.

First there is the silly, thoughtless racism. Kids are still saying “Ching Chang Chong” to anyone they think of as Chinese. The first time a kid said this to my wife I was surprised. She gave them quite a tongue-lashing, though. I’m surprised that my son reports kids’ say this to him. This is, as he said, just ignorance.

Some people are simply curious. My 7-year-old daughter says a boy asked his brother to ask her if she was Chinese. This isn’t really prejudice, just kind of cute curiosity.

One guy really annoys Ginger with his stupid, racist comments like bugging her about Miss May, a Chinese substitute teacher as if Ginger knows this person’s personal details. Even though the school offers Chinese as a spoken language (what one of her friends called “chink” accidentally before correcting herself) for students to learn, some still ask her if she can speak “Asian” — as if it were one language. They also think that my children all go to the same church with the other Asian children.

Which is weird because even though we have a Mennonite background and name, we attend a Greek church.

I think a lot of this comes down to tribalism. Just by getting married, Alexis and I haven’t stuck with the tribe. And when we started going to a Greek church, that was yet another non-tribal activity. In a small town like ours, People aren’t used to those who don’t stick to their tribe’s customs, and they’re curious and (sometimes) rude as a result.

Moving to Lancaster County has been interesting.

First, “Hershberger” isn’t such an unusual name. It is a Amish/Mennonite name, after all, and this is Lancaster County. There are a few of them here.

Since we came here 8 years ago, my wife has had to deal with people who were not expecting a Vietnamese woman when she introduced herself as “Alexis Hershberger” over the phone to them.

But even better has been this encounter that she related to me recently.

woman: Do you go to the Vietnamese church?

Alexis: No, we go to the Greek Orthodox church.

woman (surprised): Oh, when did you and your husband come to the States?

Alexis: We moved here from New Orleans 8 years ago.

My 9th grade daughter has a cell phone. On it she is TXTing to her friends (if we let her) late into the night. She thinks the TXTing abbreviations are a big deal and is surprised when I use them.

Girl, IRC was the birthplace of TXTing.

Question: When is a person sure of having arrived at purity?

Answer: When that person considers all human beings are good, and no created thing appears impure or defiled. Then a person is truly pure in heart.

The person who is genuinely charitable not only gives charity out of his own possessions, but gladly tolerates injustice from others and forgives them. Whoever lays down his soul for his brother acts generously, rather than the person who demonstrates his generosity by his gifts.

Rebuke no one, revile no one, not even those who live very wickedly.

Let yourself be persecuted, but do not persecute others.

If zeal had been appropriate for putting humanity right, why did God the Word clothe himself in the body, using gentleness and humility in order to bring the world back to his Father?

St Isaac the Syrian

Just to prove that I actually do work at the Wikimedia Foundation, I’ve gone and posted a a blog post to Wikimedia’s blog.