Obama Mirror
The New York Times’ Michael Powell says about Obama, “He has the gift of making people see themselves in him and offers an enigmatic smile when asked about his multiracial appeal.”
From the Chicago Tribune:
Miraculin
The NYTimes picks up on Miraculin, a year later.
Looking for the mouse
A very interesting talk at the Web 2.0 conference by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and participant in the upcoming Future of News workshop here at Princeton University (May 14-15, free to the public).
Of Herons and Pidgins
I upgraded to Hardy Heron today without any problems (if you’ve never tried Ubuntu, this is the time to try it). The new distribution contains a number of software updates, one of which is a new version of Pidgin (previously GAIM). This version changes the behavior of the IM text entry field by making it two rows high (it expands if you fill up the area). In previous versions, the field could be manually resized. The change causes message windows to look cramped and claustrophobic, especially on large monitors. Here’s how it looks on my computer:
This new “feature” is annoying, unnecessary and changes the default behavior of a program, overrides settings users may have set (if they have manually set the window size) and fixes a problem no one other than the developers seems to have had. A few minutes of googling showed a rapid and emotional response to this bug, including a post titled “Behavior makes me cry“, a complaint on Pidgin’s bug tracker asking that the behavior be reverted that has nearly 300 comments (including comments from a number of users who created accounts specifically to chime in on this issue), and most dramatically, a fork of the entire pidgin project (where the first feature listed is a plugin that allows manual resizing).
The developers seem to have no interest in fixing this and respond in typical open source fashion (”Ask for your money back. Or, change the source code yourself. “). The official response seems to be the this blog post, which consists of a few strawman arguments (e.g., “Progress is good.”, “The question is not whether Pidgin can remain exactly the same forever (it obviously can), but whether we want it to.”) followed by statements like “…the fact of the matter is that Free Software is a privilege, not a right.” and “Remember, at the end of the day, it is the developers’ sweat and effort that go into the software, so the buck stops there.”
Less measured comments appeared on the mailing list. One developer’s response:
If only people would get this serious about major things in life..
The war, world peace, but a minor change in a IM client? There’ve
been hundreds of messages on this in like the last 10 minutes alone.
Another response by a developer (Kevin Stange) who does not understand how anyone could find aesthetic value in whitespace.
> 4) The window looks very unbalanced with a bunch of text on top and a
> little that I can not read easily or check in the bottom. The aesthetics
> of it alone are terrible.This is ridiculous. I rarely enter more than one or two lines of text,
why would I need to have an even amount of space used for the input
area? Widgets that are much larger than they need to be to hold their
contents don’t serve any balancing purpose. They just waste space. If
there is some reason you need to fill that widget with more stuff than I
do that’s a valid argument, but this is not.
A few years ago I worked on a now-defunct open source project with Adam Kalsey and found myself facing the sames issues that many open source developers face. Users seemed to only comment when lodging complaints or making unreasonable demands. I was spending my free time working on the project and found myself easily becoming defensive about the software I was creating for free and users were “lucky to have”. Any feature request or complaint would trigger a “program it yourself” or “ask for your money back” mental response, which fortunately did not make its way into too many support tickets.
One reason this happens is due to the structure of software dissemination. Users rarely email developers to say “thanks” or “this works really well!” (have you ever done this?) and developers have little idea how useful or how liked his software is. The one metric available, file downloads, does not allow him to distinguish between “trying it out” users and users who turn into fans of the program. As a result, the vast majority of feedback a developer receives is negative. The more popular his software gets, the more complaints he’ll see (while the number of thankful responses remain small). This can create animosity towards an “unthankful” user base and in the worst case, abandonment of a project.
Developers need to stop expecting thanks, since they’re unlikely to start getting it. The real measure of the fan base and dedication to software is the number of complaints received. The outrage over the change in Pidgin shows just how much the software is used and loved. Developers should take the complaints, sometimes civil and often not, as indicators not of displeasure with the software but of appreciation for the software and the desire that it improve. If significant changes to once-popular software are made and no one complains, the developer should be very worried.
The more complaints you receive, the better you’re doing.
CITP Symposium: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music
The Center for Information Technology Policy (the center of which I am a part) has launched a symposium discussing voluntary collective licensing. There are some very interesting posts over there that I encourage you to check out.
Charlton Heston dies at 84
That’s about all. I wonder if Man, that
marvel of the universe, that glorious
paradox who has sent me to the unknown…
still makes war against his brother., and
lets his neighbor’s children starve.
“but as a general rule, it’s a safe bet to be skeptical of Executive Orders issued on a Friday.”
Linux PDF annotation software
Xournal is a great piece of software for annotating documents. It’s made for tablet PCs, but I used it to write notes on a PDF I needed to review. It even lets you export a new PDF that consists of the notes and original PDF.
YouSneezed.com
My newest million dollar idea! YouSneezed.com