Brandon Sharitt's Blog

Last night I swtiched my server from Ubuntu to Debian and so far seems to be a success. There wasn’t technically anything wrong with the old one, but when I set it up, all I had on hand was an Ubuntu 8.04 desktop install CD, so I had a lot of unneccesary desktop packages installed and being the desktop version I have a some what shorter support window and would have to upgrade in a year anyway. The public facing web server stuff was able to be set right back up, but there were a few hang ups with some of the local services, but they seem to be fine now.

Last night I tried Domino’s new pizza last night, not so much because I wanted to try it, but mostly because it was cheap. So was it any better? Technically it was better than the old pizza, but from where it was coming from, better doesn’t necessarily mean good.

Let’s start with the meats. That was one thing they really couldn’t screw up before and it’s mostly the same here. The cheese seems to be the same white cheese they keep calling mozzarella, but certainly doesn’t taste like it, but it is largely the same as most other national pizza chains.

The only real changes appear to be the sauce and the crust. The sauce has been upgraded from ketchup to a cheap jar of spaghetti sauce. Not a big change, and not exactly good, but technically an improvement. The crust is still mostly chewy cardboard, but the outer crust has been improved somewhat. Now it’s covered in the same garlic seasoning that you’d find on bread sticks. So at least the outer crust has gone from pretty much inedible garbage to free bread sticks. I’d rate that as the only real improvement. Overall, it’s the same crappy pizza now with free bread sticks.

First the old project, Junecode. It’s a project that’s been floating around in my head for a long time in a lot of forms, but never a whole lot of code to show for it. Originally I was looking for a larger scale content management system for my site, Junetech, and was using either PostNuke or PHP-Nuke, and the initial version of Junecode existed as a customized and striped down fork or which ever one of those I was using at the time. Due to it only existing on my shared web host at the time, when Junetech shutdown at that time, away went was was then Junecode.

Over time Junecode was the name I attached to the idea of a blogging system I would write, but never got around too. Finally a couple of months ago, I sat down for a weekend and threw together a minimalist blog system in PHP/MySQL, mostly to brush up on my PHP and MySQL, but I’ve decided to upload it to the long empty Junecode site on SourceForge. The project is here.

And now for a new project, Articulation. It is a GUI for Concordance to program Harmony remotes. Initially it was just going to be the current Congruity GUI with a way web rendered directly itegrated to give an experiance closer to that of the regular Logitech version. I’ve since decided to do the GUI in native GTK+ instead of wxWidgets, so I’m in the middle of a rewrite of Congruity to GTK+, then I’ll worry about the web part.

It seems like every time you try to do something nice on the internet, some has to come along and mess it up. A few members of one of my favorite sites, reddit.com, decided to organize a secret Santa gift exchange. They did and amazing job at building a new site(redditgifts.com) and organizing everything from the ground up and in the beginning everything was happiness and unicorn farts. In fact, things were going to so well, the secretsanta sub-reddit was turning into a nauseating circlejerk. It was Christmas time on reddit. Now there have been hiccups such as people getting crappy gifts or some people not sending, but that’s to be expected with a gift exchange among strangers of this size(around 5000 or so I believe). The problem was with how the organizers dealt with deadbeat santas and the inherit nature of recipe combined to create a disaster.

I should probably back up just bit and explain reddit to those of you unfamiliar with it before moving on. Reddit is a site composed of user submitted links and discussions where users get to up vote or down vote comments or post, similar to other popular sites such as digg.com. A majority of the time this leads to great results with the best posts and comments floating to the top, but these sites have an ugly side. You’ve probably heard the quote “with great power comes great responsibility”, and on reddit, users have more power than on most sites, but not all of them handle that responsibility well. This is where the secret Santa naughty list comes back into play. The way the organizers decided to deal with the bad santas that didn’t send a gift was to make a list with their reddit users names and a link back to their profiles. I don’t really have a problem with a hall of shame of sorts, but it’s the link back the profile that caused the issues. Sure if you have the username, it’s not overly difficult to see that users profile, but most people aren’t going to make any effort above clicking on a link. So the link it there and someone clicks through to the profile and sees all that user’s comments with that down vote button. This is where things break down for that portion of people who can’t handle the responsibility. They start down voting every thing that user has ever posted, despite the content not being relevant to the whole secret santa thing, and when you put that in front of a couple of thousand eyes and that ten percent that can’t really handle the responsibility, well you can probably guess the rest. The “bad santa’s” posts for the last couple of weeks, that had nothing to do with the secret santa, were effectively censored from the whole of reddit. Basically trolling is fought with more trolling and things just get made worse. Heck, I posted an opinion that this probably isn’t the best way to do things and my account attacked in the same manner, though to a lesser extent. Don’t you dare question the hive mind.

I wish I could leave it here that a secret santa on a user moderated site went a little awry and everyone learned from the mistakes, but unfortunately there is another little wrinkle to the story. While a more extensive “bad santa” list was planned for the coming days, it was launched with just a single name, exposing that single user to the ire of a lot of people all alone. This is where the organizers lose a bit of their credibility to just say “oops, we didn’t handle that well, better luck next time”.

I refer to this thread here for a little back story of what happened. The user is Bootled and the organizer is kickme444. In case any thing gets deleted, here are their comments on the matter.

Bootled:

I told them early that I have less money than I expected when I signed up. I also told them I was getting h0lylag a gift, albeit late and cheap. I might also have gotten pissed and said some mean things to whoever emailed me.

Fair enough, and here’s what kickme444 had to say on the matter:

This is the only response I will make about this. After I told bootled that he needed to live up to his end of the bargain, that the person who bought him a gift went above and beyond and he needed to figure out how to do this, this was his response to me:

“Fuck you asshole! Do you think that if I knew my bank was about to screw me over royally I have signed up? I’m buying [name taken out] a box of condoms when I can afford it. It’s not much, but I can’t even afford to get my family members christmas gifts. In short, fuck you.”

After this, I sent him this email:

“you are the irresponsible one here, your name will be going on the public list of people who couldn’t live up to their end of the bargain.”

his response was:

“Sweet. Now fuck off.”

Ok now, to me, it is not enough to say, i may send my giftee something at some point, especially when you have just told me that you can’t send something. If bootled would like to tell me, i’ve changed my mind, I am indeed sending something, I will gladly remove them. Its pretty easy, I do not want this list to exist, at all.

Now Bootled mentioned that he said some very nice and kickme444 confirms that. Bootled didn’t handle things well, but it’s not a one sided story. Instead of being the bigger man and just adding Bootled on to the list as a whole and releasing his name along with everyone elses, it would appear that kickme444 got offended by Bootled and released the list with just his name in it with other names being added Monday. This also wasn’t a simple case of them being in the middle of posting names when others stumbled upon it. No, he made the list with the one name and announced it in a post that list was up.

The good news in all this mess is that kickme444 has taken down the list and so far doesn’t appear to be putting up a new one. If was a fun experiment before it turned ungly, but I don’t think reddit or other similar communities are built for secret santa. Best to keep it with close groups of friends of smaller communities.

Just testing the WordPress app for BlackBerry.

Today I got my Windows 7 Party Pack in the mail. Yes, for the same goofy launch parties in the videos, but what the hell, it’s a free copy of Windown 7 Ultimate, which should be a nice upgrade from the copy of Windows Vista business I got for watching some developer videos at its launch.

Instead of inluding things really needed at a party like food and beer, Microsoft seems to have have just gone with the lame end of party supplies and thrown in some streamers, ballons, napkins, a card board “center piece” and a big poster. For activites, they have thrown in a puzzle and a deck of playing cards, which makes the lack of alcohol even more puzzling since copius amounts would be required to make either of those much fun at at party.

And what will the guests bring home? About half a dozen small cards with advertisments/coupons and a large bag to take them home in. So it’s probably best not to tell your guests what they’ll be getting before the come to the party.

Of course I took a few pictures of all this(also first test of the camera on my new BB Tour). Later on tonight I’ll probably install Windows 7 and should have a review up soon(right after my reviews of my E71, Ubuntu 9.04, the Pre, and my Tour).

In order to make myself a more well rounded job candidate and ensure that my resume is accurate, I’ve been refreshing my knowledge of some programming stuff I used to do. This weekend I started off slow with some web programming involving so PHP, but mostly focused on MySQL. It was actually kind of nice to get back into it, though I didn’t actually get too far into the project I want to do. Mostly I reviewed some PHP and MySQL books, writing some small code snippets, but nothing big or interconnected yet. Luckily I finished an online JavaScript class recently, so that was a nice JS and HTML refresher.

Once I feel comfortable with the web stuff, I’m moving on to Python, and I’ll probably throw in some Perl. Luckily these are the one’s I’m most up to date on since they’re a little more used in my day to day Linux use. After that, I think I might put off the Android development and go for some .NET/C# stuff since it’s probably more marketable, and the Android stuff is more for fun. Hopefully by the end of the week I’ll have some code to post.

A couple of weeks ago, I officially decided to get out of the Air Force. So that means I’m looking for a job. Right now I’m looking in Kentucky(but not closer than 100 miles from Cincinnati), Tennessee, and the Carolinas, with most of my energy focused on the Carolinas. I’m really hoping to find something in the Raleigh or Research Triangle Area of NC since it seems to be such a great place to live and work, though I’m not limiting myself at this point. One up side of being an IT guy is that I can pretty much work anywhere with computers, which is just about everywhere these days.  I’d appreciate any advice, leads, or any help at all. My resume is here.

So far the biggest problem I’m finding is that while I feel I’m qualified for a great many jobs, I’m having trouble “proving it”, mostly when it comes to Linux admin jobs. I use Linux at home all the time, there aren’t even any Windows machines in my house, and have years of experience using it, but unfortunately my professional work in the Air Force has been almost all Windows. While I will work as a Windows admin(servers, I don’t really want to do PC support anymore), I would really like a shot at Linux. Just for my own purposes of brushing up on things in case I do get a Linux job, I’ll be setting up a new backup server this weekend, and I’m probably going with CentOS for no other reason that it being mostly Red Hat.

I’ve also pretty much decided to stop working on what will probably be a mostly worthless online degree. Instead, I’m going to take this opportunity to flex my long dormant programming muscles. I’ve got a few projects planned over the next few months. One that I’m most excited about kind of goes back to my beginnings. My first programing project was a picture view written in Visual Basic. While it wasn’t much to look at, I was still proud of it. This new project will go just above picture viewer into some organizing territory, and this time it will be written in Python/GTK+ and targeted at Linux. While I’m writing it as more of a programming exercise and am not aiming for anything close to iPhoto or Picasa right away, I do hope I stick with it as a long term project.

That will cover some Python and desktop programming warm ups, but another area that I’m not as rusty in, but still need some refreshing is web development. What I want to do with this is just a little recipe database for use inside my home network. With it I’ll be brushing up on my PHP, HTML, JavaScript(maybe some AJAXy stuff), and especially MySQL(I really need to work on my database programming). If I get right to it and don’t get too distracted, this could easily be a weekend project, but I don’t see myself getting that much free time.

Finally, I plan to branch out into something new, mobile development. This one is the most distant, and most subject to being forgotten about. I don’t even know exactly what type of program I want to write yet, but I do want to do a little bit of Android programming. I also need the Java practice since it’s one of those things I’ve learned in school, but never actually put into practice outside of the assignments in class. Overall I think they are some solid projects and small enough in scale to make them quite attainable, assuming I can just find the spare time.

In the latest builds of the testing version of the next version of Ubuntu, the Ubuntu team has made a slight misstep by making the Google search bar default to a custom Ubuntu start page. As far as I’m concerned, Ubuntu adding its own custom search to default search bar from ad revenue is perfectly acceptable. In fact, if I were to make my own distro, I would likely do something similar. The only real problem is that they are replacing Google with their own custom search. Even if it is based on Google, it should clearly be branded as Ubuntu search, with a “clean” Google still available. Just make it easier to opt-out, that’s all that’s needed, though I would prefer they go even further and offer search options on first run with the Ubuntu search as the default.