RSS 2.0 and Dave

Initial impressions of the RSS 2.0 news: Bravisimo. Heart-Warming. Rock.

Politically Incorrect

I've been told that the following paragraph, censored from one of my latest bits of writing, is "politically incorrect" and "not humorous". Well, sheesh!

This isn't security like in software downloads, where you concern yourself with viruses or trojans or pirated registrations. Where there you worry about the Post Office lacing anthrax, web server security is like leaving a note that says, "My wife is already tied. Be back in two hours. I'll ring twice." In a word, you're politely inviting the bad guys in via the front door.

On a side note, soaking your ass in warm water works wonders.

What Players Really Want

From Gamegrene.com:

As a gamemaster, your most important job is keeping the players happy. There are mundane reasons for this: if you don't have happy players, soon you won't have players at all. Ultimately you want to keep the players happy because roleplaying is a recreational activity; whether you're telling a good story or presenting difficult tactical problems, the point is to have fun. (Maastrictian) Read more from this post.

Zelda Tilts Her Head Quizzically

Link dumping ground:

Loch Ness Monster Found

The Loch Ness Monster, or rather, it's remains, have been "found" (registration required at news24.com, though I've snippeted most of it below):

Gerald McSorley, 67, found the fossilised remains of a long-necked, carnivorous sea reptile, which existed 150 million years ago, while walking along the shoreline. McSorley had stumbled on four perfectly preserved vertebrae of a plesiosaur - the prehistoric creature most commonly associated with modern "Nessie" sightings. The fossil, which is set in grey limestone, complete with spinal chord and blood vessels, was found in shallow water, and scientists at the National Museum in Scotland confirmed the fossil - the first of its kind to be found at Loch Ness - proved that a 10 metre "monster" once lived in the area.

Is There A Doctor In The House?

If anyone has had experience with anus/anal/rectum pain, email or IM me - I'd be interested in talking with you. I suspect I've an anal fissure, but this pain has lasted since Friday (as opposed to "hours"), so I'm not 100% convinced (or, in a word, relieved). Note: I've no health insurance, nor have I ever had a doctor or physician, so admonitions to go see one will be ignored. Suggestions to move to Canada will, however, be knowingly chuckled at.

And yes, I'm serious.

(Take that naysayers of "I shall no longer take chances on my blog" or "Waaah, I can't say personal things cos people will find out!" or "Ohhh nooOoOo, I put some info up on the web that I regret, and now... now... now, someone has archived it! How disrespectful!")

Crafting The System

From Gamegrene.com:

A large part of role-playing is creativity. People have a desire to build, to create, and gaming with friends offers various outlets of this drive. Game masters produce entire worlds for players to exist in. Players in turn, establish roles and enrich this newly established existence. The ultimate innovation, however, comes in designing a set of rules for this universe to subsist in. While the majority of people use one of the many systems available, others have a passion to create one of their own. (anablepophobia) Read more from this post.

Open Source Precursors

One of the projects I've worked on recently approached me concerning open sourcing the code I'd written (always a happy start to my day). He opened up with "we have a system and other $businesses don't, but might want it" and continued on with what it might entail, the process of doing so, etc. As I did with my response to a friend concerning technical documentation, here's what I sent him back:

Your first comment is the most crucial one, and determines the fate of the project, really: if people don't want the code, then a lot of work would be wasted getting it into a place that'd make it usable. Do $businesses even want the code? Have you asked? Have you checked other sites and seen what they're using already? Do they have features that our current backend doesn't? What are their technical capabilities? Can they even run our code?

The next most important question: what does $yourcompany get out of this? Are you prepared to answer tech support questions from other $businesses? Prepared to discuss design issues on why you did things this way, and not that? Prepared to say "welp, I can put that feature on the todo list, but since we're never going to use it at $yourcompany, I doubt it'll be anytime soon." What happens if someone uses your code, and it magically deletes all their data? What are you going to say to the people who don't have proper backups?

Are you prepared for the open source community to look at your code, discover some huge security hole, publicize it on heavily-read security lists without telling you, and then scramble to implement a fix before the hordes of script kiddies come knocking? There are certain rules of ethics in reporting security vulnerabilities, but you inevitably get the idiots who find it more important to announce how smart THEY are before they give you a chance to prove how smart YOU are.

The above are all questions that need to be addressed. I'm a huuUuge fan of open source, and I need to protect against the common suffrages:

  • lack of usability ("here's the code, there's no docs, whee!")
  • lack of support ("here's the code, i'm in Maui, whee!").
  • lack of forethought ("well, i thought i was doing the 'right thing' by making it open source, i mean, that's the new wave, right? how can something so good require forethought?")
  • lack of community (where can people talk about your project? how can they announce their changes, code tweaks, problems? where can they report bugs?, how do you announce updates?).
  • lack of development (releasing code is nice and all, but if it's just gonna sit there and stagnant, it may not be the most ideal. if you DO just want to release one version of code, and let be what may, then you can ignore the support or community aspects: open source projects that never update are often ignored for being "out of date", whatever that means).

From an implementation standpoint, there are a few things I'd suggest need to be done before announcing, or offering the code to other people:

  • solve "lack of usability". I know the code, you know the implementation. "documentation" consists of you asking me a question, and me writing up some insanely long email like this. before the code would be usable, documentation would have to be written, covering areas of database layout, how to administer, how to customize the templates, how to install the project, how to implement a database backup system, etc.
  • solve "lack of usability". currently, the templates all look like $yourcompany, they're tweaked for $yourcompany, blah blah blah. to give people a good base to start off with, attractive and anonymous default templates would need to be created, that they can customize at their leisure.
  • solve "lack of usability". the database is currently PostgreSQL. as we've discussed in the past, it's probably a better solution to make the default database MySQL. from the standpoint of new users, MySQL is more widely implemented on generic webhosts than PostgreSQL is.
  • solve "lack of support and community". create a project over at sourceforge.net, with mailing lists, bug trackers, etc., etc. while you won't know if the code is a "hit" for awhile, and the features could lay dormant, you don't want to stymie early adopters by not having an outlet.

Thoughts?

OS X Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning time in OS X software-land:

Mini-Milestone #BLAH!

My next secret project, a book, is missing deadlines. I am beginning to worry.

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