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jueves, marzo 02, 2006

This lent, it looks like I'm giving up the car

This Lent, it looks like I'm giving up the car. No, I haven't darkened the halls of a Catholic Church for nearly two years (I will only do so if I go to mass with a someone; a vow I made two years ago is that if God wants me to go to Mass, He'll set it up so I go with that particular person). However, yesterday, on Ash Wednesday, I had a minor fender bender in a parking garage which makes it impossible for me to open up the driver's side door.

I didn't even know yesterday was Ash Wednesday until this morning, when I got an email about Ash Wednesday from one of my Catholic friends.

Very fitting, that. I've been telling myself that I really need to give up the car and start bicycling to work. Well, since the car will be in the shop, and since I can't afford to rent a car, that is exactly what is going to happen.

Argh.

- Sam

10:52

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martes, febrero 07, 2006

Prediction: Duke Nukem Forever will come out before Wikipedia 1.0

I mentioned Wikipedia 1.0 in a previous blog entry.  I make the following prediction:

Duke Nukem Forever will come out before Wikipedia 1.0 comes out.

OK, some background.  Duke Nukem Forever was a game announced back in 1997 or so.  It never came out.  It topped Wired's 2005 vaporware list.  However, it will still come out long before Wikipedia 1.0 comes out.

I say this because Duke Nukem Forever is actually in production.  Supposibly.  Wikipedia 1.0, on the other hand, is just yet another thing people are having endless pointless discussions about on the Wiki, just as they discuss everything endlessly there.

04:06

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lunes, febrero 06, 2006

Why I left Slashdot

I left Slashdot for pretty much the same reason I left Wikipedia: A culture that tolerates incivility and rudeness, and a culture that is more interested in debate for debate's sake instead of accomplishing anything.
My last non-Anonymous post to Slashdot was in response to the following:

I take it you were dropped on your head as a small child.
And was as follows:
Just to let you know, I feel that comments like this are very inappropriate to say to anyone, either on-line or off-line. This is a very nasty personal insult; I have been to schools where this kind of language would not be allowed (it is "fighting language"; language which angers someone enough to start a fight in the real world).
As a result, I have placed you on my foes list. If you wish to be taken off of my foes list, please apologize to the person you have personally insulted, and mail me proof that you have done so.

You are free to continue using this kind of language, of course, but people will respect you less and your karma will undoubtably suffer.

The result? The original very rude comment was moderated up as a good comment, and my comment was moderated down as being "offtopic". The message was clear: If you act like a jerk and attack someone, slashdot moderators will think you are being funny. If you tell someone they are being uncivil, slashdot moderators care so little about civility that they will moderare you down.

That was nearly three years ago and the last time that I ever posted non-Anonymously to Slashdot; while I did later post anonymously (with posts that got moderated up all the way to five from zero to boot), I stopped even posting anonymously once Sean pointed out Digg to me here on Myspace.

Life is too short to be involved in communities that not only tolerate, but downright encourage rudeness.

12:22

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domingo, febrero 05, 2006

How to practice Spanish in California

Know a little Spanish, but need to practice it? Afraid to use Spanish in public? This is one exercise which may work:
Go to your local taqueria/burrito joint where the person taking orders looks latino. Order whatever it is you want to eat--in Spanish. It's really easy once you overcome your fear:

"A mi me gustaria tener" (I would like to have).

At this point, just name what you want; use the name on the menu (which will usually be the Spanish name for what it is you're going to eat).

Always place "por favor" at the end of your request; "por favor" and "gracias" are the most important Spanish phrases to know.

If you freeze up, just switch to English or ask the lady in English how to say what it is you want in Spanish. They'll be very delighted that you are learning Spanish and will be very helpful.

For example, let us suppose you want a Carne Asada burrito:

"A mi me gustaria tener un burrito de carne asada, por favor"

or even

"A mi me gustaria tener un carne asada burrito, por favor". This isn't technically correct Spanish, but the person taking your order will understand you perfectly.

Once you get your food, say "gracias".
Don't worry about being correct. The point of a language is to communicate information, not to be 100 percent correct in your grammar.
(Postscript: Myspace doesn't allow any accented characters in blog entries; it's becoming more and more time to move my blog elsewhere)

03:09

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sábado, febrero 04, 2006

Wikipedia founder on what's wrong with the Wikipedia

In some private emails to my friend Expat-leo (on my top 8 here), I expressed some of my frustration with the Wikipedia. In very blunt terms, I told Expat that, when a community tolerates unpleasant people, the community will attract unpleasant people and repel everyone else. Wikipedia has fallen in to this trap. Larry Sanger, one of the Wikipedia founders, expressed it well on Kuro5hin:

I stopped participating in Wikipedia when funding for my position ran out. That does not mean that I am merely mercenary; I might have continued to participate, were it not for a certain poisonous social or political atmosphere in the project.

There are many ways to explain this problem, and I will start with just one. Far too much credence and respect accorded to people who in other Internet contexts would be labelled "trolls." There is a certain mindset associated with unmoderated Usenet groups and mailing lists that infects the collectively-managed Wikipedia project: if you react strongly to trolling, that reflects poorly on you, not (necessarily) on the troll. If you attempt to take trolls to task or demand that something be done about constant disruption by trollish behavior, the other listmembers will cry "censorship," attack you, and even come to the defense of the troll. This drama has played out thousands of times over the years on unmoderated Internet groups, and since about the fall of 2001 on the unmoderated Wikipedia.

[...]

A few of the project's participants can be, not to put a nice word on it, pretty nasty. And this is tolerated. So, for any person who can and wants to work politely with well-meaning, rational, reasonably well-informed people--which is to say, to be sure, most people working on Wikipedia--the constant fighting can be so off-putting as to drive them away from the project. This explains why I am gone; it also explains why many others, including some extremely knowledgeable and helpful people, have left the project.

Larry Sanger expressed far better than I could exactly what is wrong with the Wikipedia, what is wrong with Slashdot, and what was wrong with Usenet. This is one of the major reasons I left. Another one is that Wiki has certain political and religious viewpoints which are too strong to have as part of an Encyclopedia; people who try to be moderate are shouted down. See, for example this article (click on the "discussion" tab).

Wikipedia needs to fundamentally change before it can become a respectable encyclopedia. I do not think these changes will ever happen.

03:10

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sábado, febrero 04, 2006

How I used to perceive Spanish

When I was a kid, I used to perceive Spanish as having the same grammar rules that English has, but just having different words. I thought English's grammar was somehow a universal grammar and that all languages had the same grammar.

This perception ended when I was given the following sentences in my first Spanish class:

Juan mira la television
Which translates to "John watches the television". Then, the teacher showed us how to ask whether John's watching TV:

Mira Juan la television
This completely threw me off; the word-by-word translation is "Watches John the television" which is not grammatical in English. My first reaction was to insist that Spanish used a form like the English "Does John watch the television?", and I just had to learn the word for "does". I even asked my father this; he explained that Spanish had no such thing; all you did was invert the verb and noun to make a statement a question.

Once I passed this hurdle, learning negation was easy. In English, we have the complicated "John does not watch the television". In Spanish, it's simply "Juan no mira la television"--word for word "John no watches the television".

- Sam

P.S. In Mexican Spanish, you actually say "Juan ve la television", but I think the teacher chose mirar because she's from Spain and because "mirar" is a regular verb ("ver" isn't).

P.P.S. I'm placing this under Travel and Places because one generally travels to go to a place where people speak a foreign language. In my case, I only have to travel to work or travel my dial across the radio spectrum to find Spanish.

01:53

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jueves, febrero 02, 2006

I'm leaving Wikipedia

Emoticón actual:  enfadado/a

Note: This is a copy of a statement which I today posted on the Wikipedia.

I'm on Wikivacation until I can get all of my 2006 New Year's resolutions done

Wikipedia has stopped being fun for me to edit. Wikipedia used to be a place where there were a significant number of articles one would want to have in an Encyclopedia that were not written yet. No longer. Wikipedia has articles on just about anything anyone would want to learn, and a zillion articles on things that people probably don't want to learn about.

Instead of working on improving the articles that Wikipedia has, the emphasis seems to be on having more and more articles about more and more trivial subjects. Do we really need articles on every single Micronation that may have been mentioned by the press out there? Do we really need articles about every single Star Trek episode that do nothing more than to spoil the plot of the episode in question? An article on a TV episode should be about information which can't be obtained just by watching the episode. To name just one example, the article on The City on the Edge of Forever (TOS episode) should only describe the plot in broad terms, and discuss Ellison's and Roddenberry's conflict over the episode's plot.

Do we really need to have the math-related articles be written in a manner which an average intelligent English speaker can not readily understand?

Wikipedia seems to be focused on getting 1,000,000 articles out there instead of focusing on making 10,000 quality articles. There have been many examples where some obscure Wikipedia article has clearly false information in it and the editors did nothing about it; the famous example of John Seigenthaler being falsely accused of being involved with the Kennedy assassination comes to mind. [1] As a lesser example, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones article was out of date for a couple of months while I was on Wikivacation working on MaraDNS.

Wikipedia reminds me of one of those 1990s MUSHes where the world has a zillion abandoned locations and only a few locations with actual users. Only controversial articles get regularily edited; other articles are left abandoned and suspectible to subtle vandalism.

My other frustration with Wikipedia is its community. The editors of Wikipedia, by and large, are castaways from Usenet; many of the problems the Usenet community had are manifest here: Flame wars spinning out of control, insenitivity to people's feelings, pissing contests (with nearly 1,000,000 articles, you'd think Wiki would have one on Pissing contest), and other behavior which makes Wikipedia an unpleasant place to edit. Now that the articles on just about anything someone may wish to look up have been written, Wikipedia is left with nothing to do but argue endlessly on the articles which are already in place. Since Wikipedia doesn't have a reasonable way to resolve conflicts, Wikipedia is going the way of Usenet. (Let me confess that I myself have been guilty of all of this behavior.)

If Wikipedia is serious about being an encyclopedia that people will respect, I would like to see something come out of Wikipedia:1.0. Until Wikipedia is willing to have the basic quality assurance that a piece of software has, I don't think Wikipedia should call itself an encyclopedia. A knowledge base that is as unreliable as often as reliable, maybe, but not what I would call an encyclopedia. For Wikipedia to be a true encyclopedia, about 95 percent of the articles would need to be deleted so that there are a reasonably small number of articles which can actually be actively maintained.

Wikipedia isn't fun any more. Life is too short for me to waste time with things that aren't on the balance fun. I really wish Google would stop giving Wiki articles such high page rank (Actually, Google has degenerated a lot since its peak in 2002 or 2003, but that's another blog for another day).

I'm on Wikivacation. The only articles which I will edit will be ones I will edit without logging in: MaraDNS (to update the number of the stable release whenever I release a new stable release) and my user talk pages to reply to people who leave messages here (to tell people I'm on wiki-vacation and to email me if they have something to tell me).
I will come back from Wikivacation when either I accomplish all of my 2006 New Year's resolutions, or when Wikipedia:1.0 is actually released.

12:53

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miércoles, febrero 01, 2006

Reality distortion fields

There are a number of what I call reality distortion fields out there. This is when there is some loud-spoken minority believes has some viewpoint which plain simply does not match up to reality. Let me give you some examples:

Linux is better than Windows

This is a view point which has existed since the mid-1990s, back when the internet was Usenet and not the web. Linux certaintly is better than Windows--if a Unix-like environment is what you are seeking. I learned UNIX, so Linux certaintly was better than Windows for my tastes. But, for people who liked using graphical applications, Linux was light years behind Windows 95.

It was amazing how people would try and argue that a secretary could be productive using TeX instead of Microsoft Word. It got so bad that, at one point, a Linux advocacy howto specifically told people to not tell people that end users would prefer TeX over Microsoft Word.

There really isn't a greenhouse effect

This one is popular among conservatives. This ignores the following objective facts:

Carbon dioxide will cause an atmosphere to increase in tempature

There is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now than in any time in the planet's history

The average temapture of the earth is the highest it has been for 10,000 years.

Basically, people don't want to take responsibility for the environment.

Concealed carry laws decrease crime

Gun-toting advocates love this one. Anytime there is a statistic which supports this assertion, gun-toting advocates go crazy and talk about it left and right. Every time there is a statistic which goes against this assertion, the gun-toting adovocates either ignore the statistic, or go on about how statistics are biased.

Any attempt erase a flame is censorship

The anti-"censorship" people are about as extreme as the groups I have listed above. Basically, these people are the kind that feel that not having pornography in the Wikipedia is somehow censorship. They think that erasing trolls and flamebait on public forums is somehow censorship (somehow, erasing spam isn't censorship).

Censorship is not me deleting some flame in my blog comments. Censorship has a very particular meaning: It means the government making a particular expression illegal.

Anyway, that's enough reality distortion fields for today. Basically, groups get together and come up with the most crazy ideas which the rest of the world reacts to by shaking their head in disbelief.

13:17

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miércoles, enero 18, 2006

New Orleans mayor: Hurricane was divine punishment

Today, the New Orleans mayor said that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment, for us invading Iraq and for black people not taking good enough care of their family.  He is not the first person to say this.  When the hurricane was happening, my lovely friend Michelle told me that the hurricane was a punishment for our country invading Iraq.

One minor technical problem with Michelle's (and, likewise, the maor of New Orleans) explanation.  About two months after Katrina, a hurricane hit Mexico causing some serious damage.  I should call up Michelle and ask her what Mexico did wrong to get hit by this nasty hurricane.

As an aside, this article is not an endorsment of our invasion of Iraq.  However, we don't need a hurricane as retalitation.  The number of US soldiers being killed in Iraq, the very high cost of a war which we are not winning, and the president's drop in popularity are consequences of this invasion.

10:43

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martes, enero 10, 2006

Cool web sites

OK, instead of posting bloggies griping about Slashdot (yesterday's gripe was my second anti-Slashdot gripe), I think it is more productive for me to post a bloggie about some cool web sites out there. First, the cool web sites that are constantly updated:

World Socialist Web Site. A very left-of-center website which describes current events all across the world (Leo, before strangling me alive, look at the following link)...

Jerry Pournelle's mail bag. Jerry Pournelle is a science fiction writer who has also written some excellent non-fiction. Pournelle is right of center; for example, he invented the 1980s "Star Wars" program. He gets a lot of (usually conservative) mail from a lot of very intelligent people.

Some community blogs suggested by Sean: Digg (50 cent review: You get too many "that sucks" trollers in the comments), Metafilter (50 cent review: Left-of-center; anti-right-wing flames in comments), and Link filter (50 cent review: Looks like a real grab bag of interesting links).

For people who like role playing games, I found an interesting (albeit static) site here (warning: Takes a while to render in Firefox; demonstrating the infamous "Firefox freezes while rendering a large page" bug).

As an aside, if you want to get Jonn Serrie (a composer of some excellent relaxing music), his Miramar-era music is only available used (the label is, alas, no more). Buyer beware: Miramar cut some corners in the pressing of their CDs, resulting in a high defect rate; check the return policy before buying a used Serrie CD.

(Correction 2006/01/14: Serrie's entire back catalog is available at New World Music)

Actualmente escuchando:
Flightpath
Por: Jonn Serrie
Fecha de publicación: 01 July, 1991

13:08

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