I remain a big fan of the notion of animated maps as a teaching aide to history. Here’s a nice one of North America post Columbus:
Non-Native-American-Nations-Territorial-Claims-over-NAFTA-countries-1750-2008.gif
An old blog by now, but I’m slow.
I like reading this: http://geekfeminism.org/2009/11/29/questioning-the-merit-of-meritocracy/ - being in the male, white, English as first language, degree holding camp, it’s still valuable. We can be self-effacing too. It was very noticeable to me that I had to change my style of doing things once I was doing computing as a job, and once I got more involved at Apache. Of the two I’ve not found Open Source to require more pushiness, but I have found it easier to be pushy there (online decouples things). That led to a bit of burn out online, while in the dayjob I have to remind myself in things like self performance reviews to think about selling myself instead of always critiquing myself.
So agreed - we don’t have meritocracies. We aim for meritocracies, but all too often they become shoutocracies.
Two licenses that attempt to formalize putting something in the ‘public domain’:
Welcome to the next frontier of license proliferation.
Noticing that AtlasCamp is on in a couple of weeks (blog announcement). Typical Aussies have found somewhere to surf while they’re up in the US 
JIRA 4.0 also appears to be out. Looking at the June Atlassian Summit presentation, it looks like the major topics are JQL (do more interesting searches), Gadgets (aka AJAX based portlets by the look of it and the 4.0 install I did the other week), Actions from the Issue Navigator (hopefully pluggable actions too, and a new Browse Project HUD that may or may not be anything to write home about.
I’m looking forward to both using and updating my plugins for the new Gadget world. I also keep meaning to write a pair of Issue actions to move a project up or down a version.
There’s probably a better way, but thought I’d share a quick hacked up script I created to take an SVN changelog and filter out revisions that I didn’t want there. I used it while merging Commons Collections generics branch into trunk to create specific submit messages showing the bugs fixed on each file in its commit message. I filtered out the common and not interesting revisions for fixing tabs, or my shifting of the license header so the merging went easier.
# ARGV contains a list of filters to ignore
# stdin contains a file
svn_separator = "------------------------------------------------------------------------n";
entries = $stdin.read.split(svn_separator);
ARGV.each do |revision|
match = "^r#{revision}"
entries = entries.select do |entry|
entry !~ /#{revision}/
end
end
if(entries.length > 1) then
puts entries.join(svn_separator);
puts svn_separator
end
The comments to this make for very interesting reading:
Ugandan king ‘not backing down’
First instinct: Yikes, things getting scary in Uganda.
Second instinct: Of course it’s the Internet, so untrusted sources are taken with a pinch of salt.
Third instinct: Yet the crowd can be trusted to self-manage; ie) the comments have a common message to them rather than a typical zealot/flamewar.
Fourth instinct: But there is an editor, so a series of conflicting messages can be massaged into a common message.
So it comes down to whether I trust the BBC to edit. I largely trust the BBC (more than others anyway) to report without bias. Why do I find myself not immediately applying that to the editing? Odd.
Summary: Yikes, looks like things are getting scary in Uganda.
(From mailing list email)
Thought I’d share the status of Lang 3.0.
Ideally… March 2010 would be a great time to see 3.0 come out.
I’ve started moving some issues to 3.x that don’t have anything actionable. Things like “Maybe add a RegexUtils?” etc. Basically ideas.
There’s one JDK 1.6 dependent issue in there. WIth a circa March 2010 release, I think that’s a fine dependency given that 1.5 goes end of life in Nov 2008.
There are a good range of simple and complex issues in there to work on.
Noticed Ben Hyde linking to Wordle.
Stupid dumb licensing statement of the day from the Wordle site:
May I make money off of Wordle images?
Yes. The images created by the Wordle application are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license
A tool. That I put input in to. Whose owner claims ownership of the output of the tool by determining the licensing. That’s evil.
Of course he does state before that:
May I use my Wordles for…
Yes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use in any way you choose. (snip…)
So they’re mine to use in any way I choose… but he defines the license. Of course… it sounds like what I have to do is provide attribution to myself (obviously not the intent… but if I own it and have to use that license…hmm).
I can only assume it’s the font. Which is an interesting question that I was pondering idly the other day; font licensing. If I print up a lorum ipsem etc in a particular font, do I own that piece of paper? Presumably it’s messy.
Effectively this is the Afferro permissive (aka badgeware) license that I pondered on a year back. Rather than existing properly, it’s surfacing in dubious application of existing licensing.
Looking for the muse to return. In vain currently.
Excellent blog entry back in April from Stephen Colebourne on No Java SE 7 - The ASF perspective. I’ve been there for much of it and found it informative myself to see the history being discussed. As it is… Sun have shown one of the great dangers of IP to a project being locked up in one (for-profit) entity (as MySQL AB had done beforehand) by being bought by Oracle and suddenly all our foundations are crumbly and jellified. I read elsewhere that the Oracle/Sun deal is on hold for four months - hopefully good news for any threatened with layoffs.
Another excellent entry (also in April… my how slow I am at reading) from James Strachan on Scala as the long term replacement for java/javac?. Groovy begetter picks Scala as successor to Java splash across the tabloid blogs near and far. Of course James is one of the greatest “shiny thing!” creators out there, so who knows what he’ll like next year 
Still. A kick in the arse to go read more on Scala.
Atlassian have their JIRA 4.0 release coming out someday and have nudged plugin authors to make sure their plugins work and maybe to think about tying their own release dates. I don’t currently have any pending work on my plugins, but do need to sit down and prod the 4.0 beta to make sure the plugins work. They probably won’t - I seem to relish in finding JIRA APIs that are going to be modified. I also need to work on Apache’s JIRA instance - I merged 3 JIRAs into the main one and there was a tiny bit of custom data mangling that I’ve still not worked out the database fu to fix. That’s blocking the Struts and ActiveMQ ones merging in and ending up on the “one true JIRA(tm)”. It really needs time to focus though… my dim sum life really doesn’t allow for that right now.
Speaking of… dim sum increments and glacial development are a process I’ve been mastering (imo) for the last few years. Add glacial administration and glacial project management to that as well. I seem to specialize in working on things that have no defined end goal, but instead they move a little bit further each increment. Often the increment is a daily event, but only 30minutes. Context switching makes that 30minutes a tricky one to maximise. Still - it’s how various Commons libraries have been released. Need to write up Glacial Development one of these days. My older name, which I probably prefer, is Tortoise Development. Amusing that I’d forgotten about that, come up with Glacial and then remembered. The tortoise doesn’t know where the milestone is, just puts one foot in front of the other and moves forward. Obviously it’s not as simple as that - for example you could end up on a life long death march if you weren’t defining forward as closer to some realizable goal. Still… probably is a life long death march
Two major code things I want to be working on right now but lack the impetus are Commons Lang 3.0 and migrating Jakarta Taglibs to Tomcat Taglibs (along with the creation of the Extended Taglib and release of a JSTL 1.2 implementation). The Taglibs migration will end my involvement with Jakarta after 8 years (probably 9 by the time I’m done). That’ll be quite the day. Really need to use that to drive me on.
We reinstated our Netflix subscription now that a bunch of movies have built up. So nights currently are spent watching the play on demand and the delivered dvd’s. Fill the time etc. Plus I’ve robbed the open source time kitty of an hour each night to clean the house. At 2:30am in the morning, said kitty is way overdrawn and in need of rescuing.
Apache Licensing/Trademark lists are also being ignored. There are others who can jump in, not a low bus count there thankfully
Waiting on the muse. Reading library books on the bus. Buying Willard Price out of print books to complete the collection that my children probably won’t care about anyway. Looking at explodingdog.com pictures. Wanting to write AA Milne type poems for the kids (not managed to achieve the blend of innocence and maturity that AA Milne manages yet) and create a maze creation bit of software for the eldest. Engaging in retail therapy at REI. Waiting on the… well, let’s be honest. It ain’t a muse. No creative spark in this here realm. Just waiting on the energy to pick up the mop and do some more open source janitorial work. Someday.
Knowing there was an increased chance of it happening didn’t make much of a difference to the shock, but having been through this before has helped us feel less lost.
In the late evening of Sunday 23rd August, our baby (Jack Owen Yandell) left the womb at the tiny age of 17.5 weeks since conception. Far too young for anything to be done about it - he was still months from being able to survive without his mother and the sudden and unexpected departure from the womb was far more than his body could handle even if he could.
For the second time I cut one my son’s umbilical cord - a world of difference in the context. The placenta came out fine, as did the-damn-IUD (you say it all in one word, deep south style). No emergency room was needed and we spent the subsequent day between doctor and hospital taking care of Carrie. Nathan and Levi both held up superbly and had a short trip to the zoo while Carrie was in surgery.
Today we took them both to the funeral home. Nathan wanted to see baby-Jack, seemed to be clear enough on the subject and did superbly. Very proud. It’s so much better to see your baby than have the absence we had with Abigail, and I’m happy that Nathan was able to have the better experience. Watching a four-year old boy carry his dead baby brother back to the undertaker has to be the most heart-wrenching thing I’ve ever experienced though. On a par with explaining to a four-year old boy that the baby he’s talked about so much over the last 2 months is gone.
The vagaries of chance swung far too much each way for this little one, and he’ll always be remembered.
