The Goldfish Chronicles

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.

Article on multi-tasking research is stunned to find out that focus-task type individuals are better at all the core constituent parts of multi-tasking:

Multitaskers bad at multitasking

Being good little scientists, they took the parts of multi-tasking (allegedly), then they split them up into separate tests because that’s how you test them. Then, when given one test at a time they were stunned that multi-taskers were no longer good at them. Erm. Way to not understand your subject.

Where was the test that asked them to do all three at the same time?

Interesting BBC article -
UK games market being ’strangled’. One of the main complaints being that the 2nd hand game market is stifling industry growth. When you buy a game, a lump of that money goes to the publisher (and various others involved). When you sell that game again, you don’t give any of it to the publisher (and cronies).

Not content with steadily rising prices in the gaming arms race (much like the TV and music arms races of throwing more and more money at each release and using that black hole to justify whining… in fact much like top tier football transfers), creators of games are being nice and honest that they’re looking forward to digital distribution when selling on a game won’t be possible. Of course they’ll also then complain when the consumer base reacts to increasingly being milked of their incomes and turns increasingly to piracy.

This pattern of moving from ownership to licensing seems to be everywhere… there must be a whole economic theory around it if only I knew the write name.

The theory of spending more and more money and taking on more and more risk to increase your share of a relatively constant pool of wealth; and then justifying attempts to give less and less value for that wealth and making the transfer of value a temporary thing with the need to spend more and more money. “Movies are so expensive to make nowadays, we can’t let you ‘own’ them”. “Surviving in the Premier League costs more and more each year”. “Games aren’t cheap you know”. “We have to charge full price for that 1960s classic because… erm…remastered….erm…cost of…you’ll pay it like the dumb eyeballs you are”.

Wonder what the games industry thinks of my kids spending more of their time playing DOS games than the latest PS3 or XBox2 ‘megahits’. Hopefully they’ll honestly look forward to the death of the PC and it being harder to put together a game, or upload it to WiiWare.

Via my contribution report plugin for JIRA, I see that Apache Commons Lang has been the work of 337 JIRA users, working on 519 issues, with 445 patches and 2,307 comments.

From: http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009/public/schedule/detail/10152

“The first 60 attendees will receive their very own unlocked Nokia 5800 device.”

I’m sure most people read blogs through RSS nowadays, I know I generally do, but the ‘homepage’ is still something that one likes to play with and craft. Eirik Bjørsnøs has kindly given me permission to copy a bit of his code from the excellent svnsearch.org and now I have a compressed calendar widget to show 7 years worth of blogging, rather than the exceedingly long list of months that the system provided. I need to get the mouseovers back, but I’m liking it.

Irritated at Open Source software that doesn’t use standard licensing but instead picks and chooses from other licenses. A huge amount of the value in Open Source licensing is not in the text of the licenses themselves. Great - it’s a free use agreement. It’s in the fact that we’ve got a standards body and a set of standard accepted licenses. Suddenly you can start to have standard use definitions rather than having to look at every license as if it is unique.

If you go and play expert by editing license texts, you’re not longer using a standard and half of the value of Open Source is lost.

Last Monday Carrie made a doctors appt because she’d been feeling run down and ill for a while. It was beginning to seem familiar, so she went straight to the specific doctor in question. No… no way, but let’s be sure… oh look, there it is. About 7 weeks. And there’s the device that was meant to stop this happening over there in the corner.

An appt for a better look then occurred. Bigger than 7, let’s say 10 weeks. And look there’s the device. Let’s take it out.

Appt to remove device=. Nope, can’t get it out.

Additional appt setup to remove device with some fantastic voyage camera work. Nope, can’t get it out.

So here we are. 11 weeks in and a high risk pregnancy for both mother and child. Who knows how this will go - we’ve seen enough of this that we’re avoiding getting too excited but also looking forward to another bundle of joy.

[Publishing a draft from a few months back. Internet time is lovely - in the meantime SourceForge bought Ohloh and not Google as I predicted. Given that I was predicting it would be bought by Google Code as such, I’m feeling nicely prescient here]

How the Open Space became

Nathan Yandell - Year 12 - OSS101

In the last decade, the 10s, Open Source development has undergone yet another revolution.  The bazaar has truly come of age and the last Open Source cathedrals are torn down - there are no more ‘committers’.  Looking back, it’s easy to see how we got here - the only oddity is why it took so long.

The first step was the surprising popularity of Linus Torvalds’ Git project.  Written for the now gone Linux operating system, it took off, added recognition to existing tools and was emulated by others.  It’s unlikely to cause argument to say that without Git we would not have had dSVN.

The second step came when Google having bought Ohloh, decided to donate the company to the Open Source Initiative and signed Google Code up as the first user of its shared identity pool. Sourceforge and Codeplex soon followed - eventually even the hold outs at the FSF, Mozilla, Eclipse and Apache joined the pool.

Sourceforge’s ‘branch a non-sourceforge project’ feature made a high noise but low impact entrance - but over time it built in popularity and with the other open cathedrals following suit the Open Space was born allowing projects to be copied from one repository to another.

To an outsider - our new world looked like chaos. URLs to codebases were as fleeting as your parent’s tweets. Reputations were built up and torn down, code patches danced into view only to vanish into history. More worryingly, legal arguments between projects increased. We saw amendments to the popular Open Source licenses that defined the list of licenses which may be used on a patch branch, and trademark enforcement was used to keep terrible old software from being destroyed by this week’s new up and coming patch branch.

This all changed with the release of the Creative Commons Trademark License (Swaziland). Connected to changes in trademark law in Swaziland, it allowed for trademarked brands while enforcing that product names must be openly useable. A dusty project such as Firefox saw a name change to Mozilla Iceweazel - at long last able to build on the success of its descendants. GNU Java finally gained competitors in IBM Java and Codehaus Java, which led to much confusion in the aging Java development community.

Now I can take a project, fork it and apply my official IETF Brand name by signing the product’s Ohloh certificate with my personal Ohloh brand certificate. As a member of the OpenLoonies I can also apply the certificate for the OpenLoonie brand (”The most trusted brand in Open Source”) - once I’ve had 3 +1s from other loonies. Within an hour I can release my bugfix as OpenLoonie Lucene and it can start building up its trust rating.

How people used software before the community evolved the trusted open software system - my generation will never understand.  It must have been like flying your car blind.

Reading the BBC’s article on Getting inside a downloader’s head and one of the bits that sticks out is the popular advert which points out that you wouldn’t steal a car etc, so why are you downloading a film?

The biggest miss imo is that the alternative is not answered. If I own a car, I can sell it, rent it, lend it, show it off in public, customize it, rip it apart and build a motorbike from its parts. Or at least I could - I bet that nowadays there are patents in some black box in the engine and I’m not allowed to reuse it for a different use. Anyway… when I buy a DVD (or CD or audio book) I am buying something that I don’t own, instead I am paying for a license to it. I can’t do any of the above. That’s the mind of the downloader - why do I have to buy a DVD, then go online and buy the digital version with DRM v1, then go online and buy the digital version with DRM v2, then buy the same but for the iPhone, then…. Basically if the vendor starts to milk their customer, the customer starts to find their own milk.

What’s the effect?

With music I started to listen to the CDs I had. One of these days I need to buy a tape -> mp3 converter, but they’re not cheap. Generally I feel morally right to download any song I have on tape, the claim that it was a lower tech is weak as I paid the same amount then for the tape than I would pay today for the CD (inflation included). I wouldn’t be stunned to find out that I paid more. I’ve done it for a few, but a) it’s painful to find such things (or I don’t know how) and b) I don’t have that many tapes that I care about. My new music is either a couple of new CDs at christmas (and that is the limit of the CDs I get) or the occasional download from mp3.amazon.com. Usually for the case where I like a song but not the band. The Pogues for example. Apologies to fans of that band, but after getting their best of album, I immediately disliked everything but their poppy New York song. Same for the Undertones iirc. Lots of songs that underwhelmed me, and I’d have much preferred to have spent less on the one song I liked.

Movies. I don’t buy a lot of these. Mostly it’s DVDs for the kids. The Region thing has me very pissed off. We go to the UK, they see something they like, we come back to the US and you can’t get it in Region 0 or Region 1. Goto the store and the sellers have no clue Regions even exist. Sure I can research DVDs more to find one that can be unlocked, but given that I use an XBox and am not willing to risk its clunky old hardware with my soldering attempts, I have to find some other way to get the Flumps off of the DVD. I have some DVDs that are simply bricks right now. So mind of the consumer… stop ripping me off with your Region evilness.

And let’s not mention Disney and their “It’s our copyright, but we’re not going to sell it right now because you’ll pay more in 2 years for the ultra-double-super-amazing 80th anniversary edition”. Copyright hostage taking. If something is out of print, then it should be out of copyright. Which is a nice statement and it would be interesting to see how modifications apply. If Disney release Cinderalla 2, is that enough to keep Cinderalla in copyright? Or would it be more like Star Wars: Digital Edition with ‘Han shooting second because heroes have to be whiter than white’ keeping the original Star Wars edition in copyright? When does a modification stop being a modification. Presumably that’s a “I’ll know it when I see it” judge decision.