The Goldfish Chronicles

I recently bought a Linksys NSLU2. It’s a small hub-like bit of tech that promises to network your USB drives; which sounds like a good thing as it’d be a great way to have a simple home storage system.

Spec-wise, the only bit that I disliked was that they limit it to 2 drives. I’m sure there are good technical reasons, but from a user point of view I want to attach a USB hub to it and have 4 drives, or 8, or 16. Hopefully the limitation is not just due to the usual marketing reasons that handicapping a device will mean they can sell more.

I bought it at Thinkgeek for 80 USD, mainly because I wanted a few other bits (t-shirts, perl ‘onesie’ for the baby, floating fish in the mouse for Carrie) and though it was shipped separately from the others and from a different location, it turned up promptly and at the same time.

As I couldn’t be bothered to goto the basement where I planned to set it up, I actually read the docs and was annoyed to read, right at the end, that it did not support normal filing systems and would need some kind of proprietary system on it. Ack. Suddenly all my momentum to play with it vanished and I spent an hour or so wallowing in pity and doing unimportant things (like eating dinner).

Reading further, it turns out the special format is just Linux’s ext3, so while this isn’t cool as it will mean reformatting the drives, it’s also not the proprietary fs that the manual’s casual mention of reformatting fired off so many alarms for.
More investigation discovered that while the device itself is relatively mediocre, there is an active community, nslu2-linux who are installing improvements to turn the hard-drive router into a web server, print server, media server, mail server etc.

I got the thing working last night with a USB thumbdrive as the only attached drive. It didn’t demand a reinstall, so unless it did it on the sly I’m guessing the thumbdrive is still on FAT. Apparantly it considers anything under 10G to be a thumbdrive, so once I get the 60G external drive clear of data, I’ll see how painful things become.

I also upgraded the firmware, which turned out to be wonderfully easy. Download a .zip and upload it through the web interface to the NSLU2. Make sure you’ve removed the drives (they’re not PnP btw, so turn it off first) and you won’t get pesky out-of-space errors.

All in all, an adequate device that needs some improved touches (multi-hdd support, PnP, FAT32 support assuming it’s not there).

It is oft said that Apache is a meritocracy. This is only half of the truth.

Apache is a constant choice between meritocracy and consensus. You decide if people believe strongly on an issue. If you think they do, you seek consensus and if you think they don’t you wax meritocratic.

This is a real trap for a pmc chair. A large part of the pmc chair role (in my opinion) is to fill in the gaps that are not being filled. A variant of ‘the buck stops here’; if there’s something that needs to be done, and no-one is volunteering, then the chair had better bloody well do it. Or at least form a press-gang.

This means that the chair is being meritocratic in many places, because they are filling in the gaps that people don’t care about. I find this is amplified in an umbrella project, like Jakarta, because much of the caring is focused on the subproject level rather than the project level. Thus one can find oneself being meritocratic on relatively weighty issues and the direct community to gain consensus from is actually very small. Thus may be born a despot.

Despotism is no bad thing in the short term, but in the long term it creates reliance on a singleton and as we are all mortal (attention-span of 2 years it seems) the loss of that singleton can sap momentum.

This is a key ingredient of the Apache way, avoid despotism to achieve better community health.

It would be interesting to create a worthless metric by which we run a script against a CVS repository to analyse the likelyhoods of despots and alert if they are found. The same thing would be useful at companies, please list codebases where we lack knowledge failover.

Back to Apache, one method that I have found very useful is the announcement-of-meritocracy. It goes much like this: “I think XYZ should happen, if I don’t hear a -1 by XXXDay, I’ll go ahead and do it. “. This is effectively an invitation for a consensus discussion and while it’s unnecessary for most activities at Apache, it’s very useful for a chair who is trying to avoid the slide to despotistry. Much of the Jakarta site overhaul has been founded on this trick.

Another classic, and obvious, method to deal with the consensus/meritocracy choice is the mock-up. Decide something should be done, do it, but don’t apply it to CVS/production. Instead put it up privately, call for opinions and then call for a vote. This is a general rule for sales anywhere, but it works well in open-source communities. It has the same dangers as it does for a business, don’t spend too much time on the mock-up as a failed vote may depress.

One of the best things about managing/serving an open-source community is that your coding itch starts to click on new subjects. My Jakarta thoughts nowadays are centered on how we can create an index of Jakarta, in which the subprojects can continue to be highly autonomous; and how we can apply that to the rest of Apache. Then how we can add associations to that so that the Java@Apache association is obvious.

Interesting stuff, but to a large extent sitting in the cracks and a great stick bun on despotability. Fortunately there is a group of people interested in the same thing, other pmc chairs

Sweet. Googling for Commons‘ sees Jakarta Commons as the 2nd entry after Creative Commons, from 22+ million hits.

The best is that we beat out the Houses of Parliament, where the House of Commons is the ‘lower house’ of the UK’s parliamentary system and the one you often see the prime minister speaking in.

Just noticed that Bookpool is having a 43% off sale on open-source books from all publishers.

Usually they jjust do it per publisher, so this is a cool new idea that I’m sure many of us will be interested in.

(warning: sombre thoughts, it’s been a bad week)

A month or so back, a friend of mine (my boss in fact) announced that he was resigning from the human race. I know how he feels.

On the one hand we have the governments of the world, a more sordid group of degenerates as you could hope to meet. Pick a country, google for that country and atrocity and you’ll probably find some nice allegations. It’s not all old either (of course). We (the ignorant people) discover atrocities of 30 years ago etc all the time, so what will we be discovering in 30 years time. All the time they’re on the take to one level or another.

Then we have the wonder of corporations. Creating a subscription-model, consumer-owning, herd-like society. Their advertising branch (aka the media) keep our minds chained with sweet placebos, while their product branches recycle ideas and invent buzz. We’ve created these entities which are singularly evolved to gorging themselves on us, and they unashamedly do so. If they were predators from the animal kingdom we’d be pointing out how they can’t help do what’s in their nature.

The irony of the Matrix trilogy is not that it could be true, and we don’t know that we’re plugged into the machine; it’s that the matrix does exist, but it’s a far more insidious one of our own creation. It’s the twins of government and economics, criss-crossing the 10,000 year old society we have, and increasingly intermeshed into what makes us human.

Not wanting to turn this into a verbal Matrix masturbation (there are so many online already), but I’d like to use it for material one time more. In the film it’s so easy to be against Cypher (Joe Pantiliano, great rat-faced actor) for wanting to plug back into the matrix, but when you start considering cancelling the cable access, avoiding the boxed-set dvd for christmas, not getting an X-Box 3, avoiding large-chain restaurants and not upgrading to that Powerbook G5; wouldn’t you want to plug back in too?