The Goldfish Chronicles

Or at least, ApacheCon first 24 hrs.
Wife, child and I got in around 9pm on Sunday night and rented a Prius. An upgrade from the land-shark that they’d originally offered us. Carrie seemed to figure it out quickly, so all is happy (until the pressure starts for me to buy her one). We made it to the hotel happily, with sleeping boy, and when room service showed up with the much needed, though pricey, dinner - said boy was wide awake instantly. Suffice to say, I was reading “Reptiles and Amphibians” with him at 1am and falling asleep.

The morning started with family things - swimming in the pool, eating as much as we could in the buffet breakfast (pricey again, but when you’ve gotta eat…). Then family went off and I went over to the Hackathon. Time to try hard to not be the antisocial sod that I usually am.

Along with many old faces, I met Vadim Gritsenko, Matthieu Riou and Rony Flatscher(briefly). Jason Hunter had t-shirts for all on offer and Bjorn, Ben and I worked on Commons Lang 2.4. To reward them for figuring out all the issues, I went off and found 8 more in JIRA that we should consider. Bet they’re glad I saved them from the Axis 1.x and Commons Validator issues they were working on before I sat down. I also released a jira plugin bugfix for the FilterList plugin.

Tea time rolled around and back up to the room with C+N to consider dinner. That turned into cereal and toddler acrobatics - with a bit of blogging. Then back to the evening hackathon a bit later methinks.

The other week I took the plunge and bought Lego Mindstorms. Thereupon it sat on the table for a couple of weeks until I finally got around to picking up some rechargeable batteries. Friday night we built the robot, and on Saturday we discovered the act of programming said robot to do some basic tasks.

Nathan was very impressed by the concept, but obviously it’s a toy for me. It’ll be a while before he groks the concepts involved. My thesis was on computing and education, and while I did a terrible job at that (average code, with hindsight, and poor research), said thesis sparked an interest in me for the ideas of how computing improves education.  I was lucky enough to be a part of the 80’s BBC + Logo/Turtle push in the UK and it’s one of the parts of my primary education that stand out in my and my peers’ memories. Another was raising the Mary Rose - an educational ‘game’ in which we painstakingly dug out the Mary Rose and cataloged our finds.

Hopefully I can keep up the Mindstorms energy and have a good play. Lego recently offered up a Tie-Fighter Tank from the Star Wars Expanded Universe - it’d be cool to take one of the Tie-Fighters I have, mix that with the Mindstorms and have a little Tieby that runs around on the floor doing dumb things.

Even better would be to have a robot with multiple CPUs trying to work together. Given that the future is about event driven multi party systems, having multiple mindstorms seems like an educational thing for the lad.

As one of my favourite blogs was recently talking about wanting to sign up for the battle against the Bugs, I decided that it was time to re-read Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Especially after a friend had asked if I had “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” and in shock I realized I didn’t (it’s my dad’s copy that I’ve been reading each time I go back to my parent’s).

It’s been a very happy read - the concept of a powered suit is still very cool, the relationship between the various people is nicely done compared to many of Heinlein’s early books and I really like the way in which the story is really a loosely attached series of chapters in the main character’s life. The general post-history is still apt - a slow and gradual breakdown of democracy because people believe they have the right to a vote and no responsibility for said votes actions (amongst other complaints) that result in increased crime and a third world war between US/EU/Russia and China. Eventually war veterans restart things (after a collapse of the nations) with a limited democracy in which the vote is only eligible to those who have served in the military. The point being that only those who are prepared to go through a grueling few years for the good of the many have shown any aptitude to be making decisions for the many (though not necessarily that they will all make good decisions).

Anyway - it was enjoyable and barely shows its age (48 years), and I’m reminded of just how bad that movie was.

Yesterday Carrie and Nathan came to work - Nathan in astronaut suit and with Halloween decorated bag in hand.
We walked around the office and our 3-year old got his first memorable experience of Halloween - lots of people happy to see him, offering him lots of sweets and asking how old he was. He in turn would mumble “trick or treat”, then a “nk’you” and run off in search of the next pot of gold. Unless there was a dog present, then he’d spend a bit of time with the dog.

As time went on, the mumbling got softer and softer until he started to hide behind Mummy & Daddy. This was mostly because of an older kid wearing a scary mask - he was verrry unsure of the monster until the mask was lifted and a child shown. Big smile on face after that.

It was a great success - knocking door to door isn’t something we’re very into; our neighbours do not form our community, you have to do it after work, so it’s late at night (when little ones should be asleep) and it’s damn cold. Doing it at work is a  great idea, and also let me introduce my family to some colleagues and introduce my workplace to them.

I talked the other day about how to beget activity and the important gift of hope that your activity gives to the community. I think one of the thing that holds people back from stepping up is time. Driving the life of a project is a lot of work, lots of issues to deal with, lots of commits, lots of bug reports. It all takes a lot of time. How are you ever going to find the time?

You’ve become the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland. Running around measuring time and panicking. The reality is that you don’t have to. Instead of our leporine friend, picture the Tortoise. One steady step after another. Slowly does it.

Work on one issue a week, or one each month, or one every other night. Whatever you can find time for. Carve out a small piece of time, on a recurring basis, and try to knock off an issue each time. Most Open Source is developed in punctured equilibriums - long periods of bugger all happening, and then a short scurrying around of ratlike development before the silence descends again. If you can set up a steady heartbeat for your project, the number of rabbit development bursts from others will increase, they pick up hope from your monotone and squeak now and again. Before you know it you’ll be posting mails to the dev@ list to point out the last few remaining hard issues and suggesting that it might be time for a release.

I’ve no proof, but I suspect that tortoises have a lot less heart attacks than the rabbits. In developer terms - they burn out less. Plod… plod… plod…