Livre d'Or

I've really tried to keep the option open for people to comment anonymously. There are lots of good reasons for it and I don't want to insist people create yet another account just to interact. But I've had a second big flood of spam in just a few weeks, captchas slow it down to once every 2-3 minutes rather than literally constant, but that's still too much spam to deal with.

( options )

Some time last week, I was in a bad mood such that what I felt like doing was spending hours playing simple, repetitive computer games. But honestly doing that does not really make me feel better, except very very short term, it just makes me annoyed at myself for wasting a lot of time on pointless things. So I had the brain-wave of deciding to sit down and work out what it is exactly that I crave from computer games when I'm in that kind of jangly bad mood. I concluded that I wanted to be doing something sufficiently difficult to give me a sense of accomplishment, but easy enough that if I concentrated I'd have a pretty good chance of succeeding. And I wanted lots and lots of immediate feedback. I figured out that a more productive activity that meets that need is programming.

So I took the plunge and asked to get my Dreamhack (DW development environment) reactivated after a three-year hiatus, and started working on a really small styles bug. ( volunteering for DW )

The other reason this is important to me is to keep me empathizing with learners. mixosaurus made a really powerful blog post about respectful and compassionate teaching. Kat is right on the money that the sort of people who become academics may never have been crushingly bad at any academic subject, whereas by definition we're going to be teaching people with a range of abilities and levels of motivation, not just those who excel and love the subject and go on to become experts in our fields. It's really, really good for me to remember what it feels like to be a beginner, to be too scared of making mistakes to actually make progress. I know I have students who find, say, immunology as arcane and jargon-filled and arbitrary as I'm finding Git right now (like I said, the programming is going fine so far, it's the version control I'm struggling with). And they're not "stupid" and they're not deliberately refusing to try just to be awkward, they're beginners, or they're people who have succeeded at somewhat related skills (such as A-Level biology) but find that this particular intellectual field doesn't quite fit with the way their brain works.

So learning new skills is good for me as a teacher, as well as being satisfying. I've revived my dev journal at livredor to document some of my learning process, and since I have it I'll probably throw the baking in there as well, and maybe some of my very beginner-ish Arabic, though I generally know how to learn languages so I have less need to work on the meta-cognition stuff there. I strongly expect that 99% of people will find this detailed documentation totally boring, which is why I'm hiving it off into a separate journal. But I'm also mentioning it just in case you have the exact mindset where you find watching people learning new things interesting, and if you do you're welcome to watch the dev journal.

And if you have wishes for DW, well. I am not quite at the level where I can scratch my own, or my friends', itches yet, but I'm hoping to get there, at least if we're talking small itches. I mean, ideally what I would like to do is write a couple of smartphone clients and a decent front-end for the image hosting and a tool for exporting journals properly with comments and maybe something to import from Tumblr before Yahoo screw the site up beyond repair. But those are way beyond my capability and likely to remain so, because this is always going to be a hobby for me, I don't have a thousand hours to actually become an expert.

However, what I can do is a whole bunch of things related to the back-end that generates journal appearances. The most complicated things I've done so far are writing the Page Summary module, and writing code that mainly affects designers rather than end users to do with the option to colour-code entries on your reading page depending who posted them. Certainly, if there's a colour combination or a display option that you wish existed, there's a good chance I can make it happen. Note that I am not a web-designer by any stretch of the imagination, but what I can do is implement someone else's aesthetic concept in a format that can be made into an official style on Dreamwidth.

In order to be able to do that it has to be something with a licence that DW can use; if you designed something yourself you need to submit a CLA before it can be incorporated, if it's someone else's design then it needs to be public domain or under an appropriate licence. This means that I can't make official DW layouts with, you know, Game of Thrones wallpaper, and it also means that I can't make a Dreamwidth version of LJ Flexible Squares, which is a very common request. What I can do is take CSS-based layouts that modify Flexible Squares, and apply them to Dreamwidth's Tabula Rasa, because actually DW has more flexibility for styling with CSS than LJ ever did, it's just not very well publicized.

So tell me, next time I am in a bad mood and want to spend an evening programming, what can I do for you?

On 7^th April, to j4 and addedentry, a daughter, Imogen Ruth. I know that offspring don't turn out exactly like their parents, but I have great hopes for the future of a new person who may be more like Janet and Owen than most other people.

( misc social plans )

May 1^st marks the official second anniversary of Dreamwidth. This means that the three_weeks_for_dw project is in full swing from yesterday. I'm a bit behind with that stuff, but it seems to be doing pretty well without me. It's a fun fest, but seems a lot less necessary than it was this time last year, which is an encouraging sign. As you might have guessed from the above list, I'm pretty busy for the next three weeks, but I'll see if I can contribute something. I might do a FONSFAQ, perhaps on a Jewish or sciencey topic, and I might at least attempt one of the floating memes. But anyway, let me know if there's anything you particularly want me to post about and I'll see what I can do.

And last but very much not least, jack and I are getting married on Sunday 20^th May 2012. We still have lots of details to think about before we can officially invite people, but just so you know.

I've seen all of these in the wild, and I admit that people who believe them probably aren't going to accept my rebuttals, but I thought I'd put something out there in case it's useful for anyone to point to it!
( Debunking )If you're sceptical, that's totally fair enough, but I invite you to try one thing: compare Dreamwidth's Latest Things page with LiveJournal's Latest Posts. Note the new features, particularly the tag cloud. Yes, you will see a snapshot that includes quite a lot of fanfic, but also plenty of other stuff. (To get a valid comparison, you probably want to skip the porn, spam and Cyrillic that make up the majority of LJ's latest feed; Russian-language LJ is a very different creature that happens to share the same infrastructure.) And more to the point, you'll get a much better idea of the sort of content that populates Dreamwidth, than you would get from the skewed sample that is people who make a lot of noise about Dreamwidth in fandom communities.

From the time when Dreamwidth was just a cool idea, one of the things that was talked about was the ability to read posts from other LJ-based sites on your own reading list (DW terminology for "friends page"). Not a half-arsed RSS feed of public posts, actual posts that would respect access ("friends lock") settings and cut tags and allow you to join in the comment discussion. This project, which I'm love with, kept being stalled because it's a difficult problem socially and ethically; it needs to be done in a way that will not irreversibly freak out either LJ management or individual users. But finally this week, Dreamwidth announced that the feature is under active development.

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EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!


( actual analysis )

While I'm on my soap-box, let me talk briefly about why the Google Buzz debâcle is not the same thing. The problem there was not people being angry when stuff that was already public became more obviously public (though it did get confounded by elements of that), but that Google chose to reveal to the whole world, by default, your most frequently emailed contacts. Webmail has been around for multiple decades now, and it's always been the expectation that while it's not highly secure (it goes over http, duh) against a determined hacker, it's not actually public to anyone with an internet browser, let alone deliberately broadcasted to other people you email. And yes, Google have now fixed this so that the list of frequently emailed people are only suggested rather than automatically trusted by default, but it's too late, once the information is out there the genie won't go back in the bottle. Not to mention that lots and lots of Gmail users are not all tech-savvy and won't have been following all the internet discussion about how bad the Buzz roll-out was.

Me, I straight away went in and locked down the system as much as I could (I don't dare delete my profile and switch off Buzz altogether, because one of the many bugs seems to be that if you don't opt in, you can't get at any of the privacy controls. Also I feel nervous about next time Google decides to randomly broadcast private information, and I would rather get a notification than be blissfully unaware. I then discovered that if you edit your Gmail contacts at all, they are automatically shifted to "My contacts", which is by default the highest level trust filter for the Buzz. So when I edited an address book entry with a note saying, "out-of-date address, don't use", that long defunct Hotmail address was suddenly on the list of people who get a notification whenever I update my Gtalk status or post a photo to Picasa. And whoever now has that recycled address could probably deduce quite a lot of information about whom I know. So I spent a couple of hours going through my 500-member contact list, deleting every entry that is obsolete or belongs to some random customer service rep I emailed once or random Scandinavian who happens to be on the same Jewish mailing lists as me.

I'm not actually worried personally; I decided long ago that I wasn't going to use my primary email for web activities. I made this decision not because I'm prescient but because I wanted to minimize spam and quasi-spam in my main inbox. But now I'm really glad that I did, because Google knows nothing about my social networking presences, they're not linked to my main email address or real name. The trouble is that because of Google's extremely clumsy attempt to bypass the network effect and set up a service that was already populated, if I'm not strict about locking everything down, I could compromise my friends who may be more security / privacy conscious than I am (not to mention those people whom I sometimes email who are not my friends but are, for example, teenagers attending my bar mitzvah classes).

I thought people were being melodramatic about Buzz when it first appeared, because after all it's fairly easy to opt out, but the more I think about it, the more I'm annoyed.

[Cross-posting to LiveJournal because I think both the DW news and the Buzz stuff are important for LJ peeps to know.]