*hypf*

I am part of some online “communities” but then again, I'm not—somehow. It's funny as I regularly contribute to some of them, namely Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, Rosetta Code and Stack Overflow (and its relatives). Now currently there are elections for new moderators on Stack Overflow and I (as most users) was asked to vote:

But I honestly can't vote there.

The problem is that Stack Overflow is largely content-based. Whatever there may be in community is mostly driven by content and not by the users. Which means that I could judge the candidates by the content they contribute which is easy enough but doesn't tell me anything about their qualifications as a moderator. Equally unsuitable are the moderator nominations, mostly done by the candidates themselves and their user profiles; they simply aren't an accurate picture of how well they would do their job.

Stack Overflow goes great lengths in pushing the actual users into the background, emphasizing the questions and answers. There is a little incentive to continue contributing, namely reputation and badges; I'm playing that game too. But overall it doesn't really matter for Stack Overflow to keep specific persons there—as long as the contributions are still there and of high quality, no one can complain. But ultimately you don't really know about those people. You know about their technical knowledge and how they write or how willing they are to provide outstanding answers. But about how well they would perform as moderators? Nothing. While sometimes discussions arise in the comments on a question or answer they are mostly very short-lived, just as the questions/answers themselves (most questions, even those with stellar answers vanish after at most a few hours and no-one reads them anymore). What's more: comments are de-emphasized on purpose: smaller font size, gray text, hidden by default (except for the top-rated comments). As a discussion medium, where I could actually see how people approach problems, how they deal with it and ultimately solve it, this is a complete fail; again, on purpose.

Stack Overflow isn't alone in this regard; I just picked it out since it's the one example I'm most familiar with at the moment. The problem is similar for me at Wikipedia where the means of communication are comparably arcane and inefficient. Mostly you're communicating with a large blob of vaguely human form which could be anyone. And most of the time you don't talk to the same persons regularly. To me it is surprising that (at least for the German Wikipedia) many people participating in discussions, polls, &c. seem to know each other and are actually talking there. Maybe I'm the ugly kid who stands besides all this or maybe I just didn't see a suitable way of getting to know the people behind the content.

Ultimately, there are probably persons who could judge how well someone is suited as a moderator: Those that have access to logs that detail what moderator-like activities a person has done. For Stack Overflow this would include things like close-votes on questions, flagging questions and answers for moderator attention—that's the technical side. Then there's the human side which necessarily includes discussions (such as what makes a question programming-related). But discussions are, as noted, very much de-emphasized in contrast to questions and answers (which tell me only about technical problems someone faced and was able to solve).

For the normal user there is simply no easy way of looking at the things that would matter in this regard and help in a decision. As for the candidates: I've never had anything to do with the vast majority of them, except for two.

Well, back to my original point, I find it a little weird that such sites ask their members about positions that need certain qualifications, who—by definition and purpose of the site—don't know each other well enough to make an informed decision on that. I see it as a kind of pseudo-democracy where the site owners/administrators give the “community” something to decide. But in the end I doubt the final decision will be made with regard to the actual qualifications of the elected person. The votes itself are probably rather random for most people participating in the election or maybe guided by prior advertising on behalf of the candidates. I don't remember the original nominations of the candidates anymore but what I read of them didn't strike me as convincing. Heck, not knowing those people I couldn't even decide whether their application/nomination was meant seriously or is just full of senseless talk.

I think such sites should either make actual communication (read: social behavior of people) part of their purpose (not that I see this necessarily as a good thing—I'm part of no social network for a reason) or stop trying to pretend they have a community. In fact, they haven't, in my opinion; they have content, they have people that contribute it; but they have no community.

I needed the format painter pretty often in the last few days. It's quite a handy tool sometimes, though with one caveat: The mode created by selecting the format painter ends after one use. So usually you can only paint the formatting onto a single destination before having to re-enable the tool. That's not very nice when having multiple places to apply the formatting.

However, you can simply double-click the button in the Ribbon which leaves the mode activated until Esc is pressed. Found this by accident but it is handy.

And, noticing now, it's even mentioned in the documentation. But who reads that? :-)

Now that Stackoverflow got statistics on the tags I just had to look where I am with my favorite tag: Batch files.

And behold, I am first place for the last month and (more or less) close second behind Pax in the all-time stats.

Pax, I get thee :P

Am I taking this a bit too serious? Maybe, maybe not. I have to agree, though, that he knows some evilness I didn't know so far so perhaps the current ranking is appropriate :-)

Also, a little competition isn't bad in itself :-)

Now I only need a few more upvotes to get a batch specialist badge.

Update (2009–08–06): By now I am first in the batch tag. Yay.

A fellow student unearthed the following /. signature:

“Anyone else notice what x+k+c+d adds to? 42! :) [x=24,k=11,c=3,d=4]”

Interesting discovery. I wonder whether that was intentional. And it goes on: When adding up ASCII representation values of the characters you get 120 + 107 + 99 + 100 = 426 which includes 42 as a substring.

Said fellow student then discovered even more similarities between those two numbers:

<sh> sebastian@madlax:~$ factor 426
<sh> 426: 2 3 71
<sh> sebastian@madlax:~$ factor 42
<sh> 42: 2 3 7
<sh> This is a *bit* creepy for a coincidence.

So both numbers are even sphenic numbers and the prime factors of 42 are a substring of the prime factors of 426.

Scary. So xkcd seems to be linked to 42.

I just filled another glass of Ginger Ale and first I put it far away from my laptop. The reason: The droplets that bounce out from the glass from sparkling are pretty hard to remove once they land on the display and dry up.

The question is, how high (and far) do these droplets fly? They are propelled by a bubble of carbon dioxide that rises to the surface and bursts. That should give us an upper bound of the energy that is available for flying around. Ich also wonder whether the height is affected by the filling level of the glass, i. e. the way a carbon dioxide bubble can/has to rise.

Is there probably an ideal filling level where you shouldn't worry about droplets landing on your display (or other hard to clean objects in the vicinity)? Does the flying height maybe follow a specific distribution function so you could specify a filling level where you have 99 % certainty that no droplet escapes the glassy confinement?

I think I have to think about that later again. The droplets actually move fast enough to leave trails in the above image, captured at 1/250 second (may not be visible since I resized it, though).

Talk about weird problems that can occur:

I never knew there could be compatibility issues with cables …

Seriously, I get some strange referrers from Google. Who the hell gets the idea to clear that from a batch file? I mean, most programs store that kind of stuff either in the registry or in some ugly binary files. The first option is the easier one, at least on Windows 5.1 onwards, since you could use reg.exe. The other part is trickier except the application doesn't mind a missing file.

It works, but reminds me a bit of How do I inflate a bicycle tire with a potato?.

Ah well, since rootnode posted his results on a Nerd Test (no longer available), I just had to, too. Although my results are not nearly as nerdy; I seriously wonder what that guy does all day …

As you may have noticed, I started translating the site and some content into German. I wanted to do this for some time now but only recently installed the Drupal i18n module. I will try to offer all future content simultaneously in English and German, though English will remain the first language in which content is published. Meanwhile I will translate missing content as I see fit and time.