*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.

Something very un-computer-like today. I am an avid reader of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. I read the first three books some years ago and just finished reading them all again as well as A Feast for Crows, now eagerly awaiting A Dance with Dragons.

In the recent months I also did many vectorizations of flag images on Wikimedia Commons and due to that read a bit on heraldry and blazonry. Not much, but enough to guess what a blazon would look like given its description and I even can describe simple blazons myself.

Anyway, I noticed a slight change in GRRM's series with A Feast for Crows. His descriptions of coat of arms of the numerous major, minor and lesser houses of Westeros were pretty simple in the past (i. e. up to A Storm of Swords) with their descriptions seldom more than “charge on a colored field” and usually not using heraldic terms for tinctures and charges. This changed, however, with A Feast for Crows where more complex coat of arms emerged as well as usage of certain heraldic terms, like barry, gyronny, countercharged, etc. I probably should have marked the pages as I noticed the occurances so unfortunately I can't give examples here but I think it might have been better for GRRM to stay with the tone of the previous books here. Not that I mind in particular but most people are not proficient with heraldic language and for them the simpler descriptions would serve better.

Although maybe I am nearly the only one to notice, at least I have been told by others that they didn't notice. But for me it's a slight stylistic break that was unnecessary.

I ordered something last Monday and it got sent to me meanwhile. In the mail that said that the package is on its way I found the following sentence: “If you are satisfied with our service you can give us feedback here” followed by a few links. I always wonder what such feedback and evaluation systems are good for. Well, one benefit is obvious: Customers have a measurement for credibility of the seller. But is it worth bothering every single customer with evaluating the seller?

In my opinion all this is more a nuisance than pleasant. The rule for buying something should be that everything works out fine, so why do we need an explicit evaluation in that case? Angered customers tend to spend more time venting their displeasure, I think. But if I bought something and have no reason to complain I don't visit thee sites and give feedback, possibly writing some 500 characters every time. There is nothing to say, everything went off without a hitch – so what should I possibly write (e. g. Amazon forces to write a comment when giving feedback)? What could possibly be said against defaulting to “Both sides are pleased” and just using the feedback system in the case you were displeased?

I think the customer shouldn't be bothered more than necessary. And certainly unnecessary exercises should be avoided, especially if they do not directly relate to what you really want to do (buying stuff). I usually ignored such requests for feedback simply because I don't want to be bothered with it.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is an interesting concept in linguistics that basically states that the language(s) you speak affect the thoughts you are able to think and your understanding. Now I read an interesting connection to programming languages by Jeff Moser.

I never thought that this may apply to programming languages as well, but it seems reasonable. Paul Graham notes such a thing as The Blub Paradox where he explains that one's choice of programming language usually determines an opinion towards inferior ones (“How anyone can get anything done with it. It doesn't even have x (Blub feature of your choice)”) and towards more powerful ones (“He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.”). Blub is the language the programmer thinks in and it inevitably determines his way of solving problems and judging other tools for solving them.

Probably that's the reason why we (CS students at Uni Rostock) were told that learning programming is not about mastery of one programming language, but rather solving problems in as many languages as possible. To prevent lock-in to one particular language and the thinking connected to it.

That said, I still won't learn Perl :-)

Well, starting from “Or” considered harmful. we noticed that the distinction of andor, xor and ewok is certainly a useful concept, however, the naming scheme leaves room for improvement. Andor is certainly too long for practical usage and ewok always raises associations to small furry creatures.

On the quest for appropriate names we thought that or certainly suffices for andor, just like (mathematical) logic tells us. Xor is short and pronounceable enough for everyday use and the meaning is clear with the usual knowledge of geeks. This leaves ewok. sh suggested eor, which may be interpreted as ewok-or. It does not sound too stupid, is short enough and thus quite usable.

The only challenge now is to switch my writing and talking habits over to those new words :-)

I faintly remember the times when games and other software came along with installation instructions (nowadays it seems most publishers assume that people can install software without instructing them). A common and recurring template was “Insert the CD into your CD ROM drive. The setup program should start automatically, if it doesn’t, follow these steps to turn on AutoPlay and try again: …”

This is, essentially, a non-solution. It solves a problem the customer doesn’t even have: Usually you don’t think ‘How could I turn on AutoPlay which I disabled a few weeks ago to save me from setups popping up?’ instead you want to run the setup that simply didn’t start automatically (which may be on purpose).

A similar situation occurred to me recently when I visited a web page that wanted to display an image in a popup. I have set my popup blocker to highly aggressive, so it blocks essentially everything that opens a new window. When I manually opened the link that caused the blocked popup in a new tab (a method that usually yields the content) I found myself on a page that explained in detail how I could either turn on Javascript or turn off my popup blocker.

Great. They are solving a problem I don’t even have. I just want to access the content.

Since the advent of popup blockers I doubt popups are a valid method of conveying information to the user anymore.

After InstallShield and others moved on to simply generating Windows Installer scripts that were executed and wrapping their own GUI around it (though I still don't quite understand why this GUI has to be so ugly skinned in recent versions. Consistency across a platform is actually a nice thing to have and I don't like it when programs break that intentionally) now there is a new problem to overcome for installers: Signatures and requesting elevated privileges.

The first part might already have been important with Windows XP SP2, though I can't really tell since the time I've used that OS accounts for maybe a few hours total. However, more and more open source projects move to signing their installers what I see as a good thing since it enables Windows to check the signature and detect changes (whether deliberate or just download errors) before executing the whole thing and it enables users to establish a base of trust (plus, it's tracable to the person or corporation that signed it). Also Windows will display a much more friendly confirmation dialog when the signature can be verified.

The other part is more icky on Windows Vista. Since Microsoft introduced UAC programs can request elevated privileges through a manifest. If the administrator disabled automatic setup discovery heuristics (which are pretty accurate, however they cannot be bypassed which makes them not quite good if they give a false positive) through group policies the only thing Windows will use for determining whether the program needs administrative access is the manifest.

Actually, there is another option: Requesting elevated privileges only when you need them. This is what the Windows Installer currently does and I found it to be a pretty nice idea. Why bother the user with requests that are unnecessary? However, most installers actually do need elevated privileges.

Many programs nowadays are packages with the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) and since most of them are hobbyist or open source projects almost none are signed (a problem not specific to NSIS, but it has a broad userbase in the open source community due to the fact that it is itself open source). Furthermore, no NSIS installer I found included the manifest that told Windows to start it in elevated mode. And NSIS apparently does not support (or no one uses it) requesting privileges only when needed.

The funny thing about NSIS is that if you start it as a limited user it will try to run the installation (which may succeed to some degree thanks to Vista's virtualized files) and then fail miserably. The worse part here is, that on failure NSIS won't even bother to do a rollback which I find a little disturbing. An installer often meddles with the system at a quite low level and may produce inconsistencies if it won't run completely. An installer not being able to properly roll back changes already made on failure relies a little too heavily on the assumption that everything will work fine (I doubt they even try to use Transactional NTFS on Vista [although this may be true for all installers currently but would be a nice addition]).

So basically you have to clean up your system a bit after NSIS failed due to limited user rights. Thankfully the stuff for that is all in one place.

Windows already has a hard time dealing with the multitude of different installers while the only package management system which could be called by that name (Windows Installer) isn't used as widely as I'd hope. Come on, guys. There is already a decent installer framework. InstallShield, Wise, etc. made the move to compile their scripts to Windows Installer, should be possible to do that with NSIS as well.

Or use WiX.

Just a little thought that struck me today: Couldn't it be possible that due to our advanced medicine and promiscuous use of it we're hampering evolution?

I mean, evolution works by letting individuals survive that are better adapted to their surroundings. By rescuing numerous people from their deaths who would otherwise die we do enable them to spread their genes and thus they have (almost) the same chances as healthier individuals of propagating their stage of evolution. Basically we're staying at one point of evolution and encourage stagnation.

This may be beneficial to the individual but possibly not for the whole species itself.

Who knows where we'd be today if it weren't for doctors, medicine and letting people survive who'd otherwise die? Maybe a few million/billion people less on Earth, resistances against epidemics?

Don't get me wrong. I hereby do not encourage euthanasia or similar ideas, it's just a play of thoughts what could be if. As I said, it is beneficial for the individual which seems to be the primary goal for most human beings. Very few choose to sacrifice themselves for the good of a species and I am possibly no exception.

Maybe we overcome this drawback with genetical engineering; maybe ethics stand too much in our way for that. We'll see ... :)