WWWWolf's LifelessJournal

In unrelated news, deletion is still broken

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 20:50:32 GMT

Okay, some time ago, they blew up the Wikipedia article on Exaile. (One of the major Linux music players obviously needs no article.) Now, they've blown up the article on MyPaint.

The latter is an annoying case. No, admittedly there's no sources. Nominator says "we shouldn't have a consensus for deeming most FOSS as notable" - well, duh, maybe we should craft actual software notability criteria then, it seems to be AWOL at the moment, and it's a tad bit annoying that the software notability has to be judged solely through the common notability criteria (i.e. availability of outside coverage). But Exaile's case showed that even reviews in high-profile web sites shouldn't be trusted. The fact that Blender guys endorse MyPaint is obviously not important at all. What the hell can we trust these days, then? Do we need the third-party books nowadays?

We need the MyPaint article. Where's MyPaint's press coverage? Should I blame them for not publicising the project better?

And at the same time, we get more and more and more bullshit articles that no one even looks at. If the deletionists are winning, why the hell does the site have over 3 million articles? Why?

And an actual quote from the deletion discussion: "Thank god we don't have a bunch of "WP:IAR" hand wavers this time around and can delete this cleanly." Yeah, especially when everyone who values their sanity stays the hell away from AfD. I've been writing a webcomic about assassins lately, and haven't done that much research into the topic yet, but even I know that best way to murder someone in the night is to make sure no weird helpful people buzz around and stay concerned about wellbeing of others. With attitudes like this, it's easy to see why I don't follow AfD any more.

And let's not forget the whole recent deletion and deletion reviews discussions around Human disguise. Hundreds of kilobytes. Thousands of words. A few million bullets. No answers.

Here's an analogy that I posted on my user page today:

Sticking articles in AfD is like seeing a book being fed in a wood chipper. Very slowly. There's no point in trying to save the book from being destroyed once the process has already started because the damage has already been done. The rednecks with shotguns think it's hilarious to do this sort of stuff, and you don't want to annoy people with shotguns. With enough determination and hard work, those books can, theoretically, be rearranged back into coherent wholes if you salvage all pieces of paper. Ultimately, in this situation we can at least comfort ourselves that not everybody engages in this sort of hideous destructive behaviour. Far from it.

In summary: with each case like this, my faith in the workability of AfD decreases. We need some new process to replace it.

Articles get murdered in the night.

So yeah, I've probably snapped. I just can't defend our deletion processes any more. I'm not having a complete mental breakdown here.

I'm not blaming anyone here. I try not to call anyone names - the above comment about shotgun-wielding ignoramus psychopats is an obvious exaggeration and anyone who doesn't get that is an obvious n00b who has no idea about our consensus on humour.

I'm against these prevalent negative attitudes.

Simply put, I'm against the notion that producing hundreds of kilobytes of deletion and deletion review discussions is somehow helping the community to build an encyclopedia. We're pretending we're seeking consensus and acting toward the good of the website. We failed to realise that the site is growing too fast for AfD to handle.

I still somehow have faith in tomorrow. Somehow.

I just wonder why no one's fixing things.
I mean, I can't. I've got to go draw more stuff using the awesome graphics application that doesn't exist because some nascent philosopher figured out its existence is original research. Damn. Can't really argue with that.
Do I sound jaded again? Sorry...

Don't fight the future, dammit!

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:50:19 GMT

Whoa, been a while since I posted anything here. Anyway, here's some rambling...

I've been trying to find an alternative word processor that would implement a rather crucial part of OpenDocument specs: OpenDocument metadata and templates. Or, since I don't know damn about the internals of OpenDocument, a rather crucial thing that the XML is supposed to guarantee: The word processor should not F*** With Stuff It Doesn't Know Damn About.

So far, I've tried opening .odt files in AbiWord and OS X TextEdit.app. Both open the test file I made in OpenOffice.org Writer just fine. Both save the file just fine. They sort of also retain the formatting. They certainly retain the text.

But they f*** up the document metadata. Both also lose the reference to the original template, making the formatting stick.

And AbiWord folks just whine and whine and whine that supporting OpenDocument is too difficult and we should instead use RTF.

Bloody hell. We just invented the next generation word processor interoperability format that's supposed to support more modern word processor features than RTF. Like metadata, styles and templates.

This is one of the problems I have with open source developers right now. Oh, hell, with all developers. The same thing went to, say, Processing - "Well, Java 5 sucks because JVM is such a big bloated piece of shit, so we'll stick with Java 1.4, blah blah blah".

People - don't fight the future.

The Future is OpenDocument. AbiWord is a nice little word processor, but because it doesn't implement OpenDocument properly, it's not usable for me. They can say OpenDocument is too difficult to implement all they want - I will keep looking for software that actually does implement OpenDocument just fine.

The same with Java 5, which might have sucked, but Java 6 is frigging awesome. Luckily, Java 6 remains compatible with dog-old releases. But the point is, unless you have a real reason to stick with Java 1.4, there's no reason not to use Java 6.

Well damn, I just wanted to stretch my fingers again.

More pondering on open source meritocracy and {{sofixit}}

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 11:57:25 GMT

I posted this as a reply to one comment on Amarok 2.0.2 release, where people were saying the Amarok team is under no obligation to react to any requests:

Of course such choices are up to the developers. But all too often, "Go code it yourself" means "I'm not discussing this feature request (or whatever) with any other developers, nor any other prospective developers"; it's incredibly arrogant and deluded to expect that everyone who wants the features are willing and able to implement them, but it is not so arrogant and deluded to expect that there's someone out there who can do that thing. Rejecting the ideas right off the bat results in a lot of wasted time because people didn't even know that some people want something done. This could happen: Someone brings up feature requests, nothing happens because the devs reject the idea; three years later, someone else comes up with a feature request, nothing happens either; three years still, someone thinks "why the hell this program doesn't have this feature when it'd obviously make the program much better, I'll go code it myself". Nine years, and hey presto, we've got functionality.
The lesson learned: Don't reject clearly feasible feature requests. It's better to have a 9-year-old open feature request ticket in your Bugzilla, than sixteen saying the exact same thing and all tagged WONTFIX. Gauge the popularity of the requests: if a feature request gets five bazillion Bugzilla votes, it might not be a good idea to put all energy in your new pet ideas.

I'm against "meritocracies" because allegedly clueless people can sometimes have good ideas too, and open source world is often exactly the kind of clueless meritocracy where good ideas are often rejected because they're presented by allegedly clueless people. And worse yet, these allegedly clueless people might be the people to code the new features, but for some reason, they just don't feel motivated for whatever reason. Meritocracies must be tempered by open mind, channels for communication, and lack of contempt for the populace at large.

Sure, I'd love to see (say) a frigging working ReplayGain in Amarok. I can program. But what makes people think I know anything about KDE? Or finer points on how the hell ReplayGain is actually supposed to work, for that matter? Capability ("Yeah, I know a little bit about C++ and can program myself out of the proverbial paper bag") doesn't automatically translate to expertise ("Yeah, I know stuff about Qt and KDE frameworks and can build Amarok from source if I need to") and motivation ("Yeah, I we need the ReplayGain") don't necessarily translate to actual work ("Let's build this").

That said, I'm definitely not against handing out {{sofixit}} advice as such. All I'm saying is that people should always be aware what needs to be done to improve the project. Currently, I have two projects sitting in github.com, and I'm not sure when or if I can improve them much, so pretty much everything will go in the "go code it yourself" category; yet, the project wikis are open and you can fork the projects easily to work on them, so feel free to document your requrements.

Random Multi-Million Web 2.0 Idea: Crowdsourcing Psychics!

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:16:58 GMT

James Wagg rants on James Randi Educational Foundation about a website that provides free-of-charge psychic readings.

One thought immediately occurred to me: Wow, in the pre-Web era, the psychics charged an arm and leg for their services. Now, this service is clearly Web 1.0: Crazy idea, some venture capital, free service for the customers, and the folks are not-so-desperately looking for a way to make money.

A further thought, immediately afterwards: Wouldn't it be neat if there was a true Web 2.0 psychic website?

Web 2.0 has been so far a venture capitalist's nightmare: No one knows how the hell Twitter (for example) is going to turn profit, and the only people who keep their head above the water seem to be, uh, Google and Wikipedia. (And Wikipedia only because we seem to have have principles.) Thus, the fact that the psychic site would be a Web 2.0 site would immediately banish all thoughts that this site is there only for money. (The site still needs money, hence "Multi-Million" in the title of this post.)

And thanks to the crowdsourcing aspect of Web 2.0, we can break the hegemony of only having a single psychic on a single site! A Web 2.0 Psychic Service would be a truly open meeting place for people needing a psychic's help and psychics who are willing to provide the help.

Indeed, a Web 2.0 Psychic Service would evaporate a bunch of very serious issues that usually mar the reputations of the psychics. The service could be organised into tasks that anyone can contribute to, thus providing the best possible results for the person needing the help.

Thus it follows that there would be no need to limit the operations to merely ordinary people and psychics; other kinds of people could also provide valuable feedback in the cases in question. Some psychics had been foisting quack medicine as well; why not also let qualified medical personnel have their say? Some psychics are quick to attack their critics; why not let everyone discuss about things openly and freely?

Open mashuplet support would also provide easy access to the underlying Creative Commons-based data. Certain people have had occasional small problems tracking the track records of some psychics, but open data access would provide extremely fruitful bedrock for powerful, web-embeddable statistical analysis, that could also be syndicated in RSS/Atom format.

(Aww heck. I started this half-seriously and now I'm spouting nonsense again. I guess it's time for six hours of Halo or something.)

"Real Men don't make backups..."

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:10:56 GMT

"Real Men don't make backups. They upload it via ftp and let the world mirror it." - Linus Torvalds

I used to have quite a few weird bookmarks stored on the Ma.gnolia social bookmarking site. I rather liked the site technically; the site had a nice design and it let you license your public bookmarks under a Creative Commons licence of your choice (just Attribution for me!), and even backup your bookmarks.

The backup feature, obviously, struck me as a nice feature - I felt much safer in LiveJournal since it lets me back up stuff - but really, wouldn't it be nicer to let the site owners take care of the backups? I mean, a local backup is nice, but since I'm not moving the bookmarks anywhere, the need for backups is all a little bit theoretical, right?

...well, suffice to say, a while ago Ma.gnolia folks realised that a) the server was screwed and b) no one had noticed that the backup system doesn't actually work.

But the odd thing is this: As the people are furiously pulling their hair out and trying to restore whatever scraps of bookmarks they have around, no service has sprung up out there that would have made use of Creative Commons-licensed ma.gnolia bookmarks.

Which is a little bit weird. Social bookmark information doesn't sound like a terribly interesting information to share, but it sure as heck beats most of the Creative Commons-based microblogging drivel. (I'm saying this as an enthusiastic supporter of identi.ca. =) It's information that people have found actually useful, and spent time organising.

And even when it was useful information that was specifically licensed under CC, no one seems to have come forth and said "hey, we have backups of that stuff".

This is a weird world. Teh Intarnet nevar forgets, but if you specifically tell them to go ahead and make copies of your stuff, they go "huh?"...

Amarok is really getting aggravating [resolved]

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 13:58:10 GMT

UPDATE: The issue has been resolved, and as suspected below, it was a minor issue. The culprit was a messed-up KDE cache directory, which was buried somewhere somewhere underneath the underground /var/tmp or whatever. AT NO POINT did the program provide any helpful feedback on why the heck this folder was at fault. Still, most of my rant below stands: The KDE4 bugs seem quite aggravating.

First, apologies for an uncharacteristic rant. The following is a product of frustration and nothing more; I could have constructed a calm, rational, orderly piece of critique, but I'm starting to feel that there's absolutely no change in how the process works and the whole thing is starting to look pretty embarrassing. I really wish to apologise in advance. I'm usually not this angry. It's hopefully just caused by a small problem somewhere. I just have no bloody idea what problem and where.

Various KDE developers have lately been dismissing this kind of posts as trolls... but let me say that I've tried to give a rational, calm feedback before. Now, I'm just aggravated. I can start to understand these "trolls"; what comes to usability, it's little snags that drive people crazy, and if you fail to understand that, you're in a world of hurt. Don't surprise the users negatively.

So apologies for aggravation. I'm trying to give honest critique here.

Anyway:

I love Amarok's features.

I especially love the public image and attitude shown by the developers. (So many cute wolves!)

However, I'm more and more disappointed with the stability of the application itself.

I was extremely happy when Amarok 2.0 brought in Phonon and we finally got back the gstreamer backend, something that had been missing in late 1.4 releases.

And when I ugraded to Amarok 2.0.1.1 and Phonon 4.3.0, guess what I get? Broken Phonon gstreamer backend.

Allow me to go spare for a few moments. CAN'T THESE PEOPLE KEEP ANYTHING STABLE FOR MORE THAN A FEW MOMENTS, GODDAMN IT? ahem.

I'm starting to seriously get fed up with this. I've been using Amarok since 1.3 releases, and there's always been some minor breakage, several mysterious disappearances of the music library metadata, and temporary (or indefinite) disappearances of features.

Is it really that hard to have some sort of commitment to the feature set you have? We bloody well had gstreamer backend once. it was taken away. Now that it's been given us back, it's pretty horrible to take it away again. It's bloody cruel. (No doubt they'll withdraw the gstreamer support again - because no one uses it. Well, people might use it if it were stable in the first place, right?)
This argument isn't really about wanting gstreamer in particular. It's just that changing feature set confuses people. People want to rely on the particular features they have. 2.0's decision to cut some features temporarily was a good example of this: people don't want to adjust their usage patterns too much when they are used to having, for example, the stop-after-current-track thing.

Do we really need to worship the new features and leave stability aside? The notion that "x.0 is supposed to be unstable, just wait x.0.10 for a really stable one" is dreadful. My standard of stability is "if the version number is greater than 1.0 and it's specifically marketed as a stable version, it's supposed to be a goddamn stable version in that case". I can't remember the last time I've seen The GIMP crash, for example - the development branch has the crashy version if you expressly want it.

*sigh* I'm really unhappy about not having a bloody gstreamer backend, but I guess I'll just have to go back to the goddamn xine backend then. I just wish there was a GNOME music player project that put cute wolves everywhere. I really appreciate that in Amarok. I can forgive anything in Amarok if there's wolves out there, but that alone can't keep the rage down.

Science smashes digital legends, and stuff

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 17:53:51 GMT

Back when I was a kid, I read about a poem by William Gibson, called "Agrippa", stored on a self-destroying floppy. You could read the thing once, and after that, the poem was gone. It wanted an original disc, a copy wouldn't do. Unbeatable and inevitable thing.

I have only vague memories of what I was thinking at the time. I've always been worried about data loss, actually; this age where we're living in now is making me very damn nervous, what with its shifting file formats, easily-corrupting storage media and greedy, selfish DRM schemes that put money before longevity. I'm not sure, but perhaps learning about this poem made me hate disappearance of digital information.

Yet, I was somehow not that worried about this particular poem. It was meant as a hacker challenge, and by golly, crax0r they did. When I poked my nose in some BBSes later on, I found a copy of the poem. When I got to the Internet, there it was, probably on some Gopher site or something. I can't remember.

Now, it's also on Gibson's own site.

The poem is, of course, about fading memories. And mine are definitely fading too, even if it wasn't really that long ago. And I never really read the whole thing - I knew the pirated versions would always be there. Okay, as far as art projects go, I guess this is pretty pompous and it doesn't have a really big message - but it's the kind of an art project I can identify with. It has taught me a lesson.

More importantly, it has left a legend to dwell in my head.

A legend of a weird self-eating diskette...

Later still, I found The Agrippa Files, which contains a surprising amount of documentation of what actually happened. In the light of the evidence, it seems to have been a high-brow concept that didn't really fly that well (Gibson wasn't impressed by the results and the publisher went bankrupt)... but still a quite curious thing, all things considered. The legend lived on, the realism started to set in. The site had weird scraps of Lisp code and all: what if someone had the actual floppy and dissected the actual program and see what it really did???

Well, now they have an actual floppy image up... as well as emulated run in video format and some covert video from a reading in 1992.

Well, culture's served an all that. It's all fitting and proper to have it out there after so many years of suspense.

Though my heart sank a little bit when I read how the computer forensic guys recovered the disk image.

...we inserted the diskette into an internal floppy drive on a desktop machine in the University of Maryland’s Digital Forensics Lab running a modified version of Debian Linux. Using the standard data definition “dd” application, we created a bit-level copy or image of the disk.

H-hold on. dd if=/dev/fd0 of=agrippa.dmg ??? That's all you've got to do to copy that stuff?

I mean, I'm just an everyday computer geek (incidentally also a Debian user), but even I have this level of technical know-how. dd(1) isn't rocket science.

Okay, the article goes on to say that re-written image didn't work on actual hardware, so maybe the copy protection did work to at least some extent, but the same image worked almost perfectly in an emulator. That's pretty weird. That's pretty perplexing.

This sort of stuff tends to shake my faith in the l33tness of the original implementors.

I could use some more of the shaking.

If anyone knows anything about Weird 1992 MacOS Software, please do completely demolish that program. I'm sure that now that the actual program is out there, it could - and should - be dissected to hell and back.

Unix shell woes

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 11:12:38 GMT

Okay, I'm getting really scatterbrained.

Here I am, deeply concerned that the Rails developers will declare something obsolete and dead and buried while I'm not updating my stuff, and decide to finally fix my Rails app to use Rails 2.0 .html.erb file extensions rather than Rails 1.0 .rhtml.

Before I do the move properly, I decide to go experiment a little bit...

find app -name '*.rhtml' -exec echo `echo -ne '{}' | perl -pe 's/\.rhtml$/.html.erb/gi;'` \;

And guess what I get back? A list of files with .rhtml extension. NOT .html.erb.

In my n years of perl-fu, I have never seen something this simple blow up. I can't believe my frigging eyes. I replace '{}' with '{}.rhtml' and what do you know, I get a giant bunch of files with .rhtml.html.erb extension. Twiddling with the regex doesn't do a damn thing: .rhtml, Repeat the previous command with > imgonnaopenthisshitwithgoddamnhexeditor.txt tacked in the end, and after doing as suggested, nothing is any more clearer.

How can I possibly fail at this???

...and after good 20 minutes I notice, oh, it's that goddamn it's-interpreting-that-{}-as-literal-except-when-it-isn't thing. Basically, echo -ne '{}' here somehow echoes, um, {} instead of the file name. Doesn't really matter if it's quoted or not, it somehow does it anyway. Perl somehow reads that in and the whole shell expression still manages to spit out the original file name somehow.

It's probably some part of a shell / find(1) weirdness that I haven't yet understood. Over 10 years and I still don't understand the subtleties of find -exec. *sigh*

So here's what actually works:

for i in `find app -name '*.rhtml'`; do git mv "$i" `echo -ne "$i" | perl -pe 's/\.rhtml$/.html.erb/gi;'`; done

Not as clever, but got the job done...

Conservapedia or Wookieepedia?

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 16:44:33 GMT

I'm a latecomer to the party, but I have to say that RationalWiki rules. And before I got here, I paid zero attention to Conservapedia (my previous Conservapedia rant was based on material discovered through RW, by the way). Now that I'm following What Is Going On At Convervapedia, I'm seeing stuff that I find just... weird.

For comparison - how did I become a Wikipedia admin? Oh, random editing here, random tweaking there, speaking some sense here, comprehending Stuff, and another user proposed me for adminship. After the discussion was over, I was just magically sitting there with a trolley full of advanced janitorial tools and no clue where to go. The sky was the limit. I went and proved my worthiness by destroying useless garbage... all by my own... with only me responsible for what I did. So far, I've mostly done pretty harmless stuff - only a few user blocks based on more than ample evidence that someone's in dire need of cooling down.

So how does the stuff work at Conservapedia?

RationalWiki's description of this stuff as a conversation between a Sith Lord and an apprentice is pretty spot on.

"Permanent or 5-year blocks for vandals; short blocks measured in days for people who are counterproductive, as in the non-stop talkers." (Aschlafly)

Yes, that's right: counterproductivity is a bannable offense in Conservapedia. I get annoyed really fast if someone's calling me counterproductive without paying me to work, but that's just me.

Oh, my misunderstanding - actually counterproductivity is "non-stop talking". If there's anything I've learned in my career as a Wikipedia admin, it's that there's no such thing as too much communication. Lack of communication leads only to misunderstandings and ill will: If you can't tell what the heck the other people were trying to accomplish, it's probably up to anyone's interpretation. If I do something that requires an extended explanation, I'll give one, rather than remain a Faceless Bully Admin.

But this tour-de-force was what really silenced me:

"KonstantinL is a good candidate for a block. His user name is dubious and first edit smacks of an attempt at 'liberal humor.' Many of these cases are pathetic. If you don't block him, I will. A permanent block would be appropriate, though you could choose a shorter time if you think there might be something of value in this user." (Aschlafly)
"Well done, Rod. Your promotion is thoroughly deserved." (Bugler)
14:03, 25 November 2008 RodWeathers blocked KonstantinL with an expiry time of 5 years (account creation disabled) ‎ (Liberal vandalism)
...
"Great blocks!" (Aschlafly)

Why do I get the picture of "a local Hells Angels chief tells the hang-around to eat a dog alive"? This is so delightfully villainous in literary sense!

You know, speaking of Star Wars, I liked Anakin Skywalker's fall from grace. Being a good guy sometimes sucks, because villains are sometimes so awesome it hurts! How oh how did I end up with the good guys, and not the "blood and souls for Aschlafly" crowd?

We support Conservapedia, apparently...

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:06:08 GMT

This is a little bit funny: Conservapedia says "We love you, Finland!" Apparently, according to Alexa, we are the second most important source of Conservapedia readers. Way to go!

Which is hardly perplexing - I believe I speak for the entire nation when I say Finns love hilarious web sites. I believe this is a good example of the fact that hit counters don't tell you the whole picture: they tell you "how much?", but not "why?"...

This is a very secular country, with values that are quite different from American conservative values.

For example, I find it particularly funny that Conservapedia's Finland article begins:

Republic of Finland [...] is a country of northern Europe known for its largely social democratic economic system. The Finnish conservative party, the National Coalition led by Jyrki Katainen, is its principal conservative organization.

You put the important things right at the beginning of the article, right?

What can I say as a Finnish citizen? Well, the focus here is pretty much on weird things. (Puts the hat down, sits down and waxes poetic) What makes our country great? Our serenity and our safety! (Gaze firmly in the horizon, arm uplifted poetically) The deep woods, the little lakes, its nature in magnificence, and our dedication to keep it that way; our people, quite honest and rational in nature, sturdy and hard-working, oft undefeated in fields of sports; and not often rivalled in intelligence and resourcefulness, crafty in ways of culture and technology; our beautiful language, our distinct character, our delightful quirks; our love of the country and unquestioned will to defend it - yet also our ever-growing open approval of other nations and our adaptation to the ways of the world without worries over losing our own nature...
(Back to planet Earth)
[I, of course, mean every word - the funny part is supposed to be the poetic tone. 'cause no one speaks like this. =) ]

...and there's nothing to that in the opening. I mean, Wikipedia covers stuff pretty boringly, but at least the WP article lead list stuff that matters.

In turn, Conservapedia's lead section just highlights the boring part. Yeah, Finland is a mixed economy. (And, incidentally, it has nothing as such to do with Social Democracy, other than the fact that AFAIK Social Democrats support mixed economies.) Yeah, we have a big "conservative" party - a centre-right one, who don't seem to have US-style unilateralism in their dictionary, what with getting us to join the EU (not a bad thing, in my opinion) and now saying we should've joined NATO too, like, yesterday (well, I'm not sure about this one). Big and mighty hype, and a curious party to highlight too, considering Conservapedia doesn't even mention Christian Democrats...

That's just about the only big funny thing about that article. Everyone else would focus on facts that actually define the country in some quantifiable manner - but Conservapedia goes on and harps about facts that interest absolutely no one, unless you're an enthusiastic capitalist and conservative.

I don't have much time today to rip through the rest of the article - a part of it seems to resemble truth - but there's small curious things. For example, section on political parties says "Political activity by communists was legalized in 1944, and although four major parties have dominated the postwar political arena, none now has a majority position" - I don't know how to interpret this, and the history of Communism in Finland is so convoluted that no one can make heads or tails of it, but I'm not sure if anyone would have ever called any of their influence "domination of postwar political arena" around here. Communists have been pretty much a minor force in politics for several decades now.

Vagueness is the key to victory: "The origins of the Finnish people are still a matter of conjecture, although many scholars argue that their original home was in what is now west-central Siberia." Some argue that Siberia is, shall we say, a big place. (I'd have personally thrown a dart around the bend of the Volga and say "well, Fenno-Ugric-speaking people possibly, maybe, originated here-ish". But what do I know?)

Also, the article mentions Mika Waltari, Väinö Linna and J.L. Runeberg as "the great masters of Finnish literature". None of these are actually covered in Conservapedia yet, for reasons unknown. I'm, of course, attributing this to the priorisation - after all, Gay Bowel Syndrome is an immediate threat and such has to be covered immediately, works of literature are of secondary importance - but still, one has to wonder if they will remain uncovered. Runeberg came before the other two... obviously, a great master of literature for that huge amount of greatly patriotic verse that he produced. Then we get Mika Waltari, who wrote a depressing but enlightening tale regarding the (godless) Egyptians and how the human nature has remained constant through centuries. Then we have Väinö Linna, who wrote Tuntematon sotilas, originally controversial but in recent times considered a time-tested patriotic work, often lauded as the single greatest rebuttal of jingoistic bullshit and depiction of the horrors of war ever written - clearly prime material for Conservapedia.

"...and finally, in general and in particular: Give thy guidance to the lords of Finland, so that they shall not, for the second time, go forth and ram their heads on the pines of Karelia. Amen." -Tuntematon sotilas, ch. 12, IV (my translation)

Yawn, slow vandalism fixups - and other silliness

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 19:19:56 GMT

Let's look at Hats (party), where we see curious things happening in recent history, showing that the more articles we have, the longer it probably takes to fix vandalism...

21:03, 27 October 2008 Wwwwolf m (5,077 bytes) (Reverted edits by 71.37.109.57 (talk) to last version by DragonBot)
06:10, 20 October 2008 71.37.109.57 (5,062 bytes)
06:09, 20 October 2008 71.37.109.57 (5,078 bytes) (→Policy)

(shit, son, the rollback button actually did what it says in the tin!) ...and also, when we look at the article itself, we see some other curious long-reaching historical things:

The Hats were a political faction during the Age of Liberty (1719-1772) in Sweden. [...]
Policy: [The neutrality of this article is disputed.]

Well, the actual text of the article is clearly too long to read for my tired mind right now, but I'll just remind you that I usually see this sort of terrifying disclaimers in... uh... articles about currently existing political parties.

Too bad BJAODN is dead. Don't do the Hat party! Politics is confusing and boring. Let's do party hats instead!

Computer-generated music from 1960s

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 17:16:43 GMT

I found a rather cool set of clips from the YLE's web archive (Actually Somewhat Working Windows Media Streaming; not sure how easily they can be viewed from outside of Finland), on Markku Nurminen's experiments from 1967 on generating tango music.

The videos are pretty interesting because they show pretty well how programming was practically done on an IBM-1130. "The Real Programmer types some FORTRAN on page. The Real Programmer operates a keypunch and produces a stack of cards. The Real Programmer 'adds a card on top of the deck that instructs the computer to fetch a compiler program from the external disk storage'. The Real Programmer watches a lot of cards come out of the machine." Academically speaking, exactly the same as today, just different in little specifics.

The program is interesting too because it apparently has a model of what sort of songs the tango maestro Toivo Kärki wrote, then generates songs similar to those based on random patterns - in about "half a minute" - and prints them out in tabular form. Or plot the score out in notation format, using a plotter.

And there's one example song that doesn't sound at all bad. Even Kärki himself is impressed.

And, of course, there's an analysis by a computer music person who leaves open the question on whether or not computer generated music would, in future, replace human beings in the process - could computer-generated music become some sort of gloomy formulaic future? Yawn... a bit of hindsight, from the year 2007: Human beings can be mass-producingly formulaic too, thank you very much. =)

Television is fun. When it works.

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:37:06 GMT

O god.

Let's see: my digital TV receiver has been behaving funny over the last... um, few months. When in use, it needs to warm up before it works at all. Needs to be unplugged if I'm not using it, or everything else connected to the SCART "bus" that I have here will get noise too.

Oh, there's the Net TV too! Except that for some reason, the folks at the local major TV channels all use Windows Media. Which wasn't a problem before, but nowadays, I usually just get "we screwed up" error messages from MTV3/Sub, at least.

Well, not really "we screwed up", but "well, it's not working, either". From mimms:

Connecting ...Could not read packet header: Success libmms error: libmms connection error

Good heavens, the rest of the world uses Flash video and it works just fine, none of here do and it doesn't work at all, what's wrong?

Brushing off over ten years worth of dust

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 13:21:36 GMT

Oh what the heck. I'll go with the flow.

The day before yesterday I brushed off ten years worth of dust. Around 1997, I was using this "Active Worlds" thing and enjoyed the dog-slowness of custom content virtual world exploration over a 28.8k modem line, software 3D rendering on my Pentium 166, and horrors of FM MIDI synthesis. =)

And now, I'm in Second Life, as "Wefil Netizen", the hacker lady extraordinaire. Well, I haven't done much yet aside of looking at the very cool freebies, explored a bit of the world, and managed to NOT get my age verified because apparently Integrity needs phone number for age verification for folks in Finland, and that's not even in SL's bloody age verification form. (Had to spam the support with verification request. Hope they don't nitpick too much about my expired passport.)

So far, the place looks pretty cool. I've already seen weird and cute things, and also experienced some odd things. In the first day, the Linux client, like, crashed. Today I stepped out of the help island and just about 5 minutes in found a car stuck running in air above a bridge and fell through the ground a lot, only to be rectified soon.

Haven't run into any Weird Sex Stuff yet! I wonder how many more joyful Seconds of Innocence the fate has reserved for me?

How all projects evolve

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:17:28 GMT

This is how all projects evolve.

The honest phase where the engineers get to describe the product (git-core 1:1.4.4.4-2):

Description: content addressable filesystem

This is a stupid (but extremely fast) directory content manager. It doesn't do a whole lot, but what it 'does' do is track directory contents efficiently.

Amongst other projects, the Linux kernel source tree is managed through the git content manager.

This package provides the git core components.

The phase after the Marketing steps in (git-core 1:1.5.6-1~bpo40+1):

Description: fast, scalable, distributed revision control system

Git is popular version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency; it is used mainly for various open source projects, most notably the Linux kernel.

Git falls in the category of distributed source code management tools. Every Git working directory is a full-fledged repository with full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server.

This package provides the git main components with minimal dependencies. Additional functionality, e.g. a graphical user interface and revision tree visualizer, tools for interoperating with other VCS's, or a web interface, is provided as separate git* packages.

Just random piece of weirdness, provided to you by Debian package repository. =)

A calculating mind can't see the end of the possible scenarios

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 13:40:37 GMT

In Sunday I posted a thought or two about the most recent story I had written. Summary of the relevant part: I haven't yet gotten much responses to my stories, so let's see if a bit of questioning-morality weirdness helps, because spoofing Jack Thompson in my stories didn't generate any responses.

Not soon after, I get a comment from an anonymous user Florida, based on IP address. Posted by "Jack Thompson, Attorney", saying "Huh? Jack Thompson". Okay, I explained what the big point was - basically, I had a random character who was vaguely based on real life.

But was this the genuine Jack Thompson? And how the hell could I tell?

What speaks for the case are the signature, Florida IP address, and the guy's writing style (read: extreme brevity).
What speaks against is the... well, the whole idea that Jack Thompson would be ego-surfing in Sunday and posting comments to a random loser's blog is pretty preposterous.

But it got me thinking...

If you were Jack Thompson, how would you prove you are who you claim to be? The guy basically shot his online identity when he himself started registering random LiveJournal accounts to comment on gamepolitics. If JT can register random sockpuppet accounts, anyone can, and I'm not going to trust any of the sockpuppets unless LJ staff can confirm they're one and same - and they're probably not going to.

Well, there would probably be one marginally trusted way - Jack could make his website OpenID-enabled. Then the only remaining question would be "is this really Jack Thompson's website?", which would obviously arise knowing JT's lack of Web-technical capability... =)
But the big issue is obvious. The more someone waters down the technical aspect of their online identity, the less credible their identification becomes. Technology is nice and all, but it sure doesn't seem to help in telling apart the real people and trolls, because, well, damn it, people don't do that, either.

Clearly, these are life's little mysteries...

Nothing new under the Sun, part n+5: Blog widgets

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:02:24 GMT

"Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!" Oh God, I'm getting pretty depressed when I look at blog/social network widgets. I'm looking for something useful to add to my blogs, but regrettably, the usefulness of the widgets is limited to personal diary type sites (i.e. sharing My Stuff From Other Websites). I don't want to make my LiveJournal layout any more unreadable than it already is, and that type of content just doesn't usually fly in topical blogs. And I just don't want to add stuff because it offers some fun analytics stuff as a side bonus - I'm a bit on the edge on whether or not I should use traffic analysis at all. I used to be enthusiastic about getting my website's logs, but I haven't looked at the log analysis for years.

Anyway, that's not the depressing part. The depressing part is that there's just too damn many bloody clock widgets in the blog widget category. GOOD GOD. Apologies for shouting, but can you all people LOOK AT THAT LIST and claim with good honest conscience that this is a good thing? *sigh* Okay, okay, I'm not trying to be overly critical or anything, people should build widgets they think are interesting and fun to build, but still, please consider the possibility that the market might be severely oversaturated.

Not only that, but back around 10 years ago or so, we didn't have any of these "Social Network" and "Blog" things. We only had "Personal Home Pages" and "Web Diaries". And you know what people were doing with their personal home pages? Well, they basically made ugly pages that looked like, oh, your average MySpace profile. (Well, less ugly, usually.) People were happy learning HTML for that purpose - making their trendy web pages and stuff! And JavaScript! Oh God, did they ever learn to write JavaScript! They made JavaScript clocks for their web pages. Of course, every Big Boy (And Girl) in Web Designing Business said "well, you know, usually people have clocks of their own, like that little one in the corner of your Windows 98 desktop screen." (Or the huge-ass clock you get on the modern Vista desktop, apparn'tly. Meanwhile, we Linux users have always had several choices between those two extremes!)

So things don't change really all that much. The list now has plenty of clocks, just like the JavaScript clock craze of ages ago. Perhaps now they have Aesthetic Web 2.0 Design! With abstracted DOM, so that it won't break between Netscape and MSIE... I mean, Firefox/MSIE/Opera/Safari.

There's also a bitty browser which is actually pretty cute, as this list describes it: "embed a cute, fully functional mini web browser to your blog." Aww. Cute little mini web browser. Within a web browser. It's like a web browser's child. So very cute! Well, I mostly just use the web browser itself to browse other pages, but it's still a very cute concept and I like it! (Aww. Little browser. Awww.) Got to start a paragraph so that I don't accidentally insult the cute widget.

Anyway, yeah, unfortunately, some widgets seem to replicate things needlessly. There's answers.com widget, which lets you... um... search answers.com from the web page you put it. You know, instead of going to answer.com, or using toolbar search or search bar with answer.com as search engine. You know, the old "let's use the best tools for the job" thing. Another widget to display a Google Maps map! ...in case you don't want to go to, I don't know... Google Maps, maybe. There's syndication widgets that grab headlines - why so many to grab headlines from specific sources, when RSS and Atom have been invented? Then there's the category of widgets that should not be widgets in the first place. Games. If I want to play games, I usually head to, say, game sites. If you need a blog sidebar game to keep me in your blog, then you probably have some problems coming up with interesting content that makes me hit the feed subscription button. Maybe.

Then there are the mysterious unintended consequences waiting for the unwary to head that way... "Show Technorati Blog Rank of your Blog / Website with fancy images." Kinda like Technorati's own damn widget? "Note : In order to support our operation, you agree that we place pop-under ads behind your site by using our widget." I don't usually use this expression lightly, but here goes: fuck you, o shady widget developer, for even making me moderately interested about the widget - but also thank you for telling me in advance, because some (okay, most) people hide facts that cause most rational people (and their readers) to run away screaming in the small print.

Some are weird. "Easy-share uploader". WTF? Widgets are supposed to... like... show information in blog pages. Why the hell should they let people upload random files? And again: there's websites for that. if a blog reader wants to add a file attachment to the comments, there's bazillion of file share servers out there. Yawn.

Okay, it's five o'clock in the morning and I have only found a few cute and charming widgets (like animals!) that I still wouldn't put to my blogs... and a whole giant bunch of incredibly repetitive and beautiful but ulimately useful variations on the theme of "a clock" and "ze headline aggregator of my dreams: fresh hot off theblogyouveneverbloodyheardof dot com". I guess it's more or less time to go to bed.

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 18:53:57 GMT

(My Slashdot post, trying to defend why Firefox tab design is spot on and why MSIE, Opera and apparently Google's new browser concept are doin it rong by placing tabs where God never meant them to go)

The way I strain my logic is this: If you want to make good use of screen real estate, the tab bar has to disappear when there's only one page open in the window. This effectively dictates that you can't put the tab bar above the other page navigational controls, because no one likes it when the controls are randomly in random parts of the screen depending on the current usage situation.

Navigational features are something that every browser window needs, but the amount and very existence of tabs is something that depends on what pages you have open.

In other words, browser window (or any application window) should be divided into areas that show how you do things and what you are doing now; URL bars and buttons and bookmark bars are former, the tabs and the page content are latter.

Today's angst: Forumware and the real reasons why OSS newb help sucks

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 17:38:56 GMT

Okay, today wasn't a good day. I got a good idea today - specifically, I just wanted to install a nice simple forum for the Avarthrel site. I took on the task optimistically enough: phpBB appears to nowadays have a mod for it that allows you to use OpenID, and phpBB3 also runs on SQLite. The rumour has it that there's a ton of really shitty forum implementations and then there's the one that's quite a lot less shitty: phpBB.

But then - woe and horror, the bloody thing doesn't run. That blog post is a bit more whiny, so let me try to take a calm, analytic look at what's going on.

Apparently, phpBB requires this little module called "sqlite", which uses SQLite 2.x.olderthanheaven.pleasejustletitdiealready and a "native-like" API. Not pdo_sqlite, which I do have and use and works okay, and which uses SQLite 3.x and, uh, PDO (you know, the innovation in PHP database access technology that made PHP look not hopelessly antiquated to Perl/Python/Ruby/Java/etc programmers, who have long had cool atomic shit like DBI and JDBC).

Car Analogy™:
Proudly advertising brand new, rewritten, reimagined, re-engineered software that "now also runs on SQLite 2" is like saying "Here's a brand new Ferrari with 1970s Lada engine, if you're into that sort of things" - you know, there's nothing bloody wrong with Lada engines (they probably freeze less in our climate than Ferrari ones), it's just that it's from 1970s. It's better to have an engine that can theoretically survive nuclear strikes than an engine that has demonstrably survived several in row and the warranty only covers three 20 megaton blasts. =)

Anyway, this was just the tip of the iceberg. I went through a lot of web pages, looking for other forum software packages, and all of them had several problems. Specifically:

The requirements were a bit obscure, and a professional-looking website is no indication that the program is actively maintained. I've seen the same problem when I was looking for the blogware and CMSes for Avarthrel site (before finding the blogware and giving up on finding the CMS). Sites like ForumMatrix are invaluable: I don't want to spend several mouseclicks and tons of eyeballing to find out that it's yet another bloody PHP3/MySQL3 package that was last updated somewhere around the Mathias Rust incident.
Feedback and newbie questions: Would I have been able to voice my concerns about phpBB's lack of pdo_sqlite support? Sure, except that the support forums require a bloody registration. I looked at NuclearBB, grabbed a machete to wade through the marketing bullshit, found no system requirements on the website and damn me if I'm going to download the thing just to figure out if it runs. File a bug, perhaps, that the website isn't helpful? I'm supposed to log in the bloody forums, they say. I looked at FluxBB, and they have a nice wiki page where the requirements are listed... but you, of course, have to register to update the page to say that pdo_sqlite isn't supported, because registering to edit is what wikis are bloody about, be sure to confirm the email in six steps and make sure you have both capital and small numbers in your password (to steal an ancient joke).

The latter about having open forum, open wiki or even an easy-to-find public feedback web form is something I really would like to see in a lot of projects. I liked Inkscape's approach: new feature proposals can be submitted through the wiki. SourceForge.net nowadays accepts OpenID, so there's probably less registration hassle (not that I mind, I've had sf.net account for ages). Speaking of which, such centralised systems (sf.net, gna, Launchpad, whatever) are very important.

Sorry for this post, I guess I just need a second rant to clear up my head. =)

Iteration of pain

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:09:02 GMT

You know, I thought Java's XML DOM implementation was hilariously boneheaded in that it reimplemented lists (badly). What made people think this is a good idea? "Oh, I'm sure Java doesn't have obscure programming concepts like Lists. Let's implement our own! Iterators? What are these blasted newfangled contraptions you speak of?" You have to use ugly hacks to Process Stuff.

So today, inspired to see what PHP 5's new, amazing XML support looks like... I find out that they've rewritten arrays so that they don't work with PHP's neat simple iterator-equivalents and you have to use ugly hacks to Process Stuff.

Please stop the planet and throw out whoever came up with this...

Can't help but wonder... (wait, this is an awful title for a blog post)

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:12:36 GMT

Sorry for the rant. Stuff like this seem to sometimes happen. Despite of what people keep telling, weird stuff happens in Wikipedia all the time. This is one such case.

A snippet of the move log:

05:18, 3 March 2008 Reptaboy moved Instant messaging to Instant messaging & messengers ‎ (Instant messaging is one thing and Messengers is another)

Yes, that's March 3rd. March 3rd.

Now, instant messaging is a hugely popular thing, no? I talk with my friends over Jabber every weekend or so. People IRC and stuff. One of the most important things people do online! One of the Internet's most important application groups! Yeah! As a result, it's an important topic for an encyclopaedia.

And out of blue, without any discussion, someone renames the page and gives a rather cryptic explanation.

No one flinches.

No one looks in the Manual of Style Naming Conventions section and sees if it's suddenly okay to list synonyms in the article title. Or use a trendy, lowering-IQ-with-a-sledgehammer "&" instead of "and".

Computing Wikiproject lists the article as "B-class" and "High importance".

And no one flinches when the page gets moved to this dubious title.

And it stayed there for over 5 months.

Let me remind you again: B-class. High importance.

None were amazed when they saw weird stuff on their watchlists. None of our esteemed computer experts looked at list of highly important computing topic and went "oh, seems we've had good progress on this article on... what the hell?"

*sigh* People used to boast that vandalism tends to get dealt with promptly, but sometimes, good-faith but questionable editorial choices remain up there for long time and no one dares to work on them. Even if it's in a very blatant place like the article title. In a rather prominent, important article.

Malware? In my Linux?

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:55:59 GMT

Okay, so I'm minding my own business, googling for town generators. In the end of the page, I see a link to "Justin Dunmyre's Town Generator". Clicked the link, and boom!

...a javascript popup.

ATTENTION! If your computer is infected, you could suffer data loss, erratic PC behaviour, PC freezes and crashes.
Detect and remove viruses before they damage your computer!
Antivirus 2009 will perform a quick and 100% FREE scan of your computer for Viruses, Spyware and Adware.
Do you want to install Antivirus 2009 to scan your computer for malware now? (Recommended)

Hitting cancel gets me to a funky scanner thing. Which sloppily scans my C: and D: drives (wherever they are) and says, among other things, that I have a critical infection of "Spyware.IEMonster.b", which is pretty funny, because the only copy of IE in this system is stowed in the directory with my (unbootable) dump of my old Windows 98SE files.

And the weird thing is, the page is perfectly wgettable and works fine if I disable referers or go to the page from any page other than Google. Wonder if this is some weird cross-platform client-side hackery? Because this looks like (to my currently woefully uncoffeed brain) a case of pure server side weirdness: Firebug says I get mathemagician.net/town.htm, which gets 302 Found bounced through 87.248.180.90, greatvideo3.com and finally internet-defense2009.com.

Some digging later, turns out it's possible that it's related to these guys also discussed in malwarehelp. Apparently, they drop bogus .htaccess files everywhere. People hack websites now to spread malware? This is bloody evil.

Thoughts on Blogging

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:26:11 GMT

Well, I went and upgraded the blogs I have on beastwithin.org to Movable Type 4.2. I still can't get over how cool system that thing is. I'm thinking of opening a photo blog someday, now that I have borrowed a digital camera.

Anyway, I ran into a post in MovableType.com congratulating Kottke for blogging for over 10 years. And I dug around and noticed that wow, I've been blogging for over 10 years too! I never realised that, because I've never tried to put any specific value on blogging. I'm just using the technology here, logical evolutions of existing stuff... People certainly had online diaries before, and posted status updates, and this was an old hat... I don't feel particularly remarkable for doing this stuff for a long time.

Somewhat luckily, however, my first blog isn't in the web any more, but I luckily have a copy of the entire thing. Archive.org doesn't seem to have a copy, though they do have old copies of my web page. The thing was called Strange Days (after a film I hadn't seen at the time and had no idea what it was about. I saw it later. it's pretty good.) First entry? February 22, 1998.

Of course, I never called it a blog at the time:

Think this as a "glorified finger" (The Curse of Major ISPs is that they don't provide fingers to play with).
I write when I feel like. Patience. Bear with me.

(Amazing old stuff to read after reading the recent maddoxrant. Also, the latter part pretty much sums why I'm not a great popular blogger, because this particular policy is something I absolutely refuse to change for now. =)

Specifically, I was inspired to blog because I was following the .plan updates from Crack dot Com until they went bankrupt trying to develop Golgotha. Also, a lot of other cool people in GIMP community seemed to have .plans. I couldn't have publicly accessible .plan so I put the crap in the web. Later, I started doing stuff in Everything2, then Kuro5hin, and finally LiveJournal and other places.

Oh, and apparently, before I started this LiveJournal, I was trying to roll some of my own, and had a "mood log" where I could post short updates. That was April 11, 2002. Goddarnit, I beat Twitter too! Though, I think, identi.ca is much better than the quick-and-dirty tiny hack I had. =)

Oh well. I'm growing old without even putting much effort in this. Time passes, but I can't say I've done anything big and major... but I can say that I have, for a long period of time, done something I've thoroughly enjoyed doing, and will probably never quit doing. That's what matters. =)

The strange case of Nyrva Dragonrhyne

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:16:52 GMT

Wow, seems that I've somehow been involved in a little bit, er, dramatic case. Okay, I admit that being sarcastic about pageviews in an AfD discussion without telling the newbies what's going on is a bad move. I definitely screwed up there.

Anyway, the case in summary: Someone called Witaku posts an article about a character that's featured in deviantART and is apparently subject of an as-of-yet unfinished novel. Neither is a solid claim to fame as far as Wikipedia's notability criteria go. And, worse than that, the only claims of fame that are puffed as proud achievements in the article are two pictures featured in a news post - which, incidentally, has a chance of actually have been seen by at least some people and indicates a highly rudimentary form of editorial control by another allegedly uninvolved person, which is more than most deviantART users can say they have. Still, a far cry from what Wikipedia considers reliable sources.

Apparently, the artist in question appeared in Wikipedia and told this zealous fan to stop trying to combat the issue in Wikipedia because WP isn't friendly to underground work. Sound advice, and the latter point is not only true but it also has (of course) been demonstrated many times.

So, today, I got the bright idea to go see the artist's page and say that, despite the WP drama, I didn't really think the drawings were all that bad. So what do I find in the artist's shouts?

That Edward321 is an ass, and so is wwwolf! You better ban wwwolf from your page so he doesn't trash you here like he did on Wikipedia!

...from Witaku, who now has "WIKIPEDIA SUCKS!!!" as a motto. Sarcasm is a filthy habit, I know, but please allow me to partake in it yet another time, with all due warnings: No, I have never ever in my several years of Wikipedia editing heard that assertion in this particular context before.

And Neomorphasis has apparently done as requested. Yay.

Look, this is what I don't get: I never had any intention to "trash" the character. The only thing I did say was some random rubbish about hit counts, and if that counts as a bloody insult these days, then I suggest people pass laws prohibiting hit counters because they clearly lead to heads exploding all the time when they show too high or too low numbers. However, I asserted that the character doesn't fulfill WP's notability criteria. Neomorphasis appears to concur. And then goes on to ban me from their user page, apparently thanks to a zealous fan's suggestion... whom he tried to calm the hell down.
Yeah, I see everyone is really really calm and rational here. (Okay, I have to admit it, my sarcasm reservoir is overflowing.)

Some time ago I wrote to Witaku in Wikipedia, trying to clear things up, and posted (to his userpage) an apology and a request to give thumbs-up to Neomorphasis on my behalf about the artwork. I hope those regards get relayed eventually.

In case they don't get relayed, and for the record: Neomorphasis, I'd like to thank you for realising what Wikipedia does; we regrettably don't cover things that have (so far) limited audience. However, I believe I speak for every Wikipedia administrator when I say that if the character ever becomes demonstrably famous, we're all happy and more than willing to re-negotiate. And, hey, like I said, the drawings really weren't half bad - the details need a bit of polish, yeah, but the design is good so far.

Edit, 20:10: Luckily, the situation seems to be resolved now - I don't have any weird bans any more! Let this be example for people on how easily all these weird drama situations can be fixed if people just keep their heads nicely calm and icy! =)

PublishAmerica and Lack of Marketing

wwwwolf@iki.fi — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:29:28 GMT

PublishAmerica is a rather well-known vanity publisher - despite of their claims of being a "traditional" publisher. Basically, they publish your book for free... and then you realise the only way to get your book Out There is to buy a bunch of them from them and then sell them yourself. Marketing? PublishAmerica does the bare minimum (i.e., list the book on their website that may or may not process orders from random people). The author has to do the rest. And most of them aren't advertising professionals. Or, it seems, in the mood to do some common sense every-day ho-hum grassroots promotion that works.

This is also exemplified in the way the inhabitants of the PublishAmerica's message board inhabitants work. On a few occasions, I've heard PA's authors saying that Wikipedia's article on PublishAmerica needs to be corrected. I've switched my brains in the "article defender" mode and over the next days, absolutely nothing happens. Okay, turns out one author decided to try to improve the article and was greeted with all the proper ceremony - but that was not the point of this particular example. That one, single edit was made in January. The author in question said on PublisAmerica Message Board, in May, that they had fixed things in Wikipedia. And that was the author's only edit to Wikipedia, ever. A single edit doesn't a campaign make. The edit in question is mysteriously absent from Wikipedia nowadays - hint, hint, there were no sources.

Okay, but I'm not here to talk about Wikipedia today, really - I was supposed to talk about marketing. The above is merely an indication of the level of effort people put into these things if they don't research how things work. Wikipedia wants sourced facts, and this user's small effort was foiled by the fact that you can't just add random stuff to the article and expect it to stick. Had they rolled up the sleeves and found statements, pro and contra, about how PA works, with appropriate sources, that would have been better. But that takes effort.

So, onward to marketing! Here's a video clip created to market a book, posted to YouTube in February 4. Yesterday, the video was watched 40 times. Today, 87 times. Call me paranoid, but I guess the doubling of watch count is probably attributable to being mentioned in absolutewrite.com forums. This lady makes videos for PublishAmerica authors for the low price of $30.00. "You can provide your own pictures or I can use pictures from my media library if you wish." (Links not in the original, but probably truthful.)

But here's the thing: How on Earth can you make a YouTube marketing video that gets 40 legitimate hits in a bit over 5 months? As a hired service, no less?

Hitcounteritis is an insidious disease. People in PublishAmerica Message Board are busy Marketing, by creating, uh, FreeWebs web pages. With hit counters. And there's a prevalent attitude that web hit counters are directly proportional to book sales. As everyone with even rudimentary knowledge of Internet marketing knows, that's utter rubbish. From technical point of view, there's three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and hit counters. From marketing point of view, everyone knows that merely getting the prospective buyer to see an advertisement doesn't guarantee a sale in itself.

But even if you believe in hit counters, 40 hits is still utterly puny.

Coincidentally, I posted a video of my own around same time - February 5. It has received 1351 views as of yesterday.

And I'm not a marketing professional, darn it. I used common sense, such as...

Being topical. The whole thing is basically a forum injoke. Folks in the forum loved it. I believe the Big Marketing Boys call this thing "studying the focus group" or some other complex stuff like that.
Actually linking spreading the link. I mentioned the thing on the forum. I put a link on the signature. People asked to embed it on their website, so I told them to go ahead.
Making the video easy to find in YouTube. Type in "GNOME Tracker", and there it is. "desktop search", hey, there it is too. "SpectateSwamp"? Ding ding, surprise!

About the last one: This 40-hit video has... ugh, tags like "commercials", "news", "advertising", "trailer", "book"... but the description and tags don't mention what the book is about. I bet half of the people who came to the video were looking for that hilarious commercial from three years back where the cat went behind the book case. (Just an example - I'm not sure if there was an actual commercial like that.) So you see, metadata is painfully important!

On to another topic: it's probably painfully obvious that the video pictures really are random pictures grabbed from Google. Some of them even have copyright messages and even watermarks clearly visible.

But the scariest of them was this particular video about a fictional fantasy novel (no, not the way "The Mad Trist" is a fictional fantasy novel).

You see, there was this case of Limbo of the Lost lately. The massive playthrough fest on rpg.net just concluded, and now, the game of "spot the lost asset" is really getting in the full swing! After learning about this game and following the epic journey of the Eternal Hero of Game Fora through madness and insanity and ripped-off backdrops, you see the world differently. You start seeing the ~~fnords~~ watermarks. You open your eyes and say "I've definitely seen that picture somewhere else, damn it, I'm sure I have".

And you bloody well least expect to see two very famous promo screenshots in this book video. Not content with ordinary image plagiarism, no, she did the one thing that immediately invokes "shades of Limbo of the Lost" in peoples' minds. LotL became famous when people noticed the makers had ripped off The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It's as if this video isn't merely saying "I'm ripping off images, hooray"; it's saying "I'm ripping off images and deliberately reminding people that I'm ripping off images, just like those wacky Brits."

I love Oblivion, but why is every shady person out there trying to rip off graphics from it? Limbo of the Lost people at least played the game, went to various locations in the game and grabbed the screenshots themselves. These are famous promo shots. Geez. Now, I'm not usually advocating intense copyright paranoia or anything, but this really looks pretty darn hilarious - I hope Bethesda Softworks will stomp on this practice soon, or soon you see the screenies ripped off to every shady little production out there.