Intellidick.com - Pure Insanity

The joy of running content management systems like WordPress and image galleries like Coppermine is trying to find a theme that has been ported to both of them. Needless to say, this blog and the accompanying photo gallery don’t match… It’s not because I couldn’t find a port of the Ocadia theme, it’s because the port of the theme to CPG didn’t really work out so well. Fixed width and all kinds of nastiness… About my only choice here is to go to something that has a built in image gallery and blog engine (like BitWeaver) and then have 8,000 features that I don’t use!

This is almost worse than trying to get all of my skins on my desktop applications to match.

I’ve recently been coding away on an open source application and I need to embed multiple scripting languages. I started with Perl, googled for a while, hit some Perldoc, and my embedder is working flawlessly. The whole process was relatively painless. I then went on to build the rest of my framework around my Perl embedder.

Now it’s time for the Python embedder…

Step 1 : Some Python code to execute in the embedder.
I get on the web, do some googling, and i’m on my way. Some simple functions with some screen I/O, nothing exciting, but functional. Life is good.

Step 2 : The embedder in C
Once again, I hit the web, do some googling, find lots of docs… and lots of people asking questions. The Python doc for embedding/extending is quite long winded and not overly informative. It also makes a point of stating that most people who want to embed Python “discover” that they should just write their whole application in Python instead of C. *cough cough* Yeah well, that’s not going to work for me. I can’t make heads or tails of these docs, i’m not finding any valuable answers in forums and such… so now i’m screwed.

But wait! There’s IRC. Whenever I need help with opensource software, there’s always someone on the IRC. Sure enough, I hit the python site, find the IRC channel, jump onto FreeNode and hit #python. Bingo! There’s ALOT of people in here… i’m good to roll.

I write out my question using clear language, no l33t speak or anything, and try for a solid explanation of what I need. 5 minutes go by, finally, somebody kicks in a link to the python docs site… WHAT?!?!?!?!? Did this jackass just RTFM me? What an ass.

So, I inform him politely that i’ve already read the docs but they’re not overly clear for what i’m trying to do. So I explain AGAIN as to exactly what I want to do with the interpreter. He then sends me a link to the C API from the docs site and suggests one of the functions… the one he suggests doesn’t do anything close to what I want. Great. Thanks again for RTFM’ing me.

After a few more message bounces, I finally give up on this guy. He’s obviously not reading what i’m typing and doesn’t know what i’m asking for. Basically, he’s never done this. Yay.

So, the point here is that in a matter of 10 minutes, he alienated me. He didn’t care enough about new users to try to answer my question w/o giving me an RTFM. Dude, i’m a C programmer, you don’t think i’m used to looking at the damned manual by now?

Congrats, if it weren’t for the fact that I need python for this particular project, i’d tell this jackass to hit the road and just stick with Perl. This shows yet another fundamental problem in open source… the elitist community. Just because you can write some stuff in Python doesn’t mean you’re that awesome. Help the new people, welcome them in to the community… that’s the key to success.

But that’s just me, I could be wrong.

The internet is about to be killed. The fun is over. We had a good run but the end is near. The writing is on the wall.

Normally I stay away from issues like this because of the firestorm that it starts, but hey, sometimes even I have to stand up and shout out the obvious.

So why do I say that it’s over? Why is the internet going away? Because it’s ideals are dead.

It’s not free anymore, everyone is here to make money. The damned ISPs are pissed because we’re “using too much bandwidth”. So now content providers are going to have to pay more to get a higher slot in the QoS of those ISPs. WHAT A CROCK! Basically, the big boys like MS, Google, Yahoo, etc are going to pay the tariff and get high priority, and all of the content I like to read (including this site) is going to go slow. The next thing that’s going to happen is that more and more sites are going to sign up for this and the ISPs will generate monstrous lists of hosts that get high priority and the rest, the next trend here is that they’ll have to upgrade their hardware to actually watch that much traffic. And of course, consumers will get the bill for that hardware upgrade with some new “tier” of service. Oh, and let’s not forget that the internet is a mega network made up of a few larger providers and subdivided into a lot of smaller providers. That’s a problem… and here’s why.

So for example’s sake, let’s say I have to go through AT&T, Sprint, and Qwest to get to Google. Google signs up with AT&T and Qwest for “premium” bandwidth, but they don’t sign up with Sprint. So now, AT&T and Qwest push them up in their QoS and Sprint pushes them down. Guess what?!?!?!?!?!?!? Google is still slow b/c they didn’t pay off everybody. That’s right, I said PAY OFF, because that’s what this is. This is major providers pushing the government and the government bowing down to them and allowing stuff like this to pass through.

This is wrong and everyone knows it. Would someone please get the governments away from my internet? The internet used to police itself, if you didn’t like what you saw, it was your choice NOT to go there. I don’t agree with a lot of the stuff I see on the net, but I recognize the freedom of expression.

The next problem… censorship. Ooof, i’m not even gonna rant too long about this one. I shouldn’t have to. Just start looking folks, censorship is happening all over the damned place. It’s just not cool.

So anyway, the fat lady is about to sing. The freedom of the internet is over. It’s just a place to do your job and buy stuff now.

[esc]:set rant on

Alright, so i’m an RSS junkie. Google homepage, Liferea, whatever… just give me the news man! Throughout the years, there have been many different pages up there, but there’s always been slashdot… always. If it wasn’t RSS, I had the headlines e-mailed to me. (Still do) With that being said, let’s talk about Digg.

So, Digg appeared almost out of nowhere. Sure, it’s been there for a while but it really just got popular lately. More and more people are flocking to it… including me. Like any good netizen, I added it to my RSS and feeds and gave them a shot at attracting my attention. At first, that was a good move, the stories were flying fast and I was clicking like a wild man trying to keep up. It was great… and then the BS started happening.

I never left Slashdot, it’s been there for a long time and I still take the time to read it daily. Part of the Slashdot “aura” is the commentary. From funny to informative to flame wars, whatever, almost always fun to read and a LOT of information comes in those comments. (If you’re only reading the headlines, you’re missing the point)

In accordance with that, I started reading the Digg commentary… which mostly seems to consist of “Cool, I digg”, “Rockin! +digg”, or “This sucks, no digg”, and let’s not forget “Dude, this is so old! But i’ll digg it anyway”. This really started to bother me after a while. (Apparently, old crap is still digg worthy, even if we all saw it 3 months ago) Now, i’m not saying this NEVER happens on Slashdot, but it happens less(tm).

At this point, I was still okay with Digg… they still had some good stuff pop up there from time to time. (Then again, so does del.icio.us) The part where I had a problem is when the war began. All of sudden, Digg got some traffic, and a whole new “kill slashdot” community emerged.

What’s this all about? What are they so angry at Slashdot? And who cares who is on top? Just do the best job you can and let the people decide! Okay, i’ll admit, the Slashdot community can be a bit tough to break into. They tend to lean towards the eccentric uber-geek kind of stuff. (Which is why I like it!) I’ve posted a few stories there, and to this day, not one of them has managed to hit the front page… ever. Oh well, life goes on, i’m a sh!tty writer. I still submit, I still read.

I guess my point here is that i’ve now completely abandoned Digg b/c of the “kill slashdot” community. It’s damned near every other article on there these days. Talking about how good Digg is compared to Slashdot. In reality, Digg has turned into a social bookmarking site and is becoming less and less a technology site. It’s really quite pathetic.

Then again, I have this same problem with the “Kill IE” community. Okay, so Microsoft stepped up and made a browser when there really wasn’t much else to choose from. Okay, so IE has been riddled with security holes and lacks ALOT of functionality. So, MAKE A BETTER PRODUCT AND LET THE COMMUNITY DECIDE. I use Firefox BECAUSE it’s a better product, not because I want to see IE die. IE can stay, I just won’t use it. Problem solved.

Do you see what I mean, start reading some of the Digg commentary and see some of the fan sites that have spawned (like “diggvsdot.com”). What a joke. Slashdot is a solid web site with a lot to offer. Digg needs some polishing, but it could be very good. So, COMPETE Digg… don’t try to win the war with FUD. I don’t have time for it and just don’t care.

[esc]:set rant off