Copyrighteous

When my friends Karen and Annina were confronted with an offensive sticker on the laptop of someone working at our lab, they organized a very constructive and effective intervention.

I was so impressed that I made a short illustrated write-up of the story on my wiki.

I took a little time today to make a new release of the Free Software Project Management HOWTO. Nearly eight years after I wrote it, much of the document is out of date or has been replaced with better, more comprehensive write-ups. In particular, I think Karl Fogel's book, Producing Open Source Software says everything insightful I say in the HOWTO, a whole lot clearly -- plus adds a lot I missed.

That said, my HOWTO is short and is apparently still useful to folks. I updated it to include links to a new German translation courtesy to Robert F. Schmitt, to fix a bunch of links that time broke, and to address a few obvious mistakes that readers have pointed out.

Thinking about the documents' future, I'm happy to release it under Creative Commons BY-SA in addition to GFDL and would love to help out on a wiki book project to merge a few of related efforts into a comprehensive wiki reference work.

After a late-night IRC conversation about egg corns, shaggy dog stories and feghoots the idea for a short story came to me in the bathtub this morning.

I give you, The Story of Josephville. Apologies in advance.

I watched Citizen Kane several weeks ago and was shocked to learn that the major villian in the film is a political boss named Jim Gettys. Of course, a real Jim Gettys is a well known X Window System contributor who is currently working at an OLPC manager.

Last night someone reminded me that OLPC's new President and COO -- who I'd always just thought of as Chuck -- is named Charles Kane!

Here's a short clip from a video of the fictional Charles Kane giving a rather long speech decrying the fictional Jim Gettys! (Also in Ogg.)

I haven't been this amused since I learned that the head villian in the cartoon Jem was named Eric Raymond!

Nothing is more embarrassing than a website announcing that something will happen on a particular date -- e.g., a product will be released, a feature will be turned on -- after the date has come and gone! Even worse, putting things off repeatedly can be a lot of work!

To help such people, I just did a very quick 10 minute hack I'm calling The Vaporizer. It looks like just a date on a webpage. However, if the date originally listed has come and gone, a little bit of Javascript will change the site so that it shows tomorrow's date instead. Vaporware providers of all types can use it to safely (and effortlessly) put things off without worrying about looking overdue!

I have seen the future, and the future is tomorrow.

One thing that has always annoyed me about most wiki is the way they handle images. MediaWiki, like most wikis, allows users to upload images and embed pictures. However, if you want to change an image, you need to download the file, open it up in GIMP, Inkscape, or Photoshop, edit it, save it, and re-upload it. Somewhere in this long process, the ease of editing that makes wikis so wonderful gets lost. Basically, I'm annoyed because images in wikis aren't very "wiki."

I had a talk with Brianna Laugher at Wikimania about ways to make it easier to folks to edit pictures from within the browser -- even if it is only simple stuff. Yesterday I took the afternoon to write a new MediaWiki extension which gives a working example of in-browser image editing. It provides the ability to crop images using David Spurr's wonderful Javascript cropping user interface and uses ImageMagick to do the actual image manipulation.

It is in the form of an extension to Mediawiki I've called EditImage. It's an afternoon hack from an under-qualified PHP hacker so it's nothing special. You can read it about on its page in the Mediawiki wiki and you can try it out on my personal wiki where I have it installed.

I'm certainly not the first person to think about doing this. In fact, some old pages in the MediaWiki wiki imply that I'm not even the first person to play around with the idea of using Spurr's code to do image cropping for MediaWiki. Hopefully though, my code can act as a nice first step and a framework for folks wanting to add additional image manipulation features. For example, I think it would be quick to add the ability to do in-browser brightness and contrast manipulation and I would love to see this in a future version of the extension.

When I gave a Revealing Errors talk at Lug Radio Live USA, I had the misfortune of being up against Robert Love's talk on Android which many people at the conference wanted to see -- myself included! One person who showed up to my talk anyway was Allison Randall. She was apparently entertained enough to invite me to give a short version of the talk as one of the keynote presentations at OSCON 2008!

In the talk, I covered the ideas behind my Revealing Errors project and quickly walked through a few examples that showcase what I'm trying to do. I'm happy with the result: a couple thousand people showed up for the talk despite the fact that it was at 8:45 AM after the biggest "party night" of the conference!

For those that missed it for whatever reason, you can watch a video recording that O'Reilly made and that I've embedded below.

A larger version of the Flash video as well as a QuickTime version is over on blip.tv and I've created an OGG Theora version for all my freedom loving readers.