Suits and Sinners
January 26th, 2006<self-righteous mode>
Just renewed my subscription to Linux Weekly News. For a long time I made do with the one week old, free version, on the grounds of not paying for web content on principle. Then I had a bit of money left sitting in a PayPal account, and thought “what the heck” and used it to pay for a few months’ LWN. So now I’m a fully paid-up subscriber, and I’d encourage anyone with an interest in Linux to do the same.
</self-righteous mode>
What amused me in this week’s edition was a report of the GPLv3 Launch Conference and the conflict between suits and hackers, and how the suits managed to hijack the conference stars – much to the annoyance of the hackers.
This brought back painful memories of the one faux pas of what was otherwise an outstandingly successful OOoConf in Koper/Capodistria last year – the best OOoConf ever. Unwisely, some of us were cajoled into helping one of the commercial sponsors organise an invitation-only evening meal for ‘key opinion formers’ in OOo, while another funded event was taking place elsewhere for the masses.
This seemed a fair quid pro quo at the time for some generous funding from a new sponsor, and the promise of much more to come. However, it didn’t go down well with those who weren’t invited, and the alternative event for the masses was a flop. To make matters worse, it was even worse for those who were invited to the top table. The sponsor’s main spokesperson turned the event into a personal ego-trip of truly breathtaking dimensions. I’ve seen some pretty embarrassing displays from vendors in my lifetime in IT, but this took the lifetime achievement award.
So, my sympathies go to the good hackers who felt they were left out in the DMZ at the GPLv3 conference. But if our experience at OOoConf was anything to go by, just be glad you weren’t in with suits – be glad, really glad.
February 4th, 2006 at 8:03 pm
speaking of “corrections”
I was impressed with how fast you corrected your internal documentation for the update to the fold menu plug in Jan. when I pointed out the “glitch”.
I still don’t see any way to contact you through your site directly.
I see another problem. On your web page when you give intsallation instructions you have a space in the suggested code that causes it to not work unless I am sharp enough to remove it. I’ll copy the code below and replace the space with the #.
Pages’ ); ?>
to this:
Pages’ ); ?>
That # space breaks the code.
I have an unusual case going where I cannot get the fold menu going right … and intially I thought that might be my problem. But I still cannot get it going. I think I have two identical copies of the blog running on two different servers. I am moving servers and waiting for the dns files to change over so I have a duplicate going. I have been doing this all week as I am migrating hosts for some folks sites I handle to get better service. On the others I shut down the original server site and put a forwarding page to the ip based address of the new one while I wait for the old one to go away. In this case, there are so many deeply coded hard links by the client that it takes them to the old page many times. I could run the thing and do replacements, but the I would want them switched back in less than 36 hours anyway.
I cannot for the life of me figure out what the problem is. Nothing has changed has it? I think I have 2.0.1 running on both so I am guessing it is something totally stupid I am doing somewhere and NOT a problem with the plug-in.
February 5th, 2006 at 9:36 am
Thanks for pointing out the extra space. Putting up code on a web page is always a bit tricky. What the reader sees may not be what I have written due to font size, browser window width, etc. I noticed I also had text-align: justify for code, which wasn’t clever. I think that’s it fixed now.
On your other problem – I have a site where I have a test version and a live version on two different dns addresses. When I promote the test to live, I dump the test database into a text file, do a global search and replace /test dns/live dns/, then selectively load tables into live. So far, I’ve not had problems…
Good luck – John