So much water under the bridge...

7 years since the last time I posted here. Reading through some of them makes me cringe a bit. So earnest about Wikipedia... It's an awesome project but it looks a lot better at several years remove from day to day efforts.

Appropriate editorial emphasis of the lead Global Warming article in Wikipedia

I.ve gotten a bit involved in trying to assist in bringing some more collegial editing to the Global warming and Climate Change areas within wikipedia

One thing that has come up is what the right emphasis for the lead article ought to be... should it be primarily science or should it be on more than just that, such as sociopolitical and economic considerations as well, and how much of which. My talk page has been abuzz with this and other GW related topics (for example see Primary focus (a permanent link once archived will be in archive 63)

I decided to see what Britannica had to say as a possible guide to the right emphasis...
here is what I found... Read it for yourself. I confess I found it a bit harder to follow what their lead was but they do seem to lead with the science. However there is a fair bit of emphasis given to other matters as well. So perhaps not a perfect test but interesting.

Password masking considered harmful?

Image via Wikipedia

We've all seen it, it's ubiquitious... the little box to type your password into. The line of asterisks grows as you type the secret characters in.

We've had it drilled into us, make your password safe, use lots of different kinds of characters (some sites even require that you use 3 of the 4 types, lowercase uppercase, numeric, special characters), don't use a common dictionary word, make it long, and so on.

So there I am on some site or another that shall remain nameless, trying to enter in "RodgerD0dgerC0dger!" and all I see is a line of *********

The phone rings mid stride. What character am I on anyway? hmm.. let me count backwards... I think I got it... OK.

"wrong password". Let's try that again ... A bird chirps outside the window Hey, did I remember to make that third 0 a zero but not the first one? Ah, must be right... OK.

"wrong password". Drat... Give it another try. Almost done.... Did my hand slip when I was holding down the 1 to make the ! ? No way... OK...

"wrong password" followed by "You have entered an incorrect password three times in a row and are now locked out of the system, please call our help desk between the hours of 8 AM and 6 PM Mumbai time to get it reset"

Argh! It's happened to all of us. And it's so needless. What do those asterisks do for us anyway? Unless we are being shoulder surfed, nothing.

As reported on Out-law.com there may finally be a realisation dawning that this is needless, and mindless, security. Well known usability expert Jakob Nielsen recently wrote about this in his AlertBox of 23 June 2009, opining that it's not needful, cleartext is better, and it may actually make things less secure. For those that actually have to deal with shoulder surfing, a checkbox to make the system use asterisks in that one case (or default to that for high security sites) is the easy way to handle that.

High time this was done. Start suggesting it to the sites you frequent. I think I'll go open a Bugzilla bug for MediaWiki if there isn't one already.


Oh, and RodgerDodgerCodger isn't actually my password.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Password Masking: love it or leave it? (downloadsquad.com)
  
• Nielsen Recommends Not Masking Passwords (it.slashdot.org)
• Why you should mask passwords (omgponi.es)

Dirty Laundry

Dirty Laundry, out for all to see... Image via Wikipedia

There is rather a nasty thread on WR right now, about me. I have been holding back because this whole thread is wrong on many levels. The following doesn't exactly put me in a very favorable light as far as interpersonal relationships go. So be it.

When I started editing on WP, my wife and I had been estranged for almost 10 years. We led completely separate lives. I was approached by a female Wikipedian and we had a short relationship. That led to a couple more, none lasting more than a few months. To me, at the time, these were serious, sincere relationships, not casual, and I am still on good terms with these women.

After some time, Josette and I started talking again. She decided to look into Wikipedia and LEGO to see if we might find some common ground, and by mid 2007 we had decided to get back together... it's been bumpy, I've made mistakes, and even backslid a couple of times, but we are trying very hard, we are still working at it, and things are getting better. The other women I had relationships with all understand that I have gone back to my wife and they all respect that. One benefit of this statement is to ensure that women that don't know the situation are now also aware of this.

I had heard vague rumors of stuff being shopped around to ArbCom, but until the last few days, I did not know what this was about, or who the person was that supposedly took offense and later raised a ruckus on WR. She gave me no indication of any problem at the time. Rather, she used phrasing like "mad 4 it" in response to my seeking permission as the conversation progressed.

While it is true that I have always been a flirt, this whole thing bothers me because I have always respected the women on WP and women in general. I am sorry if any woman feels I was out of line in my chatting, but I was always, I thought, careful to repeatedly check for permission, to ask if it was OK, and to always remember that "no means no". Even so, I'm sorry anyway, it should not have happened.

The important takeaways from this are:

• None of this has any bearing on my carrying out my duties and responsibilities on the various wikis.
• If you think someone is acting inappropriately and you don't like it, call them on it. Or get a friend to say something. Or just leave. Any of those things are better than engaging in whisper campaigns later.
• The days of my looking for relationships, of having relationships, are in the past, and have been for quite a while, because I am committed to my relationship with my wife.
  

Something for nothing?

Chrysler Headquarters,
Auburn Hills, MI,
Image via Wikimedia CommonsS0... Fiat (late of greenmailing GM not to merge with them after GM foolishly signed up, to the tune of 2B USD) gets 35% of Chrysler.

What did they give in exchange? Billions of dollars? Some factories? 35% of themselves? Nope. None of the above. They gave nothing except the promise of some future advice and access to technology.

Great work if you can get it...

Tell you what, Mr. Nardelli, give me .0035% of Chrysler and I'll give you some advice. Or maybe I'll just give it to you for free. You should have actually come out with the Durango Hybrid back when you first started talking about it. You know, in 2000? Then you'd have some technology experience by now. And stop giving away your company for nothing.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fiat Acquires 35% Stake in Chrysler

Infrastructure?

Amtrak Locomotive
image via Wikimedia CommonsFirst, as a libertarian, I'm of course holding my nose even just writing this post... things should be funded by private enterprise rather than government. But since it's being talked about, and it's going to happen anyway... might as well make some constructive suggestions

Everyone has ideas for what sort of infrastructure the big stimulus should build. Everyone says be smart, and avoid pork... way easy to say but hard to do.

Some stuff is obvious:

• Improve the electric grid so that renewable energy can be routed to where it is needed.
  
• Fix bridges, tunnels, water mains, and so forth that really need it

Those are both "construction" sorts of things. Manufacturing has been hit too, though.

Amtrak has seen a surge in ridership of late, as other modes of transportation have become pricier. But they're running into limits. Why? Amtrak has a rolling stock shortage. For years, their capital budget has been far short of replacement, and there are lines of passenger cars in need of repair, awaiting funds. New trains or more frequent service are proposed and often deferred because there just isn't the rolling stock available.

So then... build some... increase Amtrak's capital budget, and get the shops going repairing things. That has the advantage of not only stimulating manufacturing, it also produces something that's actually needed, and when used, will reduce energy consumption.

And don't limit it to Amtrak, review all the other mass transit modes and see what capital improvements for rolling stock have been lacking. We need that more than we need new freeways that promote urban sprawl.

Bonanzle

Network effect.
Image via Wikimedia CommonsI sell on eBay. Mostly LEGO brand sets, because that's what I have a lot of and what I know a fair bit about (plus b... IBM doesn't sell a lot of LEGO products so I'm clear on Conflict Of Interest concerns)

(I think I've got a link to my store over there on the sidebar... but hey, just in case you missed it, my store is Milton Train Works...)

I made Power Seller status a while back. Nothing big, it's very small time, but we do sell a fair bit. I do OK, but I am there not because it's cheap but rather, it's the biggest venue. Network effect means it's a good place to be if you want a lot of buyers.

For the record eBay charges small sellers like me, all in, somewhere around 15 %, give or take, of the gross sale price when you calculate store fees, listing fees, and final value fees. Plus another 3% for Paypal. Periodically, I look at what eBay is charging me and wish I had a different alternative. People keep trying to introduce some, but so far none has panned out.

But maybe this time it will be different. Bonanzle.com has come on the scene fairly recently and seems to actually be doing OK. They make it easy to migrate, you can just import all your eBay listings into a "booth" and away you go.

So I figured why not. I set up yesterday. It was easy. And today, I had my first sale.

Color me pleased. I hope you will give Bonanzle a try. Competition is good.

My Bonanzle "booth" is also called Milton Train Works. Tell all your friends :) If you mention this blog posting when you make an offer, I'll give you a 5 percent discount. Let's see if that viral marketing thing actually works :)

Toward less boring layouts

Bill Ward, of BayLUG/BayLTC has a blog...

This post on track geometry is worth reading. Though LEGO has ended 9v, there is a lot of 9v track out there. As well, the ideas work for their new RC track too.

The images were done with Track Designer but you can experiment with BlueBrick as well.

MichLUG uses some of these ideas (notably the 45 degree curve) but there are others that we don;t use enough of. Myself, I use the 1 straight == 2 curves alignment trick all the time.

Why I chose not to run for ArbCom this year

This is not me...
Image via Wikimedia CommonsI have received a number of queries about why I am not running in the English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee elections this year.

I was seriously considering it. I felt duty bound to put up or shut up, to try to effect the "change we need". But when I saw the quality of some of the candidates (whose views I by and large agree with) that were standing, I decided to stand aside. I have a lot of things to do and the last thing the project needs is another arbitrator that can't give full measure, attentionwise. I'd rather someone else were elected that could devote full attention. I hope I'm not wrong in judging their quality (and winnability) and that candidates I support and agree with do end up getting elected, and candidates I oppose don't.

But another factor is that with the SlimVirgin-Lar case so recently closed, after some analysis, I felt that the potential for drama and disruption if I ran was high enough that standing aside seemed a good thing to do for the good of the project. I'd note that the SlimVirgin motion has, even though it's been closed and SlimVirgin desysopped, been used by ElinorD to re-raise issues I feel are already well and truly settled, and by others to trumpet some of the victimization memes we've heard before.

As far as that case goes, I continue to feel constrained by privacy considerations about what I can and cannot say, and by decorum in not wishing to use the same level of vitriol as some of my opponents have employed, and by honesty in not wishing to distort matters in the way I feel some of my opponents have done... an election campaign with me in it at this juncture would possibly lead to more disharmony. Given that there are competent, generally right thinking candidates standing, why do it?

Instead I put those questions of mine together, at some considerable thought, as a summary of some of the important issues and philosophical underpinnings facing the project. Candidates have been evaluated by me (and others... I want to single out Kato for his particularly cogent and insightful work in this area) on how well they answered them. If the community nevertheless chooses candidates that fail to answer these well, so be it. But asking these questions and NOT running seemed more likely to effect the change we need than NOT asking them and running, and having the campaigns veer off into internecine warfare and drama.

So that's why.

If next year is a rerun of this year, if the candidates we elect this time, with the strongest community mandate for change we've seen yet, nevertheless give us the same arbcom we got before, or worse ... then maybe I'll run next year. Or find a different hobby. Because if there isn't a change for the better, we're in for it. And since I've been there, done that... I don't want to do it again.

Bail out the Big Three?

Image via WikipediaEveryone's talking about it, so surely this is just one more voice in a sea of noise...

Bailing out the Big Three (Chrysler, General Motors, Ford) automakers is a bad idea. They should be allowed to restructure. Even if that means bankruptcy. Why? Because without restructuring, we are just postponing the day of reckoning and making it worse when it does come.

Look, I'm from Michigan. It will be painful. Hugely. People will lose their jobs. But the alternative is worse. The Big Three made some bad decisions. Bankruptcy is a way to take the useful assets and try something different.

Some will say that bankruptcy means everything shuts down. Nope. The automakers will still be making autos, still be making spare parts. Just not under current management and with current contracts. Airlines keep flying. Railways keep running. Stuff just gets cut.

Some will say that no one will buy cars from a bankrupt maker. If the maker is bankrupt it doesn't mean the car that was OK to buy yesterday all of a sudden falls apart. Nor does it mean that parts will never be available or that cars can't get repaired. Parts come from a network of suppliers. Ford hasn't made Model T parts in over 70 years, but they're out there, in the aftermarket. Repairs are carried out by dealers. And dealers make most of their money from service, not sales... dealers will continue to repair things, they'd be foolish not to.

So... let them fail, if they're going to. And let them KNOW they will fail if they can't sort things out themselves... that will give them incentive.

Schumpeter speaks of creative destruction. Let it create. This is a case where the village has to be destroyed in order to save it.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Seeking Aid, Automakers Have a Friend in the U.A.W.
• UAW chief: No more concessions
• Here Comes Auto Industry Bailout Bills
• Showdown Over A "Dinosaur" Auto Industry
• POLL: Would you buy a car from a company in bankruptcy?

Out with the old, in with the new..

Out with the old... Good bye Bush II!

In with the new... Hello new little one!

Today I should be a grandfather. I sit here in the hospital waiting. Daddy (newly become a citizen, this is his first election) stopped to vote on the way to the hospital. Priorities seem right to me :)

Update: I AM a grandfather.

And McCain's concession speech was high class.

Reframing

A picture frame
Image via Wikipedia In US politics this year, as always, we have seen a fair number of attempts to change the subject. The McCain campaign, when asked some difficult questions, seems at least in part to have focused on Obama's involvement with Stephen Ayers instead. The Obama campaign, when asked some difficult questions, seems at least in part to have focused on such things as Sarah Palin's incipient grandchild.

This is reframing things. When presented with a question, answer something else. Or better yet, make a charge that is entirely unrelated.

It's a particularly effective technique, and a particularly insidious one. When you're losing... change the subject. Accuse the other side of something else. If it's scandalous enough, it doesn't even matter if it is completely irrelevant to the question at hand

If this sort of behaviour were confined to US politics alone, we could brush it off... politics as usual. But it's not. Reframing happens in everyday life as well. Look hard enough and you'll find it in your walk of life too, I bet. And woe be to you if you're the frame-ee rather than the frame-er. It can be quite hard to get the question back where it belongs.

So watch out for that.

Know of any examples of reframing? Let's hear about them

Finger pointing

Barney Frank
Image by Getty Images
via DaylifeSo the bailout failed. Count me in the glad camp, maybe now a second try will come up with something more reasonable, something that really gets after the problem. Taking up toxic paper and leaving taxpayers holding the bag wasn't going to solve this mess.

But in among the finger pointing for the failure going on here (and there is a lot of it going on isn't there?), where is the finger pointed at Barney Frank? I think most agree this mess is due in large part is the vast number of bad loans given out during the housing bubble. Bad money drives out good, and when you had Fannie May and Freddy Mac competing against private lenders, but using loose underwriting standards, it only caused investors to clamor for other lenders to do the same...

Frank's irresponsible comments and actions to sabotage reining in the two GLCs are among the causes of that cause. His attempts to deflect inquiries into that by harping on CEO pay ought to be treated as what they are... BS. If you want to know the root cause, start by looking into which lobbyists gave which legislators how much, and when, and what the effect was on bills that would have required GLCs to follow the same standards as private companies.

You're no doubt tired of hearing it, but my party was against this well before it was fashionable.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Fannie Mae's Patron Saint :: WSJ
  An editorial giving more detail on my allegations of Mr. Frank's irresponsibility
  

Is this the best we've got?

Joe Biden explains something
Image via Wikimedia CommonsRecently , when interviewed by Katie Couric, Joe Biden was quoted as saying:

"When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed,"

Look, I'm not really a big fan of either of the duopoly parties... or their candidates (my guy is Libertarian candidate Bob Barr and yes I know he's not going to win) but I just have to wonder... how well did Joe Biden actually pay attention in history class?

• The big crash was in 1929, before FDR was president
• In 1929 TV was just an experimental idea, not really something that presidents spoke on. (the first president to even be seen on television was Truman, in the 40s, and it wasn't until 1951 that a president spoke nationwide)

So maybe we have a VP problem regardless of who wins?

Now I can retire...

My image of Taliesin West
(from Wikimedia Commons)

Previously, I have written about how Encyclopedia Britannica introduced a free access scheme for bloggers. Nifty. But this flows both ways. EB is also moving to make use of resources available to it.

Point in case, the image at right.

As I am sure other people do, I periodically search for my own name using Google's search capabilities. Well, the other day, on the second page of the search (may not still return results) I found this link ... Turns out that EB chose to use my image to illustrate their article on Taliesin West! (Taliesin West was architect Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home and school in the desert in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA from 1937 until his death in 1959.)

So now I'm rich, right? Well no. That image, as you can see, is freely available on Commons, for anyone to use, as long as the license (in this case the GFDL 1.2) is honored. Which it is.

So am I upset? Nope! I'm delighted. This is how it's supposed to work. Free images are made free so that people can USE them. EB has properly atttributed the image and thus is free to use it as they see fit.

Maybe it's a bit ironic that EB is using a free image FROM a WMF site to illustrate an article which is supposedly better than the same article on Wikipedia. (which by the way, currently uses someone else's version of basically the same composition)... and, better or not, clearly is in competition.

But it's nifty! Got any other examples? I wonder who else has been honored this way?

By the way, here are both articles, you decide which is better:

• Wikipedia's version is here.
• Encyclopedia Britannica's version is here.
  

In all honesty, I have to say EB wins this one. What do you think?

LEGOdometer

Image at right is from Brickshelf...

I'm slow. This has been buzzed up already, and I'm late to add my raves. But for the benefit of my paltry readership, if you like LEGO at all, you need to go check this out. Read the LUGNET posting.

Shaun Sullivan of NELUG has built a LEGO based odometer for measuring distance that trains run on exhibition layouts.

Note that an odometer was used at the PNLTC Guinness record attempt but it was electronic.

This one is purely mechanical. It's testimony to Shaun's addiction that he chose to do it this way... but ironically used significant computer time to calculate the gear ratios needed to get to within 8 feet per mile of accuracy in his measurements.

Signal to Noise, part II

Robot Moderator?
Image via Wikimedia CommonsA while back, in my post Attacking the noise, I described ROBOT9000, automated moderating technology introduced at one of xkcd's IRC channels as an interesting experiment. Apparently the idea has legs.

While reading a very interesting New York Times piece on trolling, The Trolls Among Us (which, by the way, "outed" several trolls, giving their real life identities or information sufficient for a determined person to track them down.... perhaps more on that later... the topic has come up on various WMF wikis and discussion groups) I ran across the tidbit (on page 7 of the piece), that ROBOT9000 has come to 4chan.

Sure enough, there is now a moderated subforum at 4chan called ROBOT9000 (or /r9k/ ).

Dan must be proud!

I for one welcome our new robot masters, if they can improve signal to noise...

Do you?

Knol and Wikipedia

Wikipedia's Knol page
Image by dannysullivan via Flickr
Fair use claimed for commentary
By now, everyone and their brother has blogged about Knol. If you don't know what it is, you've been under a rock, apparently (not that there's anything wrong with that)... follow the link. (which naturally leads to Wikipedia)

Probably half of those blogposts have to do with the relationship between Knol and Wikipedia. Again, go find them if you want to read them.

Some people are saying it's a new gold rush. I have an AdSense account so I decided to see what if anything in the way of gold there is to be had.

I've taken some content from Wikipedia and put it on Knol. The content I took is content I myself authored... I took my DYK articles, at the point of the last edit by me prior to the first edit by someone else, so all content was mine, and Knolised them. (why that edit? Because at that point the content is solely authored by me. That means I can relicense it as I see fit, granting GFDL does not take away the right to license under other terms as well)

The actual formatting leaves a lot to be desired, since they are paste jobs, if I see any signs of traffic I'll improve them. But for the most part at least so far, they are the only Knols on those topics. All their links lead straight to Wikipedia, at least for now.

I am not going to pimp them by linking... if you want to find them you can.

I'm curious as to how this all will play out... will these get any traffic? Will I get improvement suggestions? Will Knol itself complain? Most of these show high correlation to Wikipedia which is not unexpected.

What do you think? Have any of you done this? What will the long term effect be?

This post intentionally left blank

Blank pages in a book
Image via Wikimedia CommonsSo Risker pinged me on my talk page, and like these sorts of low semantic content conversations do, it veered off into other topics, notably how posts sometimes have little content... and whether "no comment" really is "no comment" or actually more like "almost no comment"... this led to "This page intentionally left blank" ... and well... I'll repeat what I said there.

IBM is famous for making a great deal of use of these pages (back when IBM published all its manuals in hardcopy form). They would carry a footer with the manual name and the page number of the manual where they belonged. I can recall inserting them into manuals on my desk, many a time. (Periodically one would receive packets of pages in the post containing fixes to manuals, which one duly inserted into the manual binders, hopefully in the right places. Sometimes some of the new pages would be blank, to replace a page that described something that had been obsoleted, and sometimes some of the new pages would be non blank, but would replace a page that had previously been blank, as they described something new which space had been reserved for in the organization of the manual) There is an apocryphal story that there was an APAR opened against the entire publication group, requesting that all pages which said "THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK" be replaced with pages which said "THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT ALMOST BLANK" on the grounds that was a more accurate statement... Needless to say if there was such an APAR, it must have been rejected, as the cost of the PTF to identify, produce and print all those (thousands of different) pages (properly numbered and with proper footers, since that is how things were done), mail them out to every manual receipient, and so forth, would have been enormous. Even for IBM.

(this is not the only apocryphal story about APARs and PTFs, remind me sometime to tell the one about the APAR against IEFBR14)

Oh, and by the way, this whole post is a way for me to NOT talk about what really has me steamed right now.... perhaps I'll, in the best IBM tradition, replace this post with what I really want to say instead.

Update:

In accordance with the recommendations made by the This page intentionally left blank project, I decided that my personal site needed one of these. So I created one.

You got me...

Randall Munroe
image via Wikimedia CommonsSo, today's xkcd consists of a drawing of the Wood article in Wikipedia, but cut away to show only the lede, and the bottom, which is a large "in popular culture" section, with such gems as "In episode 7 of Firefly, "Jaynestown", Jayne is given a wooden rain stick by a villager", among others.

Wikipedia is big enough time that it now gets mocked in cartoons on a regular basis (in xkcd's case, lovingly... I think. :) )

Random questions:

Does anyone not think this is one of the funniest Firefly episodes? :) (it goes without saying that I expect most of my readership (all 3 of you) to have seen all the Firefly episodes)

Does Randall Munroe not actually like "in popular culture" sections? Or, is he annoyed that Wood doesn't have one? :) (It goes without saying that it doesn't have one, actually)

Was I the only xkcd reader to go check if Wood actually had an "In popular culture" section? (It goes without saying that I did go check)