Technocrank

I don’t know if people still use Last.fm.  I think they do.  At least, that’s what Last.fm’s statistics claim.  Anyway, if you’re an artist or label and you’ve been trying to upload new tracks you’ve probably found recently that their import engine has been sucking lately (i.e. completely fubar’d).  Uploaded tracks won’t appear, or if they do the actual MP3 file is missing (“We don’t have a copy of this track, why don’t you upload it” – yeah, I did – 5 times).  Frequently, after uploading (which depending on your upstream bandwidth can take a while) you get kicked back to the upload page.

Apparently, it’s a known problem and they’re trying to fix it, although their forums are somewhat unhelpful.  I’ve yet to see anything actually completely fixed, though.

A few weeks back I was thinking about converting a Facebook Group I have into a Page.   So I was looking through the Facebook “Help” pages and wondering if there was a mechanism for doing this.  There was.

In fact, Facebook would do it for you.  I put a request in for them to do this.  I waited and having not heard back from them in these weeks, I thought I’d check up on it.

Turns out, now:

We’re no longer able to convert Facebook Groups into Pages. You’re welcome to create a Page and notify your Group members that you’ll be using the Page instead of the Group going forward. If your Group has too many members to send them a message, we unfortunately aren’t able to provide you with any other solutions for how you might contact them about this change.

It’s pretty obvious that a Group admin would especially be looking into an automated option if the Group had a lot of members.  It’s doubly irking that there’s no indication as to what motivated their change of heart.  Was it technical?  Or was it sociological?

Anyway, I’m now wondering if I should bother since apparently there’s no way to invite “Fans” to your Page whereas there still is with Groups.

I found this Adobe Gripes Tumblr blog via Create Digital Motion.  It’s your basic public rant forum about expensive software that’s failing; filled with rage and expletives.  I can’t decide if it’s hilarious or depressing.

Firefox 3.1b3, released today is downloadable here.  If they’d waited another day, they could have numbered it 3.141592, Beta 4, and put it up at 4:32pm (since they’re now considering continuing the arbitrary version numbering scheme).  Oh well.  Life is full of missed chances for nerds.  What is that, anyway?  A number pun?

I’ll be waiting for the OSX Intel optimized version at latko.org who says it should probably be up today sometime.

Update: here it is.

I suppose this is really a subset of a larger question: does it make sense to get involved with open source software projects in general?  Seeing Jane Wells’ recent posting about contributing to WordPress stoked an old ember deep inside me and I thought this is actually a question worth asking out in the open (not moderated by, um, moderators with a vested interest).

By their very nature, open source projects are pet projects.  They have people who are very interested in their success.  And, of course, this is a good thing (no, I’m not going to capitalize those last two words).  Also, there is a need to have some degree of management and control over what gets dumped into the repository.  This is sensible – that there should be some level of review and direction that keeps the project on track (even if that track is the Oregon Trail).

Within the WordPress development system, everyone is encouraged to contribute.  Everyone has read (a.k.a. checkout) permission to the SVN repository.  However, only a handful of people have “submit” access to the repository.  That is, only a few (key personnel) can write to the code base directly.  If you’re not one of those few, you can still grab a bug or whatever out of their Trac, work away on it and then submit a patch back to the Trac whereupon somebody needs to recognize the patch has been submitted, test it, and then approve it.

Reality kicks in, though, when you realize that the core developers who have direct write access to the repository also grab bugs from the Trac and also work away on them (feverishly, even).  However, they don’t always check to see that somebody else has claimed the bug (or if they do, they don’t care).  So it’s a bit of a slap when you discover that after going through the motions of following their procedures, claiming responsibility for the bug, the thing you’d spent hours, days working on has been been superseded and already patched by either Matt, Ryan, Mark or whoever – while it’s still marked as YOUR BUG IN THE TRAC.  Either that, or you submit the patch and nobody notices.  I mean, hell, the system flags it (assuming you submit the tags properly), so somebody should notice, no?

God bless them.  They work hard and there’s a lot of stuff to crank through and they do a great job.  Yeah – but if you want to get involved and help out with squashing bugs in the core?  Forget it.  It’s really not worth your time.  There are theoretically better things to do, like work on the documentation, offer help in the support forums, write a plugin or a theme – basically anything that doesn’t require direct approval or suffer from intervention-itis.  I guess what I’m saying is only work on stuff that’s useful and that matters.   And by that I mean, if it doesn’t matter to the developers if you are spending or have spent your time, then your time has been wasted.

And while a lot of open source projects suffer from the same deficiencies (or benefits, as some call them), not all do.  You could also just start your own pet project.

Note: this has been written intentionally rhetorical, but not untruthful.  I am a crankietech, after all (and I have voiced this concern in the appropriate places prior to this).  If you feel that I’m way off base, please feel free to comment and also give me write access to your repository.  Whatever your project is. 🙂  I would love to hear from people whose experiences contradict mine.