CloCkWeRX's Sticky Bits

Hello all!

It's almost Bug Triage Day again, which will be taking place on December 6th/7th

If you are a user of PEAR and have wanted to contribute to an open source project, here's a great opportunity.

We run a bug day every 3 weeks or so, on irc.efnet.org #pear & #pear-bugs across two days. We basically try to improve the quality of incoming bugs reports and write test cases, make sure they are reproducible problems.

We also try to boost overall code quality - unit tests, documentation and other improvements.

If you've got a package you use commonly, or bugs you filed some time ago that haven't been fixed; this is a good time to get involved.

Join us on Dec 6th/7th; or pop into irc.efnet.org #pear to say hello and ask questions; or respond here!




My main focus:
Text_Wiki is a heavily used package which could use a little love!

There are numerous feature requests and bugs open for it which could no doubt use some attention:
http://pear.php.net/bugs/search.php?cmd=display&package_name[]=Text_Wiki&status=Open

Other pear developers, if you've got a specific target in mind, chime on in!

Here's what happened at the last one.

It was exam time recently. Lots of people talking about assignments and word limits.

"ARGH! I need to do a 30 trillion word essay on earwigs!" was not an uncommon utterance.

If there is anything about writing software that I know, lines of code is completely the wrong metric.

Understandability, correctness, and simplicity are far more useful from a software point of view.

You might say that the English language isn't designed for a computer - and I would argue that neither are modern programming languages.

I would suggest that a "word count" is just the same as lines of code. If we've spent 30 years or more knowing that lines of code is a horrible measurement, why hasn't this insight spread to other fields - particularly universities and centers of education?

Why are people still required to create essays of a given length?

Why not set a different requirement out: convincingly argue X in clear and rational terms?

Posted by Mickey Kataria, Product Manager

From time to time we release updates to the terms of service governing our products. We recently released an updated version of the Google Maps API Terms of Service. Based on feedback from that update, we are releasing a revised version today. The Google Maps API TOS is intended to satisfy several goals: it gives Google the rights needed to operate a service which overlays content on the map, gives us the ability to showcase popular mashup sites, and allows us to index and provide search over Maps API sites so that Google users can find them.

What changed and why? A key goal for the November 12th revision was to eliminate a number of unpopular restrictions, including the prohibition on friend finder applications and non-"site" mashups. We also eliminated ambiguity about whether it's OK to use the API w/ password-protected free sites (it is). Additionally, we streamlined the format of the terms, eliminating the need for developers to reference multiple sets of incorporated terms of service, including the Google Terms of Service and the Google Maps Terms of Service to figure out what rights and obligations applied to their use of the Maps API.

That format change appears to have called attention to the "License From You to Google" - section 11 in the November 12th update. That content license has always been part of the Google Maps API Terms of Service, because it is contained in the Google Terms of Service. Both the original and the November 12th updated Terms of Service relied on that provision to ensure Google received a sufficient content license to provide the Maps API service and to promote the service, including by highlighting excellent mashups as we did here. That section does not provide Google a license to all of the content on your Maps API site to use for any purpose, nor is that how we have treated the content from existing Maps API sites that were developed under the terms that existed prior to the November 12th update. Section 11(b), which we initially included in the November 12th update, created a lot of confusion among our API developers who are publishing licensed content. In 11(b) we were trying to be clear that we wanted a broader license from Maps API developers for use of business listings information. However, given the confusion that resulted, we removed that language from today's revision of the terms.

Thank you for using the Google Maps API. We look forward to continuing to create great products together with you.

"Why won't this stupid thing just... just... graagh!" The salesman clutched the edges of his massive keyboard tightly, his knucles white. While he looked angry, he wasn't actually angry; rather he was frustrated approaching angry.

The year was 1984, and the PC was finally moving out of the "early adopter" range and companies started sending them out into the field. Ricky happened to be working at a help desk during this exciting time, aiding in the rollout of the shiny new PCs to various teams in the company. Unfortunately for him, one of the first teams that needed the PCs most desperately was also one of the departments least able to understand and use them – sales.

It's not that the sales team was stupid; it was just that they were now having to deal with a major change to the way they'd measure performance, record sales, and run reports. One salesman in particular, Jeff, struggled with it more than his other colleagues in the department. He became well known by much of the helpdesk staff – Ricky, in particular.

Jeff didn't really have much of a temper, but it didn't take much to frustrate him. When he encountered a problem, it was as though he'd encountered quicksand. He could save himself if he took a moment to assess the situation when he was just ankle deep, but instead would struggle and thrash around, burying himself deeper and deeper. By the time that just a single nostril (metaphorically) was sticking out above the muck, he'd call the helpdesk to rescue him.

"I'm trying to get this report to not look stupid, but the stupid thing just... just..."

"OK, Jeff," Ricky began, trying to talk him down. "Can you describe how you want it to look?"

"I want it condensed; like, smaller, you know?"

Since it was printed on a dot-matrix printer with fixed sizes, there wasn't much Ricky could do there. He sighed, knowing that this would be another time that getting a more detailed description from Jeff would be like pulling teeth. "So is it too many pages horizontally, or vertically, or..."

"Yeah, it's too many pages. Also I don't need this date that shows up."

"Which date?"

"03/20/84."

Ricky kept probing Jeff for more information, and Jeff's answers remained vague. Jeff kept changing his description of what he wanted, and both just became more and more frustrated with the other. Hoping to ease the tension and get the conversation back on track, Ricky decided a little joke was in order.

"OK, I'm sorry, I'm really not understanding what you're telling me. Could you just hold the phone up to the screen so I can take a look at it?"

Ricky heard a faint click of plastic hitting glass, then silence for about 30 seconds. Finally, Jeff came back on the line. "Well?"

Maintaining his composure, he asked Jeff to send in a hard copy. Ricky could only imagine Jeff waking up at 3:00 AM that night to wonder "WTF did I do?"

---

Brought to you by the Non-WTF Job Board:

---

RT @IanWoolf Internet Censorship is a topic on the 7:30 Report on ABC1 tonight #fightthecensor #nocleanfeed

I'm sick of Adelaide's transport system; or at least the people behind it.

Today, I missed my bus by 20 seconds. This was 8:37am on Prospect Road. I settled in for the wait, being a 'GO Zone', knowing that it should only be a maximum of 15 minutes before the next bus.

Finally, 9:00am rolls around, and so does the bus. 23 minutes have elapsed. 8 minutes late. I wouldn't mind, except the entire bus trip into work from my house takes only 21 minutes. The bus is so late, it could have gone to Adelaide in the elapsed time. What the hell was it doing?

Worse, I get on the bus, and they charge me $4.20 - full fare. If I had waited 60 more seconds, that would have been $2.60.

Frustrating, yes. If this were a one off, I'd live with it. Unfortunately, this is not the first time and I doubt it will be the last. This is a regular occurrence on my bus route.

So far, everyone I've met involved with public transport in SA has been a complete dolt. In my last encounter, I had been assured that Adelaide metro data would end up in Google Transit - but that was a year ago, and there has been a complete failure to do it.

Day to day travel costs have risen, the buses and trams remain uncomfortable, I get ticket inspectors acting like the gestapo trying to fine fare cheats, I get a substandard way to access transport information, and I have little faith in certain bus routes actually delivering buses when they say they will.

What gives? Am I alone in thinking this?

Jon Seymour responds to Clive Hamilton's support of ISP filtering: http://is.gd/8xz8 #nocleanfeed STotC

Need to serve up HTML for most users, but have an RDF representation of your resource?

Simply pop in:

$accept = explode(',', $_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT']);
if (in_array('application/rdf+xml', $accept)) {
    header('Location: path/to/rdf/version.rdf');
    die();
}

How neat is OpenAustralia.org? I just found it today via twitter.

Even better, there's structured data available of the Hansard. I wonder if I can turn this into RDF or make it GRDDL-friendly.

I'll have to learn how to use git to get the source though.

Update

I just made a quick politics GRDDL transformation and ontology to extract data out from the hansard.

by Miško Hevery

Google Tech Talks
November 13, 2008

ABSTRACT

Clean Code Talk Series
Topic: Global State and Singletons

Speaker: Miško Hevery

Video

Slides

@Tuna Conroy needs to be fired. The internet is too important to be regulated by the dumbest guy in the room. #nocleanfeed

A quieter bug triage this time around, spread a bit over the preceding days and a brief sprint on the weekend itself.

PEAR's wiki is moving, so the results live in a new place.

Probably the biggest efforts of the day came from from Igor (ifeghali, MDB2_Schema), Lorenzo (quipo, MDB2 & friends) and Michael (gauthierm, Crypt_GPG / unit tests).

Igor got out a new release of MDB2_Schema, driving it from having a high number of open bugs to somewhere way down in the depths of obscurity on the bug statistics wall.

Michael refused to sleep until Crypt_GPG's unit test coverage was much improved, and Lorenzo was more or less on the prowl for anything that could be fixed.

In other news

cweiske got his new server almost built (so it can run unit tests lots). That was until ...

cweiske: we got stuck while installing php on it from debian testing
cweiske: it crashes on cli when you load the mysql extension

Oh dear.

Additionally, Greg (gsherwood) started adding new coding standards improvements to PHP_CodeSniffer - it'll be interesting to see what happens to the stats.

There were also some sensible discussions around Coding Standards driven by Alexey.

Finally; there was also a Mock Driver added to HTTP_Request2 by Alexey as well - it'll be a great help to overall code covereage within PEAR over the coming years.

Next bug triage day is for 6th-7th December.

How neat; some of my photos were used in this.

Creative Commons FTW!

DSCN0373

CloCkWeRX posted a photo:

DSCN0365

CloCkWeRX posted a photo: