Before the Shadow Play

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  • Laundry part 3: solved

    University Electric came through like champs. I found a 24″ GE unitized washer-dryer that would fit and that had generally positive reviews, checked that they were a GE dealer, called them up on last Tuesday, and asked if they could get it for me. “Yes. Saturday.” Well then. That’s faster than I expected. They called me Friday to let me know that yes, I was on the schedule 8-11 AM tomorrow. They arrived at 8:30, and they were done and I was taking care of the queued laundry by 9:30.

    All in all a very satisfactory experience; I do recommend that you figure out what you want yourself, though –  the last-year’s Bosch that they had would have been fine, I’m sure, but the reviews were too up-and-down for me to feel comfortable spending almost $700 more than I would have for the original full-size pair I tried to get in here. I was also a bit doubtful about getting service.

    The new machine is a 2.0 cu. ft. washer/4.0 cu ft. dryer, so it’s not large, but neither is it hideously small. Seems to do a fine job both washing and drying. It has a 240V vented dryer, so it can actually manage to dry the clothes, getting around the problem that people were complaining about the non-vented and 120V dryers. Doing a good job so far; I’ll wait for a few months’ experience before I try to rate it.

     

  • Laundry, part 2, bicycles, and too much sun

    First, if you read my blog, and you send music to stillstream.com, please note that my address has changed; check the stillstream.com site for the new address. The new tenant in my old apartment is quite confused by the CDs he’s getting even though I’m set up forwarding for my mail. Now on to the trivia of everyday life.

    So I still haven’t actually gotten anything into the new place to do laundry with. Obviously I’m going to need to do this sometime soon as I cannot wait until I run out of underwear to make the decision on this. Well I can, but I won’t be very popular.

    So today I am headed over to University Electric in Santa Clara to see what they can do for me in terms of a washer-dryer that will actually fit into the space that I have. It looks like I’m either going to have to go with a stacked unit similar to the one I had in here before (I wouldn’t wash anybody’s clothes in that, and I suppose it’s just as well the Best Buy guys took it away), or I’m going to have to go with a European washer and dryer. Those are still not very popular here in the US, so I don’t have a very good basis on which to judge them. The ratings tend to be all over the place, from “oh my God best washer ever” to “this is a terrible piece of junk and I wasted my money and I hate life”, so it’s difficult to get a bead on exactly how good or bad they are.

    Sorry – just got distracted by a hummingbird in the tree outside the window. Where was I?

    I also made a slight misjudgment as far as the crime rate in the local neighborhood. Understand, the place is safe to walk around in, even at night,but there is apparently a potential for petty theft. (Apparently there’s a problem with some of the local high school age kids.) When I arrived, I put my bicycle in the bicycle rack inside the parking garage, and the rest of the bicycles didn’t seem to be locked up. So I figured, “Oh, this must be plenty secure then.” and left it unlocked and didn’t think anything further about it. About a week later I came home, thinking, ” hey, I should probably take my bike out for a ride today,” and…no bike. Apparently during the time when the outside of the place was being painted someone came into the garage and lifted my bicycle.

    Not really happy about this because I really did like that bicycle quite a lot – it wasn’t the world’s most wonderful or expensive bicycle but it was my bicycle. (It may have been one of the local homeless folks, and in that case I don’t feel quite so bad, but I really wasn’t planning to give my bicycle away – I was planning to ride it.)

    A neighbor happened to have a what looks like 1990s-vintage Specialized Ground Control bicycle sitting in his garage which he gave me; according to the folks at REI when I took it in to see what repairs it needed, it’s not worth repairing. I’m going to check in with a local Specialized bicycle shop and see if they have a different take on this; it looks like a really nice mountain bike.  If it’s not too terribly expensive to fix up I actually kind of like it. Looks like it’ll need new front forks and probably a new rear shock; the tires are probably also going to need replacing and the brake pads are shot… Okay, so the frame is in good shape…

    The REI guy said that I probably ought to consider saving up for a new bike instead because he could probably get me into something for around $200-300,  which I’m guessing means that he thought it would be at least that much to fix it. I’ll get a second opinion today at Mike’s Bikes, which is a Specialized shop, and if they say the same, I’ll consider the bike a lost cause, and take it over to Goodwill to drop off.

    The other thing today is that I realized that the clerestory windows I have in my main room, beautiful as they are, really let a lot of sun in. I really haven’t spent enough time here to this point to notice this. The AC cools the place off again okay, but they’re going to have to be blocked off at least part of the time; I got toasted enough by the hot sunlight that I needed to put on some anti-sunburn lotion and drink a lot of water. I need to talk to my real estate agent and see if putting in remote-controlled blinds for those windows is a good idea, or if I’ll have to take them down again when I want to sell the place, In which case it’s not worth doing, And I suppose I have to check with the HOA as well and make sure that’s this is not breaking one of the covenants.

    Anyway overall the new house is really quite nice and livable, or it least it will be as soon as I get all of these bloody boxes out of here. Still in the process of unpacking, and there’s always more stuff you find out you have to have, bring in, assemble, and then get rid of the boxes from that too. My weekends will not be idle for a while yet.

    Off to the appliance store; back later.

  • Best Buy and appliances: avoid

    If this had not actually happened to me I would say it had to be made up, but this is a precise report of exactly how badly Best Buy managed to handle a recent attempt to purchase a new washer and dryer.

    I spent quite a lot of time researching and finally picked out a washer and dryer for my new place. I did make a mistake as far as size; the units I picked would have fit, but they didn’t leave enough clearance on either side. So I’ll own up to that.

    Delivery was on July 19th. Install crew number 1 removed the old washer/dryer combo (side note: if they do not install the new unit do not let them take the old one). They looked at the taps and said, “oh, hey, those look like they might be leaking, you need to get that checked. We can’t install this.” So I am left with no working washer and dryer, and the new ones in the middle of my floor. I get the plumber in, he looks and says, “yep, those need tightening up”. He fixed them, did a pressure test, all good.

    I call Best Buy, they can’t get anyone out for a week. Washer and dryer in the middle of the living room.

    Second install crew comes, says, “oh, you didn’t buy the installation stuff from Best Buy, we can’t install this”. Despite the fact that the stuff in question was identical to the Best Buy materials. They refused to install it even with my parts if I said fine, I don’t care, I just want working appliances. Nope. They measured and said “It’ll stick out about 3 inches, is that OK?” Fine by me if I can wash my clothes. Washer and dryer still in the living room. I’m starting to think of them as an art piece by this point.

    I go to Best Buy and buy the parts they say I need. Three more days before install crew 3 comes out.

    Install crew three arrives. “Oh, we can’t install this, it won’t fit.”

    I am at this point rendered speechless. I call dispatch and tell them, “you have two guys and a truck here who refuse to install the appliances. Fuck this. I want them gone, now.”

    “We can’t do that. We’ll have to send another crew.”

    At this point it was lucky I was unarmed. Another two days, crew #4 shows up and takes them away. I call dispatch, who assures me that they’ll do a refund as soon as they appliances get back to dispatch.

    It’s August 1st now, in case you’re counting.

    I get the return letter on Saturday, and figure it’ll take till Monday. So I wait. Monday, no refund. Tuesday, no refund.

    I call.

    “You’ll have to go to the store where you purchased the item to finish the return.”

    I bought it on the Internet, so I didn’t buy it in a store.

    Still have to go to the Santana Row Best Buy to get my refund.

    Amazon, those guys are not.

  • ETL into WordPress: lessons learned

    I had a chance this weekend to do a little work on importing a large (4000 or so articles and pages) site into WordPress. It was an interesting bit of work, with a certain amount learning required on my part – which translated into some flailing around on to establish the toolset.

    Lesson 1: ALWAYS use a database in preference to anything else when you can. 
    I wasted a couple hours trying to clean up the data for CSV import using any of a number of WordPress plugins. Unfortunately, CSV import is half-assed at best – more like about quarter-assed, and any cleanup in Excel is excruciatingly slow.
    Some of the data came out with mismatched quotes, leaving me with aberrant entries in the spreadsheet that caused Excel to throw an out-of-memory error and refuse to process them when I tried to delete the bad rows or even cells from those bad rows.
    Even attempting to work with the CSV data using Text::CSV in Perl was problematic because the site export data (from phpMyAdmin) was fundamentally broken. I chalk that partially up to the charset problems we’ll talk about later.
    I loaded up the database using MAMP, which worked perfectly well, and was able to use Perl DBI to pull the pages and posts out without a hitch, even the ones with weirdo character set problems.
    Lesson 2: address character set problems first
    I had a number of problems with the XMLRPC interface to WordPress (which otherwise is great, see below) when the data contained improperly encoded non-ASCII characters. I was eventually forced to write code to swap the strings into hex, find the bad 3 and 4 character runs, and replace them with the appropriate Latin-1 substitutes (note that these don’t quite match that table – I had to look for the ”e2ac’ or ‘c3’ delimiter characters in the input to figure out where the bad characters were. Once I hit on this idea, it worked very well.
    Lesson 3: build in checkpointing from the start for large import jobs
    The various problems ended up causing me to repeatedly wipe the WordPress posts database and restart the import, which wasted a lot of time. I did not count that toward the overall time needed to complete when I charged my client. If I had, it would have been more like 20-24 hours instead of 6. Fortunately the imports were, until a failure occurred, a start-it-and-forget-it process. It was necessary to wipe the database between tried because WordPress otherwise very carefully preserves all the previous versions, and cleaning them out is even slower.
    I hit on the expedient of recording the row ID of an item each time one successfully imported and dumping that list out in a Perl END block. If the program fell over and exited due to a charset problem, I got a list of the rows that had processed OK which I could then add to an ignore list. Subsequent runs could simply exclude those records to get me straight to the stuff I hadn’t done yet and and to avoid duplicate entries.
    I had previously tried just logging the bad ones and going back to redo those, but it turned out to be easier to exclude than include.
    Lesson 4: WordPress::API and WordPress XMLRPC are *great*.
    I was able to find the WordPress::API module on CPAN, which provides a nice object-oriented wrapper around WordPress XMLRPC. With that, I was able to programmatically add posts and pages about as fast as I could pull them out of the local database.
    Lesson 5: XMLRPC just doesn’t support some stuff
    You can’t add users or authors via XMLRPC, sadly. In the future, the better thing to do would probably be to log directly in to the server you’re configuring, load the old data into the database, and use the PHP API calls  directly to create users and authors as well as directly load the data into WordPress. I decided not to embark on this, this time, because I’m faster and more able in Perl than I am in PHP, and I decided it would be faster to go that way than try to teach myself a new programming language and solve the problem simultaneously.
    Overall
    I’d call this mostly successful. The data made it in to the WordPress installation, and I have an XML dump from WordPress that will let me restore it at will. All of the data ended up where it was supposed to go, and it all looks complete. I have a stash of techniques and sample code to work with if I need to do it again.

  • Bluetooth, LineIn, Soundflower: talking over Skype and playing music

    Someone who wants to teach dance classes online asked me if there was a reasonable way (i.e.., without spending a lot of money) to set up a Skype link that can be used for both music and a wireless microphone setup.

    The plan is to put something together that allows her to

    • Get far enough away from the camera that she can be seen head to toe (being able to see the footwork is important) and with a wide enough angle that she doesn’t have to dance unnaturally in one spot.
    • Send iTunes output and her voice over the line at the same time to one or more people,  in sync to the music.
    • Have some kind of a wireless mic to be able to communicate to her students without shouting.
    • Be able to hear her students talk back without their hearing their own voices delayed, or her hearing her own voice, delayed.

    This turns out to be more complicated than it might seem. The iSight camera doesn’t work very well for this; its field of view is quite narrow, and it’s very difficult to adjust it so that it pointed properly on top of that. This was relatively easy to solve: a Logitech HD Pro 920 works fine for both the wide-angle and head-to-toe issues; it can be mounted on a tripod (it has the necessary threading to mount on a standard photo tripod), and after an upgrade to a more powerful laptop – her 2008 MacBook Air was just not cutting it! – the video issue was solved.

    The audio issue was thornier. Originally, I hit up Sweetwater Sound for a real wireless mic setup; after realizing this was going to be well north of $300 once I got the mic, the base station, and the computer interface to actually hook it up with, and that this was going to be a lot of different hardware issues to deal with as well, I decided I’d better scout around for a better option.

    I was stuck until the instructor suggested a Bluetooth headset instead. It’s a reasonable, good-enough audio input channel at 8KHz – she wants to talk across it, not record studio-quality audio, so a little bit tinny is OK – and it’s definitely wireless. After a bit of investigation, I settled on the Jawbone ERA as the most-likely-workable option. The ERA is light, small, fits tightly (important for a dancer) and is the current best headset suggestion from Wirecutter, who I have learned to trust on stuff like this. It’s easy to connect a Bluetooth headset to OS X (getting it to talk properly to the software’s a different issue, see below). This takes a lot of hardware complication out of the way. Skype supports Bluetooth, so I thought I’d solved the problem.

    Unfortunately, an audio test with the music and voice both going through the Bluetooth mic showed me I’d have to get more creative; the music was either inaudible or distorted (that 8KHz bandwidth made it sound hideous, when you could hear it at all). It needed to be audible and undistorted if it was going to be possible for a student on the far end to use it to dance along with.

    A lot of Googling finally led me to thisevilempire’s blog entry on how to play system audio in Skype calls on OS X. This got me part of the way: I had, according to tests with the Skype Audio Tester “number”, gotten the audio to play nicely across the link, but I was getting a half-second delay of my voice back on the same channel, which made it hard to talk continuously. Not good enough for an instructor.

    More searching found a post on Lockergnome spelling out how to transmit clean audio, overlay voice,  and hear the returned call without an echo. Here’s how:

    1. Install Soundflower and LineIn, both free.
    2. Make sure the Bluetooth headset is on.
    3. Open the Sound preference pane in System Preferences.
    4. Set the
      1. Jawbone ERA as the input device
      2. Soundflower (64ch) as the output.
    5. Duplicate LineIn in the Applications folder, and rename both copies: one to “LineIn Bluetooth” and the other to “Bluetooth System”. The names aren’t important; this just so you can tell them apart.
    6. Launch both copies of LineIn. You’ll need to drag one window aside to reveal them both; they initially launch in exactly the same spot.
    7. Choose the “LineIn Bluetooth” instance in the Dock, and set
      1. Input to “ERA by Jawbone”
      2. Output to Soundflower (2ch).
      3. Click the “Pass thru” button.
    8. Select the other instance, “LineIn System”, and set
      1. Input to Soundflower (16ch)
      2. Output to Soundflower (2ch).
      3. Click the “Pass thru” button.
    9. Run Soundflowerbed (installed in the Applications folder by the Soundflower install). In the menu bar, click on the little flower icon, and
      1. Select “None” under Soundflower (2ch)
      2. Select “Built-in Output” under Soundflower (16ch).
    10. Run Skype, and open its preferences.
      1. Select “Soundflower 2ch” in its Microphone pulldown, and leave everything else alone.
      2. If you have an alternate camera attached, switch the Camera pulldown to the appropriate camera.

    You should now be able to make a Skype call, and play music from iTunes, DVD Player, or Youtube over the wire at full fidelity, and talk at the same time. You should hear the far end’s voice on your  speakers, along with the music you’re sending across (undelayed).

    Try to keep the headset away from the speakers to minimize the chances of feedback.

    It’s not all that  difficult; it’s just the tricky bits of being able to reroute the audio internally via the two LineIn instances and Soundflower. Getting those tricky bits right is the difficult part.

    I’ve tested this with the Skype test call and it seems to have worked; the big test will be the full-up video camera plus the streaming audio. We’ll give that a shot soon and I’ll follow up on whether the Bluetooth mic is good enough, or if a better mic is needed.

    Update: Undoing the process!

    It’s necessary to restore the normal audio routing after the call; you can do this with System Preferences.

    1. Open System Preferences and select Sound.
    2. Set Input to Internal Microphone. If you’re wearing the ERA, it will make a little descending bleep to let you know it’s been disconnected.
    3. Set Output to Internal Speakers.
    4. Quit both copies of LineIn.
    5. Check the Soundflowerbed menu; it should have both Soundflower 2ch and SoundFlower 64ch pointing to None. Quit Soundflowerbed.
    6. Turn off the Bluetooth headset; put it on its charger for a while.
    7. Quit Skype.

    You should be all set.

  • Mojolicious Revolutions

    3rd in my series of talks at SVPerl about Mojolicious; this one reviews using the server-side features for building bespoke mock servers, and adds a quick overview of the Mojo client features, which I had missed until last week. Color me corrected.

    Mojolicious Revolutions

     

  • Pure majority rule considered harmful

    I’ve been discussing an issue on Perlmonks over the past couple days; specifically the potential for abuse of the anonymous posting feature. I’ve seen numerous threads go by discussing this, most of which have focused on restricting the anonymous user. Since the anonymous user’s current feature set seems to be a noli me tangere, I proposed an alternative solution similar to Twitter’s blocking feature. One of the site maintainers very cordially explained why my proposal was not going to be adopted, and in general I’d just let this drop – but I received another comment that I can’t just let pass without comment. To quote:

    I’m saying “This isn’t a problem for the overwhelming majority, therefore it is not a problem.”

    I’d like to take a second and talk about this particular argument against change, and why it is problematic. This is not about Perlmonks. This is not about any particular user. This is about a habit of thought that can be costly both on a job-related and personal level.

    Software engineering is of necessity conservative. It’s impossible to do everything that everyone wants, therefore we have to find reasons to choose some things and not others. And as long as the reasons are honest and based on fact and good reasoning, then they are good reasons. They may not make everyone happy (impossible to do everything), but they do not make anyone feel as if their needs are not being carefully considered. But, because we’re all human, sometimes we take our emotional reactions to a proposal and try to justify those with a “reason” that “proves” our emotional reaction is right.

    In this case, what is said here is something I’ve seen in many places, not just at Perlmonks: the assumption that unless the majority of the people concerned have a problem, there’s no good reason to change; the minority must put up with things as they are or leave. Secondarily, if there is no “perfect” solution (read: a solution that I like), then doing nothing is better than changing.

    There is a difference between respectfully acknowledging that a problem exists, and taking the time to lay out why there are no good solutions within the existing framework, including the current proposal, as the maintainer did – and with which I’m satisfied – and saying “everyone else is happy with things as they are”, end of conversation.

    The argument that the majority is perfectly happy with the status quo says several things by implication: the complainer should shut up and go along; the complainer is strange and different and there’s something wrong with them; they do not matter enough for us to address this.

    Again, what I’m talking about is not about Perlmonks.

    As software engineers, we tend to lean on our problem-solving skills, inventiveness, and intelligence. We use them every day, and they fix our problems and are valuable (they are why we get paid). This means we tend to take them not only to other projects, but into our personal lives. What I would want you to think about is whether you have accepted that stating “everyone else is happy with things as they are” is a part of your problem-solving toolkit. The idea that “the majority doesn’t have a problem with this” can morph into “I see myself as a member of the majority, so my opinions must be the majority’s opinions; since the majority being happy is sufficient to declare a problem solved, asserting my opinion is sufficient – the majority rule applies because I represent the majority”.

    This shift can be poisonous to personal relationships, and embodies a potential for the destruction of other projects – it becomes all too easy to say the stakeholders are being “too picky” or “unrealistic”, or to assume that a romantic partner or friend should always think the same way you do because “most people like this” or “everybody wants this” or “nobody needs this” – when in actuality you like it or want it or don’t need it. The other person may like, need, or want it very much – and you’ve just said by implication that to you they’re “nobody” – that they don’t count. No matter how close a working or personal relationship is, this will sooner or later break it.

    Making sure you’re acknowledging that what others feel, want, and need is as valid as what you feel, want, and need will go a long way toward dismantling these implicit assumptions that you are justified in telling them how they feel and what should matter to them.

  • youtube-dl: it just works

    I was having trouble watching the Théâtre du Châtelet performance of Einstein on the beach at home; my connection was stuttering and buffering, which makes listening to highly-pulsed minimalist music extremely unrewarding. Nothing like a hitch in the middle of the stream to throw you out of the zone that Glass is trying to establish. (This is a brilliant staging of this opera and you should go watch it Right Now.)

    So I started casting around for a way to download the video and watch it at my convenience. (Public note: I would never redistribute the recording; this is solely to allow me to timeshift the recording such that I can watch it continuously.) I looked at the page and thought, “yeah, I could work this out, but isn’t there a better way?” I searched for a downloader for the site in question, and found it mentioned in a comment in the GitHub pages for youtube-dl.

    I wasn’t 100% certain that this would work, but a quick perusal seemed to indicate that it was a nicely sophisticated Python script that ought to be able to do the job. I checked it out and tried a run; it needed a few things installed, most importantly ffmpeg. At this point I started getting a little excited, as I knew ffmpeg should technically be quite nicely able to do any re-enoding etc. that the stream might need.

    A quick brew install later, I had ffmpeg, and I asked for the download (this is where we’d gotten to while I’ve been writing this post):

    $ youtube_dl/__main__.py http://culturebox.francetvinfo.fr/einstein-on-the-beach-au-theatre-du-chatelet-146813
 [culturebox.francetvinfo.fr] einstein-on-the-beach-au-theatre-du-chatelet-146813: Downloading webpage
 [culturebox.francetvinfo.fr] EV_6785: Downloading XML config
 [download] Destination: Einstein on the beach au Théâtre du Châtelet-EV_6785.mp4
 ffmpeg version 1.2.1 Copyright (c) 2000-2013 the FFmpeg developers
 built on Jan 12 2014 20:50:55 with Apple LLVM version 5.0 (clang-500.2.79) (based on LLVM 3.3svn)
 configuration: --prefix=/usr/local/Cellar/ffmpeg/1.2.1 --enable-shared --enable-pthreads --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-nonfree --enable-hardcoded-tables --enable-avresample --enable-vda --cc=cc --host-cflags= --host-ldflags= --enable-libx264 --enable-libfaac --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libxvid
 libavutil 52. 18.100 / 52. 18.100
 libavcodec 54. 92.100 / 54. 92.100
 libavformat 54. 63.104 / 54. 63.104
 libavdevice 54. 3.103 / 54. 3.103
 libavfilter 3. 42.103 / 3. 42.103
 libswscale 2. 2.100 / 2. 2.100
 libswresample 0. 17.102 / 0. 17.102
 libpostproc 52. 2.100 / 52. 2.100
 [h264 @ 0x7ffb5181ac00] non-existing SPS 0 referenced in buffering period
 [h264 @ 0x7ffb5181ac00] non-existing SPS 15 referenced in buffering period
 [h264 @ 0x7ffb5181ac00] non-existing SPS 0 referenced in buffering period
 [h264 @ 0x7ffb5181ac00] non-existing SPS 15 referenced in buffering period
 [mpegts @ 0x7ffb52deb000] max_analyze_duration 5000000 reached at 5013333 microseconds
 [mpegts @ 0x7ffb52deb000] Could not find codec parameters for stream 2 (Unknown: none ([21][0][0][0] / 0x0015)): unknown codec
 Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' and 'probesize' options
 [mpegts @ 0x7ffb52deb000] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate
 [h264 @ 0x7ffb51f9aa00] non-existing SPS 0 referenced in buffering period
 [h264 @ 0x7ffb51f9aa00] non-existing SPS 15 referenced in buffering period
 [hls,applehttp @ 0x7ffb51815c00] max_analyze_duration 5000000 reached at 5013333 microseconds
 [hls,applehttp @ 0x7ffb51815c00] Could not find codec parameters for stream 2 (Unknown: none ([21][0][0][0] / 0x0015)): unknown codec
 Consider increasing the value for the 'analyzeduration' and 'probesize' options
 Input #0, hls,applehttp, from 'http://ftvodhdsecz-f.akamaihd.net/i/streaming-adaptatif/evt/pf-culture/2014/01/6785-1389114600-1-,320x176-304,512x288-576,704x400-832,1280x720-2176,k.mp4.csmil/index_2_av.m3u8':
 Duration: 04:36:34.00, start: 0.100667, bitrate: 0 kb/s
 Program 0
 Metadata:
 variant_bitrate : 0
 Stream #0:0: Video: h264 (Main) ([27][0][0][0] / 0x001B), yuv420p, 704x396, 12.50 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
 Stream #0:1: Audio: aac ([15][0][0][0] / 0x000F), 48000 Hz, stereo, fltp, 102 kb/s
 Stream #0:2: Unknown: none ([21][0][0][0] / 0x0015)
 Output #0, mp4, to 'Einstein on the beach au Théâtre du Châtelet-EV_6785.mp4.part':
 Metadata:
 encoder : Lavf54.63.104
 Stream #0:0: Video: h264 ([33][0][0][0] / 0x0021), yuv420p, 704x396, q=2-31, 12.50 fps, 90k tbn, 90k tbc
 Stream #0:1: Audio: aac ([64][0][0][0] / 0x0040), 48000 Hz, stereo, 102 kb/s
 Stream mapping:
 Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (copy)
 Stream #0:1 -> #0:1 (copy)
 Press [q] to stop, [?] for help
 frame=254997 fps=352 q=-1.0 size= 1072839kB time=02:49:59.87 bitrate= 861.6kbits/s

    Son of a gun. It works.

    I’m waiting for the download to complete to be sure I got the whole video, but I am pretty certain this is going to work. Way better than playing screen-capture games. We’ll see how it looks when we’re all done, but I’m quite pleased to have it at all. The download appears to be happening at about 10x realtime, so I should have it all in about 24 minutes, give or take (it’s a four-hour, or 240 minute, presentation).

    Update: Sadly, does not work for PBS videos, but you can actually buy those; I can live with that.

  • Test::Routine slides

    This is my Test::Routine slide deck for the presentation I ended up doing from memory at the last SVPerl.org meeting. I remembered almost all of it except for the Moose trigger and modifier demos – but since I didn’t have any written yet, we didn’t miss those either!

    Update: My WordPress installation seems to have misplaced this file. I’ll look around for it and try to put it back soon.

  • The Node.js “he”/”they” Change: Analysis of a Social Bug

    The Node.js foofaraw – concerning a fix meant to remove a “he” and switch it to a “they” – has gone all the way from a one-word patch to a monstrously-long comment chain on the patch and a core contributor resigning from the project.

    The controversy continues a week later, with opinions ranging from “good riddance” to “how terrible people would make a good programer quit the project”. I’d like to step back and try to do what good programmers do when something fails in a spectacular way: look at what the situation was, what happened, and try to determine not only a cause but a way to prevent the issue in the future.

    Rather than spend a lot of time on the deep analysis first, I’m going to go straight to my conclusion, and then illustrate why I think it’s true.

    The social bug

    The problem was neither completely a software problem, nor a social problem, but one caused by multiple confusions of software criteria for social ones (and vice versa), and of the essence of software with its representation, followed by not seeing the necessity of cohesion to help correct a community-wide problem.

    Node.js is both a software project and a social group. There is code: an agreed-upon, human-intelligible means of communicating information about a set of designs and procedures to other humans, such that the chosen representation of that information can be turned into a different representation that can be executed by a computer. This is shared among the people who are working on it, and all of the people working on it submit proposed changes to a set of core committers who decide what goes in and what doesn’t based on their technical expertise, the quality of the submissions, and the overall goals of the project. So far so good.

    Software, however,  is not only the expression of algorithms and design, but an expression of the community’s standards, especially when it is a public project. Because we are not computers ourselves, that communication will by necessity include desires, impulses, preconceived ideas, and all those other messy things that go along with being human. Some places the community or readers and writers will share nearly all the same ideas and goals; in others they will have large differences.

    So it’s possible, even likely, that “good’ software – it executes properly, meets its design goals, it produces proper results – may communicate a personal or social message that raises a problem for members of the group on a personal level. This is a social bug.

    Fixing a social bug

    Fixing a social bug requires a very different set of talents and procedures than software debugging does. Among these are careful listening and a willingness to take enough time to reach an agreement, or at least an understanding; a willingness to accept that bad judgement and errors in solving a social bug can cause problems far worse than the original bug; and that sometimes the only tools that can fix them are personal responsibility and acceptance, with ensuing personal costs.

    “Too small a change”

    The Node.js failure occurred because Ben evaluated a social bug patch as a software patch. The specific change was a one-word change to a comment – a change to a comment is one of the clear signs that this was a human issue instead of a software one. Second, the change was gender-related. Most software developers during the current era are aware that a gender-related question is almost certainly going to be a social issue instead of a software one. Not seeing this and switching to a different problem-solving paradigm was the first error.

    Causes for this first error are quite obscure. The very quick escalation of the problem caused by the lack of followup communication (see below) led to it being difficult to see what the proximate cause of the error was. It is possible that the initial evaluation of the change as insignificant was triggered by a cursory look at the patch: (paraphrasing) “one word in a comment? this isn’t worth it”, but we can’t say for sure.

    The first error could have been avoided in a couple ways. If Ben had spotted this as a social issue immediately and had deployed social problem-solving immediately, it’s possible that this problem could have been resolved in a couple minutes. Possibly a lack of experience or training in dealing with social issues is the base reason for this particular failure; training, either formal or informal, in dealing with social issues is recommended to provide a base to work from.

    “Works for me”

    The second error occurred when other users filed “votes” for this social bug; they were attempting to communicate that the social problem was a problem for them as well, and these reports were seemingly ignored – there was no response for some time – or brushed off with a statement that the patch was not significant enough.

    This failure can be summed up as a ‘works for me’ closure for a social bug, which, in an open source project, will more likely exacerbate the problem instead of fixing it. Closing a social bug as “works for me” communicates to the person reporting a social bug that the responder disregards the fact that the reporter is not the same as the responder, and that  the item complained about is not “working” for reporter; else it would not be being reported! “Works for me” for a social bug communicates “you’re taking this too seriously” or “this doesn’t mean anything, you should ignore it”.

    The solution to this situation is to engage the reporters. Talk to them, find out their reasons for reporting the bug, take their input seriously. It may not make sense immediately, but it is critical to be seen as open, willing to listen, and accepting. You may need to say “I’m sorry, I had no idea this was the case.” Apologizing at this point is far easier than doing so after arguing against the reporters’ feelings and thoughts. Only after listening should you take any action. You should offer to listen in private so that persons who might feel at risk in speaking in public can feel safe in speaking to you. You may be on the receiving end of some anger and frustration; do your best to accept it as a communication of those feelings rather than responding to its face value. You do not have to be a doormat; you may ask for less emotionally-loaded communication, but only after acknowledging the sender has a right to those feelings and that you understand that they feel upset/angry/frustrated. Your job is to take all this in and return understanding.

    Setting up a private conversation would have been ideal; a second-best would be to have said, “I can see this is more important to people than I thought; I understand this, but I’m still of the opinion this change by itself is smaller than we normally prefer to commit. Can we come up with a solution that expands the scope of the patch – maybe do an audit and clean it all up – and I’ll gladly commit that – or is there another possibility? Let’s talk about this – write me at XXXX@YYYY.ZZZ”.

    “Consider yourself chided”

    At this point, Isaac attempted to simply solve the social bug by merging the fix; unfortunately Ben apparently continued to view this as a software issue, and reverted the patch with comments about procedures and “chiding” Isaac, who was trying to head off the social train wreck. This sent the message (whether justified or not) that Ben had an agenda and was actively engaged in retaining the social bug, thereby escalating the bug from a small issue to a community-wide one of “what kind of message do the responsible members of the community want to send about this issue?”.

    Several problems occurred here. A secondary social issue, no doubt amplified by the Joyent/Strongloop rivalry connected with Node.js, was aired in public instead of sorted out in private. The appearance of dissension among the core committers sent a bad social message – that the basic values of the community were indeed in conflict. This led to the airing of less and less productive attitudes and attacks.

    Other persons at Ben and Isaac’s respective employers have explained that the issue was caused by Ben’s not understanding that the use of a gendered pronoun was so loaded. Perhaps this is true; given the amount of discussion of this issue over the past year or so, it seems unlikely. However, a number of people attempted to communicate that this really was an important issue. As far as can be seen, Ben did not engage with them when they tried to communicate this really was a big deal and that he should pay attention. It is always a failure in a social bug situation to appear to not care.

    At that point, many different factions within the community, who before the bug was worsened into one of community principles had not even noticed the patch became involved. By this point the discussion had already spread to Twitter, pulling in other persons for whom this was indeed a social bug that mattered to them, myself included. It also pulled in a number of persons who were coming to the “defense” of the committer, further increasing the appearance of dissension in the ranks, and leading to YouTube levels of argument. In retrospect, joining the discussion was not productive, and I should not have done so. Trying private communications first would have been the right call; if there were no other way to communicate, trying to talk to Ben directly might have been acceptable; replying to people arguing with me was definitely not, and I should not have allowed myself to do so. (Again, my apologies to Isaac, who was trying to tamp down the social problem; I’m sorry to have made it harder on you.)

    Many of the most rancorous discussions came out of trying to pretend that the software was an entity divorced from its human representation, and therefore social bug reports about the code were inane, hypocritical, or the result of ulterior motives (“white knight” was bandied around with vigor). Unfortunately there was no one at the upper levels of the Node.js informal hierarchy with the ability to choke off the argument (GitHub does not have a means of limiting discussion on a patch), and the core committers as a group were unable to, unwilling to, or simply did not think of establishing a united front and announcing a social bug solution. Isaac deployed a number of good social bug patches (language usage standards, acceptance of the patch, a definite statement that Node.js was committed to being inclusive), but the solidarity of the group had been damaged.

    Solutions for this? When a social situation is spiraling out of control, the first task is to restore a consensus. It may be necessary to impose a cool-down period; discussion of the topic is barred in the public forum but encouraged privately. If a cool-down cannot be imposed (as in this case, where commenting could not be blocked), then the putative leaders must establish their own working consensus and reiterate it until it is clear that there is a consensus for now; that observations and complaints will be listened to and all points of view will be considered; that it is clear that there is a problem and that it does need to be fixed; and that the current decision is not necessarily the permanent last word on the subject, but it is the current decision of the leadership of the project, and that it is the end of the public discussion for now. Concerned parties are encouraged to talk to the leadership to help shape policy in this area.

    Resignation

    Ben has resigned form the project. I am sorry, as he has been a valued participant and has contributed a lot of code. This is the “everybody loses” solution to dissension; one person or another quits or is forced out.

    In a hypothetical “everybody wins” version, the people who had the argument are required to resolve it – privately – and to come to an agreement. This may require one of, or all of, the participants to apologize: to each other, to the community, perhaps to others outside it, and the agreement is presented jointly by those who were arguing.

    Any further discussion of the topic is cut off by the person on the “opposite” side: in this hypothetical instance, if someone was defending the initial refusal to commit, it would be Ben’s responsibility to step in and say, “we’ve resolved this, and we don’t need to discuss it further here. If you need to talk to us about it, write me a XXXXX@YYYYY.ZZZ.” If someone was saying, “Well, Isaac was right to override,”, then it would be Isaac’s responsibility to do the same. If someone simply is insisting on discussing feminism, or language, or someone’s motivations, any one of the participants should say “speaking for all of us, we’re done with this now; this is the policy. If you don’t like the policy, send your objections and suggest fixes to XXXXX@YYYYY.ZZZ.”

    “Asshole”

    During this period, various official entities published blog posts support for one committer (the Joyent “asshole”/”fire” post) or another (the Strongloop “second language” post); none of these did much except make one set of people happy and another unhappy.

    The Joyent posting chose loaded language (e.g., “asshole”) to describe behavior; worse, “asshole” was not used in a way that made it clear that someone can act like an asshole, but that this does not necessarily mean that they are permanently and unreservedly an asshole. Certain behavior on the first committer’s part was socially inept and appeared condescending and somewhat hostile to an outside observer.

    The only real solution, difficult as it is, to someone is calling you an asshole is to stop and re-evaluate your behavior to understand why they are saying this. If your re-evaluation of your actions causes you to realize you were wrong, then you need to say this. Even if your evaluation says you are right, something has caused the name-caller a problem, and for the continued social good health of the project, you need to figure out what it is. This will probably entail talking to someone who is good and mad at you, and it will probably be very uncomfortable. You may have to take timeouts from the conversation. You will probably have to apologize. You will almost certainly have to change your actions and probably your ideas, unless a neutral observer (not someone “on your side”) agrees that the name-caller really is off in na-na land.

    Conclusions

    It is, yes, a shame when knowledge leaves a project, or when someone loses their enthusiasm for it and gives up on it. It is not a shame that people were willing to stick their necks out and say, “I think that this decision does not reflect well on the project”, especially when some of those people have a lot to lose because of it. (I’ve been in a conversation where someone has actually offered the opinion that if a person using a particular ID is being verbally harassed at that ID, the right solution is for them to abandon that ID an move to another. Apparently the harassers shouldn’t have to do so.)

    Persons who have a high profile in a public shared project do need to be willing to listen; to say they are sorry; to say thank you to someone who points out a mistake, no matter the language in which this is done. If you have inflicted a social bug’s results on someone, you don’t get to decide what reaction is appropriate; you don’t get to decide how many people are allowed to react; you don’t get to decide how someone is allowed to speak to you about it. You only get to decide whether or not to say something like “Holy crap. I didn’t realize. Thanks for telling me. I’m sorry about this.” If you decide not to, you may be acting like an asshole. If you always decide not to, you may be and asshole, for the purposes of people who observe this and then give up trying to interact with you.