preed's blah-blah-blahg

So... a few weeks ago, I finally broke down and got a Facebook account.

After having spent some time filling in all the little "tidbits about me,"¹ and more or less trying to interact with... "it" over the past couple of weeks, I've decided I don't really grok Facebook.

The first thing I noticed about Facebook is that it is very... SYN-ACK heavy.

[Continued...]

When you friend someone, it notifies them... which makes sense. But then they have this secondary round where you can let people know how you know the person. If you met through someone, who did meet through? (And do they have a Facebook account?!) If you're in a relationship, when did you meet and how serious was it?

So... maybe you're bored and you fill that out too, right? But then it'll send that to the other person, and ask them to cancel or allow. I understand why they do it, but it seems like each "friending" is this arduous process of negotiating back and forth how to publicly portray your connection to other people.

The second thing I noticed are the weird... "mini-apps." Like the "poking" feature. If you haven't used Facebook, you can poke people. They will be notified that you poked them when they log in again. When you get poked, you can poke back, or remove/ignore the poke.

That's... all it does. And I just don't get it.

The labyrinthine permissions model/system/UI the site uses isn't... great either. Now, I consider myself to be a pretty technical guy,² and... I mostly understand what permissions I set when I set them, but... I don't really understand what an actual person can see on an actual particular page of the site. So I still don't quite know if random people can see that I have "airplanes" listed under the "Fetishes" section, or I have to friend them first.

I also don't quite get the "clouds" by which they organize people (school, business, etc.) I understand that this made sense in a collegiate environment, where the site has its roots, but their application of the concept to, say, geographical locales... doesn't quite translate. You can only be a member of one particular geographical "cloud," and you can only change like twice in sixty days. Ok, fine, but then they have three areas for the Bay Area: "San Francisco," "East Bay," and "Silicon Valley."

It's quite reasonable to be a member of the "Silicon Valley" and "San Francisco" groups—thinking commuters here—but there's no way to express that in Facebook.³

Which leads to conversations like this, which I just had tonight with a longtime-friend-but-new-(too)-Facebook-er:

(21:50:20) midendian: so what is the common practice on facebook?
(21:50:28) midendian: do you friend everyone you've ever talked to like myspace and lj?
(21:50:35) mrjohnreen: or just people you want to know?
(21:50:40) midendian: or is there supposed to be some relationship, like linkedin
(21:50:43) midendian: oh
(21:50:49) mrjohnreen: hah
(21:50:51) mrjohnreen: I don't really know
(21:50:55) midendian: i can't figure out the dynamic. it's bizarre.

My friend pointed out that, unlike Flickr or LiveJournal, Facebook doesn't really have any medium to moderate the interaction; I can read/enjoy someone's [public] photos and posts on those other sites, but as my friend put it, "facebook, etc, are all about being friends/whatever." And the ambiguity of the "whatever" is... just confusing for an old Web one-dot-oh-guy, like me.

The site also tends to do everything it can to keep you hooked into it... well... all day. It doesn't seem to support things like emailing you when changes occur or provide RSS feeds, so you could see what your friends were updating without... y'know, going to the site. A particular pet peeve of mine is something Gerv expounded upon: the "emails about emails and other messages" you get. Facebook will tell you someone's sent you a message via email, but "oh... you wanted to read it? No, no, no... you need to log in for that."

This is understandable from a business perspective, but it's disconcerting, because we basically have a generation of Internet users that don't remember services any other way. It's completely reasonable to them that they should be forced to stay logged/locked into a particular site (that has obvious network effects) all day.

The youngins seem to like it this way, though?

During my recent trip, I was talking to a 17 year old girl—who has friended me on Facebook—about various things, and I asked her if she had a MySpace page, and she looked at me as if I had farted in fourth period French. She quickly responded "Oh, no, no, no. I have a Facebook page."

I figured at some point, I'd become too old to understand what the "high schoolers" these days were in to... but I must admit, I never thought it would be a social networking application (of all things) that confused me. More personally disconcerting, though, is that what I think I find most confusing is the style in which Facebook models social interactions.

I can't tell if it's weirdness with Facebook's implementation, or if socio-digital⁴ interactions have changed in such a way that I just don't grok them anymore.

If anyone can explain it to me... well... poke me on Facebook.

_____________________
¹ My (first) favorite quotation is: "When you're filling out your Friendster profile, it says 'Give other people a chance to find out how you're unique,' and the second question in that list is 'What's your favorite television program?'"
² And maybe that's the problem?
³ Admittedly, this may be an implementation detail, but... they have yet to fix it, and I don't even know if they consider it to be a problem.
⁴ I just made that word up. Think I can get someone to give me a research grant?!

Posted by preed at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

With a time-warpish flight, the Nomadic Build Engineer '07 Tour has come to an end.

I think United is playing games with the flight times on this flight: they claim it's about a five and a half hour flight on the plane, it's published as a five hour, forty-five minute flight, we left JFK almost fifty minutes late, and got into San Francisco a half-hour early.

Yah, I don't get it either.

I flew United home, so of course I listened to channel 9 (the ATC audio channel) and got to enjoy the beauty of the nation's aviation transportation infrastructure again.

No matter how many times I fly commercially, I'm always amazed that "RBV J230 LARRI J230 AIR J80 EMPTY SPI J80 HLC HGO J197 DVC ILC RUMPS OAL MOD3" gets turned into:

We got to see a bunch of big planes skid the turn to one-three-left today; they tend to keep their speed up, because they all have traffic on their tails, so it's very interesting to see them come out of the turn, drop everything in, and plant it on the runway.

Especially when the plane is something like a 747 or A340.

A 20 knot crosswind kept things interesting.

I was gonna grab some of the clips from air traffic control that kept things... bearable (but probably only for me... since I was seemingly the only one sitting in my seat, giggling) while we sat and waited for fifty minutes, but it turns out that JFK's ATC Internet feed is multiplexed, so... the joke about the pilot asking "A few whats between friends?" isn't as funny when the recording missed the tower controller saying "What's a few digs between friends?"

Lamentably, it also only grabbed half of the conversation about the pilots "turning into pumpkins" in a half hour.

And Tony: I promise next time, we'll let you make omelets.

Posted by preed at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The The Nomadic Build Engineer '07 Tour continues in the Big Apple, the always open land of real pizza, subway churro stands, and a Mass Transit System That Is Actually Usable (tm).

My NYLUG presentation went... ok, I think.

Everyone I talked to said it went great, but I'm not as sure. When I mentioned that I enjoy questions during the presentation, it seemed like we got lost on a half-hour tangent about Webkit on Windows, why Firefox doesn't work on a decade's old install of Slackware, why the "update problem" really is hard, and why we do some of the things we do (that may not always make sense to super technically-minded users). Then I had to sorta rush through the last third of the presentation to catch up.

But all-in-all, I think it was useful and informative.

(In fact, one of the NYLUG leaders randomly just told me: "I have a definitive answer about your presentation. You used the word fuck, which according to our founder, all the best presentations contain the word at least once." Well... f'ing awesome!)

The drivel presentation is available online, and there's supposedly a Podcast of it floating around (cheers to whomever recorded it, despite the fact that I'd rather ignore it exists, because hearing the sound of your own voice... ... yah).

For those in a rush, my hour-long talk can be summarized with the following slide:

The Firefox release process in six easy steps.

Obviously, this process relies heavily on the Internets' Tubes.

(Which aren't big trucks.)

Anyway, I had a lot fun, and I hope NYLUG did too. Thanks for the invite!

We stopped by Atlantic City (and got to see a major thunderstorm-induced traffic jam at KEWR!) last night, and I won $7! Which is more than I can say for Vegas.

Then, more yummy East Coast food and city-explorin'.

Posted by preed at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

If you've been wandering around the Mountain View office, wondering where I am, I've just finished wek one of the Nomadic Build Engineer '07 Tour.

First stop for the tour bus: Toronto!

While soaking up that world-renowned Canadian hospitality, highlights included:

I only took like three pictures in Toronto, and this was one of them. It's a statue of Winston Churchill in [[Nathan Philips Square]]; as you may be able to tell, the pigeons have a particular fondness for Churchill['s head], but frankly, haven't we all felt a little like that about Churchill['s head] at at least one point in our lives?

• A few conversations with mconnor about build-related needs for Firefox 3, so there are little-to-no surprises.
• Learning what it's like to be remote to a bunch of meetings.¹
• A meetup with Ben Hearsum, Buildbot-er extraordinaire. Chatting with him was a double-header of release automation fun-ness³ and a review of someTinderbox code. Once we got the bad taste out of our mouths, we started brainstorming requirements for a build harness that might eventually replace Tinderbox Client. Ben then filed bug 384943 today, which rhelmer, cf, and I all noticed pretty much in unison.⁴
• My first encounter with [[poutine]]; I don't think I'll ever be the same again, but my arteries thank you, Gavin and Johnath!
• My first encounter with Beer Bistro; I don't think I'll ever be the same again, but my liver thanks you, Gavin and Johnath!
• A trip to the ballet, courtesy of Lucy; they were performing Don Quixote⁵; it was a dress rehearsal, so every once in awhile the director would stop everything, give a bunch of notes, and then they'd re-do it. It was great! Like Tivo-for-ballet!
• Riding the Toronto subway.
• Walking up and down Church St. with Lucy at 2 in the morning.
• Cursing Beltzner for listening to his wiki-suggestion to stay in the downtown Days Inn, who has seemingly confused "beds" and "layers of cardboard with sheets."⁶
• A stop at Active Surplus, which is kinda like a Canadian version of Weird Stuff. Johnath has promised to build me a control panel with those old switches from the Cold War movies that have the protection cover over them to launch the missiles. "Firefox 2.0.0.5 released... now!"⁷
• While walking down the street, I asked Johnath: "Does Canada have any assholes? You're all so nice here," and of course, on cue, someone guy started laying on his horn constantly as we walked by. So I learned that, despite my earlier perceptions, Canada does indeed, have at least one asshole. But for a country of thirty million people, that's pretty good.
• Even though they are Canadian, Air Canada is still like every other airline. They just say "We're going to screw you, eh?" and thank you for the opportunity to do so when they're done.

A special shout-out to the Toronto office for taking me in, and dealing with my [now extra] screwed up sleep schedule. I had a lot of fun!⁸

The Toronto Subway was fast, clean (of course!), and easy to understand. A+++++!!!!! WOULD TOTALLY RIDE AGAIN!!!

But more than that, it's been one of the most productive trips I've been on in terms of strategic planning (hey, imagine doing that in Build-land, for once!)

Week two has me in New York City, meeting up with Ted Mezerk... Ted Mylizkriy... Ted Mcyzkiske... luser to work on Build Things for the next alpha.

Shameless self-promotion. And on my own blog, too!

Also, on Wednesday evening, the New York Linux Users' Group, one of the largest LUGs in the country is hosting me for a talk about releasing Firefox to millions of users and the unique challenges that presents how I drink scotch all day and the Mozilla community makes me look good.

The talk is Wednesday evening, but you have to RSVP by Tuesday afternoon, so if you're interested, head on over to the website.

Should be interesting (babbling), if nothing else.

14:53 <@preed> cf: so, I'm in NYC right... and I'm right next to little Italy
14:53 <@preed> so I've been enjoying the Italian food
14:54 <cf> nice
14:54 <@preed> but like... they have chianti with EVERYTHING
14:54 <@preed> "Uhm, no... I didn't order any wine with lunch... well... ok."
14:54 <@preed> "(Twist my arm.)"
14:54 <cf> twist it hard
14:55 <cf> makes afternoons kinda fun
14:55 <@preed> it sure as hell makes them go faster! ;-)

______________
¹ BRING THE MIC CLOSER! So that I might... join with it. Do it. NOW!^2
2 Sorry... sorry... awful Star Trek V reference.
³ That will likely involve some BuildBot subclassing hotness
⁴ And I don't mind telling you that it made us all a bit tingly in our special places.
⁵ Am I the only one who kept pronouncing it "Don Kwix-oat" until I was like 16?
⁶ I still <3 you, though, Beltzner; especially since you're still reviewing my presentation? Right?
⁷ Of course, QA would have the other key, and we'd have to turn them together.
⁸ So much, in fact, that I've started thinking about what it would take to work from the Toronto office for like... a year. I really like the feel of this city, and I've never done anything spontaneous like that. Of course, this is one of my [many] harebrained ideas, so it's unlikely to go anywhere... but you never know. This one may stick!

Posted by preed at 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Because this change will cause Tp numbers to noticeably shift, we will be closing the tree at 6 pm PDT, an hour before the outage window. Assuming the outage window goes well and the new pageload server stands up, we'll reopen the tree at midnight.

This will allow a few cycles using the new server, giving new base Tp numbers for the new pageload server.

Any questions, feel free to shoot build@m.o an email.






_________________
¹ Don't know what an axolotl is? Yah... I didn't either.^2
2 Why-oh-why wasn't this machine named WuperRuper?!
³ There is no 3 above, but I stole the picture from wikipedia and munged it; according to the license, I'm supposed to attribute that here; so this is the original copy.

Posted by preed at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, we can't comment our code the way we see fit anymore?

Didn't we already go through this once?

I think the most logically inconsistent part of the bug is the whole "You can't say certain 'bad words,' but we'll still help you spell them"-thing.

This seems like a losing proposition. As censorship of any form typically turns out to be, if you integrate over a large enough time interval.

I might just have to add an $equalAmount++ of "that word" to my next patcher2 patch.

Posted by preed at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)