Monica

I've been spending some of my free time working with two open-source projects that are building new, community-driven Q&A platforms. (Yes, two. We're cooperating, including on common interfaces, but have some different goals. We didn't know about each other right off.) I don't have useful programming skills to contribute, but I'm helping with other aspects, including functional design, some feature design, and general cat-herding (on the larger one). Also, one of them asked me to serve as doc lead. :-)

Codidact is a platform for networks of sites on specific topics, much like Stack Exchange is a network of sites. Lots of (current and former) moderators and users from Stack Exchange are involved. (No I did not start this project; I was recruited after it had started.) We're talking about better management of comments/discussion/feedback, and about answer scoring that takes controversy into account, and tying user privileges not to a single "reputation" number but to related activity on the site. We're also talking about allowing more per-site customization, the trick there being to support customization while preserving the sense of an overall network. We have a wiki, a draft functional spec, a front-end design framework, and a forum where we're hashing out a lot of the details. I hope we'll see a database schema soon.

As you can infer from all that, we don't have running code yet. However, we have one community that has been pretty much destroyed on its previous platform, and the Codidact team lead had previously built a prototype Q&A platform, so Writing has a temporary site now, as a stopgap and to keep the community together, while waiting for Codidact to be ready. (Site introduction.)

The team building the Codidact platform will also run an instance (a network of sites). Others are free to take the software and run their own instances if they want to follow different policies or prefer to have full control.

TopAnswers is being built by a few people from the DBA site on SE. They are being much more agile than Codidact is; they have a running site already, which gets improvements on a near-daily basis. Chat is tightly integrated; they actually built chat first so they'd have a place to coordinate building Q&A. They have an interesting voting model where people who've gained more stars (reputation-equivalent) can cast multiple votes on a post, essentially giving experts (to the extent that stars = expertise) optional weighted votes. They also integrate both meta posts and blog posts into a site's main question list instead of isolating those types of content elsewhere. I find this idea intriguing and am advocating it for Codidact too. (The link I provided is to the network-wide meta site. If you choose "Databases" from the selector at the top, you'll see what a "regular" site would look like.)

TopAnswers has a blog post laying out its high-level goals. I wrote some stuff too, from a "consumer's" perspective.

When some sort of incorporation is needed, both projects are planning on going the non-profit route (a la WikiMedia), so that the communities, not profit-seeking, remain central. Right now I think both are running on donated hosting.

Both approaches look interesting to me, and I can see some communities preferring one over the other. I'll be interested in seeing how things work out -- what ends up getting implemented on each, what lessons both positive and negative we learn from past experience, what changes stick, and where individual communities end up being active.

Because of corporate changes (spun off from one company and merged with another), we have to remove our last dependencies on the old company's IT infrastructure. In this last round, they move our email and our (Windows) login accounts to a new domain. My migration was today.

They've sent lots of email about this over the last few months, but they left out some important details. A coworker who's been through it alerted us that they would be uninstalling and reinstalling Office, for no particularly good reason that I can see. (I mean, there's a good reason if you were on the wrong version or something, but I moved from 2013 to 2013.) The only hint they gave was telling us that we'd need to update our email signatures. Yeah, a bit more than that... maybe most people don't customize Outlook much, but I have to for accessibility. So a couple weeks ago, after finding no way to export all my client settings, I walked through all the configuration panels taking screenshots. Today I reapplied them all -- and there's a critical thing that's still broken and I haven't found a solution. I started customizing the web interface instead to see if that can meet my needs, but am feeling the lack of keyboard shortcuts. Maybe that's userscriptable. Dammit, Outlook is a PITA sometimes but it was working and now it's not.

They also created new user profiles for us. They said they would move "your files" over, but coworkers warned that this was incomplete. My browsers are very important to me, so I did my best to save bookmarks (easy), tabs (reduces to bookmarks), and session state. Chrome came through just fine. I was quite surprised, when launching Firefox post-migration, to be staring at the default configuration -- it didn't occur to me that I might lose about:config settings, add-ons, and other UI customizations. Frantic, I dug around in Users/me/AppData, found a Mozilla directory under Local, and copied the profiles therein. No effect. Eventually I went to Google to find out how to put things back the way they were (and sighing deeply about the customizations that don't sync, which I'd have to reconstruct), when I found something that pointed out how to ask Firefox where it's reading profile data from. Aha! Under AppData there is also a directory named "Roaming" (WTF is that?), and it was under there. Once I copied that directory I had my old browser state back. Whew! (Also backed that up for safekeeping.)

The actual migration process (not counting email, which they moved overnight) took about six hours. A chunk of that time was spent blocked and waiting on hold with IT. (An hour on hold the first time, 1:15 the second. Sheesh.) Because I knew the hold times would be long, as soon as I smelled a potential problem the first time I placed the call while I continued to work on it. Alas, the second blockage was a surprise error from their tool. By the way, they helpfully offered links to the FAQ and "contact support", both dead. At least they also displayed a phone number (which I'd secured in advance so I didn't need, but some would).

They moved most Windows settings over; for example, my large fonts, desktop icons, custom colors, and classic taskbar styling were intact. But, I discovered, they didn't move environment variables -- and I have no idea how to get those, since I can no longer log in with the old profile. I discovered this when Emacs didn't read my configuration -- it depends on HOME. So I reset that one, but I wonder what else I've lost.

Tomorrow I get to find out what else broke. I know the main doc tool will need intervention; the domain change confuses the license. I haven't tried git yet.

My laptop is getting on in years. On the one hand, this would have been a good time to replace it, given that there's going to be a lot of disruption anyway. On the other hand, it would come with Windows 10, which hasn't been making friends on my team. Also, I brought in a Windows 10 tablet to use during the migration, and yesterday when I was testing some stuff it announced that it couldn't start and I would have to reinstall the OS (!). I hadn't done much on it so I didn't lose a lot (had to reinstall the VPN and the browsers), but...really? In all my years of computer use, I've never once gone from "works fine" to "start over" in a span of hours. I wonder if I accidentally picked up that virus latest OS update, the one that was damaging data because it didn't check to see if there's enough disk space before starting. Every time that tablet asks me if I want to install updates I say no, but maybe something slipped through?

Hello, save-me-from-trying-to-read-small-signs-in-traffic device, I really appreciate you. You have made a difference in helping me get around in unfamiliar locations. But there are a few things I'd like you to know.

1 - When you tell me to "stay left to stay left", I don't know what you're trying to communicate. "Take that not-very-obvious left-side ramp" would have been wonderful.

1a - It might have been more visible if it hadn't been raining heavily. I wonder how far we are from navigation apps responding to poor conditions by being more verbose?

2 - The desktop interface has a way to reroute, by dragging part of the path to another place on the map, but I could not figure out how to do that on my phone.

3 - But ok, the desktop interface has a "send to my phone" link. So I reasonably expected you to be pre-loaded with the route I'd carefully constructed.

4 - Instead, I got a list of directions that I guess I'm supposed to read while driving (nope!), but no "start" button to get the audio instructions that are the whole point of using the app.

5 - Playing "outsmart the app" by choosing destinations to force a particular route is not fun.

My group moved to a new office location last week. Today was my first time driving there from home. I helped with the move on Thursday, so I'd already driven home from there once and decided that the "best" path, while best in travel time, is not best for me, because of poor visibility in places. So I am very interested in finding an alternate route home. I found one via the desktop app but, well, getting my phone to implement it wasn't so straightforward. But tomorrow is another day.

My Mac has been bugging me to let it install some updates for several days now (requiring a reboot), so since I was going out for the afternoon anyway, I let it do so.

I completely forgot that this would cause Firefox to update to version 57. Oops. (At work I both turned off automatic updates and did some prep work to update to add-ons that will continue to work in 57. I hadn't gotten around to updating add-ons at home, and I forgot that I hadn't turned off browser auto-updates.)

I've lost my Stylish CSS overrides. Some I shared between home and work (or between Firefox and Chrome at home), so those ones I have, but some sites I only visit at home so I didn't have those at work. I found some stuff about how to find them on a Windows machine, but the filenames mentioned there don't exist on my Mac.

For the most part I'm going to just live without them and migrate more of my browsing activity to Chrome. The main reason I limit Chrome is that the tabs display is totally unreadable if you have too many tabs, unlike Firefox which sets a minimum size and gives you scrolling and a drop-down menu to see all of them. I just found a Chrome extension that provides that drop-down menu, so I can at least find stuff, though I haven't yet found a way to get Chrome to stop trying to show all of them anyway.

I also found these instructions for doing some of the things that Classic Theme Restorer did.

I've updated my earlier post about Firefox 57 with other workarounds I've found. For userscripts, I installed TamperMonkey, which I'm already familiar with from Chrome. For both scripts and CSS, I decided that at home I'll just do all my Stack Exchange stuff in Chrome -- I mostly was anyway, and now that it'd be actual work to get those scripts and styles back, time to just commit to it. Firefox is now almost exclusively for blog-reading (mainly Dreamwidth and those few people still on LJ), and everything else I do in Chrome. (That's at home; at work I do a lot more in Firefox.) I tend to have a lot of DW tabs open, so keeping that activity in the browser that handles tabs better makes sense.

My (Android) phone alerts me when traffic is bad near me. This can be handy at the end of the day because I work downtown. Except... it's telling me about traffic on roads I don't use to get home. Sure, there's spillover so it's not unhelpful, but it'd be great if I could tell it -- maybe by gesturing on a map -- what paths I care about, so it could tell me about those ones.

Does anybody reading this know of an app that does that, or a way to get Google Maps to do it? It needs to be fire and forget; I don't want to have to open the map app to look for red lines on it.

It feels like all the information is already there, if only my phone were making use of it.

(This would also let me know before I leave in the morning if traffic is still bad at the other end. At that time I don't really need extra information about traffic near my house; I need it 3-5 miles away.)

Query to the brain trust: I have USB headphones that include a microphone. What free software can I use to record voice from that microphone (preferably on Windows XP but I also have an iBook with OS 10.4 available) and produce something like WAV files? (I know I'm not going to get stellar audio quality from this setup; that's ok. The immediate goal is to record torah chanting -- think "teaching tapes", except no one uses tape any more.)

Followup on UJF: I spoke with the campaign manager on Friday and she was very apologetic. She promised to take appropriate action. (I've updated the original entry to reflect this.)

This week my employer's landlord started giving preferred parking spots to people driving green vehicles (definition not provided). Not that I'm going to turn down the convenience (my Honda Fit qualifies), but as one of my coworkers pointed out, are those the cars for which they want to minimize driving? (Should we try to get the gas guzzlers to stop on the first floor instead?) I used to always park on the top indoor floor, mostly so I could park in the same place every day and not have to worry about remembering at the end of the day. Now that I think about it, that decision represented about 2-3% of my commuting distance.

You know that "25 things about me" meme that's been going around? Maybe it's older than you thought. Or maybe not. :-)

The local SCA got some decent TV coverage recently.

Via jducoeur: Facebook company secrets were revealed by someone who applied paper analogies to digital media. Oops. No, white-out doesn't work on bits. (From the news story it sounds like it might have been the court that screwed up, which presumably means they can't sue anyone for the leak.)

Birkat ha Chamah is a once-every-28-years observance, and it's coming up this April. I wonder if anyone local is doing anything for this. It sounds kind of peculiar, but it'll be a while before I could next satisfy my curiosity. (The timing is inconvenient with respect to Pesach, however.)

Glow-in-the-dark body cream, pointed out by browngirl.

Thanks to xiphias for pointing out this comic to me: ( moderately-large image )

Dear LazyWeb,

I have one -- count it, one -- DVD from which I would like to extract the audio. Google leads me to many, many software offerings, some trustworthy; alas, the half-dozen I've tried so far all have built-in limits of 3 to 5 minutes for the free trial. If I were going to be doing this a lot I'd buy the software (as I have for other pieces of the great digitization project), but I really just want to do this once. I'd pay a small one-time-use fee if that were available. Because I only want to do this once, I'm not fussy about user interface and features -- if it does DVD in and WAV out without quality loss, I really don't care about anything else. Any suggestions?

(Clam Chowder, "Kosher", in case you're wondering. I want to be able to listen to it on my non-video-enabled iPod.)


Update: I ended up with a two-pass approach. HandBrake (recommended by some of you) turns DVDs into several other video formats, including AVI and MP4, but no audio-only formats (as documented). However, this free tool converts MP4 to MP3. Both of these have a batch mode, so I can just set 'em loose in turn. A small trial worked just fine, so now I've got the big job running. Thanks, everyone.

A coworker pointed me to these cartograms illustrating election results geographically. Nifty!

Dear LazyWeb,

Dani and I have a lot of albums and cassettes that we don't play any more, so we have begun the process of figuring out how to upgrade to digital media (while culling the stuff we don't care about any more). Some albums exist as CDs or downloads; others we'll have to burn ourselves (we have hardware for that). Mostly we're replacing albums, we think, and not just grabbing the "good tracks". But not all albums were reissued as CDs, so there are some individual tracks in our future assuming we can find them. (We're only through "folk, A to C" so far so expectations could change, but this is what it's looking like now.)

Even though most of this is going to end up as MP3s anyway, I prefer to buy physical CDs where we can. Yes, it's extra work to then burn them and we have to store the CDs, but I want both the liner notes and the security of knowing that some digital nanny isn't going to prevent me from moving that album to a new computer or iPod. It's also easier to browse; cover art and location on the shelves are meaningful guideposts for me, and iTunes' "genre" is not nearly rich enough for sorting; I need multi-level catagorization.

First questions: where besides Amazon should we be looking online for reasonably-priced CDs, some obscure? Is anybody beating Amazon on price consistently enough to look into? (I realize that the Amazonians among my readers might not want to answer that. :-) )

Now, about downloads. We haven't bought much music in this form before. We want it to be as easy as possible to play whatever we buy on multiple computes and iPods, including future ones and future tech. Sometimes this is prevented (DRM, I presume) -- I bought a song from iTunes and we were unable to play it on Dani's computer. Other times things appear to work fine -- Dani bought a song from Amazon and I could play it just fine. Next questions: are these typical experiences for those two vendors? Are there other vendors we should look at?

Thanks.

Maritan Headsets (from Joel on Software) is a long but worthwhile article on software standards -- both not having them early enough, and having them and trying to enforce them. Parts of it made me laugh out loud, like the paragraph containing this passage: "[...] but of course when you plug the headphones into FireQx 3.0 lo and behold they explode in your hands because of a slight misunderstanding about some obscure thing in the spec which nobody really understands called hasLayout, and everybody understands that when it's raining the hasLayout property is true and the voltage is supposed to increase to support the windshield-wiper feature, but there seems to be some debate over whether hail and snow are rain for the purposes of hasLayout..."

Rescue me: a fed bailout crosses a line seems (to this non-expert) like a good analysis of what just happened to the market and the dollar. (Need a login ID? Try BugMeNot.) I am more scared, and more angry, about our government's economic policies than I've been in a while. As someone on my subscription list said (I forget who), the people who actually took personal responsibility and saved rather than spending recklessly are the ones who are going to get hammered by this, while the idiots who bought houses (or corporate holdings) they couldn't afford and racked up tons of debt will be bailed out because we can't stand to say "too bad you were an idiot".

As long as I'm saying "too bad"... too bad, Michigan and Florida. Agreed.

On a lighter note: Garfield Minus Garfield is surreal. And since seeing it a week or so ago, I haven't been able to read Garfield "straight".

I just used MeetingMaker to schedule a weekly meeting. It requires that you specify an end date -- or you can just check "ongoing". Doing the latter causes it to fill in an end date of 12/31/2039. (Which is a Saturday, just in case you were wondering. My recurring meeting is on Tuesday, so one could argue that it should have set the end date differently.)

It quickly reported the two dates this year that some attendee isn't available. This made me wonder whether it was, in fact, searching a sparse calendar all the way through 2039, in which case it gets points for speed but maybe not for appropriateness, or whether it has some built-in limit for how far ahead it will search for conflicts.

By the way, the odds are very good that the room in which my 34-year recurring meeting occurs will cease to be available later this year.

At work I've been running an ancient and venerable version of cygwin (Unix shell for Windows machines), designated "B20". Once too often I got annoyed by not having a useful utility available, so I finally decided to upgrade. Not being stupid, I did not allow it to install over my current copy.

The new version (no obvious version number; current as of Friday) breaks for me in fundamental ways. I don't understand why. Yes, I have read TFM.

First off, it doesn't automatically source my .bashrc the way the old version does. Yes, HOME is set correctly (and the old version gets its). Peculiar, but an obvious workaround exists. Perhaps relatedly, it ignores the "start in [directory]" setting in the shortcut definition. (I want it to start in a directory that is not HOME but it won't.)

Second, by default it emits some text in dark green on my black background, bypassing the color settings I've given it. This problem goes away after I source my .bashrc manually. I guess it's doing something strange with the default prompt, which my .bashrc changes to show the current working directory. Wacky, but if it doesn't recur I can ignore that.

However, there are two real problems. First, even after processing my .bashrc, which includes all the usual definitions of environment variables like ANT_HOME and JAVA_HOME and PATH, it can't find ant. When I run ant via an explicit path, it can't find java. I fired up new and old cygwin shells side by side and applied printenv to all the relevant variables; the definitions match. (The new cygwin has added some stuff to PATH and casts everything as "/cygdrive/d/blah_blah_blah", but it doesn't seem to be missing anything.) This is fatal; it does me no good to have the latest Unix tools if I can't run ant or (apparently) java.

And second, noticed in passing, the new version is sloooooowwwww. I issued a printenv command (for one variable, not the entire environment) in the new shell, switched to the old shell, typed the same command, and switched back, and the old one completed several seconds before the new one did. I have no idea what's going on.

I thought cygwin pretty much worked out of the box, but it's not doing it for me. Frustrating, especially when the old version did. I wonder what's wrong.