Labels

There was a recent article in techradar suggesting that the Open source `community' doesn't exist.

Whilst I agree with the statement itself (or at least the way it is generally used), the article itself isn't much more than an ad hominem attack on 'open sauce' advocates. Basically suggesting that (unlike the rest of the IT world?) they're dumb like a flock of birds (or sheep?), and haven't grown out of the partisan arguments of the atari st vs amiga days.

Which is of course utter dingoes nuts. One just has to see the incoherent and emotional responses to any article suggesting the iphone isn't the best thing since sliced bread, or that the wii is only for kids, or that a microsoft xbox 360 is an unreliable piece of junk. This is just human nature. Apart from the sociopaths who like to provoke people for sport, anyone with an emotional and financial tie to something likes to make noise about attacks on their judgement.

Back to the issue of the `open source community'. The relevant definition of community is:

com·mu·ni·ty

3. a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually prec. by the ): the business community; the community of scholars.

So can this be applied to advocates of open sauce software? Perhaps, but only in the broadest of senses such that is has little meaning. Like suggesting all salt-and-pepper haired men form some sort of a community. i.e. sure they exist, but that label tells you nothing particularly useful about them.

I suspect many that might accept the label of belonging to the 'open source community' might not even fully agree with the open source definition. For some it appears that somehow open sauce generates better quality software, for others it is the cheap labour, and yet others it is just a faux hat-tip to corporate social responsibility. So you effectively end up with factions or divisions, and it all quickly devolves into politics - which apparently the open saucers don't believe in.

Once you start labelling people you start dividing them and separating them from other parts society. Political parties or religions seem to almost exist as little more than a physical representation of their own labels (often utterly failing to 'practice what they preach'). With the labels themselves eventually becoming more important than the ideas they're supposed to convey - well demonstrated by the scene with the `People's Front of Judea' in the movie `The Life of Brian'. The labels don't mean much themselves but are a powerful tool for social and political division.

In the end it's only about one thing: politics.

So I agree - there is no such thing as an `open sauce community', but there are certainly plenty of `open sauce' advocates. And despite one of the founding issues behind open sauce claiming it is all about the code and not politics, once you have a group of people the politics comes along for a ride.

At least the free software movement acknowledges that the politics is there and that it does matter. I would also shy away from labelling those who advocate free software or belong to the free software movement with a general label of 'free software community' too even if they might have more of a coherent political face.

Things are always a lot more complicated than can be conveyed in a single label.

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As an aside, reading through the open source definition linked to above one is left a little confused. The 10 point definition -- which doesn't stand on its own without the long-winded explanations -- seems a lot more complex than it needs to be - like some document from the UN or EU which tries to say what it means without offending anyone. Contrast this with the free software definition of 4 self-contained and concise points and the long descriptions filling out the `why' and not merely completing the `what'.

Reading numbers

I'm a little numerically dyslexic at times, but i'm starting to get a bit annoyed at people who can't seem to read phone numbers.

My phone number is one digit different to a local private girls school here in Adelaide, and at least a couple of times a week I get a call around 0830 intended for them. Mine has a sequence 834 and theirs has 833 in the same spot but the rest is the same. Maybe I should put a pointer in the voicemail message.

Today some guy called 3 times. Once, where he seemed to suggest the number he was calling wasn't actually my phone number, then immediately afterwards where I didn't pick up, and finally a good few hours later in the day just to say that he had the wrong number again.

A shed of my own.

Shed's finally up. Makes me feel a bit more of a bloke to finally have my own shed. Previous houses have only had a garage at most.

Bit of a mess on the outside, just some temporary stormwater for the verandah.

Well finishing that lot should give me plenty to do this xmas, although it is yet to be seen whether I keep the momentum going or not.

OpenCL scheduling

I was playing around over the last couple of days with adding extra work queues to the OpenCL application i've been working on for work. Up until this point I was using a single queue referenced off a central 'context' object, which has worked ok, but I had to add some longer-running background processing steps which don't fit into the rest of the application.

I noticed one weird thing - I have two separate processes, one of which (say) takes 5 seconds to run, the other 6. If I run process 1 and 2 at the same time (on separate queues), process 1 takes about 6 seconds to run but process 2 blows out to 25 seconds. If I run two lots of process 1 then they both take about 10 seconds to execute.

I suspect it is because although they execute in about the same amount of time, process 1 is made of fewer steps and the scheduler is just alternating through the jobs in function-call sequence and so a lot more of process 1 gets run when process 2 is also active. Although it doesn't matter at this point it could be a significant problem in a 'real' application.

They are both run on a separate thread and throw out a lot of queue.finish()'s as well - mostly so it can detect user cancellation without queuing up too much work, but also because it seemed to run into resource problems if I queued up thousands of function calls at once (the over-all processing time is important but the interaction is more important at this point). So that also might be affecting the scheduling time. This is on NVidia.

I also found a bug in JOCL and filed another bug on the jogamp bugzilla - the 3rd JOCL bug there, and the 3rd i've filed myself. Hmmm.

Video

Spent a few days this week ... gasp ... coding C++ on microsoft windows. Ugh. I don't really get paid enough for that pain, but I suppose it's bearable in very limited amounts (and being a professional, one just has to deal with it). I was looking at using directshow to get some images from a camera. No surprise - what a horrible shit, overcomplicated and poorly documented API. The bits I needed to use were removed from the microsoft windows 7 sdk too, and the published work around is to copy the headers from an older one ... sigh. Strangely enough the fastest way to look up functions on MSDN is to type it into the URL bar in firefox and let google find it; the bing link was slow slow.

Although it did force me to finally work out JNI. Which is fairly simple and straightforward and a bit easier than I thought it was. It is a little clumsy but not unreasonably so and in ways that seem to make sense. I think what normally makes it such a horrendous pain is 1. microsoft windows, and 2. ant.

It's a bit of a cold dreary wet weekend and I was still feeling a bit seedy from a (very) boozy Thursday night - not to mention having 2 packets of chips for dinner yesterday - so I just spent all day today hacking. I was thinking of doing some video image processing stuff but that seemed too much like work work so I played with DVB instead. Maybe I should've poked ImageZ a bit more.

Mucked about with a simple bit of code to record the transport stream and change channels, and using ffmpeg's libraries to play them. Very simple and pretty easy. Pity that's really the only easy bit - which is why i've always avoided playing with this stuff before. There's somewhat more to doing anything useful with it than just storing and playing video. Then I got sidetracked learning about the EPG they use in Australia - which is some horrid MHEG stuff, or EIT neither of which I could find much about. Along the way I tried a newer mythtv ... oh dear, that's got even more bloated. It has bits or extensions not only in everyone's favourite extension language of the month that I love to hate - python - but also perl and even more alarmingly, php.

Might need to get away from the screens and keyboards tomorrow.

Verandah

At last, the verandah is done.

The highest corner is 4.4m from the ground.

Next, the shed, drainage, electricity, shed floor, deck, rainwater tanks, paving, lawn ... ...

Pay per patch

I just read an interesting article about a pay per patch business model for free software.

This is something i've been thinking about lately and I came to a similar but slightly different solution - not that I necessarily want to go down that path myself.

The problem is a pay-per-path or pay-per-feature model is essentially a 'bounty' system - and bounty systems just aren't that successful for a number of reasons.

• You still need some sort of maintainer to vet and accept the patches (are they unpaid by the patch money?)
• Duplication. You can't work for nothing for potentially months on a project only to find someone else has done it, also see next point.
• Undercutting - students, otherwise employed (e.g. me), people in developing countries don't mind working for relative peanuts or even nothing at all.
• Legalities. It is really work for hire but usually not treated as such because it complicates matters particularly for international projects. Obviously this is something PFP would try to address but it isn't simple.

I think it needs tighter control for a given product and not be so much a free-for-all for all comers. Also a formal legal grounding is required and for adequate compensation.

• Only a core set of project maintainers would be part of the process, depending on the project. This removes problems with duplication of work or the need for separate approval. As with other projects people could contribute in their own time for free as well and eventually become a core maintainer if there was enough work/they proved their skills.
• Contracts are based on time and materials. The customer (be it a 'contracting company' organising multiple cients or the client itself) and worker (be it a group or an individual) agrees to a formal contract of what is to be done in what time-frame, and at what rate.

Essentially it boils down to running a project as a business rather than as a hobby. An example might be an individual or group of individuals starting a new project from scratch, getting it to a base level of usability and then asking customers to pay for new features. The main difference from the PFP model is you don't have a 3rd party involved as such, or a free-for-all for who might apply to do the work. As soon as you add 3rd parties you add extra costs ('leeches'), and lots of politics.

Although this will work for business and enterprise applications I'm not sure it would work for end-user applications. For starters end users are used to paying nothing for software (even if it was hidden in the cost of the computer). Secondly they don't realise just how expensive software is to make. At the very least of say $50/hour, it adds up very fast (casual cleaners get $22.50/hr here, so $50/hr is pretty cheap). Even very simple features will take at least a few hours to implement and some may take weeks or months for multiple developers.

And you still have a problem when the software works well enough for most users - eventually most software goes into maintenance mode where less effort is required. The upgrade mill that proprietary software companies use adds unnecessary expense for users even if it helps the developers maintain their lifestyle.

Coastal Weekend

This is where I went for the long weekend just past. After a few cold and windy mornings the weather finally smiled on us and my early morning rises were finally rewarded with this tranquil sight.

The clouds ended up burning off during the day and a few of us went out on a small boat and caught a good feed of squid and a small fish and a crab.

We were fishing in a few metres of water and it was so clear we could see the squid approaching from 10 metres away and being tempted by the jigs, and the crabs walking into the net. As one squid floated by hiding under some floating seaweed I dropped the jig infront of him and simply pulled him out of the water.