The word for world is forest, by Ursula Le Guin.

It took me awhile to get into it. It’s kind of slow building. But by the end I was completely hooked. It’s one of those stories where there’s no good guys. Just complicated people. And it’s definitely a product of its time, but still stands up.

There were a few moments where it was very clear when this was written. For example there was a reference at one point to children playing blacks versus Rhodesians. Which puts it firmly in the early 80s.

But other than that the themes were universal. Racism, slavery, and toxic masculinity.

It’s a quick read, and worthwhile if you like interplanetary sci-fi.

Stephen O’Grady expresses very clearly what I was trying to articulate earlier this week.

This is in response to Matt Asay asserting earlier in the week that it no longer matters whether software is actually open source, because it’s “open enough” or whatever.

Arguing that the definition of open source doesn’t matter because developers don’t care about it is like arguing that climate change doesn’t matter because citizens don’t care.

[Note: This is really two articles that I’ve smooshed together into one. At some point, I need to tease them apart and publish them separately to avoid muddling the ideas.]

If you hang around open source for more than a few minutes, you’ll hear someone talking about “giving back to the community,” as though it is some kind of moral obligation or repayment. And while contributing to open source purely out of a sense of altruism is great for philosophy students, the reality of open source contribution is very different.

Open source software is pragmatic. People contribute to it, primarily, for practical reasons. For example, most people contribute a change to an open source project in order to improve it for their own benefit, or the benefit of their company or customers. This has historically been called “scratching your own itch.” And you contribute that change to the project, rather than keeping it to yourself, not out of generosity, but so that you don’t have to maintain a separate version of the software with your change in it. It’s also to ensure the sustainability of a piece of software that you rely on. Making it better ensures that it will have happier users (or customers), and thus be more successful and last longer.

The other side of this misnomer is that one contributes changes “to the community.” Open source contribution, done properly, makes you part of the community. The contribution is to yourself, not to some other group of people that you’re not a part of. Contributing to the project is a step towards earning trust and gaining ownership of the project.

Projects which do not immediately attempt to capture contributors by welcoming them into the community are similarly misguided. This is often done for seemingly sensible reasons, but in the long run, it’s always a case of giving up the long-term health of the project for dubious short-term benefits.

The most common of these short term benefits is control. I, or my company, want to have more say in the direction of the project than any outsider. And the more control you strive to have, the greater chance that contributors will get frustrated and go away, or that users will choose an alternative where they have greater say in the project’s choices.

A lot of this has to do with a mistaken definition of “community.” A community is not a gleeful band of friends dancing around a campfire. A community is nothing more or less than a group of people with a common mission. If you are unsure what the mission is, then you’re not a member of the community. Similarly, a “community” which is unsure of their mission isn’t likely to last very long.

As it happens, friendship is often a side-effect of strong communities. This is simply because you’ve found your people – people who share your mission – and so friendships are easier to form. But friendship is not the goal of effective communities, just a happy outcome.

As always, I encourage everyone to read Charles Vogl’s book “The Art of Community.”

“Community > Code” doesn’t mean that the code is unimportant. Rather, it means that the code is a means to the end – the end being the mission of the community. The community (ie, the mission) is more important than the code, because it is the mission that drives the community. The code is a vehicle. The code serves the community (ie, the mission).

Open source projects should give a lot more thought to their mission. Not the function of the software, so much as what problem they are trying to solve. Communities that lose sight of their goal, or who never clearly understood it in the first place, tend to spend a lot of time casting about for things to do, because they’re not sure what they’re trying to accomplish.

The Apache Software Foundation’s mission isn’t “software for the public good” – that’s just a phrase for legal documents. The mission of the ASF is to provide a vendor-neutral place where important software can be developed without the threat of corporate capture. This is why the httpd project was created in 1995 – to ensure that the vendor capture that happened to the NCSA web server wouldn’t be likely again. And it’s why the ASF was formed – to ensure that one vendor didn’t get outsized influence in the projects.

All of our rules serve that goal. If a rule seems unmotivated by that goal, then perhaps it’s time to reconsider the rule. And losing track of that mission results in us being unsure how to enforce community mores that serve that mission. (Like single-vendor projects, for example, or too-high bars to inviting committers.)

If you have a Playstation4, you’ll eventually run out of drive space. You’ll want to use an external USB drive. And then that will eventually run out of space. You’ll want to get a larger one, and then you’ll be stuck with the question of how to copy the data from the old one to the new, larger one.

While the official answer is “no, you can’t do that”, here’s how you actually do it. (Yes, amazingly, this is actually not something you can do with any on-board tools. You will find many wrong answers from well-meaning people online.)

1. Find your geeky friend who runs Linux. Bribe them with pizza.

2. Run `df -h` to list what drives are already connected.

3. Plug in old drive, and run `df -h` again to see where it attached. This will probably be `/dev/sdb` unless there were already additional drives. Trust your Linux geek friend.

4. Plug in new drive. It will probably land at `/dev/sdc‘

5. `sudo dd status=progress if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdc` (Replace sdb and sdc with wherever those drives landed, if they are somewhere else.)

6. Wait for ages while the copy completes. This will make an exact bit-for-bit copy of the old drive onto the new drive. As it copies it will show you how much data has been copied, so that you can get a general idea of how long it will take. I get about 40 to 50 MB/s across a USB connection, so do the math. It’ll take a few hours.

7. When you plug the new drive into your PS4, it will probably complain and say that it needs to repair it. Don’t panic. Let it do its thing. All will be well.

8. I am reasonably sure that this process will also work for the PS5 filesystem. Would be happy for someone to buy me a PS5 so I can test.

Since PS4 uses a custom filesystem, you can’t just mount the drive on Windows or Mac and copy, but `dd` doesn’t care about filesystem format, it’s just a low-level data copy, and will gladly copy whatever is there. As long as the target drive is as large, or larger, than the source, it’ll Just Work.

And that’s why everyone needs a geeky friend who runs Linux.

I have a hard time keeping track of the cast of characters in my job. There’s so many projects, and so many people who work on each. A dozen times a day I have two questions: who’s that, and who works on XYZ.

I’ve been looking for a solution for this that works with how I work and think, and everything that I found suffered from one or more of the following problems:

• Windows-only
• Doesn’t sync between my machines
• Data hosted somewhere that corporate security would frown on
• Expensive

I finally decided that what I needed was something that I host myself, which syncs between my various machines, and which I can use from the command line, because that’s where I spend most of my time.

So, here it is: https://github.com/rbowen/whosthat

whosthat is written in Perl (because I like Perl), runs from the command line, and stores its files in simple text files (YAML) that I can sync between different machines via rsync or OwnCloud or Dropbox or whatever.

The two main functions are:

whosthat Rich

Returns details about records where the name or email address matches “Rich”

whoworkson openstack

Returns all records where the project or “team” matches “openstack”.

Behind the scenes, there are people records, project records, and team records.

People consist of a name, email address, notes, and what project or team they work on.

A project is, initially, an open source project, since that’s what I care about in my job, but there’s no reason it has to be. It’s any project that they work on.

And a team was, initially, the team or department within my company that someone is on, or the AWS Service they work on. But more generally, it could also be what company they work on, for tracking of people outside if my company.

Data is stored in YAML files. There’s also a addwho and editwho command for doing those things. But these just open the YAML file in your $EDITOR. It’s intentionally very simple. Could get more features over time, but this does what I need it to do.

There are a few things in this that are AWS specific. In particular, it assumes, by default, that email addresses  are @amazon.com and it links to our internal system for additional user info. I’ll try to make these configurable eventually, but right now that’s hard-coded.

If something like this is of interest to you, please do try it out. It’s Apache licensed and free. If you speak Perl, your patches are welcome. If you don’t, your ideas are welcome, but no guarantees that I’ll get anything done, since it’s very much a scratch-my-own-itch project.

Short version: Lost my passport; Found it again; Heading home.

This morning I checked out of my hotel in Paya Lebar (Singapore) and went to the airport. I went around 10am, not because my flight was imminent, but because Changi airport is the world’s best airport and I wanted to see more of it.

When I got to the airport, the checkin desks weren’t open yet, so I sat by an outlet and started some writing that I have been putting off. About an hour later, my manager says, on our team chat, that he lost his passport at TSA on the way to Amsterdam, and had to go back and get it.

So … I check my pocket for my passport … and it’s not there.

I went to the info desk to ask about lost and found, and it’s unstaffed. The security guy, who doesn’t understand a lot of English, says, yeah, someone will be there soon.

I went through all of my bags three times, emptying them on the floor, and started to panic. Thinking back, I KNOW that I had it when I left the hotel, and that I put it in my back pocket, rather than in the pocket of my bag where it goes. Ergo, I must have left it in the taxi.

After waiting on hold for more than an hour with the taxi company and opening a lost item report on their website, I start trying to figure out what happens if I don’t find it. That leads to an hour on hold, and then being passed around to various people at the US Embassy. And of course it’s Sunday, so nobody has any actual answers.

And then several hours talking with my company travel folks, and getting passed around to one person after another after another and back to the beginning and FINALLY getting a straight answer that I can get my flight moved to tomorrow, so that I can go to the embassy.

More time talking to the embassy tells me that an emergency passport takes 1-2 days, best case. So back with the travel agency to find a hotel. And back with the taxi company checking on the lost item report.

Anyways, after about 6 hours, I went downstairs looking for some food, and … there’s another info desk, and they have my passport. Apparently I dropped it as I came in the door when I arrived, and it’s been there all day.

So rather than seeing Changi Airport, I spent 6 or 7 hours on the phone, being as stressed almost to the point of tears.

So I’m in the Blossom Lounge now, and heading home soon.

I’ve started reading The Sword of Shannara. Re-reading, I should say, and it might even be the third time. It holds up, and is as gripping now as when I first read a beat-up copy from the school library at Florida High School in 1982.

40 years later, Terry Brooks is still telling stories, but these are the ones – the original trilogy – that I keep coming back to. There are passages that I remember from the first time, and others that are new again.

I’m looking forward to this new old adventure.