Today we crossed 300 people in the #apache IRC channel on Freenode. I remember when we crossed 100, and bemoaned the changes in the nature of the conversation. And, now that we’re at 300, the feel is indeed less friendly, more hostile, more angry people, more rude “helpers”, more RTFM responses, more people looking to be spoon-fed rather than actually participate in solving their own problems.

I think it’s probably possible to restore a bit of courtesy and friendliness, but I imagine it would be pretty hard.

I just got done listening to the WordPress podcast, and I’m very impressed both with the quality of the production, and the quality of the commentary. That two guys can natter on for an hour, and still be interesting and informative, is pretty impressive.

I’m fascinated, however, by the remarks about Habari. In particular, I have a growing interest in how people measure the success of a project, and this podcast tweaked that interest a little more.

It appears that a lot of people measure the success of a project by things that are utterly unimportant to me. High on this list are:

Install base: Habari can’t be a success because WordPress already has a huge install base, and, starting from scratch, Habari has only 3 users.

Number of themes: There’s only one or two themes.

Number of plugins: WordPress has a lot of plugins and is therefore successful.

These intrigue me, not only because they are completely disjoint from how I measure success, but because the last one is, to me, a clear indication that WordPress does a lot of stuff wrong – at least, after listening to the list of new plugins listed on the podcast.

Yes, it’s neat to have lots of people using our stuff. I imagine that’ll come with time. But it’s not a measurement of success. I got involved in Habari for rather different reasons.

I wanted to work on some cool code. I actually enjoy programming, when the code is elegant, beautiful, and innovative. Habari code is those things, at least now. And it’s fun. If folks end up using it, bonus, but that’s not the measure of success.

Also, I wanted to produce a package that does what I want it to. One of the fundamental principles of Open Source is scratching one’s own itches. If we end up with a product that I can use, that does pretty much what I want it to do, and which I can tweak to do other stuff I want it to do, then it’s successful.

As for themes, that’s a non-issue. Habari will be able to use WordPress themes, so however many themes WordPress has, Habari has ’em to.

Finally, plugins. Well, that’s interesting. One of the plugins that was mentioned on the WordPress podcast allowed you to reorder pages. I don’t even understand what the problem is, let alone why you’d need a plugin to solve the problem. When something hugely obvious, like reordering pages, requires a plugin, this makes me wonder both about the community process (why wasn’t this just a trivial patch to TRUNK, rather than a third-party plugin) and the code (why on earth should it be so hard to reorder pages that it requires a third-party plugin?) Of course, this is likely a bad example, and I’m sure the plugin does useful nifty things that would be impossible otherwise. But there are large numbers of plugins that seemed to me like they should be core behavior. My canonical example is the dashboard. The first thing that I do when I install WordPress is install a dashboard plugin, so that the administration dashboard is actually useful, rather than being a list of RSS feeds of blogs in which I am utterly uninterested. Why I would want a list of blog entries on someone else’s blog as my main administration interface completely escapes me.

Anyways, thanks for the podcast, and for the insightful things you had to say about Habari. We’re having fun, and we’re producing interesting software, so we’re already successful. I find your measuring stick interesting, but I think you’re using the wrong one.

I’ve been reading The Dilbert Blog for several months now. Today, I have finally removed it from my aggregator. I’d just had enough.

Some of the time, it’s very funny. Most of the time, it’s mildly offensive. Some of the time, it’s profoundly offensive. I guess I just got tired of being offended, and the occasional funny wasn’t making up for the usual offensive.

I don’t mind that some people are atheists, or agnostics. What I mind is people of one philosophical persuasion feeling the need to defecate all over the beliefs of other people on an ongoing basis. Yes, Scott, I get that you disagree with my view of the world. What I don’t get is your unbridled rage and venom that you feel the need to spew so regularly, and so violently.

You’re a good writer, Scott. But the vitriol just doesn’t fit you. It comes across as hatred and rage, and I wonder what it is that you’re reacting to.

I don’t mind being offended. I’m not so full of myself that I can’t deal with being offended. But it’s no longer entertaining, and the occasional insight and occasional humor simply doesn’t pay for the venom.

We’re just about ready to get started on the ApacheCon planning for ApacheCon EU 2007 in Amsterdam. We’re in the Peachtree Westin, downtown Atlanta. Not everyone has showed up yet for the 9am meeting. Hopefully they’ll be here soon, so we can get this show on the road.

The hotel is very nice. The surrounding area is wonderful. This is where we’re doing the 2007 US show in November.

I’m back in the BlueGrass airport. I think I might start taking this personally. Every flight I’ve been on in the last 6 months has been delayed. My flight was supposed to take off an hour ago, and the plane hasn’t even arrived yet. We have confirmation that it’s off the ground in Atlanta, and on the way. So it’s anywhere from 0 – 90 minutes away.

I’m on the way to Atlanta for the planning meeting for ApacheCon. We have about 250 submitted talks, and we need to shoe-horn those into the available 60-or-so slots. With those kinds of numbers, we’re going to have to be very brutal and throw out a lot of good talks. But I get to hang out with a number of fascinating people, so it should be fun anyways.

I’m writing again. This is good, but it’s been pretty hard to get started.

I’m writing two different things. One of which, I suppose I shouldn’t tell you about, since it could hurt the sales of a book that I already have out. Of course, all of my loyal readers already own copies of all of my books, right? Right?

The other thing is a work of fiction that I’ve been working on, on and off, mostly off, for about 3 years. I think. Anyways, it’s been a long time. And precious little progress has been made in that time. But suddenly, the book makes more sense to me, and I can see the parts of it more clearly, and how they fit together, and I’m once again excited about writing it. I still find fiction a little frightening. The way that stories seem to write themselves is a little alarming. When I try to figure out the entire story, it seems to kill it. If I just start writing, the story comes out by itself, as though it already existed fully-formed, waiting to spring from my forehead like Persephone, or whoever the heck that was. Athena, perhaps? I forget.

My resolution to write something every day is going pretty well, so far. Well, not *every* day, but almost every day. And I’m taking pictures almost every day, too, and one or two of them have turned out pretty well.

Ok, back to writing. I have a deadline this weekend, and I need to get busy so that I still have some time left to procrastinate.

I know, it does indeed sound too good to be true, and I’m sure that the article is considerably dumbed down for the target audience, but it does indeed sound like there’s a potential cure for cancer in the works. I’m reminded of the scene from one of the Star Trek movies, where Bones gives a patient a tiny pill, and he’s cured from some incurable illness. In generations to come, perhaps we’ll look back at the generations of horrible deaths from cancer, and wonder how we could have thought ourselves enlightened, in the midst of such ignorance and darkness.

The ApacheCon CFP (Call For Papers) expires tonight at midnight Pacific time. So far we have received 194 submissions. 91 of those submissions have arrived in the since 00:01 Thursday. So it looks like we’re going to have more than 50% of the submissions arrive in the last 48 hours, once the last one comes in and the CFP is closed.

I’ve moved my site to Habari. I *thought* that the import had screwed up my categories, but turns out it was because I simply hadn’t categorized the last bunch of postings. So, laziness, not bugs.

And so I’m currently running out of the latest bleeding-edge svn. We’ll see how this goes.