eaves.ca - Latest Comments

Re: Why not open flu data?

Brenton — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:00:43 -0000

Did anyone see the Google trends piece on the swine flu? They predicted and tracked outbreaks using search terms (as they've done with other things) about a week ahead of the CDC in the US.

Re: Why not open flu data?

tara_robertson — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 20:09:36 -0000

Jennifer Gardy argues that opening up scientific data, collaboration and open access scholarship (sharing data, sharing ideas and sharing articles) made the response to H1N1 much faster than the response to SARS:
http://www.terry.ubc.ca/terrytalks/2009/11/03/p...

Re: Три закона Oткрытой базы данных:

David Humphrey — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:20:17 -0000

Watching these translations flit by each day, I'm struck by how ineffective blogs are for certain kinds of writing. The translation, even more than the original, points at the labour involved in writing. As one version of this is replaced by another, the chronological organization of the blog reveals itself. I think that this experiment, when it's done, would best be captured by you registering opendatalaws.org or something, and making a static site with your translation together with all the rest. The law needs to not disappear into memory.

Re: Why StatCan is (or could be) like Google

staffing123 — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:46:31 -0000

They look to monetize content instead of creating and enabling public value from the content they are mandated to create. Meanwhile, there is a massive shift away from direct content monetization to other forms of value creation in content industries

http://staffingpower.com/

Re: Die drei Gesetze der offenen Daten

JDrolet — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 20:05:46 -0000

Gute Art zu zeigen was du meinst !

Re: Making Open Source Communities (and Open Cities) More Efficient

facebook-1461417541 — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:15:23 -0000

I echo Oshama's thought that unfixed bugs were not necessarily a *problem*. I consider myself an experienced bug reporter, and yet there are lots of bugs that I have filed that probably won't get fixed. Why? Because I have this habit of occasionally submitting feature requests, and sometimes the feature requests are so uh advanced that it just doesn't make sense to add that feature (at least now). However, if you add it, that maybe gets people thinking about it, and how they maybe could implement it.

I made six requests for enhancements to Thunderbird back in 2002. None of them have been implemented, but I expect that some of them *will* be implemented someday (based on discussions with some of the Thunderbird team).

Re: Rex Murphy: Sarah Palin’s Strong Bond

facebook-1461417541 — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:53:10 -0000

I believe that Sarah Palin connects with people's right-brains, and Obama connects with people's left-brains.
http://blog.webfoot.com/2009/11/21/right-brain-...
Liberals (by and large) don't care about right brain processing; some conservatives are concerned about people who rely too heavily on the (fact-based) left-brain.

Re: Twitter is my Newspaper: explaining twitter to newbies

Facebook User — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:43:08 -0000

Its amazing to me to see how many people fail to see the potential in Twitter and services like it. I usually use this link to show folks that Twitter is not just about what Kim and Larry had for lunch: http://twitter.com/the_pub_debates

Re: Foreign Policy Camp – Vancouver Nov 30th

facebook-678795867 — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 20:49:47 -0000

Come down to the Foreign Policy Camp Vancouver, happening this Monday, November 30th at SFU Harbour Centre from 8:30am-5pm!

Re: Rex Murphy: Sarah Palin’s Strong Bond

facebook-671925511 — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:24:06 -0000

But being a contrarian is difficult business and the most important rule is don't over reach. Take an argument too far and it ceases being and interesting and clever experiment and instead it just becomes silly.

Some call this 'doing a Hitchens' heheheh!

I guess though that you have to judge the rhetoric by the target audience and the aims they seek to fulfill. As you note Palin's target audience is mainly White and Conservative and from what I can tell her aim is to appeal to the Religious and evangelical streams and build on a certain White working class ressentiment and in that she is pretty successful. As we saw W managed to do this kind of faith-based rhetoric quite well and won elections with it (well one election anyway, hehhehe). Obama's target audience and aim is somewhat different, more broad-based, more progressive and certainly more unifying and conciliatory on a whole range of issues. He also does emoting quite well, though his rhetoric is more aspirational than faith based. Whether he succeeds more than Palin is debatable; because outside the core bases for their respective parties, I doubt most wavering or uncommitted Americans are necessarily swayed by rhetoric, even if it is good rhetoric, alone. Comparatively, I think as far as the rhetoric goes though, Palin might be edging Obama, in terms of achieving what she sets out to do successfully.

Re: Rex Murphy: Sarah Palin’s Strong Bond

alex — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:30:33 -0000

If newspapers want to innovate, they should take all these tired commentators and dump them. Rex, Wente, Travers, Coyne, Corcoran ... what do these people offer that any other person couldn't do as well? The guest editorials are usually much more interesting.

Re: Rex Murphy: Sarah Palin’s Strong Bond

ChrystalOcean — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:22:26 -0000

So, do you still bother reading Rex Murphy's stuff? I gave up on him ages ago

Re: Rex Murphy: Sarah Palin’s Strong Bond

Joseph — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:42:57 -0000

Actually, that's not entirely accurate, Dirk. As in, not at all. Palin had been pushed by the far-right evangelical element early on. It's highly likely that's one of the reasons McCain was so smitten with her (no need to speculate on the others . . . his schoolboy giddiness around her in the early weeks speaks volumes).

There is a reason the religious right media had media voices had talking points and breaking news details the morning of her announcement when everyone else was going, "Wha?" on camera.

And by the time she gave her speech, it had been a 24 / 7 news item for nearly a week. The sheep were already on board, having been fed everything they needed to know . . . ad nauseum . . . beforehand.

Re: Rex Murphy: Sarah Palin’s Strong Bond

Joseph — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:40:31 -0000

Re: Rex Murphy: Sarah Palin’s Strong Bond

Dirk Gibson — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:04:19 -0000

"Sarah Palin's speech succeeded in generating a spark yes, but among the conservative base that already loved her. "

When she gave that speech, nobody had even heard of her, conservatives included. They certainly didn't "love" her at that point, but they sure did afterwards.

Re: Rex Murphy: Sarah Palin’s Strong Bond

cjottawa — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:18:25 -0000

Edit just past that one:
"Take an argument too far and it ceases being and interesting and clever ..."
The second "and" should be "an".

Re: Rex Murphy: Sarah Palin’s Strong Bond

david_a_eaves — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:59:24 -0000

Hi guest - thank you. Fixed the typo. Not sure blogging is post proof-reading, but as I noted before, I do get by with a little help from my readers.

Re: Our New/Old Drug Policy: Welcome to the 1980s

arrianna — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:46:20 -0000

Drug problems do not end when a person stops taking drugs. The accumulated effects of drug-taking can leave one severely impaired, both physically and mentally. Even someone off drugs for years still has “Depression treatment center in Utah.”

Re: Rex Murphy: Sarah Palin’s Strong Bond

guest — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:10:34 -0000

Not going to get an account to suggest that you mean "ceases being" instead of "seizes"

New topic "The Blog Era - Is it post proof-reading?"

Re: Making Open Source Communities (and Open Cities) More Efficient

oshoma — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:54:57 -0000

John is spot on about lack of reproduceable test cases leading to useless bug reports, and the cost/benefit issue being a barrier to reporting bugs in the first place.

I don't think these issues have much to do with the source being open or closed. It's more about the ability and willingness of the software owners (which could be a large community) to diagnose and fix problems.

One way Microsoft addressed this around 1999 was to instrument beta versions of Office and Windows to automatically generate anonymized bug report data and make it available for uploading along with the end user's text comments. The product team ended up with a full trace of user activity leading up to the crash, and the end user only had to click a checkbox to permit sending the info. No more baffling questions -- "What's your OS version? Oh, let me explain what that means. Now what type of hardware are you running? Oh, let me explain...."

This tactic coupled with improving internet connectivity (dial-up modems --> DSL) made it dramatically easier to report bugs. Bug report rates and fix rates jumped upwards significantly for those versions of Windows and Office. (I don't recall the numbers, but it was a huge shift.)

Nowadays, of course, it's commonplace to do this. And I bet if you looked at Firefox bug reports you'd see a significantly higher fix rate for those with app crash data attached.

In the world of pothole reporting, the analogy is uploading a geotagged photo rather than trying to explain the problem in words. The photo wins: very low cost, very high utility for diagnosis.

So provide tools that make reporting and diagnosis cheap.

As for the really experienced bug reporters, you may be seeing people uncovering bugs that are extremely hard to diagnose reliably (e.g. Heisenbugs), or issues that are really architectural or design flaws the product owners don't want to fix for whatever reason. Look at Ruby on Rails or Linux bug reports and you'll see pages of discussion between developers arguing about whether an issue is a "bug" or "by design". That's a huge cost, but I don't know how you make it go away. I'd rather have smart people poking holes at my product than ignoring me.

It would be interesting to see the red line plotted as individual data points. Showing it as a continuous line is confusing.

Thanks for writing this. Thought-provoking!

Re: The old, old, old war on drugs

DrugLord — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:23:17 -0000

The war on drugs from my opinion is a war which is never going to stop,there always will be people who will sell drugs and people who will buy drugs because this is the nature of humans, and if the drugs will be legalized I think doing that it will be worst then fighting against drug dealers and consumers trying to teach them life is better without substances.If the drugs will ever be legal then I think Human kind will die slowly because drugs are not anything but slow assasins pretending to be your friends.

____________________________
Alcohol Rehab Center

Re: Making Open Source Communities (and Open Cities) More Efficient

Mook — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:14:38 -0000

To stretch your analogy way too far...

I wonder if I'm in the oval; it feels like the road crews are concentrated downtown (since that's what they get paid to do), but I keep reporting bugs about Marine Drive because that's where my commute is. Unfortunately people who decide what to fix never wander down this way, and I can't figure out where to submit my plans for fixing the problem.

(This isn't actually true of the real Marine Drive, of course - for that you'd need to look for a farm access road.)

Re: Making Open Source Communities (and Open Cities) More Efficient

johnjbarton — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:13:54 -0000

Of course we could poll users to get an understanding of why they don't report bugs. But I think we know the answer: the cost of reporting exceeds the benefit by a wide margin. Unfortunately fixing the bugzilla UI is not enough.

Let's compare a pothole on Broadway and 7th to a software bug. Most software bug reports are similar to "I hit a bump on the way home". The developer can't reproduce the problem and other users can't figure out if they have the same bug. Sometimes we get a bit more information "I hit a hole in the road on the way home". Not a pothole that we know how to fix, but a 'hole' which could be anything from a pothole to a cliff. Even when users do communicate in the same vocabulary, we still need a test case, the equivalent of "Broadway and 7th". Often this is very difficult to create.

If these problems are not enough, software shares the problem of expectations and responsibility with the world of potholes: if I hit a bump on the way home, is it 'normal'? Why should I report it rather than any of the other drivers on the road? Doesn't the road crew just drive around and fix these? I guess potholes and software bugs are reported to friends and neighbors often and we get a sense of how to proceed from the response. "yea, I hit too" or "well pay attention dummy" or "We should call the highway department". A community can have a lot of impact on the probability of a next step, but only if the repair report is easy and effective.

Let's go back to your study. I bet if you looked at FIXED bugs, a very high percentage would have test cases; conversely if you look at bugs that don't get fixed, few have test cases. So if true, fixing the bugzilla UI would just increase the number of bugs that don't get fixed.

And now I shift to report to you on a bug on your site: this box is too small to re-read my comment ;-)

Re: Making Open Source Communities (and Open Cities) More Efficient

gregeh — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:05:38 -0000

It's true that the way most projects use bug trackers, not every "bug" is a bug. The term "issue tracker" is usually more accurate. A bug can be a feature request, a documentation typo, or an error that only happens on a certain page. I think calling it a "todo list" is oversimplifying, but it's certainly the case the bugs vary widely in relevance and work involved.

And it's also CERTAINLY the case that the Bugzilla is not suited for mere mortals. Then again, the most likely outcome of a newbie submitting a bug is that it's a dupe.

Re: Making Open Source Communities (and Open Cities) More Efficient

david_a_eaves — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:43:11 -0000

John - I really enjoyed your comment - particularly the last line. It is definitely agree that fewer bug reports could be a strong indicator of a lack of confidence in the system/software/project and that that is a valuable way to look at the problem. Diederik and I are working on some methods to try to ascertain how many people don't submit bugs because of this - but it is hard to do, as there is (by definition) no base data or information to start with (if you don't submit a bug, there is definitely no bug submission we can query). Indeed, if you had thoughts about how we could measure or infer this, I would be very interested in chatting.

I'm not sure that the last sentence of your first paragraph stands though. I do think that, to a certain degree bugzilla does function as a to do list for some at Mozilla, but the employees may be the people at the upper variance (80-90%) complete.

I think what this chart in part tells us is that it may be hard to ascertain if a bug is actually new (e.g. search results don't turn up effective results, its hard to do, or it is hard to learn to do) and that as a result there are many, many, many duplicate submissions.