Matthew J. Simoneau’s Weblog

It used to be that forking the code was interpreted as a failure in leadership. Forking would split the code, community, and users into competing factions and generally make life more confusing for everyone (see XEmacs).

In the world of distributed revision control systems like Git, forking means something different. These systems were designed to support a web of related revisions. Forking is just the way you roll. A multiplicity of forks is a sign of a healthy developer community. In fact, GitHub advertises the "5 Most Forked Projects" on their home page.

I was sending someone directions to my office, and I noticed that the placemark that Google Maps puts on the map of the office address is more accurate. It used to be nearby on Route 9, but is now exactly on my building.

Back in November 2007, Google introduced a feature to allow editing of addresses and other information by anyone with a Google account. When viewing a placemark, you can now click "Edit" and move it to the right place. You can also see the history of the edits, which appears in this picture in reverse-chronological order.

You can see Google’s original guess with the gray arrow in the lower picture. It looks like it was moved three times: to the right spot in November, a little off the right spot in January, and then back to the right spot in March.

Community editing is often abused, but I’m coming to expect this degree of interactivity from websites. When I see something amiss, I’m frustrated when there’s not a "submit correction" or at least a "flag spam" link. In this case, I was the happy beneficiary of my peer’s contributions.

I’m on the design team for MATLAB Central, the MathWorks online community. Whenever we solicit feedback, we always hear from a user "joking" about adding a dating service.

True to form, it wasn’t long after I created the MATLAB fan page on Facebook for similar comments to start showing up on MATLAB’s wall. An excerpt is pictured here.

On a more serious note, the MATLAB fan page has already grown to 2,434 fans without any promotion at all. Crazy.

Not bad, eh?

Look carefully at the Wikipedia page on Linda Hamilton. Notice anything strange about the photo? Yes, that is my friend Peter who has his arm around her. Though I am an occasional Wikipdia contributor, I had nothing to do with this. Peter is thrilled to be in this position and calls it a “Christmas miracle”. How could such a thing happen?

It starts back in 1997. My friend Zach was just starting his career in special effects. He had just finished up work on was a small independent film, The Titanic. Maybe you’ve heard of it? The crew was having a wrap party on the Queen Mary, and somehow Zach convinced his employer to let him take a handful of his scruffy friends to the party instead of a date. James Cameron, the director, was there with a real date, actress Linda Hamilton. The details are debated, but at some point in the night someone started a conversation with her, producing many awkward moments and a photo.

Fast forward to 2007. Flickr, where I host my photos these days, introduces a new stats feature. In addition to the number of times someone views one of your photos, they now also record the referer. Most web browsers, when loading a new page, will tell the page the last page it was on. That is, you can often tell the last page a visitor was on before he arrived at your site. I noticed a bunch of traffic coming from Wikipedia and investigated.

The visitors were arriving at this group picture with Linda Hamilton from her entry’s talk page. Every page on Wikipedia has a companion talk page (which you can access via the “discussion” link at the top of each page) where contributors can chat without muddying the page itself. They had conducted a long debate about fair use. Wikipedia’s goal is to create a free encyclopedia. Not just free to read, but free for anyone to use anyway they want. (Free as in free speech, not just free as in free beer.) As such, they’re very concerned about including content, including images, that have are under normal copyright. In 1989, the United States adopted the Berne Convention, which automatically puts anything you produce under copyright. On top of that, copyrights in the United States now last at least 70 years (usually much longer). This makes it tricky for Wikipedia contributors to find content they know is safe to use.

I’m happy to have people reuse my photographs. Creative Commons is an organization that wants to make it possible for non-lawyers like myself to say this in a legally-valid-type way. They developed a suite of licenses to help. You can choose under which conditions you’ll allow people to reuse your work. Flickr makes it easy to select the one you like for your photos, creating huge collection of images that people or projects can reuse in their own work without fear of being sued. I’ve released all my photos under the Attribution license, the most permissive license, which says “do what you want but give me credit”. This allowed the Wikipedia contributor to crop my photo down to (mostly) Linda and to upload it to Wikipedia. They credit me by giving my name and a link to the original on the image’s detail page.

And create a Christmas miracle.

Google finally added Street View data for Boston. The first thing I aways do is check Waltham Street, where I used to live. Here’s a shot of my old apartment building:

They let you create a link to a view like this, but it seems to only include the camera position when you use “Link to this page” on the “My Maps” tab. The range of their coverage is impressive. Zoom out on the map and you’ll see the spidery coverage extending as far as Ware.

(via Google Operating System)

While walking by Fenway Park last night around 11PM, I saw a stream of sparks raining down from somewhere up on the scaffolding. It was cool, in an industrial sort of way. As it turns out, also dangerous.

I saw this news item on Boston.com. I don’t visit that site regularly, but I received a “Check out the new Boston.com” e-mail and figured I’d check out the new Boston.com. The e-mail lists eight improvements they’ve made to the site. The first is “Our pages are wider”. Having been involved with the design, development, and maintenance of another complicated website, I know how painful the seemingly-simple change of widening your site’s standard width can be, but this feature is unlikely to impress a potential visitor. I wouldn’t lead with it.

IKEA’s America at Home campaign features a sequence of non-traditional images of "home", starting with an Airstream trailer.

This is a repost of a video that first appeared on this site in December 2002. My camera recorded the video to QuickTime format, which made it tough for some people to play. Between then and now, YouTube happened. You may have heard of it. So here it is again, this time in a friendlier format:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8l9a0lf6-s

Five years later, Lucky still makes these excited noises whenever she’s in the car, especially when Dad is taking her to the b.e.a.c.h. (If you have dogs or children, you now why you can’t say this word casually.)

I expect all of you to repost my viral video on your respective blogs. I’m looking at you, Ned. And think of something pithy to say about it.

Here is the code to cut-and-paste:

<object width=”425″ height=”353″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/H8l9a0lf6-s”></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/H8l9a0lf6-s” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”353″></embed></object>

Together, we can bump poor Miss South Carolina out of her top spot(s) on YouTube’s Most Viewed This Week and make Lucky the Queen of the Internet.

Amazon remembers every order you ever placed. My first order was on March 3, 2000. Here’s what it contained:

• Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Hedgehog and the Fox : An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History, by Isaiah Berlin
• Cocktail : The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century, by Paul Harrington, Laura Moorhead

I liked Red Mars, but never got around to reading the rest of the books in the series. The Hedgehog and the Fox was good too. I was reminded of this book recently in an excellent SALT podcast by Philip Tetlock called "Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs". The real winner in this batch is Cocktail, which I still reference regularly. This is no surprise though. I was already familiar with this same material from HotWired’s Cocktail, which introduced me in 96-97 to what are still my three favorite drinks, the Gibson, the Rusty Nail, and the Sidecar.

Viewing the payment info and it said I used a gift certificate for that order. I searched my e-mail and found the original gift certificate. It was a gift from Diana, the same Diana I would start dating later that year.

Embarrassingly, the search also turned up the fact that this gift certificate originally expired before I cashed it in. Amazon was nice enough to send me this e-mail a month later:

We’ve discovered that you received a $<INSERT_AMOUNT_HERE> Amazon.com gift certificate, and that it expired without ever being redeemed. That’s no fun. So, as our gift to you, we’re reactivating it.

In spite of the honkey-tonk mail merge that left in INSERT_AMOUNT_HERE, I was able to reactivate it and make my first purchase.

(via Matthew Oliphant)

This came in over an e-mail list I’m on dedicated to MediaWiki (the software behind Wikipedia). It’s a breakdown of where the traffic comes from for all Wikipedia-related sites:

http://leuksman.com/log/2007/06/07/wikimedia-page-views/

The answer is Google, mostly. No surprises here. In fact, I thought the Google numbers were low until I remembered there that this table doesn’t exclude internal traffic from other Wikipedia-related pages (rows #1, #5, #6). Note that no non-search sites made the short list. As much as Wikipedia is linked to by other sites, the traffic from these links are negligible (something less than 1.6%) compared to the traffic arriving from searches.

I’m on the team that runs the MATLAB Programming Contest. The contest has evolved into a week-long series of mini-contests, each with its own deadline. We post all deadlines relative to our own clocks in Natick, MA, but we have contestants playing in real-time from all over the world. I just stumbled on a simple tool that can help them out.

Simply fill out a form giving your location and the desired time, and it returns a page translating that moment in time to all the clocks of the world. For example, we can say that the contest ends at noon on Wednesday, and clicking the link will let contestants know what this is in their local time. The can even set their location to see just the time they care about.

(via Flickr)

At work, I’m the maintainer of some company internal standards. Some of them link to a section of of our public online documentation. The system that produces this doc doesn’t produce cool URLs. They are long, ugly, and change every time we do a major software release.

Q: How can I get out of the business of updating these URLs every six months?
A: Hack Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

Google crawls our site regularly and will always know where this page lives. If I tell Google what I want to link to, it will always know what the right URL is. By inspecting the HTML behind Google’s submit form, I came up with the following procedure.

First, figure out a search query that will always return the page you want as the first result. Here is what I typed into Google’s search box:

"Marking Up Text in Cells for Publishing" site:www.mathworks.com

I’m using two good search tricks here. First, I use quotes to surround the exact title of the section of the doc I want to reference. These individual words appear all over the doc, but this exact phrase is only on this page and pages that reference it. Secondly, I use the site: directive so the results will include only results for our website. I use this trick all the time (usually via the “Search only items on the current Web site” button on the Google Toolbar). Between the two of these, I can feel confident of finding the exact page I want.

I press “I’m Feeling Lucky” and confirm that Google indeed takes me to the desired page. Now I need to hack a URL that will do the same thing. I go back to the search page and press the usual “Google Search” button. Copy the URL in the search bar to use as your link, which looks something like this:

http://www.google.com/search ... &btnG=Google+Search

If you used this as-is, clicking on the link would bring you to the Google Search results. To make it skip the results and go straight to the first result, we just need to tweak it a little. Find “btnG” in the URL and change it to “btnI”. Now the link will take you straight to the desired page

Since last September, I’ve been living in my 2005 25′ International CCD. I couldn’t find much information about how they perform in the cold, but its been relatively painless despite the occasional blizzard. I did have a snag about a month ago. Here is what I posted to The Airstream Knowledge Sharing Forums:

I’m hooked up to a septic system, but my black water tank is no longer draining properly. It only drains very slowly and has backed up all the way into the toilet. My gray water tank is draining fine. My guess is that either the black water tank itself or its outflow pipe is blocked up. I’ve tried the mild enzyme-based septic tank treatments without success. My only thought is to try something more serious, Drano or the like, but the Airstream manual has made me paranoid about using something so corrosive in the system. Should I not worry about this? Is there something else I can try?

I was overwhelmed by the response from the community. An hour after my post there were already five responses. The most entertaining and most helpful was from “2airishuman”. Here’s an excerpt:

2 approaches to this issue,

into the mouth of the beast or at the exit…

wearing gloves and a mask or bandana and using a 10 foot section of old garden hose…

To see the rest of his suggestion and how it worked out, you’ll have to read the thread.

We’ve been having a good discussion at work on how to encourage and reward friendly behavior on our very active user community site. One idea is to implement some kind of user rating system, like awarding points for contributions or even a Slashdot-style karma system.

I’m not crazy about these ideas. My thinking has been heavily influenced by Jimmy Wales, the BDFL of Wikipedia. He speaks strongly against using them in communities. Here’s a quote from one of his talks:

Programmers always love to have lots and lots of metrics, like the eBay rating system. The eBay rating system works really, really well because most of the interactions on eBay are not necessarily community interactions. When I go to buy something on eBay, why do I care about that number? I care about that number because I don’t know that person, and I don’t know anybody who knows them, so I need some kind of a metric.

That works very, very well for a site like eBay, but in our case, we don’t have ratings of users, and the reason we don’t have ratings of users is that people who are working together and editing articles, they come to know each other… The kinds of judgments we use to make the work be good, have nothing to do with rating metrics and numbers. You can imagine, suppose you went to work at a company and every day and you have some sort of a badge and it has a number on it that tells how many people like you or not? Not really where you want to work, I think. Instead, what do you want? You want people to judge you on a wide variety of characteristics… You can’t capture that in a number. It’s real human judgments about real human people.

You can download this whole talk from The Long Now, and this quote is about 1/4 of the way through. While you’re there, be sure to browse through all the other great seminars they’ve had over the past few years.