BALUG-Admin January 2009

balug-admin@lists.balug.org

4 participants
5 discussions

Re: [BALUG-Admin] [BALUG-Talk] RSV #'s - Re: [BALUG-Announce] BALUG: Tu 2009-01-20 Kyle Rankin on Where'd my files go?
by Michael Paoli 21 Jan '09

21 Jan '09

Quoting john_re <john_re(a)fastmail.us>: > How many have RSV'd so far? Based on past #'s, what's a current > estimate for attendance for this meeting? Do you think it will make the > #'s for the upper room? For RSVPs before the meeting, and adding speaker and Andrew Fife, I came up with a total of 26. I think our actual total worked out to be right around 23 - inclucing a few folks that weren't joining us for dinner. I estimate we had about 23 ('tis often easier to estimate past, than future, eh?). And no, ... "magic" number to pretty much assure we'll have dinner in the "upper room" (3rd floor banquet room) is 40 - so we ate "downstairs" (2nd floor main dining room), and went upstairs for the talk/presentation. We may have had a somewhat lower turnout than we otherwise might have had, due mainly to: A) first weekday after 3-day weekend (at least for many folks) B) post-inauguration parties, etc. (I got on BART around 11:00 P.M., and there were still many folks quite obviously returning from post-inauguration parties/celebrations).

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Re: [BALUG-Admin] how to (and not to) post to lists, etc.
by Rick Moen 18 Jan '09

18 Jan '09

Here's an instructive case-study: ----- Forwarded message from balug-announce-bounces(a)lists.balug.org ----- From: balug-announce-bounces(a)lists.balug.org To: balug-announce-owner(a)lists.balug.org Date: Sun, 18 Jan 2009 08:05:58 -0800 Subject: 15 BALUG-Announce moderator request(s) waiting Notice: 1 old request(s) automatically expired. The BALUG-Announce(a)lists.balug.org mailing list has 15 request(s) waiting for your consideration at: http://lists.balug.org/admindb.cgi/balug-announce-balug.org Please attend to this at your earliest convenience. This notice of pending requests, if any, will be sent out daily. [snip a lot of held spam] From: john_re(a)fastmail.us on Sun Jan 18 02:53:09 2009 Subject: RSV #'s - Re: [BALUG-Announce] BALUG: Tu 2009-01-20 Kyle Rankin on Where'd my files go? Cause: Post to moderated list [snip more held spam] ----- End forwarded message ----- That was, of course John Regan, attempting to respond conversationally to Michael Paoli's meeting announcement _on balug-announce_ -- which reply mode is of course is antithetical to the fundamental notion of an announce mailing list. Fortunately, we have and use the technology to _not_ allow through such postings by default, so I was able to return John's posting to him with a gentle reminder: "Sorry, John, the balug-announce mailing list is for, well, announcements. If you need to comment in response to an announcement posting, you need to send it to the poster personally (in private mail) or post your comment to whichever of the _discussion_ mailing lists is appropriate." Now, imagine that we did _not_ have the technological means to intercept and return inappropriate postings to balug-announce. What would we have in its place? A rule. "Only meeting announcements from designated BALUG staff may be posted to balug-announce." Then, about every month or so, member A would screw up by posting something conversational, and get yelled at. Member A would give the traditional responses: "Well, I didn't know / didn't understand. And I didn't mean any harm, so surely that makes it OK. And it's not my fault, because the rule wasn't clear enough." A week later, member B, professing to be unaware of any of the affair, will follow suit with another inappropriate posting to balug-announce. After getting yelled at, he/she will cite all of member A's excuses, plus add a new one: "Besides, I saw member A's conversational posting, and naturally concluded that it's OK to post that way." Members A and B now have a need to justify themselves retroactively, so they go around arguing their point of view, and that the listadmin is just a tyrant who wants to beat up on people. The point is, that sort of dumb social dymanics is difficult to avoid, in technical media used by volunteer groups, when bad behaviour is perceived as being enforced only by rules that are to be, essentially, self-applied. You get people arguing their innocent intentions, you get people arguing that they're exceptions, you get people arguing that the rules are unjust or somehow up for debate. The more types of misbehaviour you add to the list, the more the list tend to serve as notice that "People screw up a lot, here, and this is a roster of all the most popular ways _you_ can do it, too." And all of that goes away if you make a particular type of bad behaviour simply impossible to indulge, and automatically rejected -- as we do with conversational replies to balug-announce. (And the bizarre thing is, one almost never gets any dumb backtalk, when enforcement is automated that way. Suddenly, it's perceived as no longer a matter up for debate, but rather just "the way things work".) Now, am I saying there is never any point to documentation on what to do and not do? No. Some of it's quite classic, e.g., Brad Templeton's "Emily Postnews Answers Your Questions on Netiquette", http://www.templetons.com/brad/emily.html . The central problem is one of the role such documentation ends up occupying, which is not necessarily what the drafters intend. You write it with the intention that people will read it on some timely occasion and think "Oh, this is how I should behave on the BALUG mailing lists and not be perceived as a dipstick." But most people won't read it at all; most of the few who do won't do it in a timely manner, _and_ they'll tend to read it with automatic "sales resistance": "Oh, this is what some self-appointed czar at BALUG _wants_ me to do and not do. Why should I do a favour to this person? What's in it for me?" In other words, you intend it as a free clue, but the general population are socially conditioned to reject the value of anything free, anything they haven't sought out and paid for. If you're handing out something for free, there must be a catch: You must be, somewhere, somehow, angling for them to do you a favour. It's being urged on you, so it must be a sales job. Sales jobs are to be resisted. If what you're suggesting is also inconvenient to the reader, e.g., requires thinking before responding on balug-announce, then that clinches it: The reader implicitly assumes you're trying to pull a sly one, and should be argued against, lest you finagle a favour from them for free. In the Linux User Group HOWTO, I talk about this syndrome as a clash of value systems: People are conditioned from birth to apply the concept of _acquisition value_ to everything: It's worth what you paid (at least, to a first approximation). Anything someone's giving away must be worthless, at best, and probably has hidden costs. In the open source world, we tend to apply _use value_ to things: Something you receive had value based on what can be done with it, irrespective of what its original price was. Many of the worst social problems of user groups arise from conflicts between these value systems (or rather, failure of some parties to apply use value because they're so conditioned to the other way of thinking). E.g., an outsider enters and treats with contempt the feedback of experts that he/she needs to be more specific in his/her questions, because, after all, who do those people think they are? Why, the ousider thinks, he/she isn't paying them a penny, so how dare they not just get hard at work on his/her vague and sloppy demands? Obviously, their time and effort is worth nothing, or they wouldn't be handing it out for free. This problem applies in spades to documentation, especially documentation of proper conduct. When people come across Emily Postnews, it's usually in the context of _them_ seeking out either netiquette pieces, or humour pieces, or both -- so Templeton doesn't get a continual backlash of sullen resentment and resistance. But a user group that says "You should do [foo] and not do [bar]", it _will_ get sales resistance, backtalk, and the attitude of "they must not be serious, because they're talking too much". So, in general, I recommend application of technology, over posting of rules. Make physically impossible every form of dipstick behaviour you can, and you'll get no arguments. (E.g., tell Mark Weisler to simply _not hand the microphone_ to the alcoholic who recently resigned the SVLUG presidency, and you'll not have to endure a slurred 20-minute incoherent speech that wasn't on the meeting agenda.) There _is_ a place for posted rules: That's where you point people to, after they've screwed up, or tried to screw up and been blocked, as a way of saying "You had no excuse, and continuations will result in stronger measures" and making clear you mean it. You want the posted rules to be super-terse and as few & minimal as you can make them. http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/jobs is a decent example. Because jobs mailing lists have a particularly severe abuse problem, the list is moderated, which is rare. When I have to reject a post, which happens frequently on that particular mailing list, I politely point the poster back to that page and cite which rule or rules they failed (usually #1 or #2). Note that the top of the "listinfo" page is the ideal place for rules: Any subscriber pretty much had to see that page, when joining. Last, one caution: There's a natural tendency among computerists to think that, if people are screwing up, the problem must be that you didn't explain well enough the first time. So, you deluge the user with additional detail -- which generally doesn't work either. The fallacy lies in the assumption that your existing explanation / documentation was insufficient. More often, people screw up because they just don't give a shit, or they weren't paying attention. Or they think that following rules and reading documentation is something one does only when forced.

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Re: [BALUG-Admin] permission to post regarding UC Berkeley Extension Linux Short Courses
by Rick Moen 16 Jan '09

16 Jan '09

Quoting Valerie Dow (vdow(a)unex.berkeley.edu): > I'm fairly new to UC Berkeley Extension. We have a cluster of intensive > Linux short courses that start this month. Is it appropriate for me to post > an announcement about the courses on the BALUG-TALK list? I've attached a > press release. Let me know if it's possible to announce these courses to > BALUG and the best way to do so. Oh, I think that would be fine. I'm cc'ing the balug-admin mailing list to solicit other comments if any. Please strongly consider copying and pasting the substantive contents of your MS-Word file inline into your posting's body text -- or in some other way post real ASCII -- as opposed to file-attaching an MS-Word document to the mailing list. Posting binary-format attachments to mailing lists is, in general, a bad idea. (If my point is unclear, please say so, and I'll be glad to clarify.) In fact, I've just run the press release through a filter that extracts plaintext from MS-Word files, so here y'are: UC Berkeley Extension Announces Embedded Linux Short Courses January 7, 2009, Berkeley CA UC Berkeley Extension announces four new intensive embedded Linux courses in its spring line up starting January 26 in Redwood City taught by Dr. Kevin Dankwardt, an author, speaker, and instructor who has specialized in embedded Linux for the last 10 years. "Unlike most of our other courses," says UC Extension Program Director Jim Connor, "these are short, intensive courses lasting one to five consecutive days that are designed to provide software developers with a very efficient, accelerated learning experience." The courses are very hands-on with a wealth of practical exercises so a developer or an entire team could take all four of these courses in January and early February", says Connor, "and have a rapid ramp up working with embedded Linux." The short courses, held in Redwood City, are: Linux Application Program Design and Development January 26-30, 8 am - 3 pm EDP 326223 Linux Device Driver Issues Design and Development January 26-30, 3 pm - 10 pm EDP 326321 Real-time Linux Design Development and Measurement January 31, 8 am - 6 pm EDP 326249 Embedded Linux Design and Development February 2-4, 8 am - 7 pm EDP 326215 Students should have some experience with UNIX/Linux fundamentals and C. "These four short courses complement each other, says Extension's Jim Connor. "Developers who work at the application level or kernel level will benefit greatly from each of them. We're very excited to have these short courses as part of our program this spring," says Connor. Dr. Dankwardt earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from The Center For Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Louisiana (Lafayette), and held a professorship at Louisiana Tech University where he served as Chairman of the Computer Science Department. Additionally, he chairs the Education committee of the Embedded Linux consortium, and serves as contributing Editor to LinuxDevices.com. Founded in 1891, UC Berkeley Extension, [1]www.unex.berkeley.edu, is the continuing education branch of the University of California Berkeley. Today, Extension offers 1,500 courses each year, including online courses, along with more than 30 certificate and professional programs. To find out more about these Linux courses and other open source courses offered at UC Berkeley Extension this term, visit [2]http://www.unex.berkeley.edu/cat/cis.html#openos or call 510.642.4150. To find out about the computer technology and information management program at UC Berkeley Extension, visit [3]www.unex.berkeley.edu/it. # # # # References 1. http://www.unex.berkeley.edu/ 2. http://www.unex.berkeley.edu/cat/cis.html#openos 3. http://www.unex.berkeley.edu/it

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Lists: stats, etc.
by Michael Paoli 10 Jan '09

10 Jan '09

Lists: stats, etc. For our three balug- lists, for as long as I'm aware of us having been tracking numbers for those lists, these are count of email addresses subscribed to each. YYYY-MM-DD announce talk admin 2009-01-10 662 290 30 2008-08-17 635 290 29 2008-03-03 571 247 28 2008-02-07 563 268 28 2008-01-02 337 260 28 2007-12-28 336 261 28 2007-10-21 304 251 27 2007-09-03 264 258 27 2007-07-24 287 256 27 2007-06-17 280 249 27 Note that generally "announce" includes all the email addresses, and probably is the best number to use for "membership" number if/when someone wants to know how many members BALUG has. Of course we don't force folks to come to meetings, so meeting attendance numbers are another statistic (and we don't fore folks coming to our meetings to be on our email lists either, so they're relatively independent numbers). references: file://balug-sf-lug-v1.balug.org/home/balug/e-mail_lists/info http://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-admin-balug.org/2008-August/000602.h… LC_ALL=C export LC_ALL cd /home/balug/e-mail_lists || exit ls -d balug-announce/membership_[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9] \ balug-talk/membership_[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9] \ balug-admin/membership_[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9] | sed -ne 's/^.*$[0-9]\{4\}-[0-9]\{2\}-[0-9]\{2\}$$/\1/p' | sort -r | uniq -c | awk '{if($1==3)print $2;}' | while read d do echo "$d" \ `wc -l < balug-announce/membership_"$d"` \ `wc -l < balug-talk/membership_"$d"` \ `wc -l < balug-admin/membership_"$d"` done | awk ' BEGIN {print "YYYY-MM-DD announce talk admin";} {printf("%s %8d %4d %5d\n",$1,$2,$3,$4);} '

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(forw) Re: permission to post regarding UC Berkeley Extension Linux Short Courses
by Rick Moen 07 Jan '09

07 Jan '09

If someone with more free time in the middle of a busy business day wants to handhold her some more, please feel welcome. (I didn't even notice the bit about "lists.org".) ----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick(a)linuxmafia.com> ----- Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 15:23:51 -0800 From: Rick Moen <rick(a)linuxmafia.com> To: Valerie Dow <vdow(a)unex.berkeley.edu> Subject: Re: permission to post regarding UC Berkeley Extension Linux Short Courses Quoting Valerie Dow (vdow(a)unex.berkeley.edu): > Hi Rick, > I've lost track a bit. Do we need to hear from anyone else? > If not, sounds like I send email to: > svlug-announce(a)lists.org > balug-announce(a)lists.balug.org Nope. You originally said mailing lists balug-talk and svlug. To which I said, basically, "Er, sure, fine. Just please don't send Word files to those or any other mailing list." In contrast, the -announce cousins of those mailing lists, which you are now talking about (above) are restricted. I was glad to help out earlier, but you're really going to have to proceed on your own. Please see these pages: http://www.balug.org/#Lists http://lists.balug.org/listinfo.cgi/balug-talk-balug.org http://www.svlug.org/policies/list-policy.php http://lists.svlug.org/lists/listinfo/svlug Listadmins tend to be friendly if somewhat overworked volunteers, but there are limits, and ultimately you're expected to read the posted guidelines and deal with the mailing lists on your own. I'm sorry if that sounds curt, but I really just don't have time. ----- End forwarded message -----

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BALUG-Admin January 2009