The Wrong Way To Ask For Help On The Mailing List
... and some people wonder why they're ignored.
Update: I guess the message from the above drawing is not obvious to some readers (I’m such a bad ‘illustrator’ :p), so I’ll try to explain it a bit more…
I’ve been following various open source projects’ mailing list these past 5 years, and from time to time, there’s always some people who send an email with a few short sentences (often in capitals, with lots of typos)… asking for HELP!!!, stating that something doesn’t work, and that it’s an urgent issue.
They need to remember that…
- most people volunteer to participate in those projects, i.e. it’s not their paid job.
- asking for help is ok, asking for HELP!!! is less ok.
- notifying the list that something doesn’t work is not good if you don’t accompany it with more information on what you did, how did you come up with the conclusion, or what sort of investigation you had done.
- if it’s urgent for you, it’s not always urgent for other people. most people won’t suddenly stop whatever they’re doing just to assist your urgent problem.
Multiple Feeds Monitoring
Patrick Struhs left a comment on Hudson Build Monitor page, suggesting “A nice feature would be to be able to monitor more than one server easily,” and that’s what I’ve been working on sporadically this week. I started with the statusbar panel, the goal is to keep the UI minimal but still provide enough information. I’ve also got the multiple feeds processing pretty much done.
This is how the statusbar panel looks like in 0.8-SNAPSHOT. I used Tango Icon Library to keep it consistent with Hudson. The above screenshot shows the status of six feeds, the first one is a Netbeans feed with a warning, the second and fourth ones show an error icon indicating a problem with the urls, the third one is a JBoss feed – currently downloading, the fifth one shows the no-build icon, and the last one shows that the feed is currently queued waiting to start the download.
Next up… preferences and right-click menu revamp.
Citysearch.com.au On Nintendo DS
This is my first attempt at using Opera on my Nintendo DS, recorded using Panasonic Lumix. The video was edited using Kino with sound effects from The Freesound Project. For the record, I did my best Indonesian accent, notice the ‘rrr’, the ‘sss’, and the ‘d’ replacing the ‘th’.
I had a go at browsing Citysearch.com.au to see how it looks like on a handheld device. I think the site is still quite usable, the default CSS works fine. Business Finder HTML chunk need to be moved further down so verticals content is served first. Spoiler: starting from 5:00, I was trying to figure out how to click a link using the stylus and it took too long after 2.5 minutes, so I stopped the video. If you got bored, fast forward to the end where I gave myself an applause. Spoiler 2: at around 2:40, my brother made a voice cameo appearance by asking for the bus timetable.