Flickirritated

Why is uploading to Flickr so exasperating?

I'm on a business trip to Tokyo and Hong Kong this week, and I've spent from about 8 this morning until now, around 1:38 PM Tokyo time, trying to get 165 photos to Flickr. I'm still uploading.

I've tried using 1001, Flock, and the Mac OS X Flickr Uploadr. Each has either timed out, crashed, or done nothing, sometimes all of the above. Right now I'm uploading the rest of what didn't manage to get uploaded after Flickr Uploadr crashed with 1001. Earlier, 1001 stalled forever doing nothing while trying to upload the first of a batch of photos. I'm hoping it'll do better this time.

What's more, why is it so hard, nearly so hard as to not be worth bothering, to specify a display or upload order for the photos? I like to upload and organize my photos such that they have a chronological progression. With most digital cameras, that means pictures with default file names (which become titles) should be ordered in incremental progression. Instead, all of the uploading tools I've used when uploading a batch do the opposite by default, showing newest photos first. I can understand this in a sense; you always want to display new photos by default, but within a batch of photos, I want to go from oldest to newest. There's no easy way to do this in the Flickr web interface that I've found, nor any support in any of the uploading clients I've used. I resort to using the Organize function, dragging and dropping each individually, one after another, checking to make sure I'm following the order with the files stored on my computer.

If your photos have EXIF data, and the camera is set correctly, you should be able to order in multiple ways by looking at the timestamp of each photo. But there's no support for that kind of feature.

A School You Can Pass Notes In

Live notes from SubEthaEditors at Startup School 2006 are available at an Infogami site I set up for collaborative note taking. Check out the blog too.

Sunday (Post-)School Brunch Lunch Munch

Wiseman is coming up for Startup School (reception tonight, starts tomorrow!), but he heads back down to the Sprawl on Sunday. If you're game to meet up with him and other Startup School students/Lisp nerds, I'm putting together an ad hoc late breakfast at Stacks' in Menlo Park at 11 AM on Sunday before he takes off. RSVP to dnm@pobox.com.

Electric Larryland

Joshua: holy shit
Joshua: oracle <- sleepycat
Dan: That's news.

Sure enough, the press release doesn't lie. Unless, of course, it's a lie. Which it's not. Probably.

Gavin: no. we knew that yesterday.
Gavin: plus jboss and zend.

I'm so out of touch. But at least I'm not the only one:

Joshua: jboss and zend?
Gavin: yeah, oracle bought open source.
Gavin: bought everything.
Dan: Internet to be renamed Oracle. Film at 11.
Gavin: electric larryland.

Forever Eating Our Own Tail

Wiseman posted an excerpt from a comp.lang.lisp thread about Franz and their pricing model. You might be able to get to it, but right now his site is timing out for me. In the comments for that post, Ash wrote:

Wow, what a bunch of assholes.

I love that 'shipping ACL with its product' is what they call compiling binaries. Which nearly every development environment on the planet lets you do for free.

I'm sure this sort of insanity really helps lisp's reputation!

I wated to reply by posting a comment of my own, but time out problems prevented that, so here's the reply"

Ash, please.

"You guys are assholes for setting a pricing and licensing policy I don't like! And you have the gall to enforce it!" C'mon. They haven't hassled your family, called you names, or shown up at your door with and scalded you in the face with piping hot coffee in a cup clearly labeled "WARNING: THE CONTENTS OF THIS CUP ARE EXTREMELY HOT".

You know, usually, when I find something too expensive or a license too restrictive for my tastes, I don't buy it. It's a pretty neat solution. Sure, It doesn't work everywhere, such as with mob influence and in nations without a vaguely capitalist marketplace (black market or otherwise), but where it does work, it works pretty well.

The other cool thing about the power to not buy things is that sometimes you can, should you be so moved, talk to the person who makes the expensive thing and say "this is way too expensive", and maybe they'll make it cheaper. I've given this a snazzy name I call "negotiation". But maybe they don't, and then hey, you can still not buy it. Win-win!

Anyway, I don't think Lisp's "reputation" is hurt by Franz. It turns out other people -- shock! awe! -- sell Lisp too, like Lispworks, and they have -- zounds! -- different pricing and licensing terms. Some people buy their product because they prefer the price and/or the licensing terms.

My bias: I bought a Franz license, but I had a similar issue; I couldn't afford their licenses. So I cornered a guy from Franz at a trade show and told him why I wanted to use his product but couldn't. Small companies that have niche products are usually dying to know this sort of thing, since they can't really afford to ignore or ostracize people who would be fans and users of their product if they'd only let them be. We continued talking over email and we worked out a deal that was okay for the both of us which involved licensing terms I liked and some money and some of my time for them.

In short, I don't think the people at Franz are assholes because of their pricing or licensing decisions, or their willingness to back them up, and my personal experience working with them has been entirely positive. I think you're more likely to damage the "reputation" of Lisp by claiming that Lisp vendors are assholes because they created a pricing and licensing policy they were comfortable with, someone once broke that agreement, and they followed the law.

It's idle speculation, but would you be as outraged against, say, the developers of CLISP, if they used legal remediation to try to stop someone who was illegally using CLISP and not adhering to the GPL? Somehow I doubt it.

Small is Beautiful

In advance of my presentation today at CommerceNet (4:00 PM, 169 University Ave, Palo Alto, CA. Come one, come all!), I just put the Small Services site live. Check it out, and check back often for more content. Comments are definitely welcome!

Contextinople

Reddit's transition to Python has resulted in the predictable Lisp community backlash, which is nothing new. Saddening, but not new. The level of miscommunication that is going on is perhaps not surprising either, but I'm going to do my part to help. For example, let's take Scott Reynen's blog post "Community Influences Language Adoption." In it he mention a post by John Wiseman and then writes:

So it's not just me. Turns out Reddit's post followed the same path as my own. It was posted on Lemonodor, without context, and with emphasis that spun it as a vehemently anti-Lisp post, and then it was picked up by Planet Lisp. I take back what I said about the problems with planet sites. It's not the aggregator, it's the writer that removes the context. John Wiseman is the author of Lemonodor. I want to paraphrase Jon Stewart and say to John Wiseman: Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting Lisp.

By provoking unnecessarily emotional defenses of Lisp across the web, John is causing otherwise neutral people like myself to actively avoid the Lisp community, because it comes off as a bunch of irrational trolls.

Scott, I know you probably don' t know this because you're likely not a follower of John's blog, but John is your friend in this battle. Trust me. I read John's post totally different from how you read it, as a critique of the Lisp community which has a tendency to navel gaze and work more on implementations than creating software people can use. And, although with that comment it's unavoidable, I don't mean to disparage Lisp implementers either, because we need them, and I applaud their work.

From where I sit, I agree both with what the original Reddit post and Scott say: community does influence language adoption, and, as a member of the Lisp community, it needs a lot of work. We need better software to do more of what people want, and there are folks in the community doing those things too. You don't hear much about them because they're not usually making noise, they're trying to get work done and improve the image of Lisp.

Do parts of the community work against each other? Sure. Are there loud annoying people making foolish arguments for things they don't understand? Yes. But this is no different, in my mind, than the Java community, the Ruby community, the Perl community, the Python community, or any other language or development community you care to mention. Lisp has more catching up to do with most of them in terms of having interesting software for the problems people want to solve now, and as any Lisp weenie will tell you, most of them have to catch up to Lisp in other ways. And this is okay.

Scott, I can see how you didn't take John's post the way I did because you lacked the context of knowing John and having read his previous posts. Context I had. John's post wasn't unambiguous either, but that's because he's writing for his audience, which is primarily other Lispers.