Ok, it's decided, I am officially burnt out, at least for a few days. I just checked, and I have modified or written about 4500 lines of code in the last 5 days, and that is besides the work that puts food on my table.

So, since I have al­ready been burnt a cou­ple of times in the past, and it was aw­ful, I will just stop cod­ing un­til wednes­day. I in­tend to watch dumb shows on TV, have as much sex as I can, and do the ab­so­lute re­quired min­i­mum re­al work. If that does­n't avoid the ex­haus­tion, at least I will have fun.

Be­cause, dear read­er, I am tired, and when I'm tired I'm cranky, and when I'm cranky I bite. Turn that in­to the ob­vi­ous yo­daesque re­flex­ion, if you will.

Lots of work done on KRN today. Implemented autoabort of pending jobs when the window is closed, for one, which was something that had me confused, as well as automatic thread cancellation.

I need to do RMB menus avail­able for stuff, so I can start wiring the old func­tion­al­i­ty to the UI. Should not be too hard, and I should have it done to­mor­row.

I won't do my usu­al (as of late) rant here about what hap­pened in di­verse ar­gu­ments with peo­ple, be­cause:

a) I am tired, very tired, right now. b) I am ex­treme­ly dis­ap­point­ed.

Ok, so I got the answer to my question of what drives a slashdot troll. The answer, it seems, is ego, immaturity and a strange thirst of revenge for imagined damage.

Or at least, that's what it seems to me, from read­ing the thread at kuro5hin.org, I'm sure the trolls them­selves, and that new stranger fau­na, the troll fan, will dis­agree com­plete­ly, and prob­a­bly I am com­plete­ly wrong[1].

No­ticed some­thing else: the ten­den­cy to re­cip­ro­cal cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in ad­voga­to. Now I am start­ing to be­lieve that some of the peo­ple who cer­ti­fied me on­ly did that ex­pect­ing me to cer­ti­fy them in re­spon­se[2]

On the KRN side of life, it is cur­rent­ly a de­cent ba­sic news­read­er again, al­though it is much less fea­ture­ful than 0.6.11, but, boy is it smooth! :-)

Af­ter read­ing the re­spons­es to the ad­voga­to sto­ry on the /. im­plo­sion, I see Raph replied to my preach­ing against anony­mous post­ing. Well, I am against it not as a prin­ci­ple, but as an aesteth­ic judge­men­t.

Posts made by a rec­og­niz­able en­ti­ty shape my per­cep­tion of that en­ti­ty. Such en­ti­ty can ac­quire over­time fea­tures I ap­pre­ci­ate, like in­tegri­ty, hon­our, hu­mour, wit, knowl­edge, em­pa­thy.

A anony­mous post is an end in it­self, it's a dead al­ley. It on­ly con­trib­utes to the con­text of the thread, and then van­ish­es.

Anony­mous posts are graf­fi­ti, named posts are cor­re­spon­dence.

If you take the let­ters by Sartre to Si­mone, sep­a­rate them, put each in a piece of pa­per and re­move the names, you have a lot of rather nice writ­ing.

Mix them with an­oth­er 1000 let­ters by oth­er­s, in the same con­di­tion, and you have a lot of noise, with semi-in­ter­est­ing nuggets ev­ery now and then.

Take the Sartre let­ter­s, put them in a book, and you have what I am read­ing now, and trust me, it's not the same.

The whole is rarely the sum of its part­s.

--

[1] I don't be­lieve I have any ca­pa­bil­i­ty to un­der­stand oth­er peo­ple's mo­ti­va­tion­s, at best I can re­act to their ac­tion­s. I re­act­ed strong­ly to these par­tic­u­lar ac­tion­s.

[2] By def­i­ni­tion, those who cer­ti­fied me in that vein are cer­ti­fy­ing me wrong since they are on­ly sup­posed to cer­ti­fy me if they know me, and any­one who knows me will say I will not grant cer­ti­fi­ca­tions as a re­ward. I sup­pose I will be Ap­pren­tice to­mor­row[3] ;-)

[3] Hey, re­verse psy­chol­o­gy worked on /. ;-)

Today's sign of the end of times: I actually like Madonna's 'American Pie'. So shall we all perish in fiery hell soon.

On the free soft­ware fron­t, KRN is now ac­tu­al­ly sta­ble again. While co­op­er­a­tive mul­ti­thread­ing avoids most strange race con­di­tion­s, some can still oc­cur, and they can be go­daw­ful­ly hard to de­bug. How­ev­er, think­ing a bit does help ;-)

Any­way, as I was say­ing, it is pret­ty sta­ble now. The cur­rent list of bro­ken things is: post­ing, menus, tool­bars, fo­cus, cus­tom dock­ing, pro­gress, dis­con­nec­tion, ex­it­ing and de­cod­ing. Im­pres­sive!

With the right kind of wind in my sail, this should all be fixed by fri­day.

On the per­son­al side... hav­ing a busy girl­friend suck­s. I feel ne­glect­ed. I am gonna turn to al­co­hol and pill­s! Hm­m­m... men­tos!

The new dock-based, MT KRN is advancing well, although the amount of things broken in it is a bit scary. Of course the code to do all the things 0.6.11 did is still there (and anyway, that's what CVS exists for ;-) but it is totally divorced from the UI.

On oth­er is­sues, I got over slash­dot to­day, af­ter a long while. Af­ter I thought the site had reached the bot­tom, they get a shov­el and dig deep­er :-P

No, I don't mean /. it­self, but the peo­ple com­ment­ing in it. What *is* the point for them? What do they get? I am a firm be­liev­er in quid pro quo[1].

Are they so eas­i­ly amused as to be re­ward­ed by the imag­ined re­ac­tion of peo­ple read­ing about grits and pet­ri­fied teenag­er star­let­s?

I doubt any of them will read this, but... well, let me tell you: there is prob­a­bly no re­ac­tion at al­l. I know I just look at that waste of elec­trons with sort of a blank ex­pres­sion, and then click "nex­t". I ex­pect ev­ery­one to do the same (ex­cept for the grit­ter him­self, who prob­a­bly looks at his oeu­vre and gig­gles in­sane­ly for around 13 min­utes).

But to­day, it had reached new depth­s. One guy made a poor taste com­ment about GNOME, pos­ing as a KDE ad­vo­cate (I se­ri­ous­ly doubt he was, I'm more in­clined to be­lieve he was just a a trol­l).

But the an­swer left me as­ton­ished. It in­clud­ed a graph­ic de­scrip­tion of how all KDE ad­vo­cates are worm­s, who look for­ward to be put in a hook. Pret­ty dis­gust­ing. Again: I don't be­lieve that an­swer was writ­ten by a GNOME ad­vo­cate, but just by a pre­pubescent mo­ron.

How­ev­er, when the time comes that peo­ple need to im­per­son­ate oth­ers to fight in the name of those oth­er­s' be­lief­s, such peo­ple have deep trou­bles. So, sor­ry, /., you are now of­fi­cial­ly a loony bin. It used to be fun to hang around there. Close it, and start an­oth­er site. Or rather: don't close it, and start a new one, hope­ful­ly the stupid and in­sane will stay in /., trolling and in­sult­ing each oth­er.

If that day comes, email me, I will be on an­oth­er site. Which one? Sor­ry, I won't say. It's a nice lit­tle site, with short dis­cus­sion­s, usu­al­ly in a po­lite tone.

I al­so saw a dis­turb­ing trend here, with the trust met­ric ar­ti­cle, and the Jab­ber peo­ple ar­gu­ing about whether they de­served to be "mas­ter" or what­ev­er... light­en up­[3]. If you are a mas­ter, you are a mas­ter re­gard­less of what col­or your name ap­pears on ad­voga­to, and be­ing marked as mas­ter here if you are not is just food for the ego, and junk food, for that mat­ter.

And it must be true be­cause I say so, and I am a mas­ter... oop­s, Jour­ney­er, what­ev­er that means :-)

This must be the long­est di­ary en­try I ev­er wrote, and I'd bet not many have writ­ten longer ones, hope­ful­ly you, hy­po­thet­i­cal read­er, will for­give me.

[1] Yes, I be­lieve we don't do free soft­ware out of the good­ness of our heart­s[2], and that we all have ul­te­ri­or mo­tives, even if we are not ful­ly aware of them. I should write about it some­day.

[2] I al­so be­lieve the end re­sult is pret­ty much in­dis­tin­guish­able from what would hap­pen if we were do­ing it out of the good­ness in our hearts (or rather your heart­s, mine is dark and eeeevil, just ask around)

[3] Of course ask­ing oth­ers to light­en up about things that are of no big im­por­tance to me is easy. That's why I do it. I sup­pose that if ad­voga­to rat­ed projects and KDE was some­how marked as lame, I would care. I hope peo­ple will tell me to light­en up when that hap­pen­s.