[sf-lug] On hearing the sounds crickets make

[jim]

[Top and Bottom posting]

Preamble:

     I'm truly sorry for Rick's understandable frustration.
The detail in Rick's email is extremely helpful, partly
thanks to its lucidity.
     As I seem to be the primary culprit in the stories,
here's something of an explanation and response. I
tried to be brief. If you care about the topics, please
read, or at least peruse, the whole damn thing, down
to the very bottom.

* I am often in overwhelm for a few reasons:
    personal obligations, 400 emails per day, mostly
    technical lists (I've oversubscribed and therefore
    lose more focus than simple arithmetic might
    suggest), with a long-standing reading problem
    (I'm working with someone to help me read
    more easily), and far, far behind the experiences
    of Rick and Michael and some others on the list.

* I tend to read people's comments as statements,
    not as requests for dialogue; this may actually be
    related to my reading problem or to my distorted
    socialization. Per the example asking if Michael
    should also receive weekly data, I think that's a
    great idea, but also think that Michael should
    respond, not I. On second tho't, seeing the proposal
    in this light, seems it would be helpful that I (and
    others in SF-LUG) would respond "yay" or "nay".
        (Let me add: I am quite grateful to Rick for
    creating this weekly dump!)

* The make-up of the sf-lug list membership may
    be different from that of conspire or svlug in that
    there are more "newbies" and "wanna-bes" (in a
    good sense--willing to learn, at least a little), and
    perhaps a more geographically far-flung set.

* The nature of the observations preceding crickets
    strikes me as less straightforwardly technical and
    with a "human behavior" element that's less
    prominent in discussions on conspire and svlug.

     Back to the overwhelm part. Reading long emails
with lots of technical information is difficult for me,
anyway, because often to understand it I have to
look up terms and wonder about techniques that
are unfamiliar to me. Speaking for myself, it's a
tough slog.
     I don't know quite how our group discussion of
putting together a backup system to duplicate the
sf-lug MailMan system (to be able to have a current
backup copy of the roster and archives) went awry,
but it seems that it went dark--I'm guessing because
the content of the thread shifted too much to human
behavioral aspects and away from the technical
aspects.

     I've had cricket experiences, too. I've occasionally
asked if anyone would like to participate in working
on a project, primarily as a learning experience, to
build skills. Responses are few and tepid and for some
reason don't pan out.
     My way of learning depends on being able to breathe
the same air as a mentor who shows me how to do
something and talks about it. For example, I spent two
years trying to learn assembly language, mainly by
reading books. I learned a lot and got no where. An
expert was kind enough to share thirty minutes with him.
That was all it took for me to learn to do. Ah: one needs
a text editor! None of the books said that. Ah: one
creates a proper text file and then invokes the assembler
using the text file name as an argument. I hadn't found
that exactly spelled out in any of the books. After that
thiry minutes, I was writing assembly language programs
that worked and had no bugs.

[my specific responses interspersed below]


On 02/01/2015 12:59 AM, Rick Moen wrote:
> In truth, crickets are quite noisy.
>
> However, metaphorically speaking, hearing 'crickets' means hearing
> silence where a response was expected or (at bare minimum) socially
> appropriate.
>
> I've asked a number of questions to SF-LUG folks in honest and, I think,
> reasonable expectation of response.  Often, that's been in the really
> baffling situation where I'm asking something specifically to -help-
> SF-LUG, e.g., when I asked Jim very recently whether Michael Paoli
> should be also getting the new weekly mailing of the membership roster.
>
> But here, let me show what I'm talking about.  This is not intended as a
> complaint, just mostly to point out the pattern of my repeatedly trying
> to help you and getting rather impolitely ignored, for my efforts.
>
>
>
> March 2011.  I inform Jim and SF-LUG of a Mailman option Jim should make
> use of, as listadmin:
>
> There's a feature in Mailman that meets users halfway, though: You go to
> the Mailman adminstration pages' 'Mass subscription' subpage and put in
> one or more address of people you think might want to subscribe.
> However, instead of immediately hitting Submit Your Changes, you should
> first alter this radio button setting:
>
>   Subscribe these users now or invite them?  (o) Subscribe ( ) Invite
>
> to this:
>
>   Subscribe these users now or invite them?  ( ) Subscribe (o) Invite
>
>
> JS: I have no idea why to use this feature. I know of no one to whom it seems appropriate to send such an invitation. Seems to me best to let people use the URL for signing up.
> {crickets}
>
> {Four years later in January 2015, I again post this reminder to the
> mailing list in response to a 'people need to get added' thread, as
> nobody learned from my explanation the first time.  Again, crickets}
>
> JS: same as previous reply--I see no need.
>
>
> March 2013.  Attempting to give Jim some good advice in response to his
> intent to dual-boot Knoppix and Ubuntu:
>
> Also, have you considered something more satifactory than
> dual-booting?  Like a virtual machine setup such as VirtualBox?
> Many vexing problems go away if you do, and you get incidental benefits
> like concurrent use of multiple OSes rather than needing to shut down
> everything to switch between them.
>
> Again, the real question is:  What problem are you _really_ trying to
> solve?
>
> JS: at the time, VM seemed beyond me--more to learn with no obvious benefit to me. I'm happy setting up a Linux box, olde style, and run a bunch of processes on it. The primary purpose for considering Knoppix on the same box was just in case of the other OS failure: I could reboot to Knoppix and edit the files of the now-dormant OS.
> For my purposes, even now, I perceive no need for VM.
>
> {crickets}
>
>
>
>
> March 2014.  There was much discussion about how a PGP keysigning would
> be a really good idea.
>
> Quoting The Doctor (drwho at virtadpt.net):
>
>> I think it would be a good idea.
> Make it happen.
> http://rhonda.deb.at/projects/gpg-party/gpg-party.en.html
>
> Example:
> http://linuxmafia.com/gpg/party-page-2004-09.html
> http://linuxmafia.com/gpg/
>
>
> JS: more overwhelm. I see no need to learn PGP keysigning. I've got ways of sending plain text to people that is reasonably safe from exploitation, and such times are infrequent.
>
> {crickets}
>
>
>
>
> Still March 2014.  Jim Stockford had been talking about his system
> partitioning practices.
>
> Quoting Jim Stockford (jim at systemateka.com):
>
>> For my personal computer I usually have a 50 GB or greater part for
>> /home/.
> I'm just curious, your rationale for separate /home is...?
> (I can think of reasons, but was curious about yours.)
>
> JS: I did drop the ball there. To respond I had to think things out, and I got distracted. My rationale for a separate partition and filesystem for the /Home/ directory is that it isolates my stuff from the system stuff. If need be, I can unmount the storage from /home/ and do whatever I want to the system--wipe clean and install a new release is generally what I do. I also have all of my stuff in a separate filesystem storage unit so I can  dd  the stuff to some other storage unit and be sure I've got absolutely everything from /home/ as an exact image (inode numbers intact...), and quickly.
>
>
> {crickets}
>
>
>
>
> July 2014, for the _second_ time, I provided a better way to deal with
> 'the Web site is down' situations than just guessing about cause.
>
> Quoting Jim Stockford (jim at well.com):
>
>> My guess is that netsol has un-dns'd sf-lug.{org,com}, and
>> http://208.96.15.252/ suggests I'm right.
> No need to guess.
>
> Upthread I laid out an explicit, detailed set of six steps to isolate
> what's wrong when 'the Web site is down', i.e., when you have good
> reason to think something is broken on the service-provision end[1], and
> want to determine what.
>
> 1.  Domain registered?
> 2.  Auth nameservers listed in the registration?
> 3.  Auth nameservice works?
> 4.  Routing to the server works?
> 5.  Connectivity to the Web server IP & port works?
> 6.  Web daemon returns site HTML when queried on that IP & port?
>
> Each depends on the one before it, so you can just use that rundown as a
> diagnostic checklist.
>
> JS: probably the emergency either disappeared or I became acclimated. I've developed a lot of fondness for the approach of doing without as a default behavior. Per the list of six steps above, that list does not have specific commands or directions, so the overwhelm factor is fairly great. Were the commands or some brief direction associated with each step, the overwhelm factor would be greatly reduced, possibly to within the threshold of tolerance (i.e., I could probably take action rather than aspirin).
JS: Besides: I tossed out a notion hoping to spur discussion.
>
>
> {crickets}
>
>
>
>
> August 2014, replying to mmdmurphy at gmail.com:
>
> Anyway, if you're curious what happens if you kill init, why not try and
> see for yourself?  It's not necessary to ask a mailing list the answer
> to a question you can easily determine just by typing the command and
> observing.
>
> JS: I can sympathize with the fear that killing init would totally hose my system, make it unbootable, create CPU overload that burns out all traces on the motherboard, etc. (Killing init has the effect of immediately respawning init with the same PID of 1).
>
>
> {crickets}
>
>
>
>
> Early January 2015:
>
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 2:40 PM, jim <jim at well.com> wrote:
>> I'm for MailMan. Either we wait until Rick gets to
>> it or we set up our own (after we get the backups
>> from Rick).
> [snip the many-times-already-repeated explanation about how to download
> at any time the cumulative mbox of all SF-LUG mailing list information
> to date -- which over a period of years and many pleas to do this,
> nobody had ever done.  This finally got fixed later in January -- not
> surprisingly, by Michael Paoli.]
>
> In the case of my server, all mailing list information is present on
> both my backups and on the live hard drives of the (down) server.  If
> you-all decide you wish to get the current data, you can visit my
> house and bring a Linux machine able to read an ext3 filesystem from a
> USB device.  I can easily give you the cumulative mbox file during
> your visit.  For the roster, I can give you Mailman's stored copy,
> which is in a Python's 'pickle' stored-data format.  You would need to
> figure out how to extract what you need from that.
>
> You have my cellular number.
>
>
>
>
> {crickets.  I find it particularly interesting that I was glad to go way
> out of my way to get you current mailing list data, but the moment you
> guys needed to do something, i.e., get off your tochises and visit,
> suddenly you lost interest and didn't bother to reply to my offer in any
> way}
>
> JS: I think this is a little off base. I am, if anything, willing to drive to places to help people accomplish stuff. I've occasionally offered to drive to Rick's place and bring things or help work on things. Mainly my focus is on "carrying hod", which is to say to take on necessary but boring, non-technical aspects such as carrying equipment, going to the store, supplying food, etc. Also, I did not percieve a proposed day-time so in my mind the proposal was to some degree floating. Rick, I don't think it's right to suggest that I don't get off my duff; I get off my duff for some things and not others. In short, probably a sense of overwhelm and distraction.
>
>
> January 2015
>
> Quoting Daniel Gimpelevich (daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us):
>
>> Any chance the messages from the recent interim "mailing list" can be
>> added to that?
> Someone assemble an mbox for me.
>
> JS: I have a dovecot web page about mbox format open; I'm still reading and re-reading, wondering here and there what it's talking about, hoping I might be able to understand the format well enough to create the desired email in mbox format. I recall that there are several indexes and other metafiles associated with the single (large) file that contains the emails themselves. Also, it strikes me as problematic that we add the emails that Bobbie collected and maintained (with a lot of effort on her part--she's one of my heros); the need did not seem clear and requests and discussion about this topic died without a clear agreement to do so.
>
>
> {crickets - except for Daniel expressing his assumption that I keep all
> mail.  I said no to that assumption, and added this redirect by me to my
> offer:}
>
>
>
>
> Anyway:  You want me to add messages to the archive that weren't passed
> through GNU Mailman?  OK, no problem.  Just send them to me in a
> suitable format for merger, i.e., mbox format.
>
> JS: I've still got the Dovecot mbox page open and occasionally review it., I would like that the group is clear on the need to include the interim email in the archives. One alternative way to do that is to clip and summarize the email and paste it into one or more mail messages to the list--voila: the stuff is there, no importing, no mbox....
>
>
> {crickets}
>
>
>
>
> January 2015
>
> I just ran this manually:
> # /var/lib/mailman/bin/list_members -f sf-lug | mail -s "sf-lug Roster as of $(date +%F)" Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu
>
> I _could_ add Michael Paoli as a recipient of that mail weekly (Sundays)
> via cron job, as Jim already is a recipient.  Would that be to your
> liking?
>
> JS: yes it would, but I'm just one person in this group. I have no special status other than a kind of data janitor. my opinion is worth 1/300 of concensus. If Michael agrees, hey! nobody's objecting.
>
>
> {crickets}
>
>
>
>
> Later in January 2015:
>
> Quoting maestro (maestro415 at gmail.com):
>
>> Right now this is uncertain as there may be a new SF Linux/open source
>> mail list & meet-up space going up online...
> Interesting.  How are you putting this together?  I'm interested in
> details.
>
> JS: I know little about any of the proposals that have been suggested. My take is not to use a service that is other than MailMan. I believe we should build a platform that runs Linux, an email server, and MailMan and copy the LinuxMafia.com/* for sf-lug to it and treat that new system as a backup system: regularly copy the current sf-lug data to the backup system and verify that we can use it (i.e. copy and test restore). Daniel suggests gmane as a backup and alternative reading medium, which seems good to me, thanks to Daniel's summary; the gmane web page has lots of information (more overwhelm). I don't like moving to some other technology because of the headaches of importing the archives and preserving the membership (e.g. the prospect of having to invite current members to a completely new system).
> By the way, I have installed Postfix and Dovecot and the system works in that it gets email from "out there" and delivers that email to my email client (Thunderbird, these days), but I cannot send replies because of some problem "out there" (I believe at the first node to which the system connects:
> "An error occurred while sending mail. The mail server responded:  5.7.1 <baha.organizer at gmail.com>: Relay access denied. Please check the message recipient baha.organizer at gmail.com and try again." Seems to me there's some kind of configuration needed, but I can't make out what from the error message.
>
> {crickets}

The point of the sf-lug list is to provide a pleasant medium that lets 
us discover the San Francisco linux community and get technical (and 
other) support for using and becoming increasingly comfortable with 
Linux and open source generally. (Personally, my primary motivation for 
trying to promote open source is that it seems morally correct and 
offers a wide path to individual's involvement.)

Seems to me we must tolerate various styles, some of which are 
inconsiderate, and welcome and correct and explain our positions, which, 
for each of us, is unique with respect to temperment, style, and expertise.
>
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