Loved the episode. My recent work environment has changed a lot and your thoughts on programming tools certainly resonate.

KUTGW,
Jed

http://blog.bitratchet.com/2010/03/19/diffed-and-merged-and-ported/

I’ll check the plugin out. The one I tried, eclim, is an excellent idea but kind of clunky. I’d love to be able to use both Eclipse’s refactoring and vim’s editing capabilities at the same time, which eclim promised, rather than use the almost as good external tool config where I can just invoke vim and load my current Eclipse buffer into it as a convenience.

When you talked about VIM and Eclipse, I was reminded of an Eclipse plug-in for VI with VIM compatibility called viPlugin. I don’t know that it has all of the functionality you are looking for from VIM, but my colleague swears by it, only leaving it for some Eclipse keyboard shortcuts that have the same key mappings in VIM.

http://www.viplugin.com/viplugin/

Thanks for the great show.

In his paper Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast, Russ Cox, the Google engineer who also authored the press release, says, “Some might argue that this test is unfair to the backtracking implementations, since it focuses on an uncommon corner case. This argument misses the point: given a choice between an implementation with a predictable, consistent, fast running time on all inputs or one that usually runs quickly but can take years of CPU time (or more) on some inputs, the decision should be easy.”

I guess so. . . it really comes down to features versus performance.

It seems to me that the biggest problem is the notability guidelines are subjective. Just about anybody can flag an article for deletion and respected Wikipedians can each have their own definition of “reliable” sources and because they have history behind them they can arbitrarily delete articles.

The good news is that they will usually move the article into a users private area (if requested on the talk page), so you can work on your sourcing and resubmit to the mother ship.

It’s a hard nut to crack.

My concern is that FLOSS as a class is not the only category of articles where the current guidelines present difficulties. So my question is, can the definition of sources useful for preventing the self serving cat articles you use as an example by made general enough to qualify new sources for FLOSS and other subjects where journals/articles aren’t so useful but in a continuous fashion rather than as an unending series of exceptions?

The goal would be: how can we make this not fail? What *would* be reasonable requirements for FLOSS articles? I’m sure that if you worked with, say, the WikiProject Free Software, you’d be able to get a special notability guideline for this subject area.

The key is determining, well, what does make something worth writing about in the FLOSS world? Case-by-case deliberation is fair enough, but if the underlying guidelines don’t help the subject area, it’s not going to work out well in the long run.

I suppose what I am looking for is some change in ethic, norm or policy that would increase resistance to this sort of gaming not just for any one class of article.

Regardless, I concur, it is a concerning trend, as Reynir points out, that warrants much more discussion and thought.

Respectfully,
CafeNinja

Yeah, I”m THAT guy.

You have no idea how much I appreciate your support at the panels I do. Thank you for being there, and for the lovely complements on your blog. Can’t wait to see you again at Balticon!

True enough, I see your point.