Author: Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

Copyleft

I’ve seen a lot of people doing an un-copyright, including Brian Gardner who did it (in part) to simplify his life.

Our pervasive permission culture. Via Mimi and Eunice

While I’m a huge proponent of ‘Give it away’ (see all my ebooks), I also retain copyright on my creations for a reason, and it’s curiously the same reason why Brian (and Leo Babuta) don’t. Let me quote Leo:

I’m not a big fan of copyright laws, especially as they’re being applied by corporations, used to crack down on the little guys so they can continue their large profits.

I’m not the big guy. I’m the little guy. I want to protect what I created not for miles of profit, but because attribution is critical to my end goal of “obscurity.” That is to say the rationale behind my ebook philosophy of “Pay what you want” is that if people don’t know about a thing, they won’t buy/use a thing. Where as if people do know, and can find, a thing, they will use it.

As I said, and as Cory Doctrow says: People don’t not buy a book because it was free, they don’t buy a book because they don’t know about the book.

So if I remove copyright, and no one has to credit me, then no one knows about me and they can’t come back and get WordPress Multisite 110, or WordPress Bookstore and learn more. They can’t find this blog and get even more, free, tidbits about WordPress and computers and business and whatever else they use this site for. In short, without attribution, people can’t learn any more from me because they don’t know about me.

As confusing as this can be, I’m okay with you taking my stuff and giving it away for free. But I do want you to say “I got this from halfelf.org” so that you pass on not just the information to the next guy, but the ability for them to find more information. The knowledge, not just the information, is key here. Taking my work and presenting it as your own gives information, but it does not teach knowledge, nor does it enable anyone to learn and go forward because you’re throttling their resources.

Copyright isn’t about protecting the bug guy for me, it’s about protecting you from the big guy. It’s about making sure you know, and the next person knows where the information came from and how to resource it. Encyclopedias give away information, but the reason they’re amazing is that they give you the ability to gain knowledge from the information.

Copyright is my encyclopedia. It’s forcing you to keep credit/attribution, which gives you information and the ability to gain further knowledge from it. It protects me, but that’s incidental in that it helps you. And if it can keep the big guys from stealing my stuff and presenting it as their own, then everyone wins.

26 February, 2014
LastPass? LostPass!

ModemLoper came up with the name.

So here’s a frustrating experience. My office uses LastPass to share passwords for things. Secret things. They send me an ‘invite’ for the Enterprise account with my company email. I go to log in with the first-time password thing, and it says I need to make a new password. Sure, because email isn’t secure, so I make a new password the same way I have for the last year. I open up 1Password, make a new account there (LastPass – Work) with the login as my.email@myoffice.com and generate a password. So I have a password stored there you see. I then copy that password and paste it in, twice, to change the password.

I want to note some things here. I did not have a message about how my master password was super important at this time. In fact, it just said to enter it twice. Also remember this was for an ENTERPRISE account. Not a normal user. Okay?

So I do that, it says yay log in now! I take the same password, paste it in, no go. Oh, okay, maybe a butterfly farted. I’ll just reset it. Guess what I can’t do? The password ‘Hint’ was useless, since my password was along the lines of dyEno4FfW4EsED and I’d set the hint to “1Password” like you often do. Also there’s no ’email me my password’ or ‘reset my password’ thing I can use. Probably because email isn’t secure. The email where they’d emailed me a temp password just before to create my Enterprise account.

At this point I tweeted obscenities. I have an account but I can’t use it. I can’t reset the password. I can’t recover the password. I don’t have a ‘One Time’ use password because I never got to the point where it let me create that sort of thing. Ditto with ‘reverting’ my vault. There was nothing to revert to so I couldn’t do that. The official answer was to delete my account and start over. There was more swearing. Most of it public use of the F-word on Twitter.

But I did delete the account, made a new one, and this time it said “Hey, this master password thing is super important!” and took me to a second screen where I have to re-enter it. Oh, and yes, I used the same password I’d made before. It worked this time. My coworker resent the invite to join our Enterprise account. I do so, set up Two Factor Authentication, trust my laptop, and he shared the folders.

As I spell out the drama to him, I realize that this may be happening because I didn’t have an account before. That is, I went ahead and used the account and password from the email. Don’t believe me that they sent a clear-text password? Here:

I redacted the account, even though you could guess it. Four hours pass. I get a tweet from the LastPass CEO:

https://twitter.com/joesiegrist/status/403649508715667456

to which I replied:

https://twitter.com/ipstenu/status/403649761212784640

Everything’s fine now, and my takeaway from this is ‘Make an account before joining an Enterprise’ because clearly their ‘sign up through your enterprise’ thing is buggy. The whole interface is a little janky, and I find that their statement of how they cannot possibly reset your password to be weird:

Recovery for LastPass is not the same as other services you may have previously used – due to our encryption technology, LastPass does not know your Master Password, so we cannot look it up, send it to you, or reset it for you. This means your data remains secure from threats, but also means that there are limited options when you forget your Master Password.

I gather they mean “There’s no way to change your password without knowing your current password.” And really this is the ultimate security, isn’t it? No one but you can change it without knowing your master password. The problem with this, and really all these things, is that if I have one master password, it must be easy for me to memorize and remember at the drop of a hat.

Which means my master password is my least secure password. Check the sticky notes on my monitor.

24 February, 2014
InBox Insanity

I get a lot of emails. I’m usually receiving and sending every hour or so. Most of the time they’re email alerts, sometimes conversations. While I’m a massive unsubsciber of email lists, I filter a lot of my emails into folders, where I’ll leave them unread until I have time, and then I delete them. Oh yes, I’m a member of Inbox Zero.

I started doing the Zero because I wanted to cut down on the stress in my digital life. An unread notification sits there, like a malignant ‘Deal with me!’ eye. And the thing is I do, I will, I always at least read the email. I don’t always reply, but I will read it. But what I don’t need is a five year old kicking my seat asking if we’re there yet.

I’m not patient. I eat my bagels undercooked because if the dang thing isn’t done in the time it takes me to start the toaster, get my cream cheese, make a coffee, and go to the bathroom, then it’s getting eaten as is. I would never be a good chef because I don’t care if every slice and dice is the same, I care about eating. If it’s time to go and you’re dawdling, I hate you. I get annoyed when people can’t budget their time well and thus are always late. It’s a thing, it’s mine, and it’s what it is.

Conversely, when it’s not food, or when its not a specific time event (like “I’ll meet you there between 4 and 5”) then I don’t stress about it. And when it’s email or Twitter, I’m seemingly negligent about serious replies because I may take a long time, and reply to other people frivilously, but in reality I’m thinking about the right reply. I have a couple emails in my drafts at any one point in time because I’m thinking.

It’s funny, I know, that I get upset when people nag me about replying. But I understand that people need processing time, and while I’m terribly impatient when I wait for an email reply from someone (seriously, ask my wife, I’m really annoying), I try as hard as I can NOT to bother them about it! I may send them a little “Hi” note after a week or so, depending on the issue, but I’m usually asking someone for a special favor in the first place, and I try to respect their boundaries.

Whew. Lots of me me me here!

Also I like using desktop applications. I like email apps, and Twitter apps, over in their own thing that I can totally close out and ignore if I need to write or whatever. I’m not tempted to open twitter.com in my browser because I never do it. It’s good for me and my sanity, because I don’t get those ‘gotta clicks.’ The only ones I have in my browser are my RSS reader, Facebook, and Google Plus, none of which annoy me with alerts in my browser (well, not once I forcibly turned off all alerts).

But email and Twitter, being a desktop tool on my Mac, need some settings changes too. Twitter has two places:

On the first settings page, General, I set my menu bar icon to disabled, so nothing to pester me up there. On the Notifications page, I turn of nearly everything. The exceptions are mentions (which I keep as menu, just in case I change my mind… it’s been a month, I suspect not) and messages. Messages are important. Very few people DM me on Twitter, and when they do, it’s probably important or private, so it needs serious attention.

Nothing else does.

Email is weirder. How do you turn off the dock? Surprisingly easy. Go into your System Preferences and click on Notifications (first row, last column). In there, I always turn on “Do Not Disturb” settings from 9pm to 7am. If I’m up and coding at that hour, I’m in a zone and leave me alone. Otherwise I’ve left the laptop open, and either way I’m probably not in a mood to talk to people. The last thing I want is more alerts.

Next scroll down to your email app (mine is Postbox) and turn off everything. Uncheck the boxes and set the style to ‘None’ and walk away:

Boom. No more red number.

Don’t worry, I’m still checking mail.

21 February, 2014
Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde

I like WordPress. I like the community and I like the way I can invite other people in on it. But. I wanted to run a site, a small site, with static content for the most part, no comments, and just the basics. So why not Jekyll? After all, I’m big on self-hosting, and while most people I know seem to be running Jekyll on GitHub, you know me. I want to do it myself, I want to have it all here.

Six drinks later…

My major issue with Jekyll is that the ‘Simple’ directions aren’t obvious the way everyone seems to think they are. I mean, yes, they’re simple, but they lead you to some pretty crazy misconceptions based on how websites and CMSs work, and have worked, for a long time. And given all the posts I’ve read about how terrible WordPress is, my remark on that is: No, Jekyll is not terrible, but it has an audience.

Look, of course WordPress can be terrible. So can your car. It’s all in how you use it, what you add on to it, and what you fuel it with. I have a lot of reasons to use WordPress, and I really like it for many reasons (least of which is if you asked me to explain Jekyll to someone who emails me a PDF of a Word Doc to post on WordPress… Well, yeah, no, it’s not simple.)

Misconception: Where Do I Install Jekyll?

DaFUQ?

Okay… you think “Hey, Jekyll’s running my site so it’s all on Jekyll, right?” Nope! Jekyll is installed on my laptop. It’ll be used to create content that I will deploy to my website. Jekyll generates the webpages. Just bear with me. Yes, it also runs the site, but it doesn’t have to. In fact, it generates all of my pages into a subfolder called _site, which you can actually load as a webpage. If I copied all of that over to a folder, it’d work as is. So option one here is that I could just do that. But that’s not what I’d call ‘friendly’ and it means all my code has to be on the server where a sneaky person could go get it. Part of why Jekyll interested me is that it’s more secure by being a flat site.

Option two is to use a Jekyll ‘front end’ deployer, like Octopress or Prose. Option three was to stop and think “Maybe I just don’t get this and I should start simpler.” It’s very odd to me to have my ‘content’ on a server, but the ‘source’ not there. While if it’s just me running a site, that’s great. But as soon as I have to tell my dad to check code out… Maybe this is a bad idea. I don’t want end-users to have to learn all this. I want to tell them “Write your content. Save it here. Magic.”

Revise: Needs vs Wants

When I get really bogged down in thoughts like this, I step back and ask my self “What are my needs?” That’s similar to asking “What problem am I trying to solve?” but it’s a little broader, as I may not have an actual problem, I may just need a small change.

I’m looking for a product with a small footprint, no comments, a way to subscribe to updates (RSS or email), separate content and design (so my writers don’t mess with the layout), and it needs to have a workflow that does not involve me having to teach svn or git commands to a music major. Oh and it has to be easy for me to upgrade (one click or git pull will do).

Say what you will that git is easy (it is for me, albeit sometimes confusing). It’s not necessary for everyone to learn. I really feel a journalist shouldn’t have to learn to use it in order to write content! Still, after banging my head on this, I finally decided I was making my life too complicated by trying to self host before I understood the actual workflow of the process. So I went one step further back and decided not to self host right now.

KISS: GitPages

Everyone uses GitHub Pages. So fine, so will I. They walk you through the setup, so that’s nice. It was pretty painless to make a repo. But what did that have to do with Jekyll? I can edit everything within GitHub which is nice but I don’t want that. I wanted to learn Jekyll… Scroll to the bottom and there’s a nice graphic saying I can use Jekyll!

And they link to the Jekyll quickstart. Okay, thank you, I can install Jekyll. How do I hook them up? I had to actually Google to find the link to Using Jekyll with Pages and frankly, after reading it… I don’t want to. Oh I did it, but it’s not “simple.” It’s a total pain in the ass. It reminds me of the old MoveableType when you had to fuss with cgi-bin. It’s all manual. And this is fine for a dev, but I don’t want to have to install this on my Dad’s laptop. Did I mention he was on Windows?

So using this for a version controllable, static website, is actually far less tolerable than I wanted it to be. I can use it, I kind of understand it (the whole source folder is confusing me a little…) but it’s not something I could easily roll out to a medium-technical person without some serious training. In fact, I need some serious training to get good at just pushing my content, and when I compare that to WordPress…

I get why people like it, though. The static files alone are pretty cool, but it’s going to be a learning curve.

19 February, 2014
Impostor Syndrome

Shortly before I pushed out an ebook (WordPress Plugin Support) I had a rush of panic and fear. “Why do I think I’m capable of this!?” I asked myself. “I’m not a great coder like Jorbin! I don’t know deep seated WordPress secrets like Otto! I’m not an autodidactic trac machine like Sergey! Where do I get off thinking I can write a book about plugins!?”

Then I stepped back. I wasn’t writing a book about how to write plugins or how to code, or even everything that everyone did wrong. I was writing a book about how to submit a plugin to the repository. I was writing about how to handle support, how to document, how to reply to people, and generally how to not be a pain in the ass. That’s all stuff I know damn well, and I’m good at!

So why was I scared?

Impostor syndrome is a weird idea. It’s basically feeling like you’re not worthy of the praise you get. Have you ever had someone say “Thank you!” and you replied “It was nothing.” even though it was hours of thought where you racked your brain for a long lost memory? Why didn’t you say ‘You’re welcome.’ instead? It’s because somewhere, deep down in your head, you were sure you didn’t deserve it.

Mentioning this on Twitter brought up the suggestion I write a book about impostor syndrome and how to overcome it, but the fact is I don’t know how.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I know what I’m supposed to do, but I can’t do it and not feel a little bit like a fraud. I was always told ‘Write what you know!’ and that gave me the courage and confidence to hit the publish button on a lot of posts here, and my books. Certainly I wasn’t raised to not be confident, which is funnier if you know my father. I have absolute confidence in myself and my abilities. I know I can do things, but still I get scared.

Here’s what I do know. At some point in my life, I lost that ability to be certain at all times. But only when I’m alone. Before I speak at a WordCamp, any WordCamp, I am tense and stiff, not very funny, anxious, and nervous. People get a lot of crappy pictures of me that way. I told the photographer at Las Vegas “It takes a bit for me to warm up. As soon as I start talking, though, I’ll be fine.”

And this is true. Once I start doing it, I’m fine. As soon as I hit publish, the fears were gone. As soon as I did something I felt great. This is true pretty much all the time (except the one time I clearly remember thinking “Bad choice! Bad choice!” and it ended in broken bones). I know it won’t be perfect, and I know I’ll probably have to go back and fix things, but that’s alright.

What is the truth here? Am I really lying to myself at one point in this process? Do I really know nothing? Why can’t I, or anyone, just shake it. It’s not true, and I know it, that I’m incapable of things, but fear and all this stuff that’s ‘in my head’ is frustrating especially because I know it’s pretty much all in my head.

The point, and this comes back to why this is on my ‘tech’ blog and not my personal one, is that what holds us back more than anything else is ourselves. The reason I don’t code ‘as much’ with core is not because I can’t but because I still feel awkward and slow when doing so, which holds back a process which is running along so fast now, it can hardly stop to wait for me.

But instead of grumbling and giving up, I’ve been slowly, steadily, working on what I can do, making it good– no, making it great, and moving forward with that. Sometimes that develops into a patch, and sometimes it means I write a long blog post about things and what they mean to me, or how I learned them.

That’s my truth. The only way to keep fighting that impostor feeling is to ignore that inner-me telling me I’m not good enough, accept the fact that I’m probably not fast enough for the rapid development world, and just truck on keeping up and fixing what I can, when I can.

But this is my answer. It’s not going to be the same for everyone, and that’s why I can’t (yet) write a book about this. Because there is no answer for everyone, or even enough people, to make that doable. Still, know this. If you did something, if you tried something, then you did it. You tried it. No one can take that away. Not even that really annoying inner you who thinks you suck.

Because you don’t suck.

17 February, 2014
Open Source Olympics

I try never to argue about the ‘spirit’ of the law these days and god help me if I ever consider talking about the spirit of GPL. But I do have a firm belief in the spirit of what Open Source is and how that impacts what we do.

I generally tell people I’m a Socialist and that’s why I love Open Source. It’s also true that I love the Olympics not because I want my country to win (I rarely keep track of medal counts) but because I want to see people exceed their expectations and go higher, faster, stronger. I cheered when the Dutch finally won the shorter length races in speed skating. I was sad when Simon Ammann did not place in ski jumping (I’ve been watching him jump for 16 years!). I was delighted to finally see women’s ski jumping!

But if I wanted to sum up exactly why I love the Olympics so much, this single viral photo sums it up:

If you watched the US broadcast of the men’s cross country finals (individual sprinting – they’re basically doing running on skis, it’s brutal), you saw Anton Gafarov wipe out, or at least part of it. They readily admitted they missed why he fell, but rewound so you could see this poor guy, skiing in his home country, come flying down on his back, behind the other skiiers, and crash into the wall. He lay on the snow in anguish, because he knew he would never get a medal now. He had trained his life for a moment that may never come again, and that hurt.

But, and this is what you didn’t see on NBC, Gafarov got up and kept racing.

And then he fell again, because (as you can see), his ski was broken beyond repair. It would be illegal for him to finish on foot. His race was totally done. In a sport where the difference between first and second is tenths of a second, he was out the moment he fell, but now he wouldn’t even be able to place and would end his Olympic experience disqualified. If you’ve never been a part of a competition where you DQ’d, I promise you that hurts way worse than not placing well.

That’s not where the story ends, though. Go back to that first picture. See the guy on the right side getting him set up with a new ski? That would be Canadian coach Justin Wadsworth.

Wadsworth took new skis out, helped Gafarov put them on, and thus the Russian finished the race (in dead last) to rousing cheers from the crowd. When asked by Canadian news site The Star why he did it, the answer was simple: “It was like watching an animal stuck in a trap. You can’t just sit there and do nothing about it. … I wanted him to have dignity as he crossed the finish line.”

We love to say that the Olympics are about overcoming adversity and doing amazing things, but much of Olympic spirit is inclusion and helping others. It’s never ‘us versus them’ but ‘look at how cool humans are.’ And to me, that’s what I mean when I talk about the Spirit of Open Source.

Open Source is about people creating amazing things in an open environment, without fear of restrictions. It’s giving incredible freedom to let the art of code shine through the function, and it allows for astounding advancements because of that. But it’s also about making things better by doing it together, and by enabling the next guy to take your work and do more.

If we see someone who has a need, we try to meet it. Not always for those wants (like I’d love a new iPad and laptop, but I don’t need them), but when someone’s in a massive car accident, or loses a job, or wants to go to an event and can’t afford it, we move heaven and earth.

Open Source would bring Gafarov a ski.

14 February, 2014