Curiouser and Curiouser!

A different kind of voting system

I was reading the comments on a site and there were a couple of folks who, quite clearly, hadn't read what they were responding to but were parroting out a knee-jerk reaction from deep in their gut.

It made me think about how you could moderate such a thing and that lead to a thought which is somewhat akin to an idea I've had for how I want my Twitter client to work.

The idea is this, you vote on a post but not for how much you like it. Rather your vote is:

• the minimum length of time before you'd want to see another post from this person

So you might vote 0 meaning good stuff or tomorrow for someone who has written something in poor taste or ranty or next week for someone constantly irritating or next month for a real asshole.

Now here's the thing, the site would then use some function f with the input being incoming votes for that user and use the output of that function as the minimum time before the user could post again. A naive example might be median time.

Instead of down-voting individual posts which is kind of negative and, anyway, useless (because you were forced to read the garbage before you could vote it down) a community could muzzle idiots who insist on posting without thinking. They could still post but would have to wait increasingly long between such posts. Maybe they'd learn.

I guess this would depend to some extent on it not being super-easy to create an maintain a whole bunch of accounts.

Anyway just a random thought.

CoreAudio is not Apple's best work

Chris Randall of AudioDamage is pre-rant about developing 64-bit plugins for Apple Logic.

Shit is in some serious drama up in that bitch right now, with the massive bloated pile of failsauce that is Logic Audio leading the way, so we're gonna just let sleeping dogs lie for as long as we can.

Which I think means developing AU's for Logic is a massive screw-up.

I can well believe it. My own experiences dealing with anything Apple and Audio are that it's complicated, poorly undocumented (where it's documented at all), examples are spotty, and bugs are to be expected.

I want to build an audio host application and I've been looking at some of the available code and boy do I think this is a world of hurt I am looking at.

A note to my future self

Okay so sometimes when you're doing a git rebase you will end up with a conflict. Git will be all:

You must fix the conflict then add the file.

And you will do that and then git rebase --continue and Git will be all:

You must edit all merge conflicts and then
mark them as resolved using git add

And you'll be going But I did!!! and thinking Git doesn't love you any more.

The answer my friend is to just ignore the error and git rebase --continue a second time. There's some foolishness over timestamps, second time round it will work and you will breath a deep sigh of relief.

Soulver v2

Nice to see Acqualia have updated their calculator pad app Soulver. It's my favourite app for doing scratch math. Recommended.

When you don't have a mandate

A little while ago I was listening to the Today program and John Humphrys interviewing Home Secretary Theresa May when the subject of repealing the Human Rights Act came up.

Not long ago Paul Walk tweeted that he thinks JH is a rotten interviewer. I defended him on that occasion since I do think JH can do a good interview. This was not one of those interviews.

The crux of JH's argument appeared to be this:

• it was a Conservative manifesto pledge to repeal the act
• the Liberal Democrats pledged to do the opposite
• if the government fails to repeal the act they have betrayed Conservative voters
• if the government fails to repeals the act they are "bending over" for the Liberal Democrats

Allow me to say that Theresa May is my MP and I've no special regard for her. While I tend to believe she has worked for our constituency it is also true that we disagree on 98.75% of the points I've written to her about (thank you WriteToThem.com!)

That said, I found JH to be at his most rotten in this interview. He continued to worry away at this point seemingly without regard to reason.

It put me in mind of the comments of a political analyst just after the election. When asked what might happen next he replied the press would leave no stone unturned to find a breach between the partners and work it into a chasm. Disappointingly it seems that the Radio 4, the Today program, and JH are all party to this.

Is it not obvious that the results of the election mean that no party received a mandate to carry out it's program?

If Conservatives who support repeal of the Human Rights Act feel betrayed then they should look to themselves because they didn't muster enough support to give their party a mandate to carry through it's manifesto commitments.

Short of such a mandate, compromise is a requirement to govern and while the LD's are the "junior partner" if they're not going to be Cameron's bitches then they must be getting something more worthwhile than a desk and a red dispatch box out of the arrangement.

While I am already heartily sick of the New politics slogan the coalitionites trot out at every opportunity let us at least acknowledge the facts of the election: neither party, individually, has a mandate and they must agree to compromise in order to govern.

When you criticise them because they are compromising (or, in this case, about to compromise) rather than about the specific policies that arise from that compromise it leads one to consider if you are ignorant, boorish, or both.