Last year's ICFP Contest was so intense, I just had to agree to do it again. So from June 18th to 25th, I'll be in Oklahoma City, OK with James Edward Gray II and his cronies. Should be a good time, though I expect it to be once again hotter than Satan's ballsack, and the contest (which runs the 20th-22nd) to be absolutely impossible.
If there are any Ruby folks or others who feel like driving to OKC that week, I'd be happy to see you.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Monday, May 28, 2007
Please Stop Talking About These Whales
In the unlikely event that any of you are working for the Associated Press, please stop talking about these whales that are taking an extremely long time to find their way back to sea. Yes, it's sad that they are in danger, and maybe the first couple days deserved coverage. But I'm tired of the news articles that say "The whales have moved 45 feet". No one cares, and I think these whales are probably embarrassed enough as it is. Let me know if they die, or when they get back to sea. In the mean time, stop talking about them, please.
50 things 25 people are happy about
Yesterday, I asked 24 people a simple question: "What are two things you're happy about?". I tried to catch them with the question by surprise, and didn't tell them what it was for until after they answered. I originally planned to ask 50 people, but realized that this was quite time consuming and wanted to get the answers out sooner than later.
I can't tell you how rewarding this little project was. Because of it, I spent nearly my whole day yesterday talking to folks about things I never expected I would, or at least saying hello to old friends who I've lost touch with.
I wonder what would happen if everyone I asked this question even asked 5 people to do the same, how much of a good effect it would have on things. We're conditioned complainers, and it seems like just thinking about a couple things that make you happy instantly make you a little more at ease.
Buried in the below are two of my things. I wonder if you can find them. :)
I can't tell you how rewarding this little project was. Because of it, I spent nearly my whole day yesterday talking to folks about things I never expected I would, or at least saying hello to old friends who I've lost touch with.
I wonder what would happen if everyone I asked this question even asked 5 people to do the same, how much of a good effect it would have on things. We're conditioned complainers, and it seems like just thinking about a couple things that make you happy instantly make you a little more at ease.
Buried in the below are two of my things. I wonder if you can find them. :)
- rspec seems to be working on rubinius
- i had a bad headache that is now gone
- drawing
- I just finished a fine cup of coffee
- the light coming from the skylight
- Memorial Day
- i’ll be happy when you leave me alone
- i have time to hack this weekend
- you
- gorgeous weather
- it’s not raining in indianapolis
- God
- I’m happy Insun is with us.
- Ruby
- i make enough money to go on exotic vacations
- beach sand
- my strange mind is finally useful for something
- friends and family
- Vinny
- I’m taking seriously the study of the Dharma.
- the warm days, birds in the trees, and sunshine
- travelling
- my wife
- I’m joining an ultimate league
- my life
- the foot massage I’m giving myself
- I’m madly in love with my wife. We just celebrated our 11th anniversary and it has just been a wonderful time to be together.
- my kids
- my wife
- my adult life is infinitely better than my childhood
- I’m currently experiencing a nice synergy between my job, hobbies, and friends that is making it easy to enjoy what I do everyday.
- I’ve made lots of good friends over the last year or two
- my kids, they are my greatest happiness
- the temperature is really nice
- good health
- I’m happy we’ve[my husband and I have] been together 11 years.
- friends
- programming
- delicious food that’s good for me, too
- books that I’ve read
- languages
- I might be going back to school
- my job
- my son is learning how to work for things that are important to him
- I’m writing open source software
- my sister got remarried
- it’s a sunny day
- my daughter has her head on straight
- bike riding
- I’m graduating
The fish shell
Zed Shaw and I regularly break into each other's computers and copy configurations from each other (At least, that's how I ensure our obscure choices stay synchronized).
On a serious note though, he and I have near identical tastes in 'good software' so his suggestion to try out the fish shell was spot on.
Yeah, folks have tried to pimp zsh on me and I gave it five minutes without falling in love (granted I didn't try hard at all), but fish was different. In fish, I typed help and it fired up a page in Firefox with some pretty dang comprehensive documentation.
Here are a random smattering of favorite features so far :
Get on with the new shell hotness. Bash is so 1987.
On a serious note though, he and I have near identical tastes in 'good software' so his suggestion to try out the fish shell was spot on.
Yeah, folks have tried to pimp zsh on me and I gave it five minutes without falling in love (granted I didn't try hard at all), but fish was different. In fish, I typed help and it fired up a page in Firefox with some pretty dang comprehensive documentation.
Here are a random smattering of favorite features so far :
- Syntax coloring. Red means bad command, green means good
- Tab completion that actually works. ssh sa[tab]@ru[tab] is all I need to fire up a session to rubyreports.org
- Tab completion that really rocks. rm -R[tab] gives me a contextual listing of all the extra flags I could be using and what they're used for. Screw searching manpages!
- No more typing cd, just type and tab complete directories as needed
- No need for ~/, it always knows your home dir's layout.
- Search history by typing part of a command, and hit the up arrow. It'll highly the part of the command you typed.
- nice clean config file syntax
Get on with the new shell hotness. Bash is so 1987.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Friday, May 25, 2007
My Poem About Love
Some folks thought this was funny, others depressing. Might as well post it here
Love is a basketball shoe.
A nice, clean, expensive, endorsed by God-Athlete
strap of leather
and rubber.
The sole becomes a soul.
The laces entwined around the rhythm of my heart.
A whisper in my ear says:
"Gotta be like Mike".
Oh sweet, merciful, wonderful shoe.
I like to pump you up.
Nike Air, true bliss.
A nice, clean, expensive, endorsed by God-Athlete
strap of leather
and rubber.
The sole becomes a soul.
The laces entwined around the rhythm of my heart.
A whisper in my ear says:
"Gotta be like Mike".
Oh sweet, merciful, wonderful shoe.
I like to pump you up.
Nike Air, true bliss.
Found in the back of my notebook
I wrote this less than 2 months ago, but totally forgot about it:
Scribbled on a napkinor the back of a matchbook
words are still words
Nothing more than teardrops of paint,
the writer's hand is what creates the portrait
Staining the pages with clandestine zeal
I sit here lonely in search of words I can feel
MWRC Videos
The MountainWest RubyConf videos are done, including my talk on Pragmatic Community Driven Development in Ruby.
This is the first time I've seen a recording of me talking. Aside from saying "umm" too much, I think this was one of my better talks.
Feedback is welcome here, and if you're a public speaker and have any tricks to avoid the overuse of "umm...", I'd be interested in hearing about it. It'd also be great to get the discussion going again about community driven development.
Errata / Notes:
This is the first time I've seen a recording of me talking. Aside from saying "umm" too much, I think this was one of my better talks.
Feedback is welcome here, and if you're a public speaker and have any tricks to avoid the overuse of "umm...", I'd be interested in hearing about it. It'd also be great to get the discussion going again about community driven development.
Errata / Notes:
- You might notice the slides are not synced with when I actually advance them. My laptop didn't give a good video feed, so Confreaks had to manually sync them. They did as best as they could, but sadly that'll cause you to miss a little of the Takahashi splendor. It's a shame, because this talk was one where I got the timings pretty good.
- The first part where I mention Boston RUG and 25 minutes was not about talk length, it was about 'getting my computer to work with the projector' time, which was probably 5+ minute at MWRC.
- When I asked who was involved with free software projects, better than half the room raised their hands
- The phantom question which got me talking about meta-docs was because James Britt said that he found you need to make it extremely easy for people to contribute to projects, and cited some examples from ruby-doc.org
- Ruport Mailing List was originally established in December 2005, not 2006
- The GPL/MIT comparison I quoted was from Eleanor McHugh
Thursday, May 24, 2007
The Sangha in your neighborhood
I think one of the most fascinating things about Buddhism is that because it's not really an evangelical practice, it's really tough to gauge who's interested in it. It's also non-exclusive and certainly not normalized, because there are so many distinctive schools of thought regarding it.
What I've found to be wonderful though, is the surprising amount of folks around me who are at least somewhat familiar with the teachings of the Dharma, and how willing those folks tend to be to talk openly about their thoughts and feelings.
I think that the beauty of it is really how adaptive it is as a set of beliefs and practices. When most people think of religion, they think of rigid doctrinal beliefs, and that's not at all what Buddhist practice is about. The idea of "Be a light unto yourself" really appeals to the hacker side of me, and it gives me something to think about that helps me relate to people's common humanity.
A somewhat strange but pleasant effect of talking to people openly about spirituality is that you learn that the human essence is independent of all these concepts and labels we dream up for things. Just the aspiration to see things as they really are seems to make it happen more often in reality. In that sense, I've found people's thoughts about human nature fascinating, regardless if they're looking through the same conceptual lens as I am or not.
Of course, there are occasional struggles. There always are. But at the same time, I feel like I was at one point taking a view point where I believed science and logic were all powerful, and that lead to a really nihilistic viewpoint. It caused me to create this mental dichotomy in which the objective intellectual was enlightened and all else were in the dark. Dropping those assumptions about folks, I'm starting to learn that all people have something valuable to teach you, if you're willing to accept them for who they are.
I think that we're in a difficult situation, socially. We live in a country where about half of the population believes you should follow a rather specific dogmatic religion, and the other half is staunchly atheist, possibly masking that for family convenience at times. There is tremendous pressure to fall to one side or the other of that dichotomy, and I guess it's an interesting experiment to find yourself somewhere in the middle.
I recently regained a huge interest in religion of all types, because as much as on the surface it seems like superstition, ritual, and god-worship, it truly boils down to being about people, in a way that's more direct than many other things are.
This is just a random, sleepy rant, but I think it's good for people to explore the spiritual space around them, especially if they can do it in a way that's open minded and can be shared in a positive light with others.
Oh, and to give some relevance to the title, the Sangha in Buddhism can refer to a lot of things, often referring to a community of Dharma practitioners. My view on it is that my Sangha is made up of all those who are spiritually impacting on me in some way, whatever their religious views might be, it doesn't really matter. What matters are the good conversations we have and the ideas that are shared.
What I've found to be wonderful though, is the surprising amount of folks around me who are at least somewhat familiar with the teachings of the Dharma, and how willing those folks tend to be to talk openly about their thoughts and feelings.
I think that the beauty of it is really how adaptive it is as a set of beliefs and practices. When most people think of religion, they think of rigid doctrinal beliefs, and that's not at all what Buddhist practice is about. The idea of "Be a light unto yourself" really appeals to the hacker side of me, and it gives me something to think about that helps me relate to people's common humanity.
A somewhat strange but pleasant effect of talking to people openly about spirituality is that you learn that the human essence is independent of all these concepts and labels we dream up for things. Just the aspiration to see things as they really are seems to make it happen more often in reality. In that sense, I've found people's thoughts about human nature fascinating, regardless if they're looking through the same conceptual lens as I am or not.
Of course, there are occasional struggles. There always are. But at the same time, I feel like I was at one point taking a view point where I believed science and logic were all powerful, and that lead to a really nihilistic viewpoint. It caused me to create this mental dichotomy in which the objective intellectual was enlightened and all else were in the dark. Dropping those assumptions about folks, I'm starting to learn that all people have something valuable to teach you, if you're willing to accept them for who they are.
I think that we're in a difficult situation, socially. We live in a country where about half of the population believes you should follow a rather specific dogmatic religion, and the other half is staunchly atheist, possibly masking that for family convenience at times. There is tremendous pressure to fall to one side or the other of that dichotomy, and I guess it's an interesting experiment to find yourself somewhere in the middle.
I recently regained a huge interest in religion of all types, because as much as on the surface it seems like superstition, ritual, and god-worship, it truly boils down to being about people, in a way that's more direct than many other things are.
This is just a random, sleepy rant, but I think it's good for people to explore the spiritual space around them, especially if they can do it in a way that's open minded and can be shared in a positive light with others.
Oh, and to give some relevance to the title, the Sangha in Buddhism can refer to a lot of things, often referring to a community of Dharma practitioners. My view on it is that my Sangha is made up of all those who are spiritually impacting on me in some way, whatever their religious views might be, it doesn't really matter. What matters are the good conversations we have and the ideas that are shared.
The Tiniest Kitten
I started with the title
"The Tiniest Kitten"
How the hell can I top that?
"Itsy Bitsy Kittens"
seems too story book
and trite
"The wee little kitten"
sounds like
Green Beer on St. Patty's
Poetry is for people who understand the tiniest kitten.
I surely do not.
"The Tiniest Kitten"
How the hell can I top that?
"Itsy Bitsy Kittens"
seems too story book
and trite
"The wee little kitten"
sounds like
Green Beer on St. Patty's
Poetry is for people who understand the tiniest kitten.
I surely do not.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Why I'm Glad I Don't Trust Apple System Updates
A conversation with James Edward Gray II today:
10:07 [bbazzarrakk] BRB, need to try a restart to get around this nightmare of a bug...
10:07 »» bbazzarrakk [bbazzarrakk@login.oscar.aol.com] has quit [Leaving...]
10:11 [sandal] what are you, on Windows ME?
10:11 [sandal] plug in a mouse and then have to restart the computer?
10:11 [sandal] :)
10:12 [bbazzarrakk] <laughs> It's weird. Apple put a nasty bug in the last system update. Pray it doesn't bite you!
10:12 [sandal] Oh, really?
10:12 [sandal] I should avoid updating
10:12 [bbazzarrakk] <nods>
10:12 [sandal] as I have been doing
10:12 [sandal] What's the bug?
10:13 [bbazzarrakk] It randomly activate System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Seeing -> Zoom and you can't shut it off.
10:14 [sandal] that's the most retarded bug I've ever heard of
10:15 [sandal] force quit doesn't work?
10:15 [sandal] or kill -9
10:16 [bbazzarrakk] When I killed the Universal Access process, I was stuck in a Zoomed state, but could no longer move around the screen. That's when I gave up and restarted.
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Good Vegetarian Meals?
About a month ago, I gave up meat. It was partly to do with my Buddhist practice, but mostly just an exercise in self-control and eco-consciousness. Fear not, I have no intentions of wearing Meat Is Murder shirts or trying to push other people to not eat meat, I really think it's a personal choice.
What I'm wondering is if anyone has suggestions for good meals. I'm not eating any kinds of meat or fish, but I'm pretty heavily leaning on dairy for substitute. As much as I love cheese, it seems like a diet primarily rich in cheese and starches can't be considered well balanced.
I like most vegetables, not crazy about onions, mushrooms, or green bell peppers. Everything else is pretty much fair game.
I have no idea if this blog has a readership yet as it's brand new, but if anyone out there has some good meat free meal suggestions or other advice related to maintaining a vegetarian diet, I'd appreciate it.
What I'm wondering is if anyone has suggestions for good meals. I'm not eating any kinds of meat or fish, but I'm pretty heavily leaning on dairy for substitute. As much as I love cheese, it seems like a diet primarily rich in cheese and starches can't be considered well balanced.
I like most vegetables, not crazy about onions, mushrooms, or green bell peppers. Everything else is pretty much fair game.
I have no idea if this blog has a readership yet as it's brand new, but if anyone out there has some good meat free meal suggestions or other advice related to maintaining a vegetarian diet, I'd appreciate it.
Forgot to enable open comment posting
Hey folks, if you checked out this blog earlier today and wanted to comment and then said "F That, I'm not registering for an account", open commenting with captchas should now be set up.
Sorry about that!
Sorry about that!
Monday, May 21, 2007
Happy Meal Toy : The iZ
I figured I should post about Happy Meal toys at least once to make this blog's header not a lie.
One of these bastards graces my desk (a green one). It's one of the leading sources of WTF? in my decor, and it's sufficiently absurd looking that I hope you will laugh when you see it.
Possibly more humorous is that I found pictures of them by typing "little green alien happy meal toy" into Google, and came across this IR Repeater hack.
One of these bastards graces my desk (a green one). It's one of the leading sources of WTF? in my decor, and it's sufficiently absurd looking that I hope you will laugh when you see it.
Possibly more humorous is that I found pictures of them by typing "little green alien happy meal toy" into Google, and came across this IR Repeater hack.
I don't consider myself a Free Software Advocate anymore
Folks who've known me for a while would probably say I can be somewhat overzealous about my beliefs in general, especially when it comes to the topic of software freedom. Those who have less of a history with me but have heard me talk or seen my writing may have noticed I hardly ever use the term "open source" and I will refer to Linux distributions as GNU/Linux.
These are die-hard signs of folks who drank RMS's koolaid and consider themselves part of the Free Software Movement. The last year or so of experiences have brought me a major change of viewpoint that is subtle but I feel has made a major difference in how I look at this topic.
I started avoiding the term "Open Source" when I realized how eager companies were to slap it on the 'wall o' buzzwords' that I think they throw darts at when forming job postings. I was totally with the FSF standpoint that Free Software was a social movement, and Open Source is a set of business practices. I still feel that way today.
At the same time, I don't think proprietary software is evil, and I don't want to castrate people who choose to or need to use non-free software in their day to day work. Although it makes me a little uncomfortable, I can't even fault any programmers that choose to sell their work as products, giving up their rights in exchange for payouts. Just because I won't work on non-free code doesn't mean my friends are evil for feeding their family and still doing the work they love to do.
I spent a lot of time this year trying to hustle up contracts to get by. To do this, I needed to explain what free software was and why it mattered to me and why I was unwilling to sign away my rights to content I produced. But I didn't think that the scare tactics the FSF tends to use would be that effective (even bordering on being downright *wrong*). I'd feel like I was selling out if I threw around the "Open Source" label, to any Rubyists, to me that's like the itchy feeling a lot of us get when people assume Rails == Ruby.
Eventually, I figured out the essence of what I care about in all of this, and I've been calling the practices and ideas Community Driven Development. I don't know or care if that's an original term, but I don't hear it being used that often. Still, it seems to me like this immediately expresses the core of what matters to me. What motivates me when I write free software is that there are a bunch of people out there with common problems that need solving. This is something that people can understand without religious fervor or business-injected smarminess.
We share because it makes sense to share. We help each other for a lot of different reasons, some of us get cut big pay checks by some company, some of us are starving college students. There are some people who dedicate their lifes to all of this, and others who maybe hack on a pet project one weekend a month. But there is pragmatism rooted behind all this gift giving our culture tends to support: we do it because it's somehow rewarding to us.
Most of the time, we need a great deal of freedom to do what we do, and therein lies the basis for commercial advocacy, license holy wars, and other side effects of fighting for things that matter and have broad effects. Still, It's important to realize that not every challenge is necessarily a fight, and that not every battle needs to be won.
If we remember that the free software community and the open source community overlap in a lot of ways, and that the union of these communities still interacts with both the technological community in general as well as society as a whole, I think we'll find our way to some great freedom.
We don't need to drink the kool-aid to do that, either.
These are die-hard signs of folks who drank RMS's koolaid and consider themselves part of the Free Software Movement. The last year or so of experiences have brought me a major change of viewpoint that is subtle but I feel has made a major difference in how I look at this topic.
I started avoiding the term "Open Source" when I realized how eager companies were to slap it on the 'wall o' buzzwords' that I think they throw darts at when forming job postings. I was totally with the FSF standpoint that Free Software was a social movement, and Open Source is a set of business practices. I still feel that way today.
At the same time, I don't think proprietary software is evil, and I don't want to castrate people who choose to or need to use non-free software in their day to day work. Although it makes me a little uncomfortable, I can't even fault any programmers that choose to sell their work as products, giving up their rights in exchange for payouts. Just because I won't work on non-free code doesn't mean my friends are evil for feeding their family and still doing the work they love to do.
I spent a lot of time this year trying to hustle up contracts to get by. To do this, I needed to explain what free software was and why it mattered to me and why I was unwilling to sign away my rights to content I produced. But I didn't think that the scare tactics the FSF tends to use would be that effective (even bordering on being downright *wrong*). I'd feel like I was selling out if I threw around the "Open Source" label, to any Rubyists, to me that's like the itchy feeling a lot of us get when people assume Rails == Ruby.
Eventually, I figured out the essence of what I care about in all of this, and I've been calling the practices and ideas Community Driven Development. I don't know or care if that's an original term, but I don't hear it being used that often. Still, it seems to me like this immediately expresses the core of what matters to me. What motivates me when I write free software is that there are a bunch of people out there with common problems that need solving. This is something that people can understand without religious fervor or business-injected smarminess.
We share because it makes sense to share. We help each other for a lot of different reasons, some of us get cut big pay checks by some company, some of us are starving college students. There are some people who dedicate their lifes to all of this, and others who maybe hack on a pet project one weekend a month. But there is pragmatism rooted behind all this gift giving our culture tends to support: we do it because it's somehow rewarding to us.
Most of the time, we need a great deal of freedom to do what we do, and therein lies the basis for commercial advocacy, license holy wars, and other side effects of fighting for things that matter and have broad effects. Still, It's important to realize that not every challenge is necessarily a fight, and that not every battle needs to be won.
If we remember that the free software community and the open source community overlap in a lot of ways, and that the union of these communities still interacts with both the technological community in general as well as society as a whole, I think we'll find our way to some great freedom.
We don't need to drink the kool-aid to do that, either.
The Power of Two
Working on community driven software development for the last few years has taught me a profound lesson: It takes (at least) two to tango.
It seems like if you don't get at least one response on mailing list posts, blog entries, requests for comments about feature changes, you name it, you'll never get a discussion going.
Okay, that sounds a little obvious there. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've seen blog posts I've written on O'Reilly Ruby that are somewhat controversial take 12-14 hours to get a single comment. After you get past that ice breaker, sometimes it's like the floodgates have swung open.
It took a while to notice this pattern, but it seems like this isn't anything new. It's true as much in the real world as it is online, and as much as we nerds think the shield of keyboard and monitor helps us be more bold socially, we haven't overcome our greatest fear of saying something stupid (on our own).
I guess the question is, if we're trying to build community, or if we're at least genuinely concerned with what our users or peers think of what we're saying, how do we address this issue? Well, I know some folks buy votes on Digg, but I think there are probably some more ethical ways to go about it.
There are a couple techniques I've found helpful in getting discussions going, and both start with actually caring about what people have to say rather than focusing the hit count a high comment stream will bring you.
1. You probably had a specific audience in mind, so go ahead and ask them directly.
I don't mean just to email someone and ask them what they think of a blogged article or mailing list post you've written, instead, actually ask them in your post.
If you don't suspect they'll see it, send them an email or some smoke signals or whatever, but it's important for you to recognize that this person or group of people have feedback that is valuable to you. It might be "women programmers in Ruby" or "Joe Hacker from Foo Project", but go ahead and call them out.
Be sure to address the whole audience, but at the same time mention who you're really looking to hear from. This helps transform any content you put out there from a "look how smart I am" soap box into a discussion.
A lot of times, this ends up very positive, other times, you might end up getting some heated criticism, but I think that kind of honesty is important for people to see out in the open.
2. If you appreciate someone's contribution, let them know.
Don't be lazy if you care about your posts. Participate in discussions and thank folks who are especially insightful.
There are a lot of occasions where I've sent an off-list post to someone saying "Gee, you've been really helpful with contributing to this discussion" and turned out getting into some great conversations and even ended up meeting new contributors for software, new friends, whatever. If you care about the hit counts only, maybe this doesn't interest you. But if you're trying to build a community, don't be afraid to engage folks.
Nothing is more sad than a bunch of really good content that could be having even better discussions if the poster didn't seem like a sort of information sniper that disappears after dropping content from a hidden location on a roof top somewhere. I'm no expert on this issue, so I'd definitely love to hear other ideas from mailing list curmudgeons, bloggers, and other folks who spend their time stirring stuff up.
I hope these couple tips help folks who've found this a difficult experience when participating in online communities, and I'll be sure to rant more about stuff like this in the future.
It seems like if you don't get at least one response on mailing list posts, blog entries, requests for comments about feature changes, you name it, you'll never get a discussion going.
Okay, that sounds a little obvious there. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that I've seen blog posts I've written on O'Reilly Ruby that are somewhat controversial take 12-14 hours to get a single comment. After you get past that ice breaker, sometimes it's like the floodgates have swung open.
It took a while to notice this pattern, but it seems like this isn't anything new. It's true as much in the real world as it is online, and as much as we nerds think the shield of keyboard and monitor helps us be more bold socially, we haven't overcome our greatest fear of saying something stupid (on our own).
I guess the question is, if we're trying to build community, or if we're at least genuinely concerned with what our users or peers think of what we're saying, how do we address this issue? Well, I know some folks buy votes on Digg, but I think there are probably some more ethical ways to go about it.
There are a couple techniques I've found helpful in getting discussions going, and both start with actually caring about what people have to say rather than focusing the hit count a high comment stream will bring you.
1. You probably had a specific audience in mind, so go ahead and ask them directly.
I don't mean just to email someone and ask them what they think of a blogged article or mailing list post you've written, instead, actually ask them in your post.
If you don't suspect they'll see it, send them an email or some smoke signals or whatever, but it's important for you to recognize that this person or group of people have feedback that is valuable to you. It might be "women programmers in Ruby" or "Joe Hacker from Foo Project", but go ahead and call them out.
Be sure to address the whole audience, but at the same time mention who you're really looking to hear from. This helps transform any content you put out there from a "look how smart I am" soap box into a discussion.
A lot of times, this ends up very positive, other times, you might end up getting some heated criticism, but I think that kind of honesty is important for people to see out in the open.
2. If you appreciate someone's contribution, let them know.
Don't be lazy if you care about your posts. Participate in discussions and thank folks who are especially insightful.
There are a lot of occasions where I've sent an off-list post to someone saying "Gee, you've been really helpful with contributing to this discussion" and turned out getting into some great conversations and even ended up meeting new contributors for software, new friends, whatever. If you care about the hit counts only, maybe this doesn't interest you. But if you're trying to build a community, don't be afraid to engage folks.
Nothing is more sad than a bunch of really good content that could be having even better discussions if the poster didn't seem like a sort of information sniper that disappears after dropping content from a hidden location on a roof top somewhere. I'm no expert on this issue, so I'd definitely love to hear other ideas from mailing list curmudgeons, bloggers, and other folks who spend their time stirring stuff up.
I hope these couple tips help folks who've found this a difficult experience when participating in online communities, and I'll be sure to rant more about stuff like this in the future.
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