Asymptomatic

Alex and I have been going back and forth in comments over the areas of our interest that overlap. In his recent post, he asks, "how long can organic communities self-moderate?"

I admit that I haven't read the Starfish and the Spider, although I did just one-click it into my Kindle, so it's doomed to suffer my analysis. Nevertheless, I had some comments about how leaderless organizations can thrive, particularly in open source communities, of which I happen to be a part of a couple.

Obviously, one of my passions is working with Habari and the people that have come together around that common goal. When we started, there were just four of us, each with various levels of ability and availability. I think you can pretty well call that "leaderless", since we all worked in tandem, and any small change any one person made was easily detected and reviewed by the other three. But as the project has grown, I think there is some kind of tragic irony in that the size of the operation inevitably leads toward a need for at least an informal management structure....

It's hard to make headway against the "leading brand" without showing exactly what sets you apart from them; what you do better. I think that Habari needs and can provide many examples of how we've taking what everyone looks toward - probably most rightly - as the "standard" in blog software, and done something radically better. This is one example that stands out firmly in my mind.

I am not the only person who has noticed that WordPress is released under the GNU General Public License. In the license, it very plainly states:

You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

The only conclusion is that if your theme executes functions that are provided by WordPress, then your theme is indelibly connected to WordPress, and must itself be made available under the same terms as WordPress. more

One application that I look for every so often is a screen measuring application. Developing on the web, I often find myself in need of being able to measure how big something on the screen is in pixels. It's strange that I have not yet found anything that truly suits my needs and workflow.

What I usually end up doing is taking a screenshot of the screen and opening it in Irfanview to measure it. This isn't exactly efficient.

What I would really like is something that sits on true simply in the system tray, and activates only upon pressing a specific hotkey. When I push the hotkey, only then would it take a screenshot of the screen and display it for me, whereupon I could use some measuring tools on it....

I'm a subscriber to Pyramid magazine, and some days I think the only reason I have to do so is because it's an inexpensive, consistent flow of game news. It's because of articles like the one I read today that I fail to fathom why I continue to pay them at all when less expensive tripe can be obtained more abundantly from many other sources.

The article in question is available only to subscribers (sorry), but involves a game that I discovered while meandering around the exhibit floor at Origins. The game is Rock! by Out of the Box Publishing, and is one of the more interesting new card games I saw while at the game fair.

Here is the summary of what the article said about the game, Rock!, besides ranting for several paragraphs about the quality of the materials from which the game was built:

Sadly, the artwork and the tin are the best features this item has to offer. … Alas, Rock! doesn't really rise above its "source material," and the underlying game is an inexpensive way to pay too much for what amounts to a gimmick.

Not only does that make no sense ("inexpensive way to pay too much"?), but it's outright wrong. Let me explain what Pyramid completely overlooked about this game. more

I've been playing tabletop pen-and-paper roleplaying games since fourth grade. Since then, I've been kind of a junkie, collecting whatever RPG that looks interesting that I can lay my hands on.

I think it was in high school that I realized that not all RPGs were created equal, after trying to play a game of Cyberpunk with my friends. The game talked a lot about skills and character attributes, but didn't say anything good about the actual gameplay. After we were done creating our characters, we didn't really know what to do. I suppose that epiphany led to being a bit more picky about the games I bought and played - although never too picky.

I've accumulated some favorites over the years. Most of my favorites are so for a similar reason - They allow free play with limited rules, or rules designed to be very malleable. So here's my top-of-the-head list of role playing game favorites:...