Jumping Around: My Inevitable Demise

I have had my fingers in everything. It is my tendency to jump around from hobby to hobby, from task to task, with little or no warning, and with much undue haste. It is due to this that I know bits and pieces of more languages, both human and programming, than I can possibly count without thinking. I’ve jumped from everything to reverse engineering StarCraft to CPU scheduler design for the linux kernel to highly esoteric mathematics to Japanese to Sherlock Holmes novels.

This has always been a problem for me. Since the moment I got on the internet, my interests have hopped around without stop. Very few things I have stuck with since I was about 8 or 9 years old. But all of this is a tangent. The point of this entry is the fact that, for the first time in years its really starting to hurt.

Now, I can’t honestly say I haven’t suffered at the hands of this unbreakable habit. In the past it has caused me to wander away from jobs that paid very well, to move away from tasks that might otherwise have me as one of the most influential people on the internet today, and more. However, these are the mistakes I can live with. I can look back and say “Wow, if I would’ve done this, that probably would have happened.” Nothing is certain, and I can look forward to the future and say that I did learn from that experienced, and being well versed in almost everything is now a talent that I can claim with a decent degree of truth.

But today I’m seeing the kind of mistake I cannot live with. The kind of mistake that I can see the repercussions of off in the distance, but the near distance, and I fear them. It relates to school, and for the first time, it was not a result of procrastination. In fact, this particular assignment I did just the opposite, I started doing my research and homework right away. The problem is picking and sticking to a topic for a paper, especially on an open ended one like this one happened to be, not that that should matter.

As I worked on this paper, I would start with a topic, and begin to write my paper. Halfway through I’d decide that there wasn’t enough information in criticisms to support my point, that my point was just too vague or too specific, that I could not extract enough information to meet the length requirements for the paper, that the topic was something that was just so off the wall that it wouldn’t get the kind of grade I’m looking for. This fiddling cost me. The paper was due a while ago, while I was sick of course, but the deadline for the paper at this point is now in 9 hours.

What do I have to show? Half-developed ideas and my latest rendition of the unfinished paper. The others I foolishly scrapped (the topic of which I could write another rambling and inspection of my own psyche for), and so they are nothing but ideas. This entire weekend I knew this paper must be done, but yet is it not? Why? I can think of a thousand excuses. I could list the things that kept me occupied, that my mind jumped to, for the entire weekend. But what is the point? I flat out did not finish the paper. And I am ashamed.

Perhaps this is all a lesson that I must learn. I am disappointed that it is a lesson I am learning so late, a time where my highschool grades will show on the transcript I must submit to college. And watching the grade suffer. Ugh, its absolutely killing me, but there’s little I can do now. Eleven hours and fifty minutes now.

Ever wonder how to keep the number of bugs and feature requests down?

Easy, just needlessly close every Trac ticket that comes in. Let’s take this one for example. Why was it closed? Because the guy’s grammar was imperfect and he did not state word for word that “This feature is a request to fix the problem that…” or some other crap like that?

I wonder if Ryan hadn’t committed this one if it would’ve been closed for not being stating that “This patch fixes a bug in bookmark-template.php that is based on the input data that I tested with for the following 20 million cases. The Problem is that there was a typo in some other commit, the solution is to fix that typo.”

Ahh, yes, I nearly forgot

Another bug that will stay open forever. Why? Search is infamous for being and staying broken. Happened with the codex for a long time, when the WP.org site was redesigned it stayed broken for a few months. My bet is that bug remains open until about February.

NY Meetup

I’ll be heading up to the New York WordPress meetup this month, as I was invited by Owen to come along and visit since the NY organizer asked him to go. If you’re in the area, around 4PM we’ll be meeting at StarBucks. See the meetup page and Owen’s post for a little bit more info.

Halloween is coming early in the WordPress world

And Matt is out on mischief night already (thanks to Owen for the tipoff), “crazyegging” a handful of the WordPress.org pages. I would think of all the pages, the Docs would be the important place to get a heatmap of. It would give documentation managers a hint on what pages are important, where the focus is, etc. Imagine how much we could improve the Codex with this. It’d definitely get a better marginal and more useful improvement than the homepage. But the Codex is forever to be abandoned by those above… unless it involves adding more features to Blicki.

Scheduled Events Release Delayed

Due to a wonderful bug that took quite some time to track down, I have to push back the release of the Scheduled Events plugin I’ve been writing another day (hopefully tomorrow). Seems this wonderful bug is stopping me from doing what I need to with cron, and so I would rather wait for the patches to go in. Hopefully some other patches I’ve sent to Ryan go in tomorrow as well so I don’t have to duplicate code in my plugin, mostly functions that return instead of echo their contents for the exporter.

For a sneak preview though, here’s a little something Scheduled Events can do out of the box (the message has since been changed and the filename to reflect the time with higher precision, but you get the idea).

Is it really that unbelievable?

(15:36:38) (Caius) masquerade: “security issues” isn’t clear, its an quick excuse, if it was a proper reason then he should back it up with evidence or a description.

And if one wasn’t bad enough…

I’m still not clear on whether or not the plugin has a security vulnerability, from wp-testers archives

Believe it. Follow the wp-svn mailing list and you know its true. If you search bugtraq for the vulnerability, its the first result. Heck, if you visit skippy’s site, you’ll see that it exists. Just for giggles, I googled it too. Believe it yet? I don’t know about you, but if I was the lead author of software on hundreds of thousands of blogs, I wouldn’t just go around spouting off about a security vulnerability that doesn’t exist.

As a sidenote after discussion, yes, security issues may be a poor justification. I don’t want to be misunderstood, I agree that it might be a silly excuse, a poor excuse, a petty excuse, etc., but I wouldn’t doubt when Matt says that there were security issues. If anything, you should be questioning how worthy that makes the plugin of being removed entirely, like this.

Obligatory First Post

Here it is, the first post on my shiney new (okay, well, I’ve had the blog for a while, but haven’t used it) WordPress.com blog. Why am I posting here when I have and have had blogs on my own servers you might wonder? Well, I’ve decided that this blog will be dedicated solely to my work on WordPress or WordPress in general. I’ll probably cross-post all my information on plugins and such here, and have it as the official way to get updates on Plugins soon enough. Also, a good bit of the content here will be ranting on stupid things, things that annoy me, anyone who annoys me, et cetera. This means that the normal professionalism I try to maintain on my own personal blog which I want to be able to link to for potential employers is out the window. This doesn’t necessarily mean I will have a sailor mouth here, it just means I might say some things that I wouldn’t say about people on a blog that I want an employer to look at. Oh, and yes, the ranting bit on WordPress has been done before by the infamous wank, but I personally think that some of her points are a bit over the top and her ranting is occasionally stupid. You may think the same about whatever I write here, but that’s your opinion, and I respect it.