Every time I read about a new Web 2.0 application, or Y Combinator boot camp, or anything ending in “oogle”, I lose a little piece of my mind. Over time this adds up and I start thinking strange, crazy thoughts, like “maybe I should rewrite Automake as a set of GNU Make include files”.
Occasionally in these moods I brainstorm web site ideas.
For instance, how about vbeer.com, for all your virtual beer-owing needs? Instead of saying “I owe you a beer”, say it via our new social networking site, dedicated to beer redistribution. It has an irc bot so you can /msg your thanks as well. vbeer connects to the free software calendar of events, and will show you a printable chart of how many rounds you have to buy, for whom, at the events you’ll be attending. Version 2 will include some code for (optional) transitive beer forwarding
More seriously, I keep wishing there were a site for “sensitive programmers” (titled perhaps after Elaine Aron’s book, which btw is pretty good) — say a sort of support group with ideas on how to avoid excessive emotional bruising in a field that, in my view, over-tolerates assholes
Finally, I know this is crazy, but what about a web site dedicated to making it easy to download and install random bits of Emacs Lisp code? Oh, wait, I did that. (And if you’re into this at all, there’s an amusing and somewhat strange discussion of package.el on the Emacs devel list.)
5 Comments
A long time ago I wrote a build system based on GNU make includes for Debian:
https://perso.duckcorp.org/duck/cdbs-doc/cdbs-doc.xhtml
Looks like it’s still going. But yeah, make is crazy as I’m sure you know =)
That’s one weird thread on the emacs list. I’d attribute it to pre-release frenzy 🙂
A site for sensitive programmers because elisp nerds like ((hugs)).
Colin, your fellow Debian developers have not forgiven you for cdbs.
Agreed on the assholes. Want to start a list on freedesktop.org? =)
Sometimes I share those same frustrations about Web 2.0 and the multitude of social networking sites, but…
I absolutely love the “vbeer” idea and I know a bunch of people that would actually manage they beer relations with that. Why? Because it’s super-geeky (all the non-geeks secretly envy geeks, right? what better than a “be a geek” opportunity?) and super-new-age (Web 2.0, social networking) and just plain fun (just because – recursion warning – it’s so geeky and new-age).
There. In the internet every outrageous idea will find it’s followers 🙂