schwern writes "Some of you may have heard me talking about geek2geek communications lately. One of the biggest issues is the problem of empathy in electronic communications. It's really easy to be an ass to a piece of ASCII and forget there's a human whom you're writing to.
One way to solve this problem is to attach a face to the text, either in your head or in reality. Unfortunately, we can't meet everyone face to face in real life. Fortunately there's already technology to do this and its really simple. Gravatars.
Gravatars are simply small pictures (80 x 80 max) associated with an email address. Using a specially written URL you ask the Gravatar server to give you the picture for a given email address. Done! For example, here's my gravatar for my CPAN address. How do you make that magic URL? Why with Gravatar::URL of course.
You'll notice I used my CPAN address. Wouldn't it be neat if other CPAN authors did the same? Then wouldn't it be even neater if CPAN sites displayed an author's gravatar when you looked at their module? Then you'd have a face to associate with code, rather than just a name, and maybe be a little be politer when you're about to bitch out the author for their totally obvious and moronic bug.
Another handy application is to register a Gravatar for your normal email address, then other people can configure their mail reader to display it. There's a Thunderbird plugin called MessageFaces which displays Gravatars and other face formats when you read a message.
Get out there and increase empathy!"
I was having a problem off and on all day, but by the time I just added it to my blog - I guess the issue got worked out.
For you viewing pleasure, my new gravatar is here.
Plus, it's one more annoying thing to have to register for. If I could log into it with my OpenID identity, that'd be no effort at all. And anything OpenID-conversant could query Gravatar to see if a given OpenID has an icon associated with it. But you can't do that, so I'll pass.
Re:No thanks
Aristotle on 2007-09-10T18:04:05
You could stick an email address in your OpenID profile and the other system could query Gravatar with that.
Of course that requires implementer buy-in…
OpenID would be great, but...
schwern on 2007-09-11T03:49:37
<Jayne>If wishes were horses we'd all be eatin' steak!</Jayne:>
While I agree, OpenID would be the cat's pajamas, there's a certain question of pragmatism.
To use OpenIDs would require...
1) Changing PAUSE's author data to associate an OpenID with each PAUSE identity.
2) Enhance the PAUSE interface to allow authors to add their OpenID.
3) Get authors to sign up with OpenID.
4) Get authors to tell PAUSE their OpenID.
5) Get Gravatar to work with OpenID.
6) Get authors to sign up with Gravatar using OpenID.
Whew. That looks like a lot of work, and asking a bunch things I don't control to change, and getting other people to do work and a lot of waiting while it all gets done.
OR!
1) I hack up a quick CPAN module to generate gravatar URLs
2) Ask Graham to plop it onto search
3) Get authors to sign up for Gravatar using their cpan.org address which everyone already has.
In the interest of JFDI I JFDidI.
I'd love to see OpenID information added to PAUSE though.
perl -MDigest::MD5 -e 'print Digest::MD5::md5_hex("rgiersig@cpan.org"), "\n"'42675453fde7b6ee681e9c0ded931c00, but this doesn't work. I tried to verify withperl -MDigest::MD5 -e 'print Digest::MD5::md5_hex("mschwern@cpan.org"), "\n"'61c2a42ed105748d58b7b2f7ac3cd712, but the article says db1a33946e2a8577b8d3377d0715bf61.Re:Can't get it to work... :-( perl encoding issue
chargrill on 2007-09-11T17:03:14
Nope. It's your
@.Try instead:
perl -MDigest::MD5 -e 'print Digest::MD5::md5_hex( q(mschwern@cpan.org) ), "\n"'That one got me too
:( Re:Can't get it to work... :-( perl encoding issue
RGiersig on 2007-09-12T08:15:45
Of course! *smacksforehead*Thanks!
:-)
So now I hope that my gravatar will result in less people contacting me with support issues...;-)
Re:Can't get it to work... :-( perl encoding issue
schwern on 2007-09-11T22:02:10
Turn on warnings.:) Yes, even in a one-liner. My fingers are practically hard-wired to type "-wle". Re:Can't get it to work... :-( perl encoding issue
RGiersig on 2007-09-12T08:24:17
Good advice... thanks!:-) But I guess you meant "-we" (which is really easy to type), not "-wle"...
Anyway, now I'm waiting for the positive effect that my gravatar on CPAN will have on the support requests...;-) Re:Can't get it to work... :-( perl encoding issue
chargrill on 2007-09-12T13:34:47
No, actually the
-lgives you a little extra help too, it saves you from having to print"\n".So your one-liner could've just been:
perl -MDigest::MD5 -wle 'print Digest::MD5::md5_hex( q(mschwern@cpan.org) )'Re:Can't get it to work... :-( perl encoding issue
Burak on 2007-09-16T19:46:27
Look ma no quotes:) me too btw...
perl -MDigest::MD5 -wle print+Digest::MD5::md5_hex(shift().q(@cpan.org)) burak
Re:KISS Army!
Alias on 2007-09-14T05:32:00
I believe the other big problem is that most files are treated in archive mode? So they aren't allowed to be changed?Re:KISS Army!
TorgoX on 2007-09-15T05:58:51
Oh crap, I think you're right. Some exception to this would have to be made for me.jpg files. Altho, presumably this would be one line of code, and the least of anyone's worries.
Re:The Faces of CPAN
Aristotle on 2007-09-19T05:15:13
Discounting the non-mugshot pictures, that’s 1 female among 130 males. Wow.
Re:The Faces of CPAN
wirebird on 2007-09-20T17:12:16
YAPC::NA seemed to reflect that too, yeah. I got stopped by a cleaning lady at the elevators who asked me if I could "keep up with all those guys." (I took it in the technological sense, though in hindsight maybe she meant it elsewise, in which case I would have been even *more* blindsided by the question.)
But if it's any consolation, I was never conscious of any of "all of those guys" treating me any ways different from anybody else. So there's that.