• Java Performance Community
• Java Performance Tech Topic

Friday March 23, 2007

nick decoder ring

So you're probably wondering... where's Tom been? I really enjoy participating in dicussions on lists, IRC and blogs... And recently there have been many very important conversations going on! Alas this past week has seen me spend a great deal of time having internal discussions, partipating in conference calls, attending meetings, discussing F/LOSS issues with more lawyers, filling out applications, and all sorts of things that "must be done".

Please indulge me for taking a break to have some fun this time with the OpenJDK IRC nickname decoder ring -- that I promised at FOSDEM. It takes me a while to remember name-face associations... and this is especially hard when I've never met people f2f. And I'm intrigued with the sorts of clever robots people have deployed on IRC (for answering FAQ questions, recalling the transcript, launching discussed URL's in a browser window, etc.) And so I thought it would be great to have the "nick decoder robot" to do the mapping from nickname to real name, e-mail, website and... mugshot!

Although I don't have the robot written the key is having high quality data to work from and that's the point of this first effort: to constuct a draft of the data so that it's ready to go (for when the hacking begins). Of course this is all personal data and thus it's important to be sensitive to allow each person add as much, or as little, information as they would like. Therefore the first draft is hosted on the OpenJDK Wiki. Everyone can edit the OpenJDKWikiNickDRing and (unlike some wikis that allow to you get the wiki code directly) you can save the data by selecting Edit, copying the contents, then selecting Cancel. This is really low tech, open, but not completely unstructured, data.

I wonder what other columns might be interesting (e.g. which networks are frequented, one sentence bio, etc.)???