Last week’s scribing performance

One of the things I did a lot last week was minuting meetings, that is capturing a record of what people talk about. At W3C we typically do that via IRC and then a handful of bots and scripts generate HTML minutes.

So I scribed. Friday was particularly intense, being the second day of the Advisory Boad face-to-face meeting, the agenda for the day still being pretty full, and people’s heads being quite full of long talking points on what I consider complex topics.

I cleaned up the minutes the same evening, as I usually do, while things were still fresh in my memory. And what surprised my was the small amount of typos and spelling mistakes I had to fix.

Thanks to grep and wc, I found that of the 949 lines in the IRC log of the Friday meeting, 687 were my scribings (amounting to 8835 words). And the number of typos and spelling mistakes I find so low is: 32. That is all. I performed significantly better on that day than I usually do.

Of course, the worst part is now; I need to synthesize 2350 lines (15K words) of minutes into a summary. And “again, the Advisory Board saved the Consortium” isn’t enough (nor is it true just yet!).

Quick, a computer exorcist!

The fact that I find this irrationally funny is worrisome. Don’t worry; I already do.
Someone’s computer (Rigo’s) goes berserk and gives darobin concerns. So, this made me laugh out loud:

[...]
2012-09-25T10:59:04Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:06Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:10Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:11Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:15Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:17Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:19Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:21Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:24Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:25Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:27Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:29Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:31Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:33Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:35Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:37Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:40Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:41Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:43Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:45Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:47Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:49Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:52Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:53Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:55Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:57Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T10:59:59Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:01Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:03Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:05Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:07Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:08Z <darobin> mmmmm WTF?
2012-09-25T11:00:09Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:11Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:13Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:15Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:17Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:19Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:20Z <darobin> rigo?
2012-09-25T11:00:21Z <rigo>
2012-09-25T11:00:23Z <rigo>
[...]
2012-09-25T11:58:24Z -!- rigo [rigo@128.30.52.169] has quit [Excess Flood]

Chatting with a bot

We use several IRC bots at work, and this is what happens when sometimes they interrupt a conversation, out of the blue (we, humans, usually invoke them with triggers, none of which I knew I typed). This bit has only my side of the conversation, and I chose to leave out all context as it entertains me better this way:

2012-07-27T15:02:23Z <koalie> so I'll do it by hand
2012-07-27T15:02:23Z  * Zakim koalie, you typed too many words without
commas; I suspect you forgot to start with 'to ...'
2012-07-27T15:02:40Z <koalie> ok, Zakim
2012-07-27T15:02:57Z <koalie> to ... have it with both, so I'll do it by hand
2012-07-27T15:02:57Z  * Zakim sees koalie on the speaker queue
2012-07-27T15:03:05Z <koalie> silly bot
2012-07-27T15:03:10Z <koalie> ack me
2012-07-27T15:03:10Z <Zakim> koalie, you wanted to ... have it with both,
so I'll do it by 

How to check a CVS repo for integrity


Here’s a funny exchange I just read in one of our IRC work channels. I didn’t ask their permission to blog their little exchange, so I’ve anonymised the nicknames of my colleagues.

2010-10-05T21:00:13Z <joe> Anyone know a convenient way to
 check a CVS repository for integrity?
2010-10-05T21:03:49Z <jane> give it $20 in change for a $10
 and see if it takes the money or returns it?