Friday Chat w/Jeri Ellsworth

SavageCircuits

For those of you who know who Jeri Ellsworth is and are interested in a live IRC chat with her, please mark your calendars and join us on Friday. Details below.

The Friday Chat is an event where the members of Savage Circuits login at a specified time and talk via IRC. This event normally occurs every 1st and 3rd Friday of each month and is posted to the site calendar. All discussion will be logged for those who miss the chat events. We will post the logs on the site some time after the event. Click here to go to the forum thread!


Date: February 11th, 2011
Time: 6:30PM (PDT), 7:30PM (MDT), 8:30PM (CDT), 9:30PM (EDT)
Topic: Open
Special Guest: Jeri Ellsworth
IRC Info:
You can connect to our IRC channel via the web client by clicking here.

If you have an IRC client, then join the channel #SavageCircuits on the server irc.afternet.org (port 6667).

Forum member eod_punk has created a thread here with information about using the XChat client to connect to our channel.

markaeric

Very cool! She always has some of the most interesting projects listed on hackaday.com

SavageCircuits

Just a reminder everyone...tonight, "Jeri Ellsworth!" :thumb:

AJM

I missed this. Thanks for the reminder

Oldbitcollector (Jeff)

I'm going to be running a bit late.. Could someone ask her what her objections to the Propeller are? I've never been able to pin her down on this.

Roy Eltham

It's probably the same as her general objection the MCUs and CPUs. She prefers to just make a FPGA project of it.

lardom

I subscribed to her YouTube channel. I'm sorry I missed this.

SavageCircuits

It turns out (it would seem) that with Jeri and some others, lack of credible information on the Propeller is what steers them away from it. Also, misunderstood architectural differences seemed to be another spot that was an area of contention. Several believed the Propeller was programmable only in BASIC, which was an immediate turn-off. Likewise-things like lack of interrupts seemed to grab attention, while there was no explanation of the fact that interrupts are not needed in a multi-core system. However this then led to the revelation that several thought the Propeller could not go into low-power mode and then be triggered awake by an external event.

I am planning on addressing some of these misconceptions after I have gone through the chat logs and got a handle on the most predominate ones. It's amazing to think that some of the most popular hackers were misinformed on the capabilities of the Propeller, potentially leading to their lack of participation.

localroger

I would like to say, as constructive criticism, that I thought Jeri's IRC interview was a logistical disaster and that's one of the reasons I bugged out early.

I have, as I mentioned in the chat, been the guest of honor myself at a couple of these things. What was done there, and it worked, is that there was a moderator who everyone knew was the moderator going in. Like Jeri I always showed up early and had informal chat time with whoever was there, but when the formal chat began the moderator became king. People would submit questions at random, as you can do on IRC, but the moderator would pick one and direct it to me, and that would be the question that I would address no matter who asked what on the side. That meant I as a guest didn't have to figure out who was who or herd a bunch of cats, and the moderator could make sure that all legitimate questions got air time.

Expecting Jeri to deal with that all on her own was not cool.

Oldbitcollector (Jeff)

I know Jeri...

Organized chaos is her bag. I'm pretty sure she was comfortable with the chatroom.

OBC

localroger

Well OBC she might have been comfortable with it but I wasn't. And I wasn't cool with having to basically do the IRC equivalent of shouting to even get myself heard. It was a disaster.

Oldbitcollector (Jeff)

I apologize if I came off insensitive ...

The IRC channel was chaos. The flavor of the evening was more like IRC chats that I have been involved with with Jeri in other channels, but not typical of Savage Circuits. (I met Jeri through the C64 circles, and Friday IRC of organized chaos is a weekly event with that group.)

It appeared that our primary moderator was having some trouble with his internet connection, or I'm sure he would have reigned things in a little more.

OBC

SavageCircuits

There are three things one needs to keep in mind here...first and foremost the IRC chats with guests are still a relatuvely new thing at Savage Circuits. Because of this we're still working out the bugs so to speak. That takes time.

Second thig to keep in mind was we normally have two moderators. One handles messages while the other handles who can chat and such. Our main moderator was late due to traffic getting home from work. During that time we were still trying to get a handle on how Jeri wanted to have things handled.

And finally, many of the people who showed up were brand new to our channel and in the mix it took us a little bit of time to get things calmed down. It turns out about 10 minutes after you left with some help from one of the IRC moderators things kind of fixed themselves a bit. So many people thought there would be a video stream, which again shows how not everyone can be made happy. Over time as we have more people on we'll get it smoothed out. But members can't expect such a new thing to just work right immediately. At some point we may even add a video stream. But for now we need people to understand that the guests often specify the level of moderation and that it may take a few more minutes to get it evened out, as it was that night.

Roy Eltham

I wouldn't call it a disaster at all. Things settled down and a lot of questions were answered, and people seemed to enjoy it. We got several new forum members and regulars to the chat channel in the process.
I'm sorry your question wasn't answered immediately, it was eventually. I'm not surprised Jeri ignored the question at first, she's not really a fan of MCUs/CPUs in general. She'd prefer to use an FPGA.

Anyway, If you want to see chaos and disaster in IRC visit the TWiT IRC channel during a live show with a guest.

electromanj

@ localroger, I'm sorry you had a bad experiance with the chat last Friday. I was AFK most of time but when I was there everthing seemed to be going very smoothly considering the amount of new people that were there. I've attended every Friday Night Chat at Savage Circuits and I've taken useful knowledge away from each one, including a movie reference that you gave me.(thanks) I hope people are not discourged from the IRC channel at SC. It really is a wonderful 24/7 venue to meet and exchange ideas, and information with like minded people.
traVis.

localroger

I understand SC is new at this. Jeri is as close to a celebrity as you're likely to get in these circles and it was obvious a lot of newcomers were attracted. I'm glad it settled down a bit later. But the reason I left when I did wasn't that she didn't answer my question immediately; you just don't get that in an IRC interview. It's that there was nobody and no mechanism to even acknowledge my question.

This is why I said "constructive criticism." When I was interviewed here is how it worked: Everyone was notified in advance that X was the moderator and would field questions. I was specifically asked not to answer any questions except those fielded by X. Of course people popped in throughout, some of whom didn't know the rules, and X would answer them "I'm the moderator, I've noted your question and will field it to Roger in turn." That chat went on for 3 or 4 hours, there were probably 50 participants, and everyone knew at all times where they stood in the access queue.

Unknown

I'm guessing that Jeri wasn't paid for this gig and she doesn't use the Prop. Chatrooms are always chaos because I haven't seen many that weren't. So maybe next time you can all submit questions you expect to be answered that are reasonable because there isn't enough time for any moderator or guest to answer in 10 minutes. There are a lot of hard questions that reasonable people can't answer while reading and writing. Most people can't read and write at the same time. There are too many distractions. Can you formulate your thoughts at the same time and read and write from many different people? It is the same problem people have with texting and driving. It doesn't work for everybody.

schill

The chat with Ken Gracey went a lot smoother as far as questions and answers went. The main questions were moderated.

Jeri's chat was a bit more free-for-all, but overall it seemed to work pretty well. It was much more like a chat than an interview - not that Ken's was interview-like either.

SavageCircuits

Jeri tweeted about the event and so did Chris Gammell. That brought a lot of people who had never been there before. When the topic of moderation came up, Chris Gammell seemed quite taken back by it. I don't think that he has ever really been "moderated" before. Nonetheless, I knew things would even out by the time Roy got there one way or another, since, if moderation had become necessary it would have really needed both IRC moderators to participate and, Roy was unfortunately running a bit late. As for notifying people in advance we did that on the Chip Gracey event, but people who heard about it late and came in late weren't following moderation. Granted, we have the IRC channel now so we can enforce that, but I'd like to see moderation only as needed.

Same as these forums here. They can be set so that every message has to be approved, but what would that do to participation? So we compromise and let things go until things get out of hand and then pull the reigns a bit.

localroger

When I talk about moderation, I'm not talking about typical IRC moderation where you whack people for being out of line. Since the term moderator is loaded, let's say the chat had a leader who might not even have IRC moderation privileges. Most people knew going in who the leader was and that you directed questions to him, but if n00bs popped up the leader would tell them their question was noted and in queue and please wait their turn. I went on after being interviewed to participate in many other chats, some with quite well known people in their community even more heavily attended than Jeri's chat, and it always went smoothly. The regulars knew not to interfere with the current questioner, n00bs were notified that their questions were noted and in queue and if they acted disruptively then they were IRC style moderated, and the interviewee always had one target and didn't have to field a queue themselves. As an interviewee it's very easy to ignore the side chatter from the n00bs as you pay attention to the person the leader has told you has the floor. It just works.

SavageCircuits

We're working toward getting things nailed down. In the mean time I invite you to watch the last "Ask an Engineer" from Adafruit. Because Jeri Ellsworth had noted they would debut a video she made for them on that show I thought I would give it a second shot. Even though it is moderated I wated many questions fly by and go unanswered even though they were asked before others. I don't think it was that the moderator was picking and choosing so much as that there were dozens of lines of text scrolling up the screen in an almost river-like flow...So much was lost and they have the IRC and video streaming going on. Hopefully you will come to the next chat and see that it does get better.