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_why is no more

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Re: _why is no more

#211

Post by geek4christ »

daveungerer wrote: post #56
Jeremysr wrote: post #2

I just noticed that _why apparently deleted his twitter account. I then found that that wasn't all he deleted: http://twitter.com/_why http://github.com/why http://whytheluckystiff.net/ http://poignantguide.net/ http://hackety.org/ http://shoooes.net/ All disappeared... For those who don't know who I'm talking about: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

I managed to dig up a PDF copy of his Poignant Guide to Ruby over here: http://www.ember.co.nz/resources/whys-poignant-guide-to-ruby... Anyone who hasn't checked it out yet, do yourself a favour. And for the rest of us, who would like to remember this anonymous creator of cartoon foxes. Let's hope it's just a quarter life crisis and that he's back soon. Or that he finds something else that makes him happier than prog…

Someone has also created a github project to archive his work: http://github.com/binary42/why-archive/tree/master

It currently has a pdf of the guide.

Re: _why is no more

#212

Post by doki_pen »

mmaaxx wrote: post #198
mosburger wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something doesn't seem right about that detective work - there's a Jonathan Gillette online who is a web developer in Harrisburg, PA who doesn't seem to be _why. Obviously it's likely that there's more than one Jonathan Gillette on the internet, but it seems odd to me that this other guy is also a web developer, with a decent online presence, in (somewhat) the same geographic area where _why is suspected to live, tha…

http://jonathangillette.net/ is defiantly not him. The site runs on PHP.

http://www.advogato.org/person/whytheluckystiff/ There are a few PHP apps there. Apparently he did PHP work before. There is also a Java project called javuh that he maintained. Archive.org for these projects reveals that the outing previously mentioned was in fact correct.

Re: _why is no more

#213

Post by DTrejo »

blasdel wrote: post #193
fogus wrote: post #184

Perhaps he's rebooting his online identity? http://www.jonathanpaulgillette.com/

That's just weird enough to be plausible -- there's pictures of the Shoes shoes, kitties, rainbows, needlepoint, and Tom Cruise giving a piggy back ride.

http://www.jonathanpaulgillette.com/about.html

Re: _why is no more

#214

Post by Semiapies »

scott_s wrote: post #205
Semiapies wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rude, I'd agree. No more, though - we're certainly not talking about exposing where Salman Rushdie's sleeping tonight. How rude, even, is an open question. This doesn't exactly rise to the level of pestering J. D. Salinger at his house. Trying to be anonymous is one thing. Trying to remain anonymous while writing books and blogs and making public appearances, all under one common identity, is downright quixotic and j…

I actually agree with all of that, but it still requires one person to say "I want to out him!" And that person is being rude.

I agree. I'm just not sure how rude.

When there's a picture of you in your Wikipedia article from a public event you chose to speak at, you've made yourself just a "Hey, I know that guy!" away from being outed. At that point, I don't think you can claim it's a major affront when someone puts public information together to identify you.

I think the "who is why the lucky stiff" blog is odd and a bit dickish, but I'm not appalled.

I'm also skeptical of that purported outing as the cause of all this; this is one story I think that a bunch of people chatting and commenting are precisely the least well-suited way to work out the truth.

Re: _why is no more

#215

Post by [deleted] »

pol wrote: post #142
sha90 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without git, everyone has a local copy of the source on their machines, at worst we can get Hpricot back up without the commit history... but that's not the issue. The problem is GH was hosting all the Hpricot wiki HOWTO docs, which frankly, were invaluable resources to anybody using the library. It's perfectly fair to leave the community. Destroying the ability for others to use your past work, however, is pret…

The wiki is still there, probably because they are jeckylled static files: http://wiki.github.com/why/hpricot

[deleted]

Re: _why is no more

#216

Post by duairc »

PieSquared wrote: post #169
mudge wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll call him.

Do you mind saying what happened when you called?

I just tried calling that number, I got an automated response from " Solutions" with a pretty generic "press 1 for sales", "press 2 for customer care"-type set of options. That was a bit disappointing, I really hope he's okay...

Re: _why is no more

#217

Post by Semiapies »

ahoyhere wrote: post #209
Semiapies wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rude, I'd agree. No more, though - we're certainly not talking about exposing where Salman Rushdie's sleeping tonight. How rude, even, is an open question. This doesn't exactly rise to the level of pestering J. D. Salinger at his house. Trying to be anonymous is one thing. Trying to remain anonymous while writing books and blogs and making public appearances, all under one common identity, is downright quixotic and j…

Except that this enigma was something just about everyone treasured about him. He's a Ruby community treasure, our slightly twisted crown jewels. And the reason nobody tried harder before, or if they did they kept quiet, was out of respect for that cherishing. He has always seemed a bit delicate, and that's why the rest of us always treated him gently. And he repaid us ten-fold with his quirky gifts. This is like the…

Personally, I like _why, "Jonathan Gillette", or whomever he actually is, because of his humor, talent, and kindly style.

As to the rest, it might be best not to assume we know what's going on in this situation.

Re: _why is no more

#218

Post by mr_justin »

timdorr wrote: post #113
_giu wrote: post #111

looks a little bit suspicious to me: http://twitpic.com/ehm2h (_why created a repository called "lol" 30 minutes ago)

Wrong. "why" created that account, which has only been a member since today. "_why" hasn't done anything.

_why's account on github has always been "why", presumably because github does not allow an account name to start with an underscore.

_why deleted his account and somebody snatched it up real quick

Re: _why is no more

#219

Post by pyre »

eridius wrote: post #157
pyre wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

--depth does have some benefits... one of my friends tried to do a 'git svn clone' of his work's svn repo... he gave up after the process had been running for a full 3 or 4 weeks. That said --depth doesn't have too much use when it comes to native git repos though. Unless you have a ton of binary files in the repo and don't want the full history of all of them...

If you want to git-svn clone such a massive repository (and either it was truly massive, or your friend's net connection sucked, or he was using an old version of git that had the bug where git-svn slowed down over time), you should copy it to your local computer. git-svn runs significantly faster when it doesn't have to deal with network latency. Edit : Also, --depth does have a use with git repos, namely if the git…

I'll defer to my friend on this one. He's really heavily into the internals of git and keeping up with the mailinglist. This was about a year ago, and if there was any way to speed up the process I'm sure he tried it. I think that he said it had something to do with the number of branches that have existed over the years in the repo and trying to resolve all of them into git branches.

Re: _why is no more

#220

Post by jcl »

Jeremysr wrote: post #2

I just noticed that _why apparently deleted his twitter account. I then found that that wasn't all he deleted: http://twitter.com/_why http://github.com/why http://whytheluckystiff.net/ http://poignantguide.net/ http://hackety.org/ http://shoooes.net/ All disappeared... For those who don't know who I'm talking about: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

It looks like someone is in the process of mirroring what they can find:

http://github.com/whymirror

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