jfleck at inkstain

A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico

This was me once

I’m in recovery.

identi.ca

Troopin’ on over with the cool kids to identi.ca – kinda like Twitter, but with open source cool.

Congrats to DV!

The very cute couple: And you’ve gotta check out the blog post: a) did a new release of libvirt, and b) got married.

Access to the Code

One of my old Gnome friends, Dave Mason, is in Rwanda working on a public health technology project. He told a great story today about what the Rwandans he is working with need from their software: I was very directly asked if we would develop our software in open source. They asked because two other [...]

Administrivia

I’ve upgraded the software running Planet Fleck. I was running a quite old version of Jeff Waugh’s wonderful Planet, and it wasn’t handling some of the feeds very well. That’s why James’ blog, for instance, looked like gibberish, as did the new Nature climate blog. But I wasn’t motivated enough to fix it (I hate [...]

Trusting in Statistics

My friend Luis, who was smart before he started going to law school, has an interesting discussion of the expansion of the open source model: There is no guarantee, but community practices evolve to make it statistically likely that help (or bug fixing, or whatever) will occur. The internet makes this possible- whereas in the [...]

Gender Issues

Over at Dave’s blog, some thoughtful comments from Malcolm regarding gender issues in the computer world: I’ve been using motherboards and daughterboards since I started playing with computer hardware. No fatherboard in sight, though. Come to think of it, most of the plugs on the back of my machine are female as well. I’m with [...]

Stuff I Wrote A Really Long Time Ago

An old missive of mine resurfaces: “filesystem or file system“

Comment Spam

I use the Spam Karma WordPress plugin to protect myself from people trying to boost their Google rankings by leaving comments on my blog. It pretty much runs itself, so I never pay it much attention. So I was astonished when today’s SK Simple Digest Report landed in my inbox. SK has caught 5,214 attemped [...]

On Line Leadership

Luis reminded me the other day of one of the few smart insights I’ve ever had: the notion that in the free software world, a free-for-all of self-organizing social systems, “evolution” of a sort selects for nice people. Commenters at the time (rightly, I think) complained that “nice” was a bit “self-patting.” Jeff Waugh worked [...]

keep looking »