Category: Open Source
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Justin Searls: How to Program
I enjoyed this talk by Justin Searls who highlights what should be an obvious subject (for anyone who programs). There is a gap between knowing the semantics of a programming environment and being able to program with it to create something useful. Justin sheds some interesting light on this fundamental subject. Though I still live…
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Targu Mures City Council
Due to efforts by local political activists there is, on the Targu Mures city council at least one councellor (if not three) who believes in transparency. He live streams the city council meetings with a mobile device and then makes the recording available online. The transcriptions of the meetings are also available in PDF files…
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Software is Politics
Richard Pope, formerly of the UK GDS project, writes in Software is Politics: “It’s time to stop designing digital services to just be easy to use and start designing them to be understandable, accountable, trusted, and easy to use. 1. Accountability at the point of use Imagine if Uber made it clear exactly how much…
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Vata in Software
Though I have moved away from the more hard-core environment of software development I still enjoyed this talk very much. It talks about something which can look inconsequential – software versions and its effect on software creation. The subject, though technical, is framed in this talk as a matter of relationship amongst developers. There are…
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Government as a Platform
This may seem slightly off-topic, but for me there is some valuable cross-over of ideas and domains that do relate to Oameni. This is a presentation by Tom Loosemore about his work in the UK Government Digital Strategy during the 2015 Code for America summit. In it he describes an architectural view of a government…
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Successful Customer Support
“… Even the most reactive, labor-intensive ticket represents an opportunity to earn goodwill with your customers. When you nail that experience you can create a ripple effect across revenue, social media, and the broader marketplace. That is customer support … Customer support, when done well, is a career. Every conversation, whether it’s reactive or proactive, is an…
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Matt Mullenweg on GMO’s
Matt on GMO’s a comment about a pro-GMO article. I commented on it and am reposting the comment here: If that is scientific then it would seem that science is broken … and science doesn’t seem to know it. Science has a clear view on one aspect of climate change: the past. Scientific community is…
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Decades of Introverts
In this interesting commentary on Mozilla’s intention to deprecating non-secure HTTP I came across this example of a “developer profile’: “In the last couple of decades, the answer to the introvert’s dilemma was easy: get a computer and learn to code. Like a novelist (another popular introvert career path), you can create a new world…
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Goodbye to Apple, Google and Microsoft
A good article about the technologies we use in our day-to-day lives and how we can bring back value, consciousness and choice into selecting our relationship with them: “More important, I’ve moved to these alternative platforms because I’ve changed my mind about the politics of technology. I now believe it’s essential to embed my instincts…
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Cyanogen and the future of Android
I’ve been told that to activate an Android phone you have to have and sign in with a Google account. I hope that isn’t true but I haven’t confirmed it. I think it would, sadly, be difficult to confirm because most people have google accounts and think that having their phone logged in to Google…
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Tesla Motors – Opens Electric Vehicle Patents
On the heels of this, comes this: “Tesla Motors was created to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport. If we clear a path to the creation of compelling electric vehicles, but then lay intellectual property landmines behind us to inhibit others, we are acting in a manner contrary to that goal. Tesla will not initiate…
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How Bitcoin Works
Following the passionate podcast comes an excellent technical yet accesible description of how Bitcoin works came to me also via Pietro. It, together with the podcast, outlines the underlying potentials of Bitcoin as a technology (rather then as a currency) … and I have questions: Would it be correct to describe Bitoin as a publicly…
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Oligarchy of Programmers?
A twitter interaction with Pietro led to him sharing with me the following video: I do think that bitcoin as an amazing technological innovation (that may give birth to other valuable inventions), but I also believe it is, for now, a useless one. If to embrace the metaphor from the video – bitcoin is like…
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Dear Dalton 2
Just yesterday I published my first Dear Dalton … and so much seems to be happening. I wish I could write you a “wow, great job” … I really do … but this isn’t that. You are taking a familiar path instead of a path you should be taking. The screenshots you posted tell me…
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A Safe Online Presence
My twitter stream turned up these two videos regarding Facebook. If you haven’t already seen it (I think it went pretty viral when it came out) then you may also want to view this fabulous video. Facebook is dangerous. Period. It isn’t just Facebook, its ANY ONLINE SERVICE that services you (usually free of charge)…
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Goodbye OpenOffice, Hello LibreOffice
I first ran into LibreOffice a while ago, when it was still in beta and I didn’t have much time to play with it. It has recently resurfaced and I have finally gotten around to installing it. LibreOffice is an excellent example of open-source stability. Though I have only read superficial information, it seems that…
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The #OMCru System
Personal Disclaimer: I am not a fan of communities. It may be my understanding of “community” that is unclear – but it is what it is. I’ve been rejected by many communities most of my life. Most of the communities I have experienced were aggressive towards and threatened by my personal sense of freedom. For…
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Dismantling Ubuntu RAID Array
It was just over two years ago that I setup a home-made RAID storage server with 2.2 Terabytes of storage using Ubuntu. Now as we prepare to leave for Romania, the RAID has come to an end – and the accumulated data (~1TB) is being offloaded to a new laptop computer and some external hard…
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Better Business
Yes there is a way to do better business. Matt Mullenweg of Automatic, the company behind (amongst other things) WordPress.com has announced that Automattic has donated the WordPress trademark – a major assett – to a separate legal entity the WordPress Foundation to ensure that it remains protected and free: “Automattic might not always be…