Reading the feedback from my Why The World Needs OSM post has been enlightening. One criticism of OSM that has come up multiple times is the concern about edit wars like those seen in Wikipedia. It's a topic that I know something about, both as a long time OSM contributor …
The Role of the Fringe
I'm in the process of reading In The Land of Invented Languages- an excellent book I will write more about. For this post, I want to focus on how Esperanto's community is like our Free Software/Free Culture community and the role of the fringe element.
Reading about Esperanto and …
The Scoop on Cat Litter
It's time to take a break from the high minded to the mundane. Today I'm doing a review of cat litter!
I have two wonderful cats, one male and one female, both about one year old, both about 7lbs, and both adopted from the ASPCA.Since I've owned cats as …
How Sirius/XM mis-handles customers
I had a recent experience with Sirius/XM that I think is a great lesson in how not to handle your customers.
Let's face it, Sirius/XM has an uphill battle in terms of entertainment. They have dozens of music channels, but a subscription to Pandora or Spotify will take …
You don't need to worry about GPS
GPS is virtually synonymous with navigation, but GPS exists at the whim of the US government, so shouldn't I be concerned? The answer is that I am somewhat concerned, but that I also do my part in trying to reduce our dependence on that system.
I'll venture to bet that …
The World Cares About OpenStreetMap
[UPDATE] I will stop updating this, but after four translations, syndication by The Guardian, and a video interview on Slashdot... I'm speechless.
Wow, what a response! My last post, received over 120,000 unique visitors, over 500 tweets, was #1 on Hacker News, was #2 on /r/technology on Reddit …
Why the world needs OpenStreetMap
Every time I tell someone about OpenStreetMap, they inevitably ask "Why not use Google Maps?". From a practical standpoint, it's a reasonable question, but ultimately this is not just a matter of practicality, but of what kind of society we want to live in. I discussed this topic in a …
Learning Math Earlier With Computers
Writing the previous post got me thinking about the nature of how programmers use programs and how it relates to teaching in general.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a little prototype address book that accounted for my misspellings. The idea was that if someone had a name like …
Python for Adults
My girlfriend has always wanted to program. She even took C++ in high school and college, but never quite "Got it", leaving her with a bad taste for computers and programming. Still, when I lent her my copy of The Little Schemer, she took to it pretty easily, so I …
Reintroductions
Wow, I must have really touched on something in my last post (Observations at a Python workshop), it's received over 20k unique visitors in the last twenty four hours, which is a lot from a blog which until yesterday, didn't exist.
For those people who don't know me, I thought …