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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
[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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
I heard about a Python tutorial that was going on this weekend, and with well over a decade of Python experience, I decided to volunteer to help students. I hadn't realized it was a women's workshop put on by PyLadies, but I'm glad I went because I came out of …