-
Upgrading Democracy — Reflections on Today’s Unconference in Palo Alto
Does anybody still think that today’s “democracy” doesn’t need substantial improvements? Hardly… but it’s difficult to figure out just what we need to improve and how. So I was heartened to see the announcement of an unconference (my favorite form of conference) in Palo Alto on the subject of “Upgrading Democracy”. It took place earlier…
-
What are the FLOSS community’s answers to Siri and AI?
A decade ago, we in the free and open-source community could build our own versions of pretty much any proprietary software system out there, and we did. Publishing, collaboration, commerce, you name it. Some apps were worse, some were better than closed alternatives, but much of it was clearly good enough to use every day.…
-
Speaking on UBOS and the Indie IoT at Mozilla San Francisco on Sept. 27, 2016
Mozilla, the makers of Firefox, have an Internet-of-Things unit. Did you know that? It was a surprise to me when I heard about it, but a good surprise. We need the kind of openness that Mozilla stands for in the IoT, and I hope they can play a large role in the emerging IoT market.…
-
Java’s “Uncompilable Source” RuntimeException Mystery Solved
Two days and a countless …(censored)… later, I think I figured it out. Here’s the mystery: I successfully compile my Java code into a bunch of Java archives (JARs). I deploy that code to my server. The app fails to start. The stack trace shows: some of my code runs my code invokes some of…
-
Training for a Mount Whitney day hike
For this 21 miles roundtrip, 6000 ft-plus up and down hike, here’s how I trained: Running every second day for some months, usually in the 3-5 mile range, sometimes 7-8 miles. I worked that up to one (my first) half-marathon one weekend. On weekends, hiked up the local hills (~1000ft altitude change) at the highest…