Upon 2020

Upon2020 (archive)

  • At the Internet Archive for EFF’s John Perry Barlow Symposium

    Just some random notes: I have not seen the Internet Archive’s great hall (a former church) this full. All sorts of famous people are here. Ted Nelson, hypermedia pioneer, is sitting just a few feet from me. Introductory remarks by the Internet Archive’s Brewster Kahle and the EFF’s Cindy Cohn. Cory Doctorow is delayed from…

  • My updated shell prompt

    Updated and fixed 04/13: I had been missing escapes, so command scrollback would get screwed for long lines. Phil Windley asked, so here you are: this is the code in my .bashrc that causes my shell prompt to have different colors dependending on whether the previous command succeeded or failed. It also shows Git branch…

  • How I’d like to consume interact with my news

    (Prompted by a discussion today with Doc Searls, newly minted editor-in-chief of the reborn Linux Journal, and full of plans to redefine the relationship between publication, reader and advertiser. With some notes from over a year ago after prodding by Dave Winer) My personal news portal I follow about 30-40 sources of news (from CNN…

  • How to be Evil and Do Just Fine in the 21st Century

    Being professionally evil used to be easier. In Al Capone’s time, you could hide your evil deeds in places without snitches and live public life as a respected American patriot. Found a traitor who would give it away? Just threaten and maybe kill them. And if law enforcement got to too close to your secrets,…

  • Automated Testing for the Indie Web?

    (This post is mostly for Indie Web geeks. Feel free to ignore) The problem We spend too much time debugging why things didn’t work as expected Not so much Gen 1 people running their own, custom-developed software, but later-gen people who try to, say, make WordPress work with a previously unseen combination of plugins and…