Category: Tech

WordPress, poster child of the LAMP stack, turns 20

WordPress turned 20 over the weekend. Older than that, if you count the b2 codebase WordPress forked from. 20 years for a project is quite an accomplishment, but WordPress hasn’t merely survived for 20 years. The open source CMS powers a huge chunk of the Internet and has shown...

Everything you need to know about Vim and text on Linux (Slides)

Last week I had the opportunity to present at Open Source Summit North America (2023) in the Open Source On-Ramp track. I promised to upload my slides by Monday of this week (oops) but didn’t factor in getting COVID. Apologies to anybody who came looking for the slides previously,...

SOSSA and CRA Spell Trouble for Open Source Software

Even though I’m no longer writing full time, I do have a “bucket list” of publications I’d still like to write for, and Dark Reading has been one of those publications for many years. Happily for me, I get to cross that one off (though I’d do it again!)...

Stop calling things “clickbait” already

My friends, I have a request. That request is, for all that’s Holy, stop calling things “clickbait.” It’s an old and busted term that has no place in the media landscape of 2023....

Copyright consistency

I keep thinking about the arguments around content being used for AI data sets and the arguments around content being archived/offered by sites like Internet Archive. They don’t seem consistent, on either side. Corporations are happy to use data sets scraped from copyrighted content, but they surely don’t want...

See you at Open Source Summit North America!

In just a few weeks I’m going to be dusting off the slide clicker and giving two talks at Open Source Summit North America. I’ll be giving one talk on databases and containers, and another talk about working with text on Linux using Vim and other tools. Kind of...

Why would writing be any different?

Fair warning, I’m going to wade into the whole AI/ChatGPT discussion. It’s been discussed to death, but I’m going to jump in anyway. Feel free to click away if you’re already sick of the topic.  I’m going to use “ChatGPT” as a stand-in for ML/AI-driven writing tools, even though...

What If Everybody Did It (WIEDI)?

Most people, I think, tend only to think about their actions and interactions as one-offs. That is, we think “what happens if I do this” and consider the impact from that perspective. But what if we considered the outcomes and impacts if everybody (or even a lot of people) do...

Why your talk was rejected (or maybe accepted)

I had a few snarky opening lines for this post, but decided that was a bit unfair. Let’s just say that people get very impassioned about tech events and getting talks accepted. If you’re on the conference committee, it can be… intense, sometimes, managing the needs of an event...

Tab sweep: eFanzines, data privacy, playlists between two artists

Been a lazy Sunday of doing some light pre-Spring cleaning/organizing and quality time with the cats. Here’s a few interesting sites, articles, and such that have been idling in tabs for a little while. Two on data privacy The Markup has an article about how grocers, specifically Kroger, are...